God Does Not Need Makeup

Remember that we are talking about the vision of our church, the complexity with which we try to view the Christian life, and the different currents, the different extremes that we sometimes try to hold together in relation to one another. We are a complex church. It is not that other churches are better or worse than we are—that is not the point—but we have a specific heart, a calling God has given us, a collective personality as a church. And your pastor also has a way of viewing Scripture, and sometimes, as I said last Sunday, that lends itself to misunderstandings even among people who are with us, who are members of our congregation, and who do not understand why the church does the things it does.

I would like to show you a video of the 9:00 a.m. service and this 12:00 service so that you can see how different the two services were. In both, the Lord manifested His presence. In both, the Lord did wonderful things, but the first service was very different from this service; the dynamics of the worship were very different. And that is because we believe in both. The 9:00 service was much calmer; the worship was much shorter, more restrained, but there was a beautiful spirit, and God did His work there. God moved in that place. And today, here at 12:00, well, the time is more enthusiastic, the temperature a little higher, the moving of God perhaps more obvious, but it is the same Spirit that was there at 9:00 as well.

That is to say, we are a church that delights in the celebration, and we also delight in the stillness of the Spirit. And that is the good thing: we do not have to force things. Many times, it is as though we become accustomed to the temperature always having to be way up there, going full blast, and if it is not, then we make sure it gets there. If the gifts are not being manifested, we manufacture them, because the people have to leave believing that they had a Pentecostal experience.

We believe that is not so, that we must move in every kind of moment. God is the one who ordains things and who does things as He wishes and at the time He wishes. And that is how we saw it in the text we read last Sunday in 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, where it says that the ministries of God are different, the movements of God are different, but one and the same Spirit does all these things.

So, what we have wanted to do through this series of sermons that we have begun is to give you—and also those who listen to us over the internet and others—an idea of what we are as a church. Because people often ask me, “Well, Pastor, what is your vision? What is the vision of León de Judá? What are you? Are you Pentecostals? Are you evangelicals? Are you liberals? Are you conservatives? What are you? Are you fundamentalists?” And we say, “We are a little bit of everything.”

What I want through these messages is to enrich you, and do not think that I am speaking merely about theory. No, these are things with very powerful and very real applications.

Look, I am going to look at just a few; I am not going to read all the texts we had for this morning. Deuteronomy chapter 9, verses 1 and 5. They are somewhat harsh passages, but there is a reason why I have chosen them. Here we see God telling Israel that He is going to deliver over to them nations far more numerous and powerful than Israel:

“...great cities fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakites, whom you know about. Understand, then, today, that it is the Lord your God who goes before you like a consuming fire that will destroy and humble them before you, and you will drive them out and destroy them at once, as the Lord has told you...”

You see here this image of a destroying God, a God who owns the whole earth and gives it to whomever He wishes. These nations had become corrupt; they had given themselves over to sin in an irreparable way, and God decided to drive them out of the land of Canaan and sovereignly give that land to His people Israel, whom He had been preparing for centuries beforehand in Egypt and to whom He had given a promise through Abraham even centuries before that.

And then, not content merely to remove these nations from the land, He commands the Hebrews to destroy them, to exterminate them completely. And He says, “And know that I am the one doing it.” What often happens when there are violent things in the world, things that take place? It is as though we are always trying to excuse God.

Sometimes I see many evangelicals trying to put makeup on God. God does not need makeup, brothers and sisters. God does whatever He pleases. God gives life and takes life away. God gives the land to whomever He wishes and removes from the land whomever He wishes. God is not married to any political party. God is not married to any political movement. God loves soldiers, and He loves pacifists too. What is more, I believe that God sometimes—and this may scandalize some of you—sometimes God is in war, and sometimes He is in peace.

What does the writer of Ecclesiastes say? He says there is a time to heal and a time to kill, a time to destroy and a time to create. There is a time to build walls and a time to tear walls down.

Brothers and sisters, God is like the galaxies. God is like the suns that exist in the universe. If you look at the universe, it is an extraordinarily violent thing. At this very moment, entire stars are exploding, supernovas emitting such explosive force that anything millions of miles away is consumed, so great is the power of that galaxy when they explode—and of suns as well.

There are black holes that swallow absolutely everything around them, melt it into the void, and compress it until it becomes a tiny little ball that fits between two fingers of a human hand.

