Great Expectations: The meaning of true faith in God

It’s good to prepare, and every pastor or minister of the Gospel should be able to prepare a word for his people. I have often prepared a message with careful study and notes, mainly for the purpose of disciplining myself by imposing limits and parameters. This is because the Word of God is a passion with me and once let loose with just a Bible I can speak without notes interminably. So, notes are good.

This article, however, is adapted from a short word I recently delivered at my home church - New Hope Community Church in Wishaw, Lanarkshire. It wasn’t a sermon or a prepared teaching; just an off-the-cuff word that I felt the Holy Spirit wanted me to give.

We do that at New Hope where we encourage our people to contribute whatever word, or song, or prophecy they feel God has impressed upon them to share with the Body. We also encourage them to take notes of what ever God might say to them, as well as follow in their own Bibles, whatever the senior pastor Marshall Cross or I may say, because it’s important that they check whatever they are told, for themselves.

It’s not a free for all in any chaotic sense, because we do things decently and in order. But it is free inasmuch as we don’t put God in a box or stick rigidly to a set agenda. It’s God’s church, in which he is the Host and not the Guest of Honour. He sets the agenda; We just follow.

For some reason this seems to work, which I suspect is because God has been God for a very long time and he’s actually quite good at it. Such agenda as there is, he sets, not us. We ministers arrive prepared, but not inflexibly so. We prepare music and a word and announcements and all that sort of stuff, which is perfectly fine and proper. The only proviso being that if God says otherwise, we shove any and all of our own stuff aside, and follow his lead.

From experience we have found that what is much more important than coming with a service prepared, is coming prepared to serve - and that means being prepared for anything.

What you are about to read then, is simply an extemporaneous word I gave one ordinary Sunday morning which, like any other Sunday morning at New Hope, was like no other Sunday morning at New Hope. We hadn’t even sat down, far less opened in prayer or begun praise and worship, when one lady came up and asked for healing of an injury she had acquired during the week. God is a Dad who is not bound by formality and will not keep a daughter in pain while we go through our religious rigmarole, so I laid hands on her prayed a few words right there and then, whereupon she was instantly healed. She was so delighted, she went and told another lady who had been in pain from another condition for several days, and she came over. Same deal. Done and dusted. Pain free in less than a minute flat.

That may sound like a success, but I’ll call it that when these ladies are laying hands on the sick themselves with instant results, because it‘s a pastor’s job to equip the saints and not to strip the saints - for the ministry. My senior pastor and I are servants, not superstars. Neither of us is a one-man band, but there to facilitate and not hinder - and certainly not to build our own personality cult at God’s expense.

When we actually got round to it, we had a great service. And afterwards, my good friend Ness Kennedy asked me if I had written an article on what I had delivered. I said I would check, and did so, but nothing quite fitted, so I'm writing this to fill that gap. I have also added a brief bit of background, since Hub readers don’t go to our church and may not be up to speed on the Biblical concept of expectation. Other than that, I’ve added only a little extra here and there to what was a very short teaching at New Hope.

This one’s for you Ness.

This verse famously says:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

That’s pretty succinct. Indeed, some regard the way it is often taught as rather trite. But what does it actually mean? Well, Hebrews Chapter 11 is often referred to as the Faith Chapter, in which verse 1 concisely defines what we are talking about.

Many people think they understand the second part - that faith is the evidence of things not seen - which they interpret as meaning that faith is believing in things that are not so. But that’s not what it says. After all, I believe that Beijing is the capital of the People’s Republic of China. I’ve never been there so I’ve never seen it for myself, but I have no reason to doubt that Beijing exists merely for that reason. Likewise, I’ve never actually seen an atom, or a proton, or an electron, but that doesn’t mean I dismiss quantum physics or chemistry out of hand, simply for that reason.

So, it’s nonsense to suggest that having faith in something one hasn’t seen is necessarily the same thing as believing in what is not true. Life experience tells us quite the contrary. But where I wish to focus in this article in the prior assertion of verse 1, that -

‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for.’

