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John 12:37-43 When God Hardens Hearts · The TakeAway

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: How can God be loved and still harden someone's heart?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the most difficult questions raised by Scripture.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: In John chapter 12, a crowd has witnessed extraordinary evidence of who Jesus is.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yet John tells us that they not only did not believe, they could not believe.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then he reaches back to Isaiah to explain why.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: God had blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: At first, those words can seem impossible to reconcile with the love of God, but perhaps the difficulty begins with the way we have to find love in the first place.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: In this message, Pastor Harry examines John chapter 12, verses 37 to 43 and asks us to let Scripture define God's love on his terms, revealing why the God who loves does not always make the road easier, and why being left alone may be very different from being loved.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here's Pastor Harry Barns with today's message.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: And today we're picking up on the tension we left off with last time, where we saw in John chapter 12, verse 37 that even though this crowd had been given so many signs by Jesus, they still did not believe.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, think about what that actually means for a moment.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: These weren't people reading about Jesus in a book or hearing about him secondhand from someone who claimed to have been there.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: They watched him.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: They stood close enough to see a man born blind walk away with his sight, and close enough to smell the grave when Lazarus came out of it four days dead, and still they did not believe.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, most of us have wondered at some point what it would take for the people we love to finally see the truth.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe a clearer explanation, a better answer, one undeniable moment.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: And this crowd had the undeniable moment standing right in front of them, and it wasn't enough.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly where John takes us next.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because in verse 39, he tells us something much heavier than what we saw last time.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't just say they did not believe, he says they could not believe.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now that lands very differently than the way many of us in the church think about belief today, because we've been taught to treat believing as an intellectual thing, something you get convinced into if the argument is good enough.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've been following with me for any length of time, you know I keep pushing us away from intellectual belief and back toward being born from above.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: The way Jesus tells Nicodemus in John chapter 3, verse 3, that unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: So what we're doing here at the takeaway has never been about convincing you to be saved.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because as Jesus says in John chapter 6, verse 44, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: What we're doing is helping you work out your own salvation, the way Paul puts it to the Philippians in chapter 2, verse 12, and to be sanctified in the word, the way Jesus prays for us in John chapter 17, verse 17, when he says, Sanctify them in the truth.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Your word is truth.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, we teach to convince, but we understand that God is the one who causes a person to be born again, and that through the word of God they become convinced, not because they reason their way there, but because God birthed something new in them and they came to know and understand the new birth they already been given.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: So what we have in front of us today is a crowd who does not believe.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And John tells us plainly that they cannot believe.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then in verse 40, he goes one step further and tells us exactly why they cannot believe.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that brings us to the question sitting underneath all of this.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: If God is the one who causes belief, then how is God love if he reveals himself and then leaves them in their blindness?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: How is that loving?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Why would he leave people in a state of unbelief while he's actively revealing himself to them?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if that question sounds familiar, it should because we spent three full episodes on something similar back in episodes 52, 53, and 54 when we asked how a God of love allows suffering in this world.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And what we found there is exactly what we're going to run into here: that we take love, we define it from our own perspective, we lay that definition over top of God, and then we go back and reinterpret scripture around that definition that we brought with us.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that is exactly what we just watched this crowd do in our last episode when they quoted the everlasting throne promise to David in 2 Samuel chapter 7 and the kingdom that never ends in Daniel chapter 7.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: We saw that they knew their scriptures.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: They could quote them, but they interpreted those scriptures through their own understanding instead of through the one standing right there in front of them, the one who was actually defining it for them.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the question isn't different this time.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's just pointing at something much harder.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: We are still trying to understand love from God's perspective while we keep defining it from our own.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And those two are not the same thing.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Which means the real question that we have to answer today is this What is God's motive right here?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: What is he doing when he reveals himself to a crowd and then tells us plainly in verse 40 that he was the one who blinded their eyes and hardened their heart so that they would not see and would not turn and would not be healed.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, John doesn't leave us guessing at that.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: He answers it, but he answers it in the order he chooses, not the order we'd probably pick.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: So let's walk it the way that he wrote it, starting where he starts.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: In verses 37 and 38, John writes, Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him, so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now, notice where John starts.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't start with an explanation, he starts with the plain fact that they still did not believe.