All Is Grace
Book of Acts chapter 15. Here we go. Verse one. Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers unless you are circumcised.
According to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved. This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed along with some other believers to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this. The church sent them on their way.
And as they traveled through FIA and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. And this news made all the believers very glad when they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and elders to whom they reported everything God had done through them. Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said the Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.
The apostles and elders met to consider this. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them as brothers. You know that some time ago, God made a choice among you. That Gentil should hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe God who knows the heart showed that he accepted them by giving the holy spirit to them just as he did to us.
He did not discriminate between them and us, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now, then, why do you try to test? By putting on the next of the Gentiles, a yolk that our ancestors nor we have been able to bear. No, we believe it's through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved just as they are.
So the whole assembly became silent as they listened to Barnabas. And Paul tells about the signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. When they finished, James spoke up. Brothers, he said, listen to me. Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose the people for his name from the Gentiles.
The words of the prophets are in agreement with this. As it's written after this, I will return and rebuild. David's fall intent. It's ruined. I will rebuild, and I will restore it so that the rest of humankind may seek the Lord. Even all the Gentiles who bear my name says the Lord.
It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead, we should write to them telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality and from, the meat of strangled animals, and from the blood for the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.
Then the apostles and elders of the whole church decided to choose some of their own men. And then send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They chose Judas and Silas men who were leaders among the believers with them. They sent the following letter, the apostles and elders, your brothers, to the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria.
And greetings. We've heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed You troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends, Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Therefore we're sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth. What we are saying. It seemed good to the holy spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements, you must abstain from food sacrificed idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality, you will do well to avoid these things.
Farewell. So the men were sent off and went down to Antioch, where they gathered the church together and delivered the letter. The people read it and were glad for its encouraging message Judas and Silas, who themselves were prophets, said much to encourage and strengthen the believers. After spending some time there, they were sent off by the believers with the blessing of peace to return to those who had sent them.
But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch where they and many others taught and preached the word of the. all right, here we go. This is a passage that you don't hear preached on very much. I don't know if I've preached on it before because it's a theological debate. And in this day and age we find theological debates to be a little bit tedious.
I don't know many people in this room. You like to sit around and talk theology like really dig into it. Argue. Maybe you do. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes we read stuff like this and we think what's the big deal. . They had this council, they got into an argument. They figured stuff out.
The fact of the matter is though Luke wrote this epistle this letter, this story of the church, and he included 28 chapters and he took a whole chapter of this 28 and he thought this is pretty important. As a matter of fact, it stands at the center point of the entire book, the very center place of the book.
He puts this story in a day and age when writing was expensive. He wasn't just writing on paper, just typing stuff out that he could delete later. This was important. And he chose this story as the heart of his message for a reason. As a matter of fact, the way the church treats this incident shows us how important it is.
They convened the council to have a conversation around this issue and the church in Antioch chose Paul and Barnabas to go back and deal with this to Jerusalem. Now, Paul and Barnabas, if you remember the last chapter were on a mission to the Gentiles, they were preaching the gospel around the world.
That's a big deal. That was their calling, their vocation. They were sent to preach the gospel to the end of the earth. And the church in Antioch said, hold on, hold. I know you're supposed to go out there. I know you're supposed to deal with all of the idolatry and all the brokenness in the world.
I know you're supposed to be sent out, but we've gotta deal with this first. So they put the mission on pause the mission to the Gentiles. As the churches are rolling to the nations, they say, hold up. We have to deal with this first because this theological debate over the issue of circumcision, which is a little bit bizarre for us is actually at the very heart of the.
This issue, according to Paul and Peter and others is everything. If we get this wrong, we miss the entirety of the gospel. As a matter of fact, Paul wrote a book of a book called Galatians that was actually to the church about this very issue around the same time that this council was happening.
Here's what he says, Galatians one six. I am astonished. You are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel of circumcision, which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and trying to pervert the gospel of Christ, but even if we, or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one that we preach to you, let them be under God's curse.
Now I read this to show you how important this. For Paul, for Peter, for the believers in Jerusalem at stake, here is nothing less than the gospel itself. That's how important this is. Now the story goes, something like this. There's a group of people that went from Jerusalem to Antioch and along. So remember the same journey that Paul and others had taken from Jerusalem to Antioch preaching the gospel.
