Transcription
There is a terrifying difference between knowing about God and truly knowing God.
History is marked by a handful of men and women who paid the ultimate price to live entirely in the consuming presence of the almighty.
But look at the modern church. We want the crown without the cross. We want the glory without the grave. We are dying of spiritual hypothermia because we have embraced a cheap, comfortable religion that costs us absolutely nothing.
We read about the great saints of the past, yet we cannot even sit in a room for 10 minutes to seek his face without reaching for our phones. We are a generation paralyzed by distraction because we refuse to pay the agonizing, beautiful cost of knowing God.
Today, we are going to confront this comfortable apathy through the prophetic voice of A.W. Tozer. He was a man who despised mechanical religion and understood that the secret place demands a funeral, the absolute death of your flesh.
Before we dive into this devastating truth, please take 1 second to leave a like on this video. It tells the algorithm that this generation is still hungry for true biblical depth and let us know where the remnant is watching from. Leave a comment below with your city and country.
Now, let us address the coldness in your own spiritual life. God provides the fire, but [music] you must provide the wood. He will not send his presence upon an altar that is in ruins.
If your prayer life is inconsistent, if you are paralyzed by spiritual apathy, and if you have no structure when you close your door to pray, you must rebuild your altar.
Your Bible is your ultimate foundation, but if you need a tactical battle plan to conquer your flesh and build the discipline of the secret place, we created [music] a tool for you. It is called the war room manual and it is linked in the pinned comment below. It is a tactical guide to help you silence the noise, focus your mind, and stay on your knees until the fire falls.
Now, prepare your heart. Let us listen to A.W. Tozer.
>> My beloved, I come to you tonight not with the soft and perfumed words of a salesman of religion, but with a burden that has laid upon my chest like a millstone, a burden born of long nights and longer silences, a burden that the spirit of the living God has pressed into my soul until I can no longer carry it alone.
There is a sickness in the modern church, a sickness so subtle and so refined that we mistake it for health.
We have built sanctuaries of stained glass and polished wood. We have erected platforms and amplified our voices. We have multiplied our programs and our publications, and yet in all of this elaborate machinery, there is a hollow place where God himself ought to dwell. And that hollow place echoes with our own busyness, not with the thunder of his voice.
We have learned to talk about God with the fluency of theologians and the confidence of scholars, but we have forgotten how to tremble in his presence. We have made of the almighty a domesticated deity, a tame lion to be petted and consulted, a celestial therapist to soothe our anxieties and bless our ambitions.
And the tragedy, my brethren, is not that the world has rejected this God of our making, but that we ourselves have settled for him. And in settling for him, we have lost the only God who is.
Hear me carefully, for what I am about to say is not the fevered rhetoric of a man trying to stir an audience, but the sober observation of one who has stood at the edge of eternity and looked down into the abyss of his own poverty before the holiness of God.
There is a knowledge of God which is merely intellectual, a possession of facts about him, a memorization of his attributes, a familiarity with his vocabulary. And this knowledge, while not in itself evil, can become the most dangerous obstacle to truly knowing him.
For the man who knows about God may sit comfortably in his pew and never once feel the searing breath of the seraphim. Never once cover his face as Isaiah did and cry out, "Woe is me, for I am undone."
The man who merely knows about God can quote chapter and verse and yet remain a stranger to the consuming fire. He has the map, but he has never made the journey. He has the menu, but he has never tasted the bread of heaven. He has the photograph of the beloved, but he has never embraced her in the flesh.
And this, my friends, is the condition of multitudes who fill the pews of evangelical churches across the continent. They are theologically literate and spiritually illiterate. They can debate the finer points of doctrine while their hearts remain as cold as the marble of a mausoleum.
The God of the scriptures is not a concept to be grasped by the mind alone, but a person to be encountered by the whole soul. He is the one who dwells in light unapproachable, before whom the cherubim veiled their faces, whose voice shakes the wilderness and breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He is not safe. He is not predictable. He is not manageable.
And the moment we attempt to manage him, the moment we attempt to package him for easy consumption, the moment we reduce him to a series of propositions to be affirmed, in that very moment we cease to know him at all.
We may know our doctrine of him, but the living God has slipped away from us like water through clenched fingers, and we are left holding nothing but the dry husk of religious correctness.
