My son Isaac is spending the summer in Nashville, and he's, you know, trying to make it big, and we'll see. But, I don't know, for whatever reason, that gave me the idea of writing a country song. So, I wrote a country song yesterday about my love life when I lived out in the country, and I called it LBF. Y'all know what LBF means? Y'all never been LBF'd? That means let's be friends. And every time I had a crush on a girl or a young lady, I always kind of got LBF'd. I would always put firmly in the friend zone. You're great, Ricky. Let's be friends. And that was a nice way of letting me down. And that was basically her way of saying, I'm not into you. I'm not into you. You know, I think we need a guide for people to read that shows them, you know, signs that she's just not into you or he's just not into you. I one time had a competition with a girl named Missy about who was more country. Because we both grew up out in the country and everybody from the South thinks they're country and a lot of them are not. Country means that they wore khakis instead of wool or something like that. But we're both kind of the real thing. I talked about being able to cross the street to go deer hunting and having a class offered in my school where we brought our shotguns and got hunter safety. You don't do that much these days. But she taught me. She said, my name is Missy because my dad insisted on naming me after his girlfriend. If your husband names your daughter after his girlfriend, he's not that into you. And today's sermon is really on this text where God is figuring out she's just not that into you. He displays for us this amazing picture of His grace. Beautiful, beautiful picture of His grace. And then this utter rebellion against it. And His response to that rebellion. And the reason why this story is where it is, it's in the front section of Ezekiel. Ezekiel is a long book with very long visions, and I want to kind of entice you to read it. We're not going to cover the whole book in six weeks, but we are going to cover a large portion of it as far as the pictures go, and to give you a sense of what it's about. I want you to remember that Ezekiel is prophesying to God's people as God is doing the thing they never thought he would do. His very first vision is of God leaving the temple, of leaving Jerusalem. God's left the building. And the question on everyone's minds is some of them have been taken to this refugee camp. A large, large number of them have been taken to this refugee camp outside of Babylon. And the question on their minds is, why? Why are you so mad at us? What did we do to make you this angry? And so Ezekiel tells them their whole story. their whole history in one parable. It's a graphic parable, so I'll cut it up for you, but I would encourage you to go read the unredacted version at some point. What I want you to learn from this parable is in light of God's love for us, our rebellion, Israel's rebellion and our rebellion is all the more heinous. And His grace is all the more shocking. I want you to see three things in this parable, this story. I want you to see unconditional love. I want you to see just irrational, just irrational rebellion. And I want you to see incomprehensible grace. Please stand as we read from Ezekiel chapter 36. I mean, 16, I'm sorry, Ezekiel chapter 16. two sections, verse 4 through 8 and then verses 48 and 49. As for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling clothes. No, I pitied you to do any of these things for you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field for you were abhorred on the day that you were born. And when I passed by you, I saw you wallowing in your blood. And I said to you, in your blood, live. I said to you in your blood, live. And I made you flourish like a plant of the field. And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full adornment. Your breasts were formed and your hair had grown, yet you were naked and bare. And when I passed by you again, I saw you Behold, you were at the age for love and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine. And then he goes on in the next 30 verses to describe how Israel had broken this covenant with him in, like I said, very graphic ways. And then he ends the story saying, As I live, declares the Lord, your sister Sodom and her daughters have not done as you and your daughters have done. Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease. but did not aid the poor and the needy. Thus far the reading of God's word, all men are like grass and all of our glories like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but not God's word. God's word stands forever. You may be seated. In light of God's amazing, unconditional love and grace to us, Our rebellion is all the more heinous and His grace is all the more shocking. This first section really does describe for us God's unrequited love. It's just unconditional love that's not frankly returned. And it is a beautiful story, isn't it? It's a story that's very similar to the true story Neely Tucker writes in his book, Love in the Driest Season. And he starts about his real effort, pretty incredible struggle, had to get international laws changed for he and his wife to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia during the AIDS epidemic. And the first sentence of the book is, at the noon hour, the aunts found the girl child. And it's about a child that was just left to die out in the wilderness and was rescued and ultimately came to live with him and his wife. And we see the same thing