Category: Messages

“I am Crucified with Christ“

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 20, 1959

Having read most of the story of Saul and the prophet Samuel from 1 Samuel 15, I’ll refer to it only as an illustration, but I want to take a text now from Galatians, the second chapter. Paul says, I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Now, what I want to say tonight, will not be new to you, and it certainly will not be new to me. I want to sum up what I believe on a certain important phase of Christianity. I have said this. I have weaved it in here and there, as a weaver might weave in a favorite color into almost every tapestry that he created. But I want to sort of concentrate tonight and speak from the Lord. I don’t know what you will do about what I say.

And I’d like also to say this, that I will not teach anything that isn’t believed by every fundamentalist in the world. Every fundamentalist in the world believes what I’m going to preach tonight. But the difference is this, that most of them seem satisfied to teach it and hold it as a doctrine. But I insist that if it is true, then it is too important to let lie quiescent. It ought to be detonated. It ought to be set off and allowed to explode; and then, after the smoke is cleared, see what you have left. And if you don’t have anything left, you didn’t have anything left to start with, anyhow. If you do have anything left, it will be eternal.

These words by the man Paul are a very strange verse. So strange, that the man might be accused of deliberately confounding or confusing people at least. He said, I am crucified with Christ. And of course, the tense is, I have been crucified with Christ; and a man who has been crucified isn’t around anymore. So, it’s very odd that a man should say, I have been crucified. Nobody else has ever said it. A man might say, I am to be crucified. He might say, I am being crucified, but nobody ever put it in the past perfect and said, I have been crucified. He’s dead, he couldn’t talk.

But here’s a man talking. He said, I have been crucified. Nevertheless, I live a strange kind of crucifixion that, and he apologizes and says yet, I don’t mean that I live. What do I mean? I mean that Christ lives in me. And yet, Paul, you’re alive and you’re among us. We hear your voice and we see your little body, wearing it’s old fashioned toga. You’re among us, you’re alive, yes, I know. But the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. There’s only one conclusion here. The man who said I have been crucified. He had a resurrection, otherwise he couldn’t have said this. He had to explain that I was crucified and the fact that I’m alive here. I’m no ghost. I’m living now by the faith of the Man who loved me and died for me and rose for me.

Now, that’s what Paul said, and I haven’t added anything. I’ve just tried to explain a little bit. And I insist that if this kind of life was an apostolic life, if this is true, then you and I ought to be greatly disturbed about the way we’re living. And we ought to do something about it. Because you see, Paul here gives us the way of God. This is the way of God; the way God does things. God sets life and death over against each other and they’re eternal opposites.

You’ll find in your Bible, that there are opposites always standing against each other. Musical directors, and even pastors sometimes, in conspiracy with the musical directors, set up a service in which everything in it is like everything else. The pastor is going to preach about heaven. They sing about heaven, read Scripture about heaven. The soloist sings about heaven, and the offertory is “Jerusalem, the Golden. And it gets saccharin, because it’s all one thing. But life isn’t like that. Life is two things, always two things. One thing stands over against something else, totally opposite. We call the other sex from us the opposite sex.

Human life exists because there are opposites. If the whole world was made of men, we would last one generation and die. If it was made of women, one generation. But there’s the negative and the positive, life and death. And God sets them over against each other–eternal opposites. And do you know what death is? Death is the enemy, always the enemy. Death is the enemy and yet God makes it the gateway to life–strange. It’s here though. Paul said it. Life speaks of blessedness and peace and happiness and love and fulfillment. And death speaks of darkness and loss and eternal negation. And yet, strangely because we’re in the fix we’re in.

Now, mark you this, my friends, if we hadn’t fallen, all that I’m saying, would not need to be said. And if we hadn’t fallen, it would be foolish to say it. There are so many things that are tentatively true. That is, they’re true because of the fix we’re in. But as soon as the Lord comes and glorifies His church and sin is no more, that won’t be true anymore. I said a while ago, a man had to be stubborn, to serve God. That’s because we’re in a world surrounded by enemies. But five minutes after the Lord comes, I couldn’t say that and tell the truth.

