Seeing Beneath the Stumps of Life

Welcome to the Lookout Weekly Podcast.

Church of the Lookout is in Boulder, Colorado, and our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with awe-inspiring love.

Visit us online at theLookout.church.

So this morning, uh if you're a guest with us here today, so glad to have you with us.

We are we're gonna start easing into um this last several weeks of the year, uh, our Advent uh sermon series where we start turning our attention to um to Jesus in a particular way.

We we've officially begun the Advent season.

If you're unfamiliar with what that term means, it's a Latin word that actually means arrival.

And it's a time where we turn our attention to the anticipation of the coming and ultimately the return of Jesus.

And so we're just calling a series Advent Promises.

And the season, I believe, is of particular importance to us because uh it names the feeling that we had, the feeling of anticipation in our hearts as we await the fullness of the kingdom of God.

And um this lifelong tension is something that we live in.

It's this idea of living in the kingdom that is here and is not yet, as Jesus would say.

And it's a it's a kingdom, as Jesus would came, uh would come and invite us into his kingdom.

It's a kingdom that has inaugurated, but it's awaiting its fullness, and we're caught in the in-between.

And so in this in-between, we cling to the hope of Christ's return, yet living most of our times, what would be what we could call the confusing in-between.

Um, or as we'll refer to in the next whole several weeks, we we hold on to the ancient promises of God, yet wait what wait for the fulfillment of those promises.

And you guys probably know what I'm talking about when we say waiting in the in-between.

Certainly, as a church, we believe in the immanence of God's presence.

We believe in the here and now.

We believe that we're not just singing about God, we are singing to him, that we are enjoying his presence.

We believe in God as healer.

We believe that God is not somewhere else, that he is among us through the resurrected Christ.

And yet we wait as Christians, we wait in eager expectation as we watch this new world being birthed.

As Paul would talk about in Romans, about this, we're living in a time where all of creation is still groaning for the fullness of God's kingdom to come to earth.

And we feel that in all kinds of ways, don't we?

We feel it when we pray for the peace of Jerusalem or peace in the Middle East, and yet we watch every day as the news stories continue to unfold and there's an escalation in Israel and Palestine, you know, as we're anticipating if hostages will be released, or what's next in this brutal war.

So, how is it that we pray for peace and yet hold with tension in our hearts as we see war rage on?

And we believe, for instance, that there's a day where all sickness will be no more, where God will wipe every tear from our eyes and all will be made well, and yet we stand with each other in times where sometimes God allows some disease to go unhealed.

Why does that happen?

We don't always know, but we know that that's part of our experience.

We believe and we contend in faith for God as healer, and yet we walk in this world where we're in between.

We don't always see the answers to our prayers, right?

It's trusting in the nearness of God when you haven't heard his voice in nearly three years, or maybe several more years than that.

It's believing there is intimacy and belonging available to you even when you're on the backside of an ugly divorce or a relationship ending.

We live in this confusing middle, and most of our lives, most of our lives we actually live in this limital space, in between one thing or another.

Author uh Ronald Rollheiser, he's the author of The Holy Longing, he suggests this is actually what true spirituality is.

It's not just spirituality, isn't just the belief in some mystical otherworldly thing.

Spirituality is actually what we do with these desires when we're in the in-between and how we direct the longings of our heart.

That's actually our spirituality.

He would he would argue it's it's impossible for people when people say, I'm not a spiritual person.

He says, no, everybody is a spiritual person because all of us are directing the longings of our heart in one particular direction or another.

But as Christians, what we do is we direct the longings of our heart towards the promises of God, even when we await the fullness of those promises.

So for the next few weeks, we're turning our attention to some of these promises that the people of God clung to all throughout the ancient days, all throughout the old covenant.

And as the people of God were being formed, they were awaiting the Messiah.

They were awaiting the arrival of one who was going to bring them back to the garden, bring them back to the garden of delight.

And they were tucked away in the hopes that these prophets were, that God would send his people to announce what it was going to be like when the king came, when the Messiah came.

And they these prophets would write these things down and they would, they would, they would create a language that the people of God would hold on to.

And most of these things we, you know, many of these things we kind of skip over in the Old Testament, if we're honest with ourselves.

We read through a lot of things that we don't quite understand, and so we just we flip through until we find something we can wrap our head around.

