The scripture reading comes from Deuteronomy chapter 5, starting in verse 1.
Please follow along in your bulletin or Bible.
Verse 1,
And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them,
Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the rules that speak in your hearing today,
and you shall learn them and be careful to do them.
Then in verse 6,
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above
or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,
but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,
for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy as the Lord your God commanded you.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work,
but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
On it you shall not do any work.
You or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant
or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates,
that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.
You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,
and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.
Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you,
that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
You shall not murder, and you shall not commit adultery,
and you shall not steal, and you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,
and you shall not covet your neighbor's wife,
and you shall not desire your neighbor's house,
his field, or his male servant, or his female servant,
his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.
This is the word of God.
Great. Thank you, Echo.
I should have met.
Great. Welcome, everyone, to Watermark.
It's a really exciting day for everyone to be back together.
If you're in the overflow room, we're really excited to have you as well.
It really is, it feels like a long time since we've really been together,
so this is just a really great celebration.
Let me pray for us, and then we'll dive into Scripture.
Father, thank you that you are the one who speaks.
You're the one who is true, and your word is true.
And I pray that this morning you would speak in a way which goes through the defenses that we put up in our lives,
that you would speak deep into the core of our being and show us who you really are.
Show us your goodness and your grace.
Show us our need for you.
Open our hearts to see that you're so much better than we even think you are.
And I pray, change us.
Transform us.
Let us be different people this week and the rest of our lives as a result of today.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
Great.
So, we have been going through this series looking at the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Words, as they are in Hebrew.
And we've now got to number nine.
Okay?
So, we're nearly there through them.
And this has been just, for me personally, both a challenging and a very rich series.
And so, we're looking at number nine today.
But just to set it in context, in 2008, a Christian Pakistani lady who's called Noreen, or to some people known as Asha Bibi,
had an argument with her Muslim co-workers over a shared water bucket.
As a result of that, they claimed that she had blasphemed the prophet Muhammad, and she was arrested, and witnesses were brought in to verify this accusation against her.
At the end, she was sentenced to death by hanging, and was on death row for eight years until 2018, when after a lot of public pressure,
the truth came out, that actually, they had lied about everything that had happened, and she was released.
And now, she's actually living, I think, somewhere in America.
But this commandment is about that kind of thing.
This commandment is about justice.
This commandment says, do not bear false witness.
Now, what is a witness?
A witness is someone who has seen something, or heard something, and then testifies to what they've seen or heard.
So, you know, if I knock into someone's car, if there's a car crash, police will come and take witness statements to verify what really happened, and to establish the truth.
And for justice and right relationships to take place, you need to have truthful witnesses.
Quite simple.
But here it tells you, don't be a false witness.
And the word false here is the same word in the third commandment.
Does anyone remember what the third commandment is?
Oh, everyone else is looking down now.
Third commandment, don't take the Lord's name in vain.
It's that word, in vain, the same word.
And so, just as the third commandment told you, don't misrepresent God in your words and in your actions.
So, this commandment is saying, don't misrepresent other people or situations by speaking falsely in order to deceive or harm other people or harm someone's reputation.
That's what this commandment is about.
And often, this commandment was actually in the law courts.
But it's in scripture.
It's not just there.
It's actually part of a bigger story that is going through about what it means to be a community of false witnesses versus a community of true witnesses.
And so, what I want to do is kind of look at those two points and pull out a little bit of the story of what this commandment is really telling us this morning.
So, let's look at a community of false witnesses.
The Bible story and actually the Ten Commandments are shaped by the story of a God who rescues and redeems people and takes them out of slavery to be a new kind of people in the midst of a pagan world.
They were to be a witness to the people around them of who God was.
And so, if you pile back in the story to Genesis 1, what you see is right at the beginning, God creates this incredibly abundant, transparent world.
You see, his character is the foundation of all relationships.
He's the God who cannot lie, Titus tells us.
Jesus tells us he's the truth.
His word is truth.
What he says always corresponds to reality.
And out of this absolute security in the trustworthiness of God, Adam and Eve, humans in the garden, they had this unhindered, transparent access into the presence of God.
