"Fear of the Lord" Was Never Supposed to Be Fear | Who Told You That? (Week 8) | Chad Belew

I've got a theory.

I told the team back there.

I've got a theory.

I think.

Our young spurters team and their children.

They're going to go up to New York tomorrow.

They're going to lose games for you.

All right.

Hold on.

Hold on.

They're going to win the next floor.

And win the next floor.

And win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win the third floor.

They're going to win tomorrow.

They're going to lose games for you.

All right.

Hold on.

They're going to win the next floor.

And win the seventh.

Because kids do what we talk about a lot to do.

And that's not supposed to happen.

This is my theory.

And also.

I forget I think he's making sense.

That's just chatting and protecting himself.

But they lose London.

It's still going to happen, guys.

That's my theory.

Mark it down.

Oh.

Hey, we're continuing our series.

Who told you that?

Actually today is the last sermon in this series of talks.

Who told you that?

The subtitle on that you probably can't see it.

It's how fear, shame, and bad religion distort the way we seek God.

We're going to go through this for eight weeks.

We're going to go through this with nine.

And so I'm going to wrap this up today.

I grew up mainly in the city.

For most of my life.

But a city boy.

At least since like when I was 14 years old.

When I was born and grew up in Oklahoma City.

So it's kind of a city.

And then right outside of Oklahoma City.

Okay, calm down.

I was actually born in Norman.

Which is where the University of Oklahoma is.

Boomer.

She gets me in trouble right here.

But yeah.

So then I moved to San Antonio when I was 14 years old.

In 1996, actually right after I moved here is when I drafted Tim Duncan to play for San

Antonio City.

But it's also the worst year this person ever had.

So it was a fun time to be a new fan.

But I grew up in a city.

I really like.

If you think I can see there's lights everywhere.

I love living downtown so cool lights.

You see the little alien light that pops up over the tower.

All this cool stuff.

I look like truly endless.

A few times in my life I would say.

One of those times was in the middle of the desert.

In Baghdad or out.

I was on a patrol base.

Just like this small little compound.

We're outside of the main base area.

Actually we were living in what was an old house.

We were living in a city.

There was a lot of things.

So that is big houses.

We would take it over.

It was our patrol base.

I was looking at this little area.

The desert that had what we used to call moon dust.

It's this sand.

It's ultra fine.

It's an open powder.

It just gets in everything.

We were on like a blackout patrol base meeting.

There was like no lights.

At night a journal lights off.

In fact DJ and I were just comparing lights on the watches.

I didn't have this in a wrap.

A flashlight just on this.

His garment was really brightening.

But what he couldn't figure out.

Now I can't do it.

I'm just going to have to put it on.

This.

If we were to use a red light.

That's the only way we could get around the base.

We could use red light flashlight because it wasn't right.

But we're on this blackout base because we would get incoming

all the time.

They were trying to kill us.

Let me show you a picture.

There's a picture of me and my interpreter.

I'm the white guy.

That was back.

A few pounds ago.

That's my interpreter.

I worked with him.

Majority of that deployment.

But we just ended this base.

We kind of got set up.

We took a picture.

We thought we were cool.

We went back out to our homie to get some stuff.

And then next we know we got incoming.

This is what Louis looked like right after incoming.

Because he fell into the moon dust.

I remember he fell.

We were running from incoming.

He fell.

And I was like look at him.

I grabbed him and he looked at me.

And he looked like Mrs. Doubtfire.

We're all going to put his face in the pie.

And I was like smile.

I took a picture.

And then we went and got behind cover.

Because we were suddenly shot.

You do weird stuff.

No red lights tonight because we took incoming quite often.

But when the sun went down.

All the lights went down.

It went all the way down.

No city glow.

No light pollution.

Nothing.

Just desert and dark.

And I remember one night looking up.

And I'd never seen anything like it.

The sky wasn't like a ceiling anymore.

It was just there was depth to it.

There were stars that didn't even exist.

There were layers to it.

And I didn't know what to do with it.

I just kept looking up.

And now I realize I was feeling this emotion of love.

Like real love.

They kind of make sure you go quiet and feel very small.

I felt it in the middle of a war.

In one of the most fearsome seasons of my entire life.

I'm standing on a base that we kept pitch black because people were trying to kill us.

And the thing that rose up in me looking at the sky was the fear.

It was one night.

In that moment it showed up in the middle of the fear.

