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You guys can be seated at this time.
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I'm gonna invite our scripture reader out.
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Hey everyone, uh happy Sunday.
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My name is Stetson.
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This is my son Cairo.
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Today uh I will be reading a passage from Matthew 28, 16 to 17.
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Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.
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When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.
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This is the word of the Lord.
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Thank you.
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Thanks be to God.
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Thanks, Stetson.
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Thanks, Cairo.
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Hi, friends.
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It's good to see you today.
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My name's Mike Goldsworthy, and uh I feel like we were just hanging out not that long ago.
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Got to be with you a couple of weeks ago, and so it's good to get to be with you again.
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Um, now have any of you ever done an escape room?
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Has anyone done one of those?
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Okay, good.
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A good chunk of you.
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Who uh who knows what an escape room is?
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Do you know what an escape room is?
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Okay, so for those of you who don't know what an escape room is, essentially what they do is you pay money for them to lock you in a room to take your phone away.
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And when you look up, there's a clock up on the wall that's counting down from an hour.
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It's essentially the setup to every horror movie that I watched as a kid growing up.
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And you pay to go in and do this.
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The first time I went, we go into the room, and there's all kinds of like objects in the room that and when we went, there was like this couch on one side, and I had a coffee table in front of it, and some magazines there.
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It had an old-time TV and kind of old-timey remote over there.
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And then on the other side, there was a desk, and some of the drawers were locked, some were unlocked, and there's papers on the table.
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There's this locked briefcase over there, and then all around the room, there are these like paintings and pictures that like seemingly have nothing to do with one another.
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And what they literally do is they lock you in the room and they say, Now figure it out.
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And like there's no instructions, you don't know where to start, you don't know what you're supposed to do.
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And so this first time that we're there, we're like searching around, trying to figure it out because they won't let you out until you figure it out.
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So, like we're searching, trying to figure it out, opening up couch cushions, doing all the things.
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And I look up and it's been 20 minutes, and we haven't figured out anything.
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We don't know what we're doing.
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And and it's like you kind of hit that point where, like, it you've been there a while and you're starting to get hungry and you're looking around at each other, going, like, who are we gonna eat first?
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It's like one of those moments that my son is like trying to get the TV to work.
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Like, will I ever get to see a screen again?
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They've taken my screen away from me.
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We're having one of those sort of moments, and out of this, just frustration of like, I'm just stuck and and and I can't figure this out.
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I said out loud, I go, I don't know what to do.
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And then suddenly this voice came from a speaker we didn't know existed in the ceiling.
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They said, Would you like a clue?
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I was like, Yes, Lord, that please, like, give me something.
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Because up until that moment, I was frustrated.
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I had no idea what to do, I couldn't figure out a way out.
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And I wonder, I wonder if you've ever had experiences like that.
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If you ever just like felt like that generally, that it's kind of like this is what happens for us in life, isn't it?
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You're just kind of like thrust into life, and it's like, go out there and figure it out.
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You'll figure it out, and you're like, What do I do?
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And they're like, Oh, you'll be great, just go for it.
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You're like, go go for what?
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And we're just kind of like feel stuck at times, and you just want this like voice from up above to like shout down to you, do you want a clue?
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And you're like, Yes, somebody, like, please help me figure this out.
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And a part of what we're doing in this summer series together called Steps is we're getting some wisdom from the intersection of two things, from the intersection of the time-tested recovery programs, and where that intersects with the scriptures.
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And through that, we're learning how to not stay stuck.
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We're learning how to not repeat the same cycles in our lives
Load full transcript
over and over and over again.
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We're learning how to create a pathway of growth in life, regardless of what life is looking like for you.
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And so last week, Lawrence started this series for us, helping us understand the first step, which is the acknowledgement, which is the acknowledgement of two words of I can't.
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And I can't is this like super counterintuitive move that in order to grow, the first step of growth is to be able to say, I can't.
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And this is this is very different from the the kind of posture that's become the normal self-improvement kind of posture, isn't it?
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The the psychologist Richard Beck, I love his work.
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He's out of Abilene Christian University.
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And he writes that the modern self, those of us who are like living and doing life right now, that the kind of general bent for the modern self, he says, is that it's collapsed upon itself, that it's become inward-looking, self-absorbed, and self-referential.
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That our lives, he said, oftentimes, if they have a direction, the direction is turned inward.
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If our life has a shape, the shape is concave.
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That we've become trapped inside of our own heads trying to understand ourselves well.
