Well, it's such a joy to be again here with you. I just feel right at home with you and I'm so grateful to get to dig into the word. I do feel like I should tell you about something that you may not be aware of that's happening in the rest of our nation. It's called fall. And so the rest of us have leaves changing and The pumpkins on our back porches, they mean that fall has arrived. And so one of you was like, why are you wearing that sweater? I'm like, well, it's November. But I'm really, really grateful to be here with you and pretending that it's a fall retreat with you. We're going to be in 2 Corinthians to start, so go ahead and get your Bibles open to 2 Corinthians. Just by way of review, I don't know if everybody was here last night, but for the newbies and because it's good for all of us just to remember where we've been, We are talking about how we can only be satisfied in Jesus. And we all have natural sinful inclinations to seek satisfaction elsewhere. And so yesterday we looked at Nicodemus and we reminded each other that Jesus is our center. And the Pharisee's mistake is not to miss God. The Pharisee's mistake is not to even do things for God, to try and please God. The Pharisee's mistake is to miss the centrality of Jesus in his word and in our lives. And we all are prone to the Pharisee's mistake. This morning, we're not gonna be talking about Jesus as our center, we're gonna be talking about Jesus as our comfort. And so let me read to you just one verse to start 2 Corinthians 1-3, and then we'll dig into this idea of Jesus being our comfort. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. Whew, that's a lot of comfort. We'll unpack it together. 307, that's how many days it's been since I bought myself a little something something. You know what I mean? You had a stressful day at work and so a new pair of jeans would just help that out a whole lot. Or maybe you are fighting with your husband, you could just not get him to see your point of view but you think perhaps if you just changed out the curtains and the throw pillows in the living room that that would help you cool off a little bit. or maybe you don't feel so good, and so you start scrolling, and somebody on social media is showing off their Amazon haul, and then as if by magic, three of the dresses that they were showing you, they're in your Amazon cart all of a sudden. These are little things. They're cheap things, and they're relatively harmless things, unless, as is the case in my life, you think these things can provide any real comfort, because they can't. Let me explain. Every year at the beginning of the year, I set aside time to really try and seek the Lord and ask Him, what is it in my life that needs dealt with this year in order to make me more like you? And there are always things. because I remain a woman of flesh. Even though I've been walking with Jesus now for more than 25 years, he is still doing the sanctifying work of making me more like him. And so that exercise has become really precious to me. And so I'll just seek the Lord and I'll say, okay, Lord, what is it? What are we gonna work on this year? And because I am a slow learner, the Lord will often give me an assignment. And they often seem very strange to others, so I don't often tell people the assignments that the Lord has given me, but the Lord is so gracious to me. He's such a good teacher to me. He knows that I need these assignments to learn what he has for me. And so at the beginning of 2024, I did all of that. I sought the Lord. I said, okay, what is it, Lord? And I felt I had this strong sense that I was supposed to give up shopping for the entire year. And I didn't really like it, so I ignored that since, but that, it wouldn't go away. It felt really clear to me that that's what the Holy Spirit was asking me to do, was to give up shopping for the whole year. Some of your brains just shut down because you're afraid, you're afraid I'm going to get to the end of this message and ask you to give up shopping for the entire year. I'm not, that's not my point. Obviously, I still need to buy toilet paper. I still need to buy groceries. As I've told you, I have four sons, so I am always buying groceries. Our grocery bill has now far exceeded the cost of our monthly mortgage. I mean, we are buying groceries all the time. But the assignment was no new clothes. No new jewelry, nothing unnecessary for my house for one year. And you should know that I do not consider myself a shopper. I do not have secret stashes of bags underneath the bed. If you give me a free Saturday, I am way more likely to want to go on a hike than to go shopping. And so I was surprised by this assignment. I thought, I don't get it, Lord. I don't even like to shop. I don't know what this is about. But the Spirit was pressing in on something, and I often say that kicking and screaming obedience is still obedience, and I'm so grateful. So I'm not going to tell you that I wanted to obey, but I want to be with Jesus. And so I thought, okay, Lord, I don't understand this. This seems like you've given me the wrong assignment, but I want to obey. I made the commitment. 