And it was bigger than the fear.

That was it.

Now you've heard me talk about awe for like a year.

We've spent the whole year along here.

So we did the "Pass by Series" on this emotion.

You guys know this has become like a life study for me.

Like psych research on this emotion.

So I don't want to re-explain onto you because most of you have heard this.

You can probably preach it back to you this way.

You know this line went up.

"Fear narrows all white ones."

But I want to aim it somewhere today.

For nine weeks we've been asking one question.

Who told you that?

And today I want to point it at any oldest religious feeling there is.

The one most of us were taught to call fear.

The question is who told you that the right response to God was to be afraid.

Let me catch us up for those of you that maybe haven't been here for nine weeks.

Today is where this whole thing has been headed in this entire series.

Way back in week one we started in the garden.

Out of an eve they do the one thing and the very first thing they do after is they hide.

They sow the leaves.

They get in the bushes and God comes walking in the pool of the day and ask the question.

That's been echoing under this entire series.

The question is where are you?

Hold on to that question because we're going to come back to it a little bit later.

I think it's going to land differently than you think.

What we've watched since that first week, and we've walked through the series,

where the fear came from.

From Augustine to Ansel, to Edwards, to the Chick tracks.

We talked about what it does to a body.

What fear does to the body where the bracing, the hypervigilance, the nervous system,

that never gets to exhale.

The older brother who kept every rule and still felt like a higher hand

when his prodigal brother left.

And then last week we talked about Nicodemus, the most religious man in the gospel,

John, showing up to talk to Jesus at night because he was afraid to be seen.

He just threatened the whole Bible of the whole people hiding,

and bushes, and rule keeping, and the dark, and their own bodies.

Hiding from a God they were sure was angry.

And last week I sent you along with a question.

What's one thing about God you were handed a long time ago that you've never gone back and checked?

So today we're going to talk about and hopefully check the biggest one of all,

the one we built whole churches on, entire, like, religion, and it's the fear of God.

You know, you know this verse too, because we talked about it a lot,

let's say with you because it matters for what's coming.

The verse 9, 10, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

We've all heard of it. Most of us read it exactly how it sounds in English.

We're scared of God and that's where wisdom starts.

But the word under the fear is the Hebrew word yerah, which we've talked about.

And yerah is not mostly about being scared.

It's the trembling you feel, standing in front of something so vast and so beautiful

that the whole body knows it's small.

It's not the fear that makes you run.

It's the thing that makes you take your shoes off,

because you know you're in a place that's holding you.

Your eyes awe reverence before the vast and holy.

Not the fear that makes you run, the awe that makes you take your shoes off.

One pushes you away and one pulls you in.

We have a word for it. We don't use it in the church of life.

It's that word awe that we don't use in most churches.

This church you hear a lot.

So yerah, translated to awe, the beginning of wisdom is the awe of the Lord.

It's a very different sentence than the beginning of wisdom is being scared of the Lord.

Once starts you on a path of wonder, the other starts you in the bushes.

And somebody somewhere took the trembling wonder word and translated it into the danger word

and then built a whole religion on the danger.

And here's why there's not just word games.

You can't argue your way out of fear that lives in your body.

I've tried.

You can't think your way from God is love on a test.

You're answering a question to actually feeling safe with God when the room goes quiet.

The concept can say love, but your gut still flinches at the bottom.

But awe, it's underneath these words, these ideas.

It's not new information about God.

It's a new experience of that.

Last week we talked about this kind of knowing.

In the Greek, there's two different types of knowing.

There's oeda, which is to know in your head, knowledge.

And then there's the word genosto.

Genosto in the Greek is knowing by encounter.

Not knowing about is, you don't get talked out of the flinch of being in the presence of God.

You get done by something bigger than that.

You experience the love of God.

There's a difference in knowing and experience.

We know the sick from relationships, right?

I gotta tell you, I'm running on like maybe three hours of sleep this morning.

I've been sick for the last few days.

And I went to the doctor to see what was going on.

I throw a surgery and I get strepto like all the time.

I'm running to keep something happier in my tonsils, but I don't know why.

But I get a strepto like once a year.

And I thought a strepto wasn't.

But they gave me a steroid shot.

And I didn't realize it, but I think it wired me.

This morning, what it was like, you chose violence today.

What is happening?

I'm just having fun.

I'm just being playful, but she about knocked me out.

