In Genesis 40, Joseph’s suffering and apparent abandonment remind us that God is always faithfully working His sovereign plan, even when we cannot understand His purposes.
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Amen. What a blessing to be thankful for: that God is faithful. And we’re going to carry that thought on as we come to God’s Word this morning. Let me have you remain standing. Take your Bibles and turn to Genesis chapter 40 this morning. Genesis 40. Follow along with me, please, as I read, and give your full attention, of mind and heart, to this, because this is God’s Word spoken to us this morning. Genesis chapter 40.
SCRIPTURE READING: GENESIS 40
Sometime after this, the cupbearer of the king of Egypt and his baker committed an offense against their lord, the king of Egypt. And Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker, and he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, in the prison where Joseph was confined. The captain of the guard appointed Joseph to be with them, and he attended them. They continued for some time in his custody. And one night they both dreamed, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison, each his own dream and each dream with its own interpretation.
When Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw that they were troubled. So he asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in custody in his master’s house, “Why are your faces downcast today?” They said to him, “We have had dreams, and there is no one to interpret them.” And Joseph said to them, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Please tell them to me.”
So the chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph and said to him, “In my dream there was a vine before me, and on the vine there were three branches. As soon as it budded, its blossoms shot forth, and the clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup and placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand.”
Then Joseph said to him, “This is the interpretation: the three branches are three days. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office, and you shall place Pharaoh’s cup in his hand as formerly when you were his cupbearer. Only remember me when it is well with you, and please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house. For I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, and here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the pit.”
When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was favorable, he said to Joseph, “I also had a dream: there were three cake baskets on my head, and in the uppermost basket there were all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.” And Joseph answered and said, “This is its interpretation: the three baskets are three days. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head from you and hang you on a tree, and the birds will eat the flesh from you.”
On the third day, which was Pharaoh’s birthday, he made a feast for all his servants and lifted up the head of the chief cupbearer and the head of the chief baker among his servants. He restored the chief cupbearer to his position, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand, but he hanged the chief baker, as Joseph had interpreted to them. Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.
OPENING PRAYER
Let’s pray. Father, we thank You again for Your most wonderful Word that You have given to us, that we might know You, that we might know ourselves, that we might hear of Christ, that we might know of the plan of salvation that You have given to us as You develop it through the history of creation. And as we look at this passage this morning, we pray for Your blessing, Father, that You would teach us and encourage us in Your Word. And we pray this in the name of Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen. You can be seated.
INTRODUCTION
As a pastor, as you might expect, I get asked lots of questions. One of the most common questions, in one form or another, is “Why?” Why is this happening to me? Why is God putting this on me? Why am I struggling with this sickness? Why am I having this situation? Why did I lose my job? Why did this or that disaster happen? Why do the righteous suffer and the ways of the wicked prosper? Okay, that last one was from Jeremiah, but I get asked questions like that as well.
And while some of the questions of why, why is this happening to me, why am I going through this, can often be answered by digging into a person’s life, because very often the cause of our suffering is our own sin and God chastening us for that sin, a lot of the time the answer that I give when people ask a why question is “I don’t know,” because I don’t.
God does. We can rest in that. We know that God does. In fact, down in verse 8 of our passage this morning, Joseph says, “Do not interpretations belong to God?” And that’s not just interpretations of dreams; that’s interpretations of why something is happening, because God knows, because God has a plan. He knows the answer. Most often, He has chosen not to reveal it to us specifically, and we need to be humble enough and trusting enough of God that we say, “Okay, we are simply to learn the lessons that He teaches us through these things, learn to respond, and make sure we’re responding to them in a biblical way, in a godly way.” And we are to respond to the situations that face us with faith in God, knowing that He is working His work, and that He is working all things for our good, as that famous verse in Romans 8 says.
A case in point is Joseph. He has had many points already in his life where he could have asked the question “Why?” Was it Kris Kristofferson who had a song so many years ago, “Why Me, Lord?” That’s what people asked. And maybe that could have been what Joseph asked, but we don’t see him asking that in the text that we’ve been looking at, do we?
