My Last Sermon (Part 1) Mark 6:30-32

Pastor Josh: to all who are weary and need rest, to all who mourn and long

for comfort, to all who feel worthless and wonder if God really cares, to all

who fail and desire strength, to all who sin and need a savior, to all who

hunger and thirst for righteousness, and to whoever will come, this church opens

wide her heart with a welcome from Jesus Christ, the befriender of his enemies, the

defender of the guilty, the justifier of the inexcusable, the friend of sinners.

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, welcome, welcome in this Place…

The title of the sermon is called My Last Sermon.

Mark 6:30-32

Mark 6:30–32

And I'll read it.

the apostles returned to Jesus, told Him all that they had done and taught, and

He said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while."

For many were coming and going, and they did not have leisure even to eat.

Even to eat.

This is the word of the Lord.

Bless your word, Lord.

I'm gonna do…

break this up into two sermons, because it just got too big and too unwieldy.

'Cause sometimes, I don't know, kind of my heart was just poured out.

I've been working, as I had posted, probably on this for 10 years.

I've preached this at different points and different times.

but, like I said, it's titled My Last Sermon, and that's a little clickbait-y.

because it's a title I would have hated in another time, but this was

the last sermon I ever gave as lead pastor, as the man who planted Reality

Stockton, though I understand it's called Reality Church of Stockton now.

A change of branding after I made myself obsolete or after they made me obsolete,

depending on who's telling the story.

It's true, this was my last sermon, not because the tank ran dry, but

because I left the tank at the mercy of those who always wanted it emptied.

The community that had been my family…

FYI, this gets a little personal, so bear with it.

Please, I know you don't-- some of you don't know me very well,

but here I am baring everything.

the community that had been my family, the chosen family that I believed

impossible to lose, managed to cast me out by the oldest and ugliest of methods.

Soft exclusion, hard exclusion, whispers, group texts, passive-aggressive coffees,

and finally what felt like the full shun.

There's nothing so fierce as a holy mob.

I was naive the first time I preached this, hopeful even, believing that

if I stood before them and bared my wounds, they would see the blood and

do what Christians are supposed to do.

Bring bandages and bread, weep and pray, and carry me home.

I forgot that in modern churches, sometimes even ones you start, wounds are

mostly for hiding, and public lacerations are met with collective wincing in the

empty space that used to be fellowship.

I was not just sent away, I was unmade a son, unadopted, as if the legal paperwork

of my soul could be burnt at the same altar where I had burnt my thirties.

They made sure I felt it too, all the rituals of excommunication.

No gentle confrontation, just a slow bleed into the cold desert beyond

the reach of the announcement list.

I was a broken prodigal, and when I tried to limp home, the elder brother met me

at the perimeter of our property, arms folded, eyes already scanning the horizon

for the next threat to his inheritance.

"There's something wrong with you," he said.

"You're not useful in this family.

In fact, your weakness has weakened the structure of the whole house."

Then, in the silence of cruelty and ambition, he whispered something under his

breath, and all I could make out was, "The father doesn't wanna see you anymore."

Of course, he couldn't tell me what I'd done, only that

I was broken beyond repair.

A contaminant, a hazard to the salvation of others.

There's a special heresy that only the wounded can invent.

You come to believe not just that you're lost, but that those who

toss you aside have found the secret exit hatch to the Father's love.

They inhabit a parallel universe in which the cross is a velvet

rope and you're the stanchion.

The elder brother wrote the narrative for the rest of the family.

He took my name off the mailbox and crafted a letter to all

the cousins, the aunts, all the anonymous people in the pews who

only knew me, by sermons and sermons.

He wrote about transformative moments of vulnerability, but only the

vulnerability, not the transformation.

He removed my pictures from the family photo album, deleted

forever the home videos I was in.

I became a warning, a byword, someone who had been up close to holy things, but had

been found wanting, unworthy, and unsafe.

They baptized their cruelty as concern, dressed the wound in love, but made

sure it festered just enough to keep me from ever coming near the table again.

The father's house, which was, once had been a sprawling manor with room

after room of misfits, now shrank to a single airless chamber, and I was not

even allowed to peer through the window.

So I did what the shunned always do, I ran from the Father, from his children,

from the siblings who had once built forts with me in the backyard of faith.

I excommunicated myself from the rest of the story.

I stripped off the borrowed robes, the signet rings, the sandals, and left

them in a heap in the city landfill.

I felt naked and publicly shamed, flogged for a crime I couldn't even name.

Maybe that's the most exquisite torture, not being condemned for

something you did, but for a deficit you don't know how to measure.

The charges were in a different language, and everyone else

seemed to have grown up bilingual.

All I knew for certain was that my voice was unwelcome, my prayers unanswered,

my soul surplus to requirements.

In the aftermath, the only time I prayed was to tell God what I really thought.

I told him I would gladly trade my salvation, I was the anti-Paul, if

he would put the men I used to call brothers in hell right next to me.

Because what I had learned from those relationships, what had been demonstrated

over the past year, confession and retraction, was that I was their hell.

I wanted them to know how it felt to be shunned, to be a ghost

in the house that you built.

I wanted them to see their own faces in the flames, to have their

sermons echo back to them with the hollow ring of guillotines.

Maybe this is the truest legacy of spiritual wounding.

You become unable to imagine any grace that is not accompanied by judgment.

There were months when I did not attend a single service, where the mere sight of a

church sign would make me physically ill.

I avoided the sacred in all its forms: wine, bread, worship music on the radio.

Even the light through a stained glass window I thought might burn me.

But the longer I stayed away, the more I realized that absence is a

demon that feeds on its own tail.

The loneliness became kind of a second skin.

I could not tell if I missed the presence of God or if I missed the ritual of

presence, the elaborate song and dance of being seen and heard in a community.

Some mornings I woke up and felt a hunger that was not for food or for

love, but for the discipline of meaning.

I wanted to be needed again, but more than that, I wanted to believe

that I could still stand in front of people and not be a cautionary tale

I tried to fill the void with the distractions that are so abundant now.

I binge-watched shows about murders, and cults, and tiger kings.

I listened to podcasts that deconstructed faith with surgical precision.

I read novels about lost men who wandered deserts and deltas and

found nothing but their own shadows.

For a time, I convinced myself that this was healing, that to

ignore the wound was to cure it, but I was haunted all the same.

Haunted by every word I had ever preached about forgiveness, about being

with God in the wilderness, about the possibility of resurrection after death.

