[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Thank you all for being out here today.
Thanks for coming back. Think about it. I think we actually have a few more people than we had last night and so that's really good. We're grateful you took the time. You had a long day of work. Whatever it is you're doing, whether you were wrestling kids or whether you were doing your super secret typey box stuff that no one can know about, you were doing it and you came back tonight. And so thank you so much for being here, not for me, but for the community here. And I was thinking about the community here and our connections and even beyond family, of course, you know, my daughters are upstairs. We had one of ours went to your, your kindergarten here. And kids care. Is that what it's technically called? Madison Kids care here with Momo, of course, the wonderful Momo.
But also, I mean, it goes deep.
This summer we have a summer intern, a guy named Jay Hunt. You may know him because he goes here and your.
I'll call him the mom intern, which is going to be really confusing for the people online. They have no idea what that means. But Jason's intern back here, it was one of ours as well. We love Josh and his family and had him for two summers at Owens Crossroads. And so he's doing good work and we're just grateful that, that he's here. So thanks for being here today. As you can tell, we'll be in Mark Chapter one. We'll be picking up there.
Again, I love that your kids are all studying the same thing. So we can go home and we can have these discussions and we can discuss the different parts about what's going on and we're going to look at it at an age appropriate level for us and then you can hear what they learned with the great curriculum that was created for you all as well, and so I want you to think as we begin about an old western town.
You've probably seen one of these. If maybe it's on a television show, maybe you've been somewhere out west and you've seen a recreation or something. You're probably, you kind of know the look and feel because they all have the same, strangely similar look and feel to them.
You've got these kind of tall, almost straight looking two story buildings. And there's always kind of the same type of things in these buildings. By the way, I'm sure you've noticed, you may have, you may have a guy who has a shop and he may have a shop that he has groceries on, right? This guy's got to be named Uncle Bun if he's got a grocery store in an old western town. So Uncle Bun's got his grocery store and he's there along the town. You may go a little farther down and there may be a flower shop without a lady who's obviously named Priscilla, has a flower shop in old western town. And then you keep going down through the town and maybe you look a little further and there's a place where you can get a cold beverage.
Obviously it's milk, right? Ella's milk.
Obviously Ella owns that and it's all milk. And so I don't know where you grew up, but obviously that's the case.
But they all kind of have the same look and feel.
And that's not by chance at all.
They all kind of have those flat looking fronts, the two stories, the big porches, everything looks really good.
And I want to go back to a picture from a more period type photo.
Here's the thing you may not know in this photo, there's not any good photos I could find like that actually present what I want. But what you may not know is that if you were in those towns during the 1800s and you rolled into them and you saw these big stores and the two story buildings and everything, that if you were to take just a couple steps, steps beyond, around the corner from the shops, you would notice something.
They're what we call false fronts.
You see, they came in and they built the fronts of the shops and then they let whatever needed to come in behind it come and build behind. And some of those they had real structures. Some of those they came in and they built maybe a small home behind it and maybe it had a shop built into it. And. And it was only one story, even though it looked like it was two stories. And then another one they would come in and there'd be another shop you'd walk into, and it would look really tall and fancy on the outside. But as you walked in, you would notice it was really just a tent they put up against that false front.
That's why they all look the same. That's why they're so flat, so two dimensional.
Can you guess why they did it?
You see, think about the gold rush back in the 1800s. You had people who were traveling out west and they were trying to build up cities and build up towns and build up things as they went. And to do that, they had to look like they had some things really figured out. And so for the sake of speed and efficiency, they would just come in and they build up these towns with these false fronts. Because it looked more impressive, because it looked more put together, it looked more permanent. And. And they thought, if we look like we have the best thing going on, then people will stop here, they'll spend their money here. They may even stay here and decide this is where they want to call home. All while hoping no one turns the corner and realizes the grocery store is actually a tent.
They built up that false front.
They wanted to make sure no one knew what was really behind it.
Now you can guess. This practice didn't stop in the 1800s. And I'm not talking about buildings, okay?
In our lives, in a lot of different ways, we build up these false fronts as well.
We build up these fronts so that people see us and we think, oh, they see the nice and clean and shiny version of me, where everything's put together and where it looks like everything's okay and where. And my life looks really put together and you don't have to really worry about it. And what we recognize is for the same reasons they did, we just hope no one gets close enough or turns the corner enough to recognize that what's really going on is actually pretty messy.
