How We Should Show Up to the World

We're in a series of messages that we've been doing for the last 10 weeks called cover to cover.

So if you're just showing up today for the first time, you're kind of jumping in into something that's kind of been rolling for about 10 weeks.

I'd encourage you if today's interesting to you to go back and kind of uh look at the other weeks, but we're taking on a challenge in 15 weeks, we're trying to look at the whole Bible.

And today we're gonna cover a large swath of particularly the Old Testament.

Um we're gonna be in the Old Testament uh this week and next week, and then we'll move into the New Testament.

Um and so again, there's a there's a lot of things.

I don't want to go re-preach all those messages, but what we to give you kind of a summary, um, we start in Genesis 1 and 2 in the Garden of Eden, and really what you see in those texts, they're really critical in understanding the whole Bible because they present to us what we call the meta-narrative or the big storyline of the Bible, and it's creation, fall, redemption, restoration.

Creation, God creates opportunity, he creates an ecosystem, and then the fall is related not just to sin, but to flesh.

Certainly sin falls under that category, but there are some things in your flesh you do that you knew was wrong, you just did it anyway.

I do that.

I mean, there are times it's like I know better, but I I didn't do better.

But then sometimes your flesh is isn't necessarily just trying to mess things up.

Sometimes you think you're doing a just thing, and in the moment it feels just, and in hindsight you look back and it was unjust.

Uh, when we have all this free will happening simultaneously, we end up in situations, often that are complicated, where people are in pain, uh, they're suffering.

It's just the complexity of human relationships.

And that pain is not the end of the story.

All right, we see that even in the errors in the uh Garden of Eden, God brings them grace and redeems and ultimately restores.

They they lose the opportunity of Eden, but their opportunities don't dry up.

God leads them out of Eden into new opportunity, and that's sort of the meta-narrative of our lives.

We have new opportunity, uh, we have flesh that gets involved, God redeems and restores to new opportunity, and you see that all throughout the Bible.

And the book of Genesis uh sort of tells the story of humanity becoming um at war with one another, and all that flesh uh creates a lot of fall.

And so God says, you know what, I'm not gonna leave the world hanging.

I I I wanna I haven't given up on people.

I love people, and and and I want people to be in right relationship with God, right relationship with themselves, and right relationship with the world around them is what he intended the whole time.

And so he decides to make a covenant with Abraham.

He says, Abraham, I'm not giving up.

I'm gonna make a covenant with you, and this promise is gonna be connected to the purpose.

And my purpose is to set humanity to rights.

I want community to operate the way that I've intended.

And so I'm gonna use you and your family, and we're gonna make a nation out of you, and I'm gonna give you law, and the law is designed to help you understand conduct, conduct in worship, conduct in morality, uh, and even civic and uh judicial law.

And then I'm gonna give you land and I want you to live this way.

And he goes, I'm gonna separate you from the world.

Not forever, but for a season.

I want to separate you because the world and and and flesh and fall will impact you unless you step away.

I want you to step away and I want you to live the way that I've intended for you to live.

And once you get it down, I'm gonna send you into the world.

And then that's how I want the world to function.

So that's what we've been looking at.

And we we went through the process of Exodus and into the uh ultimately into the promised land in the book of Joshua and Judges.

And now uh we're going to, this week, we're gonna look at prophets, priests, and kings.

Okay, we're gonna look at these roles, uh, not just from an academic standpoint of like what were the roles, but what's the why behind the role?

Why did God set this up?

And I think once we really look at that, we're gonna see um what that has to do with our lives and how we live in that here and now.

All right.

I'm gonna start with actually priests, okay?

So the the concept of a priest and a priesthood, it actually started in the book of Exodus.

You have a guy named Aaron who came from the tribe of Levi.

So the Levites, anytime you see Levites in the Bible, think the this is the tribe that the priesthood uh comes out of.

And it's really in the book of Leviticus and Numbers that the priesthood is defined, and I'm gonna give you a summary real quick.

I've shared this before, but I'll bring it back so that we understand what was the priest's job, what were they supposed to do?

So go ahead and bring it up.

Um four responsibilities of the priests was one to put God's character on display.

To put, actually, yeah, no, leave that up.

