If I Were a Teacher...

1. Read James 3:1-12 together. Are you convinced the tongue is as critical to your spiritual life as James says it is? Why or why not?
2. Why do you think the text say that teachers will be judged more strictly?
3. How do our words reveal our spiritual condition and character? What are some examples of words you've used that might not reflect your true character or spiritual well-being?
4. Verses 4-5 compare the tongue to a small fire that can set a great forest on fire. Can you recall a time when words, either yours or someone else’s, caused significant harm or good?
5. Read Matthew 12:36-37. What are some examples of how we speak carelessly to each other or to ourselves?
6. Assess your relationships and the impact of your words on the people around you. Who is someone that needs a life-giving word this week?

Prayer + Practice:

This week, rather than starting your day with your to-do list, start by considering what you need to hear from God and what you need to say back to him and say to others during your day. Begin each day this week focusing on the tongue and asking for God’s help by praying, meditating on, and memorizing Psalm 19:14, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”

James has been teaching us about genuine faith, how it works, which means, what does a life in relationship to God look like for real? That may be a better way to say it. James says it's transformative and it's actually very productive, because he says at the end of chapter two, faith works, works. Faith is active, working, producing works. It produces an enduring life, a controlled, emotional life, a compassionate life, self aware life, welcoming truth, kind of a life, an ethical life.

And in all of that, James connects. What for him is definitely a picture of genuine faith at work is that the inside and the outside of your life match. So it's an internal work and it is an external work. And one of the ways, or key ways that James explains the dynamic of the inside and the outside coming together is through the image of the tongue and the heart, the external and the internal. And he connects them inextricably to one another.

And he moves very fluidly, as we'll see as we continue to move through the book, he moves very fluidly from works to words.

Words to James are works. Words are actions to James. And so remember in chapter one where we saw if anyone thinks he's religious, it's kind of a summary of the chapter. If anyone thinks he's religious, but does not bridle his tongue, same word he's going to use in chapter two here, deceives his heart. So he connects the heart and tongue right here and just says, you don't even have what you think you have.

If there's a disconnect between these two, our words give away our spiritual condition. That's all James is saying. And for James, it's the primary way, it's the easiest way to assess your soul. So in every chapter, James will allude to speech and tongue. And somehow, through these next twelve verses, I will try to show you the beauty in which James does that.

Throughout the book, our whole lives, our spiritual well being and our relational well being are all dependent on words. They dictate reality. The words you say to God, the words you say to yourself, and the words you say to others, James will surface all of those, and we will. And you'll be able to distinguish a life simply by what you say. Remember when I went through James earlier in our series, and I just wrote down everything the tongue does that's unhealthy.

And there they are, selfish, judgmental, demanding, assaulting, swearing, evil, blaming God, all of those things. And then if you go through James and look at all the things that the tongue does well, asking, that's interacting relationally, praying, blessing, calling, teaching, surrendering, confessing, loving. All of these things are happening in James. And you can see two distinct lives just based on words. It's two distinct lives.

So if you were to go to James and say, you know, I'm just here for a spiritual checkup, James, he would say, stick your tongue out.

I had yesterday two doctors at my house, Maya and Julzy, my little granddaughters, they had their little doctor kit out. They were going to work on getting a splinter, a make believe splinter, out of my hand. They had tweezers, this little box of medical stuff, tweezers, stethoscope, you know, that tongue suppressant. They had a shot, but their favorite thing to do was to stick that thing in my mouth. I was like, now focus on the splinter.

Focus on the splinter. And so they were correct. Look at the tongue. They're going to be brilliant physicians. I can see it.

I can see it. But if you would go to James, you might say, you know, doc, I've got this problem in my life. And you might describe it to him, and he would say, no, that's not your issue. Your tongue is your problem. And you'd go, no, that's not really it, James, I'm hurting.

I'm hurting somewhere else. I think I told you some time ago that about a year ago, just a little over a year ago, I went to see an orthopedic for my knee. I was experiencing some obviously pain in my knees, working out and stuff like that. And my right knee just wasn't getting better. Usually these pains will come and go.

The right knee just wasn't getting better. And so I thought I'd go see him. So I went in there. He had got x rays of both knees, stuck me in a room. There was a little desk right outside the office where I was, and the door was shut, and I could hear the doctor come over, and he was talking into his little recorder right outside my office, or right outside where I was.

