Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] One of the most beautiful but challenging things that I get to do in my role as a pastor around Journey is walk with people through suffering in life.
[00:00:13] Just in the preparation of this sermon, a little over a week ago, I spent with a couple in a hospital room waiting to give birth to a baby that they knew was no longer living.
[00:00:31] Went to the grocery store and walking through the grocery store, and there was a young lady that she serves on our worship team, and she's just got one of those personalities that just kind of lights up the place. And when I walked by her, she just didn't seem the same. And so as I walked away, I was kind of thinking and praying, and then, you know how it works in the grocery store. I ended up coming by her again, and I just asked her, is everything okay?
[00:00:59] And she said, we're losing my grandfather, and I know him. And he often sits right there, and I often would just give him a hug as I would leave to come up and preach. He's the most beautiful, kind man you would ever want to know.
[00:01:13] I had conversations both verbally and through text with wives whose husbands are unexpectedly leaving and they're absolutely devastated.
[00:01:23] Spend time with people whose kids are in situations that are just bringing them to tears. And you know what it's like. It's even more difficult when it's your kids than if it's even you that's going through the thing that's difficult.
[00:01:36] People are dealing with so much financial stress, broken relationships.
[00:01:41] People have. There's jobs that they don't have, and there's jobs that they don't like.
[00:01:47] It's been challenging.
[00:01:49] Think about the level of anxiety and depression and fear.
[00:01:52] People in our church that just don't know what the future is going to hold, their circumstances feel dire to them.
[00:02:03] It's a harsh reality, friends, that even if we want to follow Jesus with everything that we have, we want to be all in with him. That suffering is common to every single one of us right now. I know the people in this room. You either are going through something that is challenging, where you need God's comfort, or you have gone through something that God maybe has brought you through, or buckle in. You're going to go through something in this life that's gonna be difficult.
[00:02:37] It's just true.
[00:02:40] And it's. In those times of suffering, we find ourselves wanting to reach out and find God. But oftentimes it's that exact times that God can feel a little bit difficult to find.
[00:02:51] And friends, it can be so tempting to just get wallowed down and mired down in the questions. God, why me?
[00:03:00] Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this?
[00:03:05] We find ourselves just stuck sometimes in self pity, sometimes in self condemnation.
[00:03:13] Sometimes we just get so frustrated and envious of what it seems like everybody else's life is going so much better than mine. Why did they have it so good and my life is so difficult.
[00:03:26] We can give way to these fears that we have.
[00:03:29] How long, God, how long is this going to keep going in my life and what's next?
[00:03:37] We can just live in fear, wondering when is the next shoe going to drop in my life?
[00:03:42] And we can wonder, you can wonder what it God, where are you in this? It feels like our prayers are just bouncing off the ceiling.
[00:03:52] God, where are you in our humanity, our flesh. We just want to run from it.
[00:04:00] We want to do anything we can to avoid suffering at any cost. We want to do whatever it takes to wrap our life in bubble wrap so we won't have to experience the pain and the suffering in this life. We want to get through it as quickly as possible.
[00:04:17] But friends, when we do that, I just want to give us a warning.
[00:04:22] I think that we can respond in ways and think in ways that are not accurate biblically.
[00:04:29] We need to understand how do we think about and walk through suffering in this life.
[00:04:35] And I've got to tell you, this is the topic that is the most difficult for me to talk about. People say, oh, oh pastors, they don't like to talk about money. I would way rather talk about money than suffering.
[00:04:48] Because here what I know is true. There are people in this place right now whose hearts are breaking. And I want to hold that with everything in me. And here's what I want to do. And this is why I feel like it's so difficult. On one hand I want to talk theologically and biblically. I think it's important that we do that. But I'm also well aware that to speak to your mind when your heart is being ripped out from the inside doesn't always land well.
[00:05:20] But I'm also going to do the best job I can to try to speak pastorally.
[00:05:25] I want to try to thread that needle.
[00:05:27] We need to speak theologically and we need to speak pastorally.
[00:05:32] How do we do that? We need both.
[00:05:37] How do we think about in this series we've been talking about, what does it mean to be an all in follower of Jesus? Here's what I want us to understand today. What does it look like? How do we think about being an all in follower of Jesus in the midst of great suffering in our life.
[00:05:54] Here's what I find often to be true is if we were to try to chart suffering versus being all in, this is how we think that this works. Oftentimes we think that the more all in I am, the more committed to Jesus I am. That's naturally going to mean that the amount of suffering that I'm going to experience in my life is going to go down.
