How We Got Our Bible L12

Opening

Alright, let's look at Psalm 68. Psalm 68 this morning. Psalm 68 and Psalm 68 and Psalm 68 and let's look at verse 11. Psalm 68, the Lord gave the word. The Lord gave the word. Great was the company of them that published it. And so the Lord gives the word. But his church in the Old Testament, it was the Levites. and in the New Testament, the church. And in the New Testament, it was the church. He was the church in the Old Testament. And in the New Testament, it's the church. And in the New Testament, it's the church. Psalm 68.11 the Lord gave the word. The Lord gave the word.

The Lord gave the word. Great was the company of them that published it. And so the Lord gives the word, but his church in the Old Testament it was the Levites, and in the New Testament it's the church. in the New Testament, it's the church, publish it. And where we left off a couple weeks ago was we left off at the word of the Lord was precious. We looked at that verse in 1 Samuel 3, the word of the Lord was precious. And so there are many factors that contributed to the word of the Lord being precious after the decline of the Roman Empire and the interconnectivity of Europe declining with it.

And then, of course, in a day when everything was hand copied. So there's a lot of reasons that it wasn't published, obviously, as much as it would be in the modern era. And I speak the post-Renaissance era, say around 1500, with exploration and technology, namely printing. And other things that really sped up the publishing of the word of God. I want you to look at Psalms 119, Psalms 119, and a great verse, a great verse. And they used to call the Middle Ages, they used to call them in school, they called them the Dark Ages. And there was a reason for that, of course, with the decline of empire. There, learning went down in a lot of the civilized world.

And even in the civilized world, it didn't continue at the same pace. Of course, there's another reason for it, and that was the light, the light of the gospel slowed down. It slowed down in the Middle Ages as compared to those first few centuries of Christianity. But Psalms 119, Psalms 119, and look what he says in verse 30. He says, the entrance of thy words giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple. God's words give understanding not just to the educated, right? Not just to the enlightened, not just to the elite, not just to the scholar, to the doctor. David was a shepherd boy from a little city in Judea, a little town in Judea, and yet he knew the scriptures.

And he says that the entrance of thy words giveth light, it giveth understanding unto the simple. And so the scriptures were meant not just to educate the learned doctors of the church. They were to give understanding to the simple. And, sir, Psalm 119, 130, did I not say? What did I say? Yeah, you got to just come right back at me. Let me, or I'll just keep on going. Just like a train. You know? Psalm, jump in front of it if you dare. Hey, Austin. Okay, look at it again then. Psalm 119, 130. The entrance of thy words giveth light. This is a great verse. It giveth understanding to the simple.

The Lesson

Now, what was I just talking about when you raised your hand? No, it's okay. I got old people syndrome. No, I do. It's happening. I feel like right now, there's this hole in the center of my brain where all the words that I want go. Do what I'm talking about? Like, I can actually visualize it. It's driving me nuts. More fish oil, please. Amen. Anyways, and so it was meant to give understanding to the simple. It wasn't just for the learned. Now, there's a reason, I guess, that translation into the vulgar tongues was slow. There's a lot of reasons given. Languages were themselves transitioning. You had barbarian languages that weren't written with a syntax that would accommodate the scripture.

And so, and in addition to that, the attitude of the church was, don't translate the Bible into the vulgar tongues. Just teach them Latin. And then we can preach to them in Latin. That was kind of the attitude. And, of course, the problem with that is that you're dealing with Celtic and Germanic peoples who are just, by nature, very independent. And they're not just going to do that. They're going to keep their culture. They're going to keep their language. And you had a Latin-German fusion in Europe, right? And that gave rise to the existing ethnicities and nations that are there today. But still, they were centuries without the Bible in their own tongue.

If you were going to learn the Bible at all, you just had to go to church on Sunday and hear it read. You hear it read. And that was how it was for most of the world prior to the printing press, most of the Christian world. Okay? And so that was a factor. Of course, there was also regional dialects. there's like 14 regional dialects today in Italy, where they speak a little bit different Italian, even though they can understand each other. But it was much more pronounced before. And there were other factors. The Catholic Church didn't have much motivation to give illiterate people the Bible. They just didn't. And, in fact, before the Viking invasions, the most literate place in Europe in the Middle Ages, believe it or not, was Ireland.

