Inviteth and Enticeth: The Moral Act in Moroni 7

It does me good to be with you all, and I’m very grateful for BYU and for the Maxwell Institute. Today I want to read six verses of Mormon’s sermon in Moroni 7 closely enough to find in them something unexpected, especially as an ethicist: a complete theory of the moral act grounded in the Book of Mormon’s own authority, and to learn from the sermon itself how theological ethics is actually done. But let me begin not with a text, but with the story.

Picture someone at the summit of a real career. Let’s call her a dean or chair. Her resume is replete with scholarly articles, leading publications, clinics she built in the Global South, students now serving in every sector, grants won, and lives her expertise measurably improved. No scandal, no pretense. The work was good, and the work was hers. At a retirement dinner, the tributes run late into the evening.

And driving home, she’s ambushed by a strange emptiness. Every word of praise names something she had done, and she cannot remember the last time anyone described who she is.

David Brooks authored a book that you’re probably familiar with, centered around this sense of emptiness. It’s called The Road to Character, and he distinguishes between the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues.¹ Brooks is meticulous, as we must be, to avoid transforming this story into a morality tale. The resume virtues are not vices, he says. Both of Soloveitchik’s two Adams belong to a complete human existence: one a builder, the other a soul.²

We are fluent in the first language, but oftentimes we stammer in the second. So we drift into keeping two ledgers, or two accounts: achievement for the marketplace and character for the funeral. So here’s my question. Not which set of virtues—we need both, I think. The work has to be done well, and the hungry actually have to be fed. But what joins them? Where does the goodness of a life or a single act finally live, so that doing and being are actually integrated, or one? And a harder question inside of it: If that goodness lives deeper than mere performance, can the deeper thing be changed?

Moroni 7 was preached to address that very question, I believe, and its response is more profound than either a ledger or scoreboard. It elevates the most commendable acts a resume could showcase, such as a generous gift or an offered prayer, and declines to consider them as resume entries at all. “If a man being evil giveth a gift, he doeth it grudgingly; wherefore it is counted unto him the same as if he had retained the gift.”

The sermon by Mormon does not dismiss the significance of deeds. Verse 5 underscores the importance of works: “For I remember the word of God which saith by their works ye shall know them; for if their works be good, then they are good also.” Nonetheless, it assesses every action based on its true origin, as David Holland concisely encapsulates in its core principle: the nature of the source defines the essence of the output, regardless of appearances. The fundamental concept is familiar since childhood: “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, KJV). What is notable is that the sermon systematically articulates this understanding.

So here is my thesis succinctly. In Moroni 7, the moral worth of an act is determined upstream of the deed itself, and in three places. First, by its origin: the allegiance of the heart, the fountain from which the act springs. “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). Second, by its manner: the real intent with which it is done. The manner is not a separate choice, but follows from the source, which is why the evil man “doeth it grudgingly.” Third, by its orientation: the enticement the heart answers to, which is known by where it continually leads, whether to do good and to love God and to serve him, or to sin (Moroni 7:12–13). And because a bitter fountain cannot sweeten itself, the worth of any act rests on a gift: the Lord who changes the spring (Moroni 7:16, 48). That is, a corrupted origin can be redeemed solely through divine gift, which embodies fullness and charity.

There are no two ledgers here. There is one act read at its fountain.

And I confess a personal stake. Many years before I read Moroni 7 as scripture, there was a song I kept on repeat as an undergraduate. This dates me a bit. It was the religious seekers’ hymn of my generation by the Indigo Girls, “Closer to Fine.” They counseled, “The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” Hang tight, for I will revisit this both personally and theologically.

One more case, sharper than the dean’s parable with which I began. Two people feed the hungry today, for example. The meals are identical. Outwardly we see the same thing. The only difference is that the second act is filmed for millions.

Is the second gift still generous? I think something in us suspects that the two outwardly identical acts can differ morally, and we struggle to say where the difference lives. Where does an act’s goodness live?

