JUST FOR FULL DISCLOSURE: My friend Hunter Davis came up with my title for today on Sunday’s Pathway Home Webcast. After he said it, I quickly wrote out a few notes. And, several times over the last few weeks, I’ve heard him say “converted people convert people.” I love that. Thanks, Hunter, for giving me the ideas for this post.

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Israel sang on the far side of the Red Sea. Miriam took a tambourine in her hand, and the women followed her dancing, Exodus 15:20-21. Pharaoh’s army was gone, and generations of slavery lay behind them at the bottom of the sea.

Three days later they were thirsty and angry.

When they finally found water at Marah, it was too bitter to drink, and the people grumbled against Moses, Exodus 15:23-24.

Paul calls that crossing a baptism. Our ancestors were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 1 Corinthians 10:1-2. A few verses later he says these things were written down for us, 1 Corinthians 10:11.

New Christians need to know this going in. The hardest stretch of your faith may come in the weeks and months after you come up out of the water.

Even Jesus Went There

It happened to the Lord himself. He came up out of the Jordan, the heavens opened, and the Father spoke: This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased, Matthew 3:17. Mark tells us what came next. Immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness, Mark 1:12. He was there forty days with the wild animals, tempted by Satan, Mark 1:13.

So when a new Christian hits a dry, hard season, it does not mean something has gone wrong. He is walking the same road his Lord walked.

Picture a young man baptized on a Sunday night. The whole church crowds around him with hugs and handshakes, and he drives home lighter than he’s felt in years. By Wednesday his phone is lighting up with Friday-night plans from his old crowd. By the next Sunday he’s wondering whether anything really changed. He still lost his temper at work, and the old temptations showed up right on schedule.

The wilderness will come and you need to be ready for it.

You Don’t Walk It Alone

Israel crossed the sea as a nation. They camped together, gathered manna together, and followed the same cloud. God did not send anyone into that desert by himself.

The writer of Hebrews reaches back to that wilderness generation when he writes to the church. But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception, Hebrews 3:13. He says daily, which is a good deal more than a handshake in the foyer once a week.

The church at Pentecost understood this. Three thousand people were baptized in one day, and Luke’s next sentence tells us how they held on. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer, Acts 2:42. They ate together in one another’s homes, Acts 2:46.

For if either falls, his companion can lift him up; but pity the one who falls without another to lift him up, Ecclesiastes 4:10. A new Christian with nobody beside him is a lamb out in the open.

If you’ve been a Christian for years, this part is for you. Learn the new convert’s name. Sit with him on Sunday. Text her on Tuesday, and have her family over for supper. God may use you to pick up somebody who’s ready to quit.

Some Friends Will Leave

Some old friendships cool off fast after baptism. Peter saw it coming. They are surprised that you don’t join them in the same flood of wild living — and they slander you, 1 Peter 4:4.

That hurts, and Jesus knew it would. Listen to what he promised.

He said a hundred times more, and he said it would come in this life. You may lose a few friends at the start, but the family you gain is far bigger. Walk into a gospel meeting three states away, and you’ll find brothers and sisters you’ve never met who will feed you and pray for you like you grew up together.

Converted People Convert People

The day Andrew met Jesus, he went looking for his brother. He first found his own brother Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah,” John 1:41. Andrew had known the Lord about a day and had no training at all. He told Simon what he had found and brought him to Jesus, John 1:42.

That’s still how it works. Converted people convert people. Your story is fresh, and the coworker who watched you change is probably already curious.

For This Week

Where are you today? Fresh out of the water and already thirsty? Or have you been a Christian long enough to forget how lonely those first months can be? Who in your congregation was baptized this year, and do you know their name? Who could you sit with this Sunday?

Israel did not cross that wilderness alone, and God never meant for you to cross yours alone either.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

Rudy Vazquez had a question about Isaiah, and he didn’t take it to his minister.

He’s a construction worker in Jacksonville, Florida. During worship he heard a passage from Isaiah read and couldn’t make sense of it. He told NPR he’d held back from asking his minister because of how earlier questions had gone. He never felt he got a real answer. So he opened an AI chatbot and asked it to explain Isaiah 5.1

He has plenty of company. OpenAI says ChatGPT now gets about 70 million religion-related questions a week, and about half of the Christian ones are people trying to understand a Bible passage.2 Barna found that roughly four in ten practicing Christians say AI has helped them with Bible study or prayer.3 Barna also noted that most of them are working this out with little help from their ministers.

I use AI every day in my own study, so I’m not here to scold anyone for wanting to understand their Bible. That hunger is a good thing. What bothers me is the question underneath it. Why was a chatbot easier to approach than his preacher?

A Man in a Chariot

Luke tells us about another man reading Isaiah. He was an Ethiopian official who managed the queen’s treasury, and he was riding home from worship in Jerusalem with the scroll open in his lap.

The Spirit told Philip, “Go and join that chariot.” When Philip ran up to it, he heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” “How can I,” he said, “unless someone guides me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him, Acts 8:29-31.

Look at what he already had. He had the text. He had a sincere heart, and he’d just traveled hundreds of miles to worship. What he was missing was a person, and God sent him one: a preacher running down a desert road.

Philip climbed up and sat down. Then, beginning with that Scripture, Philip told him the good news about Jesus, Acts 8:35. A few miles later there was water, a baptism, and a man who went on his way rejoicing, Acts 8:39.

Can a machine explain a passage? Often it can, and sometimes it does it well. But it can’t sit beside you. It doesn’t know your name. It won’t notice you’ve missed two Sundays and call to check on you. It won’t stand in the water with you.

A Word to Shepherds

This part stings for those of us who preach. Barna found that about a third of practicing Christians want their pastors to help them think through AI. Only 12% of pastors say they’re comfortable teaching on it.4

Peter told the elders to shepherd God’s flock among you, 1 Peter 5:2. Among you means close enough to be asked. Hebrews says those leaders keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account, Hebrews 13:17. You can’t keep watch over sheep you’re not connected to.

So we need to teach on this, even if we feel behind. We should be honest that we use these tools and show people how we check them. Most of all, we need to be easy to approach. Am I? When someone brings me a question I can’t answer on the spot, do I admit it and go dig, or do I brush it off? Have I ever made someone feel foolish for asking? Maybe we need to stand at the door a little longer after services.

A Word to the Flock

Now a word to everyone else in the pew. Your elders and your preacher want your questions. That’s part of why we’re there. God gave the church evangelists, pastors, and teachers, equipping the saints for the work of ministry, Ephesians 4:11-12. Equipping happens up close.

Here’s the guidance I’d give you if you asked me.

Use it like a reference book, not a counselor. It’s handy for background, context, word meanings, and cross-references, the same jobs a Bible dictionary or concordance does. It shouldn’t be the voice that tells you what to do with your marriage or your guilt.

Keep your Bible open beside it. These tools can misquote a verse or cite one that says something else. Some will even make up a reference that sounds right. The Bereans examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so, Acts 17:11, and they were checking an apostle. Read every passage AI gives you in your Bible before you trust it.

Know whose theology it learned. It was trained on everything people have written, so it usually repeats the majority view. Ask it about baptism, worship, or how a person is saved, and you may get common denominational teaching presented as settled fact. Ask it what the text says before you ask what everyone thinks.

Remember it’s built to agree with you. It’s designed to please the person typing. The wounds of a friend are trustworthy, Proverbs 27:6, and a chatbot won’t wound you. It won’t tell you that you’re wrong about the very thing you most need to hear you’re wrong about. Paul warned about people who collect teachers who say what they want to hear, 2 Timothy 4:3. You can now do that with an app on your phone.

Take the heavy things to people. Sin you keep falling into, doubt, grief, a marriage in trouble: confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, James 5:16. That verse needs a person in the room. Pray in your own words, too, because prayer is a child talking to his Father. And don’t type anything into a chat window you wouldn’t want read back to you someday.

You can watch a ten-minute video on replacing a water heater, and plenty of people do. But when a neighbor who has put in thirty of them walks through your door, the job goes differently. He spots the corroded fitting you’d have missed. He tells you what the video left out. And he stays until the hot water runs.

Use the tools if they help you. Just don’t let a screen take the seat God meant for a person.

So What About You?

Is there a passage that’s been bothering you? Who in your congregation could you ask about it this week? What has kept you from asking? And if you’re one of the people others ought to be coming to, are they?

The Ethiopian had the words of Isaiah in his lap, and God still sent Philip to sit with him.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

I listened to the news on the way into the office this morning. It was about 10 minutes, and that was enough. After every election, part of the country wakes up relieved, and part of it wakes up afraid. Give it a few years, and they trade places. Meanwhile wars grind on in places most of us couldn’t have found on a map ten years ago, prices keep climbing, and every screen in the house is telling you whom to blame. It’s an anxious way to live, and Christians feel it as much as anyone.

Isaiah’s first readers knew the feeling. In the thirty years after Jeroboam II died, the northern kingdom of Israel crowned six kings and lost four of them to assassins. Judah’s king, Ahaz, had stripped the temple of its silver and gold and sent it to Assyria with a plea, March up and save me, 2 Kings 16:7. Judges took bribes. The poor couldn’t get a hearing. And the most powerful army on earth was moving south, town by town, until it stood close enough to Jerusalem to shake its fist at the city, Isaiah 10:32.

If anyone ever had reason to believe the world was spinning out of control, it was God’s people. Isaiah 9 and 10 is what He told them.

The ax doesn’t swing itself

The center of the passage is a boast. The king of Assyria looks back over the nations he has flattened and says, I have done this by my own strength and wisdom, for I am clever, Isaiah 10:13. Taking a kingdom, he says, was like reaching into an unguarded nest and gathering the eggs. Nobody flapped a wing.

God’s answer is a question any farmer could follow. Does an ax exalt itself above the one who chops with it? Does a saw magnify itself above the one who saws with it? Isaiah 10:15.

Assyria was real, and its power was real. But God called that empire the rod of my anger, 10:5. The superpower everyone feared was a tool in someone else’s hand, and when the work it had been given was finished, it would answer for its own pride, 10:12.

That doesn’t make every ruler God’s friend or every outcome good. Assyria was cruel, and God judged it for that. What it means is simpler and more comforting. Nothing happening in the world this week has slipped out of God’s reach. The nations make their plans and fight their wars, and over all of it sits a Lord who is never surprised and never outvoted.

Be careful where you lean

Isaiah has a word for trust that I love. The word he uses here in chapter 10 is different than the usual Old Testament word for trust. On that day, he says, God’s people will no longer depend on the one who struck them, but they will faithfully depend on the Lord, 10:20. The Hebrew word, sha’an, means to lean your whole weight on something. It’s used twice in the verse, and the repetition is the point.

