20/20 Vision Series -- Cross-Cultural Discipleship: Healing and Hope

Man, it's good to be together in God's house with His people and I invite you if you would, let's bow our heads and pray today.

Father, we thank you for this morning. Thank you for the Sabbath day, a day to rest and be with Your people, a day to focus our hearts and minds on You. Lord, we pray today, Father, for all in our community. Lord, those who are isolated, those who are lonely, Lord, we pray that You would draw near to them. Those who are sick, those who are afraid of getting sick, Lord, we pray Father that You would heal.

Father, those who are struggling with various kinds of stress, various kinds of anxiety. Lord, this virus has been unrelenting. Father, we pray that You would relieve our stress. Lord, give us Your peace. Father, we pray for those who are in physical pain, those who have physical needs. Father, we pray that You provide, use Your people to provide.

Father, we pray for our church community as we haven't seen each other. We don't even know who's still a part of our church community. Father, we pray that You would help us care, to reach out. Lord, Father, we pray that we would do all the one anotherings of Scripture. Father, we pray Lord for our students and our kids for whom this has been a really challenging time. Lord, we pray that You would build resiliency in them. Father, we pray that You would help us to draw near to them and encourage them.

Father, we need a giant dose of Your encouragement. Father, we pray for Your Spirit to be at work among us in ways that we haven't experienced before. Lord, we are always people in need. Right now, more aware of it maybe than we have been in many points in our lifetime. We pray Father that You would meet us. We pray for marriages that have been really challenged. We pray for parent-child relationships that have been really challenged. We pray Father for those who are out of work. Lord, we pray and ask that You would provide and meet us in our places of need this morning. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

We're going to turn our attention to God's word. If you would find your bulletin or you can look up on one of the screens beside me. We're going to read together from 1 John 1, verses 5 through 10. And I apologize if you're just joining us, we are sort of in the middle of a series around the vision of our church. You'll see a picture of a tree there in your bulletin and that is a kind of pictograph of what our church's leadership have said we're aiming for over the next ten years. So we're looking at the second of the apples on that tree, which is cross-cultural discipleship today, and this is our last sermon on that particular fruit. We'll start the last one—last of the three fruits—next week. But let's look at God's word together. If you would read with me out loud, 1 John 1, verses 5 through 10. You ready? Three, two, one.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you: That God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us. — 1 John 1:5-10

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let's pray.

Father, we pray this morning that Your word, Lord, would come and find, Lord, fertile soil in our hearts. Lord, that it might bear fruit. Lord, bring hope, bring healing. Lord, for Your glory and our joy. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Well, as I said, we've looked at cross-cultural discipleship and we've looked at several tools related to cross-cultural discipleship over the last few weeks. And today we're going to come to the last one of those. We're going to add one more to our toolbox with that. But as we talk about cross-cultural discipleship, as we talk about race in this country, one of the conversations, the questions that I hear regularly is this, and it's sort of said in frustration: Why does everything have to be about race?

And that's a complaint I regularly hear from people who are tired of talking about this. Maybe you're tired of talking about this. Maybe we believe that, like we've already dealt with this between the Emancipation Proclamation on the one hand and the Civil Rights movement on the other, this should be behind us. We shouldn't have to keep talking about it anymore.

But I think the question itself is really profound because it reveals something about us. The question "Why does everything have to be about race?" reveals that there is a deep theological longing in each of us for innocence. We're longing for innocence.

We're longing to not have to keep talking about this. In his book The Content of Our Character, writer Shelby Steele writes: "I think the racial struggle in America has always been a struggle for innocence." What we want is to be able to return to Eden. We want things to be the way they should be, and really we want to be declared innocent—all of us in this area.

I mean, don't we all wish we could take a giant eraser and go back and erase this part of our country's history? It's embarrassing. It's a blot on our record. It makes us deeply sad. It brings up all kinds of feelings we would rather not feel—shame and anger and sadness and frustration and fear and lots more. We're all sort of done with that.

I've been to workshops on race and on cross-cultural discipleship, and I've heard people say things like this: "I just wish I could turn in my white people card." It's a desire for innocence. Or remember Rodney King in 1992? "Why can't we all just get along?" We long to be able to return to Eden. Why is that so hard for us?

