Hugh Anderson - "With All Thy Strength and with All Thy Mind" (May 22, 1960)
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| Preacher | In the name of God the Father, | 0:10 |
| God the Son, | 0:13 | |
| and God the Holy Ghost, amen. | 0:14 | |
| From my experience of university life, | 0:22 | |
| both in Europe and here in America, | 0:27 | |
| I think it would be accurate to say | 0:31 | |
| I have the impression | 0:34 | |
| that on the campus, | 0:36 | |
| religion is very frequently dismissed | 0:39 | |
| as a rather dull and effeminate business. | 0:42 | |
| To tame to be endurable by anyone | 0:46 | |
| with any sense or spirit of adventure. | 0:50 | |
| Indeed, on the campus, | 0:55 | |
| a good many students are rather disinclined | 0:56 | |
| to speak about personal religion. | 0:59 | |
| That is true even in a place like Duke, | 1:03 | |
| where undergraduate courses in religion are required. | 1:05 | |
| When the subject, however, | 1:10 | |
| of personal devotion is raised, | 1:12 | |
| many students are awkward and uneasy. | 1:14 | |
| I guess that very frequently, | 1:19 | |
| what they are saying by their silence is this, | 1:22 | |
| "Give me a healthy and manly agnosticism. | 1:27 | |
| Or give me the scientific outlook with its realism | 1:33 | |
| and its genuine quest for discovery. | 1:37 | |
| Give me anything or give me nothing, | 1:41 | |
| but for any sake don't give me that jaded thing | 1:43 | |
| called religion with its melancholy sequence | 1:46 | |
| of prayer meetings, church services, | 1:49 | |
| trivialities, and tone, or even gospel." | 1:54 | |
| What is there in religion many students seem to say, | 1:59 | |
| what is there in it to thrill the heart | 2:03 | |
| and fire the imagination? | 2:06 | |
| Would you agree that that is perhaps | 2:11 | |
| a prevalent attitude in many universities? | 2:13 | |
| Last summer while I was in Europe, | 2:17 | |
| I spent some time at the university | 2:19 | |
| of the Sorbonne in Paris. | 2:22 | |
| And while there I had occasion | 2:25 | |
| to meet some communist youths. | 2:27 | |
| Upon my word, they were red, hot communists. | 2:30 | |
| And in effect, | 2:33 | |
| what they said to me was this, | 2:35 | |
| "Your Christianity's no use, man. | 2:37 | |
| It's just antidote or a drug to keep people sleeping. | 2:40 | |
| But our communist ideology, | 2:46 | |
| there's something to captivate the heart | 2:48 | |
| and claim all the devotion of our souls." | 2:51 | |
| And in fact, they were quite militant about it. | 2:55 | |
| They were on fire with their belief. | 3:00 | |
| By contrast with that, | 3:04 | |
| in the free countries of the west, | 3:06 | |
| where the church is an established part of our history, | 3:09 | |
| it does seem as though Christianity has become diminished | 3:14 | |
| into a rather innocuous business, | 3:18 | |
| which is rather womanly and very drab and very tame. | 3:22 | |
| Christianity in effect, many students, | 3:31 | |
| many young people here on this side seem to think is fit | 3:34 | |
| only for bucolic creatures with no red blood in their veins | 3:37 | |
| and precious little romance in their souls. | 3:41 | |
| I wonder, to what extent | 3:47 | |
| it is we preachers who are to blame. | 3:50 | |
| I wonder to what extent it is we | 3:54 | |
| who have given the impression that Christianity is a dull | 3:56 | |
| and tame affair with no red blood in it | 4:00 | |
| and no red hot appeal to make, | 4:03 | |
| particularly to young people. | 4:05 | |
| I wonder if we are to blame. | 4:07 | |
| I wonder in particular, | 4:09 | |
| if the modern pulpit | 4:11 | |
| and especially the university pulpit, | 4:13 | |
| if you might forgive me for saying so, | 4:15 | |
| has conveyed the notion to too many people | 4:18 | |
| that the Christian religion is something which, | 4:21 | |
| only with a tremendous struggle | 4:24 | |
| can be made intellectually respectable. | 4:26 | |
| And therefore has to be apologized for. | 4:29 | |
| As though Christianity | 4:33 | |
| were a mere spinning of petty theories, | 4:34 | |
| which are fit only for dilettantes and day dreamers. | 4:38 | |
| I wonder if too many of our sermons | 4:44 | |