Ahaz leaned on Assyria, and Assyria turned around and hit him. Israel leaned on its alliance with Aram, and Isaiah lists Aram among the mouths that devoured Israel, 9:12. Every crutch they reached for broke under them.

We are tempted in the same way. It’s easy to believe that the right leader, the right party, or the right policy will finally make things safe. How many have fallen into that trap over the last 10 years? Christians can vote, serve, speak up and work for good government, and many should. The danger comes when a political cause becomes the thing we lean on. Then we’re crushed when it loses and proud when it wins, and either way our peace rises and falls with the news. Only one place will hold your whole weight.

Start with your own house

For most of Isaiah 9, the prophet is preaching about the northern kingdom. He exposes its pride, its misleading leaders, and its civil war, where brother tore at brother, 9:20–21. You can almost hear his audience in Jerusalem agreeing with him. Those people up north had it coming.

Then he turns. Woe to those enacting crooked statutes and writing oppressive laws to keep the poor from getting a fair trial, 10:1–2. No northern city is named. The questions that follow are addressed to you: What will you do on the day of punishment? Who will you run to for help? 10:3.

In a season of outrage, it’s very easy to see corruption only on the other side. Isaiah won’t let us do that. Before the people of God talk about the nation’s sins, they have to ask where 10:1–4 touches their own dealings with the weak, the widow and the people who can’t push back.

He has a word for the rest of us as well. The leaders of the people mislead them, and those they mislead are swallowed up, 9:16. Isaiah blames the leaders, but he doesn’t excuse the followers. The prophets of his day had become tails wagging at the crowd’s demand, 9:15. Be careful whose voice you let shape your fears. Hold every voice up to Scripture, from whichever direction it comes.

Do not fear

If you’re feeling uneasy this morning, read this: My people who dwell in Zion, do not fear Assyria, though they strike you with a rod and raise their staff over you as the Egyptians did. In just a little while my wrath will be spent, Isaiah 10:24–25.

God doesn’t tell them the blows aren’t real. He tells them the blows are numbered. Then He reminds them of Gideon’s little army routing Midian, and Moses lifting his staff over the sea, 10:26. He has broken rods before.

And He did it again. In 701 BC the Assyrian army camped outside Jerusalem, and that night the angel of the Lord went out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians, 2 Kings 19:35. Less than a century later Nineveh itself fell, and the empire that had terrified the world was gone. Isaiah had already pictured it: a great forest, chopped to the ground by the Lord God of Armies, 10:33–34.

Empires that look permanent never are.

Look to Jesus

Right before this passage stands one of the best-known promises in the Bible. For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders, Isaiah 9:6. His name is Mighty God. The dominion will be vast, and its prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from now on and forever, 9:7.

Every government in Isaiah 9 and 10 fails. Israel’s kings murder one another. Judah’s courts rob the poor. Assyria rises, boasts, and is cut down. And one government never fails, because it rests on the shoulders of the Child.

When that Child grew up and stood before Pilate, the most powerful official in Judea told Him, in effect, that His life was in Roman hands. Jesus answered, You would have no authority over me at all if it hadn’t been given you from above, John 19:11. It’s the ax and the hand all over again. Pilate had real authority and used it wickedly, and the hand above him was using even that to save the world, Acts 2:23.

That King is reigning now. Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, Hebrews 12:28.

What this asks of you

Fear is a poor counselor, and you will hear a lot from fear over the next few years. Instead of letting it dictate to. you, …

Lean your full weight on the Lord. Take your political responsibilities seriously, and then refuse to let your peace depend on how they turn out.

Pray for the people who govern you, whoever they are. Paul told Timothy to pray for kings and all those who are in authority, 1 Timothy 2:2, and the king in his day was Nero.

Look hard at your own house before you point at someone else’s. Deal honestly, treat the powerless fairly, and let the church be the place where people who disagree about everything else still sit at the same table.

Turn off the noise sometimes and open your Bible instead. For me, I have no plans of listening to the news over the next few days and will probably stay off my social media feeds as much as I can. Maybe we should all do that.

And when you do tune in, and the headlines make you afraid, remember who is holding the ax. The nations still answer to Him. For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. It still is.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

Can a preacher quote a scholar from a denomination he disagrees with without sending people toward that man’s errors?

It’s a fair question. I’m not a Calvinist. I don’t believe God picked some for heaven and some for hell before the world began. And yet some of the most careful writing I’ve ever read on the cross came from men who did. My Logos library is full of commentaries by scholars I’d part ways with on baptism, on grace, on how a person is saved. Some of them still know more about a Greek verb than I ever will.

So should I read them? Should I quote them? And if a young Christian follows my footnote and picks up something wrong, whose fault is that?

Paul Quoted Pagans

Start with Paul on Mars Hill. He’s standing before Athenian philosophers, and he reaches for their own poetry. For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, “For we are also his offspring,” Acts 17:28.

Those poets weren’t writing about the God of Israel. They were writing about Zeus. Paul knew that. He lifted out the line that was true and set it to work for the gospel.

He did it again with a Cretan prophet in Titus 1:12, and then added, This testimony is true, Titus 1:13. The man was a pagan. The sentence was accurate. Paul quoted the sentence.

Truth doesn’t become false because the wrong man said it. And error doesn’t become true because the right man did.

The Bereans Checked Paul

Back up to earlier in that same chapter. Paul had preached in Berea, and Luke records how the town responded. The people here were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, since they received the word with eagerness and examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so, Acts 17:11.

Think about who they were checking. An apostle! And Luke calls it noble.

That settles a lot. Every Christian carries a Bible and a responsibility. Test all things. Hold on to what is good, 1 Thessalonians 5:21. John says the same thing: do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God, 1 John 4:1. No reader gets to hand his conscience over to an author, a preacher, or a publisher. Each of us will give an account of himself to God, Romans 14:12.

But the Writer Isn’t Off the Hook

Now, what about the writer's responsibility?

Not many should become teachers, my brothers, because you know that we will receive a stricter judgment, James 3:1. Jesus said it would be better to have a millstone hung around your neck and be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble, Luke 17:2. No preacher should ever read that verse lightly.

I’m not big into eating whole catfish. Deep-fried fillets with a good breading are more my thing. Now, if you’re going to eat a fish whole, you need to know where the bones run. You need to chew slow. And if you’re the one serving it, you’d better tell your guests the bones are in there.

That’s what writer responsibility looks like. When we cite a man, where possible, we owe our readers a clear word about where we stand with him. If he’s right about the atonement and wrong about how a sinner is saved, we should say so. We shouldn’t send a brand-new Christian into a book on predestination without a word of warning.

At the same time, we can’t treat grown Christians like toddlers. The writer of Hebrews scolded his readers for staying on milk. But solid food is for the mature—for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil, Hebrews 5:14. Trained senses come from use. If we never weigh anything, we’ll never learn how.

So where does my job as a writer end and yours as a reader begin? I’d put it this way. I’m responsible for what I hand you and how I label it. You’re responsible for what you do with it once it’s in your hands.

Who Decides?

The last question is the biggest one. Who gets to say which sources are scriptural?

Not me. Not a school, an editor, or the most respected paper in the brotherhood. Jesus answered this one himself. The word I have spoken will judge him on the last day, John 12:48. And Paul set the bar where no man could reach it. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than what we preached to you, a curse be on him! Galatians 1:8.

Did you catch the we? Paul put himself under the word too. So does every writer you’ll ever read, including the one writing this.

Every commentary on my shelf gets measured against one Book, and that Book answers to no one.

So What About You?

When’s the last time you opened your Bible to check something a preacher said? Has anyone ever handed you a book that shook you? Did you run from it, or did you take it to Scripture? Have you made a favorite author your standard without ever meaning to?

Read widely if you’re grounded. Read carefully no matter what. Eat the fish and spit out the bones, and keep the Book open on the table the whole time.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

1. Peace Has to be Chased

   1. Hebrews 12:14: Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness—without it no one will see the Lord.

   2. Paul writes: So then, let us pursue what promotes peace and what builds up one another.

   3. Peter quotes the Psalm: Let him seek peace and pursue it, … (1 Peter 3:11)

2. Who We Pursue Peace With

   1. Hebrews 12:14: Pursue peace with everyone, and holiness…

   2. Hebrews 12:14: Pursue peace …, and holiness —without it no one will see the Lord.

      1. How we treat each other and how we stand with God are not separated.

      2. 1 John 4:20: If anyone says, “I love God,” and yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For the person who does not love his brother or sister whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

3. Roots Grow in the Dark

   1. Hebrews 12:15a: Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God …

      1. “Make sure” means to look over, to keep watch. It is given to all of us.

   2. Falling behind what?

      1. Hebrews 12:15a: Make sure that no one falls short of the grace of God …

      2. Falls short means to lag behind, to come up lacking.

   3. Now the phrase itself. No root of bitterness.

      1. Hebrews 12:15b: that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many.

      2. See Deuteronomy 29:18-19. In Moses’ day, the root was a person — one man, one family, one clan whose heart had quietly turned away from God.

      3. Bitterness doesn’t always grow out of a grievance against somebody else.

         1. Sometimes it grows out of grief.

         2. Ruth 1:20: “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara,” she answered, “for the Almighty has made me very bitter.

         3. Even this type of bitterness must be dealt with:

            1. Ephesians 4:32: Let all bitterness, … be removed from you, …

            2. You don’t negotiate with a root in the sewer line. You get it out.

4. Bitterness Never Stays Home

   1. Hebrews 12:15: …that no root of bitterness springs up, causing trouble and defiling many

      1. Bitterness is not a private matter.

      2. A root that springs up doesn’t stay in one heart. It defiles many.

   2. How does that happen?

5. Looking to Jesus: Blood That Speaks a Better Work

   1. Hebrews 12:3: For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you won’t grow weary and give up. If anybody in history had a right to a root of bitterness, it was Him.

   2. 1 Peter 2:23: when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. — You hand the case to the Judge —

6. As We Close…

   1. Look for the root in yourself. (Psalm 139:23-24)

   2. Decide that you won’t be anybody’s soil.

   3. Keep an eye on each other. Roots are patient. Grace is stronger.

1. Quick to Hear

   1. James 1:19: My dear brothers and sisters, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. Listening comes first.

   2. What to do with what we hear:

      1. James 1:21: Therefore, ridding yourselves of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent, humbly receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

      2. A proud heart argues with the word. A humble heart lets it in.

   3. Don’t hear the truth and walk away unchanged:

      1. James 1:22: But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

2. Why We Stop Our Ears

   1. Pride or Weariness. See 1 Kings 12:8 and 2 Timothy 4:3.

   2. Solomon said:

      1. Proverbs 27:6: The wounds of a friend are trustworthy, but the kisses of an enemy are excessive.

      2. Proverbs 12:15: A fool’s way is right in his own eyes, but whoever listens to counsel is wise.

      3. Proverbs 12:1: Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but one who hates correction is stupid.

3. When Refusing Becomes the Problem

   1. Constant refusal will keep you stuck.

      1. Proverbs 29:1: One who becomes stiff-necked, after many reprimands will be shattered instantly— beyond recovery.

      2. God is patient. He sends the word again and again.

   2. A heart that keeps saying no is a heart that’s slowly hardening.

      1. Hebrews 3:13: But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin’s deception.

      2. Hebrews 3:15: As it is said: Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.

   3. Psalm 145:5: Let the righteous one strike me— it is an act of faithful love; let him rebuke me— it is oil for my head; let me not refuse it.

