Pastor Brian and Jacque Lother, Pastor Jeff Orluck
Brian: It's great to see everybody today. Stan and Kathy, welcome. Angela is showing improvement. Thank you, Lord. For those of you who don't know, their daughter had a terrible fall and hit her head; multiple fracture in her head, terrible brain injury and she is now moving about a little bit and responding to commands and so forth. Little by little, we just pray for a complete restoration for her and we just bring her before the throne of grace every day.
Jacque: Every day with updates. Thank you.
Brian: Yes. We also have some very special friends with us. My dearest friend, Billy, who is now with my dad in heaven, he passed away in February, their family is here. We are going to lay his remains to rest after the service today. We welcome Gator and everybody from the family, Cheryl. I don't think there is a day that goes by that I don't miss Billy. I see him everywhere around here and I see him everywhere around my house. He is indelibly etched in our minds and we miss him a lot. So thank you for being here today worshiping with us.
I pray there is comfort for all of us because it's a tough world we live in, isn't it? It's a hard world. It's a harsh world. The only thing that really makes is it livable is Jesus. It's really Jesus and his love. My heart at times breaks for people who don't know the love of Christ because of the turmoil and just the trauma, I believe mentally, psychologically, and emotionally that they have to be going through and dealing with in their lives.
There is a book of the Bible that is often not read very much. It's the Song of Songs. Sometimes it's called the Song of Solomon. It's a book that is full of metaphors and allegories to represent God's love for us. It's really interesting, when Moses was coming on the scene to encounter God and God had a great future for him, he showed up in a burning bush. It's like, wow, what a strange way to introduce yourself. Do you ever think about that? What a strange way to introduce yourself to somebody, like a burning bush. There are different ways that God began to reveal himself to mankind throughout history. It all was with the idea, intent to demonstrate how much God loves us. Boy it was a number of years ago; I don't know how many years ago, maybe 15 or 20 that I heard Pastor Jeff really do some teaching on the book of Song of Songs. And I thought to myself someday, we are going to have him kind of share some of these insights with us. You know what, someday is right now.
Jacque: We are on our third week of it.
Brian: We are in our third week of it and we could go probably a lot longer. What's in this book, if we just kind of read it at face value, we miss the things that God is trying to say, but if we can look a little bit deeper into the metaphorical writing, the allegorical writing and what God is trying to communicate to us as human beings, and he does it in a way that maybe we would understand it the best and in the language, in a sense that we understand, then we can start to really see this passionate love God has for us and the incredible longing he has to have a relationship with us. God is not this angry deity that's way off, kind of like in Greek mythology where we have to appease him and go through all these rituals to help him not be in a twit, as I've been saying for a few weeks, but rather God, especially in this book really starts to express his passion and his love for us. With that, I'll let you take it away and we'll just interrupt you every once in a while here this morning.
Jeff: Sure. I just thought… I don't know if you did it yet, but just thank everybody for their participation in the prayer day yesterday.
Brian: Yes. Yes.
Jeff: All of you, who participated in that, live streamed it at your house, or went down to the [crosstalk 53:39].
Brian: Crossroads.
Jeff: Crossroads Chapel. That was a very important day. One day of prayer doesn't change world history, but we have to remember that all the prayers and all the faith that went into that day, everyone who participated, all of that was put into a big bowl up in heaven, right? The day is coming when that bowl is full. God is going to tip it out and pour it back down. That's what we have to look forward to. When he pours that bowl down, it's going to be quite a response to the intercessions and prayers and tears of God's people. Yesterday was a part of that, filling that bowl.
Brian: One thing I was… I was kind of fascinated by this because there were just a myriad of different people that prayed, some for just maybe 30 seconds, some, longer. Some prayers were just very fiery and other prayers were almost meditative and the whole spectrum. I left yesterday with this thought that God heard every single one of them and every single one of them meant something to God. They meant something to God. It isn't so much in the manner in which, in a sense we pray, but it's the passion that we have in our hearts as we pray. Thank you everybody, those of you are watching on live stream, all those who participated. There are many of you here who did as well. Thank you, Sean, for a great job over at Crossroads Chapel at the state fair, and a beautiful facility there. The live stream was great over there. The sound was great. Thank all your technical people for all that. It was a wonderful day, wonderful day.