But what does that mean?

 

The word substance used there is a Greek noun that occurs twice in the New Testament, the other place being in Hebrews 1:3 which, speaking of Jesus, says:

Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; Being made so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.

The Greek noun common to Hebrews 11:1 and Hebrews 1:3 is hupostasis (generally written hypostasis) - which, in chapter 1, is translated ‘person’.

In the context of chapter 1, Jesus Christ is described as,

‘...the express image of God’s person’.

Express image is ‘charakter’, which refers to an impressed stamp - like the Queen’s head on a British coin. You want to know what the Queen looks like? - Bang! - There she is. You want to know what God the Father looks like? - Bang! - There he is - And his name is Jesus.

This concurs with our idea of the Trinity or Threeness, of God, which describes God in terms of three distinct hypostases - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who we think of in terms of persons, although the Bible never uses that word specifically. It is ironic too, that ‘person’ derives from the Latin persona (mask) yet is not the term employed to translate hypostasis in the Vulgate, where it is rendered ‘substantiae’; essentially the same as in Hebrews 11:1, where the Vulgate translates it ‘substantia’.

The idea of hypostasis, then, is of the fundamental essence of being that undergirds the integrity of whatever it is described as the hypostasis of. Which is why we describe the hypostases of God as Persons of the Trinity - in that most oxymoronic concept of distinctive singularity - Three in One.

 

So, in describing faith as ‘the hypostasis of things hoped for’ the writer of Hebrews opted for a very singular idea. And notice that faith is the hypostasis, not ‘the things hoped for’ - which is one word in Greek - ‘elpizomenón’ (from the root elpizó - ‘to confidently trust‘).

The Biblical concept of hope is not the blissful state of ‘wishful thinking’ that we would normally attribute to it today, but something much closer to the idea of a confident expectation.

Similarly, the idea expressed by the writer of Hebrews could be quite properly rendered as,

‘Faith is the fundamental essence that undergirds our confident expectation.’

Again, we could interpret the whole verse like this:

Without faith we would have no real hope, but with it our hope amounts to confident expectation. So much so, that it makes real to us even those things we cannot even see.

So, one of the hallmarks of faith in any believer is not that he is able to say the right things when asked, but that he confidently expects God to do whatever God says he will do. He has a confident expectation of God.

And now that we understand that, we can tackle the main message.

And Elijah the Tishbite, of the sojourners of Gilead, said to Ahab, “As Yahweh, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, except according to my word.” (verse 1)

In James 5:17, Jesus’ half-brother described those few words spoken by Elijah to Ahab as earnest prayer, which should help dispel any religious notions of what prayer is about, as this one is all of 17 words long in Hebrew.

And the Word of Yahweh came to him, saying, “Go away from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, before Jordan. And it shall be, you shall drink of the brook. And I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.”

 

So he went and did according to the Word of Yahweh. For he went and lived by the torrent Cherith, before Jordan. And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the torrent. (verses 2-6)

This may annoy rather than amaze those sceptics who are disinclined to believe in the miraculous, but it should also amaze Christians, although most believers today will probably not realise how astonishing this section of scripture truly is.

Believers in the miraculous manifestation of God’s power will have no problem in accepting that the prophet Elijah was fed twice daily on bread and meat brought to him by ravens.

‘Good for Elijah!’ - ‘Hallelujah!’ - ‘Praise God!’

But the amazing thing to any Jewish reader would not have been that God used birds to feed his prophet. What would have flabbergasted them was which birds God chose to feed Elijah - because every observant Jew knows his Torah, and this is what it says in Leviticus 11:13-15,

"And these you shall detest among the birds; they shall not be eaten; they are detestable: the eagle, the bearded vulture, the black vulture, the kite, the falcon of any kind, every raven of any kind…”

The list goes on, but we’ll stop right there because ravens are unambiguously categorized as unclean. One reason for this is that ravens are members of the crow family and therefore regarded as carrion eaters, meaning that they eat the flesh of creatures they have found already dead, which is something else the Torah mentions, in Leviticus 17:15.

