The Lord's Day Morning
July 4, 2010
Luke 11:29-36
“How Are Your Eyes?”
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III
If you’d take your bulletins in hand I want to point out a few things to you about the service today. It is July the fourth. It is the day that we, as citizens of the United States and as Christians, express thanksgiving to God for the freedoms, the very costly freedoms that we enjoy. That's an appropriate thing for us to do as Christians. It's also very important and appropriate for us to remember, since this day coincides with the Lord's Day, the Day of Resurrection, the day in which we celebrate the liberating resurrection of Jesus Christ, to simply remember that the greatest freedom that we have comes from Christ, that in His life and death and resurrection He has given us a freedom that not only exists now but which will exist forever. And so even as we thank God for the costly sacrifices of our forbearers and of those today who, in the far-flung places of the world protect our freedoms and seek to foster the freedoms of others, and even as we thank God for them, that we never forget to thank God for the Lord Jesus Christ and the liberty that He has won us.
Notice that right after Derek prays the morning prayer we will sing the national hymn that was written on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876. It's a wonderful prayer to God to continue to preserve us. It acknowledges God as the source of all our liberties and it asks the Lord to continue to preserve our land in those liberties. It's good, rich, biblical supplication, “God of our Fathers,” and we’ll sing that appropriately on this Lord's Day.
You may want to go ahead and open your hymnals to number sixty-six. Our opening song of praise deliberately acknowledges God's sovereignty. Jesus is King – in the dominion of His church there is no other prince, there is no other ruler, there is no other king. The Lord Jesus reigns. He is the King and head of His church. And so we’ll acknowledge God's sovereignty singing number sixty-six, which is actually a psalm. It's part of Psalm 76. And we’ll begin and you may want to use those words as we prepare for worship together.
We’re working through the gospel of Luke. We’re in Luke 11:29-36 today. It's a passage in which crowds are pressing in on Jesus and He turns around to those crowds and He says something that very few preachers would have the courage to say today. He looks at them and He says, “You are an evil generation.” And thus begins a very, very important series of illustrations that Jesus gives to the generation that He was speaking to in order to uncover the secret sins of their hearts. And His words to them, two thousand years ago almost, are just as timely — and I'd argue almost more so — to us today than even to that group that He spoke to almost two thousand years ago. So let's prepare to worship the living God together.
O come, let us sing unto the Lord. Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving. Let us shout joyfully to Him with songs for the Lord is a great God, a great King above all gods. Let us worship Him!
Now let's look to God in prayer. Let us all pray.
Heavenly Father, on this holiday weekend and this Independence Day, we give thanks to You for the gift and blessing of the freedom we enjoy in this our great nation, from sea to shining sea. We are thankful for the Christian and religious convictions of the founding fathers as they struggled to build a new country and create a new way of living with a goal of freedom and justice for all. Today, many of these freedoms are under threat, and therefore Lord we pray in particular for the deliberations of the Supreme Court, that You would reverse the trend toward intolerance of Christianity in the public place. You are sovereign, O Lord, and can overturn appointments made by man in particular.
We pray this morning for the unborn and the defenseless and ask for mercy upon our national sins. We are conscious of many sins, and this morning collectively we confess to You and ask for the Spirit's help in repentance. Wash and cleanse us afresh in the blood that is able to cleanse from all sin. For we say with the psalmist, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your loving-kindness. According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me, thoroughly, from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” We recognize, O Lord, that we have no right to such blessings as freedom and like Christians in the past, You may well have another design for us, designs which will call upon us to sacrifice and endure persecution. Enable us for the fight that may lie ahead of us. Give us renewed conviction in the power of the Word of God and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that we might fight the good fight of faith and endure to the end. Help us dare to be a Daniel in the midst of a hostile government. We pray for our soldiers in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. We thank You for their skill and bravery. We pray for victory over the forces that week to undo our freedom and liberty.
