Left On Read with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

It's so good to be back.

Uh, if you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

I want to thank Pastor Noel and Pastor Andrew.

If you guys could help me thank them for bringing the word the last couple of weeks.

Two very strong messages.

I'm also excited because next Sunday, we're starting a brand new five-week series called Canceled Conversations.

Clear answers to some of today's hot topics.

Uh, we're gonna look into the word and find out what God has to say about all kinds of subjects that the culture is speaking very loudly about, but often the church is not speaking about at all.

And the Bible is our rule for faith and life.

It speaks to everything that we experience.

And uh, so I'm very excited to get into this.

I'm asking for you guys to plan to be there all five weeks.

I think the series is actually that important.

And while today is not officially a part of that series, I do think it will set the table nicely for what is to come over the next several weeks.

But first, um, I have to start with an admission of guilt.

And the the people who are close to me, they already know this about me.

Uh, but I think it's fair that you know as well.

I recently learned a new cultural term, and it was very convicting to me because it describes me very well.

I discovered that I am a lurker.

And a lurker is someone who sees your text but does not respond to your text, okay?

Um, some of you know, some of you are like looking at the lurkers in your life right now, so that was rude, but um, I I am this, I've been this since like text messages were a thing.

I don't know why, and I don't like this, and I've worked really hard, I've put things in place to get a little bit better.

I have the world's most annoying ringtone when I get a text message.

You might not even know that your iPhone can do this, but I went deep into the settings, and now for every text I get, my phone vibrates 14,582 times, okay?

Like anything to get my attention, and I want to respond, but there is like a disconnect from the response that I formulate in my brain and then it not making its way all the way to my thumbs, right?

And I've tried to get better, I do still struggle with this.

I used to, however, get in a lot more trouble for this bad habit, and I got into a lot more trouble for one reason, two words, red receipts.

You see, the iPhone used to not give you an option of whether or not it showed when you had seen somebody's message.

Which meant when somebody asked you, hey, did you get my text?

It was a trap, okay?

They already knew that you read their text because the iPhone told them, and now you can hide those.

So praise Jesus, right?

You have some plausible deniability.

I really have tried to change this because I do understand how frustrating it is.

When you work really hard to craft a really good text, and you anxiously send it out, and then you see that they read it, and then the worst is every once in a while when like those three freaking bubbles come up and they just stay there forever, and then ultimately they don't reply.

It can be very frustrating, and I'm often that frustrating person.

Um, we call this being left on read, and nobody likes that.

My message today is left on read.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you, and we thank you for your great love for us.

Thank you for MetaCurch.

Thank you for everyone who is here, everyone who is watching this online.

And I pray, Holy Spirit, that we would just be open.

We'd open our minds and our hearts.

It's what you want to say to us today.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name, and everyone who's ready to get going say amen.

Amen.

Being left unread is frustrating because it's a lack of follow-through.

It feels like the person doesn't care enough to join the conversation or just give you a simple response.

And this issue far predates text messaging.

Um, what when I was a kid, we we didn't even have cell phones, but if my parents left the house, usually they would leave a note with some chores on it.

Now I would read that note, but the TV wasn't gonna watch itself, right?

So I would read it, I just wouldn't do it.

It's like another version of being left on red.

Or if you supervise people at work and you send them an email clearly outlining a project you need them to complete, and for whatever reason they don't steward their time wisely, or they let other things get in the way, or it drops down in priorities and they don't get it done.

They read it, they just didn't do it.

All kinds of different ways to get left on red, and it's very, very frustrating when you are the one who sent the message.

And yet, I think there is one area where this is a bigger deal than all of the other areas: your career, your relationships, your friendships, and I think there is one individual who is left on red more than all of us, and maybe even more than all of us combined.

I think that person is God.

I want to remind you what James, the half-brother of Jesus, wrote all the way back in the Christian scriptures.

He said, But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

In other words, don't just read God's word and then not respond to it with your life.

Or to use our cultural terms, don't leave God on red.

He goes on to describe what that kind of life would be like.

If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like someone looking at his own face in a mirror, for he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of person he was.

When we believe in Jesus, we're brought into relationship with our Heavenly Father, the line of communication is opened and he has given us his word, inspired, powerful, protected for us throughout the ages.

Yet, far too often we read it or we hear it and we walk away and we do not respond to it with our lives.

We read it, but we often don't do it.

And God gets left unread.