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You know, some of what my job looks like, my day job is that I do some executive coaching with pastors and with C-suite leaders.
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And I was remembering that there's this one particular client who I have who I've been working with now for several years.
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But when I first began working with them, they knew themselves so well that they could tell me all the assessments that they've done.
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You know, the self-assessments that maybe you've taken those before, disc, Myers Briggs, Strength Finders, one of them, like you're a beaver or a lion or like an owl or something, like you're some sort of thing, like you've done those, right?
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Uh and so they knew all of those.
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They knew how they identified on all those, that they're like, oh, I'm an INTJ on the strength finders.
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And they knew that because they're an INTJ, this is why I do the things I do at work.
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This is why these things frustrate me.
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This is why I chose this kind of major in college.
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They understood all of these things.
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And I remember asking them in one of our early sessions together, because they had just such great self-awareness and self-knowledge.
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And they said, Well, you know, what is it that you feel like you
need out of our time together that you haven't gotten elsewhere?
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Because it seems like you've done a lot of personal development work.
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And so, like, what do you want out of this?
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What do you hope will be different from all the other things that you've done before?
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And they said this.
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They said, Everything else has helped me to understand myself well, but it hasn't helped me to move forward.
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They knew themselves really well, but they were still stuck.
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Their life hadn't kept moving because their life had turned inward.
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And I wonder if I wonder if you've ever experienced that in an area of your life, uh, some area that you wanted to change, some place where you wanted to see some progress.
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And maybe, maybe for you, you understand the why behind why you're doing some of the things you're doing.
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Maybe, for instance, like you have difficulty, let's say studying for long periods of time, and you understand why it's difficult for you to do that.
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Maybe you have a diagnosis attached to that.
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Maybe there's some other things that you understand about yourself.
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Or maybe you understand why it is that relationships have been so difficult for you.
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You can look at your own upbringing, you can look at your family history and like you get it.
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You get the why.
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Maybe, maybe you know why it is that you have been numbing yourself through substances.
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Maybe you can name the trauma.
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You know what your triggers are, you know those things.
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Or maybe, maybe that trauma isn't necessarily showing up and numbing yourself.
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Maybe that trauma is actually what's behind your angry outbursts.
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And you know why you're having those angry outbursts, you know what's behind that.
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Maybe it's why you haven't been able to keep a job.
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Why you keep choosing unhealthy partners to date or unhealthy partners to marry, why you always play it safe and you never take a risk, or even conversely, why is it that you recklessly and needlessly risk?
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Maybe you understand why and you can name why.
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Maybe you've done some of that work, which by the way is good and important work.
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But maybe, like my coaching client, maybe you're not actually moving forward.
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And I wonder if for some of us, a question is not whether or
not we understand ourselves it or even have an idea of why we have ended up in cycles that have kept us frustrated.
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And certainly, certainly, like we might not fully understand why some of us have done have more work to do in understanding it, and all that can be helpful in so many ways.
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We may understand those things though, and still find ourselves stuck.
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Because there's a point where that kind of work is helpful, and there's a point where it then becomes the self-involved project.
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And what we're actually discovering is that the movement of our lives, when the movement of our lives is inward and when the shape of our life is concave, for many of us, our experiences that it's actually doing the opposite of what we had hoped it would do for us.
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And so it's fascinating to me that if this afternoon, if after you leave here, if you're to walk into an AA meeting or an NA meeting or an SA meeting or any other kind of meeting that's based on the 12 steps, which has helped countless people move towards health and wholeness, the first step that they're gonna talk about when you walk in there is not about gaining more control over your life that's gotten out of control, but instead it's an acknowledgement of the reality of life through surrender with those two words that Lawrence talked about.
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I can't.
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But then the second step, the second step is fascinating to me.
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Because the second step isn't a turn inward.
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The second step isn't what will come much later and what we will learn together later, where things like an inventory is created, where we do some sort of like self-interrogation, where we do some of that needed internal work.
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That's not the second step.
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The second step isn't to like understand our family history or our personal history that might have contributed as significant as that is to understand it's important, but that's not the second step.
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It's not to recognize the trauma that was very real and the triggers that might have brought you to that room in the first place.
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Those are all good and helpful and important things, but they are not the second step.
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And if I'm honest, if I was the one who's creating the program, if I was the one who had written the big book, if I was Bill W, what I would have like intuitively done, like I think my intuition would have said, like, oh, what you need to do now is you need to understand like where this is coming from and why this is happening.
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And you need to delve inward and understand those things.
