Following Jesus #10 - In the Way of Clarity

Episode Description

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund walks through the first part of John 16 and 3 ways we see the methods that clarity often works from the Holy Spirit in our lives.

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Message Transcript

Good morning and welcome. It's great to be together at Orchard Hill. Just before we jump into the teaching today, I want to take a moment to recognize veterans. It's Veterans Day weekend. So if you're a veteran, would you stand, here in the Wexford Auditorium, in the chapel, Butler County, Strip District, would you just stand up for a moment?

I would guess that sometimes when you're asked to stand like that, you feel like, okay, it's veteran's day, we get the quick stand up and people thank us, but I hope you know that, for many of us who did not serve, we really are grateful for the things that you gave so that the quality of life, the freedoms that we enjoy, are things that we can continue to enjoy as a nation. So thank you for the way that you have served and helped all of us in different ways.

I also just want to say congratulations to several people, who are part of our church, who ran for different things in the local elections, school boards, things in different districts. As far as I know, everyone from our church who ran for office won, so congratulations and great job on that as well.

So let's take a moment and pray together. Father, I ask today, as we're gathered in a couple of different locations, but yet one church, that you would speak to us, God, wherever we're coming from, whatever our week has been. I pray that my word would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.

In 1999 John F. Kennedy, Jr. was living in Manhattan, and he found it difficult to always commute between Manhattan and Massachusetts, where his family had some luxury property. So he bought himself an airplane and he learned to fly his airplane because that way he wouldn't be on anybody else's schedule. He could go take off and fly his plane up to Martha's Vineyard and spend time on weekends with his family.

One weekend he decided to take this flight, and there was some weather advisories that had come in saying there'd be some fog, but he figured he would be able to navigate it just fine. His fiance, and I believe her sister, and John F. Kennedy, Jr. got in the plane that afternoon, on a Friday, and took off. And soon, as he was flying, he was in dense fog. And as people who investigate these things do, he looked at, they've looked at it since then and have seen that it is likely that what happened, as he was flying in the fog, that he began to trust his senses rather than the instruments that would tell him where he was. What ended up happening was his plane crashed into the ocean and they all lost their lives. When people, again, have looked at it, what they've said is that the reason this is true is because your orientation, when you're in the fog, tricks you, so you have to fly by your instruments because if you pay attention to what you think, it will be disorienting.

I saw that and I thought it's in some ways a good analogy for our spiritual life, for our moral life. Because many of us, if we're honest, think that we have a great sense of how things are, how things should be, and that we don't really need an outside voice. We don't need an instrument of any kind. That if we follow our own sensibilities, that we'll be led to great decisions. And then sometimes we end up in a fog where it's unclear and we think what I need to do is I just need to get in touch with what's inside of me more than anything else.

Well, this year we've spent a lot of time in the gospel of John. There are four gospels in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. John is a gospel account, an account of Jesus' life. The good news of John is what that really means. And so John, or the good news according to John, what John does is he tells us about Jesus, that Jesus is God, that Jesus came to Earth, that Jesus is headed to a cross. We're still before the cross at this point in the gospel of John, John 16, and that what Jesus is about is helping us know who God is and come into a relationship with God. That if we believe in Jesus Christ, that we can have eternal life. John 3:16, one of the most famous verses.

And now we come to John 16, and one of the things that John says here is he says that Jesus says, because he's recording Jesus' words, is that Jesus says, "I'm going away, and if I go away it's better for you that I go away than if I stay." And his disciples were there, his followers, his initial followers were thinking, really, how could it be better for us that you go away? And what Jesus says is, "It's better for you that I go away because my going away means that you'll have a different role with the Holy Spirit. That the Holy Spirit will come." And if you were here a few weeks ago, we talked about the word that John uses, Jesus uses here for the Holy Spirit is the word Paraclete. It means advocate or comfort or counselor, one who comes alongside. And so Jesus says, "I'm going away so that you'll have this Holy Spirit that will come and the Holy Spirit will be the one who comes alongside you to help you, to advocate for you, to be your comforter."

