The Heritage of Hope – Part II

This is an exegetical sermon on Romans 4:18-22 titled, The Heritage of Hope – Part II and looks at the hope of faith that began with Abraham and finds its culmination in Jesus Christ. This sermon was originally preached by Pastor Duane Smets on April 2, 2006 at The Resolved Church in San Diego, CA. Audio unavailable.

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::The Resolved:: April 2, 2006

“The Heritage of Hope – Part II”
Romans 4:18-22

Duane Matthew Smets (elder)

Romans 4:18-22

ESV (English Standard Version)
18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”

Introduction

Good evening. So here is what is going on. we are studying through this book of the bible called Romans, so far we’ve learned that humanity is really messed up, and that includes everyone of us, and that we are screwed because there is a deep seated wickedness in all of our hearts that does not recognized God and that everything comes from him and so we don’t thank and honor and glorify him as we ought to, so we are miserable.

Chapter three introduced us to Jesus Christ who died on a cross. Paul, the author of Romans, taught us that this is significant because our wickedness is an infinite offense to the eternal God and therefore deserves and infinite eternal response from God, which is the wrath of God, hell, unending torturous death. Jesus Christ is significant because he is fully God and fully man and since he is man and the only man to have always glorified God he is therefore sufficient to be the representative for all humans on the cross. And since he is fully God he is sufficient to satisfy the demands of an eternal or infinite death incurred by our wickedness.

Now in chapter four Paul is explaining how this thing with Jesus and the cross works out for us individually and there is this key phrase that appears in this chapter three different times, and the entire chapter is unpacking and what it means and how we experience it. The phrase is “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.” almost two months ago we started this chapter we learned that this word believed is the word faith and faith here is to believe that Christ work is sufficient for us and in turn Christ’s righteousness is credited or counted to our spiritual bank account and the result is that we escape the wrath we deserve and instead we receive an eternal inheritance of glory.

Last week we studied verses 18-22 that look at the life of Abraham and the heritage he passes on to us of hope and faith. tonight I want to consider the fatherhood of Abraham and revisit the relationship of hope and faith, looking at where it comes from and where it is going, and how that relates to some things our culture thinks and how it all relates to the rest of scripture.

Let’s read the text and pray.

Holy Father who dwells in inapproachable light, we humbly come before your name tonight to petition you to open our eyes that we might see wonderful things. You are glorious and we do not see it much of the time. The world beckons for people of substance but we are often lost and confused and know little of hope or faith. With our heads down we look up and call upon you to glorify yourself. Be father to us. Teach us, correct us, put courage and creativity in us that we might spread the message of the gospel and find much delight in you. AMEN

Biblical fatherhood

Last week we got deep into this thing called hope, what it is and how it relates to faith, God, and glory. We’ll go back to that in a little bit tonight but first I want to address a phrase in our passage that I intentionally did not deal with last week. The phrase is in the latter half of verse 18 (read). “…that he should become the father of many nations…” this is the sixth reference in this chapter alone to Abraham as a father and there are over 200 references in the whole Bible which look to him in this way. That tells us that there is something important here God must want us to understand about the fatherhood of Abraham. Quickly, look with me at the five references here in chapter four. 4:1 “…Abraham, our forefather.” 4:11 “…the purpose was to make him the father of all who believe…” 4:12 “…to make him the father of the circumcised.” 4:12 “… (To) walk in the footsteps of the faith (of) our father Abraham…” 4:17 “…I have made you the father of many nations.”

A father. We could spend an hour just talking about all the different life experiences we have all had concerning what kind of father we have had in our life. For some, probably most, it is something painful and for a few it is probably something good, which mostly likely has do with why you are here…because you had a good dad. But rather than dive into some sort of psychoanalytical tirade I just want to tell you about what scripture has to say about this as a whole. Because it is something very important to God in the Bible and therefore is something very important to us here at the resolved that we want to change about the way things are today in this city and in much of this country. We want to help rise up and make good fathers here. So men listen up and women you too because this is the kind of man you want.

