Bible Stories

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Well, good morning, everybody.

Welcome to Access Church.

So honored you're here.

Honored most of you are here except for these people wearing Philadelphian Eagle shirts on the front row.

That's a hate crime, everybody, and um our lawyers will be in touch.

I'm honored you're with us today.

Hey, special hello to those of you joining us online church family.

Put your hands together and welcome those of us who are joining online today.

So glad you're with us.

You picked an amazing Sunday to come.

You are in for a treat, and as your pastor, I want you to know this.

I only bring you the best, and today is no exception.

You're gonna hear from a good friend of mine, Dr.

Chip Bennett.

Uh, Dr.

Bennett is the pastor of Grace Community Church over in Sarasota, an incredible pastor, incredible leader.

He's a good friend of mine.

He'll be a good friend of yours in just a moment.

Let me say this about him.

He is the smartest person I've ever met when it comes to the Bible.

I know a lot of smart people, but he's the smartest.

Listen to this.

He has three master's degrees, like you do, and then two doctorates.

And I just want to say this he helped me so much get mine.

So technically, he has 2.5 doctorates, comes with chair one.

You are in for a tree.

Would you stand to your feet all across this room?

And let's put our hands together and welcome our yesterday from Snickers.

Mom, doctor Chip.

How is everybody this morning?

You good?

Good.

Will you go ahead and have a seat?

Um I I want to take just a minute here just to say a couple of things that I think are really important that you know.

Um, first of all, you are in a church that is experiencing growth, which is not normal right now in America.

In fact, this is a this is a true fact.

Twenty-three percent of the church in America left during COVID.

23%.

The fact that you all are growing means that God is at work here, and it means that you've got great leadership.

Don't take for granted what's going on here.

Okay?

Listen to me.

I'm I'm I'm a straight up guy.

What's going on here is fantastic.

And your pastors, Jason and Liz, they're great people.

Like I know them personally, they are good people.

This is Pastor Appreciation Month.

I'm telling you, make sure that you go by and you tell them, love them, pray for them, um, get involved here, serve what's going on here is not normal.

You need to thank God every single day that you get up, that you're a part of a church that's growing, that's thriving, and that people are coming to know Jesus.

So let's give the Lord a hand for that because he's doing some really, really, really good things.

So, what I want to do this morning is I want to set the table for this evening.

Um, and what I want to do is go through some Bible stories that you probably are familiar with to some degree.

Um, you may not be familiar with all of them, but I I suspect you'll be familiar with with most of them.

And what I want to do is I want to show you how they can be read, maybe in a way that you didn't particularly see how to read it that way, to give you some tools for your toolbox so that you can better read scripture as well.

Now, let me let me ask this question, and I you don't have to raise your hands, and just I think you'll agree with me on this.

I remember one time when I was in junior high school, um, I was assigned a poem to read in home, you know, is homework, and I read the poem and I read it several times, and I was like, I I know what's going on here.

I went back to class, and my teacher got up and started telling me who wrote it, why it was written, you know, the the background and all the stuff, and I was like, wow, I didn't get any of that in this poem at all, in any way, shape, or form.

Um, maybe you've had that experience with a song that you know you you're in your car and you sing it, you know every single word and you know what it means to you, and then you flipped on the TV and the person who wrote it actually tells you what they were writing about when they wrote the song, and you're like, oh wow, that's not what I heard at all.

You know, we all have those moments where we're reading something, but then somebody comes along and shows us something differently.

And what I want to do is I just want to give you some helps to maybe get you thinking about how you read scripture.

Um, 11% of Christians read their Bible daily.

So I think we have a lot of room for improvement.

So what I want to do is I want to get you excited.

In fact, what I want to do is I want to make the Bible great again.

How about that?

Is that okay?

Can we can we do that?

That's for me, that's important.

I want to lift up Jesus.

I want to make sure people read scripture because that's what's important for us as Christians.

So we're gonna look at some stories, and I think that you will uh hopefully be encouraged.

And what that will do is maybe that will inspire you to be here tonight at six o'clock.

If you want to go to heaven, it's tonight at six o'clock.

I'm just joking.

Some of you like, really?

