1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,000 I've got a theory. 2 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000 I told the team back there. 3 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:03,000 I've got a theory. 4 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000 I think. 5 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:05,000 Our young spurters team and their children. 6 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:06,000 They're going to go up to New York tomorrow. 7 00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:07,000 They're going to lose games for you. 8 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:08,000 All right. 9 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:09,000 Hold on. 10 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:10,000 Hold on. 11 00:00:10,000 --> 00:00:11,000 They're going to win the next floor. 12 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:12,000 And win the next floor. 13 00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:13,000 And win the third floor. 14 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:14,000 They're going to win the third floor. 15 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:15,000 They're going to win the third floor. 16 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:16,000 They're going to win the third floor. 17 00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:17,000 They're going to win the third floor. 18 00:00:17,000 --> 00:00:18,000 They're going to win the third floor. 19 00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:19,000 They're going to win the third floor. 20 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:20,000 They're going to win the third floor. 21 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:21,000 They're going to win the third floor. 22 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:22,000 They're going to win the third floor. 23 00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:23,000 They're going to win the third floor. 24 00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:33,000 They're going to win tomorrow. 25 00:00:33,000 --> 00:00:36,000 They're going to lose games for you. 26 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:37,000 All right. 27 00:00:37,000 --> 00:00:38,000 Hold on. 28 00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:39,000 They're going to win the next floor. 29 00:00:39,000 --> 00:00:40,000 And win the seventh. 30 00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:41,000 Because kids do what we talk about a lot to do. 31 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:42,000 And that's not supposed to happen. 32 00:00:42,000 --> 00:00:43,000 This is my theory. 33 00:00:43,000 --> 00:00:44,000 And also. 34 00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:45,000 I forget I think he's making sense. 35 00:00:45,000 --> 00:00:46,000 That's just chatting and protecting himself. 36 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:47,000 But they lose London. 37 00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:48,000 It's still going to happen, guys. 38 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:49,000 That's my theory. 39 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:50,000 Mark it down. 40 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:53,000 Oh. 41 00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:57,000 Hey, we're continuing our series. 42 00:00:57,000 --> 00:00:58,000 Who told you that? 43 00:00:58,000 --> 00:01:05,000 Actually today is the last sermon in this series of talks. 44 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:08,000 Who told you that? 45 00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:10,000 The subtitle on that you probably can't see it. 46 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:17,000 It's how fear, shame, and bad religion distort the way we seek God. 47 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:19,000 We're going to go through this for eight weeks. 48 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:21,000 We're going to go through this with nine. 49 00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:27,000 And so I'm going to wrap this up today. 50 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:32,000 I grew up mainly in the city. 51 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:33,000 For most of my life. 52 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:34,000 But a city boy. 53 00:01:34,000 --> 00:01:37,000 At least since like when I was 14 years old. 54 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:40,000 When I was born and grew up in Oklahoma City. 55 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:43,000 So it's kind of a city. 56 00:01:43,000 --> 00:01:46,000 And then right outside of Oklahoma City. 57 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:49,000 Okay, calm down. 58 00:01:49,000 --> 00:01:51,000 I was actually born in Norman. 59 00:01:51,000 --> 00:01:54,000 Which is where the University of Oklahoma is. 60 00:01:54,000 --> 00:01:56,000 Boomer. 61 00:01:56,000 --> 00:01:59,000 She gets me in trouble right here. 62 00:01:59,000 --> 00:02:00,000 But yeah. 63 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:03,000 So then I moved to San Antonio when I was 14 years old. 64 00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:12,000 In 1996, actually right after I moved here is when I drafted Tim Duncan to play for San 65 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:18,000 Antonio City. 66 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:21,000 But it's also the worst year this person ever had. 67 00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:24,000 So it was a fun time to be a new fan. 68 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:26,000 But I grew up in a city. 69 00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:29,000 I really like. 70 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:32,000 If you think I can see there's lights everywhere. 71 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:34,000 I love living downtown so cool lights. 72 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:38,000 You see the little alien light that pops up over the tower. 73 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:40,000 All this cool stuff. 74 00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:46,000 I look like truly endless. 75 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:49,000 A few times in my life I would say. 76 00:02:49,000 --> 00:02:53,000 One of those times was in the middle of the desert. 77 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:55,000 In Baghdad or out. 78 00:02:55,000 --> 00:02:57,000 I was on a patrol base. 79 00:02:57,000 --> 00:03:00,000 Just like this small little compound. 80 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:02,000 We're outside of the main base area. 81 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:08,000 Actually we were living in what was an old house. 82 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:11,000 We were living in a city. 83 00:03:11,000 --> 00:03:14,000 There was a lot of things. 84 00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:16,000 So that is big houses. 85 00:03:16,000 --> 00:03:18,000 We would take it over. 86 00:03:18,000 --> 00:03:21,000 It was our patrol base. 87 00:03:21,000 --> 00:03:25,000 I was looking at this little area. 88 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:31,000 The desert that had what we used to call moon dust. 89 00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:33,000 It's this sand. 90 00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:35,000 It's ultra fine. 91 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:38,000 It's an open powder. 