The sermon titled 'Christ our Prophet' by Peter Allison explores the role of Jesus Christ as a prophet, emphasizing His divine and human nature. It begins with a reading from Hebrews 1:1-3, highlighting that God has spoken through Jesus, His Son. The sermon underscores that Jesus, being fully God and fully man, fulfills the office of a prophet by revealing God's will to the church. Humanity's ignorance, guilt, and rebellion necessitate a mediator, and Christ addresses these needs by enlightening, purifying, and subduing humanity. Unlike false gods and idols, Jesus, as the true prophet, speaks and reveals divine truth, separating Him from other deities. The sermon references both Old and New Testament scriptures, illustrating that Jesus was foretold as a prophet and fulfilled this role through His life, death, and resurrection. It concludes by urging believers to be persuaded of the truth of God's Word and to proclaim it boldly, despite opposition.

Hebrews chapter 1, I'd like to read the first three verses as we begin our consideration of Christ's work as our prophet. Work as our Prophet. Hear God's word, God who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world, who being the brightness of His glory and the expressed image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." May God be praised at the reading and hearing of His Word. Almighty Heavenly Father, we ask that You would give us ears to hear, and a heart to understand what You say to us this morning. We ask that You might speak to us in your mercy and in grace and peace.

In Jesus' name we pray, Amen. Please be seated. We've been looking the last four weeks, I think, at who Jesus Christ is, His person, His being the Son of God. He is having all of the attributes and the excellencies and the perfections of God. That He is Jesus Christ, is God, but also that he is also man, fully man, that he has a human nature, a flesh and blood nature even as we do, and that in him the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily.

The second person of the Godhead of the Trinity is Jesus Christ, two distinct natures, fully God and fully man, in one person. These natures are not mixed together or confused, but they are separate and distinct natures, but in one person forever. That Jesus having taken to himself a human body still has a human body. In that body, flesh and blood, He ascended into heaven. With His body and humanity, He has sent it into the heavens, has sprinkled the blood of the heavenly temple, and has sat down at the right hand of God the Father, where He rules, where He reigns.

So having looked at then who Jesus is, having the one who has made the heavens and the earth, the one who had all the glory of God in his pre-incarnate days and who now has it again. We want to look now at his work, what he does. What he does for us, and what He does in us, what He does through us. What does Christ do? In Christ's work, you might say, is aligned to what our needs are.

We are ignorant. We are guilty and we are rebels. We are ignorant of God's will, of God's truth. We are guilty of breaking His commandments and we are in rebellion against His rule. So Christ as our mediator, Christ as our Savior addresses each of these needs.

Christ as our prophet addresses our ignorance. Christ as our high priest addresses our guilt. And Christ as our High Priest subdues us to our rebel heart to Himself. So this morning, as our text says in Hebrews that God has spoken to us by His Son, that Jesus Christ is our Prophet. Christ executes, or Christ carries out the work, the office, the duties, the function, and we speak of office, we're speaking of a function.

Christ carries out the function, or the office of a prophet, in revealing to his church the will of God. He is the God who speaks. And in that sense, he is set apart against every other false god. Because as Isaiah describes and others, and Abakuk describe so eloquently, false gods cannot speak. They don't know.

Speak. They don't know. Isaiah describes these idols, false gods, as a blacksmith, working one with the tongs. You can imagine the work of a blacksmith to hammer, to heat up steel until it's very hot and glowing, and it becomes soft and malleable, and then pounding it into a shape that he desires. Or the craftsman who carves something out of a tree, cuts the tree down and then carves an image out of it.

He takes maybe even some of the wood to heat his food. And then the other piece of this wood, he carves an image out of it and lies and bows down to it and says, Speak. But these are dumb images, dumb idols. They cannot speak. Dumb idols, they cannot speak.