And I told you guys, he said, you see, mister Chi Chi o fu struggled with that a little bit. Chiafala. And then he said, all right, pain in the right knee. I'm looking at both knees. It's really the left knee.

I'm hearing this. He hasn't even seen him yet. It's really his left knee that I'm concerned about, not his right knee. So I'm in here going, what's wrong with my left knee? So he finally comes in, and I said, doc, yeah, man, I'm just having this pain here.

And it won't go away. Like normally they go away. He goes, I don't even care about that right knee. That right knee is not even a problem. It's your left knee.

I go, what's up? He goes, you're going to need to replace that. He goes, your right knee is going to be fine. I'm going, yeah, but this is where the pain is. Can you fix this problem here?

You need to worry about that left knee. So I've had to make some adjustments to some of my, you know, what I do to prolong a replacement.

And I can almost hear James, you leave and you go, I think this guy's a quack. I told him my right knee hurts. He's telling me it's my left knee that's the problem. And it's very possible that you will sit here today. I promise you'll do this.

I've been battling it. I promise you'll say, james, I think you're overstating it. I'm not sure the tongue really has that big of an impact.

And it almost seems to me that before these next twelve verses will be relevant to you, you're going to have to wrap your head around the fact that James knows what he's talking about here. And that won't be easy. You get to chapter three and we have to be convinced of the seriousness, our words. And so we come to the core of the book, this little center section, five chapters in James, and we're going to be in this section right here. And these twelve verses introduce it and it begins what you just read on the tongue and it ends with stop speaking evil to one another and the judgment attached to them.

And so in between here, when you have something called an inclusio, you know, it's like a parentheses, what everything that's inside there is related to these two things. And James will talk about your personal life in between there, and he'll relate it back to your mouth, and then he'll talk about your relational life and he'll relate it back to your mouth, and then you'll get to the end of here and he'll talk about your spiritual life and he'll relate it back to your mouth and basically say, there's no area of your life that this is not relevant, it's profound. So in this core now, throughout the book, he talks about this, but this is sort of the center, as if James is saying, you know, I'm looking at, I'm seeing doubt in your eyes when you think of spirituality. I don't think you're thinking of your words, and so I need to help you do that. That's what chapter three, one to twelve, is actually this whole section.

Okay, James, so how about we all just decide? Okay, James, if you're going to say they're that serious, show us. And that's what I think chapter three does.

I want to give you two snapshots because you got twelve verses here. We're not going to look at all of them today. I'm just going to give you a couple of snapshots because I want you to wrap your mind around the series. I think that's what we have to do first.

I'm struggling to do it. James is slowly convincing me.

Two quick snapshots. Here's the first one for we all stumble in many ways. Okay, James, amen to that. Anybody surprised by that? The only thing you're surprised by is how many different ways you can screw up in a week.

Isn't that, are you surprised? Do you surprise yourself every now and then? That was remarkable how much I screwed that up. You ever say, you ever do that? I guarantee you've done that.

I have a gift. All right, so James is saying a variety of ways you'll mess things up. And the word stumble here, it's not used a lot in the New Testament, but here he's just talking about just the constant mess ups. It's like every time I turn around, I'm creating a mess some way, shape or form. James says, ah, but if anyone doesn't stumble in what he says, he's a perfect man.

James is about to say, you don't even know how many times you stumble with your mouth. This, you get this, I'm not sure has really registered, but I will tell you this, what I'm after in this book, and that's what James told us, isn't that what he said in chapter one where he says, let patience have a perfect work, that you may be perfect, lacking nothing. That's the aim of the book. That's maturity, that's completeness.

That's what I want you to be. And you're like, oh, yeah, I got a lot of problems keeping me from that. And James says, your biggest problem is your mouth.

If you want to really be that, you'd focus on this, that it's pretty powerful. That's not what I would focus on.

Like, if you were to come in here today and we were to sit down and I asked you, so how'd you screw up this week or in the last month? I guarantee you'd rattle off a bunch of things. You might not even mention something you said, because you could think of a lot of other things you did that would prioritize in your mind over what you said.

Or if I asked you, what do you think you could do different next week when you think about all the things you've done, you might not even think, I probably ought to talk different.

