Series: The Sermon on the Mount
May 30, 2021 - Alec Seekins
We’re just going to dive right into things. I’m kind of hoping that you guys will be willing to follow me to a place that will be pretty uncomfortable but ends someplace pretty awesome. I’m kind of hoping that, at some point of time during the service or during the course of your day, that each of us will allow ourselves and our heart to kind of sink into a place where we’re willing to feel some of the weight of our sin and our shame, whether present or past.
Please don’t be confused. What I don’t mean is that we would camp out there. I don’t think that Jesus wants us to live in a place where we’re rolling around in our sin and shame. I absolutely don’t mean that I think Jesus wants us to go back to something that he’s already set us free from. But I suspect that there is probably quite a few of us that think we’ve really dealt with our sin, but all we’ve done is managed our shame effectively.
Jesus doesn’t want us to just manage our shame. He wants us to actually move past that. He wants us to end up in a place of transformation. I think that, in order to end up in a place of transformation, we have to experience it at his feet, by his blood. I think in order to do that, we have to be moved to repentance. I think in order to be moved to repentance, for many of us it can be really helpful to feel some of the weight of our sin and our shame. To allow ourselves to be re-sensitized to that, so that again we would repent and let the Lord actually deal with the root of the shame, which is our sin. Because he is absolutely able to do that.
Without Jesus, I don’t think we have hope in this area. But with Jesus wee have hope to get through this on our knees, by his blood. I’m not asking you to follow me into this difficult and painful place to find hopelessness. I’m asking you to follow me there so we can follow Jesus out of there for good.
A lot of you guys know, because I got to share this a few months ago, that last year my wife and I spent the year in southeast Asia, working with an anti-trafficking ministry. When we had been there for a little while, I was asked if I could teach English for these two women who not too long ago had left their lives as prostitutes. They had subsequently come to Jesus and now they were engaged in this year-long discipleship program. So me and a woman from our team would teach that class twice a week for a couple of hours each class and we would just go over English stuff.
Before too long, we decided, you know, why don’t we kill two birds with one stone, because these women are brand new in their faith, they’ve never really been exposed to very much of the Bible, let’s kill two birds with one stone and start reading through stories in the book of Genesis.
What I was thinking of when we made that decision was like how the book of Genesis is all these cute, fun little children’s stories that are so great for learning English, right? Like Noah and the fluffy animals and Joseph and his really cool coat and all that kind of stuff. But if you’ve ever read that book as an adult —I don’t know why this didn’t click for me because I’ve read it many times as an adult — you realize really quickly this is not fluffy animals and cool, colorful coat. This book is full of scandal and sexual brokenness. It’s rated TV-MA if it was going to be on Netflix, for sure. It’s not PG, I promise you.
So we started reading these stories. And every time we would read one of these stories that had to do with sexual brokenness and depravity and this wickedness, I would start to feel super awkward. I’m the only guy in the room. Two of the women in the room, not too long ago were prostitutes. I am profoundly and acutely aware of the fact that my very presence might make them feel threatened. And now we’re reading stories like, you know, Noah passed out naked and drunk. Abraham’s got tons of them, right? Multiple occasions Abraham takes his wife and passes her on to another man and says, “Nah, she’s not my wife. Go for it.”
Then some years down the road in his relationship with Sarah, his wife, they’re having a hard time getting pregnant, so Sarah comes up with a brilliant idea and says, “Why don’t you take my servant, Hagar, and why don’t you sleep with her and she’ll get pregnant and she’ll have a kid and the kid will kind of be our kid a little bit.”
And then they do that. Then, surprise, surprise. Sarah ends up really angry and frustrated and bitter and jealous of Hagar. So she goes to her husband and says, “Why don’t you take the servant, the slave woman and her son and dump them in the desert?”
And he does that. Father Abraham had many sons, and one of them he left in the desert. It’s kind of messed up. And it continues from there. It doesn’t stop. It goes on and on and on. We look at Lot and his daughters and Judah and his daughter-in-law. And it just continues from there. And it’s usually at the hands of the protagonists, or the man characters or the heroes of the faith that this wickedness is being done.
I had these moments when we would read these stories. It kind of felt like, if you remember being a teenager and you’d watch a raunchy comedy with your friends, and you think it’s so funny because you’re all teenagers. And, gosh, it’s so funny how gross that is. Then a few months later you go to Blockbuster if you’re old enough, or whatever, and you rent the DVD and then you bring it home. And what you don’t think about is how raunchy that comedy was. It was so funny, but now you’re watching the movie and Mom or Grandma are in the room. And Will Ferrell’s not so funny anymore, is he?
