The Offering

[0:00] Thanks, Lisa. Hello. Again, like Lisa said, my name is Jesse. Of all those who are listening to this online, thanks for doing that. We're in our series, Look to the Rock. And just by way of reminder, this is about seeing Jesus in the Old Testament, right? The Bible is this story telling of God's redemptive purposes and plans to overcome sin and to save sinners and to bring his kingdom.

[0:27] And we don't have to wait to find out about Jesus until he shows up in the Gospels in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament. He's actually, there's these little clues and whispers and foreshadowings and types that are pointing to him all throughout the Old Testament. And in fact, if you think about it, let's say me and you were having a conversation of somebody. I knew them, but you didn't. And I was describing them to you. They're like this and they're like that and so on and so forth. But it was only a time later that you actually got to meet that person in person. Well, all of my information and all of my history with them that I was able to tell you about helps inform you in a deeper level of who they are. And in the same way, the Old Testament, to really understand your faith and who Jesus is more fully is best understood and uncovered a lot in the Old Testament, actually, as it points to him. And that's even about the subject that we're talking today, which is the sacrifice. We look at the sacrifice that Jesus made and what that meant for us. We think about the cross and all that it is. And what's interesting about, you know, when you read the Gospels, it gives you the details, the historical details of Jesus on the cross, right? But it doesn't go into the richness and the depth of all that means for us. And so actually, what we're going to get into today is talking about that. And we're going to do that by looking into the book of Leviticus, which is a book that really unpackages in depth all the different sacrifices that were involved in the nation of

[2:00] Israel. And so being in the book, typically what we do is we get into a book and I'll have like a set of verses that I really work off of. But the scope of this and how it's laid out in Leviticus, I'm going to be jumping around a lot just to warn you. So if you have your Bible, you can turn to Leviticus. We'll be in Leviticus 1. But just a heads up that we're not going to be going through just a succinct set of verses. So the other thing about Leviticus, this isn't the kind of book that it like really holds your attention. Like, hey, parents, little clue, don't give your kid a Bible and say, you know what, you should start in Leviticus. It's really going to turn them off to the Bible, okay? It's something that like when you start your reading plan, you go through Genesis, you know, sweet, man, reading through the Bible of the year, Genesis, awesome, Exodus, pretty cool, Leviticus, everyone kind of starts dropping out at that point, right? It's just one of those kind of books. It's like really hard to understand.

[2:54] It's really hard to relate to because it just has a lot of out-of-date rules and regulations. And there's laws that like God put into place that just, laws that covered everything and anything that you can think of, especially around things like cleanliness, like even bodily discharges.

[3:12] It has laws around that, which let me just say, as a dad with teenage boys, makes me think God was onto something there actually, right? But a significant portion, again, of Leviticus is around these five sacrifices that the Israelites would offer and the priests would carry out. And in fact, that's what they are called. They are called offerings. And to sum up kind of what these sacrifices were, it says this in Leviticus 7, verse 37 and 38, this is the law of the burnt offering, that's one of them, of the grain offering, of the sin offering, of the guilt offering. They throw in this like odd one called the ordination offering, which is like, it's way out there, we're not going to cover that. And then the peace offering, the ones we're going to cover, the burnt offering, grain offering, sin offering, guilt offering, and peace offering. When did these come? Which the Lord commanded Moses on Mount Sinai, on the day that he commanded the people of Israel to bring their offerings to the Lord in the wilderness of Sinai, right?

[4:10] So fair warning, lots of animals being killed in this book. This is not like PETA friendly at all. Let's acknowledge the fact, guys, that killing animals and burning them for worship is a strange idea. To our modern sensibilities, it's pretty odd. We don't do that today. And if you do, you should stop. But still, you know, there's a temptation to approach books like Leviticus with what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery, which is this idea or this belief that we can hold that newer is truer. And it takes the assumption that anything that's been expired from common practice, it's just should be discredited.

[4:50] And, you know, there's really nothing that we can learn from it. It's kind of like the notion of believing that contemporary music is superior to older music or classical music just because it's modern and it's what we like. It's what we know. It's what we understand. You know, you might connect with a Bruno Mars song more than a Beethoven symphony, but that doesn't mean classical music has nothing to teach us today about music or music theory or that it has zero impact on modern music at all.

[5:20] And in the same way, we can look at these old customs of ceremonial sacrifice with that kind of chronological snobbery and think they have nothing to teach us, but we would miss out on so much truth.

