Today's first Bible reading is from Psalm 119, starting from verse 89 to verse 96.
Psalm 119 verse 89 to 96. Your word, Lord, is eternal. It stands firm in the heavens.
Your faithfulness continues through all generations. You established the earth,
and it endures. Your laws endure to this day, for all things serve you. If your law had not
been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction. I will never forget your precepts,
for by them you have preserved my life. Save me, for I am yours. I have sought out your
precepts. The wicked are waiting to destroy me, but I will ponder your statutes. To all perfection,
I see a limit, but your commands are boundless. The second Bible reading will be from 2 Peter
chapter 1 verse 16 to 18. 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 16. For we did not follow cleverly devised
stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in our power, but we were
eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to
him from the majestic glory, saying, This is my son whom I love. With him I am well pleased.
We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.
Alright, well good morning again everyone. It's great to be here with you and I bring greetings
from Bull Creek where I serve typically. So wonderful to be joined together in our fellowship,
our wider WPC fellowship. There's a number of us, our churches across our state. It's great that we
can serve one another in this way. So I will say as well, it's been a little while since I've been
here. I don't think I've been here since Michael has been here and so I can see already the place
looks a bit different than it did before. So wonderful to see some new faces too. So yeah,
praise God for what he's doing among you guys. Now for this morning, so we're going to be doing
a looking at a sermon called Can We Trust the Bible? Now this is from a sermon series that we
did at Bull Creek earlier this year and really what we were trying to do in these sermons was
think about important questions that people raise about the Bible, about Christianity in general,
and one of these was this one that we're going to look at this morning. So looking forward to
getting into that. It's more of a topical sermon for us today so we're going to think about the
reliability of the Bible. But before we do that, let me pray. Please join me. Our great and gracious
Father in heaven, we praise you for revealing yourself to us, for giving us your holy, inspired,
inerrant word. We thank you that we get easy access to this, that each week, each day we can open it
and turn and see the truths written within it. We pray this morning as we think a little bit about
its reliability, would we come away from this morning with great confidence in your word,
in the truth of Scripture? May that move us to be more faithful servants of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In his name we pray, amen. Okay, well, back in 2019, the Christian pastor and author, a man named
Joshua Harris, perhaps you've heard of him, he made this post on his Instagram account, one of
his social media accounts. Now he had already, by this point 2019, he had disowned a very popular
book on Christian dating that had actually made him famous a number of years before. This is one
he'd written in 1997 called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Maybe that's a book you're familiar with,
it's kind of a thing that made him famous in the Christian world at least. But more surprises were
in store because in this post that he wrote on his social media, he announced to the world,
firstly that he had separated from his wife and secondly that he had gone through a process
called deconstruction. What is that? What's deconstruction? What does that mean in this
context? Well, the term itself is actually, it's a little slippery, a little hard to define exactly,
but for those who use it, the noble aim behind this is usually to examine your own beliefs,
to try and separate what's true from what's fiction. To separate what's true from what's
fiction. To figure out in what you believe what's actually true and what's not true.
But as another Christian man, a apologetics expert named Neil Shenvy said when he was
recently asked about this, he said, the question is how do you decide how to do that in Christianity?
How do you decide in Christianity what's true and what's false? Now that's a really important
question to know the answer to, right? Because that is going to greatly impact our faith. Now,
Neil Shenvy, this man, he goes on to answer this question. He said, the reformers, men like Martin
Luther, John Calvin, they knew that the Bible is our ultimate authority. The Bible is our ultimate
authority in matters of faith and practice. That's where we turn to determine what's true
and what's false when it comes to Christianity and the Christian life. But for the man, Joshua
Harris, and for many other people who say they're doing this thing called deconstructing, well,
the Bible sadly is often the first thing that gets determined as false. They say the Bible's
not really true. And sadly, from that point, often it's a slippery slope away from the faith
until in the case of Joshua Harris, the man we were looking at, you get to a conclusion like this.
Here's what he said on this post. I'm going to quote him. He said, the information that was left
out of my announcement is that I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus.
