It's Not Supposed To Be This Way

Good to be with you today. Just to encourage you and to lift your spirits on this Sunday morning, I want to ask you to imagine with me the worst pain you've ever experienced. Right now, you might be thinking of kidney stones. We might have some moms who are reliving childbirth experiences. Maybe you're remembering the last time you had to listen to someone sing horribly off key.

That doesn't bother some people. But if you're a singer and you have a good sense of pitch, that, that's. That can be really painful. Maybe you're thinking about getting dry sockets after you had some wisdom teeth extracted. Anybody else ever been there?

That's a glorious experience. Maybe you're thinking about recovery from an organ transplant or a joint replacement or a traumatic accident that caused you some extensive injuries. Maybe you're thinking about watching the Colts most of last season. I don't know. But the reality is not all pain that we deal with is physical pain, is it?

I mean, you might be thinking of the death of someone you love. You might be thinking back to a season of unemployment or poverty, maybe homelessness. You might be thinking about a falling out that you experience with a close friend or a family member that you haven't talked to since, maybe a divorce or another relationship breakup. Maybe you're thinking about a struggle with debilitating anxiety or depression or a moral failure of some sort that became public in a really embarrassing way. Maybe you're thinking about an experience of betrayal or abuse by someone that you should have been able to trust.

Or maybe you're thinking back about two minutes to a jerk faced preacher who ruined a perfectly good Sunday morning by asking you to think about all this painful stuff. You're welcome.

Pain comes a lot of different shapes and sizes. And for many of us, whether we consider ourselves believers or whether we would describe ourselves as spiritual skeptics, pain is a reality that we often have to struggle to reconcile with the goodness of God that we just sang about. The Bible opens with a declaration that God created a beautiful world that reflects his power and his creativity and his love. The opening chapter of scripture, Genesis chapter one, declares seven times that God's creation was good. In the beginning, God lived with humanity and there was no death or mourning or crying or pain.

But that goodness and that perfection did not last. God wants a genuine relationship with us, so he gave humanity free will. And we didn't even make it to the second generation before we blew it. Adam and Eve, the first people God made, rejected his instructions and that decision fractured their relationship with Him. And every subsequent generation has followed suit.

Adam and Eve's son murdered his own brother. And as sin became more and more pervasive in our world, so did pain and suffering. That's not what God intended, but that's how our world is now. Fortunately, the rest of the Bible is the story of God's mission to redeem and restore what our rebellion has wrecked. And the centerpiece of that story involved God putting on flesh in the person of Jesus and showing us what complete goodness and submission look like, and then offering his perfect life on the cross as a once and for all sacrifice for all of humanity's sins.

That was our focus last weekend. We remembered Jesus death and we celebrated his resurrection that followed it. Now we still live in a jacked up world, but through his resurrection, Jesus offers forgiveness and restoration and eternal life to everyone who trusts and follows him. But of course, that restoration is still a work in progress. That's why we struggle.

But at the end of the Bible, all the way at the end, we get a sneak peek of what will happen when Jesus returns to bring beauty from ashes and put everything right. The book of Revelation provides us a glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth where God will once again live with us and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. And that renewal is what everyone who belongs to Jesus looks forward to. But we clearly aren't there yet. And so the more life hurts, I think the more deeply we long for what Scripture promises.

Now, the reality is the pain that we experience in this world has a number of different causes. If you are with us at the beginning of this year, this may for a couple of minutes be familiar territory because we began this year with a look at some of the different reasons why we experience pain to begin with. And I want to recap some of those things as groundwork for where we're headed over the next few weeks. Sometimes pain results from our wrong choices. You know, when I was about seven, I got curious one day what would happen if I stapled my finger?

Inquiry, Minds want to know. And I would summarize my clinical trial in four Jab hurt, blood cry. That's kind of how it worked. I would like to tell you that I am much smarter today, but that's debatable. Now, when we make poor decisions, we often get hurt.