And so a group of believers in the name of Jesus went out from the same place in the same direction, preaching a different message, they were saying, it's great that you have received Jesus. It's great that you have recognized the Jewish Messiah. Now what you need to do is be circumcised so that you can be saved.
You've taken step one. Now it's time for you to take the next step. That's what they're going out. And they're saying, and they say this all the way to Antioch. When they arrive in Antioch, they go to the church where Paul and Barnabas happen to be. And they say the same message. It's so great. U Gentiles have finally gotten.
You finally begin to understand what we Jews have known all along now. You've recognized arm Messiah, be circumcised, obey the law of Moses and you're in and Paul and Barnabas say, wait just a second, wait, just a second. That's not the gospel we're preaching. So they go back to Jerusalem. They have this conversation and the conversation is recorded.
It says a group of people, believers who were from the. Party of the gen of the Pharisees stood up to oppose them. Did you hear that anybody, any anybody know that there were Pharisees who were Christian that struck me this last couple weeks as I was reading this passage that these are Christians, believers, people who had confessed the name of Jesus and had been baptized who belonged to the party, the Pharisees that shouldn't surprise us too much.
Jesus spent a lot of time with the Pharisees. There were Pharisees in Jerusalem. There were people who heard the gospel and responded. Of course, some of them would be. In other words, very strict about obeying the law of Moses. So they brought all this stuff in to their understanding of who Jesus was, Christian Pharisees.
They stand up to plead their case and their case goes something like this. You've if you've been here throughout the acts series so far, you've noticed that I've spent a lot of time trying to defend the Pharisees. Cuz I think that sometimes, and I've said this before, but sometimes we just view them as bad guys in the story.
These are not necessarily bad people. They're people who have all sorts of motives for what they do. They're not just cardboard characters who are just like the Thanos of the Bible, right? They're not just a villain. They are people who have motivations and have reasons for the things that they're saying for the ways that they're acting.
And so what was the reason that the Pharisees, these Christian Pharisees stood up and said they have to be circumcised? The reason is this command to be circumcised goes back 1500 years. We talk about the law of Moses. The fact of the matter is this command that all God's people are circumcised goes back before Moses to Abraham, listen to this in Genesis 17.
Then God said to Abraham, as for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for generations to. , this is my covenant with you and your dissenter and your descendants after you, the covenant you're to keep every male among you shall be circumcised you're to undergo circumcision.
It'll be a sign of the covenant between you and me for generations to come, keeps on going here. Verse 13, whether anyone born in your household or bought with money, foreigner or Jew, they must be circumcised. My covenants in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. Listen to this. Any uncircumcised male, who's not been circumcised in the flesh will be cut off from his people.
He's broken my covenants. Now what we don't get in English is the fact that in Hebrew, the word for circumcision and the word for covenant are the same word Bre. It means to cut. I know it's a vivid picture, but the reason is when you make a covenant in the Bible, you literally cut a covenant. We say this a little bit in English.
Don't we say we cut a. we cut a deal. We cut a covenant. And the reason for this is a vivid illustration in the Bible. You didn't sign a contract. Like I said, writing was expensive. You didn't shake hands. What you did is something a lot more vivid, a lot more kind of grotesque. Okay. If you made a covenant with someone, what you did is you separated, you took an animal and you would separate the two halves of the animal.
This is called the path of blood. You'd separate. One on one side and one on the other. And then the two parties who made the covenant together would walk down the path of blood between the separated carcass of the animal and this, when they did this, they were saying to one another, in essence, if either of us breaks the covenant may, what was done to this animal, be done to us.
This is how this worked. And now the covenant of circumcision, this cutting is a vivid, painful representation of that idea. It's a cutting. We remember the terms of the covenant that God has made. Why were they so insistent on the covenant of circumcision? Because God told them to, he told them if you don't do it, you'll be cut off from the people and compromising on this thing over the course of the entire old Testament is what got him into trouble.
Every time compromising on the law of Moses. Failing to obey the commands of God. There's a real historical precedent for what happens when we don't do this. That's why Pharisees arose in the first place. They were determined that never again, would God's people fail him, never again.
Would they fall short? That's why they're so legalistic. We give them this language where they we make fun of them for saying they tied their spices. They're only allowed to walk so far on the Sabbath. They have all these rules, but the fact of the matter is they built fences around fences to protect the original rule in the middle of the thing so that no one would break it even by accident.