According to Steele, the problem is this: when to lose innocence is to lose power. It feels like there's no win in this for everybody. Given the way the racial debate has gone in this country, one's essence depends on the other's guilt. This is especially true between Blacks and Whites in this country. One's innocence depends on the other person's guilt, and vice versa. So America seems kind of stuck—stuck in this place longing for innocence yet not able to get there.

I think we Christians have a unique voice in this conversation. We have something unique to add, because we know we can't go back to Genesis. We can't go back to the Garden of Eden. There's no way back into Eden that way. But Jesus provides us a different way to innocence and a place, really, for hope and healing in a conversation where there's very little hope and very little healing.

Confession as a Tool for Healing

This is our fifth tool in the toolbox. We've looked at worship. We've got empathy. We've looked at humility. We've looked at lament. And today: confession. God makes provision for us through His Son to find hope and healing—to find something even better than innocence again—through the cross.

Now, 1 John 1 is one of those go-to passages for our liturgy. In fact, it was funny. I was talking to John Miller. He's one of our elders in training who prepared our liturgy this morning. He didn't even know this was the sermon passage because this is one of those go-to ones we always use.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. — 1 John 1:9

Now, do we believe that? Okay, listen, y'all. Y'all are here with me this morning, and I'm used to preaching to about two hundred fifty people. We got about sixty people here this morning. So I'm going to need you to do a little bit more work and carry the load for about another thirty or forty people. Alright?

So, don't we believe that? Yes. Don't we believe that Jesus is a deep fountain? I mean, in Him is an endless supply of grace and mercy from God for all of our sins. Yeah, this is our bread and butter, people. We love this stuff. This is what we believe.

And here's the question though: what about with regard to racial sins? Do we believe this? Do we really apply this and believe these two things—forgiveness and cleansing—with regard to racial sins? That's a hard one.

Understanding Sin and the Hydra

So let me approach it this way. Do you know what the Hydra is from Greek mythology, or from Captain America? Maybe Captain America is a little bit more relatable. In Greek mythology, there's this mythical beast that looks like a dinosaur except it has seven heads. Hercules, you know, the strong man of all strong men, was supposed to go and slay the Hydra. But here's the problem: every time you cut off one of the heads, two more come back in its place. This is like: how are you going to kill the Hydra? Or how is Captain America, right, going to defeat Hydra, the organization?

I want to use that Hydra analogy this morning because I find that Hydra is roughly analogous to how we understand sin. Now, if you're a Christian, you gotta know what sin is. Even the littlest of little people in the church know something about sin. Your little kids who come up in the church—if you ask them what sin is, they say something akin to "bad things I do," right? They know that definition. Some of you have more nuanced definitions—biblical ones—like "missing the mark," right? Or "any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God." That's the Westminster Confession right there.

But it's easy to define sin. The real challenge is defeating sin. I mean, sin is not that tricky.

Sin is much more tricky to deal with and kill in ourselves and our lives than it is to define. That's why I want to use this analogy of the hydra, because sin not only has guilt but it has all these other effects on us. I want to walk through and think about this this morning.

I'm borrowing an idea from writer Cornelius Plantinga. He has a book called Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, and it's about sin and all the different ways that sin works and all the different ways that sin manifests itself. He talks about sin as pollution, sin as perversion, sin as masquerade, folly, guilt, and shame. I know some of you are like, "Pastor's weird, reads the weirdest books." You guys like weird stuff like this. It's actually a really hopeful book because when I'm looking at all the different ways that sin works in us, all the ways that sin affects us, it actually helps you see that in all these areas, the cross can cover all of these things. It's incredibly hopeful.

This is what I want to give you this morning: biblical hope. But if we're going to get there, we have to be willing to face the Hydra. Here's my question for you: Are you feeling brave this morning? Are you willing to do this with me? We're going to look at the Hydra together with regard to race.

Original Sin

Let's start here with original sin. A lot of you probably could define original sin for me. Original sin is that sin that we inherit from our first parents, Adam and Eve.

Sin came into the world through one man, that's Adam, and death through sin and so death spread to all men. — Romans 5:12

In original sin, we see in the Bible that it affects all the parts of who we are as a person. It's not just our moral areas, but it's our rational thinking, our emotions, our desires. It affects all of us.

