Devotional 11: Of God, and of the Holy Trinity: What comes into your mind when you think about God

The Confession Read

There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him; and withal, most just, and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, Section 1

Introduction

What comes into your mind when you think about God? A. W. Tozer posed that question to a generation of Christians, and it has lost none of its searching power, for the answer we give — not the one we have learned to recite but the one that rises unbidden when the mind turns heavenward in the quiet hours — is the truest measure of our spiritual condition. It is the fountainhead from which every other conviction flows. A man who imagines God to be a distant watchmaker, having wound the universe and withdrawn to some far remove, will live as a practical atheist, managing his affairs as though heaven were empty. A man who thinks of God as a sentimental grandfather without the spine to judge sin will trifle with transgression and never learn the fear that is the beginning of wisdom. A man who reduces God to a cold philosophical abstraction — the Unmoved Mover of the schools — will never pour out his heart before the throne as a child before a father who hears and loves and answers prayer. What we believe about God shapes everything we are, for we are worshipping creatures before we are anything else, and we become like what we worship. The Westminster Divines understood this with the clarity that only deep pastoral wisdom can produce. Having completed their treatment of Holy Scripture as the fountain of all saving knowledge, they turn now to the subject of that knowledge itself. Before they speak of the Trinity, before they unfold the eternal decree, before they trace creation and providence and redemption through the great arc of the Confession, they pause to ask the foundational question: Who is this God? What is He like? And their answer, compressed into a single sentence that has few rivals in the English language, is a portrait of the living God drawn entirely from Scripture — every brushstroke a word from heaven, every attribute a beam of the divine glory refracted through the prism of inspired speech. We stand this hour upon holy ground. To speak of God is the highest calling and the deepest peril any creature can undertake, for finite words can never compass the Infinite, and he who speaks much of the divine glory may, by the very attempt, diminish it. Yet God Himself has spoken, and what He has revealed we are commanded to receive, to believe, to adore. The Confession before us is not speculative philosophy but a faithful summary of what God has told us about Himself in His Word — and what He has told us is the fountain of every comfort, the ground of every hope, and the summons to every duty the Christian life entails.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession opens with a thunderclap of biblical monotheism: "There is but one only, living, and true God." This is the Shema, the daily confession of every faithful Jew from Moses to the present hour, recorded in Deuteronomy 6:4 : "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD." The Hebrew word for "one" is echad, and it carries real theological weight, for it does not denote bare numerical singularity — a mere integer, as though the point were simply that the gods of the nations number many while Israel's God numbers one. The echad of the Shema is a unified oneness, a comprehensive wholeness, the same word used when God declares that a man shall cleave to his wife and they two shall become one flesh. Just as the unity of marriage is a rich, organic union without division, so the unity of God is the fullness of undivided being. The Divines will unfold this further when they come to the Trinity in Section 3, but even here the echad whispers of a unity deeper than arithmetic. But the God of Israel is the living God — and this adjective sets Him in stark opposition to every idol. Jeremiah contrasts the LORD with the gods of the nations in Jeremiah 10:10 : "But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation." The Hebrew chai, living, stands against the dead gods of wood and stone who have mouths but speak not, eyes but see not, ears but hear not. A dead god cannot answer prayer or intervene in history or stretch out his right hand to deliver. But the God of the Bible is the living God — the God who hears, who acts, whose voice shakes the wilderness and whose ear is open to the cry of His people. This is no philosophical abstraction accessible only to the trained intellect; to know Him is life eternal. And this living God is the true God. In 1 Thessalonians 1:9 , Paul describes the conversion of the Thessalonians as a turning "to God from idols to serve the living and true God." The Greek alethinos means genuine, authentic, the real thing as opposed to every counterfeit. The idols of the nations are not lesser deities but non-gods — empty projections of the human imagination, lies dressed in stone and silver. The God of Scripture alone is the true God, and His truthfulness extends to every word He speaks, every promise He makes. Having established the uniqueness