You ever stay up too late and then oversleep and miss something really important the next morning? If you eat too much or you drink too much or you spend too much, those can all have painful consequences. If you Text while you're driving, you might wind up in a ditch or in the hospital. Years ago, we had a kid in our youth group who jumped on the back of a friend's car as he left the parking lot. But the driver didn't realize his friend was back there until he accelerated and his friend suddenly slid off and hit the pavement.

Now, there were no permanent injuries, thankfully, but that was a painful lesson. There is sometimes a clear correlation between our choices and our pain, but not always because, number two, sometimes pain results from others wrong choices. If you text while you're driving, you might not wind up in a ditch, but you might put somebody else in the hospital or worse, cause a wreck that you walk away from, but that someone else doesn't. In recent months, this has been headline news. Over 50,000 people, many of them civilians, have been killed in the war in Gaza.

They're just caught in the crossfire. And I think we often struggle most with this kind of pain, don't we, when people hurt because of somebody else's actions. We know in our core that child abuse and domestic violence and sexual assault and murder and terrorism and genocide are deeply wrong. But it's even more personally painful when people that we ought to be able to trust, like our parents or siblings or close friends or church leaders or, or government leaders or law officers, behave in unethical and illegal or predatory ways. And trying to understand why God would permit such terrible things to happen is a huge barrier to faith for a lot of people.

Now sometimes, number three, pain happens because we're victims of circumstance. Not all of the suffering in our world can be clearly pinned on anyone in particular. When a lightning strike causes a fire that destroys somebody's home, when a tornado obliterates a city, when someone's just chilling in the ocean enjoying their vacation and they get attacked by a shark, or when a stroke or a heart attack hits without warning, when a bird strike causes a fatal plane crash, there's no person to hold directly responsible for that. And the randomness and the seeming senselessness of that is hard for us to process. Sometimes we're just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But then, number four, sometimes pain happens when God punishes evil in a tangible way. The Bible describes some specific times like this when God has decisively and painfully judged sin. We don't get very many chapters into Genesis before we read about a flood that was just such an occurrence. We we read a little bit later in that same book about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The book of Exodus tells us about a series of plagues that God visited on the nation of Egypt.

And there are more biblical examples where those came from. So people sometimes conclude that whenever bad things happen, it's because God is judging someone. But as we've already seen, pain is not always the fault of the person who's suffering. I mean, I believe personally that scripture highlights some of these specific instances of God's judgment to show us that much of the pain, perhaps even most of the pain we see in our world is not that. I mean, we don't and we won't and we can't always understand why painful things happen.

But what we want to explore over the course of the next few weeks in this series is the reality that sometimes pain is an opportunity for God to demonstrate his power. In John chapter nine, after seeing a man who had been blind his entire life, Jesus disciples asked him, whose sin was to blame for this man's blindness? Was it his own sin, or was it his parents sin? They wanted to know. They assumed, like many people do today, that bad things happen to bad people.

But Jesus responded in a way that surprised them. Jesus said, neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. Jesus went on to heal the man. And of course, the Jewish leaders who were there watching the whole thing attacked Jesus for violating their law by healing on the Sabbath. And Jesus used this encounter both to reveal himself to a blind man and to reveal the spiritual blindness of the people who presume to be religious teachers.

The man's blindness wasn't anybody's fault, but it provided an opportunity for God to shine through him. And we like stories like that one, because at the end of the day, the man was healed and everybody went home happy. But healing is not the only way that God can reveal his power through our pain. The apostle Paul suffered from a painful physical affliction that scripture doesn't even specify the nature of. And Paul begged God to remove it.

But God had other plans. God answered Paul's repeated pleadings to remove this affliction in this way. God said, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. God said, paul, rather than remove this affliction from you, I plan to use it. And on that basis, Paul had to wrestle with.