And we have these experiences where we’re reading these children’s stories and they don’t really feel like children’s stories. And I’m acutely aware of that. And as we would read these, I started to get concerned that my friends, who were so new in their faith, that they might hear the stories of the depravity of the heroes of the faith and it might confuse them. And they might think, Do I really want to follow a God whose holy book is full of these broken people?
So every time we would get to the end of one of these stories, I would start explaining it away. I’d say, “Before we move on to talk about grammar, let me just talk about this a little bit. Just because the main characters are doing this, doesn’t mean that God or the Bible wants us to emulate what they’re doing. They’re not the cartoons that we grew up watching, where the main character, the protagonist ends up in a moral quandary and they wrestle with it a little bit, but ultimately they end up deciding to the right thing and if we emulate their behavior then we’re doing pretty good too. That’s not how the Old Testament is written. It’s very different from that.
So I would explain this away out of fear that my friends would see themselves in the shoes of the victims of the heroes of the faith. And one of these times, maybe the fourth or fifth time I had done this, I think we were talking about how Abraham had abandoned Hagar and her son in the desert place at the tail end of tons of wickedness. And I’m explaining it away, one of my friends stops me and says, “Alec, I don’t think you understand what the story means to us.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, it’s really good news for me that Abraham did this.” I said, “What?” She said, “Yeah, because God still used him, right?” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “So, he’ll still use me, won’t he?” And I said, “Yeah, he will. He absolutely will.”
That was the beginning for her of realizing how far Jesus was going to take her. That Abraham was so messed up and God still used him. Because, for her, the shame of the things that she had done and the shame of the things that had been done to her, in her heart they were inextricably interwoven. You couldn’t pull them apart. It didn’t really matter to her if Jesus was going to pull the things apart and define them and put them in their own nice, neat, tidy little boxes before he took her sin along with her shame and cast it as far from her as the east is from the west. For her, all that mattered is that Jesus was going to get her clean, and that Jesus used horrible people like Abraham, and that we look back and call them righteous. And that God was going to use a person who had done the things that she had done and that we could look back and certainly God could, and call her righteous.
A few weeks later this same woman came to me and said, “I’ve been going on this treasure hunt through the Old Testament to find all the stories of the women who have been sexually broken and have done some sexual breaking of their own. And it’s a pretty good treasure hunt.”
The moment she said that, I don’t think I was able to see the Bible the same way and I don’t think I ever will be, after realizing all of a sudden that, yeah, this thing is full of these stories. The tip of the iceberg is pointing out the fact that there are at least two women in the line of King David, and ultimately Jesus, who played the prostitute. That holy lineage that we trace painstakingly throughout the Bible. There’s even an entire book that’s all about a man pursuing a woman who was a prostitute and setting her free. And then her coming and finding some freedom and then abandoning him and leaving, and then him going back and chasing after her again. And God wants us to know that we are that woman.
I started to wonder. Man, was this book written primarily for an audience of prostitutes? That’s confusing for me. Because I know so many people who have never been prostitutes who have experienced so much freedom in these words, who have encountered the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit through the words of the Bible. And they weren’t prostitutes. So how could that be?
And as I’ve chewed on this question for about a year now, where I’m starting to land is I think perhaps the Bible was really not necessarily exclusively written for prostitutes, but the Bible was written for people who are willing to sit in the same seat that prostitutes do when they look at themselves. For people who are willing to look at themselves from the same perspective that a prostitute was when they compared themselves to everyone else in the room.
See, for my friends the gospel was so obvious and so powerful and so clear, that they saw it in the story of Abraham abandoning the woman that he had abused. Because, for them, the story of the gospel was, “I am filthy. Jesus makes me clean. Then he sets me free. Then we move forward from there, as he makes me holy.” It was that simple and that powerful, that they can see it in the most broken stories of the Bible.
But for you and me, I think we lack this advantage of a prostitute when it comes to looking at the gospel. I think we lack perhaps what Jesus was pointing to a few verses before the ones we’ll read today, where he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Because for you and me, we get so stuck on step one. We start to complicate and convolute the gospel when we say, not “I’m filthy.” But we say, “I’m okay and I’m not the worst person in the room. I’m a pretty decent human being. Yeah, there are people that are better than me, but I’m not the worst.”
