Joshua Waggener, Professor of Church Music and Worship at Southwestern Seminary, preached from Hebrews 12, verses 1-3, in SWBTS Chapel on April 10, 2025.
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
I will run the race. That’s what we’re talking about this morning. Greetings, southwestern TBC, colleagues. I want to thank Dr Dockery for having the vision for this sermon series this spring. Has been very edifying. I also want to share on behalf of Dr Dockery that we’re inviting all of you tonight, 7pm Cowden Hall, our choirs will be doing a fantastic choir concert. You don’t want to miss it. The theme is African American spirituals, and it will be just an amazing collection of spiritual arrangements by all our different choirs here, from the youngest choirs all the way to the seminary choir.
I’d like to thank my colleagues that have contributed to this sermon series this fall. It’s been very encouraging to us as we’ve gone through the different virtues. Last Thursday, we heard Dr Yarnell speak, and when he got up here in this fine podium, he pointed out the irony of being asked to speak on mercy. And I want to thank Dr Yarnell for a fine sermon on God’s love, His goodness, His mercy, all of this in Christ on behalf of us sinners. I think that Dr Yarnell did a fine job of presenting the topic of mercy. Well, I mentioned that because there’s some irony in the sermon today. And the irony is this, that a sermon on running is being preached by someone who doesn’t run very much at all. What you’re looking at here is a very apathetic lap sadaisical run on occasion, or when I’m chased kind of jogger. Okay, that’s what you have in front of you today.
But I just want to point out, as we get going, that we’ve had other preachers this semester that are very qualified in this area. We have some expertise on our campus, beginning with Provost Madison, Grace, there he is. He ran the cow town races, and he preached to us about walking worthy. Next we have Dr Josh Williams. Check this out. He is an adventurous runner. In his sermon, Dr Williams reminded us to be kind to one another as it contributes to a healthy body. And I think Dr Williams was actually talking about the church, but healthiness right? Third, we have Dr Mark Taylor.
There he is, along with Dr Caldwell. Dr Taylor preached from the Epistle of James on the need for patient endurance. He even talked about running, and I think he knows what he’s talking about, unlike me. So I studied the verses then in Hebrews 12 that I was assigned to preach, and no matter what, I just couldn’t figure out how to get around this running idea. It’s right there in the text you can’t get around. So what was I going to do? Was I going to take up marathon training? We’ll see. Well, first of all, I went back to my roots and my family. And here’s a picture of my dad. This is Joe Wagner. He ran the Mississippi marathon December 9, 1978 and as you can see, it was a cold day there in Mississippi, he had to wear some more clothes than he might usually wear, but he ran the race, and he ran it with endurance.
And you’re all wondering, what was his time? What was his time? Three hours, 45 minutes, 22 seconds. So way to go, dad. Then I started interviewing runners. I started talking to runners. I talked to my friend Mariano Gongora, who many of you have seen making laps around this campus, around and around. He goes right. Here’s some pictures of Mariano running his marathon in Argentina in 2019 Good job. I talked to Dr Lily Park, and I found out that Dr Park and Dr Ashley Allen ran the half marathon in Dallas, and they even became the poster children for running this race.
You see this thrown the advertisement, so sign up for next year. And then things got serious when I started talking to Andrew Jennings, I heard about his experiences of running a marathon, and also this thing I’d never heard of. It’s called a Tough Mudder. A tough mudder, and this involves 15 kilometers, 20 obstacles, electric shocks, mud pits, swimming in ice water, and according to Dr Jennings, other fun stuff. Okay, that’s all for you. And then I, as I mentioned, talked to Dr Caldwell, and I’ll share some more from that in a few minutes. Finally, though, I interviewed my friend Gary Brumley, who’s here today with. This. He is our worship minister at Redeemer church.
And Gary, who’s a fine alum of our institution here, has run six marathons, not one, but six. So one is enough. Gary now helps to organize the Cowtown races every year here in Fort Worth. And Gary was so helpful to me because he talked to me about training schedules, about proper attire, about the mental techniques of running, about regulating one’s temperature, all these things that I know nothing about. So I learned a lot from Gary, and I’ll be sharing more as we go. But third, this is what was really a relief to me. I realized that when we look at this passage in Hebrews 12, just like Paul and other places in the New Testament, the author of Hebrews, he’s really using in this as a metaphor, isn’t he? Isn’t to run with endurance, a metaphor for the Christian life.