365 days, no shopping. I got some accountability partners, Rochelle is one of them, and so several times over the course of the past year, we've been like, I really want to go buy a new whatever, and we'll just hold each other accountable in that. And so I made the commitment. I got some accountability around that commitment, which we should always do when we make a decision to obey God in a way that seems radical or unnatural. And then really God got to work. This is not about me muscling my way into anything. This is about what the Spirit of the Lord has been doing in me. And what the Lord has been exposing in me, and it took many, many months for me to understand this, but what the Lord has really been exposing in me is that I do not have a shopping problem, I actually have a comfort problem. And that I have spent my life, 44 years and some change, seeking comfort in all of the wrong places. And I think the question that the Lord would have us wrestle with together this morning as Christian sisters through his word is, have you? Have you been seeking comfort in all of the wrong places? It's another version of seeking satisfaction. It's seeking comfort. And as we'll look at here in the word, you can seek comfort in any number of places. You can only find true comfort, true satisfaction in the Lord. Again, I've waited a long time to say my favorite words. You're already there in 2 Corinthians, but if you haven't opened your Bible yet, go ahead and open it now. And we're going to move from 2 Corinthians to Philippians, which is just to the right of where you just were. Philippians 3 is where we're going to park. And I love to remind you that every text is part of a context, so it's always really good to kind of get the lay of the land. And both 2 Corinthians and Philippians were letters written by the Apostle Paul. And so when we get into those epistles, Paul wrote 13 epistles, 13 letters to the church, as I reminded us last night. He was all the time reminding the church what the gospel was in those letters. And he's all the time reminding us what it means to actually live out the gospel in those letters. And so while 2 Corinthians was written to the church in Corinth and Philippians was written to the church in Philippi, these letters were all written to first century believers who are trying to grapple with, okay, We believe Jesus died for our sins. We believe he resurrected. We believe that he's called us to live wholly distinct lives. We don't have any idea what that looks like. And so there's actually a lot of continuity between these letters. I'm going to read us Philippians 3, 4 through 8. You follow along with your finger, and then we'll unpack it a little bit. Again, this is Paul writing in Philippians 3, 4 through 8. Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also, if anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. What's going on here? Well, Paul, who was an expert at building an argument, if he hadn't been a Pharisee, he would have been a phenomenal attorney, and he is building an argument here for why nothing compares to knowing Jesus. This really is kind of another layer of paint over what we talked about yesterday, which is that there's nothing that can satisfy like Jesus, and Paul is building a really theological and intellectual and personal case for why that's true. And in true Paul fashion, he does it with a pretty epic, humble brag. He gives us a list of all of the things that give him prestige from a human perspective. He's outlining what his identity was before Jesus. So let's circle back to them. Verses five through six, I'll read them again. He says, I was circumcised on the eighth day. He starts with circumcised on the eighth day. Let's just face it, men love to brag about their parts, so there's a little bit of that going on here. But that's not all that's happening here. Paul was building the case that he had followed the Jewish tradition to the letter even as a newborn. So from the eighth day of my life, I did what the law called me to do. Now, did Paul make that decision? Of course he didn't. His parents made that decision. So he's also speaking to how righteous under the law his parents were. And then he said, I'm of the nation of Israel, I'm of the tribe of Benjamin, I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews. Now this again, these things can be so hard for us in our modern western lens to understand what's happening because we've been taught to avoid classism based on race and nationality. And it's certainly true that all people are made in the image of God and that people from every tongue, tribe, and nation are going to be in glory. So in some sense it's true that the foot of the cross is level and that we don't get in based on our nationality or our heritage. But what's also true is that God's people, the nation of Israel, had been set apart by God himself for centuries. God himself called them set apart. And Paul is highlighting that. And so Paul really, humanly speaking, and even according to the Old Testament, had every right to kind of peacock based on his heritage. That's what he's doing here. He's saying, I'm from the right people group, I'm from the right tribe, I've got every reason to brag on who I am in the Lord. And then he said regarding the law, he's a Pharisee. We just talked last night about Pharisees. And we're taught to like boo, hiss when we hear the word Pharisee. Like, ooh, Pharisee bad. And they certainly got it wrong. They missed the centrality of Jesus. But let me remind you that Pharisees were people who knew the law and kept the law. So if there were gold medals for keeping the law, the Pharisees would have won them all. They