Crushing and Gethsemane | Pastor Lindsey Brenner

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Okay, good morning.

Hello and welcome to Celebration Church Orlando.

My name is Lindsay.

I'm so glad you're here.

You guys ready to jump in?

Okay, I'm not gonna waste too much time.

I'm ready to jump in.

Okay.

It has been exactly two years since I've been on this platform to teach.

It was actually two years ago during a summer school series where I taught on the history of worship.

And during that teaching, we dissected the patterns that we see modeled of worship from the patriarchs of our faith through the Old Testament.

Then we looked to the New Testament and applied these same patterns by looking through the lens of Jesus' life.

And as we looked at his birth, death, resurrection, how that redefined everything and how it influences our worship today.

I don't know if you guys remember it, but it really was helpful to change our idea.

We did it then, and I want to remind you again that worship has little to do with just singing songs and a little bit more than melody.

It actually is the entirety of our life and how we live it.

How many of us in here face pain?

Suffering, difficulty, hardship.

It's a common thread of the human experience, right?

Today I want us to look at our lives as worship through a very specific and difficult lens this morning, and that's through the lens of being crushed, walking through pain, enduring suffering.

And when we talk about the topic of suffering, most of the time this surfaces some questions within us, honestly, um, that sometimes we're afraid to ask, or we've asked, and maybe we've grappled with it unresolved.

Questions like, is crushing required for my faith?

Does God allow me to be pressed?

Does he do this because he's angry with me or as punishment for something I've done?

Or is there a purpose behind suffering?

Theologians have debated some of these questions for years.

If God is good and I serve a good God, then why am I going through something not good?

Or if God is all-powerful and I serve him, then why is he not sparing me from this thing I'm in?

Many people have left the faith actually because they were wrestling unresolved with these exact questions.

And I am by no means a theologian, so I don't plan to definitively answer those questions, but today that's not my goal.

My goal and hope for today is to kind of beckon us all on a journey together to look up close at suffering through the lens of the Bible, through Jesus' example, through our own personal lives, and see, consider perhaps that suffering has an intent, a purpose, and even an invitation this morning.

This message's title is Crushing and Gethsemane.

Let's pray.

God, we thank you so much for today.

We thank you for another incredible opportunity to gather with people, to set our sights and affections on you, to worship you, to seek you.

God, we ask that you move on these words, move on the scriptures, God, that you would pierce the hearts and minds of today.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

A German theologian, Diedrich Bonnoffer, who was eventually martyred for his faith, wrote these words.

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

And he wasn't the only one to arrive at this heavy conclusion.

A.

W.

Tozer, another brilliant mind of the faith, famously said, It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.

Elizabeth Elliot, a missionary who endured the violent murder of her husband, but chose to stay and minister to his killers, said, Suffering is never for nothing.

And I think all these believers give us a clue that suffering doesn't seem to be a glitch in the Christian life, but rather suffering is an indispensable part of our journey.

And someone who's very familiar with suffering was Jesus.

The Bible calls him a man of sorrows, that he was acquainted with grief.

He faced when he was here on earth intense emotional betrayal, physical torture, and the weight of human sin.

His life proves to us, however, that God understands the fullness and the reality of human pain firsthand.

So this morning, let's first start by looking at one of these moments in Jesus' life.

The God who we serve and worship, the God we sung about this morning, when he on earth is walking through intense suffering.

We're gonna read about the Garden of Gethsemane on the most agonizing night of his life before his death on the cross.

We're gonna look at his response, his emotions, and his physical experience, the fullness of the suffering that he endured that night.

And to do so, I wanna look at the four Gospels.

So Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have parts of the account of this night.

But to do so, there are details that I think are important in every single one.

So what we're gonna do here on the screen is we're gonna take Matthew 26, that account, and we're going to overlay the details from Mark, Luke, and John to kind of combine the full picture of what's happening here from everyone's perspectives.

So let's pull up Matthew 26 on here.

And as you can see, it's kind of color-coded for you, so you can understand when it's in blue, that's Mark's account.

Luke, red, John, green.

Got it?

Okay, let's jump in.

Matthew 26, 36 through 20 uh 42.

