Word of Encouragement AM

00:02 Amen. Let the church say Amen this morning. 00:05 Amen. 00:05 Appreciate those songs, Brother Justin. They're particularly meaningful to me this morning for some reason. Appreciate the opportunity this morning to pray and praise with the people of God here at Living Water. Invite you to turn in your copies of the Scriptures to the book of Numbers. 00:24 We're going to take a break from Malachi today and jump over to, or back in time to the book of Numbers. And several things happened in preparation for this message, none of which you would say is extremely significant as far as earth-shattering kinds of things. 00:45 But just feeling 00:50 that we've had some heavy things that we've gone through as a congregation the last number of weeks and months, and wanting to, just sensing in my heart that the Lord wanted to share a word of a positive word this morning. Just a word of blessing and a word of encouragement. And as is often the case, 01:11 we regularly preach about God's expectations. We preach about warnings for our walk. We preach sometimes, sometimes we preach words of rebuke and correction and challenge. And all of that is good. But sometimes we just simply need to preach words of encouragement. And that's what I want to do this morning with recent developments in the church, 01:33 discipline in the church, disease around the world. My, oh my, you turn on the radio and you look at the newspapers and it's just, I mean, everybody's talking about corona this and corona that and virus. And anyway, you've got disease around the world. 01:49 You've got distrust if you pay attention to the political maneuverings and political shenanigans that are being played. The distrust between people may be like never before, division, even cursing. And I'm not talking about profanity, even though there's some of that mixed in. But I'm talking about people cursing one another and just wanting the worst, 02:11 the worst, the absolute worst for their fellow man. And then destruction. You keep track of the death of Sasha Krause. And I don't know that family, but acquainted with the ministry, vaguely acquainted with the ministry of Lamp and Light. 02:31 And it followed that 02:34 just tragic, tragic chain of events and senseless violence in our opinion. And as we observe, God has something He will do with that, I'm sure. But with all of that, sometimes we just need a word of blessing. Sometimes we need a word of encouragement. And the second thing that happened, 02:55 kind of as I was pondering that, there's a sister in church that drew my attention. I don't normally use the Daily Bread very much. It's fine if you do. I don't in my personal devotional life. And that's fine too. But drew my attention to a devotional in the Daily Bread a couple of days ago. 03:15 This was last Sunday. So it'll be a couple of days before that on this passage. And so I went and it triggered my thinking a little bit on this benediction, this great benediction in Numbers 6:23-27. 03:31 And the leaders in this passage of Scripture were to memorize this blessing and communicate it regularly on God's behalf. 03:41 And it goes like this in verse 22: "The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 'Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, 'This is the way you shall bless the children of Israel.'" So if you want to know how God wants to bless you and bless us and have us bless each other, say to them, "The Lord bless you and keep you. 04:03 The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. So they shall put My name on the children of Israel and I will bless them." In 1979, that devotional went on to say, "Dr. 04:23 Gabriel Barke and his team discovered two silver scrolls in a burial ground outside the old city of Jerusalem. In 2004, after 25 years of careful research, the scholars confirmed that those scrolls were the oldest biblical text in existence, or at least that we have found. 04:42 It's called extant manuscripts, manuscripts that are available to us. 04:46 The oldest biblical text having been buried 600 BC." And the author went on to say, "Ponder for a moment that the oldest existing fragments of the Bible declare God's desire to bless you and to bless us." And I think that's significant. 05:07 I think that's significant. And I'd like for us to say this passage of Scripture, recite it together this morning. And then we're going to share it with each other at the end of the service. So let's say it together. "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. 05:27 The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace." Oh, what a blessing. And so this morning in our message, we want to look at the blesser, the blessing, and the blessed. The blesser, the blessing, and the blessed. So we see here, 05:47 first of all, in this passage that this is God's word to His covenant people. Now, some of us are reading through the Bible through the year and have come through Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus. And you can kind of get bogged down in the last part of Exodus and throughout parts of Leviticus. 