It's Patrick and Michael. Well done, guys. Well done. I think it's the appropriate time to mention that our band members are some of the most faithful people we have in our congregation. They drive the furthest to get here. They're here most often. And if collectively you added up their ages, they probably bring our average age of this congregation down by maybe eight or nine days. And that's appreciated. Okay, so this is the third installment of a series entitled Emotions and Emojis. So what are we doing here? Is this some sort of feeling fest? I mean, is that what we're doing? Are we coming to church and see if the pastor can manipulate you into feeling some sort of up, down, middle of the road kind of emotion? Heavens, no. No. We have a Lord, I call him my Lord, and he went about his business experiencing a full spectrum of emotions. I'm called to follow him, so it begs the question, where am I in my understanding of an appropriate place for emotion and feelings in life? And how do I interact with others, and at what level do I do that? in a way that will enhance the connection I have with them, and certainly enhance the connection I have with my Lord. How many of you, I'm curious about this, just by a raise of hands, how many of you are aware of, or pretty close to an awareness of what your IQ is, your number, your IQ? Raise your hand. Okay, that's disturbing, frankly. It's disturbing. Okay, well that explains a lot. So for the four of you, if we could meet after the service, I got a couple things I want to share with you. All right, so I know the answer to this question now. How many of you, if there was a number and there was a test, how many of you think you would do, have an understanding of what your emotional IQ is, your emotional quotient? Okay, ladies, thank you very much. Okay, that's really not at all helpful. I don't even know why I asked that. So what I'm looking to do here is I'm looking to get a little bit more depth and texture to how it is we understand an appropriate place for emotion in life. And be able to, and this is important, identify what it is you're feeling. Okay, not in some kumbaya, psych 101 kind of way, but to truly understand what you're experiencing because the likelihood that someone else in your life is experiencing the same thing and it's a means of connecting and identifying and empathizing with one another, that's kind of how God kind of designed it. It also will enrich your relationships, your marriages, your friendships, your relationship with your teenagers. or your teenage grandson and granddaughter, to truly understand where they're at emotionally. It's important. All right, now, not only to identify those things, but have a vernacular, have a vocabulary for these things, because we live in a world that basically is communicating emotion through basically five or six different, I'm happy, I'm sad. I'm good, I'm anxious, I'm afraid, and I'm angry. That's basically it. Any of you ever seen an emotion wheel? Oh, okay. Those are the people that put up their IQ score. I just noticed the overlap there. Okay, an emotion wheel starts out in the middle at the core with those basic emotions I just gave you, and then as you go outside the circle, with scripture even attached to each one of these things, you can see the whole plethora of emotions. There's a lot of them. And that vernacular's important because we need to be able to connect with one another. Now, many, as I said last week, many of us have been conditioned or taught, usually in our childhood, what's appropriate to express and what's not. Some families were more welcoming of expression of how we're doing, and others of us were more suppressed, like it's not appropriate here, that's, don't, and what it caused is an absence of vulnerability. transparency, it could have even fostered a level of boredom and apathy. Life is more exciting when we feel it, when we experience it, as did Christ, okay? Now, it doesn't mean we're ruled by these things, but we do have to acknowledge that they exist, and what do we do with them? I'm trying to help out your relationships, if you picked up on that, all right. So let's review. We've done doing this three weeks. The first week we took a look at anguish. We had a picture of, there we go, a cold, stark, deep dread, a shocking, perplexing, shocking awe of the reality of what has just happened. and the impending anguish of what may happen soon after has left one with a bone-crushing, bone-bending, fall-to-the-ground sense of helplessness. That's anguish. That's, as I share with you, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. You don't do that standing up. It's a deep woe and it's a dread that drives one to the ground to a point of an intersection of where is the Father and where am I and what am I feeling and how did Christ navigate those waters? And we even saw that day that the disciples didn't stay awake because they didn't sleep the night before. They didn't stay awake because they were exhausted by sorrow. What were these guys going through? The revelation of what was about to happen over the next few days, to actually be without him at all, the uncertainty of what was to happen after that, it's