OCT 6 2019 | Son of Anarchy S1E2 | Crafty Is As Crafty Does

Sea Change Church · Son of Anarchy · "Crafty Is As Crafty Does" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · October 6, 2019
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

All I can say is, mmm, goodness gracious. So good. Band sounds amazing. And by the way, once again, I know I've said this the last couple of weeks, but it's just been amazing. Chris not only understands this congregation, but has the heart and the pipes to be on any stage in the world. And we're just blessed in a little tiny corner church to have Hillsong Bethel quality here every week. Yeah, solid and excited about where we're going as a church worship wise and just super excited and passionate about it. And then also in regard to the word of God, which we're going to get to right now.

We are in the David's son of anarchy series and is a six week series looking at the family dynamic of one of the most dysfunctional, the most well known dysfunctional families in the world. David was an amazing son of God. He was a great king. Made obviously had an error. He's paying for it. But he was not great in regard to family. We're going to look at that. And the reason we're looking at this, because we really want to be a very practical church that helps families become stronger.

We believe that the family is at the core of all of society. And as the family goes, the society goes and the kingdom goes in a lot of ways. And so we see David making a lot of mistakes and the mistakes that are happening right now are pretty traumatic. And they're happening because of the consequences of his own decisions, the things that he has done. And these are things that I said last week were prophesied that God allowed to happen.

Now, one of the things you won't see in your notes, but one of the things I want to mention is that we have a tendency to want to blame God when bad things happen in the world. But we have to realize that pretty much basic Christian theology is that because God didn't create robots, if he creates robots and he's responsible for everything the robots do. But we believe in a God that creates free will because you cannot have true love going reciprocal, true love, unless it is received, unless it is accepted, unless it is given.

And so God gives us the ability of free will. Why? And that's just why he put a choice in the garden. And there still is a choice today that if you want to follow Jesus, you can, but come as you are and don't stay as you is. Because Jesus has a lot of demands on his followers and he wants to see change. David has a huge consequence in his life. And God did not cause this to happen, but God stepped back and allowed it to happen.

And God, he doesn't love consequences, but he loves redeeming consequences. And for many of you, you realize that how you dealt with the consequences of decisions you've made for good or bad and how God has jumped into the story of consequences, because God loves getting under the hood of consequences, has probably brought some of the most glory of God and kingdom value to your life. David goes on to have a lineage that births Jesus.

Bathsheba, even though she had a difficult story, becomes what I believe to be one of the five most prominent women in the world, one of the two in the Bible, I would say. Second only to Mary, probably. Bathsheba goes on, if you listen to that old sermon from about three months ago, how God used her in the wisdom literature and how she becomes part of the lineage of Jesus. And there's amazing things God does in the story.

But God does not cause this to happen, but this happens. And what happens in David's life, what happens to his family, models the sin that he committed. There is a sexual sin that happens again. There is a murder that happens again. And we know in this story that David's son, Amnon, takes an attraction to his half-sister. He ends up sexually abusing his sister, who is also the full sister of Absalom. Now, Absalom is not a person that you want to mess with.

Absalom is one bad man. He's got Absalom, and he's just ripped. By the way, if you do have kids, this is an adult book we're reading. So just FYI for this sermon. It's up to you if you want your kids to be here for the sermon. So Absalom and his brother, obviously Amnon, takes advantage of his sister. Now, I'm going to read through the passage. And then in the passage, I've left out kind of the more salacious bits. One, because I didn't think there was a lot of redeeming value in it.

Two, I encourage you to go back and read it on your own time to see what happens. The Bible has a lot of difficult things that happen. But personally, I just find it a little bit traumatic to read. This is why there's certain movies I won't go to see. It doesn't mean I don't read the Bible. And also why I'm reading the scripture today. Because sometimes you throw people to the wolves. They're like, whoa, what am I reading?

Some crazy scripture about God, you know. But this story, the reason that we want to really look at it, does not look at what happened so much to Tamar. It's horrible. And David pays the consequence for it. And Absalom, spoiler alert, ends up killing his brother Amnon for it. And allowing, you know, David ends up, you know, the whole reason David has to leave the kingdom is because of this event. But the thing I want to look at practically for you and your families are two core components that are really prevalent in dysfunctional families.