| have smelled too much of the study | 4:47 | |
| and have nothing of existential urgency | 4:50 | |
| or the dust and heat of life's common day in them. | 4:53 | |
| I wonder, it makes me think. | 4:58 | |
| And sometimes I feel guilty. | 5:01 | |
| I'm not sure to what extent we preachers are to blame, | 5:05 | |
| but this I do know, | 5:09 | |
| that if in any ways we have given the impression, | 5:11 | |
| that Christianity is only something to be apologized for, | 5:15 | |
| that the Christian gospel is a matter of divinity | 5:20 | |
| or piety, and not humanity, | 5:24 | |
| that there is no life and blood and reality in it. | 5:27 | |
| If we've done that, God forgive us. | 5:31 | |
| For we've made the sheerest travesty of the gospel. | 5:34 | |
| For the plain truth is | 5:39 | |
| that if anyone turns to the biblical message | 5:41 | |
| and the biblical message ought to mean more to us | 5:45 | |
| than Marx's "Das Kapital" means to a communist. | 5:49 | |
| If anyone turns to the biblical message | 5:53 | |
| and reads it sensitively, | 5:56 | |
| the fact is it can be a quite disturbing | 5:58 | |
| and staggering experience with explosive possibilities. | 6:03 | |
| For this word of God, | 6:08 | |
| which is in the Bible | 6:10 | |
| and which is the church's word can be sharper | 6:12 | |
| than a two-edged sword. | 6:15 | |
| For our God is a consuming fire | 6:17 | |
| who is able to use up all our energy in his service. | 6:20 | |
| John Donne once prayed in a sonnet, | 6:25 | |
| batter my heart, three-person'd God, | 6:28 | |
| and the three-person'd God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit | 6:32 | |
| has been enable sometimes when men have been open | 6:36 | |
| to His word to batter their heart. | 6:40 | |
| In other words, | 6:44 | |
| what I want to try | 6:44 | |
| in a quite humbling and faltering way this morning | 6:46 | |
| is to convey to you that the biblical message | 6:50 | |
| and the Christian gospel are immensely full of challenge. | 6:53 | |
| It's challenge and daring and high adventure all the way. | 6:59 | |
| I think I can prove this. | 7:05 | |
| You know there's an interesting truth about the Bible. | 7:08 | |
| For whom does the Bible reserve | 7:13 | |
| its most virulent polemic? | 7:16 | |
| Not for sinners, not for hypocrites, | 7:20 | |
| not even for Judas the betrayer, | 7:24 | |
| even about Judas, the Bible simply maintains | 7:26 | |
| a kind of eerie silence. | 7:29 | |
| The Bible reserves its most virulent polemic | 7:32 | |
| for men who have no excitement in their hearts. | 7:36 | |
| No enthusiasm, no passion, no red blood. | 7:38 | |
| It reserves its most virulent polemic for the neutrals. | 7:43 | |
| The in-betweeners, the sitters on the fence. | 7:47 | |
| As the Psalmist expresses it in the Old Testament, | 7:51 | |
| I hate men who are harsh and half. | 7:55 | |
| And if you turn into the New Testament, men and women, | 8:00 | |
| you discover one little word | 8:04 | |
| which rings through it like a great bell, | 8:07 | |
| tolling sonorously and insistently. | 8:11 | |
| And this little word is the word "all." | 8:15 | |
| You remember when the rich young ruler | 8:22 | |
| came to Jesus of Nazareth, | 8:24 | |
| he said, "what can I do to be saved?" | 8:26 | |
| And Jesus' immediate rejoinder was go and sell | 8:29 | |
| all that thou hast, | 8:34 | |
| and give to the poor. | 8:37 | |
| Oh my God, not all. | 8:39 | |
| I want a cozy and comfortable life, | 8:41 | |
| don't ask me for everything. | 8:43 | |
| That's too much to give. | 8:46 | |
| But this word all is inescapable in its challenge. | 8:49 | |
| The gospel is a summons to total commitment | 8:54 | |
| and surrender of our lives to the holiest and the highest. | 8:58 | |
| And we cannot evade it, for its written into thus, | 9:02 | |
| this one decisive and pertinent word. | 9:06 | |
| When Jesus summed up the commandments | 9:11 | |
| of the Old Testament law, | 9:13 | |
| he used this word all again. | 9:15 | |
| Thou shalt love the Lord thy God | 9:19 | |
| with all thy soul, | 9:21 | |
| and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind. | 9:24 | |
| Now the Jewish rabbis had said this before Jesus. | 9:29 | |