06:06 And then you come to Numbers and you say, "What is this all about?" And of course, that's a study in itself. But basically, the tabernacle in Exodus was the awareness of the presence of God in the midst of His people. 06:21 The law in Exodus and in Leviticus was the invitation from God to the people of the covenant and the community of faith to approach His holy presence. And so while we may get bogged down in all the laws and all the details and all the regulations of how you approach God, 06:42 there are several things that stand out in the middle of all of that. One being that God is in the midst of His people and He is in the relationship with His people in a covenant community, in a covenant relationship. And secondly, that God wants to be approached, that He wants to have relationship, that He wants to bless. 07:03 And He lays out for the people of Israel the way to come into His presence so that His blessing might be upon them. This is the law of invitation. It's an invitation from God to the covenant people. And then the Leviticus was the prescription for cleansing from God and how you approach God. 07:24 And the Levites then were the mediators between, the Levites and the priests were the mediators between the people and God and the leaders of worship. So if you can keep some of those major concepts in mind as you read through the book, it becomes easier to kind of sift through all of the details. And then, 07:43 of course, Numbers, interestingly enough, is because it's numbering. Numbers, there's a census in the history of Israel. The numbers were the official role of the community, the official role of the community of faith. 08:00 And these are the people that God spoke to Moses to address. And He says, "I want you and I want the sons of Aaron and Aaron himself to say blessing this way." Now, we don't get bogged down in the actual words as we bless each other. But the concepts need to be there as we bless one another. 08:22 And so He's speaking to the individual in the community. The Lord blesses through the individual, the individual through the community. And He blesses the community through the individual. 08:36 As we tell people when they come to Living Water, we say, "This needs to work for you and it needs to work for us because the church wants to bless you and you in turn want to bless the church. And we all want to bless the Lord." And so it's interesting here because He's addressing the people of Israel. But then He uses as a nation, 08:56 as a people, as a covenant group. But then He uses individual singular pronouns, "you," and "make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you and lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace." And this is how I will put My name upon the children of Israel corporately. 09:16 So you have the corporate and you have the individual. And God wants to bless the corporate through the individual and wants to bless the individual through the congregation. So we have both happening here back and forth. 09:32 And then another thing we see in the context of this blessing is that it is initiated by the Lord Himself. Now, Moses didn't come and assume that God was going to bless them. In fact, the Lord had reason to wipe them out at certain times prior to this. And Moses was saying, 09:52 "You know, please God, please don't wipe us out. What would that do to Your name? And what would that do to Your reputation?" And so on among the nations. But Moses is not asking this from God. Moses is not assuming this from God. Moses is not begging for a blessing or demanding a blessing. 10:13 God is initiating the blessing. It's one thing if you go to somebody and you ask for something and you kind of initiate that out of your sense of need. But it's another thing when someone comes to you and offers something and out of the blue and recognizes that they just want to bless you. 10:33 And maybe they don't even have a responsibility to bless you. They just want to bless you. And many times we ask the question, "What is our responsibility in a certain situation?" I like to ask the question, "What can we do to bless in a certain situation?" And so it's not an assumption. It's not begging or demanding. 10:53 It's not even Moses asking. It's God in such a way as promotes feeling and depth and intensity of emotion. He does this in poetic form in these verses 24, 25, and 26. 11:10 It's poetic form, which is meant to intensify feeling and promote emotion. Now, if you want to tell your wife, men, that you love her, that's one thing. That's prose. "I love you." That's a statement of fact. If you really want to convey emotion, put some feeling behind your voice. 11:32 "I love you." If you really want to convey emotion, write her a poem, write her a poem, write her a song. Yeah, I wrote my wife a song one time for her birthday. And that was my way of, it's kind of cheesy. I don't know if you remember the song. But anyway, to think and to put feeling into it. 11:52 And that's what God does here. 11:53 In the midst of all of this recorded history, in the midst of all of these regulations and these details of how to approach and how to be cleansed and all of that, in the middle of it, God says, "I want you to know that I want to bless you with an intense feeling of emotion that you are mine and I am yours." 