We thank You Lord for the courageous self-sacrifice and generous spirit of countless people who have given their life's blood in the defense of freedom and for the pursuit of justice. We pray for the many hundreds of soldiers in such hospitals as the WalterReedMedicalCenter in Washington, many of whom have lost limbs for us. We pray for our enemies that their swords as well as ours may be turned into plowshares. We also pray this morning for the Gulf and for the continued devastation caused by the oil leak beneath the sea. We pray for the success of this most recent attempt to stem the flow of this oil. You are sovereign and it is but a little thing for You. Have mercy on us, we pray.
And now Lord our hope is in You and in the Gospel and the liberty that comes in knowing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. For if we are free in Him we are free indeed. May Your Word be effective today in the conversion of many and the transformation of lives given over to Satan. May this Independence Day be a harvest day of souls for the kingdom of God. And bless us and hear us for the sake of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, we ask it. Amen.
Amen. If you have your Bibles I'd invite you to turn with me to Luke chapter 11 as we continue our way through the gospel of Luke, looking at a passage in which Jesus has just performed a mighty miracle. He's cast a demon out of man that had caused the man to be mute and for this great act He is rewarded with the response of many in the multitude that He has done this miracle by the power of Satan. And one godly woman in that crowd cries out when He responds to His accusers and acknowledges His heavenly wisdom. But the passage that we're reading today continues Jesus’ interaction with those in the multitudes that were crowding around Him and listening to His preaching, but who were in fact in their own hearts rejecting His teaching and sometimes out loud, challenging His teaching. And in fact, this dialogue will continue the next time we're in this passage because picking up in Luke 11:37 Jesus will pronounce a series of woes on the scribes and Pharisees, those who were the transcribers and the teachers of the law in the land, and those who were part of a lay-renewal movement of elders in local synagogues calling Israel back to the Bible as it were, and yet these people were rejecting Jesus and He's going to pronounce woes upon them. So all of what is going on in Luke 11 is a part of a piece. Luke is showing you the opposition that Jesus faced in His own public ministry and the prophetic way that He confronted that opposition.
Now as we prepare to read verses 29 to 36 let me say that the passage could be broken down into two parts. If you look at 29 to 32, Jesus tells of two witnesses that will witness against those who are opposing His ministry at the final resurrection. And those two witnesses are the Ninevites — now those are non-Israelites. You remember Nineveh is the city that the prophet Jonah eventually went to much against his will. He wanted to go to his own people and so he ran away. He tried to get on a ship and go to the opposite end of the world in Tarshish and the Lord threw him off that ship and into the water and into the belly of a great fish who deposited him onto the shore in the direction of Nineveh and he eventually wound up going to this group of pagans and he preached to them. Do you remember his gracious message? “Yet in forty days, Nineveh will be destroyed!” — not very gracious sounding, is it? But he was actually preaching repentance. He was saying, “Your wickedness deserves destruction and if you don't repent in forty days the Lord is going to bring destruction on your city.” And you know what those pagans did? They repented. So Jesus uses them as an illustration of repentance.
Then again look at verses 29 to 32. He tells of another witness and this witness is the queen of the South, probably the Queen of Ethiopia who comes to Solomon. You remember she heard of Solomon's wisdom but especially she wanted to hear it for herself. And so she came with gifts and she wanted to sit under his wisdom and she sought out that wisdom. And He uses these two as illustrations of the proper response to the Word of God.
Then in the second part of the passage we're going to read today — if you look at verses 33 to 36 — Jesus tells a rather odd story. If you’re like me, when you first read this story your response is, “Okay, I think I understand parts of the analogy here, but I'm not following all of the analogy here.” It's about a lamp and it's about a lamp put in a home and where you would put that lamp in a home in order to light the home. And then Jesus starts talking about our eyes. Now in the story, the lamp refers to the light that Jesus alone brings. And the eyes refer to the instrument of our bodies that either receives that light or doesn't. If they eyes are somehow defective or diseased, they don't properly receive light and thus we bump into things or we don't see clearly or we're darkened. And so He's using this story as a spiritual analogy of the people we are rejecting His teaching. So look for those two parts as we read this passage — 29 to 32 with the stories of Jonah and the queen of the South, and then the story of the lamp in verses 33 to 36.