But these promises are so critical that not only we reconnect with what the longing was for the initial people of God awaiting the arrival of Jesus for the first time, but it's those same promises that we hold on to for today.

So if you have your Bibles, where we're gonna start today is Isaiah chapter 11.

Isaiah 11 · chapter mention

You can turn there.

Isaiah chapter 11.

Isaiah 11 · chapter mention

He's one of our favorite prophets around here.

We love Isaiah, right?

He's the hopeful prophet.

He's a prophet that that just announced a new day, a new day of God's dawning.

Here's what he says in Isaiah 11, or chapter 11, verse 1.

He says, There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Can somebody say amen?

I'm gonna read that again.

Feel free to get excited this time through.

No pressure, though.

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Who are we talking about in this passage?

We are talking about Jesus.

You pass, if you never know the answer to the question at church, it's always Jesus, all right?

You should have learned that in Sunday school.

Just say Jesus and you're in good shape.

And it's a beautiful picture, right?

There's coming forth one with the spirit of wisdom and understanding.

The Lord will rest on him, he'll come forth, he'll bear fruit.

It's this beautiful picture of what we're anticipating, but there's one word in this particular picture that feels slightly out of place.

Do you know what that word is?

It's a word that is not even exciting to say.

It's not exciting to visualize, but it's a word that's right smack dab in the middle.

It's this word, stump.

Everybody says stump.

See, it's not even fun to say.

Stump.

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse.

Now, why would Isaiah gravitate towards this imagery?

Why would this be revealed to him?

This is important that we understand.

This is all part of the unfolding of what God is doing in this passage.

Why is the Messiah not just coming from a beautifully well-tilled garden?

Why is he not coming from a mountainside?

He is coming from, ladies and gentlemen, a stump.

Why is that?

So one of the cornerstone promises in all the Old Testament was God's covenant with King David.

There's about five covenants in all the scripture.

One of them was a covenant to King David, that out of his lineage there would be another king whose kingdom would have no end.

And what had happened was David, David was so moved, his heart was so given to making a home for God on earth that he he personally funded from his own bank account, his own savings account, he said, I am going to do whatever it takes to build a home for God on earth.

His glory, his majesty, we cannot just settle for his glory and his presence being somewhere else.

We want it to be at the center of the city of Jerusalem.

And so he he he we we read in 2 Samuel how he personally financed the building of a temple and he created a home, not because God asked him to create a home, he created a home because that was the most sensible thing he could think of to give God glory, where uh to give him honor where honor was due.

And so somehow in this building of the temple, God was so moved by David's heart that he made a covenant back to David.

He said, You know, from your line, from your seed, from your from this throne, there will become another king, and your king his kingdom will have no end.

That was his covenant with David.

And this covenant was building on top of his covenant to Abraham that God would make for himself a family that would be as numerous as the stars and the sky and the sands of the seashore.

And God had made these covenants.

I am going to do a thing over time to expand, to multiply what I'm doing.

And it's it's going to come through your seed, it's going to come through the offspring.

However, even as good as this promise was, even as glorious as this covenant was to David, even as much as God meant it, it did not uh it did not preclude David from and David's line from really messing it all up, at least temporarily.

And what do I mean by that?

We read that David's sons and the kings who would come after David were corrupt.

Their hearts would turn from the Most High God.

They would, the wickedness would come into the way that they were leading.

We read that within just a few generations, the hope of this promise that God had given to David was all but decimated.

From the 8th to 6th centuries BCE, David's dynasty dwindled, eventually coming to apparent extinction when they went into Babylonian captivity.

So for all sakes and purposes, it was done, it was over.

Not only was there no good king to carry out this promise, but they had once again lost their identity of as a people, and they hung their harps in the willows, as it says in the Psalms, and they were taken away into captivity.

And so we're given this picture of a forest that had been so devastated that only a single stump remained.

And this is the prophecy of Israel that God and God seemed to have forgotten his promise, seeing that there was no king on the throne of Israel, Davidic or otherwise, for 600 years.

For 600 years, there was no king.

A stump was all that was left of this great nation.

Imagine everything God had in his heart, everything that he intended, even in the Garden of Eden, everything he wanted for the earth.

