There is a profound significance of Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Notice His humanity before God, particularly understanding the fact of His deity. This poignant exclamation not only underscores His unique role as the God-Man but also reveals His perfect obedience and the immense love of God the Father. Through this ultimate sacrifice, Jesus accomplished what no other could: the complete atonement for humanity’s sins, securing eternal life for all who would believe in Him. This message delves into the theological depth of Christ’s suffering and its eternal implications for believers.

Automatically Generated Transcript
[00:00:00] It has been school holidays the last couple of weeks and Michelle who is a teacher has been at Home More and wanting to relax in the evenings and one of the things she does like to do in the evenings is she likes to watch this Master Craft, is it or? Master Chef, you got it. And it’s really interesting, it’s probably one of the most buoyant and good show with excellent relationships of the people and they support each other. I’m quite proud of Australia having such shows on. Not that I know very much about cooking. But Michelle gets me to sit down and join in,
[00:00:46] she wants me to learn something about cooking or at least know how wonderful it is when people do it for you. But I did notice something, that the most common phrase that kept coming up, or exclamation from the happy cookers when things were going right, was what I would call very close to being swearing. And it would be, oh my God. Of course they weren’t really exclaiming to God, they were just expressing the joy of something coming out of the oven, or right, or you know. And they were sharing with each other, and I was quite surprised at how often people say, oh my God. Now where’s that come from, and what does it exactly mean? And what does it exactly mean? What is being rehearsed when you say something like, oh my God?
[00:01:49] Well actually, number one is a recognition about how unusual something’s happened, or how wonderful is some event, how you can praise God to some extent. Not that they’re thinking of God, but that’s the part of what it is. The second thing that it recognises is the difference between God and us, when something that’s a bit beyond normalcy happens. Maybe God’s involved. They don’t really think that about the cooking, but it is a phrase that comes out of us that is a tacit recognition, that we’re human, and not everything happens And not everything happens so wonderfully except when God steps in. And so that’s something to do with where that phrase may have come from. Can you hear me alright? Okay, good. And, but we have a Bible verse, we’ll get it put up on the screen,
[00:02:48] of when Jesus was on the cross and he went through those three hours of darkness where he suffered the punishment from God for our sins. Eli, Eli, lemos amakthani. That is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I want to bring out some meaning from that statement of Jesus. In the first instance, it’s a part of the Gospel, who Jesus is. We teach, in Sunday School, sometimes that Jesus is God, that’s only half a truth. It’s not half true. I mean there’s more truth than just the fact of his deity. For the truth is that Jesus in his coming, and we call it the first Advent, when Christ came, we celebrated at Christmas,
[00:03:44] is the miracle of the second person of the Trinity, that is the Father, the Son and the Spirit and the Son, came down to earth and took on humanity. That is to say, he became the God-man. And in his humanity, he lived before the Father as a human ought to do. Part of his mission was to fulfill the Law, given through Moses to how people ought to live. And when Jesus so did, he was the first one who successfully obeyed all the Law. He fulfilled it. He satisfied it. It was a part of his mission so to do, that he might qualify to be a perfect human.
[00:04:34] And in his perfection to keep the Law of God, so he came into the world and took on humanity, as a human did what humans do under God. Now do you get this? This is a marvelous part of the Gospel. The first coming of Christ into the world is the heart of the truth. That he left heaven and took on humanity and became human, not leaving his deity behind, he stayed God. He always was God always can will continue to be God and is God now, but good news listen, he’s still taken his humanity with him. So in heaven right now our Lord Jesus Christ is the God Man and because of his humanity, stands in as a successful human being representing the race of us who who kept the law,
[00:05:35] and was perfect. And when Jesus hung on the cross and he cried out in the suffering, in the three hours of darkness, he’d been bearing our sins, he cried as a man. Yes the Godman, suffering our sins. But nonetheless it is what a human being cries out to God. my God, there’s the proof.