No, no, you don't go to heaven by being here at six o'clock.

But but I would love for you to be here.

I think it will be uh a benefit to you.

So let's let's let's get into it.

I want to try to show you how the Bible has a divine authorship all the way through that that what's going on in the beginning is also going on in the end, that there's all of this stuff going on, even though it was over 40 people over 1,500, 2,000 years that were written, you're gonna see a theme.

I guarantee you this if we went to a library and we pulled 66 books off of the library shelf, we would not find common themes through those books because they're written by different people.

The scripture, although written by people, was inspired by God.

Paul actually says Theonustos is the Greek word.

It means God breathes.

Scripture is God breathed.

And hopefully what you'll leave here with today is a new appreciation for how great scripture is, and you'll leave with a passion to be back here at 6 o'clock.

So let's get to work here.

So the first thing I want to talk to you about in this story, I call it the wounding of Adam.

Um, most people are familiar, even if you've never been to church in your life, you probably have heard of Adam and Eve.

I mean, almost everybody's heard that story, whether you agree with that story, whether you don't agree with that story, whatever it may be, you probably have heard that story.

So what I want to do is I want to show you a little bit more about the story, and a little bit more how to maybe focus in when you read Scripture, and then I want to take you to John 19 as well and show you how so much of Scripture coheres because once again there is divine authorship through these stories.

So let's go back here to the garden in Genesis 2.

It says, The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man.

The Hebrew word here for deep sleep is almost a death-like sleep or a coma-like sleep.

So Adam is put to sleep.

Now, what's important here, and it's not said here, it's it sometimes there's an assumption made by the writers that you know what's going on here.

This is this is a key phrase.

Remember this.

The Bible was not written to you and me.

It was written for you and me.

But it was written to a group of people at a specific time that were in.

They understood when they read what was going on.

We have to go back and sort of dig through and spend some time studying to understand what's going on.

So there's a lot of things that the writers assume that we bring to the text that we often don't.

So when he causes Adam to sleep here, this is before Genesis 3.

And in Genesis 3, we have what's called the fall of man.

So before Adam has sinned, before there's any sin, this is going on.

And there's there's the assumption being made when we read this that we know that, but oftentimes we don't think that way.

So check out what goes on here.

He causes a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, Adam in his sinlessness, God wounds him in his side.

And he takes out the substance.

ESV says a rib, and then he closed up his flesh.

I want you to see the imagery here.

Adam is sinless.

And in his sinless perfection, God brings the sleep, almost a coma, a sleep of death upon Adam.

He's wounded in his side, substance is taken out, he's healed back up, and we're told, and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man.

So Adam goes to sleep, he's wounded, substance is taken out of his side, and that substance forms his bride.

And when he awakens in the garden, he awakens to his bride.

Why is that important?

Why is that story important?

Well, it's important because Jesus tells us in Luke 24, after it was resurrection morning, he walks with two disciples from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

How tender is that?

If you raised from the dead, wouldn't you be out posing?

You know what I'm saying?

Wouldn't you be like, I I you know how tender is it that our Savior on resurrection morning finds two disheartened disciples and walks along with them about a six and a half mile journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

We're told in Luke 24 that Jesus taught them out of the Old Testament things concerning himself.

When I teach a class on hermeneutics, which is how to interpret the Bible, I ask the class, first class, can anybody here take the next two to two and a half hours and tell me about Jesus out of the Old Testament?

And everybody goes, Nope.

Okay, if you can't, then you're not reading the Bible the way Jesus read the Bible.

Jesus could tell about himself.

In fact, in John 5, he he tells the Pharisees and the scribes, he says, you search the scriptures for in them that you think you have eternal life.

He goes, and they testify of me.

In other words, the Old Testament is all about me.

So why is that important?

Okay, well we have Adam Pierce wounding, the substance, the wife.

Let's go to John.

John is a very, very, very, he's he's very well uh he draws um from Genesis.

He's very well aware of what's going on in the book of Genesis.

In the book of Genesis, it starts in the beginning, God.

So John begins his gospel in the beginning was the word.

And he gives us seven days through chapter two.