There are cataclysms; volcanoes erupt here in the world and sweep away whole islands and devastate everything. Who is behind all of that? Yes, evil is there too, but God permits those things. Who is behind the great movements of nations, races, and groups that move from one place to another? Who was behind the conquest of the Americas? Who was behind the great movements of history over the last 2,000 years in the Western world? God is behind all those things. Who was behind the arrival of the Puritans in America, with all the violence that took place? God neither appreciated nor supported that, but ultimately God rules over all of history.

God has power to kill, and God has power to heal. And He does whatever He wishes. We do not have to keep excusing Him, as we so often try to do.

So here we see God expelling nations and putting other nations in their place, and even commanding that nations be exterminated. And He does whatever He wishes. And it is not only in the Old Testament; we see that very strange things also happen in the New Testament.

Go to 2 Kings, chapter 1, verses 9 through 16. It says here—and this is the case of Elijah—that an evil king sends men to take Elijah captive because he wants Elijah to appear before him. And it seems that Elijah was not an easy man; he did not like being ordered around that way, and he was a prophet of God and would not tolerate being treated in such a way—because ultimately it was God whom they were treating disrespectfully, since Elijah represented God’s authority at that time, and this king did not understand that dynamic.

It says that this king sends to Elijah a captain of fifty men with his fifty: “...who went up to where Elijah was, and behold, Elijah was sitting on the top of the hill, and the captain said to him, ‘Man of God, the king has said that you must come down.’ And Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, ‘Oh, yes? If I am a man of God, let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty.’ And fire came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty. Then the king again sent him another captain”—he did not learn his lesson the first time—“a captain of fifty with his fifty, and he spoke to him and said, ‘Man of God, thus has the king said: Come down quickly.’ And Elijah answered him and said, ‘If I am a man of God, let fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty.’ And fire came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty...”

Brothers and sisters, what does one do with passages like these? Does one say, “It is simply that this is the Old Testament; God has matured a little over the last 3,000 years. He is a little older now, a little tamer, calmer; He no longer does that in the New Testament”? Or perhaps He repented and asked forgiveness for having done it, and now He will never do such things again.

That God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God can do that as well, and perhaps He is doing it somewhere in the world. I do not believe that we have to put makeup on the corpse and spray a little cosmetic spray on this passage. Some people do that. They say, “Well, this is an expression of Jewish ethnocentrism, written here in the Bible, and it does not truly represent God.”

There are many people, scholars of Scripture, who do that. And they remove this passage from the passages inspired by God. Personally, I do not believe that we are called to do that. We have to enter into those texts.

Remember that I am speaking about the complexity of our faith, that we are a complex church. Your pastor tries to maintain the balance between those two extremes of Scripture: the God who is sometimes the God of judgment, the God of justice, the God who is three times holy and who says, “This does not please Me. Do not do it, because it is an abomination to Me”; and the God of mercy, love, grace, forgiveness, and tolerance as well, who forgives the sinner, gives thousands of opportunities for repentance, and, not content with that, sends His Son Jesus Christ to die for us on the cross.

The God of extremes. Notice how interesting this is. I did not have time to address it in the 9:00 service, but years after this happened, the disciples one day encountered some Samaritans who did not want Jesus to pass through their village and rejected Jesus. And one of the disciples said to the Lord, “Hey, Lord, what do You think? Do You want us to command fire to fall, as God did with Elijah and the fifty, and destroy all these Samaritans?” And He said, “You do not know what spirit you belong to, because the Son of Man did not come to destroy men but to save them.”

How strange, then. On the one hand, the power of God does this, and yet, what was the difference? There was a difference of heart. These disciples were full of hatred and carnality, and the Lord told them, “You do not know what spirit you belong to.”

What came out of them was more like partisanship; it was a lack of mercy and love. The Lord discerned that and said, “The one prompting you to say that is Satan.” In the other passage, it was God’s servant, and God had a purpose in seeing His word fulfilled, and God allowed it to happen that way.

It is the same God manifesting Himself in two different ways, in two different situations. It is not that God contradicts Himself or that God repented of one way of acting or the other. God is at the center of both passages. And what does one do as a church, as a pastor? We are a church that allows God to move as He wishes. Many times we preach grace, love, mercy, forgiveness, tolerance, and patience, and many times we preach holiness, truth, justice, and respect for God’s law.

