It sounds like there's an adolescent male Canadian goose loose in my house right now. My son has one of those coughs. And so, Amanda and Hayes aren't here this morning, but Friday morning, along by the time it was getting pretty strong for a little man when he would wake up. And we knew he wasn't going to come to school. We took him and he likes to watch cartoons in the morning, and we flipped on the television. And it was one of those rare mornings when news is on television. Not 24 hour news, but they're repeating the same thing every 15 minutes, but real, breaking, life-altering news. The kind that they break in on other programming for. And so, as we sat and watched live, Japan being altered through the screen. It was that kind of news, the kind that changes you. They lead you to action. When we realized the tsunami was going across the Pacific and Amanda has relatives in Hawaii, what did she do? She went and picked up the phone. Even though it was 3.30 there time, she called her dad who's in New Jersey to make sure they had gotten in touch with her aunt. Because when you get real, life-altering news, you act, you respond. And that's what happens when real news comes, whether it is bad news or good news. John Nine's where we're going this morning. That's page 1664 in your Pew Bible. We spent three weeks here. We talked about the suffering of the blind man. We talked about the miracle itself. Now we're going to talk about the fallout. Jesus' action has caused a crisis. Real, life-altering news. Beginning at verse 13, let's hear from God. They brought the Pharisees, the man who had been born blind. Remember this is already healed him. We're picking up where we left off last week. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man's eyes was a Sabbath. You should hear the music in the background here. Dun, dun, dun. Therefore, the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. He put mud on my eyes, the man replied, and I washed, and now I see. Some of the Pharisees said this man is not from God or he does not keep the Sabbath. But others asked, how can a sinner perform such signs? So they were divided. You see the complexity here? People normally throw the Pharisees under the bus. The Bible is very true. There were some among them who got something deeper is going on. Then they turned again to the blind man. What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened. They see the evidence they're responding to it. The man replied, he's a prophet. They still did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they sent for the man's parents. Is this your son they asked? Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that he can now see? Well, we know he is our son, the parents answered. And we know he was born blind. But how he can see or who opened his eyes? And we don't know, ask him. He is of age. He will speak for himself. His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders who already had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. See, that's already public knowledge early on now. That's, that was why his parents said, he is of age, ask him. The second time they summoned the man who had been blind. Give glory to God by telling the truth. They said, we know this man is a sinner. He replied, whether he's a sinner or not, I don't know. This is beautiful. One thing I do know, I was blind, but now I see. Then they asked him, what did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered, I've already told you. And you didn't listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too? Then they hurled insults at him and said, you are this fellow's disciple. We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses. But as for this fellow, we don't even know where he comes from. The man answered, now that is remarkable. You don't know where he comes from. Yet he opened my eyes. We know that God doesn't listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody's ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. To this they replied, you were steeped in birth, sin at birth. How dare you lecture us? And they threw him out. Jesus heard that they had thrown him out. And when he found him, he said, do you believe in the son of man? Who is he, sir? The man asked, tell me so that I may believe in him. Jesus said, you have now seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking to you. Then the man said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him. Jesus said, for judgment, I have come into this world so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind. Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and ask, what are we blind to? Jesus said, if you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin. But now that you claim you can see your guilt remains. This is God's word, let's pray. Lord, that man said, one thing I know, open our eyes this morning, Lord, that we would leave with one thing in mind. In your name we pray. Amen. We said before, the most frequent type of miracle Jesus performed was the opening of the eyes of the blind. And Jesus doesn't just do things for the sake of doing them. He's up to something. He's revealing who he is and what he's about. So this miracle is not just for the sake of healing. It's to show people what he's up to. Lots of different miracles done, lots of different ways to show you different aspects of who he is. This is showing us that without knowledge of him, without light, we won't understand who he is. What we talked about the last couple of weeks. Now, Jesus does this miracle and it brings about a response. I said before, it's