The popular phrase for this is deconstruction. The biblical phrase is falling away. By all the
measurements I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian. Now, the truth is that when
someone comes to decide or comes to the point where they say the Bible's not true, it's not
reliable, it's often maybe the most key part of them turning away from Christianity altogether.
But it's not just former Christians who think this, it's also those who have never been
Christian. We hear this in other places as well. So in the well-known work from, again,
about 20 years ago, a man named Richard Dawkins, an atheist, he wrote a popular book called The
God Delusion. Maybe you've heard of it. And in that book, he states this. I'll quote him. He says,
reputable biblical scholars do not, in general, regard the New Testament, and obviously not the
Old Testament, as a reliable record of what actually happened in history. And that's what he
says. Another atheist, a man who, the late Christopher Hitchens, wrote a book around the
same time, called God is Not Great. And in that he said, there was no flight from Egypt, no
wandering in the desert, no dramatic conquest of the promised land. It was all quite simply and
very ineptly made up at a much later date. All the mosaic myths can be safely and easily discarded.
So when you read statements like that, both from people who are formally Christian and those who
are atheist, when you read statements like that, well, who needs to ever look at the Bible to
determine truth? If you believe these sorts of statements, you can just discard the Bible
altogether. So no wonder for many today, outside of perhaps outside of this building, Christianity
is a thing that can be easily dismissed, because to them, the Bible can be easily dismissed. So
what does all this mean? I think it means that when Christians talk with non-Christians, when we talk
with friends and family, one of the key questions that comes up over and over and over again when
we're talking about Christianity is, can you really trust the Bible? Is it trustworthy? Is it true?
Okay, and so for this morning, that's our focus. The next little part of the service, we're going
to think about this question. How can we answer this? Is the Bible trustworthy? There'll be two
main things that we're going to look at. Firstly, evidence from outside the Bible. What do we find
outside the Bible that points to the Bible's authenticity? And what do we see inside the Bible?
What's the evidence from inside the Bible? Okay. Now, when we talk about that first bit of evidence
from outside the Bible, there's actually a wealth of information, a wealth of things that we can look
at to determine actually the Bible is trustworthy. In fact, in the time we've got this morning,
there's not enough time to be able to cover all of it. I'm only going to be able to look at a few
specific things to make this case. So let's, and then we'll jump into Scripture to see more of it
from the inside the Bible. So I'm going to raise a few objections that people often raise with regard
to the Bible's truthfulness, and we'll look at them together. So first, people might say,
we can't trust the Bible because it was written a long time ago. It was written so long ago. Now,
this is actually a relatively easy one to write off. What lies behind a question like this,
if someone believes this, is something you might call chronological snobbery. Now, that's the idea
that old things, old events, just because they're old, are not as good as new and current things.
And that's the thing we see a lot in our society today, isn't it? That you want to be on the right
side of history, right? You don't want to be in the past, the past bad, the now and the future,
that's good. And so if the Bible is written long ago, people would say, well, then it can't be
reliable because they maybe, for example, didn't have the technology that we have today. But it
doesn't take much to show this is actually really shallow thinking. So for example, in the world in
which the Bible was written, that was considered what you'd call an oral culture. Now today,
we've got a written culture. If I want to remember something today, what do I do? Well,
I might get out my phone to take notes. I might have a writing pad in front of me and write things
down. That's the way I remember something. I get my Google Keep is one of the apps on my phone.
That's what I pull out and I make notes on it if I need to remember something. Now, but back in the
day when the Bible was written, they wouldn't do things like that. They wouldn't be able to pull
out their phone, obviously. Back in that day, what are they going to do? Well, they're going to tell
it to each other over and over and over again. That's how they remembered things, remembered things,
by retelling the stories over and over and over. And actually, it's surprisingly easy to do that.
If you're retelling yourself something over and over, it's actually easy to remember it. Now,
my example for this is at the moment for our three and a half year old daughter. Every night,
she wants a story before she goes to bed. And she always picks basically the same story. So I've
read the same book now for months, months and months every night. And I found that it didn't
take me long. I can do it without even looking at the book. I can just point it out and just
like read it without even looking at the pages because it's so burned into my memory just from
reading it over and over and over again. Okay, now that's a little bit like what oral culture was.