And every person who eats what dies of itself or what is torn by beasts, whether he is a native or a sojourner, shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening; then he shall be clean.

So, carrion pie is not kosher, and any meat brought by the beak of a raven - even supernaturally - could potentially be doubly unclean - something which no devout Israelite in his right mind would contemplate consuming. And, unless these particular ravens had done a crash course in baking, where do you suppose they had stolen the bread? - So, what was Elijah thinking of?

Very simply this:

And the Word of Yahweh came to him, saying,

“…I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.”

Who commanded the ravens? - God did.

So, do you suppose for one moment that Elijah was worried that the food might be a bit iffy? - Not a chance!

As it is, I confidently believe that the meat was fresh and not carrion, but the principle remains and even if God had commanded Elijah to eat the ravens he would have done so, because Elijah knew better than to question God’s provision.

 

The story continues in 1 Kings 17:7-16.

And it happened after a while, the torrent dried up, because there had been no rain in the land.

 

And the Word of Yahweh came to him, saying, “Arise, go to Zarephath which belongs to Sidon, and live there. Behold, I have commanded a widow to keep you there.”

 

And he arose and went to Zarephath, and came in to the entrance of the city, and, behold, the widow was gathering sticks. And he called to her and said, “Please, bring me a little water in a vessel so that I may drink.”

 

And as she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Please, bring me a piece of bread in your hand.”

 

And she said, “As Yahweh your God lives, I do not have a cake, but only a handful of meal in a pitcher and a little oil in a jar. And behold, I am gathering two sticks, so that I may go in and dress it for me and my son, so that we may eat it and die.”

 

And Elijah said to her, “Do not fear, go. Do as you have said. But first make me a little cake of it, and bring it to me. And then make for you and for your son. For so says Yahweh, the God of Israel, ‘The pitcher of meal shall not be emptied, nor shall the jar of oil fail, until the day that Yahweh sends rain on the earth.’”

 

And she went and did according to the saying of Elijah. And she and he and her house ate many days; the pitcher of meal was not consumed, and the jar of oil did not fail, according to the Word of Yahweh which he spoke by Elijah.

Zarephath was a good distance from the Brook of Cherith, right across on the other side of Israel in fact, and a possession of the Phoenician city of Sidon. Indeed, we are not told that the widow there was even an Israelite, and her reference to ‘Yahweh your God’, may suggest that she wasn’t.

So, once again, God appears to have promised Elijah provision that was not only unorthodox but unclean, because it was just not done to even enter the house of a Gentile, far less eat with them. The very idea would give some Jews the heebie-jeebies even today. But again, Elijah did not baulk, because he did not question God’s provision.

But look at what God said, and then look at the widow woman.

And the Word of Yahweh came to him, saying, “Arise, go to Zarephath which belongs to Sidon, and live there. Behold, I have commanded a widow to keep you there.”

And now consider how she reacted to Elijah’s reqest that she make him a cake:

And she said, “As Yahweh your God lives, I do not have a cake, but only a handful of meal in a pitcher and a little oil in a jar. And behold, I am gathering two sticks, so that I may go in and dress it for me and my son, so that we may eat it and die.”

Just a minute! - Did I miss something, or did God not say he had commanded a widow to keep Elijah there? - So, what was all this protestation about? Think about it! - How would you react if you believed that God had spoken to you and said that he had commanded a certain widow to channel his provision to you, and then she had answered as did this poor soul?

If we’re honest, I think most of us would conclude that we must have missed it. - It can’t have been God because the circumstances are totally contrary to what we might reasonably expect. For one thing, God said he had commanded her, and she obviously hadn’t a Scooby what Elijah was on about. And for another, she was dirt poor, whereas you or I would probably be looking for the rich widow with a abundant table, straining under the weight of food.