4. Look to Jesus

   1. Jesus taught hard things (John 6:60). What does it look like when we stop listening?

      1. John 6:66: From that moment many of his disciples turned back and no longer accompanied him.

      2. Jesus asks: “You don’t want to go away too, do you?” Simon Peter answered, “Lord, to whom will we go? You have the words of eternal life.

5. Grace to Those Who Hear

   1. Ephesians 4:29: No foul language should come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear.

      1. Where does the grace end up? To those who hear. It’s meant to reach you. If we refuse it, we:

      2. Ephesians 4:30: …grieve God’s Holy Spirit.

      3. Don’t shut your ears to instruction, even when it comes through the mouth of a friend.

6. As We Close

   1. The people God has put in your life are part of His answer to your struggle.

   2. They’re carrying grace to you. Please receive it.

________________________________

Have you ever done exactly what God asked of you and then had to wait a long time to see Him come through? If so, you and Rahab have something in common.

When the two spies left her house in Jericho, they gave this instruction: tie this scarlet cord to the window through which you let us down, Joshua 2:18. She was to bring her parents, her brothers, and the rest of her family inside, and everyone under her roof would be spared when Israel took the city. She agreed, and as soon as they’d gone, she tied the scarlet cord to the window, Joshua 2:21.

Think for a minute about what that cost her. Her house was built right into the city wall (2:15), so the cord hung where anybody walking below could see it. The king had already sent men to her door once looking for those spies, and Jericho was locked down tight, no one leaving or entering, Joshua 6:1. Now she had a house full of relatives who knew what she’d done, and any one of them could have talked.

Then came the waiting. The spies hid in the hills for three days before returning to Joshua. Israel crossed the Jordan, camped at Gilgal, circumcised the men, and kept the Passover (Joshua 3–5). When the army finally showed up at Jericho, they didn’t attack. They marched around the city once and went back to camp. Joshua had told them to keep completely quiet: Don’t let one word come out of your mouth until the day I tell you, “Shout!” Joshua 6:10. The next day they did it again, and the day after that, for six days.

Try to picture all that from her window. As far as we can tell, nobody had told her what the seventh day would bring. She had a promise from two men she’d met once, and a red cord tied to the window frame. I’d guess by the fourth or fifth morning of silent marching she was wondering what in the world was going on. She could have pulled that cord and hoped nobody would ever find out. She left it right where it was.

On the seventh day, the walls came down. Joshua sent the two spies to her house, and they brought out Rahab, her family, and everyone who belonged to her (6:22–23). Hebrews 11:31 commends her faith: By faith Rahab the prostitute welcomed the spies in peace and didn’t perish with those who disobeyed.

Maybe you’re in your own season of waiting right now. You’ve given your life to the Lord, and you’re doing your best to walk with Him. You’ve been praying for a son or daughter who’s drifted, or for healing, or for a marriage that’s hurting, and the answer hasn’t come yet. You keep doing what you know to do, and some weeks it doesn’t feel like anything’s changing. Most of us have been there, and some of the folks right here around you are there right now.

Those are the weeks when faith gets tested the most. When you come to worship anyway, and keep praying even when it feels like your prayers aren’t going anywhere, you’re leaving your cord in the window. Hebrews 10:23 encourages us to hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, since he who promised is faithful. Rahab kept waiting because she trusted God to keep His word. You can trust Him too.

He kept His word to her, and then some. Matthew 1:5 lists Rahab in Jesus’ family tree as the mother of Boaz. A Canaanite woman who’d once lived as a prostitute on Jericho’s wall ended up in the line of the Messiah.

So, whatever you’re waiting on, don’t take your cord down. What promise of God are you holding on to today?

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

Every preacher has heard some version of it: “We need more hard lessons.” I know that request usually comes from a good place. Most of us love the truth, and none of us wants to sit under a pulpit that’s afraid of its own Bible. I’m with you on that. A church that never hears about sin is headed for trouble.

But there’s an assumption that often rides along with that request, and I’d like us to look at it honestly. It goes like this: a gentler sermon is a weaker sermon, and a weaker sermon is probably a little suspect. Somewhere along the way we started grading sermons by the bruises. If we walk out with our toes stepped on, we figure the man preached the truth. If we walk out encouraged, we start wondering if he’s going soft. I don’t think the Bible lets us measure preaching that way, and I’d like to show you why.

What Paul Meant by “Sound”

Paul keeps coming back to the word sound when he writes to Timothy and Titus. But you are to proclaim things consistent with sound teaching, Titus 2:1. The Greek word for “sound” is where we get our word “hygiene,” and it means healthy. Sound doctrine is teaching that makes us spiritually well.

That ought to change how we judge a sermon. When you go to the doctor for a checkup, you don’t grade the visit by how much the shot hurt. You want to know what the bloodwork says and whether the treatment’s working. A painful shot can still be the wrong medicine, and a doctor with a soft voice can hand you the prescription that saves your life.

So when Paul calls teaching sound, he’s asking whether it’s true to what God said and whether we’re getting healthier under it. He doesn’t say a word about volume.

Paul Worried About Itching Ears

Right after Paul tells Timothy to correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and teaching, he explains why. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itching ear, 2 Timothy 4:2-3.

Paul was worried about us picking our preaching by appetite. We usually picture that as folks who only want to hear pleasant things, and that happens plenty. But I’ve come to believe appetite can run the other way too. You and I can pick up a taste for harshness. Give it enough years, and we’ll feel shortchanged when a sermon doesn’t leave a mark, the way some folks think coffee isn’t coffee unless it is so strong the spoon floats. That’s still our ear deciding what it wants to hear.

Faithful preaching follows the text, and the text sets the tone. Some passages are going to sting. Others were written to pick you up off the floor. Those of us who stand in the pulpit are doing exactly what Paul asked of Timothy when we handle both honestly.

Gentleness Is a Command

If you’ve ever suspected gentleness is a compromise, spend a few minutes with this passage. The Lord’s servant must not quarrel, but must be gentle to everyone, able to teach, and patient, instructing his opponents with gentleness. Perhaps God will grant them repentance leading them to the knowledge of the truth, 2 Timothy 2:24-25.

Paul’s talking about correcting people who are wrong, even people who oppose the truth. You can’t get much closer to hard-lesson territory than that, and twice in two verses he says to handle it with gentleness. He puts it on the list of requirements for anyone who teaches, right next to being able to teach.

He also tells us what he’s hoping for, that God might bring those people to repentance. Paul expected gentleness to open doors that harshness slams shut. Think about the last time you felt attacked. You probably quit listening long before the other person got to the point. I know I have.

Paul practiced what he wrote. Nobody’s ever accused him of going easy on doctrine. He confronted Peter to his face in Antioch, Galatians 2:11, and he told the Corinthians to hand an unrepentant man over to Satan, 1 Corinthians 5:5. Yet this same apostle reminded the Thessalonians, we were gentle among you, as a nurse nurtures her own children, 1 Thessalonians 2:7. A few verses later he compares himself to a father who encouraged and comforted each of his children, 1 Thessalonians 2:11-12. If gentleness makes a preacher unsound, we’d have to throw Paul out too.

Look to Jesus

When the soundest teacher who ever lived described himself, here’s what he said: Take up my yoke and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, Matthew 11:29. A number of translations render that first word “gentle,” and either way you get the same picture.

Jesus had a hard edge when he needed one. He drove the money changers out of the temple, and in Matthew 23 he pronounced woe after woe on the scribes and Pharisees. But notice who got that treatment. It was proud religious leaders who were loading burdens onto other people’s backs. The weary and the ashamed found him tender. Matthew applies Isaiah’s words to him: He will not break a bruised reed, Matthew 12:20.

That’s a good model for every pulpit. On any given Sunday, you might be the one who’s gotten comfortable and needs waking up. Or you might be the one who’s spent all week beating yourself up and needs to hear that grace is still real. Odds are you’re sitting right next to the other one. If all we ever do from the pulpit is one or the other, we’re going to miss half the room. Jesus read people well enough to know when to press and when to lift, and that’s what we’re aiming for.

A Better Way to Measure

If you’ve been grading sermons by how hard they hit, let me suggest a different question for the drive home. Was that true to the Bible, and am I closer to Christ because I heard it? If the answer’s yes, you heard sound preaching, no matter how loud it was.

And if you’ve caught yourself wishing for more stomping lately, it might be worth asking where that wish comes from. Sometimes the hard lesson we need is the one about our own appetite.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

Yesterday we watched a father run. A boy came home from the far country smelling like pigs, with a speech memorized and a job application at the end of it, and his father saw him a long way off and ran to meet him.

Have you ever thought about this in this way? If that’s really what God is like then hiding from him makes no sense. And yet we do it all the time. I’ve done it, and I’ve been a Christian most of my life and could tell you Luke 15 by heart. So I want to come back to the question I left you with yesterday. If the Father runs toward us, why do we keep running the other way?

To answer it, we have to go back to the first time anybody hid from God.

Before Anybody Hid

Start one verse before Genesis 3: Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame, Genesis 2:25. We usually skip this verse, but we need to see how it describes two people with nothing to cover and nothing to hide. They could be fully seen by each other and by God, and it didn’t bother them at all. That’s what you were made for, to be known all the way down and be at peace with it.

Then the serpent shows up, and the first thing he does is raise a question about God: Did God really say…? Genesis 3:1. By verse 5 he’s telling a story. God is holding out on you, keeping the good things for himself, and you’re not quite enough yet. The sad irony is that they were already made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27). The serpent sold them something they already had and charged them everything for it.

They ate, and the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves, Genesis 3:7. Their bodies hadn’t changed since 2:25. What changed was trust. Once they believed the serpent’s story about God, they couldn’t stand to be seen by him. The first thing sinful people ever made was something to hide behind, and we’ve been sewing fig leaves ever since.

The Sound in the Garden

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden, Genesis 3:8.

Some of us grew up reading the cool of the day. Either way it’s evening, when the heat breaks and people come outside. And God comes on foot. The way Moses tells it, this doesn’t sound like the first time. It sounds like something God had done before, and they knew the sound of it.

The Hebrew word for walking there turns up again in a promise God made to Israel: I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people, Leviticus 26:12. What God did in Eden is what he promised to keep doing. He’s always wanted to be near his people. The walking was his idea.

