Thank you, Pastor Kendall, for praying over us. Elaine and the worship team for leading us. We, we're in the middle of a 3-week piece on grace. Last week, and I'll give you a little review on it, we talked about what God's grace is. And today we're going to be talking about some of the barriers that we have in our lives that can prevent us from being able to receive the amount of grace that God wants to give us.

So for anybody that has a short-term memory problem from a week ago, or that wasn't here, here's a little review. You've got this word grace, and it comes from places in the Bible. There's, of course, in your Old Testament, the Scriptures were originally written in Hebrew, and in the New Testament they were written in Greek. Mostly, a little Aramaic in there. I bet you never studied that in high school or college, so you wouldn't recognize it if you saw it, probably.

I know I wouldn't. But in Hebrew, there was this word for grace. It was khen, K-H-E-N, and it was this concept of just this free gift that was given. And then in the New Testament, charis is grace, and it's unmerited favor from God. In other words, something you didn't earn.

You can't earn it. A gift is not something earned. That would be like a paycheck. That would be something that was, you know, just what you had coming for what you have done. Fortunately, God gives us things that we don't deserve, that we haven't earned.

In fact, you could never earn the grace that God has given you. He's offered so much to you, namely Jesus Christ. You know, the Scriptures tell us that when we were still dead in our transgressions, in other words, what we deserve for our sin was death. Adam and Eve, the first two people God creates them, He tells them something, one thing not to do. They immediately go and do that thing.

I don't know if it was immediate, but it was pretty close. You know, they go and do that one thing, and God had told them, "In the day that you do this, you will die." And yet, we read the Scripture, and they lived for hundreds of years. It's like they didn't die that day. And yet, we wonder, like, "Well, was God a liar or what?" No, God is very merciful. In God's grace, the gift that He gives that we haven't earned and can't deserve on our own, He gives us His mercy.

He gave us this opportunity that our sins could be forgiven. And so we see grace as part of the character of God. It's actually His nature. It's who He is. You might have had somebody in your life, maybe it was a grandmother, maybe it was— guys, some of your wives, they're great at this, they're just always thinking of other people giving little gifts and taking care of you in some way.

It might have been a grandparent, it might have been this person that you knew that just always seemed to have the perfect little gift or card or something for the occasion, and you think, "Man, they're just— that is who they are. That's their nature." God's nature is so much bigger than all of that. He gives you the gifts that you need when you need them. So many times we pray for things and we're asking God for something and it's not in the right timing, Maybe it's not actually in the best interest of what we need, but God knows what you need. He knows when you need it.

And it's not that He doesn't listen to your prayers, but it is that God knows what He's going to do, and He has a plan for how He's going to bless you. So God gives you His grace. We said, and we saw this in the devotionals this week that we send out every morning, that there's a time, there's a couple examples in Scripture where where Jesus talked about somebody that repeatedly went and asked for something. And Elaine and I were talking about this earlier, and she said, you know, at one point she had been taught, you know, like if you have to ask a second time, you just didn't have the right faith, or something along those lines. And it's like, well, no, that might not be true.

It might be that you need a persistence before God. You need to stay in that thing for a while. Not just say, "Okay, Lord, I said it, I dropped it off at Your lap, and I forgot it, and I left it there. Now why didn't You do something?" And you just sit there waiting, you know? No, keep storming the throne of grace with confidence, the Scriptures tell us.

Approach the throne of grace of God and just come there every day and be like, "All right, God, it's me again. This might sound like a broken record." For you guys that don't know what that is, there were these black things that were round. Most of you do, I'm sorry. But they would spin around and it wasn't a CD. I've got one and we've taught our daughter to use it.

She scratched one of my records though. It's one of my favorite songs on the record. I don't know, she might have— it might have been me. I don't think it was me. Anyway, somebody scratched it.

