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The Cruel Lie You_ve Been Taught About Loneliness · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: You have been taught gently for most of your life
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Speaker 1: that loneliness is a symptom, that it's what happens when
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Speaker 1: a person drifts, that it's a warning light on the
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Speaker 1: dashboard of the soul telling you that you've wandered from God,
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Speaker 1: and the moment you get close enough to him again,
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Speaker 1: it goes away. Good men have preached that, sincere men,
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Speaker 1: men whose books are on your shelf. But the first
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Speaker 1: time loneliness appears in Scripture, there is no sin. There
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Speaker 1: is no fall. There is no drifting. There isn't a
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Speaker 1: single wrong thing anywhere on the face of the earth.
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Speaker 1: And God is standing right there in the garden, close
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Speaker 1: enough to touch, and He is the one who looks
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Speaker 1: at a man who has never sinned, who has never doubted,
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Speaker 1: who has never missed a quiet time in his life
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Speaker 1: and says, It is not good that the man should
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Speaker 1: be alone, Genesis 2.18. Sit with that. God was present,
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Speaker 1: and it was still not good for the man to
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Speaker 1: be alone, which means everything you've been told about your
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Speaker 1: own loneliness may have been half of the truth, and
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Speaker 1: the missing half is where God has been hiding for years,
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Speaker 1: waiting for you to find him. By the time we're
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Speaker 1: done today, you will understand why God did not answer
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Speaker 1: the first loneliness in Scripture by giving more of Himself
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Speaker 1: what the two Hebrew words for alone actually meant to
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Speaker 1: the people who first heard them, why God once commanded
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Speaker 1: a prophet to be lonely, and why the loneliest man
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Speaker 1: who ever lived was the only one who never deserved
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Speaker 1: to be. And you will never read your own empty
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Speaker 1: evenings the same way again. If you clicked on this,
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Speaker 1: something in you already knew. Nobody searches for a teaching
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Speaker 1: on loneliness out of curiosity. And I want you to
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Speaker 1: know that this channel was built for people exactly like you.
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Speaker 1: If this has already touched something, take a second and
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Speaker 1: like this video and send it to one person you
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Speaker 1: suspect is smiling through something. In our website, We've built
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Speaker 1: the resources that carry it past this video, the explainer
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Speaker 1: videos of every book of the Bible that slow down
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Speaker 1: the hard passages until they finally make sense, the e-book
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Speaker 1: study guides that follow our most watched teachings, and the
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Speaker 1: deep Bible story study journal made to sit open beside
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Speaker 1: you while you watch or while you read your own
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Speaker 1: Bible at your own kitchen table. They exist for one reason,
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Speaker 1: so you can hear what God is actually saying to
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Speaker 1: you in your own words, in your own house. That's
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Speaker 1: the prayer behind all of it. Everything's in the description,
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Speaker 1: and if you want to support the mission, that's where
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Speaker 1: it lives too. Now, back to the garden. Let's go
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Speaker 1: back there because you've read it a hundred times, and
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Speaker 1: I don't think you've ever seen it. Genesis 2. The
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Speaker 1: world is six days old. There is no death in it,
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Speaker 1: no thorn, no grave, no lie, no shame. Adam is
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Speaker 1: standing in a garden God planted with his own hands,
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Speaker 1: and God has just given him work he loves, and
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Speaker 1: a world with his name written all over it. Every
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Speaker 1: animal comes to him, and he names it, and don't
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Speaker 1: rush past that, because naming in the ancient world was
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Speaker 1: not labeling. Naming was knowing. Adam looks into the face
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Speaker 1: of every living creature God ever made and understands it
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Speaker 1: well enough to speak its name. And then Moses writes
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Speaker 1: the saddest half-sentence in the first two chapters of the Bible,
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Speaker 1: Genesis 2.20, and Adam gave names to all cattle and
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Speaker 1: to the fowl of the air and to every beast
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Speaker 1: of the field. But for Adam... There was not found
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Speaker 1: an helpmeet for him. Adam has met everything that exists,
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Speaker 1: and nothing has met him. Then God says the first,
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Speaker 1: not good in the Bible. Six times he has looked
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Speaker 1: at what he made and called it good. Once he
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Speaker 1: called it very good, Genesis 1.31. And now in a
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Speaker 1: perfect world he says, Lo tov, not good. The word
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Speaker 1: for alone there is levad. It doesn't mean single. It
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Speaker 1: doesn't mean unmarried. It means separated out, set apart from,
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Speaker 1: a thing standing by itself with nothing beside it of
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Speaker 1: its own kind. Adam had God. Adam had the whole earth.
