[0:00] It's good to be with you all this morning. My name is Jonathan. I've been with you all many times in the past, but if you're new, as Andy mentioned, I work as a college pastor here in Colorado Springs. I grew up here in Colorado Springs.
[0:14] And I work mostly on Colorado College and University of Colorado Springs as a Presbyterian minister with the campus ministry wing of the Presbyterian Church. It's called Reformed University Fellowship.
[0:29] It's always a treat to be with you. I hope you all had a happy new year. I hope you all had a happy Christmas, happy holidays. Anyways, we are, first of all, welcome to all of you, particularly if you're new. Maybe you're stumbling in here with new year resolutions to come to church and you don't know exactly why you're here.
[0:46] Particularly welcome to you. We're really, really glad that you're here. Coming to church can be a really intimidating thing, and we're glad you would spend your time with us. There's a lot of other things you can do on a Sunday morning, so we hope that this is a safe and welcoming place for you.
[1:03] Turn your Bibles to Judges chapter 19. Judges chapter 19. This is, I don't know if there's, there's no universe where this is a great sermon to start our New Year's off with.
[1:15] One of you came up and said to me while we were getting, while we were doing our greet time, and says, you have your work cut out for you. This is a challenging passage that we are going to look at, and there's a reason why.
[1:28] The last time I was with you, Matthew asked me to walk through evangelism, sharing our faith, sharing the Christian faith with our friends who do not know Jesus yet as their Savior, King, Lord, Priest.
[1:43] And he says it was well received and asked me to continue this theme, asked me to do more of this. And so today and next week, I'll be with you again, and we'll look at this same idea again, different passage.
[1:55] But to continue the thread of how do we share our faith, or how is the Christian faith good news in 2026? Maybe that's the only way I can think about a New Year's sermon is how do we share our faith?
[2:08] The reality, here's the reality. There's two things that are happening in our world. The good news is there is a deep spiritual searching happening in this country on a level that we haven't seen since most of us have been alive.
[2:21] You can read pretty much any of the thought pieces, newspapers, anybody, even movies. I just watched a movie last night that was radically different from a movie that you would have made 10 years ago about how it thinks about religion and the pasture and all these.
[2:35] Something is happening. Something's in the air. There is a deep spiritual searching. The cows are coming home from secularism, this attempt to live our life apart from God, and it's not working.
[2:47] So that's the good news. The challenge is that our world, our friends, still have deep suspicion of organized religion and of the Christian faith in particular. They still are not persuaded.
[2:59] They still think Christianity is dangerous, is hard on minorities, is bad for our world. And so evangelism is simultaneously more necessary than it's ever been and also very challenging.
[3:10] And you've experienced this if you've ever tried to share your faith with someone who doesn't know Jesus yet. Family members, kids who've walked away from the Lord, neighbors, coworkers. It's just challenging.
[3:22] You can go back and look at the YouTube channels on what I talked about last time. We talked about this. We're going to look at it again from another angle today. And we're going to look at easily what I think is one of the most challenging passages in the Bible.
[3:35] It is, this is a doozy. I know that Matthew just finished preaching on the book of Judges. And we're going to look at it again, but from an angle of how do we share our faith. And if you're here today and you would say, I am not a Christian.
[3:47] I don't know why I'm here. I have deep questions of the Christian faith. Then in particular, I would say this is for you. I would ask you to wrestle rigorously with us as we think about what the Christian faith offers to our world.
[3:59] What this is is a passage that shows us that when humans do terrible things, God still intervenes to save us. That's what this passage is about. When humans do terrible things, God still intervenes to save us.
[4:13] I'm going to set the stage for a little bit and then we'll read it. The background of Judges is that Israel had been in a covenantal relationship with God. Israel is in a covenantal relationship with God, which is a lot like a marriage where they promised to worship and love and obey God completely in the same way that we would vow fidelity to our spouse.
[4:33] They would obey God. And the tragedy is they never did it. They never followed through fully on this promise. And as a matter of fact, they consistently, repeatedly run away from God and reject his rule, reject his covenant, and turn to pretty much anything else, power, money, other religions, anything else other than God.