Yeah, I should have done that.

Priests were responsible for rituals, sacrifices, and offerings at the tabernacle and later the temple in Jerusalem.

We'll talk about that in a second.

And they also had teaching roles regarding the law.

All right, four responsibilities.

The first was to put God's character on display.

So if you if you see like an artist rendering of a priest or a high priest at that time, they had a unique garb, a unique outfit that they wore.

And each part of that outfit meant something, and it was part of displaying the character of God.

Every stone, every tassel, everything was designed not to draw attention to the priest, but so that the priest could draw attention to God, so that we don't lose calibration to who God really is, to his character.

So even their outfit was putting that into the world.

Uh, the second uh was to help people navigate atonement.

Okay, back to the meta-narrative.

Flesh is inevitable, failure is inevitable.

We all fall.

When that happens, okay, how do we not get stuck in our sin?

How do we not get stuck in our failure?

And so the priest was there to go, look, hey, it happens to all of us.

Don't run from it, come deal with it, and let's work our way through it.

And so they led different sacrifices of repentance and I'm sorry, and then uh of also of gratitude.

The third is to intercede for others.

When you think intercede, that's prayer, uh, but it's also uh bridging the gap.

They're an intercessor.

They're people that were helping connect people to God, not to repel people away from God, but to help people to connect to God.

And then the fourth thing was to facilitate resource distribution.

So part of, again, their ceremonial law or their uh the way they worshiped included tithe.

So you'd have people that would give it, everybody would give a tenth of their income or tenth of what they had, and then they would take it to the temple, and then the priest would then distribute to people in need and make sure everybody had what they needed.

So that's what you had with the priesthood.

Um when you think about this now into uh the book of Exodus, when God is making a covenant with Moses, look at this language, it says in Exodus 19, 4 through 6, God says, You yourselves have seen what I did it to Egypt and how I carried you out on eagle's wings and brought you to myself.

But if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations you will be my treasured possession.

Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

These are the words you're to speak to the Israelites.

All right, so think about that language.

You're gonna be, he says, a kingdom of priests.

So in other words, he's saying, Look, look in your community.

You know, you know how you go to the priest for atonement, to navigate atonement, or or to um, you know, they're the intercessor, or putting God's character in the world and resource distribution.

He said, You as a people, you as God's people, are going to function to the whole world in that way.

And in 1 Peter, in the New Covenant, in the New Testament, uh Peter reiterates this.

He reaches back into Exodus 19, and in 1 Peter 2 9, he says, You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

Okay, context matters here because Peter is talking primarily to Gentiles.

So he's saying, Okay, guys, this is now a shift in the world.

This is a change in what Yahweh is up to.

What he started in the nation and said, This nation is going to be a kingdom of priests, now isn't about being national, it's about being part of the kingdom of God, which is open to not just uh Israelites or the children of Israel, but to all people.

All right.

It's boundless in terms of uh where you're from, your culture, your race, your gender, everybody we are invited into this royal priesthood.

And so again, what we see started there is now we now understand that all the things in Leviticus and Numbers that the Levites did, we now are commissioned and called to do.

Put God's image in the world.

Help people navigate atonement, be an intercessor.

Don't push people away from God, draw them closer to God.

Uh helping meet needs around us, right?

So now we are all part of a royal priesthood.

I'm not like the priest, and y'all come to me and you have a pattern.

No, you are you are a part of a royal priesthood.

This is your and my all of our responsibility.

Within this, we also have, and I'm just gonna barely touch on this, but uh give you the idea, of the tabernacle and the temple.

All right, so what's the tabernacle?

The tabernacle showed up um during the time of the Exodus.

So they were essentially a nation of nomads.

And so the the tabernacle was a um portable structure when they were in the wilderness, then when they set up camp, you have the twelve tribes of Israel, and in the center of the camp, they set up the tabernacle.

And the center of the tabernacle is the um is the holy of holies, it's where the Ark of the Covenant was.

It's ultimately where, and in the way they view this, this is where the presence of God is in the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle.

So now think about this visually.

This is an artist rendering of this, but you have now your whole camp is a big circle, and at the center of the community, at the center of the nation, is God, the presence of God.

