What Do You Do When Life Does What It Does?

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

This has never happened before.

You get done teaching at a staff meeting, and three elders show up, and you're I'm like, oh, I'm I'm in trouble.

I'm in trouble.

And they're like, can you come back on Saturday?

And I'm like, I I think so.

I think so.

And so I called my wife, and we were like, all right, we we gotta do this.

And just to even be and experience the worship, experience the presence.

I want you to know, friends, not very many people know what it's like and what you're walking through, but I can honestly say I do.

In 2018, uh the church of my dreams, I was kind of the next lead pastor at a massive church in Chicagoland called Willow Creek, and it just all started to crumble.

Stories in the paper, allegations, and it really just kind of rocked me at my center.

And if we're honest, it's probably rocked you.

And you really have to ask yourself, what do you do when life does what it does?

What do you do?

When life like punches you in the gut and you didn't see it, when pain shows up at your doorstep, what do you do when life doesn't make sense?

What do you do when something happens that you just can't put a bow on it?

What do you do?

And you all are at the four-month mark.

I was talking to Mark Job, and Mark said, Hey, where were you, Steve, at the four-month mark?

And I was like, I was in a U-Haul with Mr.

Biscuits, my dog.

We were leaving Chicago and moving literally to the desert.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's where I was.

And I don't know about you, but you have these moments sometime where all of a sudden something happens.

And the past comes and is revealed.

And all of a sudden the collateral damage.

And we're left picking up the pieces.

And I'll tell you, this is a defining moment for your faith.

This is a defining moment for your relationship with God.

I mean, it's amazing because while I'm driving to the desert, leaving Chicagoland at my four-month mark, I'm trying to figure out in the scriptures is there anybody else who's gone through something?

Something that we're all walking through.

I thought of this man named Joseph.

And many of you know Joseph, he was given this incredible robe, brightly colored.

He walks up to all of his older brothers and says, Y'all are gonna bow down to me?

And they're like, Who is this kid?

17-year-old.

And so what do the brothers do?

They rip the jacket, they throw him in a pit, they dip the jacket, robe, and blood, they send him off and sell him into slavery from a pit.

He ends up finding himself in slavery.

And while he is there, he rises to power because God's hand is on him.

And he rises to power in the second most powerful person in Potiphar's house.

And he's leading and directing and being used.

And what's incredible about this time is Potiphar's wife is looking at him, and all of a sudden, this this kind of interaction happens where she wants to be with him, and he ends up just running out, and she's holding his robe.

And I just at this point wonder if Joseph was like, I'm done wearing robes.

It's not it's not working out for me.

This is not a good thing.

But what happens is Potiphar throws him into prison.

And he's there, scholars will say, almost a decade.

And he's interpreting dreams, he's still continuing to be faithful.

He's gone from a pit to Potiphar's house to prison.

And one of the dreams that he interprets comes true.

And this guy gets freed from jail and he ends up going to Pharaoh's kind of house, and Pharaoh ends up having these dreams that he can't seem to interpret.

So he calls all the people, wisest people, and here's what happens: nobody can interpret them.

And then the guy from prison goes, When I was in the clink, I met someone, and that guy was able to interpret my dream.

And Pharaoh's like, get him here.

And what ends up happening?

Joseph shows up, stayed faithful, and he interprets the dream, and Pharaoh can see that God's hand is on him so much so that Pharaoh says, You are going to have all the power in Egypt.

I will only be above you.

And which is wild.

It's wild in this whole kind of season.

Is something ends up happening where for seven years there is profound blessing, and then for seven years there's a profound famine.

And in that famine, those older brothers come back and they kneel before their brother.

He thought it was going to be interpreted this way.

And he had to go through all of these moments of crisis and these stages of faith and to see it actually be fulfilled.

What's wild is before all of this dream and seven and fourteen years kind of comes and is unfolded, Joseph gets married.

I want you to see this.

In Genesis 41, verse 50, it says this before the years of famine came, two sons were born to Joseph by Asenith, daughter of Potipharra.

Genesis 41:50

If you're ever reading publicly, you don't know how to say a verse, just read it quickly and with authority and move on.

Potiphirah, priest of An.

Joseph named his firstborn Manasseh and said, It is because God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father's household.

