The Chosen King | Temptation #3 | Luke 4:9-13 | Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor at MetaCurch, and I hope that today's message is inspiring and enlightening and really builds you up wherever you're at in life.

Well, I want to welcome you in uh wherever you're joining us from.

Uh, if you're here in Helotus or if you're with us online, I'm so glad that you joined us.

Uh, we have something coming up this week that we want to make sure we stop before I get into my content and really honor.

We have Veterans Day this week, and uh you guys know this San Antonio is Military City USA.

Um, I grew up uh an army brat, and so I understand the sacrifice involved when you choose uh to serve in the military.

And for those of you who are veterans, I know you do not enlist so that someday a crowd of people would applaud you.

I know that you didn't make sacrifice for that reason.

Uh, but we are told as the church, and let me just remind you, every chance I get, the church is not this building, the church is not this service, you are the church, the called-out people of God.

We are instructed as the church to honor one another.

And so um, if you are with us online today, we can't see you to honor you, but I would love for you to just put in the comments your name and the branch that you served in.

And if you're here at one of our venues and you are a veteran, I want to ask you to stand so the rest of us can please honor you.

So if you're a veteran, please stand.

Um, thank you.

Thank you so much.

Uh, we want to honor you.

Uh, I want to just acknowledge that we say all the time we we are also in a spiritual battle, and it requires sacrifice.

And you guys, here during your time on earth, uh, by enlisting, by going in, you demonstrated what sacrifice on behalf of others looks like.

And I want to honor you for that.

I want to thank you.

Now, uh, we are going through Luke.

We are in this first series in Luke.

We called it the Chosen King.

All of this is preparation for Jesus to start his ministry.

And the last obstacle, Jesus goes into the desert for 40 days.

He's led by the Spirit there, he fasts for 40 days, and then he is tempted three times by the devil.

And we've been looking at each of these temptations.

Each has gotten their own week.

Now, if you haven't been here, it'd be great to get caught up with the temptations.

It'd be great for you to get caught up on the entire book of Luke.

You can do that at youtube.com slash metachurch.

Temptation number one was the temptation of provision.

Will God actually provide what I need?

Temptation number two was the temptation of power, trying to grab power for ourselves instead of living with godly ambition.

Uh, today we're looking at the third temptation.

This is the temptation of protection.

This is very interesting because another way to think about this is temptation one is about your external needs.

Temptation two is about your external wants.

You have your needs, you have your wants.

But this third temptation leaves the external and it goes internal.

Our internal psychological need for protection.

And this is gonna be really, really important as we look at how Jesus deals with this.

Now, a few things just to remind you, these three categories of temptation are like an umbrella that every temptation you will ever face fits under.

And also to remind you, Jesus did not handle these temptations.

He did not handle the devil primarily relying on his deity.

He did not call down fire from heaven, he did not leverage his title as the eternal God.

Instead, he stood up to temptation primarily in his humanity to model for us how no matter what category of temptation comes at us, how we can stand up under it as well.

Jesus used as his weapons in his battle against the devil, weapons that you and I have available to us.

The Spirit of God inside of him, the word of God in front of him, the hope of heaven in front of him.

If you're a believer in Jesus, you have all three of those things.

The Spirit of God inside of you, the Word of God in front of you, and the hope of heaven ahead of you.

And that's how he's dealing with this.

Now, we're talking about protection, but I want to I wanna make it very specific so you know what we're talking about today.

I want to talk about what it looks like to self-protect.

To self-protect.

Now, God gives us many good gifts in this life.

Amen?

Amen.

Uh like everything you have is by God, and that amen should be louder.

So let's try again.

Uh, God gives us many good gifts in this life, amen?

Amen.

Okay, that's what I thought.

And here's what happens uh we often take the good gifts that God has given us and we misuse them and we misapply them, and the very good things that God gives us often can turn into things that lead us to sin.

And the same is true with self-protection.

So you have a biological, neurological, instinctual reflex for self-protection.

Here's what I mean.

Uh you can go to an infant in the crib before they can walk, before they can talk, before they can rationalize anything, they have self-protection instincts.

You can go to an infant in the crib, very, very peaceful, chilling, which we love.

We don't want to interrupt that with an infant, right?

We love that.