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But what the tried and true steps of
recovery have shown themselves time and time again to be effective, what they say the second step is, is this it's that we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
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We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
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It's not a turn inward, it's actually a turn outward.
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If the shape of the self-engaged life is concave, then this is a life that shaped, well, it has a convex shape.
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Its movement is moving outward.
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It's like there is some sort of voice from above that is giving me some sort of clue.
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And so last week, Lawrence looked at a line in a letter that the apostle Paul wrote when Paul is struggling.
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He's feeling stuck.
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He wants what out of whatever it is that's tormenting his life.
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We don't know what's tormenting his life.
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There's something there that's keeping him stuck and frustrated.
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He just wants it to go away.
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And he's pleading with God to remove it.
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Like, God, please just remove it.
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Let make things just magically better, just get rid of this thing.
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And here's what he writes He says, Each time God said to me this, My grace is all you need.
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My power works best in weakness.
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So now I'm glad to boast about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ can work through me.
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Last week we saw that Paul's recognition that weakness is the preferred condition for God's power to show up.
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My power works best in weakness.
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But this week I want us to notice where that power comes from.
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He writes about it this way.
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He says, It's the power of Christ.
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The power that originates outside of myself.
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That isn't found in the self-improved project that has its own limitations.
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It requires an outward orientation towards a power greater than myself.
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We came to believe, step two says, that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, could restore us to wholeness.
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I mean, the thing that recovery groups have seen is that it's this recognition that the power outside of ourselves is the thing that can actually help us to move towards a more full and grounded life.
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And the picture that we have of living that out, of living in a kind of way where we recognize that there's a power greater than ourselves, the picture that we have of that is it is sometimes a bit off because we think what that looks like is we think it's to be like the most religious person.
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And so if I'm gonna live that out, if I'm gonna live out of a recognition that there's a power greater than myself that can restore me to sanity, what I need to do is I need to show up to more worship services.
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I'm gonna find a worship service every day of the week and I'm gonna go to that.
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And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna only listen to worship music in my car.
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And then I'm gonna start like praying five hours a day, and I'm gonna try to do whatever it is that I think a person who's oriented towards a power greater than themselves would do.
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Like I'm gonna become more religious in whatever picture I have of what that means.
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But John Orberg, who would write the book Steps that we're using as sort of like the anchor for what we're walking through over these weeks, he suggests that what we actually need is to just live out what he calls a good enough faith.
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In fact, here's how he writes about good enough faith in his book.
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He says, it's not heroic faith, it's not no doubt faith, it's just faith enough to proceed with the program.
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It's just faith enough to proceed with the program, faith enough to keep taking next steps.
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I mean, one of the problems that will happen in church is that you get this picture of the people who are all in that you think like we think they're the ones who have it all figured out.
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They're the ones who live without any kind of doubt.
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They're the ones who are super confident in their faith.
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They're the ones who are so sold out that they've they've got it all figured out.
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They are all in in that kind of way, but it's actually not the case.
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It's not the case in our own realities.
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Like it's not the case in my reality.
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And it's certainly not the case of what we see happen in the scriptures.
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In fact, there are these instances, and they they're some of my favorite moments in the scriptures where we see some of the heroes of the faith who acknowledge that they don't have it all figured out while they are simultaneously recognizing a power greater than themselves.
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That that there are things that they're not certain about.
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There's things that they still have questions about, there are things that aren't fully answered and fully resolved for them.
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And also in the midst of all of that, they keep moving forward and they keep taking next steps.
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I mean, it seems that doubt actually isn't a barrier for them.
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It seems that instead doubt's just a normal, natural part of the journey that that is just like a part of what faith looks like.
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In fact, for instance, there's this moment where Jesus, after he has been executed by the state, his followers have watched him die.
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Days later, there's a tomb that he was buried in, and they found the tomb empty, and people began to see him.
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They begin to see him around, they see him resurrected, they start interacting with him.
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His closest followers, who we would call the disciples at that time, the disciples, he appears to them.
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He interacts with them, he has conversations with them.
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They physically touch him, they touch his hands, they touch his side where the scars still are, from where nails and a spear pierced his body.
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He eats with them, they have a breakfast together of bread and fish.
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These disciples, they've personally experienced this thing that defies all the basic ways that they've understood how the world works.
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They've experienced it now for themselves firsthand, somebody who is dead, who is no longer dead.
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And then there's a moment where Jesus gathers them together to give them some departing words, a kind of commission for them to live out his work in the world, sort of like next steps for them to take in faith.