And I want to start by pointing out an issue that isn't often discussed and that I think is very significant.

I believe in the power of words.

I believe that words really actually matter.

When we talk about what we call the scriptures, more often than not, we call them the okay, hang on.

This okay, I gotta do this a lot.

At MetaCurch, this is a place where you can say things or yell things at me or do basically whatever you want.

We met in a bar for five years, okay?

You can be as rowdy as you'd like, and you're not gonna get in trouble.

Okay, so let's try this again.

When we talk about the scriptures, we often call this the Bible.

I was a Sunday school boy, the V I B L E.

Yes, that's the book for me.

I stand alone on the word of God, the V-I-B-L-E, right?

I got my gold stars in Sunday school, okay?

We call it the Bible, and there's nothing wrong with that.

And I'm gonna make it sound for the rest of the sermon like there's something wrong with that.

So hear me clearly, there's nothing wrong with that.

But words matter.

And the earliest church, which was not uh which was the most effective church, probably in history.

They didn't call it the Bible.

And you might find it interesting that the Bible never calls itself the Bible.

We actually know when the Bible was first used to describe the 66 documents that make up our Old and New Testament.

It was in 386 AD, 350 years after the resurrection of Jesus.

It's the first time the word Bible was used.

It's also the first time that the Jewish scriptures, which we call the Old Testament of our Bible, and the Christian scriptures that we call the New Testament of our Bible, it was the first time that they were bound together.

And in 386, when the Old and New Testaments were bound together for the first time, they called it in Latin ta biblia.

In English, the Bible.

And that word, ta biblia, or in Greek Biblos, or in English, the Bible, it has a very simple meaning.

The Bible literally just means the book.

Now we've put some adjectives on it, you know, throughout time.

You might have heard it called the Holy Bible, which is a good start because it means like the book that's set apart from other books.

But Bible just means book.

And the Bible is like a book of books.

It's 66 different documents: 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament.

We believe all of them inspired by God.

But when you call it the Bible, which just means the book.

My fear is that in today's culture, it sets us up to downgrade and denigrate and maybe even disregard what's in it.

And you hear this, not just outside of Christianity, but in today's culture, inside of Christianity.

Look, dude, I I know the Bible says, but come on, it's 2023.

I know the Bible, and what are we saying?

I know that book.

I know that ancient book written by people who didn't have a third grade education, who thought that the world was flat, who lived pre-science, pre-medicine.

Look, I know what the book says, but does anybody really live that way?

Words matter.

And what we call the Bible never references itself as the Bible.

The Bible isn't just a book, we believe it's inspired.

We believe that it's actually God speaking to us.

You see, when I get a text message from my wife, I can't ignore the message and just say, it's just a text.

When Katie says, you know, hey, if you could be home at 8 p.m., I can't decide to stay out till midnight because it's not just a text.

The text has an author, and that author is my wife, and my wife's sending me a message, and my couch is very uncomfortable, right?

So I gotta respond in kind.

It's not just a book, it's a message.

And a message has a messenger.

I think one of the most significant ways that scripture refers to itself is as the word of God.

And I want to try before we dive in, we're not even in the text we're gonna spend time in today.

I want to try to help you understand the richness and the depth of what that means.

That what we have put together, protected for millennia, given to us, inspired the very book that changed the world.

The word of God.

And there's been a little bit of confusion or controversy throughout the ages, because some will say, Well, the word of God means the scriptures written down for us.

And others will say, clearly, the word of God means Jesus Christ incarnate, Jesus in the flesh.

This is how John's gospel introduces Jesus coming to earth.

He says, The word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And we observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and full of truth.

So which one is it?

Well, when you carefully study the scriptures, what you find is it's both.

The word, which is this Greek word logos, which means something like the organizing principle for the purpose of your life.

It is the written word of God given to us in the scriptures, and it is the living word of God given to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

And in our scriptures, in the word of God, we have the Old Testament, and every sentence of the Old Testament is pointing to and prophesying about the coming of Jesus.

That's the written word of the Old Testament, prophesying about the coming of the living word, Jesus Christ, and at the fullness of time, in all of the manners and all of the measures that the Old Testament predicted, Jesus came, the written word, paving the way for the word to become flesh and live and dwell among us in Jesus' life, changed everything.

And as he ascended, people wrote down the stories of his life.

We call those the gospels.

They begin the Christian scriptures, the New Testament.

And Jesus handed the keys to the kingdom to a small group of men, apostles, who wrote the rest of the documents in the New Testament.