It was like this beautiful forest or a tree, and then all at once it got so bad it's almost like it had it needed more than a light pruning.

We're not talking about a light Christmas tree pruning, shave a little off the side, most of it's still good.

We're talking about a full-on, lop it off about six inches off the ground.

It had to be lopped off at the base with a sharp axe.

All that was left was a stump, and a stump, my friends, is about as dead as it gets.

All right?

Whoever here has had to deal with a stump in your yard, all right?

It's maybe the worst thing.

Because uh you got to get some heavy artillery in your backyard just to dig out the thing, all right?

Unless you get really creative and you carve a giant squirrel out of the out of the stump, as some people do, and it's fantastic, it's great.

But you still have a stump that's just in your yard, right?

We've had a stump one time we didn't want to pay for somebody else to do it.

So we don't like burn it down, we had a I had to put lighter fluid on it and coals and try to burn it down to the ground.

It was just dealing with the stump was no fun.

And yet the stump is as good as it gets after a promise to Israel.

And a stump, this this should actually bring encouragement to us because if we were to take a survey, I bet if we surveyed all across this room, there's parts of our lives that often feel like a stump.

It doesn't feel like things have just stopped growing.

It feels like things have been cut off at the base.

Has anybody ever felt like that?

Have you looked at your life and said, this looks like not just uh just waiting for things to get kickstarted, but this looks like something was very cut off.

Maybe for you that was a career turn that even that you didn't expect.

And though you had a lot of vision for where you're heading in your life, something just abruptly got lopped off and it sent you a different direction than you had anticipated.

Maybe this came through your children and you never expected this.

You thought that you were do giving your best to them, and at some point they decided that they did not trust your heart for them and they cut you off.

And they refuse to talk to you.

They believe lies about you.

You look at your family, and it looks like, man, this isn't just a something gone sideways, this is a complete cut-off in your relationships, right?

Maybe, maybe you've lost somebody that is important to you, that was important to you, despite fervent prayer, despite believing that God wanted to do something extraordinary.

Someone you love was taken abruptly.

Maybe you envision your life as a tree growing in a certain way and in a certain direction.

Most of us, especially in America, have this idea of our lives kind of going up and to the right, you know, just like the stock market, right?

It goes up and to the right.

At least that's what they say that's supposed to happen, and yet our experience is not quite that all the time.

And so it's hard to understand.

I thought God that you wanted my life to get better and better and better.

So what's happening when it I take a survey and it looks like anything but that?

It looks like I have a bunch of stumps.

But the beautiful thing, the beautiful part of this picture of Isaiah is he doesn't just leave us with a stump.

See, he prophesies that out of the stump is going to come a shoot or a branch.

And this is the key, this is the key part here.

This is key for Isaiah, this is important for us.

With prophetic eyes, Isaiah saw underneath the surface of the stump, and he saw a root system of the promises of God that were still pulsing with life.

And with prophetic eyes, he could see the roots growing into a mighty tree, and that, and that Christ being the shoot, that something was going to come through the roots.

And through the one who was coming, God was going to restore the throne of David.

And see, this was critical because Isaiah was not able just to see the surface, he was able to see what was underneath the ground.

So during World War II, there's a really interesting story.

Hitler's bombers rained destruction upon London from the skies.

Over 15,000 people lost their lives.

And many parts of the city were reduced to rubble.

But when the springtime came, an amazing thing happened.

All these beautiful wildflowers, many of them thought extinct, sprang up in the midst of the devastation.

The botanists concluded that the seeds had laid dormant underneath the buildings and other structures until the bomb blasts exposed them and gave them the opportunity to germinate.

It was only after a season of or a time of complete destruction that these seeds were able to actually find their way out of the ground.

And this is really, this is really the invitation for us today.

Well, on the surface, we often see death, we often see what has been cut off.

Underneath the stump are the roots of God's promises, and God never gives up on his word, his all his word never returns a void.

The hope, the hope that Isaiah is offering that is in dead places, God can still grow life.

In the kingdom, every ending is simply a new beginning.

And this is why the other prophets pick up on the same thing.

They seem to gravitate towards this picture of a branch.

Jeremiah 33.

Jeremiah says this.

He says, In those days, and in those days, he's meaning in the days of the coming of the king, he says, In those days and at the time, I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David.

