Sermon - Matt Terhune | Finding Hope in the Midst of Struggles: A Journey Through Exodus

Welcome to the Avenue Community Church's podcast. We are a family of Christ

followers seeking shalom in Memphis.

We pray that you are encouraged by today's message. As you listen,

may the word of God shape you to be more like him.

I got family here that's never heard me do this before. And so what I really

need you to do, we got to take care of each other, right?

I need no matter what the sermon is, I need you to pretend it's the best sermon

you ever heard in your life.

Thank you. All right.

So having said that, I'm going to start us off in a good place.

Last night, Tony Allen's number was retired at the Grizzlies game.

How many of you have always lived in Memphis?

How many of you moved to Memphis after growing up somewhere else? Okay.

So just knowing the age of this congregation, there are some of you who may

not know who Tony Allen is, and that's just fine. And so he got his number retired last night.

And one of the reasons you may not know who he is is he's not like the best

player that ever played for the Grizzlies.

He was very much like a cog in the machine, but he was, you know,

he was never an all-star.

He was famously first team, all defensive team.

But he was at the heart of a group of players that really redefined and put

their stamp on the Grizzlies and on the city in a way that no one had done before.

And really made this, you know, it was the time when the team became part of

the city, part of the fabric of the city.

And those of you that didn't grow up in Memphis may know this,

but those of you who've grown up in Memphis, I'm third generation.

So we go back to the early 1900s.

And what you would know is, is that Memphis has famously always had a little

bit of an inferiority complex.

Some of that for good reason, because this is often a very hard and unjust city

to live in. And some of it just because we're not rich.

We don't have a lot of pretty mountains. You know, we've got a great river,

but it is, this is a muddy, messy place, right?

And those of us who live here know that. Now we're allowed to say it,

but if you know, like your family, we're allowed to say it to each other.

Don't be saying it to us. Okay.

So it's great when someone comes in from the outside, Tony Allen grew up in

Chicago, played for Boston, won a championship, came here and became part of this team.

And he was, his story is very much like Memphis. He didn't grow up with anything.

He didn't have a lot of the, he didn't have any advantages. He had to grow up hard.

He had to make a lot of mistakes to get to where he was, but he made it.

And when he got here, He said, what I realized was I was a blue-collar guy,

and this is a blue-collar city.

And I've had to work for everything I've got. And Memphis has had to work for

everything that we've got.

And so after one of the games, they came back and won a game they weren't supposed

to. And the reporter comes over to him for the post-game interview.

And he says, hey, what happened tonight? What's the secret?

And he said, man, in a Tony Allen fashion, if you don't know,

you just never know what's coming.

Kind of like me. You never know what's coming out next. You can never predict.

And he said, all heart, grit and grind. That's who we are.

And in that moment, he crystallized the way a city saw itself,

but he reframed the negativity into a positive. We may have it hard. We may have to struggle.

We may have to grind it out, but that's who we are. It's what makes us who we are.

And so some of the quotes from last night that stuck out to me were one person

said it was his scars from life that made him who he was.

Anybody in here feel that this morning?

They said that his words took a fractured city, brought it a little more together.

And then they said, Memphis is a real city full of real people who work for everything they got.

So what he did was he took a story that we had told ourselves of our inferiority,

of our struggle, of our dirtiness, of our undesirability, of our,

we can't compare to other places. And he changed that narrative.

And he said, actually, the things that make us weak are the things that make us strong.

That everything we've been through has pulled us together in a way,

and it's forced us to pull together in a way, and it's forced us to take care

of each other in a way and overcome things in a way that we wouldn't have to

if we had everything handed to us.

It's what makes us special. We're all heart. We're grit and grind.

Mike Conley famously said, if you love this city, it will love you back.

Tony Allen talked about when he came here, he got to be himself.

No one asked him to be anything different. They just helped him be the best version of himself.

And so you're thinking, that is really cool, Matt.

And I've got to counteract like all the warriors talk we get up here.

So part of that was the goal.

But you may be wondering, so why am I talking about this this morning?