Not the big death, but the small deaths you die every time you're

ignored by those you love.

I remember the lines I had so often quoted about Christ suffering outside

the city gates, about the necessity of being misunderstood, about the

promise of newness on the far side of disgrace, and those lines which I had

thought were for other people came back piercing me as sharp as arrows.

Why should you be any different, Kaylor?

Why should you get to skip the cross and go straight to the garden?

It was then in the depths of that spiritual famine that I started

to see the outlines of hope

Not the hope to the restoration of my old life.

By now I knew that was gone forever.

But the hope that perhaps even my exile could be a place where God still

lingered, That maybe, just maybe, the lonely place was not just a holding cell

for the damned, but a secret meeting ground for those who had been discarded.

A place where the pain could serve as a doorway, a kind of negative

space into which grace could come rushing when least expected.

But I wasn't ready for that grace, which is a crazy thing to say.

Not ready to be healed?

I think of the lame man at the pool of Bethes- Bethesda, and Jesus's

question, "Do you want to be healed?"

And honestly, not yet.

I was still angry, still waiting for the fire to fall on my enemies

like Elijah calling it down.

I wanted to be right or at least righteous in my bitterness.

I clung to my anger like a relic, the last proof I had that it meant something,

that what happened to me was real.

So I prayed again, if you can call it prayer, and I told God,

"I would rather have nothing than have to forgive those men."

I said that I would not return, not even to Him, until my suffering

had been accounted for, until the scales had been balanced.

"Let me be Judas," I prayed, if it means they have to feel this

emptiness e v e n for only a day."

I imagined them wondering what had become of me, and I debated whether it

was better to be forgotten or hated.

I reasoned if you're hated, you're at least still tangible and present

on the outskirts of imaginations, drawing some emotion, even negative

ones, to satiate the well of relevance.

What I feared, though, was being forgotten, a ghost who couldn't

even haunt those he loved.

The truth was, I barely had the energy to get dressed some mornings.

The most radical thing I did during that time was survive until morning

I wasn't alone.

The darkness itself became a kind of presence, a companion

more honest than any I had known.

I waited for the voice of God to rebuke me, perhaps to confirm everything that the

older brother and his chorus of supporters had declared, that I was unworthy, unfit,

beyond the reach of the father's house.

But the silence that followed was neither punitive nor cold.

It was the silence you get in the last pew of a cathedral at midnight when

the echo of your own thought ricochets off the carved stone and finds you

still breathing and still alive.

There, after the rage, after the bargaining had burnt out, I began to

notice that the father didn't listen to the older brother's logic and the

reasoning of why I should be tossed out, to be sent away to boarding school

until I resembled the older brother.

The narrative of exile and rejection, the one I most feared and most despised,

was not the only story being written.

He, the father, ran after me hard, not stopping, not breaking stride

until he found me wallowing in a pit.

I didn't realize at first that I had dug the pit myself and decorated it

to look like a bunker, stocked with sarcasm and old wounds, lined with

the insulation of my best arguments.

I thought if I bunkered down deeply enough, if I became unreachable, there

would be no more surprise meetings, no more staged interventions, no more

half-hearted forgiveness that left me feeling more infected than healed.

But the father, a presence as terrifying as it was gentle, didn't lower a

branch or a rope to pull me out.

He jumped right into the pit with me, getting just as dirty in the process,

sliding down the walls with a barely dignified abandon , as if there was

nothing more important in the universe than being with me in my self-made misery.

He landed hard, but when he looked at me, there was only joy and relief

on his face, like I was a treasure he'd been searching for all along.

He gently lifted me to himself and held me against his chest, and we both

cried, my tears making little scars in his flesh, his tears washing me clean.

It was not a transactional exchange.

it wasn't the negotiation I had grown used to where grace was

offered as a kind of spiritual bailout with interest accruing daily.

This was the kind of grace that ruined you for anything less, the kind that

left you shattered and emptied out, but somehow more alive than you'd ever been.

We stayed there a long time.

I don't know how long, because time is strange in the bottom of a pit.

It stretches and folds and sometimes reverses.

I told him the charges that had been brought against me used the very

language the older brother had taught- He taught me I rehearsed my failings,

my shame, my inability to heal or fix or even explain disintegration.

He listened without flinching.

Once or twice he laughed, but never at me.

Only at the absurdity of the lies I still believed about who I was and who

he was His hands never left my back.

His arms never loosened.

Eventually, he lifted me out of the pit, and in a feat of physics or love,

managed to get himself out as well.

We stood at the edge, breathless, the air impossibly clean.

My arms were weak, but he held me upright, whispering that I could lean

on him for as long as I wanted, years if necessary, or even better, forever.

I think I believed him.

I wanted to.

Without warning, he went right to work gardening, sowing, planting flowers

all around the mouth of the pit.

He didn't ask my permission, just began to dig and till and tend,

turning something wretched and despicable into something beautiful.

The place of my failure became a memorial of sorts, a patch of riotous color in

the desert of my despair, a witness to anyone passing by that even the

ugliest wounds could become a garden.

I watched him work, baffled and embarrassed and grateful in equal measure.

I wondered if any of the old congregation would ever see this place

or recognize it, if they would be able to reconcile the scars on my soul with

the wil-wildflowers now growing there.

I doubted it, but he didn't seem to mind.

He was content to make beauty for its own sake, not as some kind of social

proof, but because beauty was his nature, and he couldn't help himself.

All of this pain was a megaphone to my soul and shattered how I thought about

church and specifically church culture.

I preached a theology of grace but had not been vigilant to

cultivate a culture of grace.

I was a vendor of words and not a, a purveyor of the atmosphere in which

those words could become flesh.

Remember, culture is not something you see.

It's how you see everything.

I'd spent years building sermons, policies, programs, each one calibrated

to present the full force of the gospel, but none of them able to test whether it

had been metabolized at the bone level.

I got to experience firsthand a culture that celebrated success but despised

weakness, and in doing so, I realized I had unwittingly contributed to it myself.

Even with all the learned lessons, the broken education I took into

planting house churches, there remained a kind of hardening, a sinew of

pride wrapped around the old wound, protecting it from air and light.

I can honestly say there was a part of me deep down hidden that wanted to show those

who I used to call family who had become judge, jury, and executioner that they

were wrong about my sentence and I put ungodly energy into proving them wrong.

Every time I gathered a new community, every time someone called me pastor again,

I felt a pulse of vindication and a secret F you to the ones who had written me off.

