In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of having a song of praise and gratitude in our hearts as believers. He describes the Christian experience as being brought out of a pit of darkness and despair and being set upon a solid foundation in God. The speaker highlights the sad state of many people who are trapped in a life disconnected from God and sinking deeper into despair. However, he encourages listeners to trust in God and experience the transformation of having a new song of praise in their mouths, which can lead others to put their trust in the Lord as well. The sermon draws from the biblical passage in Psalm 40:1-3, where David expresses his gratitude for being rescued by God and having a new song put in his mouth.

It is good to be together with you again this evening, waiting upon the Lord to come down to us by His Word and His Spirit and to lead us in His way. I want to share with you tonight a few thoughts that come from the opening words of that delightful psalm, the 40th, and the first three verses in the psalm. May I read them once again, just to focus our gaze upon the thrill which the psalmist evidently had as he rethought and relived the experience to which he refers. I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God. Many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord. Now, this is, to say the least, a very remarkable passage of Holy Writ. It's remarkable for its poetic qualities, it's remarkable for its conceptions, for the pictures that it brings before us. It's a very remarkable bit of poetry. But over and above everything else, it is remarkable because it describes the experience of someone. It describes God breaking into the life of a person who apparently was in the most distressing situation. That's why we've suggested the title to this study, Deliverance from a Desolating Experience. Now, we're not going to pause for one moment to try and discover the precise historical circumstances in which David was thus delivered. We're not going to take the time because it's quite impossible to discover the answer to that question. You will find all sorts of ideas if you consult the commentators. They will vie with one another, the one suggesting this and the other suggesting that, so we won't waste time. We don't know. Neither, indeed, need we know. The man of God is here describing a spiritual experience in the first place. Behind that spiritual experience there may very well have been a physical experience of being taken out of a horrible pit and of being given freedom and new life again. There may very well have been that physical experience. But basically what David is here describing is a spiritual experience. And we don't really need to know the physical circumstances which lay as a background to that in order to appreciate the amazing grace of God in dealing with a man as that is described in these words. Now, I want to come to these words then, looking first of all at what is evident right on the surface of things, the urgency of a human situation. And though here, of course, we are looking back into history, we are going to think generally of the experience of an ancient king of Israel. Let's remember that if God is the unchanging God, as we believe he is, then it may well be that he has a word tonight for someone here in some such plight as David found himself of old. Or it may well be that the reason why the Lord has laid this theme upon my heart is this, that some of us know of friends and neighbors and folk in the outside world who are, as David was, lost in the mire and the clay, hedged around, cooped in what he describes as a pit of slime from which they cannot extricate themselves and there is apparently no exit, no way out. If you do not need this message yourself, my friend, it may well be that God wants you to hear it tonight to take it to someone else. Let us therefore give the more earnest heed to this wonderful message, this wonderful good news that comes from the pages of the Old Testament, the urgency of a human situation. Now, the psalmist feels himself to be severed from normal life, shut away, cast away. He describes his experience as that of being cast into a pit, and here he finds himself submerged beneath what he deems to be the level of normal living. He's down somewhere, cast down into this dark, slimy pit as he likes to refer to it. Now, this image of a horrible pit, to quote the King James Version again, uh, is not an uncommon phenomenon in the Bible. Those of you who know your Old Testament very well will remember that there are many who are referred to as having been thrown into a pit or saved out of it. There were many such pits, either in the form of natural hole in the ground or of an artificially dug hole. There were many such mentioned in the pages of the Old Testament. For example, in Isaiah chapter 24 and verse 22, in a very threatening passage to the people of God, there is a threat hanging over the people there addressed, and God says through the prophet, they will be herded together like prisoners bound in a dungeon. They will be shut up in prison and be punished after many days, and the notion there is of a pit, the pit, the dungeon. Zechariah has a similar thought. As for you, says Zechariah, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will free your prisoners from the waterless pit that envisages the people of Israel who were in covenant with God, and God was in covenant with them as having been cast into a waterless pit. What does it mean? Well, it