[4:58] And Judges, the book of Judges is, in a sense, it's the social and spiritual critique of their failure to worship God. That's what Judges is.
[5:08] It's turning the mirror on them and saying this is what happens to your hearts, to your society, to your world when you don't follow God. And then the book is a slow deterioration.
[5:20] It's a slow, the drain coming out and showing us how bad it can get. And this is graphic, but if you are doing your dishes after, you know, a big meal, you start washing the dishes in the sink, and the top water of the dirty dishwasher is not that bad.
[5:35] You open up the drain, and all the bottom stuff starts circling to the bottom, right? All this gross stuff. That's what the book of Judges is, is the drain is circling, and all the bad stuff's at the bottom. And here we are at the end of this book, and it's all the bad stuff.
[5:49] It's the worst of the worst. And so I'm going to read this for us. I've written, I've chosen a long passage, so spare with us.
[5:59] And I would also warn you that this is a very hard passage. It does, I would say, this is a trigger warning. This passage does involve assault, sexual assault, and rape.
[6:09] And so please prepare yourself for that. If you need to step out, there's no shame, no foul in that. I'll try to deal with it as gently as I can, but I'll let you know that it's there.
[6:21] Okay, so this is Judges 19. This is God's word. In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a certain Levite was sojourning in the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, who took to himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah.
[6:36] And his concubine was unfaithful to him, and she went away from him to her father's house at Bethlehem in Judah, and was there for four months. Then her husband arose and went after her to speak kindly to her and to bring her back.
[6:49] He had with him his servant and a couple of donkeys, and she brought him into her father's house. And when the girl's father saw him, he came with joy to meet him. And his father-in-law, the girl's father, made him stay, and he remained with him three days.
[7:04] So they ate and drank and spent the night there. And on the fourth day they arose early in the morning, and he prepared to go. But the girl's father said to his son-in-law, Strengthen your heart with a morsel of bread, and after that you may go.
[7:19] So the two of them sat and ate and drank together. And the girl's father said to the man, Be pleased to spend the night, and let your heart be merry. And when the man rose up to go, his father-in-law pressed him till he spent the night there again.
[7:34] And on the fifth day he rose early in the morning to depart. And the girl's father said, Strengthen your heart and wait until the day declines. So they ate, both of them. And when the man and his concubine and his servant rose up to depart, his father-in-law, the girl's father, said to him, Behold, now the day has waned toward evening.
[7:53] Please spend the night. And behold, the day draws to its close. Lodge here and let your heart be merry, and tomorrow you shall arise early in the morning for your journey and go home. But the man would not spend the night.
[8:04] He rose up and departed and arrived opposite Jabez, that is, Jerusalem. He had with him a couple of saddled donkeys, and his concubine was with him. And when they were near Jebus, the day was nearly over, and the servants said to his master, Come now, let us turn aside to the city of the Jebusites and spend the night in it.
[8:24] And his master said to him, We will not turn aside into the city of foreigners who do not belong to the people of Israel, but we will pass on to Gibeah. And he said to his young man, Come and let us draw near to one of the places and spend the night at Gibeah, or in Ramah.
[8:40] So they passed on and went their way, and the sun went down on them near Gibeah, which belongs to Benjamin. And they turned aside there to go in and spend the night at Gibeah.
[8:51] And he went in and sat down in the open square of the city, for no one took them into his house to spend the night. Verse 16. And behold, an old man was coming from his work in the field that evening.
[9:06] The man was from the hill country of Ephraim, and he was sojourning in Gibeah. The men of the place were Benjamites. And he lifted up his eyes and saw the traveler in the open square of the city.
[9:16] And the old man said, Where are you going, and where do you come from? And he said to him, We are passing from Bethlehem and Judah to the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, from which I come.
[9:28] And I went to Bethlehem and Judah, and I am going to the house of the Lord. But no one has taken me into his house. We have straw and feed for our donkeys, with bread and wine for me and your female servant, and the young man with your servants.