And the reason I am is because the story you tell yourself about where you live

and how you live and what's going on in your life matters.

How you frame the things you're experiencing matters.

When we talk about in the movies, representation matters. That's the reason it matters.

It's because we need to see ourselves in the possibilities to see the potential

of who we can be and who we are.

And we need to reframe our story in a way that makes sense to us so that we

can get through the things we need to get through.

And so the reason I'm talking about it this morning is, as an elder,

one of the really awesome things about being an elder in this church is I get

your shepherding forms.

And then it'll ask kind of what's going on and what can we be praying for.

And it is an honor and a blessing to receive that and to have someone trust

me with what's going on in their life.

As we share meals, as we meet with people, as we have conversations,

as we just walk people come forward.

Watch people come forward as Tim will create a time for prayer.

And as you see people come forward and pray, and you'll see their shoulders heaving.

And so what I know from all these different places is I know that when I look

around this room, and I won't call any names, there are people who are really going through a light.

There are people who have been through a light.

There are people who have lost things that they can never get back.

There are people who are in the middle of wondering what's going to happen tomorrow,

I could walk you through health issues,

fertility issues, family conflict, loneliness, mental health,

finances, jobs, you name it.

We can check that box in this congregation.

So what are we talking about this morning? What I want to do is,

so like when Grace and I went to see ages ago, Saving Private Ryan, I haven't seen it.

So what you knew then was Saving Private Ryan was a story about them saving

Private Ryan, oddly, and that Tom Hanks was in it.

So it's Tom Hanks, right? Forrest Gump. This is going to be fun, right?

It's going to be a cool movie about them saving one of these brothers that's

the only one that survived, and it's going to be great.

So Grace and I have a couple go with us, and we get our big bucket of popcorn,

and we get our coats, and we sit down, and the movie starts to roll.

And if you know Private Ryan, the first 17 minutes is literally everything but

the smells of going to war.

People are getting blown to pieces. Legs are flying, everything.

And we're just, we walked in expecting like, ha-ha, fun and sweet.

And we're glued to the thing. And so what you expect about a story,

what you think is going to happen, what you hope is going to happen,

matters about how you experience the actual things that happen.

And this is going to be a little different for me this morning because for me,

this becomes personal because we have been praying for several very specific

things in this season of our life.

And one of the things we've been doing at the Avenue is it's not just that we're,

we don't want to have just the right knowledge about what's going on in our lives.

We also want to have the experience.

And so what I'm about to do is I want to give you a biblical,

hopefully biblical framework of how we're going to reframe this story.

But it's also going to be deeply personal for me. This is how the Spirit is

dealing with me in this season.

What I don't want you to hear me do is think that I'm comparing to whatever

we're doing to whatever you're doing.

We're not here to try to rank who's going through the hardest time or anything.

Whatever you're dealing with is your thing. It's what God's given you.

And so please don't hear at any point if I say something that I'm either minimizing

something or elevating something or I'm not here to judge.

I'm here to try to tell you what I think God's, what the Holy Spirit's been

doing with me in this season, and then I'm hoping that it will be both blipical and helpful for you.

And when I think about experience, so like if you've ever sat down on a meal

with me and we've started talking about favorite restaurants,

what you might have heard me say is the words petals of a peony.

And so I got to go back in the day with the Funkhousers in Chengdu.

They probably don't even remember this, but they took me to a restaurant there

and I thought it was the coolest experience of my life.

He's ordering in Chinese and like they're bringing out all this food and it's

just this great environment, the smells and just, it was awesome, right?

So, so Petals of Peony is a Sichuanese restaurant.

So it is fiery red hot and it will make your temples melt and like you're sweating

and you don't feel good the next morning, but man, it is awesome food.

But see, the problem is, is I can tell you about it and I can explain it to

you. I could give you a recipe. I could show you pictures.

Other people could tell you about it. but until you've tasted it,

you don't know what it is.

And so what I want us to do this morning is I want you to know that I'm both

telling you the things I've read, and I'm going to try and add in a little bit

of what I've experienced.