Then Jesus went out across the Kidron Valley, as usual, to the Mount of Olives, with his disciples following him to a place called Gethsemane, where there was a garden.

And he said to them, Sit here while I'll go over there and pray, and pray that you will not fall into temptation.

He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled.

Then he said to them, My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

Stay here and keep watch watch with me.

Going a little further, farther, he withdrew about a stone's throw beyond him, fell with his face to the ground, and prayed, My father, Abba Father, everything is possible for you.

If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will.

An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him.

And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

Then he rose from prayer and he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping.

Simon, couldn't you men keep watch with me for one hour?

He asked Peter.

Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

He went away a second time and prayed the same thing.

My father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.

And when he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy.

They did not know what to say to him.

So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.

And when he returned to the disciples and said to them, Are you still sleeping and resting?

Enough.

Look, the hour has come, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners.

Rise, let us go.

Here comes my betrayer.

Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples.

Okay, so let's make some observations from what we just read.

First, from Jesus' example, we see that the crushing, the suffering is real.

He's not pretending to be fine in this moment.

In Matthew's account, it's saying that he's overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.

Luke tells us that he was in such profound physical discomfort and emotional anguish that the capillaries and his sweat glands actually ruptured, causing him to sweat drops of blood, which is a very real condition that can happen when someone is experiencing intense psychological distress.

So what Jesus is showing us here in his example, that it's okay to be a Christian and to be experiencing pain.

We don't have to numb it, we don't have to push it down, we don't have to add an amen to it always.

Jesus felt the full weight of his suffering and deeply overwhelmed by it, physically and emotionally.

We can love God, believe in his promises, and have hard days.

Jesus' example makes that very clear.

We understand that?

Second, it's okay to ask for the cup to pass.

Jesus essentially here and repetitively three times, he's asking God for a breakthrough for the miracle.

He's acknowledging, God, I know you are capable.

Take it from me.

He's begging God for an escape.

He's praying, if it's possible, take it.

What Jesus shows us here, that it's not a lack of faith in God in order to ask him for the breakthrough.

It's okay to be in pain and ask for an escape.

We don't have to be some superhuman and I'm okay walking through pain.

Jesus shows us, through his example, that he asked God for another way.

Third, in this example, we see that Jesus does not isolate himself.

Yes, he removes himself from the hustle and bustle.

He's in a garden, but he's with his closest friends.

He brings them with him.

He needed to find space and pray.

But he invited those people closest to him to carry weight with him.

They couldn't go to the cross for him, no.

They couldn't take on the crushing for him.

Still, he invited them to come and pray with me and for me.

Unfortunately, they failed him.

And so will people in our lives, but that's not the point.

Jesus himself shows that during suffering, it is important to open ourselves up in our pain to receive support from others.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, here, Jesus' example reveals to us the ultimate response that we are invited into in our suffering, and that is through yielding.

His breakthrough that Jesus was praying for didn't come in the form of an immediate rescue.

It came through the form of yielding.

Not my will, but yours be done.

His ultimate act of worship in this garden was not a song.

It was surrendering his will, his anguish, his pain, and ultimately we know it was ultimately surrendering his life.

He didn't fight what was coming, he yielded to it.

He knew the crushing was required to bring salvation.

His present suffering and the suffering to come on the cross was for a purpose.

Now, I'd like to take a few moments to create a profound connection that I think is happening in this text.

Jesus is experiencing suffering and crushing, yes, but I think it's important for us to look at the location in which he's doing this.

He's walking out his crushing at a place called Gethsemane.

In Hebrew, the word Gethsemane literally translates into the oil press.

Archaeology has strongly confirmed that Gethsemane was a working agricultural site for olive pressing, dating back to the time of Jesus.

So it wasn't just a garden, it was a working site where the collected harvest of olives in the area were brought, put under heavy stone, crushed to the point to produce oil.

Jesus would have been incredibly familiar with exactly what happened at this site, and exactly familiar with the process that olives had to go through at this site.

We read in the Gospels above that it said Jesus, as usual, was heading to this place, or later on, Jesus often met his disciples there.

He was familiar.

And in first century Judea, oil production was very essential to the economy of daily life.