So they would never be cut off from God again. And remember one of the biggest issues. If you've read your old Testament recently that God's people had was. associating with Gentiles who were not clean, who had not observed the covenant. Whenever they did that whenever they married them, whenever they hung out with them, whenever they made towns next to them, whenever that happened, inevitably, that sort of stench, that sort of uncleanness would make its way into God's people and would damage them and would lead them away.
And so the Pharisees said never again. It's great that these Gentiles wanna become Jewish. It's great that they're recognizing the Jewish Messiah, but they have. they have to obey the law. They have to be circumcised. They have to become clean. If they're not, this whole thing could fall apart. Understand why they're so disturbed.
Why they're so stressed out. They're saying these Gentiles haven't done anything to become Jewish. They have done nothing. Yes. You preach the gospel. Yes. You dunked them in water. Yes. They started speaking in weird languages and all that stuff is amazing and surprising. But now that it's happened, they have to do these things up until now.
They've done nothing. You guys read Leviticus recently. Do you know how much God's people had to do just to live in a tent next to the presence of. like the presence of God was here. And if you're living at a tent like way over here, you still have to do all the stuff just to be that close. And now the claim that Peter and Paul and others were making was that presence that lived in the tent, that was a pillar of fire in a cloud that that, that presence, that, that parted the red sea, that, that power of God, wasn't just an intent, but was now living within these Gentiles.
And if that's the case, then how much more do they have to do in order to be clean, to be accepted. To host the presence of God. They're not just near it. They're talking like Moses level feeling. They're prophesying, they're doing stuff that Moses did well, then they better be ready to be pure. Like Moses was, you hear that?
That's the argument and it's compelling when you put it in those terms. Isn't it makes a lot of sense. Unless you'd heard the church preach. Unless you've been paying attention to the book of acts so far, cuz if you've been paying attention to the sermons in the book of acts, you'll hear something a little bit different.
It goes something like this. Jesus showed up and wherever he is, everything changes. Jesus. The church said consistently throughout the book of acts was the fulfillment of the profits. He was the heir of the throne of David. He was, is the conquering Messiah. The king we've been waiting for, but not just the conquering Messiah of Isaiah too.
Also somehow surprisingly, the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, where we read this, surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet. We considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted, but he was pierced why for our transgressions, he was crushed for our inequities. The punishment that brought us peace was on.
And by his wounds were healed. We all like sheep have gone as straight. We have turned all of us to our own way, but the Lord has laid upon him. The inequity of us all, you hear that he's the fulfillment of the prophets. He's the, he is Isaiah's suffering servant, which means then that our sinner on his shoulders.
And every time you hear the gospel preached in the book of acts, the core of the message is forgiveness of sin is found in. Forgiveness of sin is found in him. And if that's true, then not only is he the fulfillment of the prophets, he's also the fulfillment of the law. This law that exists to purify you from sin to forgive you when you misstep it's now in Jesus.
It's now in him, he has then completed the law and in himself fulfilled the covenant he's kicked off now, a new covenant. That's the language he used during the last supper. Isn't. This is the new covenant in my blood. He's initiated a new covenant. The old is completed and the old, the sign of the covenant was circumcision.
So if that went with the old covenant, then circumcision is no longer needed because a new covenant, a new day has dawned. And the sign of this new covenant is what, according to the disciples here, the holy spirit. The holy spirit is the sign of this covenant. And if Gentiles now are filled with the holy spirit, then that means that because of what Jesus has done, not because of what they have done, they are now in right standing with God as covenant people right now, not later, not someday, not if they do something else, that's the argument they made.
So to boil it all down, according to Peter, according to Paul, according to Barnabas, the only. for a Gentile to be circumcised was if they didn't believe that Jesus was enough,
the only reason for a Gentile to be circumcised is if they didn't believe that Jesus was enough. And that right there is the problem. That's the heart of the gospel. Do you believe that Jesus is enough? What's the definition of a Christian Pharisee. How do you know a Christian Pharisee? You ask them to complete a simple math problem.
Okay. Life equals Jesus. Plus what? And if they say anything other than nothing, if you say anything other than nothing, then you might be a Christian PCY because according. To the gospel life equals Jesus plus nothing.