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Speaker 1: Adam had purpose and beauty and a body that never ached,
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Speaker 1: and a conscience that had never once accused him. And
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Speaker 1: God— who was right there, looked at all of it
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Speaker 1: and said it isn't enough. Now here's the part almost
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Speaker 1: nobody will tell you, and I want you to hold
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Speaker 1: on to it, because it changes the shape of everything
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Speaker 1: that follows. The phrase your Bible translates help-meet or helper-suitable
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Speaker 1: is ezer k'negdo, and we've spent centuries arguing about the
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Speaker 1: second word while ignoring the first, ezer, helper. Go look
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Speaker 1: up where that word goes in the rest of the
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Speaker 1: Old Testament. Deuteronomy 33.26 There is none like unto the
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Speaker 1: God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help.
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Speaker 1: Psalm 33.20 Our soul waiteth for the Lord. He is
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Speaker 1: our help and our shield. Psalm 121.1-2 I will lift
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Speaker 1: up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.
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Speaker 1: My help cometh from the Lord. Psalm 75, Thou art
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Speaker 1: my help and my deliverer. Exodus 18.4, Moses names his
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Speaker 1: own son Eliezer, the God of my father was mine help.
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Speaker 1: As there is a word scripture reserves over and over
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Speaker 1: again for God himself. And in Genesis 2.18, God takes
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Speaker 1: that word, his own word, the word that describes what
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Speaker 1: he is to the drowning and the desperate. and he
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Speaker 1: hands it to a human being. Do you understand what
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Speaker 1: he just did? God did not answer the first loneliness
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Speaker 1: in the Bible by saying, You have me that settles it.
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Speaker 1: He answered it by making another person and putting his
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Speaker 1: own job description on her. He gave the man something
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Speaker 1: God-shaped with skin on it, and then he walked her over.
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Speaker 1: He built the ache. He built it into a sinless
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Speaker 1: man in a sinless world. in his own presence, and
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Speaker 1: then he called the ache accurate. So let me ask
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Speaker 1: you something and be honest, even if you only answer
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Speaker 1: it to yourself. Have you ever felt guilty for being lonely?
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Speaker 1: Have you ever added shame on top of it? Because
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Speaker 1: you're a believer, and you have Jesus, and he should
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Speaker 1: be enough, and the fact that you still ache must
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Speaker 1: mean your faith is thin. Genesis 2 is God's answer
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Speaker 1: to that shame. Loneliness is not proof that you failed.
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Speaker 1: It is proof that you were made in the image
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Speaker 1: of a God who has never in all eternity been alone.
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Speaker 1: BEFORE THERE WAS A WORLD THERE WAS FELLOWSHIP. THE SON
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Speaker 1: SAYS IT HIMSELF IN JOHN 17 24. THOU LOVEST ME
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Speaker 1: BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD, FATHER, SON, AND SPIRIT,
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Speaker 1: KNOWN AND KNOWING, LOVED AND LOVING, BEFORE THERE WAS A
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Speaker 1: SINGLE STAR TO SHINE ON IT. YOU CARRY THAT IN
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Speaker 1: YOU LIKE A WATERMARK. WHEN YOU ACHE TO BE KNOWN,
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Speaker 1: YOU ARE NOT BEING WEAK. You are being like him.
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Speaker 1: Hold that. We'll need it at the end. Now let
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Speaker 1: me take you somewhere that will unsettle you, because if
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Speaker 1: loneliness were only the fruit of running from God, then
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Speaker 1: the closer a man got to God, the less alone
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Speaker 1: he would be. That's the arithmetic we've all been handed.