And what John 16 tells us, Verse 13, is that the Spirit will guide us into all truth. And the phrase, in the original language for guide, is a word that means to guide through danger, to guide through difficulty, safely to your destination. So the Holy Spirit is given to help people who want to follow Jesus, to be guided safely to their destination. And then several times he refers to the Spirit as the Spirit of Truth. In other words, we could say that there's a sense in which the Holy Spirit is like an instrument panel flying in fog, that if you'll trust the Holy Spirit you'll have clarity, but if you and I trust our own intuition, our own gut, what will happen is sometimes we'll think we understand things and it may be to our own peril. In other words, if you're a follower of Jesus, there should be a sense in which you have clarity. You should be characterized by clarity, moral, spiritual clarity in terms of how you think about different things.

As we think about that, my guess is, many of us think, well, I have clarity, or we think of clarity in terms of a way that maybe clarity doesn't come. And what I mean is, what many of us will do is we'll think, well, clarity will be when I pray that all of a sudden I'll just have an epiphany and light will shine and God will say, "Go this way, not that way." Have you ever had that moment where you think, if I can just get God's clarity, then I'll know. Some of us think that maybe the way that we get clarity is from our gut. That we just have our heart, that we follow our heart, that if we'll let our heart and our gut speak, then it will be plain to us.

But in John 16, the first several verses, what we see is the way that clarity often works from the Holy Spirit in someone's life. So I'd like to look at three ways that the clarity of the Holy Spirit works in our lives. The first is the Holy Spirit gives clarity to keep going. And here's why I say this, Verse 1 of Chapter 16. "All this I've told you so that you will not fall away." Now, all this, is referring back to Chapter 15, and at the end of Chapter 15 John tells us, Jesus tells us, John records it, that the world will hate people who are followers of Jesus. If you were here last week, at any of our campuses, one of our different pastors talked about this and about how challenging it can be to be a follower of Jesus in our world today. And Jesus says here, "I've told you all of this so that you will not fall away."

Now, our church has a theological understanding of falling away that says, once we come to know who Jesus is and we've trusted in Jesus, that God holds us. So sometimes what can happen is when we read a verse like this that says, "I've told you this so that you won't fall away." As we say, well, falling away isn't really an option, but I want to know that in the Bible the biblical writers saw falling away as a real possibility. In other words, to start out in the faith and then end up not in the faith. And all you have to do is look at the parable Jesus told in Luke 8 about the Parable of the Soils to see this.

In the Parable of the Soils Jesus says that the word of God is like seed that's planted on the ground, and he said, "Some people, their hearts are like hard soil, it doesn't go in. Some people, they believe right away, but it's shallow. It sprouts up just a little bit, but it doesn't last." And then he says, "Then there's some who the seed will sprout into a plant, but it will be choked out by the worries of this world, by all the things of this world, and they will fall away." In fact, he uses the exact same word, the idea of falling away. And what Jesus is pointing to is he's saying, you can have whatever theological system you want, but I want you to know that practically speaking, there are people who start out and appear to have faith, and whether you want to debate if it was genuine faith or not, genuine faith is a debate for another time, but he's saying it's a real category of people who begin the process of faith and then end up not having faith. And he says, "I want you to understand that there are things that will happen that are difficult and challenging if you decide to follow me."

And why this is important is, this isn't in the small print at the bottom of a contract. You know how at the bottom of a contract sometimes you get something that's in really fine print that says we can cancel this for any reason, anytime, forever. This is not in the small print. Jesus is saying, "I want you to know," right up front, "that if you follow me it's going to put you at odds with people in your world." In fact, here's how he describes this. Verse 2, he says, "They," speaking of people who aren't of faith, "will put you out of the synagogue." That doesn't seem like much to us because the synagogue is an ancient category, and if you say, well, it's roughly equivalent to the church, even being put out of a church, which rarely happens, you'd say, "No big deal. I just go down the road and I go to a different church."

But in this day and age, to be put out of the synagogue would have disrupted your relational network, probably your economic well being, because if you were put out of the synagogue people would stop doing business with you. So this was substantial. And then he says, "In fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering service to God." What he says is, he says, there's coming a time when people will be so adamant against people of faith that they will want to literally put people to death and they'll actually think that they're doing God a solid by doing so.

Now we, in America, have not arrived at that moment, but certainly there are people who feel like if they take a position or a view that's opposing to what is Christian, what is biblical, that they're offering service to God. So what he's doing here is, he's helping us to see that one of the clarities, when we're in the fog, is to say, I need to keep going. I need to continue, not fall away.

