Tree to Tree with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaChurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaChurch.

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 uh to see you guys here.

If there is anyone here new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm so glad that you joined us.

We're starting a conversation over the next few weeks about not only what we believe here at MetaCurch, but why we believe what we believe.

And MetaCurch, it it matters that we exist as a movement and as a space because this is a place here in our city where anyone can come and wrestle with these big questions of belief.

No matter who you are, where you've been, where you're at on your faith journey, you belong at MetaCurch.

My message today is addressing what I think is a critical issue when it comes to our faith, to the Christian understanding of God, and it is a critical understanding in our cultural context.

Today we are talking about the problem of pain.

And my message today is called tree to tree, tree to tree.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you.

Uh, we believe that you are good.

We know that represented both here and online, there are people who are not sure where they're at in their faith, they're not sure whether or not they believe you or in your son Jesus.

Um, God, we thank you for a place where we can wrestle through our skepticism, a place where we can come when we are searching or seeking.

And you have told us that if we will seek you, we will find you.

So many of us have found that to be true, and I pray it becomes true for many other people throughout the coming weeks.

We love you, and we ask that uh you would speak to us now in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

We have a big question to answer, those of us who are Christians.

The big question of our day goes something like this.

If there is a God and that God is good, then why does he allow bad things to happen?

We make some very audacious claims about our God, that he is all powerful, that he is all good, that he is perfect love, and if those things are true, then why is there so much pain?

Why do all of us experience suffering in our lives?

Why are there so many tragedies and devastating events going on day after day after day?

We are living in the information age, we're living in the age of technology.

We are smarter as human beings than we have ever been at any point in human history, and many people are walking away from the faith, and many others are never considering faith in God in the first place.

And the number one reason that people are rejecting faith is the problem of pain.

There is a group of guys, they call themselves the New Atheists, and there are several of these who are not just atheists, meaning they don't believe in God, but they are actually anti-theist, which means they don't believe in God, and they don't think you should believe in God either.

They are honestly preachers in their own right, except they are not trying to point people to God, they are actively trying to point people away from God.

For a long time, atheists staked most of their claims in science, but truthfully, if you really study how science has developed, it's actually become more and more difficult to make the case that our world goes about unguided when you start to understand science at a deeper level.

So the new atheists have changed their tactic.

Instead of coming to the forefront with scientific arguments against God, they come with an emotional argument.

Their argument is very compelling because all of us experience pain, all of us go through suffering, all of us can open up our phones or turn on the news and see people who are just living in hell on earth, and their case is you say your God is good, you say your God is loving, why would a good and loving God create a world of so much suffering?

It's a difficult question.

It's a question that whether you are a believer or not, if we were all honest, we have probably all wrestled with this very issue.

And so there is an answer, I believe there's a compelling answer out of scripture of why God is good, he is loving, and he allows suffering in the world.

But before we address the actual topic at hand, I want to make it clear that the idea of I can't follow a God who allows suffering in the world, so I'm going to take the atheist route is not a tenable answer.

It does not alleviate the problem of pain to remove God from your worldview.

In fact, it makes the problem incredibly more painful.

If all there is is this material world, what we can see and understand with our five senses, then we are in a very precarious situation indeed.

Richard Dawkins, who's one of the leaders of the new atheist movement and is one of the most well-respected atheists of our time, he has a famous quote.

It says this in a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication.

In other words, in a world where there is no spiritual realm and there is no God, there is only the material.

In that world, some people are going to get hurt.

Other people are going to get lucky.

And you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor will you find any justice.

And justice is a big topic in our world and has really come once again to the forefront lately.

And over the last couple of years, millions of people across our country and our world have been marching in the streets demanding justice, and others have used their platforms like social media to cry out and demand justice for our world.

And many of those people believe there is a God, and so they have a foundation to claim justice off of.

But Richard Dawkins, who is an intellectually honest atheist, is letting you know if there is no God, there is no justice.

It's actually kind of simple.

Justice, by definition, is everyone getting what they deserve.

And so the question that that begs is how do you know what you deserve?

And to know what you deserve, you have to measure against a standard.

That standard has to be both objective and outside of yourself.