It was a feverish attempt to erase the record by creating a new one.

As if I was still on the same cultural treadmill of justifying my existence

by my idea or their idea of success.

As if I could out-preach my own expulsion.

I kept running, gathering new disciples, building fresh models, each time promising

myself that this time would be different.

This time I would never become the older brother, but the logic

was flawed, the operating system still corrupted by the old virus.

This text that closed my mouth, the one that saw me leave the pulpit with

trembling hands and a voice raw from tears and dust, calls me back now as

if my name is woven through the verses.

I return to this passage not as a preacher desperate for redemption,

nor as an outcast trembling, before the scrutiny of former brothers and

self-appointed judges, but as a man slowly, painfully learning to breathe

outside the economy of performance.

I am raw, but not ragged.

I'm battered, but no longer defined by what's been done.

For the first time in memory, I'm not returning to prove something,

neither to vindicate myself nor justify the scandal of my wounds.

I'm here present because the Father is breaking through and teaching me through

all the distance and silence that his love does not operate on the metrics

of productivity or the calculus of the culture I once sought to impress.

It took a wilderness to teach me to live as a son And not the good son,

not the one with the flawless record, the pressed clothes, and the tidy

resume of moral victories, the one who will never give up because he's so

dedicated, but the prodigal who fell short, who fell hard, whose greatest

achievement was collapsing at the feet of a father who ran, not walked,

to meet him at the edge of despair.

I used to preach about this love as if it was a doctrine to be expounded, a theory

to be debated, a truth outside of myself.

Man, guys

possesses me or I possess it, scalding and real, unmanageable.

I'm ruined for all lesser loves, all institutional affections,

all conditional acceptance.

I'm not fit for the icy slope of spiritual striving any longer.

I've no taste for it.

I want only to lean into the embrace that does not let go, to linger

shamelessly even forever in the arms of God who lo- no longer needs me to be

exemplary, just unguardedly, fully His.

I come to this text now, these ancient words that once seemed so familiar and

now shimmer with the light of a new world, ready perhaps for the first time to let

them read me as much as I read them.

I do not come as a teacher, nor even as a survivor.

I come as a son.

I come because I'm called and because the calling is no longer complicated by the

need to impress or persuade or perform.

I come because the words are for me and for all those who have been exiled by

themselves or by others or both from the table they were born to sit at.

So let's revisit the passage together as if we are all orphans for the moment,

waiting at the threshold of home.

Let's let the text do work, not as a tool for self-justification, but

as the gentle, persistent voice that says, even to the most wayward

and bruised among us, "You belong.

You've never stopped belonging."

It is a call to enjoy being a child and linger long, maybe

forever, in the arms of our Father.

A Father who is not ashamed to jump into our shame, who delights to be

with us even at our lowest, and who knows how to make a garden out of

the places we most want to hide.

So how does Jesus rescue His disciples and us from the busyness of life

and all its demands, all that we're doing, everything that's going on,

and grab us and make us come away?

We'll look at that this evening.

and I wanna look at it under these, uh, simple, headings.

Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.

Now

I told you we're just gonna get to come away.

and we'll do the rest the next time we're together.

Come away.

Little bit of background 'cause what's going on right now?

Why is Jesus pulling his disciples away in the midst of, like, this crazy

awesome ministry that's going on?

like, mega church stuff is happening right now.

Verse 30, "The apostles returned to Jesus and told Him all that

they had done and taught."

That word apostles, stop right there.

Boom.

Let's go there first.

The apostles.

Consider the weight of this moment.

Of all the ways Mark could have told the story, he chooses

to use the word apostles.

A word that in his gospel only appears twice.

Nearly always they're called disciples, the learners, the followers, the

ones eager, bumbling or both.

But now this hinge of the narrative, they're apostles, the sent ones it

means, the bearers of authority, emissaries of the kingdom.

Their identity has shifted, deepened, matured through

obedience and risk and return.

But Mark wants us to see that even as their mission intensifies, their status

as those who return to Jesus is never superseded by any public accomplishment.

The glory of the office is not in the mission, it's in the returning.

Where else is this word apostles employed in Mark?

Only in chapter three, verse 14 and 15, and I'll read it.

"And He appointed 12 whom He also named apostles."

And guys, this is like…

could spend a million years on this n- these next couple words.

"So that they might be with Him."

And he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons.

Before anything else, before public preaching or spiritual

confrontation, their primary calling was that they might be with him.

And my whole thing tonight is, it's the whole game, folks.

It's the whole point.

It's the whole enchilada, as some people might say.

I don't know who says that.

Nobody says that.

Maybe wise people say that.

The rhythm is clear.

Withness precedes witness.

Withness precedes witness.

Communion gives birth to commission.

The order isn't accidental.

It is the fundamental architecture of Christian calling.

The being with, the intimacy, is not a prelude or a means

to an end, but the end itself.

The mission flows from it, but it never replaces it.

Before they were ever healers or heralds or exorcists, they were beloved.

The call to ministry is not a conscription of laborers, but an

adoption of sons and daughters.

Jesus does not save us to populate his workforce, but to fill his table, to

share his presence, to draw us into the gravitational center of divine friendship.

And from the very beginning, this is to be the priority, and yet paradoxically,

friendship with Jesus sweeps us into the world's suffering and needs.

If you love what Jesus loves, you cannot avoid being drawn into the flood of pain

and need that he himself wades into.

Part of being with Jesus is being caught up in his mission, his ache and

heart for the lost, his furious joy in recovering what is broken or stolen.

So yes, he sends them out to preach.

He gives them authority over unclean spirits.

He turns them loose on villages and towns, giving them only a staff

and the clothes on their backs.

For days or weeks, they're an extension of his very own presence,

replica of his own compassion and courage, conduits of his power.

Imagine the intensity.

Strangers are healed at their hand.

Demons are banished.

Whole households upended by the shockwave of kingdom news, adrenaline,

exhilaration, the occasional beatdown and rejection, the constant surprise

that any of this works at all.

And in verse 30, they come back and they report about their mission.

Can you feel the elation in their voices?

The apostles tumble back to Jesus in a flurry of stories, barely

able to contain themselves.

"Jesus, we're just like you, casting out demons, making the sick stand up and walk,

exposing the hollow places in men's souls.

Even the wind seemed to listen to us.

The message was unstoppable.

People repented.

We saw whole communities transform.

The world is changing right before our eyes.

