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Alright. Hi. Good to be back with you all here. Today we're talking about marriage particularly
what happens when the marriage that you had expected or hoped for or this portrait of life that you from a young age or maybe as you begin that adolescence, you had this sort of portrait laid out. This is what it should look like and then first comes love, then comes marriage, then there's the baby, then there's the white picket fence and then there's pickleball and then you retire and die. Right? Like that's the that's what you think life's gonna be like.
And then everything kinda comes crashing down. And and maybe the question is, especially if you're new to the Jesus conversation entirely,
does scripture and the bible, does God, does Jesus, what what do they have to say about this? And when you're talking about the end of a marriage, what you're really talking about is two concepts that we're gonna discuss today. One is disillusionment and the other is grief.
And both of those come on the other side of expectations not being met. I wanna start with a bit of a thought experiment. One of my favorite theologians of all time is a man by the name of C S Lewis. His actual name is Clive Staples Lewis, that's why he goes by c s because Clive Staples
is a weird name. If your name is Clive Staples, it's not not weird for you, just weird for him. C s Lewis wants you to imagine yourself in the middle of a park, middle of a meadow if you will. But in the middle of this park,
you see three different animals. You see the dog and you see the dog with its owner and the owner has a ball and the dog seems to be living and breathing and existing for that ball. And there's a completion to it. There is a heaven for that dog because when the owner throws the ball, he finds his precipice,
his peak, this is his summit of his life. He goes chasing the ball and he retrieves it and his tail is wagging and he gets to live out inside of nature and so C. S. Lewis is watching that and he says, for the dog whose greatest desire is the ball and the chase,
there's a completion to that thing and a dog finds home then in chasing the ball to the field. He looks up and sees a bird playing on the wind, swooping through the valleys,
approaching the plateau with the drag and the lift of the wings, it's been perfectly suited and perfectly built for the air. And when the bird is in the air, the bird finds heaven. The bird finds home. The bird finds completion to his desire.
Then he looks at the fish and the fish is darting through the water and seeming to play inside of the streams and walking up and down the brook and eating and frolicking inside of the movement of the water as it were. And so he recognizes that the gill of the fish is built to transpose oxygen
into usable particles for the body and so the fish in water finds home in paradise and the bird in the air finds home in paradise and the dog with the ball in the field finds home in paradise and then as an atheist, C. Lewis thought about himself. And he was becoming curious why as a human,
the scriptures seem to indicate there's something unique about the human but not the least of which is where is our park? Where is our air? Where is our water? Here's the language he uses. If I find in myself desires
which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only reasonable explanation is that I was made for somewhere else. If I traverse the very ground and earth that we live on, why do you and I have a strange homesickness for a place we've never been to before?
Whether your background is Buddhism or Hinduism or Mormonism or whatever it is, right? Even we have fundamentally different beliefs on the world, one thing we can all agree on, we'd all raise our hand if someone asked, do you think something's broken? And we all would say, yeah I do.
Lewis goes on to postulate, this is even before becoming a believer and becoming a Christian theologian,
he said, we keep talking about things using language like being crooked or straight. He talked about a stick. If I find a stick on the ground and the stick bends at like a 45 degree angle, I would say that that stick is bent, that stick is crooked. If I see a line on the ground and it has some sort of undulation in it, I would qualify that line as being a crooked line or as a
line that has missed the mark somehow. And then he said, then as people, we do something really interesting is we look at the entire universe. We look at the human race, we look at the moral compass of society, we look at the background in human history and we all go, this whole thing's crooked,
this whole thing's broken. And so what he said is, what are we saying when we're saying that the human condition is broken and messed up? That it has some undulations, it is bent in some way? And Lewis' argument that he comes to the conclusion that pretty much carries him into faith in Christ
is if we're all agreeing that something's broken, we're all also presupposing that there's a way for everything to be made right. There is a world where everyone's desires are satisfied
and if we think that the line of the human condition is crooked, we're assuming there's a way that it can be made right. We're lining it up against something, some canon, some ruler and saying that something's broken. And his argument is this, inside of that belief system,
the reason that we don't ever feel at home here is because we were made for there.
