Well, good morning Valley View. It’s great to continue in our series in the book of Proverbs. We’ve been going through the big middle section of the Book of Proverbs. Looking at the book of Proverbs, one topic at a time. And, side note here, keep our technology in your prayers. We’ve as you can see, we’ve got a projector that’s on the glitch and probably needs to be replaced, which leads to a lot of other questions about the state of our equipment. So keep that in your prayers. I might be bringing a, special giving opportunity before you here before long. We’ll see. But keep all that in your prayers. I’m grateful for the team that keeps things moving along, even in the midst of the challenges. But Proverbs is where we are seeking wisdom. We all need wisdom. All of life around us is pulling us away from wisdom in this modern age. And we are looking for ancient wisdom for the modern age. So we’ve looked at things like how we use our words, how we shape our character. And today we’re going to be looking at a topic that I think will relate to everyone in this room in some way or another. We’ll just take a little quiz here to see if it might relate to you or not. If at some point in your life you have had either a mother or a father, just raise your hand. Okay, looks. What about if you’ve had both? Yeah. Okay. Good. Yes. So there’s a strong likelihood you have had both a mother and a father. Now I get that. Maybe they’ve been distant. Maybe you’ve never met them. Okay, I know there are challenges within that. The reality is we. Even if we don’t have children ourselves, we’ve been in a relationship of some type with a parent, and we’ve had to navigate that parent to child, child to parent, and the book of Proverbs actually has a lot to say about that. So we’re going to look at that today. I think as I looked across the book of Proverbs, Proverbs in particular, it talks about four dynamics of the parent child relationship, four dynamics of that that we’re going to look at today. And the first, and if you didn’t get a handout, raise your hand we’ll try to get one over to you. There should be someone around you with some extra, but the first one and the first three start with the letter D. The first one is the issue of direction. Direction. I think probably the word we see more often in Proverbs is instruction. One of the key roles of a parent is to teach your children about life, to teach them about morality, to teach them right from wrong. Look at a couple of the verses here in the handout, chapter one, verses eight and nine. And this is the very beginning of the book of Proverbs- hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and forsake not your mother’s teaching. You could probably make a case that this is the main point of the whole book of Proverbs. You have a mother and a father writing down some things that they want to pass on to their children. Pass on wisdom, write it down. Make sure they know it’s probably beyond the basics of just making sure they stay alive. Some days you feel like I succeeded today, my kid is still alive. We made it through the day. That’s kind of the very basic level of parenting. They’re alive, they’re safe. They got some food. They have shoes occasionally. We’re good today. We made it through the day. Once you get past that level, the next level is, okay, how am I being intentional to train them, to give them direction in life? In fact, 22:6– train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it. Now keep in mind it’s a proverb, not an exact promise always to hold true. But in general, the proverb is true that the direction you set your children on, there’s a good chance if you’re intentional, if God shows up and works in their lives, that they will continue on that path. That’s part of the key role of what we do is to be intentional to train them. And of course, we have people that help us with that, that come alongside us with that, whether it’s the school or the church. But there’s no amount of help the church can provide that will supersede what the parent is called to do. We want to come alongside you, but the core responsibility of the parent is to be training, teaching, directing the child. Now, of course, there’s a lot of different ways we can do that. And I think in particular there’s probably two main methods. If you look here in the notes, there’s the formal, but there’s also the informal approach. Right. There’s the intentional time where we’re sitting down and we’re looking at the Bible together and we’re talking about verses or you’re in a class. There’s that very directed, intentional time. And everybody knows this is what this is that’s about. But then there’s the informal part that is probably, I think oftentimes more powerful even than the formal part. And you all know how this goes, right? Your kids are going to pick up more of what you do, even more so than what you say. That’s why the whole phrase, you know, do what I do or do what I say, not what I do, just doesn’t work. Your kids are little imitators, or they’re going to imitate what they see, whether you want them to or not. There’s sometimes where that gets revealed to you real starkly, like like a mirror. I had a I remember a mom sharing with me, she was going down the road and just had a 2 year old girl in the backseat. Normal day. All sudden somebody pulls out in front of her and so she slams on the brake to avoid slamming into him. Really. You know, just trying to make sure to keep the family safe. And as the car comes to a stop, without even looking up from the little toy she was playing with, she just yells out, jerk! And the mom turns around and goes, she must have got that from dad because she didn’t get that from me right? She don’t even know why she’s saying it. She’s just heard