[00:06:01] The very words, my God, my God. He had something more to cry about than the people of the Master Chef. What he was doing was something that no one else could have accomplished. He alone was the only human being of all history who remained sinless. And because the Law of the Old Testament required there to be a sacrifice but it made a part of the requisite that the little lambs and and goats — whatever they were —
[00:06:33] you had to be perfect. Not because they really were taking away any sins. They were just giving people something to sacrifice to show their recognition of a need. But the only person who actually suffered for our sin successfully was Jesus, which the whole book of Hebrews is written around. that Jesus was the One who bore our sins and successfully paid for them and that’s what he was doing in those three hours of darkness. It’s quite a study to study about how Jesus paid for our sins because he took on death in everything that death is and there’s various aspects of death, there’s physical death,
[00:07:15] there’s spiritual death is eternal death and Jesus Christ on the cross took all three And in the suffering in the darkness before physically he died, he was having a spiritual death, because the very definition of spiritual death is when God forsakes you. It’s when there’s this rip between us and God, and we’re cut off from God. It’s the sentence of death, for all have sinned. The Bible says it says the wages of sin is death. And in all of its aspects Jesus Christ suffered in the hour of darkness he was a spiritual side of death and he was to go on further and die physically, the physical part of death and go to where physically dead people went. As in Old Testament Times it was in Hebrew called sheol but in the Greek word for it
[00:08:09] when more Greek was spoken, and that is Hades. And Jesus after dying on the cross went down to Hades because the time of the opening of heaven was something that he was yet to do. But his death on the cross, for our sins, was going to secure it but there needed to be another step of something to happen before he went back to heaven. And that something to happen was to defeat death and to cut up on the other side of it and so the Jesus who died and beat unto death as far as bearing our sins, that one who went down into death and suffered physical death, he actually died and was taken down to Hades, he actually took the repentant thief, who’d repented on the cross down to him he said to the thief, this day you’ll be with me in Paradise.
[00:08:55] Paradise being a Persian word that means a place of comfort, so Jesus having finished paying for our sins spiritually didn’t go down into Hades in order to suffer more, and although the Creed that often is said in churches talks about him going down to Hell, it’s a misunderstanding because they’re imagining that a part of the punishment the Jesus took was not only on the cross but it was the fact that he suffered in hell but I want to tell you that he did suffer at hell but he didn’t go down to hell, he only went to Hades but I’ll tell you when he suffered in hell, is that hell came to him but on the cross he had to cry out and say, my god my god, how have you forsaken me? or why have you forsaken me? it is the
[00:09:40] cry of the lost soul in those hours of darkness when he suffered what it was to be abandoned by the father’ and that’s why he had a very good reason to say my God my God. So the first thing that we learn about these little words you know So it’s a fact of human speech and human experience that often something in just a few words can act as a bit of a flag to tell of something a lot more drastic coming. In the days of the ships that fought with cannons
[00:10:22] a man a warship for example would send up a sailor to the top of the mast with a telescope. he looked at the telescope was to sweep the horizons and the horizons just outside of sight could very possibly have an enemy ship, which they can’t detect. No radar back then but they sweep the horizons from up the top of the masts and just if it And just if they came up a mast, another mast, a ship with a flag, the flag would just be small and wavery, but they’re told of something that might be a friendly ship, another one, or it might be an enemy ship, and they needed to know. In just a little flag could tell an awful lot and if it was an enemy ship they’d be calling down ahoy ahoy this this ship coming they’d all scurry to get ready for a battle.
[00:11:25] A little piece of information can sometimes be representative of an awful lot more and this statement from Jesus on the cross my God my God why have you forsaken me is telling an awful lot more than just a saying we now use as a swear word sometimes my God my God. Oh my god. Well it tells of what Jesus came to do and that was to die for our sins and to suffer the punishment that we couldn’t ever bear or we’d have to face in eternity to suffer and Jesus cried out, my God, my God, he cried out up because he had to be a human to bear the sins, the punishment for human sin. And he had to be a human that was without sin, without spot, without wrinkles. The Old Testament sacrifices had to be able to be described. And so that’s why he cried because.
[00:12:39] he was crying because of the humanity that the gospel tells us he’d taken on, not to have left the deity behind, but to be the God-Man. You might remember when he was a boy and got taken down by his parents to Jerusalem first time down to the temple when he lingered behind, they thought he was with the rest of the relatives on the walk back to their place of living. And then, when they realized he was missing, they had to go back several days going back to Jerusalem and looking around for Jesus and found him in the Temple and Jesus, when they questioned him of the fact that he wasn’t being very caring of their fears, he says,
[00:13:21] Would you? Surely you would have known that I would be about my Father’s business, In my Father’s house, about my Father business? For Jesus came to do the Fathers’ will. And the first explanation of these words has to do with the relationship between Jesus and the Father And his willingness to do the will of the Father. It’s actually a few words that tell of his amazing and complete obedience to the Father. One Old Testament psalm verse says, I delight to do your will. Oh my God.” There’s our phrase again, Oh my God.