They're not consecutive days, but he says a day, then a day, and then on the third day, if you add them up, seven days.

Why is that important?

Because there are seven days of creation.

John is very familiar with the themes of Genesis.

So in John 19, when Jesus is on the cross and he hangs his head in death, John is the only gospel writer that tells us this.

We're told that his side is pierced.

And out of his side flows blood and water, which are the two things that form his church, that forms his bride.

On the third day when he awakens, he awakens in the garden, because Mary Magdalene said, I thought you were the gardener.

He awakens to a woman, Mary Magdalene.

Why is that important?

Because she typifies the bride.

And we'll see this as we do another story and even into Revelation.

John wrote Revelation, it's about the bride of Christ.

There's this beautiful picture that Adam, as he's wounded in his sinlessness, what happens is anticipating what will happen to Christ, which is so important for us to understand.

This is not throwaway stuff.

This is not just makeup stuff.

This is like the reason why I personally stay and have stayed a Christian is not because I didn't go to school and got and was told all the things why you shouldn't believe.

It wasn't that I didn't go to school and study textual criticism and figure out what do all the texts say and why are there all these variants and all of this other stuff.

The thing that's created and kept me in the faith, honestly, is because when I go to the word of God, I can't in rational honesty say there's anything other than the fact that this book has some sort of divine author behind it because there's too many themes that go on throughout this book.

And I want you to hear from me, in case you doubt, hear it from me and hear it from me.

Well, the Bible is the Word of God, and you can trust it.

You can trust it, okay?

Hear me.

So let's let's go to another story here to show you how important even the words are.

I call this verbs.

So in Genesis 3, we have what we call the fall of man or the fall of humanity.

And we're told in the account, we're told that Eve, she took of its fruit.

That's a verb.

She gave to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

Then the eyes of both were opened.

These are the verbs of our fall.

Took, gave, and ate.

And their eyes were open and they saw their shame.

They saw their nakedness.

Well, in Luke, there we go.

There's supposed to be something there, but anyway, that's fine.

Don't worry about it.

Technical difficulty on the pastor who just didn't get his slides right.

Um, but but in in Luke, at the end of Luke, when Jesus walks with the Emmaus disciples, we're told that he was going to go further, but they asked him to come in to the house.

And when he came into the house, it says he took the bread, he gave it to them, and they ate it.

And their eyes were opened.

What Luke has done is he's taken the verbs of our fall and he's made them the verbs of our restoration.

Every single word matters.

These texts are not throwaway texts, they're not things that are just the biblical writers understand what's going on.

Let's look at another one here.

I call this corresponding beginning and ending.

And why do I say that?

Because in antiquity, when people would write, they typically would have to understand the geography of a book.

And the reason they did is because they lived in an aur tradition.

That's A-U-R-A-L.

Aural means that you hear.

So what they would do is they would they would write things in a way where you could remember the book.

So they would have an ending and a beginning that would correspond to each other.

And typically they would walk up what we call an inverted V, which is we call chiastic writing.

We'll talk about that this evening, which is very powerful.

And it's incredible when you go through and see how these books are put together.

So at the beginning of Luke, we're told that there is a Mary and Joseph, and most of you all know who Mary and Joseph is.

You know that, whether you've been in church or whether you haven't been in church, you know there's a Mary and Joseph.

Mary and Joseph have a child that's born virginally to Mary, and his name is Jesus.

They're given the name.

His name will be Jesus.

And we're told that they took the child and they wrapped him in linen cloth and they laid him in a manger.

Why is that important?

Well, because there's going to be some shepherds that come that evening, and they're given a sign.

This is there's a sign that you're that they were given that there will be a child wrapped in linen cloth lying in a manger.

Why is that so important?

Why is that a sign?

What would that mean?

Well, first of all, I think because we don't usually know what a manger is, we tend to miss what's really going on in the text.

And so what I want to do is I want to show you what a manger looks like.

You probably have an idea in your head, these wooden things like this with hay in it, and everybody has these whole, you know, nice little things that they think about when they think about that scene and the nativity scene and all of the stuff.