And so when I realized that, I was quite relieved, because I realized that I could just really sit at my desk, no sweating involved, no soreness the next day, and I would be just fine preaching this sermon. Okay? Are we Is that okay? Is that all right? I will talk about running, but it’s just not from personal experience. So what I really want to do, though, is attend to the text. Attend to the text at hand, yeah, that’s, did you see the bumper sticker? Okay? And I want to attend to the text. With respect to this question. The question is this, what does it look like to run faithfully, to endure in the long marathon that is the Christian life.
And I think when we do look at this text closely, we’ll find that in the Christian life of faith, we are called to endure through fatigue and faint heartedness, faithfully following Jesus with the help of the Scriptures and with our eyes fixed on him by the grace that God provides so before we begin, once you pray with me, Dear Lord Jesus, we come to Your Word. We are thankful for your scriptures that ground us in your truth and point the way we thank you for what we can learn today in following you faithfully. I pray that this time together in your word would encourage us, as we each seek, to run the race faithfully all the way to the end, and especially Lord Jesus. I pray that You would help me get out of the way so that we can see Jesus in Christ’s name. Amen, so as we begin with Hebrews 12, verse one, we need to attend to the first phrase, which mentions a cloud of witnesses. Some people consider these the spectators of our run.
I want to continue the metaphor and call them the forerunners of our faith. You see, these are God given examples of endurance and people of faith that we find right here in the Bible, in particular, with the use of therefore. And since the author of Hebrews wants us to look back, I think, to the hall of faith in Hebrews chapter 11. And so as we think about those individuals, let’s just take a moment and name a few of them. Right? We have Abel who offered a sacrifice to God, but because of his brother’s jealous anger, he was murdered, suffering death for being a righteous man. Next we come to Enoch. Enoch walked with God. Let me point out, he walked with God. He did not run, and he set an example for us as one who pleased God.
Then there was Noah, who looked ahead to what was not seen, and by faith, built an ark to deliver his family. Then we come to Abraham, who went out as a pioneer, not knowing where he was going, but looking forward to the city that God would build. His wife, Sarah, then considered that God was faithful. And despite enduring a long period of barrenness until the joyful time of the birth of Isaac, she trusted in God her husband again, Abraham, when he was tested to see if he would be willing to sacrifice their son Isaac consider God to be able even to raise someone from the dead. That was his faith in Hebrews 11 verses 20 to 22 we learned about Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, and they looked ahead to what God would do. And thus they blessed their children, and they passed on that blessing to the next generation. We then come to Moses.
Well, we find out that in Egypt, Moses chose to suffer with the people of God. The author of Hebrews even tells us that it was for the sake of Christ that Moses suffered and he looked forward to his reward. He then left Egypt, of course, with the. Lights. He became a pioneer, leading people out through the promised through the Red Sea and then to the promised land. And following God’s command, he founded the Passover. This was going to be a way that they would remember how God was, the faithful one, providing all that was needed to deliver them. So there are others, but I’ll just stop there. What we learn from these faithful individuals in Hebrews chapter 11 is that they saw the end. They saw it was promised, but they did not reach it. Yet it was not given to them.
Yet, Hebrews tells us they nonetheless, all died in faith looking forward to the things that were promised. Right? So these Old Testament examples are forerunners for us of the New Covenant race that we are to run, and they are recorded in Scripture for us for our benefit. They serve as a witness to us of what it looks like to run faithfully. So in some I’ll just say this, that these forerunners, these witnesses, they teach us that Christians who seek to endure to the end, they need to remain scripturally grounded in their awareness, well informed of the examples of faithful endurance that have gone before us. That’s a good word, and yes, you should take Old Testament class.
So as we move forward, then grounded in Scripture, of course, we want to attend now to the task at hand, this running business that we started with. We can’t get around this central metaphor and command that we find Let us run at the end of verse one. So based on the other phrases, though, I want to expand on this. I want to expand on the nature of the running. First of all, the phrase with endurance makes it clear, it’s not a short race. I didn’t give any examples of sprints or other kinds of Olympic runnings, that sort of thing. As Douglas Moo points out, the need to run this race with endurance makes clear, this race is not a sprint, but a marathon.