So it's going to be a little bit different for me this morning.

So we're going to start. The text we read was from Exodus.

So the problem that Israel was facing was that as Joseph died and they had that

couple of hundred years where the people of Israel are growing and they're getting

stronger and they're multiplying and they're doing exactly the thing God told them to do.

If you look at the text, it says they were fruitful and they were multiplying.

So they were filling out this cultural mandate. They were growing as a people.

And Pharaoh got nervous because he's like, man, if we don't watch it,

Israel could be a problem for us.

So we better do something about it. So what they began to do was they began to enslave the people.

And so you look at chapter 1, 13 and 14, it says, so the Egyptians came to dread

the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly.

They made their lives bitter with hard labor and brick and mortar and with all

kinds of work in the fields.

In all their hard labor, the Egyptians used them ruthlessly.

So they were an enslaved people.

And in that verse, if you look at the original language, there's five times where it says serving.

It's just different ways of saying the word serving. And they're serving,

they served, and it was bitter, and they served.

And so they had been enslaved by the Egyptians.

And so that's where this story begins.

I want to ask this morning a couple of questions. As you think about,

and we can call it struggling, we can call it suffering, whatever words you

want to put on where you are in your life right now, or what you've experienced before,

I want us to think about the story that we've told ourselves about that,

and I want us to think about what this story of Exodus.

So if you flip to the end of the story, and you see Israel coming into the Holy

Land, you see God in Deuteronomy 6.

There's some really famous verses

there in Deuteronomy 6, but one of the things he says is, in that day,

one, you're going to be tempted to forget how you got here, and two,

when your children ask you, what is the meaning of these things that we're doing?

Tell them this story, and it's the story of Exodus.

So God said that I want you to communicate. I want you to give your children

a story that makes sense of the life that you are now living.

And so I want us to look this morning at just a couple of things that I feel

like the Spirit's been showing me.

This is a text I have lived in for months, and hopefully it will be encouraging and helpful for you.

So I want to look at, well, one other disclaimer.

I'm going to raise questions I'm not going to answer. And if you're really thoughtful

and you're listening, you're going to think of questions that I didn't raise

that I'm still not going to answer, and you're going to be frustrated about that.

And I'm not presenting anything that I'm about to say as Matt's about to write

his book on the seven steps to happy living. I don't believe that stuff.

I'm not about to tell you that I've got the answer to making you feel better

about what you're going through. I might. It's not up to me.

But I do want to walk you through this and help you think about how you want

to perceive the story that you're in.

So let's look at three things. Look at the story of our waiting,

the story of our working, and the story of our worth.

So first, the story of our waiting. What you need to know is everyone in this

story did not know how it was going to end, right?

It happens really quickly over a very short span of chapters,

but there's a long period of time covered in that information.

So like when you watch a movie and you watch Rocky, or if you're my age,

you watch Rocky and then you watch Creed.

But if you've only seen Creed, what you know is there's the workout montage, right?

He gets in shape in like two minutes. He runs up some stairs.

He lifts weights. He does some really cool jump rope. When I was in high school,

I learned to jump rope like Rocky, you know, with the skips and the crossing

and he gets in shape super quick. It's a montage.

None of this happened by montage. They lived every day of it.

They woke up every morning making bricks in the hot sun. I've been blessed to get to go to Egypt.

And the funniest thing about Egypt is you'll watch, and everybody moves different

than they move in Memphis.

And we should move like this. You'll see them all doing like this and moving

to certain sides of the streets. And they have learned to walk wherever the shade is.

And these people woke up every morning working in the heat, making bricks, enslaved.

So what I want us to look at when I think of the story of our waiting is I want

us to think about waiting faithfully, waiting actively, and waiting hopefully.

So what does it mean to wait faithfully? If we look at the midwives in 1,

15 through 22, what we find out is that Pharaoh is so nervous,

he said, you're going to kill all the male children.

He takes the midwives and he says, whenever it's a boy, you're going to throw

them in the river. You're going to kill them.

