All right. Good morning, everybody. We are going to go ahead and get started. If you didn't see in the back, we've got notes, some handouts, got some pens, got some donuts. So if you need to grab any of those before we get started, feel free to do so. And I will go ahead and open us up in a word of prayer. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your goodness to us. I praise you for the great God that you are, and how you work, and how you intervene in our lives. I pray that this morning your spirit would be active, that you would work in the midst of my weaknesses, and that your truth would be communicated, or that we would be able to see what you have to say in your work. Bless this time, and all we do, in your name, amen. What I want to start off by talking about this morning is proprioception. So I don't know if you've heard of this term before or not, but as a physical therapist, this is something that I'm talking about a lot. It's something I'm thinking through nearly every day in my clinical practice. And so what proprioception is, is simply put, it's an awareness of where your joints are in space. It's having this body awareness. We all, have thousands of these tiny little mechanoreceptors, things like muscle spindles, things like Golgi tendon organs, and they send messages to our brain to tell us, where are my arms? Where are my legs? Where's my body at? It's something I think that we all probably take for granted a little bit. each and every day. Because proprioception, what it allows you to do, is it allows you to walk on uneven surfaces, things like grass, to walk on the sand at the beach, without having to look down at your feet, without tripping, without turning an ankle, things like that. Proprioception also allows you to hold on tightly to You know, a 50-pound child, safe and securely, but also gives you the ability to hold something like an egg, something delicate, without crushing it, being able to modulate with appropriate force. It also allows me to have my eyes closed, but I can tell you, is my palm facing up or is it facing down? It gives me the spatial awareness. And if someone suffers an upper motor neuron injury, something like a stroke, their proprioception is going to be affected significantly. Even a mechanical injury like an ankle sprain, that's going to disrupt this communication that these mechanoreceptors are trying to send to your brain. Really good and high level athletes, they're going to have a high level of proprioception because it's so closely related to things like balance and coordination. But thankfully this is something you can train, this is something you can work at if you have diminished proprioception, we train it all the time in physical therapy. Because it's important to have this kind of body awareness if you're going to function in everyday life. Awareness is also important in other situations. It's important to be aware of your surroundings, because if you're not, something bad could happen. And as you can see, I've got a video of a couple of my boys. I feel like they're a common example in these adult discipleship classes. But this is from last year. We go to Maine every year. And this is a video of them having a water balloon fight with their older cousin, Carson. And what you're going to see is Jaden. He demonstrates a high level of awareness. He throws a water balloon at Carson, and then he notices Carson is winding up about to throw this water balloon as hard as he can, and he gets out of the way. Jackson, on the other hand, does not exercise the same level of awareness, so let's see what happens. On your marks, get set, go! Not me! That was pretty rough. That was brutal. He hit a bloody nose from that hit. That was major hit. And he was three years old in this video, so I think with age and experience comes a little wisdom. He now knows, someone's throwing a water gun at you, you run through your life so you don't get hit in the face. And so awareness, this is really important whether it's, you know, for things like Wahoo, know where your body and joints are in space. It's really important for things like water balloon fights, but awareness in this area of ethnicity and culture is also really important to the Christian, because it helps us view things in a biblical way. We've talked a lot over the last couple of weeks about what the scriptures have to say about this issue, We speak a lot to this issue. It doesn't ignore it, so we shouldn't ignore it either. And most of us, we probably struggle in this area at least a little bit. I know I do, and where I find that I misstep a lot, or I make mistakes, are when it comes to this area of awareness. Sometimes I'm just ignorant. I'm lacking this kind of awareness. And so today, I want to start off by looking at Luke chapter 4, what many regard as Jesus' first sermon, or one of his first sermons. And we know that Jesus was a master teacher, so it probably comes as no surprise that he demonstrated an incredible cultural ability to be culturally aware. And that he would use all these examples to relate to people and that he had this, you know, it helps when you know people's hearts and people's thoughts and people's tendencies really well. So we see this passage is going to illustrate that. very well this morning. We're gonna see that Jesus, he's gonna make some strong statements along this issue, so I'll start reading, picking up in verse 16. And Jesus came to Nazareth, where he'd been brought up, and as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him, he enrolled the scroll, and found the place where it was written, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year in the Lord's favor. And he rolled up the scroll, he went back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. So I think we've probably heard this account before. To recap briefly, Jesus preaching in the synagogue, Nazareth and he makes these really strong claims that he's the Messiah that he is the fulfillment of this text in Isaiah and so you know what what do you think the response to this is what do you think people sitting there in the crowd are going to say to these strong statements will read what they think in verse 22 and all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, isn't this Joseph's son? And so we see the response to him making these strong claims is actually very overwhelmingly positive, that they're marveling, they're saying, how can this be? These are very gracious words that Jesus is speaking. But if we fast forward to verse 28, we see a drastic shift in the mood, a drastic change in tone. Luke writes, when they heard these things, All in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built. so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away. So we see in verse 22 and to verse 28, something very significant happens. Something very big happens because they go from marbling, they're saying, how can this be? This is amazing, to wanting to kill Jesus. So what did Jesus say that was so egregious? What did Jesus say that was so offensive? We'll pick that up. in verse 23. And Jesus said to them, doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, position, hill yourself. What we've heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well. And he said, truly I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. So Jesus is getting a little bit confrontational here. Verse 25 says, but in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the lands. And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, only Naaman the Syrian. So we see, this is what angered everyone, this is what made the change in tone. It wasn't him making his claims about being the Messiah, it was about him talking about how God miraculously worked to people outside of ethnic Israel, to these Gentiles. And Jesus was sending this message that he's the Messiah, just not their version of what the Messiah should be. That Jesus is the Messiah of the entire world to all peoples not just to ethnic Israel So we see Jesus what was aware? He knew what was in the Pharisees hearts and he exposed what they were thinking because we can see there was clearly ethnic pride There was clearly ethnic hate in their hearts, and when we see this in Jesus' day, then we fast forward 2,000 years, and I think we probably agree there's not been a lot that's changed about the human condition. You know, we're all sinners, and we have these sinful tendencies that prefer our way over others. It's kind of built into us as our default position to be selfish, to be prideful. So my point is, we need to be aware about these things. We need to think about these things. That's one of the first actionable steps I think that we can take to learn more in this area. Because we know that not everyone experiences the world the same way that we do. You know, based on geography, gender, age, ethnicity, there's all these different experiences that we need to be aware of. So keeping that in mind, I want to draw our attention back to two weeks ago, which I know it's really hard to do. I probably should have spoke on it. a couple weeks after Dr. Ware's video, but he gave this example, I don't know if you remember it, he was talking about a chaplain, this African-American guy who was a chaplain on the football team that had just won the Super Bowl. And he was going around the country speaking in different churches, and one of the churches he was speaking in had a family that invited him over for dinner the night before. It was an affluent family, it was this white family, and they lived in a gated community. So they gave him the code to the community, come on in, we'll have dinner, you can tell us about how God's working in your life, in this football team, and how the season went, and all of these different things. So this chaplain comes to the community, returns the code, and as he's driving, he gets pulled over by this police officer. And Dr. Ware tells this story much better than I'm recounting it here, but as we heard a couple weeks ago, terrible experience that they pulled him out of the car, put him on the ground, pulled a gun on him, called him, all these terrible things, said terrible things about him, put him in the back of the police car, and then when they went to run his license and that kind of thing, they found him. Nothing was there. They asked him, what do you do in this neighborhood? He said, oh, I was invited by one of the people that live in your community, so they called this person, they confirmed it, and they essentially were like, sorry, my bad, made a mistake, and dropped him off at their house. And what was troubling about this experience was that this family that he was eating dinner with, They didn't really mention this at all. They kind of just glossed over it because they were more concerned about hearing about the Super Bowl and, you know, what are you going to speak on in church tomorrow? And I don't think that this family was probably malicious. They probably weren't intentionally being unkind. It was probably just ignorance, probably just a lack of awareness. So we want to be extra careful in this area where we can learn and we can be intentional, we can love others through purposely thinking