[00:14:08] I delight to do your will. Your law is within my heart. Jesus before the Father is human before deity, although he also is deity. This is not a trade off half of each, it’s a both hands. The Godman, but he has a relationship with the Father that is a relationship only a human can have, oh my God, he says the Father God is his God, and when he took on that role, he relinquished all the rights that went with the equality of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit all share the same attributes, and there is an equality, they have a oneness and they have an equality, but yet they are three We persons, in the sense that we mean, have personhood. He’s not a…
[00:15:03] He wasn’t be an eternity past, a human person, but he took on humanity as extra,” if you like. Not an… I said that badly… I don’t mean extra in the sense of a little bit extra. I mean he became fully human while retaining his deity with certain losses involved with that and the certain things that he either chose not to do, or couldn’t do. For example, he didn’t know the time of his own return, eventually, he’s coming back again for the second Advent. But he didn’t know when while he was a human on earth.
[00:15:34] And a part of that humbling that he did of himself was to take the role of a human being. So much so that as he walked around in Galilee and in Jerusalem, as he walked past people they might have noticed something of his holiness, perhaps, but they didn’t say, oh, there goes a divine person. They didn’t know. His humanity, as it were, hid. The fact that he was fully man and fully God. But it was necessary that he might face human life in its fullness and completeness. That he might be completely obedient. And these little words, ”Oh my God! I delight to do your will, oh my God!”
[00:16:16] and also as he cried and the cries, ”My God! My God! , Why have you forsaken me?” Are just a few words that actually capture an enormous truth as to who He had been and was and will continue to be. You know, He took that humanity to heaven. He’s still the God-Man. Why is that important? Because He actually represents us. Not only did He represent us in bearing our sins on the cross, But He represents us when He went to heaven, to stand before the Father, and to say to the Father, the price has been paid and to represent humanity, so that you and I could get in, not on our own basis, but because our representative has gained our entrance, Jesus, in glory in Heaven.
[00:16:58] He prays to the Father on our behalf and has become an intercessor. The whole role of being an intercessor is someone who’s in between and speaks to this one on behalf of that one. And I want to tell you that you’ve got an Intercessor. You’ve got a prayer partner. He’s praying for you. Right now the Bible tells us in glory that Jesus prays for us And he says to the Father, There’s Johnny or whatever your name is, Mary or Kathy or whatever he calls you he says… And I love them and I gave my soul for them and I paid for their sin. Will you not send your spirit and draw them and call them that they may be forgiven.
[00:17:39] He’s an intercessor today. There’s something very wonderful when you realise you’ve got an intercessor who always gets a yes answer. You’ve got someone who prays for you and he’s praying for you and for me right now. It is a fantastic thing when you realise Jesus said O my God, because of the role that he was representing, but even further when he says why have you or how you have, it’s an exclamation as to what has happened, forsaken me It brings me to the next point that those little words are only have to do with a human before the divine in a role that sometimes we overlook. It also tells us a little bit about the love of God and how Jesus came to bring the love
[00:18:31] of God, how to do what God’s love needed him to do. It also tells me of how his willingness to be obedient to the Father which I’ve just been talking about his complete obedience is seen in those words, when Jesus was obedient and came to earth and took upon himself to keep the law and took upon himself eventually to go to the cross and die for our failure to keep the law. When Jesus did that, he was doing so because, listen to me, listen, the Father loved you and Jesus was cooperating with and joining with the love of the Father. One of the most famous verses in the Bible is John 3 16. You’ve probably heard it 1,000 times. Won’t hurt you to read it again,
[00:19:18] Remain for God so loved the world. And that is, you could say all God is Father, Son of the Holy Spirit, or you’d take it to mean God the Father, which often it does but it just says God. For God so loved the world, and I believe it means God the Father because what comes next? That he gave his only son, and a part of the obedience of Jesus was to come, as the Father requested he so do, in order that he might live the perfect life, become the perfect sacrifice without blemish,
[00:19:50] and then that he would go to the cross and bear your sins. How much did God love you? How much does he love his son? and you can tell by the correspondence between the Son and the Father of the terrific love that’s there between the Son and the Father. Yet that Father gave that Son for you! For God so loved the world that He bankrupted heaven of the most precious possession that could ever have His only Son. Why? To zap you to be a Christian like it, or not, no?
