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As you know, we live in a hyper-psychologized culture, a very therapeutic culture.
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A lot of that has infiltrated the minds and beliefs of a lot of Christians and local churches, which has led to a lot of Christians, whether they're aware of it or not, oftentimes not that aware of it, they resign to this belief that their present sin is excused by their past trauma.
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So you have people who have gone through some egregious things in their lives.
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They've been seriously sinned against.
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They've gone through traumatic events that have shaped them in many ways, but they're presently sinning against others or sinning against the Lord or, you know, have unbiblical ways of thinking and responding to life, but they don't see it as unbiblical or sinful.
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They see it as just a byproduct of their past trauma.
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And so I'm going to address that in this episode because I do think it is a pain point.
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And I do think some Christians who would agree with me can be a little heavy-handed in how they go about trying to disciple and correct saints who struggle in this way.
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But to set up, you know, this conversation, I do want to make clear that we can take suffering seriously without using it as an excuse.
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And we can help other Christians do that.
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How can we do two things?
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Make sure we acknowledge the suffering and take it seriously, but then also disciple people in the truth of God's word and realizing that we cannot make an excuse for our sin.
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And so I just have a few pastoral thoughts I want to share here, starting with hey, suffering is real and God cares about it.
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All throughout the Psalms, we see language of like God is near the brokenhearted.
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So suffering is legit.
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We don't ever want to, and I think some can overcorrect and minimize people's suffering and have this posture of just man up and grit your teeth and persevere and endure to the glory of God kind of thing.
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And listen, I'm all for perseverance and endurance.
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Those are biblical things, but that doesn't mean that God is unconcerned with his children's pain and suffering, because he absolutely is.
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I mean, we have entire books of the Bible essentially to teach us that very principle.
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And so if God cares about our suffering, his children's suffering, then we as his children should care about our brother and sister's suffering and to never minimize it, but also to help them guard their hearts from using their suffering and trauma as an excuse for present sin.
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And so we want to start with compassion.
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The Bible doesn't minimize abuse, it doesn't minimize loss or hardship and the brokenness of the fall, and neither should we.
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I mean, Jesus himself was described in Isaiah 53 as a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief, right?
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And so God takes suffering very seriously.
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As a matter of fact, maybe I'll put this in in the screen here on the screen so you can see this, but I created this illustration of just how I tend to think about suffering as more of a spectrum.
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So, for example, I would suggest that any form of just brokenness and affliction that comes into your life that is a byproduct of the fall in Genesis is a form of suffering because it was never God's original design for his people and his creation.
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And on that spectrum of suffering, there can be things on one end of the spectrum that are quote unquote not as severe as far as your experience of the suffering.
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And then there's things on the other end of this, other end of the spectrum that are more severe and serious in their impact and your experience, right?
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So you can think of serious forms of abuse and being sinned against, for example.
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But it's all suffering, therefore it's all important to your heavenly father.
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And so something we can do sometimes as Christians is compare our suffering, and then we determine, based on, you know, other people's suffering whether or not God cares about our suffering.
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So if you're on the verge of potentially losing your job and that's just creating some anxiety in your soul, and you're like, I don't know if I should really be taking this to the Lord in prayer.
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Maybe I should just toughen up because man, my sister in the church just shared with me that she was just diagnosed with a serious form of cancer.
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And it's like, well, no, the father cares about both because it's important to you, therefore, it's important to him.
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It grieves his heart because it was never his original design for any of his children to experience any measure of brokenness.
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Therefore, God is moved with compassion for it.
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And so we got to be careful not to compare.
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So we want to start with suffering is real and God cares about it, therefore, we should as well.
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But another biblical principle is to remember that all sin comes from the heart, right?
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From the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
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What comes out of a man is what defiles him.
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Jesus is always concerned with our hearts as we're discipling other people.
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This is why we should never be content with behavior modification, just getting people to change externally, right?
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So, for example, if someone stops drinking alcohol for five years, uh, that's that is a great goal, that's great self-discipline.
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But if their motivation for that change is simply, well, because I don't want my wife to be mad at me anymore and she threatened to take the kids and leave, well, that's that's not the proper motivation.
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It should be the glory of God, wanting to joyfully obey the Lord out of gratitude for what he's done for you.
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So what's in our heart, what motivates us, does matter.
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Now, the reason this is important is because if we are as Christians who are committed to a biblical understanding of sanctification, the doctrine of union with Christ, our justification, right?
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A doctrine of sin, well then, and regeneration, conversion, well, then we got to be very careful not to use our past trauma or past suffering as an excuse for present sin.