[5:33] Now, remember, God gave Israel, his people, the book of Leviticus, and he gave it to them as a guide for acceptable worship. Now, if God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, this should get us to pause and reflect. God gives his people a lengthy instruction manual on how to worship him. Why does he do that?

[5:55] Well, because worship is tied to obedience, and God calls us to worship him according to his way, not ours. Now, this is the ongoing challenge, I think, for God's people, for the church of all history and even today, whether it's a thousand years ago in a desert or here in eastern North Carolina 2021. We want to customize our worship like it's a subway sandwich. But when God introduces these sacrifices, he starts them with this, command Aaron and his son, command the priest, command the guys that are overseeing the sacrifice. This is the law of the burnt offering. This is the law of the peace offering. This is the law of the grain offering. This is the law of the sin offering, the guilt offering. These are laws.

[6:40] These are ordinances. These are things that God says you must do this, and you must do it this way. And if you were an Old Testament Israelite, this is what you did. That's strong language God uses.

[6:51] He doesn't say, please do this if you feel like it or when you feel like it. No, it's you must do this. And so, as an Old Testament Israelite, this is how you lived, making sacrifices to God at his tabernacle, right? We talked about that last week. God, Jesus is the fulfillment of the tabernacle that was set up in Exodus. And they made these sacrifices at that tabernacle, and they made it in that specific way according to God's plan and design and pattern. Now, we can step back and say, man, you know what?

[7:22] This sounds a lot like legalism, a lot of rules, not liking this. Where's the grace? Actually, it's not legalism at all. Let me explain. Remember, Leviticus comes after Exodus. Here's why that's important.

[7:34] Exodus tells the story of God delivering his people out of slavery to Egypt. He brings them out by his mighty hand, outstretched arm, right? He does all these things. It wasn't like Israel rose up, had this great fight against Egypt, and emancipated themselves. No, God delivered them. He rescued them by signs and wonders and in his power. And he brings them out, and then he establishes this unique relationship with them. He says, out of all the nations in the world, I've chosen you.

[8:05] I will be your God, and you will be my people. So, we see in Exodus, there is this establishment of identity before any law was given. And that's how God works. First, he gives you an identity.

[8:18] We understand who we are in him, and then he gives us commands to follow. And relationship with God is always in that order. It is what they call the indicatives before the imperatives. What you do flows out of who you are, not the other way around. Israel didn't have to sacrifice their way into being God's people. But because they were God's people, they followed his sacrificial laws. And this points to something, I think. It gets at the heart of something, as I think has always been at play, that things that deceive us, you can call them two thieves of the gospel, is we can believe falsely that when our obedience informs our identity, or another false belief is that we can negate the importance of obedience at all. But when we're grounded in the identity of God, and the identity he gives us by grace, the natural response is obedience. Obedience, and sacrifice, and grace, and love are all tied together. But we have to realize that we are responding to God's grace.

[9:24] God intervenes to save us. He steps in, just like he did with Israel, not because we deserve it, but because he loved us, because he's full of grace, it's according to his plan. And then what is our response to his amazing gift of grace? We offer him our love, and obedience, and sacrifice.

[9:42] And let's be honest, when you've been loved well, you know how much it creates in you a desire to respond. So when my wife Haley gives me a well-thought gift, or a passionate kiss, it creates in me a desire to respond, and we'll just keep it PG. So should we expect anything different? Should we expect anything different when God's perfect love hits us? Like my wife, she loves me well, but her love ain't perfect.

[10:09] When God's perfect love hits us, man, it changes. It changes things. No obedience or sacrifice feels like too much, and that is what we learn from these sacrifices in Leviticus. The sacrifice leads us away from shallow worship. Now, we're going to briefly look at these five sacrifices, and I think what we're going to see is that all of them together, they add up to this worshiper bringing himself, all of himself, everything, all that he is to God. And that is really what God wants from us. He wants all of us. He doesn't want a little bit of us. He wants all of us. So let's start with the first sacrifice we see in Leviticus, which is the burnt offering, okay? Now, sorry for, like, you'll probably, you know, start getting bored or be like, man, this is crazy. What are they talking about here? But just hang in there. So Leviticus 1 verses 1 to 4, it says, the Lord called Moses and spoke to him for the tent of meeting, saying, speak to the people of Israel and say to them, when any one of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of livestock from the herd or from the flock.

