The Shepherd Isn't Lost

All right, I'm gonna jump in to today's message and get right after it.

Um, I want to talk about a kind of work on this question: what should I do for somebody I'm worried about?

What should I do for somebody I'm worried about?

If you have somebody in your life who you love, you care about, uh, part of the challenge of loving when you love someone, you care about them deeply, is you have a tendency to worry about them.

And some of you may be worrying about somebody for good reason.

Maybe they're beginning to make some decisions that um could really get them into a world of hurt.

Maybe they're already getting into some bad space and you're trying to figure out what to do.

Should I speak up?

Should I shut up?

Uh, should I have an intervention?

Should I cut them off financially?

Uh, how do I help them?

And helping somebody who you care about sometimes can be extremely difficult.

So if you find yourself in that situation today, uh I have a message for you.

We're gonna learn some stuff right from Jesus the King, all right?

Uh I want to start out with actually just some foundational um kind of understanding a little bit about God that will kind of help us, and we'll draw on this throughout our conversation today.

Um, within the throughout the Bible, you see uh several different metaphors for God so that we understand dimensions of Him.

And today I'm gonna give you three of them.

Uh, one of them is the one that we built this series on is God as King.

And through God as King, we uh understand his power, that he is powerful, just like a king would be.

The second is God as judge, uh, which focuses on his justice.

And the third is God as father, okay, which focuses on his love.

What's interesting is the top two metaphors are the ones that carry really throughout the Old Testament, where the nation and human beings, you know, man's pursuit of God and understanding God, uh, they focused on his power and his justice.

And actually, God as father was only used ten times in the Old Testament.

Uh, this is what was so provocative about Jesus.

We talked about this a few weeks ago, but Jesus shows up and literally hundreds of times throughout not only the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but throughout the letters of the epistles written that establish doctrine, uh talked about God as Father, and Jesus uses this jarring word uh abba, which is like a childish word.

It's like dada, abba.

The Greek word is for God as, or I'm sorry, for father is ab, and little kids, you know, go dada, abba, abba, abba.

So Jesus shows up doing this, and no one really thought of God that way at that point, and Jesus introduces the love of the Father.

Now, one of the things with this that I'll tell you I've struggled with over the years is sometimes losing track of the fact that God is always all three of these all the time.

He's not one of the other.

And sometimes it'll get in my head, and it may be like evil forces uh trying to shame me, or maybe it's some of my own thinking, but a lot of times I'll pick one and only think of God as that.

For example, if I screw up real bad and I feel bad about what I did, I tend to focus on God as judge and justice and forget about the fact that he's my father who really loves me and that he has the power to help me, okay?

And so we we have these sort of broad understandings of God.

When Jesus shows up, he shows up in flesh, so he is God personified, and it says in John 1 and 14 that he came full of two things.

He came full of grace and truth, okay, which is interesting to think of being full of two things, or you know, two things full of both.

It's not like he was half grace and half truth.

You know, sometimes I'm grace and sometimes I'm truth.

Which one am I gonna get?

He came full of both.

And sometimes these two can be in a little bit of tension.

Have you ever had somebody ask you a question and the truth would have hurt so bad you put a little grace on it?

You know what I mean?

You you held back a little bit, I'm gonna give him some grace, all right?

Honey, how do I look in this outfit?

Amazing.

All right, it's just perfect, wouldn't change a thing.

All right, I've only I'd only changed one thing: nothing.

All right, it looks awesome.

All right, so but throughout life, we kind of wrestle with this, but what we know of God through Jesus is Jesus came full of grace and truth.

In the New Living Translation, it translates that text, full of unfailing love and faithfulness.

Okay?

Then in 1 Corinthians 13, it defines love even greater, and I'm gonna give you a partial and then we'll fill it all in later.

But it says here's what love looks like, manifest in real life.

Love is patient and kind.

Okay?

Now, this is the character of God, this is personified through Jesus, but it also affects us in how we display and demonstrate love to the people around us.

First John says that that we, with the same love we receive from God, we love other people.

It should spill over into our relationships.

But here's the problem: in the real world, what does it look like to be patient and kind case by case?

Okay, sometimes the thing that's patient and kind to the recipient doesn't feel patient and kind at all.

Let me give you an example.

Some of you know a little bit about our family.

We have three kids, two of our boys on the autism spectrum.

