The Origin of the 12 Tribes

(soft music) When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he enabled her to conceive, but Rachel remained childless. Leah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Ruben, for she said, "It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now." She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son, she said, "Because the Lord heard that I am not loved, He gave me this one too." So she named him Simeon. Again, she conceived, and when she gave birth to a son, she said, "Now at last my husband will become attached to me because I have borne him three sons, so he was named Levi." She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son, she said, "This time I will praise the Lord, so she named him Judah." Then she stopped having children. When Rachel saw that she was not bearing Jacob any children, she became jealous of her sister. So she said to Jacob, "Give me children, or I'll die." Jacob became angry with her and said, "Am I in the place of God who has kept you from having children?" Then she said, "Here is Bilha, my servant, sleep with her so that she can bear children for me, and I too can build a family through her." So she gave him her servant Bilha as a wife. Jacob slept with her, and she became pregnant and bore him a son. Then Rachel said, "God has vindicated me. He has listened to me, my plea, and given me a son." Because of this, she named him Dan. Rachel's servant Bilha conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. Then Rachel said, "I have had a great struggle with my sister, and I have won." So she named him Nephtali. When Leah saw that she had stopped having children, she took her servant, Zilpa, and gave her to Jacob as a wife. Leah's servant, Zilpa bore Jacob a son. Then Leah said, "What good fortune?" So she named him God. Leah's servant, Zilpa, bore Jacob a second son. Then Leah said, "How happy I am. The women will call me happy." So she named him Asher. During wheat harvest, Ruben went out to the fields and found some mandrake plants, which he brought to his mother, Leah. Rachel said to Leah, "Please give me some of your son's mandrakes." But she said to her, "Wasn't it enough that you took away my husband where you take my son's mandrakes to?" Very well, Rachel said. "He can sleep with you tonight and return for your son's mandrakes." So when Jacob came in from the field that evening, Leah went out to meet him. "You must sleep with me," she said. "I have hired you with my son's mandrakes, so he slept with her that night. God listened to Leah, and she became pregnant and bore Jacob a fifth son." Then Leah said, "God has rewarded me for giving my servant to my husband, so she named him Issaqar." Leah conceived again and bore Jacob a sixth son. Then Leah said, "God has presented me with a precious gift. This time my husband will treat me with honor because I have borne him six sons. So she named him Zebulin. Sometime later, she gave birth to a daughter and named her Dina. Then God remembered Rachel. He listened to her and enabled her to conceive. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son and said, "God has taken away my disgrace." She named him Joseph and said, "May the Lord add to me another son." This is the word of the Lord. - Thanks, Peter God. Thanks. People love telling their stories, and they really love doing it with a genre of mythology. Mythology is a kind of storytelling that relies on meaning as much as if not more than actual fact. And as we try to embed history with meaning, we tell romanticized and idealized versions of what actually happened. These stories often seem larger than life because they are larger than life. We speak of heroic figures with tragic pasts, overcoming odds and making something of themselves or their family or their country. These are the ancient mythologies of Assyria and Babylon. The pre-modern mythologies of Rome or Greece has anyone seen the Odyssey. Yeah, I have not, but it hurts really good. Myths are not necessarily bad. Christian scholars, in fact, call the Bible a true myth. But myths need to be tested. They need to be tested because they're not just ancient, they're also modern. Like the founding of our country or how other countries in our country portray world leaders or make meanings of the wars that we find ourselves in. The opening line of the novel "Strength of the Few," which is the sequel to "The Will of the Many," has the main character, "Vis" reflecting this way. Fear, my father once told me, is simply our realization of a lack of control. And that is why when we are afraid, sometimes the only way that we can cope, the only way that we can dull the edge of that lack is to put our faith in those who appear not to suffer it. Myths help us feel safe. They exist in politics and schools and businesses and sometimes even in churches. Maybe you've heard of churches where there are pastors or prophets who hear directly from God for a whole generation or leaders who need your full buy-in and they view questions or concerns as an