I heard one person refer to some focus groups that were done to ask people how they saw Christians, or Christianity. Here were just some of the responses. Many people say Christianity is very stifling. It's full of people who aren't open. That Christianity gives people a reason to be hateful and to feel better about themselves. That Christianity's very oppressive. That it's about a bunch of rules and coercion. That it's misguided, dangerous and crazy. That it's full of conformity and ignorance and closed minded people. That it's old, rich white men, pretty much, exclusively. That it's anti-science. That it's obnoxious. That the people are too happy and that they're stupid. That's just one quick focus group saying, what do you think of Christians?

And what Jesus does here is he says, "I want you to know, that if you follow me, that there will be some things that will put you at odds with the predominant culture."

William Barr, who is the Attorney General, gave a speech at Notre Dame last month. He's a practicing Catholic, is part of the current administration. I don't agree with everything in his speech or everything that he necessarily stands for politically, but I figured since I quoted somebody on the political left a few weeks ago, I can quote somebody on the political right today.

Here's what William Barr said in his speech at Notre Dame. He said, "We've seen a steady erosion of our traditional Judaeo Christian moral system, and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square." And what he's referring to is he's saying, here's what's happening in our culture. He says, "Our country had some moorings that were built on the idea of some of the scriptural principles, the dignity of human life. That there were things, in terms of the morality of the fabric of our nation, that had some bearing beyond just simply, what do you think is best?" He says, "Now, people want that out of the public square." He said, "By any honest assessment, the consequences of this moral upheaval have been grim." He says, "Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground." And then he said these issues, he said, "There are more children being born without two parents who are planning to raise the child. There's an increase of mental illness. Drug overdoses are substantially higher than they were. Suicide rates continue to climb, and senseless violence is also experiencing an uptick."

And what he was driving at is he was saying that the things that seemed to matter in our culture are often at odds with the things that matter in Christianity, and that the people who are opposed to Christianity think they're doing a service to God say, "We don't want any morality or any thoughts of how you live to be part and parcel of what's going on here and now." And here's why this matters.

Chances are, if you're just exploring faith, even just to come to a place like Orchard Hill, may have invited some ridicule. Maybe your husband, your wife, said, "What are you doing? You're going there." Or if you get involved in a group to try to study the Bible together, that there will be some people in your life who will say, "Is that really worth it?" And then there will be times that you'll come to believe something that the Bible teaches, that scripture teaches, and then you'll say, "But this puts me at odds with the broader culture, and I don't like that feeling." And what the Holy Spirit does is the Holy Spirit brings clarity in the fog to say you can keep going.

Maybe what this is like is a marathon runner. I've never tried to run a marathon, nor do I ever intend to. But I've been told that those who run marathons will often hit a wall, what they describe as a wall, where mentally they will say, "I can't keep going. If I keep going, it's too difficult, it's too hard." And then once they cross the wall, that a second wind kicks in. That's where the phrase second wind often comes from. And all of a sudden they say, "I can run more." And then sometimes they'll hit even another wall in the race to try to run their full race to the best of their extent and their capacity.

Now, why do they push through the wall? Because knowing that the wall is coming, they can say, "I want the prize at the end, running, finishing, getting the best time that I've ever run for, so I'm willing to endure the pain and the difficulty and knowing that it's coming helps me to keep running." And the Spirit of God gives that kind of clarity to people who begin the path of following Jesus. That's one point of clarity.

Here's the second way that the Spirit provides clarity. And we're just going to say that this is... the Holy Spirit gives clarity to change direction. This is this part in Verse 8 and following, it says, "When he comes," speaking of the Holy Spirit, "he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment. About sin, because people do not believe in me. About righteousness, because I'm going to the Father where you can see me no longer. And about judgment, because the Prince of this world now stands condemned." In the NIV, which you we read here usually uses the word "prove" here. And that word is challenging. It's sometimes translated as convict or as convince or expose, and all of those have some limitations to what the word really means.