[00:20:28] That whosoever believes in him, and who is that you were to believe in but the God-man, the humanity of Jesus, the fact that he came from heaven, and took on our humanity and then took it to the cross, and then rose from the dead to defeat death. This human has conquered not only sin, but he’s conquered Satan, and he’s conquered death. This one is a truly marvelous Savior. He’s a savior par excellence. There’s never been a corresponding equivalent. Jesus is the Savior of the World because of that mission that he came, and he came on the mission because he shared the love of the Father for you and for me. of God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, the Son in full cooperation suffered
[00:21:18] in your place on the cross that whoever believes in him – and a believe in him is a very special word and the way they used to write it back then, they had to change, to make it fit this verse – normally you put it in a way that means to believe about him, but they changed little endings and put an extra preposition in there and it reads’ to believe into him. To believe, and if you read an Amplified Bible it tries to bring out the fullness of the meaning of this, and sometimes it reads that whoever believes in, trusts in, relies on and adheres to. Do you want me to say that again? I don’t know if I can. Anyway, or the whole fullness of what it is to believe in Jesus is a commitment and the idea of into is used. The word into, Sometimes they use the word prostowards but usually don’t use either,
[00:22:12] they just mean believe-about. But when it says, whosoever believes into him, what’s trying to be captured by the wording is the fact that there’s a faith thing whereby you commit yourself to him, whereby you trust yourself to him, whereby you begin to learn how to rely upon him, whether you learn to adhere to him, stick to Him, don’t let go, stick to Him, whoever adheres to him, believes in him, trusts in him, should not perish
[00:22:45] but have eternal life.” Are you a sticker? Are you a truster? Are you an adherer to Jesus, not just adherent to the Church, as much less than adherent to Jesus? Are you trusting in Jesus? It’s actually about faith, and faith is that ingredient that involves commitment. What’s more, it’s an ingredient that’s about commitment to a person. God gave his only Son on the cross, but also gave him to be there for you to trust yourself to him. Coming to Jesus and finding him as your personal Savior is what this believing in him means. It’s not something that is about a ceremony. It’s not something about some whipping up of vigour of belief that you might be able to do. It’s about simply resting in
[00:23:53] what God says he is. The very nature of faith is that you believe what God says. comes across or translates into believing his word, and when he’s given his word then you rest in it, that’s proper faith, it’s believing into the truth of the word. But the truth of the word is Jesus, as well as all the things the word asserts in terms of propositions, it is Jesus, whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. That’s the centre of the Gospel. Don’t let anybody put something else in the centre of the Gospel that’s not just about the Second Coming. Second Coming is a part of the Gospel. It’s not just about going to heaven. Going to heaven is where you’ll go if you do trust in Him and the eternal life you get will take you
[00:24:48] there, but the heart of the Gospel is when you come to Jesus in the here and and you rest your case for everything in him, you trust him for forgiveness”. Sometimes there’s people who struggle with that because they want to do something or they want to secure it by feeling, or they want some other way to make it certain but the nature of faith is just that you rest your case in him and what he’s promised to believe the promises the promises of Jesus is to believe in him. And the Bible is Jesus telling you about eternal life, whoever believes in him should not parish, would not perish, won’t parish, but have eternal life. Well, so it’s about eternal life, it’s about the love of God experience, because Jesus was obedient and went to the cross, and and died for your sins. It also involves a lot of suffering. Because a suffering he
[00:25:56] had was intense and there’s nothing to parallel it. The perfect relationship between Father and Son that had always been the case for eternity for the first time, and that in itself is a crazy statement. First time, which time… All eternity actually, but it’s hard to tie down time and is time different in Heaven than time on Earth? Is time and glory, you know, does it go the same way? Does it obey the laws of physics or goodness me, I can’t answer any of those questions. I don’t ever expect to be able to. But whoever believes in him will not perish. The should-there-is, not saying it’s only possible, it’s saying the outcome of believing in him is that you won’t perish. But have, possess, it’s happened, you have it.
