We Need Truth Tellers | Cornerstone Church | Pastor TJ McConahay

I'm gonna be I'm so excited to be just opening the word of God with you guys today. And last time I was with you, I got to share a little bit about a time when I was church hurt. Toxic senior pastor, toxic church environment,

and me and my wife were just kind of cast out from there. I And don't need to bring that up, but I want to talk about the healing process of that. Now, God was so good to us actually. Right in the middle of that pain, in the middle of all of that trauma,

God restored us pretty quickly. He was offered a new job, we got into a new house, and things were fixed right away. They were righted where everything else was wrong. Problem was is that even though everything felt like it had been restored, my heart still wasn't.

And one of the things that I've gotten to do in my marriage, and we still do this this day, is my wife and I go on walks and we talk. And for the first year after that initial church hurt, we would go and we would walk and we would talk.

And I gotta tell you, there was one subject that I just kept cycling to every single time. And it was the pain, it was the anger. You know, Britt also got cast out and so she was hurt too and we talked about it together. So it kind of felt therapeutic at first,

but then it just kept going on and pretty soon she was quiet and I was still wanting to talk about this pain that was going on in my heart. About a year into this struggle, Britt finally said the true thing to me, the thing I needed to hear. She said this, TJ, you have to stop.

Nothing has happened to you that didn't already happen to Jesus. And if Jesus can take the pain and the trauma and the hurt and he can die for it and he can raise to new life, surely you can rise from this too. It's good, but I didn't want to hear it. But she was right.

If I was gonna keep on just thinking about that, I was gonna probably become something I never wanted to become. The bitterness was seeping in and she could see it turning me. So I gave her permission in that moment to tell me to stop every time I did it. For the next several weeks,

she would have to have a conversation like this with me. Hey, TJ, you know that thing that you told me to tell you when you're doing it? You're doing it right now. It was hard but the truth was I needed to rise from that too. Now guys, we live in a culture that's got it wrong about how we heal. Our culture

and some of the smartest minds that like look at trauma, they say the wrong thing a lot of times. They say that you need to just keep talking about it. You need to keep bringing it up. Now, I don't think that we have to just tuck it down and never talk about it again.

But it comes a point where we just keep telling ourselves the worst thing that ever happened to us, we become the worst thing. We keep becoming the worst version of ourselves. And we miss the victory because we become victims to our past.

And so God might be wanting to tell you a different story but you're not ready to receive it because you're so caught up in what happened to you a long time ago. If we're going to rise from these things, we have to listen to the truth. I had to listen to the truth that day,

and I think that was the mark of when I really started to heal from that church pain.

King David, the second half of his life is brutal. After he sins with Bathsheba, it's bad. He actually becomes a completely different person. His instincts are bad. He's not this warrior king who's always righteous and before God. He's

scared and he's meek and he makes the wrong decision oftentimes. And those wrong decisions have just terrible effects on his family. In fact, his son learns to despise him. Absalom hates his dad

And he divides the kingdom against himself, starts a civil war, and actually drives his dad and the people who are loyal to David out of the kingdom. And now there's 20,000 dead Israelites in the middle of this rebellion, and king David is cast out of his own kingdom. Lucky for David, he had friends in this moment.

In the middle of his fog, in the worst time of his life, he had friends. And three generals step up. One of them is the hero of our story. His name is Joab. And they say, king David, we will fight for you.

We can take back the kingdom and this is how we're gonna do it. They hatch up a good plan to do this and David wants to go to war with them. They say, David, you are worth 10,000 of us. If they kill you, this war is over and Absalom's the new king. Stay back at the city gate and let us fight for you. The king

allows his generals to go out and fight for him. But he says something before they leave. And it's kind of pathetic. Second Samuel eighteen:five,

he looks at his general who are about to go to war for him, who are about to win back his kingdom, generals who probably have family members who died in the rebellion of Absalom, people who are ready to go to war for him. He looks them in the face and he says this, be gentle with the young man Absalom for my sake.

Now you guys think about this. For David, this was his baby boy, the young man Absalom for my sake. You're asking your generals to be gentle with the villain who was not gentle with any of their family. And all of his generals know what has to be done.

And we know because the story goes on that they do not listen to David's instincts. Why?