[00:06:20] I'm going to burst your bubble. That is not true.
[00:06:24] Sometimes when we try to be all in with Jesus and we surrender every time to everything, to him, oftentimes our experience can even be more difficult than it was before.
[00:06:37] That's why Peter tells us this in 1 Peter 4:12.
[00:06:43] And just to give you a little heads up, that book of First Peter, one of the major themes of the entire book is how do we navigate suffering. But here's what Peter says in this book. He says, dear friends, do not be surprised.
[00:07:00] Don't be surprised at what? At the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you.
[00:07:07] There's going to be fiery ordeals. Your hair is going to be on fire, your life's going to feel like it's on fire. He's saying, don't be caught off guard. You need to know that it's coming as though something strange were happening to you.
[00:07:24] Peter's just trying to set our expectations.
[00:07:27] It's the most normal thing of following Jesus.
[00:07:32] Peter wants us to know that it is obvious.
[00:07:35] It is obvious both from scripture and honestly, I think from our personal experience, that God will not and does not wrap our life in bubble wrap as much as we would want him to. He never promises that if you're all in with me, that the circumstances of your life are going to be safe.
[00:07:58] They're gonna be easy, they're gonna be peaceful, that they're gonna be healthy, that they're gonna be prosperous.
[00:08:07] In fact, on the contrary, we are certain to experience, if we want to follow Jesus with everything is we will experience danger.
[00:08:17] You're gonna experience hardship. That's what the scripture shows us. There's gonna be turmoil in your life and in your family and your relationships. There's going to be ill health, you're going to experience loss in this life and every one of us.
[00:08:33] It doesn't matter how all in you are, your life will end in death.
[00:08:41] And sometimes those children of God that desperately want to be all in, that give everything to be all in, seem to be particularly fraught with pain and affliction.
[00:08:55] Here's the deal. Friends, I'm going to say this statement because it's got to sink into your soul.
[00:09:01] We cannot, we cannot read God's favor or disfavor toward our life by assessing how troubled our life is.
[00:09:15] Isn't it tempting to do that? Isn't that tempting to do in our own life and maybe even in the lives of other people? We cannot, we cannot read God's favor or his disfavor by assessing how troubled, how much pain, how much suffering, how much affliction that we're walking through. They're unrelated.
[00:09:37] You can be all in with Jesus and still be experiencing difficulty in this life.
[00:09:44] We need to understand that suffering does not mean that God's mad, that he's frustrated, that he's abandoned me, that somehow he's condemning me in my life, that I've done something wrong. Because if we walk down that road, if we walk down that road in our thinking, we will not respond accurately or biblically to suffering. We've got to stay off that road.
[00:10:12] Why do I believe that this is true?
[00:10:15] Why do I believe that the more all in we are does not mean that suffering is going to go away in our life? I'm going to say one thing. It's the life of Jesus, the example of the life of Jesus. And as we've been talking in this series, being all in with him means that we walk in his footsteps. We do the things that he did. Why would we think that if we did the things that Jesus did, we wouldn't experience the things that he experienced?
[00:10:44] And that's why the writer of Hebrews tells us this.
[00:10:47] Hebrews chapter 5, starting in verse 7, it says during the days of Jesus life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions.
[00:10:58] That seems right. Jesus prayed a lot. Listen to how he prayed. With fervent cries and tears, difficulty and anguish, cries and tears. He cried out to the one who could save him from death.
[00:11:17] And then it says he was heard because of his reverent submission.
[00:11:26] What does reverent submission mean?
[00:11:29] I think that's a great definition of all in Jesus.
[00:11:35] He was humbled before the Father. He lived his life in obedience to the Father. He was submitted in every way. Jesus was all in.
[00:11:49] And yet, Son though He was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.
[00:12:00] God was doing something. He even in the life of Jesus.
[00:12:06] Would we be so prideful and arrogant to think that God would do something in the life of His Son that He loved and not do that in our life that God wouldn't want to teach us? And Help us to understand that suffering actually brings us to a place of obedience.
[00:12:27] It brings us to a place of greater levels of all in with Jesus. What did Jesus suffer?
[00:12:35] He suffered everything.
[00:12:37] There's nothing that we're suffering that he didn't suffer himself.
[00:12:42] He knew what it was like to be completely rejected and misunderstood.
[00:12:48] His life and ministry was all about being rejected by the world around him. And it wasn't just the world.
