The Importance Of Learning From Our Mistakes

Good morning.

Happy to be Am I on?

Am I on, sir?

Thank you, baby girl.

Testing.

Am I on?

Can y'all hear me?

Okay.

All right.

I don't sound on for some reason.

Okay.

Um, welcome to Christ Community Church.

I'm very happy that you're here.

I'm very happy to be here.

Uh 26 of us went down to a little village right outside of Juarez, Mexico, this week, and we built two houses, believe it or not.

And um it was fun.

It was wonderful.

Nobody got hurt.

Nobody got sick.

Uh the planes all flew and landed and took off the way they were supposed to.

And uh very grateful.

I'm grateful for those of you that went.

I'm grateful for those of you that gave money so that we could go and build the houses.

I'm grateful to those of you that prayed because the Lord was kind to us, and I'm I'm grateful.

Um, I was going to talk about Tiffany and uh uh Bethany and their little well, just y'all know that uh Tiffany and Bethany both had little babies, and everybody's healthy and uh good, moms and little ones, and so I'm very thankful.

Um I'm very thankful for that.

That's just a neat thing when little children come into the world, and uh I'm happy that they're a part of our church.

I really am.

Um, Shirley, you deal with a lot of students.

Uh, when it comes to students, when they mess up on a test or a paper or whatever, um in my experience I've noticed that people, young and old, deal with mistakes, fails, whatever.

They go they tend to go to extremes.

And you ever noticed that?

Um yeah.

I think uh with students, and I also think this is probably true of most of us, when there's a mistake, when they make a mistake or they get caught or they are afraid they're gonna get caught, um, their tendency, our tendency, is to kind of hide.

You know, hide the if if I know that I cheated on a test, or if I more so in what I do, plagiarism on a paper.

You know, like I've a student has just clearly plagiarized on a paper.

That's something I'm supposed to teach, that's supposed something I'm supposed to instruct for them to know what it is and what it isn't.

Oh, and that's that's wrong.

It is wrong.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, it is.

It's it is not.

My sister in high school, her name by everybody at Memphis Prep was uh little uh Indian Princess Wand Eyes.

That was her that was her name.

Anyway, but yeah, go ahead.

So you know, if I'm if I'll um I think when someone is in the wrong, in my experience with teenagers, they will avoid you.

They'll avoid me, they won't look in my eye.

But if I if I'll look up and say, you know, so and so, you know, she might look away.

So avoidance, uh hiding, um, little children will do it, won't they?

You know, they've done something, stolen something, broken something, whatever they do, and go hide under a table, or you know, a little child will think that if they can't see you, you can't see them.

That's cute.

And they're they're hiding from their crime, you know.

Yeah.

Yes, yeah.

Thank you.

In counseling situations, when it comes to mistakes or fails, I notice people tend to go to one of two extremes.

Either they will be very strong on denial or blame, not not owning it, you know.

Uh they they they really minimize their culpability.

Uh they they deny it, they minimize it, uh, or they deflect it, I guess.

The other extreme is uh there are people, and I I really have to battle with them in counseling, they overly emphasize or maximize their wrong.

It's all the our marriage is in trouble, and it's all my fault.

Or it's all your fault.

Exactly.

It's either all your fault or it's all my fault.

And both of those are not healthy, not true, um, not productive, I guess is what I would I would try to get them to see.

Um we all know this.

This is not new information, but I want to challenge us to think about it today.

One of the the keys to experiencing success in life as a person, as a in the business world, uh in marriage, as parents, uh, whatever.

I think one of the most significant things that we can ever learn is how to deal with our mistakes and our fails in healthy, productive ways.

And uh, because we're all gonna fail, we're all gonna mess up, we're all gonna drop balls.

So, not if, but when that happens, what am I gonna do?

How am I gonna respond to that?

And um, I was reading in my little journey through the Bible, and I read a little proverb every day, and uh I was reading in Proverbs chapter 21 where it says this fools, and actually there's a word that is implied, even fools, even fools learn from the mistakes of others, but the wise learn from their own.

Proverbs 21 · chapter mention

Even fools when they observe someone really mess up.

Huh, I'll not do that.

But a wise man, he learns from his own mistakes.

I asked my precious, wonderful daughter to read that uh passage from 1 Chronicles chapter 15.

1 Chronicles 15 · chapter mention

And I think I put in the thing that y'all got the email that I wanted you to read.

Did I tell you to read chapter 13 as well?

