Introduction: The Mercy of a Painful Memory

We've all had painful and embarrassing memories that we would just as soon forget. Some past memories only harm us and weaken our faith. They end up being negative affirmations that kill faith. So given that fact, why on earth does Moses want Israel to very self-consciously press these super-painful memories into their national consciousness? He says, "Remember! Do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness." He does not want them to ever forget how far and how quickly they fell into gross idolatry. And the point is that some memories of sin are good to retain. They are more than good - they are imperative. We are going to be seeing that there are some memories of sin that actually keep us from repeating those sins and make us cling to God’s grace. Obeying this command ends up being a mercy.

And an illustration that will hopefully make sense to you is the Japanese Tsunami Memorial stones. They continue to remind people of the tens of thousands of Japanese who drowned during previous Tsunamis. Tsunamis are like a huge wave or wall of water that comes rushing way inland because of an earthquake. That's not exactly a comfortable memory. The Tsunami stone pictured in your outline is the one in Aneyoshi, Japan. But there are many similar stone monuments all along Japan’s northeastern coastline that continue to warn residents about the danger of tsunamis. Let me give you the history of this particular four-foot stone below the village of Aneyoshi.

It was erected after repeated disasters - I couldn’t find the exact date. A tsunami in 1896 killed thousands and drove the villagers to higher ground. But after a while, people gradually moved back toward the coast, and forgot about the Tsunamies. Another tsunami struck in 1933 and left only four survivors. It decimated the entire village. The stone warned their descendants, “Do not build your homes below this point,” and declared that high dwellings would ensure the peace and happiness of future generations.

The villagers preserved that painful memory and continued building above the level of that stone. So when the massive tsunami of March 2011 devastated other surrounding communities, the water rose to within about three hundred feet of the marker—but the village itself remained unharmed. Other communities had dismissed similar stones as relics of the past and rebuilt near the coast, often with tragic results. The stone at Aneyoshi shows that remembering suffering is not meant merely to keep old wounds alive. Sometimes a painful memory is preserved so that later generations will recognize the danger and avoid repeating the choices that brought the disaster on.

To review - in Deuteronomy 9:1–6, Moses directly told Israel what they must not say when they enter the land: “Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land.” Their only righteousness was in their future Messiah, Jesus. He repeated the point three times. Not because of your righteousness. Not because of the uprightness of your heart. You are a stiff-necked people. Even though they had daily received God's grace, they still had a sin nature that continued to need grace if they were to maintain their blessings long term. So those verses called them to remember that they still had an unruly sin nature that is symbolized in the last picture in your outlines. That stiff-necked sin nature can move us to fear and then to pride and then to fear again, and then to other sins. It is not enough to remember that God defeated the Anakim. They must also remember how often their own hearts resisted God.

In verses 7-17 Moses makes the memory of past rebellion part of Israel's defense against future rebellion. It is true that the generation standing before him was more believing than the generation that had died in the wilderness. But that did not make them immune to the same sins. They carried the same fallen nature, lived in the same covenant community, and needed to learn from the sins of their fathers.

This is important because sinners are experts at selective memory. We remember the parts of the story that make us look noble. We forget the parts that expose our guilt. We polish the past until it flatters us. And once we forget how we fell, we become vulnerable to falling in the same way again. We turn grace into evidence of our wisdom, our strength, our sacrifice, or our righteousness. Well, that makes us vulnerable to spiritual tsunamis.

So Moses does something merciful. He forces Israel to remember what they would rather forget.

Verse 7 begins:

“Remember! Do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness.”

That sounds painful. But it is mercy. A painful memory can be a guardian against both pride and repeated rebellion.

Now, let me clarify that there is a kind of remembering that leads to despair, shame, and paralysis. That is not the kind of hopeless memory that Moses is promoting. Instead, he is promoting the kind of remembering that humbles us, sobers us, makes us focus on God's grace, and teaches us to continue to live by mercy and grace. The point is not “Remember your rebellion so that you can give up.” The point is, “Remember how rebellion began, how quickly it grew, what it deserved, and how only grace preserved you — so that you will recognize the same path and refuse to walk down it again.” We must constantly walk in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I know I've taken longer than usual on the introduction, but the theme of the whole section is that sanctified memory protects both the humility of grace and the vigilance of obedience. And hopefully I can dissect this in a way where it is practical and actually builds hope.