Was it Amy? It wasn't Amy, okay. And so as it goes around, it just tch, tch, tch every time. And then sometimes when you get just the right scratch, it hops over one little groove and it just plays the same few bars over and over on that. And it's like, oh yeah, it's that song.

I've got to go. Move the needle. Might sound like a broken record to God. You're like, "I'm saying the same thing again today. It comes back around.

I'm saying it again." God doesn't get tired of that. Sometimes He just wants to know that you're actually willing to not just bring your request to Him, but that you're actually willing to seek His face and to say, "Lord, okay, here's my request, but what is it that I'm missing from Your presence today? What aspect of Your character and Your nature have I not understood that You want me to understand through this process?" It's not that He's playing with you, or toying with you, or just kind of dangling it over you saying, "If you just ask right, or just ask enough, then I'll give it to you." It's not that He's doing that. It's that God just desires to have that conversation with you, and so don't stop in your request to God. But do be aware that sometimes we ask for the wrong things, and what we're actually asking for isn't the full grace of God that He is offering you.

What you're actually asking for might not be the thing that you most need. So continue asking God, but be willing for Him to reveal to you what it is that you actually are in need of from Him. But do you know this? God gives you grace every day. Whether you've had the worst day, whether you've had the best day, anything in between, somewhere in there you have received multiple gifts of the grace of God in your life.

Some of the practical ways that it plays out, we talked about forgiveness, the mercy of God. Mercy is— if grace is getting something that you didn't earn, mercy is not getting what you did deserve. You know, mercy would be, practically speaking, in life, just as a person from person to person, if somebody wrongs you in some way and you have, like, they damage your property, your car, whatever it might be, you have a right to receive some type of compensation for that. Or perhaps if somebody harms you, there might be legal consequences for them and they should have punishment under the law. But you might say, like one time I had somebody and they had done something to me and the police said, "Do you want to press charges?" I said, "No, I'd like for him to not be a jerk anymore, but no, I don't want to press charges.

Like, this guy might have just been having a rough day. I don't know. Like, I don't even know him, but no, I don't want to jam him up on that. It's not worthwhile." And so that was— That was being merciful towards that guy. I could have demanded justice against what he had done to me, which wasn't anything that much, but I didn't.

I just said, "You know what? Let's just let this one go." God has done that on such a larger scale for us. The things that we have done against God and the ways that we have worked against Him and sinned against Him deserves punishment justly. And God is a God of justice, but He's also a God of grace. And mercy.

And in that, He has provided a way through His Son Jesus Christ dying on our behalf that we can receive forgiveness for our sins, and His mercy allows us that the consequences of our sins were placed on Christ and not on us. That is the full grace nature of God played out in our lives today. So forgiveness, mercy, provision, protection, I mean, there are some folks that pray every day when they get in the car that God would help them to arrive safely to their destination. Me? I'm a man, and I just think that that has a lot to do with how I drive, you know?

But I totally get it because there are a lot of bad drivers out there. I mean, some really terrible drivers, and it's like, okay, you know, um, no, I'm not gonna say that. Okay, so anyway, I'm editing out my own joke that I won't get in trouble for now. Aren't you proud of me?

And so, I'll still get in trouble for alluding to it. Anyway, so praying for protection though in different things, like, that doesn't give you the right to, like, go and put yourself in dumb situations, like, purposefully. It'd be like saying, like, I'm going skydiving with no lessons, "And I'm not like, I'm solo skydiving, but Lord, help me to land safely." Bro, you don't know anything about skydiving. You can't ask God for that. I mean, you can, but like, the first way into that safety was not jumping out of that airplane, right?

Now, I did go skydiving once, but I was strapped to a guy that had 17,000 jumps behind him. It was every day for him, multiple times a day. No big deal. Not a problem. I mean, it was literally the smoothest landing possible.

Just like, boop. That was it. It was easy. It was great. Didn't hurt your knees at all.