The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can understand it? — Jeremiah 17:9

That means we have, according to the Bible, massive blind spots about ourselves. There are ways that we don't even understand ourselves or our own hearts. To be human, yes, is to be infected with sin, but it's even affected with blindness to whole parts of who we are. We don't understand how we work, what we want, or why we do the things we do.

So how does this relate to racial sins? Well, it means that when someone points out, "Hey, there is such a thing as implicit bias, or there's something like a predisposition in you where you judge people on the outside before you know them on the inside," the Christian should be like, "Yeah, of course. Of course there's a bias. I mean, we have blind spots. We all have places that we don't even know ourselves." We can agree with that. Don't we believe that with regard to original sin and implicit bias, that the cross is big enough? Do we believe that if we confess our sins, he is faithful to forgive our sins? So here's the question: Can we confess that maybe, just maybe, we also have implicit bias? That's the first head of the Hydra.

Actual Sin: Sins of Commission and Omission

Let's look at another one. How about actual sin? Let's talk about sins of commission. Now, that's a fancy word, but commission comes from the word commit. These are the things that you meant to do. You actually did intend to hurt someone else. You did intend to say that thing. You did intend wrong.

Again, with regard to sins of commission and purposeful sins, do we believe that if we confess our sins, he is faithful to forgive them? Do we believe that, class? Yes. And so can we apply this again to areas of racial sin? Jokes, racist jokes, racial slurs, intentional racist actions or words. Do we believe God can forgive those? Yes, we believe that.

But here's where it gets harder. Because in the Bible, we see that guilt is not just the things we intended to do, not just our intentions, but also our inattentions. The things that we didn't mean to do but still affect other people. That's called sins of omission.

Jesus criticized the Pharisees for these things. The things that they failed to do.

Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you tithe the mint and the dill and the cumin and you neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Those are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. — Matthew 23

James says the same thing:

Anybody who knows the right thing to do and doesn't do it sins. — James 4

Right? Their guilt is not just about the wrong we do but the good we didn't do. It's about our inattentions.

And see, this is really important when we talk about race in this country, because it's very common for people to say, "Okay, the real racist out there are the people who belong to the Ku Klux Klan."

White nationalists, the people who showed up in Charlottesville in 2017 yelling blood and soil. But if you say racism just has to do with intentions, and if you have no intention of hurting somebody and yet you do, and they feel resentful and you feel resentful that you're being accused of racism because you're generally a nice person and you didn't mean to do that and you generally mean to do good, are you willing to look at that?

We have a member of staff who was telling me that she worked for years doing ropes courses and that on ropes courses about ninety-nine percent of the injuries that happen are from omissions, things people failed to do. Failed to set up the harness correctly, failed to really check out the equipment. Now, that still hurts people, right? Those failures, those omissions still hurt. Great harm comes to people not just because of our intentions but because of our inattentions too.

So, separating those two—if you separate inattention from attention—it means that if we say something that inadvertently hurts someone else, you don't need to get defensive about that. Instead, you can say, "I'm sorry, I had no idea how that would affect you. That's how it would sound to you. That's how it would feel to you." You can use it as an opportunity to learn like, "Wow, I don't even see that. Help me understand."

You know, the moment we point away from ourselves and we're like, "No, those are the real racists over there," we're like the two guys in Jesus's parable. You remember the Pharisee and the tax collector? The Pharisee is like, "I'm glad I'm not like other people. I'm glad I'm not like them." And there's no room for that in the people of God. That's what Jesus is showing us. There's no room for that. We should be people who are saying, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Help me see that."

So, let me ask this question again. Do we believe that if we confess our sins—our sins of omission—that he's faithful and just to forgive our sins? I mean, we do this a lot of times in our church when we confess our sins. We pray this really old prayer and it goes like this:

Merciful God, we confess we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole hearts. We have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.

That's a prayer of confession of sins of omission. Can we confess those?

Corruption and Generational Sin

Let's try another one. Another head of the Hydra: corruption. And here's a tough one. So hang in with me on this.

The Bible speaks of one of the effects of sin being corruption.

A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough. — Galatians 5

You know what yeast does in dough? You work it in, you knead it in, and it causes the whole thing to rise. The picture there is sin infects all the areas and sin begets more sin. It grows.

So, let's think this morning about generational sin. This is a hard one—you're gonna have to put on your thinking caps like in preschool, right? About generational sin.