That was the most literate place. They had the highest literacy rate. Because of the decline of empire in mainland Europe and the Irish being a little bit insulated because they were geographically separated, they were able to kind of continue on with education, learning, monasteries, libraries. And so, actually, a lot of Irish scholars and British scholars, Britons, just old inhabitants of the British Isles, were actually imported to the mainland to re-educate people. And now, there were always efforts made, and we're going to get into this, but there were always efforts made by evangelicals or kings at different times to translate the scriptures. But we want to kind of pick up where we left off.

You remember, a couple weeks ago, I finished with reading that note, Elfrith the monk, to his friend there, when he had translated some of the Old Testament into Old English, right? Anglo-Saxon, essentially. It's a Germanic language that eventually became English. English, and he told him the concerns of giving the people the Bible in their vulgar tongue. Do you remember we left off with that? and, he said, unlearned men and even unlearned priests, it would be dangerous for them to have a copy of the scriptures themselves. And one of the things that he mentioned was that, for instance, a guy might read the Bible and see that Peter had a wife.

Well, this would be very dangerous, because we don't let our priests have wives. Right? In other words, don't give them the Bible. They might figure out that we're wrong about something. Or they just don't understand what we know. They don't know what we know. Because more than any other reason, the truth is, is that the church had no motivation to give people the Bible in their own language because of this idea of apostolic authority. And that idea of apostolic authority was that to the church were committed the truths of the scripture, right? To the church was committed the keys of the kingdom of heaven. To the apostles was committed the word.

And to the apostles and their successors, which were, of course, the pope and Rome and the cardinals and the men that he gave holy orders to. And so the idea was, why do you need the Bible? We have one at church, and I will tell you what it says. And by far more than any other reason, because before the Catholic Church kind of stepped into that administrative void left by the Roman Empire, right, you had scriptures translated into the vulgar tongues at a fairly rapid rate. You had it translated into Ethiopian, and Armenian, and Nubian, and Persian, right, and Gothic, and then into Italic, right, which was the native language of Italy that eventually became Italian, a little different from some of the Roman Latin.

You had, it was going everywhere at a quick rate, and that slowed down. The reason it slowed down is we have the Bible. We will, you can learn a little bit when you sing the Psalms on Sunday, when you pray the prayers that we give you to pray, and this is how it worked. And so really, the scripture, in the making of modern Europe, it became the great leveler, right? It's the great egalitarian book, right, that gives every man the key to knowledge, every man the key to eternal life. Jesus Christ said, the words that I speak to you, they're spirit and life, and he said, thy word is truth.

And he said, ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. And so we see that with the proliferation of scripture. So just a little overview here, and we'll just get into this a little bit today. I just want to show you real quick, and we'll probably touch on this later, but the thing, we're talking about how we got our Bible. And one of the things that makes English unique is that you can say a word so many different ways. Right? So like, kingly, that would be from German, right? And then, royal, I think, would be from Latin, right? And regal would be from French, right? And so they, it takes, it's taken words from several languages.

So English is about 60% pure Latin, I mean Latin, but about half of that comes by way of the French language. Right? But English is a mix. It's a mix of different languages in a way that many other languages aren't. Right? And even to this day, right, we absorb so many words. Right? And we absorbed a lot of words from the natives that we displaced here, right? We absorbed a lot of words from the Spanish. And so it makes it unique in that sense, but what I just want to show you is that these languages in Europe were developing. They were developing. So, we're going to get to that later.

This is here just a little bit of the history of when Europe was in flux, just in flux, with the decline of empire and all of the invasions that we talked about the last lesson. One of the ways that God used his people to get the Bible back into Europe was you had people at the far reaches of the empire that had an old Latin Bible and a Bible really that dated back prior to Jerome's Bible, prior to Jerome's revision there in around 400 AD. They already had the Bible there. And when Charlemagne and others wanted scholars, they got them from here. You had a guy named Columba that had a monastery there at Iona and his missionaries went into Britain.

Another man named Columbanus that his people went into Germany and what you would call northern France today. And so God's always found a way to keep his words and to get people his words. And there's a lot of different ways he did that. Now, I think we already talked about that last week, so we're going to keep going here. Now, when we talked about those, when we talked about those, the people that kept the Scriptures through this time, when they were kind of either non-existent or there was just one beautiful, nice Bible in a regional church. And we showed you some pictures of those last week, I think. There were people that believed that every man should have a Bible, at least every church should have a Bible.