That sound should’ve been the best sound in the garden. Instead it sent them into the trees, and Adam tells us why: I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid, Genesis 3:10. Those are the first words we have from a man to God after the fall, and the first thing sin taught him to say was I was afraid.

John explains it: There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment, 1 John 4:18. Fear is what hiding runs on. We hide because we expect to be punished. The younger son expected it too, and that’s why he planned to ask for a job.

Where Are You?

Go back to verse 9. So the LORD God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

Does God know where Adam is? Of course he does. He planted the trees Adam’s hiding behind. So why ask?

Think about how you talk to your little boy or girl who is hiding under the bed after he’s broken something. You know exactly where he is, because you can see his feet sticking out. You still say, Where are you, buddy? You’re giving him the chance to come out on his own. God’s question works the same way.

Notice who does the looking, too. Adam doesn’t go looking for God. God comes looking for Adam, and he never stopped. Jesus said it about himself: For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost, Luke 19:10. Where are you? is the first time in the Bible that God goes looking for someone who’s lost. It isn’t the last.

Stories God Never Told You

Then God asks, Who told you that you were naked? Genesis 3:11. It’s a fair question. Nobody in the garden had said a word about it. God had made them that way and called it very good (Genesis 1:31). They’d been listening to another voice, and now they had a new story about themselves: if God really sees you, it’s over. God never said that. They picked it up somewhere else.

A lot of us are living on stories God never told us. You’re too far gone. He puts up with you, but he’s disappointed in you. If the people at church knew, they’d be done with you. Some of those came from a hard father, and some came from a church that talked more about the rules than about the Father. Some we wrote ourselves at three in the morning. And some came from the same voice that asked, Did God really say?

Then watch what Adam does. God asks him a direct question, and he points at his wife and then at God: The woman you gave to be with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate, Genesis 3:12. Eve points at the serpent. That’s another way to hide. You don’t need trees if you can stand behind somebody else.

Remember the older brother I said we’d come back to? He did his own version of this. When his father came out into the yard to plead with him, he hid behind his brother’s sins: this son of yours… who has devoured your assets with prostitutes, Luke 15:30. As long as he was talking about his brother’s failures, he never had to look at his own heart.

He Made the Clothes

The consequences in Genesis 3:14–19 are real. The ground is cursed, childbirth will hurt, and death comes. God doesn’t pretend the sin didn’t happen. But before he sends them out of the garden, look at what he does: The LORD God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them, Genesis 3:21.

Set that next to verse 7. In verse 7 they made coverings for themselves out of fig leaves. In verse 21 God makes the clothing and puts it on them himself, and they leave the garden wearing something he made. The text doesn’t stop to explain it, but skins come from somewhere. Something died so they could be covered.

Now think back to yesterday’s road. The same Father who clothed Adam and Eve at the edge of Eden threw his best robe over a boy who smelled like pigs. That’s what he does with people who come out of hiding. He covers them himself. For those of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ, Galatians 3:27. Our fig leaves were never going to be enough. His covering is.

That’s how Hebrews can say two things that sound like they shouldn’t go together. No creature is hidden from him, but all things are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account, Hebrews 4:13. That’s Eden all over again, and you can’t hide. Three verses later the writer says, Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, Hebrews 4:16. You can walk boldly into the presence of a God who sees everything, because our high priest has already covered you.

Come Out of the Trees

So why do we keep hiding? Genesis 3 gives the answer. We hide because we’re afraid, and we’re afraid because we’ve believed a story about God that he never told. The cure is to hear his voice again. Where are you? is an invitation.

Think of one place you’ve been hiding, whether it’s from God, your family, or your church. This week, step out of the trees in that one place. Pray about it, the way a child talks to his dad, or tell one person the truth the next time they ask how you’re doing. If you wrote a name and a date on the back of your card Wednesday, you already know what that looks like.

We started this week with a question: when you picture yourself finally getting it right, whose face do you see? I hope the answer’s starting to change. It’s the face of a Father who went looking for Adam among the trees and ran down a road for a boy who’d wasted everything. He’s still asking, Where are you? And he’s already made the clothes.

MEMORY VERSE

Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.

Hebrews 4:16 (CSB)

Weekly Challenge

Write down one story about yourself that God never told you, something like you’re too far gone. Next to it, write Genesis 3:21 or Galatians 3:27. Every time that old story shows up this week, read what God actually did instead.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

Have you ever rehearsed an apology? I did it as a boy, walking down the hall to go find Mom or Dad. I still do it, only now in my truck. Maybe you’ve worked out what to tell the boss, or the neighbor whose mailbox you backed into, and given the speech four times before you ever pull into the driveway.

We rehearse because we don’t know how we’ll be received. The speech protects us, and we usually build in an explanation we hope will take some of the sting out of the apology.

Yesterday I mentioned a story Jesus told about two sons who both thought their father was an employer. Today I want to stay with the younger one, the boy who rehearsed a speech all the way home, and the father who wouldn’t let him finish it. His older brother is still out in the field. We’ll come back for him.

Why Jesus Told It

Luke 15 opens with two crowds. All the tax collectors and sinners were approaching to listen to him. And the Pharisees and scribes were complaining, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them,” Luke 15:1–2. In that world, if you sat down at someone’s table, you were saying you accepted them. The religious leaders couldn’t understand how a teacher from God could sit down to supper with people like that.

Jesus answered them with three stories. In the first, a shepherd loses one sheep out of a hundred, and in the second a woman loses one coin out of ten. The third begins, A man had two sons.

A Speech in the Pigpen

The younger son asks for his share of the estate now. Under the law the older son received a double portion (Deuteronomy 21:17), so this boy stood to get a third. An inheritance came when your father died. Asking for it early was about as close as you could come to telling your father you wished he were already dead. And the father gave it to him.

Not many days later, he turned it into cash, went as far from home as he could get, and squandered his estate in foolish living, Luke 15:13. Then the money ran out, a famine hit, and he ended up feeding pigs for a foreigner. For a Jewish audience you couldn’t sink any lower. He was jealous of what was in the pigs’ trough, and no one would give him anything.

Then … he came to his senses, he said, “How many of my father’s hired workers have more than enough food, and here I am dying of hunger!” Luke 15:17. What brought him to his senses was his stomach. You and I have probably watched God use an empty stomach to bring plenty of people home. He doesn’t wait for your motives to be pure before he starts drawing you back.

So he writes his speech. Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired workers, Luke 15:18–19. The confession is a good one, but the last line is a job application. A hired worker didn’t live in the house. He was paid by the day, and his place was only as good as his last week’s work. The son figures he can’t be family anymore, but maybe he can earn a wage, work off what he owes, and eat on the porch.

Maybe you’ve come back to God with that same plan. I know I can’t be what I was. Just let me work my way back into good standing.

A Long Way Off

Now verse 20: So he got up and went to his father. But while the son was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran, threw his arms around his neck, and kissed him.

You don’t spot somebody a long way off unless you’ve been looking. That father had been watching the road. How many evenings had he stood at the edge of his land, looking down it?

Filled with compassion comes from a word built on the Greek for a person’s insides. It’s compassion you feel in your gut. Luke uses it for Jesus at the funeral in Nain, when he saw a widow burying her only son (Luke 7:13), and for the Samaritan who stopped on the Jericho road (Luke 10:33).

Then he ran. A man of his age and standing didn’t run. To do it, he’d have to hike up his robes and show his legs in front of the whole village, and nobody with any dignity did that. He may have had another reason to hurry, too. A boy who’d shamed his family like that wasn’t going to get a warm welcome walking through town. The father reaches him out on the road before the village does. Whatever shame gets handed out that day, the father takes it on himself.

He throws his arms around his son and kisses him before the boy has gotten a single word of his speech out.

The Speech He Never Finished

Now lay verse 21 next to verse 19 and see what’s missing. Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight. I’m no longer worthy to be called your son. He gets the confession out. He never gets to make me like one of your hired workers.

But the father told his servants, “Quick! Bring out the best robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet,” Luke 15:22.

Every gift says son. The best robe in the house, very likely the father’s own, covers the rags and the smell of the pigs, and anyone who sees that boy walk through the village now knows his father’s taken him back. The ring is a signet that carries the family’s authority. When Pharaoh raised Joseph over Egypt, he took the signet ring off his own hand and put it on Joseph’s (Genesis 41:42). Nobody hands the family seal to a day laborer. The sandals matter too. Servants often went barefoot, and sons wore shoes. He’d walked home barefoot, and he went into the house with shoes on his feet.

Then comes the fattened calf, the one they’d been saving for a special day. Because this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found! Luke 15:24.

What did he do to earn any of it? He came home hungry, with mixed motives and a speech that was half wrong, and the father didn’t wait for any of that to improve before he started running.

The Father Who Ran All the Way

That father took some shame on himself on a dusty road so his son wouldn’t have to carry it through the village. Jesus took all of it. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even to death on a cross, Philippians 2:7–8. He came all the way to the far country where we were, and he bore the disgrace that belonged to us so we could come home as sons and daughters.

And remember who Jesus was talking to. The grumblers meant This man welcomes sinners and eats with them as an accusation. It turned out to be the best news in the chapter. They were watching the Father’s welcome happen right in front of them, at a table with Jesus.

You Don’t Need a Speech

Some of you know the far country, and you don’t need anyone to describe it to you. You might still be out there, wondering whether you’d even be welcome inside a church building after all these years. Or you’ve been a Christian a long time and wandered a long way, and now you’ve started the walk home. You’re rehearsing what you’ll say and figuring how long you’ll have to sit on the porch before God lets you back in the house.

You can put the speech away. The Father’s been watching the road, and in Jesus he’s already run to meet you.

Tomorrow we’ll go back to the first garden and ask a hard question. If the Father runs toward us, why do we keep running the other way?

MEMORY VERSE

But while the son was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran, threw his arms around his neck, and kissed him.

Luke 15:20 (CSB)

Weekly Challenge

Write down the speech you’ve been rehearsing to God, the apology and the bargain you tacked onto the end of it. Pray the confession out loud. Then cross out the bargain. And if someone you love is in the far country, reach out to them this week with no lecture attached.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

Yesterday I asked you to write a sentence on a card and cross out everything after the word when.

God is pleased with me…. …. ….

Some of you believed what was left the moment you read it. Some of you have been arguing with it ever since.

Today I want to talk about what will make us set that card down and quietly decide it was written for somebody else. Most of the time it’s the sin nobody else knows you’re carrying.

Have you ever had a slow leak behind a wall? A few years ago, we discovered a major leak in our heating system that caused our entire living room, part of our dining room, and our mother-in-law’s kitchen and pantry downstairs to have to have a months long major renovation. The leak began behind the drywall in the space between the two floors and continued for months. Life went on like nothing was wrong. By the time the carpet in our living room began to be saturated, the damage was done. The subfloor had to be replaced, and we had to deal with mold mitigation because of the hot steamy water. What would have been a ten-dollar fix turned into a contractor and a dumpster in the driveway. Most of the damage happened where nobody could see it.