Our oldest son, Hudson, is 10 years old, and he's a little more severe than our son Miles.

A little while ago, he's just out of control to the point that he actually had to switch schools.

The school he was in couldn't be contained.

He was running out of the room uh in danger to himself.

Uh at one point he was uh he was getting violent with people around him.

He hit my mother.

Okay, there's like a lot of bad stuff happening, and so we're like, we gotta we gotta get him some help.

We had some blood tests done.

There was some work on his gut, okay.

We need to change his diet uh to this very specific stuff.

And then he he was sort of fixating on electronics, so things that he would have, like he would just sort of obsess on it.

If you took it away, he was just out of control.

So we went hardcore.

My wife and I are like, Man, we love this kid, we're full of grace, but we're also full of truth, and we're gonna do the patient and kind thing, which is to to you know change all make all these changes.

Now, when we did so, we changed, we basically his new diet took away a lot of the foods that he prefers, okay?

And so we took those away, and he, I'm talking, my man ran through his whole bag of manipulation.

He started out with like just blind rage, okay, screaming, like primal screaming, melting down.

He got physically violent, he threatened us, then he tried to go the other end and butter us up.

You know, he's like, Dad, I love you so much.

Can I have some cinnamon toast crunch?

You know, it's like no.

And so, like, we were offering him healthy food.

We had to break him down to where he lost all hope.

He gave completely bored, wouldn't let we we literally locked the remote controls, locked them away, so he couldn't get them.

Everything, okay.

So he eventually got so hungry and so bored that he started eating healthy things and his imagination came back.

And praise the Lord.

I mean, we're not out of the woods, but we had a bit of a breakthrough, some good stuff.

Now, what I'm gonna tell you, what I'm gonna tell you, I almost tell you not to clap, because I'll tell you, having a son with special needs, okay, it's like throwing spaghetti on the wall, and it all falls except one piece, and you're like, yeah, and you declare victory, and then it falls, you know?

You're like, let's do it again, you know, let's just do it again.

Okay.

Um, but that's where we're at.

We had somewhat of a breakthrough, but we're not out of the woods.

I'll say this.

To us, we know in our hearts, we were doing the patient, kind, loving, gracious thing.

In his mind, it wasn't patient and kind, it was cruel and unusual punishment.

And he didn't get it.

He didn't say thank you.

It wasn't like, you know, mom and dad, you know, I can see the character of God in the two of you and the way that you're really have my best interest at heart.

It was a lot of foul language, I'll just be honest with you, uh, and attacking, okay.

Now, for us, it was relatively simple.

Now, it was hard to execute, but it was simple because we knew we were doing the right thing for him.

And because he's 10 years old, we can contain him physically.

Some of you are dealing with more complexity because as somebody gets older, they're harder to help, they're harder to contain.

And the consequences of the behavior become bigger and they're magnified and can end in death, can end in suicide, can end in um, you know, complications to a life, decisions that can't be undone.

And so even how to help is tough.

Should I speak up?

Should I shut up?

Should I be proactive?

Should I be patient?

I don't know what to do.

What should I do next?

I'm trying to help somebody.

Fortunately, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the King throws us a bone in Luke chapter 15.

Luke 15 · chapter mention

Luke chapter 15, Jesus gives a trilogy of made-up stories and parables, okay?

Luke 15 · chapter mention

And you may be fairly familiar with these, but I want us to take another look.

Even if you're totally aware of what I'm gonna say, tune in a little bit more because there may be something for you.

Um, Jesus gives a trilogy.

The first one is he talks about the lost sheep.

Okay?

And he says, go ahead and pull that up in verse 4, Luke 15 and 4, it says, if a man has a hundred sheep and one gets lost, what will he do?

Well, when he leaves the 99 others in the wilderness, by the way, when you read, leave the 99 in the wilderness, don't read neglect, because that's not what it was.

Wilderness is where you herded sheep, and so he would leave them in the fold, in the protection of the fold, and he would go after the lost one and search for that one until he finds it.

Okay?

When you think of sheep, and of course, this is anytime Jesus gives a parable, pay attention to nuance and detail because he's totally making this up fictional story, so he's doing it on purpose.

When he describes a sheep, I want you to think about this is an animal who is both innocent, okay, and ignorant.

So, so you this isn't a vicious creature.

This isn't a rebellious creature.

This is a creature that gets itself lost, not trying to be a rebel.