Don Carson, who wrote a commentary on John, put it this way. He says, "Commentators most commonly propose to render the verb in this passage to expose or to convince or to convict. Although any of these might in theory be acceptable, part of the difficulty in securing a credible interpretation rests in the ambiguities of the English words, to expose, because it has no necessary negative overtones, but it can be used in context where exposure engenders profound shame. To convince someone can sound like a merely intellectual exercise, and seems a bit anemic if there ought to be personal shamed recognition of personal guilt. And to convict could be understood is a purely judicial sense of bringing down a negative verdict, regardless of whether or not the convicted party admits any guilt. Alternatively, it is used in religious context to mean something like to bring someone to an acknowledgement of personal guilt."

And then here's what he goes on to do. He goes on to argue that this word is used 18 times in the New Testament, and then he lists them all and lets you look at them. I'm not going to do that right now, but he says this, he says, "In all of these instances, the word has to do with showing someone his or her sin, usually with a summons to repentance." And here's why this is important.

When John 16:8 says that the Holy spirit will prove, convict, convince the world of sin and righteousness and judgment, what it's saying is that the Spirit will direct people to change their minds. Now, clearly it says here, the world, and so the first reference is to say, this is the work of the Holy Spirit in the world to help people come to a point of saying there is such a thing as sin, there is such a thing as righteousness, God's way of doing things. Some see this is as referring to self-righteousness, which is possible. And there's such a thing as judgment. Because what happens in our world is people, by and large, and this isn't negatively stated, don't want this idea of there being sin, there's no standard. There's nothing that I need to say or do that's sinful. They don't like the idea of there being a standard or of being potentially guilty of self-righteousness, and they certainly don't want an idea of judgment. It takes the work of the Holy Spirit to bring all of this to bear. That's what he's saying here.

And what happens in our day and age is a lot of times we want to live in a place where we say, my way is right, and the people that I associate with, they're right. Again, William Barr from his speech at Notre Dame said this a little later on. He said, "Christianity teaches micro-morality." I'm not sure I agree that, that's the primary teaching of Christianity. This is one of the places where I might disagree. I don't think it doesn't teach it, but he makes it sound as if this is the primary thrust of Christianity. "Christianity teaches micro-morality. We transform the world by forging and focusing on our own personal morality and transformation. The new secular morality teaches a macro-morality. One's morality is not gauged by their private conduct, but by their commitment to political causes and collective action that addresses social problems." And here's what he's saying.

He's saying we live now in an age where people will say, my own goodness is not conditioned on how I live or the ethics that I have. So if I want to pay to get my kid into a better school, that's okay, even if it causes somebody else to get in, as long as I'm committed to a social cause or a political agenda that makes me feel somewhat righteous. That's what he's saying. And in a sense, there's a sense in which what happens for many of us is we can say, because I'm part of something that believes that there's a good cause out here, then I don't have to deal with my own sinfulness, my own need for righteousness, and my own sense that I will one day face judgment, because I feel like I'm part of a collective whole.

Fleming Rutledge put it like this, and that is, "Whenever we are sure that we're among the righteous, or the good people, we can be certain that we're among the arrogant." In other words, as soon as I start to think that my group has it figured out, that our way of doing everything is the right way and other people have the wrong way, that I'm not just among the good people, but I am now among those who are really arrogant about how we see life.

And here's the issue. If you and I are rarely convinced, convicted, proved to be sinful, then it's as if the Holy Spirit is rarely working in our life. In other words, if you say, "Look, I'm pretty much good with this," then the work of the Holy Spirit is not active in you. Because one of the things the Holy Spirit does, I know it says the world, but you can see other scriptures that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, even in the work of the believer, is to continue to convince us of our need for a savior and our need to change direction.

Now, there were a couple of times in the New Testament that we get a command about the Holy Spirit. One is, "Do not quench the Holy Spirit," First Thessalonians 5:19. And to quench means to put out or to extinguish, to minimize, basically, the Holy Spirit. So how do we minimize the Holy Spirit? Well, there's at least two ways. One way is by simply saying, I ignore the work of the Holy Spirit. I say there is no such thing as sin. There is no righteousness. There's no future judgment. So I live, I do what I want to do, I experience life the way I want to experience life. And the other is by being so good that we never feel like we have a need for conviction.