And now we have the Old Testament, the written word, making way for the living word to come.

The living word resurrects and ascends, promising to return.

And the New Testament, the written word of God, prepares us on how to live in light of his coming.

And we do it a disservice.

When we set it alongside all the other books and call it the book.

The word of God is what has changed the world again and again and again.

And the word of God is what changes our life.

In the book of Hebrews, in just a couple short verses, it breaks down the incisive power of the word of God, what it means to our life, and why we should be more than willing to submit ourselves to it.

We're gonna be in Hebrews chapter four.

We're just gonna look at two verses today.

In verse 12, it says, For the word of God is living and effective and sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

The word of God first is living.

Jesus Christ is alive and reigning on high, and the written word is living and active in our world today.

You see, the problem when we are not submitting ourselves under the weight and the authority of the written word of God is that you have far too many believers in Jesus who have been given eternal life, who have been blessed with the Holy Spirit, who are very much alive, but are not yet fully living.

And we live in the physical here and now, and yet we live with the spiritual reality.

And the world today is the domain of the enemies of God.

And the greatest enemy of God is known as Lucifer.

Lucifer means the deceiver his goal for the believer, he can't change your eternal destiny.

There's no chance if you've believed in Jesus that Satan can ever send you to hell, but he can do his best to make you live in a very special kind of hell right here and right now.

He's the deceiver, and so he takes all that God creates and he counterfeits.

And he offers endless paths in our world.

Counterfeit purpose, counterfeit calling, counterfeit influence, counterfeit passion.

We walk down those at our peril.

And often we walk down them blindly because we are not being guided by the light of the word of God that is available to us.

The word of God is living, which means it might be written in an ancient world, but it is applicable right here and right now.

We're gonna look at a couple quotes from Charles Spurgeon.

He was a preacher back in the 1800s.

He wrote, For the gospel is such a living gospel that if it were cut into a thousand shreds, every particle of it would live and grow.

If it were buried beneath a thousand avalanches of error, it would shake off the incubus and rise from its grave.

If it were cast into the midst of fire, it would walk through the flame as it has done many a time, as though it were in its natural element.

The word of God breathes life into our tired and weary souls.

It shakes us and wakes us, brings us to life.

The way that the gospel spreads is people see the word of God reflected back in your life.

People see the hope of Jesus changing the way that you interact with the world.

And when believers are not being brought to life by putting their lives under the Word of God, we just look like everyone else.

Sleepwalking through our careers, driving home just on autopilot, vegging out on screens, you know, barely tolerating our spouses, doing the bare minimum with our kids, having having toxic relationships, if any relationships at all.

Nothing setting us apart, nothing making us unique, nothing bringing us to life.

Hebrews 4 12 says, the word of God is living and it is effective.

It's not just that it's alive, it's what brings you to life, puts you on the path of your God-created purpose.

Has you embraced the fullness of the adventure of what it means to follow after Jesus?

Part of the effectiveness of scripture that is absolutely miraculous in nature is how it is even here for us today.

You see, there are some false religions who started, and the way they spread, and the way they propagated was at the edge of a sword.

They were the aggressors, they were the persecutors.

Christianity was under persecution from the moment that it started.

The largest empires in the world have tried to stamp out the Christian scriptures.

There were hundreds and hundreds of years.

And still today, in some parts of our world where your life can be taken just for owning a copy of the scriptures.

Again, Charles Spurgeon wrote, How vain as well as wicked are all attempts to kill the gospel.

Those who attempt the crime in any fashion will forever still be beginning and never coming near their end.

They will be disappointed in all cases, whether they try to slay it with persecution, smother it with worldliness, crush it with error, starve it with neglect, poison it with misrepresentation, or drown it with infidelity.

As long as God is alive, his word shall live.

Amen.

And for thousands of years, there have been attacks that have come from outside of the movement.

Outside of God's church.

And no one could stop its effectiveness.

In 2,000 years, the word of God and the movement of Jesus has changed the world as we know it, especially in the West, where it has had its most dominant effect.

And even atheist, secular historians who are honest have to admit that fact.

The way that we view each other as human beings is diametrically different than the rest of human history because of the influence of the gospel.

The uplifting of women, the abolition of slavery, the belief that we have inherent rights given to us by God, not by a government, all of that came from the word of God.

It changed the world forever.

And these external attacks could do nothing to stop it.

But here's my concern.