That's what it was like in the day the Bible was written. Now, if you don't believe me,
well, let's hear. There you go. Someone's excited. If you don't believe me, well,
what about this? Okay, now here's a Greek scholar, a man whose full-time job it is to study the
original, the New Testament in its original language. He said it was common for children
in ancient Greece, that's more than 2,000 years ago, common for children in ancient Greece to
memorize all of Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey. Now those are well-known ancient stories with
about 200,000 words. These are big lengthy stories and it was common for children to memorize them.
Now on top of that, it was common for Jewish Old Testament scribes, get this, to be able to
memorize all of the Old Testament. I wouldn't be able to, I don't think it'd be able to memorize
a chapter of the Old Testament, but the Old Testament scribes would memorize the whole thing.
Now that's the kind of accuracy they had in transcribing things, in keeping things remembered.
That's the kind of accuracy that we're talking about for those whose job it was to know the
Scriptures and to pass them on to others. So when you think about what was happening in the day the
Bible was written, we want to be very careful about saying, because the Bible was written so
long ago, they just didn't have the technology, they wouldn't be able to record things like
we can today, so we just can't trust it. Actually, no, that's chronological snobbery, it's shallow
thinking, doesn't take into account what was happening back in that day. So that's the
first objection. Second objection, we can't trust the Bible because it's full of errors,
full of errors. Now this is a claim based on the fact that when we think about the New Testament,
there are lots of copies of the New Testament or manuscripts of the Bible spread all throughout
history. And now there's a professor in America, a man named Bart Ehrman, who's agnostic, not a
Christian, and he's recently tried to popularize this idea that the Bible is full of errors. And
one of the things he said is that when you add up all the errors, so an error is a difference between
one manuscript compared to another, maybe it's a letter, maybe it's a single letter that's different,
maybe it's a word, things like that. He says when you add up all these differences, that you get an
enormous amount of them. And so people begin to think, well, if that's true, then the process of
recording, getting the New Testament like we have it today, that must have been a little bit like a
game of Chinese whispers. One person says something to the next and then to the next and all the way
down this long, long line of copying. And so surely if someone introduces a mistake at one,
then it gets copied to all the others, right? And now by the time you get to the end, you've got a
completely different translation. Well, while it's true that there are minor mistakes, minor errors,
differences between manuscripts that were used to copy things and transcribe them and continue them
over time, actually that works in favor of the Bible's trustworthiness rather than against it,
as some might say. How so? Well, the more copies that you have of a work and the earlier those
copies are, well, the more chance you have of actually figuring out what is true and what isn't
true. You're more likely to determine when you have two copies that have a slight variation
between them, which one's accurate and which one isn't, because you can compare those two to all
the other copies that are out there. You've got thousands and thousands of copies. You can compare
them all to figure out what's actually true. And so there's a branch of scholarship that's
actually dedicated to this task, and we call this a textual criticism. The whole aim is to try and
better understand the creation and transmission of a text, of a written work. And when it's used
rightly, and it can be used wrongly, when it's used rightly, you can compare all the copies that
you've got of little parts of the New Testament and work your way backwards to determine what was in
the original. And that's what's happened for the Bible. What this means is for the Bible, we can
know actually to an incredibly high degree of accuracy, despite the differences in the manuscripts,
we can know to a really high degree of accuracy that what we read in the Bible today is similar,
almost exactly the same as what was written in the original. Now if you don't believe me, here's the
man Don Carson, well-known faithful Bible scholar. Here's what he says. He says,
nothing that we believe as Christians to be doctrinally true, and nothing that we are
commanded to do, is in any way jeopardised by differences in copies compared one to another.
Nothing is doctrinally true, nothing that we're commanded is in any way compromised by that.
In other words, the fact that there are lots of copies, different manuscripts of the New
Testament floating around, and that there are errors in them, differences, well those differences
are so minor, it doesn't negatively impact the Bible's trustworthiness. It actually helps us
to affirm its trustworthiness. Now before we move on, one more thing to say here, and that is,
not only do we have accuracy in the way that the Bible was transmitted or copied over time
for the scripture, not only do we have heaps and heaps of copies of different parts of the
New Testament, we actually also have endless archaeological evidence. I really do mean endless
here, endless archaeological evidence, because not only has evidence for the Bible been literally dug
up to back up what Bible scholars have said in the last 150 years, it's still happening even today.