quite an emotional time. And if it wasn't emotional, I gotta ask the question, did they understand his friendship? Did they understand his love? Did they understand the necessity of him in their life? The absence of him in their life, it had to be emotional. All right, and then we looked at compassion. We looked at compassion with the idea that we are gonna have to, on the left there, compassion is best experienced and best conveyed and best used by the Lord when we are, listen to me, 110% in the moment. There is nothing else going on. Compassion has its premium. It reserves, at a deep level, our attentiveness to another person. Compassion necessitates a party of at least two, and an empathetic, groaning, visceral groaning down in here, not between your ears, down here in your compassions for another person. You've got to be in the moment and compassion transcends the differences between people. Compassion brings two very different parties together to share in a mutual emotional understanding of what's going on. Jesus looked over the skyline, he looked at the crowds, and he saw sheep without a shepherd, he saw their wandering, he saw their aimlessness, he saw their lack of nutrition, he saw their lack of protection, and it so grieved him that he compassionately wept over the city, or the crowds. All right, second picture. We don't have to ask God for compassion. We already have compassion. Compassion is the essence of the healing ministry of Christ. The healing encounters that he had with other people were deeply fueled and drenched and dripping in compassion. That Christ is already in you. It's not that we have to get compassion from some outside force, some circumstance, some study. What we have to do is unearth the Christ that's already in us. This little girl represents this idea that there was a time when we were most innocent, when we were most compassionate, when we were most open and most earnestly interested at a real childlike level for another person. And we have to make sure that we haven't buried that in all kinds of bias, judgment, all the things of the flesh that keep us from experiencing from one another. You know, I see this in the medical profession. I see it in ministry. Be careful that your patients don't become projects. These are people. I've been through some medical things here recently and I've learned this, I don't care if you're the secretary at the counter making the appointment, and I don't care if you're the doctor that just lit you up with an electric shock, either one, I've learned to look at them before they leave the room and say, listen, to the secretary, to the administrator, hey listen, thank you for what you do, thank you for being here. I don't know what it would have been like for me to come over here and you not be here. And to the doctor, hey, stop for a moment. Let me tell you something. Thanks for taking care of me. Thanks for taking care of me. I don't know what I would have done had you not taken care of me. We've got to continue to sow seeds of humanity We've so objectified one another, we so depersonalize one another that we have to continue to sow seeds into people's life to remind them the reason they devoted themselves to their calling. And we have to do that with one another. Compassion. We have to be like the little girl and the puppy. We really don't need compassion. to allow the roteness of life and the habit and the ritual and the ceremony of life to just pass us by and not connect personally with almost anybody and everybody we encounter. You're a born again Christian for crying out loud. You ought to be sowing seeds of compassion and encouragement and love and restoration and redemption. Or Christ should be doing it through you. Whatever's in his way, remove it. Remove it, because it's hurting, it's hurting our influence in the lives of other people. And the last thing I would say is, feel it, man. If you leave here unfazed, untouched, and you get some sort of lame, dispassionate message from me, you'd call me and tell me. Because I get enough of those calls, I'll be the first one out the door. You've got to, the word of God has to do something to you. It has to penetrate to dividing soul and spirit, joint and marrow. It has to allow it to, expect it to, ask him to take it and marinate it into and sow into what's going on within you so that we can actually perceive the world in an earnest, authentic, and even at times emotional way. Why? Because it looks good, because, No, because our Lord did that. I see this all the time. I watched that Notre Dame game the other day when Northern Illinois beat them and that coach, coach could hardly speak after the interview after he just beat a number five team, sent them to 18. Oh man, they played a great game. And unfortunately, I mean, the sideline correspondent, I mean, what are they gonna do? They ask the stupidest question. Can you explain why right now you're emotional? Oh my gosh. Well, it could be I'm in this hallowed stadium of tradition going back to the Gipper. It could be my team just beat Notre Dame number five in the country. It could be I used to play for them as a running back and I quit an NFL job. Yeah, I'm gonna sit