So fathers in the Bible. Father in the Bible first refers God. It is one of the names which he calls himself, he is father God. The source of all life, the one who created the human race and everything else in this universe. God is a father, never called a mother in the Bible. God the father is strong, he is all-powerful and God the father is wise, he is all-knowing. And God the father has a son, named Jesus who is the Christ and Jesus is our brother. He is never called our sister but he is our brother and like his father he is strong and he is wise. He is our leader who is at the same time as tough as a lion and as gentle as a lamb. God the father in the bible is about making fathers who will make fathers, godly men. The bible is a patriarchal book about making godly men to lead their families and their churches and their cities. And that is what this verse in Romans about Abraham being a father of many nations has to do with.

Biblical masculinity

But before we can talk much about fathers we need to talk about something that may not be obvious to you and that is that to be a father you have to be man, a male. God created male and female and they are equal in their ability to reflect who God is and to know God but there are different in their biological make-up and their internal essence. Men and women are equal but they are different. And these differences mean that our conduct as men and as women is to be different. So you say, what is different about men?

Mark Driscoll, a pastor of mars hill church in Seattle, points out three different things about men and who the bible says they are made to be: one a cultivator, two a warrior, and three a sage. As a cultivator men are made to work, to create and cultivate something. It doesn’t matter if it is outside working on a building or inside on a computer, there is something about who we are as men that we will not be satisfied unless we are working on something, cultivating it. It is why I love home depot. I love to go there and just walk around and look at the tools. There is something very godly about home depot. We as men are made to cultivate.

In genesis in the first couple chapters, God creates man and tells him to fill the earth and subdue it. God is a God who works and he calls his men to work. Secondly, man is to be a warrior, he is made for battle and built for victory. Men are to be protectors of their family, they are guardians, are to be strong. I work at a boys home and there the guys are not allowed to wrestle around but they are always getting into trouble because it is so hard to resist this wrestling horseplay. And there is something very good and Godly about boys learning to fight. God is a God who is against evil and wrong doing and who conquerors his enemies and God calls men to fight sin and evil in the world.

The third thing is a sage. Men are to be wise people who get wisdom from God and from their fathers and then teach it to others. Men are built to read and to learn and then in turn teach to their families. When a man gains knowledge and then imparts there is something inside him that makes him feel deeply satisfied.

But here is the deal. Men will be these things no matter what, the problem is that if they don’t know God they will be them in the wrong way. If they don’t know God they will cultivate sin rather than righteousness. If they don’t know God they will fight and kill and hurt people unjustly instead of fighting against sin and fighting for souls in the kingdom of God. If they don’t know God they will teach others to follow them in their wrong thinking and teach how to be wicked.

The results are evident. A man that does not cultivate righteousness will end up lazy, always taking the shortcut, the path of least resistance. He will avoid responsibility, not pick a career and not work and instead just drink a lot, always look for some new girl to screw, watch a lot of porn, TV and movies and then maybe play some video games. A man that fights the wrong things will end up using his strength and power for harm and not help. You see a man’s strength is for building up not tearing down. If a man does not know God he will likely channel his anger wrong and set himself against women and end up blaming her, being mean, brutal, and intimidating to her. ladies, avoid these guys, the kind that can’t keep a job because they can’t get up for work and instead use all their money to get you drunk and get into your pants…avoid them. They will not be able to make you happy but will end up hurting you.

What we need today is for men to be manlier and for women to be more womanly not the other way around. We need manly masculine men who want to become fathers of fathers who will cultivate, fight, and teach. Today we as men are so short-sighted that the thought of even marrying a girl just seems so huge and far off and overwhelming and the idea of even having kids or being or your kids having kids, being a grandfather is even on the map of our heads. We need to think transgenerationally. Over and over again in the bible the Christian faith is referred to the one with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That is a father, a son, and a grandson. All this business about the nuclear family is wrong; we need to start thinking generationally about our family and the families we build.

