Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and
suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a
violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were
sitting. Divided tongues as a fire
appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak
in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living
in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd
gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them
speaking in the native language of each.
Amazed and astonished they asked, Are not all these who are
speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each
of us in our own native language?
Parthians, Medes, Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea
and Cappadocia, Pontius and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and
visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and
Arabs. In our own language we hear them
speaking about God's deeds of power.
All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does
this mean? But others sneered and said they
are filled with new wine. This is the word of the Lord.
All right. Good morning, friends.
Really happy to be here this morning.
So today is an important day. Some of you may have been aware
walking in the room they look forward to.
I think a lot of it is what's required of you in that room.
Some of it has to do with the people that you'll be with,
whether you trust them or you're curious about them, whether
there's something alive between you in the relationship that you
have to the people in the meeting.
And some of it is the hope that you carry into that space.
So an all office meeting for Dunder Mifflin generally isn't a
particularly hopeful place, but my hope is that meetings like
the one that we're sitting in now, we could call this a
meeting, would be hopeful would be spaces where we're curious
about what's going on in the room and in each other's lives.
The story that we're reading this morning, the the story that
Thomas just read to us, begins with a meeting, actually a
series of meetings, sequential meetings for days on end, where
people are gathering together in the same place to do more or
less a similar thing each time they're together.
And the meeting that is at the center of the story that we're
reading today turns out to be one of the most consequential
meetings in the story of Scripture and in the story of
human history. The theologian Willie James
Jennings says this throughout the book of Acts.
The one thing you know about the coming of the Spirit is somebody
has been asked to do what they don't want to do.
What is it that the Spirit wants you to do?
He wants you to be with those who you prefer not to be with.
It's an interesting perspective on meetings, isn't it?
So the next time you're called into a meeting full of people
that you prefer not to be with, whether it's this one or another
one, think about the words of the theologian Willie James
Jennings. This is the work that the Spirit
is doing in the world today. Obviously this is a little bit
tongue in cheek, but friends, we're being called together with
people who aren't like us for a grander purpose than any of our
singular lives in and of themselves.
That's what the book of Acts is doing in just a few sentences.
And it starts here in a room with a group of people who had
no idea what was about to happen to them.
So the passage opens when the day of Pentecost had come, they
were all together in one place. And I want you to notice what
Luke does not do at the beginning of the story.
He does not open with the wind. He does not open with the
spiritual phenomena. He does not open with the
miraculous spectacular thing that takes place in this
meeting. He doesn't open with fire.
He intentionally opens with this room full of people who have
been gathering together one day after the next.
If you go back 1 chapter, Acts chapter one verse 13 tells us
that after Jesus ascended, they went up to the upper room and
stayed there. And so this was a habitual
assembly. And Acts 114 describes what
those 10 days looked like. It says all these were
constantly devoting themselves to prayer together.
And that word together is instructive in this passage and
really throughout the rest of the New Testament.
The Greek word appears 11 times in the book of Acts, and it
carries a sense of unified purpose, which is obvious.
We we think that when we think of the word together, but it
also has a musical dimension to it.
In the ancient world, this would be the same word that's used to
describe musical harmony. So different voices, different
parts that come together and create something that none of
them could have produced on their own.
And that's what's happening in the Upper Room.
For 10 days before Jesus ascended, he told these
disciples to wait in Jerusalem. And so they they waited and they
prayed. And they were likely recounting
the stories of what it was like to be with Jesus and thinking to
themselves, Gee, isn't it strange that our good friend was
just, you know, disappeared into the clouds in front of our very
eyes? What is it that we do at this
point? They were grieving because they
found themselves in a strange circumstance that they probably
didn't have a lot of clear answers for.
But they were hoping in the same breath because their teacher,
their rabbi, this Messiah whom they had come to trust and know
as the visible image of the invisible God, told them to
wait. So that's what they did. 120 men
and women who had followed Jesus from Galilee.
This included his mother and his brothers.
Ordinary people who had seen extraordinary things throughout
Jesus ministry and they didn't entirely know what to do next.
And so they were there because he told them to be there day
after day, and they just knew to keep meeting.
They didn't know what to anticipate.