here and blubber like an idiot. What's wrong with that? There's this thing that you kind of, oh, you're emotional. I don't know if that's okay or not. I don't know what we do. Let me ask you a stupid question. We'll get past it. No, just feel it, man, feel it. So today, we're gonna take a look at, to start with, 1 Corinthians 9, verse 20 and 21. I'm laying a foundation for you. To the Jews, I became like a Jew. To win the Jews. To those under the law, I became like one under the law, though I myself am not under the law. so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law, I became like one not having the law, though I am not free from God's law, but I am under Christ's law, so as to win those not having the law. Listen, in this world today that we live in, in this culture, half the country from the get-go is gonna be different than the other half, right? I mean, we're different in that way. That's fairly obvious. We're generationally different, we're racially different, we're culturally different, politically different, we're spiritually different. But Christ gives us this mutual human experience on which to connect with other people. As long as we get our biases out of the way, we stop judging one another, we can connect with anyone with any perspective, I would hope. I would hope. And we can do that. So we have to be like someone else. We have to identify. We don't have to lecture and share our personal testimony up front and fix every problem they ever have. Don't expect that. But all we're trying to do in this world and around the world, if you wanna know the truth, is connect with someone where they are emotionally and say, I get that, I've been there, I know you better now. We just graduated from an emoji. We took it to another level now We have a foundation on which to build a relationship. We don't have to differ on our spiritual issues our political issues We could just say I get you dude. I get you and it's okay. I've been there and it's not permanent We have to feel something, and we have to do that in connection with other people. Today we're gonna talk about a highly upbeat emotion, and that being sorrow. Isaiah chapter 53, verse two through four. Is my goal today to get you to sit here and feel terrible before you leave? No. You know, the emotions that I'm sharing with you, many of you have already experienced. It's like grief. I don't know who's been teaching you, but I'm gonna teach you something right here. Grief doesn't ever go away. We just understand it better, and we process it better, and hopefully we use it and leverage it for good in a better, more effective way. If you're guilty of loving and you've lost, you put those two things together, you're gonna have some issues. It's not going away. Don't ask God to take your grief away. He's not gonna take it away. It's gonna remain, it's just gonna be one of many things you've experienced, and it's gonna be something that you're gonna have to learn to manage and navigate. May it dissipate over time? Sure, but we can always bring it out and connect with somebody. We can always use it to lean on the Lord a little bit more. We can always look back on seasons of our life and we can say, okay, yes, I've been through that. I'm probably, I don't know if I'd agree with it 100%, might be better for it. But the fact of the matter is, it's not going away. Nor is your love for the lost person, the person that you lost. The love's not going away, the gratitude's not going away, nor is the grief. It's there, okay? It's just part of your life now. It's the way it is. All right. So we come to this 700 years before Christ and Isaiah's looking as a prophet forward to the Christ figure in what we call the songs of the servant. There's a number of them. This is one of them. Isaiah 42, Isaiah 61, Isaiah 53, just our three of them. And he says, he has no form or comeliness or splendor, and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected or forsaken by men. Now here it is, verse three. He is a man of sorrows, man of pains and acquainted with grief, even sickness, is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And then he makes this statement, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him. The Romans are out in the countryside looking for Jesus, and they happen upon a crowd of people, and they see a teacher, which is not unusual, and they look at him. They don't see anything in his appearance that would any way match up with the influence that he's having in the culture at the time. Nothing, nothing in his physical appearance would go, oh, there he is. No, he looked like everyone else. It wasn't his appearance, he didn't have some splendor, he didn't have some Byzantine art halo, angelic halo over his head, none of that. He's just like a regular dude out teaching and preaching and healing every disease and sickness among the people. And the truth is, they despised him, a lot of people did. and they kinda wanted to hide their faces from him. Okay, obviously that speaks to the passion of the Christ, not the compassion, but the passion of the Christ on the cross. The mutilation of his body, the distortion, the pulling of the sinews, the tendons, the