Jeff: Kind of to segue from there, I think one of the introductory remarks I felt would be really good for us today is to just remind ourselves that Christianity is not a philosophy. It's not a theology, and it's more than just a way of living or a way of thinking. It's an experience. It's an experience with a living God and our lives are changed. Our lives aren't changed because we learn something intellectually and we begin to practice it. That always is helpful to live life in a way that benefits you, and the ways of God are the ways that benefit our lives, so even if you don't know Jesus and you live his ways, your life will be better. But what changes our life, isn't just adopting a lifestyle or adopting a code of ethics or a set of morality. What changes our lives is an encounter with God himself. That transforms us in a moment. And then his presence goes with us through our whole lives, and it changes. Our entire life is a series of transformations. It is a journey of change that happens inside of us because of the intimate relationship that we have with our savior.
Brian: It doesn't have to happen in church either.
Jeff: It doesn't have to happen at church.
Brian: I remember a song that Jacque used to sing- I met Jesus today, and I really must tell you... finish it.
Jacque: He didn't look a lot like the pictures. It wasn't even Sunday and I wasn't in a church, but it was him just as sure as can be. He was a hungry child, a sick friend of mine, stranger who needed a friend. He was a lonely old man who needed a friend, a stranger forsaken and alone.
Brian: And it's in these places that we can encounter Jesus. I love to encounter the Lord here at church. There is nothing quite like the family of God coming together, worshiping in unity, but you don't have to be here to encounter the Lord. You don't have to be in a building to encounter the presence of God. I would just encourage all of us to keep looking for that encounter every day with Jesus.
Jeff: Excellent. We are going to embark this one morning, is the desire that God has to encounter us. In other words, we tend to think of us reaching out to God, praying to God, trying to know God, but the very real truth is that our God desires to know us intimately. That's where we want to go today. One of my favorite preachers that I listen to online said there is only one thing more important than knowing God.
Brian: And that's him knowing us.
Jeff: That's him knowing us. That's him knowing us. Do you remember, he said to his disciples who thought they were serving him so well, "Depart from me. I never knew you." We want to make sure he knows us. That's a passion that he has. We are going to go into chapter four of the Song of Songs. I'm going to read out of verse 12. Excuse me, verse 13 and 14. We are going to start there and we'll go to verse 12 after that. He says, "Arise, my love, my beautiful companion." This is in the NIV.
Brian: That's chapter two.
Jeff: Oh, I'm sorry, chapter two. We'll go to chapter four next. Thank you. And run with me to the higher place. For now is the time to arise and come away with me. For you are my dove hidden in the split open rock. It was I who took you and hid you up high. Oh, you know what? This is as the message.
Brian: No, that's the... I bet you, that's the Passion translation.
Jeff: That's the Passion translation. Okay. I've got to read it from up here, because I need the NIV.
Brian: I've got it here
Jeff: Okay. Go ahead.
Brian: Arise, come my come my darling, my beautiful one. Come with me. My dove in the clefts of the rock in the hiding places on the mountain side, show me your face. Let me hear your voice for your voice is sweet and your face is lovely.
Jeff: So he is calling the one that he loves to go with him to a hidden place, the cleft of the rock, the secret place. Isn't that where young lovers like to go, someplace where they can be alone? Remember those days?
Brian: Am I supposed to say yes to that?
Jeff: Of course you are, just someplace where...
Brian: Is that when the lights on the porch kept flickering?
Jeff: Yes. That's exactly right. You did that too, huh?
Jacque: My mom.