And this is one of those groups. We call them the Valdensens or the Vadois. There's different names for it. Valenci, which means in Italian, the men of the valleys. The men of the valleys. And these people, they inhabited this region here. They call it the Piedmont region. So it's coming out of the plains up into the mid-hill country of northern Italy as you're getting into the Alps. And they, at one time, existed all throughout Italy. Big bunch of them, and even in Calabria. But they had been in this area for as far back as we know. And they weren't, they were just called men of the valleys, or they were called Valdensens, supposedly named after a guy named Peter Waldo.

But essentially what they were is they were just Latin Christians. They were old Latin Christians. And the big lie is that there was this homogeny in the Roman Catholic Church for all these centuries where everybody agreed and everybody got along. And that's just not true. Right? People were very independent. Right? You didn't have the interconnectivity of today. And so you had groups, and I think we mentioned last time about the independence of the Spanish churches. We talked about the independence of the Celtic churches. These folks were mountain people, and they were on both sides of the Alps. The French side of the Alps, the Italian side of the Alps. And they kept the scriptures for themselves.

And I call them the Scriptorium of the Sky. So there's many places that God used to preserve his words. But one of those groups was the Valdensens. On this side of the Alps, they're called the Albigensens. In this area, they're called Leonists. But it's just names given to heretics, people that did not agree with the Church of Rome on a lot of things. All right? Now, they kept their own old Latin Bible for centuries with copies often confiscated and burned by the Roman Church. And their Bibles were... There's just a picture of one that's in a... That's a later manuscript, but that's from the Trinity College Library in Dublin. And one thing about the old Valdensens Bibles that's different is they're a lot smaller.

Right? I mean, you look at those old purple, tomes. Right? In the churches. Right? That took a year or two years to produce. Written with silver ink and purple-dyed pages. And you're like, how can you use that? Right? That's almost like a relic. It's almost like an idol in a sense. Right? It's like, oh, they have it. Just like the bones under the altar. Right? Just like a piece of the cross that Jesus was crucified on. It's like, there's the Bible. There's where the truth is. Right? And of course, it's off to the side a lot of times because the center of the old church was the altar, not the Word of God. but it was there but the one thing about the Waldensians Bibles they tended to be a lot smaller.

They tended to be a lot smaller and often times they wouldn't be a full Bible. A lot of times it would be a New Testament or just the Gospels. Right? Because they make it smaller and packable. And the reason for that is because they like to use them. They like, isn't that book called The Sword? Right? Amen. It's called The Sword of the Spirit. And so it was kind of a characteristic of their Bible and now they claimed and they claimed this they claimed that their Bible was brought by way of Asia Minor in the 2nd century dating back to anywhere from 120 to 150 AD they believed that we know that's when the Bible made it into Italy.

We know that. But they claimed that their Bible came from Syria and had nothing to do with the Pope or Rome or Jerome or anyone else. And they kept it for centuries. Now, the old Latin church in the West when we speak of the old Latin church in the West the reason we're talking about these guys is because they had a Bible. They had a Bible. And it was hand copied. And it wasn't necessarily any official copy but it was a Bible that they had and it was a Bible that they had for centuries. And the characteristic of these men were they were Bible believers they were independent and they tested what was told them by the patriarchates by Constantinople and Alexandria and Rome and Jerusalem.

Closing

They tested what came out of those patriarchates by the Bible. That was what was unique about these people. And I don't I think it was more common than anyone will ever let on. Remember the winners get to write the history books. Just remember that. Right? That's how it is. And a couple of these just some examples of these men you had a guy named Vigilantius who was born in Spain and all of these guys preached against the upswell of heresy in the Orthodox Church. Vigilantius preached against monasteries the worship of martyrs prayers for the dead clerical celibacy all that garbage that was creeping into the church. Right? A man named Jovidian who was an Italian he preached in Italy against the perpetual virginity of Mary he taught justification by grace through faith he taught a spirit baptism was more essential than water baptism we understand these things.