The second son he named Ephraim and said, It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of suffering.

I don't know what your name means, but my name means crowned one.

My parents didn't name me Manasseh, which means you made me, God, forget about my family and all of my household.

Can you imagine just looking at a kid and every day going, Thanks be to God, you made me forget about my family?

Thanks be to God.

But I think there's something really, really powerful because for me, there was something at which Joseph had, and he was able to actually embody not just when life was up and to the right, but when it was messy and did go the way that we thought it would go.

And this is what I want to talk about today.

We're gonna jump to the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, verse 13.

1 Thessalonians 4:13

Many of you know this passage, but Paul's writing to this church in Thessalonica, and he says, brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind who have no hope.

Do you understand that we are different from every other faith?

Because we are people who can grieve, but we don't just grieve on its own.

We're people who can grieve with hope.

And you have to ask yourself, grieve with hope?

But how?

How do we be the kind of people that can actually honor and name and break down and fall to our knees and repent?

How can we be the kind of people who can just find ourselves going, man, God, Cindy, I just it breaks my heart for what she had to walk through.

And how do we name that and own that?

And at the same time not lose hope.

This is hard.

Because I think for some of us, we're so good to just bypass any sense of cognitive dissonance, but this is when our faith gets transformed.

It's when you have to live in this moment where you're like, God, it doesn't make sense.

I learned some of the most profound spiritual, theological, formational understandings of Jesus from someone, and that someone hurt me.

So what do we do?

How do we lean into that?

And Paul is trying to say, we as Christ's followers, we do it differently.

We feel it, we grieve.

And here's my definition for grieve: you honor what comes up when change shows up.

When there's change, you gotta honor that feeling.

It's different, it's not the way we thought it was gonna be.

You gotta honor that feeling and honor the result of what led to that change, but you also, as a Christ follower, have to do it with hope.

Hope.

Did you know that in the Roman culture, hope was seen as a form of mental illness?

In the early grammar school years, the elementary kids would write down some stuff, almost imagining if this bad thing happened to me, how would I react?

And if the teacher saw that there was any semblance of hope, it'd smack their hand and make them do it again.

They wanted every person to live with the sole concept and idea that reason, reality, Caesar, and Pax Romana, the peace and security of Rome is everything that you put your life and trust in.

But that's not us.

And so Paul in Romans chapter 5 writes a declaration to the church in Rome about the kind of people that we are.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

And this, my friends, I believe, is five verses that I believe God wants to just put into your heart, into your mind, into your soul, so that you will be someone who can grieve with hope.

Says this in chapter 5, verse 1.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

Not only so, don't miss this, but we also glory in our sufferings.

Because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope, and hope does not put us to shame.

Because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Friends, do you feel that verse?

And this is this is a verse for us.

Because I need you to understand something.

Many of us can boast in the hope of glory.

We're really good at that.

But when's the last time you boasted in the fact that you're entering a season of suffering?

Thanks be to God, I got a ticket.

Thanks be to God, I'm actually out of a job.

Thanks be to God.

I'm actually trusting you, God.

Because I know that the only way that we can grow is actually in the midst of suffering.

Because it reveals where we had our, as Tim Keller would say, counterfeit gods.

Where we put our faith in something or someone other than Christ alone.

And we sometimes we miss it.

I was like, No.

Who likes to run?

He's like, No, no, you don't understand.

The whole town comes out, we run, it's really great.

My family then takes us to the best steakhouse in town.

And I was like, run for steak?

I'll do that.

A couple weeks later, I show up, and there's like thousands of people, and I'm like in basketball shorts, and obviously I don't run, and and and I should have known I'm in the wrong place because I'm seeing shoes that I don't necessarily know how to pronounce, like saucine or hoca or something.

And and there's this row of porta-potties, and so I walk to this porta potty before the race, and and as I'm as I'm getting out, and I've already met my friend and and his family and his siblings, but I as I walk out of the port-a potty, I can't find them.

But I'm being ushered to the starting line, and over the speaker, I hear, all right, runners, here we go.

Five, four, three, two, one, go.

And I'm like, all right, well, I'm gonna find him.

And I'm thinking about that ribeye, medium rare, and I'm just running, and I'm running, and I feel like I've been running a long time, and and um, and what's a little bit bothersome to me is there's an 82-year-old man in front of me.