Other religions get this, Islam, Judaism, Mormonism…they understand something about families and having fathers lead them. But today Christianity has ended up in a confused place because it is mostly women, the average is 3 to 1 and many of the guys who show up in Christian churches are weak, lazy men who are just looking for girls to sexually prey on. We are on a mission against that. We at the resolved are on a mission against rape, abuse, child abandonment, single moms, and divorce. I told you I work at a boys home with kids that have either been sexually or physically abused and all have either been abandoned or removed from their homes because of it and now they are really screwed up and nobody knows what to do. Our system doesn’t work, nearly everyday I go in and they are either punching holes in the walls or cutting themselves and my question is where were these boys’ fathers? Where were the men to wrestle with them, to lovingly discipline them, to teach them, and to help them find out what they are good at and how to work hard at it? Where are the fathers today? We are into making fathers here at the resolved and that starts now.

The father of many nations

Now, many of us have not had that kind of a man in our lives. I didn’t. That means three things. One, it means for you boys here that you need to become a man. it means that God is calling you to stand up and be a patriarch like Abraham, to start fresh, to change things, to vow that whatever bad things you have inherited from your family…that it stops with you and you start a new type of family. two, it means for you women that rather than to run away from men because they have not treated you properly that you need to start looking for a Godly man who cares about protecting you and being strong for you. Someone who will be a good father to your children. Three, it means that there is grace for those of us who have either had bad fathers, for those of us who have been bad men, and for those who have been hurt by men.

God is a God of grace. Look at verse 16, Justin preached on this a few weeks ago. Romans 4:16 “That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring – not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.” Look at the phrase “…in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed…” grace means that the goodness of God may come to your life not dependant upon you. Grace guarantees because it never started with you in the first place. The truth is, as Paul has shown, that we are all screwed up and grace is the undeserved favor of God.

Deuteronomy 7:6-7 says that God chose Abraham and the people to come out of him to be his treasured possession, not because he was numerous for he was the fewest, but it says that he chose them because “he set his love on [them] and chose them.” So the answer to the question why did God choose Abraham? Why does God choose you? The answer is nothing in me, he chose because He wanted to display His marvelous glory by showing what he can do with screwed up people. God is about His glory and we will not give it to Him and therefore we will be miserable unless God imparts grace to us. And grace is amazing because if it didn’t start with us then it will not continue based on us but on God because He doesn’t start something and then not finish it. He is not flippant and does not change as James 1:17-18 says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of His own will he brought us forth by the word of truth…” thus grace guarantees because God will not give up on you and therefore you life can change. There is grace for those of us who have had messed up families and fathers.

Now I don’t have kids. I have no idea what that is like but according this text in Romans that we are studying more tonight there is something about being a father in the life of Abraham that I need to get hold of. Verse 16 as we read that “…to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, [he] is the father of us all.” And in verse 18 we read that he is “the father of many nations.” The Greek word behind that word “nations” is ethnos where we get the word ethnicities or peoples. So Abraham is a father available to everyone of us here in this room. Okay, how?

This is what we looked at last week. Abraham teaches us about cultivating, fighting for, and teaching about faith like a good father. Here is how. Abraham was 100 years old, his wife Sarah 90, they’ve never been able to have kids because there is something wrong with Sarah’s womb, God comes to them, tells Abraham will be a father of many peoples, many many children, as numerous as the stars. A few years go by, it’s not happening and God shows up again and reaffirms his promise and shortly after Sarah gets pregnant. now, Abraham did a lot of stupid things in his life like many of us, one time he offers another king to have sex with his wife just so the king won’t kill him, not a good fatherly thing to do, but there were some key things that Abraham did that Paul mentions which make him the father of faith for all of us. we noticed last week that Abraham despite the difficulty of his situation grew strong, was fully convinced, and gave glory to God instead of becoming weak, distrusting, and wavering in his conviction that God was God and able to do what he promised. And they way that Abraham was able to do this was by the grace of the word of God, Paul refers to it three different times: what Abraham was told, the promise and the promise.