And that does not mean that one day, when we preach grace and mercy, we are a liberal church, and that when we preach holiness and obedience, we are a fundamentalist church. We are both things, because God moves in both dimensions. But many times God also moves in the darkness, in the terrible, and in judgment.

Look at another passage: Ananias and Sapphira. You do not even have to read it. You know the story. Ananias and Sapphira lied so that people would think they were generous. They sold a property for one price, said they had sold it for more, and kept the excess. And in those days, when the Spirit of God was moving with power, Peter, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, said, “You have lied to the Holy Spirit, and right now you are going to fall down dead.” First it was Ananias who lied, and then his wife came in as happy as could be and told the same lie, and she too dropped dead right there before the prophet. The poor young men had to carry these two people away to bury them.

That is the New Testament. And we do not have to put makeup on it. I do not need to excuse God and look for a reason to try to make it appear that God was not the one who did it. God did it. Do we believe it or not? God is sovereign.

Another passage is 1 Corinthians chapter 11, where you will see the apostle Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, say that there are people in the church at Corinth who are not discerning the Lord’s Supper with the reverence and prophetic significance that the Lord’s Supper possesses. Instead, they go there to eat the turkey and do not discern the body of Jesus Christ within the Lord’s Supper.

And he says that this is why many of you are sick and even sleep. In other words, they have died. What do you think? Listen, brothers and sisters, if we were to take an X-ray right now of everyone here, might there be someone who is sick because they are grieving the Holy Spirit in some way? I do not know. If you are sick, that does not mean this is the reason; understand clearly what I am saying.

Remember what we said the other Sunday about illness, and how God sometimes works through an illness as well and is glorified in the cross. But what we mean is that the mysteries of God are many. Strange things happen, and we as a church have to remain within the complexity of Scripture. We have to look at the whole Word, the whole counsel of God, and many times, when we encounter these strange passages or doctrines that we cannot explain very well, instead of trying to fit them into our little boxes and trying to tame and control them so that they will be easy for us to understand, what we have to do is accept that this is a mystery, that we are facing a mystery. And someday God will explain the reason for these mysteries to us, but in the meantime we have to enter into Scripture and let it judge us and speak to us, rather than us speaking to it.

There are people who judge Scripture, and when they see something they do not like, they either try to change it or somehow remove it from the Bible, instead of entering into the whirlwind themselves and letting the whirlwind consume them and transform them into the image of Scripture, rather than transforming Scripture into our image.

There are many churches, there are many people who try to fit the Bible into the cultural boxes of the time, or of their denomination or doctrine, instead of letting the Bible judge doctrine, denomination, or culture.

I do not know whether I am explaining myself clearly, but I want you to understand that we as a church try to enter into the complexity and see things that way. Let me say something else here: I say that no one can claim to read the Bible one hundred percent and understand it precisely as the Bible is.

We have to understand that every time you approach this book, you approach it through the lenses of your denomination, your temperament, and your culture. No one sees the Bible in a completely neutral way. We are always making adjustments of some kind. Why? Because you do not even know or see yourself exactly as you are. Physically speaking, we always see things through the lenses of intellect and culture.

But there are people who believe otherwise: we have the perfect, correct interpretation of the Bible, and everyone else is simply distorting and twisting it. And that is not so. The Bible is tremendously complex, and it expresses itself as it wishes. In fact, I was telling you, look, for example, at the way we see ourselves and how we never see ourselves exactly as we are.

An anorexic person—generally they are women, but there are also men—looks in a mirror and sees herself as fat, even though she is starving to death. But she has a psychological problem, and when she looks in the mirror she believes she is fat, and so she is always vomiting her food. They are practically skeletons, but they are never satisfied, because they are seeing themselves through the eyes of their distorted minds; and when they look through their eyes, what they see out there is someone who is too heavy and needs to diet even more.

I was telling the brothers and sisters that two weeks ago I was interviewing a New England leader, a man who is very active in politics and is a deeply committed Christian. We were on television, on the internet, and I was interviewing him. At one point, before the program began, the camera was focused on him and they were looking for the right angles, et cetera. This man, who is a very tall Anglo-Saxon, a former army colonel, big-boned, a typical strong, very tall Anglo-Saxon with a square face, was shown in profile. He has a prominent nose, and when he saw his nose in profile, he commented, “Oh, what an ugly nose I have.”