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Because when we do that, we are saying that our past trauma is determinative.
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This is how you get Christians who say, Well, this is why I talk the way I do, this is why I respond to certain situations the way I do.
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This is why I can be a little sharp with some people and they're sinning against their spouse or sinning against their children or people in their sphere of influence, but they don't see it as sin or they don't see some of their beliefs and thought patterns as unbiblical.
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They just see it as a byproduct of a past event of suffering and brokenness that they experience.
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And I just don't think the Bible supports that.
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Now, let me be clear: things we experience, whether it's the household you grew up in, the community you grew up in, the culture, right?
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Whether you experience a traumatic event when you were younger or at any point in your life for that matter, uh, whether you've been sinned against in serious ways, those things are very real.
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They are circumstantial, they have influence, they shape temptation around you, but they are not deterministic for your behavior.
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You are responsible before the Lord how you respond.
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Don't believe me, take your time after this episode and go read Romans 12, 9 through 21, where we are, as Christians commanded do not be overcome by evil, but rather overcome evil with good.
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Do not repay anyone evil for evil, right?
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But rather, vengeance belongs to the Lord.
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We're commanded to go out of our way to show honor to people and to entrust, you know, people to the Lord because He's the true and faithful and just judge.
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And so we got to be careful from, for example, some people can say, well, the reason I talk to people this way is because I have a personality disorder.
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Then I would say, well, then with God's help, repent of any sinful ways of living and responding to people and put off and put on with the help of God's spirit and his word and his church.
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We can't throw, here's an example, okay?
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Because I know this can step on toes, and that's okay.
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No one will stand before Jesus Christ on judgment day, and Jesus, Jesus is gonna say, you know what?
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We can ignore all these sins over here, this cluster of sins you committed throughout your life, because that was your personality disorder or that was your mental illness, right?
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That was your depression.
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So we're just gonna, we're just gonna act like that's not there.
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No, like Jesus is not gonna grade on a curve.
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Sin is sin.
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Again, if you've experienced things that introduces temptation into your life, that is circumstantial, but it is not deterministic.
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This is why I encourage Christians to be careful about the language we use.
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When, for instance, if you're talking to your spouse or your kids and maybe you're confessing sin, but you you delete your confession when you say, But you know, you made me so angry when you blank.
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It's like, well, no, nobody can make you angry.
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They can do things that circumstantially create an environment of temptation that provokes you to respond certain ways, but at the end of the day, you chose to respond the way you did.
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You're responsible for your sin before the Lord.
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This is why I laugh whenever you see a significant figure in the in whether it's a celebrity or a politician, or maybe some some something scandalous comes out and they give this PR statement of, you know, apology.
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And you'll typically see some common phrases where they'll say, This doesn't represent who I really am.
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That that was a mistake I made that doesn't reflect my true values and convictions.
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And the word of God would say, No, that that revealed exactly who you are, because from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
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What's in our heart is revealed in our actions.
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And so we got to be mindful of that.
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You know, the inner man, the heart, when the Bible refers to the heart, it's referring to that inner man of us, the focal point of our being that shapes our our volition, so our choices, our affections, and our beliefs, right?
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Our cognition.
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That's that is what the Bible is referring to when it says the heart.
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And so, to be clear, our circumstances do influence us, okay?
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I'll use myself as an example.
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Unfortunately, I grew up without my earthly father in my life.
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He left before I was born, and I've met him one time my entire life.
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Now, what if I were to say, because I didn't have an earthly father, how on earth am I going to be able to love my kids?
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How am I going to serve them well?
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How am I going to actually be able to disciple them and train them up in the ways of the Lord?
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I didn't have that in my life.
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So how can I be that or give that to my children?
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And the word of God would say, Well, no, that's not deterministic.
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It is circumstantial.
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It has shaped you in real ways.
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But by the grace of God, if you're in Christ, you're a new creation.
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You've been united with Jesus Christ.
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You have his spirit indwelling you, you have his word, his church, godly men to model for you what it looks like to be what you did not have.
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And I would say that is a very hopeful message, right?
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Because the first says, Well, I'm just a slave to my circumstances.
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So I'm going to be a horrible father because I didn't have a good father.
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And you see people in the world talk like this.
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Well, you know, his dad wasn't a great dad.
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He was abusive, and you know, he he didn't really show affection and so on and so forth.
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And so that's why Johnny is the same way with his kids.
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And that legacy just keeps getting passed on.
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And it's like, well, praise be to God through the power of the gospel.