Of course, we know what comes next because we just read the
next part of the story. But into that room, those people
and those prayers, those unfinished stories told and
retold, the miracle of God's presence by the Spirit arrives.
And so this community was creating the conditions for what
was to happen next. They were actually making
possible this feeling that happens.
They were creating the container for the presence and the love of
God to come into their midst. And so there's something that
would have been obvious to every Jewish person in that room that
morning that we almost entirely miss because of our situation in
time and space. Pentecost was not a new holiday.
This was not a thing that they were coming up with on this day
that the Spirit came and and filled them.
It was a ancient Jewish festival, a feast known as
Shavuot, the the Feast of Weeks, one of the three great
pilgrimage festivals on the Jewish calendar.
And so 50 days after Passover, the people would gather in
Jerusalem to celebrate the wheat harvest and to remember
something important from their history, the giving of the Torah
at Sinai. So this was the festival that
sort of marked the remembrance of Moses ascending Sinai and
receiving the law from God that would instruct the people of
Israel, you know, how how to become a people, this covenant,
this gift that would make Israel who they were supposed to be.
And so when Luke opens with when the day of Pentecost had come,
he's placing this moment on a very specific point in the
devotional life of the people, the way that they sort of marked
the time. So think about, I don't know,
it's Memorial Day weekend. And so we have these secular
holidays that sort of mark the time and that might invoke some
particular memories for some of you.
I know for me there were things from childhood, you know,
cookouts or camp outs or whatever that when I hear
Memorial Day, I just think, Oh yeah, that stuff.
And so this is that's the work that this is doing in the, in
the, the people who are gathered, they're together and
Oh yeah, it's the feast of weeks.
And so it sparked some particular thoughts for them.
This is the day that we remember Moses on the mountain.
So even in the simple way that this is situated in our story,
it's beginning to actually make a claim about the kind of thing
that's happening. Because Luke doesn't just name
Pentecost to mark the time. He's also, he's invoking this,
this festival, this feast to sort of flag that something is
happening that sort of rhymes with that thing that the people
were already familiar with. And so then in verse 2, suddenly
from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,
and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
In verse 3, divided tongues of fire appeared among them, and a
tongue rested on each of them. And the wind and the fire are
specifically Sinai imagery. When God meets Moses on the
mountain, there was smoke and fire and loud sounds and the
mountain trembled. So what Luke is doing and
telling the story is he's he's sort of signaling this is
happening again. It's happening again in a new
way with a new group of people. And God is doing something that
rhymes with an earlier part of the story.
So, you know, when we when we learn to read the story of the
Scriptures as one unit, as one grand story, you can start to
see the ways that these things sort of repeat themselves and
rhyme with earlier parts of the story.
God is showing up in the way that God showed up at Sinai.
So when you read that story from Exodus and you see all of these
things that are sort of similar, at Sinai, God gave the law to
one man who carried it down the mountain to the people.
And at this point, fire doesn't land on each individual person.
Moses, one person has a radical encounter with this powerful
presence of God. And verse 3 in our text is
careful about that. It says a tongue rested on each
of them, so it rhymes, but it's not the same because we can see
that something a little bit different is happening.
Every person in the room is touched with the kind of
phenomena that one person, Moses, the leader, experienced
thousands of years before. The presence of God is enormous
and impersonal and far away. In the first story that we read
at Sinai, even for Moses, it's actually not quite close enough
to touch. I want to show you 2 paintings
side by side for a moment. The first one is from the, the,
the 17th century, a painter named Jerome.
And we see Moses. We, we actually don't see Moses,
We see God. There's a far away sort of giant
figure on top of a mountain. And you see the masses of people
sort of gathered around the base of the mountain.
And this thing you see visually is sort of, you know, God's
giving the law. And I don't know if there's like
lasers coming out of his eyes or what's happening, but you know,
it's like there's something, there's something going on up
there on the mountain, right? I mean, that's, that's what
that's what I would title this piece.
And so when you look at this, you can see the this this kind
of experience that would be recounted that people would have
read in the scriptures and would be called to mind by this moment
that, you know, way far away. One person who we kind of knew a
little bit, who was one of our leaders had a crazy encounter
with God out there on the mountain and we all kind of
followed suit. Now look at the next one.
