Morning. It was nice to see Charlene go on an art crawl instead of her usual pub crawls yesterday and she was much brighter this morning. Let’s let’s pray together as we go to God’s word. Father, we believe your word is living and it’s active and it’s sharper than any two-edged sword. And so, I pray that your word would uh would fall on our hearts this morning. And uh there’d be good soil in our hearts for the word to come and for us to receive it and for it to uh send roots down into our lives and uh and show good signs of new life. So, Father, we’ve come uh whatever we’ve come with this morning, we want to uh lay it down for the next while and just enjoy your presence and have your word come and build us up and bless us. And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. So, when I was in high school, our our family practice was to go to church every Sunday. And I did. I never signed up to enjoy it, but I went every Sunday. And one day I asked my mom, who was the most devout member of our family by far, what she got out of church. I said, “Why did why do you go? What part of the service means something to you?” Kind of a smart ale question for a teenage son to ask his religiously devout mom. But uh she took it seriously. She thought about it for a moment and she gave an answer that I wouldn’t have expected. She said the part that’s most meaningful to her is the benediction. Now I pro I probably would have given the exact same answer. But my reason would have been that the benediction mark the thing that it was over after an hour and a half of lurggical calisthenics up down and up down and reciting and chanting in unison unsable hymns and listening to a self-eracing sermon. The benediction marked the time that the credits were rolling and I could finally soon head for the parking lot. So I might have thought of the benediction like that, but not my mom. When she said it was the thing she got the most out of at church, she was receiving something from it that I wasn’t. She was taking something in and she was letting something flow over her that she needed in her life. Now, the benediction in our church was always the same. It comes from the Old Testament book of Numbers, chapter 6, where Aaron, the high priest, was instructed to bless the people with these words, the people of Israel. You’ve likely heard them many times. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Now in our liturgy, the last phrase was worded slightly differently. Instead of the Lord turn his face towards you, the pastor would say the Lord lift up his countenance or his face upon you, which I slightly more archaic, but I think it’s a more poetic and delightful way of saying the same thing. So, I believe that the benediction, the blessing that God wanted said regularly over his people has something to say to us this morning about what we’ve been looking at the last few weeks about whether we fail or succeed in carrying out the great commission at the end of Matthew chapter 28. Let’s read that commission once again. We’ve been reading it week by week. Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I’ve commanded you. And surely I’m with you always to the very end of the age. So we look at our task or the commission that God has given us project we’re assigned as individual believers and as a church as a corporate body is to take raw human material and in the power of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit’s the only one who can change hearts. You and I can’t change hearts. But we’re to take raw human material in the power of the spirit and turn it into something different into something new. Disciplem begins with evangelism, helping sinful people embrace the gospel message that Jesus died on the cross to set them free from their sin. He’s risen in victory to give them new life. And then a person is to be led and developed from being an initial convert to being a disciple and they’re baptized and they’re taught with the expectation that they will continue manufacturing more disciples. So the church is to be a place, a bit of an assembly line, so to speak, moving people from convert to disciple to disciplemaker. And this morning, we want to see if that ancient benediction, that ancient blessing has something important to to say to us about fulfilling that commission. Any of us who’ve been in church for any length of time know that that assembly line, it never runs like it should. It keeps breaking down. people. None of us move smoothly from convert to disciple to disciplemaker and we maintain that posture for the rest of our lives. I think we all know that at Knox Church we could initiate a structured disciplehip program tomorrow and we could be very organized and would probably start by working on the basics of the Christian life. what are called spiritual disciplines, holy habits that we can embibe in our lives. Would offer workshops on how to meet God every day in a time of Bible reading and prayer and how to meditate and how to memorize scripture. And we could train people to do evangelism and prepare a testimony and share the gospel clearly and respond to common questions or objections people have against Christianity. In our disciplehip program, there would be accountability. We’d been g be given assignments and practicums and studies and courses and would do it maybe sequentially over the course of uh maybe two or three years and then hold some kind of formal graduation program at the end. And we could do all of that for the next three years. We could have great buyin widespread participation and then evaluate the results a few years after that. I suspect what we’d find is that some people would have really thrived and grown and become committed and effective uh at making disciples and others would look in time at their lives