Ngụ Ngôn Người Canh Vườn Nho – Ai Là Chủ Đời Sống?

We live in an age that’s been called the Age of Psychology, and it’s because never before in history has a society looked at so much of life and looked at so much of their reality in terms of psychological forces, internal emotional dynamics. In light of that interest in psychology, it’s pretty fascinating to notice the Bible says a great deal of our behavior can only be understood and can only be explained in terms of a deep dynamic of emotional, spiritual repression.

Let me say that again. The Bible teaches a great deal of our behavior, a tremendous amount of our behavior, cannot be understood or explained except in terms of a deep dynamic of emotional and spiritual repression. The Bible says we’re repressing something. You can’t understand yourself until you understand what that is. Now, you know, the words repression and denial are pretty important concepts in modern psychology, so I got out three old textbooks of mine (actually one of them is not too old), and I looked up repression. I found they all agreed. This is what they said. I looked up some definitions.

First of all they defined psychological force as a motivational construct that directs your behavior. What is a psychological force? Very often psychologists talk about conflict of psychological forces. A psychological force is a motivational construct, it said, that determines behavior. What really you’re after. What drives you. Then, of course, it says something that is common sense.

One of the problems we have in life is many of the things we all want are at loggerheads with each other. In other words, we have motivational structures that are directing us toward this goal and directing us toward this goal, but very often as we reach for one, we lose another. If we reach for this one, we lose another. We can’t have it all. That creates conflicts, the textbook said. It creates anxiety and pain, which we tend, in whole or in part, to repress. This is the great place.

One of the textbooks said what does repression result in? If you’re angry, if you’re passionate, if you’re afraid and you will not admit it, if you repress it, what is the result? The one textbook said repressed material over-determines behavior. Great word: over-determines. When you won’t admit how mad you are, when you won’t admit how afraid you are, when you won’t admit something that’s there, it over-determines your behavior. It powerfully controls you. It dominates you. It moves you around because you don’t know it’s there.

In other words, when you repress something, you know a fact at one level but not at the level at which you can realize and address it. You know it at some level but not at a level where you can realize and address it. Now the Bible says there is something we repress that’s even beneath our other repressions. The Bible actually says something none of these textbooks tell anything about. The textbooks talk about a lot of things we just won’t admit: sexual attraction and self-hatred and all sorts of other things.

The Bible says underneath your self-deprecation, underneath your inhumanity or anger toward other people, underneath everything else, the thing that is really repressed, that thing is over-determining your behavior, the thing you can’t admit and, therefore, it’s over-determining your behavior is an enmity, an antagonism, an animosity, a contempt, yea verily, a hatred for God himself.

The Bible says the nature of the human heart is not just that you’re indifferent to God, not just that you don’t like God, but it is intrinsic to every human heart, a contempt, an enmity, an anger, a hatred for God. You won’t admit it, the Bible says. See, in Romans 8:4, Paul says, “The natural mind is enmity toward God. It will not submit to the law of God. Indeed, it cannot.” We’ll get back to that in a minute.

Then also in the book of Romans (Romans 1), it says we hold down what we know of God. We know it, but we hold down the truth in unrighteousness. What’s Paul saying? What’s the Bible saying? The Bible is saying what counselors know, that real hatred hides itself so it can do its work without obstruction. The Bible says there’s a contempt and there’s an anger toward God we will not admit. As a result, it affects our lives. That’s actually what this parable is about.

This is what’s so ironic about it. The reaction of the parable shows exactly what the Bible says. The fact of your anger toward God is seen in how incredibly angry and irritated you get if anybody tries to tell you this is the case. Even as Jesus is talking about two groups of people and saying, “You are angry at God. You say you serve God. You’re religious leaders. You’re religious people, but you hate him,” as he tells them this story, they want to kill him.

The very thing he illustrates, he evokes. How do you react to the parable? How do you react to this message? Let’s take a look at the parable. Let’s take a look at three key relationships inside, you might say, the narrative structure of the parable and see what each of them teaches us spiritually, what each of them teaches us about this great and critical and important and unpopular teaching.

First of all, let’s look at the tenants’ relationship to the owner. Then secondly, the tenants’ relationship to the messengers. Then thirdly, the tenants’ relationship to the son. Each one tells us something pretty radical.