it, and she knows that’s what you do in moments like this. She’s picked that up automatically. Modeling is really important. That’s the next, bullet point here. There is the great importance of modeling and what we do, how we live. Living as an example, Proverbs 20, verse seven, the righteous who walks in his integrity, blessed are his children after him. You know, if you do nothing else right and of course, I hope that we do a lot of things right. But at the bare minimum, focus on pursuing Christ yourself and growing with him and growing in character and growing in integrity. That will have a profound influence on your children, on those around you, even more so than what you say and teach. Of course, we’re called to use our words as well. We talked about that in our whole session on words, but there’s something so profound and powerful about the way we model our behavior about the way we live. We also want to make sure we’re modeling growth really well. And of course, that’s the big emphasis for us as a church this year is how are we growing into oaks of righteousness? We’re all called to continue to grow. I hope that our children see us hungering to grow, that we are modeling what it means to continue to hunger for God’s Word to grow in knowledge of His Word. They see us almost accidentally. They catch us studying our Bible or reading a book that’s challenging us to grow spiritually. Or they see that we’re engaged in a small group or a service ministry where we’ve developed an accountability group with people around us. They see that. They pick that up. They they realize that that’s normal. That’s how I should be living my life. That’s what it’s a big part of what it means to be a Christian and connected in church. We want to be modeling that for them. The next one here is model being teachable. In fact, in chapter four, verses three through four, the writer of Proverbs is saying, hey, I remember back to when my father taught me, now I’m here to teach you. That means I remember when I needed to be taught. And by the way, I hope that we continue to stay teachable, even as parents. In fact, look at this next verse here. First Timothy 4:12. Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young. The rest of it goes, but set an example for the believers in speech in life, in love in faith and in purity. There’s something about a parent child relationship that sometimes becomes too top down, like it’s my way or the highway. This is how it is. And even if they bring up a good point, you can’t hear it. It’s got a might even feel a little defensive to be questioned, even though as you’re thinking about it, you realizing that actually makes sense. But I can’t let on right now that that makes sense because that would show weakness. Well, no, we want to model, teachability. We want to see we want them to see someone who can learn, who can grow, who can be teachable, who can learn a new thing even from our children. And there’s plenty of times, I gotta tell you, there’s plenty of times my kids have brought up a point and I’m like, you know what? That makes sense. I, I don’t want to say the word wrong. I won’t I don’t want to go that far. That’s a hard word to get out of your mouth. But we’ll just say I’ve learned something today. We need to model teachability. Let them see that I can. I can admit wrong. I can say I’ve grown, I’ve learned something new. And then I think this last one goes in line with this. In terms of how we model what we model in our lives. We model repentance, we model confession, and we model apologizing. Model apologizing. That definitely is a powerful example of being teachable. We want to make sure that we’re showing them that it’s okay to admit when you’re wrong. You know, if in your home, you’ve often wondered how come it is that my children really struggle to ever admit they’re wrong or to ever confess sin? I think in that moment we have to pause and ask ourselves, maybe. Maybe they’ve not seen it done very well. And I know that’s a hard thing to do, is to confess a sin to your child. Listen, I wronged you, and I’m sorry, in fact, I. I’ve done this before. I won’t do it today. But I think if we were to ask around the room, how many of you had parents that ever apologized to you about anything? It’s shocking how many hands go up. I never saw that in my home. My parents would never admit wrong and that’s a hard situation to be in. We need to model it well. We need to model confession of sin, repentance, apologizing, teaching them how it’s done rightly. And so I’ve got to be okay with coming back to my child and say, listen, I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you. I was too angry. I yelled at you because I was angry. I got out of control. Now, here’s the delicate part. Here’s the part we need to be careful about. Don’t follow it up with a big but, right? The. I yelled at you, I was angry, but you made me. No, no. Okay. Yes. I reacted to something they did. Don’t. Don’t blame. Shift it. Don’t turn it into an opportunity to blame them. Just apologize. The way, the way I acted was wrong. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to treat you that way. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me? Now you may need to come back around and deal with the behavior that they display. That’s part of our job too. But model apology. Model confession. Model repentance. Look, that’s part of the big secret of growing up is when you’re little, you think your your parents know everything and have it all figured out. And as you grow up and become parents, you realize they didn’t, right? Because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to figure it out too. Parents aren’t perfect. Not, even great parents aren’t perfect. I have fantastic parents. They’re great. But they weren’t perfect. There’s a lot they could have done different. In fact, I’ve been building up a list since I was very young that I want to present to you today of a few things I think they could have done different. We’ll start here at number one and just work our way down, if you don’t mind. You know, look, I would never do that because let me tell you how long their list would be, right? My parents are here. By the way, if you’re a visitor, you’re wondering, we don’t let them have a microphone because of this. Look, the reality is, none of us are perfect. The parents aren’t perfect, children aren’t perfect. And children, let me speak to you. By the way, isn’t it convenient that our kids are off at camp today? Right? They’re not here to hear all this. But if you’re wondering why my parents don’t ever seem to apologize, well, maybe you could model it as well. It’s okay. First Timothy 4:12, set an example for the believers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been inspired by seeing a young person do things right. Seeing a young person pursue Christ, someone very young. And I and I look at that and I go, man, I need I need to be more like them even, seeing their passion for Christ, their generosity, their kindness. Of course they don’t do it all right. But we want to make sure that at times when we can, we’re modeling behavior well. So that’s the first letter D- direction. How are we giving direction to our children? Training, instruction, intentional direction. Second here is the letter D– discipline. And I really see these as two sides to the coin of raising children. One side is giving them instruction and direction. The other side is correction, discipline. When they don’t follow the path they should, part of our job is to redirect, to pull them back towards God’s standard, his direction for them. You know, this is really if you think in terms of how God designed humanity, this is how things were to be from the beginning. This is the God’s plan for evangelism. In fact, I mean, he created a family. His first institution he created was mother and father, a marriage of family. They had children, in theory, families should have been passing on their faith to the next generation for generation after generation after generation. And that change continues and everyone knows about Christ. They know to follow him because they learned it from their parents, who learned it from their parents and passed it on. Of course, we know that’s not how it goes. There’s a break down. Sin enters the world. We all have our own choices to make. Everybody has to make their faith their own. But in theory, that’s what should be happening. We should be passing down wisdom, knowledge, faith, love for Christ. But when things don’t go right, there is the discipline aspect of parenting. Look here at chapter three, verses 11 and 12. My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be wary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves as a father, the son in whom he delights. The first thing to recognize about the importance of discipline is that discipline is actually a sign of love. Doesn’t feel that way in the moment if you are the one receiving it, but it’s a sign of love. In fact, look at 13:24– Whoever spares the rod hates his son. To not discipline actually shows a lack of care for a child. But he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. In fact, 29:15 says, the rod and reproof give wisdom. But a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. You know, every generation has the distinctive way they approach parenting, training, passing on faith to the next generation. And some, I would say probably in past more previous generations, they we tend to swing one way or the other, in terms of the extremes. You might accuse previous generations of being too harsh, maybe too heavy handed, too top down. I think probably our generation, current generation, and those younger than us would probably have swung the other way in terms of being too hands off, too child directed. Let the child choose which way they should go. But this verse here reminds us, 29:15– A child left to himself brings shame to his mother. A child undirected ends up in a bad place. A child needs wisdom. A child needs wisdom from life that you can bring to the table. And a child left to himself. The two year old that hasn’t learned about authority hasn’t learned about that there are times that I need to submit to a higher authority over me. If they haven’t learned that at two– And of course, there is still hope in the coming years. But if they never learn it, they become the 20 year old who’s going to have a very hard life. They’re going to learn it the hard way from their boss or many, many, many bosses as they cycle through many jobs. Or they’ll learn it from the police. And you’ve all seen the videos of someone who won’t take any instruction from a policeman, and that does not go well. Part of our job is to help them understand. Look, we’re all under some authority in life, all of us. You pick the richest person on earth, they still have people they have to be mindful of, and in some ways submit to and respect their authority. Whether it’s a government or fellow businessmen or of fellow countries, they are, or not cooperating with. We’ve all got to learn that there is a higher authority above me, and I can reject that, but it’s not going to go well. Now, the main word that’s used related to this idea of discipline in the book of Proverbs is this word rod. You see it here. The rod in 29:15. Rod and reproof gives wisdom, but a child left to himself bring shame to his mother. That word rod is interesting. It I think it can literally mean the idea of an actual physical rod that was used to bring pain. You see that