would have been on the top of the platform all the time. And Paul's saying, I'm a Pharisee. I keep the law. The law that God gave me, I keep the law. Then he says, regarding Zeal, I persecuted the church. We tend to say that Paul killed Christians. We actually don't have any evidence in the New Testament that Paul killed Christians, but he was a persecutor, and he would round up men, women, and children, and send them off to their death, send them off to prison. And so no one was more passionate about enforcing their view of God than Paul. I was teaching somewhere recently, and someone, they introduced me, and they said, Aaron is a modern-day Paul. And I was like, I could just die right here? It's the nicest thing anybody's ever said about me. But I think they were saying, like, I'm a zealot. And I am. And Paul was a zealot. And he said, regarding the law, I'm blameless. Now, this is why you gotta know your whole Bible. This is why when we use what I call the claw method, where you just, like, extract a verse here or there, you can get really confused. Paul knew that he wasn't really blameless. This is the same Paul who called himself a chief of sinners. But if you could earn righteousness by checking the right boxes, Paul checked the right boxes. He was in. And so, hey girls, welcome. So this is a really impressive list that Paul is giving us here in the book of Philippians. We're in Philippians 3. And these were things that Paul was looking to to make himself feel good about himself, which we all do. These are the things that Paul was looking to to give him comfort. to convince himself, I'm okay, I'm okay. And that his identity in keeping these things was a source of comfort. And this is where he was looking to give himself comfort about the world around him. He was looking around the world around him and he was like, this is a mess, but I got all these things that I can look to to give myself a comfort. But the bottom line is, none of it worked. Because none of the things on this impressive list could cover up Paul's deep sin problem. And none of the things you look to for comfort can cover up your deep sin problem. And so listen to what he says in verse 7 again. In verse 8 he called it all rubbish. I think that's actually the very nice sanitized translation. The actual translation is they're dung, they're poop. All of these things that I've looked to to make myself feel better about myself, all of these things I've looked to to try and make sense of a very broken world, they are worse than rubbish. They're dung and they stink compared to knowing Jesus. Now I do want to be clear, it's really important that your Bible teacher always teaches in context. And this is a passage, at least at first blush, this is a passage about salvation. You cannot earn your way into heaven with a list of credentials. Because God is holy, holy, holy, and you are a sinner, sinner, sinner. It doesn't matter how long your list is. Your list might sound like raised by Christian parents, went to church every time the doors were open. I don't know how many times I've heard that line. Gave my life to Christ at VBS as a child, went to Christian college, married a Christian guy, have been in church all my life, have taught Awana for 12 years, which in ministry years, that's a lifetime if you teach Awana. Those can all be good and beautiful things. And none of those things can build you a ladder that can get you into heaven. They're all rubbish. It becomes legalism when we're doing those things to earn salvation. It's not legalism when we're doing those things in response to salvation. As a response to God's grace, we do those things, then they become just beautiful evidences of the Lord at work within us. But when we're doing things to earn salvation, they won't hold up. And so that is, I think, ultimately what Paul's talking about here. But I also think there's application to our focus this weekend on Jesus and the fact that only He can satisfy. And here's how I'd bottom line it for you. Anything you turn to comfort, anything you turn to for comfort, other than the God of all comfort, will fail you. Anything you turn to for comfort, other than the God of all comfort will fail you. And not only will it fail you, it's garbage and it stinks. And if you're not discerning, you will spend your entire life, and I'm talking to us as believers, if you aren't discerning, you will spend your entire life seeking something other than Jesus for the needs that only Jesus can meet. That's where this dissatisfaction comes from, that I was talking about last night. And it's so easy to do. I find it's really sneaky in the lives of most of us who are Christians. Now, certainly there's addiction in the church, and there's porn use, and there's sexual sin. Those things are in the church and outside of the church. But for those of us who are serious in our walk with the Lord and we're maturing in our faith, those are not usually the snares that the enemy is successful at trapping us in. Though certainly if he's ensnared you in those areas, then your assignment today is to tell somebody and to get free and let us walk you towards freedom together. But for the rest of us, It's the seemingly harmless sources of comfort that keep us from running to the God of all comfort and keep us from seeking what only Jesus can deliver to our souls. You know, I see this really clearly in the way I think we as women