In heaven, nobody is stubborn. Everybody lives in the will of God, smoothness and sweetness, and so will it be in that glad day when the Lord comes and glorifies his people. And then so many things that are true now won’t be true then. They won’t need to be true then. Take up your cross and follow me. Give up all. Leave your family and come and follow Me. It won’t have to be so then. Nothing like that up there. It’s down here true, but it’s not up there true.

So, here’s death and life, and they stand over against each other. And the reason for it is because the human race is bad, we’re bad. And we’re so bad that you can’t make us good. That’s the doctrine that Paul teaches. That’s the doctrine that Jesus taught. That’s the doctrine that the Old Testament story taught. Were so bad, you can’t make us good. God doesn’t try to. He doesn’t want to. It isn’t His plan nor His purpose to do it. We’re so bad that He doesn’t try to make us good. We’re so bad, the only way we can be made good is to be killed. There are some people so bad that the society pronounces a death sentence on them, and they die because they can’t be made good. They’re considered to be beyond salvation, beyond hope, beyond reclamation.

And the whole human race before the eyes of God is so bad, it can’t be made good. God can’t patch it up. He never meant to patch it up. He never came into the world that you and I should learn to think lofty thoughts and dream high dreams and learn etiquette and ethics and all the rest. He came into the world in order that He might fix it so a certain number of people could die with Him and rise with Him to a new life.

Paul never said I’m good. Paul said I died. Paul was so bad that the Lord couldn’t patch him up, couldn’t fix him up. It’s no use. There’s only one way to deal with Paul and that was crucify him. But a crucified man is of no account. He’s lying out there dead. So, the next thing, if God wants to use him at all, or to have his mouth filled with praise is to raise him from the dead a new man. The kind of man he ought to have been in the first place and wasn’t.

Now, what am I teaching? I am teaching Keswick doctrine, if you please. I’m teaching that which the Sunday School Times was founded on, the victorious life. I’m teaching that which gave birth to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of us Christians who know this doctrine who’ve never made it work in our own lives or done anything about it. Now, I say it’s the way of God in this world in which we live. Put life over there and say there is life. Now, that’s what you want. When we start out for life and God said, no, you don’t get it that way. You get it by going the way of death. That’s the way of God. But it is the way of man to try to do the opposite. He wants to engraft the new life on the old life. That is my criticism of modern evangelism and a great deal of modern evangelicalism.

We don’t understand Paul, and we don’t understand the teaching of Christ and the cross. And so we take men and graft life on them. God never did it. He never meant to do it. He never tended to do it. He never planned it. He never ordained it that way. But we do it. We take the old life and then graft some new life on it. And we graft life in one hand and death in the other hand. We will not pass the judgment of death on ourselves; we just won’t do it.

We will save face. We acknowledge our sin. We admit our faults. We lose face and we get chagrined, and we get humbled, and we apologize, but we never pass the sentence of death on ourselves. Paul did. We curb the grosser manifestations of the flesh and count that enough. So, you see, the ways of God and the ways of man are contrary, the one to the other. And in the church of Christ, they are contrary, the one to the other. We get a fellow to admit that he’s accepted Christ, and we graph new life on him and get him fixed up. And pretty soon he gets so he can talk in public. And then after that, he gets on the board. And pretty soon he’s in a position where he’s exerting his authority and his weight in spiritual things. And he may be a good man and well-intentioned, but he’s had life graft on. He’s never understood what Paul meant when he said, I die with Christ. I have died. I’ve been crucified.

And so that man is trying to live like a man who had died when he hadn’t died. He’s trying to live like a man who had risen when he hasn’t risen. So, He’s halfway in between the old death and the new life, caught in the middle. Paul told us about it in the seventh chapter of Romans. Read that again sometime, that miserable, wretched seventh chapter in Romans.

Yet, the great man Paul said he was in that position. Such a man as I’ve described, won’t go all the way with God, but he won’t go all the way with the world either. He won’t go all the way to the cross, but he insists on going part of the way to the cross. And He says, I have been partly crucified with Christ. And so, he would have to admit, I nevertheless, I partly live. Because he’s partly dead, he partly lives, and that’s the kind of Christianity we have in our day. Partly dead and partly alive, everywhere, everywhere you go, it’s the same.