| In their wisdom, they had summed up the law in this way. | 9:33 | |
| Ah, but Jesus, the Christ has a perfect right to say it. | 9:37 | |
| This harsh and implacable demand for total commitment | 9:43 | |
| looks ridiculous when it comes from a mere human. | 9:48 | |
| But when it comes from Jesus Christ it is different. | 9:52 | |
| For he himself is in his world | 9:57 | |
| with all the other of his being. | 10:01 | |
| Jesus the Christ himself gave his all, | 10:05 | |
| he spared himself not, | 10:09 | |
| but delivered himself up to the death of the cross. | 10:11 | |
| This is my body, which is broken for you he says. | 10:15 | |
| It's all I have to give. | 10:19 | |
| I will hold nothing back. | 10:20 | |
| Take it all for its yours, given freely. | 10:22 | |
| And I've always felt in my heart of hearts | 10:27 | |
| that a Christ who gave his all | 10:31 | |
| has a right to expect the same from his followers, | 10:33 | |
| that they will not spare themselves, | 10:37 | |
| but give all their soul and strength and mind. | 10:40 | |
| In other words, | 10:45 | |
| if being a Christian really means being like Christ, | 10:47 | |
| then I don't for a moment, | 10:51 | |
| understand how anyone can dismiss it | 10:52 | |
| as drab and tame and dull and commonplace. | 10:55 | |
| For to be like Christ is surely life's biggest challenge | 11:00 | |
| and biggest adventure. | 11:04 | |
| What Christianity has to offer us in fact | 11:06 | |
| is not a conventionally respectable | 11:10 | |
| or a dull colorless negativist ethic. | 11:13 | |
| What it has to offer us is some frightfully big and dirty, | 11:18 | |
| an unending warfare against everything evil, | 11:23 | |
| the beauty of a redemptive concern for all men of every kind | 11:27 | |
| and class and color and condition. | 11:31 | |
| The gospel has to offer us a sole trust in our hearts, | 11:35 | |
| claiming that we should live in Christ's big hearted way. | 11:40 | |
| As Helmut Thielicke distinguished contemporary | 11:45 | |
| German theologian put it recently, | 11:48 | |
| do you imagine? | 11:52 | |
| Can you imagine? | 11:54 | |
| That Jesus Christ died upon a cross simply in order | 11:56 | |
| that men might be scratched on the surface by Christianity? | 12:01 | |
| The radicality of Christ's claim, | 12:08 | |
| his demand for all our soul and strength and mind | 12:12 | |
| rings out again and again | 12:16 | |
| from the course of the Christian centuries. | 12:18 | |
| Kierkegaard in Denmark over a century ago, | 12:23 | |
| said, "What's wrong with Christianity?" | 12:25 | |
| His reply, "It's not Christian. | 12:28 | |
| Christianize your Christianity." | 12:32 | |
| Lee Hunt said considering the number of Christians, | 12:35 | |
| the fewness of them is sheerly amazing. | 12:40 | |
| G.K. Chesterton said, "It's not that Christianity | 12:47 | |
| has been tried in this world of ours and found wanting. | 12:51 | |
| It's never been tried." | 12:55 | |
| I can think of no more eloquent expression | 12:58 | |
| of total Christian commitment | 13:01 | |
| than the words of Studdert Kennedy. | 13:03 | |
| "I bet my life upon one side in life's great war. | 13:06 | |
| I must, I can't stand out, | 13:12 | |
| I must take sides. | 13:15 | |
| The man who is un-neutral in this fight is not a man, | 13:17 | |
| he's bulk and body without breath. | 13:21 | |
| I want to live, live out, | 13:24 | |
| not wobble through my life somehow. | 13:27 | |
| And then into the dark, I must have God. | 13:29 | |
| I must have God. | 13:34 | |
| I can't stand shivering on the bank. | 13:37 | |
| I plunge head first." | 13:41 | |
| And if anyone in this congregation has ever seen | 13:45 | |
| Jesus Christ face to face, | 13:49 | |
| can we offer him anything less than that? | 13:52 | |
| Maybe inside you this morning, | 14:00 | |
| you're kinda laughing at me. | 14:02 | |
| Maybe you're saying to yourself, | 14:05 | |
| well, I've heard all this big idle preacher's talk before. | 14:07 | |
| Some of my students said to me the other night, | 14:12 | |
| when I was discussing the possibility | 14:14 | |
| of preaching on this theme, | 14:16 | |
| a university congregation will not go with you. | 14:19 | |