92 00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:42,000 It just gets in everything. 93 00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:45,000 We were on like a blackout patrol base meeting. 94 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:47,000 There was like no lights. 95 00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:49,000 At night a journal lights off. 96 00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:52,000 In fact DJ and I were just comparing lights on the watches. 97 00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:55,000 I didn't have this in a wrap. 98 00:03:55,000 --> 00:03:57,000 A flashlight just on this. 99 00:03:57,000 --> 00:03:59,000 His garment was really brightening. 100 00:03:59,000 --> 00:04:01,000 But what he couldn't figure out. 101 00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:06,000 Now I can't do it. 102 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:11,000 I'm just going to have to put it on. 103 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:12,000 This. 104 00:04:12,000 --> 00:04:14,000 If we were to use a red light. 105 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:16,000 That's the only way we could get around the base. 106 00:04:16,000 --> 00:04:19,000 We could use red light flashlight because it wasn't right. 107 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:22,000 But we're on this blackout base because we would get incoming 108 00:04:22,000 --> 00:04:23,000 all the time. 109 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:25,000 They were trying to kill us. 110 00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:27,000 Let me show you a picture. 111 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:30,000 There's a picture of me and my interpreter. 112 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:33,000 I'm the white guy. 113 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:36,000 That was back. 114 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:40,000 A few pounds ago. 115 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:42,000 That's my interpreter. 116 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:44,000 I worked with him. 117 00:04:44,000 --> 00:04:47,000 Majority of that deployment. 118 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:49,000 But we just ended this base. 119 00:04:49,000 --> 00:04:50,000 We kind of got set up. 120 00:04:50,000 --> 00:04:51,000 We took a picture. 121 00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:52,000 We thought we were cool. 122 00:04:52,000 --> 00:04:55,000 We went back out to our homie to get some stuff. 123 00:04:55,000 --> 00:04:57,000 And then next we know we got incoming. 124 00:04:57,000 --> 00:05:00,000 This is what Louis looked like right after incoming. 125 00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:02,000 Because he fell into the moon dust. 126 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:04,000 I remember he fell. 127 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:06,000 We were running from incoming. 128 00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:07,000 He fell. 129 00:05:07,000 --> 00:05:08,000 And I was like look at him. 130 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:10,000 I grabbed him and he looked at me. 131 00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:13,000 And he looked like Mrs. Doubtfire. 132 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:19,000 We're all going to put his face in the pie. 133 00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:20,000 And I was like smile. 134 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:21,000 I took a picture. 135 00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:24,000 And then we went and got behind cover. 136 00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:29,000 Because we were suddenly shot. 137 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:32,000 You do weird stuff. 138 00:05:32,000 --> 00:05:37,000 No red lights tonight because we took incoming quite often. 139 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:42,000 But when the sun went down. 140 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:44,000 All the lights went down. 141 00:05:44,000 --> 00:05:46,000 It went all the way down. 142 00:05:46,000 --> 00:05:47,000 No city glow. 143 00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:48,000 No light pollution. 144 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:49,000 Nothing. 145 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:50,000 Just desert and dark. 146 00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:52,000 And I remember one night looking up. 147 00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:55,000 And I'd never seen anything like it. 148 00:05:55,000 --> 00:05:57,000 The sky wasn't like a ceiling anymore. 149 00:05:57,000 --> 00:05:59,000 It was just there was depth to it. 150 00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:01,000 There were stars that didn't even exist. 151 00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:04,000 There were layers to it. 152 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:10,000 And I didn't know what to do with it. 153 00:06:10,000 --> 00:06:13,000 I just kept looking up. 154 00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:18,000 And now I realize I was feeling this emotion of love. 155 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:20,000 Like real love. 156 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:26,000 They kind of make sure you go quiet and feel very small. 157 00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:31,000 I felt it in the middle of a war. 158 00:06:31,000 --> 00:06:35,000 In one of the most fearsome seasons of my entire life. 159 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:40,000 I'm standing on a base that we kept pitch black because people were trying to kill us. 160 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:45,000 And the thing that rose up in me looking at the sky was the fear. 161 00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:48,000 It was one night. 162 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:54,000 In that moment it showed up in the middle of the fear. 163 00:06:54,000 --> 00:06:56,000 And it was bigger than the fear. 164 00:06:56,000 --> 00:06:58,000 That was it. 165 00:06:58,000 --> 00:07:02,000 Now you've heard me talk about awe for like a year. 166 00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:04,000 We've spent the whole year along here. 167 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:10,000 So we did the "Pass by Series" on this emotion. 168 00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:14,000 You guys know this has become like a life study for me. 169 00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:18,000 Like psych research on this emotion. 170 00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:24,000 So I don't want to re-explain onto you because most of you have heard this. 171 00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:26,000 You can probably preach it back to you this way. 172 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:28,000 You know this line went up. 173 00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:32,000 "Fear narrows all white ones." 174 00:07:32,000 --> 00:07:35,000 But I want to aim it somewhere today. 175 00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:40,000 For nine weeks we've been asking one question. 