Secret sin works the same way. It doesn’t stay the size it was the day it started, and it grows fastest when you have nowhere to say it out loud.

The King Who Kept Sending

2 Samuel 11 opens on an ordinary evening. In the spring when kings march out to war, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel… but David remained in Jerusalem, 2 Samuel 11:1. The king stays home, gets up from his bed with time on his hands, and sees a woman from the roof. Most of our falls start somewhere just as ordinary. It's a weeknight, you're on the couch with a phone in your hand, and you're bored.

There is one verb runs through the chapter 11. David sent someone to ask about her. He sent messengers to bring her. When she sent word back, I am pregnant, he sent for her husband Uriah, and later he sent a letter to the front with Uriah carrying it. Yesterday we watched God send his Son and his Spirit. Here David is doing all the sending himself, every message out of the palace an attempt to manage the outcome. The text is careful about where the guilt lands. He’s the king. He sends, and she is brought.

The adultery was one night. The cover-up took weeks. It cost Uriah his life, along with other soldiers who died in that assault, and it cost Joab his integrity when he went along with it. The cover-up nearly always costs more than the sin, and it takes better people down with it. When the chapter closes, Jerusalem thinks the king has taken in a war widow. Then comes one word: However, the LORD considered what David had done to be evil, 2 Samuel 11:27. The man nobody saw had been seen the whole time.

A Year of Silence

By the time anyone says a word to David, the child has been born. That’s the better part of a year spent leading worship, hearing cases at the city gate, and walking past that roof.

Psalm 32 reads like it was written from inside that year: When I kept silent, my bones became brittle from my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was drained as in the summer’s heat, Psalm 32:3–4. Most of us know that feeling. You wake at three in the morning and your mind goes straight to it. You’re short with the people you love and can’t say why. You keep the calendar full, because quiet is where it finds you. Somebody at church asks how you’re doing, and you say fine.

David thought silence was protecting him. Psalm 32 says it was draining him. And that heavy hand was mercy, the hand of a Father who won’t let his child get comfortable in the dark.

Then the verb comes back: So the LORD sent Nathan to David, 2 Samuel 12:1. All through chapter 11, David did the sending. Now God sends. David wasn’t looking for a way back. He’d had a year to build his cover story, and God came to him anyway.

Nathan tells his story about a rich man who took a poor man’s only lamb. David pronounces sentence on the rich man, and Nathan says, You are the man! Then verse 13: David responded to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Then Nathan replied to David, “And the LORD has taken away your sin; you will not die.” In Hebrew, David’s confession is two words.

Forgiveness didn’t erase the consequences. The child died, and the sword never left David’s house. If you’re living with consequences right now, that doesn’t mean you’re unforgiven. David was forgiven, and he still buried a son.

Now listen to the man on the other side of it: How joyful is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! Psalm 32:1. Four verses later he says he did not conceal his iniquity. Covered and conceal translate the same Hebrew verb, kāsâ. As long as David kept covering his sin, God wouldn’t. The day David stopped, God covered it completely.

Beloved Before Anything

Why did David hide in the first place? A king’s standing rested on his record, and he had too much to lose. Most of us hide for the same reason. We think our standing with God is only as good as our record, so the record has to look clean.

So come to the river I promised you yesterday:

Count what Jesus had done in public at that point. He hadn’t preached a sermon yet; that starts in verse 14. He hadn’t called a disciple or healed anyone, and the cross was three years away. If he’d written a résumé that morning, the ministry section would have been blank. And yet the Father says, You are my beloved Son.

You might say that Jesus had lived thirty years without sin, so of course the Father was pleased. That’s true, and don’t lose it. He’s the only one who ever stood in that river with nothing to confess. But notice the order of the Father’s sentence. You are my beloved Son comes first, and the approval follows. Everything Jesus does from verse 14 to the end of Mark, he does as a Son who has already heard it.

Matthew and Luke say the heavens were opened. Mark uses a rougher word, schizō, torn. It’s a violent word, the kind you’d use for ripping cloth. Mark uses that word one more time, when Jesus dies and the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, Mark 15:38.

What does his baptism have to do with yours? For those of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ, Galatians 3:27. God’s grace was lavished on us in the Beloved One, Ephesians 1:6. Nobody heard a voice from the sky when you came up out of the water, but you came up wearing the Beloved Son. The Father’s pleasure over you rests on him, and his record doesn’t change on your worst day.

Sons Can Tell the Truth

Put the two scenes side by side. A hired hand who breaks something in the barn hides it and hopes nobody notices before payday, because his place on that farm depends on his record. A son can walk into the kitchen and say, Dad, I broke it. It might cost him his allowance. He’ll still be at the supper table tonight. There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, Romans 8:1. Hired hands hide. Sons can tell the truth.

That’s where James comes in: Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed, James 5:16. Your forgiveness was settled at the cross, and telling a friend adds nothing to that. James says healed. Pardon comes from God. Healing usually needs someone else in the room with you. As long as nobody else knows, you’re fighting it by yourself. Tell someone who loves you, and now there are two of you.

David didn’t confess on his own. It took a Nathan. Some of you need to find yours, and some of you need to be one. When someone comes to you, don’t flinch, don’t lecture, and don’t repeat it. Nathan told David the truth, and he was also the one who said, The LORD has taken away your sin. He carried both.

Turn the Card Over

Find yesterday’s card and turn it over. On the back, write one name. Choose a faithful Christian you trust, someone who will keep it, pray about it, and tell you the truth back. Under the name, write down the conversation you need to have. You don’t have to script it; David did it in two words. Then write a date before next Sunday. Without a date, you’ll keep putting this off, and David’s story shows how long that can go.

If what you’re carrying has hurt someone else, or has become something you can’t stop, that first conversation still matters. It won’t be the last one. The person whose name you wrote down can help you take the next step and walk it with you.

Tomorrow we’ll open a story Jesus told about two sons. Both of them thought their father was an employer.

MEMORY VERSE

And a voice came from heaven: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased.”

Mark 1:11 (CSB)

Weekly Challenge

Keep the date on the back of your card. When you’ve had the conversation, write one sentence on the card about what it was like to say it out loud. If no name comes to mind, ask God every day this week to show you one. And if nothing comes to mind to confess, ask him to make you somebody’s Nathan.

From Fear to Faith | fromfearto.faith

Yesterday I left you with a question: when you picture yourself finally getting it right, whose face do you see? We named the problem and stopped there. That was on purpose. Today Paul starts handing us the cure, and it is found in one small word most of us read right past.

Picture a hired hand on a farm. He shows up at daylight, bales hay, mends fence, and at the end of the week he’s paid for what he did. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s honest work. But under that arrangement, his standing is only as good as last week’s work. At noon he eats his lunch on the porch. The family eats inside at the table.

After over thirty years of preaching, I’m convinced a lot of us run our whole walk with God on hired-hand math. I read my Bible four days this week. I kept my temper with the kids. I made it Wednesday night. I’m probably in pretty good shape. Or the other column: I blew it the other day. I haven’t prayed in a week. I’d better lay low with God until I’ve made up some ground.

In by Grace, Kept by Effort?

That is the very thinking Paul was fighting in Galatia. Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh? Galatians 3:2–3. The teachers who came in behind Paul had a simple message: you got in by grace, so now stay in by effort. Paul calls that foolish.

Then he points to something that has already been settled: for through faith you are all sons of God in Christ Jesus. For those of you who were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ, Galatians 3:26–27. If you’ve put your faith in Jesus and been baptized into him, you became God’s child the day you came up out of the water.

So why do so many of us live like the help? Paul answers with a picture in Galatians 4:1–3. A wealthy family’s son will own the whole estate someday, but while he’s small you can’t tell him apart from the servants. Someone else tells him when to get up and what to eat, and someone else holds the checkbook. That lasts until the time set by his father. The tragedy in Galatia was that the time had come. The father had handed his son the keys to the house, and the son was asking for a bunk out in the barn. Grace felt too good to be true, and rules felt safe.

Two Sendings

Now read the heart of the passage: When the time came to completion, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then God has made you an heir, Galatians 4:4–7.

Paul uses the same verb twice. God sent his Son, and he sent the Spirit of his Son. Both were God’s idea, and both were God moving toward us.

Jesus came born under the law, inside the very system that had us boxed in, and he kept it perfectly all the way to the cross. He came to redeem, which is a purchase word. It is the price paid to buy someone out of slavery. And the purchase had a purpose: he came so that we might receive adoption as sons.

The Greek word is huiothesia, literally “placing as a son.” Paul is the only New Testament writer who uses it. In the Roman world adoption was serious business. A man without an heir would often adopt a grown man to carry his name and receive his estate. Julius Caesar adopted his great-nephew Octavian in his will, and that adoption put him on the road to becoming Caesar Augustus. An adopted son took the family name, stood on equal footing with a son born in the house, and left his old life behind. It was a legal act, settled on paper. God adopted you, gave you his name, and wrote you into the will.

Sisters, this includes you. Paul says “sons” on purpose. In that world the son was the heir, and Paul gives every Christian the son’s standing: There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus, Galatians 3:28. You inherit with every one of God’s children.

Because You Are Sons

Now slow down at verse 6. And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit. There’s the small word I promised you: because.

Why does the order matter? The hired hand assumes the Spirit is the reward. If I get my act together, maybe God will draw near. If I pray more, maybe I’ll feel his presence. Paul runs it the other direction. The sonship comes first, and the Spirit comes because it is already true. When I wrote on this text for a Galatians study a few years ago, I put it this way: the Spirit is God’s proof that he has accepted us as sons.

God sent him into our hearts. He brought his children in off the porch and moved in with them. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him, Romans 8:9.

And once he is there, he cries Abba. It is an Aramaic word, what a child called his father at home. It is also the word Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, hours before the cross: Abba, Father! All things are possible for you. Take this cup away from me, Mark 14:36. The Spirit of that Son lives in you, and he puts the same word in your mouth. Some of us pray like we’re reporting to a supervisor. You don’t have to work up the right mood to call God Abba. The Spirit gives you the word, even on mornings you don’t feel spiritual at all.

Some of you had a father you could never talk to like that. He was hard or he was gone, or he sat at the supper table every night and never really saw you, and you’ve carried that picture into how you see God. The Father who adopted you is the one who put Abba in your mouth.

Assurance You Receive

Paul says it again to the church in Rome, and notice how he uses courtroom language. Can you spot it? For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father!” The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children, Romans 8:15–16.