Quiet infant, good, right?

If you walk in the room and you make a really loud noise, what typically will happen is the baby will freeze up and then scream and cry.

That is the instinct to self-protect.

Now, I am not a scientist, but over the last 10 or so years I've become really fascinated with neurology.

And so here's some of the things that I've learned.

Um, you have all these different parts to your brain, and the uppermost parts, literally the higher parts, like the prefrontal cortex.

This is where rationalization happens.

This is where you use logic and reason, strategy.

This is high-level decision making where you can take a lot of different factors, really comb through them and make good decisions.

That all happens in the higher parts of the brain.

The lower parts of the brain, literally the parts that sit like right on top of your spinal cord.

Uh, this area generally is called the hippocampus.

There's uh a part of that called the amygdala.

This job of the amygdala is to keep you alive.

It's not rational, it's survival.

Okay?

Now, some neurologists will call this your lizard brain, because like almost every animal, all the mammals have this part of their brain, most reptiles have this part of the brain.

It's instinctual, not rational.

It is not to help you thrive, it is to help you survive.

And so this is a very, very good gift that God gave us because you don't always have time to make rational decisions when your life is in danger.

Let me give you a really practical example.

If you walk into the crosswalk and you don't see the Honda Civic that just ran the red light, uh, you don't have time to do a physics equation, right?

Okay, so that's a Honda Civic that's traveling about 64 miles per hour.

I'm seven feet from the curb, it's 160 feet from me.

How long does Johnny have to get to the sidewalk?

You know, it's like we don't have time to have a rational and like write a thesis on this.

What happens is as soon as we hear the car coming, we jump out of the way before we've ever had a single thought.

In other words, the lower parts of your brain, the amygdala moves your body before your brain even gets a say.

And thank God for that because that keeps you alive.

If you're hiking on one of the nature trails here in Texas and you hear a nice little rattle, you do the high step like this, right?

And you move.

You you might you might tear something moving so quick if you hear that rattle.

Now, here's what's interesting: because it's not rational, sometimes something scares us, and we look back and we realized on the nature walk, a baby just dropped their rattler and then we're a little embarrassed all by ourselves, you know?

Because we haven't had time to tell a story about it, to think about it.

We're just moving on instinct and thank God for that because it keeps us alive.

This is where fight, flight, and freeze comes from.

These are our natural reactions, instinctual reactions, the same reactions that a lizard would have or any kind of reptile would have.

It's available to us.

Here's the problem: this good gift that God gave us can be misused and misapplied and can even lead us into sin.

What happens over time is this self-protective instinct that keeps us from physical danger makes its way from our head down into our heart.

And we begin to self-protect, not against physical danger, but against social danger, relational danger, emotional danger, psychological danger.

And this typically happens from real wounds that we receive coming up through life.

And so for some of you, you had really toxic friendships at really important parts of your life.

Now you have a friendship wound in your life, and you eye every new friendship with an eye of suspicion.

For some of you, you were in a relationship early on, or maybe even a marriage where you were cheated on, or there was an affair, and now every new romantic relationship, you really, really struggle to put your trust in that relationship because you are still self-protecting from an old wound.

Some of you grew up and you didn't have all the things you needed, or you remember skipping some meals, or maybe you were just impoverished.

There's no other way to say it.

You really grew up in some deep poverty.

And so now you have a financial wound in your life, and you've become very greedy.

It's almost impossible to be generous, and you hoard every single dollar because you are trying to self-protect from what you were.

You never want to end up there again.

Some of you grew up and you didn't have the parents you should have had.

Maybe you had both parents in the house, but they were abusive or they were neglectful.

Maybe one of your parents abandoned you.

There are people who have written off like an entire gender just because of what they experienced in their childhood.

We have an epidemic of fatherlessness in the West.

This shows itself very differently between young men and young women.

Young women, it's more obvious, it's almost a stereotype.

It is a stereotype.

Young women grow up with a out of father in the home and they never received the proper love from a man, and so they grow up and they become very sexually promiscuous often.

They think if I just give men the number one thing that they want, then maybe finally this wound will be healed inside of me.

And you actually know it doesn't work because you've tried it, and the higher your body count goes, the more unloved you feel, the more unwanted you feel.