So, let's be really careful and clear. First, Christians do believe the Bible shows us that one person's sin can be imputed to another person. That's in the book of Romans. Adam's sin imputed to us. All people and, because of the cross, our sin imputed, put on Jesus. So we do believe in that. But the Bible says that God doesn't impute the culpability of a forefather's sin on the children.

The soul who sinned shall die. The son shall not suffer the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself. The wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself. — Ezekiel 18

It's saying God is saying the person—that person's responsible for their sins.

On the other hand, there are warnings in Scripture that God visits the iniquities onto the third and fourth generation. And you see different people in the Old Testament like Daniel and Ezra and Nehemiah—they're praying for forgiveness for the sins of their forefathers. So what gives? How do we hold all these things together?

Well, there's a way we can hold all these things together. This is what the Bible does with the idea of generational sin, and the way out of this is to think about the word "visiting the iniquity." That's that little phrase—visiting the iniquity. I don't want to overwhelm you with all the Bible stuff here, but I will give you this: the Bible has three words in Hebrew for iniquity, and we're most familiar with the one that has to do with blame, responsibility, or culpability. The person who did the sin. But one of the words for iniquity that's used over and over with "visit the iniquity" is sin with its results. Sin with its results. And this is different from culpability. This is called corruption. This is corruption.

Sin, yes, makes an individual culpable before God, responsible to him for what they did. Accountable to him for our rebellion. But generational sin works this way—it's like yeast. It brings corruption to the third and fourth generation. It pollutes. It infects other people.

See, it's quite simple. Culpability is personal, but corruption is community. We see this over in the Bible. For example, in Revelation, Jesus has letters to these seven churches and three of the letters address the sin of an individual in a church and yet call the congregation to repent of the corruption. You're all infected by this in some way. This affects you.

Again, this is why Daniel and Ezra and Nehemiah prayed about the sins of the people who went before them, their forefathers. Because they knew, they felt this sense of corruption from the actions of their forefathers that had infected them.

Racial Sin and Corruption

Let's take us back into our conversation about racial sin. This is hard for us as white people. We don't want to be associated with the sins of our forefathers who enslaved people, robbed Native Americans of land in this country. We don't want anything to do with that. But sin has been visited upon us. We feel its corruption. This is why there's so much guilt around these conversations that makes it almost impossible sometimes for white people to be honest. Like, "I don't want to. You can't blame me for that."

But we are feeling its corruption, and in a lot of places that has never been owned in this country. People of color have never heard white people say, "You know what? That's real and I want to acknowledge it."

But don't we believe? Let me ask you again. Don't we believe with regard to corruption that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness?

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. — 1 John 1:9

Cleanse us. Man, I want to be clean.

Pollution and Its Effects

Pollution is closely related to corruption in the Bible, but it has to do with something being ruined or spoiled or poisoned. Now, one of my favorite pictures of this is the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Man, God had some fun times with Jeremiah. Gave him crazy stuff to do. Jeremiah, cut off your hair with a sword and weigh it on a scale. Jeremiah, cook your dinner over dung. I mean, just weird stuff. But here's one of them: Jeremiah, go get a brand new linen belt and bury it in the mud and then a couple days later, pull it out and see what it looks like. Does it look pretty? No. It's ruined. It's polluted. That's the picture that God is showing them.

It means, again, deeply affected. Ruined, poisoned. And with regard to racial sin, it's really important to name pollution because there are ways that being white in this country has benefited me. It's advantaged me. Things have worked out for me in ways that they haven't worked out for people of color. And because of that, some of the things that I gained from that feel polluted. They feel kind of tainted. They feel off.

Now, we didn't—I didn't intend that. I didn't go out one day and say, "I really want to take advantage of the systems that make things work for white people." But they just do. They just affect things. And it doesn't mean though—just because we didn't intend something, we're not affected by it. That's what pollution means.

Generational Wealth

One example of this is generational wealth. We've talked about this a few weeks ago. I cited the statistic that in this country, white families have 10 times more generational wealth than Black families. We often use the "self-made man, self-made woman" bootstraps principles. I don't even know what bootstraps really are, but like, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you work hard. But look, people—10 times? I mean, no amount of hard work explains 10 times. 1.5 times, that might explain that through hard work. But 10 times? There are ways that systems in this country have benefited me and my people that have not benefited people of color in the same way.