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His transforming grace can completely wreck that past and start a new legacy with one person who's committed to God's word, and to say, I am not a slave to my circumstances.
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I will be the change with God's help.
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And so we got to be mindful of the fact that Jesus says that evil flows from within our own hearts.
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We cannot blame our circumstances.
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So let me give another another illustration here.
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The apostle Paul.
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Paul man went through some things, okay?
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Imagine if Paul made excuses for his sin or made an excuse to maybe not serve some of the churches he was called to because of his past trauma, right?
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Imagine if he constantly was just throwing in people's faces, well, you know, you got to understand this is why I behave the way I do, or this is why I lashed out at this church, because I was shipwrecked at sea several times.
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I was persecuted for the faith.
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I was stoned almost to death.
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Don't you know what I've been through?
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That's it's almost like imagine if Paul was using those things that were real severe forms of suffering he endured.
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But imagine if he was using that as a license to sin.
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And that's what we can sometimes do as Christians.
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We can think, well, no, I have a license.
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Like you got to grade me on a curve.
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So my anger is not the same as your anger.
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If I disrespect someone, or if I'm unloving, or if I hold a grudge, or if I this or that, you got to judge me a little bit differently than others because of what I've been through.
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And we just got to say, wait, wait, wait, wait.
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We want to take seriously what you went through and make sure we help you work through that through a biblical lens, but you that does not give you any license, though, to respond to sin with sin.
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Both dishonor the Lord.
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But another thought is the danger of blame shifting.
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This goes all the way back to the garden with Adam and Eve, right?
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We cannot blame shift.
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So I know a lot of people like to pick on our sister Eve because she was the one who, according to Paul, was deceived by the serpent and he and she gave to Adam, who voluntarily partook.
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But let's not forget, before the fall, what was Adam doing when God created Eve and presented her, his wife, to him as this precious gift?
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He like burst out into this poetic, you know, articulation of his joy and gratitude to the father for Eve.
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And then shortly after, when God is calling Adam to account, where are you?
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Right?
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What does Adam do?
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He blame shifts.
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He throws Eve under the bus and he had the audacity and pride to point the finger at God and say, The woman you gave me, right?
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That's what Adam did.
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He blame shifted and put the blame on the father.
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We can do the same thing if we blame shift, if someone, because this is another sign that maybe, you know, someone is using their past trauma as a license for sin, is if they're above correction.
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So if someone who is standing on biblical authority tries to lovingly restore them or bring to their attention, like, hey, I just noticed you kind of have this victim mentality where when someone tries to confront you in like legitimate sin, you just chalk it up to, well, you gotta remember because of what I went through in this season of my life, I have this personality disorder, or I have this mental illness, or I just have, you know, just a bad experience that I went through that has now, you know, led me to think or behave or respond in this way.
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And when someone tries to bring that to your attention, you kind of push back as you like this inner defense attorney comes out as if, oh, no, no, no, no, you just don't understand my situation.
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You don't understand what I've been through.
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And that very well may be true.
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Someone might not understand all the details of what you went through, but at the end of the day, if you profess faith in Christ, none of us has a license to just sin.
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And I don't think it is God honoring to walk around with a victim mentality because that's that's enslaving.
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That's that's to submit to you know the lie that what you've gone through is deterministic, as if there is no hope for you to change because of what you went through.
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But if you understand the gospel, man, think about the power that you have access to to recognize, yes, I've gone through horrendous things, but by the glory of my Savior who rose on the third day for my justification, whom I am united to and his spirit indwells me, I am not a slave to what I've gone through.
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I don't have to repeat the cycle.
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I don't have to have the same type of marriage, I don't have to be the same type of father or mother.
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I don't have to respond the way everyone else has responded in my life in this area because I've been set free from the power of sin.
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Its influence still remains, it's still gonna shape and tempt me, but I have the power through Jesus Christ to say no and to joyfully obey the Lord.
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And so we got to help people guard against blame shifting because, again, no one is gonna stand before Jesus and be able to make a legitimate case, or you gotta understand what I've been through.
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And Jesus can look you in the eyes and say, no, no, no.
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Let me tell you what I've been through.
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I am the savior of the world.
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I sat at the right hand of the Father.
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I never known sin a day in my life, and yet I endured suffering, trauma, unjust trials, being beaten, mocked, and ultimately murdered unjustly to save my bride, the church.
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And not even Jesus would use what he went through as a license for anything other than to hold up the message of the cross.
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And so we gotta be careful about naming the name of Christ, but walking around as victims who use our past suffering as a license for present sin.
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But another thought here is some of what I got at here already, but let me just circle back to why this is all really good news.