Um when I go to Israel, which I usually go every year, we haven't gone the last couple of years because of COVID and travel restrictions and all this stuff, but when I go, when we get to Telmegiddo, which is um uh a tell is where different civilizations have sort of built upon each other.

In Hebrew, it's harmegiddo.

Har is the um Hebrew word for mountain, it's the mountain of Megiddo.

Um that gets translated into Armageddon in the New Testament.

Um it the it it at that tell, there are mangers.

And when we set and say, this is a manger, everybody goes, What?

You're kidding me.

Let me show you what a manger looks like.

This is a manger.

You go, hold on, that's not what my nativity set has at home.

That's not what it looks like.

I'm not gonna mess you up.

Your nativity scene is just really jacked up to begin with, because it's it's not, you know, that's I've got all these stories that we tell.

You need to read your Bible.

Go read Luke.

It says, they went to uh to Bethlehem, it says, while they were there, she gave birth.

They weren't rushing in.

It wasn't middle of the night.

They were there.

They got nobody in the first century would have rushed to a town.

They knew they got there.

They were in a house, they weren't in an inn, they were in a house, they would have had people there, would have delivered the baby.

The Magi didn't come till Jesus was probably around a year and a half, two years old.

You can read that in Matthew 2.

That's why Herod wants to kill the kids two years and younger.

Bottom line is they always call me the killer of Christmas at grace when I when I when I do this.

You need to read your Bibles, though, because if you don't read your Bible, you may believe jacked-up stories that are not even true.

I want you to know what the scripture says.

So why is this important?

Why is this a sign?

Okay, because if you can imagine a child wrapped in linen cloth, it looks like a little mummy in a rock-hewn limestone manger.

It looks like a baby that's been wrapped up and put into a sarcophagus.

It's a baby that looks dead but's alive.

Not only that, it's a manger.

Animals fed here.

You will also feed on that child when you come to the table of the Lord, because you will have the bread and the wine.

These are not throwaway things.

They're not just stuff that's in there that you go, oh, I'll just read through that.

It doesn't mean every everything matters.

So here's the beginning: Mary, Joseph, a manger, raccoon, linen cloth, all this stuff.

So go to the end of Luke.

What do you have?

We have another Mary and Joseph.

Not the same Mary and Joseph.

But the but the names are important because they help you center the story.

Who's the Mary and Joseph?

Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea.

What do they do?

Well, we're told when they take the body of Jesus down from the cross, they wrap him in the linen cloth.

And he is placed in a rock hewn tomb that no man has ever lain.

That's a virginal tomb.

Out of the virginal tomb, Jesus will resurrect.

There's a corresponding beginning and a corresponding ending that make the text incredibly rich.

Let's look at another story.

John 4.

I call this a wife at the well, and I'll explain why in just a second.

It's the woman at the well.

I was asked earlier by one of Pastor Jason's boys, um, what's your favorite story in the Bible?

And I went, man, I don't know.

I go, well, probably the woman at the well, and I'll teach this today.

So why is this story?

I need to set this story up for this to understand the literary dimension of how the biblical writers have written.

So in the book of Genesis, which John draws from heavily, remember when God breathes into Adam the breath of life?

At the end of John, he breathes onto the disciples.

I mean, there's so many parallels between Genesis and John because he's very aware of the Old Testament.

And we're at, let's be it, let's be honest, we're at a deficiency there.

Most American churchgoers don't know the Old Testament very well.

That's a deficiency for us because we miss a lot of stuff that they sort of assume that we would know.

Let's be honest, how many of you all have started the Bible in a year?

You got to Leviticus and you quit?

Just be honest.

We're in church, you don't have to lie, you know.

Um, and it's like I think Leviticus to Matthew is the quickest trip that's ever made.

You know, I'll just start here.

I think this is better.

You know, so John assumes that his writers have an idea about Genesis.

The patriarchs.

You have Moses, you have Isaac, you have Jacob.

One of the things we know about those people in Genesis is that when they find their wife, they find their wife at a well.

That's sort of just known if you know the Old Testament.

So in John 3, when John the Baptist says the bridegroom comes, who does the bridegroom come for?

It comes for the bride.

So it shouldn't be shocking when you read that in the text that the very next place Jesus must go is to a well.