But that conversation carries on into what we're talking about today. If you've reached the end of your marriage, whether it's because someone got sick and died like what happened in my case with my wife in 2021, Or
it is a result of someone's infidelity against you. Some of us in this room when it comes to the end of our marriage, we're the victims in the case. We tried to do everything we could, we worked at it. In a lot of cases then it's just we're caught in the sin of someone else's backwash
and the backwash of someone else's sin and we find ourselves as a victim. We tried to be everything and then we caught or we discovered the infidelity and the adultery and so we sit in this victim
mentality. There's other people who it's really hard to decide what happened first, the chicken or the egg, did I quit first or they quit first?
And maybe in the middle of that, we came to know Jesus and now we can feel an embarrassment and for others of us, we're not the ones who were cheated on, we weren't the ones who were hurt or abused, we were in fact the perpetrator of it. And in a room of this size,
it it is extremely likely that all of those categories are represented in spades and there's others of us who go, my marriage is going great, what does this have to do with me? What it has to do with us is whether it's specifically the end of a marriage
or like we're talking about in this series, or somewhere in life you have experienced disillusionment with God. You've experienced grief. And our ability to process that as people, the reason it's so difficult is the very Lewis idea that we're talking about previously. Because humans were created in Eden
with these two truths, humans were never built to die and humans were never built to break covenant. So your very fabric, your hardwiring, your DNA, your very sense of understanding of the self, you are in a predisposition towards
having eternal life and having eternal covenant making. So what happens when we who are built for eternal life and built for nothing except for life experience death? We talk about it in terms of being overwhelmed and that's exactly what happens.
When when I got the phone call that Paige had passed away, I remember thinking that there was something so core to who I was that it's, I didn't have the tools to cope with it at that time. And it's true.
You don't have the tools to cope with these kind of things because we were built just like Lewis says, for another place. We're also not built for the misery of death and built for the misery of covenant breaking. So it does overwhelm. And what happens then when we as people experience something overwhelming,
we don't just very typically, we don't just sit and categorize it. I suppose this is overwhelming but I'm gonna still pursue obedience. What happens for most of us is we have to cope with that and we start to engage in very broken or very anti biblical behavior and thought patterns.
I feel like there's a sense in which I'm able to speak to you about this not because, well listen,
when you're as intelligent and you're as godly as I am and you experience grief, you won't do any of the foolish things that you people have done. No no. I'm talking to you as someone who walked through that and I felt the flesh and all those things and I felt my own coping mechanisms
and I was just so angry at God for so long and I just kept thinking that repeating the same behavior was gonna produce different results. And so what I wanna do is I want to as a brother and as a friend and as someone who loves you, again, you don't need to be a follower of Jesus at this moment if you're entering into this conversation
to recognize and to ask yourself the very hard questions which is we have a lot of theories as people. Right? You hurt me so I'm gonna hurt you back. You hurt me so I've become embittered, Colossians chapter three. You've hurt me so I'm going to
create a whole bunch of shower trials. Ever been on a shower trial before? Where you put someone else on trial in your shower talking to your shower head and you just, you're like the bet, you're like Harvey Spector from Suits. You just crush everyone
in your wake, but then you show up to the actual party where you see them again and you're silent, and you're frustrated, and you're standoffish. And these behaviors and these patterns that we find ourselves inside of,
because the secular world and because the non believing world gives you that commendation, it's so true. When when Paige died, the whole world said, basically whatever you do next, we understand. When someone hurts you like that, whatever you wanna do next, we get it.
What I realized is I was participating in this sort of monotonous insanity of repeating the same behaviors again and again, expecting something to change. It's the very definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again expecting
something to become different in my life. And so if if that's where you are, if you're in disillusionment or grief
and you have bought into this cyclical nature of who you are that you get angry, then you get embittered and that leads to bad decision making which leads to shame, which leads you getting frustrated, which isolates the self, and in isolation you make worse decisions which leads to shame, which leads to embittiment, which leads to bad decision making, which isolates the self, which leads to
there is in the gospel of Jesus Christ a way to get out of that. There's a there's a way to break that cycle. If you're the victim, God has a plan for you in your life and it is not for you to be a victim and to be defined by the tragedy
of your life. If you are a perpetrator, you are not too far gone for the grace of the cross. If you're sitting in disillusionment,
you might think that the only way that God could ever accept you or want any relationship with you is once you get all your stuff together and yet the scripture seems to indicate this, what does Jesus say to those who are feeling the brokenness and the weariness and the heavy burdens of life? He says, come to me all who have your life figured out and have everything together
I will give you a pat on the back. If you're new to the scripture, you're like, see? That's what I thought. It's not what it says. Jesus says this, come to me all who are weak and heavy burdened and I will give you, help me out, rest.