He's done the work you can clap there. If you're gonna clap at anything, that's the point, right? Paul says this in Roman's eight there's therefore now no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus, the law of the spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin.
For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh. God did by sending his own son. He condemned sin in the flesh. Oh I skipped the part by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the flesh.
But according to the spirit, do you hear. Yeah, what we were incapable of doing God has now done for us. See, that's the thing that the Pharisees didn't quite grasp. That's the problem with their retelling of history, with their understanding of theology they thought that the law was about works.
But what they failed to see was that from the very beginning, God's people had been violating the covenant time after time. And yet God was relentless in his determination to bless them. Sometimes the blessing was severe. Sometimes it was painful. Sometimes it looked like exile, but God never gave up on his people.
It was always about grace. They had never done anything to deserve it. And now suddenly they think that they're earning it. And Paul says no. And Peter says, no. Do you guys remember two chapters before the chapter? I read about Abraham and the covenant of circumcision. When God gives Abraham the covenant, it's a really vivid scene.
I described it to you. You split the animals in half and you walk between them. Do you remember Genesis 15? God caused Abraham to fall asleep. And while he was asleep, he had a vision. And what was the vision? There was a slaughtered animal. The carcass was separated and he saw what looked to be like a fire pot, a torch passing between the carcasses while he was asleep.
In other words, God made a covenant with Abraham, and then he walked through between the halves of the animal alone. God walked through without Abraham. What does that mean? It means he was guaranteeing both sides of the covenant. Him.
It means I'm taking this whole thing upon myself. I know that you and your descendants will fall short in a million different ways, but I will never stop blessing you. Abraham was asleep through the whole thing. He missed the whole covenant ceremony. God did it all himself. And that's the story of the Bible time and time again, God's people fall short and he is absolutely dogged relentless in his determination to bless them.
He does not give up on them. He's not faithless when they are
persistent. It's always about grace. It's always about grace. That's the way this whole thing works. What have the Gentiles done to deserve this? Nothing. That's the point? That's the whole point.
You don't have to do anything to earn his favor.
You don't have to do anything to live under the blessing of this. God.
As a matter of fact, if you come to him with something in your hand to commend you to him, he'll say, leave that at the door. The only way we approach this God is with empty hands.
The gospel begins when we realize we have nothing to bring to the table and that nothing is exactly what you're supposed to bring to the table. This is a gospel for the needy, for the hungry, for the desperate, for those who know that apart from him, we have no good thing that apart from him, I cannot possibly begin to live up to what is expected, but Jesus showed up and he did it.
See the pH he's told the Gentile Christians. You've become Jewish. You've bowed a need to our Messiah. That's so great. Isn't he great? Crucified rose from the dead. Isn't he amazing now? Just one more thing. My friends, if you hear the gospel and after hearing it say just one more thing, you haven't heard the gospel.
the difference between a Christian and a Christian Pharisees is simple for a Christian Pharisee. Jesus is really something for a Christian. Jesus is everything.
So the question I have to ask today is Jesus everything, is he enough? Is grace enough? Or do you have something at the end of your equation?
I was thinking about that during worship. And for some reason that something I haven't thought about in a few years I probably have lots of things at the end of my equation, if I'm really honest, like depending on the day of the week you ask me, I don't want to, I don't wanna be a Christian Pharisee, but been around the church a long time.
You pick it up if you've been around these people but we wanna do this differently. Don't we? So I'll tell you, I'll tell you one of the things I wrestle with my Jesus. Plus what it's the plus thing is significance. It's like having people approve of me, and it's having a significant ministry, a significant church.
I remember I was in India several years back. And I was walking the streets of this little village with a pastor from a local church. And he was telling me about his life through a translator. And we were just walking the streets of this little village. He was talking about the stuff that had happened to him on a regular basis.
People are throwing stuff at him. This is in militant, Hindu territory. Getting yelled at having curses cast on him and his family, all sorts of threats, all this kind of stuff. And then we arrived at his church, and we walked into the service and there was like six people in there. And he was, you could just see, he was glowing with how much he loved this community.
And it was a dirt floor and the roof was half falling off. And that this time of worship, that was really beautiful and special, but the whole time I was sitting there, you know what I was thinking, I could never do this. I could never just grind it out day by. In this village, dealing with all the threats and all the frustrations and all the stuff going door to door and trying to care for these six people.