And who does he find at this well?

Well, it's the middle of the day.

He's at Jacob's well.

Well, what do we know about Jacob's well?

It's the largest narrative in the Old Testament.

What we know is that Jacob was at a well and Rachel showed up in the middle of the day.

And he was smitten by her beauty.

He was just stunned with how beautiful she was.

In fact, he was so stunned that he ran over and took the stone that was on top of the well that normally would take four or five men to pick up.

He goes and picks it up himself and takes it off and puts it down.

Look at me.

You know?

Some of you ladies are like, where's that man at?

He was there 20 years ago.

Where's he at today?

You know, my my wife, Mindy, says it best.

Your marriage is a garden, and if you don't tend it, there will be weeds.

So make sure that you pay attention to your marriage.

But so she he takes this thing off and she she sees him, he sees her, she goes back into town, Laban comes out, oh, this whole story.

And then, of course, he thinks he's gonna marry her because he works for seven years, right?

And he ends up with Leah on wedding night.

And we're told in the text he doesn't love Leah because she's not pretty.

He doesn't have eyes for her.

He loves Rachel because she's beautiful.

So now the bridegroom comes and he's at Jacob's well.

We know the story.

Okay, what time is it?

Middle of the day.

Okay, we we know there's gonna be a woman.

Who's gonna show up?

Is it gonna be a beautiful lady?

No, it's actually a Samaritan woman who's both Jew and Gentile.

And when she comes and she meets Jesus, Jesus says to her, You've been married five times.

And now you're currently living with another.

Just a note here theologically, he doesn't say you were married once and the other four don't count.

He said you've been married five times.

Some of y'all who maybe who live under the guilt of a divorce and feel like God doesn't love you, let me set you free and realize that all sin can be forgiven.

Listen to me, it's important because so many people struggle with that.

So she comes to the well and he tells her what she didn't want to hear.

It's why she showed up in the middle of the day.

She showed up because she didn't want to have to deal with who she was.

She was ugly.

She wasn't beautiful.

And she meets Jesus there.

And she asks a question that is so important when we understand this text.

She says, Are you greater than our father Jacob?

Can you love the ugly?

Can you love the one that has all the scars that I do?

Can you love the one that's as broken as I am?

And the answer, thank God, is yes.

He can.

She's so moved by Jesus that John says she leaves her water pot.

You don't leave your water pot ever.

That's the way you get water.

She is so moved because she's found living water.

She goes back into town and she says, Come meet the man that told me everything I've ever done.

That's the reason that she came out during the day, was because she didn't want to have to deal with everything that she's ever done.

Now she goes back into town after meeting Jesus and says, Come meet the man that told me everything I've ever done because Jesus has transformed her scars into her testimony.

And is she not a perfect representation of the bride of Christ?

Because she's both Jew and Gentile.

Beautiful stuff.

Let's look at another story.

Mark IV.

I want to tell you a story, and then you tell me if you can sort of hear the story again as we go to Mark IV.

And the reason I say that is because a lot of times the biblical writers use what I call a watermark.

If you ever had a nice piece of paper that you hold up to the light and you can see like a watermark in the piece of paper, there's there's something there.

The philosophers called it the difference between the the uh um the logos and the muthos.

The logos was the way the story was being told, but the muthos was sort of the underpinning of what was going on in the story.

And a lot of the biblical stories sort of expect that you know the stories when you read them, that you understand.

And you start it starts in the Old Testament.

It's all throughout the Old Testament, you know, where you sort of learn as things go, the stories keep getting told again and again in different ways because God is it, God is it work.

So here's the story.

There's a guy who gets on a ship in the Old Testament.

And when he gets on the ship, he leaves the port and he goes down and falls asleep.

A storm comes up.

And the storm comes up and it's bad.

They're throwing stuff off the boat.

And finally they remember that there was a dude that got on the boat at Joppa that was running from his God.

And they thought, hey, maybe this guy knows something.

So they go down and wake the guy up and bring him up on the boat and say, What's going on?

He's like, Well, I, you know, I'd be honest with you, I got, you know, God's sort of getting me here.