of God, the Confession unfolds a cascade of divine attributes, each drawn from the sacred page. The first group speaks of what theologians call the incommunicable attributes — those perfections of God's being that belong to Him alone and cannot be shared with any creature. He is "infinite in being and perfection." Solomon, dedicating the temple, grasped this in 1 Kings 8:27 : "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?" The word "infinite" does not mean merely very large; it means without boundary, without limit, without measure. God is not contained by space, not bounded by time, not restricted by possibility — His being has no edges, no horizon beyond which He is not present. He is "immutable," changeless. Malachi 3:6 declares: "For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." Here is the anchor of the believer's hope, for every creature changes — the mountains wear away, the seas shift their boundaries, the stars burn out, the strongest empires crumble into dust, and our own bodies and minds are in perpetual flux from the cradle to the grave. But God does not change. His purposes do not shift; His promises do not expire; His love does not cool; His power does not diminish; His wisdom does not need updating. The God who spoke to Abraham is the same God who speaks to you this day, and what He has promised He will perform. Closely related is the confession that God is "eternal." Moses prays in Psalm 90:2 : "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God." The Hebrew is me'olam ad olam — from the vanishing point of the distant past to the vanishing point of the distant future, and beyond both. God does not exist within time as we do, carried along by its current from one moment to the next; He inhabits eternity, and all times are equally present to His infinite awareness. And He is "incomprehensible" — not that He cannot be known at all, but that He cannot be known exhaustively. The finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Zophar the Naamathite, for all his errors as a comforter of Job, spoke truth in Job 11:7 : "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?" The Hebrew cheqer means to search out to the depths, to explore exhaustively — and the answer is no. The deepest theologian and the simplest believer stand alike before an ocean whose depths no plummet has sounded; to know God truly is not to know Him fully. Yet this incomprehensible God has made Himself known. He is "almighty." When Abram was ninety-nine years old, God appeared to him in Genesis 17:1 : "I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect." The Hebrew is El Shaddai — God Almighty, the All-Sufficient One, the God for whom nothing is too hard. No obstacle is too great, no enemy too strong, no heart too hard, no circumstance too tangled for the arm that stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth. He is "most holy." The seraphim cry in Isaiah 6:3 : "Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory." The threefold repetition is the Hebrew way of expressing the superlative. God is not merely holy; He is holiness itself, the fountain from which all creaturely holiness flows. The Hebrew qadosh carries the sense of separation, of belonging to a category entirely other than the common and the profane — utter moral purity, infinite distance from all that is sinful and defiled. And yet this holy God draws near to those of a contrite and humble spirit. After the soaring peaks of transcendent majesty, the Confession descends into the tender valleys of God's moral goodness. He is "most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth." Here the Divines are transcribing what God Himself proclaimed to Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus 34:6-7 — the most concentrated self-revelation of the divine character in the Old Testament: "And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin." Every word here is a world of meaning. Rachum, merciful, comes from rechem, the womb — the tender, visceral compassion of a mother for the child she has borne. Channun, gracious, speaks of unmerited favour freely bestowed. 'Erek appayim, long-suffering, is literally "long of nostrils" — a God whose anger takes a long time to kindle. Chesed, translated "mercy" but elsewhere "lovingkindness" or "steadfast love," is the covenant faithfulness of God, the love that will not let go, the mercy that endures forever. And all this stands alongside 'emeth, truth — the utter reliability of everything God says and does. But the Confession, like Scripture, will not permit us to construct a God of our own liking from half the revelation. The same passage that proclaims mercy also declares that God "will by no means clear the guilty." The Hebrew of Exodus 34:7 is even stronger: venaqqeh lo yenaqqeh — literally, "and clearing He will not clear." The repetition is for emphasis; the negative is absolute. Nahum echoes this in Nahum 1:2-3 : "The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked." The God of the Bible is not a sentimental deity who shrugs at sin; He is "most just, and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin." His holiness burns against iniquity with a fire that will