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Speaker 1: Watch it break. Jeremiah probably still in his teens when
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Speaker 1: God calls him, and he says what any of us
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Speaker 1: would say, Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak, for
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Speaker 1: I am a child, Jeremiah 1.6. And God answers him
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Speaker 1: with a sentence that should have made him the most
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Speaker 1: secure man in Judah. Before I formed thee in the belly,
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Speaker 1: I knew thee. And before thou camest forth out of
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Speaker 1: the womb, I sanctified thee, Jeremiah 1.5. That is about
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Speaker 1: as close to God as a human being gets in
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Speaker 1: the Old Testament. Direct call, direct commission. The word of
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Speaker 1: the Lord coming to him again and again for forty years.
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Speaker 1: And here is what that man writes in chapter 15,
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Speaker 1: verse 17. I sat not in the assembly of the mockers,
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Speaker 1: nor rejoiced. I sat alone because of thy hand. Read
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Speaker 1: it again. because of thy hand, not, I sat alone
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Speaker 1: because I sinned, not, I sat alone because I wandered,
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Speaker 1: because of the hand, because of the call, because of
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Speaker 1: the nearness of the very God we've been told cures this.
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Speaker 1: And then it gets worse. And this is the verse
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Speaker 1: that ought to end the argument forever. Jeremiah 16.2 God
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Speaker 1: speaks to him and says, Thou shalt not take thee
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Speaker 1: a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in
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Speaker 1: this place. Do you see it? The same God who
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Speaker 1: stood in a perfect garden and said it is not
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Speaker 1: good that the man should be alone, looked at Jeremiah
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Speaker 1: and commanded him to be alone. That is not a contradiction.
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Speaker 1: That is a sermon. Because in verses 3 and 4,
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Speaker 1: God tells him why. The children born in that place
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Speaker 1: are going to die of grievous deaths. and Jeremiah's empty
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Speaker 1: house is going to be a prophecy the whole city
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Speaker 1: has to look at every single day. His loneliness was
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Speaker 1: the message. He wasn't allowed the ordinary comforts because God
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Speaker 1: had made his life into a sign, and a sign
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Speaker 1: has to be read. So when you hear a preacher
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Speaker 1: say a believer shouldn't feel lonely, that if you're lonely,
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Speaker 1: something in your life is promoting it, Take that man
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Speaker 1: to Jeremiah 16 and let him explain the prophet whose
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Speaker 1: solitude was assigned by God in writing as an act
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Speaker 1: of obedience. Some of you know this and you've never
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Speaker 1: had language for it. Something happened to you, a diagnosis,
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Speaker 1: a loss, a season where God took you down to
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Speaker 1: the studs, and you came out of it seeing things
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Speaker 1: other people can't see yet, and now you sit in
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Speaker 1: conversations that used to satisfy you, and you feel like
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Speaker 1: you're watching them through glass. You didn't grow cold. You
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Speaker 1: grew deep. And the deeper the water gets, the fewer
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Speaker 1: people are standing in it with you. That's not a symptom.
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Speaker 1: It's a cost. Jeremiah paid it, and God never apologized
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Speaker 1: for it. Which brings us to a harder word, and
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Speaker 1: I want to handle it carefully. because this is where
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Speaker 1: Scripture gets almost unbearable. There's a second Hebrew word for alone, badad,
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Speaker 1: and you need to know where it lives, because the
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Speaker 1: Bible only uses it in certain rooms. Leviticus 13, a
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Speaker 1: man's skin breaks out, and the priest examines him and
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Speaker 1: pronounces him unclean. And the law says, verses 45 and 46,
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Speaker 1: his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and
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Speaker 1: he shall put a covering upon his upper lip and
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Speaker 1: shall cry, unclean, unclean. He shall dwell alone. Without the
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Speaker 1: camp shall his habitation be. Badad, that's the word, not lonely, quarantined,
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Speaker 1: not by himself, put out, torn clothes, which is what
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Speaker 1: you wore to a funeral, because he was attending his own,
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Speaker 1: a hand over his mouth so his breath couldn't reach you,
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Speaker 1: and a voice he had to raise himself, announcing his
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Speaker 1: own condition so that people had time to get out
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Speaker 1: of the way. Every night he watches the fires of
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Speaker 1: the camp from a distance. He hears the voices of
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Speaker 1: his own family carried on the wind, and he cannot
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Speaker 1: go home. And here's the part that will break you
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Speaker 1: if you let it. Under that law, if he touched anyone,
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Speaker 1: they became unclean too. His condition was contagious. His cleanness wasn't.