If there is no God, there is no objective standard.

If there is no standard, there is nothing that you can measure against.

And if you can't measure, you can't tell me what you do or do not deserve.

If there is no God, there simply is no justice.

And Richard Dawkins is honest enough to admit it, he continues.

If there is, at the bottom line, no design.

So this world where everything just miraculously works all the way down to the smallest cellular level, he says there is no design, which means there is no designer.

There is no purpose.

And we all have a sense that we should have purpose.

It's what wakes us up in the morning, it's what often causes us to be so frustrated and we jump from job to job, career track to career track, relationship to relationship, hookup to hookup, addiction to addiction to addiction, trying to find a sense of purpose in a world without God who purposed us, there is no purpose, and it just makes sense.

If all there is is different combinations of atoms all colliding with each other, they are unguided, which means they don't actually care.

If you are sick or you're healthy, you're rich or you're poor, if you're dead or alive, the universe does not care without God.

There is no justice, no design, no purpose.

There is no evil and there is no good.

Evil and good have the same problem that justice has is evil can only be measured by its opposite.

Good can only be measured by its opposite.

Both of those require some kind of external objective standard.

If there is no God, there is no standard.

If there is no standard, then what is good and what is evil is simply a matter of your opinion.

Genocide, school shootings, suicide bombers, rape.

All of it can be called many things, but there is no standard definition if there is no standard bearer.

No justice, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good.

Richard Dawkins says in a world without God, there is nothing but pitiless indifference.

Materialistic atheism, the belief that all that exists is what we can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, and feel, absolutely makes the problem of suffering and pain exponentially worse.

And so that doesn't deal with our main topic at hand, which is why would a good God allow bad things to happen?

But it does level the playing field.

And if you have walked away from your faith, or if you've never considered faith in the first place, and you think that the answer lies in getting a worldview that has no God in it, it will not make your problem better.

It will only remove the last pieces of hope that you could possibly carry in your life.

Millions of people have left the faith, millions more, never considered it.

And part of it is on us.

The church, for far too long, when people ask the hard questions of why hard things happen, of why they are suffering, of why someone they love is dying, of why there's so much evil in the world, we have pushed it off and just told people have a little more faith.

It's all in God's plan.

You just have to have a little more faith.

And that is true.

But we do have a better answer.

And if we can understand what I'm calling from tree to tree, a proper perspective on God's plan for the world and for humanity, then we can have a proper perspective on our pain.

If we can see the full picture of God's plan, we can begin to see the full picture and understanding our pain.

And I'll take it a step further when you can fully see God's plan.

I believe that the very reason that God allows suffering is actually the same reason that God is worth you following.

The problem of pain must be understood in its full biblical perspective.

We're looking from tree to tree.

The first tree introduces the problem of pain.

The first tree was in a garden called Eden.

It's at the very beginning of our Bibles and the creation narrative.

And if you don't believe the claims of Christianity at this point in your life, I understand the creation narrative is a really difficult pill to swallow.

There's some timelines that don't really seem to line up to scientific finding.

You know, there's like only two people on earth, and how'd the rest of the people get here?

There's a talking snake.

I get it, right?

Like there's some issues we have to resolve here.

But what happens is we throw it all out and we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And here's what you need to hear.

The creation narrative, at its deepest level, its most important point, is revealing God's original design for his world, and it's revealing his original intention for mankind.

That is the bottom line of the creation narrative.

It is showing his original design for how the world operates, and it is showing his original intention for how mankind was purposed.

And what do we see in the garden narrative?

We see an actual perfect world.

We see intimacy with God Himself, humanity and divinity coexisting.

We see endless resources, all that you would ever need.

We see perfect relationships, we see work that is satisfying and significant, and we learn through the creation narrative mankind's actual purpose for being on earth.

God created the world and it was all good.

And then he created humanity and it was very good.

Scripture says that before he created mankind, he said, This one, this part, the pinnacle of my creation, we will create in my image.

We were placed on earth as image bearers of God Himself, and in the creation narrative, we are given what is called dominion, which means God placed us on earth to rule and reign alongside of him on the earth.