Growing up in the South in a very traditional church structure, we kinda had this phrase like, you know, this is like nineteen ninety's high perm holiness kind of an idea, right? The higher the hair, the closer to heaven that you were. That was like what I grew up in. And
so you would get into church and one theologian puts it this way, when did we forget the idea that church is for the sick and not the healthy? Here's the language he uses, that a church is not a museum for saints but it is a hospital for the sinner. And sometimes I think to myself,
God doesn't have anything to say about my situation or my brokenness or my disillusionment or my grief because he's only interested in people who have their act together.
Or maybe maybe he's here for the victim but he's not here for the perpetrator. Or maybe he's here for the person who needs forgiveness but how is he gonna meet me in the middle of this? And here's what the bible says, the book of first Timothy says this.
As Paul is writing to this young pastor he says, don't you remember that all scripture is God breathed? That's the language he uses. All scripture is God breathed. The Greek there is and
that word means it's the breath that you feel on the front of your hand when you talk. You're gonna feel the warm breath of your own hand, of your own breath and your own oxygen coming out. It's this, that warm breath that you feel. This is what God says his word is like. It says, all scripture is God breathed
and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the man or woman of God may be equipped for every good work. What's the problem? The problem is if we're not careful and we only engage in the big themes of scripture,
right, think about the pictures that you colored in Sunday school growing up. How often are you coloring pictures of people who are living in total disenfranchisement
towards the Lord? How often are you coloring pictures of people who are screaming out, how long will you wait oh Lord to do what you've said you're going to do? Did you ever color a picture from Revelation 10 of the martyrs of old tugging on the robe of the God of the universe saying, how long will you wait to avenge me? Did you ever color the picture of Asaph in Psalm 73 where he says, why do you keep helping non believers and the believers sit in decay?
Or Psalm 77, how long oh Lord will you hide your face? Like right now there's a 100,000 Christians getting their heads cut off in Africa and here we are sitting, how long will you wait? We didn't color those pictures. David and Goliath colored that junk all the time. And God must be interested in heroes like David.
Noah and the ark, God must be interested in people who build big boats. Right? God has this interest in people who are not like me.
And yet when you read the old testament and the new testament in its entirety and you don't just piecemeal episodically these high point moments, the bible's essentially a who's who of losers until Jesus shows up. Noah,
he built the ark. 40 daisies daisies. Here's all these animals coming into the ark. Wow, rainbow, perfect. What happens next? He's drunk and naked in a tent and his family finds him and he's a loser. He ends his life. This is like his legacy is in this moment.
David, he slays the giant. Yeah. And then he murders a guy so he can sleep with that guy's wife and then his son abuses his daughter and he says nothing about it. All throughout the old testament it's basically pointing to we need a greater savior who is Jesus.
But what do we do? We take the highlights and high points. So I wanna introduce you to some of these things because if you're sitting here and going, what does God have to say about the misery that I'm in or the disenfranchisement
that I'm in? This is David, Psalm 13. How long Lord will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Job, very likely the first book of the bible ever written. Now in the chronology of time, the way that we assemble the bible is because Genesis tells of the story of creation. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, those are the first five books of the Christian bible.
But God gave the Pentateuch, the first five books to Moses to write down. It is more than likely that the first book actually ever written was the book of Job. And if you're new to the bible, the book of Job is a strange story. It starts like this, one day God was standing there and Satan walked up and said,
can I attack Job? This is how the story starts. So if you're new to the bible, this one's just gonna, it's puzzling. Satan walks up to God and says, that Job character, he only likes you because you give him stuff
and God says, oh really? Satan says, yeah. If you release your hedge of protection from him and let me attack him, he's gonna turn on you. You'll see. And that's not the craziest part of the book. The craziest part of the book is God's response. What does God say? Okay. So what happens? Job's whole family dies.
Raiders and pirates come in and take his ox and his cattle and his donkey. He takes everything from him. Everything that he loves gets burned down. He's sitting on an ash pile of the brokenness of the dreams he thought he was gonna have in this moment of disillusion and grief and then
he gets little boils all over his body. It's like could you find a worse moment when you're sitting there looking over everything that you used to love and have and it's all burning down and you look down and these little blisters start to pop up all over your skin and you go, what?
