The Adoration of God

Transcript

Good evening, everybody. I hope everybody's doing well. I am looking forward to class tonight and I think it's going to be a little bit different. And so I hope that you'll humor me. It's going to be different in the sense that my hope is that this evening we'll be able to have more of a conversation than a presentation. If you are inclined, I'd love for you to turn your camera on so that we can share conversation together. If you're a little shy, that's okay too. But what I want to focus on this evening is the concept of prayer. And this is a follow-up to a Sunday morning Bible class that we had a few weeks ago. We were speaking on the subject of aging and we were talking about this concept of achieving a good death. The idea behind it is that many of us are getting older. Many of us are struggling with physical infirmities, etc. And the idea of prayer was discussed. And sometimes as we age, we find that our… And I heard I tuned in just at 730 and I noticed that there was a conversation about cognitive issues. And sometimes as we age, we find that our cognitive abilities aren't as great as they once were. Sometimes through the hustle and bustle of life, I think it's common for us to find that our minds are scattered. And this sometimes can impact our prayer lives. And I can tell you that speaking personally, I have found it not uncommon for me to struggle praying. And I don't imagine that I'm alone. There are times when I will begin a prayer to my God and I will lose my train of thought. Or I might find myself just at a loss of what to say and what to pray for. Or at other times, I will find that the prayers that I offer seem to be cliched, that they are the same word phrases that I have used over and over again in my prayers to God. So maybe that's your situation too. Maybe it's not. And through conversation, it'll give us all an opportunity to share what works in our prayer lives and maybe struggles that we've faced. And so that as I started this subject, I wanted to present to you a concept that I personally have found very helpful in my prayer life. And it's a concept that is known as guided prayer, guided prayer or guided meditation. It was first introduced to me at the Manuka Bible School out in Portland, Oregon, many years ago, where at the end of the evening, one of the brothers there had a session where anyone who wanted to could come to a room. And there we sat. And he led us in a guided meditation where he said, I want you to think about. And he provided prompts for us. And over the course of 10 or 15 minutes, he would have us breathe in and just think about this passage or think about this particular word. And it was the first time I'd ever experienced anything. And I'll tell you, quite frankly, I was a little outside of my comfort zone at the time. But in hindsight, I found that it was really a very meaningful thing for me. And so that's my hope for tonight's class that we'll be able to talk a little bit about this concept of guided meditation. And I'd suggest to you that it's not new. You'll remember that the Lord's Prayer is sometimes referred to by Christadelphians, by many Bible scholars as an outline or a template or a guide to pray. So for example, and I'm just going to share my screen for a moment, but for example, when we think about guided meditation or guided prayer, we can think about the disciples of Jesus coming to him and asking him to, Lord, teach us to pray. And the Lord taught them. And he said, our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And so when we are thinking about guided prayer, brothers and sisters, we might think of this as, one section of a prayer where we begin our prayers with praise, praising our God, our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. And we would spend that first section of prayer praising and magnifying and revering the creator. And this will be a focus of our class tonight, this one particular section. I'm hoping that our focus is going to become narrower as we go through class and that our focus will primarily be on the adoration of God, adoring God, hallowing his name. And I want to use the balance of our class to talk about what that means generally, and then more specifically, how we can explore this idea of adoring God. So that's a little bit about where we're going in class. But if we can just come back to sort of the big picture right now where we're thinking about guided prayer, we can consider the fact that Jesus' prayer, where he's teaching his disciples to pray, is just that, a guided prayer. Lord, teach us to pray. And so we can certainly recite the prayer, and it's a beautiful prayer to recite, or we could use it as a template. And again, in this first section, our Father, which art in heaven, this is a section where we could praise our God. The second section, if you could call it that, is where we pray for God's kingdom to come and for his will to be done on the earth, just as it's now done in heaven. And we could spend some time in prayer thinking and speaking to God and conversing with him about the kingdom and praying for the kingdom and for the restoration of all things. And we could put those concepts and those thoughts into our own words as we share this conversation with God. The third section, if you will, in the Lord's guided prayer is when we are to spend time in prayer asking God for his blessings, that he would give us this day, our daily bread. And here we might pray for things that we need or that we desire or things that we want. Then there's a section on forgiveness. There's the section where we ask that we not be led into temptation and the conclusion where we again praise God for the kingdom to come. And so I wanted to present this, and this is I'm sure is not new to most of us, this idea of the Lord's prayer used as a guide, but I wanted to present it because I think the concept of guided prayer is not new as evidenced by the Lord's prayer. Now, the second thing that you'll see on the screen here is a template that I have been using for a while now as I begin my mornings. So when I get up in the morning, I've been trying to get in the habit of spending some time, spending some time with God. And this is time not where I'm reading, not when I'm turning the pages of my Bible or reading a magazine article or anything like that, but instead it's a time when I try to put into words, put into action the words of Psalm 46 verse 10. That particular passage says, be still