12:13 That's the context of the blessing. What about the actual prayer itself? Let's look at the blesser. Well, the priests are involved in this blessing. They're the ones who God is singling out to be primarily responsible to bless the people because that was one of the primary roles of the priest. 12:33 The priesthood had two definite functions. One was to represent the people to God. 12:40 And that was through the prayers and through the sacrifices and through the offering of incense on behalf of the people and through the peace offering and the sin offering and the burnt offering and the free will offering and all of the offerings and sacrifices that were done. 12:56 The priest on behalf of the people, mediating their worship between man and God. But then also the priest taking the things of God and mediating that down to the people. And so the priest would have this message from God. And they would declare the word of God. And they would read the Scriptures publicly. 13:16 And they would bless the people on behalf of God, praying to God on behalf of the people, blessing the people on behalf of God. And so that was their priestly role. And so the priests were involved in this blessing. But more than that, this is a blessing from God. This is a blessing from Jehovah. 13:37 They are speaking words of life from God Himself. "The Lord bless you. The Lord lift up His face upon you, shine upon you. The Lord keep you. The Lord be gracious to you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you. The Lord give you peace." So we have the Lord. 13:55 Who's the Lord? Jehovah, Jehovah, Yahweh, the covenant-keeping God who is the self-existent one, who from eternity past to eternity future, made by no man, self-existent, and who keeps His covenant that He makes with His people, the people of Israel. 14:15 That God, the eternal God who is your refuge, the Lord Himself bless you. This comes from God. This is what God thinks about His covenant people. He wants to bless them. You don't have to twist God's arm to get Him to like you. 14:33 Sometimes you try to appeal to people in a variety of ways to like you, to like you. Well, I don't think that person likes me. And so I'm going to do something to make them like me. Not with God. You don't somehow do something to make God like you. God loves you. 14:49 And He delights in you when you are in the community of faith in Jesus Christ as His children in His family. And He has put His name upon the people of Israel. And He has put His name upon the church. And He blesses the true child of God. This is the heart. 15:10 This is a picture into the heart of God. Again, I say it's significant that this passage of Scripture is the oldest known manuscript dating all the way back to 600 BC that we have available to us today. Interesting, fascinating, beautiful. 15:27 Then we have the Messiah because this blessing finds its fulfillment in Christ as the Old Testament does. We find this blessing in the Messiah because He is our great high priest. He is our great high priest. He is the one who is the mediator between God and man. He replaced the Levites, 15:47 the sons of Aaron, as the great high priest after the order of Melchizedek. And Hebrews 9:11 says, "But Christ, being come and high priest of good things to come by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, a greater and more perfect tabernacle," He's that high priest. As you can picture the priest, 16:06 the sons of Aaron, at the door of the tabernacle blessing the people as they stretched out their hands after the sacrifices and after the day of the atonement and after the feast of the Passover and blessing the people, you can imagine and you can picture Jesus Christ standing in the presence of God with His hands outstretched over His church saying, 16:27 "The Lord bless you and keep you." We have an high priest who is set on the right hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens, minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched and not man. Hebrews 3:1, "Wherefore, holy brethren partakers of the heavenly calling, 16:48 consider the apostle and high priest of our profession, Christ Jesus." Hebrews 4:14, "Seeing then that we have a great high priest that is passed into the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession." So we have the role of the priest. We have the role of Jehovah. 17:07 We have the role of Christ, the Messiah, the Lord. And we have the role of individual believers, the role of individual believers because now we are a holy priesthood, a holy priesthood. And we need not wait for the priest or the pastor or the preacher to bless us. 17:27 We may bless one another. Amen? 17:32 We may bless one another because First Peter 2:9 says, "Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people that you should show forth the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." So if you've been called out of darkness into His marvelous light, 17:52 you have the commission to bless the family of God in such a way. Jesus also refers to us, or John the Revelator does in Revelation 1:6, that He has made us kings and priests to His God and Father. That's present tense. 