You think, well, I got to do this and I got to do that. And I've read this book and it says to do that and this says this and this and do that. And I listen to this guy and he says to do that, and everybody's saying, do, do, do, James, you might not. You might not even recognize that. That's the biggest problem.

And you certainly wouldn't say, that's what I need to do most.

That's how I know. We don't know the seriousness of what James is saying.

Your tongue moves faster than any part of your body.

You speak more than you move, you will speak far more evil in your life than you will actually do.

That's interesting. We wrote the biography of your life, and it was just about Pete's failures. Buy this at Amazon. I could go through and list all the big blunders. Might not even have a chapter in there on things I said.

James will say in chapter four, you are murderers and you're adulterers. And most of us in this room, most of us, I assume, would say, I've never murdered anybody. I've never been unfaithful.

James, with your mouth. You've killed more people than your hands could ever kill.

And you've been unfaithful more times with your mouth than you could ever actually do in a lifetime.

That's quite remarkable.

I don't know that that registers. I did hear somebody say, and I've been reflecting on this, purity is easier than confidentiality.

I'll let you meditate on that.

That's worth meditating on.

So that's the first thing James says. Am I getting your attention on seriousness? Here's the second one.

The tongue is a fire. Not like a fire.

It is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. It's set among our members in its unique spot, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. Not like hell, hell itself.

Very few things you do are going to be described, or I do are going to be described like that. I did go and pick up some pictures because I thought it would help us a little bit think about all the fires that we've had over the last couple years, everywhere, you know, in our country, even in our state. Just look at that.

Uncontrollable, overwhelming, nothing in its path alive.

Okay, James, what are you?

A world of evil. The world is cosmos. It's just a world, a cosmos of evil and chaos. The NASB says it represents a world of wrongdoing. It's just a universe of wrongdoing.

And the message says it just sends the whole world up in smoke. We'll look at this verse closer later. But, you know, James is the only person outside of Jesus himself that uses the word gehenna, which is the word for hell. Gehenna was just a Hebrew word transliterated into Greek, and it meant the garbage dump. It was the valley of hinnom.

It was the garbage dump. It had a lot of Old Testament history, evil and immorality and an idolatry associated with evil things. It became the garbage dump for Jerusalem, for outside the city, everybody. That's where garbage went. That's where meaninglessness, if it didn't mean anything, that's where it was.

That's what hell is.

It's just meaninglessness. God's not there. There's no capacity to receive when you're there, and there's no capacity to give.

There's no capacity for joy or meaning there. It's just consuming the horror of everything you normally need as a person you do not get. That's hell. We talk about hell on earth. This is the only text of the eleven times Gehenna's used where rather than it being described as a destination, a place you go to, this is hell itself actually making its way into your life and into your world and onto the earth right in front of you, destroying things.

Hell itself.

It's hard to get more serious than that. I don't know that James could say it anymore.

Weighty. It creates a living hell from hell itself. So I think you're getting the picture. You're not convinced yet.

It will take more. And so all I want to do today for the rest of our time together is just look at the first verse of this chapter and see if James can help us a little bit. And this is the only verse I want to talk about today. Not many of you should become teachers. He says, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater structure, strictness.

He includes himself here. Now. One of the decisions you have to make when you're studying James and you get to chapter three is what. What's he talking, who are the teachers? What is he saying?

Is this is all of chapter three, one through twelve, about teachers. So I got a bunch of commentaries in my room reading on James, and you got this, got a handful over here that say, yeah, he's talking to teachers here. Then you have another set of commentaries over here, other scholars who will say, no, he's not talking to teachers. He brings teachers up. But it's not about, the whole chapter is not related to teachers.

And you have to make the decision because it would be very easy for us to just say, well, if he's talking about teachers, I'm safe, right? Ah, I don't think that's what he's doing. So I fall on the side that he brings up teachers at the beginning to help us understand the seriousness of what we say. But that's not how all of the rest of the verses need to be applied. You can certainly apply to teachers, but that's not what's happening here.

What I think is happening, and the reason is because all the metaphors that get used, they're so broad. And in fact, verse two, if you look at verse two, where is it? Remember, right after he talks about teachers in verse one, he says, we all. So he immediately broadens after teachers. So that's the first thing.

