Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Twelve Steps: Inventory (Step 4)
That wasn't so bad, was it, Don Elle? No, it wasn't. And it was very healing. I imagine it was very healing for you. Hey, Easter's coming next weekend, so you 11 o'clockers. You know, we're going to have a sunrise service at 9.30. So please feel free to come at 9.30 because I have a feeling 11 is going to be packed out with friends and relatives. So feel free to bring them, and any of you who are able to come at 9.30, that's extra credit. Time off of purgatory to come at 9.30 next Easter. For Good Friday, we are going to be having our first Good Friday service as Don Elle mentioned, just to let you know what will be happening. It'll be a little bit different. It'll be kind of a quiet time, just for an hour, no longer. We'll open up with the Divine Hours, which is what you can do and together as a group. That'll take about 10 minutes together. Very simple. You don't have to participate if you don't want to kind of thing. And then Karen Blatt from our multimedia team has put together a PowerPoint presentation of images and biblical text. It's like her best ever is what I hear. She's quite talented, and that'll serve as like a 25 minute period of meditation. So you can just look at that and reflect, or if you want to bring a copy of the Bible and read the Passion account for yourself, that'll just be a time for us together to have a time of reflection and contemplation. And then we'll close with the Divine Hours. So there won't be no music or sermon or any of that kind of stuff. It'll have a little bit of different flavor on Good Friday. So by the way, it's Bob Crawley and Craig Lownsbury here today. Craig, why don't you stand up? And I don't know. It's Bob, where's Bob? If Bob could stand up, I just wanted to recognize these guys. They are really leading our facilities team. And you may notice that before you clap, they give them their due when I'm done, but they replaced all the light bulbs in here. They got their jetpacks on and we're flying around and service this thing and put new lights up here and have been coming pretty much every Saturday. So if you want to help out on the facilities team, maybe come once a month on a Saturday and hang out with Craig and Bob. They're great guys to begin with. And just a round of applause for Craig and Bob for the good work they're doing for the church and our budget passed. I'm sure you all about that. So we do have a budget for this coming fiscal year. So that's good news. Thanks to Alan Crow for doing multimedia this weekend. All right. Excellent to read the text. It is Palm Sunday from Mark chapter 11 here of the account of the first Palm Sunday when Jesus came into Jerusalem in the final week before the crucifixion and the resurrection. When they were approaching Jerusalem, close by the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, go to the village facing you and as you enter it, you will at once find a tethered cult that no one has yet written. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone says to you, what are you doing? Say the master needs it and we'll send it back here at once. They went off and found a cult tethered near a door in the open street. As they untied it, some men standing there said, what are you doing untying that cult? They gave the answer that Jesus had told them and the man let them go. Then they took the cult to Jesus and threw their cloaks on its back and he mounted it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road and others greenery which they'd cut in the fields. And those who went in front and those who followed were all shouting, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of David, our father, Hosanna in the highest heaven. He entered Jerusalem and went into the temple and when he had surveyed it all as it was laid by now, he went out to Bethany with the 12th. It's a significant text because it reveals something that's really at the heart of our mission as a church which is in a sense, we're called to be the donkey. We're called to bring the presence of Jesus into the city that he loves. And our mission as a church really is to bring the transforming presence of Jesus into the heart of Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor surrounding communities. And so toward that end we've been working through the 12 steps this year. On the first weekend of every month we take one of the 12 steps that were made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous and are used in many other recovery programs. And we're on the fourth step today. Just a bit of rehearsal from where we've been. The first three steps go like this. Step number one is we admitted we were powerless over alcohol. You can insert your besetting sin or just your separation from God however it's expressed that our lives had become unmanageable. And then two we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And then step three we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. These first three steps are all about surrender to God. They're the way that we connect with him in the very early stages. And so the natural question is what comes next after surrender? After in desperation we've turned our lives over to the care of God as we understand him. What do we do? And step four is about what we do after that. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. You can see the step four is the one that separates the men from the boys that says this, yes Christianity really is about personal transformation. It's not just something you play and put on, it's very real. This is a journey of spiritual transformation that we are on and it's in steps, the 12 steps. It's in manageable increments that we take one at a time, one after the other, and we start out spiritually untransformed. We start out lost as a matter of fact. Like I go to Briarwood about twice a year now. And so in between I forget how it's laid out. And I personally think it's a little bit confusing and stores change. And I'm intuitive male so I think I know where I'm going. And often it's the fourth corridor that I've tried where I find the store that I'm going to. But eventually at my Briarwood trip I find myself like this guy in front of the map that tells you where you're going. And who knows what he's looking for. Maybe the gap, maybe Brookstone, maybe Victoria's Secret, something for the misses he's looking for. It could be anything but you find yourself when you're lost at Briarwood and you want to find the gap and you look up the gap and you find where it is. But you need one other crucial bit of information. Which is what? Where am I exactly? It's very comforting sometimes to go to the map and to see that little sign that says you are here. And I'm like thank you. You know this is sometimes when you're disoriented in your life and you don't know what to do, get yourself to Briarwood and stand in front of that map. And just be comforted by those words. You are here. Thank you. It's nice to know where I am. Of course we're talking now about a spiritual journey. So knowing where you are physically doesn't help. The question is where am I in relation to God? The significant distance between us and God is not a physical distance. It feels physical but it's not. God is spirit. That means God is closer than our next breath. The real distance between us and God is a moral distance. And so a moral inventory is what we need in order to answer the question where am I in relation to God? Let's break it down this fourth step. It's number one. It's an inventory. I love the learning channel. There are all those programs that started in England and now are coming from mother country. Clean sweep is a great one on the learning channel. Along with the while you were out and all that. I love clean. I can really identify with clean sweep. That's where a homeowner who is powerless over his clutter comes to admit it. And then the next step of course is you come to believe that a power greater than yourself, i.e. the clean sweep team, can restore your life to sanity. And then you make a decision to turn your house over to this care of this team. And the first thing that you do under the care of the team is you start moving stuff out to the lawn. In effect you're taking an inventory. You're not throwing it out at first. You're not deciding what to do with this stuff. You're just getting it all out of the room, out onto the lawn, so you can see what's there. And if you watch the program, powerful things happen to people during this stage called the inventory stage. You just can watch the people going through their inner turmoil and their connection to all their junk. And you can watch as they see the junk with fresh eyes because they're not just looking at it themselves, they're seeing it as it were through the eyes of another, the clean sweep team. And they're beginning to realize, you know, this stuff that looks to an objective party like it's worn out and useless actually is worn out and useless even though it's very comforting to have it with me all the time. You watch them see it all together and light bulbs start going on in their hearts and they come up with powerful radical conclusions like this is really too much. I can't keep all this stuff. There's no way we can take this back into the room. The room cannot bear it. It's not fair to the space and so they need counselors around all the time during the inventory stage. It's a very powerful thing to do, make an inventory. And in step four we're making a moral inventory. Now the whole moral thing, you know, morality. Yeah, you're at a party and you really want to get things flowing and see, let's talk about morality. It's just, you know, it's not something in our culture that we're really, it's kind of uncool the whole category. It's a very retrograde thing, you know, morality. We'd actually like to remove the category from human experience entirely. You know, it's just like this, it's like this mine field and there's just pitfalls and traps all the way around when we talk about morality. Can't we somehow get away from this? Love is another field like that that has traps and pitfalls but like morality we're kind of stuck with the category called love because we're human. And so we do as humans we have an indelible sense of the good. And we have an indelible sense of the less than good or the ungood or to use the primitive language bat or evil. So in spite of the fact that this is all kind of mixed up and uncool and retro, there's something in the words of the prophet Micah, the Hebrew prophet who said he has shown you, oh man, what is good? And what does the Lord require of you? But to do justice and to love, steadfast love and to walk humbly with your God. When we hear that there's something in our heart that says, yes, it's a meaningful category. There is the good and I do know it. And there are requirements that are placed upon me as a human being and I want to live up to those requirements of justice and faithful love and walking with my God. So moral inventory in a sense is the most significant inventory we can make in our lives. The trail that our lives leave behind them is a moral trail. Our deeds, good and bad are the footprints that we leave in the sand. You know, at funerals, I go to funerals a lot. And being a pastor and there's a time during the memorial service when there's the eulogy or the family, friends and loved ones of the deceased will stand up and in a sense share an inventory of the person's life. And I've noticed at memorial services that