[11:14] Of his offering, or sorry, if his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without blemish. He shall bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting, that he may be accepted before the Lord. He shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. Now, let's jump down to verse 9, the second part of, the second half of verse 9. It says this, and the priest shall burn all of it on the altar, all that sacrifice, the animal that was offered, all of it shall be burnt on the altar as a burnt offering, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. Now, it is important to note that actually this offering was a voluntary offering. It wasn't like, you have to do this. It's like, the worshiper brought it of his own will. If he desired to do this, that's what he did. He could do that. It was, and it's also important to realize the burnt offering was actually the most common offering that an Israelite would make. But notice that the animal that he had to offer would be without blemish, and this is true for every other sacrifice we're going to cover, that had to be a perfect spotless animal. And this represents holiness or sinless perfection. And while like this particular offering, the burnt offering, wasn't made for sin, it still made atonement for the person offering the sacrifice. Because he was no doubtful a sinner. He was, for sure, he had sinned. And so, he couldn't draw near to God. He couldn't really offer an acceptable sacrifice unless he offered a spotless animal. So, another important part of this ritual that you'll notice is that we see that the animal, before the animal was killed, the person laid his hand on his head. Like, what's that all about?

[12:58] Well, that declared that that animal became that person's substitute. Like, placing the hand on the head made that animal the representative for the offer. And this happened with every other animal sacrifice that we're going to talk about. And then we see what happens next is that the animal is killed, and the whole of it is burned on the altar. And this burning of the whole animal is unique to the burnt offering. So, in some of the other offerings, portions of the animal were set aside to be eaten by the priest, like some of the good parts were eaten by the priest or the person making the offering.

[13:37] They could eat it. So, why this difference? Why did the burnt offering, why was it the one that, like this particular one, you had to leave it on the altar, everything of that animal had to be burnt up?

[13:48] Well, it signified something. It signified a person wholly belonging to God. It signified your devotion as a son of God or a child of God, that you wholly belonged to him and lived in full surrender to his will. That's what it was about. And Christians today, we still do this, not with animal sacrifices, but look at what Romans 12 says. Romans 12 says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. It then goes on to describe in Romans what that spiritual worship looks like, and it's leveraging your life through sacrificial serving and giving. It's leveraging it for the kingdom of God. But notice, like Romans 12 is Romans 12.

[14:39] Before Romans 12 is Romans 1 through 11. And those chapters describe in great detail how Jesus makes us holy and acceptable to God. And therefore, since you are holy and acceptable because of Jesus's sacrifice, you voluntarily offer your whole life in response to that. You live in surrender to God's will. You live for his kingdom and not your own. It's what Jesus taught us to pray, Lord, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We see Jesus lived this out in the Garden of Gethsemane when he said, Lord, you know what? Not my will, but yours be done. He was offering himself as a burnt offering. Now, our spiritual worship, what we see here is to leverage all that we have for God's will and his kingdom. Which means God says you have something worth bringing to the table. You do. You and I have something worth bringing to the table in his kingdom.

[15:41] Why? Because he's given it to you. What am I talking about? I'm talking about your time and your talents and your treasures. These are all things that are gifts from God that he has given to you, and he wants you and I, his people, to leverage them for him and his kingdom, for his glory. Not to build your kingdom, but to build his. And so let's look at that time. How do we leverage our time, right? Well, God's given us time. He's given us life. How do we use that time? We just don't give him the leftovers. Actually, man, we want to give God the best of our time. And I think, to be honest, I think this is probably one of the most overlooked sins today. Like, we live so hurried, going from one thing to the next, that, like, God barely exists in the margins of our life. We don't give him much time.

[16:32] We don't give him much time in our day for prayer or being in his word to commune with him or anything like that. And we do that because we just overcommit ourselves to other things we think are more important. The other thing that God gives us that we can leverage our lives for and return back to him in worship is our talents. Like, what you can do well, you can do and use for the glory of God. Man, I love Exodus 31. It talks about two guys, Bezalel and Aholiab. These guys were master craftsmen. I mean, they were dudes that knew how to work with their hands so well. And they used it for the glory of God and helping God create these beautiful things for the tabernacle. And they were anointed to do that by God. What has God gifted you to do? What has he gifted? What are the talents he's gifted you with?

[17:22] And start thinking about how can you use those things to leverage for his kingdom and to bring him glory. And then, of course, there is our treasures, the things that we amass in life, the money, the finances that we have, the assets God's given us. How can we use those things? Think about your home, right? How can that be a vehicle used to build the kingdom of God, to have people in?