here, right? So the picture of Israel's birth when they were small, no one loved them, no one cared for them. It's one of the amazing stories of God's grace and God's power, frankly, that this little people, one tribe, has become the center of the Christian and Jewish universe, right? And it's the place where Jesus was born. And it's a picture not only of his grace to Israel, but his grace to all of us. His grace to all of us. He's talking to Israel hundreds of years after their birth. And he would look at us and say the same things. The Apostle Paul looks at us and says, you were dead in your trespasses and sins. And God made you alive together in Christ. And that's a very real memory to those who were first generation Christians. You were dead and all of a sudden God walked by you and said live. God walked by you and said live. I love the story that Chuck Colson tells of Bob McAllister, who, though he was very high up in local government and South Carolina government, he spent his extra time doing ministry on death row. He would just go and visit and read to the people, the inmates on death row. And one night as he was walking out, he looked over and saw, curled up on the floor, his skin was the color of a shrimp, just pale. and his hair was long and greasy and rusty woomers. Rusty had been in death row since he was 22 and was now nearing his 40s, and he was just filthy, and he had uneaten food or half-eaten food all over his cell, and the roaches were crawling over the food and crawling over him, and his face was kind of drooling as he slept onto a pornographic magazine and everything about him just seemed to scream satanic oppression. And Bob had grown up in a good, healthy, respectable Southern church. He didn't believe about any of that nonsense. But he said everything about him screamed satanic oppression. And he just yelled at him. He said, Rusty! Wake up! Rusty, look at yourself. You're just filthy inside and out, Rusty. Can you say the word Jesus? Can you just say the word Jesus? He will help you. Rusty looked up and started mumbling. Bob had to go, they don't let you linger on death row. And he said as he drove home, he just sang hymns and prayed because he felt like there was this oppression, this darkness that went home with him. And he spent the weekend wondering, what did I see? What just happened? So first thing Monday morning, he drives back to death row. He doesn't even go to work. He drives back to death row. And the guards are all laughing at him, like, do you want to sell here? We can get you one. And he laughs, ha, ha. And he runs up. He wants to just see Rusty. And he's greeted with the smell of Lysol. And he turns the corner, and he sees a man with a clean haircut and clean shaven and standing in the middle of a sparkling, clean cell. And he looks at him and says, I don't know much about Jesus, but I thought he'd want me to clean up. He started a relationship that went on for decades of love and discipleship. God walked by him and said, live. And he came alive. That's our story, isn't it? That's our story. God walked by us in our sin and said, live. And we saw what we'd never seen before. We saw ourselves for the first time. We came to ourselves, and we ran to Him for cleansing. We ran to Him for home. That's God's unconditional love. And in the face of that, we see Israel's just unimaginable betrayal. And it's all the more heinous because it's betrayal against love. And the same is true for a lot of us who, though we know we owe God everything, we still, it's hard for us. It's hard for us to live and trust Him. See, that was the problem with Israel. You read the stories and you're like, what's so wrong? I mean, they just wanted a little help. They just reached out to Egypt for a little help. They reached out to Assyria for a little help. They just wanted their borders to be strong. They just wanted to not be overrun by the Babylonians, by the Assyrians. What did you expect them to do? And God says, I expected them to trust me. I expected them to trust me and they didn't. They went out and prostituted themselves to the other nations and they worshipped the gods of the other nations because they didn't trust me. There's a condition I've seen. I think it's tragic. It may be the most tragic condition I know as far as disorders go. It's called attachment disorder, and I'm gonna wildly oversimplify it for you, and if you wanna know really what it's about, you can go ask any of the psychologists in the room, and they'll say, yeah, not really, that's not what it was. But basically, attachment disorder, describe it like this. God created you with this incredible, incredible power to attach to your parents. So that in the first weeks of your life, you would attach to your mother and hopefully to your father in a way that you would never attach to another human being. That's where you'll find security and safety and nourishment. And it's just an incredibly powerful bond. And if you don't, then you honestly have, you tend to, it's healable as all disorders are by God's grace, but your tendency is just to never trust anyone. To never trust anyone. And I've seen that, and it's so sad. I've got friends who've adopted foster children, and in those first five, six years, it goes on for a long time, these children just They can't trust him, and so they steal from him. They steal everything he has, every piece of jewelry he's ever given to his wife. They've stolen and squirreled away, prepared for the day when he's going to cast them out. I've seen other children with the same