Last night, this morning, really, I'm late in bed.

It's for about two, three, two, forty-five.

If you look at my story, you can tell exactly what I shared.

But I'm reading this article on neuroscience of encountering God.

And my brain would not show off.

Because as I'm reading this article, it is singing with brain scans

almost exactly what we've been circling for nine weeks in this conversation.

There's a researcher named Andrew Uber who has spent his career

scanning people's brains while they pray in worship.

And here's what he keeps finding.

This article is in a relevant magazine you can find.

And then he's also got actual scientific articles you can read.

But here's what he keeps finding.

When your faith runs on fear, it keeps the oldest alarm system in your brain.

The survival circuitry, the threat detector is stuck in the on position.

You're a victim.

I talked about this a while back.

And in a fear-based theology, God lives in the amygdala.

And in this place that puts you ready for a threat.

And he's showing it in his brain scans.

And when your faith runs on fear, it keeps that circuitry, the threat detector,

stuck in the on position.

Low brain alert at all times.

In week six, we talked about this, the body that never gets to exhale.

But when your faith runs on love and compassion, the brain does something different.

In these scans, it regulates.

If it becomes online, be a long, finely quiet step, your brain begins to notice something different.

And here's the line that maybe grabbed my phone and started taking notes at 2.30 in the morning

and then shared it on my Instagram.

The image of God who brings into prayer matters through a logically, not just theology.

And that you carry literally shapes your brain.

That's not a metaphor.

In the tissue of your brain, the fear God and the love God don't just feel different.

Over time, they build different people.

They are firing in your brain, creating this neuroclassicity that literally develops who you're going to be as a person.

Now, Newberg is careful here and I want to be too.

A brain scan can show you that something changes.

It can't prove who you met in that conversation, in that prayer.

Basically he says that science can measure the doorway.

It can't tell you who's in the room.

And you know what, that's okay to me?

Because it's exactly where he knows who lives.

You were never going to get certainty in this relationship in his life.

You were going to get an encounter.

And the encounter is the thing that changes you.

And what you expect to encounter in the person of God

is what's going to shape who you're going to be.

And we can see this play out.

We've talked about the fruit testifies.

What you believe about God is going to shape who you are.

And in the fruit out of you is going to testify what you believe about God.

So, we go back to the garden, back to that question because I told you it lands differently now.

God comes in the garden in the cool of the day and he asks Adam, "Where are you?"

And I used to hear that as like the opening line of interrogation.

Like God on the war path.

You're a kid and you just did something wrong and here comes your parents looking for you.

You're hiding under the bed.

And Jeff knows that.

And Jeff, where are you?

I don't know if he fits under the bed anymore, but does he still fit in?

He does.

God on a war path, standing the bushes, hunting the guilty because this is the vision I have.

Like a parent who already knows and it's just giving you a chance to confess before the hammer drops, right?

That's how fear hears it.

Fear always hears footsteps of the threat.

But read it again.

Slowly.

Two people are hiding.

Certain, their relationship with God is over. Certain, God is now their enemy.

And what is God doing?

That comes looking.

God walks into the worst moment of the human story and the first words out of his mouth are, "How could you?"

It's, "Where are you?"

That's not a threat, that's a search.

That's the sound of someone who refuses to let the hiding be the end of the story in this relationship.

The very first thing God does with human failure is move toward it.

And we've watched him do this move, this whole series that we've talked through.

The father and the prodigal story running down the road before the son can even finish his speech.

He uses meaning that can be missing the dark and never shaving him for it.

Same God every time.

The God who comes walking into the garden.

The God who runs down the road.

A lot of us spent our whole lives hiding from a God who was never hunting us.

We watched him the bush is racing for footsteps and the footsteps were never coming to punish us.

They were coming to find us.

Now, one of the questions is I'm studying and talking about this and thinking about this.

That comes to my mind.

So I guess that it probably comes to yours too.

So I don't want to do us a disservice as I'm up here talking about this.

As I talk about God as like a father running down the road.

I don't want to just breeze past the thing that I know some of you are thinking.

What about the God being tested?

The flood, the drown, the world, the place.

The hard one, the one we don't say out loud.

The places where God appears to come in Israel to go into a city and leave nothing alive.

Men, women, children.

We can't just skip that, right?

I give you nice, just be like, "Yeah, we'll just forget about that."

But that's not the text messages I give.