So God gives the tabernacle and the law because he says, I want to dwell among you.

Tabernacle means dwelling place.

So I want to be in your presence, I want to be in your midst.

And so, in their minds, the presence of God is at the center of our community in the tabernacle.

Eventually, they would build a temple, and the temple then, once they got into the promised land, was a permanent structure, right?

So it was temporary while they were nomads.

When they seized the land, when the walls of Jericho came down and they went into the promised land, they Solomon then eventually built a temple.

It was destroyed, and Zerubbabel, right?

Great name.

That's a good Bible trivia name.

You can drop that one, or name your next kid Zerubbabel.

Just put it on the list.

All right.

Uh Zerubbabel rebuilds the temple.

Now, when Jesus shows up again for them, think how they think.

How they think is that the temple, this geographic location, and this one spot is where the presence of God is.

Jesus says in John 2 19, he says, Destroy this temple and I'll raise it again in three days.

And they replied, It's taken 46 years to build this temple, and you're going to raise it in three days?

Verse 21, but the temple he had spoken of was his body.

So Jesus is now starting to shift the paradigm that in the new covenant, the presence of God isn't in a building, is not in a box.

The presence of God is in the body.

And this is why in 1 Corinthians 3 16, the apostle Paul says to the Corinthians, don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple, and God's spirit dwells in your midst?

So think of the visual of the tabernacle in the middle of the community, and now take it and put it on.

The presence of God, the spirit that raised Christ from the dead, lives in you.

Don't you know you are the temple?

So we used to think, hey, I don't cuss in church.

I mean, I'll do that on Monday and Tuesday, but are you going to church?

Come on, man, you don't cuss in church.

It's God's house.

Some of y'all just got a little PTSD from your childhood.

You're the house of God.

So know ye not?

Ye are the temple.

You are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

So what we don't do is compartmentalize, and we come to church and we do the holy church thing, and then we go to Monday and we do what the Monday thing and we go to Tuesday.

No, no, no.

The Spirit of God, the Holy of Holies, is inside of you.

You are the temple.

So everywhere you go, the presence of God is there.

So so I bring this into all my relationships.

I bring it into how I do business.

I bring it into how I do conflict.

I do it and how I do family and all the choices I make, the things that come out of my mouth, the things that don't come out of my mouth.

Like all the things that I do, I do knowing that I am the temple.

There's really nothing special about this building other than the fact that you're here.

And that the Spirit of God is inside of you.

So this is a huge paradigm shift.

I'd like to keep going, but we got to keep moving.

Alright, so now I want to look at that's priests in tabernacle and temple.

Let's look at prophets and kings.

All right.

I'm going to start with prophets.

The prophets were primarily messengers who spoke on behalf of God.

So if you think of priest as the mouthpiece from the people to God, you now think of the prophet as the mouthpiece from God to the people.

So he spoke on behalf of God, calling Israel to repentance, offering divine guidance, and sometimes predicting the future or foretelling.

I want to look real quick at the definition and the role and function of the king.

So the king was expected to lead the people politically and militarily, uphold the law and maintain justice.

So if you look at in 1 Samuel is when the nation asks for a king.

So they want a king, they look around at the other nations, everybody's got kings.

These kings, these charismatic leaders are taking territory and they're they're powerful, and so they say, We want a king.

And ultimately it was a rejection of God because God said, actually, I want this to be a theocracy.

I want to be your king.

But they didn't want God to be their king, they wanted a king.

So God said, Alright, I'll give you a king, but we're gonna set the system up with accountability, because if you give absolute power, it corrupts absolutely.

If you just run no accountability, okay, you have flesh, and that flesh is prone to fall.

And now the fall isn't just about you.

When you're the king and you fall, the collateral damage is unbelievable.

Everybody gets hit by that.

And so, in fact, 1 John 2.16 says the world offers only cravings for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions.

And these are not from the Father, but they're from the world.

You you might have read it in the past as the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

But I really like how it says in the NLT craving for physical pleasure, craving for what you see, and then pride in achievements and possessions.

We're all prone to this, but you know who's really prone to it?

Are kings.

Because kings have access.

Kings, they have power.

