Whispers of Grace
Walking with God is filled with mountaintops and valleys. Join passionate yet flawed Jesus-lover and mother of four Julie Colbeth as she delves into the Scriptures with a refreshingly honest perspective that will bring hope and encouragement to your day.
Whispers of Grace
Choosing Love Over Bitterness Changes Everything
*Special Episode* Outside of Sunday Women's Retreat --Part 2 of 2--
I was blessed to share at the Outside of Sunday Retreat in Spring 2025, here is the second recording. Check out Christa Otter's ministry at Outside of Sunday Podcast | Christian
Where do you go when shame lingers and bitterness starts to feel justified? We open 1 John and Matthew 11 to find a path out of the dark and into a life marked by confession, courage, and a surprising kind of rest. I share how keeping short accounts with God lifts the labels we wear, restores joy, and makes space for the Spirit to do the work we can’t force on our own.
We explore why John holds truth and love together—and what goes wrong when we tear them apart. You’ll hear how the Holy Spirit reframes failure, why hatred blinds even when we feel “right,” and how choosing love for a difficult person can actually remove a stumbling block from your own path. This isn’t about pretending pain away; it’s about bringing the raw story into the light so Jesus can carry the weight. Along the way, we talk practical steps: pausing to confess quickly, journaling what the Spirit surfaces, asking a friend to pray, and taking one hidden action of love where resentment wants the last word.
Jesus’ invitation anchors the journey: come, take my yoke, learn from me. If your faith feels heavy, it may be a sign you’re pulling loads he never asked you to carry—image, control, old wounds, quiet grudges. The gentle and lowly heart of Christ meets you there and leads you back to lighted ground. Listen for a fresh vision of grace, biblical clarity on walking as Jesus walked, and a hopeful way to face the people and places that stretch you.
If this message helps you breathe easier, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs courage today, and leave a quick review to help others find their way back to the light.
Kiora, and welcome to Whispers of Grace, a place for women to be encouraged by God's holy word. I'm your host, Julie Colbeth, and I am overjoyed to dig into the Bible with you today. Good job, guys. Look at you all sitting down. Without even a worship leader playing a guitar, you know? And they're like, time to sit down. All right. So I'm just gonna pray. We're gonna get into it. God, we thank you again for this amazing day, for this opportunity to fellowship, to hear your word, Lord, to experience conviction and encouragement and love in the body of Christ. God, we're just so blessed to be here and to be in your word. Lord, I pray as we just enter into this new time of looking at your word and hearing your voice, God, would you bring your conviction to our hearts? Would you bring your truth and your encouragement to our hearts? God, I pray that you would help us to be completely open to what you would want to say today. Lord, that none of us would hide from you, that none of us would feel condemned, Lord, but we would all feel welcomed by your grace and your love and your heart for us, God, because it is just so big and bursting with love. Lord, we don't want to think of you any other way. So we pray that you would just hold us. Lord, we're weak and we get sidetracked and we get um tired and distracted, but I pray that you would hold us together today so that we might hear what you have to say to us today. We love you, Jesus. We pray you'd be with us. Amen. All right. So we are actually just gonna continue with the book of 1 John. Because honestly, I was like, I can't stop. I love this book. I wish I had enough time to go through all five chapters. I won't. I won't do that. Um, but again, such is such a good book. So we're just gonna kind of pick up right where we were. Um, so if you want to turn to the book of 1 John, again, it's at the end of your Bible. So we left off uh in verse 9. It says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So remember, we were talking about keeping short accounts with God, learning to confess our sins quickly, learning to let the Holy Spirit convict us immediately. Instead of prolonging the voice of the Spirit, we want to embrace the voice of the Spirit. Um, I was talking with Tekla actually after the session, and we were talking about how when you get into the habit of keeping short accounts with the Lord and very quickly noticing sin and giving it to Him, it does a couple of things for you. One, it lifts the veil of shame because you realize how broken you are, and you agree with what the word says. So I am broken, I'm insufficient, and I still need Jesus. I still need the blood of Jesus every single day. I didn't just need it once at Calvary to cleanse me from my sin. I need it every day. So it takes that shame away because that is Satan's goal is to come in and clothe you in shame so you stay in the dark and you stay condemned and you stay feeling guilty. I was I had a professor in Bible college say to me once, there's no such thing, there should be no such thing as a