Remember the Pattern of Past Rebellion — verse 7

Let me read the whole of verse 7. He starts off with words that don't sound very hopeful - at least initially. He says,

“Remember! Do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day that you departed from the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD.”

The double command is striking: “Remember! Do not forget.” Moses knows that forgetting is not always accidental. Sometimes forgetting is moral (or more accurately, is an immoral forgetting). We forget what threatens our pride. We forget what would make us dependent on God. We forget what would force us to say, “I live by mercy every day.”

Israel is commanded to remember how they provoked the LORD. That is covenantal memory.

This may feel uncomfortable because we sometimes think the only healthy thing to do with sin is to forget it. There is a sense in which forgiven sin should not be carried as condemnation. Granted. But there is another sense in which forgiven sin must be remembered as a testimony to mercy. Such memory glorifies God and exalts His mercy.

Paul never forgot that he had persecuted the church. He did not remember it as a man under condemnation. He remembered it as a man amazed by grace. He said, “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man; but I obtained mercy.” Praise God!

A scar can be remembered in two ways. It can be touched with bitterness, or it can be touched with gratitude. If you are touching it with gratitude, you are remembering not only that “I was wounded,” but also that “I was healed.” Moses is not reopening Israel’s wounds in order to re-infect them. He is pointing to the scar so that Israel remembers the mercy that healed them - and is therefore impacted positively.

But what about the second half of the sentence? Isn't that depressing? Isn’t that overly negative? Moses broadens the indictment: “From the day that you departed from the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious.” This was not one isolated event. Israel’s wilderness history was marked by provocation.

We should clarify who the “you” is. Many standing before Moses had not even been born when Israel left Egypt, and the older rebels had died in the wilderness. But Moses is addressing Israel corporately across the generations. Corporately we can share in the guilt of the institutions that we belong to. The sins of their fathers were part of their covenant history and were warnings to the children. They must not self-righteously distance themselves from the previous generation and say, “We would never have done that.” They must remember the family resemblance of the fallen heart and learn from what happened.

That is precisely how Paul applies this exact same wilderness history to us in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. He says that “these things became our examples” and that “they were written for our admonition.” Biblical remembrance is not an exercise in antiquarian curiosity. God records earlier rebellions to warn later saints that if we are not actively crucifying our sin nature and taming our inward dispositions, this too could happen to us. The wise believer asks not only, “What did they do?” but also, “Where does that same impulse live in me, and what provision has God given me to resist it?” Does that make sense?

We need sanctified memory. Families need it. Churches need it. Nations need it. Individuals need it. Not morbid memory. Not paralyzing memory. But humble memory. The kind that says, “God has been better to us than we deserved.” We should never get over our awe and gratitude toward God's mercy and grace toward us.

A church that forgets its sins becomes proud. A family that forgets its sins becomes self-righteous. A nation that forgets its sins becomes arrogant. A Christian who forgets his sins becomes cold toward grace and harsh toward others. It's an amazing thing that saved sinners can over time become harsh towards others who are struggling with sin - and that ought not to be.

So Moses says, “Remember. Do not forget.” Now, granted, remembering past sin will not automatically sanctify us, but remembering is a guardrail, and forgetting its lessons removes one of God's appointed guardrails. OK, enough on verse 7.

Remember That Privilege Does Not Prevent Rebellion — verse 8

Verse 8 says:

“Also in Horeb you provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was angry enough with you to have destroyed you.”

What's astonishing about this statement is that the place of their greatest fall was the place of their greatest privilege. Horeb was the place where God entered into covenant with them and revealed Himself to them. Horeb was where God spoke with an audible voice that everyone could hear. Did that privilege alone change them? No. Horeb was where the mountain burned with fire. Horeb was where Israel heard the Ten Commandments. Horeb was where the covenant was formalized. Horeb was a place of undeniable miracle.