Jeff: Yeah, Cheryl's mom and dad, yeah. We were sitting in the parking lot, in the driveway trying to have a little time alone just to talk. So this is what he is doing. He is calling his bride to go away with him to a secret place. I really need the NIV to be able to refer back. I'm sorry I got the wrong one here in my notes.
Brian: Here. There you go.
Jeff: You got it?
Brian: There you go.
Jeff: Thank you. I studied it all in NIV, so the Passion is really a cool translation, but it doesn't help me because all of my references are in NIV now. You know how that is? You get every Bible and it's never the same. He says, show me your face. Let me hear your voice for your voice is sweet and your face is lovely. Now, if you think about her wearing a veil, what he is asking her to do is unveiled her face to him. Now, what does really speaks to is the hiddenness of our lives and how God is trying to open us up to trust him, because all of us have all kinds of things that are hidden inside of us. We actually have beautiful things inside of us. Most of us don't realize the beautiful things are there because as we talked about last week, what we tend to focus on is the dark things. We focus on the unbeautiful things. We focus on the things that we don't want anyone else to see.
Brian: Or our failures too.
Jeff: Our failures. There is always, well, if they knew the real me, they wouldn't want to be my friend. If they knew the real me, they would never want me to be their pastor, because we know all of things that we want no one else to know about. And so most of us, we tend to live our whole lives with an outward that people see and an inward person that we keep to ourselves. And maybe, maybe, maybe somebody that we really, really truly trust gets to see that inside person, maybe our spouse. Oftentimes, we can live our entire life of marriage and our spouse never gets to see that person because we protect ourselves so well. So maybe we have a close friend that we let see, but maybe not. What it takes is it takes a trust in relationship, in a secret place where we know no one else is listening, that we can open up the hidden things and let somebody who we know, who loves us completely, that we know we can trust, let them see what we've been keeping hidden. This is a hard thing to do, but the only place that the real you can actually be seen is in a relationship where there is the kind of love that you can trust.
Some of us might find that love in a human relationship on the earth. Some of us never, ever will. Some of us have been so wounded in the past that we'll never, ever trust anyone enough to open up to them. But the whole picture that we have in the Song of Songs is of someone who loves us so completely, who sees beyond our darkness, who sees the beauty that's inside of us. We begin to trust that love. We begin to experience that love. We begin to experience the mercy. We find out that he loves us even when we are at our worst. And we begin to dare to open up and trust to him, those things that are hidden. That's what he is longing for. That's what he is waiting for. That is what your Jesus is looking for, is to know his love in such a way that you trust him with the hidden parts of your soul.
Brian: So wouldn’t did you say, Pastor Jeff, that that's pretty much the exact opposite of what most people experience on the earth?
Jeff: Sure. Yeah.
Brian: It is. And so it's so easy to take our earthly experiences and put that as a lens over God. This is why I've been sharing the last number of years that Jesus is the lens that we need to interpret all scripture by, because Jesus said, "If you've seen me, you've seen my father in heaven." A lot of times, the disciples said to Jesus, "Well, tell us what your father is like." And he said, “If you've seen me, you've seen my father.” We have this tendency, don't we to take all of our human experiences and overlay them into how we understand God and how we relate to God. Most of our human experiences have been, we've only been loved for what we could do, how well we performed, how good we were. The minute we failed, we were somehow rejected, et cetera, et cetera. Now that's the pattern that is in our minds and that's what we overlay now, our thinking with God. Of course, we are all fallen, we've all sinned, and we’ve all fall short of the glory of God. So there is an automatic tilt that already happens that God has already rejecting us. But the fact of the matter is God so loved the world that he gave so that we could be reconciled to him while we were yet sinners, not when we become perfect.
I love to tell a story about Jacque's dad, how he would drop Ruby and Jacque and Nancy off at church. God was working on his heart to draw him into relationship and yet he never could clean himself up enough to feel worthy enough to go to church, to meet God. But it was God that wanted to do the cleaning. It was God that wanted to do the cleaning.