You know, good times. But don't put yourself in a situation that's absolutely dangerous. It's like churches have been famous in the past for doing like cake and ice cream socials, and there'll be a pastor or somebody that prays beforehand that the food would be blessed to our bodies. Are you kidding me? Like, God does miracles, but He's not like gonna just play into our foolishness on some of this stuff.

So don't do things that you know are bad for you and say, "Okay, Lord, could you bless this now?" No, live how God has called you to live, and then ask Him for His provision, for His protection, for His blessings on your life as He gives you the wisdom for how to live right. One of the other ways we see God's holiness in our lives, and we didn't really cover this last week, or that was it, holiness. God's grace in our lives is holiness. The way we see God's grace in our lives is that He calls us to live a holy life, And He gives us the ability to do that. So a holy life is simply living in the full revelation of God, how He wants you to live.

There have been a million definitions of holiness over time, and people argue about it a lot. But simply put, God is holy. He— there's no sin found in Him. There's nothing bad, wrong, or offensive found in God. And He calls us to mirror that because we are created in His image.

We reflect who God's nature is. And so He calls us to live according to His holiness, and we should reflect that. And Him giving us that holiness is a form of His grace in our lives because it means you don't have to live in the filthy nature of the sin that you have in your lives. I got into a bit of a discussion with some children this week, which can be interesting when you argue with kids.

And I heard one of them say, like, "Well, we're animals." I was like, No, you're not. And everything in my brain was saying, yeah, you act like it, but no, you're not animals. And I told them, I said, you are human beings created in the image of God. Now, you might be living far from that. You might be living like an animal.

You might be living not the way God created you to live. But that doesn't change the very fact that you are who you are. You're a human being created in the image of God reflecting His nature. And what He calls you to reflect is His holiness. Ultimately, that's what— who we are.

And so, when we reflect the nature of God, we see all the attributes of His grace played out in our lives as we are outwardly focused towards our neighbor and our friends around us. So, one of the other things that we looked at, and I want to just briefly touch on, is that grace is shown through the nature of the three members of the Trinity. God as Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. See, we receive the grace of God the Father because as our Heavenly Father, He watches out for us. He cares for us.

Like an earthly father that might see their child about to do something dumb that will maybe even wind them up in the hospital, like we see that and we're like, "Hey, don't do that. That's gonna hurt." No, I can't see the future, I was just a dumb kid once too, and I did dumb stuff and ended up in the hospital. And I'm just telling you from experience. Like, I've watched Fail Army. Who's a fan of the show Fail Army?

It's the best. I accidentally got my daughter hooked on it, I guess. And she'll put it on the phone there in the house, and she'll just sit there and watch it sometimes. And she's like, Dad, there's a section that says they didn't get hurt or didn't die or something like that. Like, it's stuff that you swear if you're watching, you're like, oh, that person's dead now.

But they're not. It turns out they were okay. And so I'm like, wow, that's quite a segment. That's some intense stuff. And you're watching this and you're like, see, I could have told you that jumping off the roof onto the trampoline and into the swimming pool was a terrible idea.

But some people don't know until they try it. They needed a father around to be like, either son, here's how you do it, or son, don't do that. Either way, one or the other. And so our Heavenly Father, like, He does know everything though, and He looks at our lives and He says, "Son, daughter, here's how I want you to live." You know, you've lived your life in opposition to that person, you carried hatred or anger or bitterness towards them, or you've been avoiding this or that, or you've held this grudge, whatever it might be, and He looks at that and He's trying to to weed that out of your life. As your loving Heavenly Father, He says, "That's not how I've called you to live." The Son Jesus Christ, the propitiation for our sins, the One who took the blame, the guilt of our sin, He took it upon Himself.

The punishment that we deserved, He took in our place. He died in our place so that He could offer us not only forgiveness, but salvation. He could offer us eternal life. He can walk with us here on this earth. He's our closest friend and brother.