Yet Horeb became the place of covenant rebellion.

That is why this event is so convicting. Israel did not rebel in ignorance. They rebelled in the presence of revelation. They did not make the calf before hearing, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” They made the calf after hearing it.

The greater the light, the greater the guilt.

It is one thing for a man to take the wrong road in the dark when there are no signs. It is another thing to drive past a bright, flashing warning sign and deliberately turn into danger. Horeb was full of signs. Israel sinned against light.

This is one reason covenant children and church members must not presume on their nearness to miracles, preaching, and holy things. Israel stood at the mountain. They heard God’s voice. They saw His fire. They had Moses as mediator. They had Aaron as leader. They had manna, cloud, and glory. And still they rebelled.

Religious privilege does not automatically produce faithfulness. That’s the error that over-objectification of the covenant leads to. Greater privilege brings greater responsibility, yes. But unless we are appropriating His grace by faith, and teaching our children to appropriate it by faith, it does not change us.

In the same way, we should not say, “If we had seen what Israel saw, we would not have sinned as they sinned.” That is exactly the kind of self-righteousness Moses is trying to kill. And the reality is that we have had even greater revelation - a completed Scriptures. We have the incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and session of Christ. We have Pentecost. We have spiritual gifts. We have the sacraments of the New Covenant. We have the preached gospel. We have unbelievable privilege. Yet it is easy for people to rebel against God's commandments. They do it all the time. This is a warning for every generation. If Israel could rebel at the foot of Mt. Sinai (another name for Horeb), we can too - if we are not careful.

Horeb teaches us that the problem is not lack of evidence. The problem is the stiff-necked heart that has not submitted to grace. This is one of the fundamental differences between Presuppositional apologetics and Evidentialist apologetics. The evidentialists think that if people have enough evidences they will believe. Presuppositionalism goes to the heart of the issue and cuts the legs out from under independence and shows (as Dr. Krabbendam used to word it) that the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart. Look at that last picture in your outlines and ask yourself if you have given free reign to the inward stubborn mule of your sin nature. The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart, and even how your heart responds to the preaching of the word this morning can reveal the degree to which your sin nature is crucified and the new heart has been strengthened by the Holy Spirit. OK, moving on.

Remember the Grace and Authority of God's Word (vv. 9–11)

In verses 9-11 Moses says:

“When I went up into the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the LORD made with you, then I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water. Then the LORD delivered to me two tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them were all the words which the LORD had spoken to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly. And it came to pass, at the end of forty days and forty nights, that the LORD gave me the two tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant.”

Notice how Moses emphasizes the two tablets. Some people think that this was two duplicate tablets (with all ten commandments on each tablet) standing as a double witness against them. While that is a clever view, I still think that the traditional view is correct when it says that commandments 1-4 were on the first tablet and commandments 5-10 were on the second. It's not a big deal, but you should probably know that there are two different views in Reformed circles.

But look at the labels that he gives to these tablets. They are “tablets of stone,” emphasizing their enduring nature. They are “tablets of the covenant,” emphasizing how God's law establishes and defines our relationship with Him. They are written “with the finger of God,” emphasizing that these laws reflect God's very nature. They contain the words Yehowah spoke “from the midst of the fire,” emphasizing mercy in the midst of holy judgment. And God gave them, emphasizing His grace. Before we get to the breaking of the tablets, we must feel the kindness of their giving.

The law is not the enemy of grace. The law is a covenant gift. In fact, we will see in the next chapter that the ten commandments will be stored under the mercy seat that highlights the Gospel. It was stored in a box that sacrificial blood was sprinkled on. The tragedy is not that God gave law. The tragedy is that Israel broke God's law despite being in covenant with Him.

By way of illustration, a marriage certificate is not the marriage itself, but it is a public covenant document. If a wife receives that covenant document while her husband is committing adultery at the reception, the document becomes a witness against the betrayal. The tablets were covenant documents, and Israel was committing spiritual adultery right while the documents were being given.

That is the drama. Moses is on the mountain receiving the covenant tablets while Israel is below making the golden calf and committing adultery. Heaven is giving covenant words; earth is breaking those same covenant words.