Four Approaches to the Moral Act

Ethics offers four great answers. First, in the greatest outcomes, referred to as consequentialism or the utilitarian view. John Stuart Mill said it most bracingly: “He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of being paid for his trouble.”¹⁰

Or in the categorical imperative by Kant, referred to as deontology, the ethics of duty. Kant’s shopkeeper gives a child honest change only because cheating is bad for business, and so does right with no moral worth, he would say. Only an act done from duty has that.¹¹

Or in the act itself, referred to as natural law theory. From framing one innocent man to quiet a riot, it stays wrong, however many lives are saved.

Or in the agent, which we know as virtue ethics, with Aristotle and lately with MacIntyre and, even before him, Elizabeth Anscombe, who asked not first, “What should I do?” but “What kind of person should I become?” The honest person tells the truth, not because a rule compels her, but because truthfulness has become a part of her. It’s woven into her character.

Today’s Moroni text answers with the fourth. It’s radicalized: not only the agent’s character, but the fountain beneath the character and the Lord behind the character.

And the question is doctrinal, not merely philosophical. Aquinas and Barth, two well-known Catholic and Protestant theologians respectively, agree on almost nothing except for this: they both place the moral act inside the doctrine of God.

In a Latter-day Saint ethical framework, our directives on appropriate or inappropriate conduct stem from gospel truths or doctrinal convictions. Alma 12:32 is the foundational reference for our covenantal ethic. Elder Boyd K. Packer stated, “True doctrine, understood, changes attitudes and behavior.”³ And then Elder Maxwell emphasized a similar point, asserting that doctrines believed and practiced do change and improve us while ensuring our vital access to the Spirit. Both outcomes are crucial.

The Reformation said in one sentence, which I will argue in roughly thirty minutes: “Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works.”¹⁵ That is Moroni 7:6–11 in Martin Luther’s Wittenberg German.

The sermon preached in a synagogue at the end of a civilization is about to take up the oldest question in ethics—and answer it doctrinally—and do it in six verses.

Let me give you the setting, or the background, here. There are four aspects to it. In the terminal decades of Nephite civilization: “a continual scene of wickedness and abominations” (Mormon 8:28). That’s Mormon’s own summary. Where? In a synagogue, to peaceable followers of Christ: covenant insiders, you and I. Grant Hardy notes that this phrase occurs only here in all of scripture, in contrast to the violence that filled Mormon’s whole life.

How did it survive? Curated by the last survivor. A sermon about love presented in love, in Richard Rust’s phrase.¹⁴ And where does it begin? At rest: “Enter into the rest of the Lord,” the destination held out as a present possession in the here and now.

Before a single argument is even made, remember that word. We’ll come back to it.

The preacher argues. As far as grammatical syntax here, before we even interpret the word, notice a sermon’s sinews on its very surface. Four occurrences of “behold,” each introducing a ground; the four grounds differ in kind. We have oratio Dei, the divine speech; we have divine reckoning; we have a concrete case; and then, in verse 11, we have an analogy from nature: the fountain. Four “wherefore”s, each drawing an inference. Mormon does not assert a doctrine of the moral act. He argues one and then shows its connectedness.

The Four Stations of the Moral Act

Here’s the map: four stations. The source—the heart or the fountain. The mode—real intent, or grudgingly. The outward act—a gift, a prayer. And the verdict—profit, imputation, and reception. And one organizing claim: most modern ethical readings assess an act downstream, by consequences or outward kind. Mormon reads it upstream.

Because the verdicts at the end of the line track the fountain at the start of it.

Station One: The Source

Verse 11, where the argument secretly rests: “A bitter fountain cannot bring forth good water, neither can a good fountain bring forth bitter water.”

Let’s look at the symmetry here. And it’s usually missed. The principle cuts both ways. It’s not pessimism about sinners, but a general law of moral production.

And watch how this verse defines “a man being evil” (verse 10) as a servant of the devil. That’s character in this grammar, and it’s related to allegiance: whom one serves. Hardy notes the phrase appears nowhere else in scripture. The scholarship concurs. In this text, Daniel Becerra concludes: one cannot do good without first being good.

Luther theologically said of the First Commandment, that to which your heart clings or entrusts itself, I say, is really your God.

