Analog Church 08: Healing Explained

Good morning, church.

The scripture today is from Acts chapter 3, verses 11 through 26.

Acts 3:11–26

While he clung to Peter and John, all the people, utterly astounded, ran together to them in the portico called Solomon's.

And when Peter saw it, he addressed the people.

The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate.

When he had decided to release him.

But you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a murderer to be granted to you.

And you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead.

To this we are witnesses.

And his name, by faith in his name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know.

And the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of you all.

And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers.

But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled.

Repent, therefore, and turn back that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.

Moses said, The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me, from your brothers.

You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you, and it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people, and all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days.

You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.

This is the word of God.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to church this morning.

Thank you for joining us.

How about that extra hour?

Yeah.

I don't know why we do it, but this time of year I kind of like it.

Um thanks again for joining us.

Welcome to Redemption Church Denver.

Yeah, a big shout out to uh Jesse and Clancy for uh hanging that sign yesterday.

That was a big project.

And it even has lights.

So at night the lights come on and you can see it uh as though it were daylight.

Because lights shine right directly on it.

Um so uh we are uh a church that w for this season we're focusing on really just two things.

We're saying we gather large and we gather small.

So we gather large, which is this gathering where we all come together as a church on Sunday mornings, and we gather small in each other's homes throughout the week in our redemption groups.

There's only like three or four meetings left for the redemption groups for this fall season.

Uh and then we'll take a break over the holidays and we'll start back again uh uh probably around the end of January with the next season of Redemption Groups.

Uh but redemption groups are always open, so if you would like to join, uh you can go to redemptiondenver.com and sign up, or you can go to the welcome table downstairs.

There'll be somebody with an RC shirt and an iPad, and you can sign up on that iPad.

So that's uh uh we we want our church to be, hey, look, a pick.

And if you check under your chairs, you all get a pick.

So we are uh uh uh redemption groups, yes.

Okay, we're covered.

We're all caught up.

Thanks for joining us.

So you know when you take a lot of decongestants and it kind of makes everything feel like it's happening on TV?

I read about it, I don't know it firsthand, but I read about that.

We're in the midst of our series, Analog Church, and this series, the intention is we're going to look at the early church through the first four chapters in Acts, and we're going to see how they had this day one clarity.

The apostles had just been with Jesus, they'd seen him ascend, they'd experienced the sending of the Holy Spirit, and they knew precisely what their mission was: to be a witness to the new king who's on the throne of the universe, to be a witness to the ascended Christ who gave us his very spirit, so that his message of redemption might cover the whole world.

And they moved with this very same sort of clarity.

They studied the scriptures, they gathered together, they spread into their lives to bring healing and a witness to this new king and what his new kingdom will look like in the world.

And we're looking at that early church and the way that they lived and moved, and we're using it as a sort of analogy for our church today.

How can we live today in a church that isn't fresh, right, but has this 2,000-year-long history?

A lot of it we'd probably like to shake off.

I had a church history professor who said, if you if you want to lose your faith, a good way to do it is to study church history.

He was a church history professor.

Uh I think he was playing for our team.

But the uh uh the point is that a lot of our church history is is kind of baggage that we'd like to shake off.

And uh but what we see is they had this day one clarity.

And we can have that too.

What would our church look like if we moved with that same sort of day one clarity?

That's the purpose of this series.

What we've seen so far is Jesus promised the Spirit, him send the Spirit, and he sends the Spirit in this incredible way at the day of Pentecost when tongues of fire come down on the apostles and those that were gathered with the apostles, and normal people start acting like the prophets have for ages.

And they're proclaiming the mighty works of God, but in this special way to where anyone in any language that was present was able to understand it in their own native language.

And when Peter sees this happen, the crowd gathers and they're bewildered by this experience.

And so Peter stands up and he explains it to them.

And that's the model that we typically see through the book of Acts, is we see an event take place, which on its surface is kind of confusing.

And then we have someone who usually by the scripture looks at this event and explains here's what this means.

We have an event and then we have an explanation.

Last week the event was uh a man being healed.