Because a good friend will not let you give in to your bad instincts. A good friend will not let you give in to your bad instincts. You may have good friends in your life and sometimes it feels like they oppose you. Sometimes it seems like they're against you but you've learned to listen to them because they're usually

right when your emotions are steering you a completely different way And you've learned to respect them because they confront you in your hardest times. And they're usually right. A good friend isn't gonna make you look like a fool because they're not gonna let you give into your worst instincts.

In the same way a bad friend is always gonna let you get into your worst instincts. You guys got friends like that? I got friends like that. When I was 16 years old, I had a friend like that. His name was Steve. Steve was super strong, five foot three, which he told me was an average height for a woman.

Red hair and pink skin. Okay? He looked like a little devil.

And every time we hung out, we got into trouble together. We just did because we just let each other go to our worst instincts. One night, we're hanging out. We're in his car, which is this old station wagon. I kick something on the floor, I hear something spray. And

all of a sudden in his car, we cannot breathe the air anymore. Chemicals have risen up and rolling down the window. He's swerving back and forth. We fly into a parking lot, a Wendy's parking lot. We get out, I grab the bottle of what I just sprayed and what it says is pepper spray.

I said, Steve, why do you have this? And he goes, my dad works at the prison. His dad did. His dad didn't just work at a prison. He worked at a maximum security prison. And Steve held up the bottle and he said, this, you can't actually buy this as a civilian. This is military grade pepper spray.

Cool story. Because you know my dad told me, he said that in order to become a security guard, you have to get sprayed in the face with this. Cool story, bro. TJ, do you want to spray each other in the face with pepper spray right now? Now, the obvious answer is no. And all the women here are like, what is this story?

But every man here knows what's happening. The bro code is happening. You've just been challenged. You've just been challenged. I don't think he's gonna go through with it. So I try to read his bluff. Okay, Steve. Go first then.

Steve hands me the bottle. Remember, five foot three. He covers his eyes, and he looks at me and goes, hit me.

Hit me. He's like this little demon looking man, and he's got his eyes covered and he goes, hit me. And in this moment, my worst instinct is the funniest possible thing is I could just spray this guy in the face with pepper spray right now. And so I do. Boom. Instantly, starts screaming and running around.

He takes off his shirt and he throws it on the ground, and he's running back and forth, and it's the funniest thing. So I'm sitting there laughing so hard as he's just, like, running circles around me, And then I stop laughing because I remember that I'm next.

But Steve doesn't stop screaming. He keeps just running around. I'm just like, oh my gosh. This must hurt so bad. He's like, my head's on fire, my head's on fire. He's screaming, he's screaming and I'm about to wimp out. But bro code is you can't wimp out. So I grab him, I grab the little man running around, I grab him

and I and I I I point him toward me. He can't even see me. He's just screaming. And I'm like I'm like, Steve. He's like, what? What? He goes, you gotta spray me or I'm not gonna do it. He's like, what? You gotta spray. I put the bottle in his hand, and I'm like, you gotta spray. And then he does right into my mouth.

This is the worst feeling that I've ever felt. It did. It felt like my head was on fire. So now I'm screaming and running around, and I I I realize why there's an instinct to take your shirt off is because you feel like you're on fire.

And so I take my shirt off and meanwhile people are just going through the Wendy's drive through. We're just screaming in this moment just looking like fools and it was a funny story until I realized that one of those cars that was going through the Wendy's drive thru was my future mother-in-law.

You think that that decision had some downstream effects on my relationship with my wife? But mom, I love him. And she's got an image of me shirtless running around a Wendy's parking lot screaming with my little friend.

Friends with bad instincts make you look like fools but good friends don't let you give in to your worst instincts and David's friends knew that. They knew what had to be done so they head off to war on behalf of the king and here's the crazy thing, they win. They make short order of Absalom's rebellion.

And Absalom is fleeing on a donkey. He's he's riding his donkey out of town and he goes by a really thick patch of forestry and his hair gets hung up, gets tied up in an oak tree. And the mule just goes off into the forest. Absalom is stuck hanging from a tree.

The word gets back to Joab that Absalom is just hanging out in a tree right there. The three generals align themselves and they know what David said. It's my baby boy over there. Be gentle with him.

Joab knows what must be done and he is strong in this moment. This is what Joab says in this moment in second Samuel eighteen fourteen through 16. It says this, Joab, Joab said this, I am not going to wait like this for you.