[9:40] There is no lack of anything. And the old man said, Peace be with you. I will care for all your wants. Only do not spend the night in the square. So he brought him into his house and gave the donkeys feed.
[9:51] And they washed their feet and ate and drank. As they were making their hearts merry, behold, men of the city, worthless fellows, surrounded the house, beating on the door.
[10:02] And they said to the old man, the master of the house, Bring out the man who has come into your house, that we may know him. And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, No, my brothers, do not act so wickedly.
[10:15] Since this man has come into my house, do not do this vile thing. Behold, here is my virgin daughter and her concubine. Let me bring them out now.
[10:25] Violate them and do to them what seems good to you. But against this man, do not do this outrageous thing. But the men would not listen to him. So the man seized his concubine and made her go out to him.
[10:37] And they knew her and abused her all night until morning. And as the dawn began to break, they let her go. And as morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man's house where her master was until it was light.
[10:54] And the man rose up in the morning. And when he opened the doors of the house and went out to go on his way, behold, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house with her hands on the threshold.
[11:05] He said to her, Get up. Let us be going. But there was no answer. Then he put her on the donkey and the man rose up and went away to his home. And when he entered his house, he took a knife and taking hold of his concubine, he divided her limb by limb into 12 pieces and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel.
[11:26] And all who saw it said, Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day. Consider it. Take counsel and speak.
[11:37] Take. As far as God's word. Let's pray. Lord in heaven, we come now to your word and we need you to give us strength and your spirit.
[11:48] Equip us now as we study it, that we would know you know your grace and love in Jesus. And we would hope and we would bring that hope to others. It's in Jesus name that we pray. Amen. Amen. Amen.
[12:00] So what has just happened in this passage? I'll recap it briefly. a man takes a sexual partner. He goes with her, and she eventually leaves him, spends five days to try and get her back, and as he starts for home, they stop at a town, and no one takes them in.
[12:19] An old man says ominously, don't spend the night here. At least come into my house. And a group of, as while he's in his home, a group of worthless fellows, the text says, comes demanding to essentially have the man sexually.
[12:36] And the man instead gives the concubine, and they proceed to effectively abuse her to death. And the original man takes her body and sends it throughout the country.
[12:48] And thus ends our passage. It's incredibly disturbing. It's incredibly unnerving. And we are left asking, what in the world do we do with a passage like this?
[13:03] What do we do with this? In fact, we read something like this, and we say, everything's wrong here. And in fact, we don't even know the half of everything that's wrong. We could spend a whole sermon discussing layers upon layers upon layers of things that have gone deeply wrong in this society.
[13:19] Things like a concubine. Things like a Levite. Things like having a woman like this. Things like sexual infidelity. Irresponsible parting. Inhospility to countrymen. Homosexual lust. Oppression of women.
[13:30] Gang rape. Human slaughter. We didn't even read the part where we get to civil war and genocide. It just spirals, and it's all woven together, and the whole scene is brutal and horrible.
[13:42] And we're left wondering, what do we make of this? What do we make of this? And actually, we're very used to thinking about, we're actually quite, we're used to thinking about things like this.
[13:54] There's a popular TV genre that most of us, at least, watch something like this, and these are these Vice shows that are very similar to this.
[14:04] I'm thinking of shows like Breaking Bad or Ozark or Yellowstone, and they put their character in a world that doesn't have restraints, where they are free to let their vices run wild.
[14:18] And they're basically asking, how bad can humanity get? How bad can this character deteriorate? How quickly can a vice destroy a society? And these shows are fascinating to us.
[14:29] It's kind of like when you drive past a car wreck. You say you just want everybody to pass it, but then as soon as you get to it, we're all looking at it too, the same way. We want to see, we know it's horrible, but we can't look away.
[14:41] And it's stories like this, it's shows like this, where they fix the camera on the philosophical and existential questions of the human nature. Don't flinch, don't look away, and force us to ask, what is humanity?
[14:56] What is wrong with our world? And that is a place that is ripe for sharing our faith. It is ripe for sharing our faith.