176 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:43,000 Who told you that? 177 00:07:43,000 --> 00:07:51,000 And today I want to point it at any oldest religious feeling there is. 178 00:07:51,000 --> 00:07:57,000 The one most of us were taught to call fear. 179 00:07:57,000 --> 00:08:04,000 The question is who told you that the right response to God was to be afraid. 180 00:08:04,000 --> 00:08:08,000 Let me catch us up for those of you that maybe haven't been here for nine weeks. 181 00:08:08,000 --> 00:08:13,000 Today is where this whole thing has been headed in this entire series. 182 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:16,000 Way back in week one we started in the garden. 183 00:08:16,000 --> 00:08:21,000 Out of an eve they do the one thing and the very first thing they do after is they hide. 184 00:08:21,000 --> 00:08:23,000 They sow the leaves. 185 00:08:23,000 --> 00:08:27,000 They get in the bushes and God comes walking in the pool of the day and ask the question. 186 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:30,000 That's been echoing under this entire series. 187 00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:35,000 The question is where are you? 188 00:08:35,000 --> 00:08:39,000 Hold on to that question because we're going to come back to it a little bit later. 189 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:43,000 I think it's going to land differently than you think. 190 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:49,000 What we've watched since that first week, and we've walked through the series, 191 00:08:49,000 --> 00:08:51,000 where the fear came from. 192 00:08:51,000 --> 00:08:55,000 From Augustine to Ansel, to Edwards, to the Chick tracks. 193 00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:58,000 We talked about what it does to a body. 194 00:08:58,000 --> 00:09:03,000 What fear does to the body where the bracing, the hypervigilance, the nervous system, 195 00:09:03,000 --> 00:09:06,000 that never gets to exhale. 196 00:09:06,000 --> 00:09:13,000 The older brother who kept every rule and still felt like a higher hand 197 00:09:13,000 --> 00:09:17,000 when his prodigal brother left. 198 00:09:17,000 --> 00:09:22,000 And then last week we talked about Nicodemus, the most religious man in the gospel, 199 00:09:22,000 --> 00:09:30,000 John, showing up to talk to Jesus at night because he was afraid to be seen. 200 00:09:30,000 --> 00:09:35,000 He just threatened the whole Bible of the whole people hiding, 201 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:42,000 and bushes, and rule keeping, and the dark, and their own bodies. 202 00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:47,000 Hiding from a God they were sure was angry. 203 00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:50,000 And last week I sent you along with a question. 204 00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:59,000 What's one thing about God you were handed a long time ago that you've never gone back and checked? 205 00:09:59,000 --> 00:10:06,000 So today we're going to talk about and hopefully check the biggest one of all, 206 00:10:06,000 --> 00:10:15,000 the one we built whole churches on, entire, like, religion, and it's the fear of God. 207 00:10:15,000 --> 00:10:19,000 You know, you know this verse too, because we talked about it a lot, 208 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:22,000 let's say with you because it matters for what's coming. 209 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:29,000 The verse 9, 10, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." 210 00:10:29,000 --> 00:10:33,000 We've all heard of it. Most of us read it exactly how it sounds in English. 211 00:10:33,000 --> 00:10:37,000 We're scared of God and that's where wisdom starts. 212 00:10:37,000 --> 00:10:44,000 But the word under the fear is the Hebrew word yerah, which we've talked about. 213 00:10:44,000 --> 00:10:47,000 And yerah is not mostly about being scared. 214 00:10:47,000 --> 00:10:51,000 It's the trembling you feel, standing in front of something so vast and so beautiful 215 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:54,000 that the whole body knows it's small. 216 00:10:54,000 --> 00:10:57,000 It's not the fear that makes you run. 217 00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:01,000 It's the thing that makes you take your shoes off, 218 00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:06,000 because you know you're in a place that's holding you. 219 00:11:06,000 --> 00:11:10,000 Your eyes awe reverence before the vast and holy. 220 00:11:10,000 --> 00:11:16,000 Not the fear that makes you run, the awe that makes you take your shoes off. 221 00:11:16,000 --> 00:11:20,000 One pushes you away and one pulls you in. 222 00:11:20,000 --> 00:11:23,000 We have a word for it. We don't use it in the church of life. 223 00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:26,000 It's that word awe that we don't use in most churches. 224 00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:29,000 This church you hear a lot. 225 00:11:29,000 --> 00:11:39,000 So yerah, translated to awe, the beginning of wisdom is the awe of the Lord. 226 00:11:39,000 --> 00:11:45,000 It's a very different sentence than the beginning of wisdom is being scared of the Lord. 227 00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:51,000 Once starts you on a path of wonder, the other starts you in the bushes. 228 00:11:51,000 --> 00:12:00,000 And somebody somewhere took the trembling wonder word and translated it into the danger word 229 00:12:00,000 --> 00:12:05,000 and then built a whole religion on the danger. 230 00:12:05,000 --> 00:12:09,000 And here's why there's not just word games. 231 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:14,000 You can't argue your way out of fear that lives in your body. 232 00:12:14,000 --> 00:12:17,000 I've tried. 233 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:22,000 You can't think your way from God is love on a test. 234 00:12:22,000 --> 00:12:30,000 You're answering a question to actually feeling safe with God when the room goes quiet. 235 00:12:30,000 --> 00:12:39,000 The concept can say love, but your gut still flinches at the bottom. 236 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:45,000 But awe, it's underneath these words, these ideas. 237 00:12:45,000 --> 00:12:47,000 It's not new information about God. 238 00:12:47,000 --> 00:12:49,000 It's a new experience of that. 239 00:12:49,000 --> 00:12:53,000 Last week we talked about this kind of knowing. 240 00:12:53,000 --> 00:12:55,000 In the Greek, there's two different types of knowing. 241 00:12:55,000 --> 00:12:59,000 There's oeda, which is to know in your head, knowledge. 242 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:02,000 And then there's the word genosto. 243 00:13:02,000 --> 00:13:06,000 Genosto in the Greek is knowing by encounter. 244 00:13:06,000 --> 00:13:14,000 Not knowing about is, you don't get talked out of the flinch of being in the presence of God. 245 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:16,000 You get done by something bigger than that. 246 00:13:16,000 --> 00:13:19,000 You experience the love of God. 247 00:13:19,000 --> 00:13:21,000 There's a difference in knowing and experience. 248 00:13:21,000 --> 00:13:26,000 We know the sick from relationships, right? 249 00:13:26,000 --> 00:13:31,000 I gotta tell you, I'm running on like maybe three hours of sleep this morning. 