He had to make a really difficult but really pivotal decision that brought him to this conclusion. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why for Christ's sake. I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

See, God showed his power in this particular segment of Paul's life not by eliminating all of his pain, but by shining through it. And I'm convinced that the fact that Paul chose not to specify exactly what that affliction was actually makes God's answer even more relatable and more applicable to people who suffer in a variety of different ways. Whether or not our pain is exactly the same kind of pain as Paul's pain, there's application to be made here. When we hurt, I think you've experienced this. When we hurt, we often pray, don't we, for rescue and healing.

And sometimes God does exactly what we ask. I mean, we have prayed over the years for members of our church family. And we have seen God restore failing eyesight or relieve chronic migraines. We've seen some people bounce back from some brink of death kinds of health crises. We believe that God is fully able to do that.

That is the God we worship. That is the God we pray to. And we want to acknowledge that in our prayers. But we also need to acknowledge that God's work is not limited just to physical healing. Now, many of you know that our friend Steve Poston, our executive minister, received a cancer diagnosis about 15 months ago.

And we have been praying for his healing ever since. But thus far, God hasn't chosen to respond to our prayers via the route of miraculous healing. And yet Steve continues to live and love and believe and serve and hope. And I've asked Steve to join me today just to talk a little bit about what God is teaching him right now. Would you guys join me in welcoming Steve?

Hey, brother. Good to see you, buddy. Good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Glad to do it.

Well, Steve, I alluded just a second ago, and I know not everyone is going to have the context there, so you can fill a little bit of that in for us. But the last 15 months or so since your diagnosis, talk to us about what's. What's been really challenging for you in this season. Yeah, so I was diagnosed last February with colon cancer. And that was a very positive prognosis.

Surgery was positive. Everything was as positive, really as it could be. And I had six months of a course of chemo to kind of just knock out anything that remained afterwards. And all that went pretty well, was really not as bad as I would have anticipated. The last.

The last few rounds were a little harder, but it was really a positive you know, everything went very positive. And then a couple months passed at the. After that, and I started having some different issues. And it was back in November, Thanksgiving week, in fact, that, you know, we were given the diagnosis of incurable peritoneal cancer. And over the last.

What's it been, five, six months now, you know, I've lost over 50 pounds, and a lot of that has been muscle mass. And so I just don't have the strength to do a lot of the normal things, you know, that I would. I would do. I can't. I can't help around the house with some of the things that I would normally help with, or I'm just worn out at the end of the day, you know.

And so, you know, I think that physically that's been, you know, one of the greatest challenges, not just. Just not being able to count on doing normal things. I mean, Friday evening, I was getting up from the dinner table, and I leaned on the back of the chair wrong, and the chair tipped and the chair went down and I followed it and landed on the chair. And, you know, just as I laid there and my wife had to come help me up and just think, I can't even count on the ability to get up out of a chair after dinner, you know, successfully these days. And so that's been physically challenging.

I think mentally and emotionally, the biggest challenge was going from a very positive prognosis. And, you know, we were treating cancer for the cure at last year, and then in November, to go from going to be cured to incurable cancer. That's. That's been mentally and emotionally difficult, and we do pretty well with it. But every now and then, you know, that just comes up and.

And trying to wrap our head around and deal with the fact that this, you know, unless God does something miraculous, this isn't going to go away, so. Well, I appreciate you giving us that recap, Steve. And we just. Having walked through these last number of months with you, I know that we. We talked briefly just a few minutes ago about this text in Second Corinthians where Paul talked about his own affliction, his own thorn in the flesh.

And, you know, oftentimes when we struggle, our immediate response, of course, is to ask God to remove our pain. And sometimes God does that, but sometimes God chooses instead just to say, you know what? I'm not going to take the pain away, but I'm going to walk with you through it. And so, because that seems to be the journey you're walking right now, can you talk to us about how, how this cancer journey has impacted your, your faith so far. Yeah.

So I, it's really done two things I think, that I think of most and, and the first one is that it's, it's really solidified my faith. I, I grew up in a Christian family, grew up, you know, being raised to know Jesus, grew up in the church, you know, so that been in ministry for 35 years. So, you know, that's been a long journey. But I think no matter how long you've been a Christian, we all have those moments where we have those questions that pop up into our head, right? It's a, what if I'm wrong?