But the life, the victorious life, the life, the new wondrous life stands beckoning there, just on the other side. Not of an artistic gate. No artist ever painted that gate, that lovely, beautiful gate, not that. But it stands on the other side of a cross. And God says, if you want new life, then you will have to know death. Know death of what now? What kind of death are we talking about? Do I mean you’re going to have to die and go into the grave? Some people have foolishly interpreted it so. They say that we’re going to die and rise again; when we arise, then we’ll be good people.

Well, I want to talk about some of the things that have to be crucified and point out that God sent a man by the name of Saul, and said, these Amalekites aren’t fit to live. And I as the sovereign God who gave them life, now I want to take it from them. I have a right to do that. And I want you to go, and I want you to take an army and terminate them from the earth. Kill everything. Destroy it all, including their king and all of their fat cattle and sheep. And Saul said, I’m willing to go and he started. And he destroyed everything that didn’t do him any good. Everything he couldn’t use, he destroyed. But he thought it would be a nice mantelpiece to have around, to keep that king around to show him off.

And also, he wanted the cattle and the sheep. So, he kept the best of them. The old swayback heifers and the old lock horned steers, he killed them. But he kept all the fine-blooded cattle. The old wearied, dragged tailed sheep, that couldn’t keep the cockle burrs out of their wool, he let them die. The fine, young lambs and ewes, he kept. God had said destroy these enemies, and Saul decided that he knew better than God knew what to do with enemies. So, he made a distinction between enemies and enemies.

Now, what are the enemies that require the sentence of death? You and me? What are those enemies that keep you from growing in grace? Some of you haven’t grown in grace for years. You haven’t gotten any more spiritual in years. Why? What is it?

Well, first I’ll say that you can’t slay these enemies yourself. You can only pass sentence on them actually. You can only pass sentence on them. We call that slaying them because the slaying must be done by the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord. But I just wanted to point out a few of them to you; and one of them is self-righteousness. And now, self-righteousness, believing that we are in some measure righteous and not as bad as they say we are. We deny our self-righteousness in our creed, but we defend it in our conduct. We permit it to be felt in our hearts. Drunkenness and impurity and dishonesty in business affairs and lying out right and gambling, we say, oh, those are bad. Those are the vile things, and we get rid of those vile things. But self-righteousness can become a very beautiful thing. It can be artistic.

Then there’s self-confidence. And you know, self-confidence can be compatible with all the language of humility. We can feel deeply self-confident while at the same time we’ve learned the language of humility. We’ve learned the testimony and we’ve learned to weave into our sermons how humble we are when at the same time, we can be quite confident in ourselves.

And there’s self-sufficiency in life and in heart and in service. And there’s self-love, which indeed, is the source of all other evils, I suppose, the source of all hurt feelings. Hurt feelings do in the church of Christ, what certain diseases do for children.

You know, they say that children’s diseases are not injurious, not harmful. I know better than that. One of our boys can hear out of only one ear, because when he was a lad he had scarlet fever. It wasn’t the fault of his parents. We went to a child specialist. He didn’t know what he had. He told him to go back to school, let him go back to school because he was able to stagger. Then the rest of them got it and got it, and pretty soon we found what we had. We had scarlet fever. So, we imagine that these children’s diseases don’t hurt our children, but they do. They affect the eyes. They affect the ears if we don’t watch it.

So, self-love, is like it brings about hurt feelings, and hurt feelings in a church. They’re the children’s diseases for all the immature Christians, all the childish Christians that haven’t grown up yet. They get their feelings hurt because they’re subjected to it because they’re filled with self-love. They love themselves.

And they wear their feelings on their sleeve and they’re ready immediately to take umbrage if anybody said anything against them. And then those hurt feelings get into the church and then gets into the choir and then gets into the board and into the Sunday school, and pretty soon, you find that that little flare up of hurt feeling that you thought wasn’t anything, was a disease that has injured the body of Christ in that locality. And it all comes out of self-love.

We quote, I am crucified with Christ, but we haven’t been. We say, but we’ve crucified drunkenness. Yes, we’ve crucified gambling. Yes. We’ve crucified lying. Yes. We haven’t crucified hurt feelings and so we get it, and churches die of it. This thing goes on and on in churches until it divides whole sections of the church against each other. I never had it happen under my ministry. God’s good hand over these years has never allowed a division ever to happen under my ministry, and any hurt feelings, we got rid of very quickly. So, I’ve never seen it. But I’ve listened. I listened no later than a week or two ago to a long recital of a man who was sick inside because of what he’d had to go through in a certain church with hurt feelings, self-love, self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-pity. The source of all resentment is self-pity, so we pity ourselves.