people generally speaking don't inventory the person's possessions. You know, I just loved his Miata and I really enjoy it. But didn't you have that iPod? That comes later at the probate, you know, time after the death. But usually at the funeral service a person's deeds are memorialized. You know, she was such a faithful friend and just a great listener. I loved his humility. I loved his honesty. I loved his generosity. These are the things that come out at a memorial service because the trail we leave behind in our lives fundamentally is a moral trail. And I've been to funerals where the moral bag is so mixed of the deceased that people are straining to say something good and they're reduced to saying things like, oh, yeah, he loved his dog and he loved his beer and he loved his pestons. And there's such an emptiness in the room. The silence of what's not said is so deafening at those kind of memorial services. A searching moral inventory is what we're invited to take in step four. Searching is such a biblical word. And I think the beginning of this word searching in the Bible happens in Genesis, the book of beginnings in chapter three, where we have this picture of God and the first humans and what was going on between them and the distance between them and the cause for that distance, which was a moral failing. And verse eight, it says, the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to them, where are you? I love the Bible. I just love the Bible because the Bible has a way of conveying truth that doesn't unlike anything else you can read. And God is pictured in the Bible in ways that we wouldn't think just intuitively. There's something here about just the way God is personal and He's affected by us personally. And His heart weeps for us. It's the poignancy of a parent. When you're a parent, you lose track of one of your kids. It can be very disturbing. My daughter, Amy, I think she was six years old, were at Long Lake on vacation. I was watching her up at the beach area and there's a roped off area for smaller kids to play around in the water. And she was pretty good in the water. And so I was watching her and reading and watching her and keeping her pretty close on her and reading. It got kind of interesting. And next time I looked up, she was gone. And I looked quick around the beach and just in the immediate, there's no Amy. And that is not a feeling you want to have as a parent. And I get up and into the water, called people into the water. I told this story on Saturday night and I didn't tell them how they came out. And I wondered why they weren't listening for the rest of the sermon. But turned out Amy had just gone up to the cabin. I hadn't seen her and everything was all right. But that losing track feeling is just a bad feeling for a parent. And here in the garden, God's going through something like that. It's not that he's searching because he's lost track. But he is searching because in some mysterious way they are hiding from him. And again, that's why I love the Bible because we would naturally think, well, you can't hide from God. But the Bible is telling us through this that apparently in some sense we can hide from God. It's maybe a function of our freedom that we are allowed to hide from God. But hell is our permanent hiding place from God. And those who want to hide from God forever have a place where they can go to do that. And more than anything we want to hide, don't we? Our moral failings. That's the distance between us and the Holy God. And it's like in the fourth step what you're doing is you're finally answering God's first question to humanity which is where are you? And we tell him where we are morally in step four. The more we want to be found, the more searching our inventory will be. It's almost as if we're helping God to find us in step four. Jeremiah the prophet said, "The heart is deceitful above all things. I the Lord search the heart." Such a biblical word. John 1 John said, "If we claim to be without sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." Psalm four, the bedtime psalm, "In your anger do not sin. Search your hearts and be silent. Or search your hearts and be calm, be still, be quiet." Searching does take time. And good searching requires a certain deliberate calm. I learned this lesson the hard way. Did I tell the passport story before? Has anyone not heard my passport story, Richard? Oh, great. I'm going to tell the story. I think I did tell it before but I thought two or three hands up that I hadn't told it before but I've invited to go with the team to the Bournemouth Vineyard last year and my ticket is paid for and, you know, a few weeks before I get my passport and put it in the place where I'll remember to find it and all squared away. Day of flight, 10 in the morning, go to get my passport, get my personal effects together, flight is at seven o'clock, can't find the passport. It turns out I had taken it somewhere in the intervening time and brought it back and I thought, "Holy smoke." And I start searching for the passport. It's a pricey ticket to England. And I want to get there because I'm leading this conference. And I look around the office where it's supposed to be and it's not there. I go up to my bedroom and I look up there. The two or three places where it's supposed to be. It's not. I enlist Nancy in a kind of a momentary, stationary panic. I enlist. Please start looking. We just start tearing up the house looking for the passport. An hour goes by. There's no passport. What am I going to do? I call the passport company, but it's the federal government so no one answers the phone. But there's an 800 number that you call, a 900 number, and someone will answer and you pay $5 a minute and they say, "Yes, you can get a passport, but you have