and know that I am God. I will be exalted, the psalmist writes of God. And so in my morning routine now, I'm trying to take time to be still, to still my mind. And this has become, I'd say it's become an increasingly difficult problem for me. Sometimes it's because I've got a lot of things on my mind, things that are weighing me down, worries or concerns that I have about relationships with people or the health of people I love or just the concerns and the weight of the world. And I'm not alone in that. Other times I find that I'm having a difficult time being still because of what Nate talked about last week in his Bible class when he sort of talked about, for lack of a better description, dopamine addiction where the brightest computer programmers in the world are designing phones and apps on phones to capture our attention. I remember reading a story once about some of the people who were involved. I think it was brother John Perks that talked about this in one of his classes. And John was talking about social media and he presented a study or an article where many of the people who are developing Facebook and Instagram would not allow their children access to the very applications that they were developing. Because these programs were consciously developed to addict our minds.

The same way someone who's walking through Las Vegas and is going through a casino finds themselves at a slot machine pulling the one -armed bandit and just feeling that they can't let go. They can't walk away. They are in essence in their mind trapped. And so sometimes my mind, it feels like it's trapped when I wake up in the morning and I notice the first thing I'm doing is reaching for my phone or checking my email messages or my text messages. And I feel like my mind is never still. So what I've been trying to do, brothers and sisters, is I've been trying to make space first thing to read a single passage of scripture and to meditate on that one passage, to read it over and over again and to think about what it might mean and to then begin a prayer. And the prompt that you will see on the right side of the screen here is a prompt that I have been using because I found that there were times when I would offer a prayer and I would completely skip over things that were meaningful to me, that we have members in our ecclesia who are struggling with their physical ailments or with their mental health or with whatever it is. And I would conclude my prayer never having remembered to offer a prayer for their benefit. And so this guide here would prompt me, I would open my eyes and I would just look at this and say, what do I want to pray about today? I want to pray for things that I'm thankful about. What am I thankful for? And I might write them down. I want to pray about my relationship with my parents or my wife or my children or my brothers and sisters or my neighbors and to be able to think about those things or my struggles. When you have a difficulty, an issue that's just like pulling at your heart, those things when you wake up in the middle of the night and you just can't get it out of your mind, why would we be thankful for that? But there are clear passages in scripture that talk to us about our struggles and the benefits of our struggles. We talked about the fact that one of the characteristics of God is that we are to be long-suffering. And how can we develop this characteristic of God if we've never suffered? So there are certainly benefits for these things. And so I share these ideas with you because I have found it helpful. And what I'd like to do right now is just pause for a moment and open it up for anybody to share comments, whether they had experiences in guided prayer, whether this is something you've tried, whether this is something that you find interesting. So let me just pause there. Comments? Am I on mute? Hey, Steve. Yeah. Hey, I knew I could count on you, I know, I know it. I think what I've been trying for the last year or so is starting my careers with being thankful for. And because it just, it takes over everything else that's a burden or struggle or something. So being thankful for helps me to just sort of gratitude. Yeah, you're on the list too, just so you know. Under struggles? Oh, goodness. Steve, I don't know if you can hear me. I can, Jim. Hi. Hi. You know, I think one of the things that I really like about what you're saying here is the fact that you have a plan that helps to discipline you. Because I totally agree that, you know, the spirit is there, you want to pray, and your mind will go all over the lot. And you'll find out that after a couple of minutes, you haven't been doing anything. But the fact that you do have some kind of a system, and I think that's important for any of us to find some kind of a system that will work for us and help discipline us, so that we focus on what's really important. So I thank you for having

a template to work from. You know, I find that, you know, my dad, dad's on, I see my dad, but you know, for a lot of you, you know that my dad and I used to work together. And he had an expression that he would tease me every once in a while. And it worked so well, you stop doing it.