But you know what? I said to him, “No, man, how can you say that? On the contrary, I see the nose of a manly man; I see an eagle’s nose; I see a strong nose.” His nose looked very good to me, but for him that nose was a cause of great agony and anguish. Personally, I was saying, wow, I wish I had the nose he has, although I would also need other parts of my face to be a little larger. But he was seeing himself through his own interpretation.

How many women look in the mirror and see themselves as ugly even though they are attractive and beautiful women? But perhaps when they were girls no one ever told them, “You are pretty,” and they have grown up with insecurities. So now they look at life through the lenses of their insecurities, the abuse they have suffered, and the trauma they have experienced. Cultures change. If you look at paintings from the classical era in Europe, the women were plumper and more robust; that was the ideal of a beautiful woman. Today, however, the scrawnier and thinner they are, the better.

Thirty years ago, people spoke of a man with hair on his chest, and that was terrific. Nowadays men shave absolutely all the hair they have because the new fashion is to be hairless. And the girls encourage them in that foolishness, while those who benefit are the beauty salons, which are taking all these young men’s money. Why? Because they are seeing through the eyes of culture. No one sees himself exactly as he is. And even with the Bible, we often see the Bible through the eyes, through the lenses, of culture.

Nowadays, many evangelicals cannot believe that God is still a God of justice, holiness, and truth—a God who still has clear standards for how He wants people to behave. And in churches, people often try to silence the truth of God because we believe that if people come and hear a strong word, they will not want to stay.

So every group is convinced of its own truth. Those who are gentler, calmer, more generous, and more tolerant throw stones at those who are more conservative. And those of us who are more conservative also throw stones at those who are a little more liberal. I believe that what God asks of us is that we understand the complexity of Scripture.

By that, I do not mean that we should not have values. But what we mean is that the truth is that every one of us has to approach the Bible with great humility and great tolerance. That is why I rejoice to see brothers and sisters of all the different convictions. As I was saying—and perhaps I do not remember whether I said it to the first service or the second—I love those dyed-in-the-wool Pentecostal brothers and sisters, with their hair in buns and their long dresses, their fervent, enthusiastic prayers, those sisters who inspire you, and those men of God who emphasize spiritual warfare, fasting, and prayer.

I want those people to bless our church. But I also like the people on the other side, people who perhaps do not express themselves that way but who also have the Holy Spirit within them. And these groups add nuance to one another.

On Wednesday we are going to have someone here whom, frankly, I have never heard, but he comes highly recommended as someone whom God uses in healing. And you know what? We are going to give him an opportunity because we want the Holy Spirit to manifest Himself in different ways. That is why we said that the people who feel comfortable with those manifestations should come, as well as visitors; other people come to the main service, and we also make room for a manifestation that is less open and less intense.

But we believe that the presence of the Lord is found in all those different places and in all those different manifestations. Every culture, as I was saying, sees the Bible through its own lenses and prejudices. And that is what allows different people, for example, to do things that seem contradictory to others. For example, I asked this morning how it was possible that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and the United States, Christians enslaved Africans, went to church in the morning, and after the service—after worshiping God and acknowledging His presence—went home to have their food served by slaves whose humanity they were denying.

How could those people sleep peacefully? How could they love God and read the Bible and enslave their brothers and sisters? Why? Because they were seeing the Bible through their cultural lenses. They were seeing the Bible through interpretations that allowed them to do so in good conscience. I know that they were accountable before God, but they had received teachings that allowed them to enslave those people and deny their humanity while considering themselves genuine Christians.

When the Puritans came here to America seeking freedom of worship, they drove the Native Americans from their lands and often treated them badly. Why? Because they believed that, like Israel driving the pagan nations out of Canaan, they, as Christian people, were coming to a land where God had sent them to settle in this nation and create a new Christian society. And they believed that God gave them the right to occupy that land because these people, who were involved in witchcraft, idolatry, human sacrifice, and all these things, were not of God, whereas they knew the Word and had the right to occupy the land. So their interpretation of the Bible in light of the Old Testament allowed them to do those things.

Now, there was definitely sin in all of that, but God was also involved in it. Because look at what came out of it: a nation that has blessed humanity, with all its errors and all its issues. But I believe that God was in that project. Yet sin often intervenes as well, and the movements of God have to pass through the human filter; in that process they are often distorted, but God is in the midst of those processes.