| They'll think this demand of the gospel | 14:23 | |
| for total commitment is impractical | 14:25 | |
| and unrealistic and idealistic. | 14:28 | |
| Well I've thought it through and I'm not sure. | 14:32 | |
| I believe it has two quite concrete, practical applications. | 14:35 | |
| This demand of the gospel for all out surrender | 14:42 | |
| to the holiest and the highest. | 14:45 | |
| And the first is this. | 14:47 | |
| And I want to make it personal. | 14:49 | |
| I for one, | 14:52 | |
| poor preacher and all as I am, | 14:54 | |
| when I am confronted by Christ's word all, | 14:57 | |
| I can no longer likely assume | 15:01 | |
| that I am a good follower of his. | 15:03 | |
| Seeing that I, poor and all as I am, | 15:06 | |
| I'm so often to, content to dwell merely | 15:09 | |
| in the suburbs of the city of God. | 15:13 | |
| I put my own wants and comforts and desires | 15:16 | |
| at the center of my life. | 15:19 | |
| I so rarely go out of my egocentric way | 15:21 | |
| to fight against social injustice, | 15:24 | |
| to uplift the fallen, cheer the brokenhearted, | 15:27 | |
| erase the pain. | 15:31 | |
| When my life is confronted by this all of the gospel, | 15:35 | |
| how puny my efforts to be like Christ seem to me. | 15:40 | |
| This is intensely real and practical. | 15:46 | |
| This cuts right into the quick of our daily lives, | 15:50 | |
| both in the relationships of the campus | 15:54 | |
| and in the relationships of the wider society of man. | 15:56 | |
| And secondly, | 16:02 | |
| there is this other practical application | 16:03 | |
| of the gospel's demand for total commitment. | 16:06 | |
| In a university like this, | 16:11 | |
| there are many young people folk pass through a stage | 16:13 | |
| when they're quite uncertain | 16:17 | |
| about what they want to do with their lives. | 16:18 | |
| They are uneasy about their careers. | 16:22 | |
| They don't know which direction to take. | 16:25 | |
| Now here, now there, | 16:28 | |
| they look everywhere in fact, | 16:29 | |
| wondering where to go, where to commit themselves. | 16:31 | |
| And during this stage of uncertainty and neutrality, | 16:36 | |
| there's a good deal of uneasiness and anxiety and tension. | 16:41 | |
| Now I've had the experience of seeing a young man | 16:47 | |
| or a young woman just after they had decided | 16:50 | |
| where to go in life, | 16:53 | |
| where to put their whole heart and soul and strength. | 16:55 | |
| They see life now with a clear, fixed, definite purpose. | 17:00 | |
| They've hitched their wagons to a star. | 17:03 | |
| They know where they're going and what they want. | 17:06 | |
| And what a remarkable transformation that makes. | 17:09 | |
| So you see, it's not only the gospel | 17:14 | |
| that demand's total commitment. | 17:17 | |
| Life itself demands it. | 17:19 | |
| The gospel's claim is psychologically sad | 17:22 | |
| because we are only happy in life | 17:28 | |
| and life is only abundant and full and free | 17:31 | |
| when we know where we are going. | 17:34 | |
| When we are men and women who've got hold | 17:37 | |
| of one specific idea and we've set all our hearts upon it. | 17:41 | |
| Isn't the most deep seated malaise, | 17:46 | |
| speaking now on the broader scale, | 17:49 | |
| isn't the most deep seated malaise of the post-war era | 17:51 | |
| simply the fact that multitudes | 17:56 | |
| have been running hither and thither | 17:58 | |
| down one blind alley after another, | 18:01 | |
| seeking now here, now there some personal fulfillment | 18:04 | |
| guided only by the compass | 18:08 | |
| of their own worldly desires most often. | 18:10 | |
| Now it is the gods of mammon and the marketplace. | 18:14 | |
| Now it is the god of sex, | 18:18 | |
| now some other god of our own devising. | 18:21 | |
| And so we run down these blind alleys chasing a chimera. | 18:24 | |
| Then sometimes, suddenly, | 18:30 | |
| and nearly always on a Sunday, | 18:33 | |
| we change course and we come to the church. | 18:35 | |
| Lo and behold, we're in the church, | 18:38 | |
| and at last we are seeking the one true God. | 18:41 | |
| Oh and to be torn between the world and God | 18:44 | |