I don't know whether I did or we didn't, but the the background for 1 Chronicles 15, where David he wants the presence of God to dwell in his capital city.

He wants the presence of God to dwell near him.

He doesn't want to have to travel miles and miles and miles to where the Ark of the Covenant was at that time dwelling.

Uh he he wanted the presence of God near him.

He wanted the capital city to be the place where the presence and the glory and the and the blessings of God dwelt.

And so he moved it.

He sent the Levites and the priest to move the ark from where it was to Jerusalem.

And it was a big to-do, a big celebration, a big ceremony to accomplish that.

If you noticed in what she read, though, David made a big deal about you Levites and you priest, y'all have to move it.

That's a big deal to David.

Now the background to that is the reason that was such a big deal is that two chapters earlier, a number of months earlier, David had wanted to move the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, but he didn't ask God the right way to do it.

He didn't go back and read the book of Exodus and the book of Leviticus, which he had possessed, he possessed those books.

He didn't go to the Word of God to see how God had instructed people to move the ark, and he had not asked God to show him the way to move the ark.

And instead, what he did was, it's a long background story that's very interesting if you go back to uh 1 Samuel.

But uh the Philistine, the Philistines had wound up capturing the Ark of the Covenant, which was craziness.

And uh God said, I don't want to live among the Philistines.

I want to go back home.

And so God orchestrated some unusual events so that the Philistines not only were willing to let God go back to the people of God, they uh really participated in getting the Ark of the Covenant back to the Israel.

Uh but one of the, they didn't know, they'd never read the words of Moses.

They sure weren't asking Yahweh for any instructions, and so they didn't know any better than they got a cart, and they put the Ark of the Covenant on the cart, and it was pulled by two oxen, and uh that's how, and the oxen took the Ark of the Covenant from the land of the Philistines back to Israel.

Very significant that we get this.

David had a good thing in mind.

It was a good thing that David wanted to bring the ark from where it was staying to where, to the capital of Israel.

That was a good thing.

But he followed the example of the Philistines to accomplish his good desires rather than following the instructions of the Lord.

Any thoughts?

I know you do.

Parent, mom, teacher, wife, any of those?

Any thoughts?

You're uh you're throwing me, you're lobbing it to me earlier than I thought.

Yeah, I am.

Yeah.

Um yeah.

In literature, and in and and I mean by that, written literature, story, uh, anything we might watch on, you know, anything kind of decent you might watch on television, um, everyone is doing that, wanting what we want without the consequence, or wanting what we want without the movement toward it.

The process, the right process.

Yeah.

I mean, um, you know, if somebody wants to be healthier, they want to be healthier.

If we we want to buy a pill to take rather than doing exercise or even though it's a good thing.

Wait, we need to buy one of these new miracle pills.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's the you know, and so if I've got enough money, I can buy this, and then I don't have to do the steps that physicians or whoever says uh are are proper in order to get what I want.

We and in in literature, I think that that is because well how we see it reflected in literature is that I think that I am the one who's above the norm, like above the law or above the the the status quo.

I don't have to go through the process like other people do.

Well, just think that you go all the way back to Adam and Eve on that.

But yeah, and I I oughtn't have to do the same amount of work as you have to do for the same process.

And if you pushed somebody on that, and if they could be honest at all, I think they would say.

I think I might say, I think all of us might say, it's just, you know, I'm kind of the one of the good ones.

And so it should be easier for me.

Or something along those lines.

So if I want a great marriage, there are more books written on how to create a good marriage than could fill this room.

But I think I should be able to experience a good marriage without going through, and they all say the same thing.

They all say the basic same things, things that create good marriages, things that create healthy, strong, confident children, things that create healthy bodies.

You could go things that create healthy financial uh underpinning or foundations for individuals and families.

This is not rocket science.

And yet, that is not where I thought you were gonna go, but I love that.

That's this idea that I'm the exception.

I don't need to do the regular, systematic, faithful, consistent, step, wise steps that if I do these things consistently enough and faithfully enough, over time I will ultimately create, it will end well.

But I don't have to do that.

I'm the unusual one.

I'm the exception.

The Ugermage.

Do you remember that from like your philosophy class?

Which which really translates to Superman.

Just the the and I think people can have some sort of, I think I can, I've read it, I think I've seen it, false humility about that.

About being, I mean, I mean, really, just read the paper.

That that I ought to have an easier way because I'm uh I'm better.

It should be easier for me.

I don't have to operate by the principles of regular mortals.