1. The tenants’ relationship to the owner

What is the tenants’ relationship to the owner? It’s pretty clear from the parable, and it’s pretty self-evident over the years. There’s not a big culture gap here. The relationship of the tenants to the owner is they must tend his vineyard for him. See, a man bought a vineyard, invested in the vineyard, planted the vineyard. Then he goes on a journey, and he leaves a group of tenant farmers to tend it.

What is the responsibility, what is the relationship, what is the obligation of the tenants to the owner? It’s self-evident. It was the owner’s risk. It was the owner’s investment. It was the owner’s money. Therefore, the tenants get their pay, but they have to tend this garden in a particular way. They have to tend the garden for the owner. How? That means they have to tend it by his word and for his profit. Just think about that for a second.

By his word means they can’t tend it any ol’ way they want. They can’t treat the vineyard any way they want. They have to find out what his policies are. So they have to tend it by his word. Then secondly, they have to tend it for his profit, which means they get their pay, of course. If he is paying them a fair wage, they get their pay, but he gets the profits.

That’s something we’ve known for years, you know? This is in a pre-capitalistic society, and yet it’s still obvious if you put the money up and if you put the investment in and you pay somebody to work in your vineyard or work in your grocery store or whatever, the profits or the deficits belong to the owner.

In other words, by his word, they have to tend it for his profit. We’re told Jesus’ initial thrust, the main people he is talking to (or you might say the first set of people this parable is directed toward) are the religious leaders of Israel. You can go back to Isaiah 5 and Jeremiah 2 and Psalm 80 to see this. It was common in the Old Testament for the prophets to call Israel God’s vineyard. God had given Israel many things. God had given them their homeland. God had given them the Law. God had given them the Word. God had given them the temple.

This was their vineyard. They were given these things, and the religious leaders were seen as the tenants. It was their job as the leaders of Israel to govern Israel by God’s Word (not according to their own wisdom and tradition) and for his profit (not for their own power and aggrandizement). Of course, therefore, the first people this parable is aimed at are the religious leaders of Israel, but the broader point is absolutely critical for us to see. That’s what? That’s just this. You should look at your life. Look what it consists of.

You have biological life. You have emotional life. You have social life. You have gifts. You have talent. You have creativity. It depends on where you were born. You have a certain amount of power, a certain amount of privilege of some kind. You’ve been given all sorts of things. You must recognize you are a tenant farmer. You mustn’t look at life and what you have in life, your possessions, your talents, your intelligence, your life itself, as if you are the owner of your life. You must look at life as if you’re the tenant. That’s the broader point.

Now what do we see in the parable the tenants actually do? The tenants begin to act like owners. That’s the point of the parable. The tenants begin to act like owners. They will not listen to the messengers. They will not tend by the owner’s word, and they will also not give the owner a profit. They will not do it for his profit. Now we know the religious leaders were failing to listen to God’s Word, and they were doing it to feather their own nest, but we need to, for a moment, think about how this has an impact on us, and it’s just this.

The Bible tells us it’s the nature of the human heart to think of itself as the owner of what we have as opposed to the tenants. We are all tenants acting like owners. For example, look at your life. You have a mind. Now listen. This is a frightening thing to hear in a place like New York City. You can’t just do with your mind anything you want. You can’t just believe anything you want. You have a relational and sexual desire. You can’t just use that any way you want.

You have a certain amount of power. You have a certain amount of possessions. You have a certain amount of privileges. You have a certain amount of money. You can’t use those any way you want. I know the world, all the self-help books tell you nobody can decide these for you. You have to decide your own values. You have to set the agenda. That is exactly the opposite of what Jesus is telling us. That’s exactly the opposite of what the Bible is saying.

What those books are saying to you is, “Act like an owner!” What the Bible says is, “No, you’re a tenant.” There are all sorts of ways in which you can act like an owner instead of a tenant. One is you can just say, “I’m going to decide how I use my mind. I’m going to decide how I use my sexuality. I’m going to decide how I use my money,” when the Bible says you have to tend the vineyard by his Word and for his profit. There are all sorts of signs of it.

Some of you are very smart … very smart, natively smart. You also maybe had a great educational background. Do you look down your nose at people who are aren’t as insightful as you, who aren’t as smart as you, who don’t have the same kind of educational background as you? That is a tenant acting like an owner. Something very, very, very common is for people in New York to kind of break into a field together, you know? You first get here to be an actor. You first get here to be in business.