And so when you have that type of thing and you don't have to be accountable, then that lust for flesh, what you can have, what you see, and now you're starting to make it all about your possessions.

In fact, this is the warning God gives in 1 Samuel.

He says, Look, if you let this human being do this, they're gonna start using your sons and daughters so they can accumulate their possessions and build up their resume and get their trophies.

And so what God says is, I'm gonna set this relationship between kings and prophets.

And the king is not above the prophet.

The prophet often will speak the truth to power.

The prophet will tell the king when the king's out of bounds.

And the health of the nation, the righteousness of the nation is going to be in the accountability between the prophet and the king.

And you're gonna see throughout, in fact, go ahead and bring up the prophetic books of the Bible.

So you have what's called the major prophets and minor prophets.

The major prophets, don't think major like they're better prophets, just the books are longer.

They're more lengthy discourses.

So uh Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentation, Ezekiel, Daniel, they're long books.

Um, these other prophets that you see down here, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Abakek, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah, Malachi, those are all minor prophets, they're shorter books, but they're all bona fide prophets.

When you we're doing a flyover here, but what you're gonna see is that in the history of the nation, some kings were accountable and some weren't.

And when they when they weren't accountable, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life took over and it created terrible damage within the nation.

Let me give you a couple of few examples.

The first king in Israel is Saul.

And Saul is is is to be held accountable by Samuel, who was a judge but functioned as a prophet.

And so they had they were supposed to be accountable to one another.

And at one point, Saul goes into battle.

He's supposed to, according to the accountability structure, wait for Samuel to get there to light a sacrifice.

But Samuel's running late or whatever, and so Saul goes, you know, I'm not waiting on Samuel, I'm the king.

Okay, takes himself above the law, above the rules, and he just goes ahead and lights the sacrifice.

Samuel shows up and is like, What did you do?

And Saul, instead of going, you know what I did, I got a big head.

You know what I did?

I was scared because these the the enemy was bearing down on us, and our troops were slipping away, and and I allowed my fear to get the best of me, and I stepped out of the structure God had given me, and I didn't wait on you, and I was wrong for that, and I'm really sorry, and I apologize and I repent.

If he had done that, he would have stayed king, but he didn't.

He blamed Samuel, he got defensive, he deflected, he deferred responsibility, and he allowed his fear and his pride to overtake him, and so God said, I'm gonna remove you.

I'm looking for a man after my own heart.

And so he looks and he finds David.

David, who's a shepherd, he's in the field.

And David isn't just responsible for sheep, he loves the sheep.

He loves them.

One of the stories of David's life is that it tells a story of one of David's sheep is in the mouth of a lion.

And the text says that David went to this lion that had one of his sheep in his mouth and grabbed it by the jaw and beat it to death with a club.

Let's just, real quick.

Just imagine you're at the zoo, and the zookeeper and the lion tamer says, Come on in.

And says, you know, see how tame this guy is.

Just grab his jaw.

No, I'm good.

Like, what would it take?

Like, I'll be honest, if they had the thing tranquilized and it's laying there breathing, I don't think I'd grab this jaw.

Just in case, you know.

David grabs the jaw of a hungry lion who's in the middle of a meal.

Why do you do that?

I'm a pretty courageous dude in general, but if I'm in that situation, we're down a sheep today.

You know, you can't win them all.

You can't win them all.

Just get out the Excel spreadsheet, minus one.

We're down.

Live to fight another day.

The only way you do that, the only reason you do that is love.

That's it.

That's it.

That's it.

It's a it's a it's a dumb risk, otherwise.

It kind of reminds me of uh Jesus saying that God loves us so much that he's like a shepherd that would leave the 99 for the one.

It feels like that.

So before Jesus ever said that, Yahweh was looking for that, and he sees a guy who would grab a lion by the jaw for a sheep that he loves.

Frankly, all jokes aside, most of us would never, we would never, none of us would do it for a lamb or a sheep, but you would do it for your son or your daughter.

You would do it for your son or your daughter, you would put your life on the line.

And so so so it's this heart of a shepherd and this spirit of a warrior that God sees in David.

And so David now becomes king, but when you become king, doggone it, your flesh, lust of the flesh, lust Of the eye, pride of life, I now have options as a king, I did not have as a shepherd.