However, Elijah wasn’t fazed, because he wasn't focused on what he might reasonably expect of the widow, but on what he could confidently expect of God.

Read the rest of the story, and see how it worked out well, despite an outset of such unpromising appearances - Which brings me to another point, related to verse 10, which says,

So he arose and went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there gathering sticks. And he called to her and said, "Bring me a little water in a vessel, that I may drink."

 

What is this fascination that so many godly men in the Bible have with drinking water? Certainly, in a hot and arid land such as Israel, drinkable water has always been at a premium and highly prized, so much so that there are many references to drinking water in the scriptures. But just consider these few:

…Like the servant sent by Abraham in search of a bride for his son Isaac, who said this to Rebekah’s brother in :

"I came today to the spring and said, 'O Yahweh, the God of my master Abraham, if now you are prospering the way that I go, behold, I am standing by the spring of water. Let the virgin who comes out to draw water, to whom I shall say, "Please give me a little water from your jar to drink," and who will say to me, "Drink, and I will draw for your camels also," let her be the woman whom Yahweh has appointed for my master's son.'

"Before I had finished speaking in my heart, behold, Rebekah came out with her water jar on her shoulder, and she went down to the spring and drew water. I said to her, 'Please let me drink.'

Then there was King David who was profoundly moved by the following incident (also repeated in 1 Chronicles 11:17-19):

And David said longingly, "Oh, that someone would give me water to drink from the well of Bethlehem that is by the gate!"

Then the three mighty men broke through the camp of the Philistines and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate and carried and brought it to David. But he would not drink of it. He poured it out to the Yahweh and said, "Far be it from me, O Yahweh, that I should do this. Shall I drink the blood of the men who went at the risk of their lives?" Therefore he would not drink it. These things the three mighty men did.

And in the New Testament, Jesus famously opens his discourse with the Samaritan woman over a drink of water.

A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink." (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.)

 

The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?" (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

 

Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water."

 

In the Bible, water - and particularly cold running water - is a type and symbol of both life and the Holy Spirit of God. That’s why in John 9:1-7, we read this account. And note that, whilst I have retained the original words used, I have adjusted the punctuation in this passage as there is none in the original Greek, and most Bible translators have managed to make a bit of a mess of it:

And passing by, he saw a man who was blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, “Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

 

Jesus answered, “Neither has this man nor his parents sinned. But that the works of God might be revealed in him, I must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day. Night comes when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.”

 

And when he had spoken these things, he spat on the ground and made clay from the spittle. And he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And he said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which translated is Sent). Therefore he went and washed and came seeing.

Here we see two distinct dynamics of the divine hypostases - Jesus, as man’s Creator, and God the Holy Spirit.

That’s why Jesus spat on the ground and made clay - emulating his creation of Adam as a physical being. We know too, that this occurred just after Jesus had left the Temple at Jerusalem, from which both textual and contextual clues suggest that he probably encountered the blind man at the upper pool, known as the Pool of Bethesda or Pool of Grace, where he had healed another blind man in chapter 5.

However, that was not where Jesus told this man to wash his eyes, which was some distance away at the pool in the lower City of David - known as the Pool of Siloam - which, when translated from the Hebrew rather than the Greek, means the Pool of the One who is Sent.

For this reason, many scholars have supposed that the One Sent speaks of Jesus, but the context actually points to the Holy Spirit, as may be surmised from the events of John 7:37-39, which occurred only the day before:

And in the last day of the great feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes on me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’“ (But He spoke this about the Spirit, which they who believed on Him should receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.)

The whole picture in John 9, then, is of Jesus extending mercy to the blind man at Bethesda, by pictorially recreating his physical eyes in clay (as a type of the new birth) before receiving his sight by the anointing of the Holy Spirit at Siloam, where the opening of his eyes signifies the receiving of spiritual vision.

Remember! - We have Jesus’ own admission that…

‘…I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.’ (John 8:28b)

But, what is all this palaver about asking for water?