And the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said it in fourteen lines. Every creature has what he refers to as this inscape, the inner form that makes it itself, and then acts out from that inscape. The kingfisher catches fire because it is a kingfisher. Each thing cries, “What I do is me, for that I came.” And then the turn: “I say more to the grace person. The just man justifies and acts in God’s eyes what in God’s eye he is, Christ.”¹⁶

Being pours itself into doing. And the good fountain is the one Christ has entered. That is verse 11 with kingfisher wings.

Behind the fountain stand two solicitors: the devil, who inviteth and enticeth to do sin continually, and that which is of God, which inviteth and enticeth to do good continually.

Two observations related to ethics here. The vocabulary is agency-preserving. Both lords entice. Neither compels, and continually makes the criterion directional. Judge a thing by what it persistently draws you toward, not by an episode or a snapshot.

Here the sermon parts company with Aristotle, for whom virtue acts at the right time, in the right way, for the right end. Mormon has no doctrine of the right moment. He transposes it. The right time becomes continual direction over time, with one deadline at the far end: possessed of it at the last day. Mormon’s clock runs two speeds: persistently and eschatologically.

Here’s a caution, and it should be something that I hope you’re prepared to rebut or object to. Because this darkness can be misheard, I see Moroni 7 standing in the scriptures’ oldest moral genre: the two ways, from Deuteronomy’s “choose life and death” (Deuteronomy 30:19); or the Didache’s “two ways, one of life and one of death”; or, in Proverbs, the derekh, right? You begin with the fear of God, or you begin with trusting in self.

That genre maps ways, not people. The ways are two; the wayfarers are in motion. Solzhenitsyn’s line dividing good and evil cuts right through every human heart. The criterion judges enticements, not neighbors. Verse 18 forbids judging wrongly, and the verdict on one person waits for the last day. The sermon is stark about the map because it is merciful about the travelers, merciful about us.

And one structural discovery sealed that. Joseph Spencer has shown that verses 12 through 17 form a chiasm, in which Christ appears only in the second half, burden becomes assistance, quoting him. Christ is the criterion. At its own center, the text pivots from universal obligation to Christological enablement. Christ is the way, the truth, and the life of the Restoration ethic.

Behold that gift, because I think my whole lecture is inside of it.

Station Two: The Mode.

Watch verse 8’s grammar: “If a man being evil giveth a gift, he doeth it grudgingly.” Not “he might.” The manner follows from the state, as in the indicative, the way a limping runner runs unevenly.

The central term is real intent. We need to protect that from sentimentality. Real intent is not sincerity, a warm feeling beside the deed.

And Karol Wojtyła, who later became John Paul II, has this famous act theory in his book The Acting Person.¹² Intent is real when the agent has actually engaged and disposed himself or herself to the act or through the act. Grudgingly, then, names the divided will exactly. The efficacy is present. You see it on the outside: they did something. But the self-donation is lost. It’s not there. The hand moves, and the person does not follow.

As C. S. Lewis said, if there are rats in a cellar, you’re most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats. It only prevents them from hiding. Provocation does not make me ill-tempered. It shows me that I am.¹³

Station Three: The Outward Act

Now the lanes converge into one box. And the convergence is the argument: a gift offered, and a prayer uttered. Verse 6. From either fountain, the performance is identical. Water from the two springs, Holland says, “may look exactly the same.”

And prayer is the limit case that clenches the reading. It has no effects in the world at all, at least empirically and visibly, right? No one fed, nothing exchanged. So even if prayer can’t be counted evil, verse 9’s moral worth cannot live in outcomes or in the deed’s kind. It must live upstream. That is the sermon’s own answer to Mill’s utilitarianism, or consequentialism.

President Dallin H. Oaks presses this same logic one step further, from the deed to the very thing in the hand: “The good Samaritan used the same coinage to serve the fellow man that Judas used to betray the Master.” The coins are neutral. The heart decides what they become. Identical instrument, opposite fountains.

Station Four: The Verdict

At God’s weighing, the lanes diverge into three verdicts. One: profit—“that profit him nothing.” Two: imputation—“not counted unto him for righteousness.” That’s the gloss of Genesis 15:6. Heaven’s ledger records no credit. Three: reception—God “receiveth none such.”

The pivot is verse 8’s escalation. The grudging gift is counted “the same as if he had retained the gift,” and the giver is counted evil before God. The act is not merely discounted; it is reclassified, recategorized. What looked like giving turns out, morally described, to have been keeping.