So he would have seen, known, and been very well versed with the specific process of oil pressing.

So where would you go on your final uh couple of days if you know you were about to head into the hardest thing that you're ever gonna face?

Jesus chose Gethsemane.

He knew he was going to face these days, and he chose Gethsemane.

He intentionally walked into this place that was designed entirely for crushing.

The physical reality of what olives go through at this site was the exact mirror of the spiritual, emotional, and physical reality he was experiencing, experiencing, and about to experience.

And my proposal this morning is that Jesus Himself was the oil, olive to be crushed.

He knew the heavy stone was coming, he knew the painful pressing he was about to endure, and he still chose to go there and pray.

And I believe it's to reveal something to us.

I want to show you this video of the process that I'm speaking of.

It's a recreation of a first century oil press, and it's gonna walk you through the process that I was just describing so you can kind of get a visual of what's going on.

But as you watch, consider the parallel that I just presented to you: that Jesus is the olive.

Hello, my name is Majd, and I'm one of the guides at Nazareth Village.

We are standing in our fully functioning replica of a first century olive press.

We are entering the rainy season at the moment, uh, November and December, and this is the olive season, so our villagers already started harvesting the olives off of the trees, and we bring them in here in order to press them.

Uh, of course, olives are hard.

You cannot just press them out away.

Uh the first thing you do in the process is crushing them.

And that's why we use this big stone over here.

Uh, Mosey the donkey is helping us move the stone around, and this stone will crush the olives and the pits.

Everything needs to be crushed so finely until it turns into paste, and then it's ready for the next uh stage of pressing.

The crushed olives then are placed in baskets like the one you see over here where you're hanging it on the wall, but of course you lay it flat, and then there are pockets to the sides where you put the crushed olives, preparation for uh the actual pressing process.

And then you take about 10-15 baskets to press them together at the press.

Now the baskets are brought over here and stacked on top of each other.

Underneath them, there's the hole in the ground that is about two feet deep, and it gets also a bit wider as it goes in.

So as you press the baskets over here, oil is gonna gather underneath.

The beam of wood sits on top of the baskets, applying its weight as pressure, and then the three weights, the stone weights, are lifted using pulleys and leverage in order to apply more pressure on top of the baskets.

Each group of baskets gets pressed three times.

The first time you apply pressure, you get the best quality oil.

And according to the Jewish law, the first of your fruits you offer to God.

So the oil from the first pressing, they will not use at home.

They will take it to the temple in Jerusalem.

The second time they applied pressure, they got good quality oil, and it was used for food, medicine, perfume, and cosmetics.

By the time they got to the third pressing, though, the quality of the oil was really bad, uh, and they would use it for oil lamps and making soap.

The olive press has a very strong connection with Gethsemane.

The word Gethsemane comes from two Hebrew words, Gat Shmaimin, and they literally mean press of oils.

And the olive press is a great illustration of the pressure that Jesus was under as he was praying in Gethsemane, to the point he even started sweating blood.

And he prayed three times an equal number to the pressings, and even Isaiah 53 says he was crushed for our iniquities.

So, over 2,000 years ago, we see Jesus, the Olive, facing his Gethsemane, facing his crushing.

And currently, I'm facing my own personal Ghessemony.

When I was pregnant with our fourth child, I decided to name her Olive.

At the time, I loved it.

It was classic, it was deeply meaningful.

I felt like there were so many biblical significant words tied to its meaning.

Um, victory and peace, and the olive fruit, when it goes through this crushing, the oil from it is a symbol of anointing.

But I also remember having kind of a quiet fear.

Um, giving her that name, understanding the biblical context, that in order to produce things like victory and peace and anointing, there was a process that the olive had to go through.

If you study agriculture, what an olive has to go through just to survive, even before it meets the press, is fascinating and deeply insightful.

Olive trees do not grow in soft, fertile, easy soil.

They're planted in harsh, rocky terrain.

Drought, relentless heat, they endure the very conditions that are meant to destroy them.

And when it is time for the harvest, farmers don't gently pluck the tree, the fruit from the tree.

No, the biblical way to harvest an olive is to take a heavy stick and violently beat the branches until the fruit falls to the ground.