[15:08] This text asks, what is wrong with our world? And it shows us. It shows us what is deeply wrong with our world. Let me show you. There's a phrase that was repeated at the very beginning of chapter 19, but then it shows up several times throughout Judges.
[15:24] You see at the very beginning of chapter 19, verse 1, in those days there was no king in Israel. In those days there was no king in Israel.
[15:36] And it's actually repeated several times. In chapter 17, verse 6, it says, in those days there was no king in Israel. Then it adds another line. It says, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
[15:48] Same thing in chapter 18. In those days there was no king in Israel. And then as a sort of inclusio to end this whole story, if we were to keep reading chapters 19 and 21, we read the continued deterioration that ends, like I said, in genocide and civil war.
[16:04] The very last words of the book of Judges are, in those days there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. So three, four times the text repeats this refrain, and that repeated line is the interpretation.
[16:21] It explains what is going wrong. We're faced with this horrible, horrible situation that just is gut-wrenching. And the text tells us, what is wrong with this?
[16:33] There's no king and everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Judges tells us that what is wrong with our world, what is wrong in this situation, the oppression and the violence that we see percolating, spreading out throughout this story, throughout the human experience, is that there is no king, and everyone does what is right in his own eyes.
[16:59] And in this, it points us back to what we confessed in our confession of faith, which is, what is sin? Sin is a declaration of I would have no king but myself.
[17:14] I would do what is right in my own eyes. What did we confess? Sin is any transgression of the law of God. Anytime we look at God and say, you as king have no authority in my life, I will do and I will discern what is right for myself.
[17:32] I will be my own king. This is what we confess when we say, what is sin? It is the want of conformity unto and transgression of God's law.
[17:42] It is looking at God who is our creator and king and saying, not you, I will do what I would do. And this, the text says here, Judges 19, Judges, the whole book says, the source of the violence and the abuse, that gut sucker punch that you feel when you read this text is the rejection of God and the claim of this individual autonomy.
[18:07] I will do what is right in my own eyes. And this leads to the pain that we feel as we read this story.
[18:19] There's a great theologian philosopher, a guy named Christopher Walken, he says this, when every man deciding for himself what is good and evil sets a high value on himself and demands that everyone else value him in the same way, then human beings are in a perpetual and unrelenting war with each other.
[18:39] Autonomy and the ethic of violence are a natural fit for one another. Autonomy and an ethic of violence are a natural fit for one another.
[18:50] And so Judges 19, this passage shows us that the problem for humanity is autonomy, rejection of God and his rule. The story of the Bible is exposing our hearts as deep rebels against God.
[19:08] And the conclusion, here's the conclusion, is that unrestrained sin, that is unrestrained autonomy, leads inevitably to total societal breakdown.
[19:21] Unrestrained sin leads to weak parts of our world being hurt. when autonomy, everyone doing what is right in his own eyes runs its course, then the most vulnerable get the most hurt.
[19:39] Now, how in the world does this begin to apply to sharing our faith? Let me show you. I've read this passage many times with non-Christians and they will say something like this, see, how can the Bible have this passage in it?
[19:57] How does the Bible, how can your God possibly let this happen? This is awful. Don't you see? This is what's wrong with religion. This is what's wrong. This is why we, this is why I'm not a Christian is because this is in the Bible.
[20:13] Today's passage is a lot of things but you can't look at this and accuse it of shying away from the darkest parts of the human experience. You cannot help but feel outrage and grief and anger at verse 28.
[20:25] Oh my gosh. going to her he said, get up and be going and there was no answer. That woman alone, abandoned, in utter soul torment dies and what we get to do is as we read this with our friends, we say that's exactly what the Bible wants you to feel in this situation.
[20:52] You get, we must, if you're here and you're searching and you feel indignation, how can this be in the Bible? The Bible would say exactly. That's the point.
[21:04] You are feeling what you should feel. You should be outraged by this. You should be furious by this. It challenges us because it says the outrage that you feel, the source of it is sin.
[21:20] Sin is the problem. And frankly, we live in the same world as Judges 19 today. We have a fancier world for everyone doing what is right in their own eyes.