The first is the minimization of trauma. To say that that owie, as my family would say, my kids used to say, that owie doesn't hurt so much. Stop crying. It's not that big of a deal. And the minimization of actual trauma. You'll see this in the story. The second is the inability to communicate in a healthy way. That God is a God of communication. And God speaks to us many things. From letting us know what is right and what is wrong, which is an act of love.

To telling us that he loves us by giving us an identity of who we are. Communication is core. So the two things, as we seek to build really, really healthy families here, is to help with identifying some things that go wrong in this family. And that's what we're looking at. That's what we're pulling out of this story. If you will, the scripture actually is wrong. It's in chapter 13 of 2 Samuel. We're going to read verses 1 through 6.

We're going to skip over some of the details in the middle. I encourage you to go back, and then we'll go to chapters 20 through 22, which show what we're looking at and what's important for this text. Now Absalom, David's son, had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar. And after a time, David's son loved her. And Amnon was so tormented that he made himself ill because of his sister Tamar, for she was a virgin, and it seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything to her.

Interesting way to say it. Kind of creepy. But Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab. Now this is going to be important because the manipulation and the craftiness that we see in the family, and especially with Absalom, we're going to be probably spending a couple weeks on manipulation and wisdom and being crafty and how that in the family model, that weird stuff that goes unsaid where you're manipulating, you're keeping secrets, is going to be really important.

And Absalom was excellent at it and at manipulating actually a whole kingdom. But Amnon has a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimei, David's brother. And Jonadab was a crafty man, circle crafty man, and we're going to remember that in a couple weeks. And he said to him, O son of the king, why are you so haggard this morning after morning? Will you not tell me? Amnon said to her, I love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister.

Jonadab said to her, I'll lie down on your bed and pretend to be ill. And when your father comes to see you, say to him, let my sister Tamar come and give me bread to eat and prepare food in my sight, that I may see it and eat it from her hand. So Amnon lay down and pretended to be ill. And when the king came to see him, Amnon said to the king, please let my sister Tamar come, make a couple of cakes in my sight that I may eat from her hand.

That's so creepy, right? Like that is just so weird. Like I read that, I'm like, dude, like, maybe some cakes. What a creep. Okay, this is not a guy you want to invite over for the dinner party, especially if he starts looking at you funny when you're making the food. Okay. Verse 20, her brother Absalom. Now this is after this event happens because he takes advantage of her. And her brother Absalom says to her, has Amnon, your brother, been with you?

Be quiet for now, my sister. He's your brother. And then he says, one of the worst things that can be said to a person who has trauma and victimization. Don't take this thing to heart. Like, really? Don't take this thing to heart. Like, forget about it. Don't worry about it. And Tamar lived in her brother Absalom's house, a desolate woman. When King David heard about this, you can circle this, he was furious. But he actually did nothing.

Incredibly furious. And maybe some of you identify with that. You have a lot of fury, but you haven't done anything with it. And it's just burning inside of you, but you don't have the ability to deal with it in a healthy way. It's one of the issues with David. He could take it out on an enemy, except when it was Saul, because God told him not to, and he wouldn't touch the Lord's anointed. He was incredible at having wrath when wrath needed to be put out upon an enemy.

But when it came to his family, he couldn't even say what needed to be said or to deal with an issue or a trauma. King David was furious, and Absalom never said a word to Amnon, either good or bad. He hated Amnon because he disgraced his sister Tamar. What's interesting is you have the word furious. You have fury in a family. And there's a lot of unseen fury in families. There's a lot of angry people in family, and they deal with things with passive-aggressive ways.

And fury will come out somewhere, or it'll eat people alive. They say actually depression is anger turned inside out. And so you have fury in a family, but nothing is done. You have trauma in a family, but we're told to be quiet and not to speak about it. And then you have hatred in a family, and it is just waiting to come to roost. And one of the issues we see is because David has vacated the position as incorrectly disciplining his children and being the leader of a family that knows how to lead his family with not an iron hand, but with a strong hand, that that discipline is taken out in a wrong scenario.

Absalom actually comes and murders his brother later on. The other brothers get away. He has a big party. We'll see. He invites all the brothers there, and then he ends up having his servants kill Amnon. But this happens because David doesn't have the ability to bring correction into his family. We're going to look at those two things. What we see here, though, is a pattern, though, in David's life of continual family neglect.