in some verses I haven’t listed here, where it talks about the importance of using the rod to direct the child. I think it also refers to the the position may be much like you might say, to refer to a judge’s gavel. You know that that little gavel in and of itself has has no real strength and has no authority in itself. But it refers to the position of the judge and the authority of the judge that we respect and honor and value. And so we are called to help our child learn to realize. And again, this comes back to modeling. Do they see that in our lives? Do they see a respect for authority in our lives? Do they see that we are willing to submit to Christ to follow his direction, more so than our own way? Now, part of the challenge with this idea and discipline. And. I got to tell you, while I was preparing this message, I put out a table in my office. I don’t normally have an extra table in there. I set it out and I just wrote out on little yellow note cards all the ideas I wanted to address, and I set them out because I thought, there’s there’s so much we could talk about, how am I going to address it all? And I got done and I had so many yellow cards on my table, I thought this could be like a dozen messages, but there’s so much to talk about and there’s so many nuances in terms of all the pain that people have experienced, whether as a parent or as a child. So it’s really hard to try to bring up even the idea of discipline, recognizing that we all have a wide array of experiences. And I finished my I got rid of about half the cards, I finished my manuscript, and I realized this message is still twice as long as a normal message. And so I was like, I gotta keep cutting. I gotta keep cutting. All that to say, we can’t address everything. But let me give you a few principles, hopefully a few guiding points related to how we approach discipline, how we approach correction with our children. Look at I’ve got three letter C’s here. The first is to make sure we stay calm. Stay calm. If you find yourself so full of rage and it’s time to direct and give discipline to a child, that’s the time to just pause and take a break. And it’s okay to just admit that with them. In fact, look at Ephesians 6:4 here– fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but instead bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. You know, if your discipline is salted with anger, they’re not going to hear the instruction. What you hear is anger. I heard a story this morning, in fact, of someone who got pulled over recently. It reminded me of the more recent time that I was pulled over in my journeys back and forth between little Rock and Louisville, and I remember thinking, after this policeman pulled me over, this is really weird, but I remember being grateful because I was I was driving out of control. I was in a hurry to get back home. I was kind of in a little bit of road rage passing everybody and and I thought, man, no telling what he protected me from. If I had continued in that behavior. But also I’ve I’ve heard stories of people who’ve had different encounters with police where the the police became angry, hostile, and so when they retell the story, it’s no longer about their sin. It’s no longer about how I was the one speeding and I got pulled over and I was wrong. Now it’s all about how the policeman was irate and crazy and didn’t treat me right, and we completely forget about our sin in this situation. Can you imagine if a policeman pulls you over and he’s like, why do you hate me? Why are you speeding like this? And showing your lack of love for the community and the people around you? And how dare you interrupt my day? Who do you think you are? You know, you’d be like, what’s your problem, man? Just give me the ticket and move on. You see, we can’t let anger control us and discipline. That’s the time to pause, to pray. You can even admit it to one another. Look, I feel like I’m. I’m pretty stirred up right now, and. But you’re going to get angry. It happens. Just own it. I’m so upset right now. Look, I don’t want to discipline you in anger. I don’t want to do that. Let’s get a little bit of time apart. I’m going to go pray, try to get calm. We’ll come back together. We still need to deal with the offense. There still needs to be correction. You know, it’s not fun, but it’s the role God’s given us as parents to abdicate that is is neglect. We don’t want to do that. We’re not going to do it perfect. But we’re still going to engage. But we’re going to try to be calm in the way we approach our parenting to make sure to keep it focused on the issue, not make it about our anger. Second, be consistent. That’s the second letter. See here. Under discipline, be consistent as much as you can. You want to say what you mean? You want to mean what you say. You want to be super predictable. Really? You want your kids to know, man, if I do this, this is what they’re going to do, I know it. I’ve seen it over and over again. When the goal line and the boundaries are constantly shifting, that that creates problems where no one knows where they stand. I’ve had a boss like that in the past. You do something and you thought it was done, and then you realized it wasn’t. They had something else in mind. It was constantly shifting and that led to constant confusion among everyone. No one actually. It ended up with no one wanted to do any work because you never knew if you were going to do it right or not. You never knew where you stood. So shoot to be consistent as much as possible. Now, let me give a caveat in that too. There are times to just own the reality that maybe I set up an expectation that wasn’t right. There have been times where I’ve had to say, look, I told you, if you do this, this will happen. And I realized that I