And this is not just an out there type problem, is it? It's not just a problem for people who are outside the church building. This happens in our church buildings all the time.
Think about it. It's a normal Sunday. I don't know if you go to early service, late service, whatever service, maybe you just slip in the middle so you look like you went to it. I don't know how you roll, but you go, you come in and people are like, hey, how you doing? You know what you're going to say. You already know the answer.
You're going to say, you know, I'm great. How are you? That's like, the natural reaction. I'm great. How are you doing?
Now, if you want to, like, upgrade to the premium church subscription, you hit them back with this. Like, if you really don't want someone to ask you how you're doing when they ask you, I don't know if we have any of these folks here. You say, I'm blessed and highly favored. Do we have any blessed. Anybody who answers that?
Okay, if you do, do not admit it, okay? Because here's my thought.
In all seriousness. I feel like the blessed and highly favored folks are the ones who leave their Bibles on the dashboard of their car so it gets more patina throughout the week, you know? And so it looks like they've been reading it, but it's really just baking in the sun, in the southern sun all day. If that's you, I'm so sorry to offend you. Okay. Either side of that discussion. But really, you know, we hit them back, because if you come in and you're like, hey, man, how are you doing? You're like, great. How about you? You know, you're not. You don't have to say anything else. In all seriousness, try this on Sunday, someone says, how are you doing? Say blessed and blessed and highly favored, right? They're not gonna ask. They don't want the comparison, okay? Because they're not feeling that way. And they don't want to have to answer why they feeling as good as you. And so we. We build up these false fronts. We build it. And. But the key here is, you know as well as I do that behind these answers, these quick responses, because we don't want to talk about things behind all of that, there are people who are legitimately hurting who are around us all the time. I'm sure you've heard this before. I say this, like, once a month when I'm preaching. We fully believe in function, like there is a broken heart on every pew. Am I right? There's a broken heart on every pew. And so, yes, you come in and you put on your nice clothes that you may have ironed or maybe you just threw in the dryer, hit with a little spray stuff, and gave it the tug, whatever it is you do. And you come in looking all good, and you look like you've got it together, and you hope no one asks you a question that's real because you don't want to answer it because you know deep down how you feel.
You know, deep down, maybe your marriage is struggling.
You know, deep down, maybe you are fighting the depths of depression. Or something that's scary that you just don't want to have to talk about.
You're going through a terrible battle with something that some addiction, you don't want to have to open up. Because if people knew the real you, what would happen?
That's the key.
Why do we hide our messes, y'?
[00:09:43] Speaker A: All.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: That's what we're talking about tonight. Why do we hide it? Because we don't want to have to answer. Because we don't want to have to open up and be truthful about it. Because we don't want to spend the time. I don't know what your exact answer to that question is, but I know we do it. I know we hide our messes. And I wonder if we cover them up for this reason. I wonder if we cover up our real struggles because we're so terrified that if people don't knew the real, raw, unedited version of our lives, we think they'd just walk away. If they really knew who I was, if they really knew the struggle that I was in, they would just walk away. If they really knew the depths of the struggles and the sin that I'm going through, they would just walk away. If they knew the mess that my life is, they would just walk away.
That's what we're afraid of. I think. That's what we're afraid of. And so we think, okay, if the people around us will walk away, we end up creating this cycle that we need to think about, okay, before we get into this whole mess that we're going to talk about today. We create a cycle. And what the cycle is, is we put on a mask, we put on a false front. And we present ourselves like we have everything together. And we present ourselves like our lives aren't that messy. And what happens is when people do accept us, think about the cycle we create.
When people do accept us, we know whether they do or not, they don't really accept us. They just love the version of us we're presenting.
They love the actor that we are pretending to be. They don't know the real you. And so you get more lonely. And the cycle just gets uglier and deeper and messier and every single step of the way. And so when we begin this morning, we're talking about, what is Jesus gonna do with my mess? What can he handle with it?
What's the purpose of it? I want you to. I wonder if we really believe that it's possible to be fully known and fully loved now. And I'm talking on two levels at this point, do we believe that we can be fully known by each other and fully loved? If you knew the real me, would you really. Would you really love the real me?
And then we start to turn it to God because we do it in these walls and we do it with so many other things. Like, if God knows the real me, does he really love the real me? Or does he love the one I pretend to be, the one that I want to pretend like, has everything together, or, you know, would he walk away?