We see him carrying on. We see him being faithful. We see him making decisions to be godly and to be doing everything as unto the Lord, to do his work to the best of his ability. And we’ve seen that the Lord has blessed that, and that the Lord has been with Joseph throughout his short but event-filled life.
Remember, if you will, that when we were in chapter 39 last week, the key theme of that chapter was contained in the repeated phrase “the Lord was with Joseph.” And that remains the theme in the passage that we’re going to look at today and for the rest of the book of Genesis, really. But in chapters 40 and 41 we have recorded for us the working out of that truth that the Lord was with Joseph. These chapters, 40 and 41, really focus on the means that God is using to demonstrate that and to lift Joseph up, to raise him up. Very much focused here on events and on things that happened, as we’ve just read.
God’s name, Yahweh, which was so prevalent, remember, in chapter 39, is not found in this chapter at all. Now, that said, the fact of God’s presence is all over this. But His name as the covenant name of God, that was given in the last chapter. Now we just see how God works that out. The generic name for God occurs several times in these chapters, ten times in fact, but it is either spoken to or spoken by Egyptians, apart from two uses in the explanation of the names of Joseph’s children near the end of chapter 41.
Because 40 and 41 really go together. We’re just going to look at chapter 40 this morning, but both chapters record the events that will end in the eventual rescue of Joseph from prison and his rise to the very highest place in the nation of Egypt, exceeded only by Pharaoh himself. These are also the means by which Joseph’s dreams back in chapter 37, which he had told to his brothers and to his father, and which sort of started all of this, will ultimately come to pass.
Three things we’ll look at this morning, just three simple divisions of the chapter. We’ll look at the dreams, the interpretation, and the fulfillment. Not a difficult outline for us today. But first we’ll look at the dreams.
I. THE DREAMS
Verse 1 sets these events in time by saying that they took place “sometime after this.” That is, some undefined time since the end of chapter 39, since Joseph was first thrown into prison because of the false charge from Potiphar’s wife that he had propositioned or physically attacked her. And subsequently, due to the work of God, Joseph had, remember, gained the favor of the keeper of the prison, to the point where we learn, well, we’ll just read it there in chapter 39. Look back at verse 21; we’ll start there. It says:
But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. And the keeper of the prison put Joseph in charge of all the prisoners who were in the prison. Whatever was done there, he was the one who did it. The keeper of the prison paid no attention to anything that was in Joseph’s charge, because the Lord was with him. And whatever he did, the Lord made it succeed.
There again is that line that was repeated so many times: the Lord was with Joseph. I mentioned last week that Joseph spent eleven years between his time in Potiphar’s service and the time that he is in prison. And so he is 28 when the events of chapter 40 take place, and he’ll be 30 years old by the time chapter 41 draws to a close. Still a relatively young man, with everything that is going on for him.
And so sometime after this, we read, “the cupbearer of the king of Egypt and his baker committed an offense against their lord, the king of Egypt.” Now, king of Egypt, Pharaoh: you can use those interchangeably. Pharaoh is the title given to the king of Egypt.
And his cupbearer and his baker committed an offense. We are told that here, and you might be thinking, “The cupbearer and the baker? Wow, why are we being told about a cupbearer and a baker?” Well, the answer, of course, is that the cupbearer and the baker held very high positions in the court of Pharaoh and of any king of that time and that era. Their jobs entailed more than simply handing the king his bread and drink, though even in doing that, that shows the high rank that they had risen to. But the cupbearer of a king, of a Pharaoh here, would also serve as the royal wine taster, tasting the wine in the presence of the king before it was given to him.
And he did that not to determine its acidity or its body or its fragrance. He did that to determine whether it contained poison. Because royalty, monarchs, feared assassination by poisoning, and for very good reason. It happened quite often. Just a sampling of it: Artaxerxes III and Artaxerxes IV of Persia were both poisoned. Seleucus III, a man who had a nephew named Antiochus Epiphanes, was poisoned. King Eric XIV of Sweden was poisoned. And there are some historians who say that Alexander the Great was a victim of poisoning at the hand of Iollas, who was his own cupbearer.