And then that led to horizontally with each other, they were naked and unashamed.
Nothing was hidden.
There was no fear.
Pure transparency.
And then, what happens in the story?
You have the first false witness comes.
Genesis 3, the serpent, Satan, comes with a lie.
And Jesus says, Satan is the father of lies.
In other words, he always gives birth to lies.
Every lie is always birthed in the pit of hell.
Do you know that?
And he comes and he slanders God's reputation.
He says, did God really say, don't eat from the tree?
He says, no, no, no.
If you eat from that, you can't trust what God says.
And what he's doing, as he's doing this, he's saying, he's misrepresenting God's rule, God's word, as not good and as untrustworthy.
And Adam and Eve, they fall for it.
Because bearing false witness always starts with a lie about who God is.
And it leads you to distrust what he says.
And what Adam and Eve do, they follow their own desires and not what God's truth says.
In Romans 1, there's this, Paul's meditating on this passage and he says,
All humans exchanged the truth of God for a lie and they worshipped created things instead of the creator.
What he's saying is, the breaking of the first two commands about worshipping other gods and idols,
an idol is always a lie.
Because an idol is always making a claim to be God when it's not God.
It's being a false witness.
And every sin that you have ever committed in your life has always started with a lie somewhere about God
that he's not good, that you can't trust him, so you've got to get things your way.
And if you can't trust the creator of the universe, we are always feeling insecure.
And you know in the story of Adam and Eve, it leads to their sin and what are they doing to do?
They begin to cover up.
And when God brings our sin or other people bring our sin into this kind of law court for questioning,
what happens?
We begin to naturally become false witnesses ourselves.
And I want to show you three ways that we bear false witness.
The first way is, like Adam and Eve, we cover up what's true for self-preservation.
We either do this by being silent or being defensive.
Just think, when God says to Adam, have you eaten from the tree?
What should Adam have said?
He should have said, yes.
It's my responsibility.
What does he do?
He stays silent about that.
He stays silent.
And then he blame shifts onto Eve and says, it's not my fault, it's hers.
And then what does the woman do?
He says, it's not my fault, it's the snake.
Do you see what they're doing?
We bear witness, false witness, not just by saying what is wrong.
It's also giving a false impression by your silence or your defensiveness.
You know, one example of this, Leviticus 5 says,
If you know the truth, but you fail to speak up for somebody else who is falsely accused,
it says you will be held responsible.
Because evil reigns when good people stay silent or when sinful people defend themselves.
You know, just think about it.
You go to work.
Your boss gives you a task with another colleague.
And your colleague, let's call her Karen, asks you, actually no, let's not call her Karen, let's call her something else.
Think of a name.
Angel.
Let's call her Angel.
She says, hey, can you just send that important email over the weekend?
And you get to Monday morning and you walk into the office and suddenly you realize you've forgotten to send it.
Your boss comes walking in front of you, looking angry, and says, what happened to that email?
Why haven't you done it?
It's now a courtroom scene.
You're on trial.
You're both defense and also you're a witness.
And so where do you go?
Listen, it wasn't me.
Angel didn't explain it had to be sent at the weekend.
You know, I didn't realize it was that urgent.
In fact, she should have done it.
I was just trying to help her out.
But actually, really, it was her responsibility.
And we can never feel like we can admit to being wrong.
What are you doing?
You're giving a false impression that you're innocent.
You're a false witness.
Why do we do that?
We do that because we're insecure.
Because we fear being exposed.
We fear that someone will see that we're actually a failure.
That we're actually a sinner in some way.
And we fear punishment or rejection or a cost as a result of it, don't we?
That's why we cover up.
That's why we actually hire an inner lawyer to defend ourselves all the time.
And if you think about it, half of our marriages, half of our workplaces are filled with this.
Let me just ask you.
Has your defensiveness ever enabled your relationships to flourish more?
No.
It always destroys relationships.
Never builds up.
That's why he says don't be a false witness.
It's the first way we can bear.
By covering up.
Second way we can bear a false witness is seeking to ruin somebody else's reputation through slander.
Leviticus 19 fleshes this out.
It says don't do injustice in court.
You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people.
And you should not stand up against the life of your neighbor.
