The Real You

I'm a father of three. I have three kids. Jasper is three, Miles is seven, Just turned seven, and Ruby just turned nine. And we spent all day at the soccer field yesterday. So someone said, hey, you look tan.

Or have you been at the beach? I said, no, maybe the opposite of that. The soccer field all day. But it was a good time. It was a good time.

And I'm in a sweet spot in my parenting journey. And the reason I know that is because we. We can play a game of hide and go seek. And my kids can play it. They don't need me to play it.

But when I do play it with them, I dominate them. It's a great, great time in my fatherhood journey. And we just moved a month and a half ago into a new house. But the house that we were living in, I found the best hiding spot. It was our hall bathroom.

And it's like a longer bathroom and narrow. And I would hide in the back corner in the tub, behind the shower curtain with. With the lights off. And the kids were so afraid to go in there that they wouldn't even think to look. And it got to the point where they wouldn't be able to find me.

And I would do this I don't know how many different times, but they would always get to a point where they'd be screaming and more scared to find me. They would go from being excited to find me to like, I don't want to find dad. He's in too scary of a place. And they'd be screaming downstairs to carry. He's, like, making dinner and doing laundry and all these different things while I'm upstairs just hiding from my children, laughing at their fear, that's a good place to be.

But I'm pretty sure that's how you win hide and go seek, right? If you're the hider. If they give up because they're so afraid, like, that's domination. We're in a series called Stories We Tell Ourselves. We're gonna be in Psalm 139, and if you don't have a Bible, you'd like one.

We actually have Bibles set up in the back, back here for you to take home and for you to use in your own personal reading. So feel free. If you want to call, grab one of those. Those are for you. We're going to be in Psalm 139.

I love Psalms, and we've been there for a while. Because if you don't know where it is in the Bible, what do you do? You just put Your finger right in the middle, and you open it up. You might be on the right spot right away, but Psalm 139, almost right in the middle of the Bible. And this is called.

This series called Stories We Tell Ourselves. And we've been looking at psalms that reveal these stories that. That we tell ourselves. It may or may not be true, but then we look at the truth of who God is and how he feels about us to either challenge those stories or to reinforce those stories. But today we're going to be talking about a story that we can often tell ourselves, or at least a story that we can operate in.

And that story we can summarize in these words. Nobody knows the real me. This may be a story that comes from a place of loneliness. You know, there's probably different seasons of your life where it feels like nobody knows what's really going on in your life, and you feel lonely. But sometimes it can come from a place of shame, come from a place of hiding.

Yet you hope nobody knows the real you. So you hide the story that nobody knows is the real you. So I must hide the real me because of shame. You try to keep things secret. And there are things that you do, or things that you think or things that you're so deeply ashamed of that you hope that people don't actually find out about those things.

That's a very old, old story that we've told ourselves ever since the beginning. If you look at Genesis chapter 3, it won't be on the screen, but verse 10 says it picks up where Adam and Eve have taken of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They have fallen from the grace. And that relationship that they had with God was broken. Cause they realized that they are naked and they have the shame that comes with it.

And. And so God shows up in the garden after that, and he says, hey, Adam, where are you? In verse 10, Adam answers with this. I heard you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid from you.

You know, faithful churchgoers, I'm going to talk to you first this morning you're here. So you may be a faithful churchgoer. You love church, you love Jesus. You come here as often as you can. But you may even be tempted to hide your thoughts and your feelings and your doubts.

And there's this real temptation in our modern church culture where we show up on a Sunday, and there's this real temptation to hide those doubts, those questions, those fears, even the difficulties that you are experiencing in life. And People say, hey, how are you? And it's really just a greeting. You're supposed to say, I'm doing okay. How about you?

I'm doing all right, I'm doing good, whatever the case is. And there's this real temptation to not actually bring to this campus, to bring to this room what actually is going on in your life. And so even though you're here, you may be hiding in plain sight, you may be physically present, but emotionally, spiritually, relationally, you're withdrawn from God and from his people. You know, spiritual. Bryce said this in first service.

It's a big word. You may have this anonymity when it comes to your spirituality. You try really hard to keep up. You don't really want people to know where you are spiritually and who you are spiritually. It's.