So we have to do all these weird aerobics and gymnastics and strange things as we contort ourselves to fit into the gospel. Why? Because we’ve deceived ourselves into thinking that we are somewhere where we’re not. We’ve deceived ourselves into thinking that God is grading holiness on a curve. And that’s not how it works. And Jesus wants to make it clear to us, “No, actually, if you want the gospel to come alive, you’re going to have to realize that you don’t live up here in this better space than everyone else, than anyone else.” Jesus is saying, “I want you to come down here.” Because the people who are going to get this message understand that they cannot look around the room and say, “I’m any better than anyone else.”
My friends didn’t need to hear this message. When Jesus clarifies to a group of people that they’re probably guilty of adultery even if they don’t think so. Why? Because there were mornings when my friends would wake up and they would eat breakfast with the money they had made committing adultery the night before. You and I have these useless veils that enable us to pretend that we’re not guilty and full of sin and shame without Jesus.
So Jesus wants to make that point clear and so in Matthew chapter 5:27-28, he says this:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
And then he’ll go on to talk about how, if your eye is causing you to sin, cut it out. If your hand is causing you to sin, chop it off. It’s better that you would do that than that you would be cast into hell. There’s something more serious that you don’t understand about the depths and the weight of your sin and of your shame. And you may be able to tell yourself, “I have never cheated on my spouse, therefore I’m not an adulterer.” And Jesus is saying, “No, you missed it. If there’s lust in your heart, it’s that serious.”
Righteousness is not graded on the curve. It’s pass/fail and chances are most of us, if not all of us in the room, have failed. Why does Jesus want me to feel so bad? I think because he wants us to understand the good news.
For me, the place in my life that I can look back to and say, “Yeah, that was complete and total failure,” that’s the place in my life where I began to be able to sit down next to my friends that I didn’t know yet, that I wouldn’t know for years to come, where I could sit down with them and say, “I’m absolutely the same as you. It’s good news to me that Abraham would do those things.”
That time of life for me was when I was nine years old. I started looking at pornography and I entered into a season of four or five years of my life where my heart and my mind were completely wrapped up and intertwined with lust and brokenness. Where I couldn’t even look at my friends without being ashamed of the things that were happening in my mind and in my heart.
In that season of life I began to become really acquainted with some of the different strategies that we can employ to manage our shame. I want to walk you through three of those today. Then there’s a fourth one that’s very different from the first three.
The first of those strategies that I started to encounter, what I would consider the most base of those strategies, the most primitive of them. It’s what I would call self-pity. Or a better way to put it maybe is just wallowing in your shame. And that’s the most base because it’s just what you do. You feel shame and what are you going to do? You’re going to feel the shame so you roll around in it and you stick with it and you carry it with you in the back of your mind and the back of your heart and you don’t know what to do with it. And you try to figure out What can I do with this shame? Then, all of a sudden, you slip back into the same sin that precipitated the shame in the first place. And you find a little bit of relief from the shame. It changes your mood and you feel better for just a little bit.
For me, in that season of life, it was pornography. But I think that’s probably a good example, because it’s really good at conjuring up shame for us. But you could probably plug in any different sin that you want to. Right? So you go back to the sin and you find some relief from your shame and it feels good for a little bit, for a few seconds, a few moments, or at best until the next morning. But then the shame snaps back stronger than it ever was before. So you carry it again until the next private moment when you fall into this sin again and find some momentary relief. But every time you do this, the relief you get is not as strong, and the shame becomes stronger.
Those of us who use this as our primary strategy of shame management, the same thing happens by two different avenues. We continue to walk deeper and deeper into more and more and darker and darker sins, because lust will fill any space you give it. And once it’s filled that space it will begin to fill the next spaces. We find ourselves needing to do more sin, more frequent and more dark sin, just to find the same amount of relief that we got int he beginning, like any other addiction.
At the same time that’s happening, we’re starting to actually grow an addiction, not just to the sin, but to the shame itself. We start to like that feeling. We start to love what we do. We start to love that we hate ourselves. Eventually, people who stick with this long enough, they’ll need to hop into a whole different kind of sin that’s probably more public. Because they need the thoughts and words and condemnations of other people to magnify their own shame, because they love to hate themselves. Because we love to hate ourselves when we’re wrapped up in this self-pity strategy of shame management.