guilty Christian. And I thought, oh my goodness, because I say that all the time. It's like, oh, I just feel guilty. He's like, there should be no guilt because Jesus paid for your sin and shame and took your guilt. So if you're feeling guilt, it's not from him. Because Satan loves to come in and condemn us. He likes to tell you that you're not enough, that you haven't grown, that you'll never be able to match up what the word says, you're not as good as her. That's the voice of Satan that pushes you away from God. But the conviction of the Holy Spirit is like a warm embrace where you know that he's got you. Even though you're messed up, even though you're broken, even though you've just done something really dumb, he embraces you. That's and it drives you towards God because it shows your heart, Lord, I do need you. I do need you every minute. And a lot of times it ends in praise. Because you come to him broken, he embraces you, you leave your sin with him, and then you're like, wow, praise God, because you're free. You're free afresh. The shame doesn't come for you. Now you're walking again in the light. And how essential and important this is in our lives, I cannot overstate. Because so, back to our conversation, we were talking about how that shame is lifted. The other thing that it does when you keep short accounts with God is it doesn't become your defining thing. You don't become like, you know, the person who's full of pride or the angry person or the person, because I feel like a lot of times we want to put that label as like, oh, I'm really this or that. But God doesn't do that. And I think when you confess those sins, it takes that label off. And you're like, yeah, I struggle with that, but I keep giving it to Jesus, so it's not who I am. And we need to know that because I think a lot of times we wear our sins and we define ourselves by our worst moments. And God doesn't do that. Other people do that, right? We love to remember the worst thing that this person did to us and talk about it, and that's how we think of them. But God's the exact opposite. He doesn't, he doesn't define you by your worst moment. So this keeping short accounts, this confession that he's talking about, it shows us again and again that Jesus is faithful. He will not leave you, he will not forsake you. He wants to come and wrap his arms around you and say, I've got you. I know this is hard. Let's do better. And you can walk forward. But it gets harder the longer you wait. The longer you sit in your sin, or the longer you sit in whatever mentality you have. A lot of times when we're wronged, this happens. When somebody hurts us, we like to hold on to that. And this person did it and it was not right. And you see, we get stuck in that, don't we? And you can very easily get bitter and think that wasn't right, it wasn't right, it wasn't right, and you're right, it wasn't right. We're in a fallen world and we get wounded. You have to be able to bring that to Jesus too, and say, God, I am hurt and I want to hold on to this, and I want to go and strangle this person for what they did to me. But that's not the heart of God for them. And you need to confess your unforgiveness. You need to confess your heart that's holding on to something. Because Jesus doesn't do that. He doesn't do that to you. This is so important for our walk with God. It's really, really hard to have an abundant walk when you're still holding on to your sin or your unforgiveness, and we're not walking in the fullness of the counsel of God because it consistently tells us walk in the light, put off the works of the flesh. This is where we need to start. This constant state of brokenness. But you know what's beautiful about being broken? There's so many cracks for God to fill. Because you can't accomplish things on your own. And you really realize that is, Lord, I really can't love this person. I can't do it. This person is so unlovable, I can't. I don't have it in me. Everything they say bothers me, you know? We have those people in our lives. That gives God an opportunity. He's like, You can't, but I can. So come before me and confess that and say, God, I don't know how to love this person, and start praying for them and pressing into Jesus. He will fill you up. It takes time, it takes consistency, and it also takes a lot of humility. But that's the path that God has for us to walk. And everything else, all of the other spiritual disciplines flow out of that. Your prayer life will now be expanded because you're coming to God with a clean heart. Your service will now be expanded because he's pulling out all of those roots inside of you that were not really great in the first place. Because I think even when we serve God, we can come to him with a heart that is dirty, you're doing it for the wrong reason. I hope so-and-so sees me. They don't really know what that, you know, we get we get mixed up in things, but when we confess into God and move forward, all of a sudden now your ministry is expanded. The way that you can love your family is expanded. God just expands everything because now you're working from a place of brokenness, knowing that you're gonna fail and you're gonna be weak, but he's got you. Instead of thinking, I've got