18:14 And so we see the blesser, the priest, the Lord, the Messiah, individual believers. And what is this blessing that we may give to one another, that we're called to give to one another and we're called to receive from God? Well, let's take a look at it a little bit closer. 18:33 "The Lord bless you and keep you." Notice that the term Lord here is used three times. Well, as Christians, we recognize the significance of a three-mentioned use of the name of God. We see in this the Trinity: Father, 18:54 Son, Holy Spirit, 18:57 all the authority of the Godhead speaking blessing to His people. Father blessing His people. The Son blessing His people. The Holy Spirit blessing His people. And then we notice the beauty and the order of the poetic structures. 19:18 Now, I'm not a Hebrew scholar. Don't know if we have any Hebrew scholars here. But I'm told by commentaries of those who study Hebrew that the beauty of this poetic structure is very structured. 19:31 If you take the first line in Hebrew, it is made up of three words in the Hebrew language. The second line in the Hebrew language is made up of five words. The third line in the Hebrew language is made up of seven words. 19:51 And if you take the name Lord out, the three times when Lord is mentioned, this covenant blessing has 12 words which could actually be applied to the 12 tribes of Israel. Now, those things are hidden in the deep parts of the Hebrew language. 20:10 And we pull them out of the text, the Hebrew text. And so blessing, blessing is a very structured, very orderly, very meaningful, very intentional. This is intentional on God's part. 20:28 This is not just a 20:32 wave of the hand on your way by. This is something that has been intended by God to minister deeply and emotionally and connectedly to the human heart of His people. So we look at this word, bless. 20:52 What is a blessing? What does it mean to bless? Well, what does it mean to curse? Sometimes you can understand the meaning of a word by contrasting it with the opposite of the word. What does it mean to curse someone? Well, it means to speak ill of them. So to bless would be to speak well of them. 21:09 To curse is to speak something evil into their lives. To bless is to speak something good into their lives. To curse is to wish them harm. To bless is to wish them life and peace. And so God has said, 21:29 "If you stray out from under My covenant and you disregard My covenant, I will curse you." And Deuteronomy says, "Cursed will you be in the field and cursed will you be in the family and cursed will you be in the government and cursed will you be in your crops." But He doesn't want you out there. He wants you in here, 21:49 in the community of faith, the covenant-keeping people of God. That's who the blessing is for, to speak well of, to confer prosperity and happiness and divine care and provision. "The Lord bless you. 22:08 The Lord keep you." The word keep there means to guard, to preserve and protect, to watch over. And in the passive form is to be taken care of. 22:19 God is saying, "May the Lord take care of you and may you allow Him to take care of you and guard you and preserve you." Then I love this next phrase, "The Lord make His face shine upon you." "The Lord make His face shine upon." Face, 22:40 well, it's, of course, figurative language. "The Lord make His face to shine upon you" is figurative of an attitude of acceptance and approval. Now, you can tell a lot about a person by their face. 22:55 In fact, Abraham Lincoln was asked one time if he would allow some fellow that they knew to serve on his cabinet. He said no. He said, "Why not? Because I don't like his face." "You don't like his face? What's wrong with his face?" "He can't help his face," he said. And Abraham Lincoln said, "Any man over 40 is in control of his face." In other words, 23:17 it takes a lifetime to end up with a face that looks like this. Well, that's kind of scary. But nevertheless, with a face, you can communicate a lot of things. You can communicate pleasure. You can communicate satisfaction. You can communicate acceptance. 23:38 You can communicate disapproval. You can communicate a lot of things with the face. And what God wants to communicate is a face that shines on us, a face that shines on us, to shine on us, 23:58 to illuminate us, to enlighten us, to make us bright and our way bright before Him. Go over to Exodus 33, just a few pages back, Exodus 33. And it's interesting that Moses is talking to them about the face of God, 24:18 having spoken to God face to face, having not seen God's face, but having seen the glory of God. And now he's saying, "I want that same God's face to shine upon you. 24:35 I want the God who shined upon me to shine on you." Verse 33, so the Lord, excuse me, chapter 33, verse 11, "So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face." Now, it doesn't say that Moses saw His face, but it's a way of saying they were speaking person to person, 24:56 face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. That's the kind of relationship Moses had with God. Wow. Can we have that kind of relationship with God today? 