muscles, the bones, the stretching, all of that. Obviously you can't, almost can't look at that, but there was something else about him that, it was non-consequential, so to speak. He was despised and they did not esteem him. Surely he has borne a grief and carried our sorrows. Sorrow isn't a word you hear that often anymore. That's because we just use sadness. That covers it. That's good, we got that done. Let's talk about the word sorrows. It does mean pain, but it means physical and it means mental. They're both bad. Mental pain. Well, at its extreme, you see what mental pain does. You, most of you, I did. I came up in a grade school or middle school where we thought the Russians were gonna bomb us, so everybody got under a desk that two or three people couldn't sit on without falling apart. It was a way of explaining to us that We're gonna do this, and we went through the Cold War. That was my childhood. Now, kids sit in the classroom, look out the window, and wonder if one of their peers is gonna come down the corridor and shoot them. Okay, that's mental pain. And the mental pain of the latent, underlying mental pain of the possibility of that happening only increases, especially when it happens in your geographic area. Now, I don't know if you know how many mass shootings happen in this country. There's thousands of them a year. It's not like just the ones you hear in schools. I mean, there's, by definition. But there's a lot of mental pain on the other end of the rifle, too. There's pain everywhere in our culture. And Jesus says, I'm part of that. I've internalized that. I'm aware of that. Let me show you some pictures maybe depicting sorrow. These works of art. This is Van Gogh. That's called At Eternity's Gate. And there's something about sorrow. From a human standpoint, when an artist or a photographer captures it or wants to communicate or depict it, sorrow often incorporates the hands over the face, hands over the eyes, hands over the ears. You'll see, there's more than a few, let's keep going through these. This is... This is the idea that I'm feeling something, I have to close my eyes, what's on the outside is more than I can handle, okay? I've got to somehow escape this reality, if even for a moment. You can do it with drugs, you can do it with alcohol, you can do it with almost anything in life. But the immediate reaction to a sorrow is, It's not as lasting and deep and permeating as anguish, but sorrow, sorrow says I can't deal with this anymore. I have to close myself off from it. Eventually it becomes a blanket and a sheet, and it can be like you're in bed all day long. That's getting close to it, but it's too much and it's too overwhelming. Let's keep going. And almost every person from every different century that paints sorrow has these eyes closed and a slumped over posture. And this look of, I'm all alone anyway, why would I wanna incorporate anybody? I can't even communicate to you what I'm going through anyway, why do I need to look? Why do I even need to look? Now there's another aspect of sorrow in this Hebrew word. And it's not just a deep sadness and a loss, but it's regret. And there's peppered in there remorse and regret. Remorse and regret. The prodigal comes home, but can he really look his father in the eye? And what does he do with his remorse and his regret? I don't know if you've ever been there. I'll help you get there in a moment. But it's, I can't, I almost have to hide my face. But I don't know. I don't know that I want anybody looking at me and I don't know that I want to look at anybody. I'm alone in this. And there's something about remorse and regret that I think we'll get to in a minute, it's worth repeating. But it's a distress of mind, a sense of loss, and there is mingled within it a guilt. You've lost someone, but with that is not only the loss, but there's the regret that I didn't do this or I did do that. This went unsaid or I wish this had gone unsaid. There is in sorrow this element of self-reflection and judgment of what I did or didn't do or what I wish I hadn't done. or did do, is there any others? So let's look at this. 2 Corinthians 7.10. Now did Jesus have regret? Let's get this out in the open. Did he have remorse? I don't know what he would have regretted if he listened to the Father. And I don't know what he would have remorse over. Can't really say that. But I know he's got my regret. and I know he's got your regret, and I know he has your remorse, and he's acquainted with it, he's knowledgeable of it, and he's not only aware of it cognitively in an IQ standpoint, but he's got an emotional quotient going on. Not only does he know your remorse and your regret and mine, he actually knows the emotional implications and consequences of that regret. He knows the weight of it, he could put it on an emotional scale and weigh it. He knows what it feels like, He's not unaware of what you feel like. He understands what you wish you would have done or wish you had done. He's 100% aware of all of those things on an intimate, emotional, psychological and emotional and even physical ramifications. He becomes one with all of that. And if our regret was sin, he's internalized. He's taken it upon himself. He's taken the weight of that. You've got people all over this country right now. The number one cause of death between 15 to 24 year olds is suicide. 