What's next?

Should we organize a rally?

Launch a movement?

Should we fan the flames and keep the fire going?"

If you strain your ear, you can almost hear the caffeine in their voices

The edge of spiritual bravado, the well-meaning assumption that the next

step must be bigger, louder, more kinetic.

Kingdom logic, after all, is so often at odds with the momentum of human ambition.

We also might miss what's going on right now in Jesus' ministry.

He was at his most popular.

Crowds were flocking to him and despite his own hometown rejecting

him, in this chapter we're told in, John in this context, "When the

people saw the sign that he had done, they said, 'This indeed is of the

prophet who is coming to the world.'

Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force

to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself."

Things were never better ministry wise.

The ministry was growing.

The crowds kept coming.

Though there were real difficulties and painful realities, John the

Baptizer had just been beheaded, uh, and the needs were never ending.

And verse 31 even says, "For many were coming and going, and

they had no leisure even to eat."

busy.

And what does Jesus do?

They come back, they report.

What does…

W- let's get this.

Let's have a, let's have a strategy meeting.

What does he do?

Does he immediately commissions the apostles for a grander campaign

or call them to capitalize on the surge of the spiritual momentum?

No, he turns the logic upside down and he says to them, "Come away by yourselves

to a desolate place and rest a while."

The word in Greek for desolate or wilderness is eremos.

It's wilderness, solitude or the emptiness.

The empty place.

In the midst of explosive growth, Jesus calls his friends into silence and rest.

He gently pulls them back from the brink of burnout, from the subtle temptation

to swap achievement, from the reflex to build something for God without

being built by God But there's another layer to this that must not be missed.

Jesus, who was himself constantly pursued and pressed by the needs of the multitude,

models the very pattern he commands.

Again and again, Mark tells us that Jesus would withdraw to lonely places to pray.

Even the Son of God would not attempt to sustain ministry

apart from the life-giving sap of communion with his Father.

Mark 1:35, "And rising very early in the morning, while it was still

Mark 1:35

dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed."

If Jesus required solitude, maybe us.

Maybe.

And if he, having poured himself out in teaching and healing, would retreat

for rest, might be a little arrogant to believe we can do otherwise.

So Jesus says, "Come away."

Leave the noise, the acclaim, the urgent needs.

Come away from the villages and the cheering crowds and

the swelling reputation.

Come away by yourselves.

no entourage, no audience, no performance.

Jesus is not opposed to mission, but he's opposed to anything that

supplants the love and presence that is the beating heart of discipleship.

This command, "Come away," is not a footnote or an afterthought.

It is a rescue.

It is a rescue.

It is Jesus' way of protecting his followers from the lethal side

effects of unrelenting success.

For the human soul, especially when entrusted with spiritual authority,

there's a hidden danger in constant momentum, the eclipse of identity

by utility, the slow drift from being with Jesus to doing for Jesus.

Ministry can become a narcotic, a low-grade addiction to significance.

The applause of crowds, the stories of lives changed, the very real

evidence of the Spirit's power.

But over time, these the quiet, private, unglamorous work of abiding in Christ

But why does he call us to come away?

Why?

What's the point?

Maybe we're like Teslas and he's just gotta charge us up, right?

So that we can go the distance.

I think we think like that.

I think like that I think I should get time with the Lord so I'll

be better in doing for the Lord.

That misses the whole point

Why?

Why call a stick 'em away?

Why, why?

What's the point

Here's the reason, and it's so simple that we can become numb to it.

God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit loves you

God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit likes you

If we really sat with it, this is the most audacious and beautiful claim ever

made by human lips or divine tongue.

One of the most stunning and shockingly clear things we learn from the Bible

when we take the lid off its words and let it out, when we actually allow it

to speak and not merely confirm our suspicions, is that the Almighty God, the

eternally divine sovereign, the creator and sustainer of all things visible and

invisible, has determined to love you, to seek you, to redeem you, and to make

you the very object of His gladness.

What?

This is not a generic Hallmark sentiment that dilutes itself

on contact with reality.

It is at once cosmic and particular, transcendent and

intimate, internal and immediate.

Let it be plainly said, you are wanted.

You are sought.

You are pursued.

You are named, and you are known.

And you are loved, not as a number in a cosmic ledger, but

as a child in a cosmic rescue.

Don't let this truth become a footnote in your spiritual biography.

do not let it, for the love of all things holy and pure,

let it be reduced to paper-cut theology or domesticated doxology.

This is the marrow, the bloodstream, the pulsating center of the gospel,

that from all eternity you have been conceived in the mind and heart of

God, that even before your first breath you were the anticipated

recipient of unimaginable grace.

Hear the words of the apostle in Ephesians 1:4-5, words that if we really

Ephesians 1:4–5

let them, will unmake and remake us.

"Even before He made the world, God loved and chose us in Christ to be

holy and without fault in His eyes.

God decided in advance to adopt us into His own family by bringing us

to Himself through Jesus Christ.

This is what He wanted to do, and it gave Him great pleasure."

Do not hurry past that Every phrase is an explosion of meaning.

Even before He made the world, before the first cause from the uncaused

one, before the birth of the stars, before the first atom quivered in the

primordial cosmos, before the ancient trees spread their roots, before the

first human heart thundered in the dark, you were loved, you were chosen.

The plan was already in motion.

God, in the sheer creative effulgence of His love, spun the cosmos, not as a cold

machinery to be wound and left alone, but as a garden, a dwelling, a place of beauty

and delight, where the highest resonance of its purpose was to be found not in

order, not in law, but in relationship.

He formed us not as sterile figurines to be set adrift on existential currents, but

as living beings fashioned for closeness, for the gentle press of intimacy, for

the wild joy that springs only from deep, unguarded knowing and being known.

The ache we carry for connection, the thirst for meaning, the restless energy

that drives us to create, to love, to search, and to worship, all of these are

the fingerprints of our origin, echoes of the voice that called us forth.

God loved us and chose us in Christ, not by accident, not by necessity,

not because of foreseen merit or potential, but freely, graciously,

prodigally, recklessly, to be holy and without fault in His eyes.

Not in your own eyes, not in the eyes of your critics, not even the

eyes of the church or the world, but in the eyes of God, you are,

in Christ, radiant and beautiful

God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family.

You are not on probation You are not a guest or a tenant or a foster

child awaiting permanent status.

You are adopted, named, claimed, and given an inheritance beyond your comprehension.

By bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ, the gospel is not a

travel brochure to a distant paradise.

It is a summons home into the arms of your father made possible at infinite cost.

This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him…

This is one of my favorite verses, and it gave him great pleasure.

The logic of love is not utility, but joy

God doesn't just have a biochemical reaction and loves you.

He's not just a makeup and responding But because of joy.

It is his delight to love you.

It is to his delight to make his face shine upon you, to

lift up his countenance on you.

It is his joy, his pleasure, his delight is to adore and to love you,

to love you to the uttermost It is not grim duty or or reluctant tolerance.

It is pleasure, joy, celebration, the kind of laughter and weeping

and singing that comes only from the deepest wells of passion.

Sit with this church.

Let it well up and drown the little voices that tell you

otherwise, 'cause it, it can.

The voices of condemnation, the voices of shame, the voices of, comparison,

the voices that count your every failure and make it into the black book of your

inadequacies, those voices are lies.

The only voice that matters has spoken, and he says, "Loved,

chosen, adopted, and delighted in."

That's what's over your life.

That's the voice that you should listen to.

And God loves you not just in a general way, not just as a member of the species

Homo sapiens, but you here today sitting in these seats in this specific time

in this unrepeatable moment in history.

Yeah.

God ordained, like, this happening right now, which is such a trip.

It is.

The you that is tired The you that is anxious, the you that is distracted,

the you that is raw, the you that is haunted by regrets and paralyzed by fears,

the you that wonders if you will ever measure up, the you that has secretly

given up, the you that does not even know how to want to be loved, that is

the you that he loves with a love that is more durable than your doubt and

more relentless than your wandering.

He loves you lavishly and radically, fully and completely in ways

that beggar the imagination and scandalize the logic of religion.

He loves you to the uttermost, not just when you're at your best,

please hear that, but especially when you're at your worst.

Not just in the light, but in the darkness.

Not just in your victories, but in your failures.

Not just at the altar, but in the alley.

Not just in the clean and the ordered, but in the mess, in

the chaos, in the heartbreak.

No matter the week you've had, no matter the mess you are or the mess you've

made, no matter the shadows that trail you or the burdens that crush you, no

matter the secrets you carry or the wounds that do not heal, Jesus loves you.

Jesus loves you.

Let the words become flesh in your soul.

From the very beginning, you've been built to be with God, to know God,

and for him to know you, to be loved by God, and to love God in return.

The deepest thirst of every human heart is not for achievement or pleasure

or even meaning, but for love, a love that will not let us go, that will not

bargain or fade, that will hold us in the earthquake, in the exile, in the grave.

A love that is yours.

That love is him.

But even that's not the full measure, for if God's love is the melody,

you're invited to join the symphony.

The invitation is not to be a s- a spectator, but a participant, a singer

in the choir, a voice in the harmony.

The love of God is not a monologue.

It's a call and response, a dance of giving and receiving

That's how the universe was made, and that's how we flourish

when we join him in that.

Do you see it?

It's not just theology, not just doctrine, it is the oxygen of the

soul, the bread and wine of existence.

It is the only story that explains everything else and the only story big

enough to bear the weight of our lives.

God designed us to flourish best not in independence or solitary

achievement, but in communion with him, with creation, with each other.

When he made humans in his own image, he was crafting beings who would best

reflect his own relational nature by walking side by side with him, living

in radiant warmth of his presence.

In the earliest pages of Genesis, we find this breathtaking phrase, "And they

heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day."

The Almighty Creator of the galaxies, the weaver of DNA delights not

in distant admiration, but in the nearness of companionship.

This walking is not a matter of mere locomotion.

It is the sacred rhythm of presence.

To walk with someone is to match steps, to pause at the same wonders, to speak

and to listen, to know and to be known.

Lovers walk hand in hand.

Friends share a stroll beneath the trees.

A parent walks with the child, gently guiding and sharing the world's marvels.

So it was, and so it should be, and so it's been restored too.

The garden was meant to be a place of shared experience,

of laughter, of vulnerability and trust, a place of worship.

But the story is not static.

Even after our forebearers tried to hide from God, even after the tragic

fracture of relationship, the divine longing to walk with us didn't diminish.

It simply took on new forms of passionate pursuit.

The sacred history of humanity is studded with figures who rediscover in their

generation what it means to walk with God.

We see Enoch and Noah walking with God.

One of my favorite verses…

I keep saying that.

Mm-hmm.

This verse is fine.

Uh, is Genesis five twenty-four, "Enoch walked with God and he

was not, for God took him."

See Enoch, whose entire biography is distilled into a single

hauntingly beautiful sentence.

Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.

Listen to this.

Little is said of his deeds, of his accomplishments, of his wisdom.

What is remembered is his intimacy with God.

Enoch's life was so entwined with the divine that the boundary between Earth and

Heaven blurred and then faded altogether.

Joshua, the son of Nun.

I love this, my namesake.

Exodus 33:11, "When Moses turned again to camp, his assistant,

Exodus 33:11

Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent.

He would not leave the presence."

It's dinner time, Joshua.

I've already eaten

Moses, Exodus 33:11, "Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face,

Exodus 33:11

as a man speaks to his friend."

Numbers 12:7-8, "Not so with my servant Moses.

Numbers 12:7–8

He is faithful in all my house.

With him I speak mouth to mouth."

Whoo.

And then in the New Testament, we're given the picture of the vine and the branches.

John 15:4-5, "Abide in me, and I in you.

John 15:4–5

As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine,

neither can you, unless you abide in me.

I am the vine.

You are the branches.

Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.

For apart from me, you can do nothing."

To abide, that's kind of a weird word to our, our English ears.

It means to be at home with, to be at home with

You know when you go to somebody else's house for dinner and you wonder,

"Am I supposed to take my shoes off?

Do I keep them on?"

Do you use napkins?

Or in my house growing up, we just had a shared family towel, and we didn't

realize how weird and hippie-ish that was until, we started having girlfriends.

But man, there's nothing like at the end of a long day, you sit on your favorite

chair when you get home Everything's where it's supposed to be, and you're at rest.

Why?

Because you're at home.

And what abide means is it means you're at home.

You're at home.

Be at home with me, is what he's saying.

It's a picture of living intimately with God from one moment to the next,

and then the fruit comes inevitably.

One of the most profound and devastating tragedies, and so we're gonna shift a bit

here, to befall a human life is to find oneself perpetually surrounded by the

language of faith, the symbols of rituals and religion, and the well-worn paths

to holy places, and yet remain entirely untouched by the living presence of God.