God says this has to die. Go slay the Amalekites, and we say Lord, I used to smoke. I don’t smoke anymore. God said, I didn’t tell you to slay filter tips only, I told you to slay self-pity. You say, I kept that Father. I wanted to keep that around. I didn’t think that would be so bad. It’s a luxury to pity yourself sometimes.

Many a man, the only time he feels good during the day is when his wife bawls him out in the morning and he leaves home feeling he’s a martyr and goes off to the bus or train, feeling real good. He enjoys himself. If my neighbors only knew what I have to endure. I am a good man who makes a good living. I’ve been true and faithful and kind and look at the way she treats me. He enjoys shall self-pity. He picks up his newspaper down at 95th, 107th or 111th or wherever he lives and reads, family of six wiped out on highway 90. He reads it casually, never pities them. Too busy pitting himself. Self-pity, I say, is the source of all resentment; and resentment in the church is like another kind of disease in a family.

Then there is self-seeking. The source of much religious activity is self-seeking. If we could only know how often we serve God out of self-seeking and how often we serve God out of a desire to glorify God. I admit, I admit that bothers me sometimes. I admit that I have periods when I have to go to God and get light and help on it so that what I am doing that seems so good and right and all, won’t turn out to be self-seeking gone underground. The self-seeker can go underground and gnaw from underneath, and we’ll never know he’s there. The grass grows over him and we can’t hear him under there but he’s there, like a mole burrowing in the lawn. Many a book, many a sermon, many a song, many a school, many a church, gets their inception in self-seeking.

And there’s self-indulgence, not in low evil things of course. I am amazed when I go about and find how God’s people live. Maybe I was brought up wrong or brought up in a situation. I was brought up in a home where five cents was something you carefully laid on a shelf and reminded Mother it was there and you didn’t spend it without permission. And if you got candy, it was one penny’s worth. And if it was really a big day, was two pennies worth.

So, when businessmen take me out to lunch, “have a steak now Mr. Tozer, have a steak.” Six dollars and a half.  No. But, have a steak, we want you to have it, have it now. I look at the right-hand side of the column and whatever it says is the cheapest I take, even though it’s being paid for. I can’t bring myself to indulge myself like that. Maybe that’s a form of self-aggrandizement or self-confidence or self-righteous? I don’t know. But what I started out to say was, that I’m astonished at how people pamper themselves in the name of the Lord. They put up at the best hotels. We have everything, the very best, and never seem to ever think of money long as they’ve got it. They can talk about God continually over a six-dollar and a half steak. And for $2, they could have had a hamburger. And there’s just as much nourishment in a hamburger as there is in a steak. Anybody knows that, Brother.

I don’t want you to think I’m after you, brother, just because you’re bigger than I am, doesn’t mean you eat $6 steaks, but I’m just trying to say that God’s people are so self-indulgent. We don’t take dope. But we indulge ourselves other ways. Self-aggrandizement, everything has to advance me, advance mine.

I talked to preachers, and I can’t talk to them five minutes, not one minute until they’ve taken off, revved up their motors and gone off into the wild blue yonder. And for the rest of the meal, I have to sit and listen to what they did, who they are, what they’ve written, where they’ve been, how they’ve traveled, self-aggrandizement. Poor people at home paying the bills while they go all around over the world and collect stories. I don’t like that kind of stuff. I never did and I can’t and I’m not any near to it now than I was when I was much younger.

Now, there is a path. There’s a path to life and power, and it’s the path that Paul knew here. He said, I have been crucified. He said, I have gone to Jesus Christ and by faith of the Son of God, I have so identified myself with Christ that I consider myself to have suffered what He suffered, to be an outcast from society. I consider myself to be what he was, and by faith identify myself with Him as He identified Himself with me.