Here is a very specific promise linked to it, made by Jesus himself:

"Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. The one who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and the one who receives a righteous person because he is a righteous person will receive a righteous person's reward. And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward."

All of which explains one of the most misunderstood passages in the whole Bible.

And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: 'The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation. “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”’

Traditionally, this has long been mistaught as if hot and cold are morally antithetical - where the hot believer is fired-up with faith and zeal, whereas the cold individual lacks both, but is at least better than the compromised lukewarm believer.

There’s a word for this teaching - Rubbish!

It is abundantly clear from the context that Jesus the Revelator or Unveiler is contrasting two commendable traits - hot and cold - with one contemptible characteristic - lukewarmness. Because, to the Hebrew mind, a drink of cold water is a thoroughly welcome refreshment, while a hot drink is a comfort to one who is cold, sick or suffering.

So Jesus is simply saying to the Laodicean church:

‘I wish your were as refreshing as a cold drink of water to a thirsty man, or as comforting as a hot drink to a hurting one. Instead you are so distastefully tepid that you are not only useless, you make me vomit.’

And that catapults us right back to the Widow of Zerephath, who God had commanded to provide for Elijah, and from whom he first demanded:

“Please, bring me a little water in a vessel so that I may drink.”

Elijah wasn’t blind, he was a powerful prophet of God. He could see that the widow was poor, and he was equally aware that she was in distress. But unlike most of us, he was unmoved by the situation he could see before him because he had a confident expectation in the God who had told him to go to her. And he also knew that if he asked her for a drink of water and she got it for him, God would be able to bless her in ways she could not possibly have envisaged.

It was a small thing to ask and, on the face of it, yielded very little immediate reward other than the prophet's demand for even more from her - to share her last morsel of food with him.

As I said earlier, I think most of us would have lacked Elijah’s courage and would have considered asking the woman for a glass of water as pushing our luck about as far as it was likely to go. But Elijah’s courage was not founded in the flesh or susceptible to outward circumstances, which is why he was undeterred in demanding a cake for himself first, because he knew God, and also what the widow's obedience would trigger, so he was doubly determined that the widow should receive a prophet’s reward for blessing him.

Great expectation is founded in total faith in the goodness of God, not in confidence in ourselves. Too often, I have seen believers disappointed when they mistook 'faith in their own faith' for 'faith in God'. That happens when we exchange true faith for a counterfeit that is really just a form of works dressed up as faith - like when we ‘believe for’ things, instead of ‘believing God’ for them.

When we do that, we place our trust in our own ability to believe, and faith becomes an effort as we try to work it up and ‘believe harder’. But by believing that if we can just believe hard enough we can twist God’s arm, we fall into the trap of legalism by believing that the extent of our ability to believe for something will determine whether or not we earn it. In other words, we feel entitled to whatever we believe the extent of our faith deserves.

That is fatal, because to deserve anything is to fall from grace, since whatever we deserve cannot be received as a gift.

To illustrate this, my wife Deborah was recently on holiday with her mum in the South of England. They stayed in a nice hotel and visited one of her bothers and his family while there.

Since I receive no income as a pastor, and Deborah’s pay is quite modest, the break was a generous gift from her parents for which we are very thankful, but when it inevitably came to an end Deborah and her mum had to spend eleven hours on a coach travelling the five hundred mile journey home to Scotland.

It was Saturday and I didn’t even know how I was going to travel to church the next day without the bus fare for the twelve mile journey, so, when a phone call came from someone asking if we could help them out financially I had to decline. It was a request for only a few pounds but that was more than we had. And it’s at times like these that the rubber hit’s the road, when we just have to shrug it off and thank God anyway.

We can’t do the impossible and I certainly can’t knit money, so I just handed the care over to the Lord and left him the responsibility to provide what was needed. But even I was surprised when, a few hours later, I took our dog for a walk and found a ten pound note lying on the ground. I immediately tried to contact the person who had asked for help, intending to give them the money, but there was no reply. Instead, with the two pounds still in my possession, I could now not only afford the bus fare to Hamilton, but could even buy a £12 weekly ticket that would get me to church the next day.