And if you wanted to hang this message on three words you could hang it on these words: repentance, wisdom, and Gospel, because we're going to look at repentance through the story of Jonah, we're going to look at wisdom through the story of the queen of the South and Solomon, and we're going to look at the Gospel through not only the story of the lamp, but what Jesus says about this generation only getting one sign. And you remember what that sign was? The sign of Jonah. And once we're done with the sermon I want you to see how the sign of Jonah is directly related to the Gospel. Let's pray before we read God's Word.
Lord, this is Your Word. It is absolutely true. It is utterly flawless. It is powerful. It is effective. It's sharper than any two-edged sword. It can pierce down to the deepest parts of our hearts and show us right and wrong and show where we're sinful and You are sovereign and good. It is necessary. We need it as much as we need food because “man doesn't live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” and it is fully sufficient to equip the man or woman of God in every good work. But because we are sinners, without the help of Your Spirit, even the truth of Your Word could go bad on us because as sinners we can take the most precious things in the world and they can fall fallow in our hearts and souls. Lord, do not allow this thing. Awaken us by Your grace. Give us new life in our hearts. By Your Spirit, open our eyes to behold wonderful things in Your Word. We beg this in Jesus' name. Amen.
This is the Word of God. Hear it:
“When the crowds were increasing, He began to say, ‘This generation is an evil generation. It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.
No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.’”
Amen, and thus ends this reading of God's holy, inspired, and inerrant Word. May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.
How are your eyes? I don't necessarily mean these. Mine are getting fuzzier. You’re seeing that more and more as I push the thing back again and print my text out in sixteen-point type and things like that. I'm talking about your spiritual eyes. How clearly are you seeing things in life? How clearly are you seeing yourself? How well do you understand yourself? Are you able to be honest about what you’re like inside? Are you able to see your sin and your need? Are you able to see evidences of grace in your life, of the work of God's Holy Spirit in you causing you to hate that which pleases him and to love Him and love what pleases Him and to pursue after Him more than you pursue after other things?
How's your spiritual sight? Can you see yourself? Can you see yourself in light of God's Word? How's your spiritual sight? Are you locked in on the true wisdom? When you hear true, heavenly wisdom does it resonate with you because there's a little bit of that already in you and so when you hear it, when you hear the truth you know it because that truth is already, parts of it are already in you and so when you hear the real truth you immediately resonate with it? Can you say that? Or do you find yourself lacking discernment when it comes to spiritual things and you can't really tell right from wrong and truth from error when it's spoken because that truth really hasn't taken root in your heart?
And how about Jesus and the Gospel? Are the eyes of your heart fixed on Him? Is there anything in this world more valuable, more precious than Him? Despite the fact that you know a lot of Bible and you know a lot about God, are there in fact, things in your life that are far more important to you than God and His glory, Christ and His kingdom, the salvation which He offers? These are the kinds of questions that Jesus is pressing home in this passage with the story of Jonah, the story of Solomon, and the story of the lamp. And I want us to look together at three things that we learn out of this passage.
I. Jonah – The grace of repentance.
And the first thing that I want you to see is the grace of repentance. Look especially at verse 32. Jesus, as He tells the story of Jonah and the people of Nineveh says this, “The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it for they repented at the preaching of Jonah and something greater than Jonah is here.” Jesus is contrasting the people of Nineveh with the people of His generation. The people of Nineveh repented. The people of His generation don't and didn't. The people of Nineveh really knew very little Bible. The people of His generation knew a lot about the Bible and they knew a lot about God. They’d had their Hebrew Bibles. They’d been taught the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, by their elders and by the prophets and by the scribes going all the way back to Ezra. Every Sabbath Day they came in the synagogue and they heard the Word of God read and explained and they sang the psalms together and they prayed in the language of Scripture, and so the Bible was all around them. They had memorized big parts of the Bible and yet, when Jesus came, they didn't repent. When John called them to repentance and when Jesus called them to repentance they didn't repent.