[00:12:55] He was rejected by his own family.
[00:13:00] Mark chapter three talks about how his family went to take charge of him. They wanted to grab ahold of him because they thought he was crazy.
[00:13:08] Jesus, if you keep talking like this, you keep acting like this, you're going to get yourself killed.
[00:13:14] And ultimately he did.
[00:13:18] Jesus knew what it was like to have his friends, people that he loved, get sick and die.
[00:13:27] Jesus knew what it was like to have those people that were closest to him deny him in the end, to betray him in the end.
[00:13:38] But not just that.
[00:13:40] All of the closest. All of those closest to him, his closest disciples, as he faced the cross, they all abandoned him, left him alone in his greatest moment of need.
[00:13:53] He was unfairly tried and innocently sentenced to death.
[00:13:59] And you understand this.
[00:14:02] He understood the physical pain and the humiliation of a crucifixion.
[00:14:10] He knew what it was like to hang naked on a cross.
[00:14:14] But God said all those things, all those things that he walked through, he used to create obedience in him. God used those things in his life.
[00:14:28] So if we're to draw what this looks like, it's not this downward arrow. This is what suffering looks like in the life of a follower of Jesus. This is what it looked like in the life of Jesus. It's what it's going to look like in our life. Life as well.
[00:14:43] But here's what we also know, is that God wants to use suffering in our life to bring us to a place of obedience and ultimately to a place of hope.
[00:14:59] This is what we can trust God for, that he will do that in our life.
[00:15:04] This is what the Apostle Paul said in Romans, chapter 5, starting in verse 3.
[00:15:12] Paul says, not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings. We don't retreat in those things. We glory in our sufferings. Why?
[00:15:24] Because we know.
[00:15:27] We know. Here's what we're certain of. Paul's saying, this is what he knows, is that suffering will produce in us perseverance.
[00:15:37] Perseverance will produce in us character, sometimes called proven character and character.
[00:15:46] Hope.
[00:15:47] God will bring hope even out of the darkest things that we're walking through in life.
[00:15:54] But I want us to pay attention to some things that suffering is not to do in our life, Paul says. And hope does not put us to shame.
[00:16:06] This is how we know that we're not processing suffering accurately with God. As if there's a place of shame in our life that we're at that place of assuming I've done something wrong. The world is looking at my life as if God is in some posture of disfavor to.
[00:16:28] There is no shame, Paul says, in suffering, because God's love has been poured out.
[00:16:38] God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
[00:16:47] What's Paul saying is that when we're processing suffering accurately, we actually experience God's love.
[00:16:56] We sense his power. We sense his presence in our life because of the Holy Spirit that He's given to us.
[00:17:06] And here's the thing that's crazy to think about and to even say out loud that it's actually by God's grace that we experience suffering in this life.
[00:17:19] Because suffering is ultimately a test and a catalyst of our faith.
[00:17:25] Nothing tests our faith like suffering. Nothing brings to the surface in our life what we're really trusting in, what our life is really depending on. You start taking things away from us. We start to see in our hearts what really matters to us. Is it God or is it something else? It's easy.
[00:17:46] It's easy to say, oh, my life is all in. I have so much faith in God. Until God is all you have and things have been stripped away.
[00:18:00] And that's why the grace of God brings us to a place where we walk through things that we would never.
[00:18:08] We would never choose or desire to do these things on our own so that God can do things in our life that we could not do on our own.
[00:18:21] And friends, what I just described, that is the definition of grace. God doing something for us that we don't have the ability to do on our own. And God can and will do that so many times through suffering.
[00:18:36] But we need to be willing to be trained.
[00:18:40] Hebrews chapter 12 talks about God training us.
[00:18:45] And you need to understand too, that this whole book of Hebrews, one of the major themes of this book is suffering, because this is written to a group of people that have experienced incredible suffering.
[00:18:57] In Hebrews chapter 12, the very beginning of this chapter, the writer is talking about how God disciplines, He trains the one that he loves.
[00:19:08] And here's how that section closes at the end of Hebrews. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 11, the writer says this, it says, no discipline seems pleasant at the time.
[00:19:23] No kidding, right?
[00:19:25] It doesn't seem pleasant, but it seems painful.
[00:19:30] Just stating the truth.
[00:19:33] But the writer says later on, here's the result.
[00:19:37] However, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
[00:19:47] We need to be trained.
[00:19:48] We need to allow the Lord to discipline our lives in the same way that he trained and disciplined the life of his own son.