These guys stood up to prevailing Orthodoxy and Helvidius was an interesting one this guy right here Jovidian it took three learned doctors of the church to shut him up. Augustine Jerome and Ambrose all went after that guy. They eventually banned him to an island and he died just of exposure and being sick and not being cared for. But another man named Helvidius in that era preached against the same things these guys preached against but he also accused Jerome of using corrupt Greek manuscripts for his Vulgate and so there was an awareness that there was corruptions going on of the word of God and there were people that believed that they had the pure word of God and we're just going to keep moving here but when we talk about these people as the papacy gained power you still had these independent Christians that they thrived and they thrived locally they thrived locally and regionally in different areas and we know that from history.

A good example of that is Pope Gregory he's known as Gregory the Great he gave he was the one that really solidified Roman power over the church right in the beginning of the 7th century but Gregory the Great had a great heart for missions and he sent he sent one of his guys who's sometimes called Austin sometimes called Augustine sent him to the British Isles to convert the British Christians and at this time Britain was being overrun by Anglo-Saxons German tribes from what would today be like Denmark and they showed up and they had a conference with him he had a conference with hundreds of British pastors hundreds of British pastors and said hey we can get along if you will accept the Pope's authority if you will keep Easter when we keep it and if you will if you will baptize like we baptize and the problem with that is this is how they baptized right they didn't I could I could baptize this whole room Orthodox Catholic style right with this right you got to accept our baptism that was always the problem right because the old evangelical church believed that baptism was a was a picture of what happened to you when you got saved it didn't put you into Christ it didn't wash away sin it didn't wash away original sin and it was not efficacious for a baby right we understand that and so that didn't work that didn't work eventually some pagan kings married some Catholics from women from France got converted themselves and wiped out most of those British Christians wiped them out and but I say all that to say this not to get into too much church history but these people I mean St.