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And so his followers gathered together on a mountaintop after experiencing and encountering for themselves this miraculous resurrection.
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And here's how the gospel of Matthew records what happens Matthew 28.
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Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.
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When they saw him, they worshiped him.
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Like, right?
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Yeah, the resurrected Jesus, who was dead, who had been put in a tomb, and who is no longer dead, but is now bodily with him.
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They worshiped him.
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But some doubted.
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The people who were there, who saw for themselves, they worshiped him, they engaged in this act of faith, but some doubted.
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The ones who would be entrusted to carry on his mission and work in the world, who were being asked to take big next steps of faith, they worshiped him, but some doubted.
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It seems entirely possible and entirely normal for faith and doubt to sit side by side.
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But it but it's not only that faith and doubt can sit side by side, it's entirely possible and entirely normal in this kind of faith to keep taking next steps, to keep taking steps forward the best that you can, even when you don't have full clarity, even when you're still in some ambiguity, even when you don't have all the answers.
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And there's this other moment, it's one of my other favorite moments in the scripture.
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It happens as the church is new, and the church is figuring out who she is, and it's this period of time that we would call the early church.
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And there's this moment that we would later look back on and we'd see it as one of the most significant decisions that happened in the early church with the eyes of history that we'd see this decision that they made literally change the trajectory of the church.
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It would change church history, have all kinds of theological implications.
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And so the leaders of the church, they all gathered together for a couple of days, a couple of days of debate, of hearing and listening to each other's stories, of prayer, where they would take time to seek out God, what would you have us do?
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What would you have us decide here?
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And after all of this, after all of the best minds, after all of the most committed followers, after all of the most significant leaders, all making this important decision that would, I would say, is the most important decision the early church would make that would affect the way that we understand what does it mean to belong to the community of God's people 2,000 years later.
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Here's how they would talk about that decision in Acts 15.
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They said, it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to not burden you with anything beyond the following requirements.
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It seemed like, do you catch that?
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It's not, we are sure this is what we should do.
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It's not we're so confident that this is what we should do.
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It's not God spoke to us in an audible voice, told us this is exactly what we do, and we're just following orders.
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There is no we are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.
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No, no, no, no.
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It seemed.
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And I love this story so much for so many reasons.
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But one of the reasons is because it's so relatable and real.
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I mean, this is what it often looks like taking next steps of faith.
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This is what it often looks like when you're
recognizing a power greater than yourself, outside of yourself, that's needed to move forward.
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It is that it often looks like a little bit of ambiguity, and it often looks like I've still got some questions.
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It often looks like I'm taking a next step, but is this the right thing?
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Well, it seems like it is.
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It's the best that I understand right now with the information that I have.
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But I also wonder how often I have sat in inaction and how often have I found myself stuck because I wanted a guarantee.
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I wanted to know this is the right way to go.
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And here's how things are going to turn out.
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That I wanted the voice from above telling me exactly what to do.
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What I wanted is God to give me a Google Maps layout for my life.
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Turn here, go here, do this, don't go there, watch out for these hazards.
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I want that, but that's not the reality of how it works, is it?
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And I actually think that it's better for us that that's not the reality of how it works.
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But sometimes what will happen is because it doesn't work that way, what we do is we hold ourselves back and we stay stuck when perhaps actually total clarity isn't what I actually need.
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But what I need to do is I need to just keep taking the next step in faith as best as I understand it right now.
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What is the next right thing for me to do?
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There's this allegory from the fourth century that's been really helpful for me over the years.
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It was past.
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Around quite a bit during the fourth century, a story that was told, an allegory that was meant to like make a point, and it was meant to be told in a way where like you could hear it and like you could read into it like different things and different meanings, and you could like figure out what does that mean for my life, what I do with it.
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And the story goes like this: that they would talk about there's a donkey that was on a long journey, had been out all day long, had been walking all day long, hadn't eaten anything, and is so hungry.
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It's getting so famished, and this donkey comes to a fork in the road.
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And the donkey looks to the path that goes off to the left.
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And on the path that goes off to the left, he sees out in the distance that there's a bale of hay and he's so hungry, and that bale of hay will fill him up.
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He's gonna be good.
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It's gonna, it's gonna uh appease his appetite.
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And he starts to think about going in that direction, but he's like, wait, before I do that, I should see what's off to the right.
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Because that might be better.
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That might be a better way to go.
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So he looks off to the right and off in the distance.
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He sees another bale of hay, about equal size, about equal distance away.