And heart health has to be maintained.

My heart is only as healthy today as the decisions I made yesterday.

And today's decisions will affect my heart health tomorrow.

So you have David, who, while he was in the field, has this amazing heart.

He becomes the king, and now he's in a high place, and now he's from his vantage point looks down and sees a beautiful woman who's married to another man.

And now David becomes the lion.

David decides to take from the kingdom.

Take a woman that did not belong to him, another man's wife.

And then to put that man on the front lines, knowing that he was going to die, essentially ordering up his death.

And so even this good guy with the lust of the flesh, lust of the eye, pride of life, he gets, his heart gets bad.

And so now he's in the spot, and now the prophet Dan uh Nathan, the prophet Nathan comes to David and he says, Hey, I got a story for you.

He said there was this guy, one guy, he had like this lamb that he loved.

He just loved it.

I mean, he raised it, he named it, he connected with it, he you know, fed it, everything.

I mean, they actually he had affection for this lamb.

And David's like, Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, I was a shepherd.

I know, I know exactly what that's like.

I I love the lamb so much, I grabbed a lion by the jaw.

You know, I totally get it.

He goes, Yeah, he goes, Well, there were there was this other guy.

This guy had tons of sheep.

Just, I mean, he had flocks and herds for days.

He couldn't, I mean he couldn't hardly keep track of so many.

And this guy goes over to this other guy and he takes his lamb.

He steals this guy's lamb, the one lamb that he had that he loved and nurtured and cared for.

David's like, that's awful.

He's like, it is, isn't it?

He goes, that's that's terrible.

Nathan said, what should we do with the guy?

He goes, he should be punished, severely punished.

And Nathan goes, are you sure?

And David says, Yeah, I'm sure.

And Nathan says, Thou art the man.

That's about you, man.

You had all kinds of wives and concubines and whatever you had plenty going on in your bed, and you look over and you see the one that belongs to Uriah, and now you're gonna go take her for yourself.

So that's you I'm talking about, man.

Spoke the truth to power.

And now David has to decide: am I gonna be like Saul and say, get out of my face?

No, man.

Create in me a clean heart, oh God.

Renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence, oh Lord.

David knew how to repent.

David knew how to be accountable.

If you put the sins on a scale, most of us would say David did worse.

I mean, come on.

Saul lit a sacrifice a little too early.

David took another man's wife and had him executed.

But David knew how to repent.

David knew what to do when he had crossed the line.

He listened to the accountability and he responded.

And what you're gonna see is throughout these, the story of the kings and 1st and 2nd Kings and 1st and 2nd Chronicles, you're going to see these prophets, and you're gonna see this between the kings and the prophets.

Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't, sometimes they create conflict.

You're gonna see King Ahab, who ultimately goes and is seduced by the altars to Baal.

He's seduced by the temples to Baal.

And so he brings all the Baal's uh uh temples into Israel.

And when Elijah goes, don't do that, what are you doing?

We have a temple, we have a system, we have law.

And because Israel was a smaller nation, kings like uh Ahab would go and they would be seduced by the these bigger nations and the you know they're their their their shrines and their altars and their culture and and they wanted what they had.

It's almost like I got this little business with this little office, and you go see somebody with better technology and bigger stuff, and now we got to be that instead of remembering who we are.

And so he was just dissatisfied, and so he starts bringing in idolatry, and and and Elijah says, What are you doing?

What are you doing?

Let's go back to the covenant, let's go back to the promise, let's go back to the person of God and the purpose of God.

And and and Ahab tried to kill him.

So what you're gonna see is instead of being accountable between the prophet and the king, you're gonna see sometimes it worked, and when it did, it worked well, and when it didn't, the collateral damage uh fell into the nation.

And eventually what you're gonna have is the nation is gonna be exiled.

So they're gonna fall so low that eventually the Babylonians will come in and they'll take them off their land and they'll take them back to Babylon.

So this is another very interesting part of what the prophets would do.

So the prophets would also give, um would contextualize timeless things into dynamic environments.

So, what do we have that's timeless?

God's person, God's character.

What do we have that's timeless?

God's purpose.