Patrick right 5th century and these guys they had an old Latin Bible that they had that had been in Ireland already for hundreds of years right and Augustine and now I'm talking about Augustine the Catholic the Catholic bishop in North Africa Augustine of Hippo he mentioned an old italic which was the Latin of Italy it was called the old italic version now these people had that Bible and the writers of the Middle Ages mentioned these people in the Piedmont and the Alps which I just showed you on the map right they called this area that mountainous area swarming with heretics and they used that word carefully right swarming meaning infestation right they were called Leonists Albigens Waldenz among a bunch of other things Ranerius the inquisitor he was a 13th century inquisitor a man that would call heretics in before a tribunal and question them and sometimes put them through the ordeal in order to get a confession out of them he called the Waldenzians these people of the mountains he called them the most dangerous and the most ancient and they really weren't Waldenzians they were just Christians that's what they were they were just Christians it's just that they gave them a name to make them seem unorthodox so there was Catholic and there was everything else you gotta get that when you read this stuff if you read this stuff they'll talk about the Paulicians the Bogomiles they'll talk about the Leonists right they'll talk about the Hussites and the Lawlers and the Fratricelli and all of these all of these heretical groups right and they give them a name to make them seem like they're some sort of weird sect but they're they're just Christians that didn't submit to Rome that's all they are right and their doctrine varied right their mode of worship varied right just like Christians today just like Christians say now getting down to it right the Italians of the Alps spoke what they would some people call Romant right which is just a Latin dialect right the French of the Alps spoke Languedoc or Provencal which is which is just regional they're more than dialects they're more than dialects they're semi-languages really and so these people wanted the Bible in their language they wanted the Bible for the people and so there were efforts made there were efforts made at translation this is just a picture but this is and I don't know that he dressed like the apostle Peter but this is the Waldensians and they are presenting their Bible to the cardinals at the third lateran council at Rome in 1179 AD and they showed up and they asked for they asked for permission to preach without harassment in their villages and they presented the Pope with a copy of the Bible that they had translated into their vulgar tongue out of Latin and of course the Pope refused them license to preach because they didn't agree with him on everything and he eventually had those Bibles burned he had them burned and but there were efforts there were efforts to get the Bible to the people to publish the scripture for the common man but they just they for a lot of different reasons they didn't get off the ground and some of the factors that I mentioned okay but now here it is right here I think I already mentioned this right they already burned right Peter showed up but they were forbidden to preach they were excommunicated in 1184 they were condemned at the fourth laddering council right but these people were very good at hand copying portions of the gospel to give to their preachers and to their women believe it or not which was like whoa yeah I mean it's funny when you read these guys they say their criticisms of the waldensins and the paulicians and the lawlers which these people are separated by centuries paulicians are in asia minor they're in armenia right the lawlers are in england in the 14th century the waldensins are here in europe in the 11th 10th 13th 12th century right the criticism one of the criticisms was even their women had bibles even their women had bibles and of course we know from the scripture that's that's okay amen because in christ right there's neither greek nor gentile there's neither jew nor female and why wouldn't you want to read the bible and so these groups all had that characteristic that they believed that people should have the word of god and interesting about this these vernacular translations and waldo is credited with the first complete vernacular translation somewhere in the 12th century in europe but there have been efforts made for centuries before we talked about it last week there have been efforts made to translate the bible into old english starting in the 7th century it was said that the church historian the venerable bead translated the gospel of john 7th century but these were partial and they were met with opposition and different things there was efforts made at translating the bible into old high german which is just the grandchild of gothic and old french there were efforts made but they were slow they were discouraged and in an era constantly interrupted by war nobles fighting different kinds of stuff so however when the printing press was invented and when the reformers started to translate the word of god into the modern european tongues right so the dotty translated the bible into italian and olivitana translated it into french and luther translated it into german right and then tyndale translated it into english and this was all in the in the in the 16th century when they did that when those guys did that they all referenced some of these old walled ends in bibles they all they all noted them because they represented a reading or a stream of scripture that had developed outside of that roman influence all right and that's just that's just putting it kind of simply and even oversimplifying but this is a example of the paris bible now see the size of that now compare that to the bibles we showed you last time right and there was a reason for that there was this you know Peter Abelard some of the humanistic reformers in France some of the you know quasi-Christian reformers in Europe they all they preached this dignity of man they preached this liberty of conscience right they preached this access of to truth for all people which we noticed noted last lesson that even Alfred the Great believed that even Charlemagne believed that every person had a right to read right and to know God's truth and how we just take for granted just take it for granted we just pick it up and read it and so this idea was moving through Europe because of a variety of factors right the upheaval of society the dismay at the black plague the exposure to learning in the east because of the crusades all of these things got coffee I think coffee probably had a lot to do with it I think that the crusaders brought coffee back and people started thinking for the first time I don't know I don't know what happened but there's a lot there's a lot of reasons right but God always works just like when Christianity came to the world the first time the world there was this upheaval and transition of cultures and people and ethnicities God works on men in upheaval and in transition and Europe was entering that phase and so there was a desire to have the word of God and some of it stemmed from true spiritual hunger and some of it stemmed from if you were going to learn in those days you were going to learn the Bible right that was part of your liberal education right the Bible was just part of it you read the classics you read Plato you read Homer you read the Bible that was kind of how it was right and but of course it was more than that because it was an age of faith and so these are called the Paris Bibles that I think started in the 13th century and it was just these Latin Bibles there was just an effort to make them smaller and more affordable so that other people could have the scriptures besides the very wealthy and this is the way the world was going now when we talk about this we will mention