And so Jesus tells this story. He says, “You know, the prophet Jonah went to pagan, heathen Ninevites, people that weren't from Israel, and he preached ‘forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed’ and you know what Nineveh did? They repented even though they didn't know much about God, and they’d never ever read a Bible. When a prophet of the Lord went and preached the Gospel, by the grace of the Holy Spirit they repented.” And yet Jesus says to this generation, “You’re an evil generation. I've preached to you and you've not repented.”
You know, I think these words to Jesus’ generation are just as true and maybe more so for us. We know, those of us gathered in this room know a lot of Bible. Now I want to say especially to those of you who are students — maybe you've gone to the Day School or maybe you've grown up in the Catechism, or maybe you've had faithful parents who had family worship with you, or maybe you've had Sunday School teachers or VBS teachers who've just been pouring the Bible into you all your life.
Isn't it interesting how young people like that can go off to college sometimes and young people who've not had any of the advantages that you have had — sitting under the faithful preaching of the Word, being schooled in the truth by those who minister to you as students and by your parents and by your pastors — very often those students who know very little Bible and very little about God, when they are confronted with faithful, biblical teaching and proclamation, maybe in the context of a campus fellowship in college, they’ll come to faith in Christ. They’ll repent of their sins. They’ll see their need and they’ll run to the Savior. They’ll believe the Gospel. And yet, there’ll be other kids who know a lot about the Bible and they know a lot about God and their hearts will be cold. They’ll be satisfied with making sure that they look good on the outside, that they are externally religious and spiritual, that they show up enough at church to keep their parents from being concerned, but inside their hearts are darkened and hard and they haven't repented. Isn't that ironic?
There's a message for us in this passage. Don't play external games with God. Christianity is a religion of the heart and an unrepentant heart does not know God. I don't care how much about your Bible you know, how much about God you know. If you haven't seen your sin, if you haven't seen your need, and you haven't run to the Savior and begged Him for forgiveness, then you don't know God. You’re under the same condemnation that Jesus is pronouncing on His generation. He looks up at this Bible-believing generation of people and He says, “You’re an evil generation.” Why? Not because they read their Bibles, not because they have a high view of their Bibles, but because they've read their Bible and they have a high view of the Bible and they haven't repented. They haven't embraced Christ. They haven't embraced the Gospel. This is a word for us.
And doesn't this remind us about the grace of repentance? The grace of repentance is no common gift. It's a unique blessing of God. Isn't it ironic that so often those who know so little come to faith in Christ, while those who know so much remain hard and cold towards the Gospel? It's a warning that Jesus is giving to His generation. It's a warning for you and me today.
II. Solomon — The wisdom of God.
But then I want you to see what we learn from verse 31 and this story about the queen of the South and the wisdom of Solomon. We see something here of a picture of the thirst for true wisdom. Look at verse 31 — “The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them.” Why? “For she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold something greater than Solomon is here.” It's quite extraordinary. This queen of the South, as far as we know, has no exposure to the truth of Moses in the first five books of the Bible or to the preaching of the Hebrew prophets. She's perhaps all the way from Ethiopia and the Israelites thought of that part of the world as the virtual end of the world towards the south. And she came a long way, having heard of the reputation of Solomon, and she came bearing gifts. You remember the story in the Old Testament. And she came to hear Solomon's wisdom. And what Jesus is saying is this — when she heard of Solomon there was something in her that resonated, she recognized the wisdom that he had to offer, and she longed, she thirsted for that wisdom.