And there's a reason why your constant struggle and search for purpose always leaves you emptier than when you started.

It's because, as we've seen, week after week, your purpose is not situated in what you do.

It's not situated in your work or your relationships, your accomplishments or influence.

Your purpose is found in who you are, an image-bearer of God, meant to join with him in the administration of his world.

It's an amazing moment, and we see the first tree come into play with the first rule.

There was a rule in the garden, and the rule went like this: there's one tree, and the tree is in the middle of the garden, and it produces beautiful fruit, but you are not to eat from that one tree.

And this is the part where a lot of us are already out, and we're already out on the whole story because there's this thing about being human where we do not like rules.

Like, it's so easy to kind of like throw Adam and Eve under the bus and just think, like, man, if they just could have kept it together, dude, we would all be kicking it, everything would be perfect, there would be no pain, there would be no suffering.

The problem is, if it wasn't them, it would have been you.

There's just this thing inside of us.

We do not like rules.

And as soon as someone puts a rule on us, there's this thing that happens where it's like, I didn't really want to do that thing before, but now that you told me I can't, there is nothing I want to do more in life.

Like we all touched the hot stove growing up just because you told us we weren't supposed to.

We love to stretch the limits.

We love to push past the rules.

And we have grown into a society that holds on to a lot of our world views that we develop in adolescence.

We hold a lot of immature views, including how we view rules.

We don't like them.

We don't like people telling us what to do or who we have to be.

We like ultimate autonomy.

And the problem, if we're gonna understand how to deal with the problem of pain, is we have to have a higher level view of rules.

Rules are imperative because rules establish relationship.

The Bible was written thousands of years ago.

It was written in the ancient world, and by the time it was written, there were all kinds of religions that had popped up, and there were all kinds of deities or gods in these religions.

And the thing that makes the God of the Bible and the God of Christianity so incredibly unique is he burst onto the scene as a God who is deeply personal.

All of the other gods were distant and uncaring.

They demanded your obedience, but they didn't need your relationship.

God, the one true God in the Christian belief, came on and created a world that he was desperate for, a personal, abiding relationship with, and rules establish relationship.

We know this.

We shouldn't have to be convinced of this.

Rules establish the relational dynamics in your home.

If I come to your home, I will know who the parents are, even regardless of the age gap, the rules are going to show me the relationship.

There are gonna be some spoken rules between you and your kids, and there are gonna be some unspoken rules, and you create the rules because you're the parents and it's your house.

And so maybe your rule is that you worked hard and you cooked that meal and you provided it for them, and so they finish that plate before they leave the dinner table, or maybe they take their shoes off and put it in the bucket before they walk through your house that you took the time to clean the floors up, or maybe they take the trash out when it gets full.

Maybe in your house they're expected to say yes, sir, and no, sir, and yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am.

And it is a very good thing to have rules for your house because rules establish relationship.

There are some unspoken rules.

Like, I'll know you're the mom and the dad because you sleep in the big room, you know?

The one that's got a bathroom attached to it inside of the room.

Who doesn't want to stay in the master bedroom?

And I've known people, and they think the loving thing to do is to give their kids the master bedroom.

And if that's you, I'm not trying to just call you out right now, but you have an assignment, you move your kid out of that bedroom today when you get home.

You're gonna be so surprised in five years when your kids don't respect you.

Of course they don't.

You're living in their house.

Rules establish relationships and not just interpersonally.

Our world is guided by rules, and they establish and point to the way the relationships work in the world.

It's football season.

I say it up way too late to watch Texas AM beat the number one ranked Alabama Crimson Tide.

Any Aggies in the room, you can say amen.

Woo! Any Alabama fans?

Any?

Okay, we're good.

We're good.

Football is a game of rules.

And the rules establish relationship.

One of the rules is the teams wear different colors that establishes the relationship of who you're playing with and who you're playing against.

There are rules that establish the relationship between your action and the points that you score.

You get into your end zone, you get six points.

You get tackled in their end zone, they get two points.

If you don't know those rules, you don't know the relationship of how your actions affect the score.

There is a relationship between the score and the outcome of the game.

There are rules in football.

The rule is you score more points.

It relates to you winning.