It's one thing for us to be shocked by this, but it is quite another to recognize our own tendencies in the same direction. Pharisees are blind to the mule within; they are blind to their sin nature, and as a result they have both a lower view of the law and a higher view of themselves. We must recover the sweetness of God’s law. Sinners hate God's law because law exposes sin. But redeemed people should say, “Oh, how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day! The LORD has not left us to grope in darkness. Praise God!” God’s commandments are not arbitrary chains. They are covenant words from the Redeemer.

But the same law that is gift becomes witness against us when we rebel. Every commandment we know becomes light against which we have sinned. That is why we need mercy. The problem is not that God’s Word is unclear. The problem is that our old nature is stiff-necked.

And this memory protects us from repeating Israel's error. We are most vulnerable to an idol when God's command begins to feel like a deprivation rather than a gift. If you think of any of God's commands as a depravation rather than a gift, you are already on the slide down, and need to reverse it. And memory is one of those tools of reversal. Remember who spoke. Remember who redeemed you before He commanded you. Remember that His boundaries are good. The God who gave the covenant Word is wiser than the desire that urges you to step outside it.

Remember How Quickly the Heart Can Turn — verses 12–13

Verses 12–13 say:

“Then the LORD said to me, ‘Arise, go down quickly from here, for your people whom you brought out of Egypt have acted corruptly; they have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them; they have made themselves a molded image.’ Furthermore the LORD spoke to me, saying, ‘I have seen this people, and indeed they are a stiff-necked people.’”

The word “quickly” is a remarkable word. Israel did not slowly drift over centuries. They quickly turned aside.

This illustrates the speed of sin when we don’t guard our heart. We can go from covenant vows to covenant betrayal with frightening speed. We can sing, “All that the LORD has spoken we will do,” and very soon after be bowing before a calf.

God says, “They have acted corruptly.” They have “turned aside from the way.” They have made “a molded image.” This is direct violation of the covenant word they had just heard, and a clear violation of the first commandment.

And then God repeats the diagnosis once again: “They are a stiff-necked people.” God sees us as we really are - not the facade that we sometimes put on. He says, “I have seen this people.” The LORD is not fooled by religious noise and lifting up of hands. He sees through the festival, the singing, the joyful celebration. And He also sees through the excuses, the leadership failure, the crowd dynamics, the fear, and the rationalization. He sees any time we have given free reign to the stiff-necked human nature within.

Again, we shouldn't approach this text by shaking our heads at how awful Israel was. We should be humble about how quickly our own hearts can turn. A man can hear a powerful sermon in the morning and indulge in bitterness by afternoon. A child can recite the catechism and still resist correction. A church can confess sound doctrine and still tolerate idolatry without disciplining it. A nation can receive great mercies and quickly forget God.

That should not make us despair, but it should make us watchful. 1 Corinthians 10:12 (the same chapter that quotes these sins of Israel) says, “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” We are not as strong as we imagine. We need daily grace. Am I repeating myself enough times? That’s the whole point of remembering our sinful nature - to make us ever-conscious of our need for grace.

This is also why repentance and a return to obedience must be immediate - the moment we find conviction. Sin turns aside quickly; repentance must not be slow. We must be handing over the reigns of that mule within to the Lord. If your heart has begun to move toward an idol, do not negotiate. Do not say, “It is only a small deviation. I'll let the mule within keep walking.” Israel’s small turn of heart became a golden calf.

Remembering our past failures can often help us identify those small deviations today. What lie did you begin to believe? What good desire became a ruling desire? What command did you start to resent? What excuse made disobedience seem reasonable? Remembering a former fall should make us quicker —not slower, but quicker— to confess the first motions of the same sin and seek God's help.

Remember What Rebellion Deserves — verse 14

Verse 14 says:

“Let Me alone, that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.”

This is one of the most sobering verses in the chapter. God speaks of destroying Israel and blotting out their name from under heaven.

We must not soften this. Moses is showing that Israel deserved covenant destruction. God’s wrath was not an overreaction. Their sin was covenant treason.