And so the midwives are faced with the decision, do we obey a Pharaoh or what do we do?

And it says that they feared God and they kept the babies alive.

So Pharaoh calls them in and they're like, hey, you know, it happened so fast.

Like we couldn't, what are we going to do, Pharaoh?

But you realize that here's Pharaoh and even more so like we can protest and we can do stuff.

But this was not a time where you like disobeyed Pharaoh.

So they're taking their own lives in their own hands. They're taking this risk

because in the end, even though in their suffering, they still feared God more

than they feared Pharaoh. Oh, yeah.

I'm guessing and I have experienced that there are times in my life where things

have happened and it's made me kind of question, like, I don't know,

God, like, do you really,

like, you say this, but my experience isn't doing what you're telling me.

Is this all, or the world's telling me a story and it's really hard to hang

on to your story because this story is so powerful. It's everywhere.

Everyone tells me I'm crazy to believe this and to hang on to you.

And this is a time where the midwives were faced with a dilemma,

and it says they feared God, and they acted on that.

So one of the questions I would ask you is, is your struggle telling you that

God's not there or that he can't do anything about it?

Is he telling you that your whole faith doesn't make sense because of this thing you're experiencing?

So we need to wait faithfully. Hold on to what you know is true.

We need to wait actively. This is one of Grace's favorite phrases. I love this.

We think of waiting as just like sitting in a chair. I'm waiting on the pizza.

When are they going to get here?

We're waiting actively. There are things that we can still do in the waiting.

So the midwives fear God. They did what they could.

There's two phrases we use a lot. We talk about doing the next right thing.

Very rarely in my life can I see how something's going to end.

But I can usually see what's right in front of me, the thing that I need to do next.

And it's really hard when you're in the middle of a really trying season and

you can't see the end and you can only see the next step because there's a part

of you that says, I don't even have the energy for the next step.

I don't think I can get out of bed this morning. I don't think that I can speak to this person.

I can't answer this phone call. I can't show up to this thing. I can't, I'm done.

This is years of waking up, making bricks in the hot sun.

But what they did, was they did the next right thing. What could they do?

They could disobey Pharaoh. They didn't know what was happening next.

They don't know that we're going to be talking about them thousands of years

later, talking about them as heroes.

They're actually named where Pharaoh is at. So that's something to take into

consideration because they would have been considered like the lowest,

weakest part of their culture because as midwives, they would have been childless.

And so they would have been like on the outside.

And yet they're the heroes of the story. It's a whole nother sermon.

And then we talk about choosing our heart. So often in life,

we come to a place where both paths forward are hard.

No matter what choice you make, it's hard.

I'll use a dumb example just to keep us out of the weeds.

But if you, you know, going back to Creed and getting in shade,

like getting up in the morning and learning how to do all the crazy jump roping

and running up the stairs in Philadelphia like Rocky is hard work.

You know what else is hard? Having health problems.

So I can choose to deal with it or I can just choose to deal with it later.

But either path forward is going to be hard. yeah,

they're choosing a hard path. Disobeying Pharaoh is a hard path,

but also living with the knowledge that you had gone against your people and

that you had gone against God would have been hard.

They had no good, there was no easy button. There was no like,

hey, if we think about this long enough, we can come up with another plan. This was it.

And so for me, and I'm assuming some of you will be this way, I tend to get stuck.

I get to a point where I'm like, I don't know what the next thing is to do.

I'm not quite sure what I ought to do. And I just don't know if I have the energy for it.

And you know what's really easy to do is sit and scroll on my phone or,

you know, like watch another game or, which is not altogether wrong, right?

I mean, like somebody's clapping for that.

All right. So we're going to wait faithfully. We wait actively. We wait hopefully.

It doesn't look like hope. Chapter two, one through four, we see Moses' mom

hides Moses until she can't hide him any longer.

And then we tell this story like we're doing it at vacation Bible school in cartoons.

She puts him in a basket and puts him in the river and he floats and she sends

her daughter to watch and see where he winds up.