disorder who are just sweet and dear to every stranger they meet because they're always preparing for where they're going to go when they get kicked out of home. And when they're at home alone, they're violent and angry and profane to the people who've adopted them. And it's sad, and from the outside it just makes you so mad. These people have given their lives to you, and you're responding with theft, with anger and profanity. And it's because they don't trust. It's because they don't trust. And we all come into our relationship with God with a spiritual attachment disorder. We believe. Yeah, especially when we're in here, right? It's easy to believe when we're in here. And the air is clear and the story is told and we believe that God loves us. But when we're out there, It's so much easier to trust our jobs, to trust money, to trust our ability to manipulate relationships, to make our own family into an idol, to trust things that we can see and touch. And it's hard to trust God. It's hard to believe He's actually going to provide for us. And he uses this very concrete example, which is shocking, honestly. I mean, when you hear about the sin of Sodom, you don't think about not giving to the poor and needy, do you? This guy threw you off, didn't he? It was a curveball. That's why I put it in there. Fascinating. But why? Why would God link kind of a spiritual detachment disorder with giving? Well, if you're not secure in Christ, you're not going to give. Not really, you'll give a little, but you won't have a giving heart, a generous heart, a generous spirit. Because you don't trust him. You know what I mean? Bianca and I were talking about it last night, and she's like, tell them all to be like Scrooge. Be like Scrooge after, right? When he wakes up on Christmas morning, and he's singing, and he's celebrating. It's not too late, and he celebrated Christmas in his heart every day of the year for the rest of his life, enjoying being generous. That's what God wants you to be like. He wants you to trust Him that you're never going to run out. And so you can be joyfully generous. You can have a generous spirit. God's fascinating. In Malachi, I would encourage you to read it because who knows when I'll get to it. In Malachi, He challenges us. He says, just try. Just try to out give me. I did that last summer. It's funny, I don't know, I just got into a little game with him. I was like, all right, let's just see what you do. I want to see if you'll keep this promise. Will you just, you know, he says that you'd give, I'm going to give to you pressed down, shaken, you know, those verses that other churches talk about that we never mention. And so I'm like, all right, let's go for it. And so I go to a little charity auction, and it's got a silent auction, and I make a bid that I really can't afford. But it was a bid on some tickets to the PGA Championship. It's for charity and the Lord says he's gonna return, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I make a bid on these tickets. The funny thing was, you know, if you've ever gone to a charity auction, there's these little signs up on what you're bidding on, you know. And they'd forgotten to put the sign up. So nobody else bid and I won it. I won five tickets to the PGA. But wait. I mean, 10 tickets, two tickets a day for five days. And then, I didn't do this to complain. I was just trying to let them know they gave me the wrong tickets, thinking like I would have to exchange them, because they actually gave me more expensive tickets. And instead, they just gave me two more tickets for every day that were the more expensive ones. So, I had four tickets for every day of the PGA Championship. Now, that package I got for free, a table at the live auction paid $10,000 for. So I'm like, well, that was interesting. All right, well, maybe this is true. So I, you know, and I was really, I wanted to, you know, scalp them and get my 10 grand. But I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to give them away. So I gave away every day that I couldn't go. I gave the tickets away and just being like God and, you know, trying to be generous, trying to really see what he's going to give me next. And he gave me a, had a friend approach me and say, I want to send you on vacation for 10 days. It was nice, more expensive than anything I could have paid for. And so I responded, because I'd already kind of set up a two-day vacation, because that's what I can afford, right? And so instead of canceling my reservations, I give those to my son. And I get back from vacation, and I hear about a guy who's just got getting out of prison, and he's timed out of his rehab facility that he's in. He needs a place to stay, and I'm trying to be like God. And so, all right, God, just try it again. And so I, you know, I gather up some people and we put them in a hotel for a couple of months until he can afford to rent. And I'm like, all right, how are you gonna respond to that one? And I get a phone call from my brother, my mom's house, she died five years ago, my mom's house was blown over by a tornado. And the insurance company offered us 30 grand for it, which I thought was pretty generous. That's where I grew up. But he had argued with them and gotten a lawyer and the insurance settlement came out to 110 grand. And the amount that I was gonna get had tripled. I said, wow, Lord, maybe, maybe. Why, why does the Lord care about generosity so much? Why does the Lord want us to be generous? Well, think of it like this. Think of a poor person praying, asking God for