[00:20:00] It's interesting to me that word there, trained, that verb form of this word, gymnazo, is where we get the word gymnasium.
[00:20:08] But here's what the root word meant. It meant naked.
[00:20:13] Being naked.
[00:20:16] When they trained in a gymnasium in that day, they were naked.
[00:20:22] I'm really kind of glad we don't do that anymore.
[00:20:26] So I was thinking about this. I was thinking back to a conversation with my wife several years ago. We went to the Imagine Dragons concert that was in Bobcat Stadium years ago. And it was kind of a cold night, but it was so interesting. It was so interesting. The lead singer, he did the whole concert with no shirt on.
[00:20:49] And my wife was about halfway through, she's like, why in the world was. Would someone do a concert without their shirt on?
[00:20:57] And I was like, look at that dude.
[00:21:01] Would you look at how he's put together?
[00:21:04] I said, carmen, if I look like that, I would preach without my shirt on.
[00:21:13] When we're naked, it's revealing when. When we're naked by suffering, it reveals our weaknesses, our flaws and our shortcomings.
[00:21:28] You know what it's like to go to the gym. The gym shows our weaknesses, but that's why we go.
[00:21:37] That's why we enter into training.
[00:21:41] Because what was weak can become strong.
[00:21:46] I show up at the gym, and I don't want. I just want to just drive right by.
[00:21:51] But I know that if I show up, even if I leave feeling weak, even if my legs are shaky and my arms feel like noodles, I know that even though there's the experience of weakness, I know that I'm getting strong.
[00:22:05] That's what Paul wants us to see and understand.
[00:22:08] It feels like such weakness, so vulnerable when we're going through suffering in our life. But we need to understand that God is doing training in our life. Sometimes he does his best work in our life. When we're going through the most difficult things in our life. When we are in his gymnasium, you've got to remember, God is at work.
[00:22:34] And I'm going to say it again because I think it's that important.
[00:22:37] You can't associate your level of Suffering with how God feels about you.
[00:22:46] We cannot read God's favor or disfavor by assessing the level of trouble and pain and affliction that we're experiencing in our life. The two are not correlated theologically. Those are the things that we need to understand.
[00:23:04] But now I want to shift just for a moment, and I want to speak pastorally.
[00:23:11] How does God train us? What does he use to train us? Here's what you need to hear, my friends.
[00:23:17] God uses people.
[00:23:22] People are God's conduit of comfort in the midst of pain and suffering.
[00:23:28] That's why almost every week I've shared with you our mission statement. Together we lead people in becoming all in followers of Jesus. And that's why this word is so important and especially important when we talk about suffering. Because we can't do this alone.
[00:23:47] We can't experience the comfort of God apart from God's people.
[00:23:52] People are God's people. Conduit of comfort.
[00:23:57] I want to read to you a section of Scripture from Second Corinthians, Chapter one. Paul is trying to help us get our mind around this idea of walking through suffering and comforting one another is something that we have to do together.
[00:24:11] Chapter one. Starting in verse three, Paul says this. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of God, compassion and the God of all comfort. In the midst of your suffering, how is God looking at you? Angry? Mad? Frustrated? No, he's looking at you with compassion and a desire to comfort.
[00:24:33] Verse 4. Who comforts us in our troubles so that. Meaning, here's the result. So that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
[00:24:49] Verse 5.
[00:24:51] For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ.
[00:24:57] Can I read that again?
[00:24:59] But just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, it's just another way for another offer to author to say suffering is normal.
[00:25:10] If we're going to walk with Jesus, we are going to experience his. His sufferings abundantly.
[00:25:17] But he continues, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.
[00:25:22] If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. Paul saying, we're all in this together. Together.
[00:25:40] And our hope, our hope for you is firm because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.
[00:25:54] If we're going to walk through suffering, we've got to learn together.
[00:25:58] We've got to do this Together, Paul says that he received comfort.
[00:26:05] Here's what you need to understand. You can, you can kind of imagine maybe that Paul just by himself received comfort from God. That's not true.
[00:26:13] If you read his Epistles, he is often thanking the people that came to him, that provided for him, that met with him, that helped him through the things that were difficult for him. God used people in Paul's life. And Paul's saying, God used them in my life so that I could be used in the lives of others.
[00:26:33] And you see the implication of that in the lives of others so that as they walk through that they can be used in the lives of others who can be used in the lives of others. You see what Paul is saying here.
[00:26:45] It's generation after generation, people group after people, group. We've got to do this together.