It's familial neglect. It's the neglect to discipline correctly. Scriptures, we'll see in a moment, says that if you don't correct your children, you actually hate them. Not that you don't love them. You actually hate them. And there's a neglect of speaking what needs to be said. There's a neglect of truth. There's a neglect of light in certain situations. There is just neglect. Now, David comes from a huge family. You would think in a huge family there would be this ability to be a part of the family.

They had all these things going on. But as we'll see in a moment, David was actually left out of so much of that and neglected himself. Let's look at the first verse. David was furious. Verse 21. David was furious. But you will find nowhere in the rest of this story, and I've encouraged you to read chapters 13 through 20 of 2 Samuel to familiarize yourself with this story because it's too big of a story for me to go into all of the nuance of it.

But there is nowhere where David does anything, doesn't even discipline him, does nothing. And then all of a sudden, when you don't properly use correction in its right season, in its right time, it will be corrected at some point somehow, but it will oftentimes be out of your hands. So important to have a family that understands the boundaries of correction. In the F3 podcast this week with Bucky, one of the things Chris said that I thought was so powerful, he said when children are not disciplined, he says they feel unloved.

He said it is actually that discipline is a form of love that shows that you have boundaries. And actually he says that in the book of James. James says that you are an illegitimate child if you are never disciplined. What is so interesting is we live in a society that is actually wanting less discipline and wanting no correction and wants to discipline people who actually give correction. And they do this in the name of love.

Actually, the scripture is completely upside down on that. If you don't give correction, if you don't give direction, and you don't give any consequence for anything, what you're going to end up doing is removing love from a society in the name of love. And I don't know if you see that, but that is what the scripture shows over and over again. And in the family model, we have to have boundaries of discipline, of correction, and of love because this is loving, but it is knowing how and when to do it.

David did not. Proverbs 13, 24. Whoever spares the rod hates the children. Whoever, let me say that again. Whoever spares the rod hates their children. Strong word. Hates. Doesn't say kind of likes, doesn't love them, whatever. That doesn't mean I'm not, we're not selling paddles on the front pad, you know, in the bookstore right now. We don't even have a bookstore, but we will. At some point. But whoever, it says that you hate, and basically, you know, you can use it as you, you know, use that, just the word is correction, as opposed to rod.

There's other ways of correction, obviously. But the one who loves their children is what? Key word there. Careful to discipline them. I'm not sure we take enough time in our familial discipline. I think it's easy just to throw out a, some type of, you know, penalty, or something just to get over the hump. What does it mean to be careful in our discipline? I mean, this is true for our own selves, but in the family model, what does it mean to be careful?

One of the things with my father that was, my father was a, you know, great man, and I love my father, you know, dearly. You know, I'm very glad he was in my life. But I think he really struggled with knowing what was appropriate discipline and when. Sometimes something that deserved massive correction wouldn't get a word. And my mom would have to say something like, hey, are you going to say anything to the kids? And he'd be like, no, I'm too busy doing what I'm doing.

And other times something very small would get a massive correction. And it was just like, where, whoa, the map is crazy. There's no boundaries of what's going on. This deserves to be said. This actually really deserves to be corrected, but there's silence on the issue. This doesn't. We want to be careful in our direction. This means taking time and effort. You know, parenting children, surprisingly, takes a lot of effort.

You can do it with no effort. You can do it as an inconvenience, but it actually takes a fair amount of effort to actually think through it and to do it well. It was interesting. I told the story last week. We had a discipline opportunity. And opportunity, we talked about on the podcast, we have four R's, because every time there's need for correction, the first thing he's always looking for is total restoration. God is actually looking for restoration beyond where you were.

He wants to take where you were, you've learned something now, and take you to a better place. You see that in the Genesis story. Immediately, God doesn't go into all the negative things. He does speak about that, but he speaks about one who is going to come that is going to crush the head of the serpent. He immediately is into the redemption plan, three chapters into the Bible, talking about Jesus. And he sends Jesus to do that.

And are we careful in our correction? Let's make it if you don't have kids. Are you careful in when you have a relationship and you need to have a conversation with somebody to bring something out into the light? Are you careful with your own parents when you speak to your parents? I'm not always careful. Sometimes I just, you know, it's just mom, just going to let it go, you know? And I need to be more careful personally with my familial relationships personally, with my wife, with church people, with everyone.