I said one time that Christ identified Himself with Christians in the incarnation, and a good Plymouth Brethren came down and he was right. I admitted it. He said, Brother Tozer, never say that. Never say that Christ has identified Himself with us in the incarnation. He identified Himself with us in the crucifixion. And he’s right. But that’s what Paul says. He identified Himself with the human race and the incarnation. He identified Himself with God’s people in the crucifixion and the resurrection. I am crucified with Christ, he said. I have been. Nothing had happened to His body, nothing like that. He wasn’t even present when our Lord died it isn’t supposed. But he said, it’s by faith of the Son of God. I have gone to Jesus Christ in faith, and I have so identified myself with Him that I have learned to suffer along with Him, and I cease saying “I,” he said in effect.

Now we say, yes, Lord, I have put away these things, Lord. I have put them away, Lord. But what meaneth then the bleating of the sheep. The man Saul didn’t know that the sheep would bleat at the wrong time. If he’d had any sense, He would have known that sheep bleat continually. Any flock of sheep anywhere, are bleating all the time. Cattle, except when they’re feeding, are lowing all the time. These are not all at the same time lowing. They’re not all at the same time bleating, but there’s always one of them. The fine, thin voice of the lamb or the heavy authoritative voice of the old ram or the plaintiff, appealing voice of the ewe calling her lambs in, but they’re bleating.

And Saul overlooked that fact. He overlooked that these sheep would bleat just at the wrong time. If they can only shut them up just at the right time, he might have got away with that dirty deal, for a while. But, just when he was saying most eloquently, and being a Jew, I suppose he was using both hands, saying, oh, but I have done what you told me to do.

About that time, “Baaaa” was heard over there. He said, what’s that I hear? Oh, well, he said, excuse me, but that’s a few that my people insisted on keeping. He said, I know you, you’re a tyrant and when you want a thing you get it. You’re responsible for those sheep. About that time, an old cow let out a trombone blast that echoed down the hills. He said, What’s that? He said, there we are again. I’m sorry to have to tell you but the people insisted. And Saul said, I know you, you liar. You claim to serve God but you won’t obey Him, and God has cast you out, taking your kingdom from me and he’s given it to a neighbor better than thou.

I wonder how long the church is going to have to go on like this. I don’t mean this church, but the church of God. You say we believe in Christ. We’re saved from sin. We have eternal life and can’t lose it. Everything will be alright. One of these days the Lord will come and take us from one kind of fun to another kind of fun. He’ll take us from being happy down here to being happy up there.

Believe me what He’ll do to those liberals and moderns. We’ll lick up our chops when the Lord will trample those moderns under His feet. It is awful easy for us of the orthodox persuasion to talk like that, friends, forgetting that right while we’re making our pious protestations, the bleating of the sheep and the bellowing of the herd may be coming across the meadows to say to God they’re not telling the truth, Father. They think they are, but they’re not. What about you?

I’m supposed to come and preach at Keswick again this year. What does Keswick teach? Only this, that’s all, only this. Sometimes I think even Keswick gets you dead and doesn’t get you alive again. Dr. Maxwell, “Born Crucified” and some of his other books, that’s what he teaches. What do they teach, and Turnbull teach and the Sunday School times? What did Dr. Simpson teach of this? Dr. Simpson taught that when you rise again in newness of life after letting your evil nature die with Christ, you can be anointed with power to go out and do the will of God and live in the fellowship of God and the power of the Spirit. That’s why the Christian Alliance ever was born in the first place. It will be a bad day for us when we forget that. It will be a bad day for us. But how about you? You can’t help what 1100 churches will do, but you can help what you do. You can’t even help what this church will do, really.

But you can decide what you will do. What about it? The Lord says, put that self-righteousness to death. Pass sentence on it. Identify yourself with Christ on the cross and let that self-righteousness die. Let that delicious self-pity that you like to lick on, let that die, stop pitting yourself. Stop seeking aggrandizement, your self-advancement, stop seeking it. Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and He will exalt you in due time. Up out of our stony grief of humility, God will raise us to newness of life.

Somewhere I preached, I don’t remember where, in fact it was in Brooklyn a couple of Sundays ago. And I told them there that if they would put themselves in God’s hands and ask God Almighty to set a chain of circumstances in motion in their lives, He would lead them to be nothing and God to be everything, that they’d be surprised, that’s what will begin to happen. And then I had to tell them this as I tell you tonight, the strange thing will be that as you get better, you won’t know you’re getting better. As you get more powerful, you won’t know you’re getting powerful. As you get more God-like, you won’t know you’re getting God-like. For it is a strange contradiction that the most god-like man is the man who feels least like a God-like man.