not be quenched. How can these two truths dwell together — the God who forgives iniquity and the God who will by no means clear the guilty? The answer lies not in the doctrine of God alone but at the cross of Jesus Christ, where mercy and justice met, where God cleared the guilty by laying their guilt upon His Son. The Divines wisely leave the tension unresolved for now, knowing that to rush to the cross prematurely would rob the justice of God of its terrifying majesty and the mercy of God of its wonder. For now, it is enough to know that both are true. Finally, the Confession gathers all these attributes into a single grand purpose: God is "working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory." Paul, having traced the unsearchable ways of God through the labyrinth of salvation history, bursts into doxology in Romans 11:36 : "For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen." Everything that exists comes from God as its source, is sustained by God as its power, and exists for God as its purpose. And here is the heart-melting wonder: our deepest good is bound up in that glory, for we were made to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly convened in 1643, the doctrine of God was not a settled matter. The question of what God is like — His nature, His attributes, His relation to the world — was among the most fiercely contested of the age, and the Divines had to navigate a field strewn with errors on every side. The Confession they produced is a careful exercise in theological cartography, mapping the boundaries of orthodoxy by marking the territories of heresy. On one side stood the Socinians, who denied the Trinity and the full deity of Christ and the Spirit, reducing God to a simplified monad whose knowledge of future contingent events was limited. Against them, the Confession insists that God is "eternal" and "incomprehensible" and "most wise" — attributes that cannot be predicated of a deity who does not know the future exhaustively. The Socinian God was a diminished deity trimmed to fit the Procrustean bed of rationalistic philosophy; the Divines, by piling attribute upon attribute in a cascade of biblical language, insisted that God is greater than our reason can contain. On another side stood the Arminians, whose system raised troubling questions about divine immutability. If God changes His mind in response to human decisions — if His eternal decrees are modified by what He foresees in the creature — then what becomes of the Confession's declaration that God is "immutable" and works all things according to "his own immutable and most righteous will"? The Divines would not sacrifice the biblical doctrine of divine unchangeableness on the altar of human autonomy, insisting with the whole Augustinian tradition that God's will is not contingent upon the creature. On yet another side stood pantheism and mysticism, which blurred the distinction between Creator and creature. Against this, the Confession calls God "a most pure spirit" — not a material being, not a force diffused through the universe, but a personal, spiritual Being distinct from His creation. He is "without body": not to be located, depicted, or manipulated by ritual or image. He is "without parts": not composite, not composed of elements, not divisible. He is "without passions": not in the Stoic sense of being emotionally inert, for the God of the Bible rejoices, grieves, loves, and is angry — but in the sense that He is not subject to passions that arise involuntarily and sweep Him along as they do creatures. God's affections are the deliberate, sovereign dispositions of His perfect will, not reactions He cannot control. The ordering of the attributes is itself a theological statement. The Confession begins with God's transcendence — His infinity, spirituality, invisibility, immutability, eternity, incomprehensibility — before moving to His power, wisdom, holiness, freedom, and sovereignty. Only after the majesty of God has been firmly established does it descend to His goodness: love, grace, mercy, long-suffering, truth. Then comes justice. The structure teaches a vital lesson: the love of God is not the sentimentality of a soft deity who lacks the spine to judge, but the astonishing condescension of the high and holy One who inhabits eternity, stooping to embrace sinners. To reverse the order — to begin with love and only later mention justice — would distort the biblical portrait beyond recognition. The phrase "working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory" is the hinge on which the whole section turns. Here the Divines summarise the entire biblical vision of divine sovereignty, drawing on the Greek participle energountos from Ephesians 1:11 — God is the one energizing, actively working, effecting His purposes in every event. Nothing falls outside His decree, nothing catches Him by surprise, nothing thwarts His ultimate intention. And that intention is His own glory — not because God is a cosmic egotist, but because God's glory is the highest good in the universe, the sun whose beams warm every creature that lives, and the creature's truest happiness is found in reflecting that glory back to its source.