So he took three javelins in his hands and he plunged them into Absalom's heart while Absalom was still alive in the oak tree. And 10 of Joab's armor bearers surrounded Absalom, struck him and killed him. Then Joab sounded the trumpet, the troops stopped pursuing Israel and Joab halted them. Brutal story.

Type of story that if you're like your women's Bible study and you read through this, you just kinda keep going. Guys, evil exists in this world. It does. I know that we live in a time where we try to assume that almost everybody's got the best intentions. But that's not true. Evil is real, and evil has to be confronted.

Jo Joab knew that Absalom was a villain. He knew that if Absalom kept on living, the rebellion would keep on happening and more and more of their sons and daughters would be killed for this rebellion, for this civil war. So in chess and in war, it's the same game. You kill the king, you win the war.

So Joab knows in this moment what has to be done. Absalom has to die. The villain has to die. We also know his friend is gonna be really upset with this. But he goes through with it anyway. Why?

Because a good friend is strong when you are weak. A good friend is strong when you are weak. What if we could be that to our friends? There's going to be a time in your life and it probably already happened this week, where you have a friend who is making bad decisions. And you have a choice. You could be complicit in them

or you can be strong in their weakness. You can confront them and you can do the things it takes to keep them from destroying their lives. If we're going to be the people who live out the bible in a real and honest way, We have to become Joab. People who are willing to do the hard thing, the hardest thing.

Because what is required of the situation.

I have another friend, I love telling both these stories together because they happened two weeks apart from each other. Steve in the pepper spray and me and Adam in this story happened two weeks from each other. Now Adam was not like a little devil. He was like my cool,

mild mannered, Holy Spirit filled friend. Now the cool thing about Adam is we both got saved the same summer when we were 16 at two different camps. Adam went to the Pentecostal church down the street and I went to the Baptist church down the street. And we would go to each other's youth groups.

And I would go to his youth group and I loved the worship and he'd come to my youth group and he loved the message. And by the way, I'm just gonna give you guys a little just like insider pool. You know what a megachurch is? It's just a place where the Pentecostals and the Baptists learn to get along, okay?

And so me and Adam would go back and forth to each other's churches. And one night we were on our way to Bible study. Now here's the thing you need to about Adam. Adam's whole fit was punk rock, okay? He had a mohawk.

He wore that leather jacket with the studs on it And he would staple little edgy Christian sayings to the back of his jacket everywhere he went. My style was skater, right? We drove around in Adams 1979 Cutlass Supreme, which was primer gray, all right?

We passed a cop on the way to bible study. He looks in. He sees Adam with his mohawk. He sees my messy hair in my hoodie. He sees the car and he goes, this is a problem.

Didn't know what the problem was. He just knew it was a problem. He wasn't even he didn't have his car with him. He was on foot. Just did this little number. And Adam pulled over.

And, okay, we both got saved two years ago, but I still I mean, you could have just left, you know? You could have just not seen him in this moment. Adam pulls over. The guy comes up, and he's super aggressive. What are you boys up to tonight, And Adam looks at him as, sir, with his mohawk,

we're on our way to bible study. He laughed as well. Thought that was the funniest thing. And he's just berating us. He just knows there's something wrong. He's

trying to find a crime that's committed in this car, right? And he starts yelling at Adam. I'm like looking forward and I'm like, this guy, and I'm getting mad because I don't like these authoritarian figures. And he's just sitting there and I'm getting mad and

the cop looks over at Adam and he starts saying, hey, show me your hands. Show me your hands, show me your hands. And I look over at Adam like, Adam, show him your hands. And I realized the cop isn't talking to him. He's talking to me. And my hand's tucked down here.

So I put my hand up like this and that man came running around the Cutlass Supreme. It took a while. That's a big car. And so he opens up the car door, a bunch of fast food wrappers come flying out of it, and he goes, Oh, what do got, like a pipe in here? You got a bong? What are you hiding over here? And he's reaching under my seat, right? I can

feel the seat kind of moving under there. I'm thinking, I don't think Adam still has pipes, but he might. Like, what is he going to do? And he gets in there, he finds something sort of medley, and I can hear it, and he thinks he's got it. He pulls it out. It's an empty soda can.

And I look at him and I say, officer, that's an empty soda can. And I'm about ready to just go. I'm just like, I'm I look at Adam like, let's go to war with this guy, let's scream at this guy. And I look over at Adam and he's just peaceful sitting there with his mohawk and he gives me one of these.