You know, and I would sort of have a habit, you know, or it would be, you know, like in the sales business, you know, you always had the prospect and things like that, you know. And I had certain things, and it always fed the pipeline. And then all of a sudden, I stopped doing it because it worked so well. And I use that analogy because sometimes in life, you know, our prayer life is just going on all eight cylinders, right? We're just plugging away, and we're connected, and we are, you know, in tune with our God and with our Lord Jesus. And these things just come naturally to us. But most of us, I think, go through seasons in life, you know, where we fall in and out of good habits. Sometimes it's not just discipline, though, I think, Jim, you know, sometimes we can be as disciplined as any. But if we have some sort of situation that sort of throws us, it can be more than just a discipline thing. So for me, the discipline is that spark that gets it back, right? It's not like, I remember Dave Jennings was talking to me once about what he referred to as muscular Christianity. You know, you can't just sort of push your way through things. It's got to become part of who you are. And the discipline, I think, is, in my mind, helping me get to the point where it becomes more natural again. Does that make sense? Yeah. I see some Hey, Jason. I like how your I know your dad has lots of good advice and your mom. And my parents both used to say to me, and parents are great for these sorts of things. Don't despise the day of small things. And they will always very much into, you know, do the little thing that helps somebody or the little thing that you can offer in prayer. And as I've gotten a little bit older, I try to slow down, like you say, and focus on the small smaller blessings in life. And we bought this little plaque, and it says, What if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you thanked God for today? And it just helps me to think about what is really important in life, and try to keep a focus on those things in my prayer life. Thanks for that. Yeah. Yeah. Roberta? When you were talking about talking to God, I do that when I'm driving in the car, especially if I'm going on a trip. And what I mean by trip is, my trips to the doctors will usually be between 45 minutes and an hour. And I will just talk to God about things that either I'm going through, and I need his help, or just talking and letting him know that I appreciate him being there for me. I know he's been there for me in the past. And I ask him to please continue to be with me and help me through whatever problems may be happening at that time. So it's a conversation, though, Roberta? It's a conversation. It may be like a one- And do you think that's different than a formal prayer? Is that what you mean? Yes. Yes. Because it's not like where I would start out by saying, Our Father who art in heaven, or starting off with a preamble like that. I just start talking to him and having, it may be like a one-sided conversation, but I know that he's there and he's listening to me. Interesting. You find it helpful. I do. I really do, because sometimes I can, by doing that, I can get issues out

that I may skip over or not even think about when I'm doing a formal prayer. Interesting. Along those same lines, Roberta, a little bit different, but similar, I remember having a conversation at a Bible school or fraternal ones with Roger Lewis

about praying. And somebody had asked Roger about praying to Jesus. And if I recall correctly, Roger said that what he found helpful was to have conversations with sort of the same way that you're describing in your car rides to and from the doctor's appointments. He wasn't necessarily praying to Jesus, but he was conversing with him. I thought that was really interesting. I see Ellen has her hand raised. Ellen? Hey, Steve. I liked what you said about writing stuff down. And I have a little, somebody gave me a little metal box a long time ago. I don't remember who. And it has all these little papers in it and a little pencil that fits inside the box. And you can write down prayers or people you need to pray for, things you need to pray for. And I find, I don't use it all the time, but I find like when I'm struggling that I will, I keep it in the drawer on my bedside table. And that's like when I'm struggling with something or I will bring that out and I will look at the things that I've written in there before that I've prayed for and probably pray for them again, and then add to it the things I need to do now and pray for now. So I found that. How many times do you open that up and look at something that was like top dead center in your mind, you know, the big stressor, the big worry and say, oh, that's been resolved for months now. Sometimes they are. And sometimes it's like, wow, that issue is still there. How about that? Right. Right. Yeah. And another thing that I sort of discovered over the past, sometime in the past year, I love the verse in Philippians four, six, and seven. Don't worry about anything, whatever. Tell God every detail of your needs and earnest and thankful prayer and the peace of God, which transcends human understanding will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus. And one day I was reciting that to myself and I hit a pun that it says, tell God every detail of your needs. And I'm like, how, how have I been reciting this to myself for years and never really thought about that? Cause so many times we're like, well, God knows what we need and God, God knows what they need. Well, you know, praying for somebody and please, you know, provide what they need. He tells us to pray with every detail. And I have started doing that