And there are whole denominations today, whole movements, whole networks of churches that are holding nothing but the husk and calling it the harvest. They are clutching the empty shell and calling it the pearl. They have a form of godliness, but they have denied the power thereof, and from such the Apostle says, "Turn away."
The great saints of the centuries, those rare and burning souls whose lives still cast their shadow across the church, were men and women who refused this counterfeit. They would not settle for a religion of words and rituals. They demanded God himself, and they were willing to pay any price, endure any suffering, suffer any reproach to lay hold of him.
Think of those who fled to the deserts, who sold their possessions and gave to the poor, who spent decades in caves and cells wrestling with the angel of the Lord until the breaking of day. Think of the reformers who would rather face the flames than deny what they had seen. Think of the missionaries who buried their children in foreign soil because they could not bear to disobey the heavenly vision. Think of the praying men and women whose closets became Bethels and whose tears became wells of living water.
These were not men of stronger constitution than we, nor were they born with some special spiritual aptitude that has been denied to us. They were men and women like ourselves with the same flesh, the same temptations, the same fears, the same propensity to wander, but they had this one thing which we lack. They had a holy desperation, a divine dissatisfaction with anything less than God himself. And that desperation drove them into the secret place and kept them there until they had touched the hem of his garment.
And what of us? What of this generation that has more Bibles than any generation in history? More sermons available at the touch of a finger, more conferences and books and resources than our forefathers could have imagined in their wildest dreams.
Are we more holy? Are we more like Christ? Are our prayers more fervent? Are lives more separated? Our love for the lost more consuming?
I tell you with sorrow that we are not. We have multiplied our resources and divided our hearts. We have gained the world of religious goods and lost our own souls in the process.
We have built a kingdom of comfortable Christianity, a kingdom where the cross has been gilded and the grave has been gardened, where the call to die has been replaced by an invitation to thrive, where the narrow way has been widened into a six-lane highway with rest stops every few miles for the convenience of the spiritually undernourished pilgrim.
And we wonder why there is no power, no presence, no holy fear, no revival. We wonder why our youth abandon the faith in droves, why our marriages crumble at the same rate as the world's, why our witness is laughed at and our influence is despised. We wonder, but the answer is plain to any who will see. We have refused the cost. We have refused the cross. We have refused the death that alone leads to life.
The cross, beloved, is not a piece of jewelry to be worn around the neck as a fashion statement. It is not a symbol to be embroidered on banners and printed on bulletins. The cross is the instrument of execution, the place where condemned criminals were nailed up to die in shame and agony.
And when our Lord called us to take up our cross and follow him, he was not inviting us to a religious hobby or a self-improvement seminar. He was summoning us to the place of our own crucifixion.
He was telling us that to follow him we must die, and not just die metaphorically or symbolically, but die actually, die daily, die to our ambitions, die to our reputations, die to our preferences, die to our comforts, die to that proud and stubborn self which sits enthroned in the deepest recess of our being and demands to be served.
The self which says, "My will, my way, my time, my desires, my plans." This self must be dragged to the cross and nailed there, and there is no shortcut, no easier path, no way around it.
The flesh will not crucify itself. The flesh must be crucified, and the nails of obedience must be driven through its grasping hands by the hammer of the spirit, and there it must hang until it has breathed its last.
And yet how we resist this work, how we writhe against the nails, how we cry out for the executioner to relent, to wait until tomorrow, to take some easier route. We come to the cross willing to surrender 90%, willing to surrender 99%, but there is always that final stronghold, that last citadel of the self, that one corner of the heart which we have reserved for ourselves and into which we will permit no intruder, not even God.
And it is precisely there, in that reserved corner, that the issue decided. It is precisely there that the question is settled whether we shall know God or merely know about him.
For God will have all of us or none of us. He will not enter as a tenant into a house where he is not the owner. He will not accept partial sovereignty over a partial kingdom. He demands the throne, the whole throne, the undivided throne, and until we have abdicated and laid the crown at his pierced feet, we shall remain on the outside of the kingdom looking in through a window thick with the grime of our own unsurrendered will.
This is what the modern preachers will not tell you. This is the message that has been edited out of the contemporary gospel.