Now coming out of our mouths, it sounds ridiculous, but I mean just think back, you know, to the to to any time that any of us have committed any kind of sin, and the reason if we've cognized you know, if we're cognizant of it, it is because I think I should be able to.

Yeah.

And oh, and then when the consequence comes, I am absolutely devastated.

Yes, shocked.

Shocked is the word that I would I would uh yeah.

I won't forgive you, I won't forgive you, I won't forgive you, I won't forgive you.

This goes on for 20 years, and all of a sudden off you go, and I'm like shocked.

That it impacts us negatively.

Yeah.

Thank you.

That was not at all where I thought we were gonna go, but that's all right, that's good.

Um, I got more.

What stood out to me, Randy Ray, when I uh when I was looking at that passage in Chronicles 13 and 15 was how David did it wrong.

He tried to move the ark.

Good thing, good desire, good idea, but he tried to do it the wrong way.

He made a mistake.

He did, he owned it.

He said, I didn't ask God.

We did not ask God how to do this.

He didn't go back and read what Moses had had, God had told Moses to write down.

He made a mistake.

Several months later, two chapters later, he moves the ark again, but this time he moves it exactly the way Moses wrote it down.

It's a deep, uh, rich, you have to be brilliant to pull this out of the scripture, what what that is telling us.

David learned from his mistakes.

Now you have to be brilliant.

C.S.

Lewis might could get that, but or John Piper, but most average people, they couldn't pull that out.

No, anybody can get that.

One of the things that made David David.

Who who in the Bible is like David?

Who in the universe is like David?

And I would suggest that one of the things that made David David was that he lived a life full of mistakes.

But if you'll study his life carefully, he didn't make the same mistake twice.

He he did some bonehead knuckler things.

But when he messed up, he owned it, he learned from it, and he didn't do it again.

And you might be sitting there going, well, duh, what imbecile wouldn't learn from a mistake and then not duplicate it again?

Well, I I would like to for you to raise your hand if you could give me another example from scripture or from your phone uh where you don't have all your addresses and phone numbers, your phone.

Contact.

Your conduct give me give me a name from your contact list or from the scripture.

Great example.

Great example.

Thank you, Adam.

I would suggest that most of the people in the Bible, and most of the people in our contact list, and most of the people in the news, and most of the people that are sitting in this room, we are not like David.

From the perspective that when we make mistakes, we have a real aversion or I don't even know the right word, propensity or whatever, but we tend to not learn from our mistakes.

God's people rarely learned from their failures and their mistakes.

Um Adam mentioned Samson.

I mean, no, there's no there's not one person in the Bible living in that day in that culture that was more blessed than Samson.

Because in that day, power, strength was king.

The person that was the strongest one every time.

And yet, you see a man's life, he lived his life believing that he could find his deepest, strongest sources of intimacy and life from people that did not know and love God.

Never says that Samson didn't believe in God.

Never says that Samson didn't really want to serve God.

Blew up in his face.

But it won't the next time.

And the next time, and the next time, and the next time.

And in all that business with Delilah, it was the same mistake over and over.

Yes.

You know, it wasn't even a different mistake.

It was just the same old one.

Yes.

It's kind of annoying to read.

You want to go, dude.

She's getting your hair.

Stop that.

But he was like a person who has been in an abusive relationship, and then they they get out of that relationship and choose another abusive relationship.

Those who love that person want to go, don't do that, don't do that.

And what that person might think is this time it'll be different.

Those those qualities that light me up, but also knock my teeth out of my head and jerk the hair out of my scalp and turn my cheeks red and break all my dishes.

It'll be different this time.

And just take his life.

This idea that I can find my greatest satisfaction, my greatest delight from people that do not know and love God.

King Ahab, you know, his wife was Jezebel.

He believed that too.

The Israelites, even before Samson, even before Samson, when the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness and they go by the country of Moab, what'd they do?

We can marry, we can give our sons and daughters to them and their sons and daughters to us, and it won't impact.

We can find our deepest, strongest, richest long, we can satisfy these longings for a relationship and life from people that do not delight in the Lord, that do not trust in the Lord.

I'm the exception.

Sure, it happened to the Israelites.

I can hear Samson say it.

Yes, it happened to the Israelites in the wilderness, but I'm the exception.

King Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived.

Who started out better?

I will not be like the Israelites and the Moabites.

I will not be like Samson.

I can find my deepest relationships, my richest, most satisfying sources of life.

I can find that from people that do not know and love God.

I'm the exception.