In Luke 15 Jesus gives three stories, Parables. It's the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. But right at the beginning of the Chapter, in Luke 15 Verse 1 and 2, he says that he told these stories, or the narrator says he told these stories to the tax collectors and the Pharisees. And the tax collectors were those who would have said at some point of their life, "Look, I'm don't care if I rip people off, if I cheat people, if I do things that are wrong, I'm getting ahead, whatever it costs for me to have a better life." And the Pharisees were those who said, "We do everything right so that God will approve of us." Those who ignore the work and the law of God and those who would say, we keep the law of God.

And do you know what the story's about? Those three stories. It's about saying that it's the lost things that God values, those who can see their lostness that he enters into a relationship with. You see, you can run from God and try to ignore it, but whenever you say, I'll come back, God says, in these stories, that there will be joy in Heaven, rejoicing. Or you can say, I'm so good that I don't ever need the convicting work of the Holy Spirit in my life, and therefore not deal with God in your life.

Now, there's one other place in the New Testament where we see a command about the Holy Spirit, at least one other. Ephesians 4:30 says, "Do not grieve the Holy spirit." So, do not quench, do not grieve, what does it mean to grieve the Holy Spirit? It may be the way that you hear that, when you first hear that, is to say, well, grieving the Holy Spirit means that I do something that makes the Holy Spirit sad or angry. And many of us will probably lean more toward the anger side because what we see is we see God looking at people who don't change direction quickly enough or well enough and saying, how could you, you this and that. But I wonder if grieve here has more of the idea of sadness than anger.

I heard about a child who was placed in a foster home, and the home that he came from was a home where his parents, caregivers, would often lock him in his room for the weekend when he had been naughty. I don't know what he would do for his bathroom needs, but they would just lock him in his room and say, "That's where you spend your weekend." And one of the ways that he learned to navigate this, even as a young child, was that he would grab food earlier in the week and he would hide it in his room so that he would have food to eat during the weekend when he was put in his bedroom. And when the Department of Child Services got involved and found this, they took the child, placed them in a foster home. And what happened was, in the foster home, he wasn't locked in his room, but he would still hide food in his room. Now imagine how you'd feel if you were that foster parent. You'd be grieved, you wouldn't be angry.

And so many times what happens when we think about the Spirit coming in and wanting us to change direction is we think, well, I better change direction or God will be mad and God will be out to get me. But the reality is, God wants your best. He understands how things work because he made you. And so when he gives us standards and calls us to something, what he's doing is he's saying, I have a better way. And when we hide food in our room, he's grieved, not because he's irritated at us, but he's sad that we don't understand his heart for us. Do you see the difference?

So the Holy Spirit provides clarity to keep going. The Holy Spirit provides clarity to change direction. And then I would say the Holy Spirit provides clarity to locate glory. I say this because in Verse 13 and following, here's what we read. It says, "But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth." Guide you safely through danger, into all truth. "He will speak not of his own, he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me," Verse 14, "because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you."

So what's the role of the Holy Spirit? To glorify Jesus. To make much of Jesus. Glory can mean to give weight to, to ascribe beauty to something, to make much of something. And so the role of the Holy Spirit is to make much of Jesus. And so when I say that the Spirit will help us to locate glory, what I'm referring to is that the Holy Spirit will help us to see what ultimately matters most. To see what's beautiful. To see what's worthwhile.

I had a friend I was talking to recently and he was talking about the Holy Spirit and he said, "If you're in a church that makes a lot of the Holy Spirit, you're probably in the wrong church, because the Holy Spirit doesn't make a lot of himself, he makes a lot of Jesus." In other words, a church that is relating to the Trinity properly doesn't make it all about the Holy Spirit, they make it all about Jesus, because that's what the Holy Spirit does. I would take it even a step further and say, if you're in a church that makes it all about you, you're in the wrong church, because it isn't about us.

And here's what I mean. So many times, what happens when we come alive spiritually is we say, I want God to help me to have a better life. And so what we'll do is we'll gravitate to something where we can get steps or principles to help us be a better husband, a better dad, a better mom, a better wife, a better worker, to have more success, and we want God to help us. But the role of the Holy Spirit isn't to make much of us, it's to make much of Jesus, and the way that the Holy Spirit makes much of Jesus is by helping us to see our sin, the righteousness of Jesus, and the judgment that Jesus has taken on our behalf. Because then we start to say, Jesus is beautiful, and when we see Jesus as beautiful, when we see Jesus as worthwhile, what will happen is we'll say, now I have the clarity to keep going because whatever I'm facing today is not as big or challenging as the beauty that's ahead. And we'll have the clarity to change direction because we'll say, God is for me. God wants my best. What God has said about this world is ultimately better if I follow him then if I go in my own way.