One example of this is the GI Bill. My paternal grandfather, my dad's dad, was a career Air Force officer. He flew in World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam. And he got the GI Bill. When he came home from World War Two, he was able to buy a house and put his kids through college. My dad was the first person in our family line who got to go to college.

But here's how this played out: When I come along, when my siblings come along, the question is not if we'll go to college, but where. Not even a question of if—it's where.

Because of generational wealth from the GI Bill that benefited lots of white people, lots of white soldiers who came home from the war but did not benefit African American, Asian, Native American, Hispanic soldiers in the same way. And that was unevenly applied. Go read your history on that. And I've benefited from that. And yeah, I can look at that and say, hey, that was really great but there's some pollution attached to that. There's some ways that's benefited me that makes me go, right that is pollution.

So again, can we say, look, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Can we take pollution to the lord? Come on y'all. Y'all gotta help me out. Somebody gotta talk to me this morning. Right. We can take pollution to the lord.

Let me give last one because I'm running out of time and I could keep going but I won't. Let's talk about systemic racism. This is a hard one for many people. And I feel like I know some of you are like, you're handling lots of dynamite this morning Bradford. But look, it really shouldn't be. It really shouldn't be. For Christians, there should be no argument about this. It should be plain as the nose on our face that there could be systems of evil in this world. Right? Because we have such a well formed view of sin and evil.

First John tells us, first John two tells us, there are three enemies against the Christian. The world, the flesh, and the devil. — 1 John 2

In other words, me, me, the culture, and a sentient being of evil, the devil. Right. And all those are working together against the purposes of God in this world. So, when someone says, well, I think that there's sort of a system here that's at work, that's about evil, structural evil. Christians should be like, well yeah, of course there is.

We believe in Ephesians six which tells us that our war is not against flesh and blood but what does it say?

Against the authorities, the rulers, the cosmic powers over this present darkness against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. — Ephesians 6

I mean, are we surprised and shocked to hear like there are systems of injustice and systems of evil in the world? Heck no. Like, of course, that's what our Bible tells us, right? We're not surprised by this when we know that our hearts are desperately wicked, we're like, of course, a nation made up of lots of hearts produces a lot of wickedness.

So, look, this is why we can't just limit the race conversation to personal sins. This is why we gotta say, you know, we can't just say only personal sins affect me. I don't wanna talk about systems. Look, I'm not going down all the road with all conspiracy theories but there are systems. There are systems of racism in this world. There are systems of oppression and injustice that don't affect us all in the same way and we don't all see in the same way and those are real.

But again, what do we do with that? Do we take that to the lord? Do we take that to him and say, lord, you're the one who's able to forgive and cleanse. We need this in a big picture way. We need you to pull out not just a little scrub brush but maybe a giant gigantic mop. We got a lot of work you need to do here.

Confession and Repentance

See, what do we do with our sin? I find that many of us, we struggle with this idea of confession and repentance. This is what we'd always rather do, right? Deny, downplay, sweep under the rug, run away, hide. Man, all of those are we see those played out in the Bible. The Bible gives us lots of pictures of real sinners in real time doing the same things we do.

I find we like celebrity apologies. Do you know what celebrity apologies sound like? The celebrity gets on and like, I'm sorry if someone misunderstood how I might have possibly could have hurt someone. It's like the biggest sorry not sorry out there. Or, have you ever seen little kids apologize? We would confront some of our little boys and they would say, sorry. You're like, that ain't sorry. That's not even close to being sorry. That's sorry not sorry. Right?

But the provision that God gives us is confession and repentance. This is the only way back to innocence. This is the only way we can defeat the hydra. This is the only way and it's the best way. And God gives us so much joy in that and freedom in that.

But let's talk about what it's not because our culture is showing us what it's not. Our culture shows us this: cancel culture. Anybody familiar with cancel culture? Someone does something wrong, done. We're done with you. Right? Silence, sidelined. We're done with you but in the kingdom of God, praise the lord. There is no cancel culture. Jesus never looks at us and says, okay, you've gone far enough. Cut me off now. No. In the kingdom of God, there's redemption. There's forgiveness.

There's cleansing. There is a place—nobody can imagine this—but the church where sinners who confess together can live in fellowship together.