was that was not right of me, that was I said that out of anger or I jumped to judgment or your mom gave me the other side of the story, I realized I was wrong. Man. Those are the times to just again model confession. And it’s okay to do that. But in general, you want to be consistent, that they know what to expect. And then the last letter C here– be connected. Meaning being united. Make sure you and your spouse. And by the way, I am speaking about parenting mostly here from husband and wife together, parenting or man and woman together parenting. And yet look, I know there’s plenty of single parents. And I just got to say, I really don’t know how you do it. So grateful that you are trying and staying in there. I don’t know how you always have to be, for instance, always have to be the bad guy. That’s really hard. That’s a lot on you. Just keep staying engaged. Keep doing your best. Lean on others when you can. I’m proud of you for staying engaged and not giving up. But if you are in a marriage, parenting together, husband, wife, man, woman, stay united in your approach to parenting. Don’t let a child divide you. And they love to do that. They love to try to play you off one another. And by the way, let me speak to the children again. Is that what you really want? Do you really want your parents divided against one another just so that you can get your way in the moment? It’s a strategy, certainly works, but it doesn’t lead to long term flourishing and joy and delight as a family with parents. And I know there’s plenty of times where mom and dad aren’t on the same page. And if you aren’t, that’s okay. But hash it out later. Know if if Julie and I are parenting and disciplining and I feel like maybe she’s not going in the right direction, I might say, hey, can we can we chat for a second? Let’s let’s go off to the other room and talk for a second, or might just wait and later go, hey, let’s talk about how that went. Let me hear what you were thinking and let’s let me see your perspective. But let’s stay united. I want you to know I’m. I’m on your side more than their’s. We’re not going to let them get between us. This happened once where my my oldest son came to me and said, dad, listen, I just got this call. There’s this event I want to go to. It’s an overnight thing, and they need to know right away if I can go or not. And I said, well, you need to know right now. Yes. Need to know right now. What does mom think when you talk to her? She. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her. I gotta know right now. Like. Well, then the answer. Definitely no. Then if you need to know right now, the answer is no. What? Why would you do that? Why would you not let me go? I’m like, well, look, I’m not going to make some kind of decision without mom involved in this. So if you can wait, because what ever seems like an emergency to you, it’s not an emergency to me. If you can wait, the answer might be yes, it might still be no. But I’m not going to get out ahead of her because she’s still going to be around long after you’re gone. I hope after your. I hope you’re gone. Julie. Right. She’s still going to be around. We still got to get along. We got to be connected. And I want to stay connected. Now let me give this last point. This is really important. And I think and as I’ve taught on parenting over the years, Julie and I have often done parenting classes together. This one often gets skipped. Parenting classes, teaching books often become about methods, ideas, approaches, and I love a good tool, or a good method or good phrase to use. That’s helpful. But here’s the key idea behind all that. This third letter D at the core of our at the core of our relationship should be delight. It should be love for one another. Yeah, there will be times we don’t like each other. There’ll be times where there’s conflict, of course, but there should be delight. Look at chapter 23, verse 25 and 26 here, let your father and mother be glad. Let her who bore you rejoice, my son. Give me your heart. Let your eyes observe my ways. 3:12 which was up under discipline. The last phrase there– a father, the son, in whom he delights, and then 15:20– a wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish man despises his mother. There should be a delight, a love, a joy in one another, a celebration of one another. At the core of my parenting should be this desire to see my children improve. You know, there’s a big difference between punishment and discipline. Of course, punishment may be involved in discipline, but we don’t punish for punishment sake. I’m not punishing you to get back at you because you hurt me. No, discipline is more like pruning. You prune a bush back not to destroy it, but to see it flourish. To see it bear more fruit, to see it become better. That’s what discipline is about. And delight together how they work together. Let me tell you, I love it. Well, okay, let me just be honest. Since my kids aren’t here, how convenient is that to be able to talk about parenting on the day they’re not here. Julie wasn’t here last week when I talked about marriage. I promise I didn’t plan all that in advance, but I love it when they excel in something beyond me. Now I say I love it, but part of you kind of doesn’t. Oh man. You know, I remember the day. My, oldest son now, we would bike together and I love to bike. But I remember the day we would always sprint at the end of the bike ride. Always crushed him. But then there was this one day where he beat me, and I never beat him again. And part of me was like, man, that’s the end of that. But part of me was so pumped for him because he’s growing. He’s flourishing. When I bump the volleyball around with my daughter, I’m watching her and I’m going, man, she’s way more skilled than