And so we here, we try to make it hard. You may have seen when you walked in, there's this in the alcove in the lobby, there's a spot where it says, find your spot to serve. We want you to be in relationship with people here, so it's harder for you to maintain your spiritual anonymity. We want to challenge it and we want to put you in relationships with other people that have the spirit of God dwelling within them, that are trying to follow Jesus, that have had their life changed by the power of the gospel. We want you to be in relationship.

So it's hard for you to, to remain spiritually anonymous. But we still find no matter how much we try to challenge it, no matter how many ways we try to address it, we come up with new ways to maintain our spiritual anonymity, don't we? It's easy. It's a temptation. It's something that we try to keep because we want to portray this good image that everything's good.

And it's hard to like dig in to what's going on in our fast paced life. It takes time and we just don't have the time. It takes vulnerability and that's scary for us. So it's just easier to pretend. It's easier to hide.

And for others that you may not consider you may be here, you don't consider yourself a churchgoer. You may have been running and hiding from God for a long time and you physically ran from God. You've geographically ran from God, you've avoided conversations about him. Psalm 139 is a lyrical prayer that very much relates to the story that we tell ourselves. Nobody knows what's really going on.

Nobody knows the real me and it's this lyrical prayer that's meant to be put to music, but also one that is us talking to God as an individual talking to God, and also something we can meditate on and learn from. And it's this great piece of poetry written by the great Israelite King David about a thousand years before Jesus. And it confronts this story that nobody knows the real me, so I have to hide the real me. And he starts it with this statement in verse 1 of Psalm 139. He says, you have searched me, Lord, and you know me.

So, first point today, we're just going to start it right off that God knows the real you. Maybe nobody else knows the real you. Maybe you've done a great job of pretending and not even like your spouse actually knows everything about you. And you've navigated your life in a way that it may be a little bit true that nobody knows the real you, but this is true that God knows the real you. And this is a big statement, you know, I was reminded this week of the great the who.

You know that band? Remember that band? Raise your hand if you. If you listen to the who. I don't want to date people, but I love that band.

And one of the lines that they have is, don't pretend that you know me, because I don't even know myself. You know, we're complicated people. We're tough to get to know. There's things about ourselves that we don't even really understand or know. And what David is saying here to God, he's saying, God, you know the real me.

You have searched me. You know who I am. You know the real me. And this truth leads us into a bigger reality of our relationship with God that David explores through this Psalm, verse 2. He says, you know, when I sit down and when I rise, you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you, Lord, know it completely. David's saying here, that guy, you know my posture, my current posture. If I.

If I change the way that I'm standing, the way that. Where I'm going, how I am living my life. You know how I'm living my life. You know why I'm doing the things that I'm doing. You know my motivations.

You know my thoughts before I even think them. You know the words I have before I even say them. Nobody knows you the way that God knows you. David is expressing this with great vulnerability and naming this to God, he continues in verse 5. Says, you hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.

It's this picture that he's drawing with his words here that's showing that God covers us and he protects us and he cares for us, that he has our back and he goes before us and he's going with us into the future and that his hand is upon us and we are cupped in God's hand and he protects us. And he says, such knowledge is too wonderful. I can't even understand all the ways that you are with me and you protect me and you care for me. Even though he knows the real you, he does that. And God knowing the real us, that can be a terrifying thing.

And if you think about who you are, who you really are, and you think about the goodness of God and you think about how holy he is and how terrifying he can be when you read Scripture and how perfect he is and the standard that he wants to hold all of us to, it's terrifying that he knows everything about us. And we're tempted to run and hide. But what David is expressing here, he's saying, but you care for me. You know everything about me, but you still love me, that you still protect me, you still provide for me. Here's what we know here now is that you don't have to earn that care.

You don't have to earn that perfection. The temptation to hide and the temptation to pretend comes from whenever we know that we're in need of God's love and. And care and protection. But we become aware of our unworthiness of it. And so we hide and pretend to measure up to what God wants us to be.

You don't have to earn it. In fact, you can't earn it. You can't even explain it. God's love for you and grace for you and care for you. It doesn't make sense.

There's a song that came out, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. It was back in my prime. It's called Reckless Love and Man. There was some arguments about whether or not we should be singing that song just from the title alone, but I like the title of it because from our fleshly perspective, the way that we love people, when we look at the love of God, it is reckless. He throws abandonment.