It was a lame beggar who's in front of a beautiful gate, who Peter and John happen upon, and in the name of Christ, they they strengthen his uh feet and ankles so that he's able to stand for the first time in his life.

And this event of this lame beggar being healed draws quite a crowd who brings an interpretation to that event.

And this week Peter stands up and in a sort of typical fashion explains the event so that we can bring a proper interpretation to it.

Um before we go any further, uh, I'd like to pray, because this fuzziness is kind of annoying.

Okay, let's let's pray together.

Father, I pray that your spirit would equip us to see the truth of your scripture, to bring a real interpretation that that matches your intention to what you have for us.

And Father, I pray that your word would work in our hearts by your power alone.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

See, we're always interpreting, we're always living not according to the bare facts of existence, but we're living according to our interpretation of those facts.

So I'll give you an example.

You receive an email, and the email has one of these phrases in it.

Uh, phrase number one, not sure if you saw my last email.

So what does that phrase say?

What are the bare facts of that phrase?

I I'm not sure if you saw my last email.

That's the bare facts.

But what did you hear?

Yeah.

Yeah, you heard, you all right, why are you ignoring me?

Answer this email.

And you don't respond according to the bare facts of the email, you respond according to your uh interpretation of it.

Or uh here's some other phrases, per my last email.

Only in email do we use the expression per.

Per our last conversation, friend.

We never say we don't say that over cups of coffee.

Um what are what what are others?

Um, reattaching for convenience.

Uh you ignored my last email, so here I'm just gonna go ahead and reattach this.

It's for your convenience.

This is not me making a statement, this is just me helping you.

Or another great one, this is a good sign-off, please advise.

Which bare facts, please, I need your input.

If a friend came and said, please advise, you'd be like, oh wow, this makes me feel kind of good.

I get to give input.

In an email, what please advise means is I am washing this my hands of this situation, and now it is entirely your problem.

That's what please advise means.

And so we live not according to what the bare facts are.

We're always living according to our interpretations.

In email, it's kind of innocuous, sometimes less so.

In interactions with your spouse, you're interpreting all the time.

A lot of times when you have a close relationship like that, you can have so much background data that you can almost conjure up any sort of interpretation you like.

You know, there they're the care for your child all of a sudden becomes ignoring of you.

You know, there's all of these wrong motives that we can impose as we interpret the bare facts in front of us.

Creation itself, the Bible says, testifies to the power and glory of God.

So that anyone who sees creation knows that there is a God who is in control and is all powerful and is worthy of glory, honor, praise, and thanksgiving.

Just creation.

From the mountains to the valleys.

All right.

John Calvin talking about this sort of double aspect of the things that we encounter, uh, the interpretive nature of the bare facts that are testifying to something in our misinterpretation of their testimony.

He he expounds on that and he says this.

He says, It is therefore in vain that so many burning lamps shine for us in the workmanship of the universe to show forth the glory of its author.

He says, look at all the burning lamps shining forth for us in the universe.

They're testifying to the glory of the author.

Our mere existence itself is constantly testifying to the glory of God.

He says, although they bathe us wholly in their radiance, yet they can of themselves in no way lead us into the right path.

We have not the eyes to see this unless they be illumined by the inner revelation of God through faith.

You see, we just don't have the eyes to see it.

We've been so corrupted and we live so closely tied to just our own interpretation of things that we conjure up from inside of ourselves.

And the way we do that has been so twisted by sin that we aren't able to interpret accurately the facts in front of us.

And so that causes relational discord.

And that causes this discord between us and creation, where we aren't able to see what is the truth of the matter, of what's being said.

So we are surrounded by this thing that testifies to the glory of God, and yet, because we've been corrupted, the testimony is lost on us.

That's why Christianity is uniquely and must be a revealed religion.

That means Christianity isn't a religion that is discovered or deduced.

Christianity isn't a religion that we we looked at the bare facts of creation and we were able to break down and say, well, these facts entail this God who is glorious and gracious and loving and kind and generous.

That's not the way we discover Christianity because our hearts are too corrupted, our interpretive mechanism is too broken.