Different sports have different rules.

You play golf, the rule is you want the lowest score.

Rules establish relationships, and we've become a society who doesn't like rules.

We're like rebels without a cause, and there are many, especially young marriages who are just falling apart because two people came in, joined their lives together, and assumed they should have the same level of freedom that they had as a single person.

Well, I didn't get married to have this person tell me to take the trash out all the time.

I'll take the trash out when I'm ready to take the trash out.

We don't like rules, we don't like other people setting boundaries on us.

And you get married and you stand at the altar and you exchange vows.

Those vows are some of the rules that establish relationship.

No one wants to be an authoritarian marriage, but at the same time, you also don't want your spouse sleeping with other people.

That's a rule, and it's a rule that establishes relationship in our God is a deeply personal God.

He desires relationship with mankind, the pinnacle of his creation, those who were created in his very image.

And God is all powerful, and hypothetically, we can imagine a world that God created without rules, but without rules, there is no way to test relationship.

Rules establish relationship, and God is God, and we are his children.

He gets to put the rules in place.

And of course, there was one rule don't eat from one tree, and we broke it.

In Genesis 3, it says the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, and so she took some of its fruit and ate it.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it, and then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

They ate the fruit.

And we've been doing it ever since.

We've been breaking the rules that establish relationship, and this is the moment that death entered the world, and everything painful came with it.

And it wasn't long before brother turned on brother, parents abandoned children, children rebelled against parents, governments became tyrannical, addictions crept in and took over our lives.

All of the suffering can be traced back to this one point, but the one point represents countless points.

We're in our rebellion, we turn against God's rules, the rules that establish relationship.

And so this doesn't completely fix the problem of pain because we make these claims like God is all-loving and he is all good, but he's also all powerful.

So if he's all powerful, then why didn't God create a world where there was no chance of us breaking that rule?

Why didn't God, who is all powerful, just make the rule, but then just wire our brains where we would for sure be obedient?

Like, is it too much to ask for just a shot caller every time they get within?

Ten feet of the tree.

Why couldn't God give us freedom to do all the good things, but take away our ability to do the bad?

And this is a big question, but it points to a big answer.

And I asserted earlier that the very reason pain exists in our world is actually the reason that you should follow God, not that you should turn your back on God.

And if you believe in God, you believe in him as the creator.

And if he is our creator, he's gifted us with many things, including life.

And he has gifted you.

Every one of you has talents.

He's given you a unique personality, a skill set.

He's given you an intellect.

And one of the most painful things as a pastor is to watch the crushing insecurities that the world places on you, convince you that you don't have the gifts that God has placed inside of you.

I'm here to tell you, week after week after week, that you were created on purpose and you were created with purpose.

And there's something inside of you that God wants to unleash on this world.

God has gifted you in so many ways.

And I contend that the greatest gift he created you with is the gift of freedom.

God set humanity apart by making us in his likeness image bearers of God.

And God is free.

We are not like nature who simply follow our biology.

The sun comes up and the flower opens, the sun goes down and the flower closes.

We are not simply like the animals who follow our instinct.

We are free.

And our freedom is a gift.

We make decisions and value judgments.

We plan for our futures.

And not only can we plan for our futures, we can then create elaborate, complex, multi-layer strategies to assure that those plans actually come to fruition.

We are free, which is why we are creators in the image of the creator.

We are inventors, we explore things, we deduce, we come to explanations of the world around us.

We are conscious at a higher level than the rest of creation.

And we are free, which allows us to love.

And I know it feels like your dog loves you.

And I really kind of think my dog is like the one exception.

Like maybe labradoodles can actually love.

You know, I don't know how it works.

It seems like your dog loves you, and your dog is loyal to you, and you're probably its its master, and you're the head of its tribe, and it's loyal, and it's even affectionate towards you, but there is a wide gap between loyal, affectionate, and love.

Love that is not just reactive and instinctive, but is proactive, and love sometimes cuts across all reason and common sense.

We alone on all of creation.

In all the universe, we alone can love.

And we can do all of these things because we are free.

And so often we neglect to think on the positive side of freedom because every day we are so painfully aware of the negative.