It is possible, it turns out, to brush daily against divinity and never be

ignited by his fire, to live under the constant drizzle of sacred words and

never drink a drop, to memorize great swaths of scripture and yet remain a

stranger to the very God who authored them, to teach, to sing, to prophesy, to

lead, to serve, even to heal, in short, to be so near to the things of heaven

and yet so far from heaven's heartbeat.

Jeremiah 2:8 writes, "And the priest did not say, 'Where is the Lord?'

Jeremiah 2:8

Those who handle the law did not know me."

And that may seem like a weird verse, but what he's saying in that word

there, did not know me, is yada in Hebrew, and here's the word.

And Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore a son.

And Adam yada'd his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore a son.

And the priest did not yada me.

They did not, they were not intimate with me, is what God is saying.

The ones who handled the scripture, the pastors, the preachers, the, the

ones, who it's their job to do that.

They knew all the facts.

They c- to answer all the questions, but there was no

intimacy, is what he says here.

The very people who were, by vocation and calling, were to be the custodians

of divine intimacy, yet they settled for a knowledge of the law's details,

the letter and the ritual, but never stepped through the veil into the wild

and holy knowing that God desired.

Judas Iscariot, one of the 12, a man who heard every parable, who also was

sent out on this mission doing awesome things, witnessed every miracle, tasted

the bread multiplied by Christ's own hands in this chapter, proves that a

man can be in the inner circle, brush against the very love of the universe,

and still die of spiritual thirst.

And thirst, in the end, is the key Every soul from the pulse of Adam's heart in

Eden to the last desperate breath of the dying thief on the cross was crafted to be

with God, and our souls are tormented by restlessness until they collapse into the

arms of the one for whom they were made.

Every soul was built to be with God, and it is restless until it has him.

The testimony in the Bible is not that humans are spiritually

indifferent, but that we are ravenous for meaning, for beauty, for

connection, for peace, for wholeness beyond what this world can supply.

The testimony of the Psalms is the confession of insatiable

hunger and unquenchable thirst.

Psalm 63:1, "O God, you are my God.

Psalms 63:1

I earnestly search for you.

My soul thirsts for you.

My whole body longs for you in this parched and weary

land where there is no water."

This is not the polite longing of a lukewarm heart.

This is a man dying in the desert, clawing the sand for even a hint of moisture.

Psalm 143:6, "I lift my hands to you in prayer.

Psalms 143:6

I thirst for you as in a parched land thirsts for rain."

Psalm 42:1-2, we love this one, right?

Psalms 42:1–2

"As the deer longs for the streams of water, so I long for you, O God.

I thirst for God, the living God.

When can I go and stand before him?"

Imagine for a moment a deer staggering through the underbrush, tongue swollen

and lolling, every step driven by the hope, perhaps the madness, that

somewhere ahead there is a stream and that to reach it is to live.

That is the ache built into every human soul.

We are not merely people who sometimes want God.

We are people who will perish without God.

It is the great lie of our time, and perhaps every time, that anything

else can satisfy that hunger and that thirst and that ache.

And when a soul finally does taste the water of God's presence, it's transformed.

The language of the Psalms becomes the only language left.

Psalm 63:3, "Because your steadfast love is better than

Psalms 63:3

life, my lips will praise you."

Notice that, not merely better than death.

Better than all the living we could ever do, better than all the brightest

joys that Earth could ever offer.

Your love is better than life itself.

Psalm 16:11, "You make known to me the path of life, and in your

Psalms 16:11

presence there is fullness of joy.

At your right hand are pleasures forevermore."

There are pleasures in this life, real ones, but they are shadows,

rehearsals, and appetizers to the feast.

And God is constantly pursuing us to this wonderful end.

He's been pursuing me.

Even this evening, He's calling to you.

All of scripture is the extended narrative of God's pursuit of

this kind of relationship with us.

The whole redemptive history is the story of a God who keeps coming closer,

who keeps making Himself vulnerable, who keeps breaking down the barriers we

build out of fear and pride and shame.

Even now, even in the quiet longing of a Sunday evening, even as you hear

these words, the invitation is open.

God is calling.

He is seeking.

He is not content to be a theory or a memory or a distant sovereign on a throne.

He wants to pull you into the wild current of His life, His love, and His joy.

So let me ask you a question, and let God ask you a question.

Let's go back to the garden for a moment.

You remember when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,

and they were, they were like, "Uh-oh, we're naked, and we should get clothes."

And then they heard God coming for His daily walk, and they hid

And God asked him a question.

He says, "Where are you?"

He knew, of course, being God, exactly where they were physically.

The question was never about geography.

It was always about relationship.

Where are you in relation to me?

It is a question God still asks.

Where are you tonight in relation to God?

What comes between you and that real intimacy with God,

joining that divine dance?

It is the oldest and most persistent ache of the human heart, and yet we

chronically misdiagnose its origins.

We all do it.

I've done it.

Some of us maybe even this very evening.

Some of us, maybe as these words are hitting your ears, we feel the vast

bottomless emptiness within us, the hunger for purpose and belonging,

and like lost children rummaging through an unfamiliar house, we

reach for whatever lies nearest, most glittering, most instantly gratifying.

We turn to the pleasures of sin, not always the lurid and dramatic,

but the ordinary and the mundane.

The comfort of a bitter remark savored, the lazy indulgence of

a small lie, the fleeting thrill of a private grudge, the numbing

seduction of a screen's blue light.

We try to fill the void with anything and everything that might, for a single

hour, hush the insistent cry of the soul.

But what do these things leave us with except the taste of brine on

our tongues, that's saltwater, the parch craving that only deepens, the

salt in the wound we hope to cure?

It is the great mercy of God that we are forever unsatisfied by lesser loves.

There is a thirst in us so deep and so profound that

nothing on earth can quench it.

But I wanna suggest a much more subtle, much more insidious danger

to intimacy with God this evening.

The enemy has grown clever with centuries.

If we cannot be seduced by scandal, we may be destroyed by distraction.

If we cannot be ruined by rebellion, we may be eroded entirely by routine.

The far greater threat to our souls, at least in these sanctuary walls

among these familiar faces, is that not

We'll plunge headlong into sin, but that will wash our robes so fervently

that we never once look up to see the face of the God who gave them.

Here's the paradox at the heart of the Christian life.