And so Christianity must be revealed, even if you consider the most basic fact of our religion, the most important historical event of our faith, the crucifixion and the resurrection.

If you think that event with no interpretation given to us, if you were to see someone crucified on a cross, and then three days later you were to shake that person's hand and share a fish with them, you wouldn't think, oh, the salvation of the world.

You see, that's a big jump, right?

But if we were to just look at the bare facts and our own interpretive ability, we wouldn't get there.

But because God in his graciousness reveals himself to us, we can see it.

So that we can really see the glory of what's happening.

You know, uh if you go to a museum, it can be so frustrating, especially like a modern art museum.

It just feels like a conversation is happening here that I'm just not a part of.

So but when you go with with a guide who can stand you in front of uh a piece of artwork, and it's like, okay, this is uh like this is just white on white canvas.

And I think to myself, like the the thing that we say to ourselves museums, I could have done that.

I'm not impressed, I could have done that.

Then the guide explains to you something about it.

I don't I what I don't know anything about modern art.

And you realize, oh, this is a part of this story of conversation that's happening between these artists, and to hang this actually took this incredible amount of courage and confidence to the six people that it mattered to.

And uh then you see, oh, in the story there's this real meaning here because you had someone to explain it to you.

We get that with Christianity as it is revealed to us.

Uh B.B.

Warfield, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, Breckinridge, how do you not say that if it's your middle name?

He says, the religion of the Bible thus announces itself not as the product of men's search after God, if haply they may feel after him and find him, but as the creation in men of the gracious God forming a people for himself, that they may show forth his praise.

In other words, the religion of the Bible presents itself as a distinctively revealed religion.

It is shown to us.

That is our hope.

The hope of our corrupted imaginations that look at the universe and remove the author from the facts that we see.

The hope is that the word of God, the scripture, the spirit-empowered word of God that can take root in our hearts, can be formed in us by God, allows us to have new eyes so that we see the facts and what they really mean.

We can finally interpret correctly.

That's what Peter's doing in this passage.

We have the facts of the event, and we see that the crowd will misinterpret them, and he brings the real interpretation of this healing so that we're able to see God's glory most fully demonstrated in the miracles that he's working in the world.

So let's go ahead and jump in, and we'll see how Peter explains this healing, and how in his explanation we can gain those new eyes that we might see the world accurately to see the glory that God is demonstrating in it.

So Acts 3, 11 through 12, it says, while he clung to Peter and John, he is the uh lame beggar who was healed.

It says, while he clung to Peter and John, all the people, utterly astounded, ran together to them in the portico called Solomon's.

And when Peter saw it, he addressed the people.

Men of Israel, why do you wonder at this?

Or why do you stare at us as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk?

See, the first thing that Peter does is he jumps in front of their misinterpretation.

So the crowd gathers around and they're staring at Peter and John.

Peter and John, almost more than the lame beggar, have become the object of focus for the crowd.

And Peter sees this and he realizes, okay, the assumption that they are making is that we, Peter and John, did this healing.

They're thinking it must have been by their own power or by their piety that this man is now healed.

And so he has to jump in front of that interpretation.

Because it isn't their power, and it isn't their piety.

This strikes at something that is so core to the function of the church and the errors in which we get it wrong.

The church is always, when it's operating in the way that it's intended to, is always pointing away from itself and pointing to Christ.

And the ways that we go wrong is we think, okay, you know, you know the way to really have an impact here, to really demonstrate the power of Christ here, we may say to ourselves, is we we we need to make sure that we get ourselves in real positions of power.

I'll finally be able to witness once I have this sort of like accreditation from the church.

I'll finally be able to make an impact in my job once I finally get this promotion, and for now I'll just coast.

And we think the way to make change around here, the way to demonstrate the glory of God, is I get myself in a position of power.

Otherwise, the church says, okay, you know, the way to really demonstrate the glory of God is our own piety.

And so we're gonna make sure that we at least appear as though we really have this whole faith thing dialed.

You know, if you come into our community, you're going to see a bunch of people who really have it together.

And that's a church that in those methods is always pointing towards itself and isn't operating in the healthy way, the way that the real power arrives, which is pointing to Christ.