[21:32] A famous sociologist, a guy named Robert Bella, coined a term called expressive individualism, which is a fancy way of saying everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Which, it means that we live in a world where everyone has the individual right to express their own individuality, express their own feelings.
[21:52] And in fact, we are taught, trained, incentivized, catechized, to look within us, to be our most authentic self, and then to live that out on the world as a stage.
[22:04] And this starts from as young as childhood. Think about every single Disney movie. Every single Disney movie. I let my kids watch Disney, I grew up watching Disney, and this is what we hear.
[22:17] And it's unavoidable. Even if you don't let your kids watch Disney, it is in the air we breathe. But every single one is a sugar-coated Broadway version of everyone do what is right in your own eyes. Think about the movie Frozen.
[22:28] What does Elsa sing in Let It Go? It is an expression. It is a song of self-expression. Listen, she says, the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all. It's time to see what I can do to test the limits and break through.
[22:42] No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I'm free. Let it go. Let it go. This is the guiding vision of the sexual revolution from 1968 to now.
[22:57] This is how we are trained to think about our money in our economics. This is the vision of capitalism. No one can tell me how to spend my money. I get to choose what I do with it.
[23:08] And we've created a whole online internet market system that will have your products to let you curate your own life within eight hours or less. You can have any product you want at your front door.
[23:22] This is how we treat our politics. Michael Sandel, who's a preeminent political philosopher, says that liberalism, liberalism is the political philosophy that undergirds how we, the American political experience, the vision of democracy, says this, liberalism is a plurality of persons, each with his own interests, aims, and conceptions of the good.
[23:43] Liberalism and democracy maximize the political, social, and economic rights of the individual to live their lives as they choose. In our world today, we have perfected the art of everyone does what is right in their own eyes.
[24:02] Robert Bella says it this way, in the absence of any objective criteria of right or wrong, good or evil, the self and its feelings become its own moral guide.
[24:13] and there each individual is entitled to his or her own bit of space and is utterly free with its boundaries. This is the world we live in.
[24:25] It's unavoidable. And here's the trick. It's killing us. And everyone knows it. This is why I say we have more opportunities to share the gospel than we have in 80 years.
[24:38] Everyone looks around us right now and says, whatever we're doing right now ain't working. This ain't it. If this is what living life is, I don't want to be a part of it.
[24:50] If this is what society does, I don't want a piece of it. It's killing us. And like this story, it's particularly hurting the weakest members of our world, the poor, women with weaker bodies.
[25:09] people with dark skin. It hurts them most. Many of you know, I was just sitting in on Scott Sage's AI class.
[25:19] Many of you know there's an AI tool called Grok. It's Twitter and X's AR platform. It's a powerful tool. Last week I was reading a story about how it is being used by men to deep fake women.
[25:32] And so it can take a single picture of a woman, any woman, and you can essentially turn any picture into pornography. And there's nothing that we can do about it. Women are scrolling the internet and they will find a picture of themselves that has been deep faked into a sexually explicit image.
[25:50] And they will call the police and say, what will you do about this? And they'll say, there's nothing we can do. Why? Because we live in a land where the First Amendment, I'm pro-First Amendment, but this is free speech and there's nothing we can do.
[26:06] there is no king in the land and everyone does what is right in their own eyes and the most vulnerable are hurt the most. And here's what's true, our non-Christian friends know that something is desperately wrong.
[26:21] They know it, but they can't explain why. And we read Judges 19 to them and we let it sink in and we let them feel outrage. We let them feel how terrible it is and we say, do you not see this is the world we live in?
[26:33] And they say, yes, I see it and I hate it. And we get to say, you know what the reason is? It's because of sin. It's because we live in a world where everyone does what is right in their own eyes and you know it's killing us.
[26:48] I know it's killing us. Don't you see that listening to your heart leads to oppression and abuse and injustice? this is where we can reason with our friends and say, would you agree that our world tells us to listen to our hearts, to express our individuality, to use our freedoms to make our own name great, to buy what we want when we want, to vote in a way that makes my life better?