We can be so busy doing things for Jesus that we forget to be with Jesus,

and in forgetting him, lose everything that made our doing worthwhile.

We can mistake the work of the king for a relationship with the king himself.

Let me confess with trembling and yet with hope, I have found this true in my life.

There's a dangerous undercurrent, a subtle riptide always present in the

current of religious life, always threatening to pull me away from the

quiet shore of intimacy with my Savior.

It is easier for me to write a sermon than to kneel in prayer

It is easier to construct an argument for the gospel than to rest soul and sinew in

the presence of Jesus, who is the gospel.

It is easier to do than to be.

To be crystal clear, don't get me wrong, doing good things

for God is not a bad thing.

Quite the opposite.

Jesus himself says, "The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve."

and his entire life is a tapestry of acts of mercy, of service, of

healing, of teaching, and blessing.

But, and this is the hinge upon which everything turns, the works

are the fruit, not the root.

The works are the overflow of a life steeped in the presence of Jesus, so the

by-product of intimacy so rich, so vital, that it cannot help but spill out into

loving acts for neighbor and enemy alike.

Christian loving and living must flow from intimacy with Jesus, or else it's

just another form of self-salvation, a busy idolatry draped in church clothes.

But here's the warning, as old as Mary and Martha, and yet as modern as

our latest app notification: intimacy is never to be a means to an end.

It is the end.

Yes, ministry flows from intimacy, but the goal of it is intimacy for its own sake,

the delight of the beloved in the presence of her lover, the rest of the child in

the arms of his father, the joy of the friend who has found his truest friend.

We do not cultivate intimacy with Jesus to be more productive or

more admired or even more moral.

We cultivate intimacy because that's the point of everything, the whole enchilada,

as a wise person once said Joking.

Union with our maker, communion with our redeemer, the unbroken fellowship with the

one who loved us before the worlds began.

How then does Jesus rescue his disciples from the tyranny of busyness and the soul

splitting demands of life in ministry?

How does he rescue us today right now in this moment?

How does he invite us back into the garden where the breeze of the spirit

rustles the leaves and the sound of the Lord walking is the sweetest

music our ears could ever know?

"Come away.

Come away," Jesus is saying.

Jesus is creating a buffer, doing something that they didn't

know how to do for themselves.

PassCall once wrote that most of the disorders and evil in life are the result

of man's inability to sit still and think.

Oof.

In incredibly busy time, Jesus and the disciples are in great demand with the

crowd pressing around their face with endless needs and they had been learning

how to face those needs with Jesus.

But now they have to learn something else, how to walk

away from those needs with him.

Our culture is one of busyness.

What do we say when we greet someone and ask them, "How are you?"

Busy I'm so busy.

I do it all the time.

It's our default.

It's normal for our culture.

That is the difficulty when we find ourselves busy and doing good things

for God that we're not with God.

So Jesus is doing for the disciples and teaching them that they're

are absolutely not indispensable.

Come away.

Jesus is doing for them what they would never do for themselves.

He wants to keep them from the addiction to busyness and feeling

indispensable, from feeling important, so he says to them, "Step away from

all the good you're doing for me.

Be with me.

Come away."

Th- it must have jarred them.

The expectation was for a rallying cry, a doubling down and

unrolling the, the battle plans.

Instead, an invitation to withdraw, to become less, to

let the urgent slow to a crawl.

Jesus interrupted the momentum, not with a critique, but with care.

Care for the very ones who thought the only way to matter was to keep moving.

What we find so remarkable about Jesus, and perhaps unsettling to the point of

offense, is the way he holds both the urgency of his mission and the slowness

of his pace in irreconcilable tension.

Never in a hurry, never it seems, seduced by the tyranny of the next thing.

How often we're in a hurry, busy in the very service of

the one who is never rushed.

There's a flavor of busyness that tastes like faithfulness, but really

it's anxiety, a refusal to believe that God can do more in our resting

than we can do in our striving.

We suppose that if the needs are unending, the supply of

ourselves must be unending as well.

We say yes to the next obligation, the next sacrifice, the next service

project, not only because the needs are real, but because somewhere deep

down we believe that if we stop being useful, we will stop being loved.

What's amazing is he seems almost indifferent to their reports of success.

Or rather, he receives them only as further proof of the

need for their withdrawal.

It is as if he's saying, "All you're doing, all your achievement and

effectiveness counts for nothing if it's not rooted in being with me.

The measure of your fruitfulness is not your output, but your intimacy.

Come away with me."

So hard to believe that.

It was not just an invitation It was at its core a declaration of love.

I love you.

I care about you more than the ministry, more than all these

hungry crowds and urgent tasks.

You are not valuable just for what you do, for the demons you cast out,

for the sermons you preach, or the way you multiply loaves and fishes.

I saved you to have you, not your output, but you.

It's hard to believe that God just loves us because he loves us.

It's even harder to believe he might love us when we're doing nothing at all.

But in the face of all this, Jesus speaks softly and without condemnation.

"Come away.

Rest a while.

Let me love you in your uselessness.

Let me delight in you when you have nothing to offer but your

tired self, your hungry heart, your confusion and smallness.

Let me show you that your value to me is not a function of your usefulness,

but of my joy in calling you mine."

So I'll close just with the gospel

And with that question, where are you?

We were made, designed even, down to the sinews and synapses, to be with God.

This is our native environment, our elemental context.

As essential to our thriving as water is to a fish or air

to a newborn's first howl.

But almost from the beginning, we chose otherwise.

Self-assertion and self-protection, then self-deception.

The terrible logic of sin worked its way down through the strata

of our hearts until separation became the only thing we knew.

We lost the memory of Eden, but not the ache.

We forgot God's voice, but not the craving for it.

Somewhere inside, the echo of our original belonging pulsed in our veins

and haunted our dreams, but our hunger for Him, for togetherness, was always

greater than our capacity to reach Him.

We built towers, shrines, laws, philosophies, but all

our best efforts were Babel.

A confusion of grasping, striving, longing, never quite enough.

Our attempts at reunion made the absence more acute.

Every ritual, every sacrifice, every page of poetry, every bloodied altar

was a flare sent up from the darkness, a signal to say, "We're still here,

still waiting, still wanting you."

But the gulf remained and the generations passed, and the ache calcified

until, "And they will call his name Emmanuel," which means God with us.

Not God above us, or against us, or merely for us.

God startingly, stubbornly, dazzlingly with us.

God compressed into a single pulsing infant body.