They will tell you that Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, and that much is true as far as it goes. But they will not tell you that the wonderful plan begins with a funeral. Your own funeral, the funeral of everything you have been and everything you have wanted to be apart from him.
They will offer you a Christ without a cross, a salvation without surrender, a heaven without holiness, and what they are offering is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, but a sentimental substitute that cannot save and cannot satisfy and cannot bring you 1 in closer to the consuming presence of the living God.
The gospel that the apostles preached, the gospel that turned the world upside down, the gospel that filled the catacombs with martyrs and the deserts with hermits and the dark places of the earth with light. That gospel begins with the words, "Ye must be born again."
And being born again means that the old self must die before the new self can live. There is no resurrection without a death. There is no Easter a without a Good Friday. There is no glory without the agony of the garden and the abandonment of the cross.
And so we come to that strange and wonderful and terrible truth that the way up is down, that the way to find oneself is to lose oneself, that the way to live is to die. This is the great inversion of the kingdom of God, the divine paradox that confounds the wisdom of the world and makes fools of the philosophers.
The world says, "Exalt yourself and you will be exalted." The kingdom says, "Humble yourself and God will exalt you in due time." The world says, "Grasp and you will gain." The kingdom says, "Release and you will receive." The world says, "Save your life at all costs." The kingdom says, "Lose your life for my sake and you will find it."
And we, my brethren, we are too often men and women of the world wearing the costume of the kingdom. We have memorized the kingdom's vocabulary, but we live by the world's calculus. We sing of surrender on Sunday morning and we live in self-assertion all the rest of the week. We pray, "Thy will be done." while we are busily arranging the universe to suit our own preferences.
And then we wonder why God seems distant, why the heavens seem brass, why our prayers seem to bounce back from the ceiling. He is not distant. We are. He has not changed. We have refused to change. He stands at the door and knocks, but the door is locked from the inside and the lock is the lock of our own unsurrendered will and the key has been placed in our own hands and only we can turn it.
Consider, if you will, the matter of cheap grace, for this is the soft pillow upon which the modern church has laid its head and gone to sleep while the enemy steals away the seed of the kingdom.
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ living and incarnate. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without the cost, and grace without the cost is grace without the Christ.
For the grace of God is not a commodity to be dispensed by religious vending machines in exchange for a tepid prayer and a fleeting moment of religious sentimentality. The grace of God came at the highest price ever paid in the history of the universe, the price of the eternal Son of God hanging in darkness and abandonment on a Roman cross, drinking down the cup of wrath that we deserve to drink down ourselves.
To treat that grace as if it were cheap, to receive it as if it cost us nothing, to live as if it demanded nothing of us, is to spit upon the wounds of the crucified and to crucify him afresh and put him to an open shame.
And yet this is precisely what is being done in the name of grace from a thousand pulpits every Sunday morning. The cross has been turned into a coupon for free admission to heaven, and the church has been turned into a clearinghouse for the distribution of cheap religious goods to a clientele that has no intention whatsoever of taking up its own cross and dying.
But the true grace of God, the costly grace that flows from the wounded side of the Savior, this grace does not let us alone. This grace pursues us into every corner of our lives. This grace demands the keys to every room of the house, including the locked room where we have hidden our secret sins. This grace will not be satisfied until every idol has been thrown down, every altar of false worship has been demolished, every chain of bondage has been broken, and the soul stands naked and free before its creator with nothing between it and him.
This grace is fire, and fire purifies, but it also burns. This grace is light, and light illuminates, but it also exposes. This grace is the surgeon's scalpel, and it cuts deep. It cuts to the bone. It cuts away every malignancy of the soul until what remains is only what God himself has placed there.
And the man who has come under this grace, the man who has truly tasted the heavenly gift, will never again be content with the shallow waters of religious convention. He has waded into the deep, and the depths have called to him, and he can no longer be satisfied with anything less than the consuming fellowship of the holy.
Now, let us speak plainly of the secret place. For this is where the great transactions of the soul occur. This is where God meets with his own, and reveals to them the secrets of his heart.
The secret place is not a room with four walls, though it may have four walls. The secret place is not a particular hour of the morning, though it may be observed at a particular hour. The secret place is a condition of the soul, a posture of the heart, a determined withdrawal from all that is not God in order to be alone with him who is.