We've said before that Satan is a false witness.
Do you know what the word Satan means?
It means the slanderer.
The accuser.
That's his very nature.
And you know that his best lies are always partly true.
Right?
You know that's the best way to do a lie.
Is to actually give past truth.
But he's always looking to tear down people.
Matthew Henry describes, who's a theologian, describes slander as aggravating a person's wrongdoing.
And making it worse than it is.
Or anyway seeking to raise our own reputation upon the ruin of our neighbors.
It's basically boosting yourself up by tearing somebody else down.
Can I be honest?
I think this is one of the most prevalent, acceptable sins in Hong Kong and in the church.
Because I think we don't think that God really takes this seriously.
But if you look at the New Testament.
And look at all the kind of top ten sin lists that the New Testament gives you.
You know slander and its equivalents are always there.
Always there.
Like just give you an example.
Romans 1.
People who are under God's judgment are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.
They are gossips and slanderers.
And then he goes on.
And this is challenging.
He goes on and says.
Though they do it.
They know.
They do it though.
They know God's righteous decree.
That those who practice such things deserve to die.
And you're going.
Whew.
That sounds a little bit serious.
But what is he saying?
And he's saying that's the death penalty of the Old Testament pronounced against false witnesses in God's courts.
Because justice matters to God.
You know fake news.
And forwarding on fake news.
Without even checking it.
Is actually bearing false witness.
And we all know about that right?
What is it trying to do?
It's deliberately seeking to damage someone else's reputation through false or misleading reporting.
Right?
You know.
You can lose your job.
You can lose your health.
You can lose your money.
You can lose any of those things.
And people will come around you and support you.
But if you lose your reputation.
You're on your own.
And even if an accusation is proved false.
The stain of that is almost impossible to remove from your life.
Because everyone's always wondering.
Is it still really true?
What are we doing?
Fake news destroys people.
But you know gossip is a kind of fake news.
No one ever thinks they're a gossip.
It's got the same heart.
But don't we always love to bond with other people through sharing the faults of someone else?
You know.
Isn't this how pretty much half of all office relationships work?
You know.
You go like.
Did you hear what happened in their marriage last week?
Or it's.
You know.
You know that girl.
You know.
I saw her having a coffee with one guy last week.
And then this week.
She was having a guy with a coffee with another guy.
She must be really desperate.
And we do this all the time.
And what are we doing as we're doing.
Are we trying to build people up?
No.
We're actually doing Satan's work of trying to tear people down.
Why do we do it?
Because we actually want to belong.
We want to be accepted.
We want to boost our reputation to make us that we don't feel so great to feel better about ourselves.
And we can do that by putting somebody else down.
Man.
Isn't that so easy to join in with?
Anyone guilty of that?
Simon is.
Great.
Thank you for being honest.
Yeah.
But you know that you're gossiping.
Because we go.
It's just a prayer request.
You know you're gossiping.
When you're sharing information about somebody else's faults.
But you have no intention to actually go and talk to that person themselves about it.
You are not praying for them about it.
You're not seeking ways that you can help restore them in it.
It's just gossip.
It's a false witness.
And God takes that really seriously.
We cover up.
We slander.
The third way we can be false witnesses is just plain lying.
Leviticus again says, don't lie.
Don't speak falsely.
You know, sometimes lies can be like Enron, Bernie Madoff kind of style.
Right?
They're pretty out there.
But lying can also be very subtle.
We can either minimize or exaggerate situations for our own personal benefit.
And do you know what I've discovered?
I've discovered as I've thought about this, that I am actually a compulsive liar.
Some of you don't want to be my friend now.
I have what I think are very high standards of integrity.
But actually, if I get to a point where I really want something enough, I will lie for it.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
I remember applying for a scholarship for seminary.
And I had to fill in this form.
And part of the form said you've got to write down all your savings, all your assets, everything you have to qualify for this scholarship.
And the amount, the threshold for the scholarship that you had to get was actually quite a, it felt like a really low amount of money that you had to have in your savings.
And so I looked at my savings and I thought, oh, I've got a bit too much for that threshold.