The church is set up to be a pillar and buttress of the truth, not something that points to itself, but something that supports the presentation of the truth.

And the truth is in Christ.

The hope of the world is in Christ.

The hope of the world isn't that we finally get ourselves all perfectly figured out and then we operate.

The hope of the world is Christ.

And we are the ones that are designed to point towards him.

So when our church is operating correctly, that's the way we'll look.

We'll see incredible acts of beauty and healing and power, and we'll say, look, this is obviously not from my piety.

This isn't from the position I was able to get myself in.

This is Christ working in the world.

And we'll be driven to praise, not pride.

So he gets ahead of their misconception about Peter and John.

But he doesn't just jump to say, look, this isn't Peter and John, this is Jesus who did it.

Because that's sort of like walking up to an artwork without an explanation.

So instead, he lays the context so that the people that he's talking to might understand really what he means when he says this was Jesus' power to heal.

And so he continues in Acts 3, 13 to 15.

He says, The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate when he had decided to release him.

But you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead.

To this we are witnesses.

So what he does is he exposes just how flawed their vision has been.

And look at the opportunity that you were given.

Pilate saw Jesus and thought, you know, this doesn't make any sense.

We shouldn't crucify him.

Let me give you an opportunity to kill a murderer instead.

And he makes this so clear in the way that Peter says this.

It's beautiful, actually.

He says, you exchanged the author of life for a murderer.

Look, our vision is not just a few degrees off.

We confuse life for death.

And we literally exchange the two.

That's how off our understanding of the world is and the things that we're projecting onto the world.

We're confusing light and dark.

This is the description that Peter provides to set the context so that you understand.

Look, you saw Jesus, right?

And when you saw Jesus, you saw something that was totally different from what he actually was.

Because of that, you killed him.

So this next verse may come as a bit of a surprise in Acts 3.16, where he says, And his name, by faith in his name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know.

And the faith that is through Jesus has given the man this perfect health in the presence of you all.

You see, they're finally shown the bigger story of who Christ is.

But more than that, they see the mechanism through which the power of Christ flows.

It doesn't flow through our power or position.

It doesn't flow through our piety or our ability to have ourselves together.

But it moves through faith.

How was this man healed?

It was just by faith in Christ.

That Christ really is the king and that he's bringing about a kingdom that looks like healing and love and generosity and kindness.

So what is faith?

It's one of those words that we use so much we forget what it means.

Faith.

So my my we do this program here called Gotham, which is uh for masochists who'd sign up and read terrible amounts of books um with this archaic language.

Um and and then they pay us and then they thank us for it.

Um so uh my wife is doing Gotham this year, and one of the books that they read that no one likes is uh this book called Redemption Accomplished and Applied, uh, which is like, how do you not like that?

But I've learned that like only I like things like that.

And uh it's by a man named John Murray, and he offers this definition of faith, which I think is really helpful.

He says faith has three components.

Hopefully, this puts some meat on what the mechanism is that Christ's power flows through, uh, which is faith.

He says faith is knowledge, conviction, and trust.

So faith is knowledge, and now knowledge means you're seeing something accurately.

You're seeing the truth of the matter, and there's some correspondence between that truth out here and it's represented somewhere in your mind, so that those match.

So when you see Christ, you see him as the glorified servant of God, the resurrected savior, the king of the universe, the one who has healing in his hands.

So that when you see Christ, you don't see someone you would exchange for a murderer, but you see the very author of life.

And that's only possible by the Spirit.

So first is that knowledge, but then that knowledge moves into conviction, which is to say that this knowledge is not just something that uh I would assent to.

Satan could say, yes, well, uh, I can assent to the fact of who Christ is, but then that must somehow move deeper into this sort of conviction, which says, not only is that true, but that, but that's a good thing.

And that's something I'm going to live in accord with.

And then that conviction moves to this deeper level of trust, which says, you know, I will even deny my previous conceptions of the world because I'm going to trust that more.

This is when we we look out and we see, look, I can tell exactly what would pragmatically make sense in this situation.

And it would be to, you know, undercut this person, it would be to get ahead of this problem in some way.