I just didn't know better.

And this is what sheep do, they wander off, they get curious about something, uh, they don't understand the world around them, and because of their lack of understanding and their ignorance, they end up in a spot.

How did I get here?

What sheep will do is they'll begin bleating, bleating, they'll begin crying out for help.

But it's very often that a sheep will be crying out for help all the while going further in the opposite direction.

In the day Jesus lived in, okay, the the religious people saw every saw their whole mission in life was cleanliness.

So they would eat in a clean way.

And they had washing, physical washing in a clean way.

And if you were sick, they wouldn't even touch you.

And if you were a sinner, they thought the best thing to do would be to totally disassociate with you.

In fact, there was a slogan in that day.

Historians tell us there was a slogan in the religious community that said, Heaven rejoices every time a sinner is obliterated.

Every time a sinner, an evil person is destroyed, heaven throws a party.

Which then explains why when Jesus talks about the shepherd going after this one sheep, says when he finds him, he's so thrilled, he carries it on his shoulders.

This is why you see paintings of Jesus with a ship a lamb or a sheep on his shoulders, carrying it back.

It's from this parable.

And it says, and then he throws a party in heaven, rejoices when one sinner repents.

Okay, he's he's bringing the counterpoint to what they think.

He's trying to blow up their whole psychology and theology around God and what he cares about.

And I say to you today that if you found yourself in this position, you're like, you know, I wasn't malicious, but I'm lost.

I was ignorant and innocent.

I didn't know what I didn't know, and somehow I found myself in a position where I looked up and I go, How did I get here?

That's the first story.

The second one, told in succession, is the the lost coin and the lost coin.

And uh the lost coin is is actually about being misplaced.

It's about being misplaced.

Coins uh can't walk off.

Coins don't get themselves lost.

It says in verse 8, suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one.

Uh the connotation and the context of that group is they would have understood the ten coins with a woman was it was part of her uh wedding gift.

When a woman was presented in marriage, uh she would present her husband with a uh a chain with ten different coins on it.

So to lose one of those would be tantamount to losing your wedding ring.

And so it says, uh, won't she light a lamp and sweep the entire house and search carefully until she finds it?

In other words, she'd be willing to sweep all night.

When it got dark, she didn't go, I'll see if I can get it tomorrow.

No, no, no.

I'm gonna find this right now.

It's going to be found.

And she would work relentlessly until she found this coin.

Now, back to Jesus, why does he come up with this?

He uses an inanimate object to represent an element of hum of the human experience, which is this.

There are some areas where you were placed.

There are some things that were done to you you had no power over.

Just like the coin can't choose where it gets put, you didn't, there's a lot of your life you didn't choose.

You didn't choose what family you were born into.

You weren't, you didn't choose what generation you were born into, what side of town you were born into.

When you were three years old, they weren't asking you to make a contribution to the family values.

And what do you think about this?

You you didn't have any choice as to what house you got dropped off at, who babysat you.

You didn't have any choice as to who your uncle was, who your cousins were, what neighborhood you grew up in, the experiences you have.

Much of that, you had absolutely no choice.

You were placed, and some of you misplaced.

And this is why often something that will happen to a child at 10 or 12 years old.

People spend their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s trying to sort out the misplacing, the things that they I didn't pick this, I didn't choose this, it happened.

So Jesus uses an inanimate object to help people understand a certain kind of lostness, which is stuff I didn't even do.

It just happened.

This was someone else's misplacing.

And so he says, hey, the relentless nature of this woman, she swept and swept and turned on a light and did everything she could do until she found this coin.

The third, the third is the son, the parable of the lost son, uh, which actually uh represents rebellion.

So you have this story of this boy who goes to his father, he has a brother, and he says, you know, Dad, when you die, I'm gonna get half, he's gonna get half, but I'll take mine right now if that's cool.

Because I'm young enough to kind of do some stuff, and you know, I got some things I want to do, so so if I can have mine now, that'd be great.

And so, you know, the father says, okay, and he goes ahead to do it.

Now, this is this is the thing.

The son, and he of course describes in the text Jesus, when he's making him up, he makes him a young man.

But really, what he is is an immature person.

And how many of you know you don't have to be young to be immature?

Ain't no fool like a like an old fool, all right?

You you you can be older and still have never grown up.

And so Jesus is attacking an immature mindset.