[00:26:53] You can lean on it, it’s yours. Have eternal life. And that eternal life is the life of Jesus himself. And he with, he dwells within you by the Holy Spirit’s doing and by your having Jesus you have life.” The bible says, he that has the Son has life. He that doesn’t have the Son of God does not have life. And that is about the love of God, where Jesus cooperates in the love of the Father to be the one who dies that you might have eternal life.
[00:27:28] I can go a bit further with two more things. I won’t be too long, but the next thing that this little wave of a flag, that means a lot more, is coming. It’s like Elijah, sitting here serving, to look out and see if any rains come in He’s just a tiny little cloud runs back and tells his master that that’s the first little sign that will eventually be some penetrating rain that take, pushes away the drought and in that statement of Jesus, just a few words, My God, My God why have you forsaken me? There’s a beautiful illustration of faith.
[00:28:06] And those words, little and small, that they might be one’s phrase at the end of his suffering in the darkness, but they actually demonstrate his personal faith in the Father. Why is that? Because, at the end, he’s going to pray also, Father, into your hands. I commend my spirit. When we had a sermon on Jonah the other week, and the sermon on Jonah was about how Jonah got swallowed up by this big fish, and he’s in the belly of the fish. I don’t know how much air is down there to breathe but I guess it’s very smelly. I guess it was tormenting to be in complete darkness. I’d be terrified by being in the darkness. What if there’s seaweed wrapping around your head, you know?
[00:28:57] What if you’re thinking, whoever gets into a fish and lives again. But what did Jonah do? But he cried out to God. And in a moment of prayer, he just trusted God, and God got the fish to vomit him out on dry land. Jonah is actually a demonstration of faith, even though he was a disobedient prophet running away from the will of God. This is what God had to do to get him back on track or back on the beach, in this case. Jesus, likewise, is in a place of desperation. He cries out to the Father, and this prayer,
[00:29:42] My God, My God, how you have forsaken me, or why have you forsaken me, is followed at the end, where he commits his soul to the one who had just punished him. into your hands I commend my spirit It is about the fact that beyond sin there still can be faith. In his case our sins being suffered for, but finishing the time on the cross with a moment of faith. Into your hands, I commend my spirit. Sometimes as a pastor it gets to be my lot to be then present when people die. It happened once when I was overseas and I got called to go to a man, one of the professors who was dying. It’s a little bit of a scary moment.
[00:30:37] It’s also you have an awareness of some tremendous privilege, but I felt privileged as to be present when he went into the presence of Jesus. He’d been struggling a bit because he wasn’t fully, he was scared and he needed encouragement, which Psalm 23 I gave him really helped him. But what we need to learn is to copy the faith of Jesus in the worst rejection and the worst punishment ever a human being could be put in for. Jesus still believed. What he believed in, he had a promise because he believed that God would bring it out right at the end There were promises in the Bible that you would not leave him to perish in Hades. You won’t suffer you, my soul, to experience corruption
[00:31:41] and he believes that he will be right in the hands of God. That’s why he said, Father into your hands, he and the thief and the cross that repent are down to the better part of Hades and he trusted himself to the Father. Now what did that trust in the Father actually also entail? That he would be, whether his own resurrection be taken back to the Father. He believed. And the thing that he was believing for is what happened in his own resurrection. It’s the case that in people becoming a Christian, often not only the death of Christ is told and it’s a part of what you believe in that Jesus died for you
[00:32:23] that you don’t have to pay your own debts, Jesus has, but the other half of the belief is that you believe in his Resurrection. If you believe that Jesus died for you and that he rose from the dead and so Paul often expresses about the gospel, if you shall confess with your mouth and believe in your hearts that God has raised him from the dead you shall be saved. And so There is a necessity for trusting God, that Jesus examples for us, even when he was suffering our punishments. And then at the end of it he says Father into your hands I commend my spirit. And he gave up the Ghost, meaning he partly passed. But the Lord preserved him in Hades and brought him back to life again.
[00:33:11] Or actually, I’d say that better, he brought him back the other side of death, never to die again. In his resurrection. And those events of Jesus’ birth as a human being, the God-man, his living in the Law and keeping all the Law, his going to the cross and paying your punishment unto the suffering of God the Father, for your sins, and his Mighty resurrection, are those things that he has done for you to be saved. And when you put your rest in it, because it is the Word of God, you don’t need to have it proven to you apologetically,
[00:33:47] That might help get rid of some funny ideas, but I’ll tell you, you just believe the Word of God, I will rest my case, Lord Jesus, that you came into the world for me in the love of the Father and you died for my sins and you rose again from the dead and you’ve gone back to heaven and you’re now interceding for me praying to the Father and maybe he’s saying something like here’s, I’ll make up a name, here’s Meridith. I know there’s no Meredith see so I’m not picking on anybody, he is Meredith and she hasn’t yet trusted you.