What? And I look at I I I'm like, wait. No. No. No. This guy's wrong, Adam. This guy is an idiot. This guy he's profiling us. We didn't do anything wrong. We're on the way to bible study. We're trying to fix our lives, and this guy is just trying to just be the worst possible

know, we're not actually having that conversation. We're having it with our eyes. And I'm like and he's like so finally, look back at the cop who's holding up the pop can, but he's not looking at the pop can. He's looking in, and he looks confused.

He's looking between me and Adam, these are bench seats and he sees two Bibles stacked on top of each other. He goes, oh, you boys are going to Bible study, aren't you? And Adam goes, yes, sir. His whole demeanor changed. He says I'm sorry. I didn't know. I judged you guys driving

around like this. I'm a Christian to myself but I'm going through a messy divorce. And he just tells us everything. Adam goes, hey, can we just pray for you? So me looking like a stoner, Adam looking like punk rock, laying our hands on a cop next to the cutlass supreme.

A good friend is strong when you are weak. That could have escalated, I could have escalated that situation. Instead God redeemed that whole moment, why? Because my friend was strong and he did what needed to be done in that moment. Joab did what needed to be done in the moment and it was brutal but he did it anyway.

And all of Israel starts to rejoice because the war is over. No more dead people. This is this it's gone.

The king they need to go to go back and tell David who's at the gate still. They need to go tell him that the war is over. So they come running, running, running. And David's like, surely it's good news. And it is good news. And the the young man reports it back to David, and he says, David, the war is won. And David looks at him and goes,

what about my son though? The news comes to David that his son was killed. And David, in the middle of a victory, starts to scream and mourn loudly.

He starts to pace and he starts to wail, oh my son, I wish it was me who died. I wish it was me who died. And all the people who see King David in this state of a victory where he's sad, they see him as a traitor now because you're sad that we won. And you gotta think about it from their perspective.

Again, relatives of theirs died, sons, daughters are dead rebellion from his son. And the king is sitting there mourning the fact that his son is dead and Joab hears about this. So Joab is a truth teller. But he's also someone who will do what it needs to take. And he also can confront. And guys,

this might be the most incredible confrontation in the bible because you got to understand the stakes of what's going on here. The kingdom is at hand. This this can go one of two ways. And Joab is mad at David. But he also knows that's his friend. So in second Samuel 19,

Joab says this to David. Then Joab went to the house, to the king, and said, today, David, you humiliated all of your men who just saved your lives and the lives of your sons and your daughters and the lives of your wives and your concubines.

You love those who hate you and you hate those who love you. You have made it clear today that the commanders and all of their men mean nothing to you. I see you would be pleased if Absalom Absalom was alive today and all of us were dead.

Now David, do this. Go out and encourage all of your men. And I swear by it. I swear by the lord that if you do not go out, the man will be the men will be that will be left by your side the the no men will be left by your side by nightfall.

This will be worse for you than all the calamities that have come to you since your youth until now. So the king got up, took his seat in the gateway. And when the men were told the king is sitting at the gateway, they all came before him. Can I suggest this? A good friend

will not let you trade your destiny for your temporary.

There is all sorts of things that could happen to us in life and our emotions could take us all sorts of ways. But a good friend won't let you change what you're supposed to become because of the feelings you are having today.

That's what a good friend does.

I have this little hobby that I do with my son, and we've turned it into like a small little business. What we do is we buy old football helmets from goodwill and strip them down, paint them and turn them into custom helmets for people. Did it mostly for ourselves and people would you make them for us?

I use this as a way to teach my 14 year old about how to become an entrepreneur and how to be a business owner and do those things. And so we've done this a number of times, probably hundreds of times at this point, made all these helmets. This week, this week, we had our first angry customer. This

guy was a pain in the butt. From the time we took the order to the time we delivered it, he was not happy with us, he wasn't happy with the system and it was like, guy, this a hobby thing. This is not like a professional service. I don't

know what to tell you. But it got to a point where it was so toxic. I said, you know, here's the thing is, let's just give you a full refund. Obviously, we can't make you happy, and let's just part ways. He wasn't happy with that.

He wanted more and more and more. He wanted to be paid for his time and his stress and all these other you can't reason with unreasonable people. And then Lynn called and said, hey. You're preaching this weekend. I'm in the middle of this mess. I gotta go pray. I gotta go talk. And I gotta tell you guys, I got a friend

who will always tell me the truth, who will always confront me, and there's no place I can go where he is not. So when I was walking that night, my friend, the holy spirit, kept talking to me. I gotta tell you, he was being kind of annoying because he was saying something I didn't wanna hear.

