Beatitudes Behind a Bad Day

Good morning everybody. >> There we go. I got some good mornings back. I appreciate that, man. Great to see everyone today. Thank you so much for being here. And man, just want to redouble what Caroline said. For the men in particular, man, thank you for getting your families here, for prioritizing this. It’s a one of the the saddest blights on the American church is that Father’s Day historically is the least attended Sunday of the year. Whenever pastors are projecting for the year and they’re looking at their growth and all that and they’re gonna say, “Well, Father’s Day, we’re just gonna tank.” So, whatever. So, I appreciate all the all the men in particular being here. And I want to also redouble something that Caroline said. Man, we recognize that you don’t have to just be a biological father to have a role of father in somebody’s life. You know, for any of the guys in the room, any of y’all can play the role of father through coming alongside the next generation that may only be a couple years younger than you. It doesn’t have to be 20 years younger than you. And so yeah, a little gift is for all the guys in the room. All the boys too.

So yeah, before we continue with the sermon, you know, we we always every Sunday morning, we take just a few moments and we just pray as a congregation. We don’t want to just be a church that prays. We want to be a praying church. And for the summer, we’re focusing on the next generation. We just keep praying for our kids and for our students. I want to thank everybody for coming out on Monday night for our family Palooa. We had a great turnout for that. The church that came and put that event on had really high praise for you guys and really high praise for what that event was for us. And something else that’s really cool, the pastor that spoke and that preached at the event, he did a just a very explicit gospel presentation and invited kids to come forward and talk about believing that. So, we’ve got about a dozen kids that we are doing follow-ups with right now. So, what I want to do this morning is just continue to pray for the family palooa, specifically for the kids that indicated wanting to follow Jesus. So, just grab a neighbor, buddy up with somebody and pray for the kids, the 12 or so kids that said that they want to follow Jesus. Just asking that God would continue that work that He started in them. Y’all take it away and I’ll put a bow on it. Thank you.

Holy Spirit, I’m just really enjoying taking a moment just to listen to the congregation. Listen them pray. Listening to this group of people engage in the ministry of prayer. Listening to this group of people calling on the faithful provider, the sovereign Lord of the universe, our heavenly dad, begging You to continue the work You started in those kids. Work that we saw evidence of at family palooa. Work that we continue to hear about as we do these follow-ups. God, thank You so much. Lord, I want to thank You for those kids that You drew forward to indicate some sort of move toward belief in Christ. God, getting to read those follow-up cards. Lord, some of those follow-up notes made by the volunteers just reflecting the kids’ word. Some of them so sweet, Lord. Some of them said that they already know You as Lord and Savior. Man, that’s great, too. God, I pray that You would just continue to grow Your kingdom, grow Your family one soul at a time. I’m praying You do that again this morning. God, as I have a few moments just to open up Your word, I’m praying that You would help me to communicate clearly. God, let there be nothing that I say or nothing that I do that would make it hard for anybody in this room to joyfully believe in and follow Christ. And God, for a room this size, there’s got to be somebody in here who does not yet know You as Lord and Savior, who has not yet been rescued from their sin, delivered from the domain of darkness, and transferred into the kingdom of the beloved son. I pray, Holy Spirit, You’d do that this morning for somebody in this room, You’d get a hold of them this morning. Please, Lord. God, I really need You to guard my words this morning. I need that every Sunday that I preach. It as I was talking with one of my friends before I came up here on the stage. God, thinking about this this passage we’re about to read and we’re about to get into. God, this is this is ugly. I in my wisdom, God, I wouldn’t have put this in my holy book, but I thank you that your wisdom is higher than mine and that when you spoke authoritatively, when you breathed the words of scripture, you included Judges 19, 20, and 21. Thank you for that, God. Get a hold of us. Help us connect the dots this morning. Help all of us to walk out of here loving Jesus just a little bit more. We love you. It’s in your great name that we pray. Amen.