And notice where the verdict lands: not on the deed, but on the doer.

Before the severity hardens into despair, run the three verdicts now in reverse. The widow’s two mites were, in the world’s accounting, almost nothing. Yet Jesus says she cast more in than all, because she gave all that she had—counted, received, and profiting her (Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4, KJV). The doctrine that annuls the grand, grudging gift exalts the small, wholehearted one. Severity and mercy are one theorem, approved from both ends.

And here the parable of the chair, or dean, returns. In her hollowness was not a verdict on her resume. The sermon does not despise the work. It asks after its spring. The eulogy that finally matters is rendered neither at dinner nor over a casket, but coram Deo—Latin, “before God.” Moroni says, counted before God, where doing and being are read as one act at its source.

And before any of us exacts the parable on each other, the sermon takes it back: “See that you do not judge wrongfully.” Read through Moroni 7, the two ledger stories cease to be a diagnosis of them and become more an examination of ourselves—of me.

What the Sermon Leaves Open

What the pericope does not adjudicate.

Now, the question some might ask: Should I stay home when my heart’s not into it? I’m not really into it. The text’s own grammar answers: every verdict refers to the agent—“profited him,” “counted unto him,” “before God.” Nothing here says the loaf stops feeding the hungry.

Distinguish three dimensions of any act, and I learned this from John Paul II and Karol Wojtyła. First, its transitive effect: what does the act do in the world? That remains untouched by these verses. Whenever I act in the world, there are a couple of dimensions. One is doing something in the world. That’s the transitive, the external part of it. Then there’s its intransitive effect: what does it do in me, the agent? For the act does not merely proceed from us, right? It constitutes the kind of person that we are and are becoming. And then, finally, its imputational standing: how is it counted before God?

You met this distinction earlier when we were talking about David Brooks’s book: resume and eulogy. The sermon denies the second, intransitive dimension, and the third, imputational dimension, to the grudging giver, but it never denies the first. Its remedy is neither to stay home nor go away, but to pray for a changed fountain.

President Nelson’s tithing story, which you’re probably familiar with, runs the distinction unprompted. He says, “Was the Church any different because we increased our tithing to $1.50 per month?” He made $15 a month. That’s the transitive dimension. Of course not. However, becoming a full-tithe payer changed him. And then he later says the windows of heaven opened up for him. The external effect is nil. The intransitive effect is everything.

So stay inside the act, as Brigham Young counseled from his knees. Labor there for the heart the act requires, until, in Gardner’s words, we not only act the right way, but we are the right way. Agent and act are harmoniously integrated as one. We’re supposed to be integers, not fractions: unity rather than duality.

The sermon will soon address the problem these verses leave us with: a fountain that must change, yet cannot change itself.

In 1908, Rilke published a sonnet about standing before a broken statue in the Louvre. It’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: no head, no face, no eyes. For thirteen lines, the poem describes the stone. Then the stone turns: “For there is no place that does not see you.”⁴

“You must change your life,” he says in the poem. The German is terser and more intimate than English can convey, which is where these six verses have just put us. A text we thought we were examining has been examining us, like the statue. And there’s an imperative. The fountain must become other, while proving that no act of will can execute it.

But Rilke wrote the other half of this in his Book of Hours, the prayer poems of a monk circling God. If you haven’t read that, I recommend it. It’s really good. Being seen does not end in a verdict. It becomes address, petition, consent. A statue can tell you that you must change your life. Only God can be asked to change it. Verses 6 through 11 are Rilke’s sonnet. Verse 48 is his Book of Hours. It’s a love poem to God.

The Gift That Changes the Spring

Only a changed spring: the gift.

The pericope has stranded us deliberately, kind of suspended in midair here, trying to figure this out. And Holland presses the crisis. If a bitter fountain can never bring forth good fruit, “what then can a sinner do to pursue salvation?” Nothing at all, he says—or so he notes. Multitudes of thoughtful Christians, beginning from Mormon’s own premises, have reasonably concluded.