Jacque: When I heard that quote, "God loves you 100% all the time" at first, my brain wouldn't... This was like 10 years ago. My brain just couldn't comprehend that because I hadn't been perfect, but he loves you. He loves me 100% all the time, because that is what he is. He loves because he loves because he loves because he loves, then I could start to go to him. Although he knew everything in my heart, I could go to him and confess what was deep in my heart, because he loved me 100% all the time. I love that definition of intimacy- into me, see. That's so good.
Brian: So this portion of scripture that you just read is entire reversal of most of our experiences.
Jeff: Exactly. Yeah. There are a lot of life experiences that impede our ability to trust this God. If you grew up being abused by your father, it’s hard to relate to heavenly father. So these messages of his love for some of us, we need to [crosstalk 1:08:47]
Brian: Let me interject something real quick here. This is one of the reason why I really loved the book, The Shack, because God came to him in a way that he would listen, but then I remember the part of the book where God, the father shows up like the next day and it's a guy, Native-American Indian guy and said, well, where is what's her name and he said, well, we felt that you needed a dad for what you are going to go through now. I know that that causes a lot of us to kind of go tilt in our thinking of the scriptures. But I just believe that God comes to us in the way that we can experience him the easiest. There are unfortunately myriads of women who have been violated by their fathers and didn't experience a father's love in a way that God intended. And so they have a problem. They have a struggle with thinking God, our father is a loving God. So I believe then God just uses other means to come to that person until they can really understand that that person's father was not how God our father is. Again, we get back to this portion of scripture and how this is trying to be the lens that we view God with, rather than this angry, needing to be appeased, ready to drop the hammer upon us, kind of God, that is in the image of so many of our minds.
Jeff: I would say to you, we are all in different places in terms of how we view God and how we see whether he is a loving God or not, whether he is pernicious or capricious or hard or a man, and we hate men or whatever. But if there is something, as we are talking about this love that he has for us, that sparks anything inside of you, all you really have to do is stop for a moment and say, God, please show me more. It just takes a small response of an open heart and he will step into that openness that you provide him and he will do what you asked him to do. As we said, it's a lifelong journey to discover this eternal God and what he is really like. We are going to continue to know him more deeply and intimately every day, as long as we live, if that's what we want. We can ignore it or we can choose it.
What I've found is that every step that you take toward God, he takes three towards you, every little step you take. Even if you say, I'm just going to get up and read a verse every morning, the Bible app gives you a verse of the day, I'm going to read one verse every day, that little step results in a response of God that is magnified many times over. He always gives us more than we give him.
Brian: Thinking of the prodigal, the story of the prodigal. When it says, and when the son was a long way off, what did the father do?
Jeff: He ran to him.
Brian: He ran to him. He had turned, he was just starting to make the journey back and when he was still a long way off, God ran to him.
Jeff: And God was looking for him. He saw him coming, because he was watching. He was longing to see him.
Brian: It wasn't, "I'm watching you. I got my eye on you". I wasn't that kind of looking. He was looking for him longingly.
Jeff: That's how, that's how our God is. That's how he is towards us. There is another scripture that, that kind of parallels this that is in chapter four, verse 12. Here he says to his bride, he says, "You are a garden, locked up, my sister, my bride. You are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain." You alluded last week to the whole garden metaphor. There is just a rich metaphor in here about us being a garden full of luscious fruits and vegetables and beautiful plants that would just delight the heart of anybody. It's as beautiful as the Garden of Eden could have possibly been. If you remember in the Garden of Eden, God's favorite thing to do was to walk in the cool of tonight with Adam and Eve in the garden. That's what he wants to do with us.
We are a garden he wants to walk in. He wants to enjoy the fragrances and the nuances and the beauty and the things that we think and the things that we love and the passions that we have. He wants to share those with us. What's really cool is when you let him begin to do that, and you begin to trust him, you actually get to smell his fragrances, you get to see his nuances and you get to begin to feel his passions. Those began to work back and forth. So he shares your passions and you share his passions. Just like a man and woman, when they live a long time together, they become more alike you and Jesus become more alike. This is the best thing that could happen to you in life, is to become more like him, because he is a pretty good guy.