He risks what we consider to be risk of vulnerability and that we're not going to love him back, that we're going to take his love and. And his care and his mercy for us and mistreat it. God, he's bigger than all that, of course. But we look at that and we think, how can he love me? We can't even wrap our minds around it of how often he meets us right where we are, with forgiveness and grace and relationship.

He continues on. Verse 7. He says, where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, if I go up to the skies, you are there.

If I make my bed in the depths, if I go to the center of the earth, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me. Even that darkness, even in that dark moment where it seems like all is lost, the darkness will be not dark to you. The night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

David is expressing Something that you need to know is that God knows the real you, and God doesn't leave the real you. Even when you're trying to leave God, God stays with you and his grace pursues you, and his relationship stands with you because he cares for you and he wants to make sure that you know that in every way possible. But we struggle with this because most of us here probably have experienced a real sense of abandonment. You know, my soccer day yesterday, and my wife. My wife is the greatest person on the planet.

I may be biased, but it's true. And if you've met her, you know that's true. You meet her, you think she's your best friend, that she's great. She is great. And the reason you think that is because all those things are true.

But one of her flaws, one of them just so she's not. Just so you know, she's not Jesus. One of her flaws is that she will abandon me. She will leave me. Not like separation.

But yesterday we were at soccer practice, and multiple times I was standing there with the kids and the snacks and all that, talking to. And I look up and Carrie's gone. She is gone. I see her running across the field. I think, where's she at?

And that happened multiple times. And at the end of the day, where we're supposed to be going home, she is nowhere to be found. I'm looking. She is nowhere. I have two out of the three kids.

I don't know where the third one is. I don't know where Carrie is. I have this whole wagon full of chairs and soccer Balls and snacks. It's blazing hot. What am I supposed to do?

And this feeling of I've been abandoned, it's a deep fear for me because my parents left me in multiple places.

Universal Studios, the zoo, you name it, I've been lost there. But some of you have experienced some real abandonment. People that have claimed to care about you and whose job it is to care about you more than anybody else on the planet have abandoned you. Some of you experienced spouses walking out on you. And that's something that sticks with you.

Man, that is. It's tough to shake that feeling of being abandoned, of being left and victims of abandonment, whether it be parental, whether it be your spouse. These are some questions that are pretty universal for victims of that. Questions like, what could I have done differently?

You can hear the smallest of kids say phrases like this that are children of divorce and say, this is my fault.

Questions like, what is it about me that I could have kept hidden or changed? So this temptation that if we are a certain way, if we don't say certain things, if we don't try to be something that we're not, then the people that care about us will walk away from us and abandon us. That's not true for God. It's a different kind of relationship. It's a holy relationship.

It's a relationship that's set apart from any relationship that you can have in this life. And David, he's expressing this and he's letting us know, and he's confessing to God, like, no matter what I'm doing in my life, no matter what's going on in my life, God, you are there with me in my darkest moments. You light them up to show that you are right there present with me. And so if you're deathly afraid and you're operating in your life where, like, I can't be the real me. I've done that before and it's cost me.

Don't do that in your relationship with God. God won't leave the real you. God knows everything about you. He wants to care for you. He wants to go where you go.

He wants to go with you in the darkest moments and be there with you.

But why?

Why is he so good to us? Why does he meet us in our darkest moments? Why does he allow us to wrestle with him?

Verse 13. David continues, for you created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful to me.

I know that full well. He says that your works are wonderful to me. I know that full well. He's saying that I am one of your works. And if I'm one of your works, then I'm wonderful.

I'm full of wonder. I have design. I have purpose. We live in a time where the secular world is trying to convince people that we're here on accident, that there's no reason that you're here. Good luck finding purpose in your life.

What David is expressing here is like the reason that I'm here is because of you. You put me here. You put me together. I am intimately known by you because you're the one that made me. Verse 15.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Each one of my kids, we waited until they were born, until we named them. And we had some wild names for them before they were born. And it wasn't until we met them that we say, no, you look like this.

Isn't it amazing that before we even thought of or planned and this like God was thinking about us. He knew us. He knew every day that we would live. He knew every thought that we would have. He knew every question that we.