respond to the seasons of our life. Our lives are marked by seasons in ways that men aren't. We're different. And so we can spend our whole life thinking that when I just get to the next season, then there will be comfort in that next season. And I can only talk about it in terms of family talk. My family looks like a husband, and for children, your family might look very different. But for me, the temptation is like, oh, when I just get married, then there will be comfort. And then I do, and then it's like, well, when God just fixes this marriage and changes this man, then there will be comfort. Or when we just have kids, then there will be comfort. And then when you have kids, it becomes about this just frenetic chase to the next season. Like when the baby's asleep through the night, then I will have comfort. When the kids are just all in school, then I will have comfort. When the school year is over and the kids are just home for the summer, then I will have comfort. When we're just through whatever stage this is of parenting that's so hard, then I will have comfort. When the kids are just grown, then I will have comfort. And my oldest is almost 17, so I'm not yet in the young adult phase. But I have lots of friends who are. And I can tell you that that young adult phase seems way harder than the baby phase. And so I know that there's not just endless comfort in that phase either. And then your kids start having kids. And then you think, oh, and whatever. all have comfort and we can spend our entire life just chasing the next season of our life thinking we'll find comfort when we get to whatever it is. And we never do. And the call of scripture is to turn to Jesus for comfort in the midst of your season. Letting the hard things in this season drive you to him so that he can comfort you in the midst of them. And so what this year has taught me, and it's been an uncomfortable lesson to say the least, but what this year is teaching me is that how I cope with the pain and pressures of life says more about what I believe about God than it does about the pain and pressures of life. It's not really about what I'm facing. It's not really about, oh, if this will just change, then I can cope better. How I cope with the pain and pressures of life says more about what I believe about God than the pain and pressures of life. No, I'm glad you did. I will. Okay, you got it. How I cope with the pain and pressures of life reveals more about what we believe about God than it does about the pain and pressures of life. It's Tozer that said what you believe about God is the most important thing about you. And what you believe about God will be revealed in the heart. And so what it reveals is where you turn to for comfort. And it will always fall short if you're not turning to Jesus. So do you really believe that God loves you? We would all nod our heads and we would all say, yes, I believe God loves me. But discomfort has a way of revealing if we really believe that. Several months ago, I was at a retreat for the ministry where I serve, and the guy who was teaching said, I'm going to give you an hour. Scatter out. I'm going to give you an hour. Just go spend time with the Lord like we're going to do here in a little bit. And man, I ran. I knew where I wanted to be. There was a little dock that I had had my eye on, and I couldn't get out of there fast enough. And I opened my Bible, and I thought the Lord was just going to tell me about all the ways He wanted to use me and all the ministry He had before me. And what the Spirit began to speak to me about through His Word is that on some level, I don't really believe He loves me. My family is walking through an incredibly long journey. My mom has early-onset Alzheimer's. She's in end-of-life care now. But it has been such a long and horrific journey. Any of you who have walked that journey know it is horrific. And my mom is young. I did not expect to be losing her at this season of life, and it's just been awful. And what the Lord began to show me is that I didn't believe. There was a belief in me that if you really loved me, you would not make me suffer like this. And if you really love my mom, you wouldn't make her suffer like this, because she loves you. And it's not fair. And then he began to show me all of the ways that shows up in my life that I don't really believe he loves me. Now, I am a Bible teacher, y'all, in full-time ministry. And if 15 minutes before that you would have said, Aaron, do you believe God loves you? I would have said, yes, I do. And let me show you in scripture where he shows us that. But on some level I didn't really believe it and so I didn't really, I had stopped going to him for comfort. Do you really believe that his goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life? That's what scripture teaches. His goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. Do you really believe that God cares about what happens in your day? Do you really believe that God listens when you pray? Now again, I know you know the right answers. But sometimes we have wrong answers embedded in our hearts and our minds so deep that we don't even know that they're there. And if we don't really believe he loves us, if we don't really believe his goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our life, if we don't really believe he counts the very hairs on our head, if we don't really believe he listens