And he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

He's going to cause a righteous what?

A righteous branch to spring up for David.

So you have to understand that the promises of God are stubborn.

God is committed to what he says, He's very stubborn with what he says.

And it doesn't just require us to just pull things together and grow again.

The promise here is that God, the seed of what God says is so deeply profound in us that even when things get cut off, it's too stubborn, it's buoyant, it always comes back to the surface.

I heard a story, someone uh recent uh somebody recently had bought a house, decided to get rid of an old bamboo plant in his driveway.

He cut down the plant, took an axe to its roots, and after destroying as much of it as he could, he poured bluestone, a plant poison, on what remained.

Finally, he filled the hole with the plant where the plant had been, and with several feet of gravel, he tamped lightly and paved over it with cement.

The saying is done.

But two years later, the cement heaved, the bamboo plant began to slowly break through the pavement.

Its life principle, the blind pressure to grow was not thwarted by axes, poison, and cement.

And here's the beautiful thing about God's resilience, God's promise, God's commitment to his word in our life, is that when the when when things get lopped off in our life, when things go differently than expected, the word of God always finds a way to grow a branch out of the stump.

It always does.

This is why we believe in the resurrected Christ, because even death could not keep him down.

No evil dirt doer in human history has been able to undo the promises of God.

No pandemic has been able to undo the promises of God.

There is nothing that has been able to thwart the promises of God.

He finds a way.

This is why he's so compelling.

He finds a way to come back out of the root system of what is underground.

There is more underneath the surface than what you and I can see.

This is why following Jesus is so awesome because you can lop me off from the top, but guess what?

What God has done in my life will always grow up from the bottom up.

And if the same is true for you too.

Zechariah picks up on this as well in Zechariah chapter 6.

Zechariah 6 · chapter mention

He says, And to say and say to him, Thus says the Lord of hosts, Behold the man whose name is the branch.

For he shall branch out from this place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord.

It is he shall he shall build the temple of the Lord and shall bear royal honor, and shall sit and rule on his throne, and there shall be a priest on his throne, and the council of peace shall be between him both.

So for Zachariah, he's not it's not just that he would he would do branchy types of things, it's that his name is a branch.

Behold, the one whose name is the branch.

He is coming forth, he is the Lord of hosts, and he's going to rebuild his temple.

Paul picks this up in Romans 15, and he refers to the root of Jesse.

And for Paul in Romans 15, uh he says that this has to do with God's hope for the Gentiles, that God is doing something new.

There's a branch that is shooting up, and it's doing something new.

It's growing in a direction we least expected, which is why it's so funny that the Working picture for Jesus in all these pictures is not necessarily a Christmas tree or a beautiful evergreen or this fully flourishing whatever.

Think of the most glorious tree, you know, that you can imagine.

It's a branch because it's this picture of God's going to grow up, but when he grows up, he's probably going to grow up from a place you didn't expect and in a direction you didn't expect.

And Zechariah is saying, listen, a branch is coming out and it's going to look different than you thought.

It's going to bear different fruit than you thought, but you better start paying attention because it's going to bear fruit for the nations.

And out of this branch is going to come righteousness and a new kind of rule.

A branch often takes a different direction.

And isn't it true that this is what it's like following Jesus?

How many of you have been shocked to see that the things that, the places you expect to see God at work in your life, oftentimes He shows up in all the unlikely places that you didn't expect to see Him at work in your life?

It's such a beautiful word that even earlier this year, I actually did something I'd never done before.

I went and got a tattoo.

You probably can't see it from there, but it's this picture of a stump.

Underneath the stump are is our root system.

And right on top of the stump is a little sprout that's coming up right from the stump.

And the reason that was so meaningful to me is because, again, in this this word picture was really the catalyst for this, but but looking back, when I look back even over the last several years of my life, the last several years of this church, I can see these moments in time, these markers in time where it looks like, oh my gosh, can anything good come from this kind of moment?

We've been through, every church goes through times and seasons where things get difficult or there's failings or mistakes and things happen and there's destruction and it looks like something got lopped off.

And it always brings us to the question: what good can come out of this?

Can anything good come out of this?

I remember just three years ago, guys, just three years ago, when we're all kind of doing this awkward time of trying to do church in the middle of a pandemic, and we're doing these church services online, which I just grated at my soul trying to preach to a camera every week.