You all are gonna have to throw me over the boat if you want to live.

They're like, that sounds like a great idea.

Well, when this guy goes over the boat, his name's Jonah, what happens?

Everything goes calm.

Just absolutely calm.

I don't know how that happened there, but uh let's go back here.

There we go.

We're back to the thing.

So, you know, uh uh in the in the New Testament, when Jesus would cast out demons, he sent them into pigs.

Um, I think in 2022 the demons go into technology.

So um, that's just a I don't know if that's biblical or not, but just sort of that's sort of my thought.

So so so Jonah gets thrown over the boat and it goes, it goes calm, and everybody, everybody then at that moment goes, Who is his God?

His God was Yahweh, and they become Yahweh followers.

Well, Mark tells us a story.

See if you can hear the story behind the story.

He says that the disciples and Jesus got into a boat.

And as they were out in the boat, the storm came up to where the boat was about to fall apart, and they went and got Jesus, who was asleep.

They wake him up and they say, Look what's going on.

Wait, wait, what's up?

Look at all the stuff.

And he's like, Where's your faith?

And he says, peace.

And everything in that moment, the waters go to glass.

Mark asked the question that they asked.

Who then is this?

That even the wind and the sea obey him.

What Mark wants us to see is that the God of the Old Testament, who calmed the sea when Jonah was tossed over the boat, is actually in the boat with the disciples at that moment, calming the seas, that Jesus is God in the flesh.

That's what he wants you to see, and he wants you to read it.

Who then is this?

He wants you to answer the question: Who is this person?

Let's look at another one.

Luke 2.

Luke 2 is an interesting story because we're told that Mary and Joseph had gone to Jerusalem.

Now they would travel in caravans.

Nobody ever traveled to people alone because you would get robbed.

You'd they'd take everything, there's bandits along the roads.

You traveled in larger, in larger groups.

You know, and so they've gone to Jerusalem and we're told in the text here that the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem and his parents did not know.

You ever read that and went like, what kind of parents were these people?

Like, who could have left?

I mean, we're not just talking about like my son.

We're talking about the one that was like virginally birthed.

How could you lose that dude?

You know?

And you probably read that and go, what's going on here?

Well, it's because once again, not understanding culture, and it when they traveled, they traveled in caravans.

There was just the assumption that everybody knew that you had all the kids.

Everybody was good.

Everybody was thinking about everybody.

And typically, too, they would travel with the men and the women in different caravans together.

And so it would be easy to think that Jesus was with the men, it'd be easy to think that Jesus is with the women.

They go a day.

On day two, they realize there's no Jesus.

Where's he at?

They didn't know it.

He's not there.

You and many of you probably know if you've ever lost a kid even for a moment, but if you've lost a kid that you have no idea, and you're in a kid, you're gonna start thinking, is he okay?

Where is he at?

Can you imagine the emotions that Mary has?

Man, the angels visited me, and I've lost this kid.

Like, what kind of mom am I?

You can imagine too, she's thinking, is he alive?

Is he okay?

Has he died?

Well, we're told, then they travel back to Jerusalem.

And we're told that when they get to Jerusalem, not a throwaway word, on the third day, she found him.

Why is this story important?

What's going on in the story?

Well, at one level, what's going on in the story is we see the tenderness of the Lord and we see the sovereignty of the Lord.

He is working in Mary's heart and life in such a way where she has lost her son and she finds him on the third day because he's preparing her for another day where she will lose her son and she will find him again on the third day.

See, that's the intimacy of the Lord.

That's how much he cares.

And see, so many of us think that setbacks are so sometimes setbacks are setups, the things that God's preparing in our lives, we just don't know.

And that that feeling and emotion that she had, and she found him on the third day, she will find him again.

Last story.

David and Goliath.

You've probably heard this story many times.

If you grew up in church, you've heard it, you know the story.

David, the little boy, throws the stone, slays the giant.

Incredible story.

It's awesome.

We know the story.

I remember having read that story many, many times, and I remember when I, I don't know why.

I just realized, wow, I don't know how I've read this so many times and missed this key point of the text.

Like, wow.

And you may, I may show you this and you may go, oh yeah, I don't know.