when we pray, we will not seek the God of all comfort. We will seek comfort in other sources that cannot satisfy. And what it's like, it's like dropping your bucket into a dry well over and over again. And then pulling it up and hoping there's water in it. And maybe there's a few drops. But Jesus is the source of living water. He never runs dry, but we just keep dropping that bucket down, keep dropping that bucket down, keep dropping that bucket down into a dry well, hoping we can find what only he can offer. I want to take us back to where we began, 2 Corinthians 1. And this time we're going to do a little audience participation. I'm going to read us 2 Corinthians 1, 3-7. And every time you hear me say the word comfort, I want you to stand or sit. If you're sitting and I say comfort, I want you to stand. And if you're standing and I say the word comfort, I want you to sit. Everybody's adjusting their shirts. You guys ready to go? There's going to be a lot of movement up in this room. 2 Corinthians 1, 3-7, whenever you hear comfort, you're going to move your body. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort. On your feet, y'all. Who comforts us, step back down you go, in all our afflictions, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. That's pretty good. I didn't plan that, but we ended up sitting down. I wanted you to do that, one, to get the blood pumping, but also I wanted you to feel in your body how many times Paul says comfort here. It's a lot of comfort. And God knows we need it. We need comfort. Our world is broken. Our systems have failed us. We'll talk about that some this afternoon. Our bodies are broken. So many of us are walking around sick, and we're taking all the vitamins, and we're eating all the protein, and we're drinking all the water, and our bodies still hurt. And our families are broken. Our marriages are not what we hoped they would be. Our parents don't seem to understand us. Our children are making decisions we don't want them to make. Some of them have cut us out of their lives entirely. I'm hearing that everywhere I go to teach. I'm meeting parents of adult children who their children have entirely cut them out of their lives. Now, prodigal children is not a new phenomenon, but this no contact thing that's happening, it is, and it's from Satan because he seeks to divide families. And what do you do? when your child has cut you out of your life? What do you do when your family is broken? I think about this a lot. I look around at my own family, my husband, who I adore. I often say, if I didn't think Jesus had hung the moon, I would think Jason Davis did it. I adore that man. And my sons, who I would jump in front of a bus for without a second thought, and at the same time, My husband and those children and my parents and my siblings and my friends, they're all walking around with shrapnel in their hearts because of my sin. And I'm walking around with shrapnel in my heart because of their sin. We're broken. Our relationships with our friends aren't what we want them to be. And it's worse than that. It's worse than all those exterior things. We are broken. At a cellular, fundamental level, we are broken. We cannot be the people we want to be. We cannot keep all of the plates spinning. We love Jesus, and yet we remain women of flesh, and we cannot fully live like He calls us to live. We need comfort in the face of all of that. Now, our first impulse is just not to face all of that. But when we do face all of that, we need comfort. And we very often forget there is a God of all comfort who comforts us in all our afflictions. That's how the inspired word of God frames it. That he's the God of all comfort and that he longs to comfort you in all of your afflictions. And I wonder, do you really believe that? You can compare the ancient languages if you want, but all means all, no matter how you look at it. He offers all the comfort you need for all of the afflictions that you face. That means nothing is too big for Jesus and nothing is too small for Jesus. And what I've spent this year learning is that I have operated as if that wasn't true. We don't believe that He cares that we didn't sleep well last night, and so we seek our comfort in a cup of coffee. We don't believe that he cares that we feel lonely, and so we seek our comfort in food. We don't believe that he's noticed how stressed we are at work or at school, and so we scroll endlessly to try and get some mental relief. We tell ourselves he's too busy, there's a war in Ukraine after all, and an election in America, and he's dealing with geopolitics. He doesn't care about what's troubling us today, and so we seek our comfort elsewhere. But Jesus really is the God of all comfort. And according to his word, he wants to comfort you in all of your affliction. All of it. And when we seek, we don't seek him, we seek comfort in every little comfort that can provide temporary relief. And it does help a little. But it cannot satisfy your soul. And it cannot give you lasting comfort. Is shopping a sin? Good news y'all, no. Can it provide any real comfort? Also no. And the same is true with food and achievement and a new house and your kids' achievements and date nights and new furniture and I could go on and on and on. There are endless dry wells. If the Spirit could give you eyes to see the world as it really is, what you would see covering the landscape are dry