[27:17] Well, yes, I would say that's the way we live. That's the world, that's a good world to live in. But don't you see that if everyone does this wholesale, the result is oppression. Pain, abuse, Judges 19, it's unavoidable.
[27:31] This is what we live in. And here's why this passage, here's why stories like this are so amazing. People will read this and say, this is in the Bible, this is outrageous, how can this be?
[27:42] And the Bible says exactly. It shocks us, it offends us, it shows us how threatening human nature is separated from God. And we can slingshot off of this and say we need someone to save us.
[27:56] you know that. Let me show you who he is. Back to our story. It gets worse. I wish I could say it gets better.
[28:07] I won't read the rest. You can go read it on your own. The Levite retrieves his concubine. He's not willing to intercede on his own, but he sends her body throughout the land and shows what has been done to her.
[28:23] And to us, this feels extremely hyperreactive. At the time, it was a version of basically photo journalism. Photojournalists would go to the Vietnam War, take pictures of what was happening, and send them back.
[28:34] This is photo journalism at its most graphic. And it incenses the nation. You read in chapter 20, at the end of the 20, everyone says, nothing like this has ever been done before. What are we going to do about it?
[28:46] So the rest of the Israelite nation gathers a giant army, 400,000 soldiers, and goes and attacks the Benjamites. And there is a multi-day civil war between all the 11 tribes against the Benjamites.
[29:01] And eventually, the Benjamites are utterly obliterated. All the men are killed. And effectively, a tribe is almost wiped out. And the passage ends with essentially stealing more women to give to the Benjamites who are almost gone so that they can still be around.
[29:20] And so the passage ends, even worse, civil war and genocide, killing an entire people group. And it ends saying, there was no king in the land and everyone does what is right in his own eyes.
[29:36] And the human predicament apart from God is cold, nasty, brutish, and short. So what do we do with this? What do we do with this? Well, there's a few things.
[29:46] First, we have to acknowledge that God cares deeply about this story. God cares deeply about it. He does not approve of this evil. God is strikingly quiet in this whole story.
[29:57] You don't see any place where God is approving or condoning of any of this. The only time he speaks is he just sort of lets them go and have this civil war.
[30:08] But nowhere does God approve of this violence or abuse. And in fact, if that's part of your story, which statistically it is in this room, hear me say that whatever has happened to you, God is as upset with it as anyone.
[30:27] And he cares deeply for you. And the good news of the gospel is that he has, is, and will do something about that pain. And we will look at that in a minute.
[30:41] The God of the Bible hates injustice. He hates abuse. Listen to what Deuteronomy says. In Deuteronomy 16, God tells his people, justice and justice only you shall, you shall follow.
[30:55] In the Psalms, it's all over how he cares about justice. And then it tells us that God is going to do something. The next book in the Jewish Bible, the next words in the Jewish Bible after 2125 is 1 Samuel.
[31:14] And 1 Samuel is the story of God beginning to provide what? A king. Someone who will come to bring the justice, the vindication that this story needs so badly.
[31:29] And it is not just any king, but it is the king par excellence. David, the king that Psalm 89 says, righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. The low point of Judges 19 rises to a climax of the best king in Israel's history where there's a time of peace and thriving and justice.
[31:51] But we know that that's not even enough because even David would what? Abuse a woman. We need a better king than even King David. David. And Psalm 110 points to him and says that there is a son of David, one who will come as king, who will be perfectly righteous and bring perfect justice forever.
[32:13] And later on in Matthew 22, what does Jesus say? He says, Psalm 110, David's great son, the king that David was supposed to be, it's me.
[32:25] I'm him, Jesus says. And Jesus says, the time is at hand. The kingdom of God is now at hand. Jesus comes and says, everything that was wrong in Judges 19, this king that you needed, I am he.
[32:39] I am the one who will come and bring justice. The time that we long for a king where justice and righteousness would be integrated into the very fabric of our society, of our world, Jesus says, I will come and do that.