So then I began to think, but actually, most of that's in our joint account, not in a kind of separate account that I've got.
And then the UK account, that doesn't count at all.
And the joint account, that's really probably some of Fiona's money in there as well.
So that probably doesn't count.
You know, it's a gray area.
And so I put this figure, which was kind of half true.
And I justified it to myself.
And I think in Hong Kong, a lot of people would think that I was being smart.
But actually, I know in my own heart that I was just afraid of missing out, which is why I was not truthful.
You see, sometimes we minimize things to be a false witness.
Sometimes, though, we also exaggerate things.
I've discovered this as well.
I can exaggerate stories when I'm telling them to people just to gain approval for myself.
You know, that rather boring holiday suddenly becomes a TVB drama.
You know, suddenly, you know, that everyone's, I say, everyone's talking about my blog post.
But really, I mean two people.
Okay?
And why am I doing it?
Because I want to be seen as cool.
I want to impress.
I want to fit in.
I want you to like me.
Anyone else like me?
And we do these things.
We cover up.
We slander.
We lie.
Because we believe the lie that God is not good, we can't trust him.
He will not accept us.
He will not provide for us.
And so we've got to get approval and acceptance and stuff from anywhere else other than him.
And we do it through lying.
You know, sin by nature is deceitful.
That's what the Bible says.
And it operates in a web of lies.
And do you know, have you realized this?
That around every lie, when you start lying, you then have to have a bodyguard of other lies to protect your first lie.
And do you also realize that often when you start lying, you also start lying to yourself to justify the lies that you've been believing and saying.
It becomes a whole web of it.
And in a world of spin, a world of lies, doesn't mistrust, doesn't fear, doesn't cynicism, doesn't self-protection actually end up bringing barriers between us.
It's actually a world, a community of darkness when it's a community of false witnesses.
Just think of politics and how that affects the way we think about everything when you can't trust someone and then just play that down into every area of your life.
But this commandment is telling us to not be that kind of community.
It's telling us to be a community of true witnesses.
So here's my next point.
How do we become this community of true witnesses?
Well, we've got to swim in the security of Jesus.
Do you know, have you, do you know when you go to the airport and you know they've now got those full body scanner, security scanners that you go through, which, you know, they see everything.
Right?
You know, in the past, you used to just have the metal detector and you could sometimes put something in your pocket and hope you'd get away with it if it wasn't metal.
Maybe that's just me.
I don't know.
But now it's all visible.
They see everything.
And if you're clean, you can kind of walk through with that with confidence.
But if you've got something to hide, you've got drugs or something there, you're going to get nervous when you come approaching that thing.
Because you're going to try and cover up any way you can what you've got in your pocket or wherever it is.
And, you know, sometimes you can actually even get nervous, even if you don't have something on you, because you're worried that they might find something you didn't realize was there.
Or they might try and get something to use against you.
1 John 1 says this.
God is light.
And in him is no darkness at all.
And then he says, if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and we don't practice the truth.
What is he saying?
God is light.
He's got nothing to hide.
He doesn't need to put others down to boost himself up because he's already completely pure, already the ultimate of everything that you ever need to be.
There is no darkness in him.
He's utterly true, utterly pure, utterly trustworthy.
But his truthful light is like a scanner into your heart and mine.
And do you know what?
He sees right through you.
He sees right through your shame.
He sees right through the secrets that you want to cover up.
You can fool others, but you can't fake it with him.
God is the true witness who judges even the thoughts of our hearts, it says in scripture.
Your darkness goes beep every time you come into the light of his scanner.
Isn't that scary?
If you were to be exposed, don't we fear punishment, rejection, that exposure for who you really are?
But the thing is, at the moment you want to run away, John carries on like this.
He goes,
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.
And the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin.
If we say we have no sin, I'm not a liar, we deceive ourselves.
But if we confess our sin, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.
What is he saying?
He's saying the place of freedom to be a true community is to start with going, I am a liar.
It's to start admitting it.
It's to start with honest confession of saying, God, let your light begin to search me and lay me bare.
And God, I need to repent and come before you.
I need to come and see the light of your grace.
And do you know what happens?