Be thinking through and actually spending the disciplined time to think, what is a careful response? I talked about getting one of those janky, like, you know, pause buttons. You can buy them and they turn red and there it says panic button, right? Be awesome if you need one of those in your family. Like, as soon as there's need for a correction, you don't normally have to immediately fix it. Does that make sense? Like, a lot of times we just, I just jump into, like, fix it mode.

Sometimes just hit that little pause button and say, like, we're going to talk about this in a couple days. My daughter recently said, that was the most terrifying, that's worse than the punishment. That 48 hours, worse than anything you do. I should have just said, at the end of the 48 hours, we're done, you know, nailed it. I want my kids to know I love them. And I want them to know that they are worthwhile of my time.

It is much easier not to correct your kids. Well, in the short run it is. Because you'll be correcting them in the courts after that, you know. But it's much easier to just let your kids do what they want. One of the things I wanted to make sure that I didn't do is, as my kid is 17, and I kind of just let off the range. You know what I mean? That's close enough. I've heard that so many times. Oh, they're close enough.

Kind of do what you want. And they become kind of like party buddies, you know, as opposed to like, you're still their parent. Obviously, we're moving into friendship. David never did any of this. Keyword, careful. Are you careful in the things that you do? Now, before we judge David, I think we also need to look at what's gone on in his life. He was a child, and Kai reminded me of this last week. He said, actually, he was totally neglected.

If you think about David, where do you find him when you first hear about him? They're having a party to figure out who the next king of Israel is going to be. Samuel shows up, says, I'm going to anoint your sons. God tells him to go there. And he gets there, and Jesse brings all the sons out, save one. Little ruddy guy out in the field all by himself. Wasn't even worthy to be called up, and he says, bring your sons.

He didn't even bring them. How do you feel? How does that feel? If it's like, hey, I was called to bring all the boys together. We just didn't really include you. I love Samuel's response here. Look at Samuel's response. It says, 1 Samuel 16, 11. So he, Samuel, asked Jesse, are these all the sons you have? They're still the youngest, Jesse said. He's tending sheep. Samuel said, send for him. We will not sit down until he arrives.

You know who you don't sit down for until they arrive? The king. Because David figured it out. Well, Samuel kind of figured it out. God said one of his sons is the king, and all the other ones are not his son, and there's one left. We ain't sitting down, because I know who's there. So we see this familial neglect. We realize that David, no one ever spoke a word to David. No one spoke a word of right. No one spoke a word of wrong.

The only thing that he had to guide him besides God, the Spirit of God, was his heart. The Bible says in Romans that the law of God, all of God's law, not just the Ten Commandments, all of God's law is written on your heart. You know what to do. It says in your heart. And it says that if you have never heard about Jesus, and you never have a chance to know about the blood of Christ to save us from our sins, that you can be saved anyways, it says in the book of Romans.

If you follow the law, this is Romans 1 and 2, read it, that is on your heart. And when you stand before God, how you follow the law that was on your heart will be judged to you as if it was a law unto itself. And you will be either redeemed or rejected according to how you follow the law of your heart. That is how people that never heard about Christ all through the world got saved or don't get saved before the redemption process came.

It says that it happens. And David, all he had was his heart. This is why it says that David was a man after what? God's own heart. When he was by himself, he knew the right thing to do. He would, imagine, you want to talk about being raised to be, I mean, he was righteous. I mean, granted, he did some bad things and he wasn't a great dad. Wasn't a great family man. Be complete, take yourself, be completely neglected, put yourself in a field, never have anyone parent you, never even be included into the family, and then just go in and become king at 13 years old.

Let's see how well you do. Do you have a little more grace for David? Familiar neglect. We repeat the patterns unless we change the patterns. We repeat them unless we change them. Do you see patterns and do you want to step out of the dance? You know, a lot of us don't want to step out of the dance because we get benefits in the dance. I've met so many couples, you know, he's been doing this for, you know, 10 years. I'll be like, why have you put up with it for 10 years?

You know, maybe you're getting something from it. Counseling session out the window. No, I would say that you do not stay in things oftentimes unless there is some benefit. Now, there are some Mother Traces out there that are just throwing themselves, you know, for the sake of whatever, and there are some great stories. But obviously, do we want to step out of the dance? I mentioned I had a, years ago, had a counseling session and this guy had a wife that drank and she'd pass out.