But I've been reminded that I ignore it.

I'm going to put it on the table.

We can't just skip it and say God is all love.

If we're going to be honest people and this whole series has been about trying to be honest

people, we have to put that on a table.

So let me put it on the table today.

I'm not going to tie this up in a neat bow.

Anybody who tells you that they fully solved it is selling you something.

I want to give you the ways that serious, faithful, brilliant people have actually wrestled with this same question.

Because nobody handed me into these in church that I grew up in.

They just handed me the fear until we're not to ask.

So first, and this is the oldest.

This is not so new like liberal dodge.

The early church wrestled with these exact texts, hard.

And here's the part nobody told me growing up.

Those early church fathers did not look at a passage where God orders the slaughter of children and say,

"Well, God's ways are higher than ours, who am I to question?"

That's the move we got handed, that's not what they did.

They did the opposite.

They looked at the text like that and said, "That cannot be a strict picture of God."

But God who commands the killing of babies is unworthy of the word God.

So this passage has to mean something deeper than what it says on the surface.

Origin, all the way back in the 200s, said this almost directly.

When Scripture describes God doing something that would be monstrous,

if you read it flat and literal, that's not God confessing his character.

That's the text itself waving a flag telling you to stop reading on the surface and dig for what it actually means.

But Bible is not a history building.

And what Origin is pointing out in 200, the second century is,

and when you read this, there's got to be something deeper than this,

because I can't believe that a God that we believe his love would do this.

It doesn't match.

So from the very beginning, early centuries, they were saying this doesn't work.

We've got to go deeper.

Gregory of Visa shortly after that did the same thing.

He stared at the death of the Egyptian firstborn, children dying,

and he refused just to file it under God's will.

He couldn't square it with a good God.

So he concluded it had to be pointing at something other than a literal report of God killing kids.

Something else is happening here.

We can't just read everything in Scripture literally while people tell us we have to.

That doesn't work.

And the people closest to the origin of these stories didn't do that higher.

Catch this means.

The most ancient readers we have already assumed that a passage painting God as a child killer

probably wasn't telling the truth about God.

They didn't silence the question.

They asked it harder than most of us ever had.

They just trusted the answer would be this isn't who God is.

Then there's voices that I read now that people like Pete ends who's a theologian and an author.

I love this stuff talking about Scripture in the Bible.

He said like this, "The Bible didn't drop out of the sky.

It was written by an ancient people who understood God the way ancient people understood God.

Through the lens of their tribe and their rulers.

Every nation back then had a warrior God who fought for them.

And in says, in effect, God let his children tell a story in the language they had.

The text shows us of people growing slowly, haltingly in their understanding of who God is.

And the growth is heading somewhere.

It's heading toward a person.

God let his children tell the story in the language they had.

Great boy, Brad Jersek, more theologians now, they push it further.

They say read all of it through the cross.

When you get to Jesus, you don't see a God who makes other people believe.

You see a God who chooses to believe himself.

So in the picture in an old text and the picture on the cross don't match.

Jersek and Boyd say the cross is the true one.

God was always like Jesus.

We just couldn't see it yet.

That's what Jesus was coming to show us.

This is who the character of God is.

This is what the character of God is.

Not what you've written down that you've assumed because a lot of the things that were tied to God in old text

were brought in by tribal ideas, by things that were thought about

who a God was and what a God did.

And they attached it to God as they write these sorts.

If you look at early, early theologians and these later theologians, they all say,

"Hold on, if it doesn't match through the character of Jesus's,

then we have to question what is happening here."

Here's a part that I straighten this whole series, the psychology that I don't unsee now.

Frightened people write a frightened God.

A tribe living by the sword, surrounded by enemies, terrified.

They're going to imagine a God who fights like they fight.

We still do this.

A God who's going to protect the U.S. at all costs.

That's going to fight our holy world.

We attach our ideas of a warrior God to God and then say what we're doing is holy.

This is not a new thing. It happened in the early Rockies.

We've spent nine weeks now watching human fear shake the picture of God.

Why would we be surprised to find our elite fingerprints all over the oldest parts of the story, too?

Sometimes the violence in the text tells us less about the heart of God

and more about the fear and the people that were holding the pen.

So, what do we do now?

That probably, you got questions. I get it. We'll have a chance next week.

What do we do with all of it? Here's where I land.

It's the same place this whole series has been pointing.