20% of that age group has considered it, 9% has attempted it, sometimes more than once. Don't tell me these people don't need someone who can identify with some sort of void, some sort of something, Some of them, they have remorse and regret. Here's the way it tends to happen in people's lives. When you look the furthest in your past, when you look the furthest in your past, it tends to be what you didn't do that you regret and have more remorse over most. When you look in the most recent part of your life, your remorse and your regret tend to deal with what you did do. What you said, you wish you hadn't said. I'll give you an example. I asked this question on Tuesday morning, men's Bible study. Remorse, regret. You look back 30 years, 20 years, 40 years, whatever the case. It's not that you intended to do it intentionally. You didn't wanna do harm, but what you did for the benefit of your family is you put an emphasis on your career, on building your business, on providing for your family, on protecting your family, on doing for your family, that on some level cost you an emotional, if not spiritual connection with your children. This is not out of the realm of possibilities, okay? you look back on it in the distant past and you realize, I regret that. I have remorse over that. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to feel it. I want you to think about it. Now, as we did at this table earlier, that is all, I mean, it's not egregious. I mean, you had the best of intentions. Had you done it over, you probably would have done it slightly different. You still would have provided for your family or whatever the case may be, but it's left you in this reality, and this reality is, there was a cost to it, there was a consequence to that. Feel it, because someone else is feeling it too, and I want you to connect with them, not that you preach to them and get them all straightened out, but you identify with them, okay? On a vertical level, your conscience may be clear. I mean, it's under the blood. I'm forgiven of that. But there are some people in your life that perhaps we need to go to. Perhaps we need to discuss. I was watching a movie the other day. It's one of my, I like the movie, actually. It's a Christmas movie, but I like Christmas movies in the summertime. It's called The Family Man with Nicolas Cage. I'm not gonna tell you the whole plot line, but anyway, he's playing with his daughter in the snow, and they're having fun, and goofing off, and they fall on the ground, and they're hugging each other. And I'm thinking to myself, well, I see my daughter, I see Abigail. I don't see the character, the little girl in the movie, I see my daughter, and I thought, I know I had those times. I know I experienced that. It was oh so long ago. I mean, I know I did, but they're not crystal clear memories anymore. It makes me wonder, did I? Often enough, makes me wonder. Makes me ask the question, did I place on some level? And the answer's yes. Did I place my children on the altar of ministry? Perhaps, my gosh, we were at church from the time it was open to two hours after it was closed, if it was ever closed. There was a price for that, you see? But we all have those things. We have to, that's the horizontal relationship. We need to maybe talk about that. Maybe make amends for something like that. There's a concept. I don't know. I don't even know if it's necessary. How do I know what is necessary for you? It's not for me to say. But I mean, feel it. Remorse, regret. Had you taken better care of yourself? Had you paid more attention to so and so? Had you approached your education slightly different? I regret maybe I never wrote that book I said. I never got to the bucket list. I never did this, I never did that. Or I wish I hadn't have been that way. I wish I had stepped back and not said what I said. There may be a need for making amends there. See, that's where emotions could be leveraged. and used to better the quality of our life, vertically and horizontally. These are things to think about, unless you're perfect. If you're perfect, I need you to preach next Sunday. Remorse and regret. Sometimes, you know, that can be a vertical thing. And what we're in need of is repenting. I make a huge connection between ignorance and ignoring. Ignorance and ignoring. We can go through whole entire seasons of our life ignoring the Lord. I'm not saying we don't say he's there, we acknowledge him, we talk about him, we go to church, blah, blah, blah, but have we connected? See, that's different. The difference between religion and something living. So he was a man of sorrows. as he hid, as it were, our faces from him, he took this physical and mental pain, this distress and woe, and he acknowledged it and internalized it to the point where he could experience it, not from a basis of sin or originating in sin, but what we walk around with. This is how he can weep over us. He knows what we're missing that could be ours. He knows those things intimately. He's acquainted with those. That's