My concern is that in our culture today, and I'm speaking specifically of our Western culture that we live in, the attacks are no longer primarily coming from outside of the church.

The attacks on the Word of God are now largely coming from inside of Christianity.

And for about the last 10 to 20 years, we've been saying of the culture that the culture is post-Christian.

Like we were a Christian nation, and now we're beyond that.

Post-Christian.

And there's been a shift that has taken place and it's worth paying attention to.

We've moved past post-Christian, we now are pre-pagan.

And the reason that matters is because when we were post-Christian, the culture had to attack Christianity, and the way to attack it was at its most fundamental basis, the Word of God.

Now, our culture largely is so far beyond Christianity that it just assumes its irrelevance and puts very little time into attacking it.

And there is a disturbingly large and a rapidly growing percentage of Christians inside of the church who have been convinced to condemn large swaths of what the Word of God has to say.

It's like the killer is already inside the house.

It's a new kind of attack that we must be ready to steal ourselves against.

And we hear this.

I hear it all of the time.

Look, I know the Bible, that ancient book, 2,000 years old, that ancient book, you know, written by like uneducated barbarians all that time ago when the world looked nothing like it looks today.

I know the Bible says X, Y, or Z, but come on.

Nobody does that.

I look, I know, I know what the book says, but you know, I kind of don't know that that part really applies.

And it's so interesting because for Christians, while we've become very comfortable questioning the book, most Christians will not directly question Jesus.

By definition of claiming Christianity, you believe Jesus is actually God.

You have to believe that to be a Christian.

That's like the basics of the faith.

You believe in who he is and what he's done.

He's actually God.

He actually lived a perfect life.

He actually did miracles.

He really died on a cross to substitute his life for ours.

He really did resurrect, defeating death itself for all people who put their faith in him.

He really did ascend back to heaven with a promise to come back for us.

And so if you believe all that, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go, look, I know Jesus said this, but I'm going to do my own thing.

Most people will go to the parts written by the apostles, to the other parts of Scripture.

And we say, I know what the book says.

It's just not what I'm going to do.

And that's why we have to understand it's not just a book.

And the word of God became flesh and dwelt among us and fully revealed the Father to us and sent his helper, the Holy Spirit, of the same God, to inspire those who wrote the scriptures.

And when you say, I believe in Jesus, but I'm not gonna follow Romans, what you're saying is, I believe in Jesus, but I'm not going to follow Jesus.

And it is a shallow faith that wants the benefits that come from belief in the living word of God, but does not want to count the cost of submitting our lives to the written word of God.

It's not some ancient book.

It is the word of God.

It's the written expression of who Jesus was to us physically.

It is alive today, it's active today, it's effective today, and we know that it's effective.

Because the further and further our culture and our churches stray from it, the more we fall into chaos and confusion and anger and division.

We're in a spiritual battle in this life.

It is time for us to have a spiritual perspective on our reality.

And it is time to quit just living and actually come to life by allowing the word of God to do a work inside of us.

The word of God is living and it's effective.

And those are very positive, you know.

It's living.

Come to the word of God and live and be effective and be purposeful and have meaning and passion in your life.

But the next part takes a turn kind of to the dark side.

It then says the word of God is living an effective sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow.

There seems to be a tension here.

Does the word of God give life, or does it wound us?

What is the call of the word of God?

Is it like, come to me and finally live?

Or is it like, come get close, I will cut you, you know?

Like, what exactly are we dealing with with the word of God?

And much of the world has made up its mind that the word of God is not for healing, it's for hurting.

We are pre-pagan, much of our culture sees Christianity as the greatest evil, a plague upon society.

The opium of the masses.

The word is a double-edged sword.

That means there are no blunt sides to the gospel.

Anyone who comes near has the potential to get cut.

And so maybe this will help.

It helped me.

The word translated sword here is another possible translation, fits the context a little bit better.

It's a double-edged knife.

What we would call in our day a double-edged scalpel.

A scalpel which, in the hands of a capable surgeon, can separate joints from bone and bone from marrow, the most delicate of touch.

And one of the ways Jesus has been referred to throughout church history is as the great physician, not only able to heal us physically, but capable of cutting right into the deepest parts of our soul and our spirit.

Verse 12 ends by saying that it's sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow.

It is even able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the heart.

Not just your external life, but your thought life.

Not just what you do, but the intentions behind why you do it.

It can't just be a book.