When the pictures of God conflict, Christians have a typewriter.

Listen to how the book of Hebrews opens.

In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times in various ways.

But in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son.

The radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being.

The exact representation.

And John says nobody has ever actually seen God except the Son who has shown Him to us.

And then Jesus just says it flat out. If you've seen me, you've seen the body.

So, when you want to know what God is actually like, you don't start in the conquest of Canaan.

And the Old Testament, you start with Jesus. And then you let Jesus reach back and read everything else.

So, let's do that. Let's watch.

There's a scene early in Mark's gospel. I think most of us slow down enough to feel how shocking it can actually be.

There's a man with leprosy. He comes to Jesus.

Now, the leprosy back then wasn't just a disease. It was a social death sentence.

You are ceremony unclean. You couldn't live in the town. You couldn't worship.

If I lie, you kind of keep your distance. They call out unclean when you walked.

So, people could get away from you. Nobody had touched this man in years.

Years. Nobody was even close to him. Sit in that person.

The thing he lost wasn't just his health. It was every hand that ever might have reached for him.

And he comes to Jesus. And listen to how careful he is. How much shame is in his safety to Jesus.

If you are willing, you can make me clean. If you're willing.

He's not even sure he's allowed to ask. And here's the line.

Mark 141, Jesus reached out his hand. And he touched the man.

He touched him. Before healing, before anything got fixed, before the man was clean, Jesus put his hand on.

And you have to understand what that did. Under the law, Jesus is a good Jew.

And under this law, in Jewish times, when the clean touches the unclean, the clean becomes unclean.

That's how it always ran. Contamination flows downhill.

Everyone watching expects the dirt to win.

The way dirt always wins. I've seen Rob at times. He put a couple of water.

He has seen a couple of water. And then he pulled like a sewer water.

And just like a drop into the water. You still want to drink it?

The whole water is contaminated now. The same concept here.

Jesus touches the unclean. By law, he just became unclean.

But it doesn't work that way with Jesus. It runs backwards.

The uncleanliness doesn't crawl up his arm. His wholeness flows down into the man.

And wholeness turns out to be the thing that's contagious.

It turns out to be the thing that's contagious.

That's the picture of Jesus. That's who God is. Not a God who keeps the unclean outside the candle.

A God who walks to the edge of the can to the person nobody will go near and reaches out his hand first.

Before the face, before you got it together, before you cleaned yourself up enough to be touchable.

This is the same God walking into the garden asking where are you?

The same God running down the road to his son.

I think we touched on the sheet and the goats a few weeks back in Matthew 25, or the Samaritan stopping on the road.

Due to help, the man that had been beaten and been walked over by the religious leaders.

It's the same God every single time. Then it's something God that most of us were handed.

The God who were handed kept a list and kept distance.

The God Jesus shows us closes distance. He always closes the distance.

And that's how he came in the first place. In the very first story we see of God approaching humanity.

They paid off some different last week than I know I liked. A lot of stuff on the table.

We only took the survey last week before we came.

And one question was, when you hear, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, what comes to mind first?

And as a room, almost all of us said Easter or the cross were hell.

Almost nobody said Christmas.

I told you to hold on to that. I don't know that I got back to it.

Here's why.

We've heard that verse of transaction for so long that we forgot what Gabe actually needs.

What it actually opens up.

God sold up the world that he gave.

That he came. That the God of the impossible Iraqi sky that just had so much depth.

This God so big that the witness used to be in fear to me,

climbed into a body, got small, became a baby and a feet trough in a nowhere town to a teenager under an empire that never even noticed.

That's the answers to this whole series.

We kept asking who told you God was angry, dissed, keeping score.

And the deepest answer to the gospel gives is, go look at the manger.

God didn't show up with a fist or a ledger. He showed up as a child that you could hold.

The infinite.

Small enough to be picked up by the very people who were hiding from him.

That's something God can hide from.

That's lying in the hay.

John, the same John who gave us that verse in John 3.16, says this plainly as anyone ever has.

There is no fear in love.

But perfect love drives out of fear.

Because fear has to do with punishment.

A real slow fear has to do with punishment.

So what you feel toward God is the bracing, the flinching.

That's not the awe that Robert is talking about.

That's the punishment fear that perfect love is designed to walk into the room and drive out.

Not because you tried Harvard. Because love showed up in person and reached out his hand.

So here's where nine weeks has been taking us.