This is Titian, and it's interesting because it's a
similar composition. There's there's light descending
from the top of the frame and figures are looking up.
But the way that artists have represented this moment over
time is with a kind of intimacy that's lacking from artistic
representations of Sinai. No longer do you have masses of
people looking at the far away thing that's happening way up
over on the mountain to one person, but you have an intimate
gathering of folks who are sort of looking to the presence of
God coming into the room. And it's it's impacting it's
affecting each individual person and it's impacting their their
gathered assembly. The distance from what's
happening is completely different.
And So what Sinai kept at arm's length in the story of the
Scriptures, this powerful, intimate, loving presence of
God, Pentecost brings all the way in.
And these people had the most personal kind of encounter
possible. And then in verse 4, all of them
were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other
languages as the Spirit gave them ability.
And look at who's in the room to experience this.
Luke gives us this list in verses 9 through 11, which
Thomas read beautifully, by the way.
I love including long lists of names and places and things for
for the liturgist to have to pronounce in the teaching
Scripture. But I left it in on purpose
because people from every corner of the world as they knew it
were gathered in Jerusalem for this festival.
It's important that it was a pilgrimage festival because
people from everywhere were coming to, to to celebrate
together. Different regions, different
dialects, different food traditions, different financial
realities, different ways of of reading Torah, of reading the
law, and almost certainly different political instincts
toward Israel, toward the Roman Empire that oppressed the people
at the time. You know, this list might feel a
little bit over the top if we don't know what we're looking
at. Sometimes Scripture can be a
little bit that way when we read long lists of names or
genealogies or different things. But baked into the inclusion of
that long list of people from different places is a point that
the author's trying to make that this impacts everyone.
No one is left behind by the personal transformative presence
of God that comes in this meeting.
Jennings again describes what God's doing with that list as
nothing less than a revolution around the people, the way that
the people thought about how God was at work in the world.
He calls it the revolution of the intimate, and he writes that
it's it's the revolution of creating a life together that
breaks boundary and border. My people's story is taken up
into the story of God, and other people's story is taken up, and
our stories are woven together toward a new future.
Isn't that a beautiful thought? I mean, you know, when I think
about the ways that each person has come to be in this room week
in and week out, and the ways that our stories are so
different one from another, you know, that can become a barrier
in our ability to relate to one another.
But it can also be a beautiful representation of the kind of
thing that God wants to do. And and hear this, it's not
assimilation of stories together.
It's not all of these things losing their distinct importance
when they come together in a group.
It's each person from each place being named individually in this
list. You know, Luke doesn't take this
list of places and say all these people from all these different
places, they came together. They received the gift of the
Spirit, and then they became the same.
That's not the point. The point is that that their
distinct differences remain intact as they're drawn together
and their stories are woven together into the story of the
family of God. And so when Peter stands up to
address the crowd in verse 14, his first move is to reach for
the prophet Joel. And he essentially says this is
that that what the prophet is describing when he wrote that
God would pour out his spirit on all people, sons and daughters,
young and old, slave and free. Peter recognizes the moment
because he knows the story that he's living in and he can
recognize the pattern. He's so familiar with the story
of his people. He's so familiar with the great
stories that have informed the way that he lives his life and
understands himself in the world that he can't help but notice
that this thing is repeating itself again.
This festival that commemorated the law given to one man on the
mountain has become the day that the Spirit is available to
everyone in the room across every single category that would
have been, that would have previously determined who had
access to the presence of God and who didn't, who was allowed
in and who had to wait outside. And what happens in this moment
is that the presence of God is universalized.
It's democratized. Every person suddenly has access
to the filling of the Spirit. That's the kind of gathering
that God chose for this moment. It was a room that was wide
enough to hold the whole list that that Luke just gave to us
and open enough that God could do something completely new
inside of it. And so before we move on from
this passage, I want to further place this moment in the big
story of the Scriptures because obviously Pentecost it it
doesn't come out of nowhere. In Numbers 11, Moses is
exhausted and the people are complaining again and he's
basically completely at the end of his rope.