this, I'm gonna do better. It's no, he's got this and he's gonna do it through me. And that is the that is the shift. Because I know we all we're all different, right? But I tend to be that like, okay, I'm gonna do better, I'm gonna wake up earlier, I'm gonna make a list, I'm gonna, you know, and I like to feel like I'm in control. But I feel like the longer that I walk with the Lord, the more he's like, let go, girl. Like, yes, be disciplined, yes, chase after my face, but like be broken because you're gonna mess up. I can condemn myself a whole lot and be like, oh, you should have done better. You know, especially like, God forbid you have to stand on a stage like this and put a microphone and say these things. Because guess what? Tomorrow I'm gonna make a mistake, and Satan's gonna be like, see. And that's God doesn't want that for us. He wants you to walk in the fullness of your calling without the condemnation that Satan wants to drag you into. And that is why these verses are so essential, they are vital, and we can't move past them until we really get it. We have to sink into this thought, it has to be the roots. So, really walking with our Savior, it requires us to die over and over and over again. And that's the taking up your cross and following Him. The cross is an implement of death. Take up your implement of death and continue to follow Jesus because your flesh needs to die, but it will go down fighting. But that's what Jesus means when he says, take up your cross. This is what you need to do to follow Christ is to continue to be broken, continue to allow him to speak into your life. But brokenness is what Jesus works with. He didn't, you know, the people that he got angry with, the people that Jesus spoke aggressively against were the Pharisees, the lawkeepers, the people that had all the rules, the religious folk that like to point the finger at other people and condemn them, and like to, you know, tithe while everybody was watching, you know, dropping their coins like from a high distance to drop into the offering box. These are the people that Jesus was enraged against because they ticked all the boxes and they did all the right things on the outside, but their hearts were unclean. He says that they were full of dead men's bones. That's what Jesus said to the Pharisees, that they were whitewashed tombs. They look great on the outside, but you're full of death. We can be full of death, I can be full of death, and think that I love Jesus and think I'm following him, but my heart can be a mess. If we stay broken, if we keep short accounts with God, it keeps us from this. Because every time that you want to give so somebody else watches, the Holy Spirit's like, oh Lord, okay, I'm not gonna give until I can do it in the right spirit, and then you sit on it until you can give so your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is doing, until you can serve, not so anybody sees you, not so somebody thinks you're such a good Christian, but so Jesus is pleased, and you do it from a passion and a joy for him, and not because you're trying to earn your salvation. It is our hearts, they are deceitfully wicked, they need to be continually cleansed and brought to Jesus. We need the blood of Jesus every single day. It doesn't matter how long you've been walking with him. The apostle John had been walking with Jesus literally and then figuratively for a long time, and he is still saying the same stuff. He's still talking about sin and he's still talking about love. That's the path that we have to follow. So I brought this book up because I mentioned it before. It's called Calvary Road. If you want to look at it, I've got it up here. Yeah. A lot of us have like really loved this book, but I read it fresh, and it was like fresh and new to me. Um, one of the quotes that he has in this book says this He was an English evangelist from the mid-1900s. He wrote this book, and the Lord taught him like a whole new revival. He was an evangelist that kind of like lost his steam and was still doing evangelism, but there was no spirit, and he was like, There's no power anymore in this, like, what's happened? And God breathed all this like wisdom into him about returning to these things, and he wrote this book as a result. So this is something he said on page 34. He says, People imagine that dying to self makes one miserable, but it is just the opposite. It is the refusal to die to self that makes us miserable. The more we know of death in him, the more we shall know of his life in us, and so the more of real peace and real joy. And isn't that the way? We think that dying to self sounds terrible, and we avoid it and we try and hide, and we're miserable. We're miserable. We might be able to fake it for a little while, but on the inside, if you really ask us, we feel hollow. How can we feel hollow when we know to have the Holy Spirit? We get mixed up. That's why we need these things. We need the cross over and over again. And a lot of this can sound overwhelming. It can be like, I can't do this. You're right, you can't. But Jesus can, and the Holy Spirit can. And that's the beauty of the gospel is God tells us you all can't. We can't. We can't keep the law. We can't be perfect, we can't set all these um, you know, standards and meet them. We can't, we're gonna fail. But that's why Jesus did in our place, and he comes to empower us to walk in his will. So back to the book of 1 John. Okay, 1 John chapter 1, we're gonna start in verse 10 and read a little bit more. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him, we're making Jesus, a liar, and his word isn't in us. So there's the humility, true humility, knowing that you're a sinner still. And then he says, My little children, can you imagine Grandpappy John saying these things? My little children, these things I write to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. And he himself is the propitiation, the sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the whole world. Jesus asks for our surrender, but he promises to do the work. That that is the beautiful backwards nature of the of the gospel. It is so simple, a child can understand it, but we complicate it over and over again, especially as adults. We grow up and we're like, it couldn't be that easy to just believe and repent, and then Jesus like offers you forgiveness. And we get really confused about like we complicate it for ourselves and think, oh, well, we also have to do this and this and this. That's not what the word says. And I love, I love how he says, little children. I can just see him thinking, like, please listen to me, please listen to me, children. These things I write to you so that you may not sin. He's saying this keeping short accounts with God will keep you from sinning because you're gonna constantly be convicted. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate. And I love when they use the word advocate for the Holy Spirit because it gives me a courtroom scene and I can understand it. You know, where you're the one that has done the crime, you're on trial, and the Holy Spirit is your lawyer. He's your advocate. He's the one is standing between you and judgment. And he will advocate for you. That's the beauty. We don't stand alone. We don't stand alone in our sin. We don't stand alone under the blanket. Holy Spirit is there ready to advocate for us. And then it says, and then he gives us the gospel again because we need it again. Uh he says, Jesus Christ the righteous, he himself, Jesus Himself in his body is the propitiation for our sins. He paid the price, and not only ours, but for the whole world. We need to be honest, we need to be humble and surrendered. That's our job. We have to come before God as a hot mess, and then he works on us and he does the work. He does the work in us. So the question is why do we fight him? Why? Why do we fight him? He wants to do good things in us and we fight him and resist him constantly. Why do we hold on to our sin? Why do we hold on to our pride and our possessions or our reputation or our money or our time or our self-image? We hold on to it. We're gonna guard them very jealously, right? But God says, You need to release all that into my hands. Give it back to me. Then we're gonna read some more in 1 John. Uh it says in verse 3, chapter 2, verse 3, now by this we know that we know him, if we keep his commands. He who says, I know him, but does not keep his commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. Again, that's like a take a step back kind of verse, right? You're like, whoa, John's like throwing heat when he's writing this book. But do you see how he weaves it back and forth between if you walk in the light, you'll be children of light, you won't sin, and if you do sin, you have an advocate, you have Jesus Christ. He's he's like making a cycle of you have God who stands in the gap, but you have to hold on to him. But if you sin, and he kind of keeps going around and around, and he's saying the same things over and over again, and he keeps bringing us back to Christ. He keeps bringing us back to the cross every time. He doesn't leave us as a liar who doesn't have any truth. If you took this verse out of context and just wanted to teach on this one verse, you could destroy a whole church. You could destroy the salvation of thousands of millions of people. And that is that is one of the benefits of reading the entire Bible and not just picking out little chunks of scripture. Because if you are not familiar with the whole council of God, you can get derailed really easily because you have to understand the context of the book, why it was written, who it was written, what it says, not in just this one section, but the whole thing. So we as believers, we need to get back to a really rich Bible literacy. This is something that we're responsible for because you know what? The next time somebody posts like a 30-second video on this one verse saying how you're like walking in darkness and you're just like, oh my gosh, this person says I'm condemned. Am I condemned? And it like spins you out. You can go back to the word and be like, let's read before and after that verse. Let's see what it actually says in this section. This is a very good case of that. Because you see what John is doing, who's known as the Apostle of Love, and you want to pull this out and just say, like, oh, you don't know him and you're walking in darkness and you're a liar. Well, let's keep