Sex As A Gift

Pastor Ian Graham invites us to look at sex as a gift from God.

Transcript

Setting A Careful Tone

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's really good to be together here today. We are continuing a teaching series about three concepts and ideas that are often held in suspicion in our culture. That being power, today's topic, sex, and money. And so what I want to do today is continue with this ambition of not letting the abuses and distortions frame the board, because this is what so often happens, is we talk about these concepts that are truly gifts from God. But because of the extent to which things have been abused or distorted, then we we almost feel uncomfortable or self-conscious talking about them. And in doing so, we we miss the gift that is before us. And so what I want to do today is hopefully set the game in such a way that we come away with uh some some sense of God's vantage point when it comes to the idea of sex. And I want to, as we do this, uh just set a couple of parameters here first. First of all, as we talk about this, uh Paul and Jesus himself will talk about these concepts in mixed company. And so I am aware that in this room that not everybody is married. We as Ecclesia, we hold to what we think is a historic biblical ethic on marriage. Now, not everybody in this room agrees with that sentiment, but what I'm saying is for us, we think that marriage is a pretext for sexual activity, uh, specifically marriage between a man and a woman. And so when I'm talking to this crowd of people, I recognize that there are people that are married in our midst, but I also recognize there are people that are not married. And what we see in Jesus and Paul is they taught about marriage and by extension sex within the context of mixed companies like this one. And so the the precursor is not that everybody is at a stage of their life where sexual activity is prescribed from the vantage point of the scriptures, which is important for us. Second, statistically, in a room this size, there are dear souls whose bodies have been violated and abused sexually. So I am so sorry for what you have experienced. Nobody should ever do that to you, and nobody should ever go through that. I have no desire to bring you back there or trigger memories. And I say this is always true, but I want to say this very plainly. You are not trapped here. And if you're sitting in here and you're kind of saying, I don't know if I want to deal with this on a gloomy Sunday morning, that's okay. In just a moment, I'm gonna invite everybody to stand up and talk for a minute. And there'll be an opportunity just to slide out quietly if you're just like, you know what, that's not that's not what I'm here for today. But I also, before we do that, I just want to tell you the truth that Jesus loves you. That no matter what has happened to you, you are not tarnished in his sight. That no matter the absence of God you may have experienced, he has never once taken his eyes off of you. He he was there in your sorrow and in your suffering, and he is there still. There is healing and wholeness even in those desolate places. And I know that's hard to believe. But I know that's the truth of what Jesus does. Third, as Deborah writes in her book, Redeeming Sex, every human being on the planet is sexually broken. All of us are on a journey toward wholeness. Not one of us is excluded. Indiscriminate of our season in life, of where we find ourselves, this is the fractured world that we live in. The gift of sex is not only defined by its absence, its misuse, or its presence. I know for some of us in here today, we have received the scripture's vision for sex as a vision for our own lives, and we are doing our best to live it out. And if we're honest, for those of us who are on the before end of sex and marriage, we envision a lot of what that will look like and what that will experience will be like. And I went to a Christian college. I know that a lot of us harbor secret hopes that that will somehow fix everything about us. And for those of us who are married on the other side of that, we can sit here before you and say, hey, when that is a present reality in your life, it will not fix everything. It will actually complicate things much more greatly. This is one of the many half-truths of what's become known as the purity culture movement. It's kind of been consolidated into a whole culture and stream. Dozens and dozens of books published with what I think is a noble aim to help young men and young women preserve their sexual activity for covenant marriage. I think that's a noble aim. But as so often, when we have even a noble aim, we have to allow the Jesus way to inform the way we go about achieving that aim. And so often what's prescribed in purity culture is you have this noble vision of what life should look like, and then it's all about you to grit your teeth and figure it out and discipline yourself in order to achieve that aim. The purity culture movement focused rightly on the goal of helping people save themselves from marriage. Yes and amen. But the prescriptions for achieving this often weighed heavily, especially on young women. The editor of the book that I'm writing is a woman named Rachel Joy Welcher, and she wrote a book called Talking Back to Purity Culture, that I commend to you as somebody writing from her own experience. You can check that book out. But the prescriptions within what broadly is cast as purity culture often put heavy burdens on young women, making them responsible for men's lusts, making them self-conscious about their own emerging sexual desires, and enshrining an almost repressive approach to anything resembling sex until their wedding night, when almost by magic, this