means that God has chastised them, and he's allowed them to be cast into a desolating experience, into a pit, into a dark waterless pit in that case. Jeremiah was thrown into some such hole. We read in Jeremiah 38 and verse 6, they took Jeremiah and they put him into the cistern of Melchizedek, the king's son, which was in the courtyard of the guard. They lowered Jeremiah by ropes into the cistern. It had no water in it, only mud, and Jeremiah sank down into the mud. Joseph likewise found himself in a pit, and there are many, many others. I just refer to this so that we may remember we're not dealing with something hypothetical here, something imaginary. We are dealing with something that was real, that was often encountered in life. This was the prison house of the ancient world, a hole in the earth, sometimes covered over, sometimes large enough for lions to be thrown in with its occupants, though they didn't last together very long. We have that kind of thing on the pages of the Old Testament. Now there then is the sordid, squalid atmosphere of a hideous pit, and the psalmist sees in this a picture of his moral and his spiritual condition. I seem, he says, to have been cast into this pit, and I'm a desolate soul, severed from real life. The next thing I want you to notice is this, severed from life, he is here surrounded by clammy walls that defy every attempt to get out. Now I don't suppose any of us have ever found ourselves in a situation like this. This is a slimy pit. This is a damp, dismal pit, not a dry one, not a waterless one, but of another kind. Everything is damp, and so the walls surrounding the pit are such that if you try to climb out, well, there's only one thing to say, you're just wasting your energy. You've got nothing to cling to, and every step you try to take upwards, you slip down again, and you fall to the bottom, and you just slide back to the spot where you were, and you're more and more enmeshed in the miry clay beneath your feet. There is no way out. The only possibility of getting out of a place like that is that someone should pass on the outside with a rope or some ladder or some other contraption to pass down and to hand on to the poor man at the bottom and haul him to safety. Short of that kind of miracle, there is no way out. Severed from life, surrounded by clammy walls, and then, you see, to add to the picture, sinking in the miry clay beneath his feet. David, describing what was a spiritual experience for him, pictures it in terms of a grim situation with no possible way of escape. I want to stress that. Indeed, he was no mere prisoner within the dark confines of those cold, comfortless walls of clay, but his feet were as fixed and as firmly held as if he were in the stock. He was sinking. Have you ever tried to walk on a piece of barb? Have you ever tried to walk on terrain of this kind? I remember hearing the late General Sir William Dobbie of Malta fame, and if any of you ever heard Sir William Dobbie speak or saw him, you will remember that he was a man somewhere over seven feet high and a very massive gentleman, man of God. I remember him describing, in the service that I attended as a young boy, a young Christian, I remember him describing an incident in the 1914-18 war where he was asked personally to deliver an important message to the front lines, and he went out, if you can imagine him, walking with his batman in the dark, getting to this particular spot where someone was to meet him, and suddenly, without any warning at all, when he's been walking at a reasonable pace, he finds himself in a soggy soil, and this big 16 to 18 stone, you don't talk like that here, how many pounds an 18 stone, I can't remember, anyway, you work that out, he finds himself going down into the soggy soil until he's up to his chest, and he begins to kick and to shout, and he cannot get out, this big giant of a man, I shall never forget him saying, my, if ever I appreciated my batman I did that night, as he gave me the butt of the rifle and he himself stood on solid ground and he pulled me out of the horrible pit, referring to this song. Do you know what it is to sink literally like that? Some of us may. The psalmist is here describing a moral and spiritual condition of that kind, where you've begun to slide and your feet are caught, and now you lift one foot up, metaphorically speaking, to get out, and the other foot only gets deeper and deeper into the mire, and when you get the other one up, the alternative goes down and down, deeper and deeper, there is no way out, and the clay clings to your feet, and you become weightier and weightier, and each of your two feet are like lead, there is nothing you can do. Now my friends, I want to suggest to you that some of us may be in that kind of moral and spiritual plight tonight, or if we are not ourselves there, there are multitudes of our fellow citizens right in the dungeon, the miry, muddy, murky atmosphere of a pit from which they simply cannot escape. They can neither go forwards nor backwards, and they can't climb upwards, they can only go around in circle in the darkness, and there is nothing they can do about it. However they got into it, they can never get out of it, such is the daunting, dismal experience of multitudes of men and women, old and young, in these 80s, the year of our Lord 1981. The old time picture is as relevant and contemporary as life itself. Wittingly or otherwise, our post-war generations have been progressively sinking deeper and deeper into