to go to Chicago." And you can get it the same day. So if you can get there in time and back, you'll be okay. How am I going to get to Chicago and back in time for a seven o'clock flight? I call my son Jesse and I try to bring him into my crisis. And he says, "Well, you know, Dad, there's a guy in our church who actually has available a corporate jet. And I know he's not working today. And he's a real adventurous, some sort. I bet he'd be glad to fly out of Chicago on his jet and say, "You're kidding." He said, "No, he'd get a kick out of it." So I'm like, "Stay and look. Go to Chicago and solve the problem." I say, "I'm going to do the active thing. Go to Chicago. It'll be a great story if nothing else." So the guy picks me up and his car drives me to flint the airport. The pilots are in the plane. The jets are running. I felt like I was running for president, whisked into the jet. We're flying to Chicago. We make it there. We're in time. We get to the lady at the thing and she says, "Oh, you can't get it today. It's after one o'clock." Well, what can I do? Well, you have to report your passport stolen or lost. And then you'll get another passport. We can UPS it or FedEx it to you tomorrow morning. And I'm like, "Okay, I've missed my flight. I report my passport, lost your stolen. I get the paperwork. I spend the money to have them FedEx it there in the morning. And I fly back, get home. I'm just totally defeated. I've missed my flight. Sit down with Nancy. We watch ER together at the end of ER. Get one last look in the office for the passport. And I look down just hidden in plain sight on the end table. Is my passport. Praise the Lord. I found my passport. I don't have to wait for it to come UPS. And what if it doesn't come and I pick up the passport. And then I realize I've reported it stolen. It's no longer valid. It's post 9/11. It's a useless passport. (Laughter) Moral of the story. You can't be searching in a panic. You've got to be calm and deliberate to do a searching. And so it needs to be a searching and a fearless moral inventory. Where do we get the fearlessness to do this? We get it from step 3. We turn our lives over to the care and our will over to the care of God. As we understand them and we remind ourselves that God does care for us. And that we're only doing this in his hands, in his care. And that he's with us in the process. And that anything that comes up in our moral inventory, he'll be able to handle. We and God will be able to handle it together. You know if you grew up, for example, in an alcoholic family. This will be an issue for you because it's very common for people who grow up in an alcoholic family to believe at an emotional core level that there's just something wrong with me. Because you grow up emotionally before you grow up intellectually and you sense that there's something really wrong in the family. And you want to fix it. And you try to fix it and you can't. And nothing you can do can make it better. So you come to believe at a deep level that there's just something wrong with you. And it feels like guilt to you, although you can't even put your finger on what it is. And that is a very crippling fear. And the fear is that if you do a searching moral inventory, you'll come up with something and there won't be anyone there to help you through it. Because that's your experience of it all your life. And so you don't look. And so it's especially important if you're wired that way that you lean into step three in order to take step four and you entrust your will and your life into the care of God. And you understand that you're not alone when you're looking. And that he's good and he loves you and he's for you and he can handle everything that might come up in the searching in fearless moral inventory. And then just to unpack this finally, we made a searching in fearless moral inventory. Forgot to mention of ourselves. This is why it's hard. I mean making a searching in fearless moral inventory actually is quite easy. And we do it all the time, right? It's the way we relate to one another. We're constantly making searching in fearless moral inventories of one another. That you were like accountants who break into a business uninvited and start taking inventory of the warehouse. That's how we do, right? But the only heart we are authorized to inventory is our own heart. Matthew chapter seven, Jesus makes this point. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own? How can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye with my trusty tweezers when all the time there's a plank in your own eye. We make a fearless searching moral inventory of ourselves. You might just think of all the people that you have inventoried, whose hearts you have broken into and inventoried uninvited. And you might want to ask yourself, how can I make it up to those people? And you might respond by saying, maybe I owe it to them, if not myself, to do a searching in a fearless moral inventory of myself. This is where Jesus' thing about judge not lest you be judge comes in because we're so critical of one another. Then when it comes time to make our own searching moral inventory, we just in our gut say, oh man, that's going to be painful because we haven't been doing it gently with each other. And we know it's a painful thing, so you have to kind of press through some of that spiritual flak to take step four. You do it by leaning into step three, the care of God. Now how do we make this inventory when it gets right down to it? Well, I seriously want to recommend that if you're having trouble with the concept that you watch clean sweep on TLC. And they have this thing, 30 meetings in 30 days or 90 meetings in 90 days. Do 30 clean sweep episodes in 30 days. And by the end of the 30 days, you'll be ready