What if this isn't real? What if somebody else is right about what they think about faith or religion or end of life things? And we all have those moments, I think, where those kind of doubts and questions pop up. And I just want to reassure you that having those is not a lack of faith. Having those and choosing to move forward with your faith, that's what faith is, it's moving forward with Jesus despite the fact that there are gaps and questions because we can't have all the answers to the gaps and questions.

But this journey has really solidified my faith, particularly when it comes to death and the end of life. I was about two weeks maybe after I got the diagnosis of incurable cancer, two or three weeks, and there was a Sunday where I'd been here through the morning, and it was a great morning and I was out, I had a couple places to go, so I found myself by myself driving in the car. And as I was doing that one stretch over 10 or 15 minutes, I don't know if there was a song that came on the radio or my mind was reflecting on a song we'd sung here at church that morning, but it just started me thinking. And all of a sudden I started praying and I started praying out loud, audibly. And it was a prayer like I don't think I've ever prayed.

It was a prayer that was strong, forceful, and it was just a prayer of declaring, one after the other, all of the things that I've been taught, all of the things that I've said, I believe. All of the things that I believe about God, about Jesus, about the promises that we have, and just how that he is true, that he is faithful, that I will see him when I die, that there is hope in death for life with him. It was 10 or 15 minutes of just declaring these things that God was bringing to my mind, of all the things I'd Said I believed over the years, and it was in the days that followed. Within a week, I just very tangibly, in a very real way, felt God melting away any doubts and questions that I might have. And while there are physical, mental, emotional challenges for me spiritually, I'm in a place I don't think I've ever been.

I'm in a place where I know with 100% certainty that God is real, that Jesus. That there's truth in the story of Jesus and his death and his resurrection, and that I have hope of eternal life. There's just no doubt for me anymore. No question. It's 100% locked in, no matter what happens.

And I know that I'm hopeful that my last moments on this earth and my last breath will be in the presence of my family. But I know for sure that the first moments after this life on this earth, I'll be in the presence of Jesus. And I don't know what that looks like.

I don't know what that looks like and how that plays out, because Scripture's a little unclear. You know, the dead in Christ will rise at the second coming of Christ or to be absent from the bodies and present with the Lord. So I don't know how that all plays out. I just know my next experience after my last breath here will be the experience of seeing my Savior.

And I'm so thankful for that faith that he's given me and the way he's made that solid. And the second thing I think this journey has done is it's made life very clear. When you hear the words incurable cancer, life gets very clear very fast. And for me, it just very clearly focused in. There are two things that are important now to me in my life.

It's my family. And it's sharing Jesus with anybody who listened to what I might have to say. And I've had the blessing of being able to watch my kids grow up and become adults who are establishing their life and watch them be rooted in faith in Jesus and connecting and serving in their church and knowing that they're doing well and knowing that they're committed to my wife thriving and doing well whenever it is that I die and knowing all the things you know, there are still some pieces to get in place, but so much is in place that my family solid and God's given me peace in that. And I don't have to worry about my work.

My work there is done, and God has shown me that and given me that peace. But my work is not done in sharing the good news of Jesus. And so anybody who makes the mistake of asking, they better buckle in, because I'm ready to share story after story after story. And you can ask some of our staff. They've made the mistake a couple times, and I think that's why they avoid my office.

So, you know, I just. I just want people to know what I know and what I've experienced, that Jesus is real, that he loves us regardless of who we are and what we've done. He loves us and he waits to welcome us home. And sure, he wants things in our lives to change because he wants a better life for us, but he doesn't make that a prerequisite for welcoming us home. And in his love and his grace, he wants to give us everything that we need.

And ultimately, that ultimate gift is a restored relationship with our Heavenly Father, which we can only have through Him. And so I just want people to know that. And that's become such a clear focus of. I love that song, the Goodness of God. You know, with every breath, I will sing of the goodness of God.