For me, this wasn’t good enough. I didn’t like the feeling. I didn’t want to revel in my shame very long. So, before too long, I had to move on to another strategy. Had to move on to what I’m going to call self-justification. Convincing myself that what I was doing wasn’t wrong. I think for most of us this strategy begins with the very same question that greased the wheels to for sin to enter the world in the first place. “Did God really say? Did he really say that that was wrong?” And I would start to ask myself, “Could this really be wrong? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be hurting anyone. It doesn’t seem to be unhealthy. Everything seems to be find. What could be wrong with this?”
For those of us who stick in this strategy, we start to convince ourselves of that, and eventually maybe it’s not good enough. Maybe we need to move past, “Did God really say” and we start saying, “Does God really even have the authority to say…” Right? “Does God even have any moral authority or claim over my life?” Or “Does God even exist at all?”
If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re doing this why? Because we’re managing our shame. We’re tired of feeling ashamed and feeling like someone gets to tell that what we’re doing is wrong. So we start to convince ourselves that it’s not. This is very dangerous because this is perhaps the most effective of these strategies of shame management. Because with this strategy you can turn down the volume on your shame. And I think you can effectively mute it. Once you figure out you can mute it with one sin and the following shame, you realize you can do that to any sin and the shame that comes.
Then, at some point in time in the process, you’ll start to buttress up your opinions and your beliefs that, no, this isn’t wrong, by gathering other people around you that you can convince no, that’s not wrong. And help you convince yourself that, no, this isn’t wrong. And eventually you’ll have a little community, a little bubble of men and women who are just yes men and yes women. Eventually that can grow into a philosophy, a theology, into an ideology, even into a religion of people who are simply saying, “You do you. Do whatever makes you happy, as long as it feels good.”
I would ask you to pause just for a second right there, because I think there are some people here who are like me, who are already hearing this and starting to take it and use it to do strategy number three, self-righteousness. I think we’re hearing this and thinking, “Yeah, that’s what that person does. I don’t do that. Yeah, that’s what that group of people, that’s where that ideology, that’s where that thought process came from. And I don’t do that.” And I don’t think that’s the most fruitful use of this classification. I think the most fruitful us of this information is for us to look and say, “Am I doing this? Have I been convincing myself that, no, this isn’t wrong because it helps me dampen the volume on my shame.”
Again, for me, this strategy didn’t work for too long because I couldn’t convince myself that God was saying that what I was falling into was okay. It was clear to me in verses like the one we just read that God was saying, “No, this is wrong.” Then I wasn’t willing to abandon Jesus, to walk away from him, to throw out his word in my journey to mute my shame. So I had to move on to a new strategy that I will call self-righteousness. Really self-righteousness is just a sub-strategy under hiding.
There are so many different ways to hide, but some of us literally will go into this little corner and we’ll hide in that corner where “No one can see me, where no one can find me. I stopped going to church because I feel so bad about what I’m doing and I don’t want to talk to anybody and I don’t want anybody to know what I’m doing.”
Some people stop having friends, they stop engaging. Some people just really stay very quiet so that no one can see their shame. I couldn’t do that for very long, because I’m way too extroverted for that. So I needed to find another strategy, another way of getting out into the open where I could hide. I realized that I had these very convenient personality traits that were true of me, that I could hide behind in front of everybody else. Yeah, I was someone who really usually does follow the rules. I was someone who really did have a relationship with Jesus. I was someone who really was plugging into church and into youth group. I could hide behind those things and a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of transparency, and no one would ever know. No one would ever suspect. No one would ever ask me if there was anything below the surface.
Growing up I was a really bad liar. So I knew that if I was going to get away with anything with my parents, I had to hide any suspicion from them. Because the moment they asked me a question, I was either going to accidentally straight up just going to tell them truth before I had the opportunity to decide to lie; or I was going to muster up the courage to lie and they were going to see right through it immediately.
So, the result of that, of me revelling in really what was my favorite, probably still is my favorite strategy of shame management, is that I hid my shame and my sin so much that, even though it started at nine years old, I was fourteen years old and almost on the other side of it before either of my parents — who are good parents, who cared about these things, who talked about these things with me — before either of them ever asked me directly, “Have you ever looked at pornography?” And the answer that I was honestly able to give my mom when she asked me that question was, “Yes, I have. But I’m not really doing it anymore.” I hid it so well. I even hid it when I was finding freedom from it.
This is the strategy that is so deadly because it grows and festers when we keep it in the darkness. Right? This is the strategy that leads to headlines: Pastor. Clergyman. Politician. Celebrity. Secret affair. Secret substance abuse. Money laundering. Insert the blank. Right?
