The following story could be used as a basis to point out some of the plights we need to be delivered from.

In one story of the Holy Grail, a knight rode forth in searth of fulfillment. He came to a singing brook, deep meadows, trees plentiful with fruit. But even as he ate the fruit, it turned to dust. No feeding of the flesh could satisfy his deepest hunger.

Further on he saw a home, a lovely woman standing in its open door, her eyes innocent and kind and all her bearing gracious, and he thought that surely the love of a woman and the shelter of a home would be his answer; but she, too, fell into dust at his touch and the home crumbled into a broken shed.

Later in his journey, the knight came to a warrior clad in golden armor; but the warrior, too, turned into dust, for the deepest meaning of life is not in the pride of battle. And still later he saw a city on the hill, at its gates a great throng shouting his praises as he climbed the slope, so that he felt that surely civic honor and the esteem of others would be his deepest need, but the city and its people were gone when he reached the crest of the hill. So he cried out, in Tennyson’s words, "Lo, if I find the Holy Grail itself and touch it, it will crumble into dust!"

A concluding point could be made that God’s triumphant grace offers us deliverance from the disappointments that always follow when we look for salvation in the contemporary equivalents of the points made above, as surely we do.