so much more since I had that little revelation and, and I find it's helpful to me that

detailing that out, like this is. And will you actually write it out or is this? Not always. Yeah. But trying to be more detailed in my prayers. Like, you know, like this week, I, you know, Gary caught my cold and I really need Gary to be better. I need him to recover so he can do this, you know, so that he can do his PT. And then, you know, so I'm trying to be more detailed in what I need in my life right now. Right. So those are my thoughts. For everybody that doesn't know, Ellen and I were in the same Sunday school growing up and it was fortunate because she could memorize everything as just evidenced by this long quotation, right? And I couldn't, I could never do it. I memorized that when I was 15 years old with Bob Lloyd, Shippensburg. Yeah. So, so you, what was the passage that you quoted, Philippians? Philippians four, six and seven. Okay. So, so what you got out of that was that as you meditated on that verse, you discovered something that as Jim Sullivan used to say, that was never in my Bible before, right? All of a sudden this thing just like popped out at you. Okay. So that was one thing I got. The other thing I got was the idea of sort of keeping a list or a box where you can put things that you are casting your cares about. I, you know, when Jean-Claude and Justine joined our Ecclesia years ago, one of the first things that I remember about them was the expression that Jean Claude has and Justine uses it still. That's a problem for God, right? You know, he wouldn't carry these problems on his shoulders. He would instead cast his cares to God, you know, and drawing the connection there to your box where you put these, you know, prayers in or these worries or these concerns. It's like, yeah, that's above my pay grade. This is a problem for God. So that was something I got out of what you said. Yeah. How many people keep a, will write things down? Like, do you have a prayer list that you put on? I remember Sister Penny Caddell used to have a prayer list over Kitchen Sink, right? Yeah, that's a good discipline. It's a good way to keep discipline. Yeah. I actually

recently started a prayer journal and I tried to take a few minutes every day to jot at least one or two things. And I like it because it reminds me, you know, I put the gratitude in there, but it reminds me of what I am worried about versus what I should be focused on. And it's actually been really helpful in my prayer life. Very nice. Very nice. Thanks. Is that Liz? Is that who's speaking? Yep, that was me. That was Liz. It's so great having you on, Liz. Yeah. All right. So again, you know, this is helpful for me and I appreciate you sharing that, everybody. I'll leave you with one thing. I've mentioned it before, but, you know, one of the real mentors in probably many of our lives was Brother Harry Tennant. And Harry spoke about this very subject once. And he had a pretty powerful job, as I understand, in the British government. And he managed a lot of people. And he said that every Monday morning before he started work, he would go through all of the, he would review a list of all of the people that reported to him. And he would see all of the folks and just ask himself, okay, is there anything I can do to help Ben with this project he's doing this week? What can I do to assist him? You know, if Jim is struggling with something, what support can I send his way? And Harry talked about how it just like dawned on him, like, I should be doing that, not with my employees, but with my brothers and sisters in the Ecclesia. You know, review that list, whether it's a prayer list or simply the, you know, the list that, you know, Cindy and Deb put together, you know, our list this year, right? These are things, these are practical things that we can do to discipline ourselves to pray and to pray perhaps more effectively. You know, along those lines, Steve, I remember reading something Harry Whitaker wrote that, you know, at nighttime, and of course this happens when you get older, you'll wake up and you don't go back to sleep. I never had that problem when I was younger, but it happens. And apparently Harry had the same problem. And he said, what he would do then is he would mentally begin to go through his Ecclesia. And perhaps even just by in terms of where people sat in the meeting and he would offer a prayer for them. And he said, if by any chance you fall asleep in the process of that, God will understand. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I remember my mom talking about, you know, some of the dark days that she spent in a hospital bed after, you know, significant surgeries and the, you