[00:26:53] In fact, I think Paul would be so bold as to say if, if you want to be used in the life of another person, a prerequisite almost means that you have had to go through difficult things yourself.
[00:27:08] You get that, don't you? When we walk through things that are so difficult and we receive comfort, it gives us the ability to comfort others. Why?
[00:27:19] Why does that matter?
[00:27:21] Because it makes us compassionate.
[00:27:24] It's hard to get all judgy about the difficulties in someone else's life when we've walked through hard and difficult things ourselves. It makes us compassionate.
[00:27:35] It makes us tender hearted toward the brokenness and the hurt and the pain of others. And it makes us wise.
[00:27:43] It makes us wise in terms of how to think about this. It gives us perspective. We can see God's bigger plan. And because we've walked this path, we can grab the hand of other people that need help on that path. And we can walk that path with them together.
[00:28:01] We've got to do together, friends.
[00:28:04] That's why that is the first word in our mission statement. We can't do this alone. We can't do the Christian life alone. And we can't do suffering alone. We've got to do it together.
[00:28:17] And here's another implication of that.
[00:28:20] If what Paul is saying is true, here's what it means.
[00:28:26] It means that your suffering, your pain, the things that you've walked through, they don't belong to just you.
[00:28:38] They belong to God. And by his grace they belong to, to all of us.
[00:28:45] That is the beautiful picture of God's grace is that he uses the difficult things in us. And we don't just hold onto them, keeping them to ourselves, but we use them to love and to care for other people in our life, in the ways that we've been comforted.
[00:29:02] But here's what that means, friends.
[00:29:04] We've got to start to think about suffering together.
[00:29:08] We need to bring our suffering out into the open with other people. We don't just hunker down and try to figure this out on our own. That's not what God wants for us or from us. We need to talk about it.
[00:29:23] And here's the truth.
[00:29:25] If you're going through something difficult, you're talking about it.
[00:29:30] You're talking about it all day, every day, even if you don't say a word because you're playing it in your mind, you're having conversations with yourself.
[00:29:44] And here's the problem.
[00:29:45] You need someone.
[00:29:47] You need someone to interrupt those conversations. Because sometimes, friends, our conversations are not very gracious toward ourselves. They're not very accurate biblically. We need someone that is willing to interrupt that conversation, to speak words of hope into a situation that feels difficult.
[00:30:06] Someone that can actually speak comfort into our lives.
[00:30:10] And sometimes even to speak confrontation into our lives. We need to hear some hard things sometimes. We need to hear truth, but we also need compassion.
[00:30:21] We need people to speak direction into our life.
[00:30:25] And we need those people that have been down that road to speak wisdom into our life.
[00:30:30] You need voices from outside your own head speaking in to your life.
[00:30:37] You need to allow them to interrupt your conversation. That's God's plan.
[00:30:43] God's plan is that we would be the hands of feet into the life of other people that are suffering. That comfort that's promised in the Bible. We are to be that comfort for others. But it requires two things. One, that we're willing to talk about with other people, engage with people about the things that we're suffering in our life.
[00:31:05] And we need to be the kind of people that are willing to be God's hands and feet into the lives of other people.
[00:31:12] When you step into suffering with someone, what you're doing is you're making the invisible grace of God actually visible to them.
[00:31:24] God does that by sending people of grace to give grace to people who need grace.
[00:31:32] We're to be that in the lives of other people.
[00:31:37] When someone's going through something difficult, the look on your face needs to be the face of God.
[00:31:45] That shows them compassion, that shows them empathy in the midst of things that are very difficult.
[00:31:54] When you're with them and you're holding their hand, when you've got your arm around them, your hands and your arms need to be the hands and the arms of God showing Them.
[00:32:05] He's with you.
[00:32:07] He's got you in this. That's his touch.
[00:32:11] When you speak, God wants us to be his voice into their lives, speaking hope and truth into challenging things.
[00:32:21] That we need to be the evidence of God's love in the midst of difficulty.
[00:32:28] That's why we show up.
[00:32:30] We need to be a picture of God's presence.
[00:32:34] People may feel like God is a million miles away, but when you show up, it's as if God is right there speaking his love and his truth to them. That's why we've got to do this together.
[00:32:48] We, friends, together.
[00:32:50] We need to be a demonstration to each other and to the world of God's faithfulness in the midst of struggle.
[00:32:59] Our mission statement, we're going to keep saying it over and over again. We've got to do together.