250 00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:34,000 I've been sick for the last few days. 251 00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:37,000 And I went to the doctor to see what was going on. 252 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:40,000 I throw a surgery and I get strepto like all the time. 253 00:13:40,000 --> 00:13:44,000 I'm running to keep something happier in my tonsils, but I don't know why. 254 00:13:44,000 --> 00:13:48,000 But I get a strepto like once a year. 255 00:13:48,000 --> 00:13:50,000 And I thought a strepto wasn't. 256 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:52,000 But they gave me a steroid shot. 257 00:13:52,000 --> 00:13:58,000 And I didn't realize it, but I think it wired me. 258 00:13:58,000 --> 00:14:01,000 This morning, what it was like, you chose violence today. 259 00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:02,000 What is happening? 260 00:14:02,000 --> 00:14:04,000 I'm just having fun. 261 00:14:04,000 --> 00:14:08,000 I'm just being playful, but she about knocked me out. 262 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:12,000 Last night, this morning, really, I'm late in bed. 263 00:14:12,000 --> 00:14:14,000 It's for about two, three, two, forty-five. 264 00:14:14,000 --> 00:14:17,000 If you look at my story, you can tell exactly what I shared. 265 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:24,000 But I'm reading this article on neuroscience of encountering God. 266 00:14:24,000 --> 00:14:26,000 And my brain would not show off. 267 00:14:26,000 --> 00:14:31,000 Because as I'm reading this article, it is singing with brain scans 268 00:14:31,000 --> 00:14:37,000 almost exactly what we've been circling for nine weeks in this conversation. 269 00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:42,000 There's a researcher named Andrew Uber who has spent his career 270 00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:46,000 scanning people's brains while they pray in worship. 271 00:14:46,000 --> 00:14:48,000 And here's what he keeps finding. 272 00:14:48,000 --> 00:14:52,000 This article is in a relevant magazine you can find. 273 00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:58,000 And then he's also got actual scientific articles you can read. 274 00:14:58,000 --> 00:15:00,000 But here's what he keeps finding. 275 00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:06,000 When your faith runs on fear, it keeps the oldest alarm system in your brain. 276 00:15:06,000 --> 00:15:11,000 The survival circuitry, the threat detector is stuck in the on position. 277 00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:12,000 You're a victim. 278 00:15:12,000 --> 00:15:14,000 I talked about this a while back. 279 00:15:14,000 --> 00:15:18,000 And in a fear-based theology, God lives in the amygdala. 280 00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:23,000 And in this place that puts you ready for a threat. 281 00:15:23,000 --> 00:15:25,000 And he's showing it in his brain scans. 282 00:15:25,000 --> 00:15:31,000 And when your faith runs on fear, it keeps that circuitry, the threat detector, 283 00:15:31,000 --> 00:15:33,000 stuck in the on position. 284 00:15:33,000 --> 00:15:38,000 Low brain alert at all times. 285 00:15:38,000 --> 00:15:43,000 In week six, we talked about this, the body that never gets to exhale. 286 00:15:43,000 --> 00:15:50,000 But when your faith runs on love and compassion, the brain does something different. 287 00:15:50,000 --> 00:15:55,000 In these scans, it regulates. 288 00:15:55,000 --> 00:16:01,000 If it becomes online, be a long, finely quiet step, your brain begins to notice something different. 289 00:16:01,000 --> 00:16:05,000 And here's the line that maybe grabbed my phone and started taking notes at 2.30 in the morning 290 00:16:05,000 --> 00:16:07,000 and then shared it on my Instagram. 291 00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:16,000 The image of God who brings into prayer matters through a logically, not just theology. 292 00:16:16,000 --> 00:16:21,000 And that you carry literally shapes your brain. 293 00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:24,000 That's not a metaphor. 294 00:16:24,000 --> 00:16:33,000 In the tissue of your brain, the fear God and the love God don't just feel different. 295 00:16:33,000 --> 00:16:37,000 Over time, they build different people. 296 00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:45,000 They are firing in your brain, creating this neuroclassicity that literally develops who you're going to be as a person. 297 00:16:45,000 --> 00:16:52,000 Now, Newberg is careful here and I want to be too. 298 00:16:52,000 --> 00:16:56,000 A brain scan can show you that something changes. 299 00:16:56,000 --> 00:17:03,000 It can't prove who you met in that conversation, in that prayer. 300 00:17:03,000 --> 00:17:06,000 Basically he says that science can measure the doorway. 301 00:17:06,000 --> 00:17:11,000 It can't tell you who's in the room. 302 00:17:11,000 --> 00:17:15,000 And you know what, that's okay to me? 303 00:17:15,000 --> 00:17:20,000 Because it's exactly where he knows who lives. 304 00:17:20,000 --> 00:17:27,000 You were never going to get certainty in this relationship in his life. 305 00:17:27,000 --> 00:17:31,000 You were going to get an encounter. 306 00:17:31,000 --> 00:17:34,000 And the encounter is the thing that changes you. 307 00:17:34,000 --> 00:17:39,000 And what you expect to encounter in the person of God 308 00:17:39,000 --> 00:17:42,000 is what's going to shape who you're going to be. 309 00:17:42,000 --> 00:17:44,000 And we can see this play out. 310 00:17:44,000 --> 00:17:47,000 We've talked about the fruit testifies. 311 00:17:47,000 --> 00:17:50,000 What you believe about God is going to shape who you are. 312 00:17:50,000 --> 00:17:56,000 And in the fruit out of you is going to testify what you believe about God. 313 00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:01,000 So, we go back to the garden, back to that question because I told you it lands differently now. 314 00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:08,000 God comes in the garden in the cool of the day and he asks Adam, "Where are you?" 315 00:18:08,000 --> 00:18:14,000 And I used to hear that as like the opening line of interrogation. 316 00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:16,000 Like God on the war path. 317 00:18:16,000 --> 00:18:20,000 You're a kid and you just did something wrong and here comes your parents looking for you. 318 00:18:20,000 --> 00:18:22,000 You're hiding under the bed. 319 00:18:22,000 --> 00:18:24,000 And Jeff knows that. 320 00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:26,000 And Jeff, where are you? 321 00:18:26,000 --> 00:18:29,000 I don't know if he fits under the bed anymore, but does he still fit in? 322 00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:31,000 He does. 323 00:18:31,000 --> 00:18:38,000 God on a war path, standing the bushes, hunting the guilty because this is the vision I have. 324 00:18:38,000 --> 00:18:43,000 Like a parent who already knows and it's just giving you a chance to confess before the hammer drops, right? 325 00:18:43,000 --> 00:18:46,000 That's how fear hears it. 326 00:18:46,000 --> 00:18:51,000 Fear always hears footsteps of the threat. 327 00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:53,000 But read it again. 328 00:18:53,000 --> 00:18:55,000 Slowly. 329 00:18:55,000 --> 00:18:57,000 Two people are hiding. 330 00:18:57,000 --> 00:19:02,000 Certain, their relationship with God is over. Certain, God is now their enemy. 331 00:19:02,000 --> 00:19:04,000 And what is God doing? 332 00:19:04,000 --> 00:19:07,000 That comes looking. 