And yet, by faith, by my trust that what Jesus calls me to really is better, uh I'm gonna lay down what I previously thought and I'm gonna follow him.

I'm gonna take this loss because it better demonstrates love.

That's faith.

Knowledge, conviction, and trust.

And it's through faith alone that Christ's power is demonstrated.

Sometimes this job is so frustrating because I know you've heard sentences like that a million times.

Like it's through faith alone that Christ's power is demonstrated, but it still doesn't hit us because nothing else in life works like that.

The whole world seems to be stacked against that type of operation.

Intuitively, we think, well, okay, how do I gain power?

Well, it's by demonstrating my own goodness.

And it's so counterintuitive to say this is really just by trust in Jesus, that my righteousness is provided and I might be able to live rightly in the world.

It's so counterintuitive.

It's strange.

But it makes sense when you consider that the setup of the church is not to point to itself, but it's to point to Christ.

That we have a resurrected Lord who is meant to be our glory.

So this concludes the explanation, excuse me, of what Jesus, excuse me, of what Peter and John saw happen when the lame beggar was healed.

That's the explanation part.

But this explanation of what happened, seeing that this was uh through faith in Christ that this man was healed and who Christ is, we're able to move into the implications.

Because what Peter moves into next is he doesn't waste this moment of evangelism.

He says, now that you see this moment clearly, and through this moment you're able to see who Christ is, this has real implications for your very life.

So in Acts 3, 17 through 19, he says, and now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers.

But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled.

Repent, therefore, and turn back that your sins may be blotted out.

You see, the fact of who Christ is, as revealed in a proper interpretation of the lame beggar's healing, has this personal implication for the lives of everyone that Peter is speaking to.

He says, look, if Jesus really is this person who it seems as he is, as we properly interpret this event, then this matters for you, you personally, your life.

And the way it matters is that you've seen him wrong, and now you have this opportunity to repent and change the way that you have viewed Jesus so that you might see him truly for who he is.

See, that's what repentance is.

Repentance is when you encounter reality, discover your own wrongness, and then you bring the way that you had viewed the world in line with what reality actually is.

And we're able to see that by the scripture.

Scripture is the guide that shows us the world and says this is actually what's happening.

But look, repentance is so much better than that.

And it's better than that even in these verses.

Because the implications of repentance to Christ, because of what the story of Jesus is, means not just that we come and we say, I was wrong, I'll be right now.

But it's that our sins may be blotted out.

So our sins, all those things that have miscolored our vision, all those things that have corrupted the whole world, that have brought this terrible misinterpretation into the world, that have filled our lives with passive-aggressive emails, that that sin may be completely done away with in Christ.

I know some of you have come in here this morning with just loads of guilt that you're bearing, and you're sitting here, and each word I'm saying feels like it's heaping something more on.

And then we get to this point where we see in Christ, not by your power, not by your piety, your sins might be blotted out, removed as far as the east is from the west, that God might restore to you the joy of your salvation.

This is the personal implication of seeing Jesus rightly for who he is, that you might turn to him in faith and your sins might be blotted out.

And then those are just the personal implications.

What Peter moves to next is this this also has these global implications.

He says in Acts 20 through 21, he says, that times of refreshing, so let's connect the that.

He just said, repent and turn back, so then your sins will be blotted out.

So your sins are blotted out.

And then connected to that is this that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.

Look at what he's describing.

He's giving us the whole global story of what Christ means.

He's saying, See, see how Christ is operating in the world now?

The times of refreshing are able to come in when we repent.

Our repentance in seeing Christ for who he is acts as this sort of mechanism that ushers in these times of refreshing into the world.

So that we might be able to see the world accurately, no longer stumbling around in the dark, trying to cobble together lives based on this short, short and corrupted experience of our own lives.

And we're able to see things as God sees them.

And then these times of refreshing might come so that we no longer live burdened by the sins of our past, but renewed and refreshed in who Christ is.

This is the picture of what the world will look like as the church moves in it.

As God restores our hearts, he brings in this refreshing and he says that he may send Christ appointed for you, and he gives us a sort of timeline, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.