[00:33:04] But friends, I know that this is true. We've got to work on together, like what I'm describing, our willingness to be able to talk about it, bring these things out into the open with other people, or being able to step into the suffering of other people. It doesn't just happen overnight. Those kinds of relationships don't just happen.
[00:33:26] We oftentimes talk about that 2am friend.
[00:33:30] You need to develop those kinds of relationships where that person feels like they could call you at 2am when those fiery ordeals come and you can call them in the exact same way. We need those kinds of friends. How do we develop those kind of friends? We've got to work at it. It takes time.
[00:33:51] Here's the deal. When should we start developing those friends? We probably should have started 20 years ago.
[00:33:58] But here's the reality. The next best time to start developing those relationships is today.
[00:34:04] Because trouble's coming, suffering is coming. The scriptures have promised those things are coming and we need people in the midst of it.
[00:34:16] Okay, friends, I want to do something a little bit different today. Normally I give you an assignment, give you something that I want you to to work on, something to do as you leave here.
[00:34:26] I'm not gonna do that today.
[00:34:28] I'm gonna take a little bit of a risk.
[00:34:31] I want us to do our assignment here and I want us to do our assignment now and I want us to do it together.
[00:34:41] Here's what I'm gonna ask you.
[00:34:44] When you look across the landscape of your life, is there any place where you need God's comfort?
[00:34:51] You're dealing with pain and suffering, affliction, and you're just saying, I need God's help, I need his comfort right now.
[00:35:03] Just answer that question.
[00:35:05] In your mind.
[00:35:08] Now, here's what I'm gonna do.
[00:35:11] I'm gonna ask you to do something really brave and courageous in just a little bit. If your answer to that was yes, I'm gonna ask you to stand up. Not right now, but I'm gonna ask you to stand up. And here's what I don't want you to do.
[00:35:26] I don't want you to be like, oh, yeah. If I'd have known that the answer would be no.
[00:35:31] I want you to answer honestly. Don't try to rationalize. Don't try to think, well, I've. My pain is not as big as somebody else's pain. It's really not that big a deal. I'm just asking, do you need God's comfort today?
[00:35:46] My hunch is that many of us do. And here's what I've decided to do.
[00:35:51] I told the team, it's like, I'm not gonna do this from this stage, because here's what's true.
[00:35:57] Here's what's true. If I was sitting in those seats and someone up there asked me those questions, I would be the first one standing up. I need God's comfort today.
[00:36:08] And here's what I believe to be true. I think that there are other people out there that need a touch from God.
[00:36:16] They need his comfort right now. If that's you, here's what I'm going to do. Be brave and just stand up with me. Stand up with me.
[00:36:34] I hope that this visual sticks with you in your mind.
[00:36:41] Look how many people are standing up every week when we walk in here.
[00:36:46] People are in pain. People aren't hurting. Big, small, we are suffering. We need each other. We need to do this together.
[00:36:57] Here's what I'm going to ask you to do for those that aren't standing up. If there are people around you, I want you to stand up and just put your hand on their shoulder or extend a hand toward them. We're all going to be standing up because we're going to do this together. And I'm going to pray.
[00:37:12] I'm going to pray over us that God would meet us and that he would grow us in our ability to love and care and comfort one another. Because people together are God's conduit of that comfort.
[00:37:27] Let's pray.
[00:37:32] Jesus, we know that you're not surprised by anything right now.
[00:37:40] You know the things that are hurting in our life. In fact, you probably know more things than we even know about ourselves and Jesus. We trust you.
[00:37:50] You've seen it all.
[00:37:53] Holy Spirit in this moment I pray that you would be our comfort.
[00:38:00] Holy Spirit, I pray that you would move us as a community of faith. That we would learn how to comfort one another. That we wouldn't hide pretend that everything is all together but that we would learn to as we've been comforted to comfort the the lives of other people. Holy Spirit, we desperately need you.
[00:38:22] Jesus, we say yes to you. We surrender everything to you. Thank you that you were willing to die and give your life on the cross so we wouldn't have to wonder how you feel about us.
[00:38:34] We know that you have compassion. We know that there's no condemnation condemnation therefore there is now no condemnation for us who are in Christ Jesus. Thank you, thank you. Thank you that that's true.
[00:38:47] Holy Spirit, grow us to be people that live out together.
[00:38:54] Holy Spirit, we need you.
[00:38:57] Jesus. It's in your powerful and resurrected name that we pray and all God's people said amen.
