Well, with that, we do want to turn to our study this morning, and we are continuing in the series on the theology of reward, an often neglected topic, and we neglect it for various reasons.

We stay away from it.

As I've said before, sometimes We stay away from it because of the Roman Catholic emphasis on merit as the basis for salvation, and the Scripture clearly denounces that, regards that as a heresy of the gospel.

We sometimes avoid this doctrine also because of What we see in the charismatic movement and its excesses, where the emphasis is placed on material wealth and so on and so forth, and so we stay away from this doctrine as well.

And sometimes it's because of a mistaken understanding of God and the Christian life, and that as believers, even those who have been saved and who are walking by faith, we still are unable to please God in any way, so why would there be reward? All of those are misunderstandings, and it requires us to go back to the Scriptures and see what Scripture has to say.

And one of the important texts that I want to begin with this morning is Hebrews 6. verses 9 to 10.

Good evening.

What a wonderful evening we have already had here.

Such a wonderful time in worship.

Thank you so much, music team, Jonathan, for your leadership in that.

The opportunity that we can join our voices together and sing praises to our Lord and Savior.

That is always such a precious time, and the testimonies were As always, so wonderfully enriching, encouraging, especially from our young people.

Our title for the sermon this morning or this afternoon now is as follows, God's provision in our poverty.

God's provision in our poverty.

And the text that we will be studying this afternoon is found in Romans 8, verses 26 and 27, two wonderfully packed verses that describe for us in very, very profound ways, God's provision in the midst of our poverty.

But before we get to those two verses, it's helpful to remember the context of this letter to the Romans, the context specifically of these two verses.

The theme of Romans is God's righteousness revealed, or the revelation of God's righteousness.

In fact, if you would take the whole letter of Romans and distill it into one word, it would be the word righteousness.