affront almost to God himself. Mythologies exist in our families as well. A beloved grandfather remembered for his provision instead of the abuse. Or the hard-working mom who of course wasn't an alcoholic or the brother who just went through a rough patch and everything's in the past and it's all fine, everything's good now. Mythologies need to be tested. And the test is if the mythology demands honor without honesty. Whether it's Romulus and Remus or Manifest Destiny, having a good work ethic or being a family success story, mythologies that demand honor tend to airbrush out what actually happened because honesty can disrupt the momentum that that myth is creating. So we ignore our country's history of enslavement or that successful person's neglect of his family or her hidden addictions or sin patterns. And instead we just speak of those who did what they had to do to get us to where we are today and we should just be grateful. Friends, we should be wary of myths that demand allegiance and devotion without making room for questions. A good myth, a helpful myth allows for honesty. In fact, it actually welcomes it because for something to actually and truly be honored, we need to look at the whole thing entirely, reckoning with the bad and celebrating the good because as complex as it is, we can hold two things at once. Jesus even said truth, freedom or a truth or honesty, truth sets us free. And what greater honor is there than freedom? So we need honesty alongside honor. One of the reasons that I trust the Bible is that it tells the truth about our story, the truth about the brokenness of God's people. There's not a lot of attempt to polish out the rough bits or to avoid talking about the weirdos or villains in our spiritual family lineage. On the pages of the scriptures, we find murderers and adulterers, liars and swindlers and cheats in slavers and abusers. They are the profoundly selfish and prideful and impatient and dishonest and manipulative. Our family includes a whole bunch of failures. And our story today, it is about the origin of the 12 tribes of Israel. It's one of the most massive stories in the Israelite history. The beginning of a turning point where the Israelites are well on their way to becoming a nation. As many as the sand and desert and the stars on the sky, God is fulfilling his promise. But as we've already read, from beginning to end, this is a story dripping with deceit and pain and selfishness and sin. And so last week, we looked really closely at how deeply Jacob's deceit ran inside of him. And today, we realize that the sin that was so personal to Jacob has somehow now embedded itself into his entire family system. The deceitful Jacob is now the head of a deceitful family. So it is not just the story about the multiplication of life, it is also a story about the multiplication of death, the multiplication of sin that has been permitted again and again to crouch at their door. So this story deserves honor. But only as we acknowledge the profound honesty that we find there as well. Because what is in Jacob is in his family. And what is in his family is in me. And it is in you. Scholars say that that story we just read earlier is the focal point of Jacob's story. It's the story that his entire life, narrative and Genesis points to. And I want to show you how we know that, that's a really big claim to make. So I wanna show you how we know that because as we keep going, you're not gonna really believe it. Our culture, when we tell stories, we start down here and we climb and climb and climb and we reach the zenith towards the end of the story and then there's the conclusion. But the biblical narrative builds differently. It builds towards the middle. All the stories before pointing ahead to it and all the stories after pointing back to it. There's this mountain top middle in biblical narrative. So when we look at the way that Jacob's story is told in Genesis, we find three major movements in the middle, the bit that everything points to. We've got Jacob in exile. And on either side, we have the story. of Jacob's deception and then Jacob's reconciliation. And because the authors of Scripture are literary geniuses, each one of those chunks has three chunks within them. Each of them mimicking this pattern with that center story being the one that either side of it points to. And you thought we were done. If you zoom in on that middle chunk, you find that its middle, you guessed it, also has three chunks. Did I mention that the Bible authors knew what they were doing? And here it is, right in the middle of the chunk, of the middle of the chunk, of the middle of the chunk of Jacob's life, we are focusing today. It's in this middle chunk that you will see this same emphasis on the center story as the way of pointing our attention there. So today, we're going to talk about the birth of 11 sons who will become 12 tribes. It's a story we'll talk about later on, but we're talking about the origin story here and surrounded on either side are stories of