Habakkuk gives us a very similar picture of idols They are deaf, they are dumb. What profit is the image that its maker should carve at the moldage image, a teacher of lies that the maker of its mold should trust in it to make mute idols? Woe To him who says to wood, Awake! To silent stone, Arise and it shall teach. It may even be overlaid with silver and gold and look very beautiful, but in it is no breath at all.

But the Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silent before Him. Jesus Christ is our prophet who speaks, and we are called to hear Him. And that alone separates Him from every other god, every other claimant to be a God. It is the scriptures that speak of the origin of the world. There is no other person that can explain, no other thing that can explain the origin of the world.

Although, many people try and are very deceptive about it. Scientists talk about a Big Bang today, as if that was the beginning of the world. But even a child can ask, where did the stuff in the Big Bang come from. And the greatest minds of our age have been asked that question. And they don't have an answer.

They sit in silence for a long time. And all they can say at the end is, I don't know. Or an equally stupid answer like, it came from another world. Well then that just begs the question, where did that other world come from? It is a very, professing to be wise, they've become fools.

Because God alone speaks through His prophet, Jesus Christ. And apart from Jesus Christ, there is no knowledge. Christ comes as our prophet because we have a great need for Him. No man has seen God at any time. We cannot see God.

We cannot know what is in the mind of God. We cannot know what is true and what is not true. We cannot know anything unless God speaks to us and reveals that to us. There have been many attempts to find out the truth through means that God is not ordained. We call that the occult, the demonic.

Even back in Moses' day, God's people were warned not to seek knowledge apart from the prophet that God would send. When you come into the land, Moses says in Deuteronomy, where the Lord your God is giving you and possess it, That's the wrong chapter, verse 14. When you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found one among you, Deuteronomy 18.9, who makes his son or daughter pass through fire or who practices witchcraft or soothsayer or one who interprets omens or sorcerer or one who conjures spells or a medium or a spiritist or one who calls up the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord your God drives them out from before you.

You shall be blameless before the Lord your God. For these nations which you dispossess, listen to seers, sayers, and diviners, but as for you, the Lord your God has not appointed such for you." We are forbidden from seeking out truth or knowledge from any other means, any other way other than what God has appointed, the prophet that God has appointed in Jesus Christ. In fact, Moses goes on to say in the very next verse, The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your midst. Moses said, the secret things of God belong to him. And we're not to be those who pry into that, or not to wonder or try to find out what God has not revealed to us.

But that which He has revealed belongs to us and to our children. We need a prophet as well because we cannot stand in the presence of God. Remember when God spoke from Mount Sinai, how the mountain quaked and trembled and smoked, and God's voice spoke from Mount Sinai, and the people having heard the Ten Commandments that we recited a little earlier, they witnessed these thunderings and the lightnings and the smoke, and when the people saw it they trembled and they stood afar off and they said to Moses, You speak with us and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we die. There is none of us, there is no one that can stand in the presence of God, that can hear God's voice and not die. We are sinful people.

Let not God speak with us lest we die. That is the response of everyone who has ever in any way seen something of the glory of God. It's to be overwhelmed. Isaiah, when he saw the glory of God, cried out that he was a man of unclean lips. Manoah, when they realized that it was God in whose presence they had been, said, We have seen God and we will die.

The guards at Jesus' tomb. When they saw the glory of Christ, the risen Christ, they fell down as dead men. Even the apostles on the Mount of Transfiguration, when they saw Christ in His pre-incarnate glory, they fell down and became as dead people. We are also in need of a prophet because we are ignorant. We are ignorant.

We are, as Romans 1 says, willfully blind. We are not ignorant just because we haven't been privileged yet to learn these truths, but we are ignorant because we are willfully blind. We are darkened in our understanding. We are blind because our hearts are hardened against God. We don't want to hear the truth.

We don't want to know the truth. We have no interest in it. In fact, we, in our nature, suppress the truth. We actively fight against that truth. We're like the person in the swimming pool who is trying to hold a beach ball beneath the surface.