333 00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:16,000 God walks into the worst moment of the human story and the first words out of his mouth are, "How could you?" 334 00:19:16,000 --> 00:19:20,000 It's, "Where are you?" 335 00:19:20,000 --> 00:19:25,000 That's not a threat, that's a search. 336 00:19:25,000 --> 00:19:32,000 That's the sound of someone who refuses to let the hiding be the end of the story in this relationship. 337 00:19:32,000 --> 00:19:40,000 The very first thing God does with human failure is move toward it. 338 00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:45,000 And we've watched him do this move, this whole series that we've talked through. 339 00:19:45,000 --> 00:19:51,000 The father and the prodigal story running down the road before the son can even finish his speech. 340 00:19:51,000 --> 00:19:56,000 He uses meaning that can be missing the dark and never shaving him for it. 341 00:19:56,000 --> 00:19:59,000 Same God every time. 342 00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:02,000 The God who comes walking into the garden. 343 00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:05,000 The God who runs down the road. 344 00:20:05,000 --> 00:20:15,000 A lot of us spent our whole lives hiding from a God who was never hunting us. 345 00:20:15,000 --> 00:20:22,000 We watched him the bush is racing for footsteps and the footsteps were never coming to punish us. 346 00:20:22,000 --> 00:20:27,000 They were coming to find us. 347 00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:33,000 Now, one of the questions is I'm studying and talking about this and thinking about this. 348 00:20:33,000 --> 00:20:35,000 That comes to my mind. 349 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:38,000 So I guess that it probably comes to yours too. 350 00:20:38,000 --> 00:20:46,000 So I don't want to do us a disservice as I'm up here talking about this. 351 00:20:46,000 --> 00:20:50,000 As I talk about God as like a father running down the road. 352 00:20:50,000 --> 00:20:57,000 I don't want to just breeze past the thing that I know some of you are thinking. 353 00:20:57,000 --> 00:21:01,000 What about the God being tested? 354 00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:06,000 The flood, the drown, the world, the place. 355 00:21:06,000 --> 00:21:08,000 The hard one, the one we don't say out loud. 356 00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:13,000 The places where God appears to come in Israel to go into a city and leave nothing alive. 357 00:21:13,000 --> 00:21:17,000 Men, women, children. 358 00:21:17,000 --> 00:21:19,000 We can't just skip that, right? 359 00:21:19,000 --> 00:21:23,000 I give you nice, just be like, "Yeah, we'll just forget about that." 360 00:21:23,000 --> 00:21:27,000 But that's not the text messages I give. 361 00:21:27,000 --> 00:21:30,000 But I've been reminded that I ignore it. 362 00:21:30,000 --> 00:21:38,000 I'm going to put it on the table. 363 00:21:38,000 --> 00:21:41,000 We can't just skip it and say God is all love. 364 00:21:41,000 --> 00:21:46,000 If we're going to be honest people and this whole series has been about trying to be honest 365 00:21:46,000 --> 00:21:49,000 people, we have to put that on a table. 366 00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:53,000 So let me put it on the table today. 367 00:21:53,000 --> 00:21:56,000 I'm not going to tie this up in a neat bow. 368 00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:04,000 Anybody who tells you that they fully solved it is selling you something. 369 00:22:04,000 --> 00:22:13,000 I want to give you the ways that serious, faithful, brilliant people have actually wrestled with this same question. 370 00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:19,000 Because nobody handed me into these in church that I grew up in. 371 00:22:19,000 --> 00:22:23,000 They just handed me the fear until we're not to ask. 372 00:22:23,000 --> 00:22:27,000 So first, and this is the oldest. 373 00:22:27,000 --> 00:22:31,000 This is not so new like liberal dodge. 374 00:22:31,000 --> 00:22:36,000 The early church wrestled with these exact texts, hard. 375 00:22:36,000 --> 00:22:39,000 And here's the part nobody told me growing up. 376 00:22:39,000 --> 00:22:44,000 Those early church fathers did not look at a passage where God orders the slaughter of children and say, 377 00:22:44,000 --> 00:22:48,000 "Well, God's ways are higher than ours, who am I to question?" 378 00:22:48,000 --> 00:22:53,000 That's the move we got handed, that's not what they did. 379 00:22:53,000 --> 00:22:55,000 They did the opposite. 380 00:22:55,000 --> 00:23:04,000 They looked at the text like that and said, "That cannot be a strict picture of God." 381 00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:09,000 But God who commands the killing of babies is unworthy of the word God. 382 00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:14,000 So this passage has to mean something deeper than what it says on the surface. 383 00:23:14,000 --> 00:23:19,000 Origin, all the way back in the 200s, said this almost directly. 384 00:23:19,000 --> 00:23:23,000 When Scripture describes God doing something that would be monstrous, 385 00:23:23,000 --> 00:23:28,000 if you read it flat and literal, that's not God confessing his character. 386 00:23:28,000 --> 00:23:36,000 That's the text itself waving a flag telling you to stop reading on the surface and dig for what it actually means. 387 00:23:36,000 --> 00:23:39,000 But Bible is not a history building. 388 00:23:39,000 --> 00:23:44,000 And what Origin is pointing out in 200, the second century is, 389 00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:48,000 and when you read this, there's got to be something deeper than this, 390 00:23:48,000 --> 00:23:56,000 because I can't believe that a God that we believe his love would do this. 391 00:23:56,000 --> 00:23:57,000 It doesn't match. 392 00:23:57,000 --> 00:24:02,000 So from the very beginning, early centuries, they were saying this doesn't work. 393 00:24:02,000 --> 00:24:05,000 We've got to go deeper. 394 00:24:05,000 --> 00:24:09,000 Gregory of Visa shortly after that did the same thing. 395 00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:12,000 He stared at the death of the Egyptian firstborn, children dying, 396 00:24:12,000 --> 00:24:15,000 and he refused just to file it under God's will. 397 00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:18,000 He couldn't square it with a good God. 398 00:24:18,000 --> 00:24:24,000 So he concluded it had to be pointing at something other than a literal report of God killing kids. 399 00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:27,000 Something else is happening here. 400 00:24:27,000 --> 00:24:32,000 We can't just read everything in Scripture literally while people tell us we have to. 401 00:24:32,000 --> 00:24:35,000 That doesn't work. 402 00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:44,000 And the people closest to the origin of these stories didn't do that higher. 403 00:24:44,000 --> 00:24:46,000 Catch this means. 404 00:24:46,000 --> 00:24:53,000 The most ancient readers we have already assumed that a passage painting God as a child killer 405 00:24:53,000 --> 00:24:56,000 probably wasn't telling the truth about God. 406 00:24:56,000 --> 00:24:59,000 They didn't silence the question. 407 00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:03,000 They asked it harder than most of us ever had. 408 00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:10,000 They just trusted the answer would be this isn't who God is. 409 00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:17,000 Then there's voices that I read now that people like Pete ends who's a theologian and an author. 