And this immature mindset is essentially, I know it's wrong, but you know, dad's antiquated in his thinking, that's just kind of washed up.

I'm gonna make my own way, I'm gonna do my, and even if it's wrong, whatever, YOLO, you only live once, which is kind of a uh it seems like a pretty dumb reason to do dumb stuff.

You know, you only live once, so let's be dumb.

That doesn't make sense.

But, anyways, uh, you know, people say, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna do it my own way.

And so so the son uh asks for his inheritance now, and in verse 13, the father gives it to him.

In the verse 13, it says, A few days later, the younger son packed up all his belongings and moved to a distant land.

So again, this is showing a willful action of rebellion, and it said, there he wasted all his money on wild living.

Verse 14.

His money ran out, a great famine swept over the land, and he began to starve.

Life kicks him in the teeth.

Life kicks him in the teeth.

And verse 17 says, and when he finally came to his senses, let's pause there.

Let's let's pause there for a minute.

There are some people, in order for them to get to a place where they're ready to receive truth, they they have to learn the hard way.

They have to get their teeth kicked in.

You know, what's interesting about sin is sin creates a certain kind of insanity.

It says when he came to his senses, he had had enough of his theories being tested and truth bubbling up to the surface, whether he liked it or not.

There's something about the hunger pain that will bring you to your knees.

And once he got his teeth kicked in enough by life, by the famine, by his dumb decisions, by the wasting of his resources, he gets to a place where the this the text says in verse 17, he finally came to his senses.

Now, what's interesting about this trilogy is in all three of these stories, the main character of the story is God.

So you have um the the lost sheep, the the shepherd is God.

The lost coin, the woman who swept the house, she is God.

The father and the lost son is God.

But in all three, you see actually in the first two a totally different approach than in the third one.

In the first two, it's a relentless pursuit.

It's a shepherd going, I will not stop until I find the sheep, going all through the wilderness to find the lost sheep aggressively.

The woman who swept the house stayed up all night, working that broom till she found, I'm gonna turn, turn over everything, I'm gonna go into every nook and cranny of this house.

I will find this coin.

But the third, the father, is eerily patient.

Jesus could have told the story any way he wanted.

It was his story.

He could have said, let me tell you a story.

Main character is Liam Neeson.

And uh taken, okay, and he could have said, Hey, the son, okay, father wakes up one morning, half his stuff is gone.

His son has stolen his stuff.

He stole his stuff, and the father woke up and said, I'm gonna find him.

And I he got on and saddled a camel and he rode this camel into Wild Town.

And when he went into Wild Town, he knocked on every single door and he went into every house and he turned that place inside out until he found his lost son.

Then when he found his lost son, he dragged him home.

Jesus didn't tell that story.

Jesus tells a story of a patient father that sat back and waited for his son to get his teeth kicked in just enough to bring him to his knees and have him come to his own senses.

It turns out the father knew the son better than the son knew the father.

The father had a belief in his son that if he'll go out, he will eventually come to his senses.

But what we see from the story is the son had a limited revelation of his father.

Here's what he knew his father.

He knew his father was powerful and just.

That's why when he got to his lowest place and he started to starve, he went, you know what?

If I go home, there's food there.

Even though I took half of my dad's stuff, I believe in his ability to provide food.

And I believe in his justice.

Because he's just, because of my actions, the punishment should fit the crime.

And the punishment for my crime would be that I'm no longer a son.

So at least he'll let me be a servant.

He's powerful enough to make food, and I need food, and yet he's just that he's gonna maybe he'll let me be a servant and let me spend the rest of my life working off my debt.

But he had not yet had a revelation of his father as loving, which is why it says in verse uh 18, he says, I'll go home to my father and I'll say, Father, I sinned against both heaven and you, and I'm no longer worthy to be called your son.

Please take me on as a hired servant.

Verse 20 says, So he returned home to his father, and while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming and filled, watch this, filled with love and compassion.

He ran to him and embraced him and kissed him.

And he restores him as a son.

So now the son, even though he knew his father, he didn't fully know his father.

He fully expected the justice and the power, but he was blindsided by the incredible love that was all working together.

And and we wherever you are today, maybe you were in a place you find yourself lost because of innocence and ignorance, or maybe you were misplaced, or maybe it was an outright act of your will.

What we learn from this is the love of the Father and the pursuit of the Father.