As I’ve been prepping for this message I’ve been thinking, I doubt that those men and women start off thinking My life is going to be a scam. That’s where I’m going. I think they start off as kids who have something they really want to hide and they can just never figure out how to bring it out. And in that process, you begin to kind of split into two different people. There’s this public person, this person that everyone else sees that is righteous, that is better, that is successful, that is honest. And then there’s this other person that carries all the shame in private. This person grows and grows and grows the more this person looks better and better and better.
At some point in time, I just couldn’t deal with the fact that I felt so two-faced. I felt there were two different human beings growing inside of me. And one of them was so disgusting and the other one just felt like such a lie, even there was some truth to him. So I started going to my youth pastors, to David Stockton, to Mike Phifer, and I said, “This is what’s happening in secret.” And they gave me a lot of really good, practical advise. We could give a whole message on practical advice, trying to get over this, trying to conquer it, trying to access the freedom that Jesus is offering you.
But the best advice that they both gave me was “Repent. Go from this place of feeling the weight of your sin and shame to Jesus and lay it down at his feet and acknowledge how wrong this is, and repent and let him restore you and make you clean. Begin the years long process of allowing him to renew your mind, to transform you by the renewal of your mind, rather than being conformed to the patterns of the world.”
That’s what I did and that’s where I landed. That Jesus really transformed me to the place where I felt comfortable with my own mind and heart. Where Jesus didn’t just manage my shame. The moment I stopped managing my shame, I let him manage my sin and cast it away from me, and slowly heal and renew me to the point where none of that baggage that I was so terrified was going to follow me the rest of my life, none of that baggage really followed me into my marriage.
One of my primary love languages is words of affirmation. My wife knows this about me. Her primary love language is gifts. This last Valentine’s Day, we were kind of between jobs and spaces and really between life, and we didn’t know what to do. She wanted to give me a good gift. So she sat down to make a gift and she ended up making the best gift she’s ever given me. She sat down for an hour or two and wrote down like a hundred and one or even more really kind things to me on little pieces of paper that she hole-punched and tied together with a ribbon and gave it to me. It looked like something your kids might take home from Sunday school today.
She thought I was going to open it up and tear through it read everything she wrote. But instead, I decided that I was going to savor it and just flip it every so often to the next page and read it. Last week, when I was starting to get ready to prep for this message, I flipped the page on my nightstand and I saw a page that said, “I trust you fully.” There’s no one in this world who knows my heart better than my wife, outside of the Lord.
And this is words written from a woman who’s had her own struggle with insecurity. Words written to a husband who, at nine years old, couldn’t walk in public without feeling the shame of his brokenness and the weight of adultery in my heart. And this is on the tail end of a year spending time in brothels and red light districts and befriending prostitutes, when all the work that the Lord had done was really put to the est. And she looks at me and she says, “I trust you fully.” And she writes it down.
Because the hope that Jesus has for you this morning — as you stop managing your shame and you let him manage your sin — it’s not just hope. I mean, hope is a beautiful and a great thing. But it’s not just hope it’s tangible. Right? It’s a real thing that you actually have access to.
I don’t just hope that I’m going to have a bowl of ice cream tonight. I know that there’s ice cream in my freezer. And I’m going to go home and I’m going to eat the ice cream. And I expect it, and I’m excited for it, and I have evidence of it.
In the same way, we don’t just hope for what the Lord can do with us. Expect it. Know that it’s there, sitting in the fridge, waiting for you. Jesus can take you and heal you. It comes through repentance.
David’s going to come up and wrap us up as we just do some business with the Lord along these lines.
DAVID:
Thanks, Alec. One of the things we wanted to make sure we did as we were going through this stuff, and especially the intensity of it, is we figure out how to move from a classroom to a hospital as a church. So we wanted to make sure there wasn’t just like a message that kind of had some good thoughts and we could all think a little better, but that we’d leave room for the Spirit of God to do the next part. Let this stuff work into our heart and actually maybe bring some transformation.
So that’s what we’re going to do now. I didn’t do a lot of sermon prep this Sunday, obviously. But I did a lot of prayer prep. I’m going to read some things that I feel like the Spirit was saying about today. Some of these might connect with you. If they do, then you can trust it’s for you, and you and the Lord can talk about that and figure out where to go from there.
We have this number that we’ll put up and we’ll put it up at the end of the service, too. If you want to text anonymously, or you can put your name, whatever, and get in contact with a pastor that can help you navigate some of what you might be going through. A safe space for all of that, so that will pop up at the end of the service and you can text that number. We’ll also close and have some people up here that would love to pray for you. If you can muster the courage to come and do that, it would be wonderful. You’ll leave feeling lighter, I’ll tell you that much.