We're still finding new evidence all the time. So I'm going to give you a few examples just briefly.
Now before 1947, the oldest manuscript, the oldest copy of the Old Testament that we had dated from
the 9th century AD. So that's obviously 900 years after the time of Jesus, more than a thousand years
after the events themselves. But then in 1947, some shepherds in a backwater part of the Middle
East, they stumbled across a treasure trove of biblical writings that had been stored in a cave
somewhere in the Middle East. Here's a picture of that cave. There it is there. Now more excavations
were done in the nearby caves and what came of it, what was the eventual result, was a thousand
manuscripts, almost a thousand manuscripts being found that dated from the third century BC to the
first century AD. These became known collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls, maybe you've heard of them.
And what they did was they confirmed that what was in those earlier copies, the ones from the 9th
century, were just the same as what was in these new ones that had been found that were much closer
to the original events. So it was new evidence confirming that what the Bible says is true.
Another one, so in 1993, I'm going to say this, the Tel Dan Steely discovery was made. Now if that
word doesn't mean anything to you, all it means is a big stone tablet was discovered and that's the
name. In those days, 1993, there was a growing number of academics and skeptics who were saying
that King David, the well-known Old Testament Bible figure, that he actually must be fictitious. He's
not a real person from history. Lots of academics and skeptics were starting to say that. They were
saying, King David, he's more like King Arthur than someone who's actually real. And then in 1993,
at a dig site, archaeological dig site, what happens? Well, they found this tablet. Found a tablet,
here's a picture of it there. And on the tablet, there was a description of a victory over the
King of Aram by the King of Israel. And what was written there is that the ally of the King of
Israel was the King of, quote, the House of David. Okay, so here was more evidence that at that point
not been discovered, more evidence backing up what the Bible actually says, that King David was a real
person, that he was a well-known King, that he had a dynasty named after him, and that a line of kings
came from him. That's everything that we read in the Bible, exactly as we read it. Now if you think,
look, I'm just picking some from some past discoveries, and this doesn't happen anymore.
Just last year, 2022, okay, last year, another tablet was found. This one was a cursed tablet
found at Mount Ebal in Israel. And this one dated to around 1400 BC, a long, long time ago. And the
thing about this tablet was it contained the personal name for God. That's a Yahweh.
And this was a significant discovery just last year because it was the earliest evidence of that
name, that the name Yahweh had not been found that early before. And so that's a big deal because for
the past 100 years or so, a mainstream view in scholarship is that in the first five books of
the Bible, wherever you see the personal name for God, wherever you see Yahweh, which in our English
translations is Lord, capitalized, well, academics for the last 100 years have been saying that's
been inserted much, much later. In other words, that's not part of the original. Someone's come
in much later and added that to the Bible. But now, 2022, here was new evidence saying actually,
no, it hadn't been added. It was there all along. Here's the early evidence for it, just as it
appeared in Scripture. And in fact, this is such a big discovery that it basically meant the end of
this mainstream view that had been held by so many scholars all over the world for 100 years. And all
that was needed was more time to dig it up. So what else are we going to discover in the future? I
think all we're going to do is keep finding more and more things from the ground that back up the
historicity, the reliability of what we read in Scripture. We just need more time. Well,
okay, a lot there. Hoping I'm starting to convince you now, let's move from evidence from outside the
Bible to instead evidence from inside the Bible. And here I'll be a little bit more brief. Now,
it goes without saying that the Bible itself claims to be God's Word. That's something we can
all agree on. It's not some made up tale, but it comes from God himself. In fact, in 2 Timothy 3,
verse 16, we read that it is God breathed. It's come from God's very mouth. Now, you also have
countless references throughout the Old Testament saying, thus says the Lord. We read that over and
over again. It's a thing coming straight from God. You have New Testament passages quoting
Old Testament passages and saying, these are Scripture. So the New Testament considers the
Old Testament to be from God. Basically, you could turn to numerous pages in the New Testament to
see that. So for example, there's one in 2 Peter chapter 3, verse 15 and 16. There's one.