the mire, deeper and deeper into what can hardly be better described than pit life, pit life, until the masses of North Americans along with others are so deep in mire, severed from real life as God meant it to be, surrounded by clammy confining walls that defy their every hope of exit, and sinking deeper and deeper into the morass beneath their feet. There is nothing which is sadder to behold than the spectacle of beautiful manhood and womanhood, speaking in the past tense, having lost all its glory, and some of them before they're 30 years of age, they're so sexually exhausted and sensually disintegrated that they're old before they've been young, and they can't get out of the pit. Neither are they alone there, of course. We should not suggest that our younger people are any more inhabitants of the pit of slime than some of the older generations in which we, of the time in which we live. The pit has its sizable population of middle-aged and elderly who have lost every vestige of pre-World War II idealism, and have almost unwittingly slithered into the slushy climate of an amoral kind of living, where the only standard is that of material reward and physical pleasure. Within this pit experience, there is no real progress possible, and this describes life today in a very remarkable way. It is our most aposite picture. Economically, we are bogged down, says someone. I heard the statement made the other day. The mud has got into the wheels of the chariot, and we are confined within the clammy walls of the pit we have made for ourselves. Socially, we cannot rise above the sometimes barbaric disputations associated with race, religion, or wages. The walls of the pit surround us. Progress has become impossible. Indeed, the very concept is becoming meaningless. Morally and spiritually, we are sinking into our own mire, and we are just stomping in it. Now, of course, there are some people who think that this is what life was meant to be, and they do not see much out of place with it. If there is anything which tears my heart to pieces, it is to see members of the men who should be preaching the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, clergymen, walking and parading to support some of the most immoral issues of the day. I am reminded of the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, who could say things with a pinch of salt and acid sometimes, and still does. He wrote in the Glasgow Herald, I think it was, I saw these words of his some time ago now. I have yet to find a cause, he says, from black magic to Lady Chatterley's lover, which cannot rustle up a dog collar or two among its luminaries as and when required. Such is the mire in which we are living, the urgency of a human situation. And if you are not there tonight, my friend, there may be someone very near to you and very dear to you who is in precisely this kind of situation, and you are the only one that may know the way out. Now, that brings us to the potency of the divine intervention here. Thank God that is not the end of the story. We would not be here if that were the end of the story. It was not the end for David, and neither need it be the end for us or those whom we know, if we bear to them the glad tidings of the gospel. Look at what God did for this man, objectively first and then subjectively. Says David, he brought me up also out of an horrible pit, or as the NIV puts it, he lifted me out of the slimy pit. What was humanly impossible became historically actual. It happened, but it could not happen. No, it could not, but it did happen. How did it happen? Well, because God did it. A supernatural breaking into the situation is described here. God intervenes. God intervenes to lift the man out of the bog. He brought me up. He lifted me out. Do you know what that means? Then, if you do make this moment and make these moments as we're meditating upon this old time psalm, make these moments a time of worship. Let your heart diffuse gladness and gratitude and praise and joy to the God of your salvation. But that's not the only thing that God did for David, objectively. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit. He set my feet upon a rock. What blessed relief. Now, I suppose you've got to know something about walking in pit land to appreciate this. Do you imagine this man whose feet has been in the clay so long and he couldn't get them out of the clay, couldn't get them out of the mire. But at long last, at long last, whereas he's been sinking and sinking deeper and deeper all the time, now he's out of it. And the ground beneath his feet is firm and he's not sinking anymore. Christian, you should know something about that. To know the firm rock of ages beneath your feet so that you're not sinking deeper and deeper into misery and condemnation. He set my feet upon a rock and then adds David, almost as an afterthought, but it's a very precious afterthought and a very important afterthought I would have thought. He established my goings. That's King James and I think it's probably the best translation here. He gave me a firm place to stand, says the NIV, but the King James says he established my goings in which there are two thoughts. One, the man in the pit began to walk again, began to get going. Life started anew. Movement became possible. He's free, you see. It's a tremendous experience for a man who's been imprisoned to sin, imprisoned to practices, immoral, immoral. And by the grace of God, he or she is free again. But now there's more than that here. It's