deception. First, Laban will deceive Jacob and then Jacob will deceive Laban. And while our story in the center involves human deception and human rivalry, there's something else there if you're paying attention. So let's look at these stories meditatively, reflecting on the first story and the third story and then settling on the middle one. The one that, again, the author seems to suggest is the most important story in Jacob's life. So story one, Laban deceives Jacob. This first story starts at the beginning of chapter 29, if you want to turn there. Jacob, having just had the dream that we talked about last week where God is saying that he will be with him. He heads off to find a wife, which is just what his father Isaac had blessed him to do. But there is going to be tragedy in this story. As all of the deception and all of the manipulation that Jacob has wrought in his life, it will be turned back on him. What he did to his dad, what he did to his brother will now be done to him. Let's pick up in verse two. Jacob saw a well in the open country with three flocks of sheep lying near it because the flocks were watered from that well. The stone over the mouth of that well was large. Now, these should be two very obvious genesis motifs to you, looking for a wife and coming to a well. Both of these are symbols of God providing new life. A well, water in the desert, without that water life can't exist, and a wife providing children in a way that a husband cannot on his own. And so as the author begins to paint this downward spiral of deceit, he does so right alongside and embedded with the faithful grace of God. And with the well and with the wife, the author is saying that despite the serpent's best attempt to bring death, God will bring life. But this well seen is going to be a little bit different than the other ones we've looked at. For example, in Genesis 24, when Abraham's servant comes to a well to find Rebecca, he is full of faith, deferential to the people that he encounters and deeply trusting in God's provision. And Jacob is none of those things. Instead of waiting for God's provision, he tells them in there, "Why don't you just open the well? Let the sheep drink." And as they're trying to set him straight, trying to explain to him, we actually wait for everyone to get to the well before we open the thing. As they're explained to Rachel, whose name means lamb, she shows up with her own sheep because she is a shepherd. And as he sees her, right in the middle of them explaining this, Jacob runs over, ignoring their cultural customs and takes off the lid to the well to let her sheep drink. He rushes past how God might have provided for him. He's impatient, ignoring cultural norms and just reaching for what he wants. And so he goes home with Rachel to meet her father, who is also his uncle, Laban. And he meets his other cousin, Leah, whose name means calf. So two daughters, lamb and calf. Laban invites Jacob to work on his farm for seven years in exchange for Rachel, for marrying his daughter, Rachel, who he has fallen in love with. And we read in verse 20 that although seven years seems like a long time, they quote, seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her. He's so sappy. But the very next verse, he gets decidedly less sappy. When he goes to Laban and he says, "Give me my wife. My time is completed and I want to make love to her." If you were wondering how to talk to your future father-in-law, that might not be it. Anyway, the morning after his wedding, what's this? Jacob wakes up to find that he has married and slept with Leah, not Rachel. Laban, his uncle has deceived him. Jacob worked seven years for Rachel's hand, but was sneakily given Leah instead. And so in exchange for also marrying Rachel, Laban says, "Okay, I'll give you Rachel, but you have to work another seven years." And the language in this story is riddled with illusions to the Garden of Eden. Laban being compared to the serpent-like deceiver who twists God's free blessing into a violation of God's command and promise. So that's story one, Laban deceives Jacob. And before we reflect on story two, which is a painful reminder that our sin multiplies right alongside people, let's fast forward and look at story three. Jacob deceives Laban. After 20 years of exile at his in-laws house, now with four wives, 11 sons and one daughter, we'll get to that. Jacob is understandably feeling a little bit antsy to leave. But Laban has other ideas because he started to realize that he's actually benefiting from the blessing that God is trying to pour out on Jacob. So he's trying to get Jacob to stay. In chapter 30 verses 27 and 28, he tells Jacob that, "I'll pay you whatever you want if you'll stay." Jacob hears that and the old patterns kick in. And he begins to plot away to get rich by deceiving Laban. It sounds a lot like how he responded to Esau's desperation with the stew in chapter 25. And so Jacob says, "I'll stay if you give me all the spotted and speckled sheep, the dark lambs and the spotted and speckled