He says, it brings us, not just when we start doing that, it brings us not just into fellowship with God again.
It actually says it brings us into fellowship with each other.
You know, I remember when I was six years old.
It's the first time I can remember lying.
I was going on a school trip up to London.
And my mom gave me some pocket money and she said to me, like, don't waste this on like useless souvenirs like stamps and things like that.
Just spend it wisely.
So what did I do?
I went and bought some stamps.
And then I came back home and my mom asked me, did you spend any money?
And I went, no.
Should I show it?
Yep.
And then I ran up to my bedroom and I hid and I felt really guilty.
And my mom knew.
You know, moms are clever, right?
My mom knew.
And I spent probably hiding there an hour.
And I didn't want to go and see my mom.
But at the end of the hour, I think it was God convicting me that I walked down to my mom and I said, mom, like crying.
I said, mom, I'm really sorry I lied.
And you know, at that moment, there was liberation.
It was like a relationship.
She said, I forgive you.
And she gave me a hug.
And in the safety of her grace, there was this restored relationship again.
That is what God is about.
Because if you know that when you enter God's law court and that the truthful witness in the stand who should be your prosecution against you is actually God himself.
But he's the one who actually loves you so much that though he knows everything on your scanner, he sent Jesus to die for you, to take the punishment, to cleanse you, and to restore you, even from your lying heart.
You know, you can honestly then confess without having to defend yourself.
Why?
Because John carries on.
He says, if anyone does sin, we have an advocate, a lawyer, with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous.
What he's saying is, you can fire your inner defense lawyer because you've already got one.
You've got one who's better than the one that you think you can do with the lies that you think you can say.
Because his blood doesn't just cleanse you.
It's also the stamp of acceptance.
It's the stamp of approval.
It's the stamp of belonging to the king of the whole universe.
You know, he could ruin and expose your reputation like that.
Do you know that?
Today, he could bring stuff out about you that you've been hiding for years.
But do you see what he says?
He says, he's not out to do that.
At the judgment day, he will do that for those who have not come into his light.
That's going to be a scary day.
And if you are not a believer today, I call to you today, come into his light because you don't want to be in that place.
But right now, he says, there is a lawyer available for you who speaks for you in your defense in heaven.
He's taken your punishment.
He was rejected.
So you don't have to be.
Which means you don't have to boost yourself up by putting other people down or lying to try and make yourself look better than you really are.
Because you're already being boosted to the highest place in the universe with the king of kings.
We struggle to believe that.
But that's the gospel.
That's what God wants to work in our lives.
And that is the foundation of the security that will set you free to be courageously transparent with others.
Do you know if you only ever confess your sins to God and you don't confess your sins to each other, you're probably still a false witness.
Because you're still hiding.
But every day, we face new temptations to be false witnesses, don't we?
Your spouse says to you, were you listening to me?
And you weren't.
That is a moment where you'll have the temptation to rehire your own defense lawyer again.
Or to act as prosecution witness against them just to distract you from actually your own failings being revealed.
But it's actually a moment of courage to say, no, Christ is my defense lawyer.
I can trust him.
I'm secure in him.
And I can be a true witness.
Do you know why it takes courage to be a witness, a true witness?
Do you know what the word in Greek for witness is?
It's the word martis.
Which is the word we get, which word from?
Martyr from.
You see, Jesus in the book of Revelation is called the faithful witness.
He's the truth.
He always spoke and lived the truth.
In him and in his words, you see trustworthy life.
You can count on him.
But when he spoke, John goes on to say, some prefer darkness.
And what happened?
He gets put in front of the authorities and falsely accused.
They bear false witness against him.
He doesn't seek to cover up.
He doesn't seek to manipulate.
He doesn't lie.
He has got nothing to hide.
But his true witness lost cost him his life.
But he rose again.
Vindicated.
Just like Asha Bibi.
When at the end of the day, she is vindicated.
And her accusers are shamed.
That is what has happened with the resurrection of Jesus.
We know he is a true witness.
That's why we're here this morning.
But you know, if we're following Jesus, what does that make us?
You know, what does Jesus call his disciples in the book of Acts?
He says, you go and be my witnesses.
