Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] I needed to be led this morning in worship. I needed to be led, Claire, to the communion table.
[00:00:09] There is just a. You just have those moments where you just need somebody to take you to God. You need priests in your life.
[00:00:24] I spent the. I spent New Year's Eve in an emergency room in Little Rock, Arkansas. My brother was in an emergency room in Hot Springs, Arkansas. They didn't have the right equipment to help him. They just have like wooden stuff there. It's sticks, stones, not a lot of actual medical equipment. It's outside.
[00:00:52] They said, we can't help you. My brother has had stage four cancer since 2020. Well, stage four since 2021. He was diagnosed with cancer in January 2020, and it has proceeded to rebuke every treatment save one that they could find. And that worked for about six months to a year and just as gone throughout his whole body. My brother is 14 months younger than I am, and that is. It's tough watching him. He walks hunched over. He has a. He's. He's in a lot of pain.
[00:01:35] And he was going to. He was heading to UAMS in Little Rock to basically go, all right, what's the next steps?
[00:01:48] He has a 4 inch tumor in his liver.
[00:01:52] And he. And the next steps are, let's keep you comfortable for who knows how long. You know, could be Jimmy. We're on Jimmy Carter time. It was two years in hospice, but there's a lot going on.
[00:02:09] He has parts of his body shoving on other parts of his body, and it's real. Your body doesn't like that, it seems. And we finally got into a hotel room. I'm going to say that so much, I confuse hotel and hospital. Thankfully never financially, but speech wise, I say hotel when I mean hospital. It's. It's a crazy thing. It's a. It's a hiccup. I have.
[00:02:35] But we got him checked into the hospital about 8am on.
[00:02:41] On New Year's Day. So we spent nine hours in the emergency room, and then he spent another seven in an emergency room bed.
[00:02:51] And they rolled him up to the room where he was staying. And he's laying there, finally sedated, finally able to rest, and a nurse comes in and she shanks him. Cause you know, who needs sleep?
[00:03:11] She wants to ask him the questions that he already put on a form.
[00:03:17] So she shakes him and she goes, hey, I need to ask you some questions. He goes, okay. She goes, you're here for tummy pain.
[00:03:29] We just laughed. He goes, well, yeah, in the end, if you want to boil it down to its like lowest common denominator. I'm here. I've got a tummy ache. Just break me off a Flintstone vitamin and send me home.
[00:03:46] Just, I don't know. We couldn't find any Alka Seltzer in the house, so we rushed to Little Rock to the emergency room.
[00:03:55] No, I'm not here for tummy pain.
[00:03:59] I'm here for all of it.
[00:04:02] Well, we laughed about that. That's how our family deals with things, is we make jokes about it, you know, Even later prayed for his tummy pain.
[00:04:14] But we just had a sense of.
[00:04:18] She doesn't know the scope of the thing she's talking about.
[00:04:25] It's crazy how just, I mean, that does seem. That just didn't seem good enough. It's true.
[00:04:34] It was true his tummy hurt, but it didn't seem to encompass all of it. Even when something is true, it doesn't seem. You don't. Sometimes you don't really feel like you can get your whole mind around it.
[00:04:54] I baptized somebody. Not bragging, but in Mineral Springs. Baptized somebody once. And we had several baptisms, but it was the first one.
[00:05:04] I baptized an 80 year old woman, which was awesome. She just had never really been a Christian. And she started coming with her son and she decided, you know what? I want to follow Jesus.
[00:05:24] And we baptized her. And I say different things at baptisms. I talk about the death, burial and resurrection, the uniting with Jesus, the confession of our Lord is king, the following of Jesus, the declaration in front of these witnesses that we are following Jesus, becoming one in his death, burial. Like over. There's. There's so much going on at baptism that if I were to exhaust it in the water, they might change their mind before it happens.
[00:05:58] We can't have that, you know, so there's. There's so much going on. And I've never done baptism where I felt like I did a good enough job explaining the weight of what was happening at that moment.
[00:06:23] This woman, we had a. We had a baptistery where I didn't have to get in, was just a half stood behind it and they sat down. A baptism there, it was just a seated thing there.