Brian: I think sometimes I feel like I need a lot more time with them when I look at how he is and how I am. I need a lot more time with him.
Jeff: You will never waste your time when you spend it with him. It was like Billy Graham said, "I never met a man who wished I had spent more time in the office", a dying man. So this love relationship, as we begin to recognize, we begin to experience. Again, it's about experience, not just head knowledge. It needs to go 18 inches. There is an 18 inch gap from our head to our heart. What we need is for this love of Jesus to go from, yeah, I think he does love me to he loves me. But that little journey, what happens as that begins to grow on us, we begin to trust him.
So then what we have just right after the Song of Songs, verse 12... Actually, we are not going to read it, but the passages in between, 13 through 15, he is actually describing the garden and the beauty of the garden, and we could apply all kinds of allegorical things to it. But then in verse 16, here is what she says; now he has convinced her that he loves her. He has talked about her beauty, the wonderful fragrances that she has. And then she says "Awake north wind and come south wind and blow on my garden that its fragrance may spread everywhere." What happens over time is we don't only become convinced that he loves us; we become convinced that we have value. We begin to believe that there is something good about us, and when we do…
Brian: Self-esteem begins to grow.
Jeff: We begin to open. And then we invite Holy Spirit to come and to begin to blow, begin to refresh, begin to use us to touch other lives so that the good things that are inside of us begin to be released for him and for others. So then she says, "And let my beloved come into his garden and taste its choice fruits." So now she is at a place where she trusts him and now she is inviting him in. Okay. Yeah, you can come into my life. I will trust you with all of my life. I've shared before here, every time we would sing a song about giving you everything, we sing that, and I will give you everything, I would always pause at that point because I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure. We are talking very recent. We are talking in the last year. I wasn't sure really wanted to trust him with everything, because I had a lot of things that were pretty important to me.
Brian: That you would rather be in control of it.
Jeff: I would rather be in control. And so one morning, we were sitting out here, we were sitting out here, this was before we were doing live stream or before most of us had live stream. We were singing a song like that; I'll give you everything, I'll trust everything to you, and I hit that pause in my soul like ah, can I really say that? The Lord spoke to me right in that moment. And he said, "Jeff, if you trust your life to me, you can trust the most valuable treasures to me, I'm not going to take them away from you. I'm going to keep them for you." I just thought, of course. Ever since that day, I've been able to sing, "I'll give you everything" because he spoke into that hesitancy that I had. He spoke into my fear with love. He didn't rebuke me. Like, what do you mean you don't trust God with everything? He just said, hey, this is how it really is. When he said that, I knew it was true. Something happened in me where I could say in an even more real way, let my beloved come into his garden and taste his choice fruits. You get all of me, Lord. And this is the journey...
Brian: And what happens when you come to that place in your heart? You get filled with peace, don't you?
Jeff: Yes.
Brian: We are looking for peace in our world today. There is so many things that can create fear and it ultimately gets back to, are we trusting the Lord? It always gets back to that.
Jacque: Like we have no control over anything anyway. Why do we think if we hold on to control, we are going to be able to win? Why do we think that?
Brian: We are deceived.
Jacque: We are deceived.
Jeff: There is a lot of negative odds in family life because one or the other, or both of the parents are trying to keep it all under control, and we end up with a lot of very unhappy family lives because somebody is trying to keep it all under control. We end up with a lot of anger and even abuse issues because somebody can't let go, because we are afraid. It's the love of God that speaks into those deepest fears that we have and says, “You can trust me. I'll take care of you.” It's really hard to go of those things, but when we do then we start to say, man, why did it take me so long?