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Speaker 1: So the safest, kindest, most religious thing anyone could do
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Speaker 1: was stay away from him. He was alone, and everybody
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Speaker 1: was right to leave him there. Remember that. It comes back.
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Speaker 1: Now open Lamentations. The city is rubble. The temple is ash.
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Speaker 1: And Jeremiah writes the very first line, Lamentations 1-1. How
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Speaker 1: doth the city sit solitary that was full of people?
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Speaker 1: Same word, Badad, Jerusalem, the city of God, the place
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Speaker 1: where his name dwelt, is described with the word for
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Speaker 1: a leper outside the camp. And in the middle of
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Speaker 1: that same book, Lamentations 3.28, he says of the suffering man,
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Speaker 1: He sitteth alone, and keepeth silence, because he hath borne
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Speaker 1: it upon him, badad again, sitting in the ashes with
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Speaker 1: nothing left. Now count the verses backward from there. Lamentations 3.22-23
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Speaker 1: It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed.
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Speaker 1: because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning.
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Speaker 1: Great is thy faithfulness. The most quoted hope verse in
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Speaker 1: the Old Testament, the one on the coffee mug, the
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Speaker 1: one they sing at your church. It was written by
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Speaker 1: a man sitting in Bedad, in the smoke of a
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Speaker 1: burned city, with no wife and no children, because God
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Speaker 1: had forbidden them, looking at the corpse of everything he'd
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Speaker 1: spent forty years trying to save. Great is, thy faithfulness
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Speaker 1: was not written from a good week, it was written
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Speaker 1: from the bottom. And then Scripture does something that ought
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Speaker 1: to stop your heart. Numbers 23.9 Balaam looks down from
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Speaker 1: the heights at Israel, camped below, and prophesies, Lo, the
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Speaker 1: people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among
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Speaker 1: the nations. Badad Israel's chosenness is described with the leper's word.
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Speaker 1: Being set apart is being set apart. There is no
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Speaker 1: version of belonging to God that doesn't cost you belonging
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Speaker 1: somewhere else. And then Deuteronomy 32.12, Moses is singing over
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Speaker 1: the nation at the end of his life, and he says,
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Speaker 1: So the Lord alone did lead him, and there was
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Speaker 1: no strange God with him. Badad, God uses the leper's
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Speaker 1: word for himself. He is not a stranger to the
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Speaker 1: outside of the camp. He has been Badad since before
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Speaker 1: there was a camp. I want to pause here for
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Speaker 1: one moment because I know some of you have stopped
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Speaker 1: and reached for a pen. If today is opening something
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Speaker 1: in you, this is exactly why our store exists. We
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Speaker 1: have e-book study guides built to walk you slowly through
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Speaker 1: what we just did, the Hebrew words underneath the English,
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Speaker 1: the ones your translation had to flatten to fit on
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Speaker 1: the page. We have explainer videos that take a single
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Speaker 1: hard passage and stay there until it opens. And we
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Speaker 1: have full video lessons that carry a subject across several
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Speaker 1: teachings so you're not trying to swallow a book of
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Speaker 1: the Bible in one sitting. we invite you to use them,
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Speaker 1: not to make you a scholar, to help you go deeper,
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Speaker 1: until you can hear what God is saying to you
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Speaker 1: out of a page you've read a hundred times and
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Speaker 1: never once heard. It's all in the description, and it's
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Speaker 1: there to help you. So let me show you what
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Speaker 1: God does with the wilderness, because he does not treat
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Speaker 1: it the way we do. We treat the empty place
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Speaker 1: as the problem. He treats it as the address. There's
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Speaker 1: a woman in Genesis 16 the church rarely preaches. She
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Speaker 1: isn't Hebrew. She isn't free. She's an Egyptian slave named Hagar,
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Speaker 1: handed to a man by another woman as a solution
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Speaker 1: to a problem she never had a vote in. And
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Speaker 1: when it works, when she conceives, she becomes unbearable to Sarai.