[00:06:40] She sat down and I said what I could, said what was important in that moment. And sometimes you're just trying your best and I guarantee you I don't remember exactly what I said, but I guarantee you I didn't say enough.
[00:07:08] I didn't describe it fully.
[00:07:13] There's a wedding happening in this water and the love that is intertwining between these two people, I never feel like I say, enough.
[00:07:35] I baptized her, pulled her out of the water.
[00:07:41] She stood up and went.
[00:07:48] She said, enough.
[00:07:53] In the deepest part of her soul. It worked its way out of her hands.
[00:08:02] When we worship, we're wrestling with the same problem.
[00:08:09] When we worship, we're wrestling with this idea of, I've got this song I love, but that song's not enough.
[00:08:22] I've got this praise I sing, but that song's not enough.
[00:08:29] I've got this psalm, I read this prayer, I pray. And it just. It's not that God is up saying, well, you didn't nail it, did you?
[00:08:40] But what's happening with God and how much God loves me, what's happening with Jesus and what Jesus has done for me. How Jesus impacts this broken me, this broken life. How Jesus impact is from the beginning to the end.
[00:08:57] We don't have the words for a Sunday to leave here and feel as though, well, we've said it all.
[00:09:12] We don't have the words.
[00:09:16] Because some things I'm very thankful for right now. My mind has been on the presence of the comforting spirit lately.
[00:09:28] My brain has been focused on the power of the empty tomb.
[00:09:36] I need the hope of resurrection.
[00:09:40] It's too much death.
[00:09:44] I need the hope of what Jesus offers us.
[00:09:50] But still, that's not enough.
[00:09:58] What we have when we worship together is a group of people who have joined from all different. Y'all come in some different doors, much less come from different pathways, different weeks.
[00:10:17] Some of you celebrated with family and rejoiced in their presence.
[00:10:25] Some of you grieved loss at the turn of the new year.
[00:10:30] Some of it was hard, some of it was beautiful.
[00:10:36] But our words aren't enough to describe what God is doing for us in this moment.
[00:10:46] The hope we have, that we stand firm on courageously, that there is no cancer, there is no death, there is no illness, there is no poverty, there is no hunger that can stand against the kingdom of God.
[00:11:03] When we know for sure, deep in our bones that we have that hope, it just sort of wells up out of us.
[00:11:21] I have, in tears, praised the Lord.
[00:11:30] I'll tell you, though, sometimes the way we think about tragedy hurts us. In this time, in these times, when we think about, you know, this idea of, well, you know, this is part of God's plan. I guess that is probably the most prevailing thought in Western Christianity about chaos and brokenness and tragedy.
[00:12:07] And it might be some of the most dangerous thoughts that we have.
[00:12:18] God hates cancer.
[00:12:25] God hates death.
[00:12:30] Not the way we Talk about, you know, this phrase, how Jesus says God hates divorce.
[00:12:39] Well, we use that as like a.
[00:12:43] We use that to just smack people. God hates that thing. No, no, no, no. Listen, listen, listen.
[00:12:50] Those who have been through divorce know exactly why God hates it.
[00:12:55] God hates it for a reason.
[00:13:00] Not because there's these illegal things God doesn't want you to do with the legal system that God, you broke a rule. And I really hate it.
[00:13:18] God hates it. The brokenness that exists in our world and in our relationship. God hates that.
[00:13:27] God hate. You hear the difference in tone, where the word actually kind of makes sense, where, oh, man, I hate that for you.
[00:13:41] God hates the things we're going through, the chaos that is in this world, the death and the brokenness that happens in this world. God hates that, too. And thankfully, God did something about it.
[00:13:57] That's all we've got.
[00:14:00] And so when we worship, we stand on that promise, not that this is somehow a part of some big play that God has written.
[00:14:13] We stand on the promise that the finale of God's plan is when Jesus sat resurrected, crucified, and resurrected on the throne of God, the king, the one true king now reigns and rules.
[00:14:35] All of that happened, and now all of this can be seen differently because that happened when Jesus came near the place. It says in Luke 19, he had told him, go get a donkey, a mighty steed.