You have to work very hard to do it. But that's what we do. In the hardness of our heart, we suppress the truth. We have, as Paul told the Ephesians, a futile way of thinking. Our understanding has been darkened, and our thinking, the very way, the method of our thinking is corrupt.

And it's a futile way of thinking. We cannot understand the things of God. The natural man cannot understand the things of God, and we have no interest in understanding them if we could. So because we are willfully blind, we are ignorant of the truth, and we have a need to be instructed. We have a need that our willful blindness be broken down, and our eyes that are willfully shut, and our hands that are actively suppressing, this truth of God as if we're holding a beach ball under the water.

We have a need that someone should open our eyes, That someone should change our futile thinking and enlighten our understanding. We have a great need. And that need can't be fulfilled by any mere man. Nobody standing here or anywhere can meet this need in us. There is no person, mere person, who can open the eyes of those who are willfully blind, who can open the heart of someone who is hardened against the truth and is actively suppressing it.

We have that saying that a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. And our will is set against the truth of God's Word. And you might argue all day with someone and we can never change them. We might logically prove in ten different ways how they are wrong, but they will be of the same opinion still, because our heart is hardened against the truth. We actively suppress the truth.

We are willfully blinded. We need more than any man can do. Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. And Jesus' answer to him was, Simon Barjonas, flesh and blood has not revealed this to you. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.

We have a need that no mere man can meet. We need Jesus Christ to be our prophet, to teach us, to reveal to us the will of God, the truth of God. Christ was promised from the very beginning as our prophet. In the passage that we read in Deuteronomy 18, where the people were forbidden from seeking through the occult to learn the truth of God's Word, Moses said, The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren, and him you shall hear, according to all that you have desired of the Lord your God in Horeb, in the day of your assembly, saying, Let us not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, nor let me see this great fire anymore, lest I die." Moses comes back to the people and says, as you have asked, the Lord will indeed raise up a prophet from your own midst, one of your own brethren, like me, and him you shall hear." When the people said, let us not hear the voice of God, nor let us see this great fire any more lest we die, the Lord said to Moses, what they have spoken is good.

It is good. I will raise up for them a prophet like you among their brethren, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And it shall be that whoever will not hear my words, which he speaks in my name, I will require it of him." God has promised even to Israel in the days of Moses that he would send his prophet, one who would come from their midst, one who would be from their brethren. In Malachi, Malachi at the very close of the Old Testament scriptures, as they entered that intertestamental period of silence of over 400 years. Malachi left this promise, Behold I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me, that's speaking of John the Baptist, and the Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant." Jesus Christ was promised in the Old Testament as the messenger of the covenant, the one who would bring God's message to his people.

In that covenant, God promised to be a God to us and to our children. He promised that He would give His Spirit, that He would write His law upon our heart, that He would give us a new heart and a new mind, that He would put a new song upon our lips. That's the covenant promise of salvation. And Christ is promised in the Old Testament as the messenger of that covenant, the one who would come and proclaim the will of God to us for our salvation. And we are called to hear Him.

Salvation, and we're called to hear Him. Isaiah 61 says the same thing. It says, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has appointed me, speaking of Christ, the Lord has appointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. The Lord has appointed Christ to be His prophet, His messenger of the covenant, to preach good tidings to the poor, to preach the gospel. That's what the gospel is, good tidings of great joy to all people.

And Isaiah is saying that Christ has been anointed. That's why he is Christ. That means anointed. You realize that Christ is not just Jesus' last name, it is his office, it is his title. He is Jesus the Christ, Jesus the anointed.

Some say we don't see Christ's name in the Old Testament, but that's not so. When you understand that Messiah, Christ, and anointed are three words for the same thing, then we have Christ's word right here, because the Lord has anointed me. The Lord has anointed me, that's what Christ is, the anointed one, the Messiah is the anointed one. The Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor, to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty." It's the words of a prophet.

To proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, to proclaim the day of grace. Remember Jesus said, I have not come to judge, but I have come to save. I have not come to judge the world, I have come to save the world. For God so loved the world that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world.