And that sounds so cute and so charming. And can you imagine putting your baby in a basket,

being so hopeless and having no other choice to give your child life than to

put them in a basket and hope that someone else rescues them?

And yet, it's an act of hope.

She has come to the end of every option God has given her.

And maybe she knew they were up the river and that that's where the basket was

going to float. which she probably

did, but she has no idea how Pharaoh's daughters are going to react.

She is now in the hands of someone else. And so the mental image that we've

been carrying is that we're taking this thing that we're praying for,

that we feel like, done all I can, nothing left to do.

I don't see any other options. And we have symbolically put it in this basket

that we've said to God, here's this thing.

Will you float it wherever it needs to go?

Will you pull it out of the water when it's time? Will you take care of this

thing and do whatever it is you've got to do?

Will you do that for us? I can't promise you.

I don't know, maybe some other mom put her kid in the basket and it wasn't Moses. We don't know.

I'm not telling you that this is a recipe. I'm just saying that this is where

we are with this particular thing.

We have put it in the basket and we are putting it in the river and asking God to bless it.

And so I can imagine that in this moment, she was wondering, did God even care?

How did he bring her to this place? How did she bring Moses to this place?

What was going on? Do you feel like sometimes in whatever's going on that God

doesn't see you or God doesn't care?

I want to point out is, is we know the end of this story and we know that Moses

comes back and he rescues his people.

And it's just the coziest, warmest thing in the world, right?

Moses, you know, like, this is great.

When she put that baby in the river, it was 80 years before he comes back.

80 years of making bricks, of waking up in the heat, of being enslaved.

So Israel is going through this season where there is no visual evidence that

God is doing anything, and yet God was moving in ways they didn't know,

in ways they couldn't understand that would make no sense if God said,

came down 80 years, right?

Hey, I just want y'all to know, I know you're enslaved, but I just had this

woman put her baby in the water and Pharaoh's daughter rescued her,

So everything's going to be great.

What? And then he's going to kill someone, run to the desert and get married

and have kids and be a shepherd for 40 years.

So see, everything's going to be great. Right.

And then I'm going to appear in a burning bush. And so what I'm saying is God

could be moving in ways you don't know.

In ways that if he told you, wouldn't make sense to you. Yeah. Right.

Wait faithfully, we wait actively, we wait hopefully.

So what's the story of our working? Go to Exodus 3, 10 through 12.

So Moses goes to the burning bush and he says, who am I that I should go to

Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?

Now, as our culture, we have been trained when someone says,

who am I? I don't know. Can I?

What's our first instinct? We're going to build your self-esteem.

I'm going to tell you how good you got this. You can do it. And that's good, right?

Except that what God was asking Moses to do, he couldn't do on his own period, no matter what.

And so God says, instead of the pep talk, he said, I'll be with you.

And then later, my favorite thing in the whole story is God says,

what am I going to say? And he says, did I make your mouth. God's,

you know, keeping it real with Moses.

So the ultimate success of our work is not rooted in our competence, but in God's presence.

So I'm guessing, because I felt this, that maybe this morning you walked in

feeling overwhelmed. You didn't even know if you wanted to be here.

And you feel like you can't do whatever God's put in front of you.

You don't want to do what God's put in front of you. You don't know if you're

going to make it. And in the end, you're saying, who am I that you would give me this?

Why have you done this to me? Why am I carrying this?

And I want to be really careful to say that what you do and who you are matters.

I am saying, though, that ultimately the success of who you are and what you do is in God's hands.

And it's really ironic if you look through the biblical story,

not every person Jesus talked to came to faith.

A lot of them heard what he had to say and they turned around and walked away.

Was Jesus incompetent? Did he not do a good enough job?

Did he circle back to the disciples and go, man, I got to think about my message?

Golly, that dude walked away. Maybe I shouldn't ask for some.

Next time I'll tell him to give 50%, not 100%.

The story I've been holding on

to is Luke 5, 4, and 5, where the disciples have been fishing all night.