This matters because modern Christians often think that the judgments in the Bible are embarrassing. They think of hell as embarrassing. But Moses does not apologize for divine wrath. He fears it. He understands it. He knows it is just. And he knows that the only way this people will truly understand the Gospel is if they understand God's law and the exceeding sinfulness of sin. So that's one test of where your heart is at - do you see yourself as deserving the same wrath of God? The Pharisees didn’t. Do you see yourself as deserving hell apart from Christ, or do you minimize your sins? I suspect that many of us do not see our sins as being exceedingly sinful. A regenerate heart is a tenderized heart that does not rationalize sin.

J. Gresham Machen wrote a remarkable book called, What is Faith. In it he explained why saving faith in Christ must be “born of need” - desperate need. A person cannot genuinely trust Christ as Savior without first recognizing the particular need from which Christ saves us — personal sin, guilt, and condemnation. He appeals to Galatians 3:24, “the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ.” God’s law confronts people with an absolute standard of righteousness, destroys confidence in their own goodness, and produces the consciousness of sin that makes the gospel intelligible. And near the culmination of the chapter, Machen wrote this:

“The true schoolmaster to bring men to Christ is found, therefore, now and always in the law of God—the law of God that gives to men the consciousness of sin. “A new and more powerful proclamation of that law is perhaps the most pressing need of the hour; men would have little difficulty with the gospel if they had only learned the lesson of the law.”

He then invokes Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he said, modern people are turning toward the “village of Morality” and the house of “Mr. Legality” that downplays the law. In Machen’s own day, this took the ostensibly Christian form of “Making Christ Master” or implementing “the principles of Christ” through human effort, but with no reference to the law of God. No wonder they didn't see themselves as deserving of hell. These programs sounded morally serious, but Machen regarded them as disguised works-righteousness. His conclusion is especially important. He said,

“So it always is: a low view of law always brings legalism in religion; a high view of law makes a man a seeker after grace. Pray God that the high view may again prevail.”

Machen's logic was that Christ is intelligible as Savior only: • where sin is understood. • and sin is understood as transgression only in light of God’s fixed and holy law. • a diluted law leaves people imagining that modest moral improvement is sufficient. • that illusion produces legalism—confidence in one’s own obedience. Therefore, the law preached in its true rigor drives sinners away from self-reliance and toward grace in Christ.

Never apologize for God's wrath against sin. Instead, ask God to help you to hate what He hates and to love what He loves.

In our text, the offer to make Moses a greater nation also tests the mediator. It wasn’t just Israel that was tested; Moses was tested as well. Moses could have accepted a future that exalted him at Israel’s expense. But Moses will not build his legacy at the expense of the destruction of his people. He intercedes - and in doing so was a beautiful picture of the future Jesus - a far greater mediator. And that should motivate us to pray, pray, pray for those who have fallen away.

Now, we will look at the theology of Moses as a mediator in the next sermon. But for now, verse 14 shows that Israel’s survival was not inevitable. They were preserved by mercy, not by necessity.

A condemned building with a cracked foundation and collapsing walls is not owed preservation. If it remains standing, it is because someone intervened, repaired, and restored. Israel’s covenant house deserved demolition. It continued only because God heard mediation.

In the same way, we must stop assuming mercy. Mercy is free, but it is not cheap. Grace is abundant, but it is not automatic. The fact that God has not destroyed us is not evidence that our sin was small. It is evidence that His mercy is great.

This should produce holy fear. Not servile fear that runs away from God, but reverent fear that stops treating sin lightly, and begins to do the homework of remembering and returning to the Lord.

Remember What Sin Actually Breaks — verses 15–17

In verses 15-17 Moses says:

“So I turned and came down from the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire; and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. And I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the LORD your God — had made for yourselves a molded calf! You had turned aside quickly from the way which the LORD had commanded you. Then I took the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes.”

This is the dramatic climax of the pericope. In his hands are the covenant words written by the very hand of God. Before his eyes: the covenant people worshiping an image made by man.

So Moses throws down the tablets and breaks them before their eyes.

This was not a temper tantrum. This was a prophetic sign-act. The broken tablets preached the broken covenant. Israel had already shattered the covenant morally; Moses shatters the tablets visibly.