wells. Places that you can drop your bucket down and maybe pull up a drop or two, but not find the living water that you're looking for. There's only one God of all comfort who wants to comfort you in all of your afflictions. And only in seeking him can you experience the comfort he longs to give you, and then he wants to give it to you so you can give it to others. Everything else is rubbish. It's dung, really. The Holy Spirit didn't convict me in the area of shopping because shopping is sinful or because I'd racked up a bunch of debt like Dave Ramsey doesn't have anything on me, I'm good. He did it because he loves me and he kept watching me drop down my bucket into a well that couldn't satisfy me. And he wanted to give me the true comfort only he can give. It was a mercy, not a punishment. I have the joy of getting to do retreats like this a fair amount of times over the course of a year. And I had a pattern that I didn't even see, which is that I would pack my very favorite clothes in my suitcase and then I would get to the hotel and I would hate all of them. I would hate all of them. They were the worst clothes. Why did I think I should pack those clothes? What was really happening is that I was lonely. I was separated from my family. I was in a hotel room by myself. And I was about to teach the word everywhere I went, so the enemy had me in his sights every time. And I would think, well, I've got the time. Nobody's around. I'll just go do a little shopping. And then I would buy a new outfit, which inevitably two weekends later I would think was the worst outfit I had ever bought. And this year I get into a hotel and I think, man, I'm lonely. I miss my husband. I miss my children. And I would think, I'm going to teach the word and I don't feel adequate to do that. And I would have to face my insecurities that came with me on the trip. And then I would take those to the Lord. And the Lord and I would be able to deal with those in ways that swiping my card and buying something new could never do. I would go to the full well, the deep well, not the dry well. And it's been such a gift. And Jesus wants you to seek Him this weekend. And Jesus wants you to seek Him for the rest of your life. And that's not to shame you. Shame is the language of the enemy. It's not the language of Jesus. But He wants you to see the places you've been looking for comfort are dry. And He's not. I would love for you just to take a minute, right where you are, and ask the Lord two questions. One, ask him, where do I need comfort? Let's start there. Maybe you write it down in that journal that you've got, or the back of your placemat would be a good place to write it down if you don't have your journal with you. But just take a minute, right where you are, and ask the Lord, where do I need comfort? It's probably a long list. Do that, and then I'll pray for us, then I'll give you your second question, where do I need comfort? Anybody want to be brave and share? Where do you need comfort? Somebody has to go first. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Yeah. By a show of hands, who feels like they need comfort in the area of parenting? Yeah. Me too. Mara, what were you going to say? Yeah. That's good. Anybody else? Where do you need comfort? Yeah, physical pain. Who else is in physical pain this morning? Yeah. I happen to be a chronic pain sufferer myself, and we just learn to act like we're not in pain. But we want comfort. We want relief. Where else do you need comfort? Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. You, were you raising your hand? Or you're a pain sufferer. Pain sufferer. Yeah. Yeah. Who else? Where do you need comfort? Grief. Loss. Yeah. Cycles of depression, yeah. Anxiety, yeah. Anybody need comfort about what's going on in our world? You guys good with that? You don't need comfort there? I need comfort. I need comfort. Where else? Yeah, think about the future, absolutely. All right, the second question is harder. Where have you been turning to dry wells? Where have you been turning to dry wells? Just take a minute and ask the Lord. You probably don't see them. You didn't know they were dry or you wouldn't have been turning to them. And they're not necessarily sinful things. In fact, they rarely are sinful things for those of us who are in Christ. They're just not ultimate things. They're just not things that can satisfy. So take a minute, ask the Lord, where have I been turning to dry wells? This one takes a lot of bravery. Anybody want to share a dry well you've dropped your bucket into? Ice cream. Yeah. Shopping. Facebook. Yeah. N-word. What's that? Complaining. Talking to other people instead of taking it to Jesus. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. A gift given by God, but if we look to it for our source of comfort, it becomes a dry well. Yeah. What other dry wells? There's endless ones. Work. Yes. Me too. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I see that temptation. If I could define this era, I would call it the therapeutic age. We want a therapeutic solution to everything. And I'm not one who believes that therapy is wrong or bad. And I've seen the Lord use it in lots of people's lives. But sometimes there's not a therapeutic solution. Sometimes we just need what only Jesus can give. But we want a therapeutic solution because that's a plan that we can understand or think we can understand. So I think a lot of people would probably be drawn to that dry well. Other dry wells that the Lord brought to mind? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because it anesthetizes us. We don't have to think our thoughts or feel our feelings or face what it is that the Lord would have us to face. As part of that job shift, I took a five-week kind of mini sabbatical, so five weeks of no work, which was weird. Yeah, I had to face a lot of things in that slowdown period. Other dry wells? Music, yeah. Just always having it going. Yeah. Books, keeping the peace. Oh, girl. That's a dry well of mine I didn't see until you just said that. Yeah, if I can just keep everybody in good shape and getting along, then I'll find comfort. Well, you're going to go spend some time with the Lord here in just a minute, and my prayer is going to be that He exposes your dry wells. as he's doing for me. Just a couple weeks ago, I went to visit my mom, and as I shared, she's on end-of-life care after just an absolutely brutal battle with Alzheimer's. It's gone like this. It's gone on years longer than we thought it would go. Basically, everything we've prayed, God's done the opposite. You know, we've prayed for any number of steps, and God's done the opposite of what we've asked him to do. And here, in this stage that we're in, we've been praying fervently for months that the Lord would just take her home. She loves him, and she's made it clear to us that she wants to be with him. And he loves her, and he's made it clear to us that he wants to be with her. And so to watch her languish in her bed day after day makes no sense. And I don't have a pretty bow to put on it. I don't have any sugar to throw on it to sugarcoat it for any of you. And that's just where we've been. And I went to visit her a couple weeks ago, and she never opened her eyes. And she was filthy. They obviously had not bathed her recently, and it really bothered me. And I got in the car, and I thought, I'm just going to run to Goodwill. I'm just going to get a $20 shirt. And that is my reflex, right? Cheap comfort, really. I had the $20 and everybody can use a new shirt, right? But what I've learned is the problem with cheap comfort is it can only ever give me cheap comfort. And so instead of shopping for comfort, I ran to the God of all comfort because I believe his word, which is that he longs to comfort me in all of my affliction. And when my mom, who is desperately sick and dirty, is unable to even look at me, much less speak to me, I need comfort. And so instead of going shopping, I drove around and I cried and I was honest with the Lord and I said, I don't like this. I don't like the choices that you are making for her. I don't like the choices you're making for me. I don't like that she's in a place where they don't bathe her unless I tell them to bathe her. And Lord knew all of that was in my heart anyway. And because he had already dealt with the fact that I had some root beliefs that didn't really love me, and I now believe he does, at least on most levels, I could be honest with him. And it didn't take long. We're talking minutes, whereas if I just tried to comfort with shopping, it would have taken at least days, if not weeks. Minutes before I felt wrapped in the love of Jesus. I felt comforted. I could face it. I didn't have to like it, but I could face it. He really did comfort me in all my afflictions. And so the charge to you, if you really want to be satisfied, is if you've been seeking something, anything other than Jesus to comfort you, the action step is to repent. Not because Jesus wants to squash you. He doesn't want to squash you. He loves you. He wants to say, hey, turn away from that dry well and come to this deep well. Because the Bible gives a word to this that we're talking about this morning, and the word that the Bible gives to it is idolatry. It's looking to something or someone other than Jesus for what only Jesus can give you. And that's true of salvation, but it's also true of comfort. And after we repent, we drop our bucket down into the well of his love and his goodness. And if, like Paul, you've been racking up a list of all the things that make you feel okay, what do we do with rubbish? What do we do with dung? We toss it out. And we turn to the God of all comfort who wants to comfort you in all of your afflictions. So it's my hope that the Holy Spirit will do some work in you during your time with him about all of this. He's still doing a lot of work in me, but I can tell you that the stronghold that many other sources of false comfort had on me at the beginning of 2024 no longer have a grip on me. and that I run to him, because he's the source of all comfort, and he really does satisfy. And that's what I want for you. So let me pray he'll do it, and then Rochelle's gonna give us some instructions. Lord, thank you. It feels too good to be true, I think, that you're the God of all comfort, who wants to comfort us in all our afflictions. But it is true, because your word says it. So I pray for these sisters of mine, Lord. I'm confident that they have turned to something other than you to comfort them and that it hasn't ultimately worked. So I pray that you would expose what those things are. I pray that you would continue to expose them in my life. Help us to turn to you instead. We wanna find our satisfaction in you. Only you can satisfy. It's in your name I pray, amen.