When eventually Deborah’s bus did arrive in Hamilton, and she had helped her mother home with her bags, she phoned and asked if I would meet her at the bus station to help her home with her own bags on the final leg of her journey by local bus. I should not have been able to do so, but could now afford the means because my expectation of our Father had been miraculously requited.

We expect him to provide for our needs even when they look impossible, and that‘s what he did. Indeed, only the week before, when our electric iron shorted out, the Lord had impressed someone in our church to give us a brand new replacement, which - unbeknownst to them - just happened to be the exact same model as the one that had just bust.

As we sat in the shelter waiting for the bus home, Deborah told me about her holiday and our family and friends, when she related an incident that had occurred one evening at their hotel. As part of the entertainment schedule, the hotel put on a game of bingo, for small stakes of a pound or two, which Deborah and her mum joined in. While they was playing and two other ladies shouted ‘House!’ it occurred to my wife that she and her mum were not winning anything, while other people seemed to be enjoying multiple successes. So, she prayed:

‘Father, I’m the believer here, and I’m blessed and favoured. We should be winning something.’

Religious folks may say, ‘That was gambling, so you can’t pray for that’. Fortunately, God is not religious and she immediately looked down, when she saw that her mother had already won, but had missed her number. As it happened, however, she also had the latest number, so she could still claim, and did.

As a result, Deborah’s mum won a third share of the twelve pound prize - which was four pounds. Yes, it was gambling but not for high stakes that would impoverish anyone, just a light-hearted game and social entertainment. But what the Lord impressed on Deborah was that her mother had already won the whole twelve pounds earlier and had only missed out because of her lack of expectation. - That, he said, is where many believers are today.

Then, as we continued to wait, a complete stranger walked across from the other side of the bus station and offered Deborah his still valid All-Day bus ticket for nothing, which she was delighted to accept. Then, just at that moment, I received a text from the person who had asked me for money earlier which said thanks, but they had managed to get the money from somebody else. You see, God hadn’t forgotten about them either.

And thanks to God, not only was I able to collect my wife and help her home, but we were both able to travel the final distance at no cost whatsoever.

 

Maybe you’re more used to pastors who tell of thousand dollar cheques, or lavish gifts like free cars. Nor do I begrudge or decry any of that. But we feel privileged that God looks out for us even to the extent of a much needed bus ticket.

Or maybe you’re amused by the story of a Scottish pastor living by faith who trusts God for bus fare to church. But we have no need to misrepresent the Gospel or twist the Word of God, nor ‘operate in a spirit of hint’ in order to to manipulate the guilty and the gullible into giving grudgingly, because people are not our source, God is. People are merely one channel that God can use to get his provision to his children.

Our confident expectation that our Father will provide all that we need - and more - is undiminished by the outward appearance of temporal circumstances, because it is based on our relationship with him, and on our knowledge of the integrity of his Word and character. And, like Elijah, we have learned not to second-guess God, or put him in a box. Nor do we presume to tell him how he should provide for our needs, or through whom that provision should come.

Ravens must have seemed a very odd choice of waiter to Elijah, and an impoverished widow must have seemed the last person to turn to, but Elijah knew to receive God’s provision and not question it. And so have we, because we have learned that faith in God is very different from merely having confidence in our own ability to believe. We don’t put our trust in our trust in God, we simply stand in confident expectation of who he is and what he says and what he does, because real faith should never be an effort.

As I said at the beginning, our Father has been God for a very long time and is actually rather good at it, so we neither question his provision nor despise whatever means he may choose to deliver it. And having learned those lessons, we find that it grows continually easier to obey the following exhortation - from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18:

Rejoice always.

     Pray without ceasing.

          In everything give thanks,

               for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus toward you.