But we also learn of some a couple different tactics.

There's a time to sweep the house and hunt.

There's a time to go after out into the wilderness for the lost sheep, but there's also a time to step back and to be patient and to let nature take its course and to let life kick in some teeth until somebody comes to their senses.

Which then brings us to the question well, what do we do?

What do we do?

Back to the story of my son.

So when I found out that my sons had autism, a lot of my just deep feelings as their father was I I felt this incredible weight of responsibility that it is my job as their dad to get them to Jesus.

Okay.

I want them to know Jesus.

Like whatever they do with their life, what's most important is my kids have a revelation of Jesus and I'm their dad and it's my job to do so.

And that's challenging in life in general.

And then you add an impediment, like an autism, into the situation, and I go, you know, how do I how do I do this?

How do I help them understand power and justice and love and grace and truth and patience and kindness so that they don't innocently or misplaced or whatever that they find their way back to God?

And I and I shouldered this.

And so I just tried everything I knew to do, you know, teaching, I'd use cartoons or I would use picture books and you know, trying all these things, showing them video, you know, and and it just I could tell like I wasn't doing a good job.

The other thing too is I'm like, I would get these waves of discouragement.

Like it took us until our boys were almost seven, both of them they were almost seven years old by the time we potty trained them.

So it's like if I can't even, you know, this is an enemy getting my head.

It if you can't even potty train them, how are you gonna give them a revelation of Jesus?

Okay, you can't get them to brush their teeth.

How are you gonna get them a revelation of Jesus?

So I'm I'm feeling, I'm just gonna tell you, I was gripped, fully gripped by fear, fully gripped by anxiety, because I started to go, wait a second.

What if I can't do this?

What if I can't do this?

What if I'm not good enough?

What if I'm not creative enough?

What if I don't know enough about the nature of their issue to be able to circumvent autism to present God?

What if I spend my life talking to people and preaching the gospel and helping everyone else's kids?

And my own kids don't know God because of my inadequacy, my failure.

And I'm just telling you, it was draining the life out of me.

And I'm feeling all this anxiety, and and so I'm in God's Word and I'm reading, and I come to this trilogy of parables which I have preached and taught about how many of you know you can come up against a text you've read a hundred times, but in a certain season, it's just like boom, like it just lights you up.

Anybody ever had that?

You're like, man, I just saw something different.

So I'm reading this text, and as I'm feeling this anxiety, and as I'm reading the text, and I'm praying about Lord, help me to, you know, help me to do this.

I I felt like the Lord spoke in my spirit and said, Greg, it's the parable of the lost sheep.

It's not the parable of the lost shepherd.

The shepherd's not lost.

And by the way, you need to know who's who in my story.

Because I feel like the father.

I feel like the shepherd.

I feel like the woman with the lost coin.

That's what I feel like.

And yet, God is the one who is the pursuer.

What you need to understand actually about as Jesus is presenting this, he's introducing a new theological concept in his time that now has become somewhat familiar to us, but in that day was brand new, which was the concept of God's pursuit of people.

Up to that point, it was people's pursuit of God.

How do I crack the code of God?

How do I give God what he wants so he gives me what I want?

How do I hold up my end of the deal?

How do I make it and so everything was about us pursuing God?

And now Jesus introduces a concept of God pursuing us.

It's not a lost shepherd.

This is not the parable, it is not that this sheep was out in the wilderness and the shepherd couldn't be found, and the sheep got stuck in some briars and you know wiggled loose, and then got out and you know, bleated and whined and cried and finally, finally tracked this poor shepherd down.

That is not that is not the story.

That's not the parable.

The parable is of the power and the capacity and the ability and the tenacity of the shepherd to track down the sheep.

It's the father, the father, by the way, and you go, but the lost son came home.

It's the father's understanding, case by case, of what it would take for this son to get to a place where he's ready to receive the love I'm so eager to give to him.

For this one, it's gonna take some time.

For this one, it's gonna take some hard knocks.

For this one, it's going to take getting kicked in the teeth and nature taking its course till he finally comes to his senses, and when he does, I'm there to meet him.

It's it's it's the the pursuit of the shepherd.

And so here I am, and I'm reading this, and I get this w all I can tell you is a wave of peace that came over me as a father because I kept thinking I'm the I kept thinking I'm I'm the lady sweeping, I gotta just gotta keep sweeping, light a lamp, and keep sweeping.