But I want to read you another one. This one tells us that New Testament authors were
eye witnesses of what Jesus said and did. Okay, eye witnesses. This was the one read earlier before
I got up to speak. So Peter, second letter of Peter, chapter 1, verse 16 and 18, he says this.
Let's go, claim to be God's Word. All right, there it is in front of you. So, four, we did not follow
cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power,
but we were eye witnesses of His majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father
when the voice came to him from the majestic glory saying, this is my Son whom I love. With Him I'm
well pleased. We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with Him on the sacred
mountain. Eye witnesses, Peter said. That's how we're able to tell you about this because we were
actually there. We heard it, we saw it. And now we can read this in other places as well. The start
of the gospel of Luke, for example. Here's what the author of Luke says. Many have undertaken to
draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us. That is all the things that
Jesus has said and done. Just as they were handed down to us by those who were from the first were
eye witnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself, Luke says, I myself have
carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I just too decided to write an orderly
account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know with certainty of the things you have
been taught. Okay, Luke was setting out to make things certain and he carefully investigated
things. He spoke to the eye witnesses, the people who were there. He recorded it carefully. Okay,
so we have the internal evidence for the Bible is crystal clear. Scripture is from God, it's from God
himself and it's communicated to us by the people who were there at the time. Eye witness testimony.
So, now that's a lot of information this morning. I hope though as we've kind of walked through it
that you've seen that there is a mountain of evidence that confirms for us the Bible is indeed
trustworthy. There's evidence from outside the Bible, there's evidence from inside the Bible,
that go a long way to confirming for us that we can believe that the names of the people,
the places, events, the things that we read about in Scripture, we can believe those things
actually happened just as it is written. It wasn't made up like some would claim and then inserted
later. No, it's reliable. It's verifiable. It is authentic and trustworthy. It's not a lie.
It's authentic and trustworthy. But you know what I reckon the best evidence is, the best evidence
for the Bible's reliability is that Jesus thinks the same thing. Jesus, the very founder of our faith,
he was very clear in his belief that Scripture is trustworthy. Okay, that it records what is true
and what is false. So let me give you an example. If you've got your Bible there,
maybe you want to turn with me to Matthew chapter 12. If you've got your Bible,
you've got your Bible there, go to Matthew chapter 12. I'm going to read verses 38 to 42 of Matthew chapter 12.
Then some of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law said to him,
Teacher, we want a sign from you. He answered, A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign,
but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and
three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights
in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and
condemn it. For they repented at the preaching of Jonah and now something greater than Jonah is here.
The queen of the south will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. For she came
from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom and now something greater than Solomon is
here. Now of all the Old Testament stories that we read about, all the ones that could potentially
be accused of being made up, Jonah's right at the top of that list, wouldn't you say?
People are going to say Jonah, that can't be true. A guy lives in the belly of a fish for three days,
that's wild. But what does Jesus think? Well, he seems to refer to it as its history.
He includes it in the same breath as references to the queen of Sheba and Solomon who were,
who are well-known historical figures. And he says that the men of Nineveh will repent
just like they did in Jonah's day. Now that would be very strange for Jesus to say if he didn't
think that what happened to Jonah actually was true. Now here's what Kevin DeYoung, the Bible
teacher, here's how he illustrates this. He says it would be like making a literary allusion to the
men of Gondor, if you know the Lord of the Rings, you know what that's about. And then issuing a very
serious warning to your audience that the orcs of Mordor will rise up to judge and condemn them.
And that's just weird because it's all fictional. It wouldn't make sense. No, Jesus had to be talking
about real history. Now that's what the story of Jonah, when we read it, that's what it presents
itself as, real history. And here is the real historical founder of our faith,
affirming it, saying, yes, it's history. All right, there you go. Okay, that's my case.