And then there's a bunch of metaphors in there that just, it seems way too restrictive to apply just to a teacher. He's talking to all of us. Well, why bring up teachers then? Well, here's what I think. At least one thing, and we'll focus on it today.

I want you to imagine yourself as a teacher and let that help you come to grips with the seriousness of your words. That's what I think James is doing. And of course, the first thing that ought to pop into your head when it about a teacher is judgment. All of us are going to be judged. Put yourself in the place of a teacher and that concept surfaces faster.

You will be judged for what you say, which we get about teachers.

The more you say, the more judgment you will incur, the longer your judgment will be based on the words that you say. And we know what we think about when we're talking about teachers.

Just evaluate a teacher. Are they manipulative? Are they honest? Are they harsh?

How do they come across? You're measuring everything.

James is trying to get you to put yourself in the place of a teacher and imagine God evaluating you like you do teacher. And that's why now if you hesitate for just a second, you go, oh, yeah, that would be a little bit more weighty if my words had the meanings meaning of a teacher. I want you to think about your words, and you just think about everything you're sensitive to with the teacher, James says, then you're getting really close to what it looks, how we're evaluating your words. That's all that's happening. Okay.

If you look at the phrase, look at this, it's a very odd way to call out teachers if that's your priority. By starting with people who are not teachers, not many of you should become teachers. Is he talking about teachers or non teachers? Non teaching. So we're the focus.

So teachers becomes sort of a grid through which to look at my life, and it's a great illustration. So what I want to do is the rest of this talk is just say, well, if I were a teacher, and I'm not talking about anybody, any kind of a teacher now, if you're a teacher, you say more words. And so for sure. But if you're a Bible teacher, that's probably a little bit more what James has in mind. At the end of the day, you just say more.

So judgment is going to be a little bit longer for you. That's what I think is happening here, as we'll see. I don't think it's a stricter judgment. You're just in danger of more of it, and I'll try to prove that to you. All right, so if I were a teacher, imagine, that's what I want you to ask yourself.

If I were a teacher, here's the first thing that you'd have to assess in your life. First of all, you'd know your life is words. Listen, I've been teaching for 37 years.

My life is words. Everywhere. I have notepads everywhere. I'm writing words, reading words, and speaking words all of the time. Words are my life.

That's the first thing. When you teach, you have to think about the words that you're going to use. And I will admit, when you're younger and you're coming up, I can't listen to sermons I've given in the past. Can't do it. I just hate the sound of my voice and so many different things about it.

But I will say there were times I was careless. I've been careless because when you're a teacher and you have to use words, you have to be thoughtful and you have to be careful because they shape reality for people.

You feel the weight of your words when you teach.

Your life is words. So James would just love for you to say, well, my life is words, because that's what he's going to prove to you over the next chapter. Your life is words. Now, there is some debate about this, just food for thought, because I'm dealing with marriage, about whether guys or girls talk the most. And over the years, you've heard women say a whole lot more words than men.

And some of that has been debunked. Recent studies say that the average set of words really, in a person, a little bit more closer. Studies say about 16,000 words is the average. A person says, of course, you can say more or less, 7000 is about the minimum for most people. They do say, at least in the studies, they argue that men and women are closer.

Women talk a little bit more, but it's not nearly the gap that we've always thought. And the way they do that is they analyze conversations to hear how a man converses when he is conversing. And that's how they kind of assess it. But I want you to think about this. 941 words an hour and 140 words per minute.

Over the course of one year, you will speak 97 200 page books. In the course of one year, that's about 60,000 words per 200 page book, roughly.

That's pretty remarkable. This is why James says, oh, yeah, your life is far more words than actions. Now, I did think to myself, you know, it's been my experience, though, over life, that women say more words than. That's been my experience. I live with a woman who says more words than I say.

That doesn't mean all women do. There's a lot of talkative men. So I thought, you know what? I'll do my own little study since I've been. I told you I was studying marriage for the last couple weeks, I pulled out Song of Solomon.

I went through every single verse. She speaks in song of Solomon 14 times, 68 verses. He speaks eight times, 38 verses. I went, uh huh, uh huh. She talks about romance, love, sex.

She challenges him. She advises him. She rehearses history with him. She verbalizes her dreams. I don't share any dreams.