for step four for sure. Keep in mind that clean sweep is about step four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine actually. It's only the beginning part of the program that is step four where they take the stuff and put it all in a pile out on the lawn. So watch the first half of the episode 30 times in 30 days. And you'll get ready. That's an actual recommendation. So how to when it gets down to it? Well, first of all, one step at a time. Keep in mind what the goal is of a step four, the product is an inventory. So nothing more. You don't make decisions about what to do with the stuff you find in step four. That comes later, but it's nothing less. It's an inventory. That means get a notebook. Get a notebook. If you invited an accounting firm in to inventory your business, you had a warehouse, and they showed up without any recording devices. No notebooks, no clipboards, no laptops, no recording devices where they speak what they see into the thing for transcription later. As the owner of the business, you'd object. You'd say, "Where's your recording device?" If they said, "Don't worry, it's all up here. I have a mine like a trap." You'd say, "Well, no, that doesn't fly. It's all in the warehouse, too. I'm paying you for an inventory." So get a notebook. The goal of this is a product, an inventory. And I probably don't need to say get a pencil. You can, guys, are all so smart. You'd figure that out. Or a pen. Don't you love it when people state the obvious? And then three, take your time doing a step four. I think unless your life is really short and you've been really good, it should take like about a month of maybe once a week and take it 15 minutes at a time once a week to do a step four. If you're older, you might need a couple of months to take your time. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. And so don't just rush into it, take your time. And I would say when you actually sit down for your 15 minutes, that you begin by rehearsing step three, and that you pray, "Lord, shine your light and shed your love." Don't just pray, "Shine your light," because his light can be just penetrating and light can be painful in the wrong circumstances, but, "Lord, shine your light and shed your love." And remind me that I'm in your care. And you'll do a much better step four the more you understand that. So begin by rehearsing step three, and then finally just start writing things down. It's an inventory. Write it down. Move on. Write it down. Start with the obvious things that are troubling your conscience. Unless your sociopath, you have a conscience. And think of your conscience like if you're married, if you're like a married man, for example, and you were to say to your wife, "Honey," and you had a notebook, and you just said, "You know, what is it about me that makes it difficult to live with and things that I might want to ask God to help me change?" You know, she'd be all over that. She'd be like, "White on race." And your conscience is like that. Your conscience is waiting to just be asked. And often it hasn't been asked. And so when you ask, your conscience has just kind of come up with stuff. So just start writing it down. Don't dwell on this stuff, even if it's got powerful emotional content. Write it down and move on. Start with the obvious stuff, stealing, cheating, crimes you've committed, that, you know, violence against others. If you need some help priming the pump, you could always read the Ten Commandments. That would give you some places to start with the obvious things. Then you might move on to review your key relationships. Most of our moral feelings take place in the context of our relationship. Normally the more important relationship. So your parents, your siblings, your spouse, or your children. Old girlfriend and boyfriends are great, great fodder for this stuff. Just write it down and move on. Broken relationships, review your key relationships. Do what, maybe on another session you might want to just have a quick cruise through your bad habits, you know. Drinking to access, gambling, to access, pornography, hurting yourself through destructive habits, smoking, or, you know, whatever. Just read you those, just write them down. Keep a page for the good stuff as it comes up. This is an inventory. This is not a pity party or a guilt rave. This is an inventory. So put the good stuff down as it comes to your mind. Note it down. Keep a whole page for the good stuff. Remember you're not accusing yourself in a moral inventory. You're not condemning yourself. There's no need to defend yourself. It's just an inventory. So write it down. And then you might want to remember if you're wired to be kind of guilt-ridden to be gentle with yourself. You'll do a better inventory if you're gentle with yourself. Be compassionate with yourself. Isaiah the prophet said of the coming Messiah. He does not raise his voice in the street. The bruised reed, he does not crush the smoldering wick. He doesn't blow out Jesus' set of himself. "I am gentle and humble in heart." So he's with you in the inventory. Be gentle on yourself as he is gentle with us. Once you've gotten the biggies out, you might interview inventory the attitudes of your heart. If you need some help with that, read the sermon on the mount. That'll give you some ideas, judging others, contempt, revenge, that stuff. And then finally do like a final walk through. Like when you're visiting someone and make sure you don't leave something behind to do a final walk through. Just like walk through your life sequentially. Start with preschool and elementary and junior high. Don't forget your fraternity days. And remember your midlife crisis. Just go through. Don't spend a lot of time but go through. Like for me, I did a four step. And one of the