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Speaker 1: And Sarai deals so harshly with her that she runs, pregnant,
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Speaker 1: into the desert, toward Egypt, toward home, toward anything. She
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Speaker 1: has no husband of her own, no mother, no standing,
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Speaker 1: no property, no name in anyone's mouth except as a
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Speaker 1: description of what she's for. Go read the chapter. and
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Speaker 1: count how many times Abram and Sarai say her and
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Speaker 1: she instead of using the name. If loneliness has an anatomy,
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Speaker 1: this woman is the diagram. And Genesis 16.7, the angel
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Speaker 1: of the Lord, found her by a fountain of water
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Speaker 1: in the wilderness, not in the tent, not in the camp,
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Speaker 1: in the exact place where she had finally run out
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Speaker 1: of people. And he asked her a question I want
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Speaker 1: you to hear, as if it were spoken over your
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Speaker 1: own kitchen table at eleven at night. Verse 8, Hagar,
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Speaker 1: Sarai's maid, whence camest thou, and whither wilt thou go?
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Speaker 1: He uses her name, the name nobody in that household
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Speaker 1: had bothered to use in months. And do you hear
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Speaker 1: the echo? It's the second time in Genesis that God
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Speaker 1: comes looking for someone who is hiding and asks a
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Speaker 1: question he already knows the answer to. Genesis 3.9 Where
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Speaker 1: art thou? He never asks because he's lost you. He
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Speaker 1: asks because you're lost to yourself. And then Hagar does
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Speaker 1: something unrepeatable in Scripture, Genesis 16.13. And she called the
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Speaker 1: name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God
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Speaker 1: seest me. For she said, Have I also here looked
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Speaker 1: after him that seeth me? El Roy, the God who
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Speaker 1: seeth me, in the whole Bible, sixty-six books, thousands of years,
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Speaker 1: prophets and kings and apostles, exegetes, one human being ever
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Speaker 1: gives God a name, not Abraham, not Moses, who asked
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Speaker 1: for it and was handed I Am. Not David, not Paul,
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Speaker 1: a runaway pregnant Egyptian slave girl in the desert at
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Speaker 1: the lowest and least defensible moment of her life, looks
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Speaker 1: up and names God, and God lets it stand. Verse
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Speaker 1: 14 says they named the well after what she said, Beelahairoi,
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Speaker 1: the well of the living one who sees me. Somebody
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Speaker 1: drank from that well for generations because a lonely woman
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Speaker 1: met God in the one place nobody was watching, and
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Speaker 1: notice she isn't rescued. Read verse 9 again. Return to
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Speaker 1: thy mistress and submit thyself. He sent her back. Nothing
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Speaker 1: about her circumstances improves that afternoon. But she walks back
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Speaker 1: into that camp, knowing something the woman in the tent
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Speaker 1: with the husband and the wealth and the promise did
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Speaker 1: not know. She had been seen, by name, on the
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Speaker 1: worst day of her life. You may have been praying
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Speaker 1: for God to change your situation. He may be waiting
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Speaker 1: to change your eyes. There is a knowledge available in
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Speaker 1: the wilderness that is not available in the camp. and
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Speaker 1: he will not hand it to you in a crowd,
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Speaker 1: which is exactly what happens to Jacob, and I'd bet
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Speaker 1: money you've never noticed the sentence. Genesis 32. Jacob is terrified.
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Speaker 1: Esau is coming with 400 men, and Jacob has spent
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Speaker 1: his whole life outrunning consequences, and there is nowhere left
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Speaker 1: to run. So he does what he's always done. He
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Speaker 1: manages it, he sends the flocks ahead, then the servants,
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Speaker 1: then the gifts, droves of them, spaced out on the
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Speaker 1: road like a man trying to buy back twenty years,
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Speaker 1: then his wives, then his children, then everything he owns
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Speaker 1: crosses the brook Jabbok, and he's standing on the wrong
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Speaker 1: side of the water with nothing. And then verse 24
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Speaker 1: says it, and Jacob was left alone. And there wrestled
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Speaker 1: a man with him until the breaking of the day.