And I'm like, I'm just struggling.

And I'm like, hey man, I feel like we've been running a long time.

How much farther do we got?

The guy looks at me and he looks at his watch, looks at me, and goes, Oh brother, we just hit the five-mile mark.

We got 8.1 to go.

And I said, I thought this was a 5k.

And then he said, You're in the wrong race, dude.

If you want to know what sin looked like, it was what was happening in my head.

I was like, Did my friend actually get his entire family to punk me?

I'm not, I should probably quit, but I was too stubborn, and I was gonna finish this darn race.

And so I'm like serpentining, just just barely walking, jogging, when all of a sudden this 60-year-old woman walks past me and she's like, just just rocking it, just rocking it.

And she looks back at me, looks forward, looks back, unzips her fanny pack, and hands me a squished peanut buttered sandwich.

That's how bad I looked.

And I was like, thank you.

I finished the race.

My friend's at the starting line, he's like, dude, you ran the wrong race.

I'm like, I know.

Because I can't feel my legs.

I couldn't walk forward the next day.

All I could do was the moon walk.

It was like so painful.

I woke up the next morning and I was thinking about this, and I and I felt like God whispered to me, and God said, Steve, you're running the wrong race.

And I think for many of us, we have to be really, really honest that there is a race that has been set out for us to run.

But sometimes we drift, and sometimes we stumble into the wrong race.

What I want us to be able to do is to be the kind of people that can dare to hope.

Because we actually know that sufferings produce perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope.

I don't want us just to be people who know how to bright side and just move on because it's not possible.

I want us to be people who can grieve with hope and actually be the kind of people who have the faith that can boast in their sufferings.

So let's talk about hope.

Because the way that we use hope in our culture today is so whimsy.

We say things like this I hope the Dallas Cowboys make the Super Bowl.

You know what I mean?

I hope my plane can take off from DFW.

I hope that the whole family will gather for Thanksgiving.

But when we use hope in that way, what are we actually preaching?

Uncertainty.

We don't actually know.

We might have a good assumption, but we do not actually know with certainty.

And so I found myself really going, okay, all right, well then what does biblical hope mean?

When Paul says to grieve with hope and that hope will not be put to shame.

What is biblical hope?

And here's what I want to do is I want to dare you to hope again.

And you do that with when you desire something good.

So I want you to think about something in your life right now that isn't what you thought it was going to be.

Maybe it's with a person, maybe it's with a few people, maybe it's with a family member, maybe it's with a marketplace leader.

And I want you to desire something good from this situation.

And this isn't just whimsy, like, I hope that it will be okay.

No, no, no.

This is what would heaven desire for this person.

You put your mindset in God, if you were to take control of this man's heart, of this woman's story, of what this person did, if you could actually take control, what would you want to see happen?

You dare to hope when you desire something good, but number two, when you believe that anything is possible.

I know some of you are like, anything is possible, that feels really whimsy.

But as my friend Pastor Joby Martin says, if the tomb is empty, then anything is possible.

Isn't that amazing?

Or as Andy Stanley once said, and I think it's genius, he said this once, he said, Hey, if a man walks the earth and actually does a bunch of good, predicts that he's gonna die and rise again three days later, and he actually pulls it off, you should just go with whatever that guy says.

You desire something good, you believe that anything is possible.

Anything is possible.

Because what's harder?

To heal someone from their trauma or to raise a man from the dead?

What's really harder?

To actually reconcile or raise a man from the dead?

What is actually harder?

And when we are people who can grieve with hope, we feel it, we own it, we honor what happened because it happened.

But we also hold on to the reality that anything is possible.

Now, why?

Because you gotta have a reason why.

It's because resurrection brings certainty.

Resurrection brings certainty.

Did you want this that the same power that raised Jesus from the grave is flowing through each believer's bloodstream?

I remember I was leaving church one day and in Chicago and got my friend Jerry sees me.

I see him like reaching his hand in his pocket, and he throws me a set of keys and I catch them and I look at them and it says Ferrari Spider.

So I put my hand in my pocket and I pull out 2002 Honda Civic keys and I throw it back to him.

Fair trade, bro, fair trade.