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: And this crowd had seen more than enough because John has already walked us through water turned to wine, a dying son healed from a distance, a paralyzed man walking, five thousand fed from a boy's lunch, a man born blind given his sight, and a man four days dead called out of a tomb.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And after all of that, they still do not believe.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now in verse 38, John quotes Isaiah, and that isn't a new source showing up out of nowhere all of a sudden.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's Isaiah chapter 53, verse 1, the opening line of the servant song we've already spent time in back when we said he should be high and lifted up in chapter 52, and it was the will of the Lord to crush him in chapter 53.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: What that means is that Isaiah was already asking the same question centuries before this crowd ever stood in front of Jesus.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer in both places was the same, because revelation by itself has never been what produces belief.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the piece John wants us holding on to as he moves forward, because he's about to tell us why.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So let's take it slowly and let it say exactly what it says.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: In verse 39 and 40, we read, Therefore, they could not believe.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: For again, Isaiah said, He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now notice the order here, because it's doing real theological work.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: In verse 37, it says plainly that they still did not believe.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now that was their own act.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Then in verse 39 it says, After we saw that they did not believe, we read that therefore they could not believe.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that means is that the hardening isn't the reason this crowd first resisted Jesus, but it's what came in response to a resistance that was already real, already chosen, and already sustained across more evidence than almost anyone else in this entire gospel had been given.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I want to be careful here because there's a real difference between two things that can sound almost identical from a distance.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Every person by nature is unable to come to Jesus apart from being drawn.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we've said that plainly more than once in this series, and it's true of every human being who has ever lived.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: But this verse is describing something more specific than the universal condition, because this is God actively confirming a rejection that was already chosen, the same way he did with Pharaoh, whose own heart hardened itself across the earliest plagues before the text ever says that the Lord hardened it.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the same pattern Paul describes three separate times in Romans chapter one, when he says God gave them up each time as a response to something people had already done with what they had already been shown.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now there's one more piece to this that's easy to miss when we read too quickly.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Look where the phrase understand with their heart is sitting, right in the same sentence as see with their eyes and turn.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So this isn't describing people who couldn't grasp what they were being shown, but people who could grasp it and still would not turn, because turning was never a problem of information in the first place.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually harder to sit with than if the problem had simply been comprehension, because it means the barrier was never what they knew, it was what they wanted.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what Paul says in Romans chapter 3, verse 23, in one of the most familiar verses in the whole New Testament, when he says, For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, not fallen short of his love, but fallen short of his glory.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's what scripture puts underneath all of it, because every one of us by nature has turned from God's glory toward our own, and then defined God by what serves that instead.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: What we see is that when a person has already made that trade and been shown everything this crowd was shown, and still made it again and again and again, God being just confirms them in the very trade they already made.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there's one more piece that we have to look at because it's easy to read right past it.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Verse 41 says, Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now take in what that sentence is actually claiming.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Isaiah's vision back in his own chapter six, where he says, The Lord high and lifted up with the train of his robe, filling the temple and the seraphim crying, holy, holy, holy.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: John tells us that was Jesus.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Centuries before Bethlehem, Isaiah saw the glory of the sun.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is where it gets interesting.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: That same prophet, having seen that same glory, is the one who gives us both halves of what we've walked through today.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because the hardening oracle in chapter six and the suffering servant in chapters 52 and 53 come out of the same vision, spoken by the same man.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Judgment and mercy both flow from one sight of God's glory, and Isaiah could hold them together without needing either one explained away, because he had actually seen the glory that grounds both of them at once.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Paul deals with this same exact tension, and he goes further into it than anybody else in scripture does.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: He spends three entire chapters in Romans chapters nine through eleven, working through election, mercy, hardening, and the remnant.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And after all of it, here's where he lands in chapter 11, verses 33 and 34.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments, and how inscrutable his ways, for who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that's Paul after all that work, arriving at worship instead of a complete explanation.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Paul doesn't stay in that place of unanswered mystery because in that same section of Romans, he shows us something God actually does inside the hardening.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And John shows us the very same thing in the next two verses.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: So let's look at verses 42 and 43.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: It says, Nevertheless, many, even of the authorities, believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees, they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: For they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now notice that word, nevertheless, because if verses 39 and 40 meant every single person in that crowd was permanently incapable of ever believing, this sentence when it makes sense, sitting two verses later.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Paul lays that same thing out in Romans chapter 11.