It's like God's like, you know.

I'm the one sweeping.

Your boys are the coin.

If anything, Greg, at best you're the broom.

You're not even the light.

That's the gospel, okay?

You're yeah, at best, you're the broom.

You're the broom.

I'm gonna get to, I'm gonna get him.

I just found this wave of, I'm gonna get him, I'm gonna get him.

In my mind, I just thought, maybe God is so good.

Maybe he's so loving.

Maybe.

Maybe he maybe if God loved the world so much he was willing to send his son to be the ultimate sacrifice.

Maybe he loves my son more than I do.

Maybe, maybe the feelings that I have are just a little tiny, just a little taste of how much he loves them.

Maybe he's willing.

Maybe there's no, you know, shadow he won't light up, mountain he won't climb up coming after them.

I don't know, I heard that somewhere.

Maybe, maybe there's no wall he won't, whatever it was, climb up or kick down, or I don't know if he's kicking it down or climbing it up or or lie he's not tearing down.

Maybe, maybe he's willing.

Maybe he's able with the maybe he can get around the impediment and it's not up to me.

Maybe he can get in their you know, unique little brains and he can circumvent things and he can show them a revelation so pure, better than whatever I could do on my best day.

Maybe I just need to come to peace, be in the broom.

So then the Lord throws me another bone, and it was a good, a real, I mean it was incredible.

And here's what he gives me.

You know, we did this night to shine special needs prom, people of all ages.

And uh there was a girl that came, her her name's um, her name's Elizabeth, and she's 32 years old, she's on the autism spectrum.

She shows up in a self-made outfit, a tutu.

She has two stuffed animals, and she came down the red carpet, she danced all night, okay?

And but she didn't say anything.

She can speak, but she struggles to speak.

She says the way she describes it is like trying to speak is like a foreign language.

She can't hardly do it.

So she does a lot of her communication through writing.

So she writes me this letter.

I shared a little bit with you guys a few weeks ago, but I with her permission, she's my new pen pal.

So with her permission, I'm gonna share with you these are her words from her mind.

She said, I want to say thank you for hosting Night to Shine for us this past week.

Speaking can be really tricky for me, but I'm really good at art and writing.

I made my outfit for the dance, but I also make lots of art all the time because it's a it's a God gift.

Uh, parentheses, I call him Papa that he gave me, and that's why I never sell it.

I just like to give it.

Papa also gave me the gift of music, and I taught myself a few instruments, but my favorite is my ukulele, and I write my own songs there about Papa too.

Then she announces to me that she has autism, and she says, Don't worry though, I I don't have a sad story.

It's actually really good because you see, I love Papa, and Papa loves me.

After all, my name is Elizabeth.

That means consecrated to God.

And I was born special to Papa and set apart, and I've always felt called by him to change the world, but he needed me to see the way I was created wasn't broken, and and that when people are mean to me, they don't have power.

He wants me, he wants to use me, the me he created, not the me that the world thinks I should be.

But all I ever wanted more than anything was just to be loved for who I am and accepted and helped.

It's frustrating people think I must speak well and communicate well and be able to do all sorts of easy to them things because I can make art and music and I look nice on the outside.

I never even thought that because the bullies always said I was ugly and weird.

It's frustrating they think things that are easy, like getting ready in the morning, has to be easy because I'm talented.

Art is easy for me.

I never get mad at others for not being good at art like me.

Why do others get angry at me for not being good at their easy things?

Hello, that's a word right there.

Now Elizabeth's preaching.

Talking is so tricky.

Art and writing is how I communicate.

People don't get that though, and so I was put in foster homes and group homes and psychiatric hospitals and even homeless.

I begged people to hear me and see me and help me, but I couldn't communicate and I and they wouldn't understand.

It's such a terrible feeling.

Now listen to this.

I have such a big world inside my head.

I think people think it's empty, or maybe just filled with earthly things like money and stuff, but it's not.

It's filled with color and love and papa, and I wish I could bring more people in.

I love my world.

I think about confusing things and build pictures so I can bring them outside and talk to Papa a lot and think about all these wonderful things.

My stuffed friends, Piggy and Pluto, come alive there, and we don't use verbal language, so it's the best.

Anyway, I love the Bible and Papa.

The Bible is one of the is the one place people like me are chosen and wanted.