The king’s baker served the same kind of function for food, and it was also a position of great trust. It was very important. He had to make sure that the food was not being poisoned. I mentioned King Eric XIV of Sweden. He was poisoned with arsenic hidden in his pea soup. And so food and drink were both checked by these men. They were both very high positions, both requiring the utmost trust of the king; his life, and therefore the kingdom, were literally in their hands. And these two, the chief baker and the chief cupbearer, committed some sort of offense.
We’re not told what it is. And they both found themselves then in prison, which is also called here the house of the captain of the guard. Remember the captain of the guard? That’s Potiphar. It’s thought by many scholars that the prison being spoken of here was actually attached to the rather sizable home of Potiphar, that he had a prison wing, I guess you’d call it.
Verse 4 then tells us that “the captain of the guard appointed Joseph to be with them, and he attended them. They continued for some time in his custody.” So again, although it doesn’t say it here, we come up with what we talked about last week: it just so happened that these two were put under the watchful eye of Joseph.
You remember what it means when we say “it just so happens.” It means that God has sovereignly moved situations and ordained a situation, using a multitude of second and third and fourth causes to bring about exactly what happened. We say it just so happened, but we realize as Christians that nothing just so happens, that God ordains all things that come to pass. We use it as just a shorthand to mean we don’t know all of the particular things that were moved around by God in the ordination of this event and that event, that all were part of this particular thing happening.
But it just so happened that these two officers of the king were put in the prison where Joseph was, where, remember, as we just read a few moments ago, he had risen to the top of the heap in authority. He was still a prisoner, but he was the chief prisoner. He was the one who was given control over this, just as he had been in Potiphar’s house, so he was in the prison. And it just so happened that the captain of the guard appointed Joseph to be the one to watch over them, and verse 4 says that he attended them and that they continued for some time in his custody.
We don’t know how long that was, but long enough for a relationship to develop between them. Joseph was obviously, again, doing his job to the best of his ability. He was a caring person. He developed a relationship with them such that they trusted Joseph. Joseph didn’t know it, but this was the beginning of God’s work to raise Joseph up to that high place that he will eventually attain.
Verse 5 says, regarding these two prisoners, that “one night they both dreamed, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison, each his own dream and each dream with its own interpretation.” They both dreamed. So two dreams are presented here.
Recall that when Joseph himself had dreamed back in chapter 37, when he was at home, he dreamed dreams which, as I said, started, or at least aggravated, his brothers’ hatred of him. Remember there that Joseph had two dreams. And it will also be in chapter 41, which we’ll look at, Lord willing, next week, that Pharaoh will have two dreams. And in chapter 41, when Pharaoh has the two dreams, Joseph, in interpreting those dreams, will note that having two dreams was a confirmation that these dreams were from God. But whereas the two dreams of Pharaoh both mean the same thing, and the two dreams of Joseph earlier both refer to the same thing, these two dreams of these two men are very different. And that brings us to the interpretation.
II. THE INTERPRETATION
In verse 6, Joseph comes in in the morning. So he’s not imprisoned there with them; he is somewhere else. He comes to work, comes in to deal with these men in the morning, and he saw, the verse says, that they were troubled. And it’s interesting that they were not so troubled about being in prison; they were troubled about these dreams. And again, notice here the compassion of Joseph. He’s over these men in the prison, but he expresses care for them: “Why are your faces downcast today?” What’s up? What’s bothering you guys? And they answer, in verse 8, “We have had dreams, and there is no one to interpret them.”
Remember, that’s kind of a big deal in the ancient Near East. Dreams and their interpretations were an important part of life in the ancient Near East. Kings would have men who specialized in interpreting these dreams, to greater or lesser accuracy. And the men who could interpret dreams were often put in high positions as well. Think of Daniel. On the other side, giving wrong interpretations of dreams, especially if the dreamer was a person of some authority, royalty or something like that, could lead to imprisonment or execution.