And this is these moments we can feel in grief.
We relate to these questions. How long are you gonna wait? Where are you? Here's how Job writes it. I cry out to you but you do not answer. I stand but you just stare at me. You turn on me ruthlessly. The might of your hand you attack me. You snatch me up and drive the wind before me. You toss me about in the storm.
Surely no one lays hand on a broken man but you do. Have I not wept for other people when they're in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor? Yet when I hoped for good, evil came. When I looked for light, darkness came. The churning inside me never stops. Days of suffering confront me.
And sometimes we get caught in these systems or these spirals of repetition and the world is gonna give you permission. The world's gonna say, of course you're embittered, stay that way.
They really got you. It's important for you to remain in that bitterness. Let it take root until it's reached its climax in you. And what about you? Well, I'm gonna take vengeance by making sure I get my tongue to flesh against that person who hurt me or against that feeling of betrayal. And other others of us in grief, we go, let's numb it and let's break the cycle by just neurotically ignoring the pain or let's drink it away or I'm gonna find all of my solutions at the bottom of a bottle of Xanax until I can't feel anything
anymore. And guess what? It makes from a from a a worldly and fleshly perspective,
all of those you'll have permission to do and all of those are right on par with what happens when we feel disillusionment and grief. I wanna ask you the next question of prudence as a brother who's gone through this, who loves you deeply is this, how's it going?
Does it feel better?
Is the bitterness bringing joy? Is the numbing healing? Is the constant state of making sure that they know what they've done, is it doing anything? If you're the perpetrator, is you retaining and remaining in a constant state of beating yourself up? Is it serving you?
What scripture indicates here in Jeremiah chapter 18, God gives us a picture into his
heart when he says, I'm like a potter and you're like clay.
Some of us, we get up on the potter's wheel of marriage or the potter wheel of life and the the language of Jeremiah 18 says this, as the father is working that piece of clay into something that he has planned for it, it says the clay jumps off the table and lands on the floor and it shatters. And most people
will stay there. This is the truth. The truth is that if you're going, I'm just staying on the ground, you are on the broad path. Most people will. It's like Robert Frostian, two paths diverge in a yellow wood and the one more traveled is just sit there.
Who's gonna blame you? They hurt you. Who's gonna blame you? You think you're beyond saving. Who's gonna hurt you? She died. Who's gonna who's gonna blame you? I want to lovingly remind us in all of these situations to ask the next question of spiritual prudence, but is it working?
In Jeremiah 18 he says, but in God's long suffering and his mercy and his loving kindness, those who are willing to take the road less traveled
and in the father's hands place themselves back up on the wheel and go, God, the plan a that I had for my life or some of us when we've messed it up, God, the plan a that you had for my life, I broke it.
And theologically speaking, we find a lot of pastors who go, everything happens for a reason. Yeah but sometimes the reason for something happening is not a Godly reason. But remember, the way that God planned your life was Eden.
No death, no brokenness, no breaking of covenant. Malachi chapter two says this, God hates the treason that leads to the treachery of ending any covenant whatsoever. So what does it look like for us who are sitting on the ground
to in humility say, Lord I'm coming back up on your table and I know that sometimes I biffed plan a, sometimes plan a was biffed for me. Some of us, you didn't do anything wrong but your plan a is broken. Your plan a was that life and it was that reality and it was the thing that you saw for your life.
But I also don't want to kind of puff up that idea of going, well God from the beginning, he planned out your divorce, he was working towards divorce because he was bringing something better. No. You can't simultaneously
understand that God hates divorce and the treachery that leads to it and he hates death, John 11. He spews angrily against death, it's an interloper in his creation but I'll tell you what,
when you get back up on that potter's wheel, God's plan b for your life, when you in humility go, I messed it up or someone else messed it up for me or death entered the picture but Lord, I believe that you are the great redeeming potter of my life. Give me plan b.
I'm sick of sitting on the ground just wallowing that plan a's broken. I want plan b to begin. And if I'm being honest with you, I think I'm on like plan l in my life, right? Like plan b would be generous for me.
How many times I have in rebellion or in disobedience or disillusionment just hopped off the wheel and go, plan b's done and I just jump and go, I don't want this either.
The redemptive nature of God is no matter where you find yourself, a b c d e f g all the way to z plus and you've started back around, you're back on b again.