25:10 And in verse 20, he says, "You cannot see My face, for no man shall see Me and live." And then you know the account there how that God hid Him in the cleft of the rock. And as He passed by, Moses was able to, He removed His hand and Moses was able to see His back. Verse 23, "Then I will take away My hand and you shall see My back, 25:31 but My face shall not be seen." And when Moses came down from the mount after this encounter, chapter 34, verse 29, Moses did not know that the skin of His face shone while He talked with him. 25:46 And Moses came down and they were all afraid to come near Him because He was a shining glory representative of God. The glory that He'd seen of the Father was spilling over from His face. 26:04 Now, keep that in mind when you think about Moses saying from God, "The Lord make His face shine upon you." The same shining face that Moses saw and experienced. They didn't actually see it face to face, 26:24 but as he saw it person to person. And it illuminated him with a glory, by the way, that was fading. Hebrews, no, Second Corinthians tells us the glory was a fading glory. 26:41 But the glory that God wants to show us is His own glory that shall never fade away. The Bible says many things about the face of God. It talks about His face seeing His face. 27:01 It talks about Him hiding His face. It talks about Him, His fury coming up in His face in Exodus or Ezekiel 38, verse 18, verse Psalm 34:16, "The face of the Lord is against them that do evil, to cut off remembrance of them from the earth." Deuteronomy 31 says, 27:22 "I will surely hide My face in that day for all the evils which they have wrought because they turned to other gods." Deuteronomy 32, and He said, "I will hide My face from them. I will see what their end shall be, for they are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith." Isaiah 59 says, 27:41 "Your iniquities have separated you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you that He will not hear." Jeremiah 21:10, "For I have set My face against this city for evil and not for good," saith the Lord. 27:58 When we're outside of the community of faith, when we're outside of the covenant relationship with Jesus Christ, God's face can't shine on us. 28:09 But this face of God, God wants to shine on us, wants to bring us back into faithful covenant-keeping relationship with Him and shine His face upon us and illuminate His countenance. By the way, 28:28 what a beautiful picture of what we have in Christ. Because did you realize that in Christ, we see the fullness of this passage? 28:37 For Second Corinthians 4:6 says, "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." And so it is Jesus who shines on us the glory of God. 28:59 I'll be honest with you that much too often, I find myself burdened down with cares. And I find myself burdened down with difficulties and troubles and sometimes even with sorrows and the cares of this life. 29:17 We need to come into the presence of God as Moses did and allow that communion with God to change us and to bear our burdens, realizing that in His presence, there is fullness of joy. And at His right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. And one day, 29:36 one day, there is coming a time when we shall see Him face to face and will be like Him. And Psalm 17, verse 15 says, "As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness. I shall be satisfied," future tense, "I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness." What a blessing. 29:57 What a blessing. And so He says, "May the light of His countenance, may the Lord lift up His countenance upon you." His countenance, this is the same word in the Hebrew as the word face, same word. It implies the smile of God. It implies His smile. 30:18 What is it worth to see a parent, one of our parents, smile at us? Some of your parents, some children, you can just look at them with disapproval and displeasure, and they wilt and they weep and they get a message from your face. Other children, 30:39 and then that's true also when you smile, when you smile, and they sense your approval, your approval. The story is told of Thomas Jefferson many years ago, back when presidents traveled by horse. I'm not sure how he traveled when he was president, but this may have been before he was president. 30:59 They were out riding one day, him and some of his helpers and workers were out riding a horse one day. And they came to this place where the river had overflowed its banks, and they were needing to get to the other side because the bridge was washed out. 31:12 And so there were a couple of them who went on ahead and got safely across. And then they beckoned him to come. And there was a man standing on the shore who also needed to get across. And so he asked Thomas Jefferson if he could ride with him. Jefferson says, "Come on, get on the back of the horse." And they went across, got across safely. 