And then when we finally could meet, we were meeting outside in a field, and it was just, it felt flimsy, it felt fragile, it felt like a shell of what it had been, especially in the face of all of the hopes, all of the desires, all of the even prophetic words and the promises from of old of things that God had encouraged us with as a church of this is what I want to do for you.

I want you to be a fruitful vineyard on a fertile hill.

Well, that's crazy because it feels very barren right now.

It feels like not a lot is going on.

And even when we get together, it feels like the scraps of our souls are trying to combine to just hold on to what you're doing.

But it was in the middle of those kinds of moments and those kinds of seasons where I just I begin to see over and over again God start to grow a branch.

He says, You don't see what I'm doing, but what I'm developing in you is not something that can be seen on the surface right now.

I'm growing something from the root system up.

You might not be able to see it right now, but I promise you, a branch is growing up and it will bear fruit and it will go in from a different direction.

It'll look different than you thought, but I haven't given up on what I said you would be.

I haven't given up and you said on what I said that this community would be.

I haven't given up on what I said the church across my world would be.

I have not given up on my brine.

I am growing something up from the root system.

Do you have eyes to see my word in my stump, that the seed is still in the stump?

And I believe this is such a word for us, especially in a time on earth where it is difficult to see.

The ones who will be able to perceive the coming of the Christ will be different than the ones who fall away or just walk away altogether.

The ones who perceive what God's doing are the ones looking for the stumps and saying, I can't wait to see what God grows from this place of desolation because Jesus is always about growing something up from the ground where everybody else sees only death.

And so what this does for me is it causes me to just lighten up a little bit.

It causes me to be a little less anxious when things aren't going my way.

When I have questions about how are we going to overcome this challenge or this problem or this thing in the lot in life or something as a family or you know, a health thing, or you know, when I when I think about the types of things that I'm facing over the years, because I've seen the faithfulness of God.

I've seen what he did in the coming of Christ the first time, and I see it again.

It causes me to just be settled into the fact that I can trust that God is committed to his word.

This is not about me trying to grow up in God.

It's about me trusting that God is going to grow something inside of me and through me and through us, whether or not I can see it right away or not.

And all I have to do is surrender and say, God, have your way, have your will in my life.

And I wonder if you guys have felt that in the landscape of your life.

I wonder if even today you walked in and your life has been ravaged by discouragement or despair.

And you're caught in that confusing middle, you're caught in that in-between spot.

And it's hard to know what to do, but I'm saying this is what separates those who wait on the Lord from those who don't.

It's the ability to perceive what is in the ground and that what God says about you, He will bring to fruition.

It may look different than you thought, it may feel different than you thought.

But God is committed to the root system of your life.

He can bring riches out of rubble.

In the in the the song that we sing every Christmas, and we'll probably start ramping this up in the next few weeks.

It's this beautiful song called O come O come Emmanuel.

And it's this beautiful picture of longing.

It's a beautiful picture of the waiting for God, of the longing, the desire for Emmanuel God with us.

And the third verse, which we often don't get to because we sing the verses we like better.

You know how we do that with him sometimes?

We sing just a couple verses, and one of the other verses, I think it's the third verse, it says this says, Oh come, thou rod of the rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan's tyranny, and from depths of hell thy people save, and give them victory over the grave.

Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

First line, O come thou rod of Jesse.

This is what we're talking about.

The rod of Jesse is the branch of Jesse.

The rod of Jesse is that resilient branch that didn't even get cut off at David.

It even backed up a generation.

It's almost like they got it so bad that it couldn't just get cut, you know, moving forward.

Like he's got to back up even one more generation.

He's got to back up to David's father.

That's how bad they had screwed it up.

Let's go back to Jesse.

We're gonna cut it off there, but from the root of Jesse will come a branch, and he will rule.

He will rule with righteousness, he will rule with justice, and there will be fruit that comes up from the stump and from this root system.

Oh, come, thou rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan's tyranny, from depths of how thy people save, and give them victory over the grave.

Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel, shall come to thee, O Israel.

Amen.

I'm gonna Josh come up.

We're just gonna spend some time praying into this together.

Just around the room, would you just close your eyes with me?