goats." And Laban is like, "Sure." And Jacob sets to work. Now, what happens next is super weird. We don't have time for it. You can go look on it on your own, but suffice it to say, "The English and many of our Bibles reads a bit odd." Jacob's quote places peeled branches and watering troughs so that only kind of his cookies and cream colored flock can multiply and reproduce. And until studying the text, I kind of assumed that this was some weird ancient superstition, but it's even weirder than that. In short, the Hebrew suggests that Jacob is actually creating fake male sheep and goats so that the strongest females of Laban's flock would mate with them instead of with actual males in the herd, which then let Jacob go and breed the weakest of Laban's flock for Laban and the strongest sort of cookies and cream colored ones for himself. Jacob is stealing another blessing. He's reaching out, he's grasping for what God is trying to give him. He isn't trusting that there is enough for everyone. Now, over time, naturally Laban's heart towards him starts to change. He starts to go like, "I don't think this is really working out for me anymore." And because old habits die hard, Jacob runs. He runs away and this is the story about Jacob deceiving Laban. So those are our framing stories. Stories in which two men see and give into an opportunity to deceive each other to grasp for what they want. So what are they pointing to? What is this middle story? Let's take a look at story two, the birth of the 12 tribes. While stories of human deceit frame either side of this story, this central story is actually framed not by human deceit but internally by God's compassion. It begins with God having compassion on Leah and it will end with God having compassion. Unrachial. So let's start at verse 31. When the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he enabled her to conceive. But Rachel remained childless. She named him Rubin. For she said, "It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now." But he doesn't. Not after this son or after the next three. But the progression of their names reveals something to us as readers. She names Rubin, which means he has seen my misery in response to her pain. And then she names her next son, he hears, saying, "The Lord has heard that I am not loved." And then she names her third son attached, saying, "Maybe now my husband will finally be attached to me." And then she moves from trying to attach to Jacob to being attached to the Lord. She names her fourth son, Praise. And at his birth in verse 35, she says, "This time I will praise the Lord." Now at this point, Rachel's open wound of infertility is being pushed on by her sister, Leah's four pregnancies. And her pain leaks out onto Jacob in chapter 30 verse one. She says, "Give me children, I will die." And Jacob in his own pain snaps back at her, blaming God. Am I in the place of God who has kept you from having children? And like all moments of pain, this becomes a test. And that's a big statement. So I wanna talk about tests for just a quick moment. In the Bible, tests are not about God tricking somebody, the way that your eighth grade social studies teacher tricked you with a pop quiz on a Thursday morning. Tests are not traps. God does not trap us. That's not what's happening here. Instead, a test is closer to what happens when a jeweler looks at a precious gemstone, a diamond, a ruby, an emerald. They're looking to reveal what is already and actually there. And so this test is how they will respond in their pain. Will they trust God even if they don't get their way? Or will they scheme like all of the generations before them to reach out and grab their blessing? Well, straight out of the Abraham Sarah Haggar story, Rachel gives Jacob her servant Bilha to be married, deciding that's how she's going to build her family. And Rachel, name Bilha's first boy, my struggle. Saying, quote, "I have had a great struggle with my sister and I have won." Did you hear that? Leah's first son was named out of her pain. And Rachel's first son through Bilha is named from a made-up fight that she's having with her sister. About something neither of them can control. Pain begets pain. But like any good tellin' of Ella, we are just getting started. Leah won't stand idly by making her servant, Zilpa also married Jacob, and names her first two sons, Good Fortune and Happy. And so if you're counting, we are up to four wives and seven sons. So let's take a quick break and pause for just a second. Think about what I said at the beginning. I want you to actually answer this out loud. This is the central story in the narrative of whose life? Jacob. Then where is he? If it's true, where the heck is Jacob? That's why I wanted to show you those weird charts at the beginning, because you had to see, he's not in this. Why is this his central story? Why isn't he the central character in the central story of his life? As I'm meditated on that question, my mind wandered back to Eve and Adam in the garden. While they're in the