Amen. As you start getting back to your seats, you can start opening up to Judges chapters 19, 20, and 21. As you do that, just want to give one final announcement. Next Sunday morning, I will not be preaching. My friend Jake Boram will be preaching. Jake is a buddy of mine. I call him a friend from seminary. But I was realizing this. I actually met Jake when I was a teenager the summer that I gave my life to Christ. He was a counselor at the camp that my youth group went to for summer camp. For me, he was just Jake, just one of the counselors. And then seven years later, I’m walking into one of my first seminary classes and sitting on the front row was not Jake because that’s not who he is, but sitting on like the third or the fourth row was Jake. And we got to connect and talk. We became really good friends. We were part of the same church for a couple years during seminary. He’s been a pastor at a couple different churches over the last 10 years of his vocational little ministry. And now he and his wife are looking, praying to start a church in Greenville. And he has asked Sauldam through my relationship with him, he’s asked our church to be their official sponsoring sending church. So the way things work in the Southern Baptist Convention is that pastors do not start churches, but churches start churches. So for him to be recognized by the Southern Baptist Convention, he needs a church to sign on the dotted line saying we affirm him and we believe in this gospel work. And he’s asked us to prayerfully consider that. So what we’re doing for y’all to be able to get a better taste of who he is during the Sunday school hour at 10:00, all the Sunday schools, sorry two-thirds of you are just now learning this. I’m sorry. It’s been a crazy week. We’re all going to gather in the old church at 10 a.m. Every adult, every kid is able to be with us 10:00 a.m. in the old church. And you get to meet Jake, get to hear him, hear about his calling to ministry and why plant a new church in Greenville. And then during 11:00 service, he’s going to be preaching, just sharing from God’s word. And then we will vote on the first Sunday of July if we’re going to support him or not. So, I’ve got more details for you, but for the sake of an announcement, I just wanted to give that to you guys right now.

Turn turn the gears a little bit. As I was getting ready for this the sermon this week, you know, we made this announcement last week that Judges 19, 20, and 21, it’s it’s some hard stuff. The book of Judges, it’s kind of like the HBO of the Bible, if you know what I mean. There’s a lot of gore, there’s a lot of skin, there’s a lot of blood. And the final three chapters, it’s like the worst of it. So I’m going to do my my very best to present Christ over all of these things and not to sugarcoat what’s going on here, but also not to glamorize the sin here. But as I was looking at Judges 19, 20, and 21, I was thinking like, man, how much different is our culture today from what you see in these chapters, man? And as I think about how some pockets of our society I think have like totally gone off the rails when it comes to what we celebrate sexually to what we deny about who we are biologically to what we live for materially and financially. I’m looking at these chapters and I’ll be honest, I’m kind of like, man, there’s sometimes when I feel like I live in the book of Judges where what I see happening around me is certainly not the way that Jesus taught us.

how to live. You know, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave us these eight incredible statements about the good life. He said, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are the hungry and sorry, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because God will satisfy them. Blessed are those who mourn now for they will be comforted. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness for the kingdom of God is theirs.” That’s what Jesus taught as the ideal for our lives. But man, often times I think that the beatitudes of our culture, the beatitudes of Judges would read a little bit more like this: Blessed are the busy dads who are always at work, for they can provide without being present. Blessed are those who reject marriage and use others for their pleasure, for they’ll never be tied down. Blessed are the emotionally guarded. They’ll never have to be vulnerable or open up. Blessed are those who demand respect. They’ll never have to earn it. Man, which one of those between Jesus’s beatitudes and those other beatitudes? Which one feels a little more like the culture we live in? What do you think? Maybe this side over here.

So, here’s what we’re going to do this morning. As I’m reflecting on this culture that’s being talked about in Judges 19, 20, and 21, I’m just going to walk through three chapters of scripture. So go ahead and forgive me now. We’re not going to read every single verse, but I’m going to teach all of the verses. I’m going to present four more beatitudes or in the spirit of Father’s Day and bad jokes, I’m going to give you four more batitudes. That was funny. Okay, give four more batitudes. Offer some gospel hope. Then offer four charges for all for all of us, but especially for the men in the room. So let’s begin to walk through this passage.

Chapter 19, if you want to write this down, it is the atrocity of sin. Chapter 19 is the atrocity of sin. Read verses 1-5. In those days, when there was no king in Israel, a Levite staying in the remote part of the hill country of Ephraim acquired a woman from Bethlehem in Judah as his concubine. But she was unfaithful to him. She left the Levite for her father’s house in Bethlehem in Judah. She was there for four months. Verse three. Then her husband got up and followed her to speak kindly to her and bring her back. He had his servant with him and a pair of donkeys. So she brought him to his to her father’s house. And when the girl’s dad saw him, he gladly welcomed him. His father-in-law, the girl’s dad detained him, and he stayed with him for three days. They ate, they drank, and they spent the nights there. On the fourth day, they got up early in the morning and prepared to go. But the girl’s dad said to his son-in-law, “Have something to eat to keep up your strength and then you can go.” So they go back and forth like this for three more days. The Levite ready to get home. He has rescued his bride from her unfaithfulness. He’s ready to get back to where home life is. He’s ready to return to some normalcy. But their father-in-law practicing normal Middle Eastern hospitality just keeps saying stay, eat a little bit, rest a little bit. So for three days they are detained. They are slowed in their process of getting back home.

