What Can And Cannot Change In Our Relationship With God

In a chart entitled 'Our Relationship with God,' Dr. Chapell lists what can change and what cannot change. Very Clarifying.
What Can Change in our relationship with God:
our fellowship
our experience of his blessing
our assurance of his love
his delight in our actions
his discipline
our sense of guilt

What Cannot Change in our relationship with God:
our sonship
his desire for our welfare
his actual affection for us
his love for us
our destiny
our security
--Bryan Chapell, Holiness by Grace: Delighting in the Joy That Is Our Strength (Crossway, 2001), 196

This is very helpful. Learn what cannot change in your relationship with God and let it comfort you in difficult times. Learn what can change In your relationship with God you can have greater fellowship, greater experience's of God's blessing, greater assurance of his love, experiencing his delight in your actions and his discipline and your own sense of guilt which can change for better or worse.

Grace Is The Only Foundation

Our holiness, or sanctification, is as much a gift of God as our justification. Once we have been united to Christ and stand upon his imputed righteousness and holiness, we have, as John Calvin once observed, a foundation upon which we can build a life of piety and holiness toward God (Institutes III.xi.1). Our ongoing conformity to Christ, our growth in holiness, is driven by God’s grace— it is the basis upon which we “die to ourselves” and live more and more unto Christ on a daily basis. In a word, the Bible tells us that the grace of God transforms us and conforms us to the holy image of Christ. Through God’s grace we are enabled, as Paul writes, to “put off the old man,” which belonged to our former manner of life, and “put on the new man, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph.4:22-24). If we do not recognize that salvation is by God’s grace through faith (Eph.2:1-10), then we will never have a proper foundation from which to grow in our holiness.
by J.V. Fesko

Grace is the only foundation from which we can grow in our holiness as Christians.

Lets Get The Party Started!

Bryan Chapell, commenting on the phrase 'the grace of God has appeared' in Titus 2:11: Grace is not some abstract doctrine or theological construct. Grace comes as Christ does. Grace is as personal as he is. In fact, Christ is grace. The unmerited favor of God is what Jesus is about, but it is also who he is. We should thus see grace as a personal action by a personal God who saved us from our helpless condition out of pure love.
--R. Kent Hughes and Bryan Chapell, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus: Guard the Good Deposit (Crossway 2000), 339

Start the celebration! Shout for joy tell everybody you know you are saved by grace and grace alone. Or say it this way you are saved by Christ and Christ alone. Anyway you look at it you were helpless you were hopeless you were without God in this world. God in his grace hunted you down and rescued you from your hopeless existence because of his great love. Lets get the party started!

Music To My Ears

If for insignificant, guilty, and impure persons there is to be a possibility of true religion, that is, of genuine fellowship with God, of salvation and eternal life, then God on his part must reestablish the broken bond, again take them into fellowship with him and share his grace with them, regardless of their guilt and corruption.

He, then, must descend from the height of his majesty, seek us out and come to us, take away our guilt and again open the way to his fatherly heart. If God were to wait until we . . . had made ourselves worthy, in part or in whole, to receive his favor, the restoration of communion between him and ourselves would never happen, and salvation would forever be out of reach for us.  --Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4:204-5 

 This is music to my ears because I know if this is not true I would have never come to Christ.

What Is Grace?

What is grace? Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. It is being loved when you are the opposite of loveable.
Grace is a love that has nothing to do with you, the beloved. It has everything and only to do with the lover. Grace is irrational in the sense that it has nothing to do with weights and measures. It has nothing to do with my intrinsic qualities or so-called “gifts” (whatever they may be). It reflects a decision on the part of the giver, the one who loves, in relation to the receiver, the one who is loved, that negates any qualification the receiver may personally hold.
Grace is one-way love.

Paul Zahl

Grace From The Very Top

1993 is, I’m sure, notable for many things.  But for some, it was most notable as the year of the second straight “Fab Five” appearance in the NCAA National Championship game.  The year before, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson, and Chris Webber had become famous for being an all-freshman starting five at the University of Michigan, introducing what has been referred to as “a hip-hop element” into the game, and getting all the way to the championship game before losing to Duke. The next year, as sophomores, the Fab Five was even better. Again, they went all the way to the championship, this time against North Carolina.
And then, the timeout happened.
Very late in a close game, Chris Webber (the team’s best player and the man who would be drafted first overall in the upcoming NBA draft) called a timeout when his team didn’t have one. Such a mistake results in a technical foul, giving the opposing team two free throws and the ball. Michigan couldn’t recover, and lost. Webber was ruthlessly mocked, both at the time and for years to come. A perennial All-Star, “Chris Webber timeout” is still the first Google suggestion when you type in his name.
A few days after that fateful game, though, Chris Webber got a letter:

I have been thinking of you a lot since I sat glued to the TV during the championship game. I know that there may be nothing I or anyone else can say to ease the pain and disappointment of what happened. Still, for whatever it’s worth, you, and your team, were terrific. And part of playing for high stakes under great pressure is the constant risk of mental error. I know. I have lost two political races and made countless mistakes over the last twenty years. What matters is the intensity, integrity, and courage you bring to the effort. That is certainly what you have done. You can always regret what occurred but don’t let it get you down or take away the satisfaction of what you have accomplished. You have a great future. Hang in there.
Sincerely, Bill Clinton

Chris Webber did have a great future, and though I suspect he’s never totally gotten over that moment in 1993, this letter must have been, and likely continues to be, an incredible balm for the wound. Such is the inevitable operation of grace in the face of the world’s judgment.

Mockingbird

God’s One-Way Love For Sinners

Continued from yesterday - Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency. Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut. Once the fervor has passed, weakness and infidelity appear. We discover our inability to add even a single inch to our spiritual stature. Life takes on a joyless, empty quality. We begin to resemble the leading character in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown: “Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?” Something is radically wrong. Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat out denial of the gospel of grace. (Brennan Manning)
It is high time for the church to honor its Founder by embracing sola gratia anew, to reignite the beacon of hope for the hopeless and point all of us bedraggled performancists back to the freedom and rest of the Cross. To leave our “if’s” “and’s” or “but’s” behind and get back to proclaiming the only message that matters—and the only message we have—the Word about God’s one-way love for sinners. It is time for us to abandon once and for all our play-it-safe religion, and, as Robert Farrar Capon so memorably put it, to get drunk on grace. Two hundred-proof, unflinching grace. The radicality of grace is shocking and scary, unnatural and undomesticated…but it is also the only thing that can set us free and light the church, and the world, on fire.

Are You Living In A House Of Fear?

Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works–but our lives refute our faith. By and large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived. Too many Christians are living in a house of fear and not in the house of love. Our culture has made the word grace impossible to understand. We resonate with slogans such as: “There’s no free lunch.” “You get what you deserve.” “You want love? Earn it.” “You want mercy? Show that you deserve it. Though the Scriptures insist on God’s initiative in the work of salvation–that by grace we are saved, that the Tremendous Lover has taken to the chase–our spirituality often starts with self, not God…We sweat through various spiritual exercises as if they were designed to produce a Christian Charles Atlas. Though lip service is paid to the gospel of grace, many Christians live as if only personal discipline and self-denial will mold the perfect me. The emphasis is on what I do rather than on what God is doing. In this curious process God is a benign old spectator in the bleachers who cheers when I show up for morning quiet time. Our eyes are not on God. At heart we are practicing Pelagians. We believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps–indeed, we can do it ourselves. (Brennan Manning)

Most Christians I talk to tell me yes they understand grace they believe in grace. The only problem is that it never shows up in their life. They are generally unhappy, miserable, critical, fearful, filled with anxiety and they are not going to change because they refuse to admit they are bankrupt when it comes to grace. Grace is not amazing to these people at all, and it won't be until they come to the end of themselves, repent and ask God for help.

We Are All legalists

Graeme Goldsworthy on the kind of preaching that rejects the gospel, from “Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture”, says “. . . we are all legalists at heart. We all love to be able to say that we have fulfilled all kinds of conditions, be they tarrying, surrendering fully, or getting rid of every known sin, so that God might truly bless us. It is a constant temptation to want to take our spiritual pulse and to apply the sanctification barometer . . . The preacher can aid and abet this legalistic tendency that is at the heart of the sin within us all. All we have to do is emphasize our humanity: our obedience, our faithfulness, our surrender to God, and so on. The trouble is that these things are all valid biblical truths, but if we get them out of perspective and ignore their relationship to the gospel of grace, they replace grace with law.”
I can only pray that the revelation of this will break into the heart and mind of everyone who reads this.

The Logic of Grace

The ending to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,' set a few days after Christmas in late nineteenth-century London. Horner, who has just been proven guilty by Holmes, confesses, and then says--

'My sister thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And now--and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!' He burst into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.

There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes' finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then Holmes rose and threw open the door.

'Get out!' said he.

'What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!'

'No more words. Get out!'

And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.