Jesus Christ is the very grace of God in place on this earth in our lives. And the Holy Spirit of God, He's the presence of God that's with us. You know, if you're not familiar with this, and I try to talk about the Holy Spirit a lot, maybe not like full whole messages, but just fit it in here and there because we need to understand this. To somebody outside of the Christian faith, it sounds probably a bit hokey, a bit weird. I remember the band the Newsboys back before, like when they had the original members in it, back when they wore like these weird silver jumpsuits that look like spacesuits.

Yeah, okay, so you remember it, right? Like they were weird in the early days. They were the coolest Christian band ever, man. Petro was good too. That was a couple years before me, Stryper.

I know about this stuff. That's some good stuff. You're not going to get me to quote their most famous song though, Troy, okay? I'm not going to say the name of it. People would be like, "I don't understand why he would say that." But anyway, you can look up Stryper and see some of their famous songs, and you'll get what I didn't say.

So, the Newsboys had this song, it's called "Spirit Thing," and they're just, They're talking about the mystery, the nature of the Holy Spirit, and they're saying, "You know, it's a spirit thing," and they start describing how do we describe this indescribable thing that you can't experience anywhere else in the world except when you have the presence of the Spirit of God in you. He doesn't possess you and override your will, your humanness, your emotions, your desires, and your dreams, and your goals, but what He does is He accompanies you. He's the presence of God walking with you. There's no other There's no other religious concept in any of the history of the world that has the idea of who the Spirit of God is. See, there were people that would worship idols, they would worship gods, and they would hope that this god that they thought was angry with them just wouldn't be angry with them anymore, or that if they did certain things and rituals that these gods would provide for them.

But God Himself has given us the gift of His presence, His Holy Spirit with us as a gift. As the nature of the grace of God poured out in your life, and He accompanies you, He comes with you, He walks with you. Sometimes He comforts you. Sometimes He advocates to the Father for you. He's called an Advocate.

He's called a Counselor. Sometimes what He does is He tells you the things not to do, like, "Hey, cut that out. That is a sin." And you're like, "I was flipping through here and I didn't see it listed." He's like, I'm telling you it's a sin. There are things that the Spirit of God might tell you that for you are a sin. For you, they're wrong.

And it's because of who the Father is creating you to be, the Holy Spirit is working alongside of you to speak to you and to say, "Here's how I'm calling you to live." And so the Trinitarian nature— Father, Son, and Spirit— is able to show us the grace of God, each in their own way. So that's a little bit of a recap and a little bit of a review and kind of summarizing some of what we talked about last week. But this week we're looking at some of the barriers to receiving grace. And the interesting thing is, so much of it has to do with us and our willingness to fully receive it. And I don't know why we insist on hanging on to these things.

I don't know why we insist on living in and dwelling in the things that are a barrier to us receiving the full measure of God's grace. And you might be thinking, "No, I want more of God's gifts. I want more of His good things. I ask Him all the time for them." Okay, very well and good, but you might be doing things or holding on to things in your life that are preventing you from receiving those gifts. It's not that God doesn't want to give them, He does, but there are things, maybe you're at fault in it, or maybe you've just never addressed it and didn't even realize it was there, but there are things in your life that keep you from receiving God's grace.

Some of them, your fault. Some of them, not your fault. Let's dig into it. The first thing, the first kind of barrier that we have is either unrepented sin or sins that you insist upon doing and persist in doing them. Let me explain.

There are sins in your life that you're not even aware of that you're doing, and the Holy Spirit hasn't revealed them to you yet. How do I know this? Not because I know that much about the inner workings of your life, because I also have them, and the longer I live, the more the Spirit of God will reveal something to me. He says, "Okay, you're doing great. You've worked through that thing.

Now here's this. Now I want you to work on this." And the good news is, because of His grace nature, He's going to walk with you through that. Like, He's not going to tell it to you and then abandon you and say, "You figure it out." You know? Like, He's not going to say, like, "Well, here's this task load, this work burden." You know, maybe at your job you've had a task that was placed on you. With zero training, zero understanding of the protocols for how to do it, and then when you don't do it right, they're like, "Hey, why did you do that?" Like, literally no training, okay?