But it doesn't matter because you're self-protecting, and self-protection is not rational.

It's not about thriving, it's about surviving.

For young men, it looks very different.

Oftentimes young men are raised without a father in the home, and they grow up, and to self-protect, they become overly aggressive, and they use things like anger and violence, and they think that that makes them a man.

And what they don't realize is those are actually toxic feminine traits that are being expressed in a masculine domain.

To be violent and angry and overly aggressive is not masculine, and it's not actually true power because you don't have power if you cannot control it.

We self-protect, and it's killing us.

Think about the progression.

The devil first went at Jesus' needs, and he was like, I'm good, I trust God for all of my needs.

So then he went at his wants and he's like, I'm good, I trust God, and God will give me the power that is appropriate for me.

And so then he goes internal and he attempts to try and drive a wedge between the Father and the Son with whether or not God would really protect Jesus if Jesus were to test him.

And this is what we do.

Now we gotta be really honest.

We come to Metachurch to be honest, like brutally honest with ourselves.

Um, if you are honest, we've all been here.

We have all lived irrationally self-protecting.

We've all been there.

Now, if you're like, not me, sorry, bro, not me.

I've never done that.

I've got terrible news for you.

You're doing it right now.

Your lack of vulnerability is in itself self-protection.

We've all been there.

Now, uh, if I want you to be brutally honest, and I have the honor to be the leader of this movement, I'll start.

There are too many examples for me to go to.

I'll go to some that might hit home with you.

Uh, when I was in high school, I dated around, but there was really only one relationship I wanted.

I look back as a man now.

I cannot believe the way I allowed myself to be treated for almost all four years of high school.

I was really, really done dirty, and it left a significant wound in my life.

You fast forward to when God brings into my life a godly woman who I could spend the rest of my life with, and I have this deficit inside of me.

And so I'm always testing every situation, every circumstance is a test to see if she can, in fact, make me secure, and this is a real problem, because no one in your life can actually fill that wound that someone else created.

You need to know that.

And so what ends up happening is uh a year in, Katie sits me down, she gives me a great gift.

She's tried to talk to me about this, and I was too insecure to have the conversation.

So she gave me a great gift.

She said, I love you.

And I said, I love you.

I had no idea where this was going.

She said, I could see a future with you.

I'm like, I could see a future with you.

These weren't her exact words, but basically she was like, But you're kind of crazy.

And I'm gonna give you some time to figure that out.

It took me like three days to realize I'd been broken up with.

And it was a gift because I wasn't willing to contend with the wound that had been inflicted in my life when I was younger.

And that was enough motivation.

And so I got vulnerable and I got help, and I allowed the Holy Spirit to come and to begin to heal that so that I could come back and be the man that her and our children needed me to be.

So here's what happens because you've been that person and you've been in relationship with that person.

And here's what irrational self-protection always says.

Prove it.

I can trust you, prove it.

You're a good friend, prove it.

If this is enough money, prove it.

I can be satisfied, prove it.

And what that means is if you are irrationally self-protective, you're always testing.

You're always testing.

And here's the painful reality they will always fail your test.

Here's why.

Self-protection is a trust vacuum.

Every single issue of self-protection comes down to a core of trust.

And when you are irrationally self-protecting, you have become a trust vacuum.

Now I'm not talking about the Dyson that you hit the carpets with.

I'm talking about, like scientifically, a vacuum, you need to know this, a vacuum cannot be filled.

By definition, a vacuum cannot be filled.

This is like in space, uh, on the other side of a black hole is a vacuum.

Things go in, nothing comes out.

You are a trust vacuum.

So uh I will sit down sometimes with couples, and maybe there's been an affair in the past, or maybe they just have some baggage from the past, or maybe they have some neglect from their childhood, and they can't trust their spouse, or they can't trust their romantic partner, or they can't trust their friends.

And so I'll say, Okay, what do you need to have happen for you to trust them?

And I'm tricking them because I'm about to turn the tables, and they'll say, I need this and these three things, and I need them to do this, and here's how I need them to do it.

They need to do it on this timeline.

I need to see this, I need to experience this.

If they do these 11 things, I can finally trust them.

And I'll say, I've got bad news.

They could do all eleven, and they could do them all perfectly, and you will not trust them.