If you're willing to, he will pick you up. He will pick you up. Why? Our God's immutable and never changing, the same yesterday, today and forever. So when you cry out to him in humility, he will make that plan again. But for us to participate in that, we have to,
I'm I'm using this because sometimes the end of marriage or in deep grief or disillusionment, it feels like you're on fire. So the acronym or the kind of the idea I'm using to end out this time to give you some maybe helpful
frameworks. Maybe you're convinced, you're like, okay, I need to do that but what does that look like? When you're on fire, what's the rule? What are you supposed to do? Three things.
Stop, drop and roll. You know what's funny about stop, drop and roll is it's uber simple. You and I remember it even though you probably haven't taken a class on it recently
but it's in our mind for one particular reason. Could you imagine if the rules for what happens when you catch fire was like a three and a half minute song? You know what I mean? Like if you caught fire and you're like, how does that tune go? When a man catches fire,
this is what he ought to do. The first thing is simple, I'll give it now to you. The first thing that you do when a man is caught on fire, why why is the song not that long? Because you'd be dead. Because if you're on fire and you're like, no. It's easy. Stop, drop, roll. That's how grief feels.
Grief feels like you're on fire. Disillusionment feels like you're on fire. The ending of marriage feels like you're on fire. Death coming out of nowhere feels like you're on fire. So sometimes it's a daily reminder. The first thing that we have to do is we have to stop the spiral.
One of the my favorite things I learned recently, I talked to a manager at Trader Joe's and I said, first of all, why are all your parking spots so small? Okay? I don't know if that's the same way here in Arizona but why do they choose the smallest parking lots imaginable?
They wear their Hawaiian shirts to give you a better attitude when you get there because before that you just want to punch everyone in the throat. So you get inside, hey, we're here. Okay, so anyway. He said, we don't train our people when they're checking people out, right? When they're ringing you up,
they train them in the field of disruption. Here's what that means, the typical questions you get asked when you're checking out at a grocery store are two fold. Did you find everything okay? And how we doing today?
But our post modern western American mind has an immediate answer to both of those things. Did you find everything okay? Yep. Why? Because if I didn't, do you think I'd be here? This is where I'm done. Wouldn't I still be out there finding it? And if I've quit on finding it,
I'm not gonna have you talk to me because I'm so mad. I'm not going back in those aisles with those people. And the second thing is how are you doing? What if I said terrible? What would you do? Shut down the lane and pray for me? What would what would you do?
It's literally a social contract we make as Americans that when I ask you how you're doing, you better say okay otherwise you made it weird and I'm like, don't do that to me. If I pass you in the hallway and I go, how are doing? And you're like, actually terrible. I'm gonna go, oh no. Right? You should call someone.
So we have these cycles, we have these patterns, we have these spirals that we participate in. So they teach him a disruptor. The disruptor is this, what are your plans for the day? So when you're fumbling through your wallet and looking for a card and finding your keys and quieting down your kids, right? I've got five kids so when you go to the grocery store it's kind of like, don't touch that, no we don't eat that, don't put that in your mouth, please stop.
But when they say, what are your plans for the day? You go like this, what?
You're you're almost like, that's that's not your line. Did I find everything okay? How's my day going? Don't ask how I'm doing. It almost is like, how could you ask me that? But what is it? It's a disruptor. And the argument is, we're so cyclical.
We're caught on this carousel of life, we do the same thing over and over again and we're unwilling to welcome in a disruptor that might change the patterns that we continue to participate in. What are those spirals in grief and disillusionment? Blame cycles.
It's this person's fault, it's that person's fault. The buck never stops with you, there's no sort of self responsibility and in the end of the day you might feel in yourself, I really didn't have any responsibility, that's totally okay but the blame cycle's not working for you.
The cycle of anger against God where you rebel against him then you participate in some foreign behavior that you really shouldn't be doing and you come back in church and then once you're in church for a while, someone in the church hurts your feelings so you go back to punishing God for it, right? These are the spirals we get caught up in. Or the spirals of getting your pound of flesh, you're really gonna show them. You live in unforgiveness and here's what I love,
this language about unforgiveness. You sit there and you're bitter and you think that it's working but here's the thing that I found. If you live with unforgiveness, it's very similar to drinking rat poison thinking the other person's gonna get hurt. That's what we do in unforgiveness. It's like sitting in prison
of your own making where you hold the key but you just remain inside of that. Stop the spiral. Be willing to introduce the disruptor. What's that disruptor? Maybe try following Jesus with everything that you've got. You go, that'll never work, why not try it, your cycle's not working.