And the way that the holy spirit always talks to me is through bible verse that is that I've memorized over the years. And as I was trying to think about this message today, the message that I would have for you, the holy spirit kept saying this to me. Bless those who curse you. Bless those who curse you. Bless

curse you. Bless those and I'm like, not this guy. He doesn't deserve the blessing. Bless those who curse you. Bless those who curse you. So I sat on this bench overlooking our little lake, and these stupid Canadian geese are out there making all this noise. That's a different story, they're annoying.

I know what I need to do. I open up PayPal, and I don't just give him what he asked for. I give him more, And I push send on that thing. I gotta tell you guys, sometimes submission feels like a loss. But today as I gave that up, it felt like the victory. Because the stress lifted. The pain of it lifted. I wanna say this to you.

In your life right now, you have people who are cursing you. You do. Our economy is not rage. Our economy is not vengeance. None of those are things that we own. We don't even own the fair economy. So even when we say that's not fair, it doesn't matter.

The economy that we've been given to us, that's been bestowed to us by our creator is an economy of grace, mercy, and forgiveness. And so what we must do in spite of all the pain of this world is we have to turn the curses into blessings, and I believe that if we take that I believe that if we take all of that pain,

we put it on our backs, and we turn around blessings where we are cursed, In those moments, we get to know a holy God who did the same thing for you.

He hung on the cross. They spit. They mocked him. They cursed him. He looked at them, and he had pity on them, and he said, forgive them father for they don't know what they're doing. The hard truth that the spirit is trying to tell you today is that there is a curse in your life that can only be turned around by you choosing to bless those who curse you.

Joab, even though it was hard, chose to bless David, his household. When David was trying to curse them through his own emotions.

Three things I wanna land on. Three. One, you have truth tellers in your life who told you the truth and done hard things to you, and they were right. You need to say thank you. Maybe right now even open up that text message and just type out those two words. Thank you for being strong when I was weak.

Thank you for not giving in to my worst instincts in this time. You need to say thank you because you're gonna need those people in your life if you're gonna win in the dark times. Number two is we have to become the truth tellers to those around us who wanna destroy their lives because of their temporary pain.

We need to tell people that if Jesus rose, you can rise too. We need to say the hard thing even if it's gonna cost us everything. And if we say the hard thing and it costs us everything, we need to be okay because that's what Jesus did too. And the last is this.

Some of you guys, you listen to this whole message and you said, TJ, I don't have a friend though. I don't have a good friend. I don't have a bad friend. I wanna say that's a lie straight from the pit of hell. This is what I know about God, that we have a friend who comes and lives inside of us named the Holy Spirit.

You see, when we say yes to Jesus, there is no such thing as alone anymore. There's no place we can go where he is not, and there's no nothing he will do where he won't tell us the truth. And I think that the holy spirit has been talking to you through this time too. So I believe that you know what you must do

with the word that was given this morning. And my encouragement to you is this, do it. The only thing that David did right in this whole story was he listened to his friends. Listen to your friend, the holy spirit today, and bless those who would offer a curse to you. Amen? Will you stand with me as we pray?

Will you just hold your hands out in a prayer of submission? God, we know that in our lives we will have trouble because you have trouble. God, we know that when the world hates us, that they hated you first.

We don't serve a God who sat above us and judged us. We had a God who entered into our reality and suffered in every way, so we can endure too.

In this moment, God, I pray that we would choose to do the hard things when our friends want us to not do the hard thing. I pray that we'd be truth tellers to our friends' worst instincts. And God, I pray that we would say thank you to the people around us who kept us from the worst instincts that we had. And God,

we say this to Satan's lie,

the lie of alone. We say this, we believe that you are with us. We believe there's no place we can go where you are not. We believe that you will never leave us nor forsake us. And God, in this moment, if there's someone here who never said yes to you, in this moment, I pray that you would make an introduction to them in their spirit, and you would tell them beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are not alone, that you have a friend in Jesus who speaks mercy

and truth to our soul when we need it. God, we love you. We pray all this in Jesus' precious name, and all God's people said Amen. Amen, amen. The prayer team will be up front if you need prayer.