And, you know, he's saying things like, God, I don't know
what to do with these people. They're so stubborn and they're
so difficult. And God tells him to gather 70
elders, and the spirit that rests on Moses is going to be
spread around among them so that he doesn't have to carry the
whole thing by himself. And it works.
So the 70 elders, they received the spirit and they start
prophesying in this story. But then there are these two
other jokers, Eldad and me dad, who aren't in the meeting for
some reason. So they skipped the meeting.
They heard, you know, all, all company meeting and they were
like, no, so they're still back at the camp and the Spirit
filled them anyway. So they start prophesying right
there in the middle of everybody.
And the reaction from the people who go to the meeting is like,
hey, guys, this was like just for the meeting.
So what are you doing out here? Moses stop them.
And Moses says would that all the Lord's people were prophets
and that the Lord would put his spirit on them.
And so the moment that people begin to think in this earlier
story that we're making reference to, oh, this is just
for the people in the meeting. We we have that that thesis kind
of thwarted immediately. You you sort of see God go.
These guys get the spirit. But I'm going to put a little
spirit on these guys over here too.
Who who skipped the meeting and so long before this passage that
we're reading this morning. We hear this longing that
there's this this man, this leader who's been carrying
something heavy for a long time, and he looks out at his people,
just wanting everyone to have this kind of interface with God
that he just experienced on the mountain.
And he was asking for Pentecost. His, his longing, his prayer
sort of points to this thing that happens a long time after.
And his cry gets woven into the longest, most patient story
imaginable. Because in the beginning, God
walks with humanity in the garden in the cool of the day,
in what's what's unmediated face to face interaction with God.
And then comes the fall and the humans create distance.
And this is an important part of the story for us to get right.
So just hear that it might, it might be something for another
time. But the humans create distance
between themselves and God. We often get this wrong.
We read the story like God is, is sort of holding people at
arm's length and pushing people out of way and you've messed up.
The humans fall. And so God says, I want nothing
to do with you. But the humans create distance.
And then at every point throughout the story, we see God
doing everything that God can do to try to to to get situated in
front of the humans again to say, let me help you, Let's talk
about this. And the humans continue to sort
of say, we're not so sure about that.
And so we have the Tabernacle, and God agrees to travel with
the people through the wilderness, with God's presence
contained in a tent, which might be kind of strange for God.
And then in the temple, the presence of God is located in a
building in Jerusalem, behind a curtain accessible only to
priests at a certain time of year.
And then in the incarnation, in the coming of Jesus, God's
presence fills a human body, walking around in Galilee,
touchable and interruptable, and eating with his friends.
And each moment in this grand story that the writers of
Scripture are weaving together, God comes a little bit closer to
the people. Despite sometimes the best
efforts of the humans to keep God at arm's length, God keeps
coming a little bit closer. And this whole arc bends toward
this movement where there is no longer a veil, no longer a
curtain, no more designated few standing in the presence where
everyone else waits outside. And all of that brings us to
this passage today. All of them were filled with the
Holy Spirit. The tongue of fire in verse 3
rested on each person. The spirit that rested on Moses
alone was distributed to the 70 elders as an emergency measure.
And it comes on judges and priests and prophets and kings
for specific tasks and specific seasons.
But the longing of the entire story that we see throughout is
that that the people of God, each one to a person, would have
this experience of the loving kindness of God.
And Peter's point is simple in the sermon that he preaches
after our text, This is that happening that's coming into the
world right now for the first time.
And the longing of the entire story of the people, of the
Hebrew Scriptures is fulfilled in this moment.
And the Spirit doesn't come from an empty sky.
Peter is clear about this. And the sermon the spirits
poured out from the throne. You know, it was fun.
A couple weeks ago, I got to teach the kids about the
ascension, which I think I think Thomas and I doubled up on
back-to-back to back weeks. And the questions that came in
that room were were so much fun, you know, because it's like,
well, Jesus did what? And it's like, well, yeah.
You know, that's that's what it says.
And we talked it through. It was great.
But you know, this doesn't come from nowhere.
And and one, one of the kids nailed it.
I love this. You know, why, why, why at the
ascension did the angels tell the disciples to quit staring up
into the sky and and kind of get on with it?
And she said because there was more to do.
God wasn't done. And it's like, what a beautiful,
concise summary of this sort of Arc of the story.