garden, both of them were main characters until the fruit episode. As that happens, Eve remains the subject, but Adam takes a step back and becomes a passive bystander. She gives him the fruit and he eats it. It may be wonder if the author here is wanting us to compare Jacob's complicit passivity to Adam's complicit passivity. Eve gave Adam the fruit to eat. Leah and Rachel gave Jacob's zilpa and billhot to have children. And Jacob just abdicates. No longer standing shoulder to shoulder as a partner, but taking a step back and behind to eat whatever fruit is handed to him. It is not just the overuse of power that hurts people. It is the abdication of it that hurts people as well. And at this point, Leah's firstborn son, remember his name, he has seen my misery. He finds some man-drakes out in the field. These are plants that were considered helpful with fertility. And Rachel goes to Leah and asks if she could have some, thinking it will help her in fertility. But instead of giving her some, Leah sells them to Rachel in exchange for sex with Jacob that night. This is Esau and Jacob with the soup all over again. Another food item being used to steal a blessing. So coming home from work, Jacob is confronted by Leah in verse 16. She says, "You must sleep with me. I have hired you. I have hired you with my son's man-drakes." So he slept with her that night. Again, passivity, abdication, how often and how easy it is to sit back and just let life happen to us. But in verse 17, God's compassion moves again. Back in chapter 29 verse 31, God saw that Leah wasn't loved. And this time we read, quote, "God listened to Leah and she became pregnant and bore Jacob a fifth son." Rachel tried to grab the blessing. She tried to use the man-drakes and they didn't work. God chose by compassion to open Leah's womb. Leah here is being compared to Haggar, the non-chosen wife of Abraham who was still blessed by Yahweh. This is an ongoing theme in the scriptures of God, blessing the non-chosen, giving the abundant seed of Eden to the one who is intentionally left out. Totally missing all of this, she names her son, reward. Wrongly assuming that God is, what is God's kindness was actually God rewarding her for giving her servant to be married to Jacob. And then she gives birth to honor, going back to that festering wound of not being loved by him, saying that surely this time my husband will honor me. And then she has her seventh child, the number of completion in the Hebrew texts. And it's a daughter and she names her vindicated. Leah is done, but God is not. In verse 22 we read, quote, "God remembered Rachel." He listened to her and he enabled her to conceive. God saw Leah, God listened to Leah, and now he remembers Rachel. This story, the thread through it is the compassion of God. Now, remember doesn't mean that God forgot, God doesn't forget. Remember is a biblical word, meaning God is joining this story. God is getting involved. He's actively participating in what's happening. And before this story right here, there were only two people before her who were remembered by God, Noah and Abraham. Each of them receiving God's intervention when in a position where life was beyond their grasp. And now Rachel joins their ranks. And so Rachel names her son, he will add for, in our Bible's Joseph, hoping that God will give her another son after this. And that's it. That's the most important defining story in Jacob's life. The piece of history that the author wants us to really pay attention to, and Jacob's basically not even there. Or is he? In the middle of this integral story about the origin of the 12 tribes through the 11 sons, we are being asked to meditate on the way that Jacob's deceit and rivalry and passivity has spilled over into his family. Jacob is here. He is here in his family's deceit, in their pettiness, and in their competitive rivalry. Jacob is here in the story through his own broken patterns. So let me ask you this. Whose broken patterns are you living in? Is it your dad's anger or your grandma's self-righteousness or your uncle's passivity or your mom's anxiety? And who lives in the cladder of your broken patterns? Where do you see your cynicism or your pride in your children? How is the team that you lead impacted by your critical words? Who is crumbling under the weight of your high standards for them? Who's left wanting in the wake of your abdication and of your passivity? Who is living in the collateral of your broken patterns? All of us live in the wreckage of someone's brokenness, a lot of someone's, and a lot of people live in hours. So through the deceit and rivalry and passivity and pain, this moment in Jacob's life reveals two things. First, humanity's inability to trust God and second God's inability to stop being faithful anyway. Humanity's inability to trust God, Rachel, and Leah, fighting, using other people to get what they want. Jacob passively abdicating his partnership. All of them reaching for blessings that God's trying to give, and God unable to stop being faithful. So