[32:52] And here's what's amazing. Jesus is the antidote to the sin problem. How? Jesus never did what was right in his own eyes. He was sinless. John tells us that his only desire was to do the will of his father.
[33:07] And yet, even though he never did what was right in his own eyes, what happens to him, he suffers the abuse of a violent mob outside the city.
[33:18] What happens to the concubine happens to Jesus, brutally murdered by a rage filled crowd outside of the city.
[33:31] Jesus is the sinless king who would suffer the abuse, the violation, the death at the hands of an abusive crowd. How? Why? So that he could crush abuse forever. Psalm, I mean, Isaiah 9, we read this for Christmas.
[33:47] Of the increase of his government, king, and peace, there will be no end. And on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish it and uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time forth and forevermore.
[34:02] David's son, the king, will bring true justice, true peace to a violent and abusive world. Judges tells us that we are not okay, that we need help, that our world is broken, and God sees it, he knows, and he will do something about it.
[34:21] And this is what we get to tell our friends. We make them want it so badly, and then we say, and he has come to do it. There's three moves as we share our friends, share this with our friends.
[34:32] We agree with our non-Christian friends that the world is broken. Yes, I agree with you. Our world is deeply broken. You know it, I know it. And then we show a better diagnosis of the problem.
[34:43] What do you think is the problem? And it doesn't go deep enough. Let me tell you what the deepest problem is. Everyone does what is right in their own eyes. It's sin. But I have a better solution. It's the coming king.
[34:54] It's the gospel. It's the king who has come and who will come again to right every wrong. Jesus is the king who will bring perfect justice.
[35:05] Will you follow him with me? Jesus is the king who suffered the abuse to crush abuse forever. Will you follow him with me? Jesus suffered in our place.
[35:18] Never did what was right in his own eyes to fix a broken world. Will you follow him with me? This is what evangelism is. Slingshotting off the pain of a broken world and showing them the best and only solution.
[35:34] I'll close with this. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book called Slaughterhouse Five which is a story processing the trauma of World War II. It's particularly the firebombing of Dresden which he describes in the book.
[35:47] He talks about a man named Billy Pilgrim who becomes unstuck in time and can travel backwards in time and he sees life backwards and he pictures the firebombing of Dresden backwards.
[36:00] This is what he says. Seen backwards by Billy the story went like this. American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England.
[36:13] Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards and sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground and those planes flew home backwards to join the formation.
[36:29] The formation flew backwards over a German city that was on flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors and exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires and gathered them into cylindrical steel tubes and lifted these tubes into the bellies of the planes.
[36:46] The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices on their own which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck fragments from the crewmen in the planes.
[36:59] But there were still wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though the German fighters came up again and made everything and everybody as good as new.
[37:11] When the bombers got back to base the steel syndicals were taken from their racks and shipped back to the United States of America where factories were operating day and night dismantling the tubes and separating the dangerous components into minerals.
[37:26] Touchingly it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them deep in the ground to hide them cleverly so that they could never hurt anyone again.
[37:41] The American pilots turned in their uniforms and became high school kids and Hitler was turned into a baby Billy Pilgrim supposed. Billy Pilgrim saw that everybody turned into a baby and all humanity without exception conspired biologically to produce two perfect innocent people named Adam and Eve he supposed.
[38:04] that's what our faith promises. To suck all of the pain out of our world.
[38:16] All of the abuse. The hell that is a firebombing of a city and to bury it deep in the ground. That's what we offer to our friends.
[38:30] God sucking all the evil out of the world through Jesus as bad as it gets. Judges 19 or firebombing Jesus the king time working backwards to save us from ourselves.
[38:41] We offer that to our friends. I offer that to you. And I say would you follow Jesus with me? Would you pray with me?
[38:54] Father in heaven thank you that you have are and will suck all the pain and the abuse and the evil out of this world. And you are doing it soon.
[39:06] We pray that you would come soon and finish the job. Until then give us grace. Give us patience. Give us endurance to await the day when the kingdom finally comes.
[39:17] Give us the ability to share this good news faithfully and patiently with our friends and be glorified in it. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide slide