So what happens is the Levite finally gets away from his father-in-law. He’s got his concubine. He’s got his servant. They’re all on donkeys and they’re riding. They need to get back home, but the journey is too far to make it in one day. So, they’re gonna have to stop somewhere. They make a hard decision as night is falling to stop in the city of Ramah. Now, they stopped there because they believed that because it’s a Jewish city, they would be well taken care of in Ramah. They had passed what’s now modern-day Jerusalem, thinking that city is full of non-Jews. We won’t be taken care of there. We will find some hospitality in Ramah. So they go and they sit in the sort of town square in the city of Ramah expecting one of the locals to take them in for the night. Eventually that’s what happens. An older man comes and finds them. And you can you get the picture. He’s kind of looking around a little nervously. He’s like, “Hey y y’all need somewhere to stay tonight? This isn’t a good place for y’all to sleep.” They follow him back to his house. They go to his house and that’s where they were. All of a sudden, while they are enjoying themselves, they hear a door. The owner of the house opens the door. It’s all the men of the city. All the men of the city have surrounded the place and they say, “Hey, where are those guys we saw you bring into your house? Bring them out.” I pray I prepared you for this. Okay, bring them out. We want to have sex with them. Hey man, where are those guys? The owner of the house like, “No, don’t do this. Don’t do this atrocity.” He’s trying to bargain with them. And then in a moral compromise I could never understand, the Levite takes his concubine, his wife, shoves her out the door. The men of the city all night. Catch me in verse 26. Early the next morning, the woman made her way back. And as it was getting light, she collapsed at the doorway of the man’s house where the master was. The master gets up in the morning, opened the door to the house, and went out to leave, not to look for her. He went to leave. There she was. The concubine collapsed near the doorway of the house with her hands on the threshold. “Get up,” he tells her. “Let’s go.” There’s no response. She passed away. She had died. The man put her on the donkey and set out for home. When he entered the house, when he gets home, he takes her body, divides it in 12 pieces, sends those 12 pieces to the 12 tribes of Israel, telling everybody, “Look what has happened.” Chapter 19, this incredible atrocity of sin, man. It went, it goes from bad to worse. You know, you’ve got this city full of Jewish dudes wanting to abuse other men sexually. They’re denied that. So, what they do is they take out all that frustration and energy on this woman.

Before I continue in the passage anymore, I just want to say in a room this size, purely talking statistically, there’s probably someone in here who has suffered sexual abuse as well. And I just want to say I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve it. You didn’t do anything wrong to earn that. It’s not your fault. That’s the sin and the choice and the mistakes of other people done to you. And one day partially in this life through the application of the Holy Spirit and His love to you. But one day fully when we are in heaven all that pain and trauma and that past will be removed. You’ll be fully healed in the in between time. If that is something that’s happened to you or something that’s happened to a loved one of yours and you need help processing through that, I’ve got a list of 15 Christian counselors here in Charleston that I would love to connect you with. If you need to get connected with them and you don’t have my phone number, what I want you to do, if you got a connect card on your way in, you just write your name and your number and just the word help and you just get that to me discreetly whenever you leave or you put it in one of the offering plates and I will contact you later this week just one on one and we’ll get you connected. Want to get you to the right resources.