You first get here, and you have a bunch of other young people roughly your age, and they’re all trying to break in together. After 10 years, one of the things so many people can tell me is there were a couple of people who broke out of the pack and got successful. Not always, but so often the successful ones put a lot of emotional distance between themselves and the people they’ve left behind. Why? Because there is a fierce impulse in the human heart to want to believe if you’re successful, it’s because of your superiority, nothing to do with breaks, nothing to do with the right place at the right time. “I did it.” A tenant acting like an owner.

You see it in children all the time. “I don’t need your help,” they say almost as soon as they can talk. “I don’t need your help. I can do it myself,” even though the thing they want to do will probably result in injury or death. What is it? What do we say? We chalk it up. “Children!” Lack of perspective. The Bible says there’s something deeper going on. We all live in the illusion of independence and self-sufficiency, whereas our real condition is dependence and contingency. We don’t want to see it, and we don’t believe it.

The Bible says that is our nature. Maybe now you’re beginning to see what this primal conflict is we repress. Here’s what it is. On the one hand, we know we’re tenants. On the other hand, we hate it. On the one hand, we know we owe the owner. On the other hand, we don’t want to. We want to do it ourselves. We want to take credit for it. We don’t want to admit this is all a gift. There is a deep, deep conflict that arises out of that. We don’t want to have the illusion of independence and self-sufficiency shattered by anybody. Anybody who tries to tell us about it, we hate them for it.

Now there’s where the conflict comes: two deep motivational constructs. On the one hand, there’s this part of us that knows we’re tenants. On the other side, there’s a part of us that desperately wants us to repress the idea there’s an owner. Now somebody says to me, “What do you mean we know we’re tenants? I mean, there are a lot of people who don’t even believe in God. What do you mean we all know we’re tenants?” Think about this for a second. Think with me.

Is there a God? Somebody says, “Well, maybe. Who knows?” Now, you know, let’s be smart about this. Let’s go to the smart people. Let’s take the smart people who really thought these things out. Here’s a guy like Nietzsche who says there’s no God. If there’s no God, when we die, we rot. When the sun goes out, all civilization dies forever, and nobody will ever know what happened.

Zillions of years from now, nobody will ever know what happened, which means, as he said, it makes no difference whether you live a life of compassion or a life of genocidal mania. It makes no difference. There is no right or wrong. There’s no difference between a human being and a stone that falls to the bottom of the river. Nothing means anything if there’s no God. If you’re the owner of your life, life is meaningless.

That’s what Nietzsche said. He said you’re the Übermensch. You’re the Superman. Because there is no God, you belong to you, but there is a catch. If you’re the owner, if you can do anything you want, you have a meaningless existence in which to rule. Now I have met a few people who believe they were the owners of their lives, and they’d thought that out. The average person who acts like an owner will not admit the implications of that.

The person who says, “I believe I can pretty much live my life my own way. There may be a God. I don’t know. He may be there. He can’t speak to me. I’m not sure. I am my own owner.” People will not admit. They will not do what Nietzsche did. They will not do what the smart philosophers have done. Why? It’s repression. “Nothing can destroy the illusion of my independence.”

Because, see, Nietzsche says if you’re an owner and not a tenant, you’re an owner in a meaningless vineyard. Somebody says, “Well, now there is no difference between. You either have a meaningless existence or else you owe God everything, because he created you, which means you owe him everything.” We’re caught.

Now when somebody says, “What do you mean we all know we’re tenants?” we all know it because in spite of what Nietzsche said, in spite of what a few people say. I’ve talked to a few people who say, “Yes, I believe I’m an owner. I believe there is no God, or at least we can’t know. I believe life is meaningless. I believe there’s no such thing as right and wrong,” but we can’t live that way.

We know genocide is wrong. We know human beings are different than stones. We know it, which means we know we’re tenants. We know we have an obligation to something else, but we hate the idea. “Ergo deep motivational structural collision in your subconscious,” says the psychologist. The same thing Paul says.

We hold down the truth in unrighteousness, and we will not admit our hearts hate the very idea of a God who will not let us be in control. “I want to be an owner. I want to be in control.” We want nothing to shatter that illusion. We’re troubled. We’re messed up. Look at the second relationship. The first relationship tells us we know we have an obligation to the owner, but we hate it.