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna let him make the argument for us because he raises the question before we ever even get there.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: When he says in verse one, I ask then, has God rejected his people?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he answers it immediately when he says, By no means.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then he does something we might not expect.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: He points to himself, saying he is an Israelite, a descendant from Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And what Paul is saying here is that he is living evidence that God has not swept the whole nation aside, because Paul himself came out of that nation.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Then in verse two, he reaches back to Elijah, and this is where it gets interesting.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Elijah is convinced he is the only faithful man left in Israel.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And in verse three, he says, Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now Elijah is not exaggerating for a fact here.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: As far as he can see, standing where he's standing, the hardening is total, and he is the last one left.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: But in verse 4, God answers him back.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: He says, I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Seven thousand that Elijah could not see, that he did not know about, that his own eyes told him were not there.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what Paul's whole point is, because in verse five, he brings it forward to his own day.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: So too at this present time there is a remnant, he says, chosen by grace.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Then in verse six, he guards it from being misread.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: He says, But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, grace would no longer be grace.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So nobody in that remnant, not one of Elijah's 7,000 or one of the rulers in John chapter 12, was there because they deserved it more than the crowd standing around them.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Which brings Paul to his conclusion in verse 7.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the verse that answers John chapter 12 directly.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: When he says, What then?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: What we see is that Paul working through the same tension centuries after Isaiah and years after the cross lands exactly where John lands, a real and dominant pattern of hardening.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And inside that very same pattern, a real remnant God has kept for himself.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now that means those rulers in verse 42 aren't a loose thread in John's argument.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: They're Elijah's 7,000 showing up again in a different generation, hidden inside of a crowd that look completely hardened from the outside.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's one more piece Paul gives us later in that same chapter in verses 28 and 29, and it answers why God stays committed to Israel as a people at all, when he says, as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers, for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Not because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob earned something for their descendants, but because God made promises.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And God's promises, they do not expire.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, look at that reason John gives for their silence, because it lands right on everything we opened up with today.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: It said they love the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's the same trade Paul named in Romans chapter 3, verse 23, showing up here in men who actually believed.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: What that means is that this isn't a problem belonging only to unbelieving crowds, because it's the same pull every one of us still feels toward a glory we can see and measure and be praised by.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now we don't know for certain who these authorities were that did believe, but later in this gospel in chapter 19, verse 38, John names a man, Joseph of Arimathea, as a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the same fear that the same silence described right here.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: And Nicodemus, already introduced back in John chapter 3, as the man who came to Jesus by night, is standing right beside him.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very possible these are two of the very men described right here in verse 42.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And if that's who they are, John doesn't leave them frozen in their fear because by the time we reach the cross, both of them act publicly, at real cost, burying the body of Jesus when almost every other disciple has scattered.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: So now, let's bring this all the way back to where we started today.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: We asked, how God could be love and still leave people in their blindness while he's actively revealing himself to them.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what we've seen is that the question itself was carrying something into the text that the text never put there because we walked in holding a definition of love we built for ourselves.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what that definition usually looks like, if we're truly honest with ourselves.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: We think love means making things easy.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: We think if someone truly loves you, they smooth the road out, they remove the obstacles, they spare you the hard thing.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we take that, we lay it over God, and then we measure him by it.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And when the road doesn't get smooth, we conclude something must be wrong with his love.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: But watch what happens when we let scripture define it instead.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: In Romans chapter 9, verse 13, Paul quotes the prophet Malachi and says, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now that sounds harsh until you actually look at those two lives.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Esau on the surface got everything a man could want.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: He had wealth, he had family, he had land, he became a nation.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: God never wrestled him to the ground, never disciplined him, never interrupted him.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: God simply passed him by and left him with everything he had already chosen for himself.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now remember back in Genesis chapter 25, verse 34, Esau had traded his birthright for a single meal, and the text tells us plainly, thus Esau despised his birthright.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: He made his trade, and God let him keep it.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then look at Jacob.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Jacob's life was a mess from beginning to end.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: He deceived his father, he ran from his brother, he was cheated by Laban for twenty years, he buried Rachel, his wife, he lost Joseph, he ended his life in a famine in a foreign country.