not simply the notion of being free from the pit and the slime and the clay, but there is this. He established my goings. And the notion is this, you see, God not only set him a going, but set him a going according to a pattern. And you could foreknow almost the kind of thing he's going to do. His life is going to have a pattern. His goings become established. He doesn't live haphazardly anymore, but God establishes his goings. Doesn't this very beautifully portray what the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ offers men and women? This is the Christian experience properly so-called. It involves the experience of being brought, of being brought up and brought out of the pit we had dug for ourselves and in which we lived and went around in circles in the dark, thinking we were terribly wise and terribly clever until suddenly we realized where we were. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, set my feet upon a rock. This is of the very essence of the Christian experience. It is to know that there is a God who is eternal, who has asked us to rest on him and trust in him and lean upon him and depend upon him. And he is a God who honors faith. And he established my goings. Men and women who have been brought out of the pit by the living God are men and women who begin to live according to a divinely ordained pattern. No, God doesn't make us like postage stamps. We shall still have our own individuality and our own particular personality, but we shall begin to act in the manner that he ordained men should act. And we shall develop an attitude that pleases him. Now, what did God do for David and then in him subjectively? He did for him, then in him, objectively, subjectively. I want you to notice how he describes the change here. Looking into his own experience, he says, he put a new song in my mouth. He put a new song in my mouth. There is something incomparably precious about this. If you can envisage the picture, instead of spending his days and his nights groaning in the miry clay, he's now begun to sing. Have your singing days begun? Do you really know the song of the redeemed in your heart, in your soul, in your mouth? What's your last thought at night? What's your first thought in the morning? Where does your heart go when it has freedom of movement? What is the center of gravity in your life? Does it go on the wing of praise and gratitude and adoration toward the Lord of your salvation? Do you know God like that? Have you the song of the Lord? He put a new song in my mouth. He put a new hope in his heart. A hope that the spectacle of his rescued life would count for God and for others. Listen to what David says. Many, he says, shall see it and put their trust in the Lord. You know, there is something so true to life here. I mean from the vantage point of knowing the grace of God. Once you know the grace of God, this is the kind of thing that you would expect. David is rejoicing. He has a new song in his mouth, but deeper than the song, there is a hope in his soul. And this is the hope that many who will see what God has done for him shall fear. Now notice this. It sounds contradictory. The Lord, he says, has put a new song in my mouth. That's a sound, a singing. You hear a song sung. If you're near the person who has a song. But David doesn't say he shall hear it. He shall see it. And it's no error. On the contrary, there is here this masterful psychology and understanding of things. You see, if you really have a song in your soul, you're a spectacle. There's something to see. You don't need to tell everybody all about it. There's something in your face. There's something in your life. There's something that is discernible and visible. You don't need to call attention to yourself and say, look at me, look what's happened to me. It's there. Many shall see it. Why? Because God has been active there. And God is real there. And God has done something there. And because it's something God has done, many shall see it and be glad. Yes, but it doesn't end there. This is the hope of the psalmist. And shall turn to the Lord. He believes, you see, that the reality of his salvation is such that it'll persuade the ungodly to trust in his God. And this is his hope. And this is one reason why he's singing. Many shall see in me the kind of God he is, and the kind of power he has, and the kind of grace he shows. And seeing it in me shall turn. I wonder whether something is visible in our lives as we live through these momentous days. Is there anything that is discernible in the way we live that points unerringly to the reality of God? At a meeting in Queens Hall, London, England, celebrating the close of the First World War. Going back to the war tonight, I don't know what's the reason for that. But this was celebrating the end of the First World War. George Bernard Shaw sat next to Dr. Joseph Fort Newton, a man of great distinction in England at that time. As the massed choirs of the huge audience sang Isaac Watt's hymn, Oh God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. Shaw turned to his friend and he said to him, Doctor, he said, I would rather have written that hymn than all my foolish plays and prose. That one hymn, he muttered. Why? Because Isaac Watts had hope in God. He knew the great I am. He knew something of the covenant. He knew something of the reality of divine forgiveness and peace and promise and covenant. And Shaw did not. Hope. Hope for the hither to hopeless. God can impart hope to the downcast human