Therefore, it’s not a race for the faint of heart or those that are unprepared. And as I learned from my talk with Gary brumbly, endurance runs are completely different than short jogs or sprints, and many of you know this right. Someone training for a marathon begins with shorter distances, like seven miles or 12 miles or eight sounds pretty long to me, but they tell me, these are the shorter distances all of this to prepare for the longer marathon. Someone like me that can barely survive a 5k has no business at the starting line of a 26.2 mile marathon. But as I’m told, if you do the intermediate steps, the endurance will come and you can run it all right? The second reason why a long distance story serves as an appropriate metaphor for this Christian life, it becomes apparent with the next phrase. It tells us that it’s a race that lies before us. And the implication is that there is a certain path before us. We are to run that path, and no other path, right.
We are not to deviate to the left or to the right, and we should not do as Paul says, run like one who runs aimlessly. Instead, we run the course as marked as efficiently as possible, and to run it efficiently means we pay attention to other things, like the passage says we are to lay aside every hindrance. I think this qualifier is particularly strategic, right? It speaks to the need to put off any any clothes, to put down any baggage, to put away any accessories that would keep us from running our very best, our very fastest, the most efficiently, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do this semester. I think, in this sermon series, we’ve thought about the things we should put away.
We’ve thought about the things we should put on the Christian virtues of our lives. And so just to remind you of a few of these things, we’ve been called to put on the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. We’ve heard sermons on all of these things. We’ve also been challenged display forgiveness, humility and indeed mercy toward others. We’ve been charged to practice servant leadership, following the example of our Master, our Lord, Jesus Christ. So all these things are things that we’ve been called to put on, to put on for the long race. We’ve also been challenged to put off some things and. What this passage talks about. It says we should put off sin. Earlier we heard from Dr Williams, who preached from Ephesians. Chapter Four in Ephesians, four Paul commands that we put away lying, anger, stealing rotten speech, anything that would grieve the Holy Spirit, and here in the book of Hebrews, some think that the sin in particular to be put aside as the sin of apostasy, apostasy of falling away from the faith, of not finishing the race we started.
So we’ll keep that in mind. But what I want to emphasize here is that running the race efficiently requires that we run strategically. The race that lies before us is not meant to be run in circles, right? Hebrews 1213, later in the chapter instructs us make straight paths for your feet, not curvy ones that don’t get us where we’re going very fast. Here’s where I can bring in some more things I learned from Gary. I learned that if you’re an experienced runner on a race, you seek to run the shortest possible route. SPR get the terminology and that he actually measures races along these lines. The shortest possible route between the starting line and the finish line is what we want to run, and no more. And so this means that when a route turns to the left or to the right, we have to be strategic about that. If I was running the race a novice, I would just take my time and go around every curve nice and wide and relaxed, but an experienced runner will set his sights on the far point of the next turn. And I’ve been told seek to run the tangent from the first turn to the next.
They set their sight on that next corner as their goal, and they run there as fast as they can. What if there’s a pothole? What if there’s another runner? Well, you don’t let that get in the way. You still run directly to that next goal. And for me, I think that illustrates this next passage, this next part of the passage. So let’s look again at Hebrews two. And now verse two A this is the instruction to look to Jesus, to keep our eyes directly on Jesus. So this strategy that I just talked about, that I learned about from Gary, it speaks directly to this idea, yes, we look back to the Old Testament. We learn what we can from those pillars of the faith, those forerunners we spoke about. But the ultimate forerunner, the ultimate example of faithful endurance, is our Lord Jesus, Christ, and we set our eyes on Him. So let’s consider that further centering our focus on Christ is not just a way to be faithful to Orthodox Christianity, to say that I believe in Jesus for salvation, or I worship Jesus. He’s the object of my affections.
Yes, all that. But I want to show you that this is also strategic. We set our eyes on Jesus because we want to be free of other things. We don’t want to be distracted from the other things, as Douglas Moo points out, keeping our eyes means to direct our attention on something without any distractions. And so, like that experienced runner I mentioned, we fix our gaze on the next point, the next goal I read from Sigurd grunman. And he explains this. He says, it is imperative, speaking of the original audience of the book of Hebrews, it is imperative for them to look away from the suffering and humiliation all the reasons they want to give up and turn away from the faith and that they have to actively turn their attention away from their difficulties and instead focus on Jesus, have our sight, gazing on him, locked in there.
