Day 2: God felt hunger, what's your excuse?

We talk about Jesus as the God who weeps and sweats, and why that means He understands our grief, anxiety, and pressure up close. We challenge the habit of treating Him like a distant manager and practice trusting Him with the heavy things we carry.
• The problem with far-off decision-makers as a picture of God
• Hebrews 4:15 and why Jesus sympathizes with weakness
• Jesus weeping at Lazarus’ tomb and what that says about grief
• Jesus sweating blood under stress and what that says about anxiety
• How we project bad leadership onto our view of our Heavenly Father
• A simple action step of five minutes of silence and honest prayer
Our action step today is to carve out five minutes, just five minutes of absolute silence.

Transcript

Welcome To Day Two

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, it's Pastor Josh. Good morning and welcome to day two of If God Feels Hunger, then what is our excuse? And today we are looking at the God who weeps and sweats. See, we live in the society where decisions are often managed by someone who is far off from the decision making. In other words, a school board who has no idea what a teacher in the classroom actually needs is making all of the decisions for that teacher. But there's a massive difference between a commander who sits in a distant office and one who is on the ground in the trenches with you. See, we too often look at Jesus as a distant God. He can't possibly relate to what we're grinding through right now. But Hebrews 4 15 tells us that he sympathizes with us in our weakness, that he understands exactly what we are going through because he went through it too. In fact, in John 11, we see Jesus standing at the grave of Lazarus. And in the shortest verse of the Bible, in verse 35, it just simply says, Jesus wept. Jesus was sad. He knew what was about to happen, but overcome with grief, breaks down and cries. Again in Luke 22, we see the stress and anxiety that Jesus has as he knows he's about to go face the cross, and he is so stressed and so anxious about it that he literally sweats drops of blood. He knows exactly what physical stress and response feel like. See, we often project the flaws of the people who led us down onto our Heavenly Father. We assume He's this distant God in the sky, or that he expects us to just tough it out and suppress everything. But what we've seen with Jesus is he proves that that is not true, that there is no anxiety or grief or overwhelming pressure that you'll face today that he isn't intimately familiar with. The question really boils down to: will you trust him with the heavy stuff of your life? Or do you look at him like he's a manager far away in a distant place, making decisions for you without actually understanding? See, Jesus didn't just come to be a sacrifice, he came to show us how to have life and have life abundantly. So our action step today is to carve out five minutes, just five minutes of absolute silence. Here's what that means. Sit and stare at a wall. Sit and just be, but take the heaviest thing that you are carrying right now in your life and take it directly to Jesus. Talk to him about it. But talk to him in an intimate and personal way, not as a distant manager who can't possibly understand what you're dealing with, but as someone who knows exactly how heavy that is and what you are carrying. And then turn it over to him. Understand that Jesus is going to carry it for you the same way he carried our cross to Galgotha. So I hope you have a great rest of your day. Tomorrow we're gonna get into betrayal.