You will not trust them because the problem's not them.

You're a trust vacuum.

And you know this because you've been this, and you know this because you've been in relationship with this.

I've had friends who have this friend wound from their past.

It wasn't me, it's from their past.

And so I can be as good of a friend as I know how to be.

I can hang out with them nine nights in a row.

On the tenth night, I'm not feeling well, and I'm getting blown up, like, oh, I guess we're not friends anymore.

I thought I could trust you, I thought you were a real one.

It's like, bro, I've given you a week and a half, I've got a fever, you know?

It's like, it doesn't matter though.

It doesn't matter.

When there's mistrust in a romantic relationship, if they want to see five things, you can do all five perfectly, but in the process of doing all five perfect perfectly, if you mess up in another area, it erases out all five.

Your trust vacuum.

And so I'm dating Katie, this incredible woman of God.

In every scenario, my insecurity is screaming louder than her actions.

And I just think, you know, if I see enough and if I can trust enough, but I'm a vacuum.

She cannot fill this void of insecurity inside of me.

And here's the truth nobody can.

It's not about other people filling it, it's about the Holy Spirit healing it.

And we look to others and we look to money and we look to achievement, all of these things to try and fill a wound that cannot be filled.

It can only be healed by God Himself.

I've had numerous examples where I've gone into irrational self-protection, and it doesn't matter.

The reality doesn't matter because it's not rational by definition.

This is a wedge that the devil will put into our lives, into our money, into our careers, into our finances.

Some of you had a really toxic boss, they really wounded you deeply, and now you struggle in every subsequent job because you cannot trust any of your coworkers, any of your supervisors, any of your managers.

Some of you had a really tough go with a bully when you were younger.

All of these wounds, they come back and we project them onto other people.

And I just see in our culture and I see in the church that the devil is having his way through the temptation of irrational self-protection.

Can I tell you the real danger?

The real danger is we do this in our earthly relationships, and it's the easiest thing to translate that into our relationship with God.

And we become self-protective even against our Maker.

And this happens in a lot of ways.

This can happen because God disappoints us.

Maybe you were sold an incorrect version of God, a prosperity God who's gonna make you wealthy and make you beautiful and give you everything you want.

If you just write a big enough check, God will finally bless you in all the ways.

Maybe you were sold a version of God who always shows up on your timeline, a version of God, where really your God and God does what you want.

So you've been disappointed by God the same way you were disappointed by your father, the same way you were disappointed by your coach, the same way you were disappointed by your first marriage.

And we naturally begin to self-protect.

And what do we do when we self-protect?

We say, prove it.

There are many Christians where our entire prayer life is just us assigning God tests so he can prove that he really is who he says he is.

Can I get even deeper?

Many of us can't trust God because he's our heavenly father and we did not have good fathers in our own lives.

Can I get even more honest?

You actually have to say yes, or I'll move on.

Okay.

You said yes.

Some of us are self-protective against God because we came to God in a time of need.

We realized that Jesus is our only hope for today, our only hope for what comes after this life.

We put our faith in Jesus, and then we started following Jesus, pursuing sanctification, becoming more like Jesus over time.

We got into the Word and realized that God is going to ask us to give up some of the fundamental parts of who we think we are.

God is going to ask us to give up things that we claim as a core part of who we are and Jesus calls sin.

That God is going to ask to shift and transform our worldview that we've lived with our entire life and that we're not sure we can die to.

And all of a sudden, we start questioning God because of what he's asking us to give up.

So are we going to be people who test God or are we going to be people who trust God?

And this is the temptation that Jesus comes under.

And this by far is the most interesting temptation.

Now the devil has been up to bat twice, struck out both times, easy, fastballs, right down the middle, cannot hit them, right?

Jesus is breezing through these temptations.

So the devil tries a new strategy.

Let me explain it to you.

We're in Luke chapter 4, verse 9.

Luke 4:9

So the devil took Jesus to Jerusalem, and he had him stand on the pinnacle of the temple, and he said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.

The temptation is basically like, look, if God really loves you, I'll jump off the temple and God will catch you, right?

I mean, if God's really got you like that, you're all about God, you got baptized, he said, I'm proud of you.

If he's really proud of you, he's definitely not gonna let you splat on the ground on the side of the temple.