Theological Depth

No theologian in the English language has plumbed the doctrine of God with greater depth than Stephen Charnock, whose Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God stands as a monument of Puritan divinity. Charnock takes each divine attribute — eternity, immutability, omnipotence, holiness, goodness — and unfolds it from Scripture before pressing it home upon the conscience, for in his hands the doctrine of God is never merely academic; it is always pastoral, always aimed at the transformation of the soul. "The contemplation of God's attributes," he writes, "is the seed of all true religion. It is this that kindles the flame of love, awakens the fear of the Lord, strengthens faith against every assault, and comforts the soul in the darkest valley." Charnock's treatment of divine immutability is particularly searching. He observes that if God could change, He would either change for the better or for the worse — He cannot change for the better, for that would imply He was previously imperfect, and He cannot change for the worse, for that would imply He could cease to be God. Therefore He does not change at all. But this is no cold philosophical deduction; it is the ground of the believer's security. "If God were mutable," Charnock writes, "what comfort could we take in any of His promises? A promise is only as good as the character of the one who makes it. A changing God would be a God whose promises could be revoked, whose love could cool, whose grace could be exhausted. But the God of the covenant is not a man that He should change His mind. Has He said, and shall He not do it? Has He spoken, and shall He not make it good?" Every saint who has clung to a promise in the darkness of affliction owes his hope to the immutability of the God who spoke it. John Calvin, in the opening chapters of the Institutes, approaches the doctrine of God from a different angle, insisting that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are inextricably intertwined. We cannot truly know ourselves — our sinfulness, our weakness, our dependence — without first knowing the majesty and holiness of God, and we cannot truly know God without being driven to acknowledge our own unworthiness. "As long as we do not look beyond the earth," Calvin writes, "being quite content with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue, we flatter ourselves most sweetly and fancy ourselves all but demigods. But if we once begin to raise our thoughts to God and to reflect what kind of Being He is and how absolute the perfection of that righteousness and wisdom and virtue to which, as a standard, we are called, then what formerly delighted us by its false show of righteousness will become polluted with the greatest iniquity." The Confession's declaration that God is "infinite in being and perfection" is, in Calvin's hands, the death knell of all human pride, for before an infinite God human pretension crumbles to dust. Thomas Watson, whose Body of Divinity was the textbook from which generations of Puritan families learned their faith, brings a pastor's warmth to the contemplation of the divine attributes, likening them to the letters of the divine name, each revealing something essential about who God is. Watson is especially helpful on the goodness of God. "The goodness of God," he writes, "is a most delightful theme. It is the sweetener of all the other attributes. His power would be terrible without His goodness, His justice would be dreadful without His goodness, His sovereignty would be oppressive without His goodness. But when we see that all His perfections are tempered and sweetened with goodness — that the God who is mighty is also merciful, that the Judge who will by no means clear the guilty is also the Father who forgives — then the soul finds rest." For Watson, divine goodness is a fountain ever flowing, never exhausted; the sun may withhold its light, the earth its increase, friends their kindness, but the goodness of God never fails. Herman Witsius, the Dutch Reformed divine whose Economy of the Covenants shaped federal theology for more than a century, provides crucial insight into the phrase "without body, parts, or passions" — language that has often been misunderstood as teaching that God is unfeeling, the apatheia of the Greek philosophers smuggled into Christian theology. Witsius clarifies that the Divines were not denying that God has affections; Scripture everywhere attributes love, joy, anger, and compassion to God. What they denied is that God is subject to passions in the creaturely sense — that He is acted upon from without, that His emotional life is reactive and involuntary, that He can be made to suffer against His will. "The affections of God," Witsius explains, "are not passions that befall Him but perfections that belong to Him. His love is not a response to loveliness in the creature but the sovereign disposition of His will to do good. His anger is not a loss of self-control but the settled opposition of His holiness to sin." To attribute passions to God in the creaturely sense is to bring Him down to our level; to deny them in the purified sense of the Confession is to preserve His transcendence while affirming that He is a personal, relational, living God. Francis Turretin, the Genevan scholastic whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology provided the backbone of post-Reformation orthodoxy, treats divine simplicity with characteristic precision. The Confession says God is "without parts" — one of the most difficult and most important doctrines of classical theism — and Turretin explains that God is not composed of material parts, for He is spirit; not composed of metaphysical parts, as though His attributes were separable components; not composed of logical parts, as though genus and species could describe Him. Every attribute of God is identical with His essence: God is not a being who happens to have love, wisdom, and power as qualities that might in theory be removed; He is love, He is wisdom, He is power. The attributes are not additions to the divine being but expressions of who God is in Himself, and the pastoral implication runs deep. You can never encounter God's power without encountering His love, never experience His justice without experiencing His mercy, for in the simple being of God every perfection is always and everywhere present. When you meet the living God, you meet all of Him.