31:32 And a fellow was asked later, he said, "Why did you ask the president, President Jefferson?" I guess he was president at that time. "Why did you ask President Jefferson to ride on his horse? You didn't ask the others." He said, "Oh, that was the president? 31:45 He didn't know." And his response was, "Well, the others had a no face, and President Jefferson had a yes face." And so he felt comfortable asking, "Is your face a no face or a yes face?" The Lord lift up His countenance, His countenance upon you. 32:05 I believe God has a yes face. I believe God has a yes face for His children. Now, for the disobedient, there is a look of disapproval, and you move out from under the blessing of God. But for His children who walk in His ways and who are in covenant relationship in Jesus Christ, He has a yes face. 32:26 He wants to bless you, keep you, make His face shine on you, be gracious to you, lift up His countenance onto you, smile on you, and give you peace. It's initiated by God Himself. One final word we look at here, and that's the word peace. It's the Hebrew word shalom. 32:47 It means not only peace, but it means soundness. It means our welfare, our well-being, our completeness. It implies and means prosperity and tranquility. In the English language, we ask each other, "How are you?" And then conversation goes from there. 33:05 In the Hebrew language, I'm told they ask, "How is your shalom? How is your shalom?" It's like asking, "How are you? How is your well-being? How is your health? How is your life? How are you doing?" And God wants you to do well. He wants you to be prosperous spiritually in the right ways. 33:27 He wants you to experience tranquility and soundness and health and welfare and completeness. 33:36 Remember asking or writing down the road one day, maybe you've heard me use this illustration, but I was driving on a trip, and I was listening to the radio, and there came on an interview with Joel Olstein. And somebody asked, an interviewer on a secular radio station was interviewing Joel Olstein. 33:56 And it was soon after the time when this public denial of the eternality of hell kind of gained popularity, and people were denying that hell is an eternal place. And so the interviewer asked Joel Olstein if he believes in hell. Well, Olstein says, "It's like this. I just believe that God is for you and not against you." Well, 34:18 that didn't answer the question. So he took a second run at it and said, "Do you believe in hell as eternal place?" Well, you see, it's like this. I just really believe that we need to let people know that God is for them and not against them. So he took a run at it a third time trying to get an answer out of Olstein. And you know to not answer is to answer, 34:38 but he wanted to hear it from his own lips. And he said, "Now, when I was in church, we were taught that hell is an eternal place of punishment for the wicked or something to that effect. Do you believe that?" Well, Olstein said, "I just really think we need to let people know that God is for them and not against them." Well, 35:00 Olstein had half a message. His half was right that God is for His people and not against you. But the other half was not right. God is against the wicked because they're against Him. But in the community of faith, 35:20 as we walk together as believers, as we walk with the Lord, as we walk in in in the light of His presence—and by the way, you can't walk in darkness and in the light of His presence. So we got to clear that up. You got to walk in the light in order for the light to illuminate you. You have to make a decision to walk in the light. But those who are walking in the light, 35:41 God is for you. He's not against you. Now, sometimes it may feel like He's hidden His face. Sometimes you know the whole footprints in the sand idea, it's real. 35:55 Sometimes it feels like, "Is God even there?" But it's then we come back and we hear the heart of God. So who are the blessed in this passage? The blessed are the covenant people of Israel who would walk in the light and obedience to the word and will and ways of Yahweh. 36:19 Who is the covenant people today? Who is this for today? It is for the people of Christ who are in relationship with the Father through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and having been washed and cleansed by His shed blood, who are walking in the light of His countenance and the light of His presence. 