He takes him to the southeast corner.

This is the pinnacle of the temple.

It hangs over a valley.

The the historian Josephus.

He wrote that that southeast pinnacle was so high off the ground, if you looked over it, you lost your stomach.

It's way up there.

And he's like, just jump.

I mean, if God's got you, then he's got you.

Now, watch what happens next.

This is very, very important that we understand this.

Watch how verse 10 starts.

So, verse 9, he took him to Jerusalem, stood him up on the temple, said, If you're the son of God, throw yourself down.

Watch verse 10.

For it is written.

The devil says.

Now, if you have a copy of the word in front of you, physical or digital, this isn't gonna be on screens.

I just want you to see this.

I want you to look at verse four.

Verse four, but Jesus answered.

It is written.

I want you to look at verse eight.

And Jesus answered, it is written.

Two temptations, both of them shot down by Jesus quoting the scripture.

Don't you know it is written?

Watch what the devil says.

For it is written.

Satan's like, Oh, we're quoting scripture?

I can quote scripture too.

It's the only place that Satan ever quotes scripture.

Some of you didn't know this.

The devil knows the scripture, and he probably knows it better than you do.

He says, For it is written, he will give his angels orders concerning you to protect you, and they will support you with their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

He goes to the Psalms and he starts quoting scripture.

You need to know this.

God's word never lies, but liars will use God's word.

Can I say that again?

God's word will never lie, but liars will use God's word.

Every major false religion, they have taken the word of God and either used it directly or indirectly.

The Jehovah's Witness, they use the Bible.

They just took it.

They have a few men who made a new translation so that they can teach that Jesus is not in fact God.

So they take the very words of our scripture and they use it to lie and send people to hell.

The latter-day saints, they use scripture, but they come up with a conspiracy theory that it's corrupted and that we needed a con man in the 1800s to write a new book to help correct it for us.

Did you know that Islam uses scripture, the fastest growing religion?

Did you know they believe in Jesus?

They call him a sacred prophet.

And they also say that they Jesus tricked the world by disguising someone else to hang on the cross for him.

And so that's outside of the faith, but this very thing is happening inside of the faith as well.

There are people who have come into Christianity and they are taking the word and they're doing, I'm gonna show you what the devil did.

They're doing exactly what the devil did.

They're taking a text, they're removing it from its context, they're shaving off the ends, and they are presenting it in order to push forward their lies.

And they are leading people into sin, and some are leading people to damnation because they are taking the truth of God and they are perverting it to spread a lie.

And so I don't know.

I don't know what your YouTube history looks like, I don't know what podcasts you're listening to, I don't know what other preachers you're listening to, but I'll tell you this right now there are far too many people who are coming up, they cannot do what we're doing, they cannot spend 25 weeks in three chapters of the text because the context will expose their lies.

If the very words of God in their original context will defeat your message, your message is wrong.

You are lying, you are using scripture the way the devil uses scripture.

They take one verse here, half a verse here, they flip all over, then they put it through the lens of culture to tell you what you want to hear.

To rationalize our favorite sins.

These are people who preach like this.

Man, I really love Jesus.

Wasn't he a swell guy?

That Jesus guy, I really like him.

Now you gotta remember, he lived a very long time ago, so he said some things that I bet if he were alive today, he would totally have a different opinion on.

Let me show you.

Let me read four words from this verse and ten words from this verse and seven words from this verse, and then make something up and lie to you to keep you in your sin.

The New Testament addresses this.

If someone is handling the Word of God and is given a platform in order to tell you what you already want to hear and rationalize your sin, they should be disqualified from standing on a stage and handling the word of God.

If in fact they are Christians, they will stand before Jesus and they will have to answer for this someday.

If you're gonna stand up and handle the word of God, your concern is not what the people think.

Your concern is speaking the truths that you are submitted to.

I want to show you what the devil did.

He's quoting out of Psalm chapter 91, and what he does is he shaves off the beginning and the end of the context.

Psalms 91 · chapter mention

I want to show you.

Because you have made the Lord, my refuge, the most high, your dwelling place.

Here's the context.

Because what he quotes has a because that he cut out.

Because you made the Lord your dwelling place, no harm will come to you, no plague will come near your tent.