Then a raw olive off of the tree is still completely bitter and inedible.

It has to be crushed to release its value.

I did not know all of the agricultural significance at the time when I was hesitant to name her olive.

And I didn't know what was to come when we finally decided to name her olive.

But looking back today, there are so many connections, and I see through her almost two years of life of what olives represent, the process they go through, the conditions they're under and endure, and ultimately the oil, the peace, the victory, and anointing that comes.

Because her life has literally walked me into my own personal ghessemony.

Olive has a very rare disease, what doctors consider as one of the most severe seizure disorders.

You can type it into Google, it will pop up.

It's a condition that, due to a genetic abnormality, is connected to uncontrollable seizures that prevent the brain from growing normally.

Children with this disease are supposed to stop hitting normal goals.

They face severe intellectual delays, movement problems, challenging behavioral traits, and there is a constant risk of long and life-threatening seizures that can lead to sudden death, which means her condition is life-threatening.

In fact, the overall mortality rate of people with her disease is 15 to 20%.

And premature death is most common during childhood.

About 73% of all of the deaths happen before a child even reaches the age of 10, with a median age of just seven years old.

For those who do survive into adulthood, independent functioning is exceedingly rare.

Most face lifelong, moderate to severe cognitive and physical challenges requiring dedicated 247 care.

I remember reading these words on one specific.

Night, there were enough occurrences that led us to need getting to need to get genetic testing for our daughter.

And it was one night I was trying to get my older three to fall asleep, so I was laying on the floor with them trying to help that happen.

So as my mind is wandering, knowing that we're awaiting these results, I was searching what her epilepsy panel could come back and say.

And obviously, I knew the symptoms that we were experiencing her first year of life, what that looked like.

And um when I stumbled upon this condition, this disease, when I began reading these things, I fell into a panic attack.

I couldn't move.

I was shaking to the point uncontrollably.

I couldn't catch my breath at the even thought of this being a potential thing that was named over our daughter.

Fast forward to when we actually received these genetic testing results.

We were on a family vacation.

It was an afternoon at our Airbnb with the kids running around, and my email receives a PDF, not a doctor call, not a genetic counselor sitting in front of me, a PDF.

And on my iPhone, I read this.

That this diagnosis was confirmed.

The days and weeks and months that have passed since this diagnosis on August 8th of last year has been nothing like I envisioned for my life.

For my life, my kids' lives, my family's life, my marriage, nothing.

Our lives have been completely altered.

This diagnosis in reality of living out every single day has been crushing.

Mentally, physically, emotionally, depressing often feels relentless.

And honestly, the future is still completely unknown.

You read what I just read, I don't know what's coming.

And I have asked God all the same questions that we talked about at the beginning.

Why?

Why?

Why me?

Why now?

Will you heal her?

And I don't have the answers, truly.

But the point of this morning was not for me to make you feel sorry for what I'm going through.

It's not to compare my suffering to yours.

The point was I wanted to peel back some of the layers of my own lived experience and how I have applied Jesus' example of suffering and walking through it to change the way I'm walking through it.

Yes, the pressing is real, pain is real, there is no sugar coating in.

I will never do that.

I constantly and repetitively, like Jesus' example, pray for the cup to pass, for her healing, for the miraculous.

He can do it, and I am confident of that.

But daily we still are walking through this diagnosis.

And also, just like Jesus' example, I have invited those closest to me and even you this morning into prayer as we're walking through this.

And just like in Gethsemane and Jesus' example, there's been no instant rescue.

But the point of peeling all this back is the other side of the coin that I wanted to share this morning.

That until walking through my own personal Gethsemane that I'm still in, I don't think I've ever experienced the deep fellowship and relationship with God that I have in this space.

It has become the exact location of my most guttural dependency on him.

Prayers like I've never prayed.

Profound intimacy with his inescapable presence.

And I've experienced the truest moments in my life of worship and devotion unto him.

Now I can say, not my will, but yours be done.

And it's taken a bit to get here.

Grappling with God, asking the questions, walking through the daily pressing.

But the oil that it's producing in my life is something that I could not produce on my own.

In this surrender that I'm finding myself in daily, it's something more holy, more refined, more pure, something truly good.