There was no teaching, no training on this whatsoever. How was I supposed to know? But the Holy Spirit doesn't do that. He will show you, He'll illuminate, He'll spotlight that area in your life that doesn't align with the holiness of the Father. And He'll show that to you and say, "This is what I want to work on next." You know what the fun thing is?

There are some of you sitting here and you see those areas in someone else's life, one of your fellow, you know, churchgoers, fellow believers, one of your friends in Christ, and you see those areas in their life and you're like, "I wish that he would stop doing that," or "I wish she would stop saying that," or "I wish they would cut that out." And your your schedule for how somebody should live out holiness doesn't align with the Holy Spirit's schedule. See, you might be pinpointing something that's really obvious in their life, but there's something hidden in their life that you might not know about, and the Spirit of God is working on that thing first. He's working on that area first, and He's drilling down on it. Now, He might use one of you that's, that's kind of a mentor, an accountability partner, a close friend, a confidant, He might take you and as you're walking together, as you're sharing life together, maybe grabbing a meal, grabbing coffee, just hanging out, whatever it might be, He might say, "All right, in this conversation this is gonna come up and I want you to help me address this in their life because they're not listening to that still small voice of the Spirit yet." And so you're gonna bring it up and then the Holy Spirit is gonna piggyback that and work on it in their lives with what you have said. And sometimes that might be the case.

God might call on you to help somebody in their pathway to holiness, okay? Now, that doesn't give you the right to then go around to every person you see and start pinpointing the stuff in their life, okay? You do this by the prompting of the Holy Spirit. You do this by the leading of the Spirit of God. Anytime we try to get ahead of Him on that, it ends up in catastrophic failure.

That's when people get hurt. They call it church hurt. They say, "Somebody in the church hurt me. They did this. They judged me.

They did that. They said these things." And then you never see them again. And they're gone. Maybe for 10, 20, 30 years before they return to church and return to seeking out the faith that once burned bright in their lives, but was harmed by somebody getting out of order. But the Holy Spirit will call you out of sin.

He will call you out of specific sins, and you should repent of those. What repentance means is saying, "Lord, I am— now that I'm aware of this, I'm very sorry that I did those things. I'm sorry that I keep doing it. I'm sorry, Lord, that it's a habit that I keep going back to.

Help me to stop." And He will. And it might take time, might take months, it might take years, If it's been a deeply ingrained thing in your life, it might take a while. But as long as you're willing to allow the Spirit of God to continually cleanse you on that, because your sins are forgiven by the blood of Christ, and He gives you His righteousness, but it takes time to walk fully into that faith. It's a process of holiness that we're walking through. And so as you allow the Spirit of God to continue helping you through that, you will be walking faithfully in the grace that God has given you.

But the moment that you stop listening to the Holy Spirit, and you say, "You know what? I like this. I'm going to keep doing it. I hear what you're saying, but you know what? It's not really that bad.

There's a lot of people that are a lot worse than me. They're doing a lot worse things than me. I'm not like them, and so you need to just back off." Now I know you wouldn't be so bold as to say those words to God, I hope, But, I mean, you can at least be honest with God. He knows the truth anyway. But you might not say that to Him, but you still live as if you had said that.

You live in utter and complete defiance to the Word of God in your life.

You insist on that sin. You persist in doing it. In other words, you just say, "Nope, this is who I am. I'm going to keep doing it." Maybe you say, "I'm going to keep doing it because there's no way to quit now. I've been doing it so long." Like an 80-year-old that's been smoking cigarettes since she was 13, she's like, "Why quit now?" Like, honestly, I don't even know anymore.