reading. In verse 5, he says, But, if you didn't read this, you'd never know was there. But whoever keeps his word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in him. He who says that he abides in him ought himself to walk just as he walked. So again, he's setting this super high bar. Like, okay, you want to call yourself a Christian, walk like Jesus. You know, and we're like, ah. But remember before that he said, when you do sin, you have an advocate, the Holy Spirit who will undergird you and allow you to walk. So it's it's a process where these two truths are both true and they're holding hands. So don't separate them, because I've heard a lot of people spin false doctrine separating these two things. So it's it's either a whole lot of love and no truth, or all truth and no love. But here John is putting them together. So this is the beauty, this is the beauty of this book. Then in verse 7, he says, Brethren, I write no new commandment to you. So he's saying, you guys know this, but an old commandment, which you've had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning. So he's saying, You know the gospel, you know Jesus, you know the truth, but I'm reminding you, because you need to know again. Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the light is already shining, not is going to shine, but the light's already shining. The hope is already here. Now, here's the next thing. He who says that he is in the light and hates his brother is in darkness until now. That's a hard one to swallow, too. Because now he's starting to get into the nitty-gritty of it, right? So he talks top level about your salvation and what your walk with God looks like, and he's now coming down a little bit. Like, well, if you hate your brother, you're also not walking in light. And how many of us have struggled with holding bitterness against somebody else or really, really hating someone, right? It's it's very easy because we're fallen and we hurt each other. Now, John's saying that if you hate your brother, you're not walking in the light. So, really good indication. If you have some sort of unforgiveness, if you have some bitterness in your heart, you need to give that to God. Because if you're holding on to it and not surrendering it, it's going to keep you from all of this good life that he's talking about. And I think this is probably one of the number one ways that we get stuck is we don't love our brother. And we don't love the person that's difficult. We keep them at arm's length and we avoid them and we like to talk about them and maybe just like influence our friends just a little bit to not like them too. And don't we do that? That's walking in darkness. That's like, okay, I'm just gonna hide again. I'm gonna go under the cover of darkness, and I'm not gonna stretch out my hand to love this person. And that is really hard. But you know what? It's interesting in this book, in this Calvary Road book, he talks about how God specifically puts those people in your life to chastise you, to change you. We always want to think, oh, if only they could change this and stop doing that, then maybe. And God's looking right at you saying, you know what, babe, we gotta change some stuff. Because he sent that person to chastise you so that you could be corrected. And you think, oh, I'm nothing like them, I don't do that. Well, have you brought that to the Lord? And said, God, what are you trying to teach me through this? We don't like to do that because we like to tell the Lord, make that person suffer. Keep them at arm's length, Lord, just help them move. Not just out of my line of sight. But God says, I brought that person into your sphere so you could learn. I brought that person into your church, into your workplace, into your friend group, into your mommy and me playdate. I brought that person into your life so that you could be better. But we don't see it like that. We think, ugh, if she's gonna be there, no thanks. And God's like, oh, you're missing out on all the opportunities to grow. But again, we love to run because we think we know what's best for us, but God's the one who really does. And honestly, if we think about it, it's all the way back to the garden. You had Adam and Eve, and God just said, look at this beautiful, all these beautiful things I've given you. You can eat anything, there's all these amazing animals, and you don't even have to work. No pain having babies then. You know, really good life. He's like, just don't eat from this tree. And Eve's like, I don't know if God has my best at heart. And I think I'm just gonna try. Don't we do that all the time? God's like, the lot that I have given you, your life is what I've given you. Trust me with it. And we're like, but what about that? I think I want that instead. And we don't want to trust him with it. We don't want to walk in the hard things. We don't want to exercise forgiveness, we don't want to be next to the person that bothers us. But God's like, go be next to her. Go love her, go put your arm around her, man. Pray for her. What's going on in her life that she's got? What kind of wounds and trauma is she dealing with? What kind of people have hurt her in the past? Maybe you can be an encouragement. Maybe you