This is Jesus raised from the dead, exalted to the right hand
of the Father, pouring out the Spirit from the throne.
This is his first act as ascended Lord to give the gift
of the Spirit is the announcement that the crucified
1 is alive and reigning and not forgotten to his people, but in
fact has made his presence available to all in a way that
wouldn't have even been possible walking on the earth.
What a beautiful thing. And so this meeting is the new
temple. And this meeting becomes the the
archetype. This is now the new temple going
forward. The story arrives at the thing
that it was building toward. And, you know, I want to say
something directly to some of us who come from sort of
charismatic traditions because I think we're susceptible to a
particular misreading of this moment, you know, in in churches
and rooms where we love the operation of the Spirit and we
love the gifts and we love what God wants to do for each of us.
That's yes, yes, absolutely. And we can make Pentecost about
something that it is not necessarily about.
We can make it about the phenomena, the wind and the fire
and the tongues, as if the point of what's happening in this room
were the experience itself. And, you know, I don't need a
show of hands or anything, but I've been in rooms where we've
done that. I've actually LED rooms where
we've done that. And I just, I just want to say
that this is not about trying to drum something up because of the
story that we're reading. What Luke is writing about is a
community that that, as I've heard NT Wright say before, it
gets blown out of the upper room and into the streets to speak
the truth about Jesus with a boldness that has nothing to do
with their own courage. And it has everything to do with
whose presence they are now carrying with them when they go
out of that room. I think about this a lot because
I think it's, it's very important to pay attention to
today. I, I worry that much of what
gets called revival or renewal in America today is simply the
public broadcasting of what NT Wright would call a private
hobby. More enthusiasm, more phenomena,
more experience, but nobody getting blown out into the
streets on behalf of the poor and the stranger and the outcast
and the immigrant and people we would prefer not to be with, to
refer back to Jennings. That is decidedly not what
happens in this room. Because when we read the rest of
the book of Acts from this point forward, we see a whole bunch of
people who get blown out of that room and onto the streets for
the for the common good of people who have been overlooked
and thought less of people blown out onto the streets for the
purpose of bringing the truth about the person of Jesus into
the world in a way that's not just not just polemic, but it's
it's actionable. There is real skin in the game
from this point forward. And so the whole story of
Scripture bends toward this empowering presence that is the
basis for all of the work that Jesus is compelling us to do in
the world. And it happened in a meeting.
And so I just would want to maybe encourage us to, to
question the attitude that we sometimes have about meetings to
sort of bring this full circle. You know, I listen, there are
meetings that I don't like. I get it.
But when when we're in a meeting with other people, what we've
done is we've effectively created a container for God's
Spirit to come and fill and blow us out of the building for the
common good of the people that God is inviting us to love.
And So what does it look like to be the kind of people who show
up to a room like that? In church, we sometimes talk
about this idea of expectation. You know, we sometimes talk
about it like it's something that we have to generate a
feeling that we have to work up or an intensity that we have to
sustain. I don't know if you've ever been
in environments like that where you've kind of left feeling
like, yeah, I'm going to do the thing that the preacher assigned
or I'm going to like, you know, be a different person from this
moment forward. I'm going to start this new
practice and I'm going to do it. And then you don't, or maybe you
do for like 48 hours, but I don't.
I don't know about you. I just am not that reliable.
The commitments that I make to myself, I can't keep them.
You know, I just, I and, and I think a lot of us have a similar
experience where we're just not the most dependable.
And so listen, this isn't about that.
These ones in this story, we're not trying harder and harder to
feel ready for the spirit. They were not working themselves
up into some kind of froth to be able to go out and do the things
that they did. Following from this moment.
It was the genuine empowerment of the presence of God, the love
of God filling them that compelled them to go and do the
things that they did. They were training their
attention in this meeting. And this is kind of the last
thing that I wanted to speak about for for a moment. 10 days
of prayer and showing up together, being together, paying
attention. There's a there's a difference
between trying and training. If I went out this afternoon and
tried to run a marathon, somebody would be coming to to
help to help me. But if I trained, you know, I
mean it might take me a long time, but if I trained my body
and my attention and my aptitudes and all of those
things toward, you know, unto that thing, I, I think it would
be possible, Mary Oliver wrote, Attention is the beginning of
devotion. And I think this is precisely
the kind of thing that Mary Oliver and, and the poets are
speaking about when, when we talk about training our
attention toward a particular thing.