So you see how this works, God comes to us, messed up people, and comes to us with the truth of His word. It is hard to believe but something about it hits us deep. We know it is true and internally we discover faith. Then life happens and faith feels distant, many questions and doubts arise, and then what we discover is hope and that hope enables us to like Abraham, not waver, not distrust, but instead return to God’s word, grow strong and reach glory. That is the theological mechanics of that this chapter teaches us. God’s undeserved grace comes, it gives us faith through God’s word, the result is hope in the face of hard times, and the result is glory. This week we recognize that we need our father Abraham because of how he points us to our father God. Abraham shows us that faith is something that we can have because it comes from a God who verse 17 “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” So Abraham is a good father because he teaches us about the God’s creation of faith through grace and how that can be cultivated. Abraham also shows us that we don’t have to be weak but that we can fight for faith and be strong, so he is a good father because he teaches us to fight for the right things. And lastly, Abraham is wise because he teaches us that God’s promises can be trusted and that the satisfied life comes through giving God glory. Abraham is a good father because is a sage who teaches us that wisdom comes from God.

Cultural ideas

Okay, so we’ve done our homework in exegeting this passage. God is God. Abraham is father of faith. The grace God gives faith. Faith comes through the word of God. Faith brings the assurance of hope. Hope results in glory. But what is left? Yes, there are some things remaining about how this relates to Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection. We’ll get to that in two weeks. Next week is the one year anniversary of the resolved church and Justin is going to preach a brief sermon on who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we are going, and a few different people of this church are going to come up and share about how their lives have been affected by God through this church. Afterward we are going to have a bonfire bbq at Crown Point, and celebrate by having some carne aside tacos and beer. So if you’ve have some friends that you’ve been wanting to come check out the resolved next week is a good night. then the week after is Easter Sunday and it is kind of weird how it worked out but the next few verses in Romans are about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which Paul has not talked about in Romans yet other than in his summary introduction. So fittingly, in two weeks when Christianity celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ as Easter, we will study one of the most explicit passages in the whole bible that explain the significance of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. and if you have ever thought that was whack or just some fanciful myth you could never be sure of that only a bunch of crazy people would ever believe, come because there are some good reasons to think this thing actually happened and is actually hugely significant for our lives. So that is the next two weeks. but there is something else here that the passage we have been studying the last two weeks hits hard on that seem to me to be extremely relevant to the day and time we live in and that is what I want to talk about for the rest of my sermon.

today our culture is a mess of all kinds of different ideas and most people have just kind of decided that you can pick and choose things from here and there and sort of make up what you believe on your own. One of those ideas is what is technically known as existentialism and its extreme form, nihilism. You don’t have to know those terms but you know the thought. It is the idea that there is no meaning in anything. That humanity is just the result of some biological and cosmological incident that resulted in us, these weird animals who have come up with the stupid idea that there are such things as meaning or love or morality. We are just here for awhile, are socially conditioned, act according to our instincts, and then die and there is nothing. If you want names to attach to this thinking some of my favorites are Albert Camus, Fredric Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, and Martin Heidegger. Albert Camus wrote this book called the plague and it is all about how a bunch of people in this town get this sickness and start dying and the town is quarantined and nearly everyone just dies and there is no meaning or purpose in it. More recently, there was this movie made that I love, called “garden state.” one of the best parts of the movie is the end where the main character, who is confused about life and love, whose mom recently died, stands on a rock and shouts at the top of his lungs into a mile deep crater in the earth called the ‘abyss.’” The abyss is the great unknown. The meaninglessness and hopelessness of it all.

I told you last week that I am reading a book by Douglas Coupland, who is recognized as one of the best pop writers on postmodernism today. At one point in the book he writes this, “Our lives are gears mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability. The moment we’re able, we insulate ourselves from random acts of hate and destruction. It’s always been there – in the neighborhoods we build, the walls between our houses, the wariness with which we treat the unknown. One person in six million will be struck by lightening. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be the victim of a violent crime. A day in which nothing happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn’t. the dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species…I stopped believing in the future – which is to say I stopped thinking of the future as being a place, like Paris or Australia – a place that you can go to. I started believing that we’re all going, going, going all the time, but there’s no city or place at the end. We’re just going. That’s all.”