And the holy spirit convicted me in that moment that it was just ego. It was just pride saying, why not? This is the village. I've put him in. He's the people I brought to him and he's faithful. And if his church balloons to thousands, or if his church stays six forever and he cares for them, if he's faithful, that means something.
And he was faithful because he believed that his very core that Jesus was enough that though he had nothing else on earth, Jesus was enough. He would sustain him and he would build his church. So he put himself to the work of it day in and day out. And I was just, as we were worshiping, I was reminded of him.
And I'm so convicted again, as I think about my ministry. And like I said, I could give probably 10 other examples, but that's the first that came to mind today. Is he enough? Do I believe that at my core that whether things go well here or not, Whether people approve of what I say or not. Whether people are into our ministry or not.
Whether people show up to events or not, whether people invest their finances or not. Do I believe that Jesus is enough? That's what I'm wrestling with real-time. What are you wrestling with?
What goes at the end of your equation?
See, we wanna make the Pharisees, these legalists. We wanna say they're just like legalistic control freaks, but what's at the core of every control, freak, fear. They were terrified. They were insecure. They did not believe in their gut that it was enough.
And we all have that. Don't we all have this baseline of insecurity that we live by. If we could just grasp as that song Kean led us in. If we could just see him, if we could just turn our eyes on him and let all of it fade, we would find that he's more than enough for everything for every season, for every storm, for every green pasture, he is more than enough in all of it.
And he will never fail us. He never has, if we could just see it, but we have this baseline insecurity.
Where insecurity is the root legalism control is the fruit. The alternative is grace. Grace. You don't have to be enough because he is your ministry. Doesn't have to be the biggest or best on the block, cuz his is.
You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be all the things that you think you ought to be because he is
and where grace is. The root freedom is the fruit you get to live free now. No burden on your shoulders. That's what they said in the letter that James sent out. He said, we it seemed best to us in the holy spirit, not to lay any other burdens on your shoulders. The gospel is the opposite of laying burdens on people's shoulders.
It's relieving burdens. Remember what Jesus says in Matthew 18? Are you tired? Are you weary? Are you oppressed? Then come all you are weary and learn the secret. He says of my light yolk, my easy burden. The gospel is a lifting of burdens. It's a freedom. Jesus says it's eternal life. It's overflowing life.
It's abundant joy. It's peace, unending. This is the gospel. And it all starts with believing that grace is enough believing that Jesus is enough. Let me say that again. We talk a lot about living free around here, the road to living free. Begins with believing that Jesus is enough
Brennan, Manning, beautiful writer, an amazing man passed away a few years ago. I got the chance to meet him once, hear him speak. And he told this story it's more of an allegory. He said this. He said, I've spent most of my life in monasteries, practicing silence and solitude listening for the voice of.
Like just seeking him with my whole heart. And I have come to the conclusion that when I arrive at the gates of heaven one day and Jesus is standing there, he will ask me one question. And one question only that will determine whether I get in or not. The question is this, did you really believe that? I love you?
What if it's as simple as that. What if the whole thing this whole Christian life is as simple as that, do you really believe that he loves you and then live out of that place? Live loved by Jesus, not because of what you've done, but because of what he's done, not because of who you are, but because of who he is.
Last thing. I hear some of you in the room thinking, wait a minute, you're not telling the whole story because he also told him not to eat food that had been sacrificed idols or meat of strangled animals. There was behavior included in there. What's the deal with that? We're talking about being free of all of these behaviors, all this legalism, and, but he still picks a couple of them and throws 'em in there.
What's that all about? Let's be clear on this. This whole life with Jesus is about life change. It is about transformation. It is about renewed minds and bodies. It is about new behavior. The fact of the matter is we come as we are broken and empty and bleeding with nothing to commend us to him, but you don't wanna stay there.
You don't wanna stay broken and bruised and bleeding for the rest of your life. You come to him to be healed, to be restored, to live differently. We come to him as orphans, but when we don't wanna keep on eating orphan food. We don't wanna keep on digging through trash cans, trying to scrounge around.
We wanna live differently. So the Christian life does lead to behavior change, but there's a big difference between trying to behave your way into identity and trying to behave your way out of identity. Does that make sense? There's a difference between trying to become something and simply being who you already are.
