Alright, I'm not the teacher and I'm not actually in charge and I can't actually give you homework, but I gave you voluntary if you feel like at homework yesterday. And my question for you to think about, both then and now, is once again as follows. If somebody came along and they gave you three time travel tokens that you could use on your own life to go back and see stuff or change stuff or whatever you wanted to do, what would you use those three tokens on? My guess is that for those of you hearing it right now and thinking it through on the fly, and for those of you who had a day to think about this, you came up with something that sounds a little bit like this. I bet a bunch of you were like, I would use that to go see something beautiful. Something that was a moment where everything about life was right, that horrible tragedy that would happen later hadn't happened yet. Everybody was there, everything was right, things weren't broken, we were filled with optimism, whatever it is. I bet some of you would go back and see the beautiful thing. I would guess that if you had a time travel token that had to be used once again on your own life, not to go hang out with Abe Lincoln or anything like that, I would guess that some of you would use it to go back and be more attentive to something you missed. I bet there are some of you listening who thought of that kid that you've only got one or two years left with under your roof. And you thought about the sweet moments when they were just tiny and little and they learned how to walk and they were figuring things out, and you were looking forward to them being older. You were looking forward to them being the next thing, and you weren't in that moment as much as you could have been in that moment. And now you understand what maybe you let slip by a little bit, and you would use one of those tokens to go and drink that in, the way every wise person in your life was telling you and telling me to drink it in, but we just didn't know how to as that beautiful moment passed by. Still others of you, I bet, decided that you would use that token to go and say something you should have said, whether it was making things right with somebody, whether it was resolving something on a deathbed that should have been clarified, or going back even further, maybe to make sure that nothing needed to be resolved, that there was no truth or affirmation or fix it that needed to be done, but rather that you could just go back and get things right in the first place to warn somebody of a tragic thing that was about to happen. I'd use one of my tokens on that. I would make a phone call one particular day in one particular year to a person I loved and be like, hey, if you trust that I care about you at all and you can suspend needing to know why I am calling you, I just want to ask you not to get in the car today. Call in sick, take one day, don't do anything, and let's never talk about this again. I'd use a token on that. I bet some of you would as well. Some of you would use it like Biff tried to in Back to the Future 2, to go back and invest in things and know how the market's gonna work and to make your life amazing. But I bet every single person sitting opposite me, listening to this conversation, would have done one thing with one of those tokens at least. And that is to go back and unmake an awful decision that you made somewhere along the line. Maybe a secret thing that you did and you still hope nobody ever finds out about, because if they do, you can't imagine how much it'll hurt people you love or damage things that you've invested in. Maybe it was simply a very public, very wrong choice where you thought you knew what you were doing and your principles were in line, but it wasn't right, and history made it very clear you you didn't make the right decision. Some regret, some hurt, some thing that you said, some thing that you did, something that you could have done, but did not do, I bet every one of us would use at least one of our three tokens to go and try to unmake something that we got wrong. To try to fix one of those moments of abiding regret that is going to shape us and be with us until the moment we die. To deal with shame, to deal with failure, to deal with deep regret, to deal with injury that we inflicted on people we love or just innocent bystanders is one of the most natural things and and unavoidable things in the world for humans with a soul to wrestle with as long as they're alive. And for those of you who have been hanging out with me for a while, you know we talked about this stuff when we were in Matthew chapter six and looking at the concept of forgiveness. There is no such thing as atonement. You can try to square up accounts, you can try to make something better, but you can't unmake the stuff you did wrong. The laws of time and space and human memory and the butterfly effect say that once that thing is done, it is banked and it is real, and that's just something you're gonna have to figure out how to make do with. Unless there is one character who is ultimately responsible for keeping track of all of that stuff, unless there is one character who is ultimately master of time and space and guilt and the human mind and the butterfly effect, and unless there were such a character who had such a power, who was ultimately responsible for right and wrong, and space and time, and the human soul, and the human mind and guilt, and who was the ultimate arbiter of whether or not something counts forever or is resolved and forgiven. And if such a character existed, who was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently knowing and sufficiently good, a character who understood what it would feel like for you to feel that kind of stuff, who understood the flow of time, how absolutely unchangeable and immovable those deepest hurts and failures of our past are, if there was a character like that who understood stuff like that and was moved by stuff like that, and was benefited to demonstrate his own quality as such a deity, and was qualified and so inclined to do something about those points of guilt. Well, if such a reality as that existed, then maybe something could be done about those deep abiding hurts and regrets that you and I would use a time travel token on. But here's the thing of all of the forces that you and I looked at over the last chapter of Matthew 8, social forces, the force of distance, the force of time, the force of nature, the force of spiritual things, the force of disease, the force of otherness and social boundaries, the forces of physics, all of these things are immovable objects, but are any of them at the level of the soul as immovable as guilt? As that stuff that you, without me pushing you at all, went to in your brain that you would want to use at least one of those time travel tokens on. No, I don't think they are. I think that is the immovable force that shapes the human experience, it shapes how we think of ourselves. We try to purge ourselves of that by creating new ethical systems and by just pretending that we can rewrite our own history and make the thing that we know was devastatingly wrong, just suddenly not wrong. Well, if I don't think it's wrong anymore, then I don't have to feel bad about that. But it doesn't work. There's something about us that knows when we broke something, and there's something about us that knows that some broken things can't be unbroken unless, once again, there was a character who was positioned properly to truly and meaningfully do something about the greatest immovable force of all, which is our justified sense of guilt locked into time. We might think forgiveness is a casual thing that you just throw out and you're like, ah, it's forgiven. And from person to person, I guess it could be a casual thing, just a thing where we're like, you know what, I'm just gonna let this thing go, and that's cool. And it's life-giving, and it's awesome to give it or to receive it. But in the grand scheme of things, Jesus of Nazareth gets done demonstrating all kinds of authority over all kinds of the limitations we just talked about. And then we get into Matthew chapter nine, and here is the jewel in the crown. He is going to claim to have authority over human guilt. Not just over our failures in the moment, but over our failures locked into time and calcified in memory and the ripple effect of hurt. He is going to claim authority over that, and he's going to do it in a way that goes beyond just rhetoric. I mean, like, I could do this if I wanted to, but he's going to demonstrate it in one of those beautiful marriages between the miraculous and the invisible spiritual realities that we get looking at the life of Jesus throughout the Gospel of Matthew. And that is where we're going to pick it up tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And if what we're looking at tomorrow is true, this is a bigger deal than being granted three time travel tokens to go and try to fix our own messes. Looking forward to gaming it out. I'll catch you on Yama.