He's like, hey, you want to take it for the weekend?

I'm like, man, I don't need an Instagram account called Preachers and Ferraris.

I uh I don't need it.

He's like, just no, man, take it.

Your son will love it.

I'm like, okay, okay.

And you're gonna take my Cheerio-infested Honda Civic?

He's like, yeah, for sure.

I'm like, great, great.

I sit in this car and you control the entire car from the steering wheel.

So much power.

I'm just driving in the parking lot at like six miles per hour.

And Jerry's behind me in the Civic, and he's just honking and he's calling me, but I don't I I'm not gonna pick up the phone, especially when I when a car is worth more than my life.

But he calls again, I finally put it on speaker and he goes, Do you know what you're driving?

I'm like, I know, bro, you have a Ferrari.

He's like, No, you are driving a V12 supercharged, fully powered with almost 900 horsepower that goes zero to 60 in less than two and a half seconds.

Hit the gas, Sally.

I was like, yes, Lord, and my intent and my intestines left my body.

Um, but I gotta tell you something.

I returned that car and he handed me back the keys to my 2002 Honda Civic.

And I got into that car.

It did not have the gide up, it didn't have the pickup, I mean, it didn't have the the, it just didn't.

And I remember it took me so long to get home.

And um, I'm like journaling that night, and that and I felt like God just had these moments where he just whispered and just just showed me.

He's like, do you know that you have this supercharged V12 resurrection power flowing through your body?

But you gotta ask yourself, why are you driving it like a V2 gerbil powered goes 61 horsepower goes zero to sixty in 19 minutes and 42 seconds.

And calling that face and hope.

Well, you dare to hope, you look at what you're grieving and you desire something good.

You believe anything is possible because resurrection brings certainty.

Now I'm just getting started, friends.

I'm just getting started.

Now, here's the deal.

I was living in the desert, and um I um in like 2015 had gone to Israel, and um when I was there, I I saw a rabbi.

And if I see anyone that's wearing like anything with sports on it, I'll chop it up with them.

Or if I see a rabbi, I will go and talk to them.

I walk up to this rabbi, never met him before, and I was like, Rabbi! He's like, Yes.

I said, I have a question for you.

He goes, Okay.

I said, um, in the Hebrew scriptures, that's what they refer to the Old Testament as, there are these environments: Egypt, the desert, and the promised land.

How much time do you think in the average person's life that they spend in each of these three environments?

And the rabbi looks at me and goes, You Americans are so funny.

You think everything is up and to the right, not us.

We think that 10% to 15% of our life is in Egypt when life doesn't go the way you want it to go, and 10 to 15% is in the promised land.

And the remaining 70 to 80 percent is learning to live well in the desert.

And I had no idea what that meant, but I did know that for much of my life I was trying to bypass the desert.

And when my life fell apart in 2018, a hero and mentor and spiritual father ended up stories coming out.

I had to process that and I had to grieve, and I had to actually learn what hope is, and so we moved to the literal desert, and it's hot.

And I started to get up and begin to walk and hike.

And um, I remember hiking up to the top of Camelback Mountain and and looking over this beautiful vista of the valley, and God just said, Have you ever thought about Holy Weekend?

It's like Holy Weekend.

You know, Good Friday, silent Saturday, Easter Sunday.

And I started to process this.

And if you really think about Holy Weekend, I actually think this is very similar to what we are walking through.

Because on Good Friday, that is when we are in grief.

In grief.

We're actually getting something that we did not deserve.

Jesus, the most perfect human, got the cross.

He did not deserve that.

And for some of us, we are in situations and scenarios right now where we're like, I didn't, I didn't deserve this.

I didn't want this.

And when you are grieving, you've got to be able to ask yourself, which day of the weekend am I in?

Am I in Friday?

I just feel like I'm in grief and I gotta honor this.

Well, maybe for some of you you're in silent Saturday.

And not this is often what we don't do well in the Western Church.

But if you were those first disciples, I don't think you knew that Jesus was gonna wake up the next day.

You were wondering.

And it really is this desert season where you find yourself just in this place of waiting.

And really, what the desert is is when you start to Jedi mind trick yourself of how you could get through the grief as fast as possible.