410 00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:20,000 I love this stuff talking about Scripture in the Bible. 411 00:25:20,000 --> 00:25:23,000 He said like this, "The Bible didn't drop out of the sky. 412 00:25:23,000 --> 00:25:28,000 It was written by an ancient people who understood God the way ancient people understood God. 413 00:25:28,000 --> 00:25:32,000 Through the lens of their tribe and their rulers. 414 00:25:32,000 --> 00:25:36,000 Every nation back then had a warrior God who fought for them. 415 00:25:36,000 --> 00:25:43,000 And in says, in effect, God let his children tell a story in the language they had. 416 00:25:43,000 --> 00:25:50,000 The text shows us of people growing slowly, haltingly in their understanding of who God is. 417 00:25:50,000 --> 00:25:52,000 And the growth is heading somewhere. 418 00:25:52,000 --> 00:25:56,000 It's heading toward a person. 419 00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:01,000 God let his children tell the story in the language they had. 420 00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:06,000 Great boy, Brad Jersek, more theologians now, they push it further. 421 00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:11,000 They say read all of it through the cross. 422 00:26:11,000 --> 00:26:17,000 When you get to Jesus, you don't see a God who makes other people believe. 423 00:26:17,000 --> 00:26:21,000 You see a God who chooses to believe himself. 424 00:26:21,000 --> 00:26:26,000 So in the picture in an old text and the picture on the cross don't match. 425 00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:30,000 Jersek and Boyd say the cross is the true one. 426 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:32,000 God was always like Jesus. 427 00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:35,000 We just couldn't see it yet. 428 00:26:35,000 --> 00:26:37,000 That's what Jesus was coming to show us. 429 00:26:37,000 --> 00:26:39,000 This is who the character of God is. 430 00:26:39,000 --> 00:26:41,000 This is what the character of God is. 431 00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:47,000 Not what you've written down that you've assumed because a lot of the things that were tied to God in old text 432 00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:52,000 were brought in by tribal ideas, by things that were thought about 433 00:26:52,000 --> 00:26:54,000 who a God was and what a God did. 434 00:26:54,000 --> 00:27:00,000 And they attached it to God as they write these sorts. 435 00:27:00,000 --> 00:27:05,000 If you look at early, early theologians and these later theologians, they all say, 436 00:27:05,000 --> 00:27:09,000 "Hold on, if it doesn't match through the character of Jesus's, 437 00:27:09,000 --> 00:27:15,000 then we have to question what is happening here." 438 00:27:15,000 --> 00:27:24,000 Here's a part that I straighten this whole series, the psychology that I don't unsee now. 439 00:27:24,000 --> 00:27:31,000 Frightened people write a frightened God. 440 00:27:31,000 --> 00:27:36,000 A tribe living by the sword, surrounded by enemies, terrified. 441 00:27:36,000 --> 00:27:39,000 They're going to imagine a God who fights like they fight. 442 00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:44,000 We still do this. 443 00:27:44,000 --> 00:27:49,000 A God who's going to protect the U.S. at all costs. 444 00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:52,000 That's going to fight our holy world. 445 00:27:52,000 --> 00:28:00,000 We attach our ideas of a warrior God to God and then say what we're doing is holy. 446 00:28:00,000 --> 00:28:06,000 This is not a new thing. It happened in the early Rockies. 447 00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:13,000 We've spent nine weeks now watching human fear shake the picture of God. 448 00:28:13,000 --> 00:28:21,000 Why would we be surprised to find our elite fingerprints all over the oldest parts of the story, too? 449 00:28:21,000 --> 00:28:27,000 Sometimes the violence in the text tells us less about the heart of God 450 00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:34,000 and more about the fear and the people that were holding the pen. 451 00:28:34,000 --> 00:28:37,000 So, what do we do now? 452 00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:45,000 That probably, you got questions. I get it. We'll have a chance next week. 453 00:28:45,000 --> 00:28:48,000 What do we do with all of it? Here's where I land. 454 00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:52,000 It's the same place this whole series has been pointing. 455 00:28:52,000 --> 00:28:59,000 When the pictures of God conflict, Christians have a typewriter. 456 00:28:59,000 --> 00:29:02,000 Listen to how the book of Hebrews opens. 457 00:29:02,000 --> 00:29:08,000 In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times in various ways. 458 00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:13,000 But in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son. 459 00:29:13,000 --> 00:29:21,000 The radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being. 460 00:29:21,000 --> 00:29:24,000 The exact representation. 461 00:29:24,000 --> 00:29:32,000 And John says nobody has ever actually seen God except the Son who has shown Him to us. 462 00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:38,000 And then Jesus just says it flat out. If you've seen me, you've seen the body. 463 00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:46,000 So, when you want to know what God is actually like, you don't start in the conquest of Canaan. 464 00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:56,000 And the Old Testament, you start with Jesus. And then you let Jesus reach back and read everything else. 465 00:29:56,000 --> 00:29:59,000 So, let's do that. Let's watch. 466 00:29:59,000 --> 00:30:07,000 There's a scene early in Mark's gospel. I think most of us slow down enough to feel how shocking it can actually be. 467 00:30:07,000 --> 00:30:10,000 There's a man with leprosy. He comes to Jesus. 468 00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:15,000 Now, the leprosy back then wasn't just a disease. It was a social death sentence. 469 00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:20,000 You are ceremony unclean. You couldn't live in the town. You couldn't worship. 470 00:30:20,000 --> 00:30:27,000 If I lie, you kind of keep your distance. They call out unclean when you walked. 471 00:30:27,000 --> 00:30:33,000 So, people could get away from you. Nobody had touched this man in years. 472 00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:39,000 Years. Nobody was even close to him. Sit in that person. 473 00:30:39,000 --> 00:30:49,000 The thing he lost wasn't just his health. It was every hand that ever might have reached for him. 474 00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:59,000 And he comes to Jesus. And listen to how careful he is. How much shame is in his safety to Jesus. 475 00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:09,000 If you are willing, you can make me clean. If you're willing. 476 00:31:09,000 --> 00:31:15,000 He's not even sure he's allowed to ask. And here's the line. 477 00:31:15,000 --> 00:31:22,000 Mark 141, Jesus reached out his hand. And he touched the man. 478 00:31:22,000 --> 00:31:32,000 He touched him. Before healing, before anything got fixed, before the man was clean, Jesus put his hand on. 479 00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:40,000 And you have to understand what that did. Under the law, Jesus is a good Jew. 480 00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:48,000 And under this law, in Jewish times, when the clean touches the unclean, the clean becomes unclean. 