And in this withdrawal, there must be a great silencing, for the noise of the world has invaded our inner sanctuary, and we have grown so accustomed to the perpetual chatter that we mistake it for normalcy.
We carry our distractions with us into prayer. We bring our anxieties to the altar like uninvited guests. We attempt to pray while half our mind is reviewing the day that has passed and the other half is planning the day to come and we wonder why we do not meet with God. We do not meet with him because we have never truly come into his presence. We have come into the antichamber perhaps and we have called the antichamber the throne room, but the king himself is further in and only those who are willing to leave behind the clamor of the outer courts will find him.
I tell you the truth, the device in your pocket has become for many a tabernacle of distraction, a portable idol of light and noise that demands its tribute every few minutes throughout the day. We cannot sit still. We cannot be silent. We cannot endure the slightest gap in stimulation without reaching for it as a drowning man reaches for a rope.
And then we wonder why our prayer life is shallow, why we cannot hear the still small voice, why God seems to have grown silent. He has not grown silent, we have grown deaf. We have filled the chambers of our souls with so much noise that the gentle whisper of the spirit cannot be heard above the din and until we are willing to put it down, to walk away from it, to leave it in the other room when we close the door to pray, we shall never know the deep silences of God. Those holy silences in which the soul is unmade and remade, in which the dross is burned away and the pure gold of the divine nature begins to glow in the heart of the worshiper.
The mystics knew this, those much maligned saints whose writings the modern Protestant has often dismissed as if they were the ravings of unbalanced enthusiasts, but they had seen something that we have not seen. They had tasted something that we have not tasted. They had pressed in past the outer courts of religious observance and had entered into the inner sanctuary where the Shekinah dwells.
And what they brought back from that holy place was a knowledge of God that humbles all our academic theology and shames our shallow professions.
They had learned that God is not found in the rush and the hurry, but in the long patient waiting of the soul that has set itself to seek him and will not be turned aside. They had learned that the love of God is a love so deep, so wide, so high, so consuming that to glimpse it even for a moment is to be ruined for all lesser loves forever. They had learned that the presence of God is the only thing in the universe worth pursuing and that everything else, every other ambition, every other treasure, every other affection must be ordered beneath that one supreme pursuit or it will become an idol that competes with God for the throne of the heart.
And so I call you beloved to enter into the secret place and to stay there, not for 10 minutes, not for the brief time it takes to recite your list of requests and your dutiful thanksgivings and to escape back into the rush of the day.
Stay, wait, linger, be still. Let the noise drain out of your soul like water from a cracked vessel until there is nothing left but the quiet pool of your own attention turned wholly upon him and then wait some more.
Do not rush. Do not be anxious to receive some impression or some emotion or some confirmation of your spiritual progress. He is not in a hurry and if you are to know him, you must learn to keep step with the unhurried pace of eternity.
The watchman waited through the long watches of the night for the morning and the morning came in its own time, and so the soul that waits for God shall not be disappointed, but the waiting is real, and the night is real, and the impatience of the flesh must be subdued by the patience of the spirit before the morning star will rise in the heart.
And in this waiting, the great work of mortification begins, the slow and steady putting to death of the flesh with its affections and lusts.
Mortification, that old and forgotten word, that doctrine which our forefathers preached without apology, and which we have buried beneath layers of psychological sophistication and therapeutic euphemism. Mortification means death, and the flesh must die.
And the death of the flesh is not a single moment, but a long and painful process, a daily dying, a moment-by-moment refusal to grant the flesh its demands.
The flesh wants comfort, and the spirit says, "Deny it." The flesh wants recognition, and the spirit says, "Hide it." The flesh wants its preferences honored, and the spirit says, "Lay them down." The flesh wants revenge, and the spirit says, "Bless those that curse you." The flesh wants to nurse its grievances, and the spirit says, "Forgive as you have been forgiven."
And in every one of these small and apparently insignificant battles, the great war is being waged for the soul, and either the flesh is being put to death and the new man is being formed in the likeness of Christ, or the flesh is being indulged and the new man is being smothered in the cradle by our own cowardly capitulations.