God wasn't sent to condemn, but he was sent to proclaim the year of grace, the time of grace, the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance that would be coming. To comfort those who mourn, to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified." And while Jesus came, and he went into the synagogue, we read in Luke 4, And they gave him a scroll to read, and he stood up to read it, and he read from that very passage in Isaiah. He said, and he read that passage that we just read, and he closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and he sat down and everybody looked at him as to what he would say. All the eyes were fixed upon him. And he said, today, today this passage, this promise has been fulfilled in your midst, in your own hearing.

That God, this prophet that God had promised in the time of Moses to send to you, one from your own people, one of your own brethren, one who was a human just like you, God has fulfilled that promise. Today this is fulfilled in your hearing. That I am, Jesus said, the one who has come to proclaim the good news, the glad tidings to the poor. Jesus was of their own brethren. They even said that.

Who isn't this just the son of a carpenter and aren't these his brothers here? And they were taking that as why should we listen to him? Because he's just one of us. He's just an ordinary son of a carpenter, and there's his flesh and blood brothers and sisters. Jesus said, that's why Jesus said, a prophet is not without honor in his own town.

But when he went elsewhere, remember the Pharisees and the rulers of the Jews dared not arrest him because the people considered that he was a prophet. They recognized that he had come to proclaim the good news to those who were in bondage to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives. And he was of their very own midst, just as the Lord had promised them in the time of Moses. He would raise up a prophet from their own midst, a brethren just like them. Jesus said to the Pharisees that no sign is given to an adulterous generation but the sign of the Prophet Jonah.

Jesus came as our prophet. No man has seen God at any time. We need a prophet, but the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, who is in the bosom of the Father, He is the Prophet of God, who declares to us the will of God, the truth of God. He is one of our own midst.

He has flesh and blood, just like we do. And yet, he is also fully God. He has been in the bosom of the Father. So Jesus Christ, who is one of us, one of our brethren, is also God, who has dwelt from all eternity in the bosom of the Father, who has eternally been begotten of the Father. He is the prophet who declares to us the will of God.

Christ has always been God's prophet. The Spirit of Christ was in the Old Testament prophets. Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1, of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you, " in verse 11, searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ, which was in them, did signify. Peter says all of these prophets of the Old Testament, they inquired and searched diligently. They prophesied of the grace that was to come.

But it says that the Spirit of Christ was in them. And so it was the Spirit of Christ who was prophesying and signifying what time that Christ would come. When it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ in the glory that should follow, unto whom it was revealed that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things which are now reported unto you by them, that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven." These ministers, these prophets, preached the gospel with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven after Jesus came. But even before, in the Old Testament, those prophets who prophesied the Things which would come did so by the Spirit of Christ which was in them. These are things that Peter says even the angels desire, which salvation even the angels desire to search into.

Even the angels are created beings, not even they are sufficient or able to proclaim to us the will of God as Jesus Christ is. He is the unique prophet and it is by Him that all Those who have ever spoken in God's name have spoken. When Christ came then, He came as our prophet and when He left, He commissioned others to continue to speak in his name. When he returned to heaven, he told his disciples, all authority in heaven and earth is given unto me. Go ye therefore.

Make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe whatever I have commanded and baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In Ephesians Paul reiterates this same message. He himself gave some in verse 11 to be apostles and prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the statue of the fullness of Christ. When Christ descended into heaven, He gave some to be prophets, some apostles, some prophets whose work has ceased with the closing of the scriptures, some evangelists and pastors and teachers. That's a work that continues for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for proclaiming the truth of God's Word that we have now in its complete form in the Scriptures.

Christ is our prophet. And Christ has always been. The Spirit of Christ is that which dwells in the prophets of the Old Testament, and it is the Spirit of Christ who speaks now through His Word and through the messengers that He has ordained to bring His Word to us. And What is that message that he brings? What is the message of God's prophet?