481 00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:54,000 That's how it always ran. Contamination flows downhill. 482 00:31:54,000 --> 00:32:00,000 Everyone watching expects the dirt to win. 483 00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:08,000 The way dirt always wins. I've seen Rob at times. He put a couple of water. 484 00:32:08,000 --> 00:32:12,000 He has seen a couple of water. And then he pulled like a sewer water. 485 00:32:12,000 --> 00:32:17,000 And just like a drop into the water. You still want to drink it? 486 00:32:17,000 --> 00:32:22,000 The whole water is contaminated now. The same concept here. 487 00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:28,000 Jesus touches the unclean. By law, he just became unclean. 488 00:32:28,000 --> 00:32:35,000 But it doesn't work that way with Jesus. It runs backwards. 489 00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:42,000 The uncleanliness doesn't crawl up his arm. His wholeness flows down into the man. 490 00:32:42,000 --> 00:32:48,000 And wholeness turns out to be the thing that's contagious. 491 00:32:48,000 --> 00:32:51,000 It turns out to be the thing that's contagious. 492 00:32:51,000 --> 00:32:58,000 That's the picture of Jesus. That's who God is. Not a God who keeps the unclean outside the candle. 493 00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:05,000 A God who walks to the edge of the can to the person nobody will go near and reaches out his hand first. 494 00:33:05,000 --> 00:33:14,000 Before the face, before you got it together, before you cleaned yourself up enough to be touchable. 495 00:33:14,000 --> 00:33:21,000 This is the same God walking into the garden asking where are you? 496 00:33:21,000 --> 00:33:28,000 The same God running down the road to his son. 497 00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:36,000 I think we touched on the sheet and the goats a few weeks back in Matthew 25, or the Samaritan stopping on the road. 498 00:33:36,000 --> 00:33:42,000 Due to help, the man that had been beaten and been walked over by the religious leaders. 499 00:33:42,000 --> 00:33:46,000 It's the same God every single time. Then it's something God that most of us were handed. 500 00:33:46,000 --> 00:33:51,000 The God who were handed kept a list and kept distance. 501 00:33:51,000 --> 00:34:00,000 The God Jesus shows us closes distance. He always closes the distance. 502 00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:12,000 And that's how he came in the first place. In the very first story we see of God approaching humanity. 503 00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:18,000 They paid off some different last week than I know I liked. A lot of stuff on the table. 504 00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:21,000 We only took the survey last week before we came. 505 00:34:21,000 --> 00:34:27,000 And one question was, when you hear, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, what comes to mind first? 506 00:34:27,000 --> 00:34:33,000 And as a room, almost all of us said Easter or the cross were hell. 507 00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:37,000 Almost nobody said Christmas. 508 00:34:37,000 --> 00:34:40,000 I told you to hold on to that. I don't know that I got back to it. 509 00:34:40,000 --> 00:34:41,000 Here's why. 510 00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:46,000 We've heard that verse of transaction for so long that we forgot what Gabe actually needs. 511 00:34:46,000 --> 00:34:49,000 What it actually opens up. 512 00:34:49,000 --> 00:34:52,000 God sold up the world that he gave. 513 00:34:52,000 --> 00:35:02,000 That he came. That the God of the impossible Iraqi sky that just had so much depth. 514 00:35:02,000 --> 00:35:07,000 This God so big that the witness used to be in fear to me, 515 00:35:07,000 --> 00:35:17,000 climbed into a body, got small, became a baby and a feet trough in a nowhere town to a teenager under an empire that never even noticed. 516 00:35:17,000 --> 00:35:20,000 That's the answers to this whole series. 517 00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:25,000 We kept asking who told you God was angry, dissed, keeping score. 518 00:35:25,000 --> 00:35:31,000 And the deepest answer to the gospel gives is, go look at the manger. 519 00:35:31,000 --> 00:35:38,000 God didn't show up with a fist or a ledger. He showed up as a child that you could hold. 520 00:35:38,000 --> 00:35:41,000 The infinite. 521 00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:49,000 Small enough to be picked up by the very people who were hiding from him. 522 00:35:49,000 --> 00:35:53,000 That's something God can hide from. 523 00:35:53,000 --> 00:36:00,000 That's lying in the hay. 524 00:36:00,000 --> 00:36:06,000 John, the same John who gave us that verse in John 3.16, says this plainly as anyone ever has. 525 00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:10,000 There is no fear in love. 526 00:36:10,000 --> 00:36:13,000 But perfect love drives out of fear. 527 00:36:13,000 --> 00:36:17,000 Because fear has to do with punishment. 528 00:36:17,000 --> 00:36:24,000 A real slow fear has to do with punishment. 529 00:36:24,000 --> 00:36:29,000 So what you feel toward God is the bracing, the flinching. 530 00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:34,000 That's not the awe that Robert is talking about. 531 00:36:34,000 --> 00:36:42,000 That's the punishment fear that perfect love is designed to walk into the room and drive out. 532 00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:52,000 Not because you tried Harvard. Because love showed up in person and reached out his hand. 533 00:36:52,000 --> 00:36:58,000 So here's where nine weeks has been taking us. 534 00:36:58,000 --> 00:37:04,000 You were handed a God to be afraid. I was handed a God to be afraid. 535 00:37:04,000 --> 00:37:11,000 And underneath that fear, the whole time was a feeling that was only ever meant to be awe. 536 00:37:11,000 --> 00:37:20,000 You had the truth in the right. You just had it aimed at the right instead of wonder. 537 00:37:20,000 --> 00:37:29,000 And when the old page is scariest, when the people with the microphones scared you, 538 00:37:29,000 --> 00:37:35,000 there was always a clearer picture you could go stand in front of. 539 00:37:35,000 --> 00:37:40,000 That man reached out his hand to the one nobody would touch. 540 00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:47,000 A father running down a road. A God walking into a garden into the worst moment we've ever had, 541 00:37:47,000 --> 00:37:56,000 asking not how could you, but where are you? Because he came looking. 542 00:37:56,000 --> 00:38:04,000 You don't have to hide from a God like this. That's the whole thing. 543 00:38:04,000 --> 00:38:09,000 You can come out of the bushes, out of the roll keeping, out of the dark. 544 00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:14,000 Like they could be most finely did, out into the daylight, carry more love than he knew he had. 545 00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:17,000 The footsteps in the garden were never coming to hurt you. 546 00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:22,000 They were coming to bring you home. And they still are. 547 00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:29,000 Some of us have been hiding so long. We forgot it was an option we would stop. 548 00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:35,000 We got so good at gracing that we mistook it for faith. 