Now He contrasts her with the scribes and the Pharisees and the religious leaders and the others in the multitude who have heard wisdom incarnate, the Word incarnate, the Word made flesh — Jesus Himself. They haven't gone a long way to hear His wisdom, He's come a long way to reveal His wisdom. He's come to them and yet He's right in their midst and what? They don't pay Him any attention whatsoever. In fact, when He speaks wisdom — though this one godly woman we saw last week, she recognized wisdom when she heard it and she blessed Him and she got a blessing back — but most of the crowd said, “Oh, He must work for Satan! His power must come from Satan!” How blind could they be to true wisdom? It's an indication, you see, that their hearts were darkened, that their eyes had not been enlightened by the true lamp. You know, if they’d really known and understood their Bibles they would have immediately recognized the truth of what He was saying; they would have resonated. Have you ever noticed that? If you know a little, deep in your heart, about what the real story of the Bible is all about and you hear a faithful preacher — he doesn't have to be a famous preacher, all he has to do is be a faithful preacher of God's Word — and what happens when you’re sitting under that ministry? You go, “Yes, I resonate with this. I recognize this. I've heard this before. I've been taught this before. Yes, he's teaching me new things that I've never quite been able to put together before and yes this is impacting my heart in a way that I deeply need but I recognize it because I've been in my Bible and the Bible's begun to shape my thinking and my heart and my mind. And so as that faithful preacher ministers the Word I recognize that truth.” And the fact that these people who knew a lot about the Bible didn't respond to Jesus’ wisdom shows you that they really didn't understand their Bibles because if they did, they would have resonated with the wisdom He was preaching.
And so let me ask you this — when you’re under faithful Bible teaching do you resonate with it? You say, “Yes, I recognize that. I recognize how the Lord deals with their sin in the Scripture and I realize how the Scripture is dealing with my sin in the sermon. I recognize how the Lord exalts Himself in the Scripture and I see how the Lord is exalting Himself in my heart in the preaching of this Scripture.” Do we thirst after that wisdom? Do we want that wisdom more than anything else? The fact that the scribes and the Pharisees and the others in this crowd that rejected Jesus could sit there and listen to His heavenly wisdom and ascribe it to Satan is just a picture of the darkness of their hearts. That's why He goes to this lamp story.
III. The lamp — Spiritual eyes to see the Gospel
Jesus uses this lamp story on more than occasion. It's in a different place in His preaching in Matthew but here He uses it because it's the perfect illustration of the problem of these people. Their hearts have not been enlightened by the true light and that's the third thing I want you to see. Jesus speaks here of the importance of having sight to see the Gospel. Do you have sight to see Jesus, to understand who He is, to believe who He is, to understand the Gospel, and to believe the Gospel? That's what this story is about. Look at what Jesus says. Look at verse 33 — “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket but on a stand so that those who enter may see the light.” Jesus used very common illustrations that everybody could understand.
In a house built by somebody that lived in the area, there would have been no cellar typically. And typically there would have been one room and somewhere in that room on a high stand there would have been a lamp. For us, lamps with candles are typically decorative things. When we're having a nice party at our home or it's a festive holiday season, there’re lamps everywhere and they’re lit. This is not a decorative thing. This is a very, very important functional thing. They did not have electricity. This is the way this house was lighted at night and without that lamp on the stand, without being able to have that light in the room you would have bumped into things, you wouldn't have been able to find your way around. It's a very important thing. So here's the illustration — one room Palestinian house, He says, “You would never put your lamp on a stand in the middle of the room to light the room and then put a basket over it because the room would be darkened.” Nor Greek house — very often you had multiple rooms and you had a cellar. If you had a Greek house you wouldn't take the lamp and instead of putting it in the vestibule, the very entrance hall so that the minute you walked in the front door already the entrance hall was lit with light, you wouldn't take that and put it downstairs in the cellar.
In the illustration Jesus is the light and His point is this — if you don't see Me, you won't be able to see anything. If you don't believe on Me, your heart will be dark. If you stick me down in the cellar or you put a basket over Me, then your heart is going to be darkened because I'm the only source of light to come into your eyes and to be able to show you around. I'm the one that enlightens the human heart. I show you your sin, I show you your need, I show you the way of salvation, I show you the Gospel. And Jesus says, “Do you have the sight to see Me? Do you have the sight to see the Gospel? Have your eyes been enlightened by Me, the lamp, the light?”