I guess if you made it this long, maybe you'll be fine, but like, why not quit now? You know, like, we've got all the evidence that says this isn't good, and so let's go ahead and stop ASAP. In your life, the Holy Spirit is going to be working on you, and if you resist Him, You're not only saying, "No, I want to do it my way," you're saying, "God, I don't want to receive all the good things that You have for me." Like, how can you come to God and say, "This is what I want from You, but I don't want to do anything with You, for You. I don't want to live in obedience to You." You created a barrier to receiving the grace of God by persisting in your sin that the Holy Spirit has revealed to you as sin. Now, I want to just— little caveat to that, little asterisk point, just a little footnote and mention, just to be very clear.

There are sins in your life that the Holy Spirit has not yet shown you, and you might not yet be aware of that someday you will be, but for right now you're not. I'm not saying necessarily that those are a barrier to receiving grace. Now, there might be some very extreme things that you might be involved in that you might not have even thought yet are bad and terrible and not good. There might be some addictions that you have, there might be pornography and drugs and all these things that you might have gotten into and you might not have thought yet, "Hey, I bet this is bad," but it is, and those things are certainly barriers, and that's not an exhaustive list, that's just some examples. Those things certainly are barriers to receiving grace.

There are some things that are such an overwhelming, encompassing thing in your life that they rule it, they take over it, they control it, they have mastery over you. And those things, even if you might not have heard the Spirit speaking directly to you on them, those are things that will keep you from receiving certain parts of the grace of God. But there's other things too, and this is the one that I think gets a lot trickier because it's a lot easier to hide in some ways, and it's the bitterness and the unforgiveness that you have.

And as soon as you probably think, "Well, that's not me," keep digging back further in time. There's somebody that hurt you. There's somebody that was close to you that did something so painful that it shaped who you are today in ways that you don't even realize. Now, I'm not trying to play like psychologist. I don't have any training in that.

I literally went to one like basic psych class in college, and so I really know nothing, okay? I'm not trying to play psychology major here, but the truth of the matter is there's something that happened in your life, most likely, that inflicted some kind of trauma on you, some type of— it might not have been something like a physical or sexual abuse, although it could have been. It may not have been something, you know, like, like really extreme that would make the news, but yet there's somebody that wronged you in some way. They sinned against you. Jesus taught us in His prayer, "Father, forgive our sins, forgive us our trespasses, as we also forgive those who sin or trespass against us." Jesus said that because it happens all the time.

And there's somebody that has done something to you, and they might, by the way, not even know just how bad that was. But for you it really affected you, and you carried that for a long time. Every now and then their face pops up in your mind, in your memory. Their name comes to mind. Somebody that shares the name of them, and it reminds you of that person, and immediately you start thinking about what they did, and it brings it all back up.

I want to tell you that those things that they did to you most likely aren't your fault. I'm not trying to blame you. You know, victim blaming as they call it today. I'm not victim blaming here. I'm simply trying to illuminate that those things exist in your life.

They are present in your life. And they are— what they are doing is they're— it's not that that thing keeps you from receiving God's grace, but it's because you got a bit of bitterness about it. You got an amount of resentment that you allowed to fester and build up. You know, like if you get a splinter of some kind and you don't dig it out, eventually it starts kind of building up an infection around that and festering, and it can be very damaging. A foreign object in your body can really cause problems if it's not removed.

And we have these, these bitternesses, these resentments, these, these things that we're carrying, this baggage that we have because of what somebody else did to us, and we've never been able to get rid of that. Maybe we've never tried to confront it. We've never been honest with ourselves and with God about just how bad that thing was. And so we just allow it to just stay in there festering. And as that's going on, what's happening is your whole viewpoint on that person or people like them, you start to just kind of write them off and you don't want anything to do with them.

And then it just spirals from there. And at some point, if you haven't addressed it and you haven't released that hurt, it blocks grace from flowing into you. Again, it's not on God's side. It's not that God doesn't want to extend His grace to you in its fullness. It's that we have these things in our lives that block it.