Those of you that are reading through the Bible with me, we just read Ezra and Nehemiah.

The way Ezra and Nehemiah, both those books, end is the people of God have started intermarrying with the peoples around them.

And which that's not necessarily a bad thing.

What was bad, and Ezra and Nehemiah recognized it and identified it was you're marrying people, you're building lives with people, and it's not just marriage.

It's you're looking to sources for life, for wisdom, for example, for influence, for joy.

You're looking in places that are void of God.

And when you do that, it blows up in your face.

These people would not learn from their mistakes.

I want to uh I want you to think about that with me.

You know what there's a word for the life of someone who lives their life and they never will learn from their mistakes.

Making mistakes is okay.

We're all going to make mistakes.

We all trip, we all run off on the side of the road, we all mess up.

That's not, that's not the that's not even the goal.

Jesus came.

He didn't even come for people that don't make mistakes.

He only came for people that make mistakes.

That's the only ones he cares about.

That's the only ones he came for.

It's what we do when we experience these mistakes, these failures.

There's a word for people who live their life.

And they make mistake and they don't learn from it.

And they make mistake and they don't learn from it.

And they make mistake and they don't learn from it.

There's a word for that kind of a life.

It's called slavery.

The ultimate example of that is prison.

That's where people go when their mistakes, when they don't learn from their mistakes, and they get so extreme, so severe, so intense, then it goes to a whole nother level.

But whether it's prison or my fourth marriage, or my third bankruptcy, or my uh my twentieth attempt to rebuild and uh bridges that I burnt with my kids or whatever it is.

It's this pattern of not learning from our mistakes.

And we wind up with lives where we are enslaved to our past choices, our past decisions, our past failures.

And what struck me where this all came from is, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I don't know whether you were with me or you weren't with me, I can't remember now, but we were we were talking about when the Israelites went into captivity.

And um man it hit me, I still can't get over it, this this very clear declaration from the scripture from numerous prophets that the Israelites went into captivity because they would not look to God for life.

They would not do it God's way.

They would not put him first.

They would, they, God was looking for a one-man woman because he is a one-woman man.

He's not gonna live in an adulterous, polygamous uh deal.

He's not gonna do that.

He will not do it.

And he begged and he begged and he begged and he begged, and he said, Well, we're gonna do that.

That seems to work well for us.

Uh is that right?

That's gone well for y'all?

And so they go into captivity in Babylon.

And if you read Ezekiel, what you Ezekiel's this priest, and he's over in Babylon, and God gives him all these visions of what's going on with the people of Israel, the people of God in Babylon, and the people of Israel that are back in Israel.

And what he sees is it's exactly the same.

Both groups, the group that is living with the destruction of their land back in Israel, the people that are living in Babylon living with the consequences of that destruction, they're the same people.

And they're the same people as they were before Babylon destroyed them.

And then you read Ezra and Nehemiah, and danged if the people who come back, they're the same people.

No one's changed.

No one's learned.

No one's that there's a Bible word.

We don't like this word, but it's a great Bible word.

It's the word repented.

Repentance.

No one, and all repentance means is you turn around.

You're headed in a wrong direction, you realize it's a wrong direction, you say, you know what, deadgummit?

That's a V8 moment for me.

I'm going to turn around and go in another direction because that's not a good direction.

That's not a life-giving direction.

Israel, the people of God.

C3, the people of God.

Do we seriously take pause?

We're so quick to blame others.

We're so quick to make excuses.

We're so quick to deflect.

We're so flicked to cover up and hide and ignore.

Rather than being like the wise man in Proverbs 21, who learns from his own mistakes.

The funny thing about that Ezekiel story, it's a great story.

It's a hard story.

Ooh, it's hard.

But what's amazing is that when God gives Ezekiel these visions, you know where the glory of God is?

What's shocking to Ezekiel is not the visions necessarily.

What's shocking is God reveals to Ezekiel where his glory is.

And do you know where his glory is?

In Babylon.

And Ezekiel's like, what the Sam Hill?

God's glory can't be in Babylon.

God's glory's got to be in Jerusalem.

And God's glory wasn't in Jerusalem.

God's glory was in Babylon.

Because that's where the people of God were.

And that's what gives me hope.

And I want it to give you hope today.

I don't want you to leave here all down in the dumps.

I hadn't done a good job of learning from my mistakes, and man, I ought to have done better.

Yeah, you should.

Me too.

What I find remarkable, though, in every one of those examples that we've talked about, but in Ezekiel in particular, is where's the glory of God?