See, those who have seen Jesus and testified to him.
And in their words and in their actions, we walk in the light and in his light.
And we reflect his character.
So what that means is, being a true witness is about even sharing the gospel with people.
Do you know you can be false witness by actually covering up and being silent about your faith?
Evangelism is simply being a transparent witness to people of what God has already done in your life.
And so evangelism and integrity are two wings of the same plane.
Integrity in the small stuff and in the big stuff is how we shine a light in the dark world that we're in.
And it's risky and it's scary and it's costly.
Which is why we don't like to do it.
But what if you know that you have a security in Christ?
What if when your wife says to you, why do you always leave the towel on the floor?
And instead of jumping to your own self-defense, you actually stop, hold your tongue for a second and go,
yeah, you're right, I probably should have been more thoughtful.
What if when everyone else around you is cutting down a colleague of yours for sucking up to the boss?
And everyone, and you, instead of joining in, you go, yeah, I think that's pretty dumb.
But do you know what I was doing the other day?
I was actually, I was competing to get the first email sent back to my boss because I thought I wanted to be in his good books too.
I'm a people pleaser too.
What if you've got a client meeting and you really want to impress?
And so you hear yourself just elevating your position in the company to make yourself sound a bit grander.
And then you stop yourself and go, oh, hold on a minute, actually, that's not quite true.
I'm not quite as senior in the company as that.
What if you found a loophole which could increase your performance figures and get a massive bonus, but you choose to be honest?
What if you do that?
Two things are going to happen.
One, it's going to cost you.
It's going to cost you because some people may even move away from you.
They may even gossip about you because when you're insecure and somebody else seems to reveal the fact of your darkness by their light, what happens?
Some people just want to walk away from you because they don't like that.
You may lose that bonus.
You may lose that business deal because you weren't willing to cover up the failings on the product.
It may cost you.
But something else will happen.
You'll get a reputation for being trustworthy.
And people will begin to feel safe around you.
Relational barriers will begin to break down.
Healing will begin to occur in marriages and in workplaces and in families.
Other people will begin to open up about their own darkness in front of you because they know you're safe.
And in a world of insecurity and false witnesses and threat, if we as a community of Watermark start to find our security in our advocate Jesus, in our truthful, faithful witness who has secured our life for us,
then what will happen is others will discover that this is a place where they can put down their own masks too.
They can stop the pretense and the hiding.
And they can come into the light of both God's conviction but also the light of his grace and forgiveness and healing and mercy.
You know, it's really tiring trying to hide.
Lying is tiring.
There's a freedom.
There's a freedom in coming into the light and discovering that Jesus Christ is more than enough for us.
We have nothing to hide.
Some of us today, we actually need to just start with coming honestly before God in confession.
Because we've actually been believing a whole load of lies and we've been justifying a whole load of behaviors.
And we've just not been honest with God or even with ourselves.
And this morning, God wants you to get honest with him.
Come into his light.
You don't have to hide.
Some of us know that actually, we've actually been speaking badly of other people.
And you've almost not even thought about it as an issue.
Some of you actually need to get right with God first.
And you actually need to go and talk to the person that you've actually been offending.
And if that's you, and if someone comes to you, because that takes courage, right?
Only if you know Jesus is your advocate, are you going to do that?
No.
But if you know someone comes to you and says that, reflect the love of Jesus back to them and the forgiveness.
Don't just be holding on to that.
Because we want this to be a safe place.
A place where we can no longer live in hiding.
Because we can walk in the light as he is in the light.
Let's just close our heads.
Let's just bow our heads.
If I can invite the communion stewards to come forward.
But I want you to just really get real with Jesus right now.
Quit the pretense.
I want you to be honest.
What is God saying to you right now?
Where is he putting his finger on your heart?
If you're not a believer, take this time to actually ask Jesus to expose you, to show you himself, to show you your need of him.
For some of the rest of us, you may just need to spend some time in confession.
Some of us, we may need to actually repent of not really believing that Jesus is enough and Jesus is our defense and he's our advocate.
Some of us may need to repent of always thinking we have to have the last word.
We can never be seen to be wrong.
Let the Spirit of God just minister to you right now.