God who would get dust on His feet and hunger in His belly

and grief behind His eyes.

God who came not to grade us on our attempts at proximity, but

to close the distance Himself.

To run to the pit, and to jump in He came for us, not at our

invitation, but by his own compulsion.

His love refusing to be barred by any barricade, least of all the ones we

nailed together with our own hands.

And he didn't come as a tourist, a spiritual anthropologist

jotting down oddities of a broken species for heaven's amusement.

He came to make a new way where there was no way, and the road he

paved was not the straightest or the safest, but the only one wide enough

to carry, to hold every lost and limping soul, the way of the cross.

The Father called the Son to a lonely place.

The loneliest place in the history of the world, not merely

a wilderness, but an unmaking.

A cosmic abandonment that no other creature has ever truly experienced.

We taste loneliness as a flavor.

He drank it to the dregs.

We hide from unrest with distractions and noise.

He met it head-on, stripped of every comfort, nailed to a question mark,

my God, why have you forsaken me?"

There, every atom of our alienation was gathered into one body, the

sin substitute, the scapegoat, the single point of pain

through which all the universe's separation funneled and fractured.

In that empty, echoing space, he became our unrest.

He became the wound, the breach, the exile.

He took on himself every act and echo of our running, every failed

attempt at reunion, every secret suspicion that we had been left

behind, unloved and unchosen.

The cross was not merely pain.

It was the absence of all presence, the bottom of the chasm between God

and man, but he endured it so that we could, for the first time since Eden,

experience the rest of being with him.

The rest that is not the absence of responsibility,

but the return to true home.

The rest that comes when the striving is stilled, when the question of

our belonging is settled, when the ache is met and answered and healed.

In his resurrection, the reunion is made possible again, not as an

abstraction or a future hope, but as a present, pulsing reality.

We can be with him not as guests or servants, but as beloved sons and

daughters, as those for whom the distance has been permanently, eternally erased.

And so the ancient rhythm, the hunger, the heartbreak, the

hope deferred is transformed.

The story that began in longing ends in communion, and every moment of our lives,

even the most ordinary, becomes ashot through with the possibility of presence.

God not just above or beyond, but here, now with us as he always intended.

I think of Isaac, and I think that Jesus is the true and better Isaac

Remember Abraham takes him up on the hill and is gonna offer him, and then

there's a ram, or in the thicket.

God says, "No, no, no, don't.

Don't kill your son.

The Lord will provide himself a sacrifice."

But he tells Abraham, he says, "Man, Abraham, because you gave your son, your

one son whom you love, now I know that you love me more than anything else."

I think of Jesus, the true and better Isaac, the beloved son on

whom all hope seemed to hinge.

The child of the inconceivable promise who was not simply offered up as an act

of faith or obedience, but who walked the long and lonely road to the altar

knowing that the knife would fall and that there would be no last-minute angel, no

ram in the thicket caught to spare him from the loss, the fire, and the wood.

Where Abraham climbed, trembling, still above, the hope against hope, Jesus

climbed resolute, knowing that the Father's love for the world demanded

not a gesture, not a rehearsal, but the real and bloody thing.

His binding was not on the top of the mountain in the distant past,

but on a skull-shaped hill outside the city, in full view of enemies

and strangers and those who loved him most, who were powerless to intercede.

Abraham, knife poised, heard the cry to stay his hand.

His father's heart spared the grief, but the father of Jesus, the God whom no

one has seen, did not stay his own hand.

He let the blow land, and he let the judgment pass through

his own heart like a sword.

The wood on Isaac's back was a foreshadow.

The crossbeam on Christ's shoulders was its fulfillment, and where Isaac's

story ended in reprieve, the father and son reunited, laughter and sacrifice

intertwined, the story of Jesus ended in absolute aloneness, abandonment, silence

so deep it split the sun from the sky.

God said to Abraham, "Now I know that you fear me because you have not withheld

your beloved son, your only son."

The test was the proof of devotion, yes, but it was a proof only because

the cost was unthinkably high.

Now in the Gospel, the tables are turned.

Moriah's replayed.

The, place of the skull is replayed, uh, but the roles are reversed.

It is God who offers.

It is the son who does not protest.

It is the knife that falls unflinching, the father who

bears the unimaginable grief.

And if Abraham's faith was counted as righteousness, what name can we give

to such a love, such self-spending?

What algebra of mercy could ever account for the willingness to sever

heart from heart for the sake of those who have done nothing to deserve it?

The point is not simply that Jesus is a better sacrifice, but that

he is the end of all sacrifice.

That in him, every beloved child, every parent, every wanderer,

every homebody, every seeker, every cynic, every trembling hand, every

clenched jaw, finds shelter from the necessity of endless self-offering.

The altar is satis- The voice from heaven speaks a second time, "It is finished.

The knife is sheathed."

And so we, the children of Abraham, the inheritors of this laughter

and his doubts, trace the line of that story through the centuries.

We see at last what Abraham could only glimpse, that the ram was never enough,

that every lamb, every goat, every bull, every dove was a provisional mercy,

a shadow waiting for its substance.

We see that every story whispered toward this one, that here at the intersection

of our deepest need and God's deepest ache, the logic of love runs out of words.

God did not withhold.

He set no price, no limit, no caveat.

He loved, and in loving, He gave the only Son, the one in whom all the promises of

God are yes and amen, given up for us all.

And so now we say back to Him with trembling and awe, if we dare, with

gratitude, "Now we know that you love us because you did not withhold your Son,

your only Son, whom you love, from us."

Only on these terms does the soul finally rest, for it no longer

fears the exposure of its needs.

It has no reputation to defend, no mask to maintain, no secret terror

that is unlovable if found out.

Instead, it learns to be found out daily, hourly, sometimes in the most

humiliating ways, and to greet each exposure not with panic, but with praise.

Need is no longer the enemy, but the means by which grace gets in.

We are not merely resigned to this, but grateful for it.

Each new fall, while bitter in the moment, is sweetened by the

certainty that it will usher in a new tenderness, a deeper knowledge of

the mercy at the heart of all things.

Grace is not the permission to sin, but the permission to need, and in needing,

to discover that every lack is already anticipated, already met, already healed

by the love that has always been waiting.

We then revel, yes, revel in the glad humility of being perpetually supplied by

another, and this finally is his glory.

Not that he has eliminated his need, but that he has learned to want

nothing but Christ and to receive everything as a gift from his hand.

Let's pray.