could be a light. Maybe you could be a healing balm instead of somebody that carries gossip on their tongue and tears that person down more. But I think, again, John's like digging. He's like digging deep, right? Because this is really difficult in real life for us to do. And we're avoiders. We love to just avoid the difficult things. Can I just walk across the other street? But John says that if you hate your brother, you're not abiding in the light. So again, it's like the power of the word of God as we read through it, right? Just continues to point out the things in our heart that we need to change. We need to journal. We need to confess. We need to pray about, we need to ask somebody to pray with us. Like these are the things we need to do. Deep, deep work inside of our heart. So in chapter two, uh verse 10, he who loves his brother abides in the light. That's where he lives. He abides in the light. And there is no cause for stumbling in him. I love that. Because it says, if you're gonna go the extra mile to love your brother, which is hard, love a difficult person, it says, what's gonna happen? There's no cause for stumbling. You have now removed a stumbling block from your life by choosing love instead of judgment. That is the that is the power of God because the world doesn't do that. The world avoids, the world holds grudges, but Jesus says, press in and love. And he says, when you do that, then you'll avoid stumbling and you're gonna walk in the light. Verse 11. But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. This is what it is like to not love everyone, which is a really tall order again. But that's why we have an advocate. Remember, this is not all on our shoulders, because I know you're thinking about that person, and thinking, especially if it's like a family member that's been in your life like your whole life, you're like, but not that person. But the word tells us here that if you're holding that hate towards the person, you're walking in darkness and you don't know where you're going. That's terrifying because you think you do know where you're going, don't you? You wake up every day and you do your life, but the word says you don't know where you're going. You've lost your way, you are off the path, and now you're walking in darkness, and you thought that you came with no sin, and you thought that you were doing fine, but yet you're lacking the abundance, and there's no fruit, and there's no power, and there's no love, and you don't know why. This could be it. Because you're walking in darkness because you're holding hatred towards somebody else. And the word lays it out so clearly for us, and yet we don't want to look at it. I don't want to think about it, I don't want to take it that seriously. But this is the truth. And remember the beginning of this book, John says the reason that he's telling us these things is so we can walk in joy and fellowship with God and be in the light. And we all decided that's where we really want to be, right? We don't want to walk in darkness. We want to be on his path. We got to do it his way. I want to know where I'm going. If you, if you, like I said, if you're out in the middle of the field in the middle of the dark and you just start walking, no torch, nothing, pitch black, you're gonna fall in a hole, you're gonna twist your ankle, you're gonna walk into a pole and a tree, you might step on a possum, like stuff's gonna happen. And this is what happens in our life. And doesn't it become like a downhill fall when you start to hold bitterness against somebody where everything seems like it's against you? Like, and then work is hard, and this person did this thing, and then my car did this, and it's like it snowballs on you, and you're like, what is happening? Like everything is falling apart, and you you have no patience for anyone, and even the people that you thought you loved, you start to kind of despise, and you just want to be alone. Does this sound familiar? I can say this because I've been there. I've walked this path before. You went astray and you are stumbling around in the darkness with blinded eyes, it says. At the bottom of verse 11, it says that you don't know where you're going because the darkness has blinded your eyes. So you are blind and struggling. And yeah, that's what your life looks like because you're blind and struggling. But you know what all we need to do? We need to turn around the other way and look at Jesus. And confess and say, God, I have been blind. I have been struggling. Help. I don't know how to love that person. I don't know how to have forgiveness. I do not know how to do this. It seems hard and it makes me mad. But I need your strength. I need your grace because I want to walk in that light. And that shows surrender and brokenness. This is where we need to be. And then when you are broken, that's when the fragrance comes out. You think of the woman with the alabaster box that brought it to Jesus and she broke it. That was a picture of her life. She had nothing. She had nothing to offer him, but this little box, she broke it, and the perfume filled the room. And she had nothing to offer Jesus except her brokenness. And this is where we're at. Very, very often. We don't bring to