In the midst of the people of God having heads like granite bowling balls and hearts that are harder than that.

Where's the glory of God?

In the midst of people of God that make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake and will not learn.

Where's the glory of God?

Pursuing us.

Just like King David said in Psalm 23, surely his goodness and mercy will pursue me.

Hard head in all, unlearned mistakes in all.

It will pursue me all the days of my life.

We see it with Jacob.

Jacob never learned.

Jacob's a great example.

Adam, just like Samson.

Jacob never, his deadcum grandfather was Abraham.

The deck stacked in his favor.

Oh, that I could be a grandfather to daddy like that.

Abraham's your granddad.

Jacob never learned.

Lived his life, died, never learned from his mistakes.

But where was God?

He was with Jacob every.

When he was with his dad Isaac, God was there.

When he had to flee, basically, to Babylon to run away from his brother, where was God?

Right there.

When he came back, God was there.

When he went down to Egypt, God was there.

God never gave up on him.

And the point that I think, and you could see this with Jonah, you see this with Israel.

They won't learn from their mistakes.

But what's God doing?

Not what you and I.

So there's the problem.

We assume God acts like us.

And I'll give you, I'll, I'll, Esther, I'll give you ten chances.

Because I'm a really great guy.

But there's going to be a line.

And when you, that 11th mistake, that's Larry Ray.

That's not Yahweh.

Are you learning from your mistakes?

Or are you repeating them?

Larry Ray, are you learning from your mistakes?

Or are you repeating them?

Depends on the day you ask me.

But where's God?

He's pursuing us.

He's working in our lives.

He's appealing to us.

He's orchestrating our circumstances.

He's putting people in our lives.

He's causing us to experience the consequences of our mistakes that we won't learn from.

He's doing all, he's moving heaven and earth to try to wake us up, to get our attention, to help us become that wise man who learns from his own mistakes.

And the reason is simple.

God will cannot and he will not accept that his sons and daughters live lives of slavery.

He's going to set us free one way or another.

It might be on the other side of the grave.

If that's the plan that I want, that's okay.

Remember that movie, you know, where that dude, his daughter gets kidnapped in uh uh what's it called?

Taken, yeah.

Yeah, Liam Neeson.

Y'all don't see that movie?

It's a great, great movie.

Any dad should watch that movie.

Every dad should watch that movie about 20 times.

Uh but anyway, Liam Neeson's daughter gets kidnapped over in France, and uh uh he has to go over there and help everybody see the light.

But anyway, um, the point of that movie is what would a dad be unwilling to do to set his daughter free from slavery?

Is there anything that a dad wouldn't do?

Would a dad ever say, well, you know what?

She made that, that's her choice.

She made that choice, and she's got to live with it.

No.

No, no dad's gonna, no, that's unacceptable.

I'll do whatever it takes, I will go to the ends of the earth, I will move heaven and earth, I cannot accept the idea that my daughter would spend her life in slavery.

If you, Don and Jim and Greg and Chuck and John and Beck, Tim, and Larry, if we feel that way, because slavery is unacceptable for our children, I will not accept it.

I will not accept it.

Our Heavenly Father feels that way and more.

And so he is at work.

What's God up to in my life?

What's God up to in your life?

He is warning us to live a life of faith and courage and to attempt great things and try things and sometimes stumble and fall and make mistakes, and that doesn't rattle his cage.

He's not shocked, he's not mad.

It's okay.

But I want you to get back up and I want you to learn from that, and let's not do that one again.

Let's not do that one again.

Because if you do that long enough, you become a slave to it.

And that's I will not accept that.

That's what God's doing.

He's doing other things in our lives, and I don't mean to, you know, say he's not, but imagine the I guess the frustration, perhaps, of um of God.

The New Testament says over and over that the slavery is a motif in the New Testament, and over and over it says, Christ came to set us free.

Yes.

So that we can be free.

Yes.

It's it's it's both of those things.

To say Christ came to set us free is is, I mean, that's the gospel.

But he came to set us free so that we could be free.

And so the frustration is, I'm sure, to watch his children, for him to watch his children keep crawling back in.

I set you free from that.

You can be free.

Well, I'm just gonna I'm gonna a little bit more, just a little bit more taste.

Is um Galatians 5 says that Christ's goal in coming was to set you free.

So stand firm and don't be bound again to slavery.

Whatever it is.

Christ is not gonna let us, he's not gonna let his brothers and sisters, and his dad is not gonna let his sons and daughters spend their lives in slavery.