derelict. And my dear friends, unless we are able to go out from this sanctuary Sunday after Sunday with a hope in our hearts that however miserable the plight of man, the grace of God is greater than that. You know, our coming is of little use unless I can go back to the place where I work, to the place where I am. I find myself in the providence of God from day to day and look into the eyeballs of men and women and recognize however great your need, the grace of God is greater. There's not much to our faith, you know. And that brings me to the last point here in all its stark simplicity, the stark simplicity of the human action that resulted in such a change. The question that you are asking is the question that I asked when I read this and studied it. How did it all happen? And if anything like this is to happen in your life, you want to know, well, how, how can I expect it? It's a most relevant question. Well now, negatively, will you notice? I suppose we could quote a number of negatives here. There are many things that David did not do. He ultimately decided that he could not attempt to do anything more because it was impossible to get out of the pit apparently. And he did not go on, he didn't attempt to try and call others to hail him out, but let's come to the positive. Let's not deal with the imaginary. And the positive is this. He says, I waited for the Lord. I waited for the Lord. Literally, David puts it, waiting. I waited. Meaning, of course, to put all the emphasis on this. His salvation is due to the fact that he did nothing but wait. And God, in his infinite grace, came in and took him out and set him going. It's all of God. David focused his soul's gaze upon the Lord. Now, why this focusing of the gaze exclusively upon God? Well, you see, the answer is evident when you come to think of it. David knew that the Lord existed because of the very existence of his nation. You cannot explain the being, the existence of the Jew, except on the supposition of an almighty God. Neither can you explain the continuance in life of the nation, apart from the interventions of God in history to save the nation from herself and from her foes. David was too near to the realities. David was too near, too involved in history to fail to remember that. How did they come out of Egypt? Don't you remember those words, with the mountains of Beelzebub and Piraeus on the one side and the other, and the Red Sea before them? God said, stand still and see what I can do. And the Red Sea opened before them. And they went through dry shock. This man, David, knew the existence of God and something about the power of God in the life of his nation, in the life of his people. He wasn't a man who'd shut himself off from history. He knew his roots. He knew his history. He knew his past. And he saw the activity of God in his dealings with his own nation. And so he had something to build upon. He now is in an impossible situation. But God, if God did that, he can do this. You see, that's the reasoning. Knowing what God had done yesterday, out of sheer grace, he says to himself, well, maybe God will do something like that today. He fed his faith upon the facts as he knew them. Neither was there any alternative that he could think of. He knew of no other to whom he could turn. Oh, my friends, it's a profound privilege to be able to announce from a rostrum, from a pulpit like this, to a congregation that you do not know. I don't know you, all of you, dear people. But it's a privilege to be able to announce, look here, the God of Abram and the God of David and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ comes to you in your circumstances, whatever their nature, and he calls you, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and uh, I will give you look unto me, all the ends of the earth and be saved. Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And this is the gospel that is committed to us. I therefore summon you tonight in his name to focus the eye of your soul upon him as the one you're looking for, if you only knew it. In other words, seek the Lord, wait upon him. You know, there are some pictures in the New Testament, they always thrill my soul, not so much because of the theology that is in them, that is beautiful in itself, but because of something far simpler than that. There are illustrations of the common, the ordinary wisdom of people when they really are in need of something. Think, for example, of a character like Zacchaeus, diminutive little man, and he wanted to see Jesus of Nazareth because Jesus was befriending people like himself who were servants of Rome and no one else would have anything good to say to them. Never shake hands with them, never smile at them. They weren't wanted anywhere in the synagogue or anywhere else, they were the unwanted people. Publicans and sinners, tax gatherers and sinners, they were worthless. But this little fellow Zacchaeus, he was determined to find the friend of publicans and sinners. You remember what he did? Well, he knew that Jesus was going in a certain way and the little fellow ran ahead of the crowd and he climbed up into a tree and he just waited. Stupid little fellow, you say, don't you say that. He knew that Jesus was coming that way and I say to you, climb any tree you like if you know Jesus is coming that way and stay there till he comes. Wait upon the Lord, see that you're listening to his word, see that you sit in a place where his word is expounded and proclaimed, see that you're in the place