And what about the conquest of the Americas? The Spaniards came to the Americas and conquered all these lands, and yet Christianity and the Christian faith also came with them, while these nations here were involved in human sacrifice. When Cortés arrived in Mexico with his men, it is said that the smell of blood could be detected from miles away because, in the Flower Wars, the Aztecs and the other groups went to war to obtain human sacrifices, and sometimes tens of thousands of people were sacrificed to the god of blood, the god of death. They tore people’s living hearts out while they were still beating.

The conquistadors entered there seeking glory, and I believe that God was in that project as well, in a way we cannot understand, but God moves in history. And the thing is that, as Christians, I sometimes see us politicize the Bible, and then we want to say, “No, God could never be involved in that.” And we try to put God in a box, but what I say is that God does whatever He very well pleases.

Now, does that mean that we have to go around enslaving people or conquering and trying to drive people from their land? No. What it tells me is simply that God is very mysterious and that we have to walk across the pages of Scripture with great caution and great holy fear, because sometimes we do not know everything.

For example, look at the problem of the Palestinians and Israel. There are many Christians nowadays, especially here in the United States and in many parts of Europe, who cannot understand how God could drive the Palestinians out of that land, which God had already given to the Jews thousands of years ago, and which they have now reconquered; and how, in God’s time, God has brought the Jewish people back to Israel, and the Bible says that land belongs to the Jewish people.

Now, the poor Palestinians are there. What do we do with them? I am not going to say, “Well, God cannot allow one country alone to keep all the land.” Look, God does whatever He pleases. Now, the Jews want to reach an agreement with the Palestinians; they want to resolve the problem with Palestine. But I try to maintain a balance, a neutrality on the matter, because who knows what God is doing there? I believe that land belongs to the people of God.

One thing I believe is that the land cannot be given to anyone, because that land does not even belong to the Jews for them to give it away. That land belongs to God. And the Holy Land cannot be negotiated away; that land belongs to God. If that does not coincide with my values of justice or whatever else, that is a matter for God and the Bible, and I have to respect what the Bible says. And I have to walk very carefully.

What about dictators in the Bible with whom God worked and whom He used to advance His purposes? He revealed Himself to Nebuchadnezzar, and from what I can see in the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar had an encounter with God. What happened with Naaman, that general whom God healed of leprosy through Elisha’s ministry, who converted to the God of Israel and returned to his land? When he was going back to his land, he said to Elisha, “Look, I am the general whom the king trusts most, and many times the king takes me to the temple of Rimmon and leans on my arm. When he leans on my arm to worship this god, I also have to bow down with him. What should I do?” And what did Elisha tell him? “Go in peace. Do not worry. God is not going to condemn you for that.” And that is what you have to do, amen, but keep your heart devoted to the true God.

Wow. Those things always complicate my life, and they guide my pastoral conduct, brothers and sisters. Because the fact that this general belonged to a pagan nation that attacked Israel did not prevent God from having mercy on him, healing him, and allowing him to return to his homeland healed.

What happened to Naaman after he was healed? Did he go back to being a general? Did he lead battles and kill people? I do not know—possibly. Because God does whatever he pleases, brothers and sisters, and we as a people have to develop a biblical sensitivity. And biblical sensitivity does not put obstacles in the Lord’s way; rather, it lets God be God, and we walk within the mystery of who God is.

That passage about Naaman, for example, has always governed the way I deal with people pastorally, by the way. What does Pastor Miranda believe? Look, when people are there in the counseling office and bring serious problems to me, I try always to maintain that healthy balance that Scripture maintains concerning how to deal with the situations in which people often find themselves. Sometimes people find themselves in a bind and do not know how to get out of it. And we are so categorical in our interpretation of the Bible, and we say, no, you have to do this, you have to do that; there is no way around it.

But I look at the Bible and at the complex God who works with people’s situations and gives them a little room. And I could give you so many texts. The Pharisees could not understand Jesus, for example, because Jesus dealt with people like Zacchaeus, for example, and went to his house and sat down with Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus had not repented yet; all Zacchaeus had was a heart that knew there was something special about this man and wanted to meet him, and Jesus knew this man’s heart. And he did not wait to explain the 12 spiritual rules to him so that Zacchaeus would accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. No, he said, Zacchaeus, prepare a good meal today, because tonight I am going to have dinner at your house. And the Pharisees who were there could not understand Jesus, because how could this man possibly eat with a sinner and his companion? But that love of Christ converted Zacchaeus and all his companions; it was stronger than the legalism of the Pharisees.