So the grace of God does include the ability to help us forgive people. I gotta say right now, because some of you are— I know it is in your mind because it's been there for a long time. Satan's probably tried to fill your mind on this one. There are things in there that Satan is saying to you, "That person doesn't deserve it. That person doesn't deserve forgiveness from you." They probably don't.

They probably don't deserve that. The beautiful thing about it is that you didn't deserve God's forgiveness either, but He gave it anyway. God's forgiveness is designed to restore you to the fullness that he created you to live in. And so when you forgive someone, it does a couple things. One, it releases them, and it allows them to live, to be the person God created them to be.

But two, it releases you in ways that you couldn't have understood or expected until you finally did that. I know it's not easy, and I know some of the pain Some of the hurt and some of the trauma that you've been through is severe. Some of it that I don't know personally, and maybe nobody in this room knows personally. Like, we weren't there, we didn't see it, we didn't experience it, we don't know. And yet, if you hold on to that bitterness, that hurt, that baggage, that pain, and you refuse to let it go, it becomes your choice.

To hang on to that. This is where I will cast a little bit of blame back. It's not that the initial hurt was your fault, it's not that their actions were your fault, it's not that you caused this pain, but at some point you decided that that was your identity, it's who you are, that you were going to hold on to this because how dare you let them off the hook that easily. Folks, I've heard so many stories of people that I've known that have seen healing happen in their lives, whether it was from a stepparent or a parent that abused them, or somebody that cheated on them and left them and divorced them, and all these things, whatever it might be, all these different things. I've heard so many stories from people sharing how they were able to forgive the person that hurt them in such a dramatic way, and they're able to say, "Okay, God, I'm letting go of this.

I'm allowing you to heal me." I want to read 4 verses in the Bible because, you know, we're preaching, we're teaching the Word of God. I said all that to show you these things, and then I want to share something with you, an opportunity that we have coming up.

I can't tell you in a summary of just how ridiculous this story is in 2 Samuel. You've heard of King David, probably. You know, great king of Israel, a man after God's own heart. He really messed up a lot of times. He messed his whole family up so bad by his own actions.

He had— I'm going to try to rate this G a little bit here with some youngins in the room. David had one son, he had multiple wives, he had one son that really liked one of his half-sisters and he decided to harm her in a way. This is 2 Samuel 13, you can read about that. It's really messed up.

But I want to look at verses 21 and 22, 2 Samuel 13. Now King David heard about all these things and was very angry. "But Absalom," so the full brother of the girl that was harmed, "but Absalom said nothing to Amnon," the one that perpetrated the deeds, "Absalom said nothing to Amnon, either bad or good. Yet Absalom hated Amnon because he had humiliated his sister Tamar." Let's skip down to verse 38.

"After Absalom fled and went to Geshur, he remained there for 3 years. The king longed to go to Absalom." for he had since been consoled over the death of Amnon. Absalom had this bitterness towards his half-brother Amnon for what he had done to his sister, and it was never confronted. King David didn't confront it. He was angry about it.

He did nothing. He didn't step in in the situation. He didn't discipline or punish the son that was the offender. He didn't placate the one that that was trying to stand up for his sister, and in the end Absalom kills his brother Amnon, and then Absalom flees. And later what ends up happening, because David still does nothing about it, what he did was he brought Absalom back home to the kingdom.

He didn't see him for 2 years. He summoned him home, didn't see him for 2 years, and then he visits him once, and then 4 years passes, it tells us. And in that 4 years, the the festering of all of these things that Absalom had, he decided that what he was going to do was he was going to set up a coup and take over the kingdom from his father. And so he sets this up and he ends up getting this guy named Ahithophel to be his advisor. He had been an advisor for King David, and now he's serving the son that's taking over the kingdom.

And there's all this going on, and David is torn now because he has an enemy who's trying to kill him and take his kingdom from him, but it's his own son, and he loves his son, and he's torn with what to do. His family's already been shattered in so many ways, and now there's this, and he's like, "What do I even do?" Part of what David had done was he had had his own affair with a married woman and then killed her husband. By the way, she was the granddaughter of this advisor named Ahithophel. Isn't that fun? All of this is going on all around David.