| gives no life. | 18:49 | |
| The great theological thinkers of the middle ages | 18:51 | |
| said that acedia or depression or dejection | 18:54 | |
| was always caused in men and women | 18:58 | |
| by being torn between God and the world. | 19:02 | |
| As a basis for life, | 19:08 | |
| the slogan a little bit of God | 19:09 | |
| and a large slice of the world | 19:11 | |
| is immensely dangerous and destructive. | 19:13 | |
| Because here is how it works. | 19:16 | |
| If you have a little bit of God, | 19:19 | |
| it's only a bother and a nuisance to your conscience | 19:21 | |
| because you can't be a red-blooded sinner there. | 19:25 | |
| You can't love and cheat and hate. | 19:28 | |
| Browning once said that better | 19:32 | |
| to be a real vital sinner | 19:34 | |
| than to be an in-betweener, | 19:36 | |
| a mere nothing at all. | 19:38 | |
| That's a shocking thing, but it's true. | 19:39 | |
| If you've a little bit of God, you've an uneasy conscience. | 19:43 | |
| That's not psychologically good. | 19:47 | |
| Then if you want to pray, what happens? | 19:50 | |
| Oh the large slice of the world comes into operation then, | 19:53 | |
| and even while you're praying, | 19:56 | |
| you're thinking about tomorrow's examination | 19:58 | |
| or the next day's meeting | 20:00 | |
| or about your business concerns and anxieties. | 20:02 | |
| And so with a little bit of God | 20:05 | |
| and a little bit of the world, | 20:07 | |
| you never come to know the peace of God, | 20:09 | |
| which passes all understanding. | 20:12 | |
| I think the gospel's claim for total surrender | 20:17 | |
| is psychologically sound, | 20:21 | |
| life demands it. | 20:25 | |
| Now perhaps we can understand why Jesus of Nazareth, | 20:27 | |
| the Christ asks from us our all, | 20:31 | |
| all our soul and strength. | 20:35 | |
| Ah, but this last word this morning, | 20:38 | |
| not only all our soul and all our strength, | 20:41 | |
| but all are mine in total commitment. | 20:45 | |
| Any university, but particularly a university, | 20:52 | |
| which has a religious heritage like this one | 20:56 | |
| has the undeniable prerogative of asking from you | 21:00 | |
| the total commitment of your mind. | 21:04 | |
| Don't you think that folks like you and me | 21:09 | |
| have been extraordinary lucky. | 21:12 | |
| We are able to devote the best years of our lives | 21:14 | |
| to the enrichment of our minds | 21:18 | |
| and the deepening of our intellects | 21:20 | |
| to attaining that depth of being | 21:23 | |
| for which I believe we are here. | 21:25 | |
| Isn't that great and wonderful. | 21:28 | |
| We have reason to be thankful before God. | 21:30 | |
| Wouldn't it be a terrible thing though, | 21:35 | |
| if in the time that we're allotted to us | 21:37 | |
| in a university like this, | 21:40 | |
| we simply allowed our intellect to stagnate. | 21:41 | |
| You know the essential point of the philosophy | 21:46 | |
| of the German philosopher Feuerbach | 21:50 | |
| was that the basic sin of man is sloth. | 21:53 | |
| That speaks to me. | 21:58 | |
| I expect that since you're human like me, | 21:59 | |
| it speaks to you. | 22:02 | |
| Because we are all tainted | 22:06 | |
| with the sin of laziness. | 22:08 | |
| Oh but it were a waste and futility | 22:13 | |
| to be tainted with intellectual laziness | 22:16 | |
| in a situation like this | 22:18 | |
| when there's everything to learn. | 22:20 | |
| Worlds lie before us undiscovered, | 22:22 | |
| here in this university, | 22:25 | |
| you have the chance to pursue an utmost devotion, | 22:27 | |
| knowledge about the universe, | 22:31 | |
| mysterious in its rhythm and in its harmony. | 22:33 | |
| Here you have the chance to pursue knowledge about man | 22:36 | |
| not only in the grandeur of his genius, | 22:40 | |
| but in the frailty of his mortality. | 22:43 | |
| Here we have a chance to explore the hidden depths | 22:46 | |
| of life and the mysterious world that surrounds us. | 22:50 | |
| God keep us from being slothful | 22:54 | |
| and let us give to the task an undivided mind, | 22:57 | |
| and a committed intellect. | 23:01 | |