about this. So one of the ways that we can do this is by looking at texts like Relations 3, 26 through 28. We spoke about this a little bit a few weeks ago, so I'm not gonna belabor it, but I'll start reading what Paul writes in verse 26. For in Christ Jesus, you were all sons of God through faith. For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. So we see a text like this and we know the primary emphasis, what Paul is driving at, it is that we're all one in Christ. When Christ saves us from our sin, you know, scripture says we're a new creation. That everything about us now revolves around Jesus Christ. And this transcends everything in our life, including our ethnicity. This is a much bigger deal than things like like that, that we're declared righteous, we faith alone on the basis of Christ's finished work on the cross, that there's nothing that we bring to the table in justifying ourselves. But if we, you know, as we read scripture, if that's all we see, then we're gonna miss a big part of the glory of God and how he calls a very diverse peoples to himself to reflect who he is in a more complete and magnificent way. In verse 28, Paul is talking about all these different categories, all these different distinctions. He talks about gene or Greek, speaking of ethnicities, speaks of slave or free, talking about social class, and then male and female, speaking about gender. And we would say, as we read all of Paul's letters, that he doesn't downplay these different categories as unimportant. We would be very quick to affirm that men should act like men, and women should act like women, and there's a biblical difference between these distinctions. You know, no one would say that they're gender-blind. We don't see gender, right? And so we should praise God for how he made us. He made us male, or made us female. We should actually live in light of that. Because if we don't, we're probably living in sin. We're probably not living in the way God has called us. And we want to live intentionally to glorify God. And the same thing goes for a social class, where God has placed you. Same thing goes for ethnicity. So what I have found helpful is this book. It's called Talking About Race by Isaac Adams. And he gives us these three different categories to think about this issue. And I think it's really helpful. And on one hand, he's got being color consumed. I think we see a lot of our culture trending in this direction. And that's seeing everything through the lens of race and ethnicity. And if we fall into this error, this kind of mistake, then we're forgetting where does our identity ultimately lie. And that's first and foremost in Christ. And we read letters like 1 Peter, and Peter does a really good job of telling us that we're elect exiles, that we're sojourners, that this world is not our home. Peter would also tell us that, when we come to Christ, that we're a chosen race, we're a holy nation, we're a people for God's own possession, that we kind of transcend ethnicity and we're united with others, brothers and sisters in Christ, through the blood of Jesus. When we view every issue through color, through ethnicity, then we miss this point. So we don't want to land there. On the whole other side, I think we can fall into another area of being colorblind. And I think most people that land in this category are usually well-intentioned, usually mean well, but we can't ignore this part of God's creation. If we do that, we're kind of missing a big part of how God made us as individuals, because ethnicity is really important. It's just not the most important thing. It's not what we should focus all of our attention on. We saw in Galatians 3… that the emphasis is that we're all one in Christ. That's the priority, but we can't neglect how God created us. For example, going back to this male-female distinction, I can't just, you know, think that, I don't want to live and let the God created me be a male, I'm going to ignore it, I'm going to forget about it, and if I do that, then I'm living in this sinful way. Another way I was thinking about it is I've got four children, and they're very, very different. And if I treat them all the same exact way in every situation, I'm actually probably not doing a good job as a parent that I need to speak into their... take biblical principles and speak into their specific situations thinking about their specific personalities if I'm going to parent them well. And so I like this middle category that Isaac Adams gives us. He says we should be color conscious, that we should celebrate how all people are fearfully and wonderfully made and show no partiality while compassionately honoring different experiences. And I think this is the biblical perspective of just like we have these different distinctions, male and female distinction, we realize there's a difference in how God created us as individuals. That big picture, I think about my life, God made me a male. God made me white. God has placed me in Somerville as a physical therapist, and I don't think those things are accidental or inconsequential or that they don't carry any significance, because they do. God did this for a very specific reason, and I need to live in that reality so I can glorify God by impacting the world for him by serving in the church with the giftings and the way that that God made me. So let's be people who are color conscious. We are going to be a little short on time so I'm going to click over to this video and we will hear what Dr. Ware has to say. Applications is the next section. That's what I'm about to go to. Just before we go down on our