So even though these first century Christians were tempted to turn away and look for something else, for their salvation, they were told by the author of Hebrews to run the race to stick with it, right? And therefore today, we need to avoid distractions. We need to not let the good things of this life, the many blessings that we experience, to distract us from the best thing, Jesus Christ, we need to keep our eyes on Him. And here’s where I want to slow down for a few minutes and look at Jesus, because I think verse two gives us a lot of things, a lot of information, a lot of glorious information about Jesus Christ. It begins with two multi faceted titles.
Yes, it didn’t gives two messianic actions, and finally, it gives us one exemplary motivation. Let’s look at each of these in detail for a few minutes. First, we’ll consider the titles for Christ. And you may be looking at your Bible, your translation. We have various different translations for these. The first title is this. Jesus is the model of our faith, the author of our faith. Some translations say, or, as we read today, the pioneer of our faith. So yes, the Old Testament models from Hebrews 11 are there for us, Abel, Noah, Abraham, etc. But Jesus coming here in Hebrews 12 provides the ultimate model. In a way, it is the culmination of Hebrews 11.
Here at the beginning of Hebrews 12, we can even look back at Hebrews six, which declares that Jesus entering the inner sanctuary was a forerunner for us. So indeed he’s an example. But I want to tell you today that Jesus is much more than an example for us. Okay, we need more than a moral example for the Christian life, because we can also see this as saying that he is the author or originator of our faith. It means simply what Ephesians says that our faith is a gift of God, and that Jesus, through His death and resurrection, plays the central role in providing the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Hebrews 10, one, Jesus is also, we can say, the pioneer of our faith, and Hebrews 210 tells us he’s the pioneer of our salvation. And so we see that Jesus has gone ahead of us, forging the way of the Christian life, and he’s laid out this path for us to run, following his example, knowing that he is with us. And I think that what this next title emphasizes is that He will not forsake us.
He will be with us all along the way. Because it’s said that Jesus is our finisher. He is the perfecter of our faith. He is even the sustainer of our faith. Let’s consider each of these possibilities, the one in whom our faith originates, Jesus Christ. Well, he doesn’t just start the race. He finishes it for us, as Greenham affirms, Jesus has completed the race as the high priest and representative of his people. His sacrifice makes his people complete. He’s done it. And then, indeed, as we look throughout the book of Hebrews, I think we’ll find doctrine that shows us how Jesus sustains our faith, how he perfects our faith. Just a few examples here.
Jesus became the perfect high priest. He provided everything necessary for our salvation and for our sanctification, Jesus therefore makes us perfectly holy, forever before God, Hebrews 1014, furthermore, the one who leads our worship, Hebrews two, constantly intercedes on our behalf. And through this, Jesus provides everything necessary for us to run our races. Listen to how Jesus sustains us in the journey. First of all, Jesus gives us hope. Hebrews six says, an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. Jesus gives us confidence to approach the throne of God with boldness, to draw near to Him with a true heart and full assurance of faith, Jesus gives mercy and grace in our time of need, brothers and sisters, Jesus will sustain us in our faith. So those are the titles we find there at the beginning of Hebrews two, and they are followed by two explicitly messianic actions. Let’s look at these now.
First of all, Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame. And here I want to just consider the Gospel accounts for a minute, particularly the book of Matthew, where we see that the cross is absolutely central to the mission of Jesus Christ due to our sins, Jesus endured crucifixion on a cross, and we know that this is perhaps the most excruciating way that a person could die. I’m going to read a description of crucifixion that John Stott provides in his classic the cross of Christ. This is based on first, first century sources outside of the New Testament. And so John Stott describes the crucifixion this way. He says, first of all, they were laid on their back on the ground, while their hands were either nailed or roped to the horizontal wooden beam, and their feet to the vertical. Old, the cross was then hoisted up to an upright position, dropped into a socket which had been dug for it in the ground.