It is the will of God for our salvation. It is the gospel. He brings it in an objective way, in declaring to us, in proclaiming to us the propositional truth of the Word of God. Like He said in Luke 4 verse 43, I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities. God has come, Christ has come, and in His Word, which words testify of Christ from beginning to end, the whole Word of God testifies of Christ.

Even the things that we read this morning out of Deuteronomy, even the things in Genesis, the things in the Viticus that we get so tired reading because it seems so intricate and detailed and so far removed from our understanding and from our practice. To the promises of the Psalms, those precious promises of God's victory, God's dwelling with us, of God's comforting us, of God's preserving us, of His defeating our enemies. To those messages that proclaim the glory of God, His majesty, His power, His dominion over all things, to those passages that proclaim his judgment, for God is a God of vengeance. And he will bring his vengeance on all those who obey not the gospel. All of this is the will of God for our salvation.

When the apostles and the prophets of the New Testament preached Christ, they did so out of Moses, and the prophets, and the Psalms. Those are the three divisions of the Old Testament scriptures. The prophets, the Pentateuch, the prophets, and the writings, which the Psalms are a part. The message that Christ came to give us is first that we are sinners. Very back in the beginning of Genesis, Adam and Eve were cut off of fellowship because they had sinned.

They were clothed with skins because their nakedness was revealed. Skins of animals that required the shedding of blood, for without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin." And even there God promised to send a seed, the seed of the woman who would crush the seed of the serpent. And This promise was repeated and amplified throughout the 4, 000 years of history that led up to the time of Christ. And when Christ came, He was revealed as that whom God had promised to send. And we continually in the Gospels see that Christ did these things in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of him.

Christ came as our sacrifice. That was figured by those animals that God killed in the Garden of Eden to clothe Adam and Eve with. That was figured in all of the sacrifices that were offered in the Old Testament, in the Passover lamb that we read about earlier, where the blood of the lamb was put on the doorposts of the house so that the angel of death would pass over that house and spare the people that were in that house, the eldest, the firstborn son in that house. Jesus Christ, that prefigured Christ, He is our Passover. He is the Lamb of God who has been slain for us.

And His blood, which now has cleansed the heavenly temple, atones for our sin so that the angel of death passes over us so that we have everlasting life. Christ came as the man, Christ Jesus, and perfectly obeyed the law of God. He lived in the same conditions that we live. He suffered the same temptations that we suffer. And He was without sin, in order that His righteousness might be imputed to us.

Our sin is imputed to Him. He who knew no sin became sin. He took the legal liability of our sin. Our sin was imputed to him and his righteousness is imputed to us that we who are sinners might be declared righteous so that there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. This is the message that he has come to proclaim, that he has been victorious over sin and over sainthood, that by his resurrection and ascension he has defeated the powers and principalities of this earth.

That is the message that Christ as a prophet brings to us from Genesis to Revelation. But remember, we are willfully blind. We are hardened against this message. We are hardened against the truth of God's Word. So Christ as our prophet doesn't just come merely to proclaim objectively the truth, but he comes as our prophet to proclaim subjectively the truth of His Word, to convince us of our own sin and misery, and to enlighten us in the knowledge of the truth.

He persuades us. It's by His Spirit that He persuades us of the truth of His Word. It's not merely then to inform us that Christ our prophet speaks to us, but it is also to transform us. That by the renewing of our minds we might be transformed, and that we might be conformed to His image. This is a unique message, and a unique messenger.

There is no other message like it. There is no other messenger like Him. Because you see, He is the message. He Himself is that message. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

The Word, that message, was God. It's a marvelous plan that God has done. God from before the foundation of the world has ordained to save His people. He has ordained out of all the people that he created, his own people that he would save. In time, he sent his son to accomplish that salvation by his life, by his obedience, by his death.