news. And sometimes we hear the word good news and we've heard it in church so much, we don't think about it as news. But just like the television coming on and you see news and you respond, this was a real event that brought about evidence and a response to that evidence. So as we look to the fallout of what happened in Jesus doing this, I want you to notice the four different groups of people in this passage and how they respond to the crisis of what Jesus has done. How it brings about a crisis in their lives in different ways. All right, first of all, the neighbors. His neighbors, which we read about mainly last week versus eight through 11, eight through 12, they see what's happened. They see this guy that they knew primarily as sitting over here in the corner all of his life at this gate, basically begging. And now he's standing there. And they're looking at him and for the first time in his life, he's looking back at them. They almost don't recognize him. They argue about whether or not it's him. It really, it's hard for us to fathom unless there's a homeless guy that you know in Chattanooga, there was a guy that we knew in the city, he was a panhandler. He was missing a leg and he had a deformity on his head. And you knew him because he's all the time wheeling around his wheelchair asking people for money. If suddenly that guy showed up without a deformity in his head and having an extra leg, people would ask questions. They would wonder if they recognized him. If that really could be the same guy. That's the kind of situation where I know this guy. I mean, he grew up, there was no doubt that he was blind if this is the same guy. I mean, is it even possible? It's breaking down their preconceived notions of what couldn't, couldn't happen. And they're having to deal with it. It's really like what happened when Jesus healed the garrison demoniac. He'd been crazy. He ran around naked and among the tombs like tearing chains open and tearing his own body. And now the neighbors come out and there he is. Remember what it says in Scripture? Standing there, clothed and in his right mind. See, when Jesus does something, when he changes people, there is evidence that will beg a question. People will look and say, now, how in the world did that happen? Who is this guy? If Christ has entered your life and changed you, people will look and say, wait a minute. You know, how? Wait, didn't you use to... Let me put this a little bit differently. When you look back at your own life, five years ago, you five years ago, you 10 years ago, do you look back and ever think, man, well, that was really foolish. And I know I just talk about one little thing. I'm saying a central strand of how you operate and of what you were about. Do you look back and say, I must have been crazy to think that way. That's part of realizing God is changing you. If you don't look back and see that, then maybe you need to say, am I actually changing? And by the same token, it will give you a confidence. God is changing me, but it also should give you an element of humility because you realize five or 10 years from now, you'll look back and see something you are doing right now that you are absolutely confident should be central to your life and is what you are about. You will look back and say, I must have been a fool if God is up to something in your life, changing you. It should make you both confident and humble at the same time. I'll give you an example. Leon Morris was an Australian evangelist who tells a story of a guy who was a known drunk in the community. Just wild party kind of guy had a family with always a train wreck. One day he comes to Christ and it starts changing his life. It takes some time, but it starts changing his life and some of his old buddies come back to town. They've visiting with him and he says to him, in some points they're like, you don't drink anymore? No, why don't you drink? Well, you know, Jesus, wait, wait, wait, wait. So you believe the Bible, right? You believe him, he turned water into wine, right? You believe that kind of stuff? And the guy said, you know, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know whether or not he changed water into wine. All I know is that my house, he changed beer into furniture. His life had been changed. And it begged a question, how did you get from here to there? How is this? Now a lot of times when people ask that in our society where it's a pull yourselves up by your bootstraps kind of world, where we go in and there's a huge section for self-help, people are just looking for a technique. How do I get to the next stage? And what is it you did? But when you throw Jesus in the mix, you know, some people think Jesus is a technique. It's a set of rules that you follow. But what's life altering is to realize I don't change myself. He changed me. And it's a paradigm shift. It breaks the categories. This blind man had no delusions. We said last week that he did this to himself. And it will bring about another set of issues. See, these people are asking the how and when they're not satisfied with the answer to the how and there's spirituality to it, where do they go? They take him straight to the religious leaders. And that's what happens next. If years evidence of change in your life, it will probably bring about scrutiny. And that's what happens here secondly with these religious leaders. They bring him to the religious leaders. Did you see this? I mean, this is a long dialogue. You know, one of my favorite preachers, Dick Lucas said, this is his favorite minor New Testament character because of how the blind man