Brian: And really when you get down to it, the real greatest sin that caused all the problems in the first place was pride in Satan or Lucifer. Isn't it in a sense prideful to think that we actually can do a better job at controlling these things than God can, because that's what mistrust or lack of trust or lack of faith in God is, is actually thinking we can do a better job of it. I'm not going to trust him to do that. I'm not going to trust that person to do that. I would just like to pause right here and just take a moment to pray and ask us to all just be willing to release all these things that we want to hang on to, thinking that somehow we can determine a better outcome than what God really has in mind.
Father, we pray as was prayed yesterday, many times, Lord thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, But Lord, I also pray that we, as your children, we, as your people would be willing to yield our minds and our hearts to that will; knowing that you know how to take care of what belongs to you, and that father, your word states that you who began a good work in us will be faithful to complete it, and that you are the author and finisher completer of our faith; that our lives are in your hands, Lord and that if you really do see a sparrow every time it falls, that Lord, you will know how to take care of us. You are mindful of us. In other words, your mind is full of us, that you have inscribed to us on the palm of your hand, not just taken in erasable ink and written there, but it's inscribed on the palm of your hand, our names.
Lord, these are all metaphors, of course, to express to us in a human way, how much you love us and how we can trust in you. And that Lord, this world was not just created by you like you wound up with stopwatch and it's just kind of ticking on its own, but that Lord, you are intimately connected and involved with what is happening here. Holy Spirit, you are here on the earth and Jesus, you speak to our hearts every moment of every day that we are able and willing to listen. I pray that we would all Lord, even in our disappointments, and that's when it's most difficult to trust, even when we've had unmet expectations and disappointments and somehow a loss and setbacks. It's in these seasons Lord, that it becomes more trying and difficult for us to trust because it's so easy to fall into that old way of looking at you, that you are mad at us, you are angry with us, and now you are judging us and you are punishing us, Lord.
But father, there is a much better lens for us to view you with. That lens is Jesus and Jesus didn't go about punishing people, but he went about doing good. He made those who were marginalized, and those who were caught in sin and failure, those who were in bondage to the demonic realm, like the Demoniac of the Gadarenes, you, Jesus came to all of these people to bring your love, joy, grace, freedom, your presence. And so I pray today, Lord, that we can look at the life of Jesus and know that father, he represents exactly how you are. This book talks about your passion for us and your love for us and how you desire to bless us and how you desire to pour out Lord, your surely goodness and mercy will pursue me all the days of my life as David wrote in Psalm 23.
I pray today, Lord, that we would come to a much more serene place of trusting you. May our emotional well-being not be based on what the news headlines say, but may it be based on what your word says to us, Lord, your word right here in the Song of Songs, your word in the gospels, your word in the epistles of the New Testament, your word in the Psalms, your word Lord in Deuteronomy 30 and 31. We pray that Lord, your word would be what gives us our emotional stability and that we can trust in you because you are trustworthy, Lord. You are trustworthy.
I would Jacque to come with me. We just want to sing a song for you as a blessing over you before we leave today. Thank you, Pastor Jeff for this. We will do it one more week. Sound good?
Jeff: Great.
Brian: God's heart is not only for me, but it's for my sons and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren. He wants a thousand generations behind me to be blessed. That's the heart of God. That's the power of God. And so today, father, I pray Lord your blessings to be poured out, Lord, upon all these people who are here today, in Jesus name.
[Singing 1:27:59-1:32:11]
Brian: This we pray, in the [inaudible 1:32:15] name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Go in the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ today. Remember there is no mountain too big enough that he can't help you cross. There is no valley deep enough that he can't help you through; no flood so deep that he can't set up a standard against it; no fire too hot that whatever consume him. If you are in the hands of the Lord today, you are in good hands.
So we thank you, father that you carry us. You carry us, Lord through sorrows, through loss and you carry us to a place of victory. You know how to bring good out of any tragedy. What Satan may have meant for evil, you will bring good into our lives. This, we pray, in your name, Lord. God bless you. Thank you for being with us today. Go in the peace of the Lord, Jesus Christ. God bless you.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 9-27-20. If you would like to watch the full service, click one of the links below.