That's my story. And so with every breath I have left till the very last one, I'm committed to sharing the story of Jesus. Amen. Amen. We talk a lot, Steve, about wanting to be a church for the one just reflecting God's heart for that person who is near us but is not walking in relationship with Him.

And it sounds like one of the things God is accomplishing in your life right now is just a tightening of the screws or a sharpening of that focus. So can I ask, given that refinement of the way that you're kind of looking at the world right now, how do you find yourself praying? Yeah. Since we got the incurable cancer diagnosis in November, you know, God kind of gave us, Laid this on my heart, and I shared it with my family, and I say it to them and to others a fair amount. And I think I say it as much to remind myself that we're praying for a big miracle.

We want to see me be healed. I want that. And so we're praying for a big miracle because it would bring a big story that we could share with people about Jesus and his healing in my life. But more than that, we want to have big hearts that are big enough to accept whatever stories God wants to write and whatever miracles he wants to do. We tend to think if God would just heal me, that would be the biggest miracle and the biggest story that people just couldn't deny the reality of God.

But I Wonder if maybe God is doing miracles in people's life and writing stories in their life. As they see me and my wife Jill walking faithfully, holding on to Jesus through the difficulty of this challenging season and through the moments that are suffering, and they see that this is really real. Like, this faith is not a. It's not a false thing. It's real and it's meaningful, and it's got.

It's got legs. It stands up under the weight of real hard life. And I just think it's quite possible that he may do more miracles, and they may not be as big and flashy, but in the life of the person who sees Jesus and life has changed for them, that's the biggest miracle they can have. And, you know, I was sitting in this room in our Good Friday service, and you were given the message, and you were reading Isaiah 53, and I've heard Isaiah 53 hundreds of times, but you were reading it. And there was a phrase that landed on me in a fresh way when I heard it.

And it was just a phrase that by his wounds, we are healed.

And what I was reminded of in that moment is that whether God heals my body or not, Jesus has already given me the ultimate healing, the healing that I most need, because he took on suffering for me and he bled and died for me, and he came back to life for me and for you. And he's given us the gift of ultimate healing and a restored relationship with our Heavenly Father. And regardless of what happens in this life with my body, he's already healed me in the way I needed most. And, you know, so we just pray, thankfully, that about what he has given us and that he will use our lives and the challenge of this journey to share his ultimate healing with people who don't know about it yet. Yeah.

Amen. So that's our prayer. Okay. And that's our prayer, too. We shared a little bit from Second Corinthians, chapter 12.

Late in that letter, Paul talks about this struggle that he had and his pleading with God for relief from that and how God said, no, you know, Paul, I'm going to allow you to continue to struggle with that, but I'm instead going to walk with you through it, and my strength will be made perfect in your weakness. That entire book of Second Corinthians speaks really powerfully to these themes of pain and struggle in our lives. So I would encourage you to read that book. But one of the passages from Second Corinthians, that's been on my mind and heart in Preparing for this series actually comes in the very opening verses where. Where Paul wrote, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. And that passage, Steve, just. It makes me curious, what are some of the ways that your cancer journey is creating opportunities for you to receive help and comfort from God, but also, how is God using that to. To allow you to extend help and comfort to other people? Yeah, well, we've definitely received comfort and God's done that in tangible ways.

He's done that through many of you. There's some guys from a life group who last year said, hey, you probably need help mowing your grass, don't you? And they started from the first cut of the spring until the last shot at mulching leaves in the fall. And they cut my grass every week or every time it needed it. And they've started doing it again this year and they've got my garage code and know how to get the keys to the shed.

They just come and go and take care of that. And it's been such a blessing that they do that for us. And you know, there's. We had a water leak in our kitchen back last summer and the kitchen got torn apart and water remediation all done and then the insurance decided they weren't going to pay for it. And so our kitchen stayed kind of torn apart for about six months while we were figuring out what we were going to do about it.