Does Jesus think. Does the Lord think that my life is too messy to fix and so I just got to keep pretending as best I can so that I can get away with it? When we know that's not really how any of this works.
That's what we're going to look at tonight in Mark, chapter one. There at the end of Mark, Chapter one, if you have your Bibles, if you want to open up, it'll be on the screens as well, in both languages. We'll be in Mark, chapter one this evening. Almost said morning this evening. Let's start in verse 40. There's a lot there. We're going to spend about half our time in this first very short verse.
It says, and a leper came to him. That's Jesus imploring him and kneeling, said to him, if you will, you can make me clean.
Let's pause there.
There's so many things going on there. I want you to slow down and appreciate the weight of what just happened in this passage. And to do that, we have to do a little bit of historical legwork, okay? We have to put in a little bit of intellectual work to figure this out. Okay? So we're going to start with the idea of the leper who came up to Jesus a leper. I'm sure you've heard about this. If you've never. If you've been to a church, probably in any portion of your life, you've heard somebody talk about a leper. And maybe you know what it is, and maybe you don't actually know it. Maybe you just heard it and you're like, I just know. I don't want it. Okay? So in the ancient near east, leprosy was seen. It was this terrible skin disease that presented itself as if it was eating away at your flesh, okay? Nothing that anybody wants. And it was ugly and it was painful. And actually, it wasn't painful. Let me back up. We'll come back to that. It was ugly and it was just not fun. And it had some serious social consequences. And it had some serious physical consequences and everything kind of came together. But let me explain a little bit about what it was.
If this was a kid's class, I'd probably stay away. And I'm not going to get, like, gory just to be gory. But I want you to understand this man who came to Jesus and kneels down, what he's really going through.
You see leprosy. They always thought leprosy was this thing where it ate away at your skin. That was the original belief.
But eventually they discovered that that wasn't quite the case.
And it actually took years and years and years to figure out what was going on. It actually was killing your ability to feel.
And those of you who may have problems with your feet, you know how dangerous that can be.
It took away. Your nerve endings started to die. And so what you didn't realize is when you scratched your arm, you scratched a little too hard and it would start to bleed and it would get infected and you'd have a problem.
I hate. I feel like it's important to explain how they figured this out. There was a person who was walking up, and they were in a leper colony, and they were trying to figure this out, and they saw somebody go to a door with a key, and they went to turn the key. And you've done this before, right? And they went to turn the key, and the person kind of. They saw him struggle with it, and then they turned the key really quick once, and it took the guy's finger off, and he didn't even realize it. And they realized, oh, that's what the problem is. You can't feel. So you scratch your face. You think you feel something on your face. You have some phantom thing on your face, and you scratch your face and you scratch your face and it gets infected. And this was constantly going on in these people's life. And so it looks like their skin is just falling away and it looks terrible. And so they're living in this physical realm where it's just terrible what they're having to deal with. They're disfigured. There's just so much that's going on with it. But it's not just the physical aspect. There's the. The spiritual and social aspect that came along with it, that comes with it. We're going to look at Leviticus chapter 13 to kind of get our grasp on that. You can turn to it or it'll be on the screen, too. But Leviticus chapter 13 gives us the old law about leprosy.
If you need reminding of the social aspect of it.
Leviticus, chapter 13, verse 45, says, the leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose. And he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, unclean, Unclean.
He shall remain unclean. As long as he has the disease, he's unclean.
He shall live alone.
His dwelling shall be outside the camp.
That's a short look at it. But think about the emotional toll here.
Can you imagine the reality of this?
You're walking around, you're in clothes of mourning. You're having to warn people who come close that you're unclean. You have to yell it out so that they hear you. You have to make sure they know. I'm so messy. You can't get close to me. I'm too messed up. You don't want any part of what I have going on. Keep your distance. I'm unclean. He's cut off from his wife, this guy. He's cut off from his kids. He can't go to the temple. He can't do any of those things. He can't worship. There was even one rabbi who bragged that he would throw stones at lepers to keep him away.
What a strange thing to brag about, right?
He would say, I would throw rocks at them to make sure they didn't get close to me.
This man is in a mess.