And I can show you so many different passages of Scripture where I see the Lord dealing with people, and many times his verdict is not as clear-cut as people might think. And we have to discern God’s timing in pastoral counseling, and sometimes we have to give people a little more time to ripen before hitting them with the heavy hand of the Word, and leave them for a little while so that God can continue dealing with them.

That governs my pastoral style. Not long ago—I do not know whether the sister is here, but I am not even going to say her name—I was sitting up there with her in a counseling session, and she... I am going to confess something, if she is here: about 20 years ago, I went to her house to visit her because she asked me to. Frankly, sister, I did not even remember that you had been with us in Cambridge. She had a serious problem, a family problem, and she invited me to her house because she had a question. She had only recently been converted and wanted pastoral advice from me.

The situation was rather unconventional and required a little creativity in the advice I had to give her. Then she said to me, ‘And you gave me a word, such wise advice, and I followed your advice, and everything turned out well for me.’ So I asked her, ‘And what did I tell you?’ I did not even remember. Because I wanted to know whether the answer I gave her 20 years ago was the answer I would give her now. And that was why I smiled, and she told me, ‘You said to me, “Look, sister, I do not judge you. Do what you feel in your heart, pray to God about it, and entrust yourself to his mercy and his grace.”’

And I could hear myself today, in the year 2011, saying the same thing to people who are... In that sense, I have not changed my attitude. I always see that there are occasions when God is God, and sometimes, like Jesus, I have to tell people, ‘Look, neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.’

How does one deal with people who are undocumented, who are in the church and are serving in the church? How does one deal with couples who are not married and have just been converted to the Lord? Do I tell them, ‘Hey, you have to separate, with one of you going to live in one place and the other somewhere else’? They even have children already. They have been accustomed to living together for 10 or 15 years. We have to deal with that. We have to lead them toward God’s holiness, and in due time they do it.

But we also have to give them room, just as Naaman was given room, so that God can do the work in their lives. And what I mean is that God’s truth is often uncomfortable. So people often do not know why we advise them in a certain way and why we say, ‘Look, do this.’ Why do we allow certain freedoms? Because I see the complexity of Scripture; I see the complexity of God’s heart.

Why does God choose Cornelius? A centurion—how many beatings must Cornelius have handed out in his lifetime as a Roman centurion? But he was also a man who feared God. You know those colonels and captains in our countries who are also often somewhat bloodthirsty people, but then God touches them, they show up at a church, God converts them, and then there has to be a process through which this bloodthirsty, violent person is gradually tamed and begins to walk in the ways of the Lord. You cannot take away his revolver and nightstick right away, overnight. You have to give them time, and God has worked that way throughout all the centuries.

And God uses whomever he wants, and sometimes he deals with people in incredible ways, and he deals with peoples, nations, and individuals. And we, as a church, have to be patient and merciful and look at ourselves first. As Jesus Christ said, ‘Judge not, that you be not judged.’ First look at the beam in your own eye before looking at the speck in someone else’s eye.

Now, does that mean that we are not a church of holiness? Of course we are. We believe in it, but there are also other passages in the Bible that teach us that we have to handle things with a certain degree of care, a certain degree of caution, and a certain degree of patience. And that is one of the things that governs my pastoral style and the style of this congregation.

And we have to be careful in the way we handle these complexities. I would like to ask the musicians to come up here. This sermon turned out very differently from the one this morning, because that is how God works. If you want to see the other part, watch this morning’s sermon. And next Sunday we are going to continue addressing these truths.

What I want, brothers and sisters, is for us, through these studies, to understand who we are as a church, and I want to cultivate in you and in myself a complex faith, a faith with many nuances and a great deal of balance, so that the Lord can do the work he wants to do in our lives.

We are going to celebrate Holy Communion in a moment, and I ask you to prepare yourselves to come before the presence of God in this sublime way. And may God grant that, instead of being a source of confusion for you, these things may be a source of enrichment for your lives.

What I want is to clarify things, not obscure them. Over these next few weeks, I am going to be speaking about many different topics, and pray for me that the Lord will give me the wisdom, as I say, to be a blessing to your lives and to bless our congregation.

Father, we surrender this sermon to you, Lord, and we ask you to enlighten us, that your grace may be with us, that you may help us to be people of your Word, Father, to be complex people who see the totality of your revelation in all the passages of Scripture. Help us to be a people as you want us to be, a truly pastoral community of love, mercy, justice, and truth, in the name of Jesus. Amen and amen.