This incredible atrocity of sin in chapter 19 leads rightly to this advance against sin in chapter 20. So the Levite takes these 12 pieces of his concubine and he sends them to the 12 tribes of Israel trying to get the word out about what happened in this Jewish city of Rama. And what do you think happened? Just best guess. Do people like this? They hate this. They hated this. They’re upset. They’re angry. They’re like, “What in the world? Who has committed this? What? Like, what?” Like, I imagine there weren’t very many completed sentences like I’m offering you right now. People are just upset. They’re rightfully upset. And they know something’s got to happen. This happened in the land of Benjamin. Benjamin is one of the 12 tribes of Israel. So the 11 other tribes muster an army to come and attack the area of Benjamin. The tribe of Benjamin. The tribe of Benjamin has the opportunity to hand over the wicked men who did this to the concubine who wanted to do this to the Levite and his servant. The Benjaminites specifically the people that live in this city. I said Rama earlier. The city of Giba. Instead of handing over these atrocious evildoers, They decide to defend them, and they muster their own army. So, you’ve got these 11 tribes ready to totally smash this city and these people, and you got these people ready to defend the sin that happened in their midst, ready to battle against all the other tribes. Catch me now in verse 18 of chapter 20. The army that’s coming to attack sets out. They go to Bethel. Bethel is where the tabernacle is stored and housed, and they inquired of God. The Israelites asked, “Who is to go first to fight for us against the Benjaminites?” God answers, “Judah will be first.” So in the morning, the Israelites set out, and they camped near Gibeah, the city where this happens.

Verse 20. The men of Israel went out to fight against Benjamin, the tribe of Benjamin, and they took their battle positions against the city specifically of Gibeah. Verse 21, the Benjaminites came out of Gibeah and slaughtered 22,000 men of Israel on the field that day. The good guy, the good guys took the loss. But the Israelite troops rallied again, took their battle positions again in the same place where they positioned themselves on the first day. They wept before the Lord until evening. They inquired of God, “Should we attack again? Should we attack our brothers, the Benjaminites, again?” God answers, “Fight against them.” Then on the second day, the Israelites advanced against the Benjaminites. Again, there’s there’s fighting. There’s battling. But again, 18,000 Israelites die. You can imagine the Israelites are pretty confused at this point. It’s like, God, this is terrible. What’s happened? You are using us to discipline these people, and but we keep taking losses. We’ve lost 30,000 people so far. What is going on? So they fast before God again.

Verse 26, the whole Israelite army goes back to Bethel where they wept, and again they sit before the Lord. They fasted that day until evening. They offer burnt offerings and fellowship offerings to the Lord. Then the Israelites inquired of God. In those days the ark of the covenant of God was there, and Phineas the son of Eleazar son of Aaron was serving before it. The Israelites asked, “Should we fight against our brothers, the Benjaminites, or should we stop?” God answers, “Fight, because I will hand them over to you tomorrow.” And God gives them to the victory. The next day, the good guys set an ambush for all the bad guys, and the good guys totally obliterate the bad guys. In fact, in the entire tribe of Benjamin, only 600 men are left. They had amassed an army of tens of thousands. You can imagine in addition to the army, there are tens of thousands of grandpas of guys that are just living their life that are totally unrelated, unassociated to what happened in Gibeah that night. Only 600 men in the entire tribe are left.

Chapter 19, the atrocities of sin. Chapter 20, it’s this advance against sin where God’s people rightfully take up arms and they go to fight against what is wrong. But in chapter 21, there’s an acceptance of sin. You see, the people of Israel start to feel bad. Man, we know that all those guys in Gibeah, they did a really terrible thing, but man, there’s only 600 men in all of Benjamin left. Is that okay? Should we Should we really let their tribe die out because of that? So, the people of Israel want to fix this problem? You see, God is disciplining the tribe of Benjamin for this incredibly terrible thing that they allowed and that they did. The people of Israel are trying to figure out what’s their role between God’s discipline and their relationships. So while they were witnesses to this atrocity of sin and while they were participants in fighting against sin, I think what’s happening in chapter 21 is that they are starting to accept sin.

Let’s read verses 1-8. The men of Israel had sworn an oath at Mizpah. None of us will give his daughter to a Benjaminite in marriage. They need to solve this problem. So the people went up to Bethel again. They sat there before God again until evening. They wept loudly. They and bitterly. They cried out, “Why? Why, Lord God of Israel, had it occurred that one tribe is missing in Israel today? They’re as good as gone.” The next day, the people get up early. They built an altar. They offered burnt offerings and fellowship offerings. And the fellow the Israelites asked, “Who who of all the tribes of Israel didn’t come to the Lord with the assembly? for they for a great oath had been taken that anyone who did not come to the Lord at Mispo would certainly be put to death. But the Israelites had compassion on their brothers, the Benjaminites, and they said, “Today a tribe has been cut off from Israel. What should we do about wives for the survivors? We’ve sworn to the Lord. We’re not going to give them our daughters as wives.” Then they asked, “Which city among the tribes of Israel did not come to the Lord at Mispo?” And it turned out that no one from Jabesh Gilead had come to the camp and the assembly.