My wife has a dream. We're all going to know what the dream was.

And she affirms him, these are all the things that she's doing. She'll rehearse history, everything. He, on the other hand, speaks eight times, 38 verses. He only brings up her beauty and sex. That's all he talks about in the entire book.

You're like, what is going on here? This guy? All right, the very last two verses in the book, verse 13, he speaks. Verse 14, she speaks. So she gets the last word.

And I don't know what that means, but it says something. But he says in that book, in verse 13 is the first thing he says outside of either beauty or sex. He literally says, let me hear your voice. Let me hear your voice. He wants to hear her talk.

That's the best thing he says in the book. But it does make me doubt that the Bible is true. We'll say that you say a lot of words, and your words mean a lot. So the first thing I would say is, if you imagine yourself as a teacher, your life is words. Second thing James would say, and we've already looked at it for a second, but let's look at it again, is you better be prepared for judgment.

You better be prepared for judgment. Look what Jesus tells us. You know this verse. I tell you, on the day of judgment, people will give account for every careless word they speak. I don't even know how to process that.

For by your words, you will be justified, and by your words, condemned. Listen, I know what you are just by looking at your words.

That's all I've got to do. And see, this is judgment. We're all getting judged by what we say. It's not a stricter judgment teachers get because we're all getting judged strictly. I mean every single word.

It's just if you say more, in other words, on judgment day, when we're all lined up for judgment, all the big talkers are going to make everybody else wait. And we'll be sitting out there for all the big talkers because their judgments are going to be longer.

And what you see is words really matter, and they really matter to God. And when you think about the weight of a teacher's words, then you're getting real close to thinking about how Jesus thinks about every word you say.

Each word. Each word can be assessed in and of itself to get to the core of something about you that's weighty. I can measure your whole life by your words, so you'll be judged.

So if I'm a teacher, my life is words, and I'll be judged for every word. And here's the third thing, and this is clear in James what he's trying to do here. He's trying to put your life and your words together. And this is the thing about a teacher. And I would say the third thing if I was a teacher.

I have to connect my words to my heart. One of the things you will do no matter who you hear, teach you is you'll want to try your best to detect if whoever's teaching you means what he's saying from his heart and has wrestled with it from a heart level that will be more meaningful to you. But let me tell you what happens as a speaker that means on a regular basis. If you're a teacher, then you are constantly having to come up with words and words and words and describe and describe and see and teach and understand, and then somehow you can just leave those words out here. You've got to make sure you can connect them to your heart on a regular basis, and that is very painful.

I was sitting at lunch with a guy this past week. We were talking about ministry, and he asked me, what's your favorite thing to do in the world in ministry? What's your core gift? Passion. What is it?

And I said, teaching. I said, it's my greatest joy, but it's also my greatest pain because of the agony of trying to connect what I'm saying to my own heart. And that's what James wants every one of us to do with all of our words. If I were a teacher, I'd have to be concerned, because here's what happens. The interior of your life becomes one thing, and you talk about something out here, and there's this.

Slowly but surely, if you're not always connecting your words back to your heart, then a chasm begins. Divide between those. Remember what James says at the end of chapter two, verse 26, where he says, you separate the body and the soul, and your faith is dead. And what happens is, as those two separate, you basically just have a grave in your heart and in your soul, and you just, you die inside when you're constantly saying words, but they don't connect to your own heart, and you don't figure out how to work it into your own life.

Every teacher has to be honest with himself. He has to shape his heart around his beliefs and his words, or he'll just disintegrate.

That's the same with you. In your words, which James is saying, just like a teacher, I want you to make sure that what you're saying, I want you to make sure you're attaching those two. Don't disconnect them, because your words can do that.

You know, there's a phrase we all know. If you want to learn something, read about it.

Yogi Bhajan said this. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it. There's another step. If you don't want to be a hypocrite with what you're teaching, you better somehow figure out how to get your heart wrapped around it, where all you are is a talking head and a master of nothing.

So lastly thing about a teacher, he's gotta use words. You have to speak.

We need words. We need teachers. He's not saying don't teach. We've got to have teachers in our life, people who give us knowledge. All of us have teachers in our life.