So James here says to these Gentile believers, nothing else needs to be done for you to be loved by. You are loved by God. You are free. The gospel has set you free now live free, live loved, and he gives them two commands to do that. And they seem strange until you think about the context. The first one is he says, don't eat any food, sacrifice to idols or eat the meat of strangled animals.
Why that's bizarre. Isn't it. Until you think about it, this church has now made up of Gentiles and Jews now. No. would ever eat food, sacrifice to idols or the meat of strangled animals. It's UN kosher. It's against the law of God. They would never do it. Gentiles did it all the time. What's the problem. If they keep on doing it, then they'll never eat with the Jews and the Jews will never eat with them.
And Jesus has come to breakdown, dividing walls between people not to build them up. And so he says for the sake of fellowship, don't do these things. So that you can sit at a table with them so you can get to know them across a meal. Yes, you are free. You're freed into a family. And in this family, sometimes you lay down your freedom for the sake of somebody else.
Yes. You're free. You're free to lay down your rights to yourself, man. That's what I wish. I wish every American Christian would hear. You are free to lay down your rights in Jesus.
For the sake of somebody else
and then the sexual amorality thing. What's that all about? That's what the Roman empire was known for. It was rampant. It's like modern-day, Las Vegas, modern-day, everywhere, I guess the same as every everything else. The world of the day, like the world of today was known by sexual amorality.
And so he says, why this one thing. Because you're on mission and you've gotta be different. You've gotta live a compellingly different life than everyone around you. So you're freed into a family, don't do this so you can eat together. You're freed into a mission, don't do this. So you can accomplish that mission.
It's not just about legalism anymore. It's now being who you are. It's living your way out of identity, as opposed to into it. At the end of the day, the heart of the gospel. All as grace, start there, like really dig in there and then learn to live outta that place. Friends. Would you bow your heads with me?
So the question I want you to sit with for a few moments is what's your equation. Life like the life you really dream of abundant, overflowing life, joy, freedom, peace equals Jesus. Plus what really sit in that question.
Invite the holy spirit into that question. Pray this classic prayer of every good. Confessor search me. Oh God. And now my heart. Try me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any hidden way in me and lead me into the way of lasting invite the holy spirit into that equation. And when he shows up, the first thing you're gonna notice is no shame or condemnation.
It's gonna be kindness and love. That's how he deals with stuff.
So would you just sit there for a few seconds with him and see what he might have to say?
If you feel like you're just sitting here and you're not hearing much of anything, pay attention to your anxiety, what is it that keeps you awake at night?
It be a place to start. It's where it started for the Pharisees. It started with fear.
what are you afraid that if I don't have this, I won't be my life. Won't be enough. Invite Jesus just gently into that space.
It could just be me. It could be the holy spirit, but I'm feeling like there's a couple of groups of people that I'd love to pray for. One is a group of people that feels like you've been living under a cloud. That's just the image that comes to mind. There's, your life is just in this shadow.
And you've been asking the question like, God, where are you? And all. maybe it's been a long extended season of just overcast, waiting for the sun to break.
And I feel like to paraphrase a poem that I love God is saying that the shadow you're living in is actually the shadow of his hand. You feel like he's distant, but he's actually so close that you're living in the shadow of his right.
that image resonates with you just a second. When we start the worship, I'd love to have you come up and have someone pray for you. The other group is a little less specific, maybe a little bit more general. It's just people who really wanna believe this stuff, but you're having a hard time right now.
Like you're having a hard time getting there intellectually. You might agree. You might know it to be true, but just like in your.
you're having a hard time believing that he's enough, that he maybe is enough to cover the stuff you're dealing with.
And I just wanna invite you to receive, just feel like he's saying come and drink from the well it's free, come and eat at the table. There's no cost, just come and. If that's you, if you're just, if you really wanna believe this, you really wanna live. Like it's true, but you're having a hard time.
Wanna pray with you as well. You don't have to do anything. Just show up at the front and have someone pray with you and trust that the holy spirit has stuff for you. He might wanna say something that he might wanna show up in a specific way. It's the thing about this life with Jesus. It's not just intellectual.
It's experiential. These Gentiles are filled with the spirit. They experience his love and acceptance. And if you need that, if you want that today, come up and let us pray for you. So if I could ask everyone to stand, if you're really processing something, you wanna stay seated, that's fine. But if you could stand and if either of those words they hit you and you wanna pray about it, just come to the front and someone will show up and pray.