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Responsibility opens the door to hope.
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I think Joseph in Genesis is a great example of this.
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I mean, Joseph suffered egregiously.
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He went through severe injustice from close family.
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He was in prison for years when he literally did nothing wrong.
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He could have questioned God, he could have wrung his fists at the Lord.
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So much could have gone the other direction in Joseph's life.
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He certainly suffered terribly, and yet he never let his pass define him or define his responses, but rather he sought to trace God's sovereign, providential hand at work in his life for God's glory and for the greater good of the nation of Israel.
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And we should do the same.
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God's not always going to give us the answers as to why we suffer the way we do, He's not gonna always, you know, reveal to us why he permitted certain forms of suffering to enter into our lives.
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But at least we always know this God is good, and everything he does is governed by his goodness.
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So even if, like Job, we don't have the answers as to what's all going on behind the scenes, we can always rest in God's character and his sovereignty and his divine providence, knowing that we are not slaves to our suffer, our past suffering, but that God is presently using it for his redemptive purposes, primarily to mold us into the image of his son, to reveal maybe sin in us, to humble us, and to teach us more about his character.
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And so I just want to encourage everyone, you know, we gotta we gotta have a category for grieving what was done to us.
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If you have a testimony where you went through something in your past, we can grieve what was done to us or what we might have even participated in, what we've done to others, without, you know, not owning what we've done as well, if that makes sense.
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So we can lament what was done to us while owning what we have done.
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Again, this is Romans 9, uh I'm sorry, Romans 12, 9 through 21.
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We should go out of our way to honor others.
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We are commanded, do not be overcome by evil, but rather overcome evil with good.
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We are told to uh never repay one evil for evil, but rather we entrust ourselves to a faithful creator who judges justly, revenge is mine, says the Lord.
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That is the posture we can do.
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So we can both we can be both a sufferer and a sinner.
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Or I love how Martin Luther would describe the Christian life.
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We are simultaneously saints, sinners, and sufferers.
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That is true.
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And the gospel speaks through all three categories.
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Christ comforts the wounded and gives grace to the guilty.
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And praise be to God that we are not slaves to our past trauma.
00:20:15.440 --> 00:20:22.799
So to give a closing invitation here, I just want to encourage you to bring your pain, bring your past trauma and suffering to Jesus Christ.
00:20:23.039 --> 00:20:25.119
Lay it at the foot of the cross.
00:20:25.279 --> 00:20:31.839
I love how Joni Erickson Tata says that God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
00:20:32.079 --> 00:20:45.279
Please don't be a professing Christian who walks around your entire Christian journey with this woe is me cloud over you, where you just resign to a victim mentality and say, Well, because of what I've gone through, this is just who I am.
00:20:45.440 --> 00:20:51.200
I'm going to be this Christian who is just responding in sinful ways that grieves the heart of God.
00:20:51.279 --> 00:20:57.200
And you don't even have a biblical category to recognize that those are sinful ways of thinking and believing and responding.
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And you're just like this victim, just woe is me.
00:21:00.240 --> 00:21:00.799
I've gone through this.
00:21:00.880 --> 00:21:02.960
And it's like, no, we want to take again.
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I sometimes when you talk like this, people latch on to what you didn't say.
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I am being very clear throughout this episode.
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We should take suffering seriously.
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We should take each other's suffering seriously.
00:21:14.880 --> 00:21:16.559
We should show compassion.
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What I'm encouraging you to guard against is resigning to a victim mentality where you believe that those things you've gone through are deterministic because then you're saying that your past trauma, your past suffering is more powerful than the gospel of Jesus Christ.
00:21:32.960 --> 00:21:35.759
And that is just factually incorrect.
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And praise be to God that that is true, that you are a new creation.
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And so seek wise counsel, seek to understand the word of God, seek your local church where you can be discipled well.
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Um, maybe you've never been counseled to think through how should I view the suffering in my past through a biblical lens?
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Do you have a biblical theology of suffering?
00:21:57.599 --> 00:21:59.759
I I've seen many well meaning Christians who.
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Or because He's punishing me for the sins I committed before I became a Christian, and that's why he allowed this to happen in my life.
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And that is very damaging.
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And so, and praise God that the Word of God speaks to those things so that we can think well about them.
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Hopefully this was an encouragement to you.
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If it was, please like, subscribe, and share this with someone you think it would help.
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Until next time, God bless you.
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As you know, we live in a hyper-psychologized culture, a very therapeutic culture.