young woman was then suddenly to feel an immense freedom and shamelessness sexually. Now, all the while, all of this is being heaped upon women. Within this culture, men are subtly exempt from self-control. Women are responsible for the boundaries and dating relationships and the confines of men's thoughts by the way that they talk and they dress. Men are assumed to be hopelessly lustful. Now, we say to all of that, yes, we think that Jesus has a vision for the way that we live this out practically and ethically. But if we are tying up heavy burdens, especially placing them upon women, we are just reenshrining the patterns that are so present in our culture. And Jesus has a different vision. For those of us who are married, we can testify that the context for receiving the gift of sex in marriage does not absolve us of the pain, rejection, brokenness of human sexuality. We bring misplaced expectations and we heap them onto our spouses. We are selfish. We try to make our spouse our healer when only the Savior can heal. We objectify even the person who's closest to us. We withhold ourselves sexually as punishment. Okay, everybody take a deep breath. All of this as pretext. I'm gonna invite you to stand and have a conversation. Say hello to somebody. Now, for the introverts among you, I'm sorry, this is the way it must be. But you know, you can hold up a sign and just say, don't talk to me, that's fine. But just for a minute, and and friends, truly, with uh with laughter in our midst, it's what a joy. But if you if if you're like, hey, I'm just not here for this today, my my hope is just never to embarrass anybody. And if you need to slide out, go in peace. Jesus loves you. All right, take your time and uh I'll bring you back in when the fun's over. Okay, fun's over. This is uh I think I think indicative of the fact that we should do that every week. That was awesome. Happened in the first service, too. I was like, wow. Really, really beautiful. It's just it's a joy. I get a special vantage point at times just to watch this church be what it is, and it's a wonder and it's a miracle. And so thank you. That's really cool. All right, a couple of worldly cultural vantage points on sex uh for us. Uh slide for this too, Chris. Thank you, sir. Um, first, from the world's vantage point, sex is performance-based, and this is not just about sexual performance, but just the idea that it's not a it's not a gift of grace, but it's something that you have to conjure up for yourself and show yourself worthy of. It's consent-based. Again, this became the buzzword over the last 10 years, which is an important pretext. This is very important. And what we find that the things, the vestiges that are true in our culture are often things that need to be a baseline, but the scriptures have an expansive view where sometimes we have a narrow view. And consent is a very, in my mind, a very narrow but necessary perspective. But anything that's done between two consenting adults is fair game. Third, what the philosophers called Gnosticism, which is essentially separating the interior of our lives from the exterior, whether that be body and soul and spirit. But often what is considered in our culture is that what's done in the body is sort of irrelevant to the integrity in the whole of our lives. Repression is an unforgivable sin. This has all the makings of Freud at its fountain head, but that all of us are trying to find outlets to express these deep yearnings and desires, and to not do so actually will diminish you as a person. Experience is a plus. How could you love somebody else well with your body if you haven't practiced is kind of the working assumption. Individuality is centered. It's about my expression, my pleasure, my gratification. It's for sale. The pornography industry as a paragon of the commodification of sexuality is a tens and tens and billions of dollars industry. There's play involved. Creation is a bug, not a feature. Again, we have all these technologies that seek to deny the natural progression of sexual activity leading to creation. Now, again, there are caveats to that. I know I sit amongst dear sisters and brothers who are married and have tried to conceive a child, and that has not happened. So I want to say that very clearly. But the prescriptive, normative version of that is that creation is a byproduct of sexual activity. And in our culture, we try to diminish and deny that with birth control, plan B, all these technologies that we have. And again, not moralizing any of those at this moment, but just saying that's that's a reality. Last, and I think this is summative, it is everything determinative of our identity, our sexual expression is an expression of who we are. It's about our fulfillment that we can't be a fulfilled person without engaging in these sorts of activities. Alright, let's compare these to a scriptural vantage point. And again, anytime I say scriptural, I'm I'm I'm hesitant to use that word. Um, these are things you can point to in the scriptures. Is this a completely holistic summative version of this? It's not. Uh God's word is inexhaustible. So, but these are some things that we can see in that uh library of scriptures. It's intimacy-based. It's two people communicating. It's not just about physical activity, it's about the mingling of souls expressed in a covenant relationship, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or worse. That's a very different prescription than consent. It assumes consent, but it doesn't stop there. It is more. Come what may. It's embodied. Instead of distinguishing between the interior of our lives and the exterior, this is an integrating vision, heart, soul, mind, and strength given to another, that what we do in our bodies matters. Instead