[00:34:23] Jesus at the father’s side says, let your spirit help her trust now. Bring her in. He prays for you to get in the door. He won’t take away your ability to say yes or no. He’ll pray for God’s spirit to help you. No one comes the Father except the spirit draws him. He’ll help you and he’s praying for you. And he wants you to come, he wants you to come. And Jesus’ cry on the cross is a cry of faith
[00:34:59] and finally to finish is a cry because he’s suffering from human beings from the Father in all sorts of ways But the interesting thing is that the suffering has an end. And he gets into the hands of the Father and he is given a place in eternity as the one whose name is above every name. He’s finished it. One of his final statements was about his dying on the cross. He said, it is finished, completed work. No more to be done. And you can come
[00:35:37] because of what he’s finished. Will you come? Is there anybody here? We’re a little group, the likelihood that there’s someone here who’s never made this step before is small because I don’t know you all, it’s possible someone might not, but it’s very small so this is like a bit of a step of faith for me to go out in the limb, to give a call, but nonetheless every now and then God has just one person that the whole message was designed for, and you need to come to Christ tonight. And you can right now tonight. It might be in your case that you’ve never understood properly before. It might be your case that you lacked, have lacked assurance whether you’re in the door or not. Simple answer to that, by the way. When someone comes to me, and says, I’m not sure whether I’m in the
[00:36:32] door, I’m not sure that I’ve really come. I said, well we’ll pray a prayer, and it’ll run like this, O God, if you’ve never become my Savior before, you’ve got the invitation to do it now. And your Holy Spirit, if he hasn’t come into my life, which is what happens when you come to Jesus then I’m opening the door and I ask you to come in now. I’m going to trust you to do what you promised and keep your word and do just that because your word says that whoever believes in him. Lord I’m trusting you now. I’m feeling very sheepish about it. I don’t know I’m doing it all the right way, but I’m just trusting you. Whoever believes in him will not perish, should not perish, but have eternal life, and tonight you can walk out of this church knowing that you have the life of the
[00:37:23] eternal one, eternal life, in you, save for eternity, and you’ve got the Jesus who gave himself for you, who rose again, and he is your proof of eternal life. You’ll be in his promise, and his promise is what you’re trusting in. Will you trust in, believe in, believe into, rely upon, and adhere to Jesus tonight? If you want some help to do it, speak to us? He’s what I’ll ask you to do, is since we sing our final music and I get to stand down here somewhere just come and stand next to me. You may be the only person for whom this is the very need of the hour. It doesn’t matter if there’s others, but if you’re that person, don’t worry about what others think. Just tell Jesus you’re coming, and when you come down here I’ll lead you in a
[00:38:21] And you can rest in him. That believing in him is a restful thing. You rest your case in him. Should not perish, but have eternal life. Will you do it? The call is open. The song is coming. I’m going to stand there just to show you where to come, but God’s spirit is calling. And if you want that, come now.
[00:38:48] You might say, well, you have called me out in the open a bit. Well, Jesus had a habit of doing that, and he called people under varying circumstances, but there’s something helpful in raising the flag and there’s something – it’s a bit like being on the beach and you get your stick and draw a line in the sand and other people think I’m crazy doing this, but when I step over that line I’m going to become a Christian. Why am I going to come to Christ?
[00:39:14] Why am I’m going to clear up this doubt I’ve had for years and years and years? Will you come? In a moment, as Jesus is calling, as we come to our song, the opportunity is yours, I’m going to pray first. Heavenly Father, we thank you for that great cry, my God, my God, cry of a human being, the God-man indeed, who bore our sins and suffered and died in our place. This one who showed his obedience to go that far, this one who demonstrated joining and the love of the Father to the Son be given, this one who had great faith and gives us example, he can help us have faith, this one who suffered in our place that we might find the righteousness of God. Lord, bless that person, whoever it be, to find Jesus tonight. We ask it in his name, and for his sake. Amen.