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A lot of that has infiltrated the minds and beliefs of a lot of Christians and local churches, which has led to a lot of Christians, whether they're aware of it or not, oftentimes not that aware of it, they resign to this belief that their present sin is excused by their past trauma.
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So you have people who have gone through some egregious things in their lives.
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They've been seriously sinned against.
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They've gone through traumatic events that have shaped them in many ways, but they're presently sinning against others or sinning against the Lord or, you know, have unbiblical ways of thinking and responding to life, but they don't see it as unbiblical or sinful.
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They see it as just a byproduct of their past trauma.
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And so I'm going to address that in this episode because I do think it is a pain point.
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And I do think some Christians who would agree with me can be a little heavy-handed in how they go about trying to disciple and correct saints who struggle in this way.
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But to set up, you know, this conversation, I do want to make clear that we can take suffering seriously without using it as an excuse.
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And we can help other Christians do that.
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How can we do two things?
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Make sure we acknowledge the suffering and take it seriously, but then also disciple people in the truth of God's word and realizing that we cannot make an excuse for our sin.
00:01:41.120 --> 00:01:47.920
And so I just have a few pastoral thoughts I want to share here, starting with hey, suffering is real and God cares about it.
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All throughout the Psalms, we see language of like God is near the brokenhearted.
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So suffering is legit.
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We don't ever want to, and I think some can overcorrect and minimize people's suffering and have this posture of just man up and grit your teeth and persevere and endure to the glory of God kind of thing.
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And listen, I'm all for perseverance and endurance.
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Those are biblical things, but that doesn't mean that God is unconcerned with his children's pain and suffering, because he absolutely is.
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I mean, we have entire books of the Bible essentially to teach us that very principle.
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And so if God cares about our suffering, his children's suffering, then we as his children should care about our brother and sister's suffering and to never minimize it, but also to help them guard their hearts from using their suffering and trauma as an excuse for present sin.
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And so we want to start with compassion.
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The Bible doesn't minimize abuse, it doesn't minimize loss or hardship and the brokenness of the fall, and neither should we.
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I mean, Jesus himself was described in Isaiah 53 as a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief, right?
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And so God takes suffering very seriously.
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As a matter of fact, maybe I'll put this in in the screen here on the screen so you can see this, but I created this illustration of just how I tend to think about suffering as more of a spectrum.
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So, for example, I would suggest that any form of just brokenness and affliction that comes into your life that is a byproduct of the fall in Genesis is a form of suffering because it was never God's original design for his people and his creation.
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And on that spectrum of suffering, there can be things on one end of the spectrum that are quote unquote not as severe as far as your experience of the suffering.
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And then there's things on the other end of this, other end of the spectrum that are more severe and serious in their impact and your experience, right?
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So you can think of serious forms of abuse and being sinned against, for example.
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But it's all suffering, therefore it's all important to your heavenly father.
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And so something we can do sometimes as Christians is compare our suffering, and then we determine, based on, you know, other people's suffering whether or not God cares about our suffering.
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So if you're on the verge of potentially losing your job and that's just creating some anxiety in your soul, and you're like, I don't know if I should really be taking this to the Lord in prayer.
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Maybe I should just toughen up because man, my sister in the church just shared with me that she was just diagnosed with a serious form of cancer.
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And it's like, well, no, the father cares about both because it's important to you, therefore, it's important to him.
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It grieves his heart because it was never his original design for any of his children to experience any measure of brokenness.
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Therefore, God is moved with compassion for it.
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And so we got to be careful not to compare.
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So we want to start with suffering is real and God cares about it, therefore, we should as well.
00:04:49.519 --> 00:04:54.560
But another biblical principle is to remember that all sin comes from the heart, right?
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From the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
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What comes out of a man is what defiles him.
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Jesus is always concerned with our hearts as we're discipling other people.
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This is why we should never be content with behavior modification, just getting people to change externally, right?
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So, for example, if someone stops drinking alcohol for five years, uh, that's that is a great goal, that's great self-discipline.
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But if their motivation for that change is simply, well, because I don't want my wife to be mad at me anymore and she threatened to take the kids and leave, well, that's that's not the proper motivation.
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It should be the glory of God, wanting to joyfully obey the Lord out of gratitude for what he's done for you.
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So what's in our heart, what motivates us, does matter.
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Now, the reason this is important is because if we are as Christians who are committed to a biblical understanding of sanctification, the doctrine of union with Christ, our justification, right?
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A doctrine of sin, well then, and regeneration, conversion, well, then we got to be very careful not to use our past trauma or past suffering as an excuse for present sin.
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Because when we do that, we are saying that our past trauma is determinative.