quickly we got a couple minutes here we'll mention suppression we'll mention efforts at suppression now the church will tell you that there was never any official decree against reading the Bible okay and they always cover their tracks and of course there's a reason for that and one of the reasons is there wasn't the unity at times that we think they had okay and but the mindset it was the mindset that they possessed and that they taught that really kept men in bondage right and I think Gregory the seventh said this the sacred scriptures should be obscure in certain places lest if it were freely open to all it would perhaps become worthless and we'll be subject to scorn or we'll be perversely lead the mind into air due to mediocre translations right and this is just one this is just one quote but we need to be careful with giving people the Bible because of what they might do with it right they don't they don't they don't understand it like we do and this was a common attitude this is a common attitude in the middle ages I think that I have another one of these here's the council of Toulouse here which would be in France 1229 and this was the beginning of the Albigensian persecution where basically the Cathars and any sect that wasn't Catholic was virtually obliterated from southern France I mean wiped out they survived on the Italian side but in this part of France they were wiped off the face of the earth and it was the beginning of the Inquisition and it started here as an effort to get rid of heretics but among other things this council declared this and you know and the next place is well that was a regional council we were just trying to suppress heresy right well you could have told them to stop right but it represents the attitude of the church and we prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old and New Testaments unless anyone from the motives of devotions should wish to have the Psalter or the brevary that's that's the canonical hours those essentially those are prayers that you can read so you can have the Psalter so you can have a hymn book right and the Psalms to sing and you can have the canonical hours you can have Hail Mary you know and glory be and all that stuff right and our fathers right for divine offices or the hours of the blessed version he says it right there right so they were allowed this they were allowed a couple church books but other than that you were not allowed the Old New Testament but we strictly we most strictly forbid they're having any translation of these books you could only have it in Latin they did not want people to have the Bible in their language right now there's more of that but we call this efforts at suppression right Christians were forbidden in the old church Slavonic that's the old Slavic church by John the 10th and by the Lateran synod of 1059 they were forbidden to use the old Slavic Bible the one that Cyril and Methodius translated right and there's records of other things like this right the Synod of Besey in 1246 banned the lady from Latin and vernacular right anything you couldn't have theological books in Latin or in the vernacular you couldn't have it in your language you couldn't have it in Latin not only the Bible but theological books the priests were allowed theological books in the vernacular but none of the people in Spain the second council of Tarragona 1234 forbade the possession of a romance language translation of books of the Old and New Testament right can't have it not allowed to have it shut her down why the entrance to thy word giveth light that's why now the attitude in Europe was changing John Wycliffe was a man that was a British divine a doctor taught at Oxford and was convinced the end was nigh now he's representative of the attitude of this age coming out of the dark ages but with a lot more guts he was convinced the end was near because of the black plague so he got right got saved started preaching and preached the Bible and he said a lot of stuff he said a lot of stuff but I think I have one of his quotes here he said that Christ and his apostles taught the people in the language best known to them therefore the doctrine should not only be in Latin but also in the common tongue that he believed and he believed that mom should have a copy of it in their home to teach their children and with the start of the Wycliffe ism or the Lawler movement and they said you couldn't you couldn't walk down a road in Britain without if you met two men on the road one of them will be Wycliffe's disciples the people just were turned on to this truth that they could actually have the word of God there were many laws passed by parliament in England the next two centuries forbidding people to read the Bible to their kids in their own house and other things right and it was a reaction to what started with this guy just giving people the truth giving people the truth and Wycliffe said a lot of things but he was he had that reformation idea of sola scriptura that the Bible is the judge of all things he said this about the authority of the fathers he said neither the testimony of Augustine nor Jerome nor any other saint should be accepted except in so far as it is based on scripture right in other words if they agree with scripture fine other than that right the same thing the Britons told the Catholic missionaries 800 years before take a long walk off a short pier yeah now he said this Christ law is best and Christ law is enough and he said that since scripture provides an infallible guide for the Christian life every Christian not just the clergy ought to know the scriptures and it was this that motivated him to translate the Latin Vulgate into English right and boy did he catch it he caught it in fact the archbishop of Canterbury at the time said that pestilent and most wretched John Wycliffe of damnable memory a child of the old devil crowned his wickedness by translating the scriptures how dare you how dare you without our authority right and eventually the church was forced to give the scripture in the vulgar tongue but there are hundreds of years behind right people have been pushing for it for centuries and we need to go we need to go but it's it's what's happening in Europe in the west and what led to our Bible was that the lights were on that men were reading the scripture that men had a hunger for the scripture and they wanted the people to have it and they and I like what William Tendale said and we'll pick up with this story next week but William Tendale the man who was eventually burned for his work on Reformation doctrine and translating the scriptures into English his work his Bible was outlawed by Henry VIII but in a discussion with a Roman priest in a tavern one of my favorite phrases that priest said that only the church had the right to interpret scripture and that no one else ought to have the Bible and William Tendale looked at that guy old Welshman and he said if God spares my life many years I will cause a boy who drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you do that was the attitude and this attitude came from centuries of suppression from centuries of darkness and from centuries of trust us and keep buying indulgences right trust us and keep paying money for us to pray your loved ones out of hell right and all these things but it's you listen faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God right we're born again not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible the word of God that you cannot separate the reformation and the explosion of evangelical truth right from the publishing of the scriptures in vulgar tongues in the tongue of the people you can't they go together right it's a correlation right that has causation and we'll talk about that more next week all right father we thank you for the word of God and that it is so precious I do pray that you bless the next service in the name of our Lord Jesus amen okay God bless you're dismissed