He's always wanted to bring shalom to the earth, peace with God, peace with yourself, and peace with the world around you.

Peace is is is not the full word, shalom, there's more to it, you get the idea.

Bring shalom to the earth.

He's always wanted to do that.

Okay, but the the environment is dynamic.

So when they go to Babylon, it's a real question.

The nation, the community is going, what do we do?

We're off our land, we're in another culture.

Should we rebel?

Should we be devoted to the ban, like what we saw with the Canaanites?

Should we boycott?

Should we separate?

Should we fight?

What do we do?

And so what you you have is the nation asking, should we treat the Babylonians like the Canaanites or what?

And you have the prophet Jeremiah, who writes in Jeremiah 29, and some of you guys have a verse.

Jeremiah 29, 11, one of the famous verses of the Bible, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord.

A bunch of y'all bought it at Hobby Lobby and whatever it is up in your house.

I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you not to harm you, to give you a hope and a future.

When was that written?

It's in exile in Babylon.

If you read the whole chapter, the prophet Jeremiah says in chapter 29, hey, this is not that.

This don't treat the Babylonians like the Canaanites.

He says, build homes, build businesses.

He said, Work for the shalom of the land that I have sent you into exile.

But he said, When the city prospers, you will prosper.

When the city has peace, you will have peace.

As the city goes up, you will go up.

So have families, go in there and be a part of that.

Not to the exclusion of the law, but he said, don't treat Babylon like Canaan.

And they had a genuine question: how do we contextualize?

And so what God would use would be the prophets to not only tell them what was coming, often speak to the future, speak truth to power, but also help the nation to contextualize the timeless purpose and person of God in real time where they were.

Alright, so you take this into the New Testament, and pretty quickly you start to realize in the New Covenant these, the why behind the prophets, priests, and kings, all of that is fulfilled in Jesus.

So Jesus is the high priest.

Huh?

Did I?

I probably didn't, did I?

See, this is We'll get it.

We'll get it.

Hebrews 4, 15 and 16.

It says, This high priest of ours.

Okay, so so the writer of Hebrews is putting Jesus in the role of the high priest.

You used to have to go to the temple, you used to have to go to the high priest and speaking of Jesus.

The high priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all the same testings we do, yet he did not sin.

He's describing the character of the priest.

If you go to the priest with your sin, there might be a part of you as you walk up to a human to go, am I about to be judged here?

Am I gonna freak this person out?

Like, what is the what is the attitude of the priest when I walk up?

And what it says of Jesus is he understands our weaknesses, which is nice because I don't always understand my weaknesses.

Most of us don't.

I've had a lot of people do things that they go, I knew better, and I did it anyway.

And I'm like, well, then why'd you do it?

And they're like, I don't know.

And they're not evading the question, they're dead serious.

I don't know.

I'm not sure why I was so weak.

I really don't know why I did that.

It was foolish.

It was I knew better.

Okay, so this high priest of ours understands our weaknesses.

He faced it the same testings we do, just without sin.

So he says at verse 16, let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God, and there we will receive his mercy and find grace to help us when we need it most.

Jesus is our high priest.

Jesus was the prophet who came and and disrupted the status quo and helps us understand how to contextualize in the world.

Jesus is perfect theology.

Uh he is a prophet, he's a priest, and he's certainly our king.

So when we think about these roles of leadership, we think about these roles of contextualizing, we think about these roles of redemption and all of this, we we go, okay, so now what do we do with that here and now?

And I think what this, when you start to think about those roles and how they function here, it's not so much that people have a role, it's really that the spirit that raised Christ from the dead is in us, and those functions happen a few ways.

One of them is that often the Holy Spirit will will be like Nathan in the air of David, and it might be in a time of worship, it might be in a time of prayer, it might be in a time of studying God's word, it might be when you least expect it.

You're driving down the road and you feel a still small voice convicting you, not trying to demoralize you, not trying to discourage you, but to be honest about what's up.

Thou art the man, you need to deal with that.

That was not right.

That was okay, and now something that's been a blind spot or you just brushed over it, now you realize it's a big deal and it's got to be dealt with.

And you created me a clean heart, oh God.

And sometimes that might happen in the privacy of just you and the Holy Spirit.