There is no neutral ground in this warfare. There is no Switzerland in the kingdom of God. Every moment of every day, we are either advancing or retreating. We are putting to death the deeds of the body or being slowly put to death by them.
And the man who imagines that he can drift along on the current of his natural temperament and yet somehow arrive at the harbor of holiness has deceived himself with a delusion as old as Eden. Holiness is not the result of a passive cruise, but of an active war. And the war is waged on the soil of the soul, and the casualties are real, and the wounds are real, and the glory of the victory is real, and there is no way around the battle for anyone who would wear the crown.
Consider how Christ himself approached the secret place, he who was the eternal Son of God and yet who took upon himself the form of a servant and lived among us as one of us. He rose a great while before day and departed into a solitary place to pray. He sent the multitudes away and went up into a mountain apart to pray. He spent whole nights in prayer to God.
If the sinless Son of God, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, found it necessary to withdraw from the press of the crowd and the demands of ministry in order to commune with his Father, what shall be said of us, who are so much weaker, so much more easily distracted, so much more deeply infected with the disease of the world?
And yet we imagine that we can live spiritually fruitful lives on the scraps of devotion we throw to God between meetings, between meals, between scrolls of the endless feed. We are starving ourselves spiritually and wondering why we are weak. We are dehydrating ourselves at the wells of distraction >> [clears throat] >> and wondering why we thirst.
The wells of living water are open. The secret place is available. The curtain has been rent in twain from the top to the bottom by the death of the Son, and we have access into the Holy of Holies that the Old Testament saint could only dream of, and yet we stand outside the curtain as if it were still hanging, as if we had no admission, as if the privilege had not been purchased for us at the price of his blood.
What a tragedy, what a scandal, what a reproach upon the church of Jesus Christ that the throne of grace stands open and we do not approach it! That the king is in his chamber and we do not seek his face. That the bread of heaven is on the table and we are content with the husks the swine refuse to eat.
Oh brethren, the problem has never been with God. The problem has never been with the gospel. The problem has never been with the resources available to the believer in Christ. The problem is with us. The problem is with our cold hearts and our wandering minds and our unsurrendered wills and our love affair with the world.
The problem is that we want God on our terms and God will not be had on our terms. He must be sought on his terms and his terms are the cross, the death of self, the absolute surrender of all that we are and all that we have to his sovereign purposes.
And until we accept those terms, we shall remain on the outside of the experience even while we sit on the inside of the church.
But hear me. Hear me. For I do not bring you only the diagnosis without the prescription, only the wound without the balm.
There is hope. There is more than hope. There is the certain promise of God that whoever draws near to him, he will draw near to them. There is the promise that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled. There is the promise that those who seek him with the whole heart shall find him.
The Almighty has not made the secret place inaccessible. He has not built the kingdom upon some impossible standard that only the spiritual elite can attain. He has placed the keys to the kingdom in the hands of any sinner who is willing to come empty, willing to come humble, willing to come desperate, willing to come with nothing in his hands except his own ruined need.
The publican who could only beat upon his breast and cry, "God be merciful to me a sinner." went down to his house justified. The thief on the cross who could only gasp out his confession with his dying breath was that very day in paradise with the Lord. The prodigal who came home in his rags and his shame found the father running down the road to meet him.
Our God is not far. Our God is not reluctant. Our God is not a hard master gathering where he has not strewed. Our God is the father of the prodigal, the shepherd of the lost sheep, the friend of sinners, the lover of souls, and he waits. He waits with infinite patience and infinite tenderness for the wandering child to turn his face homeward.
But the turning must be real. The repentance must be deep. The surrender must be total. We cannot come halfway and call it home. We cannot bring our idols with us and place them on the mantle of the father's house. We cannot keep one foot in Egypt and one foot in Canaan and expect to enjoy the milk and honey of the promised land. The crossing of the Jordan is a crossing and it leaves Egypt behind. And the man who turns to look back like Lot's wife will be turned into a pillar of salt, frozen forever in the posture of his divided heart.
Wholeheartedness is the price of true communion. And wholeheartedness is rare in our day, rare as gold in the dust, rare as a diamond in the gravel of the riverbed.