You move from being in grief on Good Friday to silent Saturday trying to get through grief.

And then, really, what the desert does is it teaches you about your relationship with waiting.

And don't we hate waiting?

We mobile order our Starbucks and it's not ready and our blood boils.

Some of us, we just hate the weight.

Some of us, we waste the weight.

We actually see it as permission to choose unhealthy escapes.

And it leads to more pain and more trauma, not just for us, but for others.

You can hate the weight, you can waste the weight, or you can actually lean in and win the weight.

When the when the Hebrew nation crossed over the Red Sea, they were like a month's journey from the Promised Land.

But it took them almost 500 months and they just wandered.

Because as one scholar says, it's one thing to leave Egypt, but it's another thing for Egypt to leave you.

And it's in this time where God was beginning to say, I am not like Pharaoh.

I want you to trust me.

And that's the season I think some of you are in right now.

You're in this season of wandering and waiting and wondering.

And it's hard.

Many of us are like, just give me this Sunday, right?

Just give me this Sunday.

And because Easter Sunday is when you move from in grief on Friday to through grief on Saturday to being with grief on Sunday.

Because think about it, when Jesus returns post-resurrection, all the disciples are hanging out, and Jesus like shows up and he looks at him and goes, Shalom.

I'll say it again, shalom, peace be with you.

And they're like, What in the world?

And then he just like walks up to him and says, As the Father has sent me, I'm sending you.

Then he breathes on them with resurrection breath and says, Receive the Holy Spirit.

Then he says the most common sense line ever.

He says, if you forgive someone, then they are forgiven.

And if you don't, they're not.

What?

That's like that's your speech when you show up.

Guys, I want you to know something.

If you forgive someone, they're forgiven.

If you're not, they're not.

What?

Now, I found myself leaning in, going, okay, well, what are the Greek words for forgive that's used in the New Testament?

Jesus liked to use this word epheme.

And efeme literally means to release and send it away.

To release and send it away.

And I love this.

Because it takes its root in Yom Kippur, the Holiest Day to the Jewish people, the Day of Atonement, where we, as a communal opportunity, would put our sins onto a goat, and then we would release the goat into the wilderness.

And it was this tactile, symbolic picture of our sin leaving the building.

And when I was a pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we thought it would be good to actually try this.

And so we had all of our church come up and touch the goat and put their sin on the goat.

And then we released the goat.

And then on Monday, I got a phone call from the lady and she's like, who we rented the goat from?

And she's like, What did you do to our goat?

I was like, why?

It died.

I was like, oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness.

So we had to buy her a new goat.

The sin in Grand Rapids is real, friends.

It's real.

It's real.

But isn't that amazing that just think about this?

Like a Femi to release and just send it away.

To release and send it away.

But Paul actually uses a different word.

He uses the word charisma.

And charisma is where we get the word grace, and Zomai literally means like the grace that I've received, I freely give away.

What it does is it actually leads you back to the cross.

I ended up going to Amazon and I started to buy these little brown crosses.

Because I would find myself in that wandering season pre-Sunday.

Being reminded and being angry at some people.

And God showed me something.

Five people did.

It's my job to actually begin to practice the act of forgiveness.

And let me just say one thing: forgiveness is a solo sport, forgiveness is a process.

I'm not someone who says forgive and forget.

No, no, no.

You are gonna forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive.

And then you're gonna forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive and you're gonna forgive.

And it's hard.

But you have to understand something.

If you do not deal with that unforgiveness in your heart, just go read Ephesians chapter four.

And Paul will say, You friends, if you don't choose to forgive, you will be someone who gossips, slanders, finds yourself brawling and enrage and in anger, you will be that person on the next door app who's losing their ever-loving minds.

Because unforgiveness is a seed, and it literally wants to actually grow in you so that you do not become everything who Christ intended you to be.

And so anytime one of those five people would come to mind, I would reach my hand in the pocket and I would just grab that cross and I would say this little simple breath prayer, cross, release, send it away.

And those first few months, there was a lot of cross, release, send it away.

There was a lot of frustration.

And then as it went on, more and more, I found myself saying, cross, release, send it away.

What's really wild is I found myself thinking about what I learned from my mentor.

When I think about grieving with hope, I think about the stuff that I have to grieve that I didn't know.