He knew how we would wrestle with him.

Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Verse 17. Now precious to me are your thoughts. God, how vast is the sum.

Some translations say, how precious to me are your thoughts about me. How vast is the sum of them. Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I am awake, I am still with you. God is the reason that you exist.

You are here, breathing, living today because God wanted you here. God wanted you to exist. He knows. Here's the scary part. He knows every version of you.

You know, once upon a time, there were things that used to be cool that aren't cool anymore. And I used to think that I was really cool. And there are. You may not know this, but man, there was a version of me that was cooler than I am right now.

And God knows that version that had hair out to here, that was wearing boot cut jeans with Chuck Taylor, he knew that version of me. He knows the version of me that's asleep by 9:15 watching season 51 of Survivor. He knows all these different versions of me. And he Cares for every single one of them. There are worse versions and there are better versions of you.

And God knows every single one of them, and he loves every single one of them. Not that he wouldn't change things. And we'll get there. I love North Raleigh. And one of the things I love about this area is most of the time, this is not where you started your life.

There's a lot of transplants. And with that comes, I've been the new kid several times here, being included. And there's this real temptation to be the best version of yourself whenever you start over in a place. And there is also this temptation or this desire that people don't find out about some things about you that you just want to leave in the rear view. And that's not true for God.

That's not how we can relate with each other like that and try to be the best version of ourselves all the time. But sooner or later, if you're close enough to somebody, the real you is going to come out. And, man, can that be scary. That when that real version of you bubbles up, that can be a scary, scary thing. And here's the thing with God is that whether or not you have to walk on eggshells with your spouse, pretend to be a better father or mother than you really are, or whether you have to fake it till you make it at work, that's not your relationship with God.

Relationship with God is crazy different. He is the one that has given you life. He knows he has planned your days. He has created a great life for you to live, and he desires that for you. But even when we fail to live that life, he still knows you and loves you and is right there with you.

And he plans your life for your good and his glory. And so we need to look at that and embrace this idea that we can be the real version of ourselves, at least to God. And so the ways that we need to respond to what David is saying here is we need to stop hiding. It's useless. It's futile.

We try to act like it does something for us. And we can walk in here and try our best to be the best version of ourselves. You know what happens when you do that? Your relationships within the church of Jesus Christ become shallow. And the relationships that are supposed to be your brothers and sisters and Jesus are basically strangers.

And there's no scary place to be part of a church where nobody knows or very few people know who you really are. That's a dangerous place to be. Our enemy loves to operate within our Spiritual anonymity.

And there's no risk to being open with God. There's some risk with being open with each other. But we should look at how God knows the real us and still cares for us and should spur us on to have relationships like that, that we can be real with each other and we can work through it. Not just at the drop of a hat. We abandon each other.

We live in a time where you can look at a church and we look at it and we say, you know what? I like this thing about it. I like that I wish this thing would change. I hope that this thing changes. I heard that they're doing this.

That'll be good. But right now it's terrible. I can't wait for it to be changed.

And as soon as the product of church is unsatisfactory to us, we go and look for another church product that fits our palate better. That's so void of relationship. That's so void of intimacy. That's so anti New Testament ministry.

We desire for this church to be a place where we live as family man. Is that messy for you to know the real me and you still love me. That is a challenge. I'll tell you what. Kerry just walked in a few minutes.

A challenge, right, Kerry? For you to know the real me, you probably know what it feels like to have some relationships like that, right? Like, we just got back from a trip a couple weeks ago. You know where I went? I won't tell it because people make fun of me for saying the word so much.

But we went somewhere and we visited some friends. And these are our college friends. And they saw us from when we were 16, 17, 18 years old. And they were our best friends through our journey till we were married until this point. And there's a special kind of feeling to have that kind of relationship.

We want you to pursue the kinds of relationships in this church where people know who you really are, where you don't feel a temptation to hide. You don't feel that you need to be somebody that you're not. That the shame that you experience, the real shame you experience because of your sin, you can do something productive with that shame instead of just running and hiding that you can actually have your life changed.

And we get to the hard part of this psalm. I gotta wrestle with this. Like, what does this part of the psalm mean? So I had to do some. Some deeper studying.