[17:43] It's a place of peace. It's a place of safety where people can come in. And just like, well, let me tell you a cool story. I had great parents, but they got divorced, so they had some issues.

[17:58] But growing up, they didn't get divorced until I was 10. But I remember growing up, there was some turmoil in the house from time to time. But there was a kid up the street, two doors up from us, and his home life was a wreck. I didn't know that growing up. I mean, as a kid, you're just kind of oblivious to that. He ended up in juvie. And so I think I was about 17 or 18, about to leave my dad's house in the morning to go to work. And he comes walking up the road, all tatted up. It just got out of juvie. And he just launches into this conversation with me.

[18:29] And one thing he said to me that like, man, that so struck me to this day. He said like, man, I would come to your guys' house, and I would feel safe and at peace. And it would be the only time in my life as a kid that I would experience that. And I'm thinking like, our house? Like, the house I grew up in was like that? So you guys don't know, man, when you have these tools, you have these assets that God has given you to leverage for his kingdom. And when you open up your homes, and you open up your lives, and you choose to live not to your will, but to his will, man, these things impact. And you have no idea the impact it makes on people's lives, right?

[19:09] Man, God, offering your life as a burnt offering, it is a beautiful thing. But that's the idea of it. It's giving yourself over to God's will, living in surrender. We talk about that a lot here, living in surrender to God, holding nothing back. And then, after the burnt offering, we see God laying out this other offering called the grain offering. And this was an offering that could actually accompany the burnt offering if you wanted it to.

[19:37] But this offering was made with bread. And Leviticus 2, it talks about it. We'll read the first two verses. When anyone brings a grain offering as an offering to the Lord, his offering shall be a fine flour. He shall pour oil on it, and put frankincense on it, and bring it to Aaron's sons, the priests. And he shall take from it a handful of fine flour and oil with all of its frankincense. And the priest shall burn this as its memorial portion on the altar, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. What is interesting about this sacrifice that sets it apart, this is what the commentators say, is it's the only one that man gets involved in making.

[20:21] So this offering, what it does, it represents the devotion of the fruit of man's work to God. Think about that. First, it acknowledges that God is your provider and sustainer.

[20:36] It's what Jesus prayed in the Lord's prayer, give us our daily bread. But the sacrifice also recognizes something. It recognizes that your work should be used to worship God too. Now, this is beautiful because what it does, it avoids creating these false categories, this false dichotomy of there's the sacred and the secular. So the idea is like what we do on Sunday is way more holy and acceptable to God than anything we can do on Monday. But the kingdom of God moves forward through hanging drywall for the glory of God as much as serving at a food kitchen or going to church. This grain offering is showing us that God wants you to bring your faith to your workplace. And you just don't go with your faith and that's it. You actually, you get to go with God's presence too. Notice that the grain offering had to be made with oil. And what we see is in the Bible, there's this constant connection throughout the Bible that God makes with oil, with the Holy Spirit. And so when the spirit-filled person, which is every disciple of Jesus, when you get saved, you are filled with the Spirit.

[21:47] When you go to work, you go with the Holy Spirit. And when we submit to the Holy Spirit during work, it will affect our attitudes. It will affect our actions. It means you're going to work with integrity.

[22:00] You're going to work diligently. You're going to work with a good attitude that pleases God. When things come your way that you don't like, you're going to be able to respond with kindness and grace rather than vitriol and anger and bitterness. We don't meet up on Sundays to kind of get touch base with the Holy Spirit. No, he's with us every day of the week.