The rest of the sermon is the rescue in three gifts: light given to every man to judge; faith through the ministered word; and charity bestowed upon prayer with all energy of heart (verse 48). Holland says that’s a miracle. He goes on to say it is exactly what it takes to get from the problem to the promise.

Victor Hugo and Les Misérables stage that miracle. Valjean is not reformed by punishment; he is resourced by candlesticks he did not deserve and a life claimed for God.⁵

And here the sermon closes this most elegant loop. The one revelation I most want to talk to you about—the empty prayer of verse 9, the limit case of the corrupt act—returns at verse 48, filled as the very vehicle of the cure, the antidote. The same act is both diagnosis and prescription, distinguished only by the heart.

The whole chapter moves this way. Its imperatives, pressed for their possibility, dissolve back into the indicative of gift. Charity itself is described, commanded, and then turned into a petition. The imperative does not survive contact with its own content. It becomes a prayer.

As Hardy notes, “The ability to love is a gift from God, but it can be requested.” Meekness is the posture between: “The secret to escaping our inability is to acknowledge our inability.” Receiving the gift “just means showing up and extending your empty hands.”

The Works–Grace Problem

There’s a problem in this text. I always like to ask, What’s the problem in the text? Well, one is the works-grace problem. This is a problem that I had to confront when my non-LDS friends, at that time when I was non-LDS, said, “Why would you want to convert? Because they believe in works righteousness.” Well, they were wrong. So was I.

The sermon opens with the most works-forward sentence in scripture: “By their works ye shall know them” (verse 5), then immediately rebuts its misreading. Mormon raised the oldest disputed question in Christian theology, I think, on purpose.

Well, before Martin Luther and others, the living Church, according to Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “salvation cannot be bought with the currency of obedience.”

The Reformation, Luther’s “good man” sentence, is now recognizable as the same anatomy. The scholar Grant Underwood judges, “The presumption is that the real intent is a graced disposition.” Even the interior hinge of the act is grace. Adam Miller says it in Living in the Vernacular: works become righteousness, righteousness only as they yield to God’s grace. “We receive grace by becoming vessels for it.”

And the presiding prophet, President Dallin H. Oaks, has put the anti-ledger sentence in print. The commandments and covenants “are not a list of deposits required to be made in some heavenly account.”

The calibration is Cassian from the early Church: maximum freedom and responsibility, maximum dependence. I love the coherence there. The sermon’s theological gravity and severity are aimed at works righteousness, not at works, and never at grace.

The ethics of Jesus has these exact features: source-centeredness, the constitutive interior act, and a universal moral light that is Christ; worth as gift and charity as telos. Each is a place card with a guest name on it. No one is seated as a centerpiece. The text set this table and wrote the cards.

Here’s one of the cards, the Catholic voice. Aquinas analyzed every act by object—what you do; intention—why you do it; and circumstances—when, who, and how you do it. Wojtyła, later John Paul II, taught that the act not only reveals but forms the person. You’ve watched this distinction work throughout this lecture. And Veritatis Splendor, one of his encyclicals, states it magisterially: “Deliberate choices give moral definition to the one who performs them.”

The convergence is real. Intention is constitutive, and virtue can be infused, given rather than practiced into existence. The pressure is real too. Doesn’t the act’s object do genuine work?

Answer: Mormon concedes acts have kinds—gift, prayer—but locates their worth upstream. The fonts and fountain answer different first questions. And the conversation is not hypothetical.

If you’ve read the book Stephen Webb wrote in conversation with Alonzo Gaskill here at BYU, it’s a Catholic–Latter-day Saint theology dialogue from Oxford in 2015. It lands this grace chapter pretty much at the same place: the foot of the cross.⁶

The Protestant voices. The German Lutheran Bonhoeffer contributes the natural in Christ. The world’s genuine but ultimate goods are held within grace. He says, “Grace is free, but it is not cheap.”⁷

Anglican Christian ethicist Oliver O’Donovan, whom I got to study with in Scotland, joins with a warrant the text supplies on its own. Verse 24 is counterfactual. All good comes of Christ. “Otherwise, there could be no good thing come” is the thesis of his whole book, Resurrection and Moral Order. The created moral order is not abolished by the Fall, but vindicated in Christ.

And I will not smooth the friction, because the friction is the finding.