And Jesus shows up, and he says, cast your nets.

And they're like, we've been fishing all night. We've caught nothing.

But because you asked me, I'll cast them one more time. And you know the story.

It was more than they could pull into the boat.

And so what Jesus was telling them is, I'm sending you out as disciples with

this message. and ultimately, you know how to fish.

Like some nights they went out and fish and they just caught fish,

right? Jesus didn't have to show up and put fish in the night.

But in this time, he gave them in abundance and he said, this is what my presence looks like.

When I give you something and I'm present with you in it, this is what it feels like.

I will take care of you. I will provide.

And so the message that I've been pulling out of that is, is I don't know what

day God's answering this prayer.

I don't know if it is a day that he's answering this prayer.

I just know he told me he'd be with me in it. And he told me to get up every morning and cast my net.

So when I think about what my work looks like, of what he's given me to do,

I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to seek him and I'm going

to do the things that I can control.

I'm going to wait actively, right? And I'm going to wait faithfully and I'm

going to wait hopefully and I'm going to work as if God is about to do something in it.

And like Daniel said, like, if I go in there and I come back out, God was with me.

But if I was at the Shadrach, Meshach, one of the four said,

if I don't, God's still God.

Now, I'm understanding because I know people in this room that you've lost something

you can't get back. And I'm not making light of that.

And I'm not saying you should feel great about that. Right.

I'm just saying this is the promise that God's given us. and we'll get to how

that works out here in just a second.

Third, if we think about our waiting and our working, what is the story we're

telling about our worth?

Because in these moments, what we can really feel is worthless.

Nobody cares. Nobody sees me. Why is this happening?

Will anyone else do anything to help me because I feel completely alone right

now and I don't feel worth it?

Or maybe, maybe you're getting unbelievable blessings and you're scared to death

that the rug's going to get pulled out of you because you don't think you deserve them.

You can't believe God's blessed you in this way because you know how some other people are struggling.

And so I want to tell you a couple of things. I want to tell you that it's okay

to groan, and I'm going to tell you that God cares, and I want to tell you that God rescues.

So the story of our worth in what we read a minute ago, 2.23,

during that long period, the king of Egypt died.

The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out in their cry for help

because of their slavery went up to God and God heard their groaning and he

remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.

So God looked on the Israelites and this is a terrible word. It says concern.

He was concerned about them. What it says is, is he knew them and he knew them

in the way that when you see your child struggle, you know them.

You're present in it. When that baby cries, when something's going on,

when it's a family member, when someone you love so deeply and you know the

hurt they're experiencing, he wasn't concerned like, hope that works out.

Let me know what that test result is. He was in it.

He was there. He was with him. He remembered his covenant, the promise that

he had made, and he was beginning to act in it.

So first, do you know that you can grow?

Because there's so much of what we've grown up in, especially in the South,

where all things work together for good for those who love him according to his birth?

Like, well, yeah, but what about when they don't? Right, yeah.

Trained that to complain or to groan is not okay.

Christians don't groan. We just buck up, man. We're stoic. Bring it on.

You know, Forrest Gump, he's on the mast. Like, is this a storm?

We don't have to be that, people. We're told that they groaned and they cried

out and God didn't go, stop your whining and suck it up. He said, I hear you.

Because what we've unlearned is the language of lament.

And lament is an affirmation of who God is, of his goodness, of his shalom.

When that shalom is broken, it would be crazy if we just acted like everything was okay.

What kind of people are we to look on someone else's suffering and act like

it doesn't matter or act like, hey, it's going to be all right.

God's got you. That's crazy talk.

Real talk is to go to God and go, why is this? The Psalms are full of this.

Jesus cried out from the cross, where are you?

Because he's supposed to be there. He promised us. All through the Psalms,

David says, I know you're there.

I know you believe it, but wait, how come?

There's a whole book called Lamentations.

It's an affirmation of God's goodness for you to go to God and say,

hey, this doesn't make sense to me because you said that we wouldn't go hungry

and you said you would heal the sick and you said you would bring justice.