Maybe you know that fear. You have a bad week and wonder if this is the time God finally gets tired of you. Paul says you did not receive that spirit. When the question is whether you belong to God, your feelings aren’t the only witness, and neither is the accuser. The Spirit takes the stand. He testifies through every promise he put in Scripture about sons and heirs, and through his own life in you.

For most of our lives, assurance has been something we generate. We add up the week and decide how confident we’re allowed to feel. Paul says the Spirit gives that testimony, and we receive it.

You may be asking, “If that’s true, why obey at all?” Well, … sons obey their fathers. What changes is the why. The hired hand works so he’ll get paid. The son works because it’s his father’s farm, and one day it will be his.

Finish the Sentence

Get a pen and an index card. Finish this sentence. Be honest: God is pleased with me when ____.

Maybe you wrote when I read my Bible every day, or when I’m a better husband or wife, or when I finally stop doing that thing. Maybe you couldn’t think of an ending, because you’ve never once felt like he was.

Now draw a line through the word when and everything after it, and look at what’s left. It feels too short. God is pleased with me. Something in us wants to add a clause. Read it next to verse 7: So you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then God has made you an heir.

Underneath, write what God has said about you.

1. I’m his child.

2. I carry his name.

3. His Spirit lives in me.

4. I’m in the will.

Tomorrow we’ll stand at the Jordan River and hear the Father speak over his Son before that Son had preached a sermon or worked a miracle. Keep the card where you can find it.

MEMORY VERSE

And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!”

Galatians 4:6 (CSB)

Weekly Challenge

Put your card in your wallet or tape it to your bathroom mirror. The next time you have a bad day and feel the urge to lie low with God, pull it out and read it out loud. Then pray one honest sentence that begins with “Father.”

Watch a child at a piano recital. She plays the last note, and before she bows, before she even takes a breath, her eyes go out into the crowd looking for her mother’s face.

Most of us never stop doing that. We just learn to do it so smoothly that nobody notices.

A little over a week ago I spent three days with the church in Waterford, Michigan, for their men’s weekend. We worked through Galatians, Luke 15, and a few other texts with one question in front of us: what happens to a person when he stops auditioning for God? The men heard it first, but nothing in it belongs only to men. All of us have an audience. Over the next several days I want to walk you through that same study. We’re calling it Nothing Left to Prove. We’ll start with the problem and end at a father’s table. Today we’ll identify the problem.

Who’s in Your Audience?

So, put it out there, because most of us have never said it out loud.

Some of us are still performing for a parent. Maybe your dad has been gone twelve years. He never once said he was proud of you, or he said it one time and you’ve been chasing the second time ever since. You’re fifty-two years old and he’s still up in the bleachers. You check his face before you check your own conscience.

For others it’s a boss. You rewrote the same email four times in your head last night. You know exactly how this morning’s meeting will feel, and you’ve already rehearsed your part.

It might be your husband or your wife. You love them. You’d die for them. And there’s a part of you that’s always quietly waiting on a grade.

Then there are the people you grew up with. You still talk a certain way around them, and you still laugh at things you don’t think are funny.

Even a church can become an audience. You know how to look faithful on a Sunday morning. You know when to nod, what to say in class, and how long a prayer should run. Late at night you’ve wondered how much of that is you and how much of it is for them.

And some of us are playing to a scoreboard we built in high school: the salary, the house, the grades the kids bring home, the number of people who liked the picture we posted. Nobody else is keeping that score anymore. You still are.

I’ll go first. For years, my audience was other preachers in the part of the brotherhood I grew up in. Before I preached a lesson or published an article, I ran it past them in my head. Would they approve? What would they say? Would someone take one sentence and decide I’d drifted? That audience shaped what I said. It shaped what I left unsaid, too. It took me a long time to see it.

Here’s what all of those have in common. The audition never ends. You get the part and then find out there’s another audition next week. A good week buys you a good week, and that’s all it buys. Applause is the sound a crowd makes when you’ve given it what it wanted, and it always stops. Then you’re standing there waiting for the next round.

Applause feels like freedom while you’re hearing it. But, for a lot of us it’s become a cage.

A Gospel Turned Back Into an Audition

Galatians isn’t a calm letter. Paul usually opens with thanksgiving. Here he skips it and goes straight to the trouble: I am amazed that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel, Galatians 1:6.

What was going on? Teachers had come in behind Paul and told these Gentile Christians that faith in Jesus was a good start. To really be accepted by God, they also needed to be circumcised and keep the law. In essence it was: Jesus gets you in the door, and then the performance starts. That’s the whole crisis in Galatia. The gospel had been turned back into an audition.

Those same teachers said Paul was the crowd-pleaser, a man who shaded his message to suit the room. Paul’s answer in Galatians 5:11 and 6:17 amounts to “Look at my scars.” People who please crowds don’t get stoned and run out of town.

At the end of the letter, Paul names the real crowd-pleasers: Those who want to make a good impression in the flesh are the ones who would compel you to be circumcised—but only to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ, Galatians 6:12. A good impression in the flesh. That was the motive. They adjusted the gospel to fit a crowd.

One Owner

So, when Paul writes Galatians 1:10, he’s writing from the middle of controversy. Read the verse slowly and listen for one small word: or. Persuade people, or God? Please people, or be a servant of Christ? There is no third option.

Most of us have spent years trying to live in the and. I’ll follow Jesus, and I’ll make sure nobody at work thinks I’m strange. I’ll raise my kids in the faith, and I’ll do it without ever making anybody uncomfortable. That sounds reasonable. It even sounds mature. Paul says it won’t work.

Look at the word servant. Paul uses doulos, the ordinary word for a slave, someone who is owned. A first-century slave didn’t have a career plan. He had a master, and his days belonged to somebody else. Paul gladly wears that title. He has one owner.

Jesus said the same thing: No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other, Matthew 6:24. He was talking about money. Put applause in that sentence and it works the same way.

There’s one more small word in the verse: still. If I were still trying to please people. Paul knew that life from the inside. I advanced in Judaism beyond many contemporaries among my people, because I was extremely zealous for the traditions of my ancestors, Galatians 1:14. That’s a scoreboard. Saul of Tarsus knew where he ranked among the men his age. He had the credentials, he was a prominent teacher, and had the approval of everyone who mattered in Jerusalem. And he was so busy climbing that he persecuted the very God he thought he was pleasing.

The most religious person can be the most caged. Saul’s audience wore robes and sat in the Sanhedrin. It was made of religious people, and it was still an audience.

Bars Made of Faces

Living for applause starts small: a little silence here, a little going along there, years of checking the crowd’s face before checking God’s.

So, what does the cage look like on an ordinary day of the week?

It looks like the conversation you keep not having. Your friend’s marriage is coming apart, or another friend is drinking more than anyone wants to admit. You say nothing. You tell yourself it isn’t your place, and you call it respect. You know it’s something else. You don’t want to lose them, and you don’t want them to think less of you.

It looks like a parent who’s never once prayed out loud with the kids. Leading might mean failing, and failing in front of the people who know you best is the thing you fear most.

It looks like someone who can quote the right verses on Sunday and has never once been honest with another Christian about what’s going on inside.

And it can be quieter than that. You do the right thing and then wait to see if anybody noticed. You serve. You show up. You give. Every bit of it has a little string tied to it, running back to somebody’s face.

Now, notice what Jesus bluntly said to a crowd of religious leaders: How can you believe, since you accept glory from one another but don’t seek the glory that comes from the only God? John 5:44. How can you believe? According to Jesus, the approval habit gets in the way of faith itself. If you keep collecting glory from people, you won’t go looking for the glory that comes from God.

That’s the cage. Its bars are made of faces. Most of us have lived in it so long we’ve stopped noticing the bars.

Whose Face Do You See?

I’m going to do something preachers don’t usually do. I’m not going to fix this today. There aren’t three steps out of the cage at the bottom of this post.

You need to feel the weight of the problem before the answer will mean anything. Someone who doesn’t believe they’re caged has no use for a key. Tomorrow we’ll open Galatians 4, and Paul will tell us what God has already done about it.

For today, take one question with you. Don’t answer it fast.

Is it a parent’s? A boss’s? The people you grew up with? The family in the pew behind you? Or is it the face of the One who owns you?

If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ. Be honest with God about which one you’ve been. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.

MEMORY VERSE

For am I now trying to persuade people, or God? Or am I striving to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

Galatians 1:10 (CSB)

Challenge

For the next few days, pay attention to the moment right after you do something well: a good meeting, a kind word, a job finished. Notice where your eyes go and whose reaction you’re waiting for. Write that name down. Don’t try to fix anything yet. Just tell God whose name you wrote.

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There are sins we commit, recognize, confess, and leave behind. Then, there are the things we protect. We excuse them. We rename them. We explain why our situation is different. We may even admit they are weaknesses, but we stop short of actually surrendering them.

Those are the dangerous ones.

Isaiah ends the first chapter of his book with a disturbing picture:

“The strong one will become tinder, and his work a spark; both will burn together, with no one to extinguish the flames.”
— Isaiah 1:31

Do you see how the fire does not come from somewhere else? What we trust becomes the fuel. Our own actions provide the spark. You know, this is often how sin works. For example, you tell yourself that God’s warnings are about some punishment waiting much further down the road of life. Sometimes they are. But the Bible also teaches that rebellion carries destruction within itself. Pride destroys relationships. Bitterness poisons the person carrying it. Greed is never satisfied. Lust demands increasingly more. Dishonesty requires more dishonesty to keep the first lie alive.

What we refuse to surrender eventually begins ruling us. And what rules us can destroy us.

Saul: The Sin He Kept Defending

King Saul is one of the saddest examples in the Old Testament.

When God commanded him to destroy the Amalekites, Saul did most of what he was told. That was the problem. He obeyed far enough to convince himself he had been obedient.

When Samuel arrived, Saul confidently announced:

“May the LORD bless you. I have carried out the LORD’s instructions.”
— 1 Samuel 15:13

Samuel’s response is almost painful:

“Then what is this sound of sheep, goats, and cattle I hear?”
— 1 Samuel 15:14

Saul had spared King Agag and kept the best animals. Then came the excuses.

“The troops brought them.”

“We were going to sacrifice them to the LORD.”

“I did obey.”

Saul’s problem was bigger than a few sheep and cattle. He could not surrender his need to protect himself. When confronted, he shifted blame. When exposed, he explained. When corrected, he worried about appearances.

Eventually he admitted what was really driving him:

“I was afraid of the people. I obeyed them.”
— 1 Samuel 15:24

Even after Samuel announced that God had rejected him as king, Saul was still concerned about how things looked:

“Please honor me now before the elders of my people and before Israel.”
— 1 Samuel 15:30

That sentence reveals a lot. Saul had lost the kingdom, but he was still worried about the crowd. He never really surrendered what was destroying him: his desperate need for approval, control, and position.