So here's the story.

For now heaven must receive Christ, who is ruling his church and ruling the world to usher along these times of refreshing until this appointed moment when he restores all things.

Okay, this is bad interpretation, right?

A lame beggar is healed.

Text and call.

A lame beggar is healed.

And then when given the eyes of Scripture, Peter and John are able to look at this and say, what does that mean?

It means the restoration of the whole world is on its way.

And when you have the eyes to see, you can see, wow, the times of refreshing are really moving.

So he doesn't stop there because he explains how he knows this.

How Peter and John are able to look at this situation, this one moment, and interpret these global implications.

He says, Moses said, The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers.

You shall listen to him in whoever he tells you.

Whatever he tells you.

And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.

And all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days.

Look, I want you to see that the way Peter and John are able to interpret that situation isn't just mystical.

It isn't just that this knowledge, you know, was sort of implanted in their heads in some purely mystical way, but they were just looking and devouring the scripture.

And by the Spirit revealing to them what the truth of the scripture is, they're able to see that this was all about Jesus.

Moses, when he was talking in in Deuteronomy, when he's giving his final speech before he dies and the Israelites enter the promised land, thousands of years ago, when he said, you know, God's gonna send another prophet, and he's gonna be like me.

And for those who follow him, there will be life, and if you abandon him, it's certain death.

Peter looks back at that and he says, that was about Jesus.

And then he looks through all the other prophets, and you can even see it in his language earlier when he describes Jesus as the servant who was glorified.

We see, oh, he's been reading Isaiah, which talked about this servant that God would send, who would suffer incredibly, but his suffering would mean the salvation of all things and the redemption of all creation.

And then he sees Jesus, and by the Spirit, he's able to see in the Scripture, that's what this means.

And so we wander about in our lives and we're groping all over in the dark, and we say, what does any of this mean?

Why are these situations happening?

We can't interpret because we don't know the scripture.

Look at the way David describes it.

It's your your word is it's like a lamp under my feet.

And so it shows me, just my next step.

It exposes the reality of what is in front of me.

When left to my own devices, I'd just miscolor it.

I'd misread it as something else, and I'd probably read it not as a way of bringing glory to God who is outside of me, but I'd read it as some sort of attack on my comfort or my identity or those things that I truly hold dear.

Scripture reframes our minds and it reframes our eyes.

And that only happens when we see the scope of the story that we're a part of.

Then all of a sudden we start to see things rightly.

Finally, as Peter makes them see their place in the, as Peter shows how he interprets this through the lens of scripture, he then shows them their particular place in this story.

These are the final verses.

He says, You are the sons of the prophets, and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you.

First, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.

You know, Peter is speaking to a group of people who were gathered to go worship in the temples.

These are Jewish people.

And so he's able to say that you are the very offspring of these prophets.

This is your precise lineage.

Don't miss this story.

God and his grace towards you in particular is sending this to you first that you might turn from your wickedness.

See, we don't have a petty God, but we have a God whose grace is unfathomable.

And that's why he goes first to the very people who just denied him.

That he might say, look, your denial I can see was out of ignorance.

You denied your one hope in the world.

And so I'm going to come to you first that you might turn from your wickedness.

But he extends that, of course, to anyone, to the whole world who might turn and see this event.

This is just one event of a healed beggar.

But we can see a deeper, more fundamental event, which is the crucifixion and the resurrection.

We can see that in the crucifixion, what does that mean?

But our very sins have been blotted out.

And then it's better news than even that, because the resurrection, what does that mean?

It means that Jesus' life can be imparted to us, that his righteousness can be the lens through which God views us.

And so times of refreshing can enter the world.

Not by our own power or piety, but just by our faith in Christ.

That will be the marker of us as a people.

It takes practice and time and heart renewal in order for the lens of our lives to really be shaped towards that end.

But if we don't, we'll always be misinterpreting.

The scripture allows us to interpret the world as it is.

And the world as it is is a time of refreshing, marching towards a time where all things will be made new.

So I want you to consider this, the implications of this just personally.

Right now, you won't have to jump into any situation, you won't have to move into anything out in the world.