See, you read a book, you read a tale of two cities, you read a great biography, you read a book.

When it comes to the word of God, we don't just read the word, the word also reads us.

You don't just get in the word, the word gets into you uncomfortably so.

It seems like almost every time, when you allow it, the word of God gets into the most uncomfortable places in your life.

And honestly, this is why so many people have steered clear of Jesus, the living word of God, and have steered clear of scriptures, the written word of God.

Because at some point they came just close enough to feel it.

Cutting in the broken parts of themselves.

They're just not quite ready to submit to the great physician.

We need surgery.

We are broken, we're depressed, we're addicted, we're dejected, we're filled with hatred, we are desperately clinging to try and control things that in reality we have no control over.

We've been through trauma.

Some of us abandoned, we've made mistakes, lots of little ones, and some that cost us immensely.

The living word of God, Jesus, reveals to us in the written word of God, the scriptures, just exactly how we're supposed to live.

It hits you right where it hurts the most.

I don't believe you can approach the written word of God genuinely, the Holy Spirit inside of you, without being challenged and changed over time.

I do believe it's living, and I do believe it's effective.

And honestly, we haven't even gotten to the biggest issue.

There's a lot of different data polls that have gone out to people who claim to be believers in Jesus, Christians, in other words.

When Christians are polled, what you find is the vast, vast, vast majority of self-professing Christians never read the Word of God.

One of the most charitable data sets I found had it under 20%.

Most other polls are far lower than that of people who spend time in God's Word.

Which means the problem isn't just that God is left on read.

The problem is God's word is left unread.

And we are broken.

If we can't come here, if you can't join us online and admit that, what are we doing?

We're broken people in a broken world.

And if we want to do more than just barely get through, limp along through the rest of our life, if we want to be brought to life, to live a life on purpose and with purpose, we need help.

We need the great physician to do his work in our life, even when it hurts.

What Jesus started in you, the moment you believed in him and gained eternal life, a gift that can never be taken away from you, what he started there, let him bring it to completion.

We want new life, but we first have to die to the old.

The word of God is there to bring death to our old self so we can begin to walk in the power of a new life.

The scalpel in the hands of the great physician, it cuts through the layers and layers and layers of hurt and pain and coping mechanisms and all kinds of other stuff, junk, that this time on our broken planet has layered up on top of us.

And you might be concerned, you might be hesitant, because it will hurt.

And it might.

There's been correction that the word of God has brought to my life that as an adult has been extremely embarrassing.

Just to see how far from God I was in that moment, how dishonoring to Jesus I was living at that time.

But we know this.

A great physician will not hesitate to hurt you if they know that it will heal you.

A great physician will not hesitate to cut you open when they know your appendix has burst inside of you.

They won't blink, they won't question it, they will hurt you to heal you.

And over time, I've learned that's often how life actually works.

We live in a broken world, a very painful world.

And we end up with all these coping mechanisms and toxic habits and worst ways and broken worldviews and broken relational habits.

And it's not because we're terrible, evil, malicious people.

It's because we're hurting people, trying to deal with a painful world all on our own.

And Jesus comes and says, Cast all of your cares, your anxieties, your worries, your habits, put it all on me.

I can handle it, you cannot.

He gives you a new way forward.

And some of what we have to deal with.

And this is after belief, after baptism.

There are still some things that are so deep inside of us, it will take a very sharp scalpel in the hands of the great physician to get it out of us.

It'll hurt.

And you need to know this.

I've heard a million and one sermons about what the Bible will do for you and how it will make your life better, and everything will be on cloud nine.

And it can.

It can call you into the adventurer of a lifetime, but you need to know that the living word of God, Jesus, is more than ready to use the written word of God, the scriptures, to hurt you if it will heal you.

He knows that there is purpose and pain.

He lived it in his own life.

For us to do this, we need the proper perspective, and that comes in the next verse.

Verse 12 says, the word of God is living and effective, it's sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow.

It is able to judge the thoughts and even the intentions of the heart.

Here's verse 13.

No creature is hidden from him, but all things are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account.

The core of our belief is that someday, in our transition from this life to the next, we will stand before Jesus, the living word of God, and we will give an account for our life.

And on that day, all will be exposed.

No more hiding, no more lying, no more justification.

We will see our Savior face to face.

We will see his scars.

Scripture says we will look back across our life, and I believe we will look back through time and even see the cross.