and they’d look much the same as they were before the program started. And I have no idea what the percentages would be, but with any disciplehip program like that that I’ve ever seen, some people seem to grow and maintain their growth and others don’t. And we ask ourselves, what is it that makes the difference? You know, it was quite clear to Charlene and I when we were at the U of A and we were very involved in uh in the Navigators, a Christian group on campus where we were receiving what we felt at the time to really be the Cadillac of disciplehip training. Spiritual disciplines were emphasized and there was a accountability and we met one-on-one with our leaders and one-on-one with people who we had been able to lead to Christ and were helping to grow. And that assembly line of convert to disciple to disciplemaker really seemed to work during those years. And for Charlene and I, we thrived on it. It set a course for the rest of our lives of wanting to be involved in making disciples. But talking to some of our navigators friends who went through the same thing with us at university, we found that although we look back on that time as being pretty fun and flourishing for us, others look back on it with a certain negativity or even a bitterness. because for them the disciplines and the accountability of that time are remembered as burdensome and guilt inducing and something they’d never want to go through again. So as a church called like every other church to be disciples and make disciples, we need to consider why it is that some people seem to grow quite naturally and others don’t and one why some might thrive on a certain program, others might remain static or even come away from it with a negative impression. You know the late Dallas Willard was a great believer in spiritual disciplines. In fact, he wrote the book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, which has influenced many to develop those holy habits in their lives, Bible reading and prayer and sacrificial living and generosity and frugality and worship and more. And his friend Jim Wilder said that when Dallas Willis Willard was dying, he had only a few weeks to live. With tears in his eyes, he said to he said to his friend, “What I have learned in this last year is more important than what I learned in the rest of my life.” He realized he had no time left really to think about it or develop develop it or teach it. So in effect, he passed the torch to his friend Jim Wilder. And what consumed Dallas Willard’s thinking near the end of his life was that salvation and spiritual growth needed to be based on forming a new attachment with God. An attachment, he says, that that went deeper than the mechanics of the spiritual disciplines could ever deliver deliver. An emotional attachment to God that’s founded on on joy and on passion and on delight. Really being assured that God actually likes us. When we know that God likes us, we tend to grow. When we’re not sure that he likes us, we tend to flounder. It’s a it’s critical, but I think often overlooked aspect of what it means to be a disciple. We could say it this way. A disciple is not merely someone who knows about Jesus, serves Jesus, or obeys Jesus, but it’s someone who enjoys Jesus. See, if someone’s face lights up when they talk about Jesus, it’s probably not going to take a great deal of effort to help them become established as a disciple and be a disciplemaker. But if there’s no light in their eyes when they talk about Jesus, we might have our work cut out for us in uh in trying to help someone grow in their Christian life. We might be disappointed in the results. So, let’s bring some Bible to this and test the theory. I’ve always been intrigued by that parable of the talents that Jesus told at the end of uh in Matthew chapter 25 where a master entrusts some of his assets to three of his servants with the expectation that they’ll steward those assets. They’ll invest them well and uh they’ll have a good return during his absence. And when he returns, the master is very pleased with what two of them have done in uh investing those assets, saying to both of them, well done, good and faithful servant. come and share your master’s happiness. But the third guy, rather than invest or do anything with the asset he was entrust entrusted with, he just buried it in the ground. And his master was displeased and and we confronted the servant. The servant said to his master, “I knew you were a hard man and I was afraid of you.” Now the ma the master doesn’t seem to have been a hard man when we consider the delight that he expressed to the other servants his invitation for them to come and be happy with him. He seems like a pretty good boss to me. But the third servant viewed his master as a hard demanding person, someone to be feared. And it really left him paralyzed, unable to fulfill the mission that his master had given him. I don’t think he was attached to his master with any degree of affection or optimism. His face probably didn’t light up when he thought about his master. He wasn’t under the impression that his master liked him. And so he couldn’t go out and do the work that his master expected him to do. Consider another instant in John chapter 1 where this is pointed out by James K. A Smith that the first question that Jesus asks two early prospective disciples, he doesn’t ask them, “Well, what do you believe about me?” And he doesn’t ask him, “What do you know about me?” Instead, Jesus’ question is, “What do you want? What are the wants of your heart? What are the things that you love in your life?” James Smith comments, “What do you want?” That’s the first, last, and most fundamental question of Christian disciplehip. We are what we want. Our wants, our longings, our desires are at the core of our identity and the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow. Disciplehip, we might say, is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love. So disciplehip is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing. Jesus’ command to follow him is a command to align our loves and our longings with his. To want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God, and crave a world where he is all in all. a vision encapsulated by the shorthand the kingdom of God. Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect, but he forms our very loves. He isn’t content simply to deposit new ideas into our mind. He’s after nothing less than your wants, your loves, and your longings. So Smith is again, he’s connecting disciplehip to our emotional attachment to Jesus, not just to our behaviors and disciplines. Disciplines are secondary and they should assist, but they shouldn’t determine our attachment to Jesus. If we feel that our disciplehip is hanging by the thread of whether or not we read our Bible this morning and whether or not we prayed, we’re always going to feel one day away from failure. We’ll be threatened and we’ll be defeated much of the time. And that’s not a good recipe for making disciples. You know, if I if I have a confession to make, I would say that I’m never too bothered if I miss a day or two of my spiritual disciplines because I know they haven’t gone anywhere. I know where to find them. Habits will resurface in my life soon enough. I can’t afford to view them as the only way that I stay attached to Jesus. My attachment to him has to go deeper than the performance of my disciplines. Charlene and I were watching a short video of the late Dallas Willard and he was asked about his daily habits of drawing near to God. Now, this is the guy who wrote the book or at least wrote a book on the value of spiritual disciplines. But when he described his daily habits, he was remarkably flexible. He says that when he wakes up, he’ll generally meditate for a time on the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. That’s a regular habit of his. And then because every day is different than another day, whatever the day brings, he’ll just want to stay in touch with God throughout that day. And he says, “Have a long-term schedule.” He looks at his month and in pockets of time where he sees that he’s going to have greater freedom, he’ll invest extended times in things like Bible reading and prayer. And then he said something that that caught my ear as being quite profound. He said, ‘ One of the signs of a healthy use of disciplines is how you feel when you don’t do them. And if you feel guilt, then you need to rethink it. Guilt is not a profitable motivation for the spiritual life. Disciplines are like medicine. The ideal condition is that you don’t need it. They’re not righteousness, they’re wisdom. Now, you think about that. Meditate on what he’s saying that if you’re passionate about gardening and you’re chomping at the bit to get out in the yard as soon as the snow melts in the spring, you can’t wait. You can’t hold back. You’re one person. But if you’re not particular passionate about gardening, but you still want some tomatoes in the fall, you’ll have to put it on your calendar and discipline yourself to get out in the yard and you’ll do things you don’t really want to do to get the planting and weeding done. or if if you naturally love playing with your kids, you don’t ever need to discipline it or schedule it in. But if it’s not so natural for you for some reason, but you still want to have relationship with your kids, maybe you need to intentionally carve out the hours where you’ll go out and throw the ball around or take them to a movie. Or if you love reading, you don’t need to force yourself to read six books a year just because you know it’s going to be good for you. That’s what Willard’s meaning I think when he says that spiritual disciplines are like medicine. The ideal condition is that enjoying God is such a part of your life that you don’t really need to schedule things in like Bible reading and prayer. They’re naturally enjoyable things for you to do. But they’re important enough that you still need to do them even if they don’t feel natural. Even if you’re not very motivated, you need to take your medicine, even if it doesn’t always taste great, hoping that you’ll return to a place where it is more natural and it’s more healthy again. And if you do neglect a discipline for a few days, remember that as Willard says, guilt is not a profitable motivation for the spiritual life. There’s no better way. There’s a better way of returning to the place where you can enjoy God again. So, let’s go to another scripture. Gospel of John’s very fresh for me these days. And uh and Jesus continually relates that business of obedience of his disciples to his to their love for him. In John 14:15, Jesus said to them, “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.” Showing that everything we do to obey God really ought to spring from an emotional attachment that we have with him. And attachment is what comes before effort. The end of the Gospel of John, Jesus asked Peter three times, “Do you love me?” And each time Peter said, yes, Lord, I do love you. And then Jesus would say, “Good. Then get to work. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Look after my people. Make disciples. And do it because you love me. Do it because you and I are firmly attached to one another in love.” And of course, John 15 is probably the most direct about our attachment to Jesus. He says, “I’m the vine. You’re the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing.” So bearing fruit, making disciples, it doesn’t happen well without attachment. And not just the attachment of spiritual disciplines. The value of spiritual disciplines is only the degree in which they aid us in obtaining happiness with Jesus. Again, a disciple is not merely someone who knows about Jesus and serves Jesus and obeys Jesus. Someone who enjoys Jesus. Jonathan Edwards was a theologian, pastor in New England, lived in the first half of the 1800s. He had a brilliant mind. He was sharp and precise. More importantly, he had a very warm heart toward God and his relationship with God. And the term that he would use to describe a proper relationship with God. It wasn’t based on religious beliefs or performing religious acts of obedience. Surely those matter in our lives, but Edward spoke of the need to have our spiritual affections grounded in Christ. And he would say that a disciple is someone whose affections are increasingly set upon Christ. So he wrote things like this. He said, “True religion in great part consists in holy affections. There’s a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. It’s the difference between knowing that honey is sweet and actually tasting it.” and his conclusion was the things of religion take hold of men’s souls no further than they affect him. In other words, we’re probably not going to go much further in our own disciplehip or in making disciples than our affections will take us. Our disciplines won’t carry us very far if our affections languish and our productivity will be limited in making disciples. You know, I’ve mentioned before that one of my spiritual practices or habits is to walk and pray. And I always take my phone with me because I feel I’m in dialogue uh with God and with his spirit. And as I pray for the church or my family or my Sunday message, I’ll get these little micro bursts of inspiration, a phrase or a way of expressing itself. And immediately I record it in my in my phone as a voice note. And I often smile. It makes me happy. I’ll thank God uh for what he I feel he’s given me during our time of prayer. And I read this week about how Jonathan Edwards would spend many hours a day in his office and his sole recreation was daily horseback riding. And he loved the quiet woods. It was a fertile place for him to think and pray. And he’d always take a pen and scraps of paper. And as he rode, he he would jot down thoughts and then he would pin them to his lapels so he could transfer them to a journal when he got home. And people would comment that Pastor Edwards would go for a ride at noon on a warm summer’s day and he’d return looking like he’d come through a snowstorm covered with these tiny scraps of white paper. Would have made his life a lot easier if he’d had even a first generation blackberry. That probably would have helped him a lot. But that was a man he was enjoying God and his religious affections were stirred and maintained when he spent time with God. So he would say to us that we shouldn’t evaluate how our church is doing in disciplehip based on how many people we’re getting through a curriculum. The real question isn’t what curriculum are we using, but rather are people growing in their holy affections for Christ. So this gives us something we can all look under the hood of our own lives and evaluate and just ask ourselves an honest question. Do we really enjoy Jesus? And if we’re frustrated by our lack of growth or our slow growth, if we’re if we feel like we’re languishing, and if our spiritual disciplines are are mostly a burden and rarely a delight, we just need to reaffirm that the engine of our disciplehip runs on the fuel of enjoying Jesus. Genuine disciplehip, it begins with it’s sustained by delighting in God. So, we’ve seen two things. Disciplehip can be puzzling when people participate in the same program and the same curriculum, same practices. Some seem to lap it up while others are either left unchanged or they even have a sour taste in their mouths. And we see a pretty strong biblical connection between growing as a disciple, wanting to make disciples, and how attached we are in our love and affections toward God. And that leads us back to the blessing of the benediction. I mentioned that this blessing might have something important to say to us about whether we fail or succeed in carrying out the great commission. A lot depends on whether our hearts have the soil to receive this blessing as it’s meant to be received or whether we’re somewhat resistant to it just because of life that life’s been hard or we have guilt or insecurity or there’s trauma or we haven’t really formed a good identity in Christ and we resist this blessing. Term benediction is simply Latin for good word. If this word strikes us as a good word that we need to hear, then we’re well on the way on our disciplehip journey. Now, the context of this blessing, if you look at the book of Numbers, it’s interesting. It comes after a very detailed set of instructions, a method for a husband to discern whether or not his wife has been faithful. I mean, he couldn’t just open her phone and check her texts. So, a whole thing was required to figure it out. And after that comes a very prescribed set of practices for those who are taking a special religious vow, a Nazerite vow. And then suddenly out of this sea of laws and regulations dealing with matters of social and religious purity, up pop these words of blessing. The words God wants communicated and spoken regularly over his people. Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron and his sons, this is how you’re to bless the Israelites. Say to them, “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” Really, it’s even more beautiful. In the original Hebrew language, we have three sentences, each beginning with the Lord. The the Hebrew consonants, Yh, wh that we pronounce often as Yahweh, the very personal name that God told Moses uh that Moses could address him by. And in Hebrew, the first line says, “The Lord bless you and keep you.” That’s three words. And the second line, “The Lord make his face shine upon you, be gracious to you.” That’s five words. And the last line, “The Lord turn his face toward you or lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace,” is seven words. So three, five, and seven, each line increasing by two words, and there are 12 syllables in the first line, and then 14, and then 16. So there’s a beautiful rhythm or meter to this blessing that gets slightly lost when translated to English. And the blessing begins by telling us that the the heart of the Lord is to bless us and to keep us. God saying here that he delights in us. He wishes us the best. He’s committed with all the all of his power to achieving our good. That’s what’s encompassed in the Lord blessing and keeping us. He’ll pay the price whatever it takes for our good. It’s not just a wish of God on our behalf. It’s something he commits to achieving for us. You know, each one of us really is pretty desperate to have someone to bless us. No matter how hard we try to pump up our own self-esteem, uh we can’t effectively bless ourselves. It’s it’s seems impossible to do. And for for many, participation in social media is is a desperate attempt to get someone to notice them and to like them and to affirm them and to bless them. People are using chat bots, AI companions as best friends who will always affirm and assist them, never confront them over everything, over anything. My do daughter told me that one of her friends at the end of a long day will pour herself a glass of wine and she’ll sit down and she’ll spend a couple of hours talking to her ever affirming AI companion. It’s a way of receiving some kind of blessing, some kind of affirmation, even if it’s entirely artificial because everyone wants to be blessed and everyone needs to be blessed. Everyone needs the blessing. But to be assured that we’re blessed and kept by God, I mean, could there be anything better than that? And then then we have this this thing about God’s face. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. the Lord turn his face toward you, lift up his countenance upon you. What’s remarkable about this is that God has a rule about sinful people like us seeing his face. Because not much earlier in the Bible, before the blessing was given, God specifically told Moses that he was willing to show Moses his glory, but he added, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see my face and live.” And when God said that, he wasn’t saying, “Moses, you and the Israelites always put me in a bad mood, so I’m just going to let you see my back.” I mean, you sometimes a grumpy toddler will scowl and they’ll turn their face away because they don’t want to be seen. Now, in saying that to Moses, God was reaffirming the great tragedy of the Garden of Eden where where he and Adam and Eve would walk face to face and talk in the garden. When man and woman first fell into sin, there was no way then for sin to dwell with holiness or for holiness to dwell with sin. It’s why the consequences of the fall or that all of us are separated from God. And when Aaron pronounced the blessing on the people, they felt, I suppose, they could sense but they could not see God’s face. They could discern that there was some warmth of God toward them, but they couldn’t see his face. They could just imagine a metaphor of God’s face shining on them with a blessing and his face being turned toward them. And that blessing of Aaron would be uh said at the is uh over the Israelites at the tabernacle where God’s people, they’re constantly required to sacrifice animals, to make blood sacrifices to stave off God’s anger and his judgment against their sin. Day after day, those sacrifices are being offered. And then the people could be blessed. next day they’d have to do it all over again. God’s anger against sin could be abated but not extinguished. It was blessing in the midst of pretty bloody sacrifices going on behind them. But we read in the book of Hebrews chapter 7 in the New Testament of how Jesus, the great high priest, made one great lasting sacrifice that would permanently turn away God’s anger from the sin of all who put their faith and trust in Jesus for salvation. We read, “Because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. Therefore, he’s able to save completely those who come to God through him. He always lives to intercede for them.” Such a high priest meets our need. One who’s holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day. first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself. So Jesus suffered and died permanently for our sins on the cross. And how that works is if you have a little child and they scribble all over your wall with a permanent marker, the child’s sorry, we of course we forgive them. We don’t require a payment from them to restore the wall. We pay the penalty for their disobedience because we’re the ones who have to repair the damage. That’s how Jesus sacrifice on the cross can deal with a debt that we could never repay. The debt of our sin puts us in a rears with a holy God. Jesus pays the cost on our behalf to repair the damage. He absorbs it to himself. So when Aaron spoke the blessing over the Israelites, they could make out that God loved them and God wanted their best despite all the blood sacrifices that were going on to stave off his judgment against their sin. A theologian named BB Warfield described the Old Testament as a room richly furnished but dimly lit. I like that. You know, we we see the same room but we see it with far more light and clarity than the Old Testament saints could. They could vaguely sense God’s warmth and the blessing toward them that God’s face was graciously turned toward