And that is hard for me to even fathom.

I believe that Jesus' pressing produced the oil of salvation.

And today, the pressing in my daily life is an invitation for me to worship him with my life, to produce an oil daily for his glory.

We've all heard the word anointed before, haven't we?

If you've been around church at all, you know the word anointed.

Unfortunately, in our church culture, it's been severely romanticized.

When we use it, a lot of times we use it to describe a great message or a beautiful worship leader or a person with financial blessing or someone walking through an easy life.

A lot of times we've looked at those things and said, wow, that's anointed.

But let's look at the biblical reality of what it actually means.

Anointing doesn't mean God makes our path smooth.

In fact, what we see is that it means assignment.

That it means your life is no longer your own.

It's for God.

And it's for purpose.

So many, many of us want the product of the oil, but we resent the heavy stone.

We want the victory, but we're offended or confused by the crushing.

A raw olive, in its raw state, it remains bitter.

It never produces oil.

So we have to understand.

We're all going through suffering, right?

We have to understand what it actually takes to produce oil.

We see it in the Bible.

David, he was a young, anointed king as a teenager, and then what happens?

His immediate reward was spending the next decade of his life hiding in caves, being hunted by a jealous madman.

Joseph was given prophetic dreams of God's great calling on his life, and his immediate reward?

Being stripped, thrown into a pit by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused, and locked into a foreign prison for 13 years.

The list goes on, right?

True oil only flows from being pressed, not from a perfect life, not from a good life, not from our own works, not from a comfortable, self-protected life.

No.

And the questions that we asked at the beginning, like I said, I'm not trying to solve them all this morning, but I want to look at them again.

Is crushing required?

Does God allow us to be pressed?

Does he do it because we've done something wrong or he's angry with us?

What is the ultimate purpose of our suffering?

And I would add to it now, why should we yield?

That sounds painful.

I don't want that.

Through Jesus' example that we read and my own personal journey, I would say crushing is not required.

But I would say that it's inevitable.

We all said we're facing pain.

We will face that in our lives.

We will continue to face that in our life.

But this morning we have a choice.

That's not the point.

The point is in the yielding.

I was thinking about this analogy in childbirth.

I've had a few times to go at it, and I can be 100% real with you that the more you fight against the pain, the more you tense up, the harder it is, the more painful it is.

What happens in those moments is you kind of get stuck in a loop, fearful of the pain, then you focus on the pain, then you experience the pain, and it just cycles.

In my subsequent, some of my later ones, I learned some things.

And when you yield to the pain, or what I like to say, when you when you ride the wave of the pressing as the contractions come, when you choose to not focus on the pressure, on the pain, but yet on the product of what's coming from your pressing, it changes your reality.

And I can be 100% honest with you that those last ones were actually enjoyable.

People think I'm crazy, but for my fourth delivery, I told some of you friends in here, I'm actually kind of excited.

People are like, you're crazy.

But truly, there is a reward at the end of it.

And when you choose to take the moment of that you want to grapple for control, you're out of control.

Release and yield to it.

The product and the reward is coming.

God does allow us to be pressed.

I believe that.

But it's never as punishment.

It's not because he's angry with us, it's not because we did something wrong, and there's always meaning to it.

There's purpose in the pressing.

He's producing something.

Yes, it's still painful.

Yes, it's still horrible.

Yes, you still want to wish it away.

That is true.

That doesn't go away.

But the oil that he is producing in the pressing is precious.

He's all powerful, and he's the embodiment of love.

And he allows the pressure to extract what is holy and precious inside of our lives.

And I want to tell you, you can trust his hands.

They are careful.

They're not flippant hands.

The hands that are allowing the pressing of the stone are the same hands that died on our cross for our salvation.

So why should we yield?

What's the outcome?

I do believe there's two clear outcomes in our pressing when we allow the yield.

One is a deeper, more intimate relationship with God.

I spoke to that about my own personal experience.

It is hard to put it into words.

I was trying to think about examples.

I can't.

All I can say is my relationship with God is deeper than I could ever fathom.

A dependency that I can never put into words, a worship and devotion that was not there before.

Yes, cognitively, yes.

And even in my life, yes.