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Speaker 1: God didn't show up while the camp was full. He
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Speaker 1: showed up when the last person crossed the river. Jacob
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Speaker 1: had been a believer his whole life. He'd had the
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Speaker 1: ladder at Bethel, the vision, the promise, the stone under
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Speaker 1: his head, and the angels on the stairs, Genesis 28.12.
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Speaker 1: Twenty years of hearing about God, and he had never
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Speaker 1: once been touched until the night everything he'd been hiding
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Speaker 1: behind was on the other side of the water. That
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Speaker 1: night his hip is put out of joint, his name
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Speaker 1: is changed, he limps for the rest of his life,
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Speaker 1: and in verse 30 he says,' I have seen God
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Speaker 1: face to face, and my life is preserved.' Some of
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Speaker 1: us are praying to be spared the very solitude God
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Speaker 1: has scheduled as the appointment. He isn't late. The room
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Speaker 1: had to empty first. Now let me take you to
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Speaker 1: the darkest place in the Bible, and then we'll come home.
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Speaker 1: There is a man in the Gospels who did nothing wrong,
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Speaker 1: not once. And in a garden— and it's always a garden,
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Speaker 1: isn't it? He takes three friends up with him and says,
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Speaker 1: Matthew 26, 38, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.
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Speaker 1: Tarry ye here, and watch with me. That's a request.
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Speaker 1: Sit with how strange that is. The Son of God
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Speaker 1: asks three fishermen to stay awake with him. He goes
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Speaker 1: a stone's throw away and prays until Luke 22.44. His
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Speaker 1: sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling
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Speaker 1: down to the ground, and he comes back, and they're asleep.
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Speaker 1: Verse 40. What, could ye not watch with me one hour?
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Speaker 1: And he goes back and prays again, and comes back,
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Speaker 1: and they're asleep again. Three times he reaches for company,
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Speaker 1: and three times his hand closes on nothing. Then Matthew 26, 56.
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Speaker 1: Then all the disciples forsook him and fled. But here's
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Speaker 1: the thing I need you to see, and it's the
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Speaker 1: reason this teaching exists. Days earlier, Jesus had told them
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Speaker 1: this was coming. John 16, 32. Behold, the hour cometh, yea,
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Speaker 1: is now come, that ye shall be scattered every man
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Speaker 1: to his own, and shall leave me alone. And yet
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Speaker 1: I am not alone, because the Father is with me.
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Speaker 1: He knew he'd be deserted, and he said he could
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Speaker 1: handle it because of one thing. The Father is with me.
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Speaker 1: That was his floor. That was the ground under his feet.
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Speaker 1: Every one of us has a version of that sentence,
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Speaker 1: the thing we tell ourselves at two in the morning
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Speaker 1: when everyone's gone. His was true in a way ours
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Speaker 1: never will be. Now follow him out of the garden.
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Speaker 1: They take him outside the city, outside the walls. Hebrews 13.12
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Speaker 1: says it on purpose. Jesus also. that he might sanctify
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Speaker 1: the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate
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Speaker 1: outside the camp, the leper's address. And he hangs there,
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Speaker 1: and the crowd is enormous, and out of the darkness
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Speaker 1: comes the loneliest sentence a human mouth has ever formed.
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Speaker 1: Matthew 27.46 Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, that is to say,
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Speaker 1: my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, do
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Speaker 1: you hear it? The one thing he said he would
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Speaker 1: always have, I am not alone because the Father is
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Speaker 1: with me, is the one thing removed. That is the
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Speaker 1: floor giving way. That is the bottom of Badad. He
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Speaker 1: didn't just lose his friends. He lost the sentence he'd
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Speaker 1: been standing on since before the world existed. He was
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Speaker 1: not merely sympathizing with your loneliness on that cross. He
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Speaker 1: was made it. He took the leper's word into his
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Speaker 1: own body, and he went into it on purpose so
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Speaker 1: that it would have a bottom, so that no matter
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Speaker 1: how far you fall, you land on him. And now
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Speaker 1: go back to Leviticus 13 with me, because Scripture never
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Speaker 1: leaves a thread hanging. Remember the rule? The leper's uncleanness
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Speaker 1: was contagious. His cleanness wasn't. Touch him, and you became him.