know, the joy of seeing the sunrise after a nightless sleep, right? Yeah. Yeah. New every morning is the love. Yeah, I think there are a lot of us that a lot of folks that struggle with sleep. Yeah. So what I'd like to, what I'd like to do now is I'd like to just shift a little bit where, again, we're talking about guided prayer, creating some sort of discipline to our prayer life. And we use this concept of, you know, we use the Lord's Prayer as an example of a guided prayer. And then I showed you a guided prayer template that I had been or have been using. And that's this one here on the right side of the screen. I'm thankful for, you know, what should I pray about? These are the things that I'm thankful for that, you know, I want to pray about my relationships with my struggles with that sort of thing. But now what I'd like for us to think about, brothers and sisters, is this idea of hallowing God's name. So for it to go

back to the Lord's Prayer, and we think about how Jesus taught his disciples to pray, the first thing that he instructed them to do was to pray, Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That's a word we don't use in everyday English, right? Hallowed. But it means to be revered.

It means to be honored. It means to be declared holy or separate. The way I think of it is to hallow God's name. To hallow his name is to set God above

everything and anything else in my life. It's to revere him as the greatest of all, to honor him, to declare him holy, to set him above all things. I began class today by talking about how I was endeavoring to, in the mornings, be still. Be still and know that I am God. We read in Psalm 46. And then the passage says, Be still, know that I am God. And then it continues and says, I will be exalted. God will be set above anything and everybody. He will be exalted. And so what I want to think about now is this concept of adoring God. And one, as I was preparing for class, one writer that I read used this expression, the adoration of God is the exploration of God. To adore God is to explore him. So for those of us who are married, I want you to think back to that time when you first realized that your girlfriend or your boyfriend was that special one. You just wanted to know everything about that person. You adored that person. You wanted to know all the ins and outs. And I think that when we come to the concept of hallowing God's name, one of the things that I find so helpful is to explore the many facets of God. God is many, many things, brothers and sisters. And sometimes because he is so all-encompassing, it's hard to get my mind around just how wonderful he

is. And instead of me adoring all of the specific features of God, the characteristics of God, I just lump them all into this sort of, and I don't mean to be flippant here, but this fuzzy feeling. He's wonderful. And what I want to think about now and what I would encourage us to do, and if anybody wants to help me with this project, I would really love to try and develop this as a project either for our Ecclesia or for our Wednesday night class or for anybody that's interested. And here's the concept. The concept is to break the

characteristics of God down into something like 30 different characteristics, one for each day of the week. And if you're looking for a prompt about hallowing God's name or adoring God's name, you focus on one thing each day. And here's an example. Hold on. I'm going to move my screen here.

So the first thing that we might think about is the idea that God is the Creator. So I would like everybody, if you have your Bible, to actually turn your Bible to Nehemiah chapter 9. If you don't have your Bible, you can turn on your phone, but I want you to actually look at the passage that we're going to be reading here. Nehemiah chapter 9, and we'll look at verse 6. And what we're seeing here is the first stanza, if you will, of a prayer that was offered to God. And it begins with these words. Blessed be your glorious name, and may it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are God, verse 6. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry

all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you. So brothers and sisters, that passage speaks about one characteristic of our God, the fact that he is the Creator. The fact that he is your Creator. And the concept that I'm trying to develop in my own prayer life right now is to have a guided meditation where on Monday, for example, I read this passage from Nehemiah chapter 9, verse 6 that spoke about God being the Creator. And I sat in stillness of mind thinking about this passage and only this passage. I read it again, and then I read it again. And then I looked at it in a different version, and I just sort of let it simmer in my mind. And it dawned on me that God is the Creator