2. The tenants’ relationship to the messengers

Now I’ll be really brief on this one so we can get to the last point, which is the important one. You notice as the owner sends messengers, they beat him up. What does this tell us? Well, don’t forget the immediate thrust of the parable is to remind these religious leaders God has sent them prophets over the years to tell them they’re not tending the vineyard of Israel by God’s Word and for his profit, but they’re tending them by their wisdom and tradition and for their own power and glory.

He sent them prophets over the years, and they did beat them up. Read the book of Jeremiah some time, and you will see they literally beat them up. They killed them. Let’s draw the broader perspective out, and let’s look at us. This parable also reminds us and teaches us God, in his mercy, never just gives us one chance. God says, “I will not leave myself without a witness.” He sends repeated messengers into our lives to tell us what? To tell us we are not owners. He sends repeated messengers into our lives to tell us what? To shatter the illusion that we’re independent and self-sufficient and show us our true condition is dependent and contingent.

Now how does he do that? There are a lot of ways. For some of you, one of God’s messengers has been a parent or maybe even both parents who try to get you to see the truth. Since your parents aren’t perfect, what you’ve done is you’ve latched on to what’s wrong with them so you can discard what they say that’s true. Some of you maybe that’s how you’ve beaten up that messenger. I don’t know.

Some of you the messengers can be certain ministries. It’s just wonderful to know and to realize that for some of you, this very church has been one of God’s messengers that’s shown you the idea of your independence and your self-sufficiency, the idea that you own your life, is an illusion. There are plenty of other churches and ministries that have done it.

For some of you, the messengers have been individual friends who have just been trying to get you to see the truth, but I must go a little further and say the old Bible teachers used to talk about what they called providential messengers. A providential messenger is a near tragedy or a tragedy, a frustration, a disappointment, an unfulfilled longing God sends into your life. What’s the purpose? What is the message? The message is you are not in control of your life.

Let me tell you something, friends. Please reason with me for a minute. I continually get people who try to show me that because their life is so full of troubles and frustrations, somehow the argument is that means they shouldn’t have to believe in God. Look! They say, “Why should I believe in God when you see what a mess my life is and how many things have gone wrong with it?”

Think about it for a minute. The thrust of the argument is opposite. Life, in spite of what the self-help books tell you, will never let you control it. You can set your goals. You can set your agendas. You can decide what your values are. You can decide. If your life has gone pretty much according to your control and your agenda so far, just wait. Some of you maybe say, “Twenty years it’s been going okay.” Just wait. Life will never let you, in the end, believe you’re the owner. Life will never let you act as an owner.

No matter how hard you try to control it, no matter how hard you say, “I’m going to do it my way,” it won’t work. You’ll get beat up. Life won’t let you. Listen. If life won’t act as if you’re the owner, far and away the most obvious explanation is you aren’t the owner. So tell me how in the world the fact that life never does what you want it to do is an argument against the existence of God. What it shows us is you’re not the owner; somebody else is!

I mean, be reasonable. Life is a messenger, constantly coming at you saying, “You’re not in charge. You’re not in control. You’re the tenant. This is a gift, but you really don’t have what it takes to master this. This isn’t yours.” Your conscience isn’t yours. Your creativity isn’t yours. Your sexuality isn’t yours. Your intelligence isn’t yours. Your relationships aren’t yours. These are gifts from God to you. When you try to get into the driver’s seat, you’re like an 8-year-old who is in a car and says, “I want to drive.” You can’t even see over the top of the steering wheel.

The Lord is saying, in his mercy, “I don’t just give you one chance. I keep sending my messengers. I keep sending my messengers, but are you listening to them? What are you doing with the messengers?” May I ask you a really personal question? When we get done with this, we have a time of offering. When the offering plates are going around, I always say think about what God is telling you. Here’s what I’d like you to think about.

What are the messengers God is sending into your life, which you’re just kicking and hitting? You’re beating them up. You’re treating them shamefully. They may be people, people who actually are difficult to live with, but the people, in spite of all their guilt and all the things they have done wrong, are actually messengers to you from God, saying, “You’re not in charge of your life.” The illusion of control, shattered. See?