So that's what he's doing.

Now we can either participate or we can be hard heads like Samson and fight.

That's really the choice.

Whether it's is it time for us to start reading our Bibles?

Getting up in the morning and starting our day right.

But you don't understand how busy I am.

No, I don't.

No, I don't.

Is it time for me to really start embracing the privilege and responsibility of learning to pray?

Valuing spiritual community, valuing generosity, learning to forgive, learning to exercise faith and attempt great things for God that make the world different and better.

But it's scary.

It could fail.

Yes, it could.

And if it does, is there something that can be learned so that we can start over again tomorrow and be a lot smarter and not do it, not fail that way again?

Yes.

In Nehemiah 9, I will end with this verse.

Nehemiah made this declaration about the people of God.

He says, We are slaves.

These are the people that were freed from Babylon and sent back to the promised land.

And here's what Nehemiah said about himself and his people.

We are slaves today in a good land of abundance that you, Yahweh, gave our ancestors to enjoy.

We are slaves in a land of abundance.

In my under under that verse in my Bible, it doesn't say USA, but it sure could.

And I don't think it wouldn't it would harm the inspiration of my Bible one bit.

We are slaves in a land of abundance.

God wants us to learn from our mistakes and listen to him as he shows us better ways to live life so that we can live in freedom and not in slavery.

That's the gospel.

That's the good news.

We don't have to continue in slavery.

I grew up, I'll make it quick, I promise, in churches and in thought that I needed to be, and as a pastor's wife and all that, I needed to be good and nice, especially nice, um because the weight of the gospel of Christ was on me, and I better look the part and be nice, and so and so I did.

I did for many years, a lot most of it, actually.

Um and then I and you've heard me talk about the difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking, and I realized at the last church where we were for say three, that what I spent so much of my time doing was like putting little band-aids on gaping wounds.

Peacekeeping, being nice, rather than getting on in there and saying, a mistake has been made, I made it, I'm sorry.

What can we do to fix it?

Um it nearly drove me crazy.

And finally, God said to me, you're not responsible for the gospel in the whole world.

You're just a person who needs to be honest more than nice.

And it set me free.

And get tired enough of it.

Decide, I'm I gotta be done with that.

Who am I beyond that?

Who am I beyond those shekels of being nice?

That's who God wants me to be.

And when she got tired of making the same mistake over and over again of choosing fake peace over the peace that comes from real healing, real truth, real engagement that not only set her free, it it well, we don't have enough time this month for me to explain the impact that it had on me.

And the freedom that I began to experience as she learned to walk in the freedom of her experience.

So, like when your mate starts exercising and eating better, so often it sort of spills over on you and you start doing it too.

That health that she was experiencing, that freedom that she was experiencing, it it really, I didn't like it initially.

Uh I liked it better when she was just nice.

But uh, but anyway, that that was a whole nother thing.

So anyway, uh no, it it I'm I am the beneficiary of her embracing that.

We're gonna celebrate the Lord's Supper.

And um, Christ came and lived and died and rose again so that we could be set free from that which and those things which enslave us.

God has given us lives that we are to enjoy in abundance.

He does not want us to live lives of slavery in lands of abundance.

And so he came personally to offer us not just life, but life that is full of healing and wisdom and righteousness and holiness and goodness.

And he offers it to every one of us as a free gift.

And if you've accepted that gift, you have put your trust in Jesus and what he did on the cross when he died, you you are trusting him that that is sufficient for your sin problem.

Then I invite you to come.

Um, let's see here who I.

Patrick and Dina, y'all are guests, but you're you get to come help today, okay?

And Ashley, would you in Austin, would y'all come help me too, please?

Two of y'all come over on this side and two of you on that side.

Yeah, y'all y'all just come right over here if you will.

Grab those those two dishes, and y'all grab those two dishes, please.

There you go.

And um I challenge you before you pop up here and take the bread and the the juice, the wine.

Take just a moment in your chair.

When you hear us speak the word slavery, enslavement, I bet it doesn't take too many seconds for you to for your mind to go to where that's a challenge for you, to the part of your life where you like me, we're tired because we just keep failing.

Same song, different verse, same shampoo, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

And we're tired, we're tired.

If we want God to help us be set free, we can be.

It might take some faith and courage and help from his body, his community, but he wants to help us.

And so talk to God about that maybe for a second or two.

And then when you're ready, you come up and you take some bread and some wine, and you eat and give thanks.