Took me a while, but verses 19 through 22 is a common thing that you see in other psalms where David is up to this Point, he's talking about his relationship with God and how much God knows him, right? Then it shifts and you'll see this in other psalms where he appeals to the justice of God, the wrath of God, about how God has enemies, and there's a certain punishment coming to God's enemies. And so David, he aligns himself with God against them, and he expresses his disdain for evil people. With these few verses. He says, if only you, God, would slay the wicked away from me, you who are bloodthirsty.

They speak of you with evil intent. Your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord and arbor those who are in rebellion against you? I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them as my enemies.

These four verses, they can be tough to wrestle with. I read those natural questions come up. I thought God loved his enemies. Seems like David is saying here, you hate enemies and your enemies, and I hate them as well. These four verses, they set up the ending of this prayer, which creates this cool design.

If you look at the whole thing from beginning to end, it starts with, you know me. These verses you hit, change in tone, do something about the evil around me, do something about your enemies. And then we get to verse 23, search me, God. Know my heart, test me, and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

To go back and read verse one, the statement that he started with, he shifts it. In verse 23, verse 1, he says, you have searched me. You know me. It's this head knowledge that God like, you know me. You know the real me.

You, you, you have searched me. In verse 23, he says, Search me, know me. It goes from a statement of reality to a request to an invitation. There's a shift in posture, and it's almost as if David is coming out of any hiding place that he may have created, having this head knowledge like God, I know you, know me. But know me, search me.

I know this to be true. But God let it be true here and now, in this moment. That's the challenge of being a faithful Christian is gaining all this head knowledge without having this in the moment experience of being redeemed by God, of having this head knowledge of you know God loves you. You know that he cares for you. You know that he sent Jesus for you.

But then asking God to in the moment, let you experience that grace and that mercy in a fresh new way. That's exactly what David does. Here he's saying, God, hear now search me, know me.

This is a tough question I want us to ask. Have you stopped inviting God into your life like this?

It's easy to do, especially when your schedule's full of church things in your relationships or church relationships.

Here's another question even harder. Have you stopped inviting God into your life like this because you're afraid of what he might find?

And if you ask God to search you here and now, that, man, things are different than they used to be, this is a legitimate fear to have. So if you're experiencing that, it's legitimate. You should be feeling that way. And if you've never placed your faith in Jesus, here's the truth. You are an enemy of God.

Verses 19 through 22 should scare you not to death. It should scare you into life. It should scare you into repentance. It should scare you into saying God. If this is true, I'm in trouble because I'm an enemy of God.

And one of these days your justice and your wrath are gonna come. I don't know what to do about it because I've tried everything within my own power. And God looks at that and says, good. But the temptation is for you to run and hide. If it's true that God is one day gonna execute justice on every single one of his enemies and for the sins and the payment that comes from where we fall short of God's standard, one of these days it's gonna be paid.

And your reaction to that is to run and hide. There's gonna come a day, man, it's gonna be terrible.

And what God is wanting you to do now is to not continue to run and hide as if you can't do anything about it, you can't do anything about it, except one, stop running. Stop hiding, and throw yourself at the mercy of God.

In Romans 5, I encourage you this week in your own personal study, read this and read Psalm 139. And when you see Romans 5, we see what Paul is talking about. He talks about while we were God's enemies, while we were still sinners, while we were still on the wrong side of God, God loved us. And he showed how much he loved us by sending Jesus for us. And I pray that if you struggle with faith in Jesus and trusting in him and.

And running and hiding from what you may think may be a reality, and so you just would rather run and hide instead of thinking about it. Read Romans 5 with an open heart and open mind. But for those of us who are Christian, and maybe most of us in this room, once Upon a time, you probably knew that you needed God to know the real you. You probably have thrown yourself at the mercy of God and responded to the message of the cross and the resurrection by saying, God, I want you know all of my thoughts. I'm confessing who I really am to you, and I am asking youg to forgive all of it and to pay for all of it.

And God is faithful and just to do that. But maybe since then, life has gotten more complicated. Things aren't as simple as they were when you made that decision.

Maybe there are bigger questions than you had back then. Maybe you have bigger failings. Maybe there's more fear in your life now and less faith. Less faith in your life now.

And as adults that are under constant pressure to try to keep their life together and put on a good face, it becomes easier to just pretend and hide.