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This is how you get Christians who say, Well, this is why I talk the way I do, this is why I respond to certain situations the way I do.
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This is why I can be a little sharp with some people and they're sinning against their spouse or sinning against their children or people in their sphere of influence, but they don't see it as sin or they don't see some of their beliefs and thought patterns as unbiblical.
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They just see it as a byproduct of a past event of suffering and brokenness that they experience.
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And I just don't think the Bible supports that.
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Now, let me be clear: things we experience, whether it's the household you grew up in, the community you grew up in, the culture, right?
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Whether you experience a traumatic event when you were younger or at any point in your life for that matter, uh, whether you've been sinned against in serious ways, those things are very real.
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They are circumstantial, they have influence, they shape temptation around you, but they are not deterministic for your behavior.
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You are responsible before the Lord how you respond.
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Don't believe me, take your time after this episode and go read Romans 12, 9 through 21, where we are, as Christians commanded do not be overcome by evil, but rather overcome evil with good.
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Do not repay anyone evil for evil, right?
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But rather, vengeance belongs to the Lord.
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We're commanded to go out of our way to show honor to people and to entrust, you know, people to the Lord because He's the true and faithful and just judge.
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And so we got to be careful from, for example, some people can say, well, the reason I talk to people this way is because I have a personality disorder.
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Then I would say, well, then with God's help, repent of any sinful ways of living and responding to people and put off and put on with the help of God's spirit and his word and his church.
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We can't throw, here's an example, okay?
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Because I know this can step on toes, and that's okay.
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No one will stand before Jesus Christ on judgment day, and Jesus, Jesus is gonna say, you know what?
00:08:10.160 --> 00:08:20.000
We can ignore all these sins over here, this cluster of sins you committed throughout your life, because that was your personality disorder or that was your mental illness, right?
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That was your depression.
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So we're just gonna, we're just gonna act like that's not there.
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No, like Jesus is not gonna grade on a curve.
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Sin is sin.
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Again, if you've experienced things that introduces temptation into your life, that is circumstantial, but it is not deterministic.
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This is why I encourage Christians to be careful about the language we use.
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When, for instance, if you're talking to your spouse or your kids and maybe you're confessing sin, but you you delete your confession when you say, But you know, you made me so angry when you blank.
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It's like, well, no, nobody can make you angry.
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They can do things that circumstantially create an environment of temptation that provokes you to respond certain ways, but at the end of the day, you chose to respond the way you did.
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You're responsible for your sin before the Lord.
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This is why I laugh whenever you see a significant figure in the in whether it's a celebrity or a politician, or maybe some some something scandalous comes out and they give this PR statement of, you know, apology.
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And you'll typically see some common phrases where they'll say, This doesn't represent who I really am.
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That that was a mistake I made that doesn't reflect my true values and convictions.
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And the word of God would say, No, that that revealed exactly who you are, because from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
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What's in our heart is revealed in our actions.
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And so we got to be mindful of that.
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You know, the inner man, the heart, when the Bible refers to the heart, it's referring to that inner man of us, the focal point of our being that shapes our our volition, so our choices, our affections, and our beliefs, right?
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Our cognition.
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That's that is what the Bible is referring to when it says the heart.
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And so, to be clear, our circumstances do influence us, okay?
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I'll use myself as an example.
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Unfortunately, I grew up without my earthly father in my life.
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He left before I was born, and I've met him one time my entire life.
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Now, what if I were to say, because I didn't have an earthly father, how on earth am I going to be able to love my kids?
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How am I going to serve them well?
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How am I going to actually be able to disciple them and train them up in the ways of the Lord?
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I didn't have that in my life.
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So how can I be that or give that to my children?
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And the word of God would say, Well, no, that's not deterministic.
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It is circumstantial.
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It has shaped you in real ways.
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But by the grace of God, if you're in Christ, you're a new creation.
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You've been united with Jesus Christ.
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You have his spirit indwelling you, you have his word, his church, godly men to model for you what it looks like to be what you did not have.
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And I would say that is a very hopeful message, right?
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Because the first says, Well, I'm just a slave to my circumstances.
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So I'm going to be a horrible father because I didn't have a good father.
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And you see people in the world talk like this.
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Well, you know, his dad wasn't a great dad.
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He was abusive, and you know, he he didn't really show affection and so on and so forth.
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And so that's why Johnny is the same way with his kids.
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And that legacy just keeps getting passed on.
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And it's like, well, praise be to God through the power of the gospel.
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His transforming grace can completely wreck that past and start a new legacy with one person who's committed to God's word, and to say, I am not a slave to my circumstances.