But through suffering, I had to put the rubber to the road.

And I got to see that the words that I read on the page of my Bible came alive.

So when I read that he is close and near to the brokenhearted, guess what?

I've felt that.

And when I read that he never leaves or forsakes me, I'm confident because I've felt that.

That's what suffering does.

It produces the oil and the proof of the pressing.

The second thing is I believe there's purpose in our pain for others.

When the olive is crushed, the crushing is temporary, the oil is produced.

But the oil is not for the olive.

Who's the oil for?

Someone else.

Food, medicine, condom, whatever they said, uh perfume and cosmetics, thank you.

Whoops.

Um anyway, all of it is for someone else, correct?

And I would even say, through examples, through the example of Jesus, what do we see his crushing?

Was the crushing for him?

It was for our salvation, for me and for you.

So this morning, remember, when you are being crushed and pressed, the oil that is being produced will leave a legacy that outlasts your temporary pain.

I'd love to end with some words from the apostles who knew exactly what it meant to live a life that was crushing, who followed the example of Jesus' suffering in their own life, and they worshiped God with their entire beings.

This is meant as an encouragement for us all.

This has been a heavy message.

But I want us to understand through these personal lived experiences of the apostles that understood actual suffering, the words that they wrote for us to read today.

James writes in James 1, consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.

Let the perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

And then verse 12 it says, Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial.

Because having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.

Then in 2 Corinthians 4, Paul writes, We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed.

We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.

Romans 8, Paul writes, as his children, we will receive all that he has for us.

We will share what Christ receives, but we must share in his sufferings.

If we want to share in his glory.

So to share in Christ's suffering, that so many of them wrote about, that means we share in his Gethsemane.

It doesn't mean we just get the glory of the empty tomb, it means that we are willing to endure the crushing of this life.

The apostles clearly clearly tell us here that there is a privilege to being pressed.

Not easy, but a privilege.

And that's because when we are being pressed, we are standing in the very place that Jesus Himself stood.

You are sharing in his obedience, the crushing, and you are sharing in his victory, the oil.

You get to share in his yielding, the crushing, and you get to share in his power, the oil.

You are sharing in his death, the crushing, and ultimately in salvation, the oil.

We share in his temporal crushing in order to share in his full and complete and eternal glory.

A glory where death is defeated, there's no more pain, there's no more heartache, there's no more sickness.

Thank you, Jesus, for yielding.

Thank you for enduring the press.

Not only to give us an example, not only to give us a comforter, but to give us eternal life and salvation.

Perhaps you walked into the room this morning and you are right in the middle of your own Ghissemane.

Or maybe like me on the front end of my Gethsemane, kind of holding on to your life a little bit.

In the back of your mind, having those what if fears.

Wondering that at some point will I be in something like that?

Will I have to endure?

Will I have to suffer?

Will I be able to make it through?

What I want to encourage you with is to stop grappling for control.

To yield.

Consider the olive, what it has to endure to produce the oil.

And through Jesus' example, what He, the ultimate example of the olive, endured for our salvation.

I know it's not easy, I know it's painful, I know it doesn't make sense sometimes, and I don't have all the answers, but I know there is oil, I know there is purpose for ourselves and for others.

Jesus chose to surrender ultimately to the Father's will, and that surrender brought the greatest victory in all of human history.

The lack of this immediate relief and rescue led to our ultimate relief and eternal rescue.

His pressing didn't destroy him, nor will it destroy us.

It revealed him.

We're gonna sing a song this morning that's deeply personal to me.

I heard it at the beginning of walking through some of this stuff.

And it's called Fruit Takes Time.

And I remember Googling right away is is an olive a fruit?

Because I didn't know.

And it is indeed a fruit.

And I want to, while you are listening to the song, I want to encourage you to process what we talked about.

Maybe the pain you're facing, maybe the fear of the pain that you will one day face.

And surrender it.

Use the example, consider through the lens of Jesus' example to surrender it this morning.

His ways are better than our ways, and it doesn't make sense how the thing that we're praying for often comes by way of something we never imagined.

If you're in your Gethsemane today or one day, I want you to remember, yield to it, trust the master of the press because oil will follow.

Thank you for joining us.

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