For he will give his angels orders concerning you to protect you.

Let me show you just verse 11.

Just verse 11.

The part that we put highlighted in verse 11, the devil leaves out.

In all your ways, is a Hebrew idiom.

It means as you obey.

What is the book ends he left out?

Because you've made the Lord your dwelling place, because you've surrendered and submitted to the Lord as the place where you will dwell.

You'll walk in his ways, you will submit and surrender and walk humbly in his ways.

Because you do that, the Lord will protect you.

Let me give you an example.

My kids know this.

I have three kids.

It's like while you live in my house, I will protect you.

You will have a roof over your head, no matter what I have to do.

Our first few years as a family, I made as close to no money as you can make.

So I had about four other side jobs.

I cleaned houses here in San Antonio.

I was showing up.

Clayton made service, showing up, washing people's dirty clothes, cleaning their dirty counters to make money.

I was tutoring kids in math, and I barely got out of high school, okay?

Like I'm doing anything to keep a roof over my kids' head, to keep three meals, and for my kids, about a thousand snacks a day in their mouths.

They will be loved, they'll be psychologically protected.

And let me be very honest with you if somebody runs up in my house in the middle of the night, they will get to me first, and they probably won't get through me, but they'll get to me first.

My kids aren't getting sent out if a robber comes in my house.

I am the one to protect them.

Men, right?

Right?

You're not sending your kid, you're not sending your wife, you are going.

You will be protected in my house.

This is what the Lord says.

If you dwell with the Lord and you walk in his ways, you got protection.

So let me ask you a question.

My kids know that.

If I'm watching AM go 9 and 0 yesterday, and one of my kids decides to get out on the roof and jump off the second story down to the concrete, and gravity introduces itself to them, does that make me a liar?

Because I have told them while you're in my house, you get protected.

Of course not.

The protection that comes from being in my house is about them trusting me.

It is not about them testing me.

Let's see, let's see if dad really does love me.

I'm gonna walk out here on the roof.

The devil's going, God says in the Psalms, He will protect you.

Think about the irony.

The part he left out is because you dwell in the house of the Lord.

In the Old Testament, do you know what the house of the Lord is?

It's the temple.

They're standing on the temple.

And the devil is pulling that passage out of context, trying to drive a wedge between the father and the son.

The same way he tries to drive a wedge between you and your heavenly father.

You in proper financial stewardship.

You in relational harmony.

You in a great godly friend group that you can't trust, not because of who they are, but because of someone from third grade.

Irrational self-protection is plaguing our society and it is killing us.

And for many of us, it is the primary temptation that we are giving into day after day after day.

And so Jesus allowed himself to go through these temptations in order to show us how to overcome them.

Here's what he says in Luke 4, verse 12.

Luke 4:12

Jesus answered him, It is said, do not test the Lord your God.

Now, this is a beautiful moment.

Uh, Jesus is building, he's building throughout these three temptations.

Let me remind you, all three of the verses that Jesus has quoted come from the book of Deuteronomy.

You can go back on YouTube, get the full context on that.

I'm gonna make it short.

The Israelites are on the edge of the promised land.

Moses has led them there, but he's not going into the land.

So he gives one final speech, and he is begging the people to trust God in the land.

And so what he says in Deuteronomy 6, verse 16, is he says, Do not test the Lord your God as you tested him at Masa.

Deuteronomy 6:16

Now, some of you don't know this story, and that is okay, but you do need to start building your biblical knowledge.

You understand?

You have to start building your biblical knowledge because right now the devil knows the scriptures a lot better than a lot of you.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it will be hard for the devil to attack me with the scriptures that I've given my life to study.

Some of you don't know the context, you don't know the narrative, you don't know the stuff.

Many of you, you need to get in the academy so you can spend uh three weeks with not just me, but my dad, the one who taught me the scriptures, and we will teach you how to read the Bible in the academy.

If you will just like humble yourself and sign up and cross that bar and get into the academy, you need to go through it, you need to go through the academy so we can help deal with these wounds that are causing you to self-protect.

That's a different soapbox.

I'm gonna get off it right now.

But you need to learn the scriptures.

It's okay if you don't know the story right now, but you should know it in three years.

You should go, oh, I know exactly where this is at.