of the heavens, even the highest heavens and the starry host. But he was also my Creator. He created me. He knew me when I was in my mom's belly. You know, the other day, my mother was showing us, you know, she had texted my sister and I a photo from our childhood. And it was a picture of me at, you know, I don't know, five years old sitting on the front stoop of the house. And even then, God, the Creator was with me. And just sort of like having that sort of

narrow, deep thought about the Creator God just was very helpful for me. And it allowed me to

time in prayer, praising God, not for all of the many characteristics of which there are many, but in this particular prayer, I just focused on this one thing, what it means to have a God who created everything. And I thought about that. And that's what I prayed about. So I'm going to stop the screen share for a second and just ask if anybody would like to in and share any thoughts about that. Has anybody done anything like that, where you just focus on a single passage and perhaps pray about that one passage? The thing I'm noticing, Steve, is you've got hymns there as well. Yeah, I personally found that helpful. You know, the WCF hymns are there on the screen with obviously a nice visual and the words are there. And I'm going to, you know, Jim, I think, I think I'd like to just piggyback on what you're just saying. And I'm going to share the screen again, but I'm going to share a couple of

websites that you all may find really helpful, because it allows us to look at hymns and read hymns that relate to different things, you know, regarding the adoration of God or the fact that God is our creator, for example. And sometimes like just reading the stanza of a hymn

and thinking about its meaning just gives my prayers a different way of expressing the same thing I've been thinking about. Or if I'm listening to the music, it might stay with me throughout the day. So here I want to, I'm going to share my screen again. And this time, what we're going to do, brothers and sisters, is we're going to look at, this

is the WCF website that Jim referenced. It's wcfoundation.org. And they have, let me just go there. Under media, you see this tab here, media, they have something called hymns for Sunday. This is what we, what Josh used last Sunday, and I used the Sunday before when we were presiding remotely. And when we come to this hymns for Sunday, there is a section here that gives us a directory. And when we click on that, now what we find are WCF hymns from the Christadelphian hymnbook. It gives us instrumental hymns, praise the Lord hymns, worship book hymns. Are anybody familiar with the worship book? This is a book from Australia. All the hymns and praise songs in it were written and composed by Christadelphians. So we could go, yeah, go ahead. It's been written up in the tidings, Steve, as you probably know, the worship books. Yeah, yeah. Ben is sending his love on that. I mean, there's great music there. Okay. So if we were to go, for example, to jump on what you're saying, Steve, we have a bunch of those books at the Ecclesial Hall, a bunch of the worship books. That's right. Yeah, yeah. We've got the, they're a bit challenging, I understand, for musicians. Some of them are at a higher level than, I guess Ben could probably bang through all of them. I had no issue at all because. So, you know, so what I'm showing you on this screen here is the hymns for Sunday, and if you click on it, we have all of these different hymns that are listed. The one that I wanted to focus on as it related to the God, you know, the creator God, is I had referenced on this, on our screen, praise, the praise song 261 from the PTL book. And so if I clicked on that button on the website, there it is. And what I can do, brothers and sisters, is I can just read the words of this hymn. The earth and its fullness belong to God alone. We worship our maker who seated on the throne. He formed the earth and founded it upon the deepest sea. Oh, worship our creator God, the master of all eternity. And so when I read words like this, separate from the music itself, it helps me focus on the meaning of the words. Sometimes when I'm singing a hymn, I'm thinking about carrying the tune, and I'm not thinking about the words. And this is a way that we can maybe focus a little bit more. But if you are a person that likes the music, you can just click on the button, and it will begin to play the music. And you can have that tune, you know, perhaps you've got that tune running in the background as you offer your prayer, you know, as it runs quietly in the background. So that's one thing I wanted to show you, brothers and sisters. It's the WCF website. Once again, you go to Media, and you come down to the Hymns for Sunday button, and it will give you a list of all of these. It will give you a directory of all of the hymns. Pretty neat. The second thing I want to do is I want to take you to this website, which is ChristadelphianMusic.org.