him a whole lot besides a mess. And he's like, I can work with that. If you can come to me and you can be broken. It's when we hold on that we just, we're a mess. We get bitter and people don't want to be around us, and our life just goes downhill and we're stumbling around in darkness. Jesus has so much more for you. So much more. He doesn't want you to be stumbling around in darkness. He wants you to walk in the light. He wants you to come back to the foot of the cross again because you need to be there every day at the foot of the cross, looking at Jesus, remembering his perfect sacrifice that covered your sin, then you can offer that forgiveness to your brother. And every time you feel like it's too much, you look back at Jesus. Because that is the key to our faith is fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith. We have to fix our eyes on him. When we start looking around at our life, at our worries, at our fears, we get distracted, we stumble, we get to be a mess. When we fix our eyes on Jesus, we're good. Because he can point you where he needs to go and he corrects you lovingly and he holds you. I want to be held. I don't want to go rogue anymore. I've done it enough in my life. I just want to be held. Like a little baby in the crook of Jesus' arm. Like that's how I want to be. Like you just hold me and you feed me and I'll go where you want me to go, and I'm like down for the ride, you know? But that takes a lot of surrender and a lot of humility. But that's what God asks of us. I want us to turn to Matthew chapter 11. This is one that we're probably familiar with, but it is a beautiful reminder. Matthew 11, verse 28. Now, these are red letters in my Bible, which means these are the words of our Lord Jesus Christ. These are his words to you this morning. You're sitting in this room, he has appointed for you to be here. That means these words are for you. He says, Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your soul. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is a promise from the Creator for us that you can stand upon and say, This is for me. I claim this today, Lord. This truth, I'm I believe it and I will walk in it. But what is the first thing he says to do? Come. The very first word of the sentence, he says, Come. Because he can't work with you if you're not there. You gotta come to him and stop avoiding him and stop hiding. Come. Do you feel heavy laden? Do you feel burdened? Do you feel exhausted? Come to Jesus. And then he has a promise. I will give you rest. Now the only way that you can have rest in the midst of trials and a storm is because you're leaning on something stronger than yourself, something that is unshakable, that cannot be moved, that is firmer than the foundations of the earth. That is where you stand, and that is why we have rest. Because we know where we're going, we know our God, and we know that he has won the victory. So we can rest. Then Jesus says, Take my yoke upon you. So a yoke is something that groups together two oxen to pull a load, right? So if you can imagine you're in there with Jesus, who do you think's doing the work? I think you're just showing up, and he's like, Come on. He's pulling and his load is easy because he's God and he's pulling the weight. So he's telling you today, stop pulling the weight. You can't manage. You can't do it on yourself. If you throw that yoke around me and you, we can do it together. But the longer you try and do it on your own, the more you're gonna fail and be exhausted in the process. And then he tells us that he is gentle and lowly in heart. There are very few times where God actually describes himself. There's a podcast that I taught on Moses where Moses meets God and he reveals himself to him, and I taught all about this. But he says that he is gentle and lowly in heart. That's how he describes himself. Who could be more approachable than someone that is gentle? Don't you all have somebody in your life that is gentle? Miss Carolyn right there is one of the most gentle pieces of people. She's very approachable. I could tell her anything because she's gentle. She's not judgmental. She's sweet, she's kind, and she's gentle. And I bet you we all have that person that you're like, oh, that person is just amazing. That's Jesus. You see that reflected in that person? That's Jesus. And the lowliness of heart means he's approachable. He's not coming like with this big. He's gentle and lowly. You're like, oh, I can do that. Then he says, you'll find rest for your souls because his yoke is easy, girl. His burden's light. So if you feel like his yoke is not easy and his burden is not light, which we get to that place a lot of times, we're like, it doesn't feel easy and light, Lord, ask him why. What am I pulling? What am I carrying that I'm not meant to carry? Is it bitterness and unforgiveness? Is it shame? Is it that you've taken on too much? I don't know what it is. But if you're feeling overwhelmed and burdened and not light, come to Jesus. That's how he starts this. Come to me. Come to me and tell me all about it. And then be broken and surrender to him and let him work. He wants to work miracles in your lives. He wants to transform you. He wants to give you a path that