If a husband walks into the wedding reception and finds his bride in bed with another man, and he tears the covenant document in front of the witnesses, the tearing does not create the betrayal. It reveals it. Moses did not break a healthy covenant. He displayed the covenant Israel had already broken.

The phrase “before your eyes” matters. Israel needed to see what their sin meant. Sin always wants to remain abstract. “We made a mistake.” “We got carried away.” “We were afraid.” “Aaron made it.” “The people pressured us.” Aaron weirdly did the same thing. In Exodus 32:24, Aaron minimizes his own sin by saying that the people gave him gold, "I cast it into the fire, and this calf came out." Yeah, right! That sounds like a toddler's excuse. Moses makes the seriousness of the broken covenant very concrete: shattered stone before their eyes.

This is mercy, too. It is severe mercy, but it it is mercy. Israel must see the truth if they are to understand the restoration that follows.

In the same way, one of the mercies of God in our lives is that He makes sin visible. Fauci probably thought he would never get exposed (if you have been following that drama). But you know what? God is an expert at exposing our own sins. And such exposure is mercy. Exposure feels painful, but hidden sin kills - like a cancer it kills. We don't want sin to be hidden. When God breaks our illusions before our eyes, He is not being cruel. He is making genuine repentance possible.

Parents sometimes must make consequences visible to their children. Elders sometimes must make sin visible through church discipline. The Spirit makes sin visible in the conscience. The Word exposes the thoughts and intents of the heart. That exposure is painful, but it is mercy.

But there is Gospel hope illustrated here as well. The broken tablets point forward to the need for a better covenant and a better Mediator. Moses can break the tablets, but he cannot write the law on the heart. He can expose the broken covenant, but he cannot provide final atonement. Christ comes as the true Mediator of the covenant. He bears the curse of covenant-breakers, gives the Spirit, and writes the law upon our hearts so that we can love His law. This is the amazing thing about God's grace - it makes law-haters come to love God's law.

Conclusion: Remember, Do Not Forget

So in conclusion, this whole pericope builds on what we saw last week. Israel must not enter the land saying, “Because of my righteousness.” Why?

Because from Egypt to the plains of Moab, they had been rebellious. Because at Horeb they provoked the LORD to wrath. Because right while God was giving the covenant tablets, they were making a calf. Because they quickly turned aside. Because wrath was deserved. Because the tablets were broken before their eyes.

But this memory is not meant to destroy hope. It is meant to put their hope in the right place, and in the process to destroy boasting and to prevent repetition.

The next thing Moses will tell us is that he fell before the LORD for another forty days and forty nights interceding for Israel. That is an astounding miracle. The two back-to-back periods of forty days of fasting are a miracle in and of themselves, but to intercede for this people was also achieved by God's supernatural grace alone - showing that Moses' intercession flowed from God's own heart. God produced that in him. And we will look at that next time. But the point here is that the broken covenant did not have the last word. Mercy through mediation had the last word. And mercy triumphed over wrath. That's the Gospel. And hopefully I will do justice to God's amazing mercy next time.

But that is the movement of the gospel. The law exposes us. Memory humbles us. We then admit that wrath is deserved. But Christ stands in the breach and provides His surprising mercy.

So remember your rebellion — not as a condemned man, but as a forgiven sinner who is safe and secure in Jesus. But remember it so that you will stop being tempted to boast. Remember it so that you recognize the old path before traveling down it very far. Remember which privileges you once presumed upon, which lie you believed, how quickly you turned aside, what your sin deserved, and what covenant fellowship it violated. Remember it so that you worship. Remember it so that you are patient with others. Remember it so that you hate idols. Remember it so that you love the Mediator and depend upon His Spirit.

The memory of sin protects the humility of grace and the watchfulness of obedience. Those memories act as Tsunami memorials.

And when you see the broken tablets, look beyond Moses to Christ. He is the One who restores covenant-breakers. He is the One who bears the curse. He is the One who writes the law on our hearts. He is the One who makes stiff-necked people into a people who love the LORD their God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind. May that be true of each of us.

Amen.