of individuality, there's mutuality. Instead of self-pleasing, self-fulfilling, there is self-giving to another person. In the context, in the face of another person. You have that person's preferences, that person's reality put before you. It's sacred, not commodified. We approach it with all due reverence and fearfulness. There's play. Again, vestiges of culture tell the truth. There are things that overlap between the kingdom's vision and our culture's vision. Because there's an author of all creation that made every single person you'll ever see. Creation is a feature, not a bug. Again, all caveats from above applied. And lastly, and this is very important, it is a gift. But it's a mere sliver of the full life that Jesus has for us. And this is so important because, as I mentioned, I'm standing in front of people. Not everybody is married, not everybody is in a context for sexual activity. A few years back, we did a teaching series on relationships broadly, and we focused on a few of these areas. And one of the things I found is that when churches talk about marriage, they often ignore the people that are in their midst that are not married, single people. And we have several different kinds of single people in our midst. We have people that are single for now, right? That are on some road to being married, whether that be in a relationship or just because of their age, or that is down the road. And then we have people in our midst that are single, and that seems to be something that will be a feature of their life going forward. And here's the thing about being single: the most fulfilled, the most joyful, the most human person who has ever lived, Jesus of Nazareth. No sexual activity. And what this does is it counterintuitively pushes against our culture's assumptions about sex and about what it means, because Jesus, fully alive, the fullness of life in person. Sex was not a part of that life. And we so easily buy into our culture's narratives about what it means to be fulfilled, about what it means to live a full life. And here's Jesus and Paul for saying, I've got all I need. I want to invite you to turn over to 1 Corinthians chapter 6, and as we do so, I want to invite us to a sort of trifocal lens looking at sexuality as a gift, as a gift of a good God who gives good gifts to his children. Sex in marriage, the gift of sex in marriage, calls all of us, not just those who are married, to reverence, to joy, and to freedom or liberation. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6, beginning in verse 12, all things are permitted for me, but not all things are beneficial. All things are permitted for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach, and the stomach for food, and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. In 1 Corinthians, which will be our summer teaching series as we approach that time of the year, Paul employs a technique where he will quote the Corinthians' conclusions that they've come to as a way of sort of disarming them and rebuffing them. So we see this if you look up at the text that's on the screen here, you see in verse 12, that should be 12, and then verse 13, all things are permitted for me are in quotations. This is our modern translator's attempt to capture what Paul is doing. He's employing a rhetorical device. And you see this actually with the teaching about women teaching in church, too. But what Paul is doing is saying, This is the conclusion you've come to. Here, very graciously, is why you're wrong. So, all things are permitted for me is a Corinthian conclusion. And we think that Paul either had received some sort of correspondence from the Corinthian church in them writing to him, and he's sort of saying, okay, here's the conclusion you've come to, here's what I think, inspired by the Spirit of God. But the translators try to capture this with the quotations you see on the page. We see earlier in the letter that the Corinthian church is a church that is heavily focused on status associated with leaders. I follow Apollos, I follow Paul. And an exercise of power. 1 Corinthians seems to be written to a church that has some measure of wealth and status. That's why Paul's sort of subtle thing that he's doing also as he's talking to the Corinthian church is like, hey, rich Christians in Corinth, you should really give some money to the church in Jerusalem who is dying and struggling. And so throughout all of this, Paul is addressing their cultural norms. And the Corinthian Christians have come to the conclusion that all things are beneficial for me regarding God's grace. Now, these are hedonists, and I mean this somewhat to their credit. First of all, to their credit, it seems the Corinthians rightly conclude the implications of the resurrection of Jesus for the stuff of creation. Things like food and sex are in fact a gift. And we see that Jesus reinshrines the gift of our world, of the body, in the way that he reveals himself as the resurrected Lord upon his resurrection. Yes, Jesus can walk through walls. He's got some transhuman thing going on where he can subvert or invert the laws of time and space and physics and just appear in locked rooms all of a sudden. But he also sits down to meals with his friends as the resurrected and reigning Lord and eats fish and proclaims the reality of God's new creation to them by sharing in meals with them. Jesus dignifies the everyday life in his life, his death, and his resurrection. But their hedonism has taken them down roads that they should not go down, to their discredit. It seems they've not allowed the limits of these gifts to define the gifts themselves. And they're over-indulging or wrongly indulging their appetites. Paul says to them, look, man, yeah, all things are