| It is not only the university that asks this of you | 23:04 | |
| in this day and generation, | 23:08 | |
| the church too needs and wants | 23:11 | |
| and demands the total commitment of your mind. | 23:14 | |
| Now this is not often enough a note | 23:19 | |
| which is struck in the church. | 23:21 | |
| The church sticks too often by its narrow dogmatisms | 23:24 | |
| and stuffy orthodoxies. | 23:28 | |
| You know that the church resisted with might and flame | 23:31 | |
| the advancement of learning and the dawn of new thought | 23:34 | |
| in the Copernican Revolution? | 23:39 | |
| It resisted it again in Darwinian evolution. | 23:41 | |
| And so the church became largely responsible | 23:45 | |
| for engendering the conflict between science and religion | 23:48 | |
| or between reason and faith, | 23:52 | |
| but men and women, | 23:54 | |
| if today the church of Jesus Christ | 23:56 | |
| is to carry on a successful dialogue | 23:59 | |
| with contemporary culture, | 24:02 | |
| we shall not anymore need to encourage | 24:05 | |
| the closed and shuttered mind. | 24:07 | |
| We shall need to appeal to the members of the church | 24:10 | |
| for hard and long and deep thinking | 24:13 | |
| about the ultimate issues of today | 24:17 | |
| in sociology, politics, anthropology, and theology. | 24:19 | |
| The church desperately needs our deep thinking | 24:25 | |
| in our day and generation, | 24:29 | |
| if ever there were a desperate need | 24:32 | |
| for the light of reason to shine in the sphere of faith, | 24:35 | |
| the time is now. | 24:39 | |
| This has its practical application. | 24:41 | |
| Some of you will be going out from this place. | 24:45 | |
| You will all be going out soon or late, you students, | 24:48 | |
| to take your place in society. | 24:52 | |
| You will probably find your way into some church or other. | 24:54 | |
| You can do both the church and the world in our time, | 24:59 | |
| an immensely valuable service | 25:03 | |
| by committing to it | 25:07 | |
| your mind and your intellect. | 25:10 | |
| You can stimulate people round about you | 25:14 | |
| to think with prophetic zeal | 25:17 | |
| about the great problems and issues of our day. | 25:20 | |
| You can strike beyond the shallowness | 25:24 | |
| of every unquestioned status quo. | 25:27 | |
| Give us hard thinking, | 25:30 | |
| give us depth of intellectual outreach in the church today. | 25:33 | |
| And I believe the gates of hell will not prevail against us, | 25:37 | |
| but without them, we may be lost. | 25:41 | |
| And you who have had the discipline | 25:44 | |
| of a university training can play | 25:46 | |
| your prominent part in the church by challenging it | 25:49 | |
| to deepness of thought, | 25:53 | |
| about ultimate issues. | 25:56 | |
| Thou shalt love the Lord thy God | 26:00 | |
| with all thy soul and with all thy strength | 26:04 | |
| and with all thy mind. | 26:08 | |
| The bell has tolled, | 26:12 | |
| the all of Christ's gospel has sounded. | 26:15 | |
| God give us grace today to understand | 26:19 | |
| the inescapable challenge of the religion of Jesus Christ, | 26:23 | |
| and God help us to meet it | 26:29 | |
| with a little more chivalry and gallantry. | 26:32 | |
| And to Him be the glory, let us pray. | 26:38 | |
| Oh, mighty God, our heavenly father, | 26:48 | |
| deep down within us we know we shy away | 26:51 | |
| from the religion of Jesus Christ. | 26:54 | |
| Not because it is intellectually difficult, | 26:57 | |
| but because it challenges us too much. | 27:00 | |
| We feel we cannot give our all, | 27:04 | |
| we cannot love like Christ. | 27:06 | |
| And yet it is the love which is in Christ, | 27:09 | |
| which our torn and chaotic world desperately needs. | 27:12 | |
| Help us then to have the grace | 27:16 | |
| to rise to the challenge of the gospel, | 27:19 | |
| loving God with soul | 27:23 | |
| and strength and mind, | 27:27 | |
| all of them through Jesus Christ, our Lord. | 27:30 | |
| And now the grace of this Lord Jesus Christ | 27:34 | |
| and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit | 27:37 | |
| be with you now, henceforth, and forevermore. | 27:41 |
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