549 00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:41,000 We call our fear the fear of the Lord if it weren't like a patch. 550 00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:48,000 But the beginning of wisdom was never terror. It was awe. 551 00:38:48,000 --> 00:38:58,000 A sky full of stars, over a war zone, and it got big enough to fill it, who got small enough to find you. 552 00:38:58,000 --> 00:39:06,000 Here's the freedom I want most of us to walk out of here. 553 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:11,000 For nine weeks, the question has been who told you that? 554 00:39:11,000 --> 00:39:17,000 Then do you realize what that question has been given to you this whole time? 555 00:39:17,000 --> 00:39:23,000 Permission. Permission to one year. 556 00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:32,000 Permission to ask. Permission to walk out to your car today without having it all nailed down. 557 00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:37,000 Because here's something we don't say nearly enough in here. 558 00:39:37,000 --> 00:39:43,000 Ah, uncertainty. Can't live in the same room. 559 00:39:43,000 --> 00:39:47,000 Certainties a closed fist. 560 00:39:47,000 --> 00:39:55,000 All is an open hand. You can't stick them in the desert sky under all that depth and also play. 561 00:39:55,000 --> 00:40:00,000 You've got God completely figured out. 562 00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:06,000 Oh, it's what it feels like to be gloriously, happily small. 563 00:40:06,000 --> 00:40:12,000 In front of a God, you will never fully wrap your mind around. 564 00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:23,000 Fear needs certainty. Fear needs to pin it down to control it, to be right about it, but awe is comfortable not knowing. 565 00:40:23,000 --> 00:40:31,000 Because awe trusts the one that it can't comprehend. 566 00:40:31,000 --> 00:40:36,000 The faith I was handed told me doubt was the enemy. 567 00:40:36,000 --> 00:40:43,000 That questions were dangerous. That uncertainty meant my faith was weak. 568 00:40:43,000 --> 00:40:47,000 But the freedom to wonder was never a threat to faith. 569 00:40:47,000 --> 00:40:54,000 It might be the most honest form of those early church fathers we just talked about. 570 00:40:54,000 --> 00:41:00,000 They questioned the darkest texts in the whole battle and they didn't lose God doing it. 571 00:41:00,000 --> 00:41:05,000 They found a true one. 572 00:41:05,000 --> 00:41:12,000 So, my hope is that you will hear me when I say you are free. 573 00:41:12,000 --> 00:41:16,000 Free to ask. Free to wonder. 574 00:41:16,000 --> 00:41:23,000 Free to sit and then not knowing and call it holy ground instead of failure. 575 00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:26,000 And we're going to put that freedom to work. 576 00:41:26,000 --> 00:41:30,000 Because the next seven days is not a normal service. 577 00:41:30,000 --> 00:41:33,000 It's not me up here talking at you. 578 00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:40,000 It's this whole service turned into a room where we sit down together and we take your questions. 579 00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:43,000 The heartless. 580 00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:45,000 The ones you carry for these nine weeks. 581 00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:49,000 And when I say something, I have people tell me like, "I need more questions than answers." 582 00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:55,000 And I'm like, "Thank you. That's so sweet. That's exactly what happened." 583 00:41:55,000 --> 00:41:57,000 Because I believe like we say this a lot. 584 00:41:57,000 --> 00:41:59,000 Like growth happens into questions and that's what I want. 585 00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:01,000 I want this to be a place for wonder. 586 00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:04,000 And questions are what drive some uncertainty. 587 00:42:04,000 --> 00:42:08,000 Like getting it right. 588 00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:12,000 So, it should be open right now. 589 00:42:12,000 --> 00:42:17,000 Because when I do this the week of, I get questions. 590 00:42:17,000 --> 00:42:19,000 I'm like, "I don't have time to answer any." 591 00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:21,000 So, we're going to do, if you have questions, scan this. 592 00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:23,000 I'll put on social media later too. 593 00:42:23,000 --> 00:42:26,000 Scan this. You should be able to start asking your questions. 594 00:42:26,000 --> 00:42:29,000 Now, you can send them anonymously. 595 00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:36,000 You don't have to put a name on it. If you want to put a name on it, you can send them anonymously. 596 00:42:36,000 --> 00:42:40,000 Put your questions in this week. 597 00:42:40,000 --> 00:42:45,000 I think I haven't gone from today until Thursday, just so I have time. 598 00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:48,000 It's loud. 599 00:42:48,000 --> 00:42:54,000 [laughter] 600 00:42:54,000 --> 00:42:56,000 I think I actually opened it last night. 601 00:42:56,000 --> 00:42:59,000 It's like, "Oh no, candy's going to find it." 602 00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:02,000 [laughter] 603 00:43:02,000 --> 00:43:05,000 See, I knew it. I'll open it now. 604 00:43:05,000 --> 00:43:08,000 You can start asking your questions, what I'll do. 605 00:43:08,000 --> 00:43:12,000 I don't have to say anything. 606 00:43:12,000 --> 00:43:14,000 We'll leave that up. 607 00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:16,000 Okay, let me just do this and I'll open it. 608 00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:19,000 This will give me a week to sit with it in the next Sunday. 609 00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:24,000 If there's questions that you ask, they're similar, they're all trying to consolidate. 610 00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:28,000 And the next Sunday, we'll wrestle with them together, out loud, as a family. 611 00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:33,000 Nothing is off the table. That's when the holding was forward. 612 00:43:33,000 --> 00:43:37,000 So, the last question I'll leave you with today, don't brush it. 613 00:43:37,000 --> 00:43:40,000 Carry it alongside the ones you already had. 614 00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:47,000 Where have you been calling in fear when God was offering you hope? 615 00:43:47,000 --> 00:43:51,000 Because the God who came walking in the pool today is still asking where are you. 616 00:43:51,000 --> 00:43:56,000 Not to catch you, to carry you home. 617 00:43:56,000 --> 00:44:00,000 You can come out now and sit. 618 00:44:00,000 --> 00:44:07,000 It's always safe. It just took us a while to believe. 619 00:44:07,000 --> 00:44:10,000 I hope we get to wrestle with some questions next week. 620 00:44:10,000 --> 00:44:13,000 I hope that you understand that you are loved. 621 00:44:13,000 --> 00:44:15,000 I hope you experience that love. 622 00:44:15,000 --> 00:44:19,000 And as I say, it will be our small love love. 623 00:44:19,000 --> 00:44:21,000 That's who you're going to be. 624 00:44:21,000 --> 00:44:23,000 Let's get next week. 625 00:44:23,000 --> 00:44:25,000 [applause] 626 00:44:25,000 --> 00:44:29,000 Alright, so my family, Don't make the rest of you for Father's Day for us, 627 00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:32,000 letting the river and check out our big, super cool up, Sam. 628 00:44:32,000 --> 00:44:37,000 [applause]