And we are free to choose to go against all that God has laid out as the path for our life.

We are free to destroy each other with our words and our gossip.

We are free to kill.

We are free to commit genocide.

We are free to lie.

We are free to cheat.

We are free to get into meaningful relationships where we learn someone at the deepest level of who they are and then use all of that knowledge to slowly destroy them when the relationship goes south.

Our freedom enables and allows us to do horrendous evil.

And so, if our freedom could cause so much pain, destruction, and division, then why would God create us free in the first place?

We don't like rules, but we are elevating our view on rules because without them there is no relationship.

Rules establish relationship, and our God, who is a deeply personal God, desires relationship with you above almost all other things.

The same way that rules establish relationship, God is love.

He doesn't love, it's not something he does, it's not an action he takes.

He is the definition of love.

He is perfect love, and love requires freedom.

Why couldn't God create us to only do the good things, to only obey, to only be kind, to only be generous, to never be pryful?

Why couldn't God wire us in a way where we would never be tempted, never eat the fruit?

Because love requires freedom.

And if God would have created us as robots and programmed every one of our actions, if God would have created us as puppets, as marionettes, and every time we got close to the tree, yanked us back away from it, then God would not be loving us.

Love that is held captive is not love at all, it is slavery.

God could not love us, fully love us.

And God, who is love, cannot go against his own nature.

Likewise, if we were just programmed to do the right thing, we would not be loving God.

We would be nothing more than robots obeying our programming.

Rules establish relationship, and love requires freedom.

And here is the crux of the matter of the problem of pain.

Rules establish relationship.

Love requires freedom, including the freedom to break the rules that establish relationship.

So often in the pain of our life, we wonder why God left us.

And the full perspective of the first tree is not that God left us.

God is love, God is good, God pursues us from the moment of our conception till our very last breath.

But God is also just.

And the just part of God is kind of difficult because sometimes you set a rule in your house and your kid breaks the rule and you kind of just let them go on it anyway, and you're kind of setting them up to become adults who think that the rules are never gonna matter, but it feels like the loving thing to do, to let it go just this one time.

God is perfectly just, which means if you break the rules, there must be consequence.

And I know that's hard, but you want God to be just because without it, there is no justice in our world.

And we always eat the fruit, and we always come too near to the tree, and we give in to temptation.

They did it in the creation narrative, and we continue to do it across time, and God created us free, completely free, to the point where we could actually rebel and break the rules of the creator.

Here's the truth: the problem of pain is not that God left us, it's that we broke the rules, and by breaking the rules, we broke the relationship.

And God is called holy, which means he is set apart.

He is God, and we are not.

He cannot be in the presence of sin, and sin is falling short of those rules.

Transgressions is exceeding, going beyond what you're supposed to do in those rules, and we do it every day.

Adam and Eve disobeyed and they looked down and realized they were naked, and they didn't care about being naked because it was a perfect world.

There was no shame, there was no pride, there was no body image issues, there was no comparison, there was none of that.

But in an instant, pain entered the world.

They were ashamed and they put together some fig leaves, you know.

And I don't know if you know about leaves, but you pull them off the tree and they don't stay alive very long.

Not great for clothing.

And God clothed him.

He did it through the sacrifice of an animal.

You see, we are flawed people, and the world is very broken.

The Bible doesn't pull any punches about this.

Here's a few passages from Romans.

In Romans 3, it says, All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.

We have all sinned, we've all broken the rules that establish relationship.

Romans 6 says, the wages of that sin, the price to pay for coming short is death.

Death entered the world through sin, through breaking those rules.

And with death came all of the pain we experience.

In Romans 8, it says, For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God's children.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now, death, futility, decay, all of creation, groaning, longing, desperate for redemption, desperate for rescue.

And you know this.

And this isn't one of those sermons where I have to convince you that this is a problem.

You know the problem of pain because you experience it in your own life.

You experience heartache, disappointment, and frustration.

You know what it's like to feel like you continue to hit rock bottom time after time after time.

You know what it is like to be in the valley of despair and wonder if you will ever make it back to the mountaintop again.

You know what it is like for relationships to fall apart right in front of your eyes.