But where it is found, where a soul has truly given itself over without reservation, where every chamber of the heart has been thrown open to the inspection of the spirit, there God comes, there God dwells, there God makes himself known in ways that the half-hearted will never understand and will be tempted to dismiss as fanaticism or excess.
Let them dismiss it. Let the lukewarm scoff and the worldly mock and the comfortable shake their heads at the supposed extremism of the burning ones.
The burning ones know what they have seen and what they have seen has spoiled them for the entertainments of the carnal church and the diversions of the dying world.
They have looked into the eyes of him whose eyes are as a flame of fire. And once you have seen those eyes, no other gaze can satisfy you. They have heard the voice that sounds as the voice of many waters. And once you have heard that voice, no other music can content your ear. They have tasted of the heavenly gift. And once you have tasted of that gift, no other bread can fill you, no other wine can gladden you, no other table can satisfy the deep hunger that has been awakened in the depths of the soul.
This is what is meant by knowing God, not the dry recitation of his attributes, but the burning encounter with his person. Not the intellectual ascent to a creed, but the experiential apprehension of the one whom the creed describes. Not religion, but relationship. Not ritual, but reality.
And this is what is on offer to every believer in Jesus Christ. This is the inheritance of the saints in light. This is the unsearchable riches of Christ which Paul preached among the Gentiles and which we have substituted for trinkets of religious convention because we have lacked the courage and the desperation to lay hold of what is rightfully ours in him.
I beg you, I plead with you, I lay this burden upon your soul in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not be content with the husk. Do not settle for the menu. Do not be satisfied with the photograph.
Press in, press through, press past the curtains of religious convention into the inner sanctuary where God himself awaits you.
Lay down the device, silence the noise, drive the money changers out of the temple of your heart and let the place be cleansed for the worship of the one who has paid the price to make you his own.
Take up your cross daily and follow him into the strange and beautiful country of holiness where the air is thin and the light is bright and the inhabitants walk in a perpetual awareness of the divine presence.
The journey will cost you everything you presently possess, but what you will gain is the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field, the kingdom that cannot be shaken, the friendship of the almighty, the satisfaction of the soul and finally when the journey is done and the last mile is traveled, the welcome of the master himself.
"Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
And in that day when we stand before him, all the costs that seemed so terrible in the moment will appear as nothing, less than nothing, vanity of vanities when measured against the weight of glory that shall be revealed in us.
The tears we shed in the secret place will be the jewels in our crowns. The hours we spent on our knees when we could have been amusing ourselves will be the treasure laid up in heaven where neither moth nor rust corrupts. The pleasures we forsook, the comforts we surrendered, the ambitions we crucified, the friendships we lost for his sake, all of these will appear in that day as the wisest investments ever made.
While the careers we built and the reputations we secured and the entertainments we devoured will be revealed for what they were, wood and hay and stubble, consumed in a moment by the fire of his searching eye, leading us to stand naked of all that we trusted in apart from him.
Choose then, while there is yet time to choose. The flesh will not crucify itself, but it can be brought to the cross by the determined will of the believer who has made up his mind that he shall know God or die in the seeking.
The spirit is given to help our infirmities. The grace is given to enable our obedience. The strength is given to those who acknowledge their weakness and cry out to the Lord for help.
You are not alone in this. The whole company of heaven is cheering you on. The cloud of witnesses watches from the grandstands of glory, those who have run the race before us and who beckon us to lay aside every weight and the sin which does so easily beset us and to run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Look unto him. Look unto him in the secret place. Look unto him when the flesh cries out for indulgence. Look unto him when the world offers its bribes and the devil whispers his lies. Look unto him when the way is long and the night is dark and the heavens seem brass. He is there. He sees. He knows. He is faithful to perform that good work which He has begun in you, and He will not abandon the work of His own hands.
Only do not abandon Him. Only do not turn back. Only do not exchange the eternal weight of glory for the passing pleasures of sin and the cheap consolations of a religion that has lost its God.
May the Lord of hosts breathe upon this generation as He breathed upon the valley of dry bones in the prophet's vision, and may these bones live, and may an exceeding great army stand up to His glory.
And may we be among them, having paid the cost, having borne the cross, having entered the secret place, having known Him whom to know is life eternal.
To Him be the glory both now and forever, world without end. Amen.