Nowhere else in the world with the disabilities that look and um nowhere else in the world do people with disabilities who look and speak and move weird get positions of power.

I'm a liability in earthly places because of my disability.

I'm a uh I'm a challenge to people, but I'm not trying to be difficult.

I never am.

I love Papa, and Papa loves me, and I want to change the world for him.

By the way, he told me we're going to do this with the most powerful weapon ever.

Know what it is?

Love, silly.

Love never fails.

And my favorite thing is talking to Papa, praying because I don't need verbal language, and Papa can hear me perfectly.

So I felt this wave of peace because I knew where I fit in the story, and I just raise my view of God higher than it's ever been, to trust the justice, the power, and the love of God who's full of grace and truth, who's patient and kind.

And I take refuge in Luke 15 that in a case-by-case basis, God knows us better than we know ourselves, and he knows when to sweep the house, and he knows when to hunt through the wilderness, and he knows when to sit home and be patient, and he knows what it'll take for every single person in this room, every person watching online, everybody who you love, he loves even more.

So, what do we do?

What do we do?

Give you three pieces of advice.

Number one, stay plugged into the love of God.

You stay plugged into the love of God.

Jesus says in John 15, 5, I am the vine, you are the branches.

If you remain in me and I in you, you'll bear much fruit.

Apart from me, you can do nothing.

I think sometimes we we get so frantic and fearful because we haven't had a personal revelation of God's love in a very long time, and because of that, we think it always on us.

I'm the Father, I'm the shepherd.

Instead of when I have a revelation of how much God loves me, I'm reminded how much God loves them.

And I can play my position.

And I don't start doing things impulsively out of fear and terror.

I do it based on trust.

I'm I'm operating out of his love.

Jesus uses a vine and branches.

He's like, dude, you're not the vine, you're a branch.

And if you get cut off from the vine, you're gonna have no power.

You're gonna do dumb stuff and you're gonna make poor decisions, you're gonna make bad situations worse.

So you've got to stay plugged into the love of God.

Number two, love them the best you can.

Love them the best that you can.

Grace and truth to them, grace and truth to yourself.

Do your very best to give them love.

How do you love them?

Well, 1 Corinthians 13, 4 through 7 gives us somewhat of a bullseye.

It says love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful or rude or proud, it does not demand its own way, it's not irritable.

Okay, so if I'm doing rude things or or I'm acting out of irritability, okay, back up, get a revelation of love, rest up and then re-enter.

It says keep no, it doesn't keep record of being wrong or wrongs.

It is not rejoice in injustice, but rejoices when truth wins out.

Love never gives up, it doesn't lose faith, it's always hopeful and endures through every circumstance.

Love them the best you can.

But Pastor, I'm confused.

I don't know.

Should I cut them off financially?

Should I go radio silent?

What should I do?

Should I speak the truth?

Should I just tell them like because they don't want to hear the truth?

Should I do it?

Case by case, trust them, take it to the Lord, look, look at this bullseye.

How do I do this this way?

And then do your best to love them the best that you can.

Fueled by the love that God is giving you, now spills over into them.

Number three, pray for them.

James 5:16 says, the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

James 5:16

The prayer of a righteous man and the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous person availeth much, it says in the King James.

It's effective and powerful.

Well, what but I prayed for them and they didn't change.

It says powerful and effective.

It doesn't say it's abracadabra.

It didn't mean that it's gonna necessarily go change everything they do.

Sometimes maybe the effectiveness of the prayer will be you knowing what you're supposed to do or what you're not supposed to do.

Am I supposed to sweep the house or am I supposed to be incredibly patient right now beyond what I could ever do in my own flesh?

Because everything on me wants to saddle a camel and go to Wild Town and pull them out of the house.

And yet maybe in that effectual, fervent prayer, you find a result that the Lord wants you telling you what to do, to play your role.

Sometimes it's just a reframing and a clarity.

So I want us to take a moment here to turn to the Lord.

Take me out of my story.

My story doesn't matter to you.

What matters to you is yours.

What you know, my thing is the thing with my sons.

You you have who you care about, you have what you're walking through right now.

And why don't we do this right now?

Why don't we just take and to take all of our cares and to take all of our questions and to take all of our concerns and to lay them at his feet today and allow the one who knows how to go case by case, person by person, to bring his love to us today, to bring his clarity and his wisdom to us today.

Let's do that.