His life is physically looks like a mess. It's emotionally in a mess. It's socially in a mess. And here's the key. He was defined by his mess. You notice that in this, right? There's no denying it. No one does not know. Forgive the double negative, teachers.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: No.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: No one does not know that this guy is a leper. Everyone knows he has leprosy. He is defined by it, by what he wears, by what he says, by where he goes, where he lives. Everything about his life is defined by this mess that he has.
We might not have spiritual diseases or, excuse me, physical diseases like leprosy running around here today, but I know there's a broken heart in every pew. And sitting in these seats, we have people who feel just as isolated.
And maybe it is a physical thing that you feel isolates you from everyone else. Or maybe it's a social thing or an emotional thing where you feel like it isolates you, where you sit back like this guy with leprosy and you think, I am unclean. My life is a mess. If people really knew how messy it was, they. They would stay away from me. They wouldn't want any part of doing it. So you better keep your distance from me. We may never say those things, but they're running through our heads all the time. And we get this idea stuck in our heads that if we're going to come to Jesus, we've got to have this mess already cleaned up, that it's got to be taken care of, and that we've got to have it all worked out. Because when I come to Jesus, I better be cleaned up. I hope you know better than that, by the way. I know your ministers, I know your elders. I hope you know better than that. But just in case you don't, I'm going to remind you this evening.
This guy doesn't wait to get his life cleaned up. He doesn't wait till his disease goes away. Let's look back at verse 40 again. Like I said, we're going to spend a little time here. Let's look back at verse 40.
And a leper came to him, imploring him and kneeling, said to him, if you will, you can make me clean.
This leper came to Jesus. You just saw what we read in Leviticus 13. He came to Jesus. This is really illegal. Like, this is super duper risky behavior. The type of thing he shouldn't do. He's probably thinking, somebody's gonna throw rocks at me. He's probably thinking they're gonna take care of me. They're gonna stone me if I get too close. But he's willing to risk it. He enters that crowd, he comes in to that, and he's risking his life because he is so desperate. He is so tired of his brokenness that he doesn't care about the crowd anymore.
He doesn't care about social distancing anymore. He fell on his knees with a request.
I want us to look at that request.
Because he doesn't doubt Jesus ability. Did you notice that? He said, if you will, you can make me clean. He knows Jesus has the ability to do this.
He just wants to know if Jesus is willing. He wants to know if Jesus cares enough about him that he's willing to do something about it. He's thinking, man, I'm so messed up.
Do you, Jesus, want anything to do with me?
Or am I too big of a mess?
Have you ever prayed that prayer before?
You ever thought, man, I'm such a mess.
Am I too much of a mess? God, can you still use me? Can you still forgive me? Can you still make this right? Or did I just mess up so bad that it's over?
Probably have a handful, probably more than a handful here. Who. We've prayed that before.
We think, can you heal me? Can you clean up this mess? Are you willing to forgive me? Even if I fall on my face again?
Let's see how Jesus responds here.
Let's look at the next couple of verses. We'll look at verse 41 and 42. Let's see. So we're gonna pick up there. It says, moved with pity. Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him and said, I will be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him and he was made clean.
I love it.
So short. Like Mark. Everything in Mark's Gospel account, if you didn't know, this is just boom, boom, boom. It's just a constant sprint through Scripture. And he's sprinting here. He's moving through things quickly. And so the guy comes and he bows down and he says, if you will. And it says, jesus moved with the esv, says, pity that I'm reading. I don't know what your translation says. I'm not going to get deep into it. But I want you to know you may be looking at yours and it may say indignation. May be what your translation says.
Not to get into translation philosophy. This is not the time or place for that. But pity is probably not the best word. And I went down because I have the coolest job in the world where I can go through rabbit trails and I can chase these things down for a couple hours and see. But the reason the ESV chose pity here is because of some textual traditions they followed. But here's the key. If you want to learn more, if you want to dig deep. I gave you the citation. Take a picture of it. Google it. You got it? Okay. But he felt it. Okay, that's what I want you to get. Jesus didn't just feel pity. That's not a strong enough word to be used here. That's not the word that we should be using here.
What we would say, if we were using our good Southern English, we would say Jesus had a visceral reaction.
Jesus had a gut wrenching reaction. He's provoked or enraged. He felt it deep within himself. He feels it in the pit of his stomach. He hurts for this guy.
His heart is broken because of this man's brokenness. He looked at the mess and he doesn't.
Instead of feeling disgusting like everyone else, he felt overwhelming love here.