And when we go to God and say, where is it? It's an affirmation of who he is

and his character. And it shows that we truly believe and understand who he is.

And so it's okay for us to go to God and say, I'm struggling.

I don't get this. It's okay to groan.

So can I just give you permission to groan?

We don't want to do it all the time. And we don't want to be like sad sack Presbyterian

church, but like there's a victory at the end of this, right?

But it's okay if we're honest with each other and say, I'm struggling,

I don't understand this.

Second, God cares because what he tells us here is he saw, he knew,

he remembered, and he's acting.

So God hears your cry, he cares about it, he sees you, you are important,

you have worth, you're made in his image.

And no matter what anybody else tells you, no matter what the world wants to

tell you, you don't have to get up every day and reinvent yourself.

God's already made you who you are. And your struggle is to know the name that

he's given you, the reality that he's given you.

We're told that one day you will stand before God and he will say the name that only he and I know.

He's made you who you are. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

Going to bring it all home. The story of our waiting, the story of our working,

and the story of our worth comes together in the Passover.

Because what we find out is the only way Israel is going to get to leave Egypt

is when God tears down every idol of Egyptian culture.

When you look at the plagues, go do this sometime, every plague is attacking

a God that Egypt held up as primary within their culture.

And so he's saying, I'm tearing it all down because I'm the one true God.

And the only way you're going to leave, the only way you're going to survive

is you're gonna take a perfect lamb and you're gonna kill it and you're gonna

put the blood on the doorpost and the Holy Spirit is gonna come and he's gonna pass over your house.

So he's made a way for us. So he's rescued us.

He loves you. He loves you to the point that he took his perfect lamb,

the son, and he put him on a cross and left him there to die.

And he has taken your sins. He has taken your burdens. He has taken your struggles.

He took them to the cross.

He paid the price for you. and that is how that you know that all these things are true.

You may not get them in the here and now, but he's told you that he will make

it all new. So I want to end like this.

I can't tell you the why of your suffering. I can't tell you why you're going

through what you're going through.

And I darn sure don't want to try and put a neat bow on it and say,

hey, it's all going to work out in and you're going to look back and you're

going to understand it's all going to be worth it.

Because I don't know that. But what I do know is that God has promised that

he will be with you in it, that he will walk with you in it,

and that one day we will see it, one day we will experience.

And so I wanna close, we've been in Romans and this is just so amazing to think

this is where we've been and to connect it to this story.

I want you to tell yourself is, the story that I hope you'll wrestle with,

that's a better way to put it, wrestle with this story, that God's with you

in your wedding, He's with you in your working, and He holds you of inestimable wealth.

I didn't even say that word right. It's so big.

You're His treasured possession.

Romans 8.18, I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing

with the glory that will be revealed in us.

The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice,

but by the will of the one who subjected it, in order that the creation itself

will be liberated from its bondage

to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning, is in pains of childbirth

right up to the present time.

Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit,

groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons.

Do you hear the language? We groan. God sends us the first fruits.

We don't get the whole thing, but we get the first fruits. And what does it

tell us? That that baby in the water is getting adopted as a son.

We're adopted as sons, the redemption of our bodies, for in this hope we were

saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all.

Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not have,

we wait for it patiently.

In the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness, we don't know what we ought

to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes with us and groans.

The Spirit Himself groans for you.

Because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

That's the message of your worth. The Holy Spirit Himself right now is groaning

for you and interceding for you in ways you do not know, you may not see,

you may I don't understand, but he's there.

So that's the story that we need to wrestle with as we try to figure out what

God's doing in our lives and what he's doing in us as a church.

And I'll close with some prayer.

Lord, we're thankful for this story. We're thankful for the assurance that you love us.

Lord, it's one thing for us to talk about it and to know it and to read it,

and we can write it all down and think about it factually, get it organized

and systemized. but Lord, we need to experience it. We want to taste it.

We want to taste the reality of your life for us and your presence.

So we pray that you would give that to us this morning.