But his problem didn’t end there. Before long, Saul was consumed with jealousy toward David. He threw spears. He manipulated his children. He ordered priests killed. He spent enormous energy chasing a man who had done him no wrong. The king who would not surrender his pride eventually became a prisoner of it. Sin rarely stays the size it was when we first decided to protect it.

That is why Proverbs says:

“The one who conceals his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them will find mercy.”
— Proverbs 28:13

Notice both words: confesses and renounces. Confession without surrender can become another way of managing guilt. We can say, “I know I struggle with anger,” while still justifying every outburst. “I know I can be controlling,” while making sure everyone still does things our way. “I know I hold grudges,” while rehearsing the offense every time the person’s name comes up. “I know I worry too much about what people think,” while letting their approval determine our choices.

There comes a point when we must stop explaining the sin and start surrendering it.

Judas: The Thing He Would Not Let Go

Judas gives us the same warning in the New Testament.

We do not know everything that happened inside his heart, and we should be careful not to pretend that we do. But Scripture does tell us something important about him. When Mary anointed Jesus with expensive perfume, Judas objected:

“Why wasn’t this perfume sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”
— John 12:5

That sounded spiritual. John tells us it was not.

“He didn’t say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief. He was in charge of the money-bag and would steal part of what was put in it.”
— John 12:6

Judas had learned how to make greed sound righteous. That may be one of the most dangerous stages of sin: when we become skilled at giving spiritual explanations for things God wants us to surrender. Not long after this, Judas went to the chief priests and asked:

“What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?”
— Matthew 26:15

Thirty pieces of silver. The man who had quietly taken money from the bag eventually sold Jesus for it. That did not happen in one moment. Sin had been given room. Greed had been fed. Something Judas refused to surrender became strong enough to carry him somewhere he probably never imagined going.

Later, when the horror of what he had done became undeniable, Judas was overcome with remorse.

“I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
— Matthew 27:4

He threw the silver into the temple and left. The money he once wanted so badly had become unbearable to hold. That is the cruel promise of sin. It tells us, You need this. Then one day we discover that the thing we thought we needed has taken far more from us than it ever gave. James describes the process:

“But each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death.”
— James 1:14–15

Sin grows. That is the part we often underestimate. We think we are managing it. We think we know where the line is. We think we can keep it contained. But Scripture keeps warning us that the sin we tolerate does not remain passive.

Paul says:

“If you live according to the flesh, you are going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”
— Romans 8:13

There is nothing casual about “put to death.” Jesus said it another way:

“If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.”
— Luke 9:23

Following Jesus requires surrender because there are things in us that cannot be allowed to lead.

What Are You Still Protecting?

Most of us do not have trouble identifying everybody else’s problem.

Our own can be harder.

• Maybe it is resentment you believe you have a right to keep.

• Maybe it is a relationship you know is pulling you away from God.

• Maybe it is ambition.

• Maybe it is pornography.

• Maybe it is money.

• Maybe it is your temper.

• Maybe it is the need to be right.

• Maybe it is the need to be admired.

• Maybe it is an old wound that has become such a large part of your identity that you no longer know who you would be without the anger attached to it.

• Maybe it is something nobody else knows.

Whatever it is, do not make peace with what Jesus died to free you from.

Hebrews tells us:

“Let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us.”
— Hebrews 12:1

Lay it aside. Don’t rename it. Don’t defend it. Don’t hide it. Don’t blame somebody else for it. Don’t promise to deal with it eventually.

Surrender it.

Isaiah warned Judah that the things they trusted would become tinder and flame. Saul protected his pride until it consumed his reign. Judas fed his greed until thirty pieces of silver became the price of betrayal.

Their stories are extreme, but the principle is painfully ordinary. The sin we continually excuse becomes easier to repeat. What we repeatedly practice becomes part of us. And what we refuse to surrender eventually begins demanding more.

God’s call is not meant to rob us of life. It is meant to save us from the things that are quietly destroying it. That is why repentance is grace. God points to what is killing us and says, Let it go. And when we finally open our hands, we discover that surrender was never the end of freedom.

It was only the beginning.

1. Israel Was Told to Remember

   1. Leviticus 19:33-34: Two commands:

      1. Don’t oppress the stranger, 19:33.

      2. You are to love him as yourself, 19:34.

   2. See how He ties it all back to Egypt. for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God, 19:34 See also Exodus 23:9; Deuteronomy 10:18-19.

2. The Church Has Inherited This Command

   1. Hebrews 13:1: Let brotherly love continue. Brotherly love (Philadelphia)

      1. Hebrews 13:2: Don’t neglect to show hospitality, …describing the love of a stranger.

   2. Notice how he phrases the second command: Don’t neglect to show hospitality, …

      1. Romans 12:13: Share with the saints in their needs; pursue hospitality.

         1. Chase it. Go after it. Don’t wait for it to come to you.

   3. The reason for the pursuit: Hebrews 13:2…for by doing this some have welcomed angels as guests without knowing it. He’s thinking of Abraham in Genesis 18:1-10. You never know who is at the door.

3. So, How Far Does it Go?

   1. Galatians 6:10: let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.

      1. Especially sets a priority. Those in the brotherhood come first.

      2. But this is inside of the good of all. It needs to be a priority.

   2. 2 Corinthians 9:13: Corinthian generosity in sharing with them and with everyone.

4. Now, the Harder Part

   1. Matthew 5:44: But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

   2. Matthew 5:47: And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what are you doing out of the ordinary? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? Loving the people who love you back is no achievement.

5. What This Looks Like Tomorrow

   1. Who’s the stranger you already know about?

   2. Most of what we’ve talked about today is not dramatic.

      1. Titus 3:14: Let our people learn to devote themselves to good works for pressing needs, so that they will not be unfruitful. We have to be taught this. Nobody’s born hospitable.

6. Look to Jesus.

   1. He was the stranger.

      1. Matthew 8:20: Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.

      2. John 1:11: He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.

   2. On judgment, He will put Himself in the stranger’s place.

      1. Matthew 25:35: For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in;

      2. The stranger at your door and the Lord at the judgment are closer together than you think.

7. As We Close…

   1. Israel was told to remember. So are we. You were the stranger once. Somebody made room. Go and do the same.

Ask someone who has survived a disaster why they made it. Sooner or later, the answer turns inward. There must have been a reason. Something about the timing, or the choices, or the kind of person they are. Most of us read our survival as a verdict on our worth.

Isaiah, some twenty-seven centuries ago, saw it differently. The first chapter of his book opens with God taking His own people to court, and the land outside the courtroom is already stripped. Cities had been burned. Foreigners ate the fields while the owners stood and watched. Only one city was left, and Isaiah says it looked like a shelter in a vineyard, like a shack in a cucumber field, Isaiah 1:8. A lean-to of branches in a picked field. That was Jerusalem.

Then Isaiah explains why anything was left standing at all.

Notice the pronoun

Us. Isaiah is the prophet, and he does not step outside the guilty nation to deliver the charge against it. He is one of the survivors, and he says so in the same breath in which he says the nation deserved the same ending Sodom received.

So, what was the difference between Jerusalem and Sodom? God left survivors in one city and none in the other. That is the whole of it. Isaiah does not say Judah behaved better, and what we read in chapter 1 makes that impossible to argue. Her worship was busy, and her hands were bloody. Her rulers loved graft and would not hear a widow’s case. The comparison to Sodom is not softened anywhere in the paragraph.

The Sodom picture carries its own weight. Abraham had bargained God down to ten righteous men, and God agreed to spare the city for ten, Genesis 18:32. There were not ten. When the angels came for the one family that got out, Lot dragged his feet, and Moses records what happened next: because of the LORD’s compassion for him, the men grabbed his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters, and they brought him out, Genesis 19:16. He was carried out by the wrist. A few verses later, the reason is given in simple terms. God remembered Abraham, Genesis 19:29.

Even at Sodom, the survivor survived on mercy.

Spared, and still called Sodom

Read the next verse without a break, because Isaiah did not put one there.

Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the instruction of our God, you people of Gomorrah! Isaiah 1:10.

He has just told them they were not destroyed like Sodom. Now he addresses them by Sodom’s name. In the ruins the comparison was near; in the wickedness it is exact. The people God spared are called after the city God did not spare, and they are called that in the sentence right after they are told mercy is the only reason they are breathing.

Being spared was a door held open. Verse 10 is God’s voice through that door, telling them to listen while it is still open.

Paul builds on this verse

Centuries later, Paul faced a hard question. Most of Israel had not believed in Israel’s Messiah. Had God’s word failed? He answers in Romans 9.

It is not as though the word of God has failed, Romans 9:6. Then he goes to the prophets to prove it, and one of the two verses he uses is this one. And just as Isaiah predicted: If the Lord of Armies had not left us offspring, we would have become like Sodom, and we would have been made like Gomorrah, Romans 9:29. Two verses earlier, he had already quoted Isaiah on the same theme: only the remnant will be saved, Romans 9:27.

Paul did not invent this pattern. He found it in Isaiah. God has always dealt with Israel by preserving a remnant, and that remnant lives on mercy. That is exactly what Isaiah 1:9 says. It is also what Paul says in his own words two chapters later: there is also at the present time a remnant chosen by grace. Now if by grace, then it is not by works; otherwise grace ceases to be grace, Romans 11:5–6.

Notice what the remnant doctrine does to our pride. A remnant is small, and that stings. A remnant is also spared, and the sparing has nothing to do with being the best of a bad crop. God does not survey a collapsing nation and keep the top two percent. He leaves a seed because He is merciful.

Look to Jesus

What Paul quotes is worth a second look. Isaiah wrote survivors. The Greek translation Paul used reads offspring, a word that means seed. That seed language runs throughout Isaiah and culminates in one figure. Of the suffering Servant, it is promised that he will see his seed and prolong his days, Isaiah 53:10.

The remnant narrows across Isaiah’s book until it comes down to one man. And that man is the one God gives up.

Paul says it that way himself. He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, Romans 8:32. Follow the word spare through three scenes. Sodom was not spared and had no survivors. Jerusalem was spared and had a few. Calvary is where God declined to spare the only one who deserved to be, and that is the ground every survivor has stood on since.

What this asks of you

If you have come through something, resist the instinct to explain it by pointing at yourself. The house that did not burn. The test that came back clean. The marriage that held. None of it is a scorecard, and reading it as one will make you insufferable to the people whose story went the other way. Isaiah stood in a stripped country and gave credit in one direction.

And do not mistake being spared for being approved. That is what verse 10 is for. Judah was still keeping the calendar and still filling the temple courts, and God said He could not stand it. The same mercy that left them alive called them to wash, to stop, to learn, and to defend the widow (Isaiah 1:16–17).

So take the mercy without flinching, and let it do its work. God did not leave the survivors of Isaiah 1 alive to keep them as they were. Read twenty verses further, and you find what He had in mind for them: Afterward you will be called the Righteous City, a Faithful Town, Isaiah 1:26. The hand that spared the city is the hand that remakes it, and Isaiah puts both in the same chapter.