So what’s happening here is, to try to summarize this, is you’ve got this atrocity in a city called Giba that’s in the land of Benjamin that’s part of the tribes of Israel. This atrocity in Giba is being dealt with by all the Israelites upon the people of Benjamin where they live. So think about it this way. Let’s say something terrible happens in Charleston and the other 49 states of America attack South Carolina because of it. But the rest of America feels terrible that there’s only 600 people left in our state. And what they say is, “Hey, we’ve already promised that we’re not going to give our wives to them in marriage. We’ve already promised that we’re not going to help them any further, but we don’t want them to die off. So, is there some sort of city in America that didn’t come and help us fight?” And they said, “You know what? We New Orleans or Dallas or Nashville, they didn’t come. They didn’t make this oath. They didn’t join us. Maybe we can use some of their women.”

So what they do, the people of Israel, they go to this city, Jabesh Gilead. They find 400 women who hadn’t been married. They just abduct them, kill their husbands, kill their kids—or they don’t have husbands because they’ve never been with men. So they killed all the women who had been with husbands and all that. They abduct these 400 women. 400’s not enough. They go find another town. They do that again with another 200. They just kind of embrace the fact that sin has created this crazy situation. And instead of letting God discipline His people, they’re using sin to fix a problem created by sin.

Do you see what’s happening? Does anybody else read this and your skin is crawling? Anybody else mad right now? Disgusted. Thank you. Whoever just said, Diane, thank you. You should feel this. You should look at this and be like, what in the world is happening? We should read this and we should say, why is God not fingerlightening them to death right now? At least when I’m preparing the sermon this morning and I’m thinking about my daughters, I am not thinking this is positive and encouraging. I’m looking for God to make some sense of this, Paula. I’m sitting here and I’m like, man, what in the world? How do we get here?

But again, on the other side, this is where I look and I look at the Bible and I say, “God, thank You.” Not thank You that this happened, but thank You that You didn’t shy away from the hard stuff. I’ll tell you, if you are still making up your mind about Jesus, like, if you’re still curious about Him, you’re not totally sold on Him or the Bible, what I can promise you is that God does not shy away from the hard stuff. But what God does is God meets you in the hard stuff and helps you walk through it. And if the Bible didn’t have these moments, it’d be hard to trust, to be honest. If the Bible was only positive and encouraging like Caleb all the time, it would be hard for us to relate with. But what the Bible actually does is the Bible sometimes sings the blues. The Bible captures these dark moments where we get to say, you know what, I can kind of connect with that. At least that feels a little bit more normal to me.

So, how did Israel get here? I’ve got four beatitudes for a bad day. Four beatitudes. Write these down. I believe that in this, in the area of Benjamin, they believed this: Blessed are those who use others, for they will never be taken advantage of themselves. Blessed are those who use others, for they’ll never be taken advantage of. Did anybody else notice that across these three chapters—and I didn’t read every single verse—no names are mentioned except for one priest? We don’t know the Levite’s name. We don’t know the concubine’s name. We don’t know the name of the guy that housed the Levite trying to protect them. We don’t know these names. Everybody is anonymous. And in a culture where everybody is anonymous, that means that everybody is just a means to your ends. It’s whenever you learn someone’s name. It’s whenever you learn their background that you begin to care for them. The people here believed that others are just meant to be used so that you won’t be used yourself. Blessed are those who use others. They’ll never be taken advantage of.

Number two, blessed is the man who uses others for his own pleasure, for he’ll never be unsatisfied. On Father’s Day, I’ve got to recognize the atrocities being done by men in this passage. Goodness gracious, look at all the failures of men. You got this just absolutely disgusting, heart-wrenching moment where this woman is forced into something she never would have chosen for herself because all the important men in her life had failed in their jobs to protect and take care of her. Not only that, but all the men in the city of Gibia just viewing other people as means to their own pleasure. Man, the mark of a broken culture is when men use and abuse women. In these final three chapters of this incredibly weird book, all the men are using women for self-protection. Even at the end, the spiritual leaders are viewing the 400 women over here and the 200 women over there as just means to them to get themselves out of their own guilt for being instruments of God, God’s discipline on the city of Benjamin. What as a spiritual leader gets you to this place where you think it’s okay to abduct 600 girls from their homes? It’s when you view others as means of your own self-protection, means of your own pleasure.