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I will be the change with God's help.
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And so we got to be mindful of the fact that Jesus says that evil flows from within our own hearts.
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We cannot blame our circumstances.
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So let me give another another illustration here.
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The apostle Paul.
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Paul man went through some things, okay?
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Imagine if Paul made excuses for his sin or made an excuse to maybe not serve some of the churches he was called to because of his past trauma, right?
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Imagine if he constantly was just throwing in people's faces, well, you know, you got to understand this is why I behave the way I do, or this is why I lashed out at this church, because I was shipwrecked at sea several times.
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I was persecuted for the faith.
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I was stoned almost to death.
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Don't you know what I've been through?
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That's it's almost like imagine if Paul was using those things that were real severe forms of suffering he endured.
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But imagine if he was using that as a license to sin.
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And that's what we can sometimes do as Christians.
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We can think, well, no, I have a license.
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Like you got to grade me on a curve.
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So my anger is not the same as your anger.
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If I disrespect someone, or if I'm unloving, or if I hold a grudge, or if I this or that, you got to judge me a little bit differently than others because of what I've been through.
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And we just got to say, wait, wait, wait, wait.
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We want to take seriously what you went through and make sure we help you work through that through a biblical lens, but you that does not give you any license, though, to respond to sin with sin.
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Both dishonor the Lord.
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But another thought is the danger of blame shifting.
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This goes all the way back to the garden with Adam and Eve, right?
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We cannot blame shift.
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So I know a lot of people like to pick on our sister Eve because she was the one who, according to Paul, was deceived by the serpent and he and she gave to Adam, who voluntarily partook.
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But let's not forget, before the fall, what was Adam doing when God created Eve and presented her, his wife, to him as this precious gift?
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He like burst out into this poetic, you know, articulation of his joy and gratitude to the father for Eve.
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And then shortly after, when God is calling Adam to account, where are you?
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Right?
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What does Adam do?
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He blame shifts.
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He throws Eve under the bus and he had the audacity and pride to point the finger at God and say, The woman you gave me, right?
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That's what Adam did.
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He blame shifted and put the blame on the father.
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We can do the same thing if we blame shift, if someone, because this is another sign that maybe, you know, someone is using their past trauma as a license for sin, is if they're above correction.
00:14:22.799 --> 00:14:54.080
So if someone who is standing on biblical authority tries to lovingly restore them or bring to their attention, like, hey, I just noticed you kind of have this victim mentality where when someone tries to confront you in like legitimate sin, you just chalk it up to, well, you gotta remember because of what I went through in this season of my life, I have this personality disorder, or I have this mental illness, or I just have, you know, just a bad experience that I went through that has now, you know, led me to think or behave or respond in this way.
00:14:54.240 --> 00:15:03.679
And when someone tries to bring that to your attention, you kind of push back as you like this inner defense attorney comes out as if, oh, no, no, no, no, you just don't understand my situation.
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You don't understand what I've been through.
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And that very well may be true.
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Someone might not understand all the details of what you went through, but at the end of the day, if you profess faith in Christ, none of us has a license to just sin.
00:15:16.720 --> 00:15:23.759
And I don't think it is God honoring to walk around with a victim mentality because that's that's enslaving.
00:15:23.919 --> 00:15:34.399
That's that's to submit to you know the lie that what you've gone through is deterministic, as if there is no hope for you to change because of what you went through.
00:15:34.720 --> 00:15:52.960
But if you understand the gospel, man, think about the power that you have access to to recognize, yes, I've gone through horrendous things, but by the glory of my Savior who rose on the third day for my justification, whom I am united to and his spirit indwells me, I am not a slave to what I've gone through.
00:15:53.120 --> 00:15:55.039
I don't have to repeat the cycle.
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I don't have to have the same type of marriage, I don't have to be the same type of father or mother.
00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:07.759
I don't have to respond the way everyone else has responded in my life in this area because I've been set free from the power of sin.
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Its influence still remains, it's still gonna shape and tempt me, but I have the power through Jesus Christ to say no and to joyfully obey the Lord.
00:16:16.799 --> 00:16:27.759
And so we got to help people guard against blame shifting because, again, no one is gonna stand before Jesus and be able to make a legitimate case, or you gotta understand what I've been through.
00:16:28.000 --> 00:16:30.080
And Jesus can look you in the eyes and say, no, no, no.
00:16:30.159 --> 00:16:31.519
Let me tell you what I've been through.
00:16:31.679 --> 00:16:33.039
I am the savior of the world.