And for the first time, as much as we can preach about it and talk about it and read about it, you can watch the passion of the Christ and try to understand everything Jesus did in that moment, face to face with Jesus, for the very first time, you will realize exactly the sacrifice he made for you.

And every excuse we have for why we did not submit to the word of God will fall eternally short.

And in the here and now, while we awake standing before Jesus, the living word has given us the written word.

On that day when our life is judged, for one final time, the living word of God will cut into your life and remove everything that doesn't belong.

But here and now, we have the opportunity to submit our lives to the word of God, to allow the word of God to do its work in our life, to allow it to be active and effective, and for the great physician to hurt us in order to heal us.

In other words, we spend time with God's written word now, today, to prepare us to stand before the living word later, someday.

We have the opportunity to allow the word of God to expose and correct the things that are not of God.

And not only will this heal you and bring you to life and bolster you and strengthen you, it will put you on the path to the life that you were actually created to live.

When I was 10 years old, it's the first time I really understood the concept.

Sometimes you have to get hurt in order to be healed.

When I was 10, I considered myself kind of an expert tree climber, all right?

You know, that there were there were some like people who just took this as a hobby.

I was very serious about it.

And at 10 years old, I decided tree climbing was kind of beneath me.

And so what I decided to do was get a ladder and then climb the ladder, and from the top of the ladder, try to jump into the tree, right?

And uh, you need to know in the 90s we were unsupervised a lot, right?

So I know it doesn't really happen today, but I got the ladder out of the garage.

By the way, um, the Cowboys game was on, and so my parents might as well have been in another state, right?

I was fully unsupervised.

And so I had the ladder and I was climbing the ladder, and in my mind, I could jump into the tree and grab onto a branch.

I don't know what came next, but but I would figure it out once I got the branch.

And so I tried, and uh I need you to know I did get to the branch.

Your boys got hopped.

I just need you to know I actually got to the branch, okay?

But then my momentum of my 60-pound body brought my legs all the way out parallel, and I couldn't hold on anymore because your boy doesn't have very good grip.

So then I plummeted to the earth, I was six feet off the ground, it's fine.

And I hit the ground and I caught all the weight on my arm and I broke my arm.

And I knew I broke my arm.

But something about me when I was 10, I know you can't call kids this today because you hurt their feelings or whatever, but I was what we called in the 90s a crybaby.

Now I grew out of it, but I was a crybab, and anytime I fell, I thought something was broken.

And so I was screaming, my arm's broken, and my parents were like, the cowboys are bugging us.

So nobody came to get me.

And my sister, who was never concerned about me, was actually concerned, and that got their attention.

And so they came out, and lo and behold, not only was my arm broke, uh, but my bones were now no longer lined up.

And so we went to the hospital.

And my dad was in the army, so we went to an army hospital, and army doctors aren't known for their tact always.

He came in and no, hi, how are you?

I'm sorry.

He just said, your bones are out of alignment.

What we're gonna have to do is basically re-break your arm to set your bones in line.

And I was like, pass.

You know, I already broke it once, so I feel like I checked that box, not interested.

He explained that if we don't reset the bones, they won't be able to grow back together.

You'll never have use of your left arm.

It was more painful than when I initially broke it.

It was the first time I really understood that in the hands of a doctor, sometimes they have to hurt you in order to heal you.

And I've learned that lesson in my spiritual life again and again and again.

And every time I have tried to hide all of these little worst ways, sin patterns, toxic habits.

Every time I've tried to hide them from the living word of the great physician, it's like they just slowly have poisoned my life from within.

When you come under submission, not to a book, but to the word of God, it will encourage you and inspire you and motivate you and direct you.

It is a light for your path in a world filled with darkness.

But it will expose you.

And if you allow it, it will cut you open.

It will remove the most hidden things in your life that are holding you back from the life that God created for you to live.

But Jesus, who is love incarnate, will only ever hurt you to heal you.

And you have no idea the life that you could live if you allow Jesus to bring healing into that life.

Would you pray with me?

Father, so often we leave you on read and we leave you unread.

I pray we would get clear on what your scriptures are.

That we would allow your written word to do its work in our life.

It is effective.

But you have given us the freedom to choose whether or not we submit our lives and allow it to do that work.

And I just pray that we will.

That we will get into your word and allow your word to get in us to do its work.

I pray that we would trust you, even if it hurts, that the hurt is momentary and the healing is eternal, and that you've given us a life of purpose that is worth getting right.

We love you, and we pray these things in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.