[00:15:02] No, we're not going to do any Shrek impersonations here.
[00:15:06] Go get a donkey, mighty steed. Go find one, bring it back, says when. If they say, well, who needs this for the Lord? They'll go, okay. And they did. Someone said, hey. And he says, for the Lord. Okay, take it.
[00:15:20] And when he came near the place, he's riding where the road goes down from the Mount of Olives. The whole crowd of disciples. And notice this isn't just 12. This is probably. This is in the hundreds here. At this point, whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen.
[00:15:49] And they said, blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord.
[00:15:59] Peace in the highest, Peace in the heaven and glory in the highest.
[00:16:05] Now, some of the Pharisees, understandably, so we don't need to praise this man walking. They're a little confused by this.
[00:16:18] Pharisees are very careful.
[00:16:21] They don't want to break any rules, and they know all of the rules, and they're very careful. So let's not just throw up our hands, worship.
[00:16:38] They said, teacher, rebuke your disciples.
[00:16:45] And Jesus said, I Tell you, if they were to keep quiet, the stones will cry out.
[00:16:56] It rattled out of her bones the joy and the spirit of what God is doing now. This is Luke 19. We know where he's headed.
[00:17:09] That donkey leads him nowhere good.
[00:17:16] Leads him to a secret meeting with his disciples. It leads him to being arrested at a prayer meeting, which is one of the worst place to get arrested on a mountain. They come out and they arrest Jesus.
[00:17:34] He is beaten unfairly, he is accused unjustly, he is condemned and he goes to the cross and dies.
[00:17:57] And three days later, he lifts his head, turns to the side and puts his feet on the ground.
[00:18:13] And in the clothes that had mostly seen him in death and dying, he walked out anew, alive forever.
[00:18:31] That's all I've got.
[00:18:36] When we come together in worship, we aren't saying enough.
[00:18:43] But we are saying it to the one who is enough.
[00:18:51] So if we have to lean on the one who we can place all our hope, then we lean.
[00:19:05] If we want to dance with the one who gives us reason to dance, then we dance.
[00:19:12] We want to sing out loud with our hands in the air, or quietly close our eyes and just listen.
[00:19:21] We worship.
[00:19:25] There is no right way to do it, because now we just assume that we just.
[00:19:33] We figured it out and we say and do enough.
[00:19:41] So however you need to worship, that's the way.
[00:19:48] The way we worship.
[00:19:50] As we lift our eyes, bow our heads, raise our hands, put them in our pockets, clap our hands, stomp our feet. No one stomps their feet, but they tap. And maybe you do this, you rebel.
[00:20:08] But no matter what, there sits the King worthy of all.
[00:20:19] There sits the King who is alive, resurrected first, but offering us the same hope.
[00:20:29] There sits the King.
[00:20:33] All we've got, it's Jesus.
[00:20:38] All we've got is that Messiah.
[00:20:43] Thank God, that's all we need.
[00:20:48] Only Jesus.
[00:20:50] That's all we've got.
[00:20:52] And so this morning you may feel like you have too much to handle, too much on your plate, just frustrated with the world and way things going. You just had Christmas and New Year's and you talked with your kids, your grown up kids. Kids who one day, my goodness, won't they just grow up, make the right choices?
[00:21:17] We've got so much to fix and so much to feel, and it seems just overwhelming time and again. But all you need is Jesus.
[00:21:28] Slow down.
[00:21:31] Experience right now.
[00:21:35] Because you may worship in the future and you may have worshiped in the past, but right now, this present moment is all you've got to worship the one the one we only need this Jesus.
[00:21:51] May 2025 be the way, the year we live out the way of worship, leaning on the only one we need, Jesus.
[00:22:05] Father, Son, Holy Spirit, come and join together in this place.
[00:22:14] If you need prayers or you want to give your life to Jesus, today is the day. I'll pray with you. We got people who have people in the back anxious to pray with you.
[00:22:24] They would love to pray with you and come forward and we can talk about a life lived in the name of Jesus. But whatever you need this morning, please come forward while we stand and while we sing.