He says, usually a peg or rudimentary seat was provided to take some of the weight off of the victim’s body and prevent it from being torn loose. But there the victim would hang helplessly, exposed to intense physical pain, yes, public ridicule, daytime heat and nighttime cold. On our behalf, Messiah Jesus endured this for us. So why, then does the author of Hebrews follow that up with this phrase that Jesus despised the shame. He despised the shame. What does that mean? Well, as bad as the physical suffering was, the Gospels emphasize that the suffering Jesus endured was also due to the mocking, the mocking he endured on the cross. For example, in Matthew’s account, we find that just before his crucifixion, Jesus was mocked by Roman soldiers in front of an entire battalion of Roman soldiers, and they mocked Him as King. Then on the cross, Jesus was mocked by his own people, by the Jews. Jews from every strata of society came by and hurled their insults at him.
Matthew’s emphasis is on the growing chorus of voices that joined together to mock Jesus louder and louder and louder, even while he is enduring such physical pain. And so the intent of all these verbal taunts, all this mocking for the words of the soldiers to the words of the Jews, was evil. They intended it for harm. They wanted Jesus to suffer more. And so you can imagine that this was an incredibly, not just painful way to die, but an incredibly shameful way to die. But what we see here in Hebrews chapter 12 is that Jesus disregarded or despised the shame. Right? Douglas Moo explains, it is Tata month to disregarding public opinion. Jesus knew it was shameful, but he disregarded it, enduring it for us. And so as we know, he died on that cross and he was taken down. He was buried on the third day. He rose again.
And then the Bible tells us in Acts that 40 days later he ascended on high praise be to God. And that brings us to the second messianic act that we see here in Hebrews 12, and that is that Jesus sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. What is this about? Well, we know that his sacrificial work was done. It is finished. He had paid the perfect price for our sin. However, Jesus’s work sustaining us in our faith was not done. He sat down at the right hand of the Father, and as we’ve heard in Hebrews, also Romans, eight, Jesus constantly intercedes on our behalf. And as he does this, I believe he points to that sacrificial blood that he shed on the cross for us as what made the way for us to experience forgiveness for our sins and allows us to live lives of sacrificial service to God. He made the way. And this part of Christ’s ministry, his continued ministry, his heavenly ministry, today is known as Christ session.
It does continue until He will come again to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. Hebrews nine, so the second action, his second messianic action we see here, helps us understand then Jesus’s exemplary motivation. Let’s learn from this. At the beginning of verse two, we find these words for the joy that lay before him, amen for the joy that lay before him. Douglas Moo explains that the prospect of Jesus’s exaltation was, in a sense, the reward for this faithful obedience. Furthermore, John Stott affirms that Jesus clearly looked beyond his death, to His resurrection, beyond his sufferings, to His glory, and indeed was sustained in his trials by the joy set before Him. And so John. As Jesus went through his humiliation before he received his exaltation, we are also to look ahead to the joy that awaits us in Jesus, our example of faithful endurance, that’s something that awaits us.
So as we move to the third and final verse of our passage today, I just want to exhort you, brothers and sisters with these words. It reads, consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself so that you won’t grow weary and give up. In other words, what we’re being told here is that we are to endure faithfully despite fatigue, despite faint heartedness, and here’s where we go back to the running illustration. If you’re running a long distance race, you will definitely grow weary, and in particular, if you’re running a marathon. So I’m told, around the 20 mile mark, you hit this wall, and some of you may be shaking your heads right now, and you remember this, and all of a sudden, around this mark, you feel like you’re running through molasses.
Your body has depleted all of its regular energy and now has to rely upon something else to just keep going. You feel absolutely sluggish, and you really want to just stop right there. But despite this fatigue, marathon runners keep going right how do they do it? Well, they’ve trained properly. They have the proper mental stamina, they have the physical endurance, and so they are going to make it to the end. They haven’t trained all this time just to stop, but they will be exhausted. They will be absolutely exhausted, and after they cross that finish line, they might just collapse. And here’s what I learned from Dr Caldwell when he finished a marathon. He said, immediately after running the marathon, he could hardly lift his feet off the ground right his his body was shaking, and he almost collapsed, and then and then the emotions hit him, the sheer exhilaration and exhaustion of finishing the race just brought on these uncontrollable tears.