[22:23] God is all about making our workplaces avenues where we can bring him glory. And Satan is about making our workplaces avenues for sin. He wants us to leave God out of it, which is why the grain offering didn't include leaven. Leaven points to fermentation, it points to decay, which is pointing to sin. That's what sin creates. Satan wants to leaven our work with either laziness or becoming a workaholic, or he wants us to cheat and lie and gossip or maybe flirt at work. You know, most extramarital affairs actually happen in the workplace. It's all of this like Satan is trying to leaven you, get you to see your workplace as this place that you can't glorify God at all. And the other thing about leaven that's interesting is it doesn't add any substance to the bread. It only adds volume. It puffs up like pride does. Which is God is saying that our worship at work should not be full of ourselves, but it should be humble before God. And this shows us how much God cares to be involved in all that we do. God expects his people to give all of themselves to him, but this just doesn't flow one way, right? It's not like God's like, well, you're all in and you're not getting anything from me. No, he is also making himself totally available to us as well, which is beautifully pointed out, I think, in the peace offering, also known as the fellowship offering. In Leviticus 3, it says this, if his offering is a sacrifice of peace offering, if he offers an animal from the herd, male or female, he shall offer it without blemish before the Lord. And he shall lay his hand on the head of his offering and kill it at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And Aaron's sons, the priest, will throw the blood against the sides of the altar. And again, it talks about the peace offering in Leviticus 7, verse 15. It says, and the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offerings for thanksgiving shall be eaten on the day of his offering. He shall not leave any of it until the morning. So the peace offering is interesting because it's the only one where the offer gets to eat what is offered. And this offering was the chance to feast with God in his presence.

[24:45] From God's perspective, he's fellowshipping and feasting with the people he loves. And this peace offering was a voluntary offering that the offer can make. It's this open invitation from God.

[25:00] You could come, you could bring your priest offering just anytime you wanted to, just to be with God. Now, we can like lose sight of the fact or maybe miss out on the fact that eating back in the day, back in that ancient world, eating was a much bigger deal than we realize. To share a meal then was communicating something. It was communicating that you belong, that you are accepted, that there was this union that happened through the sharing of a meal. It was this intimate experience. And it's no wonder that Jesus, because he loves us and we're his disciples, he institutes communion for all his disciples to practice on a regular basis. It's an invitation to come to his table to feast with him and fellowship with him. And it communicates, it reminds us that we belong. We are his and he is ours. And it is through Jesus that we can do this today. Romans 5.1 kind of talks about this, Jesus, the fulfillment of the peace offering. It says, therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, through Jesus, we have also obtained access by faith into his grace in which we stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

[26:19] I mean, back then, like feasting with God, it was meant to be this like fun celebration. Like you offered this peace offering, you got to eat with God. It was a celebratory thing. It was something you did with your community, whether it was family and with the priests, but you celebrated this thing together. It was a beautiful thing. And we see here, it's the same today. Jesus fulfilled that peace offering. He is our peace offering. He is the sacrifice by which we have peace with God.

[26:47] But why? Why do we need that? Why do we need a sacrifice to bring that peace? Well, it's because of sin. And all these sacrifices, what they did is they made a way for sinners to draw near to God.

[27:00] And sacrifice is necessary, and it's always been necessary, because God is holy and righteous and sinless, and we aren't. Like right from the beginning, Adam and Eve's first sin, right? Remember, God clothed them with animal skins, instituted that law of atonement. Animal had to die in their place.

[27:20] So, so far, what we're seeing here is all these sacrifices, so far, they haven't directly dealt with sin. They're voluntary offerings that the worshiper can make. And it's something that we should make in response to God's grace. But then there's these two sacrifices that were absolutely non-negotiable.

[27:38] Like you had to do them. They were the sin offering and the guilt offering. Now, these are two different offerings dealing with two different types of sins. The sin offering was to be made for sins committed unintentionally. Now, we might think like, well, how do you sin unintentionally? Do you like, is that when you like hit your hand with a hammer and start like cussing? Now, it's, you have to remember, like, this was written to Israel and in a time where, like, there was all these crazy laws. Remember, there was laws even around bodily discharges. So, if you didn't deal with your bodily discharge right, guess what? You were considered unclean. You had to come. You had to make a sacrifice. I mean, there's all kinds of laws for all of that. And so, there was a lot of, there was a lot of opportunity for the Israelites to sin unintentionally. And if you didn't deal with those correctly, yeah, you had to sacrifice for that sin because you didn't keep that rule. But if that sinned, let's say you did sin and there were these types of sin that they spelled out. We just don't have time to read all of it. There were sins that they recognized that like, hey, if you cheated someone or swindled them out of money or you killed their animal and now they're out of an animal or you burn their house down or something like that, well, you had to bring a guilt offering as well. And that guilt offering had to include making restitution toward that person injured or affected by what you did.

[28:59] Think about the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus, right? Like, Jesus comes to his house, eats with him, he believes. And what does Zacchaeus do next? He says, you know what? I'm going to return all the money that I swindled out of people. All the money I stole from them, I'm going to give it back to them. He's making restitution. He's recognizing that guilt offering that had to be made. And this is what Jesus taught us to pray. Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors. Sin not only breaks our relationship with God, it wrecks our relationship with others. The sin and the guilt offering point to our repentance toward God and people. But where we can't give God restitution, we can offer it to those that we've hurt. So if you've cheated somebody out of money, you go and restore it. If you're having an affair, you end it, you confess it, and you start loving your spouse.