He also says something very interesting. If you look back in verses 29 and 30 He says, when the crowds are increasing, “You’re an evil generation.” And then we find out why He says that they’re an evil generation. Because why? “It seeks for a sign.” Now wait a second here folks, Jesus has just in the company of these folks cast out a demon. I trust, among those of you who are believers, were I to do that I would have your full attention. Jesus however does this and the response is, “Hmmm…He must be doing this by Satan's power. So Jesus, if You’re really going to show us that You’re from God, You’re going to have to do a sign.” Okay, like He's not already done one! And like whatever He does they’re not going to ascribe it to Satan, but they demand a sign.
And what's Jesus’ response? “You’re not going to get a sign from Me except the sign of Jonah.” Now what is the sign of Jonah? Could it be Jonah's preaching for repentance because Jonah preached that Nineveh needed to repent and Jesus and John the Baptist preached that their generation needed to repent? Well yes, that parallel is important but Jesus is saying more than that.
Look at the language of verse 29 — “It seeks for a sign but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah” and then look at verse 30 “for as Jonah became a sign.” Ah-ha! It's not the sign of what Jonah preached that's the sign of Jonah — what's the sign of Jonah? Jonah's the sign of Jonah, because Jonah, when he tried to run away from Nineveh, ended up in the belly of a big fish for three days. Now normally when you are ingested by a large, sea-gulling creature for three days you die. Somehow he ends up on the shore and on his way to Nineveh alive. On the third day he comes out of the watery grave of this sea beast and ends up on dry land alive and able to preach the Gospel. And what was that? A sign to Nineveh. As it were, God is saying, “Nineveh, I am sending someone to you back from the dead to preach repentance.” And Jesus says to this generation, “Here's the only sign you’re going to get — the sign of Jonah.”
On the third day He rose again from the dead and He declared to them the Gospel. He accomplished salvation in His life, His death, His burial, His resurrection. Can you hear the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 verses 1 through 4? That “He died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was buried and raised again on the third day according to the Scriptures so that we might be justified,” so that we might be saved. And Jesus is saying, “That's the sign that I'm going to give this generation, the sign of Jonah. It's going to be My resurrection that is the sign because that's the Gospel itself, that by My life, My death, My burial, and My resurrection I bring to salvation all who trust in Me.”
So Jesus is saying, “Do you have sight to see that sign? Do you have sight to see the sign of the son of Jonah? Do you have sight to see Jesus? Do you have sight to see the Gospel? Have your eyes been opened to understand that He is the only way of salvation and to believe on Him and to treasure Him more than anything else in this world? Does your sight show you that there's nothing in this life as precious as He is, that there's nothing in this life that can give you satisfaction like He can, there's nothing even close? Do you have that sight? Jesus is challenging His generation with that message. He's challenging you and me with that message. This is huge for us. Jesus is saying, “Don't play games with God. Make sure your eyes see Jesus and the Gospel because it's by that light and that light alone that your body is enlightened. Otherwise, there will be nothing but darkness in you, because apart from Me, you are still dead in trespasses and sins and your eyes are blind. You can walk around in noon-day sun and see nothing, not because the sun is not bright but because your eyes are darkened. They’re on the wrong thing. They’re diseased, they’re closed, they’re dead.” The sun is bright. Jesus is shining. But unless your eyes are enlightened by that lamp, that light, Jesus Christ, you have no hope.
My friends, this is a very simple message but it is a very central message. Jesus is calling His generation and you and me, who have enormous privileges. We have our Bibles. We have so many Bibles that we have Bibles at home collecting dust. We have Sunday School, we have Catechism, we have family worship, we have faithful Bible preaching Sunday after Sunday, but do we repent and do we see Jesus and do we see His wisdom and do we see His Gospel? Every single one of us has to do business with God in our hearts there. May God not let us play games. May He grant to us true repentance. Let's pray.
Our heavenly Father, we ask that You would show us Jesus and show us the Gospel and enlighten our eyes to the truth and that You would be our vision. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Now in the response to the preaching of God's Word let's sing the first stanza of number 642, “Be Thou My Vision.”
Now receive a blessing from the God who gives the grace of repentance, from the God who alone can bestow on you heavenly wisdom, from the God who has given His Son Jesus so that by the Gospel you might enjoy eternal fellowship with Him. Receive His benediction.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.