a gift, all things are beneficial, but if you become dominated by the gift, it stops being a gift. It becomes a slave master all over again. So God has given good gifts to his children, but if we confuse the gift with the giver, we reenshrine that whole cycle of slavery all over again. This is what Paul is talking about in Romans chapter 6. Because we've received so lavish a grace, shall we go on sinning then? Because God will just give us grace all the time? And Paul's saying, if that is your motivation or your impulse, no. Because you've been saved, you've been set free from sin and death. The word that the Bible often, or the word that our modern translators often use for the phrase sexual immorality in the original Greek is the word pornea, where we derive our word for pornography. Now in Corinth, there were temples devoted to various gods that promised benefits. Fertility cults, which employed temple prostitution, were about more than simple pleasure, they were places where rites and vows were enacted through the act of prostitution. And apparently, given the context of 1 Corinthians 6, some Christians within the Corinthian community have convinced themselves of the righteousness of going to prostitutes because, as Paul quotes to them, you think all things are beneficial to you. What Paul then does is offer to us an important positive vision of the body and by extension sexuality, but it's easy to miss it because it is in the texture of a rebuke and a warning. So let's find it in verse 15. Do you not know, Paul writes, that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never. Okay, so first, Paul describes how we are members of Christ. Because of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, his obedience, and faithfulness in heart, soul, mind, and strength, the very stuff of our lives, has been engrafted into Christ's body. The stuff that we do in our bodies and with our bodies has eternal significance. I have to imagine that Paul had the first words that Jesus spoke to him ringing in his head for all of his life. If you know anything about the background of Paul, who initially was Saul of Tarsus, the first time we meet Saul, he's a persecutor of the church. He's rounding up Christians and bringing them to trial. And as Saul is on one of those missions to round up Christians, he meets the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. And the resurrected, reigning risen Lord says to Saul, Saul, Saul, not why do you persecute my people? Why are you being mean to my followers? He says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And something mysteriously has taken place in the resurrection of Jesus that all of us who say yes to Jesus are engrafted in his life. We read Colossians 1 last week. He is the firstborn from the dead. The firstborn of the resurrection. We are a part of his life. His life has been gifted to us. The stuff that we do in and with our bodies has eternal significance. Now we tend to frame the calls in the Bible to refrain, to resist, as God sort of imposing diminishment or repression upon us. We think in our own mind that we know what would make for freedom. And we think that God secretly is withholding all the really good stuff from us. That if we could just give over to the desires of our flesh, that we would feel fulfilled and free. But I want to reframe this whole thing because this is not a loss narrative. What Paul is doing is saying there is fullness and abundance and infinite life over here. But you're not going to find it in what the scriptures call the realm of the flesh, the realm of our default impulses and desires that will not lead you to this kind of freedom, even though everything in our culture tells us give in to your defaults, live your truth. What Paul is doing here is quite different. His call is to restraint, and it's a call to wonder, it's a call to reverence. Our bodies have been joined with Christ's body. Thus, what we do with them has the utmost significance. As we talked about with the idea of power, this is a fearful and great responsibility, a weight of glory that we must handle with care. Now, Paul's going to talk about sin here in a moment. But I just want to pause and hear the wonder of the life that God has given us. You are members of Christ's body. You, with all your flaws and frailties, members with the resurrected Christ. Statistically speaking, in this room, a majority of people struggle under the weight of habitual compulsive use of pornography. Because I've been a pastor for a long time, I know how crushing of a burden this can be for people who follow Jesus. Because not only of the degrading effects of the behavior itself, but then the cycle of shame that it reiterates. I don't know a single Christian who struggles with viewing pornography who has not tried to stop. And many of them have even succeeded for a time. And what this does is reinshrines all these narratives of shame and brokenness. The voice of the accuser gets loud in our head with a megaphone. You call yourself a Christian. And yet you can't change this one simple behavior. Some Christian you are. Now, I wonder if today that we might look at this desolate valley from a different vantage point, one that's not based in merely shaming us or calling you to grit your teeth and figure it out. Paul is urging the Christians at Corinth to reframe their view of themselves so that it will reorient their behaviors. What a wonder that we, with all of our flaws, our sin and shame, are no longer defined by what we do in our own strength in our body, but we have been wholly incorporated into Christ's faithful, redemptive body. You are members of Christ Jesus. Yes, what you do matters infinitely more so than you ever would have presupposed. But what's