This is early on when the Israelites have gotten out of Egypt, they've escaped slavery, God has split the Red Sea, they've been in the wilderness for a second, and they got real thirsty.

And they are a bunch of complainers, you know.

I know we like we would never, you know.

And what happens in this story is they have this line that they like to leverage against Moses.

All right, Moses, great leader, Moses.

You know, we're like about to die because we haven't had any water.

So great job, man.

You know, go through all this work to get us out of Egypt for us to just die.

I guess God just wants to embarrass us.

The Egyptians will like find our bones out here.

What are they doing?

They're doing what they did the entire 40 years.

Irrational self-protection.

Some of you don't know this.

Um the Israelites got to the promised land really fast.

And then they saw the armies of the Canaanites, and they didn't trust that God could give them the victory.

And then they wandered for 40 years.

Can I put this in perspective?

It's like six minutes ago you walked across the dry ground with walls of water on either side of you.

Then you got in the wilderness, you complained there wasn't any water, so God brings water out of a rock.

I don't know if you know this, rocks aren't made of water, okay?

Then you're you're you're a little hungry, your tummy's a little rum.

And so God just starts door-dashing bread from heaven.

It's like miracle after miracle after miracle, and then you get to your promise and you can't trust God to go into it.

Because when you're irrationally self-protecting, it doesn't matter how many miracles God does, you're a vacuum.

It doesn't matter that he parted the sea, it doesn't matter that he rained bread from heaven, it doesn't matter that he shut the mouths of the snakes, none of it matters.

It's not rational, it's self-protecting.

And this is the danger.

Please hear me.

God has created you on purpose and with purpose, he has a plan for your life, he has a plan for your marriage, he has a plan for your finances, he has a plan for your career, he has a plan for your parenting, he has a plan for your friend group.

But if you don't learn how to trust God, then you will get right to the edge of your promise and you will not have faith enough to go in.

You will have lived and God will have shown up again and again.

We think this.

We're like, bro, if I was the Israelites, I'd be ready to fight.

I know there were only two in the entire nation, Joshua and Caleb, out of a million people.

I would have been the third.

It would have been Joshua and Caleb and Clayton.

I would have had the faith.

I would have paid attention to all the miracles of God, probably not.

Because you don't trust God right now, and you have experienced the greatest miracle of all.

We don't think this way, but you can take every single miracle contained in this book, you can ball them all up into one, and they are not near the size of the God of the universe, stepping out of heaven and into our reality and climbing across that belong to me, and walking out of a grave, and doing all of it so that I can have eternal life with my heavenly Father.

I've been given the greatest miracle of all.

And so have you.

And we still self-protect.

Before we judge the Israelites, we should realize we often are the Israelites.

And how many promises have we not been willing to trust God to step into?

And he keeps showing up, and he keeps providing, and he keeps answering prayers, maybe not on your timeline, but on his.

And none of it counts.

Because we're self-protecting.

Our Christian walk is not about testing God.

It is daily surrendering and learning to trust God.

Here's what's interesting.

If you are a believer, then your job is not to test God.

Your job is to trust God with the most fundamental part of who you are, including your greatest trauma and your deepest wounds.

I want to go to my my key idea.

Every form of self-protection is rooted in lack of faith in God.

Hopefully, you're identifying some areas where you are self-protecting.

I want to say a hard truth that is rooted in lack of faith in God.

And you might push back.

You're like, bro, this isn't about me and God.

This is the fact I was married and she cheated on me over and over again.

That's what it's rooted in.

It's not about God.

It's like, well, do you trust that God is sovereign over your life and has a plan for your future in spite of what happened to you?

You're like, bro, this isn't about God.

I was poor.

I was raised in poverty.

I skipped meals.

We were homeless.

Like I just have a I've got a thing with money.

Surely, logically, you can understand that.

And I say to you, logically, I can't understand that.

But more than I trust that logic, I trust the one who created logic in this world in the first place and is guaranteed to provide for our needs for those who walk in his ways.

It comes down to trust.

And so listen, all of us self-protect.

Early in our marriage, Katie and I, we had some mentors, and they walked us through a very, very difficult exercise that is very important.

And if you would be willing to do it this week, it might change your life.

The exercise is this.