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Speaker 1: Matthew 8, 2-3. A leper comes to Jesus, breaking every
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Speaker 1: law in the book by coming near, and says, Lord,
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Speaker 1: if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. And the
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Speaker 1: text says, Jesus put forth his hand and touched him.
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Speaker 1: He touched him, and the contagion ran backward. For the
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Speaker 1: first time since Leviticus was written, uncleanness didn't win the exchange.
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Speaker 1: The clean one touched the unclean man, and instead of
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Speaker 1: Jesus becoming a leper, the leper became clean. That is
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Speaker 1: the whole gospel in one verb. Everything you carry, that
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Speaker 1: you think would contaminate anyone who got close enough to
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Speaker 1: see it, he reaches for it and it doesn't take.
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Speaker 1: His cleanness is the contagious one now. And do you
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Speaker 1: know what Hebrews says next in 13.13? Let us go
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Speaker 1: forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.
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Speaker 1: Outside the camp, the place you've been ashamed of, the
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Speaker 1: place you assumed was your punishment. Scripture says, go there,
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Speaker 1: because that's where he is. He didn't remove the wilderness,
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Speaker 1: he moved into it. So what do we do with
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Speaker 1: our own? Paul, at the end of his life in
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Speaker 1: a cold cell, asking Timothy to bring his coat before winter,
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Speaker 1: 2 Timothy 4.13, that detail alone should tell you what
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Speaker 1: those last weeks were like. He writes in verse 11,
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Speaker 1: only Luke is with me, and then verses 16 and 17,
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Speaker 1: two sentences most of us have never learned to hold
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Speaker 1: at the same time. At my first answer no man
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Speaker 1: stood with me, but all men forsook me. And then,
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Speaker 1: without a breath in between, notwithstanding, the Lord stood with
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Speaker 1: me and strengthened me, both at once. The chair was
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Speaker 1: empty and Christ was standing in the room. That is
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Speaker 1: the resolution, and it's harder and better than what you've
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Speaker 1: been offered. God does not always empty your calendar of loneliness,
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Speaker 1: but he will not leave the chair empty. He sits
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Speaker 1: in it. Deuteronomy 31.6, quoted again in Hebrews 13.5, I
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Speaker 1: will never leave thee nor forsake thee. In the Greek
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Speaker 1: of Hebrews, that promise is stacked with negatives. The way
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Speaker 1: a man says a thing, when he's determined, you will
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Speaker 1: not misunderstand him. Never, not ever, not once. And John 14.18,
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Speaker 1: from the mouth of Jesus himself, I will not leave
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Speaker 1: you comfortless. The word is orphanous, orphans. He knows exactly
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Speaker 1: which fear he is answering. And then, because he never
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Speaker 1: forgets what he said in the garden, he does the
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Speaker 1: other thing too. Psalm 68.5-6 A father of the fatherless
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Speaker 1: and a judge of the widows is God in his
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Speaker 1: holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families, and the
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Speaker 1: word is yakid, solitary only, the same word David uses
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Speaker 1: in Psalm 25.16 when he prays, Turn thee unto me,
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Speaker 1: and have mercy upon me, for I am desolate and afflicted.
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Speaker 1: God sets the solitary in families, not in a better mood,
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Speaker 1: not in a fuller schedule, in families, because the first
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Speaker 1: not good in a perfect world was never answered with
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Speaker 1: a private devotional. It was answered with a person carrying
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Speaker 1: God's own job description, and it is still answered with people.