And I said, why have you continued to put up with it? He said, tell you the truth, I like my alone time and when she passes out, I get alone time. And I was like, whoa, that's a system. Yeah, man, whatever works, bro. I thought, no, leave that, leave it as it is. Let's take it back to yourself. Do you want out of your dance? Or is there a benefit to it? You know, they have co-dependence for a reason. There's a whole books written about those because we have a, we get something out of that.

David obviously was in the field by himself. Here's two things that displays two of the most common traits in broken families. The minimizing of trauma and the inability to communicate in a healthy way. Those are key. Has trauma been minimized and can you communicate in a healthy way? Verse 20, her brother Absalom said to her, has Amnon, your brother, been with you? Be quiet for now, my sister. He is your brother. Do not take this thing to heart.

Now, if you read the rest of the story, it is impossible to not take that thing to heart. It is a pretty bad story. And Tamar lived in her brother's house, a desolate woman. Now, this is opposite of what would happen if a woman was, something like this happened to a woman. No one would want to marry her anymore. None of the other men would want to marry her because she had this shame upon her or whatever, even though it wasn't her fault.

And they would live in a house or they would just live away from society and they'd just be, I mean, it still happens in Africa and different places. This shame culture would happen. Actually, this is what could have happened to Bathsheba. And what shows the righteousness of David is that he actually could have just put her away, continued to be king and forgotten about it. Instead, I know it wasn't, you know, an amazing end to the story, but he actually validated her and made her, she became queen actually.

And so it was actually opposite. It was very righteous thing. He actually tried to make right what he had done wrong. And I think we want to be in a society that allows people to make recompense for what they've done wrong and then be rehabilitated back in society. I know that's not super popular anymore, but allowing people reconciliation to be rehabilitated and back into society is a great thing. So this did not happen to Tamar.

She actually just became disgraced and there was no way back. And David could have brought her, I think he had the ability to bring her back in, but she was not. She was left a desolate woman that it says. But he says, don't take this thing to heart. Here's the deal. The minimizing of trauma. Now, why do we minimize trauma? Because trauma hurts. And thinking about it hurts. And one of the things that we use is the minimization of trauma.

It gives you the ability to survive. I know for me, I had a really difficult time feeling feelings because as a kid, when things are going sideways, when you have a divorce or you have different things happening or your father is not really involved or whatever it is, rather than sit there and think as a six-year-old, gosh, maybe I'm not worth anything. Maybe they wouldn't want me or my dad doesn't like me or whatever those really difficult thoughts.

You kind of just like, that's no big deal. Just forget about it. So I just minimize trauma. Well, that was great because it was a survival tool. I'm not sure I would have survived without it. But it hasn't proven really effective in marriage nor as a pastor. I was, about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, a woman walked in and she was a, you know, a guy at the church and she said, I have this cat and I live alone and I'm single and it's 15 years and the cat died and she started crying.

I'm like, why are you crying? I'm thinking to myself, she's going on and I went, I said, why don't you just get another cat? There's a whole shelter full of them, you know what I mean? Yeah, well, I mean, here's the deal. She ended up leaving the church. She wrote the pastor a letter, like wrote it, you know, fair enough, you know, I get it, but here's the deal. I couldn't feel my own pain. How am I supposed to feel yours about your cat?

You know, we had a divorce. This is your cat, this is that. I'm not feeling divorce. I'm not going to feel fluffy, you know what I mean? I'm not going to, you know, all that to say there was this minimization and slowly as my mom and myself and my family, we've begun to unwind that to say, ow, that hurt. That hurt. And the ability to know when something hurt and to validate. Jesus never invalidates or minimizes your trauma no matter how small it is.

You know, it's like when little children come with the smallest little thing and they're really affected by it. One of the worst things you can do is just, hey, quit crying. I was at Home Depot yesterday and they were in the, there's, I guess there were two older brothers or a dad and they had a little tiny kid and they walked him on purpose into the scary area where all the things in and the kids started crying, you know, because it was really traumatic.

I wanted to say something. I have so hard not parenting other people's children. I'm working really hard. And he's all like, he's all like, you know, just grow up, quit your crying. He goes, you need to see this. And they're like telling him, he said, quit being a girl. That's what he said to him. He said, quit being a girl to the little boy. And I was like, I'm not going to say anything. And then they walked on and I thought, not only did you traumatize the kid, you minimize their trauma by saying, you know, that, you know, giving them these, these, these stereotypes or these tropes or whatever it is.