And it was true throughout the Old Testament. Before, obviously, the closing of the canon, dreams were a regularly used, legitimate, somewhat common channel for divine communication. God Himself told Moses that He made Himself known to prophets through visions and spoke with them through dreams. Job also mentioned that God spoke in dreams. The list of people that were spoken to by God in dreams is not big. It’s not a long list: Abimelech (we saw him a few chapters ago), Jacob, Joseph, Laban, Moses, Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, Daniel, Solomon, Joseph in the New Testament, and then the Magi, the wise men, and Pilate’s wife. That’s the list.
And He came to Pharaoh’s cupbearer and baker, and He gave them dreams. And they were troubled because there was no one to interpret them. But there are two particular individuals in the Bible who are spoken of as having the ability to interpret dreams, and they were able to do so where the professionals often weren’t.
Again, think of Daniel. Joseph is quick to announce, as we read at the opening this morning, that he is not able to give the interpretation, but God is. Same thing Daniel said when he was asked to interpret. Of course, in Daniel’s case, it was even more difficult.
If you remember the situation in the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar, remember, had ordered his wise men, and then, when they failed, Daniel, to tell him not only the interpretation of the dream but also what the dream was. He didn’t say, “This was my dream; now interpret it.” He said, “You guys tell me the dream, and then interpret it.” A wise move. It’s easy for God, who gave the dreams and thus gave the interpretation, but not so easy for the wise men of the day. The other person who can do this is Joseph, whose dream interpretation is called on only here, in chapters 40 and 41.
And so Joseph gives to them the interpretation, and the chief cupbearer is up first. In verse 9, the chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph and said to him, “And on the vine there were three branches. As soon as it budded, its blossoms shot forth and the clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup and placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand.” Joseph then immediately gives the interpretation of the dream. No ceremony, no hocus-pocus, no magic, none of that nonsense: just the interpretation that God had given to him. It’s in verses 12 and 13. He said, “This is the interpretation: the three branches are three days. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office, and you shall place Pharaoh’s cup in his hand as formerly when you were his cupbearer.”
The interpretation for the cupbearer is a favorable one. Pharaoh is going to restore him to his office, and the cupbearer will continue serving in this very important office. And because Joseph knows that this cupbearer is going to be restored to his office, Joseph then, in verse 14, adds a request to the cupbearer. He asks, “Only remember me when it is well with you, and please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house.” “Please do me the kindness”: literally, “please do me the faithfulness.” For those of you who like to keep track of things, that’s the word chesed there. “Do me the faithfulness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house.”
And then we finally hear (we didn’t hear this last week) Joseph plead his innocence, first in regard to why he is here in Egypt, which he mentions, and then in regard to the situation for which he is in prison. In verse 15, he says, “I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, and here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the pit.” The pit is just another word for the prison.
And so that’s the interpretation. The cupbearer goes, “Whew.” And the baker thinks, “If that’s the meaning of these dreams, I’m ready to hear mine.” It’s interesting that he only speaks up after he hears that it’s favorable. In verses 16 and 17, the chief baker saw that the interpretation was favorable. He said to Joseph, “I also had a dream. There were three cake baskets on my head, and in the uppermost basket there were all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.” And in giving the interpretation for that, we see another expression of the moral and constitutional strength of Joseph.
Because, beloved, it’s easy to give good news, isn’t it? It’s easy to speak words that everyone knows are going to be received gladly. One rarely hesitates to do that. In fact, there are many people who seem to like it so much that they seek to position themselves to be bearers of the good news. There are those who want to be the first to tell others of something good that’s happened to someone else.
On the other hand, it takes no small amount of courage and no small amount of love and concern to tell someone something that they ain’t going to like to hear, to tell someone a hard truth, to tell someone a truth that needs to be told. “Does this dress make me look fat?” is the stereotypical example. And one of the quickest ways to get someone mad at you is to tell them something that they don’t want to hear.