You were handed a God to be afraid. I was handed a God to be afraid.

And underneath that fear, the whole time was a feeling that was only ever meant to be awe.

You had the truth in the right. You just had it aimed at the right instead of wonder.

And when the old page is scariest, when the people with the microphones scared you,

there was always a clearer picture you could go stand in front of.

That man reached out his hand to the one nobody would touch.

A father running down a road. A God walking into a garden into the worst moment we've ever had,

asking not how could you, but where are you? Because he came looking.

You don't have to hide from a God like this. That's the whole thing.

You can come out of the bushes, out of the roll keeping, out of the dark.

Like they could be most finely did, out into the daylight, carry more love than he knew he had.

The footsteps in the garden were never coming to hurt you.

They were coming to bring you home. And they still are.

Some of us have been hiding so long. We forgot it was an option we would stop.

We got so good at gracing that we mistook it for faith.

We call our fear the fear of the Lord if it weren't like a patch.

But the beginning of wisdom was never terror. It was awe.

A sky full of stars, over a war zone, and it got big enough to fill it, who got small enough to find you.

Here's the freedom I want most of us to walk out of here.

For nine weeks, the question has been who told you that?

Then do you realize what that question has been given to you this whole time?

Permission. Permission to one year.

Permission to ask. Permission to walk out to your car today without having it all nailed down.

Because here's something we don't say nearly enough in here.

Ah, uncertainty. Can't live in the same room.

Certainties a closed fist.

All is an open hand. You can't stick them in the desert sky under all that depth and also play.

You've got God completely figured out.

Oh, it's what it feels like to be gloriously, happily small.

In front of a God, you will never fully wrap your mind around.

Fear needs certainty. Fear needs to pin it down to control it, to be right about it, but awe is comfortable not knowing.

Because awe trusts the one that it can't comprehend.

The faith I was handed told me doubt was the enemy.

That questions were dangerous. That uncertainty meant my faith was weak.

But the freedom to wonder was never a threat to faith.

It might be the most honest form of those early church fathers we just talked about.

They questioned the darkest texts in the whole battle and they didn't lose God doing it.

They found a true one.

So, my hope is that you will hear me when I say you are free.

Free to ask. Free to wonder.

Free to sit and then not knowing and call it holy ground instead of failure.

And we're going to put that freedom to work.

Because the next seven days is not a normal service.

It's not me up here talking at you.

It's this whole service turned into a room where we sit down together and we take your questions.

The heartless.

The ones you carry for these nine weeks.

And when I say something, I have people tell me like, "I need more questions than answers."

And I'm like, "Thank you. That's so sweet. That's exactly what happened."

Because I believe like we say this a lot.

Like growth happens into questions and that's what I want.

I want this to be a place for wonder.

And questions are what drive some uncertainty.

Like getting it right.

So, it should be open right now.

Because when I do this the week of, I get questions.

I'm like, "I don't have time to answer any."

So, we're going to do, if you have questions, scan this.

I'll put on social media later too.

Scan this. You should be able to start asking your questions.

Now, you can send them anonymously.

You don't have to put a name on it. If you want to put a name on it, you can send them anonymously.

Put your questions in this week.

I think I haven't gone from today until Thursday, just so I have time.

It's loud.

[laughter]

I think I actually opened it last night.

It's like, "Oh no, candy's going to find it."

[laughter]

See, I knew it. I'll open it now.

You can start asking your questions, what I'll do.

I don't have to say anything.

We'll leave that up.

Okay, let me just do this and I'll open it.

This will give me a week to sit with it in the next Sunday.

If there's questions that you ask, they're similar, they're all trying to consolidate.

And the next Sunday, we'll wrestle with them together, out loud, as a family.

Nothing is off the table. That's when the holding was forward.

So, the last question I'll leave you with today, don't brush it.

Carry it alongside the ones you already had.

Where have you been calling in fear when God was offering you hope?

Because the God who came walking in the pool today is still asking where are you.

Not to catch you, to carry you home.

You can come out now and sit.

It's always safe. It just took us a while to believe.

I hope we get to wrestle with some questions next week.

I hope that you understand that you are loved.

I hope you experience that love.

And as I say, it will be our small love love.

That's who you're going to be.

Let's get next week.

[applause]

Alright, so my family, Don't make the rest of you for Father's Day for us,

letting the river and check out our big, super cool up, Sam.

[applause]