Yeah, we need to not do it. God never does that. All this to say, I tell you all the stories to say, whatever, wherever it hurts, God cares. Wherever you've been hurt, you might not even know where you've been hurt. That's a big deal. I was in a counseling session years ago and I remember the woman said, I went to this concert and at the concert, they, it was a really dark concert. They started playing music and I started having memories I didn't know existed of the trauma that had happened to me.

And all of a sudden that unleashed like all this trauma. I want to say, even though you don't know your trauma, the Bible actually says that, even though you don't know the things that hurt, God knows the things that hurt. He knows the things that have happened to you. He knows the things that you don't even know. And to begin to ask God to heal those things, here's a couple scriptures. Psalm 91, four through six, he will cover you with his pinions and under his wings you will find refuge.

His faithfulness is a shield and a buckler. I love that. I think this is the English Standard Version becoming my favorite version. A shield and a buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. And then Isaiah 53, one of the probably most hundred known scriptures, says, but he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities. And upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And by his wounds, we are healed. It is so interesting how God uses wounds to heal others. If you've had wounds, the point of those wounds now is that you can use them as an overflow to heal other people. Henry Nouwen wrote a book called The Wounded Healer that is all about your ability to take those ashes, to look at them, to see where, hey, this is where I'm responsible for those or I'm not responsible at all.

I was victimized. But I want to take these wounds and use them to heal other people. This is how the world changes. This is how Christians go out and take the redemption of hope. I want to say that whatever the pain was, whatever the trauma is, whatever you've experienced, whatever negative thoughts come, and even the things you don't know, Jesus wants to deal into those. He wants to meet you at those and have a mutuality of healing where you expose your wounds to one another.

Have you ever had a friend that you can talk to and say, this is what's going on and they can tell you that what's going on and you're like, how good does it feel when it's like somebody relates to me? You know, if Jesus had not died on the cross, I think you could legitimately look at God and say, what do you know about me? You never have dealt with this. You're God. You've never had to deal with this. But it says no, that he was afflicted with everything that we've been afflicted with, every temptation that we've had, that he understands us and by his wounds, he suffered and was victimized.

The thing about his victimization is he never acted like a victim. Jesus was victimized, but he never used his victimization as a manipulation tool. Rather, he wanted to become a victor. And I do believe we're in a culture that is saying, you know, identify yourself of your victimization, which I think is important. That's part of the story. We need to know when victimization is happening and invalidated. But then we need to help people move on to become victors.

Not live in victimization so that you can have social leverage to get the things that you want. We don't want to live in that. Jesus, even on the cross, was never a victim. Jesus was there. He allowed others to take him and he never acted like a victim, but he lived like a victor. We want to have families that live in victory and not minimize trauma. And if you've had family trauma, it's time to take it seriously. And it's time to do what the next thing is in this scripture is to bring it out into the light in a healthy way.

Maybe you need a counselor and a mediator to do that. Maybe you need to have a tough conversation. David was never willing to do this. And it'll continue to become tangled yarn. It doesn't get better. This gets worse and worse for generations and generations until a victor comes in the family and says, I want to be a victor. Until a victor comes in the family and says, the legacy changes with me. Are you that person?

Are you built upon somebody who did it? You know what's great? When you start getting some momentum, when you get great grandma and then you get grandma and then you get mom and then you get the kids and they're all going in the same direction and you start building a family based on hope and health. David didn't have that. Multiple generations of over and over again. It actually said that the sword would never leave his family.

Final thing as we come in for a landing is the inability to communicate. Verse 22. Absalom never said a word. There we are again. He's learned it from his father. Never said a word. Never brought it into light. Either good or bad. He hated Amnon because he had disgraced his sister Tamar. I was watching and I was listening to a report actually this week on NPR driving around and one of the things that they talked about was how light is one of the world's best disinfectants.

I thought that was so interesting and they're actually using all times a light therapy but one of the things you do if you have an infection is get sunlight on it. I love how God has taken the creation and put truth into the creation. Romans 120 speaks of that. When you bring things into the light they become disinfected and doing it in a right way. Obviously if you look directly into a lighthouse that spins around you're going to go blind.