What if they cheated?

What if you lost your job?

What if they passed away?

What if they grew up and didn't want a relationship with you?

What if your friends left you?

What if it happened?

And walk yourself down that path to the end.

And if you believe in the same God I believe in, at the end of that path, God is still God, and God is still good.

I'm not ignoring the pain of that path, but it's like if your worst case scenario became your reality, what would happen?

And God would still be God, and God would still be good, and God would still have a plan for your life.

So do you trust Him enough to stop self-protecting?

Here's the hardest part we self-protect in our relationships, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The relationship gets broken, not because we couldn't trust them, but because we thought we couldn't.

We never were willing to give them the trust necessary to build the relationship we are destined for.

Every form of self-protection is rooted at the deepest level in a lack of trust in God.

So, Christians, our job is not to test God, our job is to trust in God, to trust Him enough, to be vulnerable, to get the help we need, and allow the Holy Spirit to heal our wounds.

And let me tell you, your healing starts at the cross of Jesus Christ.

For unbelievers, you're in an interesting position because you have no God in your life who can heal your wounds.

So kind of your only option is self-protection, and you've probably gotten really good at it.

It's a miserable way to live.

You cannot thrive, you can only survive.

And here's why you're in an interesting position if you are not a believer and you do not have a relationship with God, is because you uniquely get the opportunity to test God.

There is one test that God has to pass.

And it goes something like this Could God really love me?

Would Jesus really choose me after all I've done, after all the ways I've rebelled, all the people that I've hurt, all the damage I've created?

Would God forgive me?

You're allowed to ask that question.

You are allowed one test of God.

And the amazing thing is when you get to know Jesus, you will learn He's already passed that test.

Here's what scripture says in Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

It says, but God proves He passed your test.

God has proven his love for us, and that while we were still sinners, still in disobedience, still rebelling, still causing chaos, still hurting people, still doing damage.

Christ came and he died for us.

Here's what you need to know if you're wondering whether or not you are qualified for God to forgive you, bring you into relationship with himself.

You don't look to yourself.

You don't look to your religious parents, you don't look to the church more broadly, you don't look to a pastor, you look to the cross.

And what God did on the cross is he came down and he proved it.

And all that he asks from you is for your faith.

Jesus didn't come to invite you into religion, he came to invite you into a relationship that will last eternally with your Heavenly Father.

A relationship where you have a real opportunity to have your deepest wounds healed.

So you can stop just surviving and you can start thriving in this life.

As we close, let's pray together.

Uh across our venues, if you'd bow your head and close your eyes, create a little bit of space for you, for the people around you, uh, for believers.

I need you to start doing real inventory of where you are self-protecting.

I'm not telling you to just blindly trust untrustworthy people.

What I'm telling you is that your lack of trust may have nothing to do with the person you're in a relationship with.

It may be centered in a wound that that person cannot fill.

Only God can heal.

You need community, you need wise, godly people to come alongside you and tell you whether or not your lack of trust is rational or irrational.

For those who are not yet believers, I want to give you the opportunity to do that today.

To get in relationship with the God who loves you, who proved his love for you on a cross, and can heal your deepest wounds.

What scripture tells us is that it is our sin that has separated us from God, but God loved us so much, He came to our world, He died and paid the price of that sin, and all that is asked of us is a moment where we choose, we become convinced in our minds, convicted in our hearts, that Jesus in fact is our way to our Father in heaven.

And so if you're here and you're ready to make that decision for the first time to put your faith in Jesus, I want to ask you for a moment of courage, right now, with everyone's eyes closed, right where you're sitting, to just simply raise your hand.

By raising your hand, this is a symbolic gesture that says, Today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Right now across our venues.

If you're ready to put your faith in Jesus, simply raise your hand.

Amen.

Amen.

For those who raise their hand, I want you to know that God sees and accepts your faith.

We can say with confidence in Scripture that your sins have been forgiven, and you have now been given eternal life with your Heavenly Father, a gift that no one and nothing can ever take away from you.

I want to help you just acknowledge this moment through a prayer.

If you raised your hand, I'm gonna ask you to repeat this with me.

And I'm gonna ask believers across our venues to pray this out loud as well.

Let's pray like this Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

So glad you joined us for today's message.

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