Confess your sins to someone, that would never work. What what do you have to lose? Your cycle's not working. Introduce a disruptor, something new, that pattern of thinking, silencing it. The second thing is to drop the coping mechanisms.
I remember after Paige passed away, I got a phone call from Rick Warren, he wrote the Purpose Driven Life and he said, exactly what C. S. Lewis said, you're not ready to deal with this. Your body's not made to deal with it. So what do we do? We find some way
of making it make sense so we either become hyper vigilant, we become uber disciplined, we become control freaks, we make our circles of people very small so no one hurts us ever again, we make big macro
concessions. I'm never talking to anyone again. I'm never gonna open up my heart to anyone ever again. I'm never gonna feel this way ever again. Here's what Lewis says about that. If you love anything at all, even a pet, it could betray you and hurt you.
So, if you never want to get your heart hurt, here's what you should do. Lock it up in a sarcophagus, in a coffin of your own selfishness, then bury it deep in the ground. But, deep in the ground of your own heart not getting broken, your heart will not get broken. You're right. It will become unbreakable, irredeemable.
You'll love nothing ever again and your life will lose all of its flavor and its color and its meaning because to love is to be vulnerable. But our coping mechanisms slow all that down. We cope with drugs, we cope with alcohol, we cope with intimate relationships,
we cope with the next woman or the next man or the next casual hookup or the casual relationship and we've traded in true relationship for the pithy hollow version of it, which is just hookup culture. It's not It doesn't work. No one's ever ever ever had it work. No one's ever had enough extramarital
affairs or fornicated relationships that they went. That's the same thing as love. And the third thing is this, roll into renewal. Stop the spirals, drop the coping mechanisms, and introduce new spiritual realities in your life. I get what you're saying. Oh, so your big crescendo point of this message
is get involved in church, serve one another, pray for each other, enjoy bible study, be generous, brilliant. But listen, here's the reality. If it was complex, you'd do it, wouldn't you?
If it was this deep, this is what I felt after Paige died. If someone gave me something uber complex, 47 steps and it cost me a thousand dollars and it was like some sort of formula
with a little bit of like witches potions in the middle of it and I could drink it and get better, I would do it. But the simplicity of it is this, what does Jesus say? Come to me all who are weak and have a burden and I will give you rest.
The reality is you're not gonna forgive yourself until you recognize the character of the savior and the king of the universe who has called you to himself. And what do you have to lose? You're already miserable.
Why not try the very simple thing of giving your life fully over to Jesus? That means every part of it. It's not just a mental ascent I think that God is real. It's not just a one hour a week thing. What if your whole life revolved around him?
What if it became a regular practice of your life to go to him in prayer? A regular practice of your life. Not to just drop into church whenever just like a crisis team in waiting, but it became a regular rhythm in your life.
What I wanna do to to conclude is just to pray for us here at at Cornerstone and pray for God's mercy and grace for all of us no matter what you're going through. And maybe you're
you're not coming out of a marriage, you're not living in grief and pain, you're still a part of this family. So we're gonna pray for each other as we go to the Lord in prayer. Father, it says that you are a God who is near the broken hearted and close to those who are crushed in spirit.
So God, those who have been victimized, for those who are perpetrators, for those who have experienced loss and death and all the things that are not a part of your original creation, we call on you now to come and be the supernatural balm to our weary hearts, to be that solution for the brokenness of our souls.
And that we as a church would be there one for another to take care of each other in the middle of these situations. Thank you for a church like Cornerstone that walks into these uncomfortable conversation and these difficult ideas.
And that you didn't sanitize the Bible by only putting in people's high moments but instead it's chock full of disillusionment and grief and you've proven that you're not afraid of our doubts and insecurities and fears and angers but instead you move towards people in their experience of that.
Would you give us the humility,
those of us who are sitting on the floor in the potter's house to say, Lord, I am putty once again in your hands and maybe I messed up plan a or maybe someone else did or maybe death just entered the picture, but Lord, I trust that you and your redemptive nature will make something beautiful out of this lump of clay.
So Lord, do what only you can do to make the old into something brand new. We pray all this in your name. Amen. If you need prayer, we're gonna have a prayer team here at the front. Thanks for the honest conversation this morning, Cornerstone. We'll see you next time.