He still works that way. Everything good in your life came to you on the terms the survivors got, and those terms are a starting line.

So live this week like someone who has been spared and knows it, and let that show in how you treat the people still standing beside you.

1. As Opportunity Comes

   1. Galatians 6:10: Therefore, as we have opportunity, .…

      1. Opportunity: a season, a window, the right moment for a certain thing.

   2. Proverbs 3:27: When it is in your power, don’t withhold good from the one to whom it belongs.

      1. The good you have in your possession belongs to someone else.

      2. Paul says: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do, Ephesians 2:10.

   3. James 4:17: So it is sin to know the good and yet not do it.

2. Good is something you work.

   1. Galatians 6:10: …let us work for the good of all, …

      1. Everybody in this room is in favor of good. That costs nothing.

      2. Good, in the New Testament, requires a little sweat equity.

         1. Galatians 5:22-23: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.

   2. The two different words for good in these two verses:

      1. Galatians 6:9: Let us not get tired of doing good, .…

         1. That which is fine, noble, admirable, the sort of thing you’d want people to see.

      2. Galatians 6:10: let us work for the good of all, .…

         1. This is the good (the action) that actually helps somebody.

   3. Then: let us work for the good of all, … The scope is wide.

3. The tired part comes later.

   1. Galatians 6:9: Let us not get tired of doing good, …

      1. Tired: means to lose heart, to run out of the will to keep at a thing.

         1. 2 Thessalonians 3:13: But as for you, brothers and sisters, do not grow weary in doing good.

   2. Galatians 6:9: we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.

      1. Giving up means to go slack, to come unstrung, to collapse.

      2. Matthew 15:32: …I don’t want to send them away hungry, otherwise they might collapse on the way.

4. The harvest is on God’s calendar.

   1. Galatians 6:9: we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.

      1. Its own season, … as we have opportunity.

      2. Two seasons in two verses. One of them is ours. The other one belongs to God.

   2. 1 Corinthians 3:6: I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.

   3. Galatians 6:9: If we don’t give up.

      1. Compare to 1 Corinthians 15:58: Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

5. Look to Jesus.

   1. Acts 10:38: God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the tyranny of the devil, because God was with him.

   2. John 4:6: Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, worn out from his journey, sat down at the well. It was about noon.

6. Conclusion Who’s the opportunity you already know about?

Loving your neighbor is work that shows up in front of you. You don't have to invent it. Solomon said:

Read that last phrase again. To whom it belongs. The good in your hands already belongs to somebody. You are just the one holding it. This might include the hours in your week, the second car in your driveway, or the extra bedroom in your house. God handed you every bit of it with somebody else in mind.

Notice there are no fences in the verse. Solomon doesn’t say the one who deserves it, the one who has earned it, the one who goes to church with you, or the one on your list of approved churches. Whoever needs it. Whatever you have.

Paul says the same thing from another angle. For we are his creation, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do, Ephesians 2:10. The work was laid out before you ever heard about it, and you walk up on it in the middle of an uneventful week.

So how do you know who the good belongs to? Jesus has already answered that. Love your neighbor as yourself, Matthew 22:39. Then He hands us the measuring stick. Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets Matthew 7:12. That is the principle underneath Proverbs 3:27.

Now, think of yourself. What would you want done if it were your diagnosis, your layoff, or your father in that hospital bed? Whatever you would want for yourself is what belongs to the person standing in front of you. The Golden Rule tells us how to behave, and in doing so, it tells us who the good in our hands belongs to.

Life happens. We don’t schedule the storm. We don’t schedule the diagnosis, the layoff, or the phone call that comes at two in the morning. We find out about them after the fact, and that’s how the assignment reaches us.

A rental truck backs into a driveway two doors down on a Saturday morning. Nobody mails you a letter about it. You look up from the mower, and the work is already sitting there. Somebody in that family will remember your help for the next twenty years because you carried the box spring up the stairs. It works the same way in a hospital waiting room or with the coworker who mentions, almost in passing, that things are hard at home.

Most of the good we withhold is never really refused. It just gets postponed. Solomon knows that too.

Tomorrow always sounds generous when we say it, and postponing is how the good ends up staying in our hands. We do not pick the people. We do not set the timing. The delivery is the part left to us.

So, look around this week. Who has God already placed in front of you, and what are you holding that belongs to them?

Moses had run out of excuses, so he reached for one more.

What if they don’t believe me and don’t listen to me but say, “The Lord did not appear to you”? Exodus 4:1. He had already tried, Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, Exodus 3:11. He had asked for a name to hide behind: Exodus 3:13. Now he puts it on the crowd. They will never listen. Nobody in Egypt is going to take the word of a fugitive who has been gone forty years.

God does not argue with him. God asks him about a stick.

The Lord asked him, “What is that in your hand?” Exodus 4:2.

A Shepherd’s Stick

Moses looks down and answers, A staff.

Think about what that piece of wood meant to him. He was raised in Pharaoh’s household and educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, Acts 7:22. He could have been holding a scepter. Instead, he is out past the far side of the wilderness, keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro Exodus 3:1. The sheep were not even his. That staff was perhaps one of the few possessions of his second life.

So when God asks the question, God is not asking for information. He is asking Moses to look honestly at what forty wasted-looking years had put right in front of him.

Throw It Down

Throw it on the ground. Moses does, and the staff becomes a snake, and Moses runs from it, Exodus 4:3.

Then comes God’s instructions. Stretch out your hand and catch it by the tail, Exodus 4:4. Anyone who has ever dealt with a snake knows you reach for it behind the head. God tells him to grab the wrong end. Moses obeys, and the thing goes stiff in his fist, and he is holding his old staff again.

Notice the order. It had to leave his hand before it could come back with power in it. What we clutch stays what it was. What we hand over, God can use.

Moses is not finished objecting. The signs are settled, so he moves the trouble off the crowd and onto himself. Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, he says, and then, my mouth and my tongue are sluggish, Exodus 4:10. Watch how God answers. He asks another question. Who placed a mouth on humans? Who makes a person mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Exodus 4:11. Then comes the promise. Now go! I will help you speak, and I will teach you what to say. Exodus 4:12. That reluctant, sluggish tongue was one more thing in his hand. Moses had carried it around for eighty years, calling it a disqualification.

Whose Staff Is It Now?

A small phrase in verse 20 is easy to read past. As Moses prepares for the trip to Egypt, the text says, And Moses took God’s staff in his hand, Exodus 4:20.

Eighteen verses earlier, it was a staff. Now it belongs to God. Nothing about the wood had changed. Same knots, same weathering from forty years of sun. The difference is ownership.

Watch where that stick shows up after this. Lift up your staff, stretch out your hand over the sea, and divide it, Exodus 14:16. It strikes the rock at Horeb and water comes out for a whole nation to drink, Exodus 17:5-6. It goes up on a hill above a battlefield while Israel fights Amalek in the valley, Exodus 17:9. A shepherd’s walking stick, cut somewhere in Midian, ends up parting a sea.

Centuries later, a prophet asks the same question. A widow comes to Elisha with her husband in the grave and a creditor at the door, ready to take her two boys as slaves to settle the account, 2 Kings 4:1. Elisha does not take up a collection. He says, Tell me, what do you have in the house? Her answer is next to nothing. Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil, 2 Kings 4:2. So he tells her to borrow every empty vessel in the neighborhood, shut the door behind her, and start pouring. She pours until there is not one jar left to fill, and the oil stops the moment the last one is full, 2 Kings 4:6. She sells it, clears the debt, and she and her sons live on the rest.

She had written that jar off as too small to count. It was the only thing God asked about.

Jesus Asks the Same Question

Five thousand men are sitting on a hillside, and the disciples want them sent home. Jesus tells the Twelve to feed them, which is not remotely possible. Then he asks, How many loaves do you have? Go and see, Mark 6:38.

Go count it. That is the whole assignment. They come back with five loaves and two fish, a boy’s lunch set against the size of the problem. Jesus takes it, blesses it, breaks it, and twelve baskets of leftovers are carried off that hill.

He never asked them to produce what they did not have. He asked what was already in their hands.

The Question Comes to You

Most of us are waiting on equipment. We would serve if we had more training, more confidence, a better story to tell, a schedule with some room in it. Meanwhile we look at what we are carrying and decide it is too simple to matter. A truck. A kitchen. A set of tools. A trade we have practiced so long we have quit thinking of it as a skill.

So what is in your hand this morning? How much of your life have you written off as a detour, when God may have spent those years teaching you to hold something? Have you thrown it down yet, or are you still gripping it and calling it too ordinary to offer?

God did not send Moses back to Egypt with a new tool. He sent him with the old one and His own name on it.

1. James 4:1-3: The Source of the Problem

   1. James 4:1: Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you?

      1. “Passions” (hedonism). Cravings. Appetites. “The things I want.”

      2. “Wage war,” a military word; the appetites are campaigning inside you.

   2. James 4:2b …You do not have because you do not ask. We never brought it to God at all.

   3. James 4:3: You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. Some pray — and pray for ammunition.

2. James 4:4-5: What’s At the Root

   1. James 4:4: You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? …

   2. Galatians 5:20: hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, …

3. James 4:6: But He Gives Greater Grace

   1. James 4:6b: God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.

      1. God moves toward the man with open hands.

      2. The proud man is turned away because his hands are full.

4. James 4:7-10: What Surrender Actually Looks Like

   1. James 4:7: Submit to God. Resist the devil

   2. James 4:8: Draw near to God. Purify your hearts, you double-minded.

   3. James 4:9: Be miserable and mourn and weep.

   4. James 4:10: Humble yourselves before the Lord.

5. So, Where Am I Resisting?

   1. Where is there a room in your life you haven’t given him a key to?

   2. Where’s the private scoreboard? Who’s on it?

   3. Is there a person you’ve stopped praying for because you’d rather be right about them?

   4. When you were corrected last — what came up in your mind first? Self-Defense?.

   5. Where have you been praying for ammunition instead of praying for a changed heart?

   6. Is there a place where you’re technically obedient and internally furious?

   7. What have you told yourself is conviction that’s actually just not wanting to lose?

   8. Where have you been double-minded … Wanting God and wanting your way, hoping you never have to pick?

6. Look at Him

   1. Luke 22:42: Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me—nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done. He didn’t stroll into surrender. He came looking for an exit first.

      1. Surrender isn’t the absence of wanting something else. It’s the nevertheless.

   2. Hebrews 12:2: keeping our eyes on Jesus, …We keep our eyes on the one who can see us to the end.

   3. Hebrews 12:3: For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you won’t grow weary and give up. He walked down to where you are and then walked further. He went first.

7. As We Close…

   1. James 4:10 is a promise: Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

   2. Open your hands.