You know what it feels like to put your hope into something of this world just for the world to pull the rug out from under you when you least expect it.

You know the problem of pain.

These aren't verses that you have to be some spiritual guru to empathize with.

You know the feeling of longing for something different, something better, longing for some kind of rescue from the seasons of life that we often go through.

And so there are a couple of options.

You can decide that because of the pain you experience, there must not be a God.

That all that there is is what we can see and experience with our five senses.

If that is the path that you take, nothing will get better, nothing will improve, no one is guiding or governing this process.

There is no purpose, there is no point, there will not be justice, you cannot call good good or evil evil, and your only hope is that one day this miserable existence will be over.

Or you can see the bigger picture that God created a world and made us image bearers of himself.

He loved us so he gave us freedom, and he desired relationship so he established rules.

He gave us enough freedom that we could even break the rules that he set.

We could break the relationship that he desires, we could separate ourselves from God.

God is just, and rules have consequences, and yet God's predominant characteristic is love.

He is love, and he loves you more than you could possibly imagine.

And you should spend your life pursuing even an inkling of understanding of the depth and the strength of God's love for you, and you'll never come close, but the pursuit is worth the journey.

We messed up, but God is good.

And he had a plan that allowed us to maintain our freedom while solving the problem of pain that came from us breaking his rules.

And to see the whole picture, you must realize there is a second tree.

From the moment that we broke the rules, God began showing us that the answer to our broken world would require sacrifice, and it would require keeping the rules.

And so, instituted across time, God's people would sacrifice animals, but animals are temporary beings and they can only cover our sin temporarily.

And God gave his law, which was over 600 commands, rules, and regulations.

Those were the rules that established our relationship with God.

And yet God, who is all wisdom, knew that these temporary sacrifices and these huge numbers of rules would only work temporarily.

God is love.

The first tree was in a garden.

It is where our innocence was taken away from us.

The second tree we call Calvary.

It is the cross of Jesus Christ.

It's where our innocence was reclaimed.

The first tree is where we lost our identity, and we spend our days just longing, trying to work our way into feeling a sense of purpose and significance.

The tree of Jesus Christ is where our identity was fully and firmly planted into our lives.

The first tree is where fear and shame, guilt, evil, and hatred entered into this world, and the cross of Jesus Christ, the second tree is where all of it was defeated once and for all.

Galatians 4 says, when the fullness of time had come, that means at the exact perfect moment, God sent his son, Jesus, born of a woman, fully human, born under the law, the rules that establish relationship, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons, so that we might be brought back into that relationship.

In Colossians 2, it says, And you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh.

But Jesus made you alive with him and forgave all of our trespasses.

He erased the debt with its obligations that was against us and opposed to us, and he has taken it away.

All that came from that first tree, all the death and misery, frustration and suffering, he has taken it away by nailing to the second tree.

Jesus came and he lived the perfect life that you and I could not live.

He perfectly kept the rules that established relationship, which uniquely qualified him to become the sacrifice, not to cover sin temporarily, but all sin for all time.

And all he asks is that we believe in him.

And if you can see the bigger picture of God's plan, you can begin to see the bigger picture on your pain.

Pain and suffering exist in this world because God created a world where love and relationships are possible.

And suffering will be erased after this world because God loved us enough to come and exchange his life for ours.

That is the message of Christianity.

And that is the answer for a very painful world.

Would you pray with me?

Father, I don't know how many people are in here who already believe in you and maybe struggle with this.

Maybe there are times where it just feels like, why can't I catch a break?

I don't know how many people are in here who have not started their faith journey, who have never believed that you are who you say you are.

Jesus, that you came and actually died, actually rose again, actually exchanged your life for ours and paid the price of our sin.

Jesus, we believe that through what you did on that second tree, what you did on the cross, you made it possible for us to be back into relationship, even though we have broken the rules.

And so, God, I ask that you would move on our hearts if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, if there's anyone watching online, maybe who have walked away from their faith, maybe some people who have never considered faith in the first place because of the suffering in this world, that they would find that you are worth pursuing, that we would seek you.

And you have told us if we seek you, we will find you.

We love you and we worship you in Jesus' name.

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.