guess what the path is lit by? His light. Because he's the lamp and he's got a path that's just for you. And you can't be on that path if you're stumbling around in darkness. We need to come back to the light. So the question today is: are you comfortable in the light or does it make you uncomfortable? If it does, ask him why. I don't know why. Maybe you don't know why, but he does. He knows why you're uncomfortable in his light and he wants to fix it. Are you willing to know the whole truth about yourself? That is also very difficult. But when you come into his light, you can say, God, show me the whole truth about myself. Don't leave any peace. I want all the light flooded over me, my situation, my light. I want to walk in it. Because nothing can be worse than trying to do this on my own strength. I'm ready. Flood me with your light. Are we ready to know and to be known? Are we ready to trust again, even though it might be hard? Are we open to his conviction to call anything sin that he puts his finger on? That's another hard one. Because I think we all know that we have these little pockets of things that probably aren't great for us, but we keep doing because we think it makes us feel better, but it really doesn't. Bring it into the light. Bring it into the light. Because maybe you're wrong, and maybe God's like, Well, you just have a your mind is wrong about it. Bring it into the light. You don't know. Are we willing to stop making excuses? We love to make excuses. Oh, I can't because of this and that. And if this didn't happen, we love to make excuses, but we can't run into the arms of Jesus if we're holding him at an arm's length with all of our excuses. Are you willing to have true fellowship with God in the light? That's the question. Are you willing to go there? Because it takes a lot of surrender and it takes the laying down of your will. Eve, let's think about Eve for one more minute. Eve thought that God was trying to hide all the good things from her. That's what she thought. She walked with him in a garden, in a perfect garden, in a perfect body, with a perfect man. Like, I don't think he gets much better. So if you think if only this or that changed, maybe I'd be happy. No, because Eve had it all and she did not care. She still thought God was trying to hide good things from her. Do you feel like God is trying to hide good things from you? Because He's not. And often, like a difficult person, He gives you a gift that you don't recognize as a gift. She's like, Lord, that difficult person surely can't be for me. There's no bow on the top of that. And he's like, Yeah, that's my gift to you, so you can grow. But we wouldn't see it as a gift if we're walking in darkness. Eve also thought that she knew what she needed instead of coming to God. How often do we think we know what we need, but God doesn't? Eve also thought that she could improve upon God's best for her. Silly, silly woman, who is also me. But as a result, she hid. She blamed others for her bad decisions. She misplaced her trust in Satan instead of God. And she hid from the light and shame. Now, deliverance from that shame and walking in the light is what we can take away from her life and her mistakes. That is what Matthew is telling us. This is the words of Jesus, come to me over and over again, come to me, look at me, be with me, walk in the light. It's quite simple, but it is quite difficult. But today, everybody in this room has an opportunity to look at all of these things with fresh eyes because God brought you here to hear these things. So I would encourage you. I know it's scary to look at these things. I know it's it pushes you to the edge of your flesh and you feel uncomfortable. That uncomfortableness does not mean that it's not for you. It sometimes is just the thing that's in the way and you have to press through. And God's like, I'm waiting for you. I'm waiting for you to really trust and press through that. We need to come together and pray for each other and really seek this out. So I want to take some time. I know not all of us are comfortable praying. I know not all of us know each other, but I want to take the next 15 minutes to just take some time to sit on this, to think about it, to journal, to pray, whatever you need to do to process, because a lot of times you listen to all these great things and then you go to the next thing. But I think God wants these things to settle deeply into our hearts, to put roots down so they will not be moved. So I want you to take this time. You can spread out in this room if you want, or go outside, or grab a friend if you feel like you need prayer and you're comfortable asking somebody, can you pray for me? Grab them and say, Hey, can we just take a really quiet walk? Can you pray for me? So let's do that. Um, and then Krista will call us back together when it's time. Um, I'm just gonna hang around over here. If you want me to pray for you, I'm available. Krista's here, she'll pray for you. Jasmine's here. Like, there's loads of people here that would love to pray. So if you just standing around looking like, somebody please pray for me, just walk over to somebody and say, Hey, can you pray for me? Yeah. Any anything else? Okay. So let's let's do it.