00:16:33.120 --> 00:16:34.720
I sat at the right hand of the Father.
00:16:34.879 --> 00:16:48.879
I never known sin a day in my life, and yet I endured suffering, trauma, unjust trials, being beaten, mocked, and ultimately murdered unjustly to save my bride, the church.
00:16:49.120 --> 00:16:58.879
And not even Jesus would use what he went through as a license for anything other than to hold up the message of the cross.
00:16:59.039 --> 00:17:10.240
And so we gotta be careful about naming the name of Christ, but walking around as victims who use our past suffering as a license for present sin.
00:17:10.880 --> 00:17:18.160
But another thought here is some of what I got at here already, but let me just circle back to why this is all really good news.
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Responsibility opens the door to hope.
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I think Joseph in Genesis is a great example of this.
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I mean, Joseph suffered egregiously.
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He went through severe injustice from close family.
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He was in prison for years when he literally did nothing wrong.
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He could have questioned God, he could have wrung his fists at the Lord.
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So much could have gone the other direction in Joseph's life.
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He certainly suffered terribly, and yet he never let his pass define him or define his responses, but rather he sought to trace God's sovereign, providential hand at work in his life for God's glory and for the greater good of the nation of Israel.
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And we should do the same.
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God's not always going to give us the answers as to why we suffer the way we do, He's not gonna always, you know, reveal to us why he permitted certain forms of suffering to enter into our lives.
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But at least we always know this God is good, and everything he does is governed by his goodness.
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So even if, like Job, we don't have the answers as to what's all going on behind the scenes, we can always rest in God's character and his sovereignty and his divine providence, knowing that we are not slaves to our suffer, our past suffering, but that God is presently using it for his redemptive purposes, primarily to mold us into the image of his son, to reveal maybe sin in us, to humble us, and to teach us more about his character.
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And so I just want to encourage everyone, you know, we gotta we gotta have a category for grieving what was done to us.
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If you have a testimony where you went through something in your past, we can grieve what was done to us or what we might have even participated in, what we've done to others, without, you know, not owning what we've done as well, if that makes sense.
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So we can lament what was done to us while owning what we have done.
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Again, this is Romans 9, uh I'm sorry, Romans 12, 9 through 21.
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We should go out of our way to honor others.
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We are commanded, do not be overcome by evil, but rather overcome evil with good.
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We are told to uh never repay one evil for evil, but rather we entrust ourselves to a faithful creator who judges justly, revenge is mine, says the Lord.
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That is the posture we can do.
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So we can both we can be both a sufferer and a sinner.
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Or I love how Martin Luther would describe the Christian life.
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We are simultaneously saints, sinners, and sufferers.
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That is true.
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And the gospel speaks through all three categories.
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Christ comforts the wounded and gives grace to the guilty.
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And praise be to God that we are not slaves to our past trauma.
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So to give a closing invitation here, I just want to encourage you to bring your pain, bring your past trauma and suffering to Jesus Christ.
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Lay it at the foot of the cross.
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I love how Joni Erickson Tata says that God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
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Please don't be a professing Christian who walks around your entire Christian journey with this woe is me cloud over you, where you just resign to a victim mentality and say, Well, because of what I've gone through, this is just who I am.
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I'm going to be this Christian who is just responding in sinful ways that grieves the heart of God.
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And you don't even have a biblical category to recognize that those are sinful ways of thinking and believing and responding.
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And you're just like this victim, just woe is me.
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I've gone through this.
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And it's like, no, we want to take again.
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I sometimes when you talk like this, people latch on to what you didn't say.
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I am being very clear throughout this episode.
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We should take suffering seriously.
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We should take each other's suffering seriously.
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We should show compassion.
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What I'm encouraging you to guard against is resigning to a victim mentality where you believe that those things you've gone through are deterministic because then you're saying that your past trauma, your past suffering is more powerful than the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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And that is just factually incorrect.
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And praise be to God that that is true, that you are a new creation.
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And so seek wise counsel, seek to understand the word of God, seek your local church where you can be discipled well.
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Um, maybe you've never been counseled to think through how should I view the suffering in my past through a biblical lens?
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Do you have a biblical theology of suffering?
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I I've seen many well meaning Christians who.
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Or because He's punishing me for the sins I committed before I became a Christian, and that's why he allowed this to happen in my life.
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And that is very damaging.
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And so, and praise God that the Word of God speaks to those things so that we can think well about them.
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Hopefully this was an encouragement to you.
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If it was, please like, subscribe, and share this with someone you think it would help.
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Until next time, God bless you.