So obviously once again the word we learned earlier is being careful but how do we slowly bring you know just slowly turn the lights on. You know there's a reason why the sun doesn't come up like that immediately right? God has a plan. Imagine if the sun just turned on you know like one o'clock boom boom whoa what just happened? I was asleep. God doesn't do that. What does he do? He slowly reveals the light and maybe you're a person that's a bringer of light.

Maybe you're one of the ones that's going to slowly start revealing the light and the truth but it will disinfect the things that foul our families. It'll disinfect the things that besmirch and cause disease and become I would say cancerous in our families. God is a God who communicates and when we bring things into light it allows it to communicate. Are you a family that can communicate? One of the things I like about our family now whether it's my mom or you know maybe we weren't a family that communicated but we are a family that communicates now and my daughter my 12 year old my 17 year old know that they can come to me and say dad I want to have a conversation and they can call me on something and say you know I feel that what you did here hurt my feelings.

They know when they're hurt. They know when something hurts them they don't minimize it. We try not to minimize it and they feel like they can come to me. I got to say I never felt like I had the opportunity to go up to dad and say hey pops can we sit down for a second? You know you really bugged me out with that thing you said right there. Can we talk about it? You know when you did that that really no I just never spoke to him.

My mom would sit us down and talk to us and have conversations but I just never spoke to my dad. Matter of fact when he was laying on his deathbed I went there and he was dying of leukemia a form of leukemia and I remember I sat down and we just talked about the Padres. It was 1984 having a good year and you know we were there we just talked about the Padres that was it. It wasn't my responsibility as a 15 year old to start that conversation FYI.

It was dad's it was dad's you know it was on his plate to start that conversation but he didn't know how to do it either. I don't blame him for it because you only have the tools that you have unless you go out and get new tools. That's why we're providing things like the parenting tools so whether you're a grandma or you know gonna have kids they're there. Here's a scripture it's out of Romans it says everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved and this talks about how God wants to communicate.

How then can they call on my name? How then can they call on the one they have not believed and how can they believe in the one whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written how beautiful are the feet who bring the good news. You are the bringer of the good news. And that good news might be painful at first but it needs to be said in our families.

And we need to have families that communicate in the model of God. God has done everything to reveal himself. First with the word then he walked in the garden then he gave a visible appearance of himself then he gave the word of God after the word of God he brought Jesus after Jesus he brought the Holy Spirit to live within us and then he wants to dwell with us for eternity forever. He is in the business of communication.

Are you able to communicate? Do you speak? And do we speak truth? These are the two things. The minimization of people's trauma. And that means your own. Have you minimized your trauma? I've had to look back at my life and different things and go you know that hurt. It's no fun to do that. It's no fun to sit and think that hurt. That was painful. But until you heal it it's never going to be healed. To take a legitimate look at that.

And so as a church we want to provide tools for you. We want to provide tools and practical ways that you can grow and do that in your family. That you can see and not minimize and the second thing is to bring things out into the light. So that we might form families that are strong and not like this dysfunctional one that we see in the life of David. Amen? Amen. We're going to do communion if you'd stand. Amen. We're going to ask our prayer team to come forward.

If you stand I'm going to bless you today. Love blessing you. A world full of curses we need blessing. I want to bless your families and your homes. If you need prayer today come forward afterwards and then after the service too join us for some fellowship. Next door we've got a great spread of food. Go check it out. It's fun. And if you extend your hand let me pray for you. Lord Jesus I just bless these people so abundantly God the provision of your grace and your joy and your hope your goodness God.

We pray over them we pray that your word would come alive and their families Lord Jesus would be affected by this message. God that you want to lean into any trauma that they've had Lord God. Or maybe you've healed trauma. Maybe you want to start using it to heal others Lord God as you redemptively move in their lives. I pray that God's word would come alive. I pray that the social things that they read Lord God the things they see online the people they talk to all of it would be your voice even the trees even the oceans cry out to them to say how much you love them and how much you want to move on God to the next chapter the next story but validating them in the moment.

So bless their homes I pray for provision in their gardens God in their lives in every area of their life they would be blessed. Bless those that are leading here in this church those that are in difficult situations those that need healing Lord God we pray over you and we release you now like an ocean of God's love into the world in the name of the Father Son and the Holy Spirit Amen.