groceries, asking God for rent money, whatever. How's the Lord going to answer that? If we don't give, how's the Lord going to answer that? That's how He answers those prayers, through our generosity. We get to experience His grace. And it really is a test of do we trust him? Do we trust him or do we have greedy, anxious, protective hearts? And so God draws out this story of spiritual adultery that's just ugly, it's grotesque. And he responds and he talks about how he's going to give them over to the Babylonians and say, all right, you wanted to trust in foreign gods, let me show you what it's really like. But he's going to protect them, he's going to keep them together, and then he makes the final, kind of the final blow at the end of this chapter. And it's shocking, it's just absolutely shocking. And I put it at the beginning of the worship service because I like a good mystery that puts the hidden ending in the beginning. Look at the call to worship. What does it say? How is God going to ultimately respond to this sinful spiritual adultery? I will establish my covenant with you. you will know that I am the Lord that you may remember and be confounded and never open your mouth again because of your shame when I Atone for you for all that you have done when I Pay the debt for all that you have done. It's insane. It doesn't make sense You have sinned against me and I'm gonna pay the debt. I It's more than unconditional. It's against the conditions. It's more than unexpected. It's the opposite of what's expected. Any story you've heard that tried to explain the gospel, if you thought, well, that makes sense, it didn't go far enough. It just doesn't make sense. It's unbelievable. It's it's it's just too good to be true. And I don't know how to illustrate it. I can't illustrate it with a real story because it's too. It's just too big, but I can't illustrate it by putting putting the story of Hosea in modern language. So let me tell you what the story of Hosea would sound like if it happened in Tulsa in 2023. God comes to Hosea and he says, I want you to marry Gomer and she's going to be unfaithful. Great. So he marries Gomer, and she's unfaithful. She's an adulterous wife. And he has his first child, and he says, Jose, I want you to name that child Archer. There's just some things that y'all have left unfixed. And he has a second son, and he says, Jose, I want you to name that son Sans Amore, because I don't love him. And he has a third son, and he says, Jose, let's name this son Nomi Hijo. This is not my son. And Gomer finally just leaves all together. Just leaves home all together, abandons Jose, and he kind of, you know, Tulsa's a small town, and so he hears where she's going, and one friend comes up to him and says, hey, I saw your wife coming out of Mahogany the other night. She traded you in for a higher class, traded you in for a newer model. And six months later, somebody comes up to you and says, hey, I saw Gomer coming out with a strange guy from Texas Roadhouse last night. Looks like things aren't going quite the way she planned. And another year passes, and somebody comes up to you and says, I saw Gomer at McDonald's. Is she OK? No, she's not okay. And then, somebody comes up to him at church on Sunday and says, you know, I was down at John 3 16 this weekend, I saw Gomer. I think she's really doing poorly. And the Lord says to him, I need you to start calling DoorDash. You need to start sending her food. It doesn't matter if she knows it's from you or not. You just need to start feeding her. So he's paying this woman who's living with other men, assuming that other men are sending the food to her, and continuing to give her love to another. And finally, somebody comes to you and says, I saw Gomer standing out on the street in front of the motels out on Route 66. And God says, all right, it's time, go pick her up. So you drive down there and you pick her, you begin talking to her and you ask her to get in the car. Then out from the shadows walks a huge, angry, mean, burly man who clearly has a gun inside of his jacket. And he says, if you want her, you got to pay just like everybody else. You square up to him and you say, how much? He says, $100 a night. And you say, all right, I'll be right back. And then you come back and you begin laying cash in his hand, not a hundred, not a thousand, not 365,000, but $3,650,000. You lay it in his hands and you tell him, I've bought her not for one night, not for a year, but for a hundred years, she is mine. And you take her. and you woo her and you convince her that yours is the only love that will never abuse her. That's the love that God has shown for us. That's the love that God shows Israel. Love that despite our adultery, despite our unbelief, despite our idolatries, He pays for us. He gives Himself, He gives His Son. The only thing that could possibly cost God anything, He gives Himself to us to show us what true love is like. How does the story end? Does Gomer finally go to Him and establish this covenant, enter this covenant, and live with Him and receive love? Or does she walk away again? That's up to you to decide. It's choose your own adventure. And I hope you'll receive it. Please pray with me. Father in heaven, we come to you and we just stand amazed at the depth and the width and the height of your love for us in Christ Jesus. And though we do not deserve it and though we struggle to trust it, we do receive it. We see you down on your knee offering to marry us, Lord, and we say yes. We say yes. In Jesus' precious name, we pray.