But that comes when we can locate our glory, not in ourselves, not in what we think we need and trying to arrange everything in this world to be about us, but we say, "I am a servant of God and therefore my purpose is to give glory to Jesus, just like it is for the Holy Spirit." But sometimes in order to do that, we need to see ahead.

I was thinking about one of the worst jobs I ever had. I don't know if you've ever had a really bad job, but one of the bad jobs I had was when I was 16. I was hired by a guy whose parents had a farm and they wanted me and a couple of my friends to pick rocks in the field before they would plant their crops. It was spring and where we lived it was cold and nasty. So, for several days after school, and on weekends, my friends and I would go out and we'd pick rocks out of the mud, in the grimy weather, and we'd take them and carry them to the side. And these weren't little rocks, these were good size rocks, so that they could... in other words, this was just hard, bad labor. I'm sure it broke some child labor laws, but...

Do you know why I did that job? For the paycheck. And do you know what I did it for? It was not really just the paycheck, but at 16, it was all the things that the money would give me an opportunity to do. And some of you are saying, "That's still why I go to work." Hopefully, at some point, your job becomes more than that, but in that moment it was just get paid. Now, my point is this, and that is not that life is drudgery and then one day we get paid, but it's if we see the beauty of the glory of Jesus then we can walk through the challenges that are external in our lives, the threats, the danger of falling away, and we can walk through the challenges that are internal to us to say, change direction, the course you're on isn't the best course. Because we say God is for me, he wants my best.

Now, there's one other question, and that is, if fog sets in sometimes, and it will, how do you really get this clarity? If that's the clarity that God provides through his Holy Spirit, how do you actually have this clarity? Well, let me just suggest two things. First, we need to put ourselves in a place where we consistently encounter the word of God. What I mean is, we need to be in a place, a church that teaches the Bible, where we're consistently hearing the word of God. Maybe in a group where it's being discussed and shared at a personal level. We need to be in a place where we're opening the Bible on our own and starting to encounter the things that God says, because it's through the word of God that the Spirit of God gives clarity. So without the word of God, we'll only have that gut sense of saying, I think I know, and what it becomes like is the pilot who flies without instruments and says, it's just my gut. So we need the word of God operating on us consistently.

But secondly, I think what we need is a commitment to respond each and every time God shows us something as fully as we can. And here's why I say this. So many times what will happen is you'll hear or see something that you say, "I'm convicted of that, I believe that might be true. God might be drawing me." And then we say, "Well, okay, I'll deal with that later, or maybe that isn't really true, I don't like the implications of that." And so we put it aside, and what happens is, then the clarity gets less for us. The sense of conviction will be smaller the next time. And so we want the word of God to be operating on us all the time and then to respond each and every time. I see it from time to time here at Orchard Hill, where somebody will come and they'll say, "I'm feeling drawn by God and I sense that God's doing something," and then all of a sudden the things of life will come along and keep them from even exploring it further. And it becomes as if that seed of faith either fell on the hard soil or it got choked out.

And even if you're a person who says, "I've been a person of faith for years and years," the way that many of us lose our way and start the process of falling away is not by waking up one day and saying, "I think I'll fall away," but it's because we start to make little decisions to say, I don't buy that. I don't like that. I'm not following that. I'm not doing that. I'll do it later. Instead of responding to the work of the Spirit every time, because then we start to get clarity. See, ultimately, God provides clarity. Sometimes we have to trust what we can't see in order to have that, but there is clarity, and only question for me, for you, is, will I trust my own intuition, gut sense, or will I trust something better than that? In this case, the word of God and the Spirit of God working in our lives.

Father, we thank you for the clarity you do give. And father, I confess that sometimes I almost prefer a fog because it's not as demanding. But God, I pray for me, I pray for each person who's here that we would trust the clarity of your word, the conviction of your spirit, rather than our own gut intuition for things that matter most. And we pray in Jesus name. Amen.