And the most powerful man is the man who feels less power. It’s not the little fellows with their light up ties that think they’re bad. It’s the Spurgeons and the Augustines and the Pauls and the Simpsons and the Wesleys, who say, I’m no good. I’m no good God. I’m no good. The little guys with the light up ties, they say, God and I just had a little huddle together. And God said to me, son, let’s do it this way. That kind of Christianity is a million miles from the faith of our fathers. The further you get into the Kingdom and the closer to the cross of Christ, the further you’ll feel away and the less you will trust yourself.

And the more trust God can put in you, the less you’ll put in yourself. And the more trust you put in yourself; the less God will trust you. And the more you seek advancement, the less God will advance you. And the more God, out of your humility advances you, the less you will feel advanced. It’s a strange contradiction, a strange anomaly, but it’s there; power where death was, peace where turmoil was, life where weakness was. This is it, brethren. I guess it isn’t any wonder that this kind of preaching doesn’t bring mobs around here. But it does excite people all over the continent who want to hear about it. Small groups here and small groups there, and people who will gather in and make large groups and say, come and talk to us about this. I suppose I’m the poorest example of it there is on the North American continent, but at least I’ll do my best trying to tell people this is the way of life.

Wesley said to Peter Bowler, Peter, my heart hasn’t experienced grace. What will I do? He said preach it till you do experience it. Preach it because it’s in the Bible. Then when you experience it, preach it because you have it. And Wesley went out and did it. It wasn’t very long until he experienced grace and set the world on fire.

Let’s pray. We are assembled here tonight, Lord Jesus, as Thy disciples. Thy servant has tried from the New Testament and from the Old to explain the way of power and life. Now, Lord, Thou knowest how much easier it is to stand up here and explain it, than it is to go out tomorrow and live it. And yet, it’s possible to live it, otherwise Thy word would be confusion and more confounded. We pray, O Christ, while the church goes on without power, without holiness, without radiance, plugging along, we thank Thee, Father, for everyone that’s plugging along.

Thank Thee, Father, for everyone who says any good thing about thy Son. Thank thee for everyone whose testimony, however hollow, still may be on Thy side. We remember Thy servant who said, I thank God that Christ is preached regardless of how He is preached. So, we’re glad for everybody, but O Lord, we mourn. The weakness, the carnality, the selfishness that’s in Thy church among Thy people. We mourn that we don’t grow up, that we don’t advance. We stay little when we could be great Christians. O Lord, help us now.

Before we conclude our prayer, dear people, how many would say, Mr. Tozer pray for me that God will teach me the meaning of this text, this doctrine, this truth which has been so wonderfully taught and lived by so many of God’s saints down the years. I want it in my life. Would you pray for me? Would you raise your hand? Yes. Yes. Who else? Yes. Who else? Yes, I see your hand back there. Others, who would like us to pray?

Father, we pray for those who have requested it. Thou hast said, pray one for another. And there’s a reason for Thy saying that. So, we pray Thee for these who have said, pray for me, men and women. We pray for them. We pray that they may tear themselves loose if they have to do it, do it by violence from the green briars and the barbed wire and get themselves out of all that, and escape the snares and traps of the flesh and follow Christ. And by faith, put themselves with Him on a cross and see themselves rise with Him into glorious light and freedom. Grant this we pray. Lead these dear friends on. Put the right books in their hands. Lead them to the right Scripture. Help them to find time during the day or night that they ordinarily don’t have, to settle some of these things privately. Grant it we pray.

And let this, we pray Thee, spread not only here to these who raised their hands but all among Thy children. Begin we pray Thee, O God, soon to draw a line between the swaggering, smiling, self-assured, self-confident, bold, Christians and the lowly and the meek and the humble and the merciful who deny self and follow Thee. Let the Holy Ghost come upon some people, the humble, the lowly, the crucified, that they may rise to newness of life to shine and be an example to the ones that aren’t. Let it be so, we pray. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.