This meeting that these people are in creates the conditions
for their attentiveness to God and attentiveness is the door
that the Spirit walks through in our lives.
Attentiveness. I really believe this.
It's not this, it's, it's not, it's not desire.
It's not longing. It's not, you know, sometimes
those things come to some end. But I really believe that paying
attention to what God is doing is the thing that that creates
opportunities for this kind of filling.
It's, it's the posture of the people who have arranged their
lives and they're gathering around the possibility that God
might show up and do something new for them.
There's a passage in The Lord of the Rings where Sam and Frodo
are in Mordor and things are difficult and the Ring is
getting heavier and they've still got a long way to go, and
Sam starts reminding Frodo about the great stories.
Do you guys remember this part? I might cry actually, thinking
about it. So about all the people who
found themselves in in dark and desperate places, up against
impossible odds, in the middle of something much larger than
themselves, he says, in moments as hard as the one that we're in
now. And then he turns to Frodo and
he says, do you suppose we might be in a story, Mr. Frodo?
I love that question because if you're if you're a reader and a
character in a story suddenly asks whether they might be in a
story, you kind of have to ask the same thing about yourself.
At least that's the way that my mind works.
I don't know about you, but, you know, when I hear Sam ask that
question, I go, do you suppose I might be in some kind of a
story? As a kid, that question was the
most alive thing in the world to me.
I, I wanted to be part of the stories that captivated me.
You know, it's, it's why I love literature and film and all
these things, you know, The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or
Treasure Island or Robinson Caruso or whatever.
And something in those stories calls to something in US.
And, and here's what I want to say to you this, this Pentecost
Sunday, God has been telling a story from the first word of the
world, from the first flicker of light that came into existence,
creation, fall, redemption, resurrection, renewal.
Moses was part of that story. The prophets were part of that
story. The 120 who were gathered in
this room were part of that story.
And so are you. And one of the most powerful
things about the story of Pentecost to me is the
continuity of the story that God's telling in the world and
the way that it invites it beckons each of us to join in
and become part of the story that God is still writing.
This is a story that you and I get to live.
Pentecost is the declaration that God desires to pour out the
Spirit on each one of us. The presence behind the veil,
the presence that walked in the garden, the presence that Moses
met on the mountain, the presence that the people could
only see from a distance, the presence that came for the first
time to each one on the day of Pentecost is now the presence
that dwells in you, us in Christ, and Christ in US.
And so when I think about even that passage, we're participants
in Jesus story in Christ. We're caught up into this
beautiful thing, this beautiful story that God's telling.
And so when we pray, come Holy Spirit, we're not trying to do
something new and we're not trying to retrieve something
old. It's actually neither of those
things. We're joining something that is
ancient and unstoppable. The greatest, truest story
that's ever been told, that's still being told through
ordinary people in ordinary rooms like this one who just
keep showing up. And so maybe when you think
about coming to church again, you have the you have the Jim
Halpert face a little bit, give us Jim.
That's fine, he can go. Now we're talking about a
different kind of story than The Office, as much as I love it.
So if you're here this morning and you feel like you've fallen
out of any good story that there ever was no connection, no
meaning, just random pieces of stuff happening to you and it's
like confusing and strange and you're not sure how to hold all
of it together. I just want to say that the word
of the Lord to you this morning might be that there is a story
for you to be a part of. And by being here in this
gathering, it's it's a great way to sort of take a step, take a
step toward that story. If you only knew, if you only
knew how caught up in this thing you already are.
If you only knew that the same spirit who filled that room in
Jerusalem is present in this room right now, that your life
is not a series of disconnected events, but a little part of a
story, a little side quest in the story that God has been
offering since long before you were born.
It could change the way that you think about everything.
And So what I want to do is invite you to stand, if you're
able, with me. And we're going to have the kids
come back in a moment. So parents actually stay where
you're at for for just a second and we're going to pray and
we're just going to ask for God to, to.