But Scripture says in Proverbs, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” One of the most loving things that was ever told to King David was when Nathan the prophet told him, “You are the man,” confronting him about his sin with Bathsheba. And the same is true of us, beloved. While we must speak always in ways that minister grace to the hearer, sometimes the word that needs to be spoken is a rebuke or a truth that is hard to speak because we know it will not be accepted by our hearer. For example, Jesus said that when your brother sins against you, the proper, loving, godly, biblical, profitable response is, Jesus said in Matthew 18, “Go to him. Tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you’ve gained your brother.” Now, I don’t know if any of you have ever done that. I hope you have, because I’m sure we’ve all been hurt by someone, sinned against by someone. But that is not easy. That is not an easy conversation to have.
Some will accept it. The godly person who hears this will recognize their sin and confess that sin and ask forgiveness for that sin. You give it, and you move on. In fact, Jesus said, “If he listens to you, you’ve gained your brother.” While some will accept it, some will not.
But it takes courage, and it takes assuredness that it is the right thing, to tell hard truths to another person. Perhaps the hardest truth to speak to someone is the truth about truth, about eternal things: the truth of coming judgment, the truth of life and death and heaven and hell and eternity, of the fact that unbelieving friends and family are facing judgment unless they turn and trust Christ. This is the hardest truth to tell, but it is the most important one. In fact, it does no good to anyone if we fail to speak to our loved ones and the ones that God places in our path to do this. If we fail to do it, it doesn’t help us. It certainly doesn’t help them.
We need to do as Paul did. Remember, Paul enlisted the prayers of the church for opportunity and for boldness. Paul’s not the kind of person that you think would be timid. But Paul himself said, “Pray for me, that I will have the boldness to speak,” for the love of others to speak, to tell them of sin and of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. And while not approaching that level, Joseph, being asked, has a hard word, a hard truth, for the baker. The cupbearer’s outcome may be good, but it will not be so for the baker.
Verse 18 says that Joseph answered and said, “This is its interpretation. The three baskets are three days. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head from you and hang you on a tree, and the birds will eat the flesh from you.” I can only imagine the awkward silence after Joseph said that. But that was the interpretation, and Joseph didn’t back off from giving it. So those are the interpretations.
III. THE FULFILLMENT
The only thing left, very briefly stated here, is the fulfillment of these dreams. Very briefly, very simply, three verses tell us how this worked out.
Now, we’re not told what brings about the decision; we’re not told what goes on that causes the cupbearer to be pardoned and the baker to be executed. But we are told that things go exactly as Joseph said they would. Verses 20 through 22: “On the third day, which was Pharaoh’s birthday, he made a feast for all his servants and lifted up the head of the chief cupbearer and the head of the chief baker among his servants. He restored the chief cupbearer to his position, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand, but he hanged the chief baker, as Joseph had interpreted to them.” Exactly what Joseph said would happen. The interpretation was true. But perhaps the most important part here is verse 23, because this chapter ends on a disappointing note for Joseph. Verse 23 says, “Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.”
Joseph had said, when he gave the interpretation, “Remember me to Pharaoh, that I can be released from here.” And the cupbearer forgot. You would think that the dramatic outcome for the two men, the fate of the two officials, would have prompted the cupbearer to go, “Oh yeah, Joseph asked me to do this. Mention me to Pharaoh and so get me out of this house.” But for whatever reason, maybe being overcome with joy, being released and restored to his post, he, for now, forgets Joseph. We come to the end of this chapter here, and this forgetting of Joseph sets up a tension for the next chapter.
What will happen? Is Joseph going to stay in prison forever? It also, of course, sets up a situation where, again, we will see that the freedom, the promotion of Joseph, is clearly a work of God. We’ll see that next week. Because just to heighten that tension, as I say, we’re going to end here for today, just to stretch things out for a week. But if we take a quick peek into chapter 41, it begins by saying, “After two whole years.” Joseph’s uncertainty about his fate lasts not just a week but two whole years. If the Lord is with Joseph, which was so evident at the end of chapter 39, it’s a little bit harder to see just in chapter 40, since we’re not going on into chapter 41. Though, of course, even these two years that are a pause for Joseph are ordained by God for the perfect fulfillment of His ultimate plan. But how will Joseph react? Will he say, “Why?” It would certainly be a huge disappointment and a frustration for him.