The case for the trustworthiness of the Bible. Now having heard all of this, a lot of information
this morning, you might have one lingering question, okay? One lingering question. If the Bible
is so trustworthy, if it is so reliable, so well attested historically, if it claims to be the
ultimate source of authority from God himself and there's good reasons to back it up,
then why don't more people believe it? Why aren't there more people out there looking at the Bible
and going, yes, look at it, this is amazing. I wanna know more about Jesus. Why does so many
people reject it? Why do our friends and family turn away from it? Why? Well, it's because no
matter how good the case is for the reliability of scripture and the case is good, well, reason
alone is not enough to bring people into the kingdom. In fact, it can't. Reason cannot bring
a person, our logical arguments cannot bring a person into the kingdom. Why? Well, because
the truths that the Bible speak of, that the matters it discusses, these are spiritual
realities and that means they must be spiritually discerned. Now this is something the apostle
Paul says, okay, in 1 Corinthians chapter two, he says, the person without the spirit
does not accept the things that come from the spirit of God, but considers them foolishness
and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the spirit.
Now does that mean it was useless, me kind of laying out the case for the reliability
of scripture, should we just forget about that, give it a second thought,
actually convert someone? Well, no, I don't think so, of course not. Reason is a helpful tool,
but reason alone, experience alone is not gonna do the job. It must be a work of the spirit,
it must be Jesus who opens the eyes of those who do not know him. And so that means sadly that we
will continue to see people, men like Joshua Harris, who kind of, you know, he's a very
good, deconstruct their faith and walk away, we'll continue to see that unfortunately.
It means that we'll continue to see the people reject the Bible out of hand, people like
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Why? Because not everyone's eyes have been opened.
So last thing, if I'm here this morning and what if I'm in that boat, what if I'm having trouble
believing all the Bible says, what if I'm having trouble believing it's trustworthiness, what then?
Maybe there's a part of the Bible that I'm having, I'm not too sure about.
What do I do? I think here's some things. I think the best thing to do is to keep reading scripture,
no matter what, keep it open, keep coming back to it time after time after time.
That God's word tells us that it is powerful to change us. So the best thing we can do is keep
reading it. I think as well, we've got to keep asking questions about its trustworthiness.
I think that's a good thing to do. If you're not sure, I think the Bible is robust. It can handle
these sorts of questions. So if you've got those questions, then ask them and be more than happy
to chat to you after the service about that if you'd like or chat with Mike after, I'm sure he'd
be happy to chat to you and Tom as well. Read up, I think, on these arguments. Some of the things,
I've just given you a small taste of all the arguments that are out there for the Bible's
reliability. There's a lot more to discover. It's a good thing to know these things because you never
know when someone might ask you a question about this. You want to be prepared. And so I'll
recommend two resources, two books that can give you some help with this. And they're both from
Josh and Sean McDowell, two American gents, a father and son. The first one there on the left
is More Than a Carpenter. That's a shorter book, easier to read, I think, with evidence for the
truth of scripture and who Jesus is. And then the one on the right, Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
That's a bigger, kind of more full-on tome, but it's definitely worth reading as well. They lay
out all the different things that back up what the Bible says. Okay, so there's just two books
that would be helpful to look at if you want to know more. I think final thing to say, most
importantly, if you've got doubts about what scripture says, the best thing to do is to pray.
The best thing you can do. These are spiritual realities. That means we need Jesus' help to
truly understand them. And the good news is that no matter who you are, no matter your background,
no matter how familiar you might be with the Bible, to anyone who truly comes to Jesus to know
him through his word, Jesus will always answer. He'll always answer that call. So I'm going to
pray and let's do that now together. Dear Lord Jesus, we've read about your word this morning.
We've looked at the arguments for the reliability of all that has been written down about you.
We pray that you would continue to help us learn these truths, to be confident in all that you have
said and all that we read in scripture. Would you give us the motivation to look into these things,
to know them well, so that should we get asked about them, we'll know what to say in the moment.
But we pray as well, we thank you for opening our eyes to see these truths. We pray for any who
might be here this morning who are still not sure, we ask that you would open their eyes as well.
Would they come to you asking these questions and be able to see all that you have said and the
veracity of it. We thank you for these things. In your name we pray, amen.