[29:55] If you're not married and having sex, you stop and you repent and you follow Jesus in purity. If you're an abusive person, whether that's in word or in action, you stop doing that. You stop being an agent of hurt and you start being someone who heals through kindness and love. Romans 13 8 tells us this, owe no one anything. Owe no one anything except to love each other. God made these sacrifices so his people's sins could be forgiven and that they could draw near to him. They taught them what it means to live all in for God. To worship him. That's what worship looks like. It shows us that the sacrifice was always more powerful than the sin. Think about that, guys. Like, yeah, they sinned. We sinned. But you know what a sacrifice God's communicating to us? By his grace, his mercy, they're greater than any sin that we can commit. And that's what we need to know. There is no sin that is greater than Jesus's sacrifice. All these sacrifices were fulfilled once and for all in Jesus. Through his sacrifice, you are acceptable to God. Jesus made the way for you to come to God, to draw near and to worship, to be able to leverage your life, to be all in for him. That's what it's saying. So, guys, let's come. Let's bring. Let's live lives that is bringing your offering of worship, being all in for him. By faith, step into his grace every single day. That grace that forgives every sin and makes a way to come to God. Holy and acceptable and approved. If the band can come up, we're going to close this way. If you're not yet a

[31:42] Christian, I want to say to you, it's not about your sacrifice. It's not about any sacrifice you can make. You cannot sacrifice your way into a relationship with God. You cannot sacrifice your way into drawing near to God. It's about Jesus and what he did for you. It's about his perfect sacrifice in your place.

[32:03] And all you have to do is believe in that. That's what faith is. It's believing and repenting and turning to him and trusting in him. And here's what he's offering to you and what God is calling you to respond. If you're not yet a Christian, take hold of his grace. It is free and it is good.

[32:19] Now, for those of us in the room who are Christians, you are following Jesus, man, we don't have to worry about all the sacrifices in Leviticus. We don't have to worry about making them.

[32:35] Jesus is the fulfillment of all those things. We can rest in his once and for all sacrifice for us. But let's let that propel us into greater worship, being all in for God, leveraging our lives.

[32:52] And I want to ask you this, where is the Holy Spirit calling you to repent? And I want to encourage you, man, that is a grace of God. When the Holy Spirit works on your heart, respond to that. Step into his grace. Be forgiven. Be healed. Be restored. Move deeper into embracing Jesus's sacrifice for you. Stand with me. Let's pray.

[33:16] So, Father, we thank you of this amazing design we see for all of history, of how you have been telling this one story. You have been moving toward throughout all history toward this point and where Jesus was the fulfillment of everything that was anticipated. We thank you for that, Jesus. We get to look back and we get to look back on the cross and we get to see that you came and you died for us. You were the perfect sacrifice. We have peace with you. But I pray for those who have not yet believed that they would believe today. Open their eyes to see there's no other way. There's no other way to heaven. There's no other way to eternal life. There's no other way to get their sins forgiven and their guilt removed and to trust in you, Jesus Christ. And I pray for us who do believe we wouldn't forget that. It's easy to slip into that and forget that. I pray that in your name. Amen. We're going to respond before we continue in singing by taking communion together. And man, remember what we talked about with the peace offering. It's this invitation that we get to feast and celebrate with God in his presence. And Jesus invites us to feast with him at his table. That's what communion is about. And we get to do that because he died for us. He not only provides the meal, he actually is the meal. He is the bread of heaven that came down to sustain us. He is the fountain of life, the waters of life that heal us, that forgive our sins. On the night that he was betrayed, he took bread and he gave it to his disciples. He broke the bread and he gave it to his disciples. He said, take and eat. This is my body broken for you. Take and eat in remembrance of me. Let's take and eat together. And then he took a cup and he said, this cup is the blood shed for you.

[35:24] It's the blood of a new covenant. It's the blood of a new relationship that I am making. And it is for the forgiveness of your sins. It's our redemption. It's our healing. And let's remember that we have peace with God because of what Jesus has done. And so let's take and drink together.

[35:42] All right, guys. Now in response to all that Jesus has done, the beauty of a sacrifice, let's worship him.