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And he looks over there and he's like, Oh, that would be so good for me.
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I'm so hungry.
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That would settle my appetite.
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Like I could go there and I could eat that and I would be good to continue on.
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And the way that allegory gets told is he looks to the left and he's he looks over there, he sees that and he's like, that would be so good.
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And he looks to the right and he's like, Oh, that would be so good.
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Looks to the left, looks to the right, and he keeps weighing his options, trying to figure out which one is the right way to go.
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And this donkey gets so paralyzed by these two different paths because he can't give a logical justification for why he should move forward on one rather than the other.
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And so he just stands there paralyzed.
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And the way that they tell this allegory is eventually that donkey then dies of hunger in that spot, which apparently they didn't know happily ever after, had not been invented in the fourth century yet, because that is a terrible way to end the story.
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But sometimes I wonder if like what we actually need is just enough to take a step forward and we don't have all the guarantees, and we don't have it all figured out, and we don't know all of where it's gonna lead, we don't know all the path, we don't have all the answers, we'll have all of that, but like we need to keep moving to keep ourselves from being paralyzed and keep ourselves from being stuck.
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And we just need to take one more step, which is a part of why we are working through this together to say, like, okay, like then what's the next step?
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I'm gonna take this step and then what's the next step?
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And I'm gonna take that step and then what's the next step?
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What's important is not that you have it all figured out, it's that you keep taking steps.
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Or as John Ortberg would write, that it's just enough faith to proceed with the program.
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I mean, in two of the most significant pivotal moments for these early followers of Jesus, they experience doubt, they experience
ambiguity, and they keep moving forward in the midst of doubt and ambiguity.
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And so perhaps faith, perhaps an outwardly shaped life, a recognition of a power greater than ourselves doesn't necessarily look like me being as put together as I thought that it should.
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Maybe the recognition of a power that's greater than ourselves that can restore us to sanity, this outward shaped life that lives out what Orkberg calls good enough faith.
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Perhaps what that looks like, it's not certainty, but it's allowing our doubts to sit next to our faith and being okay with that.
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Perhaps good enough faith isn't about clarity, but instead it's about taking what we know to be the next right step, even when we don't know all of what's gonna come after that.
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And so I wonder as we kind of sit here with this, with step two, I wonder if maybe you would be open to trying something with me here for a moment.
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Uh, I wonder if you might take a little risk with me and something that might feel a little bit uncomfortable for you.
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But I'll promise you this you're not gonna have to do anything in front of anyone.
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I'm not gonna ask you to do anything that's gonna make you feel embarrassed.
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I'm not gonna ask you to do anything that would make you feel any kind of shame.
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And so, like, would you like experiment with me for just a moment and try a little something?
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And so, if you would, would you like get comfortable in your seat and put your feet flat on the floor?
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And would you let your hands just kind of comfortably fall in your lap?
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And and if you're open to it, maybe even open up your hands in a posture of like openness on your lap.
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And would you close your eyes and notice your breath?
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And out of practicing step two, we acknowledge a power greater than ourselves that can restore us to sanity.
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And we do this alongside whatever doubts we're carrying in here with us, regardless of what you believe about God, regardless of what your thoughts are on faith when you came in here, would you give this a try?
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Would you simply ask God?
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Would you ask a power greater than yourself, just between you right now, to reveal to you an area of your life where you need to take next steps of growth, where you might be stuck, where you might be in some destructive cycles, where you might feel so tired and worn out from trying to fix this, where you're like, I don't know what to do now.
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Would you ask a power greater than yourself to reveal to you where it is that you might need to take next steps of growth?
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And now, if you're comfortable to continue staying in that same posture and place, would you keep in mind whatever that area is that came to mind?
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And would you practice what's called a breath prayer, a simple way of praying with me?
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It's a way where we pray with words as we inhale, and then pray with words as we exhale to make prayer as simple as breathing.
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And so as you inhale, you could simply say this, just between you and God, you can say this, Jesus with my, and then would you name whatever it is that God has just brought to your mind, with my addiction, with my relationship, with my fear, with my need to prove myself, with my anger.
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Would you just simply, as you inhale, say, Jesus with my and then as you exhale, would you restore me to sanity?
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Let's try it again.
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Inhale, Jesus with my and exhale, would you restore me to sanity?
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Inhale, Jesus with my exhale, would you restore me to sanity?
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Maybe one more time.
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Jesus with my would you restore me to sanity?
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Amen and amen.
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Grace and peace to you today, friends.
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Thanks, Mike.