And then he does the unthinkable, right, Says he touched him. I don't have to tell you that's a crazy thing. To do. In the old law, anyone who touches someone with leprosy, all of a sudden now you have leprosy. Now you've got to go wait and wait and see if it comes out. It's like back in the 2000s, right? You've got to go get something stuck up your nose now and see how it feels. And so he said, now that's what they deal with, that it's unthinkable that Jesus touched him. I would love to have been there to see how the disciples reacted in that moment. Because I honestly think as crazy as this scene would have been already, as they already would have been like, what is going on? Here's the guy with leprosy. He's too close. And now Jesus starts reaching out his hand and. And I wonder if they're flinching what they're doing. Cause they're thinking, there's no way Jesus is going to touch this guy.
But he does.
Now think about this. Let's slow down for just a couple seconds.
I've been told I speak like a middle child with something to say, so I'll slow down every once in a while. We'll catch our breath and get back to it.
I am a middle child with something to say. If you didn't know that, I realized y' all don't know my siblings. So, yeah, I am a middle child. But so you know where it comes from. But where were we?
Touching? Touching him. There we go.
Jesus didn't have to touch the sky, did he? Just think about it. Think of all the times in scripture, you know, where Jesus healed somebody without physically touching them. Jesus could heal people from cities away if he wants to. Jesus can. He speak, spoke the words and rose Lazarus from the dead. Jesus does not have to make a physical connection here with this gentleman, but he chooses to because he wants to make sure that human connection is there. And it is shocking to everyone. In the old law, if you had someone who was unclean and someone clean touches them, they became unclean. But the economy of grace that Jesus is working in, that's flipped around. Your uncleanness is made clean by Jesus cleanness, by his purity and who he is. Jesus didn't wait for this man to get better before he touched him.
He didn't wait. He said, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to reach into his messy life and do the unthinkable by laying a hand on him.
That's probably the first touch this guy felt in years, right?
He's probably the first. He was probably just as shocked as everyone else was. He didn't know how to handle it immediately. Scripture says that the leprosy left him and he was restored. Now Jesus tells him something interesting here in verse 43 and 44.
Let's look at that real quick.
It says, and Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once and said to him, see that you say nothing to anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing, what Moses commanded for proof to them.
What's up with that?
Why did Jesus say, don't tell anyone, but go to the priest, take the offering, go through the right channels to do this. Because Jesus wanted this man's healing to be more than just physical at this point.
Jesus didn't just want him to be physically. He's gonna restore his life with this. He's saying, go through the right channels. Let your faith, your family know that you're clean. Let your friends know that you're clean. Go through the proper channel so that everyone in the community can get you again. He wanted to heal his life here. It's more than just a physical thing Jesus was doing.
And then we get to verse 45, which is where things get really interesting.
In verse 45, it looks so simple, right? We just read that, okay, he touched the guy. He said, go, don't talk to anybody.
Verse 45. But he did. He went out and began to talk freely about it and to spread the news. So Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places and people were coming to him from every quarter.
He went out and spread the news everywhere. Wouldn't you? I would. I know what you're saying, Jesus. I know you have the power to heal me. I bowed down to you. I fell at my knees, and you brought my health back. And I know you said, don't tell anyone, but you don't realize, Jesus, how big of a change in my life this was. And so I'm going to go tell everyone.
And then the pressure's on.
Now, here's where it gets interesting.
This is where the gospel starts to kick in, in a way you may have not noticed. And maybe you did, maybe you did. Because I'm gonna tell you, I preached on this a lot. And it wasn't until I was preparing for this lesson that I caught this. And I wish you could have seen me when I caught it this morning. I didn't have. I have a lot of things written in my Bible. I didn't have one of my Bible pens, so I'm Stressed because I'm like, I've got to write this down. What happens?
He says, don't, don't tell anyone.
Just go directly, do what you're supposed to do. He goes and he tells people anyway. And it says, Jesus could no longer enter openly into a town, but was out in desolate places. You ready for the ironic twist here? You remember From Leviticus, chapter 13, you remember what you were supposed to do when you had leprosy. You remember what it was. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.
I hope you see the gospel twist here. This is not just a simple feel good story anymore. Now I hope you realize Jesus didn't just say, let me make you well.
Your life is a mess. Let me clean it up.
Now Jesus is living the life of the guy whose life was a mess.