Where would we be if we didn't have teachers in our life who didn't know how to use words to communicate and guide and give us information? That's life changing. Sometimes we've got to hear from each other. This is incredibly important. James says, you got to use words.

You better think about how you use them. That's all James is saying. We've had good and bad teachers, all of us. Some of them have breathed life into us, whether they're parents or anybody communicating, anybody speaking words into our lives. Some of us have been devastated by words.

Whether you're a friend, a spouse, a parent, a child, you crave words.

There are things you have got to hear in your life until you drop dead from the time you're born. You have got to hear things, and without them, your life is stunted. And truly, there are some of us in here who are not all we could be, because the right words have not been spoken into us. And there are some of us in here who aren't speaking those words so that people around us can thrive.

So James would say, wrap your head around that. What aren't you saying? That as a teacher, you should be saying to the people around you to give them life.

Think about Jesus words in Matthew four, where he says, you will live by every word that comes out of my mouth. You need words. You need his word. But we also need word from each other. You know, we say this, and I think at 60 years old, this has finally hit me.

And I think it's very similar to James. I don't know how long it'll take in your life before you'll realize the weight of your words. Same with this saying here. You've heard all your life, but I don't know if you really believe it. And that is, you are what you eat.

You really are.

And most of us ignore that.

It's not that meaningful to us.

Same with you are what you say. And I'll add this to it. I think James is going to do that for us. In this text is you are what you hear.

That's you know, job looked at his friends in job, chapter 19, verse two. He says, how long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words?

Les Perrault, who is a great. He and his wife are both marriage counselors. He says, relationships are maintained linguistically, you can assess all the relationships in your life. Linguistically, you heal. A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

We'll dissect that later. But it's just a beautiful sounding verse, the things you say and you don't say. You ask, who am I killing?

As James says, you'll be a perfect man. You will be better, and the people around you will be better if you can come to grips with your words.

If you were a teacher, how would you think and live with all this being true? James says, that's how I want you to think about your life. Imagine every word mattered.

Imagine stricter judgment.

Imagine that people are dying around you or living around you because of your words.

So you understand the seriousness of what I'm saying. I think that's what James is saying. The only way to, I think, practically understand just to say to you now, I don't know that we need much more for today, except, you know, what do you sound like? You know, we say things like, you know, after we hear somebody talking, you'll say this. You know, it sounds to me, because all you have to do is listen to them talk, and you go, isn't it amazing how you can understand a person?

They may not even understand themselves. You know what it sounds like to me? You're not even hearing yourself. What does James say? Be quick to, you gotta hear yourself, and then you gotta be able to hear from others.

God, of course. What am I saying? And what is it saying about me?

So think about it this way. This is the best way to apply. This I can think of for today. For today, I got a lot of other things, but for today, you're gonna leave here and you're gonna start thinking at some point today, you're gonna start thinking about tomorrow. You probably already have, but you're gonna really focus in on what you gotta do first thing in the morning, and then you'll probably.

That'll stretch to your week, and you'll think, what do I have to do? James would say, what are you gonna say?

What are you going to say? And what are you not going to say? Then you've taken James three seriously, because we will think of all we have to do. James will say, think of what you're going to say first. That's enough for me to just go, I don't even know how to.

What difference would that make in a week's time, if you focused on what you were going to say or not going to say, and then for you to believe that would make you more spiritual than anything you do in the week, then it really grabbed a hold of your heart.

Some of us are just a couple words away from our life being completely altered, completely changed. Life giving words. If somebody would just say, I'm doing a good job, if somebody would just tell me they love me, if somebody would say they're proud of me, if somebody would say, I'm sorry, if somebody would say, you didn't deserve that. How far would that go in your life? Those are the shortest sentences I can think of.

Spit them out this week and breathe life into people.

Or maybe it's God's word. You need to hear every word that proceeds out of my mouth. Are you listening to him or are you talking over him?

Remember what Peter said? Who else has the words of eternal life?

Just bow your heads.

Lord, that's a lot.

We want to process that the best we can.

Try to understand all that James is saying here, and we recognize that we don't fully get it. Our mind does not think structurally about our words. We think more about our doings. And so help us with that spirit tug at us this week, help us to hear ourselves better, certainly to hear from you. God, if there's something you're trying to say, we love you.

In Jesus name, amen.