them. And it was related somehow and made possible by all the laws of God and the bloody sacrifices going on behind them. But the New Testament following that once-forall sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. We read in 2 Corinthians 4:6, “For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. So in Jesus, we see far more clearly than the Old Testament saints ever could the contours and the outlines of God’s face. It no longer needs to be hidden from us as it was hidden from them. In Jesus, we can sense God’s face shining us on us in a way that stirs up our affections and we can receive the blessing as it’s truly meant to be received. It’s a blessing of peace. The Lord turns his face toward you and he gives you peace. Word peace is the Hebrew word shalom. And it’s not just the absence of conflict or war. It’s total well-being, total flourishing. That’s the kind of peace that Jesus wants to leave us with. So we assert at the beginning of this message that receiving this blessing kind of pushes us forward in fulfilling the great commission. And there are a couple of hints of how that works. First in numbers 6 27 when God instructs Aaron to speak these words of blessing over the people he concludes by saying so they meaning Aaron and his sons so they will put my name on the Israelites and I will bless them. Meaning God not only wants to bless us and keep us and make his face shine on us and be gracious to us and give us his peace. The blessing is also a way of God naming us and bringing us into his family and calling us his own. And there’s an echo here of what we saw last week in Luke 10. You know, Jesus sent out 72 evangelists uh on a mission and they came back and they were all fired up by their uh their success and their spiritual encounters with demons. Jesus told them though it was mar far more significant for them to rejoice that their names were written in heaven that God knew their names. He identified them as his own. They were part of his family. The blessing reminds us that as we do mission, as we seek to make disciples, we do it out of the delight of being owned and secure and named in God’s family. And the second way we see that the blessing relates to our commission to evangelize and makes disciples, I think comes at the beginning of Psalm 67. When I started studying this this week and I got to turn to Numbers 6 in my Bible and I noticed that I’d written Psalm 67:1 in the margin, I don’t know how many years ago. And so I looked that up and I I I it sort of pulled the threads together of everything that I was thinking about this week because here’s how Psalm 67 1 and two puts it. May God be gracious to us. This is the echo of the blessing. May God be gracious to us and bless us. Make his face shine upon us that your ways may be known on earth your salvation among all nations. And the blessing is pointing towards mission, towards evangelism, toward making disciples, toward um going out to all the nations and proclaiming the good name of Christ. And the the more we absorb the blessing, the implication, I believe, is the more we have our religious affection stirred by it, the more we will grow as disciples and be motivated to make disciples of all nations. As we said, this blessing can be resisted and and it is our sinful hearts do kind of resist this blessing to some degree, especially if our parents never blessed us. We never got anything from them. And if we have a poor identity formation as God’s child or we’ve had lots of cho trauma that we haven’t recovered from, we may have such a dim view of ourselves that we can’t imagine anyone, let alone God, ever saying this over us. I bless you and keep you. My face is shining over you to be gracious to you. My face is turned toward you to give you peace. So we may have to learn how to receive this blessing. It may not automatically be easy for us to accept accept. But as we learn to receive it, I think it can dramatically affect our our lives as disciples of Christ and motivate us to want to make disciples of others. If we deeply realize that God’s face is constantly shining on us, beaming on us right now, it really only makes sense that every now and then we’ll smile back. And that starts changing our lives. As we do, we’re we’re on our way to becoming that disciple who not merely knows about Jesus and serves Jesus and obeys Jesus, but one who thoroughly enjoys Jesus. So rather than saying to ourselves, you know, I don’t feel trained or able or worthy to make disciples, the first question we should ask ourselves is how warm is my attachment to Jesus right now? If it’s warm, we’re probably much closer than we realize to successfully participating in the great commission. Maybe you need to have this blessing spoken over you as regularly as Aaron would speak it over the Israelites. Maybe you need a friend to record it so you can play it to yourself when you wake up in the morning. Don’t use a chatbot for that. That’s that that’s not right. But but somehow receive this blessing that God has for you and all of us today and make that a regular part of what we know to walk with God. So let’s pray about a few of these things. Oh, there’s there’s the last one I didn’t get to. You might want to thank God that he commands not only our obedience, but also our affections and our loves and our wants. You might want to just take a moment in prayer and thank God that he is blessing and keeping you. His face is shining upon you. He’s gracious to you. He’s turning his face toward you and he’s giving you his shalom, his peace. And pray for yourself that this blessing will be well received by your heart and it would produce good fruit in you as a disciple. This is just a few moments of uh some alone time between you and God. So take that time and I’ll close us off in a minute.