You know, I think I've read that story.

I don't remember that part being in there, right?

Yeah, interesting.

Let me let me read you something because there's no throwaway words in the text, no surplus language.

David took the Philistines' head and brought it to Jerusalem.

Why in the world would he take a head and take it, I don't know, 15 miles from where he was at?

To Jerusalem.

I just remember the first time that I actually stopped to think about this.

I'm like, man, how many times have I read this and just not ever seen this?

Like, what's going on here?

Well, you know, he takes the head of Goliath that he's slain.

He takes it to Jerusalem, which is a Jebusite city at the time, so he wouldn't have been able to go into the city, but he takes the head there.

Probably in his mind, he's thinking about the fact that one day he's going to take Jerusalem.

If God gave me the head of the giant, God will give me Jerusalem one day.

He's probably thinking that way.

But he takes that head to Jerusalem.

Now he would not have been able to take it inside the city because it was a Jebusite city at the time.

So he's on the outside of the city walls, he takes the head.

Scholars will agree there's only one of two things that he could have done.

He either took the head and he buried it, or he took the head and put it on a stick, and the birds would have come and eaten it.

Either way, basically what he was saying is he's putting a stick in the ground or putting the head there, saying, one day God's going to give me this city, is what he's thinking in his head.

So we know that happened.

He took it to Jerusalem.

What's going on?

Well, when Jesus is crucified, we know that he's taken outside of the city walls.

And he's taken to a place called Golgotha.

You probably can hear Goliath of Gath there.

The place of the skull.

David has placed the giant's skull at the place that our Lord will defeat every giant that will ever come in our lives.

And that's who he is.

He's a God that takes the verbs of our fall and makes them the verbs of our restoration.

He is God in the flesh.

He is the one that all of Scripture talks about.

He is the one that prepares our hearts in ways we never know until after the fact.

And he's the one that has defeated every single giant you and I will ever face.

And the most important one is he's defeated sin in our lives.

That we can have eternal life by trusting that he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day to secure our eternity.

And maybe you're here and you just don't know where you're at with God or whatever.

You're not here by accident.

Adam's side wasn't pierced when it was.

Mary didn't lose Jesus when she did because God says oops.

He never says oops.

He is the sovereign God of the universe.

Psalm 115.3 says, Our God is in the heavens and he does what he pleases.

He's God.

And you're not here by accident.

You're here because God wants to have a relationship with you.

And whether you've got one with him, he wants more of your heart.

If you've never given him your heart, he wants it.

He loves you.

He died for you because he loves you.

Would you bow your heads?

I'd like to pray for you.

And then uh we'll turn it back over to Pastor Jason.

Father, I humbly ask that you would take my meager words, and Lord, you would bless them and anoint them into the hearts and the lives of those that are here right now.

Lord, I pray in Jesus' name that those who feel far from you, Lord, would all of a sudden feel in their lives the faith to draw near.

Lord, I pray for those that are struggling with doubt, insecurities, wondering.

Lord, I pray that you would give them the assurance that only you can give.

Lord, I pray for those that are here that may have never made a commitment to you as Lord and Savior.

But Lord, they feel it in their heart right now that for some reason they need to settle that question right now.

Father, I pray in Jesus' name, for your glory and for your glory alone, that you would move and hover over the sanctuary right now.

I pray, Lord, in Jesus' name you would draw people to yourself.

I pray, Lord, that you would minister to your people.

I pray that you would give them an excitement, Lord, that maybe they've been lacking.

I pray, Lord, that you would raise up an army here at Access Church that goes beyond the 11% of Christianity and becomes the 90% that spends time in your word daily.

I pray, Lord, that you would move everyone here to feel like the need to come back tonight at six to learn more.

But more than anything else, I pray, Lord, that for those that feel away apart from you, or those that have never made that commitment, that right now they would reach out and say, Jesus, I need you in my life.

I need more of you.

Jesus, I need you to speak to me right now for your glory and for your glory alone.

Father, answer those prayers in Jesus' name.

And all of God's people said, Amen.

Amen.

Can we thank Dr.

Chip, everybody?

What an amazing message.