This is a site that was developed by Brother Peter Claussen and Brother Jeff Gelenow. And it has some of the, you know, it has a lot of Peter's music. This is what we used as an ecclesia when we had no pianist. And before we had the piped-in music, we had just the accompaniment. And this was done by Peter. But what I want you to focus on, brothers and sisters, and for presiding brothers, this is really great. There are two things that I wanted to show you on this site. The first is where you come to Info. And under this Info section, there is something called Scriptural References. And if we click on that, you will find a hymn or a praise song that is associated with specific chapters and verses from the Bible. So if, for example, you are exhorting or you, you know, are doing a study on, you know, Exodus chapter 2 verse 24, you could know that the green hymn book has that particular passage referenced in the second stanza of hymn 122. So again, this is a scriptural reference with hymns. I think it's 17 pages long. It's a great resource for finding those musical words

and songs to help in our meditation. Then here's another one that I find really helpful. On the same website, again, this is ChristadelphianMusic.org under the Info tab. At the bottom, there's something called the Concordance. Now we all know what a concordance is when we were talking about the Bible, but this is a concordance for our hymn books. And so if we click here, there's a brother by the name of James Pearson from the UK, and he's put this website together. And what we can do is we can say, I want to sing a hymn about God our creator. And I type in the word creator, and I hit go, and lo and behold, it pulls up, what, 10 or 12 hymns or songs that reference the word creator. So we've got Praise Song 283, Praise Song 111, the Christadelphian hymn book 77, all of these things. Again, it's a way that we can find musical lyrics and tunes that are geared towards the subject that we're meditating on. Steve, could I just add one thing? Yeah, please. Another site is the Christadelphian Isolation League site. Yeah. And you do need to open an account. A password on that one, right? A password, but once you've done that, you're in automatically from then on. And there's a whole section, as you probably know, on the hymns. They are sung by the Northern Christadelphian Choir, and the entire green book is there. And so if you're looking for the hymns on the section of praise, you know, God and praise, they're all there, and they're all sung, and the words are all there. Thanks, Jim. So that's the Christadelphian Isolation League. I don't know if Phil is on tonight, but our Hope and Stoughton website has that same feature with the Northern Choir songs as well. Is Phil here? Maybe he can jump in and share that site. It's hopeandstoughton.org.

Do you remember what it is, Jim Sullivan? He put it in the chat. It's hymns.hopeandstoughton.org. hymns.…there we go. The hymns website will give you access to all the audio that we play on Sundays. And that's available to the public. Phil, it's okay for us to share the site since I'm doing it now on YouTube. And then we've got the concordance program on the Cygnus website that I've put in the chat. Oh, thank you for that. All right, you're awesome, man. Okay, so again, this is our own Ecclesia's website. Type in hymns.hopeandstoughton.org.

One of my favorite things to do is to listen to Julia Baines stuff. And so here, you know, Sister Julia Baines, formerly from Sussex, has all of her music. And, you know, you can play that and listen to that. So I won't do that now. Thanks for that. Okay, I'm going to end now, brothers and sisters. But before I do, I would like to come back to this screen where I want to share this idea that I'm trying to formulate. And that is to develop a prayer prompt where we would come up with 30 different characteristics of God, 31 different characteristics of God that would prompt us each day of the week for a month to think about a different characteristic of God. So we could talk about the Creator, and we could offer a prayer, you know, Dear God in heaven, I am grateful that you created this world, and that I can experience the wonder and the joy of hearing the birds chirp in the morning, or, you know, whatever it is that we're thinking about, we can pray about those things. We could talk about the fact that we have a loving God, and we could consider 1 John 4, and we could read that passage over and over again. And then pray and praise God in this start of our prayer where we are hallowing his name, and we are hallowing his name. We are adoring God. We are exploring his characteristic of being a loving God. We could think about the fact that he is the Almighty, and we could read from Psalm 89, or he's the God of light, or he's the burden bearer, that this is a problem for God, and I can cast my burdens to him, and he will carry them. Or that he is the keeper of promises, right? So there are seven, and I've listed passages that go with them. And then, you know, the God of miracles. And then in the week two, we've got another seven that we could go through. So I'm going to leave it there, and if anyone would like to help me with this project, brothers, sisters, friends, anybody that wants to contribute, I'd love to sort of share my ideas and get you to join me in that.