'After all, Watson,' said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, 'I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a felony. but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.'

HT: Jack Collins

How To Insult God

" But when it is freely, freely, freely, men turn away. "What! am I to have it for nothing at all, without doing anything?" Yes, Sir, you are to have it for nothing, or else not at all; it is "freely." "But may I not go to Christ, lay some claim to his mercy, and say, Lord, justify me because I am not so bad as others?" It will not do, Sir, because it is "by his grace." "But may I not indulge a hope, because I go to church twice a day?" No, Sir; it is "by his grace." "But may I not offer this plea, I mean to be better?" No, sir; it is "by his grace." You insult God by bringing your counterfeit coin to pay for his treasures." C.H. Spurgeon                                           

This is so hard for people to accept. There is something in every human being that wants to earn something from God or to pay for something that God gives for free."We are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." Romans 3:24 NIV

Don't Presume Your Relationship With God Based On Your Heritage

"Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, 

'we have Abraham as our Father,' for I tell you, 

God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham."

Matthew 3:9

In this passage, John the Baptist is speaking to the Pharisees and Sadducees as they came to him to be baptized. John's message to the religious leaders was clear (like it was clear to the other people he preached to in Matthew 3:1-2). They needed to repent. In this case, it meant repenting from their presuming upon God. What exactly was their presumption ?

According to the passage, the Pharisees and Scribes assumed their position with God based on their religious heritage. They presumed that they were children of God because they were from the same bloodline as Abraham. They were good with God because of their tradition.

I love the gospel because it speaks to each of us in our self-inflated efforts to gain God's acceptance. It bids us to repent; to literally turn from trusting ourselves, to trusting in Christ. To those who think they are good with God because they are moral people, the message of repentance is that we could never be good enough to earn God's acceptance. In fact, the only one who did that was Jesus. Therefore, we must turn from our own moral record and trust Christ's moral record on our behalf. To those who try to be their own god, the message is repent. Turn from trusting yourself as god and turn to the one true and living God. To those who think they are good with God because they come from a rich religious tradition, God's message is repent. Your religious heritage cannot save you; only I can. So, stop trusting in yourself and turn to trust in me. Don't assume you are a true child of Abraham and thus a child of God because of your families religious tradition.

This makes me ask, in what ways do I presume upon God? In what ways do I think my self-efforts earn my acceptance with God. To me, I can imagine this passage saying something like, "Do not presume to yourself that you are a child of God just because you go to seminary, or because you are an active member at a church, or because you are in ministry."None of those are bad things. However, when we trust in these 'things' to give us acceptance before God, they are wrong. The gospel is that we are only accepted by God by grace through faith. It is Christ's finish work that gains our acceptance. There is nothing we could ever do to earn it. To attempt to do so, is to minimize Jesus Christ as our Savior. This is what this passage demands we repent of. Join me in doing so. 

 

All Of Grace

Battling Bitterness by Grace

Robert Jones, biblical counseling professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, in his new and wise book Pursuing Peace, from a chapter entitled "Battling Bitterness by Grace":

There is nothing uglier than bitterness—that inner anger lodged deep in the heart, sometimes known only to the bitter person (and his all-seeing God). Bitterness is settled anger, the kind that not merely reacts to someone’s offense, but forms a more general and global animosity against the offender himself. Anger responds to an incident: “I’m angry about what you did.” Bitterness goes deeper to form an attitude—a settled stance or posture—against the perpetrator: “I’m bitter at you, because you are an evil person.” The incident becomes almost secondary.

With most hurts we encounter in our imperfect world, especially small ones, we learn to overlook the offense and forgive the offender. But occasionally we experience a major hurt—an offense that cuts deeply or turns our world upside down—that lingers in our minds and tempts us to become bitter. We might store that hurt in our heart, nurture it, and let it grow to the point where we look with hostility at the offender.

What hope do [we] have to escape the sorrow, slavery, and soul impoverishment that resentment brings? 

The answer is found in Jesus. Jesus understands. He is with us. He comes to us in our mistreatment and remains with us to help. He understands mistreatment as one who was sinned against severely. He has been there. The Scriptures tell us that he came to save his own people, but they did not receive him (John 1:11; Isa. 53:3).

Jesus was sinned against severely: mocked, taunted, punched, spit upon, abandoned, and crucified. This is the Jesus—the mistreated one—who is with us and who is able to help us handle our resentment and overcome our bitterness.

How? The answer is the gospel message of Jesus Christ.