first things I wrote down was when I was two and a half. We had a cat who had kittens and a neighbor friend and I were in the living room and we're playing with the kittens. And we start tossing the kittens to each other, not knowing any better. And we killed three kittens doing that tossing kittens around. So it's like the first thing I ever felt bad about. Now looking as an adult, I didn't understand. It's probably not something that's going to come up on the judgment day. But I just get it down, write it down on your inventory. Final walk through. I'm done. So let's get the band back up here. I want to just invite some different groups of people for some ministries as we worship and close. I think there may be people who are actually eager to do a fourth step and to get it started like soon. And that's a sign of God's work in your heart. I mean, you don't get here from just on your own. If you have an eagerness to do this, that's God. And so I want to pray for anyone who just finds yourself in the room today and you want to do this. And you see the freedom and the benefit and you want to get started. The real payoff for doing a fourth step is something Jesus said to the woman who came and watched his feet and the Pharisee objected because she had a notorious reputation in the town. And he said to the objector, he said, "Whoever loves little, whoever has been forgiven little loves little, but she who has been forgiven much loves much." And so the payoff for doing an inventory is you see yourself in a new way and you see that you are one who has been forgiven much. That's what Jesus does with the pile of stuff. He forgives it. And that's concretized for you in a first step. And so you will find yourself loving him more than you love him now. The effective regions of your heart will be awakened through this process and it won't just be kind of a beautiful love, but it will be a real felt love from the inside out. It's a great payoff for doing a fourth step. So if you're eager to begin the process, I want to invite you to come up and just we're going to bless you and bless the work of the Holy Spirit and getting you to that point. I think there may be some people who have been part of 12-step programs who have even experienced some initial sobriety, but you haven't done a step for. And you may be hoping or thinking that it won't in your case be necessary. And I just want to say that thought is as dangerous to you as an open bottle of scotch within reach. It really is necessary to do step four to move on to the other steps. So you may just be here today because the Holy Spirit is giving you a nudge to take a step four. And so if you feel that nudge, it will invite you up. And then there may be people who have been through a 12-step program, even done a step four, but you haven't done a step four with the light of Christ shining in your heart. You did it just maybe with the light of your own conscience. And as you find yourself drawn to Christ, you want to take advantage of his presence in your life and do a step four with the light of Christ shining in your heart. So you might want to just do like a quick version of it with Jesus as your guide in that process. So if you'd like to do that, I'd like to invite you up. You do it on your own time. Mind you, you don't do a four step up here. But we can bless that process. And I think there may also be some 12-step veterans. And this may apply to other people outside of the 12-step venue. Where you've done something like this. Maybe you've gone through a whole sequence of counseling or you've worked a step. You've done a four step. You've even achieved sobriety. And you still feel just exiled from God at an emotional level. It's very likely if that's your experience. You may well have grown up in the kind of family that I described earlier. And one of the symptoms of that is that you experience something called undifferentiated shame. And there's three things that attack us in the moral realm. One is false guilt. The other is true guilt. But the third is just undifferentiated shame. We just feel. And Jesus deals with all three of those. He frees us from false guilt. He forgives our true guilt. And he just heals through his love our undifferentiated shame. And so if you find yourself someone who's really worked things in your life and yet with God you still feel emotionally just exiled from him. I want to suggest to you that maybe what you're dealing with is this third category. Undifferentiated shame. And for that you need the Holy Spirit. Shut abroad in your heart loving on you. And the compassion of Christ for you felt and experienced through the Holy Spirit teaching you what it means to be compassionate toward yourself. Jesus carried on the cross or sins, but he also carried our just undifferentiated shame. He experienced it. He was embarrassed by being publicly exposed. He was naked on the cross. He felt embarrassment. He felt shame. Had nothing to do with anything wrong with him. But he felt it because he was carrying that for us. And when we come to him with our undifferentiated shame he knows it and he understands it and we can like offload it to him. We can't carry it. He can. And so you can give that sense inside over to Jesus. And invite his love to come in and to heal you of that. And so there may be people for whom that's an issue. And I want you to invite you to come forward from ministry. So let's how we stand and just ask anyone who wants to respond to any of those things or anything else from ministry to come down. So I'd like to just lead it off by praying a blessing over those who come forward. So the ministry team could get down and when those who want to respond to this right now come on down so we'll pray with you. It's going to give you a minute. [ Silence ]