important here is not the discipline that you're able to conjure up, but that you give yourself and yield yourself to the faithfulness of the one who gave himself for you. And we do this thing with when it comes to these habitual cycles of sin. We come to Jesus the first couple times, we say, Jesus, please forgive me, I won't do it again. And then five times, oh Jesus, I'm sorry, I'm a mess. Ten times, twenty times, oh Jesus, please forgive me. But when it comes to a hundred times or a hundred and five times, we're like, oh, Jesus is out of grace for us. Can I tell you the truth, Ecclesia? He never tires of giving you grace. He never stops pouring out his love for you. The worst thing that we can do is accept the lie of the enemy that we will always be what we are. Paul tells us that you are not what you were, but you will be changed. And the Holy Spirit is patient and kind and keeps no record of wrongs. Yet we show God all the time how much our past influences our present. And what Jesus sees, what God sees, is a cross there. It's like I already paid for that. You're still carrying it around. I already paid for that. And so I say all this to tell you, Ecclesia, God never tires of dispensing his grace. He is not like us. Don't give up. It may seem like the most absurd, insane thing that you do when you feel like you're stuck on these damned carousels. Don't give up. God has more for you. There is freedom from sexual immorality, whether that be pornography or something else, there is freedom. Not because you're able in your own strength, but because God loves you and He will never stop. The most distorted desires often point to the most important ones. And I want to encourage you, freedom from pornography is possible by the grace of God. James 4 says this, but God gives all the more grace. Therefore, it says, God opposes the proud. And we tend to think of pride as in this ostentatious way, we're saying, God, I don't need you. But the same posture is true when we think that we can carry around our own sin and fix it. It's the same thing. God, I don't need you. Even if you say it in a shrinking kind of way, it's the same posture. And the scriptures tell us God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. Lord, Jesus, have mercy on me as sinner. And he will, and he will, and he will. Submit yourselves, therefore, to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Jesus says it a lot nicer than his brother. Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians verse 16 Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said the two shall be one flesh. Paul then takes us back to the very beginning of the story, the wonder of marriage that is inscribed into the fabric of creation. Marriage is a sign and a wonder of God's creative, generative, covenanting love. It needs to be said over and over again. Yes, marriage is a sign, but this is not to the detriment of singleness and celibacy being a sign. As we talked about in week one, the power of God, thus the blessing of God, is not zero sum. I want to be especially sensitive to those in our midst who have long longed for marriage and found that longing still unmet. As I extoll the goodness of God and married sexual expression, I want to say to you clearly that the Lord sees you. He is Jehovah, the God who sees. As we've already testified, sex is not everything, and that Jesus, the most fulfilled, full human who ever lived, lived without sexual activity. But I sincerely hope not to patronize you here today or make you feel lacking because you aren't. What a wondrous and extravagant God that one of the ways that we fulfill our call to be co-creators and co-cultivators with him is through the pleasure and play that is sexual activity in marriage. There's an erotic love poem at the center of the scriptural library, with a desire expressed both from the woman's point of view and the man's, the Song of Solomon. Just, for example, Song of Solomon, chapter one, beginning in verse two. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. Your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out, therefore the maidens love you. Draw me after you, let us make haste. The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exalt and rejoice in you. We will exalt your love more than wine. Rightly do they love you. Honestly, that's one of the sections I'm comfortable reading. This is a wondrous gift and a call to joy. It's so important that we turn our attention towards the author of ultimate joy so that we don't make the joys, the penultimate joys of life ultimate. He has given good gifts to his children. We can move this from the subject of sex to so many areas: food and beauty and provision and friendship. We see the blessings of God at every turn, and it's important for us to stop and to marvel at the notion that not only is there a God, but he has come to us in Jesus of Nazareth. And the world that he has made is not only functional, it is fun. It's not only bountiful, it's beautiful. Lastly, Paul reminds us of the infinite implications of our body because of the infinite spirit that has taken up residence there. 1 Corinthians 6, verse 17. But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun sexual immorality. Every sin that a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, within which you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own, for you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body. Earlier in 1 Corinthians, Paul extols that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. He now reminds us that the location of the Spirit of the Lord, the where the Spirit of the Lord is, the very confines of our innermost beings. God has purchased us by his very own precious blood. We have been ransomed, redeemed, and now we are indwelled by the infinite love that brought the world to life and brings it to new creation life in Jesus. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. When it comes to sex in marriage, there is freedom. Freedom to give of ourselves, to learn another person for a lifetime. When it comes to the life of every believer in here, there is freedom from compulsive, sinful behaviors, freedom from destructive patterns, freedom from strongholds of sin and brokenness. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, is Paul's shorthand for saying, within the confines of your life, there is freedom because God has taken up residence there. I remember early on when I was in youth ministry, I was reading some of these books that would later be sort of collectively called Purity Culture. And there was a woman named Sarah Malley, and she was writing again with that good intention and vision of helping women stay pure throughout the course of their early lives towards marriage. Good and beautiful. But she starts talking about a rose. And she uses this metaphor of a rose that when it's passed around and when it's opened up, that it loses its beauty, it loses its attractive qualities, it begins to wilt and diminish. And I'm reading this and I'm just furious. Because the subtle insinuation that she's making, because she's talking about the life of somebody who was somewhat promiscuous before marriage. And the subtle question that she's asking the whole time is who would want something like that? And I'll never forget, I was listening to a pastor named Matt Chandler tell a very similar story. And he just screams, Jesus wants the rose! And I was like, Yes, that is right. Jesus wants the rose. But can I tell you something? Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And what Jesus did was say, you know what? I'm actually not concerned with the inspection report. I'm not concerned with the foundations of the house because I'm laying waste to the whole thing and building a new foundation, a new house. We're getting all the best upgrades because I am here and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And when it comes to the concept of talking about sex as a gift, we drag in all of our brokenness. And what Jesus says to you is here I am. I am here to heal, to restore, to redeem, to make all things new, to break cycles that maybe you've inherited from your parents, to redeem you from the depths and depravity of abuse that's been levied upon you. Jesus says yes to us. Astonishingly, graciously, by his very blood. Today, we see the gift of God in his presence given for us. We pray, come, Holy Spirit. God, I stand before people that for all of us this touches our lives, Lord. And I first want to pray just in line with our series, God, that Lord, in spite of the brokenness, the distortion, the miry places we may find ourselves, Lord, that we see that there is a gift here. A gift to be received, a gift to be stewarded, God. God, but in the midst of our very real circumstances, Lord, I ask that you, by the power of your spirit, God, would minister in this place. God, that you would silence the lies of our own shame, the lies of the accuser, the lies of cultures that we have imbibed and lived within without knowing what to call them or what their names were, Lord, that you would be the name above all names in this place. That you would be healer and redeemer and tender lover. We were bought with a price. God, I want to speak to those who just either they feel stuck or they don't know what to do, they feel like they're on that broken carousel, God. Or would you just help them in this moment? With the resolve of your courage, God, the resolve of your spirit to not give up. To start again with you, to fall again at your feet and say, Lord, I need you. We ask that you would show yourself strong. And God, for all of us, Lord, would you help us to just carry this fire of a vision of the goodness of the creation that you have not only made but saved and loved, God? Or that our lives can be a testimony to your presence and the miracle of what you bring about between us, God. God, would you draw near to the brokenhearted in this place, Lord? Would you heal? Would you restore tarnished images, God? Would you show us that we are your workmanship and masterpiece in Christ Jesus? By the power of your love, by the testimony of your blood, Jesus, we ask these things in your name, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. Echo, we're gonna respond for a time and by standing and singing together. And what I want to do, uh Gene, if you wouldn't mind just joining me up here. I don't know if we have any of the other prayer team in here. Alexa, um, we'd be honored to pray with you if if you'd like to receive prayer. Now, I know we've been talking about something as tender as this, it almost feels like an admission of some sort of guilt. I assure you it's not. Um, but if you'd like to receive prayer, I feel like we'd be remiss if we didn't offer some sort of touch point and almost in a healthy way. Like I'll ask if I can put my hand on your shoulder. I think sometimes we can redeem uh touch in a way that's really important. Um, and with that, I also want to say, too, if you've never experienced the freedom that Jesus has for you, what better day than today? He has a different vision for your life than you will receive from this world. It is better. And he's given himself to you, and all you have to do is say yes to him. He's knocking at the door. Receive him. Let's stand together. If you'd like to receive prayer either now or after we uh introduce the elements of communion, we'll be here waiting for you. Let's worship the Lord together as we allow the Holy Spirit to minister to us.