Verses 6 and 10 block the Aristotelian route to virtue. One cannot practice one’s way out of the bitter fountain. Here the chapter is closer to Barth than Aquinas. And verse 48 confirms it. Charity is prayed for and bestowed, not habituated.

Yet against Barth stands the text’s most distinctive move: its middle position. The moral light is universal, and it is Christ’s. Verse 16: “The Spirit of Christ is given to every man,” which is the light of Christ, verse 18. Universality with a Christological owner.

As the First Presidency declared in 1978, the great religious leaders of the world, such as Muhammad, Confucius, and the Reformers, as well as philosophers, including Socrates, Plato, and others, received a portion of God’s light.¹⁷

Whatever else divides them, Catholic and Protestant voices agree on the sermon’s final word. Charity is not practiced into existence; it is given.

Putting the Sermon to the Test

But a claim like that is proved only by use. So let me run the sermon’s test twice, once on the case I opened with and once on my own life.

The Filmed Gift

First, the filmed gift. That’s not what it does first. The hungry are fed either way, but what the filming persistently invites and entices in the giver over time—that is the question. And notice what happens. The text has absorbed our example.

It’s kind of this intertextual move. We are no longer judging Moroni 7 by the culture’s case. That’s extratextual, right? We are reading the culture’s case through the narrative of Moroni 7.

“Closer to Fine”

Now let me keep my promise: “Closer to Fine.” I still listen to that song. I love it. Emily Saliers’s song, if you didn’t know—her father was a well-known theologian, Don Saliers at Emory’s Candler School of Theology—was the anthem of my seeking years before my first conversion. I often talk about my first and second conversion.

Its verses are a catalog, a catalog of wells or fonts. She says, “I went to the doctor,” I can just hear her saying it, “and the mountains, looked to the children, drank from the fountains, went to the bar, went to the professor who graded my performance.” She says, “I went to the Bible and read up on the revival.” And its chorus counseled me not to seek my source for something definitive. I lived that as my pseudo-secular spiritual creed.

And I can tell you from the far side of two conversions that the song was right about every well it named. Each one was a broken cistern, like Jeremiah describes. What the song could not tell me is that the thirst itself was evidence that something was at work in my life.

Augustine knew this: “You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests or finds repose in you.”¹⁸ When the restored gospel found me, the restlessness did not argue itself away. It pressed in.

Every fear I had was real. What about my tenure post at Baylor? My professional guild if I get baptized? My people in Texas? My years of teaching and training in Protestant universities? My timing? Not one of these fears was imaginary, but every one of them was a downstream question: what the act would cost my circumstances.

The question integrity kept beckoning, or asking, was the sermon’s upstream question: Which fountain? Whose servant? What is this persistently inviting you toward? And I could not make my heart new by resolving to have a better one. I asked, and it was bestowed.

So the first promise Mormon held out to his hearers in verse 3—the rest of the Lord from this time henceforth—has become my word for where I landed. Rest, salvific rest. I’m not fine or perfect, but I’m closer. And the crooked line the song sang about was a path toward wholeness.

Closing Witnesses

Two witnesses to close.

When the Church opened its hymnbook two years ago, the first hymn of the first release was number 1001, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” and then “Amazing Grace” in its official hymnal ten numbers later, at 1010.⁸ The Saints have just relearned to sing the sermon’s own image: a heart that cannot tune itself, asking the Fount to do it.

“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it. Here’s my heart; take and seal it.” The hymn ends not with gift, but with surrender. Elder Maxwell told us why that is the only true offering.

He said this in October 1995: “The submission of one’s will is really the only uniquely personal thing we have to place on God’s altar. The many other things we give are actually things he’s already given or loaned to us. However, when you and I finally submit ourselves by letting our individual wills be swallowed up by God’s will, then we’re really giving something to him.”⁹

Everything the sermon says is counted—light, faith, charity—arrived as gift. The will that asks is the one offering left.

That is why the sermon’s last imperative is pray.

So let me end, not with my words, but with Mormon’s—his prayer, now ours:

“Pray unto the Father with all energy of heart, that you may be filled with this love, which he has bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son Jesus Christ, that we may be purified even as he is pure.”

I say all this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.