where the word of God is honored, where the name of God is revered, where Jesus comes and manifests himself to his people. See that you're on the route he's taking. Find exactly the same thing about the blind man outside Jericho. He heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. Everything was quiet but suddenly this man began to shout and it was a bit awkward really. People felt a bit awkward for him shouting, shouting, Jesus son of David have mercy upon me. It's not polite to do things but he wouldn't be silenced, you see. Why? He knew this is the hour, he's come near enough for me to call upon him and I will cry. Don't miss your opportunity. Do you know anything of that moment in a service such as this or another kind? When the Lord comes so very near to you, you almost feel you can touch him. That's the time to cry. Call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return unto the Lord. He will have mercy upon him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon. Wait on the Lord. Use your wits. See where he's going. Is there a company of people that he visits with reasonable regularity? Be among them. That will determine where you spend your Saturday night as well as your Sunday night. Be where God is pledged to come. Be where the Spirit normally works. Be where the grace of God is normally experienced. Wait on the Lord. Patiently wait for the Lord. Says David, I waited and he fixed his soul's expectations solely and exclusively upon God. I close with this. I suppose it is true to say that to most of us this is one of the most difficult things. It's to wait upon God and maybe one of many reasons for that. I don't propose going into them now. We find it difficult but the scriptures from beginning to end insist that they that wait upon the Lord are never losers. Never losers. And that many multitudes of men are losers because they do not wait upon the Lord. They've often quoted in the prayer meeting context Charles Haddon Spurgeon's reference to people saying their prayers without waiting upon God. And he compares them with people who go to cash a check in the bank and they present the check but they go away without the money. And there are many people who ask things of God verbally but 20 minutes later nobody knows what they've asked and they don't remember themselves. You see it was as unreal as that. It was just a kind of fancied thought. There was nothing so so so so definite about it that it was a thing that one planned to ask and purpose to wait for and meant to receive. Do you come to the bank of heaven and present your check in the name of Jesus and run away before God has given you what you asked for? Foolish man or woman. They that wait upon the Lord. Wait upon him. Don't you say I don't like waiting. No no we don't like waiting because every moment we wait it means that we are acknowledging that it cannot be of ourselves. The salvation for which we wait is the salvation that we cannot accomplish ourselves. And every moment's waiting is another way of saying oh my God I cannot do it myself. It must be all of you. Wait I say upon the Lord says the psalmist in another place. And this is the call of my text tonight. This is a most enchanting moment when we have the sensation or the sense that what happened in David's case happens to us. I like the way he puts it. And the the King James makes it very graphic to me at any rate when it says he inclined his ear to me. Now it's a beautiful picture. It's a very homey one. You're right on the hearse and there are some little kiddies in the house. And daddy or mummy kneels down to be on a level with a kiddie and puts his ear or her ear to the little kid's mouth. And the little kid says what he wants to say into the ear of mummy or daddy. He bent his ear down to catch what I was saying. Hallelujah. The mighty God of all creation. The God of Israel. The God of Jacob. The God of David. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord who holds the starry skies and all the constellations in his hands. And the whole world is just like a speck of sand to him. Yet he bends his listening ear to hear our cry coming from a slimy pit of our own making. Oh the grace of God. Wait I say upon the Lord. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint. It is impossible to wait really wait upon God in his glory and in his grace. And be the loser. You may be a waiter but you'll never be a loser. Let us pray. Our heavenly Father we are grateful for your word. To many of us gathered here this evening this experience perhaps is no longer very relevant. In the sense that you have brought us out of the most horrible pit of all. And you've taken us this way. You've put our feet upon the rock and established our goings. And there are certain things that have become part and parcel of our way of living now. And you put a new song in our mouth. And perhaps others have seen the reflection of what you've done in us. And have not only rejoiced but have recognized your hand and turned with us to you. That it may well be our Lord that we know of others our friends fellow citizens who are in precisely this situation tonight. We ask that you will give us the heart of the missionary. The compassion of the Savior. The kind of compulsion that will send us out to share with others the knowledge we have of you. Help us oh Lord in our lives to wait upon you to fulfill your promises in us and through us. And thereby bring honor and praise to your holy name. For these things we ask in Jesus name. Amen.