Amazing huh? And you know what? These guys who write this kind of thing, they are right. There is something about existential nihilistic postmodern writing that I love. I love it because it touches on something deep inside me that I cannot put my finger on. It touches on something I feel. I feel meaninglessness, I feel confusion, I feel frustration, I feel the dark unknown, I feel the fleeting of love, and I feel. There is something right about this kind of thinking but not fully right. There is something right about if you look at the world and your life with no God. if there is not something greater than ourselves, if there really is no heavenly father, then none of this can be going anywhere and in the end it is just death and there is no reason or possibility of happiness in this life. We are just here and then it is the end if there is no God. If there is no God Coupland, and Kafka, and Nietzsche, and Camus are right. We are just here and it is a mess and then it is the end.

But God’s word changes things. There is His word that we see reflections of when we look outside. We look at the intricacy of this world, the most beautiful painting ever painted and we see the hand of the divine painter. There is His word He has written through the hands of men like Paul, who explain to us why we feel as hopeless as humans and how the satisfaction we long for can be found in God and a pursuit of His glory. And there is his word that gives reason and evidence to encourage us that we are not blindly leaping into the dark when we trust in him but that we are dropping from the edge of a cliff onto sure and stable ground.

Let me just read to you a few other passages of scripture which speak about the gloriousness grace, faith, hope, glory.

2 Peter 1:4 “[God] has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.”

Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Ephesians 1:18 “…the eyes of your hearts [have been] enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”

1 Peter 1:3 “Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

Colossians 1:27 “To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the
riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

you see the Christian worldview is different because it says that yes the world is a fucked up place, but that there is reason for hope because there is a God and because he has done something amazing in Jesus Christ and that history is not aimless but is going somewhere and that end is glory for those who are in the family of God. Here me people of the resolved, there is hope for glory in the gospel of Jesus Christ, put your faith in God.

An existential confession

Some people just seem to want to stay blind to what they feel and never look internally. These are those asshole Christians who think they are better than everybody else because they don’t use certain naughty words. Then there are those who look internally but it never goes anywhere. They just get stuck looking inside themselves and end up depressed and sad and they refuse to do anything about it. I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve been both types of these people and I have friends who are both of these types of people. There are friends of mine who have left this church because they can’t handle people smoking outside before or after church and there was a time in my life when I would’ve done the same thing. and there are friends of mine who say they feel nothing of God and His truth and they refuse to do anything about it and are determined to be perpetually bummed, and I’ve been that person and been stuck for months at a time just wanting to die.

Here is what will bring you out of both sides of these errors, the word of God. It is what the Bible teaches and it proven true in my life. If you are on the neo-Pharisee legalistic side where you think being a Christian is about doing the right things, then fine. Dive deep into the word of God that you revere and look at the honesty of Jesus and his followers, the Christians. Look at the present sinful condition of believers and how the gospel is the good news that there is grace for screw-ups and that people who are screwed up are the exact kind of people that God loves to use to bring glory to his name. The word of God is what delivered me from that erroneous thinking. I was challenged by the lives of some men I knew who were very Godly men and yet they drank beer, and cussed, and knew there Bible even better than I did. Then I started reading the gospels and noticing how much Jesus drank and swore and hung out with sinners and my life began to change.