Somebody here just sparked some conversation with some other folks and thought maybe some folks would want to chip in and go together to help us get, get that done. And that started to spread through a number of folks here that somebody took that to our leadership Johnson county class that I was part of a couple years ago. And next thing you know, as far as I know, is about 75 people that went in together to fund having our kitchen redone. And somebody from that group has a connection to Duke Renovations and got them involved. And I promise you, our kitchen got done a lot faster than yours ever will.

I mean, they were four weeks ahead of schedule. When does that ever happen? And they've just taken care of us and people have taken care of things. And what people don't realize, I think we have this new beautiful kitchen and life is put back together and as my mom had said, we just needed something in our life settled, and that's helped bring that to us. But what I.

What I think people who are part of that don't realize is they've added value to our home, and that value goes into the equity of our home that one day my wife is going to need when she sells that house after I'm gone and uses the funds for the plan that we've put in place. And the people who contributed to that have increased the equity and what she's going to be able to take away from that. So they've helped us now, but they've blessed us even for the days after I'm gone. And they don't know that. There's so many people that do.

Those are big things. But, you know, there are people, there's so many of you that come up to me on Sunday morning, it's happened already multiple times today that come up and say, we're thinking about you and praying for you every day. And I'm so humbled and thankful to know that there are people who would take the time out of their busy day every day just to think about me and then to take my burden and my journey before the only one who can do anything to help me. And so people have done that, but we've received it directly from God. I can tell you that there have been some days and moments where I have endured some difficult pain.

And I just laid on my bed and repeatedly said the words, in your grace and mercy, would you grant me your favor and bring me relief, Jesus, in your grace and mercy, would you grant me relief, Jesus, in your grace and mercy, would you grant me relief?

And there hasn't been a time that I haven't asked him for that, that within a matter of moments, he hasn't taken away my pain.

I had a rough night a week or two ago, and my wife texted some of our friends and our family that are kind of our prayer people. And she came back in a little bit later and I had kind of started to drift into some light sleep, kind of resting. And she leaned over me and I could tell she was there. And I opened my eyes and she asked. She came in and wanted to see if I wanted to hear some of the prayers that they texted back.

She read one of them and I knew who had prayed it. And just because of the nature of it, I asked her when that she sent that. And she told me what time it was. And I told her it wasn't more than one to two Minutes after that that my pain subsided and I began to drift into rest. And Jesus has granted me tangible, tangible things to show me that he loves me and he cares for me and he doesn't want me to suffer.

And so we've received it directly and indirectly through you. And it's been. It's been a real blessing.

It's just been incredible. And I was watching a video the other day of a lady named Joni Eareckson Tada. If you don't know who she is, she was paralyzed back in 1967 as a teenager in an accident at a lake. Her neck was broken and she's quadriplegic. Been in a wheelchair dealing with quadriplegia for almost 60 years.

And daily she has pain. And in this video she talked about worse than the quadriplegia is the pain that she deals with every day. And she. One day, you know, she has days where she just starts today and says, I can't do quadriplegia anymore. And then one day, God reminded her of the verse in Philippians, chapter four that says, I can do all things through God who gives me strength.

And she said the words, I can't do.

I can't do quadriplegia anymore, but I can do all things through Christ. He gives me strength. And there are days where I think, I don't know how long I can do this cancer journey, because what it is, is what it's going to be until it's done. And there are days that I think I can't. I don't know that I can do cancer anymore.

But what I know is I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So every day that he gives me breath, I can do all things through him, including living for him and leading for him and sharing his story. And. And I've been able to do that. And as a result, I've been able to see God at work in people's lives around us.

And he's been at work in us both in my life and in my life of my wife Jill, and in our kids. I see it in and around us all the time, every day where he's at work. And so it's been just been impactful both to receive and to be able to give. Well, Steve, thank you so much for sharing some of your story with us. We want to pray for you.

I'm going to ask right now, if. If you're able to, would you just extend a hand in Steve's direction and just join me as we pray over him together?