CONCLUSION
Remember, as he sits in prison, we don’t know that he knows that there was a party and that these things happened just like he said, and that the cupbearer forgot to mention him to Pharaoh. He’s just sitting in prison doing his work, faithfully doing his work. So it’s a disappointment, certainly, when nobody comes to him, because it is difficult. It is hurtful to be let down by others in whom we’ve placed our trust. We’ve all experienced that. Especially in a case like Joseph’s, when he had no other recourse, no plan B, he just had to hope that the cupbearer did what he asked him to do. It was a fair request. But it seems that he’s forgotten. We know from reading, verse 23, that exactly that is what happened: he forgot. And here again, as we come to the end of this, we are reminded of a similar situation.
We’ve talked about the way that Joseph and his life is often a foreshadowing of things that would happen in the life of Christ. And this is similar, a time in Jesus’ life where He faced disappointment, being let down by others. A lesson that Jesus Himself, according to His human nature, learned at the end of His life. Remember in the garden, in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He was crucified, as Jesus poured out His heart and His soul to His Father in prayer, to the point, Scripture says, that his sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground, as He anticipates the horrific hours and the horrific events that lay ahead of Him as He offered Himself up for the sins of the world. In that time of exquisite agony, Jesus made a small and fair request of His disciples. He said, “Be alert and pray.”
And you know the story: three times He returned to them and found that instead they were sleeping, that they were tired, and so they neither watched nor prayed. Men are often unreliable. God is not. Let us remember that this morning. God didn’t abandon Jesus in the garden. The disciples did, in the way that I mentioned. And then when He was arrested, what did they do? They fled. They abandoned Him. God did not abandon His Son in the garden, but sent angels to minister to Him.
Remember that. God did not abandon His Son on the cross until that moment when He had to, in that moment on the cross when Jesus bore the sins of everyone who would ever believe in Him. At that point, the Father had to turn away from His Son so that, by the way, He would not have to turn away from you, Christian. And we know that God did that because Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God also did not abandon Joseph in prison, but continued to guide every step of the way of his life. And know this again this morning, people: God will not abandon any of His people. He will not abandon you. If you are His child, He will not abandon you.
It may seem like it at times. I won’t ask for a show of hands, but it happens. It seems like it because God allows us to go through some pretty rough things. And though it is true that He will at times give you more than you can handle, know that He will never give you more than He can handle for you.
And know that faith, trust, is what God calls for as our response. And remember that it is impossible for that man to despair who remembers that his helper is the Lord, that his helper is omnipotent and omniscient and loves him with a perfect love. Christian, when you feel like God has abandoned you, remember that your helper is God and that He has promised that He will never leave you. He will never forsake you. He is with you always.
And so let us pray that God will give us the grace to remember that in the midst of those times.
CLOSING PRAYER
And let’s pray now. Father, we thank You for Your Word, and we pray, Lord, that You will help us at times when people have forgotten us, when people have mistreated us, when people have sought our harm. Help us to know, Lord, that You are always with us, that Your promise to be with Your people is an absolute promise that will be as true as You are, who give the promise. Help us not to despair. Help us, when it seems that we have been left in prison, not to despair, but to know that behind the scenes You are working perfection. You are working not just an okay plan, Lord, but the perfect plan that will do for us the perfect good that You have ordained for us as Your child. We pray, Father, that if there are any who have not trusted in Christ, You will cause them to recognize that the greatest truth they need to hear is that of judgment and of grace: the judgment that would fall upon them if they were to go from this world and stand before You in their own righteousness, and the grace that is offered through Jesus Christ and through faith in Him. We pray, Father, that You would impress that on those who need to hear it. Remind us who have heard it and believed it. And may we glorify You together. In Christ’s name, amen.