as weird as it sounds, stories like this actually helped me trust the Bible. Because it doesn't hide these stories. It doesn't hide the story where King David murdered that guy because he got his wife pregnant. It doesn't hide the stories where our multiple stories where our ancestors are sacrificing children by fire to other gods. It doesn't hide the stories where Peter pretends to not know even who Jesus was in the first place. And when it doesn't edit out these stories, it makes me think there's hope for the rest of us. Writing about the myth of the Bible, Martin Shaw says this, "When we reach for a myth to help recover our stories, we make connections with the little eye and the big we. And in doing so, we shrug off a little unnecessary loneliness. In place of isolation, we now have the camaraderie of being worked within a bigger story. This is no small thing that we're doing, anchoring ourselves to the most extraordinary source of wisdom." When I read about the awful people in our spiritual family line on the pages of Scripture, it makes me think that maybe there's enough room for me in God's Kingdom 2. God's faithfulness to them helps me remember God's faithfulness to me because they were not faithful and neither am I. I've been deeply meditating on the words from that old old book, The Amitation of Christ. All of us are weak and frail, hold down no one as more frail than myself. Maybe there's enough room for me. Me with all of my sin patterns and character flaws, all of my deep selfishness and impatient hyper criticism, my perfectionism, my anxious attachment, my mistrust, my cynicism, my unfaithfulness, my pettiness, me. If God's story can include me, I promise you it can include you too. And if it can include us, it can include everyone else that we think is too far gone or too broken or too damaged for God's love. God, like the great physician that he is, sees our sin as a sickness. And like any good doctor, he moves closer to the sickness, not further away from it. God draws in towards us because even when we've given up, he has not. See the myth of the Bible does not demand that we honor God as much as it proves how worthy of honor he is as it tells our story with honesty. This myth, the myth of the Bible leads to human flourishing. God is for our life. There's an old Irish priest writing in the 40s who said it this way. The whole trouble is that, literally. The whole trouble is that we do not know what is good for us. And what makes that trouble worse is that we think we do. We have our own plans for our happiness and too often we merely regard God as somebody who will help us to accomplish them. The true state of affairs, he says, is actually the exact opposite. God has his plans for our happiness and he is waiting for us to help him to accomplish them. And he gets serious, let us be quite clear about it. We cannot improve on God's plans. Our happiness, it's not that things will go the way we want it to or will make enough money or will get happily married enough 2.5 kids in a white picket fence. Those are the things that we use to manufacture something that feels like happiness. Our happiness is what the church mothers and fathers from the beginning have called union. It's being invited into unending, overflowing, overwhelming, healing love of Father, Son and Spirit. It's knowing beyond any shadow of doubt that I am the beloved of God and that the only right way to respond to that love is to love him in return. And the only thing that will satisfy the ache that I feel for that love is more of it. And so, as we remember God's faithfulness and we renew our trust in Him, we then as a family get to rehearse that trust out in the world by living differently than those around us. We get to be a family who does not sacrifice to the idols of productivity and efficiency because speed and success are fruits of the modern Western age. They are not fruits of the Spirit. Speed and success are not fruits of the Spirit. God's fruit is patience and faithfulness and love. And yes, God can grow fruit in minutes if He wants, but often He grows it over generations. So we don't reach and grab, we wait and receive. And the measure of God's kingdom is not perfection, it's not performance, it's not sinlessness, it's not money, it's not fame, it is love. So as a family, we do not cut corners. We don't step over people to get what we want. Our Father gives good gifts. And if He feeds the birds, He's going to feed me. And if He closes the flowers, He's going to close me. When we tell our story with honesty, it keeps us from being distracted who the real hero actually is. Because with the biblical audience, each new person that we read about or hear about makes us wonder, are they going to be the one? Will they finally take my pain away? Will they finally take my sin away? Will they make my life easier or better? Will they be the one? And let me get really disappointed when they're not, especially when they're leaders. We need to stop being surprised when we learn about sin in someone, especially