36:39 God is for them. He's not against them. Amen? Pretty quiet this morning. Amen? God give you peace. So in the Old Testament, the name of God—I love this verse 27—"They shall put My name on the children of Israel, 36:59 and I will bless them." Put your name on them. So God put His name on the people of Israel to show that they were His people. He stamped upon the people of God the name of God. And He has stamped upon the people of Christ, the church, the name of Christ, 37:20 the name of Jesus. But you have to have an address to get the blessing. You have to have an address to get the blessing. The story is told of a man, a drunkard in the slums of Chicago, slums of Chicago for many years. And he came to the mission one night. He heard the message, ate the food, and went to bed there at the mission. 37:40 And that was his last night on earth. He died poverty-stricken and friendless, never to see another day. What he did not know was that he was a millionaire because someone in England had left him all of their wealth. 38:01 And the English authorities had searched for him but were not able to find him because he had no address. And here was a man who had great wealth, more than he could ever have wanted or used. And he lived and died in poverty because they couldn't find him because he had no address. We have an address. 38:21 It's our identity, Jesus. It is the family of God, the church. We camp out there. We live there. We fellowship there. We worship there. That's our address. That's how God knows us by being in Christ. That's our address. 38:43 It's our address. And so as one writer put it and paraphrased this passage, "May the Lord Yahweh, as Father, Son, and Spirit, bless His people and keep them, cause them to know His presence and His grace, 39:04 and allow them to sense His smile and His peace." 39:11 Tell you what, this means that we do measure up to God's approval. Sometimes we struggle with that. Do we measure up to our parents' approval? Do we measure up to our wife's approval? Some husbands, "Does your wife measure up to your approval? Do you measure up to the church's approval? Does the church measure up to God's approval?" We just are always wondering, "Do we measure up? 39:32 Are we good enough?" The fact is, in ourselves, we're never good enough. But in Jesus Christ, God the Father stamps His approval on us. 39:39 He says, "You are good enough for me to be in relationship with you." Now, trust me, we'll walk in this relationship, and you will grow from glory to glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord, as you look into the face of Christ and walk in His light. 40:00 What a blessing. What a blessing. I want you to stand this morning. 40:08 We're going to do something that I haven't thought out well, so I don't know how it's going to work. But I want every other row—and so let's keep the back row standing facing forward. The next row, face backwards. Face the people in the back row. 40:29 We're going to bless each other, okay? So if you need to have your Bible out so you can read it, or if you haven't memorized, that's fine. Now, the third row, you're going to face the front. The next row, fourth row, you face the back. And then that next row, you're facing the front. And the next row, you face them, okay? 40:50 Are you able to figure that out, which row you're in? Okay? And if you happen to be in the very front row and nobody else is there, face each other or whatever. But I want us to bless each other this morning. You see, we criticize far easier than we bless. Amen? Amen? Isn't it easier to criticize than to bless? 41:13 Well, it sure is for me. 41:16 But we're going to bless this morning as the sons of God, the offspring of the sons of Aaron, with the priestly blessing, under the authority of the Messiah, under the authority of the Lord. We're going to bless each other. And so I want the first row that's facing the back—I mean, 41:37 if you are in a row that's facing back, you go first. We're going to read it and read it to the person in front of you who's facing forward. Got it? 41:51 And read it together. "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace." Now, you're in the row that's facing front. 42:12 You look somebody in the eye or two people or however many if it doesn't work out even person to person. And I want you to read it back. Begin reading. "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. 42:31 The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace." Now, you can all face the front. I want you to close your eyes. 42:43 And I want you to—you don't have to—I'm not asking you to visualize it, but I want you to imagine it, picture it in your mind, your mind's eye. God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit putting His name on you. 43:04 His name on you and His name on this assembly. 43:13 And walk in that. Father in heaven, we thank You this morning for the blessing. Your word says in Proverbs that the blessing of the Lord maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it. Lord, we know that's a proverb and that sometimes there is sorrow and there's grief and there's mourning and there's heaviness. 43:32 And there's a time for rebuke and there's a time for correction and there's a time for admonition. But, oh Lord, never let us forget in all of those times that there's a time for blessing. Blessing from You, blessing You, blessing to You, and blessing one another. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.