Puritan Application

First, study the attributes of God until they study you. It is a dangerous thing to have a small God, for the sin of the pagan is not that he worships no god but that he worships a god made in his own image — a god who shares his prejudices, sanctions his lusts, and can be safely ignored when inconvenient. The remedy for idolatry is not less theology but more and better. Set yourself to know the God of the Bible as He has revealed Himself, reading through the attributes the Confession lists — infinite, immutable, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most holy, most wise, most loving, most just — and asking yourself honestly: Is this the God I worship? Do I tremble before His holiness? Do I rest in His immutability? Do I marvel at His grace? Do I fear His justice? Take one attribute each day for meditation, reading the Scriptures that disclose it and praying that the Spirit who searches the deep things of God would make that perfection real to your soul. The knowledge of God is not the accumulation of theological facts but the transformation of the whole person by the vision of His glory. Second, humble yourself before the majesty of God. The opening cascade of transcendent attributes — infinite, incomprehensible, eternal — is designed to produce not intellectual satisfaction but spiritual prostration. When Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, he did not write a theological treatise; he cried out, "Woe is me! for I am undone." When Job encountered the God who laid the foundations of the earth, he put his hand upon his mouth and repented in dust and ashes. The culture around us is saturated with pride, telling us to believe in ourselves, to assert our rights, to demand recognition, to build our own kingdoms — but the vision of God in the Confession cuts through all that as a sword. Before the infinite God, what are you? A vapour that appears for a little time and vanishes, a creature whose wisdom is folly and whose righteousness is filthy rags. And yet this infinite God stoops to care for you, for the humility that crushes pride opens the door to grace, and God gives grace to the humble. Third, trust His unchanging nature in a world of perpetual change. Everything around you shifts like sand: your health, your circumstances, your relationships, your reputation, your very identity as the years erode what you once were. If your hope rests on anything mutable, it rests on shifting ground — but God does not change. The promise He made to you in the gospel, that whoever believes in Christ shall not perish but have everlasting life, is as firm today as when He first spoke it. The love with which He loved you before the foundation of the world has not cooled; the power by which He keeps you has not diminished; the purpose for which He called you has not been revised. When your feelings fluctuate, His faithfulness stands; when your circumstances darken, His goodness remains; when your strength fails, His power is made perfect in weakness. The Christian's security rests not on the constancy of his own faith but on the immutability of the God in whom that faith is placed. Fourth, fear His justice. The Confession does not permit us to domesticate God into a comfortable, harmless deity; it declares that He is "most just, and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty." These are not words we may skip over because they make us uncomfortable, for they are the revelation of who God is and they demand a response. The fear of the Lord is not a relic of an older dispensation but the beginning of wisdom, the fountain of life, the safeguard of the soul in a world that calls evil good and good evil. To fear God is not to cower as a slave before a cruel master but to reverence Him as a child before a father whose authority is absolute, whose holiness is terrifying, and whose displeasure is a thing to be avoided at all costs. The man or woman who has lost the fear of the Lord has lost the very foundation of true religion, and whatever they build upon that loss will be wood, hay, and stubble that the Day will reveal and the fire will consume. Fifth, flee to His mercy. The same Confession that warns of terrible judgments also declares that God is "most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin." Every word here is a door of hope swung wide open for the sinner who knows his guilt. The threefold repetition — iniquity, transgression, sin — is the Bible's way of saying that no category of offence lies beyond the reach of divine mercy. But this mercy is found in only one place: at the cross of Jesus Christ, where the God who will by no means clear the guilty cleared the guilty by laying their guilt upon His Son. Do not presume upon His mercy by continuing in sin that grace may abound, yet do not despair of His mercy by imagining your sins too great to be forgiven. Flee to Christ, and you will find that the God whose justice you feared is the God whose mercy you now taste, and the two perfections that seemed irreconcilable embrace one another in the wounds of the Saviour. Sixth, live for His glory. The Confession teaches that God works all things according to the counsel of His will for His own glory, and this is not merely a statement about divine sovereignty — it is a summons to human purpose. If God's purpose in all He does is His own glory, then the purpose of your life must also be His glory. Every decision, every word, every ambition, every relationship should be weighed in the balance of this question: Does this serve the glory of God? Paul reduces the whole duty of man to a single imperative: "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." Your work, your family, your recreation, your suffering, your dying — all of it can be offered as a living sacrifice to the God from whom and through whom and to whom are all things. And here is the deep paradox of the Christian life: in seeking God's glory you find your own deepest joy, for the Shorter Catechism written by the same Divines opens by declaring that man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever — and the two are not separate pursuits. You were made to glorify God, and in glorifying Him you will find the satisfaction your soul was created to crave. Every other fountain is broken; every other stream runs dry. But the river of God's pleasure is full of water, and those who drink from it shall never thirst again.

Prayer

O most holy and most glorious Lord God, who art infinite in being and perfection, a most pure Spirit, invisible and incomprehensible, eternal and unchangeable — we bow before Thee in the dust of our creaturehood, confessing that we are not worthy to take Thy name upon our lips, much less to be called Thy children. Yet Thou hast spoken, and we dare to answer; Thou hast called, and we come; Thou hast opened a way into Thy presence through the blood of the everlasting covenant, and we enter with boldness, not because we are bold, but because Christ is our peace. We bless Thee for what Thou art in Thyself, apart from all Thy works: for Thy holiness that makes the seraphim veil their faces, for Thy immutability that is the anchor of our souls, for Thy wisdom that orders all things beautifully in their time, for Thy power that none can stay nor question. We bless Thee that Thou art the living God — not an idol of our devising, not a distant abstraction — but the God who hears, who acts, who draws near. We bless Thee, O Lord, for the tenderness of Thy perfections: for the love that sent Thy Son, for the grace that justifies the ungodly, for the mercy that is new every morning, for the long-suffering that has borne with us through years of rebellion and coldness and unbelief, for the goodness that supplies every need, for the truth that never fails. We tremble before Thy justice, for Thou hatest all sin and wilt by no means clear the guilty. How then shall we stand in the Day of Thy appearing? We have no righteousness of our own; our iniquities are more than the hairs of our head. We flee from the throne of Thy justice to the cross of Thy Son, where justice and mercy kissed, where the sinless One was made sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Hide us in His wounds; cover us with His righteousness; plead His merit for our pardon and His intercession for our acceptance at Thy right hand. Conform us to the God whom we worship. Make us holy as Thou art holy; make us merciful as Thou art merciful; make us steadfast as Thou art unchangeable; make us wise with the wisdom that cometh down from above. And grant that all our days — our rising and our resting, our labour and our leisure, our joys and our sorrows — may be offered up as a living sacrifice to the glory of Thy great name, through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be all honour and praise, world without end. Amen.