In Ephesians 4:31, the apostle Paul calls us to “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” The antidote to bitterness? “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Eph. 4:32). This verse is the apostle’s strategy to battle the bitterness he warns against in the previous verse. He calls us to have our minds consciously controlled by God’s forgiveness through Jesus’s death on the cross. Grasping the mighty work of our incarnate, crucified, and risen Lord moves us to forgive others. 

--Robert Jones, Pursuing Peace: A Christian Guide to Handling our Conflicts (Crossway 2012), 138-39
Dane Ortlund

The Only Thing We Deserve

“Even when we were dead in trespasses made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)”. Ephesians 2:5

Salvation is not something we deserve or merit or earn. The whole point of Paul’s teaching on salvation is that the only thing we deserved is punishment for our sins and hell. “Grace only has meaning when men are seen as fallen, unworthy or salvation and liable to eternal wrath” (Sam Storms).

The Grace Effect

By Eric Metaxas - July 16, 2012

Debating the New Atheists, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, can be intellectually stimulating. Hitchens, of course, wrote the awful book “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

Hitchens’s claim notwithstanding, it’s fairly easy to trace Christianity’s benefits to society throughout the ages: the creation of hospitals, universities, soup kitchens, and orphanages without number, not to mention major contributions to art, literature, and science. Recounting these historical facts never gets old.

But in his new book, “The Grace Effect: How the Power of One Life Can Reverse the Corruption of Unbelief,” my friend Larry Taunton shows us that the best arguments against secular atheism and for Christianity are not made in the ivory tower; they’re made at street level in every day life. Larry calls it the “grace effect.”

The “grace effect,” he explains, is what happens when the values and worldview of the Christian faith seep down into the roots of a culture, eventually bearing fruit that refreshes us all, even those individuals who choose not to believe.

But how does this grace effect play out in individual lives? Larry’s fantastic new book tells the story of how he and his family surmounted one bueaucratic barrier after another to adopt Sasha, a special-needs girl living in Orphanage No. 17, in Odessa, Ukraine.

For Larry and his family, Orphanage No. 17 was a proving ground about how worldview matters, about how a secular, statist mindset leads to hopelessness. The only rays of light in what Larry describes as a “grassless, treeless, lunar landscape” where Sasha and the other orphans lived came as the result of a previous visit from American Christians. They had decorated the rooms in bright colors and left the children with Frisbies, storybooks, and other tokens of grace.

Yet the decades of atheism eating away at the roots of Ukrainian culture have borne much bitter fruit in the lives of children such as Sasha.

After adopting Sasha and taking her home, Larry’s wife, Lauri, scolded the child for carelessly breaking some dishes, and then quickly apologized. “That’s okay,” Sasha replied. “You don’t have to apologize to me. I’m different.” By that, she meant that she did notdeserve an apology. Sasha had learned via the orphanage’s “law of the jungle” that orphans were unworthy of anything good, and the atheistic culture in the Ukraine gave her no reason to think otherwise.

Thank God, the Tauntons have been slowly undoing that ugly, godless worldview, showing Sasha that she has inherent dignity and is loved by a God who sent his Son to redeem her.

As Larry and his family have shown, sometimes our lives and what we do are the most powerful apologetic. Unfortunately, there are times when we evangelicals fall into a rationalist Enlightenment mindset where our faith consists mostly of intellectual and theological tenets.

We then think we can argue someone into believing; that it’s all about what we believe intellectually.

But what we really believe is shown in how our convictions are translated into action, into selfless love for others. What believers did in that Ukrainian orphanage, what Larry and his family did in adopting Sasha, what we do, is hugely important. In fact, it is the most powerful apologetic of all.

The Offence Of Grace

For the point is that God has once and for all reserved for himself the business of your salvation. There is nothing you can do now but, as the words of the old hymn have it, ‘climb Calvary’s mournful mountain’ and stand with your helpless arms at your side and tremble before ‘that miracle of time, God’s own sacrifice complete! It is finished; hear him cry; learn of Jesus Christ to die!’
At the cross, God has stormed the last bastion of the self, the last presumption that you really were going to do something for him…He has died in your place! He has done it. He made it. It is all over, finished, between you and God! He died in your place that death which you must die; he has done it in such a way as to save you. He has borne the whole thing! The fact that there is nothing left for you to do is the death of self and the birth of the new creature” (Gerhard Forde).

What if the gospel is not offensive because of what it demands, but because of what it supplies? Is it possible that grace is not offensive because of what it asks of us, but because it asks for nothing? This is why most Christians are offended at grace.