Number three, blessed are those who try to get the right things the wrong way, for they’ll have their cake and eat it, too. You see, what’s happening in this moment on the tail end is God is disciplining the people of Benjamin. All the Israelites feel compassion for them and they want to help deal with this problem, but they’re also recognizing they’ve made this this vow that they wouldn’t personally help marry into these families so that these 600 men won’t die off and all that. And I get it. They want a good thing. They want to make sure that that 12th tribe of Israel doesn’t die out. God had made them 12 tribes that they don’t want to see one of the tribes die off. That’s a that’s a fine enough desire. But man, the way they try to get that right desire is terrible by sending their soldiers to go and take these girls from their homes. Man, it’s like they want to have their cake and eat it, too. The leaders are using sin to fix sin. God’s leaders are compromising God’s standards to they’re using sin to fix problems created by other problems created by sin. Man, cultures that use the right things to get or that use the wrong things to get the right ways, man, they celebrate manipulating. They celebrate backstabbing. They celebrate things like this.

Finally, blessed are those who live by their own creeds, for God will never discomfort them with the truth. In chapter 20, you may have seen it, the leaders and the people of Israel are steady seeking God. At every milestone of this military exploit, they’re praying, they’re fasting, they’re weeping. You remember that? But in chapter 21, they stop talking to God. When they want to fix this problem of the tribe of Benjamin dying off, they stop talking with Him so that God will won’t discomfort them with His truth. God won’t discomfort them with His instruction. In chapter 20, they pray, they weep, they fast. In chapter 21, they just talk to themselves. They make their own plans. They fill themselves with their own desires.

It’s a lot of scripture in a little bit amount of time. So, how do we connect with this passage? I want to say hopefully you’ve never been part of things that look like this. What happened to the concubine? What happened to those girls? Hopefully, you’ve never been part of a decision that used sin to try to get a good thing. Hopefully, you’ve never been part of a moment that looked as chaotic and off the walls and off the rails as this. But I will confess that I too have made crazy mistakes in my life. I will confess that I have sinned sexually. I will confess that I have tried to get good things the wrong ways. And that’s just when I got to look at Jesus.

Philippians 2:5-11 says this, “Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead, Jesus empties Himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity.” When Jesus had come as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason, God highly exalted Jesus and gave Jesus the name that’s above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Man, if you’ve ever made a mistake, would you just raise your hands with me? Thank you. You put them down. If you’ve made a mistake like since Friday, you raise that hand right back. And I’m not talking silly things like you forgot to take the trash out. I’m talking you raised your voice. You looked at the thing on the phone. You consumed that substance. Man, we are riddled with mistakes. None of us lives the way we’re supposed to live. Right, Jonathan? None of us has a perfect record. In fact, the Bible says that we’ve all sinned and fallen woefully short of God’s standard. And you know what we earned through that sin? The Bible also says that the wages of our sin is death. Man. So, not only do I fail to live up to God’s standards, but every time I break that standard, I’m earning death for myself. That’s a pretty bad situation, right, Timmy? And you know what? That’s not a situation I can rescue myself from. None of you can. None of us can.

God knew that. And instead of letting us flounder in that brokenness, instead of letting us flounder in the bondage to our sin, instead of letting us live an eternity separated from God because of what we have done, God chose to send a rescuer for us. You see, God takes your sin extremely seriously. So serious that we can’t live in the eternal, holy presence of God without something happening. But God doesn’t just take our sin seriously. He took it personally. When He Himself bore our sin and our sorrows on the cross. When Jesus took my punishment for my sin that I deserve and Jesus died for it. When Jesus died for your sin, yours. Jesus died for yours. You know the crazy thing? Before the foundation of the world. That’s when God made this plan. So God, before anything ever was set into motion, knew what was going to happen in the city of Gibeah that night. He knew all about it. And God said, “I’m going to rescue them from that.” Before that moment happened to you where you were taken advantage of. God decided He was going to rescue you from that before you did the thing and you took advantage of somebody else. God decided He was going to rescue you from that. And He sent Jesus so that Jesus would be the way and the truth and the life. The one who could rescue us from our pain and our junk and our brokenness.