But I have to tell you this.

There is stuff that sitting in the front row watching worship, I have these memories of what my like mentor taught me.

And he would have loved that transition.

Or he would have loved the sound in the room.

And I have these moments where there's a sense of sadness.

But both are true.

And maybe some of you feel that about your pastor.

Maybe you feel that just the season that you're in.

And you have to understand that Friday is when you're in grief, Saturday is when you're going through, thinking you can get through grief, but Sunday is when you're with the grief.

And after Jesus says, if you forgive someone, they're forgiven.

If you don't, they're not, basically saying, are you gonna live out the cross or not?

That's what he's saying.

Then Thomas comes up and he's like, hey man, that's great and all.

Can I see your hands?

And Jesus shows him the hands, and it still has the scars.

Here's what I want you to understand is when you grieve with hope, just because you resurrect, and just because you get in a place of healing or restoration, it doesn't mean that you will not carry that grief.

You will just carry it differently.

You will be with this grief for a while.

So buckle up.

And how you choose to walk through this has the potential, like Joseph, to be a Manasseh moment.

Or it has the potential to lead to more brokenness and pain.

I need you to know this.

When I hear people say, This church hurt me.

No, no, no, that church didn't hurt you.

A couple people did.

Name that, honor that, walk with grief, walk to actually embody the cross, choose forgiveness, and keep holding out for hope.

Because when you dare to hope, you desire something good, you believe anything is possible because resurrection brings certainty, which allows you to expect that good is on its way.

And I don't know when it's coming, but I know it is.

So I ask you right now, friends, which day of the weekend are you in?

If you're watching online or at one of our campuses, I'd love for you to raise your hand.

How many of you feel like you're in Friday right now?

Just in grief.

Yeah.

I see those hands.

How many of you feel like you're in Saturday?

You're just wandering right now through the desert.

I see two hands right there.

I saw that.

And how many of you feel like you're in a moment of Sunday?

Yeah.

You just look at this.

This is the beauty of the church, is that we're all in different places.

We all have moments when we're in our Sunday to encourage those that were in a Friday or in a Saturday and just say, don't give up on hope.

Because suffering, which is Friday, produces perseverance and character, which is Saturday.

And that produces hope, which is Sunday, and hope will not be put to shame.

What it means to be a disciple, what it means to be an apprentice of Jesus, Paul will say that you mourn with those who mourn, or you Friday with those who Friday, and you rejoice with those who rejoice, and you Sunday with those who Sunday.

And everything in between, you have a chance to be spiritually formed and transformed, renewed, restored.

Have a bigger vision of the local church and a larger vision of the kingdom of God and a more beautiful understanding of the way of Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, receiving God's love.

This, my friends, can be your Manasseh moment.

But you will look back, and I'm six years from it.

And this past week, I started a new job as a lead pastor.

Took me six years.

I come here and I'm telling you, if you allow God to do what God wants to do, God will heal you, God will change you, God will transform you, God will be with you.

Will you be with him?

Amen.

There's a woman in Dallas, and she wrote a song called Manasseh.

And in a moment I'm gonna pray, and the campus is gonna be released.

But it what's incredible is this song really speaks to the season we're all walking through right now.

I want you to hear the lyrics.

But before the song comes, I came with a little gift.

Because maybe some of you need some brown crosses.

And what if for the next number of weeks, months, you just keep it in your pocket?

And anytime one of the people that have wounded you in your story, in your trauma, in your life, you can just put your hand in the pocket and just simply say, cross, release, send it away.

I want to live out the cross.

I want to live out the way of Jesus.

And so as the music begins after this prayer, you can make your way forward and pick up a cross.

But let me pray.

God, I thank you.

I thank you that you are a God that allows us to grieve.

Most of the psalms are laments.

We have a book in the Bible called Lamentations.

But for many of us, we struggle with it.

God, I pray that we know we can take our grief to you, that we can wander in the desert, but you will never leave us nor forsake us, and we can be people of hope.

And God, I pray even this, even through this, may this be our Manasseh moment.

Rescue us, change us, and let this be the church that you've always desired it to be.

A safe and honest and consistent place that points all attention to Christ alone.

We love you, and all God's people said, Amen.

Grace and peace.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.