what acquainted means in Hebrew. It means he knows by experience. He's internalized this. Here's a little story. The road is too rough, I said. Dear Lord, there are stones that hurt me so. And the Lord said, dear child, I understand. I walked it long ago. But there's a cool green path, I said. Let me walk there for a time. No child, he gently answered me. The green path does not climb. My burden, I said, is far too great. How can I bear it so? My child, he said, I remember the weight. I carried my cross, you know. But I said, I wish there were friends with me. We would make my way their own. Oh yes, he said, Gethsemane was hard to bear alone. And so I climbed the stony path, content at last to know that where my master had not gone, I would not need go. And strangely then, I found new friends, the burden grew less sore, and I remember long ago, he went that way before. He was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, calamity. There is a peppering of anxiety, at a smidgen of sickness into this grief implies a poignant sorrow for an immediate cause. It's an appropriate emotional reaction to something immediate that happened in our life of deep loss. Sadness will not be, and grief will not be escaped in this broken, fallen world. It just won't. If you love, you will inevitably grieve. And the process of grieving is not sequential. It's not five stages, six stages, one right after the another. And this grief and this sadness and this sorrow is not depression. Depression has a multiplicity of aspects to it. Sorrow just weighs and heavies on you. It's just there. And there's a process of this whole thing we call grief. William A. Ward said, we should be thankful for our tears. They prepare us for a clear vision of God. Kelvin Miller in The Valiant Paper says this, crying is common in this world. It does little good to ask the reason for it. Laughter can be heard here and there, but by and large, weeping predominates. With maturity, the sound of reason for crying changes, but never does it stop. All infants do it everywhere, even in public. By adulthood, most crying is done alone and in the dark. Weeping for babies is a sign of health and evidence that they are alive. Isn't this a chilling omen? Not laughter, but tears are the life sign. It leaves weeping and being synonyms. Weeping and being synonyms. That may not be your experience. I laugh and I cut up and I enjoy life far more than I weep. But to be honest, a lot of my laughing and cutting up is sarcastic. Probably covers up what really is supposed to be experienced underneath. It's probably what's not supposed to be avoided, what's supposed to be experienced. There's all kinds of opportunities to experience things that we verbally dismiss or shield ourselves from. And in case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to model some level of transparency so as to get you and I both thinking together about this actual reality that perhaps each of us could be a slight bit more vulnerable. Then he ends with this, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. If I'm gonna have sorrow and I'm gonna have grief in my life, I'll tell you what I want. I want Him picking it up in a bucket. I want Him right there with me. I want Him acknowledging empathetically and knowing what I'm going through. And as bad as it is to me, I know it's a day on the beach compared to what He went through, if I'm honest. And He will sustain me. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. We're gonna have a time at the altar here in the next few moments that the worship team comes forward. I wanna give you a suggested exercise, something for you to practice, put into practice what's being said from this pulpit. It doesn't mean it has to be a sad emotion, it doesn't mean it has to be anything. But it has to be true, it has to be real. I wanna encourage you to get together with Your spouse. Set aside a few moments. I want you to talk about, like, from an emotional standpoint, where you are right now or where you were in a particular circumstance in your relationship, in your marriage, your friendship, where you were, maybe it could be years ago, it could be months ago. And I want you to begin to use a vernacular that you've not probably used before that may even be eye-opening to you as to what you're actually experiencing on the inside. If you're accurate and truthful and vulnerable and transparent with one another, it will only enhance the connection you have. The absence of that won't work. Be strategic. Pick something meaningful, but not gonna take all afternoon. Look for areas of remorse and regret. You know, there's a big difference if I say to you, you know what, I say to my wife, you know what, right now, or back during that time we went through this, or over the last six months or so, or whatever the case may be, if I was to say something, you know what, I really felt supported. That's not an emoji, there's no emoji for that. I really felt supported. It's a whole lot better to say I'm good, it's all good. It's cool when it's not. But I felt supported, I felt encouraged, I felt loved. I can say I felt stressed, I felt worried, I felt overwhelmed. I felt disappointed, or