But you know what?

In what we do here as a church, we are a community of people filled with the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead.

So often, as we deepen our relationships and as we really get to know each other, and as we dive deeper into God's word, understanding who he is and what he values and his character, God will also use us in each other's lives to sometimes speak truth, sometimes bring conviction, not condemnation, and trying to rub your nose in it, but the idea that we cannot do this this way.

We got to change this thing.

Like it needs to stop today.

Like we got to deal with this now.

We got to move in the right direction.

We got to do an about face, man.

This is not going where we want to go.

And so often it's the Holy Spirit working independently, and oftentimes it's God speaking through each other.

And this is why I would just say we have to be very careful as a church that we don't become so wide in our growth, and we've got all these people, and you come in and out, and it's a great service, and that's awesome, but we don't really know each other, and there's no depth of relationship happening.

You know, I can't run around and hold everybody accountable, but in within the community of the church, you are the temple, you are the royal priesthood.

All of these Old Testament symbols are embodied within the body.

So now we have to start going deep enough in relationship and deep enough in our relationship with God to know what decisions, how do we contextualize these timeless things with dynamic people and dynamic times?

And that forces us to continue to come back to Him and to continue to dig deeper.

And that's our that's our call as a church.

I'm excited about that the church is growing.

That's great, that's wonderful.

But really, if we're gonna do this the right way, we have to deepen in our understanding of God and in our relationships with each other so that these roles of prophet, priest, king, accountability, leadership, redemption, okay, all of this we navigate with one another.

I'll give you this last thing.

In 1 and 2 Kings and 1 Chronicles, there you'll see the term sons of the prophets, sons of the prophets.

And if you study that a little more historically, you find that Elijah and Elisha had created like a school of the prophets, which it wasn't, don't think of like a formal academic institution, but they had created essentially cohorts with people, you know, who were called by God to function in this way.

And so what the training, what they would do ultimately is they would get together.

At that time, they didn't have a whole Bible.

In fact, writings were scarce, but they would sit around in community and they would discuss at length.

They would discuss who God is.

They would discuss what God had done.

They would take time to pray and meditate on his word and think about his character and discuss his character uh orally.

And so the more they did that, the more they calibrated themselves ultimately to God.

And so they were able to look in the world and to be able to discern when they're looking in the world to go, that's that's Yahweh right there.

That's right, and that's not.

The way I would describe it is when my wife and I started dating, she had a great grandfather, Grandpa Brindley, who had who had passed away before I ever met him.

I never got a chance to meet him.

But she just loved Grandpa Brindley.

And so, from I think our first date, she's telling me about Grandpa Brindley and telling me about her family.

And she's like, he's just the most amazing guy ever.

And to this day, my wife talks about Grandpa Brindley all the time.

And so after probably two weeks or so of us dating, my wife said, Um, she said, Greg, Grandpa Brindley would have loved you.

He would have loved you.

And I took that as such a compliment.

But if you think of that, well, how who is she to speak on behalf of Grandpa Brindley?

Like, what are you talking about?

How do you know that?

Grandpa Brindley didn't necessarily say that.

Like, how do you know?

But she had spent so much time in his presence.

She had spent so much time listening to him talk, she had spent so much time watching him make decisions.

She had heard him talk about what he liked and what he didn't like.

And she was so tuned into his values and what he believed and what he was all about that when she saw me, she said, you know what?

That's it, that that that fits.

And so you have, again, the prophets doing this, ultimately, they would, the messaging that they're getting from God, they're able to test that because they go, Does this fit in with God's word?

Does this fit in with God's character?

Does this fit in with who he is in this changing world?

And friends, we have even more of an advantage.

The spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you.

Come on, what are you hanging your head for?

The spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you.

He's guiding and leading.

We have the whole counsel of God's word.

We have this God's word that we continue to dig into and dig deeper into the literature and the history and all of it.

And the further we go there, the more we start to you start to develop your sense.

You start to receive the messages, you start to be able to look and go, that is not Yahweh right there.

That is not Jesus right there.

You know what is and you know what isn't.

And that is where, as a community, we have to continue to do these things, to wrestle through these things in a healthy way together.

Amen.

Amen.