I'm just gonna invite the Holy Spirit to come and begin speaking to us today.

Lord, we thank you for this image, God.

We thank you for this picture that you've given us.

We thank you, Holy Spirit, that you've invited us back into the hope of Jesus, of hope, the hope that the people of God waited for for hundreds of years, and the hope that we still wait to see the fullness of.

And today, God, as we just hold the space together across the room, God, I just pray that you would show us the parts of our life that maybe we have walked away from, the parts of our life that just looked like no good thing can come from this.

It looks like something has been cut off.

I just pray for courage right now and comfort, Lord God, to just re-examine some of the places, God, that just look like they have been cut short in our lives, and for us to just hold those before you in your presence now.

God, for every dream that has been that it looks like it's gone to the ground to die.

God, every hope that we had maybe even decades ago of where we would be by X amount of time, by this point in our lives, and it looks different from that.

God, I thank you for the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

God, I thank you for every prayer that was prayed decades ago that we've even forgotten about.

The fervency of our youth, the zeal of our youth, Lord God, the zeal to see your power in our lives, the zeal to see the loss come home, the zeal to see your kingdom made manifest, and then somehow maybe some of those prayers were buried over time, buried under the rubble.

I thank you, God, for every seed of those prayers, God.

And I can see those seeds in the ground right now.

I see those seeds all across this crowd, all across the room, the seeds of dreams, the seeds of hopes, the seeds of desire, the seeds of longing.

And I thank you, God, that you see these seeds because they're seeds that were born of you.

They were born of the Spirit.

And I thank you that today and moving forward, God, your desires that we do not give up on the seeds of your promises, the seeds of our prayers.

But we know that you're holding them, Lord God.

I thank you, Lord Jesus, that you hold us, God.

Hold us in the now and the not yet.

Hold us in the in-between.

I thank you across through my heart today.

You are holding like clay in the hands of a potter.

You are holding, you are holding tightly, God.

And I speak to every one of those seeds and desires and prayers, and I say, You are blessed in Jesus' name.

You are blessed in Jesus' name.

The dreams that we've forgotten about, the prayers that we've forgotten about, the things that we've walked away from.

I thank you, God, for the hope and the work and the words, Lord God, that you've deposited over the course of our lives, and we bless every single one in Jesus' name.

And we hold them before you, Lord God.

We say, Jesus, in our lives, would you spring up like a branch?

Would you spring up like a branch to make something beautiful, to make something fruitful, to make something, Lord God, that that brings you glory, the glory of your kingdom, the glory of your rule and your reign.

We thank you, Lord Jesus.

We thank you.

This is who you are, God.

As we enter into this Advent time, this time of waiting, this time of anticipation, Lord God, we pray for a deeper revelation of your promises.

We pray for a deeper revelation of you as this shoots springing up from the from the stump of Jesse, Lord God.

God, that it affects us in our spirits, it affects us in our souls.

We say, let it be, Lord God, let it come, let it shape us and mold us to anticipate you, God, to fill us with hope.

And we thank you, Lord God.

In every place of fear, if there's any fear in this room of even re-examining our lives, I thank you, Lord Jesus, that perfect love casts out fear.

This isn't about how good we can get it.

This is about how good you are and how faithful you are to your promises, God.

So I thank you.

I thank you to release us of striving and pressure to make something, but a great receiving of the gift of who you are, the God who springs up from the ground.

We bless you, Jesus.

We bless your life in this place.

Let your life move out, God.

Let your life move out.

God, I pray for the days ahead that your life would move out, Lord God.

Would you surprise us with what you spring up from the ground, God?

Surprise us with what you spring up from the ground, Lord Jesus.

Let it catch us all off guard.

Oh my God, I didn't know a branch could go that direction.

I wasn't expecting that.

I thank you.

That's exactly what you do, Lord God.

You grow something up in our lives in a way we least expect it.

I thank you for beautiful surprises.

Surprise us with joy.

Surprise us with hope, Lord God.

Surprise us with faith to see your work made manifest in our lives, Lord God, for the good of the world and for our good and for your glory, Jesus.

We thank you to spring up in new and surprising ways, God.

We love you, Jesus.

We love you, God.

And Jesus, we bless your name in this place.

We bless the name of Jesus.

The righteous branch.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.