Doesn’t that sound nice? Doesn’t it? I want to speak to the dads in the room. Isn’t it nice to know that your failures as a dad don’t have to be the last word on your fatherhood, but instead the redeeming, transforming grace of God is? Or it can be, depends on if you’re going to embrace it or not. What do you want to be the final word on your home? Do you want it to be shouting at your kids? Do you want it to be manipulating your kids, lying to your kids, ignoring your kids, dads, or do you want the final word on your home to be the Father’s words to us? “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” Which one do you want? I know which one I want. I know which one I need. And that’s what God offers all of us. Dad or not, male or not, God offers the same thing for all of us. Kids, He offers it for you. Those that are not kids anymore, He offers it for us, too.

So what? My call to you, embrace Jesus’s way. Reject the world’s. So often what Scripture is recording is the way of the world. The Bible isn’t teaching us to live like the people in the book of Judges. It doesn’t want us to do that. What God wants to do is to help us see who we are without His grace.

So that we would reject that and we would cling to the way of Jesus instead. Man, this morning as I’m reading this scripture, as I’m preaching it, I feel it with you. I’m disgusted by the words coming out of my mouth and I’m like, “God, save me from that. Get me away from this stuff.” And the only way away from the atrocities of this passage is through Jesus. Embrace Jesus’s way and reject the world’s.

Man, because of Jesus, you can drop the beatitudes of today’s culture and you can embrace the beatitudes of Jesus. Because of Jesus, men, we can protect the vulnerable through our presence and even through our money. And we can take care of women and children and the marginalized around us. Because of Jesus, you and me, we can fight the sin that lives inside of us and would lead us down a destructive path that looks like this. Because of Jesus, you and me, we can seek God in every moment. But we can call on Him and we can ask Him to speak to us and to guide us and to shape our lives.

Jesus offers us a better way. The question is, have you embraced it or not? Have you given your life to Him? You know, Monday night I’m sitting about where Miss Donna is sitting and I’m watching Pastor Jeremy preach to all of the kids and preach to the adults in the room, though we didn’t know it. He’s preaching to us, too. And he’s talking about the nature of salvation. And he says, “It’s a gift. I can offer you a gift all day, arms stretched out right here, close enough for you to hear what’s rattling in the box. But until you take your hands and embrace the gift, you haven’t actually enjoyed it yet. And some Sunday mornings, if I’m being honest, I’m wondering if I’m just holding it right here. And you hear it, but you’ve yet to use your hands to reach out and embrace it for yourself. Please let that be the day you do. Please let today be the day you embrace the gift.”

That would just look simply like a prayer like this: Lord Jesus, I’m a sinner that needs to be rescued and redeemed. I need a new master of my life because I’m a terrible master. I’ve committed sin. I’ve committed a wrong and I know that I need You to fix it. Would You please forgive me for my sin and would You make me Your child, please? There’s no magic in the words, but the power is in the heart behind them.

So, here’s what I want to do. I want to give you an opportunity to do that today and go ahead and invite Al and Sam to come and join me up here at the front. We’re just gonna be right here ready to pray with anybody. Yes, Sammy, go ahead. Al, you go ahead. And man, we just want to be able to pray for anybody who knows that they have yet to give their lives to Jesus Christ, but also for all the men in the room, specifically the ones who raised their hand and said, “Yes, since Friday, I’ve made a mistake, too.” We are also here to pray for you. In fact, this is a moment where I would expect most of the men of the church would come forward and just let us pray for you. Let us talk to God on your behalf and just ask for God to help you make your way through whatever you’re going through.

So, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pray for us and if you know you need prayer this morning, you just come to Sam, Al, or myself. I think Becca and Donna, they’ll be ready. If there’s a lady in the room that you need prayer specifically for something, in fact, I just go ahead and invite y’all. Let’s go ahead and stand right here with us. If there’s a lady in the room that knows that you also need prayer for something that’s happened in your life or something that’s going on for you, you come forward and Becca and Donna be more than happy to pray for you.

So, let’s close our eyes and let’s pray. God, every time we do this, Lord, I feel like I’m just putting out the campfire, and I need You to light the spark and actually make something happen. And I’m praying right now that You would light the spark for somebody. Maybe it’s a dad who has been walking with You for a while now, but he knows That He needs you to help fix a part of His fatherhood. Would You bring him forward, Lord? Maybe it’s a little girl who wants to give her life to Christ and she doesn’t know exactly how to do that. Would You bring her forward, Father? Maybe there’s an entire family that knows that while they do love You and they’re trying to walk with You, that they need help. Would You bring them forward? God, would You help all of us to walk out of here in a few moments with an attitude of worshiping You with complete devotion? God, we love You. It’s in Your name we pray. Amen.