What other things are coming into your life and you’re hating the circumstances and you’re hating the people who have ruined the agenda? But don’t you see, friends? Underneath all of that depression about how your life is going is an anger at the very idea that somebody else is in charge, and you’re never going to get over your anxiety and your discouragement until you’re willing to say, “I don’t necessarily need this if God isn’t giving it to me. I have decided I have to have it, because I am acting as if I’m an owner, and I say I’m going to run my life my way.”

Maybe God is coming in and saying, “Would you please give me the steering wheel back? Give me the wheel.” How are you treating the messengers? Are you listening to them, or are you beating them up? Are you treating them shamefully?

3. The tenants’ relationship to the son

Now this is the heart of it, and in a sense, there’s not a whole lot to say, because I’ve already said it under all the other headings. You notice if you read the text carefully you’ll see that as time goes on, every messenger who comes, they are a little meaner to him. Their hostility is growing the more messages they get. Finally, when the son shows up, all of that growing, semi-hidden enmity erupts, and they kill him.

The Bible teaches us underneath all of our inhumanity to each other and underneath all of our complaints about how unhappy we are with our lives and underneath a lot of our self-pity is an anger at the idea that we’re not in charge and we know what’s best for us and somebody will not let us be in charge. We hate it. Evidence? What’s the evidence? It’s natural for the human heart … all human hearts … to hate God. The evidence is, the one time in the history of the world in which God made himself physically vulnerable, he was almost immediately jumped upon, kicked, beaten, tortured, and killed.

Jesus says in John 15, he quotes Psalm 69, the great messianic psalm. He quotes Psalm 69, and he says, “They hated me without a cause.” Picking all this theme up, in Romans 8:4 Paul says, “The natural mind is enmity toward God.” You notice he doesn’t say, “The natural mind has enmity toward God.” See, that would be a weaker statement. He doesn’t say that. He says, “The natural mind is enmity.” We will not, and we cannot … We are incapable of admitting our hatred over the control of God over our lives unless there’s a supernatural intervention by the Holy Spirit.

The natural mind is enmity against God. You know, it shows up. We don’t want to admit it, and I know there are going to be people … Probably once a year I get on this theme. It’s been a long time (maybe never) that I’ve preached a whole sermon on it. Generally, I get disturbed people who say, “This is silly. I’m indifferent to God. Maybe I’m disobeying God, but I think it’s wrong for you to say I’m really angry at God.”

I would go so far as to say here’s how you know you’re a Christian. Here’s how you know you’re really becoming a Christian. Here’s how you know the Holy Spirit is opening your eyes. Because it takes the Holy Spirit to see sin is not just a violation of this or that rule and regulation, but sin is a whole attitude of resentment toward the crown claims of Christ over your life and that it permeates you. The hatred of God will not be admitted, but it’s there.

Look. First of all, under an awful lot of intellectual skepticism, there’s really hatred of God. People have all their intellectual arguments. So many times I’ve asked people, “If I could answer this intellectual argument to your satisfaction, would you give your life over to Christ?” Very often people will say, “No.” Remember Aldous Huxley’s interesting quote? He was very honest. He said, “I didn’t want the universe to have meaning. I wanted there not to be a God because I wanted to sleep with whomever I wanted to sleep with.”

He was really honest. Here’s a brilliant mind, a great philosopher. He says, “I didn’t want to believe in God, because I wanted to sleep with this lady.” What is that? In other words, no matter how smart a person is, underneath the veneer of skepticism can be an absolute hatred, “I’m going to lose control of my life? I won’t be able to sleep with her if I want to if I become a Christian?” What’s going on here? There’s an anger against God that’s controlling the thinking. The thinking is disturbed. You won’t admit it. You’re not objective.

On the other hand, let me point something else out. A lot of religiosity, not just skepticism, is fueled by anger at God. Do you remember the Flannery O’Connor character? Another great quote I love so much. It was one of her characters. She said he knew “… the best way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”

Remember that? There are a lot of people like that. The best way to avoid Jesus is to avoid sin. Why do you think so many people are so religious, so moral, and so proud of it? They have their doctrine right. They go to church, and they look down their noses at other people. They’re smug, and they feel like, “God certainly is going to be happy to receive me into heaven.”