Capon’s Parable of Gracious Infidelity: The Marriage to Merit-Demerit

So often we talk about how much we hunger for the burden to be taken from us; we beg mercy. We communicate a wanting for something other than the mode of exchange that so elementally buries us. And yet, and yet, most of the time, we don’t really want it. Our bondage, our birthwrought marriage, subsumes even our desires–that our fidelity to the Law (and its punishment!) fills the comprehensive whole, to the very inner-self. Freedom renders anxiety. When it comes down to it, we want the Preacher of Proving, we want the Very Right Reverend Reciprocity. This from Chapter One of Robert Farrar Capon’s Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace.

We are uneasy with the grace of a simply successful love affair not because it is unrealistically dull but because it is all too obviously dangerous. It threatens to blow apart the imagined framework by which we hold ourselves, however inconveniently, in one piece. As long as the law is upon us, we feel safe. Its b****ing, score-evening presence assures us that something out there has our number. Whether it approves or disapproves of us is almost a matter of indifference; the main thing is that, having our number, it absolves from the burden of learning our name. The law of retribution reigns supreme in our fantasies precisely to keep us off the main question of our lives: What would you do with freedom if you had it?
…Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at least something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will be be one redeeming card of our very own to fill the inside straight we have so long and so earnestly tried to draw to. But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at 4 A.M. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance (6-7).

Mockingbird

Grace Is Not God's Response To Anything In Us!

Grace is something that comes to us entirely from God. It comes to us in spite of ourselves. Grace is not God’s response to anything in us! This is the point of Ephesians 2:5 when he says “Even when we were dead in trespasses made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)”. A literal translation reads, “By grace you have been saved completely in past time with the present result that you are in a state of salvation which persists through present time.” The whole point of Paul’s teaching on salvation is that the only thing we deserved is punishment for our sins and hell. “Grace only has meaning when men are seen as fallen, unworthy or salvation and liable to eternal wrath”.

The Main Reason Christians Grow So Slowly

Archibald Alexander (1772-1851), founder of Princeton Seminary:

It seems desirable to ascertain, as precisely as we can, the reasons why Christians commonly are of so diminutive a stature and of such feeble strength in their religion.

When persons are truly converted they always are sincerely desirous to make rapid progress in piety; and there are not wanting exceeding great and gracious promises of aid to encourage them to go forward with alacrity. Why then is so little advancement made? Are there not some practical mistakes very commonly entertained, which are the cause of this slowness of growth?

I think there are, and will endeavour to specify some of them.

And first, there is a defect in our belief of the freeness of divine grace.

To exercise unshaken confidence in the doctrine of gratuitous pardon is one of the most difficult things in the world; and to preach this doctrine fully without verging towards antinomianism is no easy task, and is therefore seldom done. But Christians cannot but be lean and feeble when deprived of the proper nutriment. It is by faith, that the spiritual life is made to grow; and the doctrine of free grace, without any mixture of human merit, is the only true object of faith.

Christians are too much inclined to depend on themselves, and not to derive their life entirely from Christ. There is a spurious legal religion, which may flourish without the practical belief in the absolute freeness of divine grace, but it possesses none of the characteristics of the Christian's life. . . . Even when the true doctrine is acknowledged, in theory, often it is not practically felt and acted on. The new convert lives upon his frames, rather than on Christ; and the older Christian still is found struggling in his own strength . . . and then he sinks into a gloomy despondency. . . .

Here, I am persuaded, is the root of the evil; and until religious teachers inculcate clearly, fully, and practically, the grace of God as manifested in the gospel, we shall have no vigorous growth of piety among professing Christians. 

--Archibald Alexander, Thoughts on Religious Experience (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1844), 201-2
Dane Ortlund

Grace Brings Us Into A New Covenant

Grace introduces us to a new covenant, a new agreement between God and us. It’s not like the old covenant. What’s the difference? Here are some of the terms of the new covenant that God has made with people in Christ Jesus.

He forgives our sins freely. “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds, no more” (Heb.10:18). “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John1:29). The Lamb of God has removed them and put them aside forever!

Christians are now God’s people. “I will be their God and they shall be my people; I will be a Father to you and you shall be sons and daughters to me” (2Cor.6:16-18). Christians are God’s people in this intimate relationship of father to children. We are the special objects of his concern.

What is God’s purpose for His people? “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1Thess.4:3). Paul wrote to Titus our “Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us” Why? “To redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous of good works” (Titus 2:14). Jesus last prayer for before he died, was “Sanctify them in the truth: your word is truth” (John17:17).