Dr Caldwell told me he began to weep right there on the side of the finish line. This is the intense weariness that a runner experiences after a marathon. And so brothers and sisters in the Christian life. Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever felt absolutely exhausted from running the Christian life? Those of you to call it here to study students here, are you feeling even right now? I don’t think I’m going to make it to the end of the semester, much less the finish line of graduation. Colleagues, faculty, perhaps in your academic career, you feel like you’re hitting that 20 mile mark. You want to go to the end, but you just don’t feel like you can run the race, like you’ve been running it. You’re absolutely wiped out.
Many of us in ministry hit this wall as well, right just the week after week of ministry, the events that happen each week, the incredible burden and pain in the people that we serve, the constant pressures that come with leadership. All of these are incredibly tiring. They waste on us so much. And frankly, some of us, some of us, just want to give up. But the phrase here in verse three, and I think in the rest of the passage here, encourages, they encourage us not to lose heart, not to grow faint hearted, not to give up. This passage reinforces this importance, and even if we look ahead to verse four, we realize that if we look to Jesus, we will see that he suffered far more than we ever will. He endured, even to the point of shedding His blood.
And so that’s why this verse begins with another command. Did you notice that it encouraged us to consider, to consider, consider what? Well, consider Jesus. Verse three is just repeating the key that we found back in verse two to endure for the length of the Christian life. The key is to look to Jesus, and here is where I want to call us to something we can do even in the coming days as we look forward to celebrating Holy Week next week, or the preparations up to Easter, i. We are to take time and meditate on how Christ endured for us, how Christ suffered for us. Think about at that Last Supper, where Jesus was with his disciples, and what did he tell them?
He said, Do this in remembrance of Me and So brothers and sisters, I expect that next week at your churches, or at least in churches around you, you’ll have opportunity to go to a Maundy Thursday service or a good Friday service and partake of the Lord’s supper with other brothers and sisters. You will take time and you will meditate. You will consider the things that Christ went through on our behalf for our salvation, and then we will celebrate Resurrection Sunday, His resurrection on the third day. So don’t miss these opportunities in the life of the body of the church to consider what Christ has done for you. So as I close now, let me encourage you with just one more observation about the passage, and then I’ll summarize things for us today, if we go back to that central command, which I really think is a metaphor, right?
Hebrews 12 does not use the singular brothers and sisters. We’re told, let us run. Let us run. So if you are tempted to abandon the faith, to give up, you are tempted to do some deconstruction, to step off the path of the Christian life, here are three things you can do. All right. First of all, stay grounded in the Word, go to the word, study the examples of faithful, living, faithful, running that have gone before us. They’re all there for us. And primarily in studying the Scripture, look to Jesus, read the gospels, read the Old Testament, see how he was forecast there. Be encouraged by this. Jesus was with you at the start of your race, His Spirit is with you now as you run, and Jesus is there waiting for you at the finish line, so that you will run and receive your reward.
And then lastly, look to the body of Christ around you that our brothers and sisters in Christ that are right here running the race left and right, you can learn so much from their experiences, their expertise, even their stumbles, and how they picked themselves up and got back in the race. And what I’m saying is don’t try to run the race alone. Okay, so in summary, let’s go back to our question, what does it look like to run the Christian life faithfully, to endure in this long marathon? Well, faithful endurance in the Christian life entails being well grounded in the scriptures, which give us examples and principles to follow, but keeping our focus on Christ, and we know that Jesus has therefore provided every grace we need to run this race. We are to put off the sin and we are to follow faithfully on the long road of discipleship. And when we get fatigued and when we get faint hearted, when we will. We are to consider Christ the pioneer and perfecter of our faith who endured the cross on our behalf, and even in those moments, rely on His grace to sustain us to the joyful end. Why don’t you pray with me now?
Dear Lord Jesus, and Holy Spirit God the Father, help us to run this race that’s been laid out before us by our Lord Jesus Christ. Help us to run it with endurance all the way to the end. Help us to learn from your word the scriptures, as we have so many opportunities to do so here at Southwestern help us to look to Jesus more and more. May we put aside our sins, may we put aside our distractions, may we lean on our brothers and sisters. But Lord Jesus Christ, give us a vision of you as our faithful forerunner in the faith for our good, but for your glory, we pray this in the strong name of Jesus, Christ. Amen.