me. I love seeing that when I play chess with my son and he. Well, let’s. No, let’s not even talk about that, okay? Let’s just say he is getting a lot better than me, even. And I love that. I love seeing them flourish. There is a delight and joy. I love coming home to be around them. I love being at church, but when all the work here is done, I love to go home and be around them and delight in them. And yes, we have conflict. Yes, there are differences. Yes, there are hard times. But at the heart of our relationship there should be love and joy and delight. And I think a key part of that is just learning. Even in the midst of the discipline, how am I appealing to their heart, not just trying to change outward behavior, not just focusing on externals, but pursuing the heart, getting to know them, connecting with them at a heart level? The last point here is the letter H. And it’s the word honor. Ephesians 6:2 says, honor your father and mother, that it may go well with you. Now here’s the key thing to address here, and the reason why I land on that letter H. Whether you’re young, whether you you’re old. This applies to all of us. And I know in a room this size and I’m not thinking of anyone in particular. Some of us have had abusive parents, have had parents who neglected us. In fact, bad situations. Here’s the key idea of that verse. We’re still called to honor them. Now look, this is one of those topics I thought we could take the entire message multiple days on this. So I know I’m just touching a raw nerve, but what I love about that verse is it says, honor your father and mother so that it may go well with you. And this could mean a lot of different things. Part of honoring them, if they’re abusive is to set boundaries. That’s honoring okay. But the goal is how is Christ growing me? How am I growing closer to him? If you see folks who are walking around with decades of unforgiveness towards a parent, it’s killing them. It’s hurting them deeply. You see him weighed down with that anger. Honor your father and mother. Part of that is forgive. And this. This isn’t easy. I’m not trying to throw this out flippantly. This is one of the hardest things people do is to forgive a parent that has hurt them. This isn’t meant to be just some quick fix and go. It could be a really long process, could take years to get there. Honor your father and mother. Why? It’s for your own benefit, your own growth, your own delight, your own joy. And here’s the reality. In this day and age, I think the home is probably the most powerful way to declare Christ to the world. Because I could come over to my neighbor all day long and tell him how great my church is, and how great I was going to say my pastor is that sounds weird. How great the church members are, the elders and the deacons. I could do that all day long, but if they see me as a tyrant at home. Full of anger, they’re not going to want to hear it. Hey, that’s great, John. Honor your father and mother that it may go well with you and my prayer for our church. There are no, by the way, no perfect families. But my prayer is that our home is a place of refuge, of shelter, of love, of joy. And I know a message like this can be really overwhelming. Just pick one thing in here that you heard today that you say, you know what? I want to grow on this. I can’t control what my parents might do. I can’t control what my kids might do. But here’s where I’m going to seek to grow. That’s what God has called us to do, is to keep growing. Let’s pray. God, thank you for the great delight. That children are. That parents are. And I say that knowing, none of us are perfect. We’ve made plenty of mistakes. You’ve designed the world to work this way. We don’t understand it all. But we thank you for the family you’ve given us. Help us to honor you in all that we do. Help us to be good at forgiving. Good at confessing sin. Help us to model growth. And Jesus, my prayer would be that none of us here would try to do that on our own strength. That we would lean on you completely. And also just want to take a second and pray for those who have had deep trauma or abuse or neglect. God, would you bring healing? I pray that you would, even today, began to bring comfort and healing, that you would give them great wisdom, that you would bring people into their lives that would help them to heal and find love in you. Jesus, we love you. Help us to honor you in the way that we are in family relationship with others, and help this church to be a place where families can flourish. I pray for our students while they’re traveling today. May they feel your grace and presence in their life. We love you, Jesus. Amen. Well, thank you all for coming today for joining us, if you would. Let’s stand and we’ll have a closing prayer of benediction and be on our way for a week of July 4th week. Have some fireworks. How many of you have your fireworks stock already developed and ready? I’m disappointed. My son had his whole lot of fireworks about a month ago. He knew we’d be out of town this week. He’s planning that far in advance. Okay, so get with it this week. All right, July 4th is coming up. But anyway, great week for that happen in this week. Make sure you connect with one another. Well but let’s have a closing prayer. Been benediction. May the Lord bless you and keep you today. May his face shine upon you, and may you feel the fullness of his presence and countenance in your life today. No matter what you’re facing, you would know he’s there with you. And may you experience the fullness of his peace, the fullness of his joy, and especially today, the fullness of delight in one another. Thank you, Jesus, for giving us hope and peace in you. We love you and it’s in your name we pray. Amen. Go in peace. Have a great day.