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: But in Genesis chapter 28, God met him at Bethel while he was running for his life.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: And in Genesis chapter 32, God wrestled him in the dark and would not let him go until Jacob had a new name.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: What we see is that the man God loved is the one whose life God kept interrupting.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the man God hated is the one God left alone.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: So here's what love actually is the way God defines it rather than the way we do.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Love is God revealing himself to a person, not smoothing their road, not sparing them the hard thing, not giving them what they already wanted.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: But breaking into a life and making himself known, even when it cost that person everything comfortable they were holding on to.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's why Paul can write in Ephesians chapter 1, verses 5 and 6 that he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: The love isn't the end point, it exists for the praise of his glory.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that's precisely what makes it real love instead of a sentiment we invented to make ourselves comfortable.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because a love that exists to serve us would rise and fall with us.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: But a love that exists for his glory is as permanent as he is.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now, take that definition back to the crowd we've been sitting with all day, and let's ask the hard question Did God love this crowd or didn't he?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because look at what he actually did.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: He never revealed himself to Esau.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: He simply passed him by and let him keep what he already traded for.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: But this crowd, he didn't pass them by.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: He kept every promise he made to their fathers.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: He sent his own son to stand in front of them in the flesh.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: And he did sign after sign after sign right where they could see it.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: But Esau never got that.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Not one time.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: This crowd got the Son of God Himself standing close enough to touch, and they still would not have him.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus tells us exactly what that revelation did to them.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: A little later in this gospel, in chapter 15, verse 22, he says, If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: But now they have no excuse for their sin.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: What that means is that the revealing itself is what made the rejection guilty.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: If God had said nothing, shown nothing, sent no one, there would be no excuse to remove, because there would have been nothing to reject.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: He spoke and speaking is what left them without a defense.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: So let's be clear about what we're saying, because this is the whole point of everything we're walking through today.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Hatred, the way scripture uses it here, is not God actively working to destroy a person.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's God locking a person into the decision they already made, despite the revelation he already gave them.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't manufacture their unbelief, he confirms the trade they made with their own hands after showing them exactly what they were trading away.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what makes verse 40 just instead of cruel.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: God gave this crowd more than he ever gave Esau.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And when they made Esau's trade anyway, choosing the glory in front of them over the glory standing in front of them, he sealed them in it.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: But he didn't stop there because out of that very same crowd he called a remnant and he did to those men exactly what he did to Jacob.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: He broke in, he gave them new birth they never asked for and could not have produced on their own.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: So in one crowd, standing in one place on one day, we see both we see revelation refused and revelation that lands because God made it land.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the question this whole episode has been working towards.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Which God have you actually been bringing your questions to?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: The one you built to serve what you already wanted, or the one who has already told you plainly who he is?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because the same glory that exposed this crowd's turn toward their own reflection is the glory shining on you right now, today, while you're listening to these very words.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And if the hardest seasons of your life have been the ones where God would not leave you alone, that isn't the absence of his love.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's the shape of it.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: What we see is that the very glory that exposes us is the same glory that saves us.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Father, thank you for a love that refuses to leave us where it found us.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you that you did not pass us by, that you broke into our lives and made yourself known, even when it cost us the comfortable things we were holding on to.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: Forgive us for the God we built in our own image, the one who exists to smooth out our road and serve what we already wanted.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Teach us to see your interruptions for what they actually are, and for every one of us still trading your glory for our own.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Be patient with us.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Keep speaking and make us the remnant you have always kept for yourself.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: In Jesus' name.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: As always, I want to thank you again for joining us today.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope today's message has truly helped you take a step closer knowing just how much God loves you and wants you to know Him.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if anything today resonated with you, or if you have any questions or comments, please visit us on our website at thetaway.faith, where you can send us an email, or you can click on the text us link in the episode description, as we would truly love to hear from you and know how these messages are impacting you.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in our next episode, we're going to finish John chapter 12, where Jesus speaks his last public words in this gospel and tells us plainly what happens to the word he leaves behind.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: God bless, and we'll see you next time on the takeaway.