And when Christ ascended, he sent his Spirit to testify of all that Christ had done, to bring to mind what Christ's work, and to apply it to us, and so to transform us. What is our response to this prophet of God and to his message? We need first of all to be persuaded of its truth. Paul said, �For this cause I suffer these things. Nevertheless, I am not ashamed for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day." We need to be persuaded of the truth of this message.

Now that might sound obvious, but just think how many times we question and we challenge the truth of God's Word. We hear what the world has to say. We hear the lies of the evil one. They come and they whisper in our mind that, has God indeed said whatever it might be of all the things that are said in His word, Satan comes and says, has God indeed said that this is true? And we begin to doubt, we begin to question, we begin to wonder whether God's Word is indeed true.

Because we look around at the world, we look around at the apparent ease of the wicking, and they're certainly not living according to that truth. We look at them as they desecrate the Lord's day. They're not living according to the truth. We look at them in their supposed ease, in their luxury. We look at the pagan scientists and the evidence that they marshal against the truth of God's Word.

We say, How can God's Word be true when it speaks of creation, how God made the stars, the distances, and the ages? And we begin to wonder, is God's Word true? Brothers and sisters, if we cannot believe God's word when it speaks of earthly things, how can we believe God's word when it speaks of heavenly things? If we cannot believe God's Word when it speaks of the age of the earth and what God has done in creation, how can we believe God's Word when He says that you will rise again? When He says that you are under God's wrath and condemnation.

If we can't believe God's word when he speaks of earthly things, we won't believe his word. We can't believe his word when he speaks of heavenly things. We need to be persuaded of the truth of God's Word in every area to which it speaks. There is no area that God's Word speaks that we can afford to ignore. That we can afford to say, well, I'm not sure about that part of it.

I believe this part over here about the resurrection and the death of Christ. But I'm not sure about this part over here about this truth. We must be persuaded of the truth of all of God's work. And we must not just believe that it is true, but rest in that truth. We are not really persuaded of the truth unless we are resting in that truth, unless we are living in that truth.

We need to be persuaded of the truth of God's Word and we need to proclaim its truth. We need to proclaim the truth of God's Word. Not a light that is hid under a bushel. Not salt that it's lost its savor and is good for nothing but to be cast out and trampled underfoot. We need to be those who proclaim.

You just read through the Psalms, you see again and again, Not only does the psalmist write of proclaiming God's praise and God's righteousness and testifying to the truth of his word in the assembly of the saints, and we must do that, but he also says it's before the peoples, before the nations, before the Gentiles, among the coastlands, his word would be proclaimed. That is why Paul suffered the things that he suffered. For this cause, he said, I suffer these things. All the things that Paul suffered, you know the list is lengthy of all the things that Paul suffered. He did it because he was persuaded of the truth of God's Word.

He proclaimed that truth. That is our call as well, to proclaim the truth of God's Word, to speak the truth ourselves, one to another, but also to speak the truth before the peoples, before this world, to be witnesses. Now that's what a martyr was. A martyr. The word for martyr comes from the Greek word for a witness.

They were witnesses who were unafraid, who were persuaded of the truth of the word of God and who then proclaimed that truth even unto death. We must be witnesses who proclaim the truth of God's word, even if God should call us, even to death. Almighty Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have sent your Son Jesus Christ as our prophet to reveal to us by your Spirit your will, your truth. Father, we thank you that you have done so and broken through the hardness of our heart and blindness of our rebellion. You have caused to shine forth in our heart the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

We praise you that you are our great prophet and that your voice commands the heavens and the earth. That you are able with your voice to call forth the dead and that you have called us forth from being dead in our sins, and caused us to hear your voice and to rejoice in it. And we as your people today, Father, rejoice and give thanks to you. And we bless your name that you have spoken unto us. As the messenger of the covenant, you have brought your precious promises to us through your Son Jesus Christ.

You have called us to hear His voice, for He is the one in whom you are well pleased. O Lord, may we hear your voice today. Through Jesus Christ we pray, Amen.