Our world also creates permanent categories. This is heartbreaking. There's a lot of talk right now on critical race theory. Let me be clear: critical race theory offers some excellent analysis, some diagnosis of what's happening in our culture. I found that a lot of people who are anti-critical race theory have mostly read blogs about it. While critical race theory can handle excellent diagnosis of what's going on in culture, it offers no solutions. It just puts people in permanent categories of oppressor and oppressed.

The Bible looks at us and says, all of you—all of you—are oppressors and oppressed. All of you have ways that you are sinners and that you hurt people all the time, and you're deeply affected by sin. We need Jesus. We need not just generalized forgiveness but very particular forgiveness.

We're what's called a reformed church. That doesn't mean we're getting over an alcohol addiction. That means we have a view of the Bible that's really a big view of God—God's power, God's working in history, His provision for us, continuity between the Old Testament and New Testament.

One of the things in our tradition we do is confess particular sins particularly. This is from the Westminster Confession. We confess particular sins particularly. You know this because if any of you have ever been married, you know that this is how it has to go. If a husband says to a wife, "Hey, I'm sorry for that thing I did," that is not good enough. She's going to be like, "What thing would that be?" We don't repent in general ways. We need to hear something specific. We need to hear exactly how you're repenting. And this is the same thing with repentance. Repentance requires specificity because grace is that good and deep. We can experience grace in specific ways.

We don't deny that we're sinners. Did you hear what we read this morning?

If we say that we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we haven't sinned, we make Him out to be a liar, and His word is not in us. — 1 John 1:6-10

I know that for some of you these last few weeks have been really hard. I just want to acknowledge that. This is hard stuff to talk about. It's painful, it hits close to home, it's difficult for you to stomach. And yet here's my challenge: if there's anything—we talked about the Hydra of sin this morning—is there some part of that that you can own? This is a baby step. Find one part of that that you can say, "Yeah, that's true. That's true in my life."

Do I have blind spots? Do I have implicit bias? Are there sins of omission? Are there ways I experience corruption and pollution? Do I see systemic sin? Can you pick one of those?

Confession and repentance—that's the secret weapon of the church. That's why this is the place we can have a conversation that's filled with hope. Hope of healing in this area because sinners who confess together can live together.

This week, we're going to provide a time for our church to come together safely—a Zoom call, Wednesday night, 8 to 9 PM. We're going to do a church-wide Zoom meeting, and it's an opportunity for us to come together and do two things: lament, like we talked about last week, grieve our past, hold that up before the Lord, and confess. I want to invite you to participate in that. There's an email going out this afternoon with all the Zoom link info.

It's online, but maybe you don't like to pray out loud. That's okay. The Lord hears your heart. But I would encourage you to try to pray out loud. Take some time this afternoon and this week to write out some things—things that you can lament, things that you can confess. Bring them together as our whole community so we can pray the Word together and might experience healing.

Brothers and sisters, what if we tried something different? What if we tried confession and repentance?

A couple years ago, I had this lawn mower that, truth be told, I trash picked. I was trying to change the lawn mower blade on this thing, so I got the thing upside down in my front yard with the biggest wrench that I have, and I'm cranking. I mean, I am just putting all my strength on the nut that holds the blade in place, and I can't get it to budge. So I'm thinking, leverage.

Like some of y'all are engineers. Okay, so you know this part. Leverage, so I go get a big pipe and I stick that on the handle of the wrench and I'm pushing more leverage on this thing and it's just not budging. And then of course, we'd go the Bradford solution, which is a big rock. Right? So, I take a big rock and I'm pounding the wrench, it's not moving. And my neighbor across the street comes over he's like, I think those are reverse threaded. Why don't you try going the other direction?

And of course, going the other direction works. That's the invitation from our Lord. I feel like we've been pounding on this one for a long time as a culture. We're not getting anywhere. We're frustrated. But the Lord invites us to go a different way. Why don't you try going backwards? Why don't we try repentance?

Let's go to the word in prayer together. Father, we thank you for the provision of the cross and we thank you that it is not just sort of old news for us but we need it all the time. We need it every day. There are so many blind spots, ways that we don't even see how much we need the cross. Lord, thank you for your provision in Jesus. Thank you that you anticipate the sin in our hearts. You know us better than we know ourselves. Holy Spirit, come have your way among us. We pray that we would be convicted of sin. That's a dangerous prayer but we pray that, Lord. Would you convict us of sin so that we might know your healing? We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.