Jesus took it on himself. Now he's the one out there. He can't stay anymore. And I want you to remember this because with all of our messes, with everything we have, we can get to the point we think, oh, yeah, Jesus took care of it all. But every single step of the way, everywhere we go, when we look at these messes in our lives, that we're like, yeah, my life isn't too messy for Jesus. I know he's got a hand on it. You know why he does? It's not because he just is going to say, it's gone. No, he's saying, I took that.
He's saying, your mess, your addiction.
I took that.
I put it on my back on the cross. I took it. He's saying, that sin you can't shake, I took it.
He's saying, that despair that you live in, I'm gonna take it. I've taken it. I took it on the cross. I took that.
It's already there. I've taken it from you. It's not just that. He takes it away and it just kind of dissipates into the atmosphere. Okay. No, he says, I'm gonna take it on myself.
Jesus took this man's place. He took the isolation, he took the exile. And this is a beautiful picture of the cross because our shame, which is a lot uglier than physical leprosy. Jesus says, I'm going to take those ugly sins. I'm going to take those to the cross.
I'm going to go outside the camp. I'm going to die so that you can be brought into the family of God.
So what do we do?
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Right?
[00:31:34] Speaker B: We got it. We see it.
Well, let's just make this short Sweet and to the point. Here, the blueprint for our brokenness starts with a radical decision, is to stop thinking our messes are too messy for Jesus. And I know how it goes. You go, I hear you, preacher boy, but you don't know what's going on in my life. And I say, I don't.
You're right. But Jesus does.
And we could study even more than just one week about this. You say, but you don't know how deep this goes. You don't know how ugly this sin is. I don't.
Maybe I don't need to know.
But Jesus does. And he still offers forgiveness for it. You say, you don't know how bad I've been hurt. You don't know how I got burned and how that person hasn't asked for my forgiveness. And. And that person's left me out to dry. And they're acting like they didn't do anything, but they ruined my life. Patty, you don't know that. And I say, you're right, I don't. But it's not too messy. But what I can tell you is to quit hiding the mess.
Everyone doesn't need to know all your business. Don't go on social media tonight and be like, I was Ed Madison, vbs, and the preacher guy up there from out Noah's crossroads told me to dump, you know, what do we call it? Trauma dump on Facebook. Right? No, don't trauma dump on Facebook tonight. That is not due anyone any good.
But there are people around you who care about you. There's people in this room. There's people in this building. There's people in your family who care about you. And they'll look at your mess and say, you don't have to put on a false front for me.
I still love you for who you are. Is your life messy? Great. So is mine. Let's hang out sometime. It's cool, right? Let's talk about our messy lives. Whatever you need to do.
Don't think it's too much for Jesus.
He's not afraid of your addiction. He's not disgusted by your. Whatever you've got going on. He's not repelled by your past. He's not shocked even by your doubts. Okay? He's not.
Even if that's your messy thing.
Let me tell you one of my. This is my last time to speak to y' all at this event, so let me tell you about doubts real quick, okay? Has nothing specifically to do with this, but my theory on doubt. And there's a lot of guys who are a lot smarter than me in this room. Maybe you can clarify this if I'm wrong.
We think our doubts are the opposite of faith, don't we?
We think if I have doubts, that's messy. And I can't bring that to the Lord because if he knows I have doubts, what is going to happen to me?
The opposite of faith is not doubt.
And this is specific. I feel like to be very honest to our city because we're so not. We. We, you know, y' all are so smart. We like to have answers for everything, don't we? The opposite of faith is not doubt.
The opposite of faith is when you think you've got it all figured out. When you think, I don't have any more questions.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: I don't.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: I don't. Then you don't even need faith. And so don't worry. Bring your doubts. Bring it all. Jesus is standing right in front of you with that same gut wrenching feeling, that same visceral, painful gut reaction. And he's saying, look, I will take it.
I'll take it.
Stop running, stop hiding like this guy. Drop to your knees and say, jesus, I'm bringing my mess to you and it's yours.
Let's close out with a prayer.
Father, we thank you that you are not afraid of our messes.
We admit we've spent too much time and too much energy trying to hide our brokenness from you and from one another.
Today we ask you to open up the hidden rooms in our hearts that we don't want to even admit are there. We bring our shame, our habits, our grief, and our broken relationships to you, knowing you are both willing and able to make them clean. We bring you our messy lives and we know you can handle them, Father. We don't know how, but we trust you can. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Thank you all.