You can just stay right in your own head.

Introverts, you'll love this.

And just consider how do you understand yourself?

What do you consider a good day and a bad day?

What are the markers that you depend upon for your success?

Where did those come from?

Are those biblically informed markers?

Are they given to you by the given to you by what your mother thought success was, what your father thought success was?

Are they given to you by the current approval of your boss or how prideful or fearful you feel in front of others?

Or are your markers of success determined by who God makes you to be in Christ?

When you stand before God, are you standing in your own power and your own piety, or are you standing by faith in Christ alone?

If that view is brought in line with Scripture, consider how you might live.

If that interpretation of just you, just the way you interpret yourself, is informed precisely by Jesus.

Think of the way you might live in the world.

The love you might be able to show, the courage you might be able to demonstrate, the hits that previously would have crushed you, that now you can just take.

Because you see that the success of your life is actually determined by your knowledge, conviction, and trust in the one who saves, which is Christ.

Our interpretation really matters.

So with that, we'll do our our uh one question.

How do I love someone who I disagree with and interprets my beliefs as an attack?

Question one.

This is cheating.

If I love them and treat them as Christ would, but still disagree with them, what do I do?

Do I leave them in their beliefs for the sake of my own faith?

Do I try to push harder?

Disagree with interprets interprets my beliefs as an attack.

Still disagree with them.

What do I do?

Okay, b there's there's a lot of questions there.

So I I hope you don't mind whoever asks this if I if I don't take them step by step, but if I try and kind of answer what I think the spirit is of all of those together.

It's a question about how do we carry out, I'll use language that we just sort of got, how do we carry out our interpretations into the world, which, if biblically informed, we really think are true?

How do we carry those out into a world full of other people's interpretations of the same things that are constantly conflicting with our own?

How do we live in that type of a society or culture?

One aspect of this is we can have the tendency to just remove ourselves from that type of attack.

Oh, this is this is kind of a neat way to go about this question that I just thought of.

Here we go.

There's the the power way or the piety way that we remove ourselves?

The piety way that we remove ourselves is to uh uh uh just cloister together and live lives of such untainted purity that has no exposure to the outside world.

Um and so uh so that we can be sure to maintain our own belief system in our piety.

Or there's the power way, which really latches on to this language of attack or uh sort of like intellectual battle.

Like there's you can you can find like unlimited videos online from like both sides of the political spectrum of like Louveral Snowflake gets destroyed by like you know, conservative thinker.

And it's like they just like talk at a college campus.

It's like they're kind of destroyed.

Um you can buy into that language of attack which says that this conversation is primarily about power.

And when you come over to m to what I'm saying is really true, then what that requires you to do is submit to my intellectual power.

And yet we move forward in neither of those things.

Because how does our view, biblically informed, require us to move out into the world?

Was our faith something we, by our intellectual power, were able to deduce from the facts in front of us?

No.

We were so blind, it had to be revealed.

So that means we move out into the world with something that we think is true, but was only given to us.

And so we walk with this incredible humility.

Where if someone then agrees with what we're saying is true, they they need not submit to us in any way.

They need not be impressed by our intellectual prowess in any way.

They simply need to see something better, which is Christ.

All right.

I hope that answers the question.

Uh, or at least gives starts us down the path.

In the time that Zach comes up and plays music while you're waiting to take a communion, reflect on yourself.

Consider what is informing your interpretation of yourself and of your relationships.

Where is it power?

Where is it piety?

How can you lay those things down before Christ and say, our only hope is faith alone in you?

Take this time before communion to do that.

Let's pray.

Father, I pray that you would guide these moments, that your spirit in times of silence can attend us.

We aren't just wandering around our own heads unguided, but your spirit can really move and show us the reality of the work that you're doing, the work that takes place in our hearts.

Father, would you attend this time to reveal a time of refreshing that can take place in our hearts as we let go of the wrong views that we've carried and that we've lived according to, the false interpretations that have guided our lives like slave masters.

That those might be blotted out.

And a time of refreshing might come by your word, the truth of your word being applied to our hearts.

Father, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.