His own actions were messed up. He did repent of that sin. That's in Psalm 51 we see the psalm that he wrote after his repentance. But he still has this guy around him that is kind of like, "Hey man, you know, you killed my granddaughter's husband and all this stuff, you know, and then you married her. Like, this is messed up, David." But he still stays with him.

Then he advises his son, and then Absalom ends up getting killed in battle. And David's just distraught over this whole thing. There was so much as you read the story of David, and you read the story of his family, and you look at all these things going on, and you're like, If some of you guys would have just actually confronted and addressed the bitterness that you had in your heart, you would have been doing so much better. But instead, we have all of these affairs and murders and all these things going on because they refuse to address it. We have this opportunity coming up in October.

Our church is hosting something called the Healing Exchange, and the Healing Exchange is not about necessarily physical healing. We're not like, we're not coming in and saying, "Oh, we've got a faith healer coming in and you know, if you got these issues, we're gonna pray for them." It's not that we don't believe in healing, but I'm just saying that's not what this is about. It's about the things that we've been talking about, the brokenness that's in our lives, and we're wanting to exchange that and allow God to give us wholeness. Our souls have been wounded in so many different ways, And so we're going to be hosting this as our congregation with the Ministerial Fellowship. We're going to be hosting it together.

We've invited several other churches. Everyone is welcome to attend. You know, it's, you know, there's been several churches we're partnering with, but it's an open thing that we're going to be promoting. And we'll be hosting it over in the gymnasium on October 2nd and 3rd. The 2nd is a Friday night.

We're going to have a worship service there for a couple hours. And then on Saturday, we're going to have this seminar. There's a friend and teacher of mine, Dr. Richard's going to be leading that. He's very, very proficient in this, very tender in this. I've gone through this.

It's not just something that I saw somewhere and signed up for. I've been part of this, and it was helpful in my own life. It's something— Lawrence was there too. He can testify about how good this is. Is something that you might not realize just how much you need this.

You might not realize just how much that you're going to attend this thing— my ask is that you would show up for it— but you're going to attend it and you're going to realize just how much hurt and baggage you've been carrying, and how much God has wanted to heal you from that, but you haven't been willing to come to Him, or you haven't been willing to remove the barriers to receiving His grace. And so the Healing Exchange is something that's designed to help bring those to the surface and remove them from your lives and get you on a process where you receive this wholeness from God. There's nothing like magical or crazy about it, but the presence of God is in there. I can tell you that. I can promise you that.

I've been part of that. And so we'll be sharing that out digitally, of course, on all of our different stuff, you know, website, Facebook, we'll text it out to you through our text line. We'll do all these things. But I wanted to start inviting you to be part of that. There's actually a signup link.

And we charge $10 for it just to cover the materials, lunch is provided, all those things. And so I want to invite you to that, and to be part of that. And if you say I can't even afford the $10, talk to me, we've got some scholarships available to it. And we'll make sure it happens. But the biggest thing is don't miss it.

October 2nd and 3rd, put it on your calendar. If you're able to be there at all, even if you're supposed to be at work that day, like call in unsick, like I'm trying to not be sick, you know, like this is for my own health. I don't know if there's a caveat for that in your employer, but yeah, personal day, personal day. And say, listen, everybody at work will be better if I attend this, okay? Like I'll be a better person for it.

For it. Some of you I sent an invitation to directly, but we're going to be having a little bit of a planning luncheon for this. Kind of, we're going to do a shorter version of Sunday school class right after service where we still can have discussion about what we talked about today, and then after that we'll have kind of this luncheon planning meeting for this because we need some volunteers and different people for different roles in it. And so if you're able to come, we'll be in the Discipleship Place building right here, the next building over. And we'll be meeting there and kind of discussing it a little bit more and also, you know, kind of putting some names in some places for volunteering on that day.