it was nostalgic for me. You know what, I felt wanted, I felt appreciated, I felt necessary. Frustrated, anxious, perplexed, hurt, overlooked, invisible. You could do this with your children. I felt disrespected, inconsequential, I felt dissed. That hurt me. I felt apologetic and regretful and remorseful, frankly. I wish I'd never said it and I wish I would never withheld. And I'm sorry. I felt confused, mystified, dumbfounded, perplexed. I felt alive, joyous, confident, inspired. You know what? I felt your heart. I felt compassion, empathy. I don't wanna have to say this, but if it's ever true, I will, I guess. I felt anguish. We want to be closer and we want to know each other, but we don't want to communicate it. I haven't quite figured that out yet. I felt grief-stricken, stricken, and shocked, exhausted, restless, shocked, or heartbroken, forgotten. I felt responsible. I felt accountable. I felt sorrow. You know, here you are, got a few moments. These moments, they're not all that common and prolific. You're sitting here today and you say, you know what? I see my Lord. And I see what he experienced in life. And I know that he's in me. But there's a disconnect between what he experienced and his emotion and feelings and what I'm experiencing. Maybe I'm a little on the dull side, a little on the apathetic side. Maybe I'm a little on the bored side. B-O-R-E-D, bored. Maybe I'm not feeling all that connected. That may be a reason, friend. I get it. I get it. Maybe there's some people I need to look in the face that maybe I'm not. I get that too. Maybe you're here today and I need to raise my emotional quotient a little bit here. I'm at a place in my life where this is a closer step towards maturity than what I'm taking. So I'll take the encouragement. I'll receive the intent of the guy up here. You'll let me be a pastor for the next 10 minutes. Which, whether you like it or not, may be a whole lot better having one than not. According to Christ, anyway. Or maybe you're here today and maybe that's not the page you're on. That's fine. Your heart is over this country. Where we are, where we're going. Maybe you're coming to this altar as a step towards pleading with God with nothing more, nothing less than His good, pleasing, and perfect will in the next two months of this country's future as we come to the election. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing short of His good, pleasing, and perfect will. Maybe you're here today and you say, you know what, I'll just take one of them, you know? I want a heightened level of compassion for somebody I don't even know who it is and it doesn't even matter. I just want to care more. I just want to care more. And you don't have to, I'm not asking you to shout from the rooftop who it is. It could be the person sitting next to you. It could be a total stranger. I just want to care more, viscerally. I want to invest. I'm in. The only thing that would really keep you from dealing with any of these issues, frankly, is one we haven't gotten to yet. Shame. Well, we can't do them all in one day. Make a step. You might be sitting here today and go, you know what? I need somebody to get me. I need God to put someone in my life who can connect and know who I truly am, not the outside version, who I truly am, what I'm truly feeling. I need someone to get me. I might be different, like an elephant. I might look different, I might be different, I might be misunderstood. I need someone to get me. Nothing wrong with that. Anyway, however you wanna do it. Come to the altar, this song is entitled Communion. Not so much in the Eucharist sense, but yes, a communion with Him, which lends itself to communion with others. If you're looking at your future and you're trying to find some specificity, come to the altar. I'm of the belief that it's at the altar that things alter. It takes a step, it takes an action, an action on faith. Remember the first time I received, the only time I received Christ, when I was born again one night, 1987. It was as if God picked me up by the back of the shirt, right out of that pew and said, get going boy, down that aisle. And I found myself halfway down there before I realized what was going on, and I thought, man, thank you. I needed that. Lastly, there's someone in your life that you may need to make amends to. And that amends, that apology, and that forgiveness is rooted in remorse or a godly sorrow that leads to repentance. Those invitations don't come up very often. Don't squander this one. Just talk to Him about it. Talk to Him and listen. And there will be those that you have remorse and regret over that are no longer here. I feel that. I wish I had spent more time with my father near the end of his life. Deal with that somehow, I don't know. I don't have cliche pat answers for every dilemma. I do know they're up here. And they're where you are. But they're up here when you make a step to say, I gotta have an answer. I gotta have an answer. If our elders and their wives or our prayer team would feel so led just to pray over people as they come, that's more than appropriate. But anyway, you're invited to commune with the Lord before we close this service, amen.