But we also know that some of those things are hard. So I just want to share some things that the Lord was saying and see if these land.
I really felt as I was praying that the Lord was saying that, because of this message and because of some of the people hearing this message today, they were going to understand the dangers of lust and they were not ever going to fall prey to addiction to porn or anything else because of this message. I was very excited about that. Because by God’s grace that’s been my story.
Early on, for whatever reason, I felt like the Lord helped me build the walls. So anytime something was like, Woosh, I’ve just good wall reflex. Walls up. I feel like the Lord’s wanting to do that for some people here. So, young people, please hear this message and trust the Lord. Trust the Lord.
Then I felt like there was a message for some people who are overcome with lust. You don’t think you could ever get free. Maybe you’ve even tried and you’re still stuck. I felt like there were some people that the Lord was actually wanting to give one of those miracles, one of those supernatural manifestations of his Spirit, that come from time to time and completely set you free instantaneously.
If you feel some of that stirring in your heart, whether you’re online or here, he really does want to set you free. He really can set you free. Brand new neuro-pathways and everything, the whole package. And if you feel the Lord stirring that in you, I would respond. If he’s knocking in that way, I would open the door and let him come in. Get some prayer.
Then there’s some who have gotten really good at all of those shame management strategies, sin management strategies, and today, though, you’ve been found out. Pride would keep you from doing this. Deception would keep you from doing this. Some of you, the intensity of it is very different than a nine to fourteen year old and the ramifications that that would bring. Because you are married. You do have a family. You are older and the stakes seem too big. And though that might be true, Jesus is telling you, he’s telling you he can set you free. That’s why you’re here hearing this message. It’s not so you can go further away, or feel more condemned or ashamed. It’s because he really does have a plan purchased by his blood and empowered by his Spirit to get you to a place of wholeness and freedom.
I didn’t say this last service, but I felt like the Lord told me while I was sitting there. Some of you need to do this because, if you can do this now, your kids won’t have to deal with this like you’ve had to deal with it. You can break this in your family. But you can’t do it alone and you can’t do it with hiding. You’ve got to tell somebody.
Then, the last one is the person whose heart is bitterly, bitterly broken, not because of their own lust, but because of a loved one or maybe a spouse’s lust. And even hearing this today is like drinking a whole glass of bitterness. You have your own shame, not because of your lust, but because of the person you’re connected to’s lust. I fell like what Jesus wanted me to tell you was it’s not always going to be this way. That he really is going to come back and he’s going to do away with the sinful nature forevermore. It might seem very far away, but it’s not.
Also, he wants you to know that you’re not supposed to carry this alone either. You kind of feel like you carrying it is honoring the person or something like that, but actually you’re hiding your shame too. It’s super-scary but he wants you tell someone. Now tell someone that you can trust, and even try and tell someone that you think the loved one can trust. But you’re not supposed to carry this alone. It’s too heavy. But it is time for you to invite someone in to walk with you, because you need to be able to discern.
I’m going to say this and please, please be very careful with this. Please email me before you do anything crazy. Because, in the Scriptures, there are caveats in the marriage relationship that can help in times of real, real pain and agony. I mean, the Bible says at times there is an okay reality of divorce with sexual immorality. Now, again, I’m saying don’t unpack that on your own. We have people that would really love to help you, that have been through this, that can help you with that discernment. But you have some really good options that you might not be aware of that are totally in line with the scriptures.
Now, again, nobody get divorced between now and next Sunday. Next Sunday that’s what we’re talking about. Please come back next Sunday, because we’re going to have some ladies speak to us in a way that’s going to be really, really powerful and beautiful. And it’s going to allow the Spirit of God to come in way more fully than right now because of the work that will be done next week.
That’s ultimately what all this is. Jesus is trying to get some of the junk out so more fullness of the Spirit can come in.
And so we’re going to have a little time of prayer. I’ve said these things. If one of those lands or one of those struck your heart, this is your time to be silent before the Lord or confess to the Lord or cry out to the Lord. But we do want to make sure we don’t move on too fast from this.
They’re going to start playing a song and all of that a, and that’s fine, but this is for you and the Lord.
Father, we do just ask that you’ll be with us in this moment, that your Spirit would be so close and so present and so powerful that it would overcome our fears, our pride, our confusion and we’d receive what you have for us this morning.
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