Here's the Gospel of Jesus the good news is not that God knows the real you and finds there's actually nothing wrong with you. Because David asks. He says, God, see if there is any offensive way in me. Look for where I've offended you, where I fall short, the thing that you may despise about me. Look for those things.

Find those things. And guess what? Bad News. Womp womp. There are those things about you.

There are things in me that need to change. There are things in you that need to change. The Gospel of Jesus the good news is that God already knew all of it and he sent Jesus for you. It's the reason he sent Jesus. Jesus didn't die for the person that you pretend to be that you hope Southbridge Fellowship sees you as he died for the real you.

The real you. The you that your spouse doesn't know, the you that your parents will never know, the real you that only he will know, and how much he cares for you. Something that we can't even imagine in the middle of our brokenness and our darkness. He came for us and died for us and is inviting us into a new life, into eternal life, because he died for the real you. You can stop hiding.

You can stop pretending. He ain't going to leave you. There's not going to be something that bubbles up to the surface in a moment of you being real with God, that God's like, you know what? That's the last straw. I'm out of here.

He knows the real you. And in Jesus, he has demonstrated real love for you. A love that you can't get anywhere else, a love that every human is aching for, that can only be satisfied and being real with yourself and being real with God and letting his love and mercy and the blood of Jesus cover it.

Today, I don't want you to just accept the reality that God knows you.

He wants you to invite him in, to know the real you, for you to come of your terrible hiding place and ask him to know you. And through him knowing you, for him to change you when you invite God in to look into every part of your life and to find the things that he wants to change, that he wants to redeem so he can get you to work for his honor and glory, but for your good. Whenever you do that, man, things change in a way that surprise you. In a way that changes your family, that changes your workplace, that changes this world. But man, is it a scary thing to do to step out of your hiding place and invite God to say, I know you, know me, but search me and know me now, in this moment, this version of me.

Find the things within me that you want to change. Bring them to my mind. Help me to confess those to my brothers and sisters in Christ so they can help me start to live the life that you've planned for me.

I'm going to pray David's invitation in verses 23 and 24 over you. So if you have your Bible in front of you, I encourage you to to stay right there in verses 23 and 24. And as I pray, I want you to make this prayer your own.

For you to meditate and for you to use your words and what David is trying to express here.

Because David, he makes this beautiful shift from God. I know these things that you have searched me, but search me now. Know me now, Change me now.

So as I pray it, I want you to make it your prayer this morning. God, search me.

Thank you for allowing us to come before you.

We don't have to pretend. In fact, You love it whenever we bring our genuine thoughts.

What's really going on in our life.

So know my heart, know my motivations.

Know me in the season, know me in this moment.

Find what anxiety I'm carrying with me, the burdens that I'm trying to just take care of on my own.

Find those, God, know them.

Reveal to me the things that you want to change in me, the things that you find offensive, that are not reflective of your son, Jesus, of your goodness, your holiness.

Help me to see that you've paid for those things.

Even though evil exists, even though there are people that are against you, that you've made it a way for me to become your friend.

To become your son, Help that truth, to take the things that I know, where I fall short, and trust your power at work within me, your spirit within me, to become who you've planned for me, to be, who you've purposed for me to be.

In the middle of that, I thank you for loving the real me.

Thank you for giving me a new life.

Thank you for giving me eternal life. And thank you for giving me your Holy Spirit. That you lead me in the way everlasting, that your hand covers me. You go, you are before me, you are behind me. You are with me every step of the way.

And I thank you for that.

Help me to live in that promise.

As things change, as things get more complicated, as I can still wrestle with my flesh, that I can still believe the truth that you love to real me, your spirit is still with me, still guiding me. You're still leading me.

Help this moment, as a church, be a moment where we can believe that together, that we can agree to that together.

And as your body, as the body of Christ gathered together, that we can celebrate, you know, each and every one of us. You've called us to live a life together, looking like Jesus together, being the hands and feet of Jesus together, both to each other, but also to the city and to the this world. Help us to not give into that temptation, to pretend to be who we're not, to hide.

We are inviting you to know us, to search us, to purify us, so we can be the individuals but also the church that you're calling us to be. And we ask that you do this in the name of Jesus. Amen.