leaders, as if somehow leaders don't have sin. We really should be surprised that we thought we wouldn't find sin in a person. Time and again, everyone will let us down. So the Scriptures tell stories of broken people, of people who can't help but screw everything up. But they sing of a faithful God who cannot help but keep his promises anyway. So telling our story with honesty allows the beauty and majesty of Jesus to become that much clearer to us. And while we can get bogged down by the darkness of our own sin, the Bible invites us every time to fix our eyes back on God. As the seventh century bishop Isaac of Syria said, "Do not fall into despair because of your stumbling. For you should not consider them incurable. There is a healer." So we, at Bridgetown, are a community who practices confession because we believe that God's faithfulness outshines our unfaithfulness. And the truth is, I want you to hear this, the truth is either his mercy is real or it's not. Either the mercy of God is enough for you and for me and for all of us it's real or it's not. And as a community, we are banking our entire existence on the fact that it's real. And it's really hard to map that, really, real truth over the top of my own brokenness. I've had a few moments this week where my own sin has caught up with me and I've had to confess it to people, I've had to apologize for the way that I've hurt people and I really hate doing that. It's humiliating but it's the only way that this doesn't stay a theory. It's the only way. Confessing is the only way that all of this doesn't just sound nice but it actually changes my life because I'm banking my life on the fact that God's mercy is enough. God cannot help but move towards us and our brokenness towards us to heal us, to redeem us, to set us free. Or as a friend of mine said to me last night on the phone, his grace for you now is the same as it was this morning. So to close, I want us to take a moment to reflect with God, to turn all of this from a nice thought and a fun sermon into a very real experience for each of us. So would you, if you're willing, clear off your lap, find yourself in a posture of openness, a posture of presence to God. Anything that makes you honestly feel like here's how I can show up right now. Could eyes close, eyes open, hands open, up to you. Just find yourself in an open posture. And pause for just a minute to think with honesty about the brokenness that is in you. Whether the brokenness feels unique to you or whether it feels generational, take a moment to remember your need for Jesus. Just a moment, remember your need for Jesus. If there's anything like me that doesn't take too long. And now remember his love for you. Remember that literally death itself didn't stop him from loving you. And that while you may struggle a sin for the rest of your life, even so God's faithfulness is unmoved. Even so, his faithfulness and his love remains unbroken. He will always love you. So remember his love for you right now. Reveal the love of the Father over each of us. And as you remember, renew your trust in him. You're not renewing trust in yourself. This is not the time to make well-intentioned but mostly impossible promises about never doing whatever it is again. We love to look in the mirror of self-pity and self-hatred and self-contempt because it is so much easier than looking at Jesus. So take just a moment to look past that mirror and into the face of Jesus. This seeing the unshakable affection in his eyes. Receive his free gift of love. And take just a moment to renew your trust in him. Renew your trust in his love. love. Jesus, we trust you. God, we give you our trust. And finally, take a moment to ask him how he wants you to rehearse this love in the world around you. Maybe he's inviting you to risk confessing your sin patterns to someone that you trust. Maybe he's inviting you to extend forgiveness to someone in the way that God has forgiven you. Maybe there's something entirely different. Take just a moment. How does he want you to carry his love with you? How does he want you to rehearse this newfound trust that he's growing in you in the world around you? Jesus, we are fickle creatures who will forget what you've just told us in five minutes. And so we give you permission to bring it back to our mind later. Find us in a moment of quiet reflection. Remind us of the thing that you're inviting us to because where the spirit is, there's freedom. We want the life that is on the other side. There's on the other side of love. Help us, Jesus. Help us. Help us. Thanks for joining the Bridgetown family as we engage in this teaching series. To learn more about the life of our church and how you can get involved, visit Bridgetown.Church/Welcome. If you're interested in contributing financially to Bridgetown Church and to our ministry, you can do that at Bridgetown.Church/giving. Wherever you're joining us from, we hope this resource blesses you and encourages you. To be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did.