Father God, we're grateful for our friend Steve. I thank you for bringing him here four years ago to be a part of our staff team. We're grateful, God, for his friendship, for his love for you, and just the. The great help that he's offered in terms of strategic alignment. We're really, really grateful, God, for all the gifts that you've given him.

I know that even the. The series of events that brought him here were a. A challenging season. And we're grateful, God, for the. The home that, that he and Jill have found here.

We're grateful, God, for your faithfulness to walk with us in the midst of our difficulties. God, we know that you are completely capable of. Of healing. And we continue, Father, to, to ask you in Steve's life to eradicate cancer, to push back the, the progression of this disease and enable him to have many more years of a productive and fruitful life in ministry here with us. We know that you're capable of that, God, and so we ask you in the.

The mighty name of Jesus to do that. We also acknowledge, Father, on the basis of the authority of your word, that, that your, your plan may be other than that. And we want to allow you, like Steve said, we want to have big enough hearts to trust that you are God, regardless of the outcome. And I pray, God, that you would help us to continue to support Steve and Jill in all the best ways we can. I pray that you would continue, God, to pour love and hope and encouragement into their lives through the encouragement and the help and the service of others.

And I pray that you'd continue, God, to give Steve many opportunities for conversation where he can speak, speak into people's lives, the hope and the courage that you're giving him, God, through your strength and through your spirit. We're thankful, God, that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength. And so we lift Steve up to you in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.

Thank you, brother. Love you, brother. Would you thank me or join me in thanking Steve for what you've heard today is that both scripture and Steve have stressed to us that our hope doesn't depend on God always doing exactly what we want him to. That's a really important thing for us to wrap our heads around. We are resurrection people.

We are living on this side of the cross and the empty tomb. So our hope is anchored in a God who joins us in our pain, not necessarily a God who always takes it away. The message of scripture is that God doesn't just watch our pain from a distance and Feel sorry for us. Our God actually put on flesh and and he jumped right into the middle of our pain at the cross. Jesus fulfilled those words that were written in the Old Testament book of Isaiah.

Steve alluded to those just a second ago. Isaiah said he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him. And by his wounds we are healed.

And there is no more powerful picture of God's love and mercy and empathy than the cross. God showed his love for us by suffering and dying for our sins. And God showed His power by rising from the grave to offer new life to everyone who trusts Him. And we remember that together every week when we gather for communion. At the front and the back of this room are some tables, and on those tables you'll find some trays that are full of double stacked plastic cups.

The bottom cup contains a small piece of bread that is a symbol of the the body of Jesus that was nailed to a cross in our place. That top cup contains some grape juice that represents Jesus blood. And he gave both his body and his blood willingly for us at the cross. There's never any pressure to participate. We don't want anyone to feel arm twisted in any way.

But we want you to know that this sacrifice Jesus made was for all of us. And so we welcome you to participate with us. If you'd like to do that. I'm going to lead us in prayer. And then after that, when your heart is ready, we'll just invite you to move to whichever one of those tables is nearest you and join us in eating that bread and drinking that juice and remembering Jesus sacrifice and thanking him for loving us that much.

Would you pray with me? Lord Jesus, we come this morning grateful that as Steve said, you have made our complete healing a reality through the way that you suffered and died in our place on the cross. Father, we know that a day is coming. Even if our health is good today, we know a day is coming when these bodies will give out and that we were intended for more than just existence here on this planet. We're thankful, God, that you have wired eternity within us, that you have called us to an eternal existence with you in a place without the hurts and the pains and the struggles and frustrations of this life.

We're thankful, Jesus, that you humbled yourself, that even though you had every right to cling to your throne, that you chose to empty yourself, humble yourself, suffer and die in our place at the cross. And we praise you for the power that brought you back from the grave and the hope we have because of that resurrection, that through our faith and our confidence in what you've done for us, we'll be able to live with you forever as well. We thank you, God, for this time and the reminder that it gives us of who you are and what you've done for us. And we pray all these things in your name, Jesus. Amen.