Where does that come from? Do you know where that comes from? If you’re sure you’re good and you feel like you’re better than other people, then you don’t need to admit you’re a sinner saved only by grace, held up every second by the sheer mercy of God. Great religion, tremendous morality, is a way for a lot of people to keep control of their lives, to avoid losing control. It’s out of a hatred of the idea that God actually is in charge.

Religiosity. These people would never admit they hate God, and yet the reason they’re smug instead of warm, the reason they’re self-righteous instead of humble in their religiosity, shows there’s a desire to get out from under God and the gospel and the idea that you can be saved sheerly and completely by grace. The way to avoid Jesus is to avoid sin. A lot of people avoid sin to avoid Jesus out of hatred for the idea of losing control.

How do you know you’re a Christian? You begin to see this. In fact, Christians are the only people who know they hate God. Even though Christians know they’re no longer enemies of God, God has slain the enmity, instead of being enemies we are reconciled through the cross of Christ and we have a love of God in our hearts, we still know there’s a lot of enmity left, don’t we?

Christian friends, don’t you know how on a Sunday, you may come in here kind of bitter against somebody, and the Lord’s Supper comes around, and suddenly what Jesus did on the cross gets so real to you. What he did for you gets more real than what was done to you, and you forgive. Two days later, you can’t even remember that feeling, right? You’re just as bitter as you were. Do you know what that is? Why is it, Christian friends, your hearts are a lot like a bucket of water on a very, very cold day? You have to keep breaking the ice. Continually it keeps forming.

Do you know what that ice comes from? Do you know where the cold is? It’s the remnants of the enmity, and you have to keep breaking the ice. Christians are the only ones who know that. If you know you hate God, it means you are a Christian or you’re becoming a Christian. If you think this is a ridiculous idea, you’re running. You’re in denial. You need to recover. That’s what the Bible says.

What did God do about this? What can be done about this? If I had another half hour, I could do the exegesis on it. I’m just going to have to summarize. Jesus says the stone the builders rejected became the cornerstone. He quotes from that passage (Psalm 118). He is the stone on which you can either build or if you reject it, it will crush you. Here’s what he is saying. This is so wonderful.

When the son shows up, he is killed out of enmity, but the wisdom and the beauty and the glory of the gospel is the very killing that comes from the enmity is the very way in which God slays the enmity. In Ephesians 2:16, it says on the cross, though we were enemies … we were mad at God and, therefore, there was a barrier between us, God slew the enmity. That’s from the old King James Version. Ephesians 2:16 says God on the cross slew the enmity.

Now look up on the cross. What do you see up there being destroyed? There’s nothing up there but Christ, and that’s the point. Look at the lengths to which God would go to make us his friends, though we were his enemies and won’t even admit it. He made Jesus the enmity. Legally he made him the enmity, you see? It says in 2 Corinthians 5, God reconciled the world to him on the cross. How? He made Jesus sin who knew no sin.

He treated Jesus as the enemies we are, and he paid for our sin so God could come in with his Holy Spirit and open our eyes and show us our enmity. You see, if you don’t admit you’re an enemy, you will stay one, and you’ll be crushed by the stone. If you admit you’re an enemy, you will no longer be one, and it will be a building stone. There’s no in between. Either you will build your life on the stone (though I deserved to be treated like an enemy, Jesus was treated like an enemy for me; he was slain), or else you reject that and you stay an enemy.

Jesus says what happens to those who stay enemies till the end. You will either be crushed by the stone or you build a whole new life on the stone. There’s nothing in the middle. Do you understand that? Am I trying to scare you? Sure! How do you do an intervention with somebody who is in denial? You get them into a corner and you scare them.

George MacDonald said either some time during this life you say, “God, thy will be done. I am not my own,” or else at the end of time, Jesus will look at you and say, “All right. Thy will be done. You are your own. You wanted to be an owner. You wanted to hold yourself up. You wanted to be in charge of your life. Go.”

Am I trying to scare you? Sure. That’s the only way to deal with people who are in denial. What you have to see is he was … Listen. This will wake anybody up from the sleep of denial. Jesus Christ was willing to die for you. He was willing to become an enemy and be treated like an enemy for you. How can it be dangerous to give control of your life to somebody like that? It can’t be. Wake up out of the sleep of denial with the thought of his love. He became the enmity for you. He was slain on the cross so that instead of enemies, we could be his friends. Listen to the messengers. Listen to the messengers! Let’s pray.