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Speaker 1: That's what the church was supposed to be. That's why
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Speaker 1: Ecclesiastes 4.9-10 says two are better than one, for if
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Speaker 1: they fall, the one will lift up his fellow. But
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Speaker 1: woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for
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Speaker 1: he hath not another to help him up. And if
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Speaker 1: you have been alone in a pew for 15 years,
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Speaker 1: that isn't God's design failing. That's ours. And it may
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Speaker 1: be that the reason God has kept you awake with
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Speaker 1: this ache is that he intends to send you across
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Speaker 1: the room to somebody who's been aching in the seat
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Speaker 1: behind you the whole time. You've been asking him to
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Speaker 1: send you an easer. He may be trying to make
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Speaker 1: you one. You are not broken because you're lonely. You're accurate.
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Speaker 1: You were built by a God who has never been
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Speaker 1: alone for a world where you were never meant to be.
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Speaker 1: And he came, and he was born outside the room,
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Speaker 1: and he died outside the gate, and he took the
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Speaker 1: leper's word into his own body, so that the one
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Speaker 1: place you were sure he'd never follow you is the
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Speaker 1: very place he's been standing all along. Father, we come
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Speaker 1: to you honestly today without the polish. You know the
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Speaker 1: rooms we sit in. You know the hour we wake at.
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Speaker 1: You know the smile we've perfected and the silence underneath it,
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Speaker 1: and you have never once been fooled by it. Thank
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Speaker 1: you that you called our aloneness not good before we
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Speaker 1: ever sinned, that our longing isn't a defect but a
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Speaker 1: fingerprint of your image in us. You have never been alone.
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Speaker 1: Before the foundation of the world, the Father loved the Son,
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Speaker 1: and you made us to ache like that, on purpose,
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Speaker 1: and then you did not scold Adam for the ache.
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Speaker 1: You met it. For the one watching who has confused
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Speaker 1: loneliness with guilt set them free tonight. For the one
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Speaker 1: who sits alone because your hand is upon them, like
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Speaker 1: Jeremiah— Give them courage to stay in the deep water,
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Speaker 1: and let them find the way he did, that your
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Speaker 1: mercies are new every morning, even in the ashes. For
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Speaker 1: the one in the wilderness running, out of options and
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Speaker 1: out of people, be El Roy. Speak their name out
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Speaker 1: loud in the desert. Let them look up and say,
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Speaker 1: I have seen the one who sees me. For the
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Speaker 1: one who has watched everything they hid behind cross to
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Speaker 1: the other side of the river, wrestle them. Don't let
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Speaker 1: go until the breaking of the day. And if they
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Speaker 1: limp the rest of their lives, let it be because
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Speaker 1: they touched you. Lord Jesus, you asked three friends to
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Speaker 1: stay awake with you. and they couldn't. You said, I
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Speaker 1: am not alone, because the Father is with me, and
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Speaker 1: then you let even that be taken, and cried out
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Speaker 1: into a silence no one has ever measured. You went
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Speaker 1: outside the gate, you wore the word we are all
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Speaker 1: afraid of, and you put out your hand and touched
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Speaker 1: what everyone else was right to run from. So we ask,
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Speaker 1: don't only take the loneliness, inhabit it, stand in the
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Speaker 1: empty chair, and then do what you did in the garden,
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Speaker 1: set the solitary in families, send us a person, and
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Speaker 1: make us one. We are yours, we are not alone,
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Speaker 1: even when we feel it. In the name of the
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Speaker 1: one who was forsaken, so that we never would be,
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Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. Amen. And if you've reached the point where
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Speaker 1: surface teaching won't hold you anymore, if you want to
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Speaker 1: walk through the Bible the way we walked through those
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Speaker 1: Hebrew words tonight, book by book, with the video lessons
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Speaker 1: and explainer videos and study guides that exist for no
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Speaker 1: other reason than to help you hear what God is
34:47
Speaker 1: saying to you, we've opened the Founders Membership. It's for
34:53
Speaker 1: people who don't want the highlight reel. Inside, we take
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Speaker 1: every book of Scripture and open it the way we
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Speaker 1: opened Genesis 2 tonight. The words underneath the words, the context,
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Speaker 1: the connections, the questions your pastor doesn't have 40 minutes
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Speaker 1: on a Sunday to answer. We built it for you,
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Speaker 1: and we'd count it a privilege to have you in
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Speaker 1: there with us. The link is in the description below.
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Speaker 1: Until next time, stay rooted in the Word. Stay blessed.