If you are on the internal, introspective side, dig deep into the word of God. Yes, your feelings matter, they matter a lot. God wants us to feel and He wants us to feel joy. And He has determined that there be certain means to finding His joy and one of the chief means is the word of God. Read a lot of it. Consider what it says, how you feel, and how the gospel is good news for a future of happiness that is not at the expense of just forgetting yourself or ignoring how things really are. The gospel is good news because it looks reality square in the eye and conquers it and answers the deepest questions of life. The word of God is what delivered me from this erroneous thinking. I know what it is like to not have smiled for a couple months, I know what is like to have slit my wrists in a feeling of hopelessness, I know what it is like to have felt like everything that I believe is just things I may be philosophically convinced of in my head and yet I feel nothing of it inside. I’ve been there and those feelings are powerful. In those moments the most evil thoughts have entered my head where I actually considered leaving my wife, and my family, and God and my church and just moving to Europe with a new name. but then I considered the word of God and how I did believe it was true and how even though I felt nothing of it in the moment that I at least had to see what happened with it, how it played out and so I made a decision to fight rather than run and to dig deeper and search for joy. It is as though I had to chuck my whole worldview into the category of hope. So I began reading God’s word and reading books by Godly men, like John Owen’s “the mortification of sin” and joy and strength and the feeling of life and not death returned to me.

Conclusion

In conclusion tonight I want to say some things about glory, the appointed hope. Glory. It is something unattainable. We look and we search for analogies like light, and expanse, and depth but it is out of reach. I think that is part of the reason why the idea that no one person has a capital on truth is so attractive, because everything is about glory and there is no way one person could fully get their hands around it. But glory is true and it is real and there is something amazing about it. Glory is the outstreaming of God’s beauty and reality of God and that is what humans were made for. We were made for more than ourselves. John piper says this, “giving glory to God doesn’t mean adding glory to God. It means showing that God is glorious. It means calling attention to His glory and showing it to be what it really is. His glory is the greatness of His beauty and the shining of all His excellencies, and the radiance of His perfections.” God created us for glory, that is where hope leads us…to display more and more of His glory, to partake in it.

Abraham is our father of faith who teaches us to look to God and to have hope through the gospel, to aim for glory. And that is our mission. To be people of substance. to be fathers and children who have some depth to them, to have be peoples who have a deep understanding of reality and who are passionately spreading that message. And that is what I call you to as your under-pastor, under Jesus Christ the chief pastor. Put your faith and your hope in the person and work of Jesus Christ, for He is the glory of God. And then spread that message. Become fathers and wives and families that build a legacy and a tradition of faith. Become people who make God look good in this city among your friends and the people you reach out to in love.

Those who know me well know that bright eyes is one of my favorite bands. Sometimes people, without realizing the full magnitude of what they say, say the most amazing things about God and who he is and who we are to be. So I want to close tonight by quoting a song written by condor obverts of bright eyes. The song is called, “bowl of oranges.”

The rain had started tapping
On the window near my bed
There was a loophole in my dreaming
So I got out of it
And to my surprise my eyes were wide
And already open
Just my nightstand and my dresser
Where those nightmares had just been

So I dressed myself and left then
Out into the gray streets
But everything seemed different
Completely new to me
The sky, the trees, houses, buildings
Even my own body
And each person I encountered
I couldn’t wait to meet

And I came upon a doctor
Who appeared in quite poor health
I said, “There’s nothing I can do for you
You can’t do for yourself”
He said, “Oh, yes you can, just hold my hand
I think that that would help”
So I sat with him a while
And I asked him how he felt
He said, “I think I’m cured
No, in fact I’m sure of it
Thank you stranger
For your theraputic smile”

So that’s how I learned the lesson
That everyone’s alone
And your eyes must do some raining
If you’re ever gonna grow
When crying don’t help, you can’t compose yourself
It’s best to compose a poem
An honest verse of longing
Or a simple song of hope

That’s why I’m singing, baby, don’t worry
Cause now I’ve got you back
And every time you feel like crying
I’m gonna try to make you laugh
And if I can’t, if it just hurts too bad
Then we’ll wait for it to pass
And I will keep you company
Through those days so long and black

We’ll keep working on the problem
We know we’ll never solve
Of love’s uneven remainders
Our lives are fractions of a whole
But if the world could remain within a frame
Like a painting on a wall
Then I think we’d see the beauty then
And stand staring in awe