interacts with the Pharisees. Here they come. They are the religious establishment. They are the faithful order representing God. And this man comes into their world and they can't fit him into that hole. He's square peg round hole kind of thing. They are struggling to make this guy fit into the grids so they can deal with it. And he won't. There's a crisis here for them. For the neighbors, it was the how. How did this happen for them? It's the when. Did you catch this? Jesus healed on the Sabbath. You ever notice, if you read through the Gospel, he does this a lot. I mean, the guys got the ability to heal people. He can wait till the next day. He doesn't wait. He does it on purpose. He's purposefully bringing about a crisis for them. And he's not just looking to be aggravating. He's looking to aggravate them into dealing with who he is. And they get it. They get this as a problem for us. Because if he's breaking God's rules, he can't be from God. So they've got a theological conundrum. He's done something that shows he's from God, but he's done it in a way that shows he's not from God. How do we resolve this? Either it's not true where it is true. Something's got to give here. And the problem is that they are saying he broke the Sabbath, not based on the Old Testament laws, but based on their traditions. See, the traditions that rose up around Scripture, they were trying to be faithful to who God is. And they had all these traditions they added on Scripture. The Pharisees had a little law book basically. I mean, imagine them today. It would be like us folding up a little book that put in our back pocket here and around and says, 39 ways to catch Sabbath breakers. And they had this idea. There were 39 different things that you could do. There were eye-central ideas and ways to break the Sabbath. How had Jesus broken the Sabbath? He had done work. He had done work. What work had he done? Will he spit on the ground? And he got down and he needed the mud. K-N-E-A-D. All right, like you need bread. He needed them with his fingers. I mean, it's to us. It's mind-boggling to think how ridiculous that sounds. But let's take a break from him. Before we just throw the Pharisees under the bus, they are wanting to honor God. They're wanting to honor God in a way that most Americans just don't take seriously. Honestly, Olympic is of our spiritual laziness. They are more faithful to who they understand God to be than we are. And before we get on to them, just think about those. They knew the Bible better than anybody in this room. They prayed more faithfully, more diligently. They tied regularly. They were involved in the church in an incredible way. You know what? They gave themselves utterly to God in a way that's virtually unfathomable for us. So before we just throw them under the bus as legalists, catch what they are up to. The problem for them is in order to be faithful to God, they start making up their own rules that actually separate them from God. And now that he's there standing in front of them, the very people who would lead them to God are now claiming this man is anything but God. Now I'm saying this to you because in the South, we have the religious establishment. I am a pastor. I am exhibit A of what is wrong with the religious establishment. If we start going about setting up rules and regulations and traditions that really don't have to do with Jesus but make us feel like we are being faithful to God. We need to diligently hold each other's feet to the fire. Is this really about Jesus? Because over the course of time, they had convinced themselves they were being faithful to God when the very thing that had convinced them they were being faithful to God became the thing that kept them from seeing God. It made them blind. Their religiosity, their passion for God. So faithful churchgoers in the Bible belt, the Pharisees are us blind. And it's their very devotion to God that is the problem because it's not really about God. And that's where Jesus causes them a major problem in understanding what they're going to do with them. Verse 22, anyone who acknowledged Jesus would be thrown out. They had decided in advance. They decided in advance. They were close to the truth. This is their problem. They won't predictability. They want stability. They want everything to be okay. They've got control of what people see and don't see. They regulate who God is and they make society nice and smooth. If you come to church and the hope is chalkin' up another Sunday morning. If the hope is great service, now we go back to doing what we do during the week. We've missed it that Christ is out to change us. Means it's gonna hurt some in a good way. It's going to aggravate. It's going to cause us discomfort. And that we would come to church hoping not for yet another ho-hum experience. But that all of our life would increasingly in a resonating way be moving down this path. You get images like Hebrews 10 spur one another on toward love and good deeds. It's like taking, sitting on a horse with spurs and kicking somebody in the side. That's what the Bible tells you to do to your friends. You would want somebody to kick you in love to keep us from that deadness of religiosity. That's what I do. Every day is what society is. These guys who were meant to draw people to God are actually going to kick out the very guy who's been most changed by God. They're going to make it impossible for him to be restored to the community because the community's design is to keep the status quo. To keep God's revolution out. And because of that, if Christ changes your life, it will bring heat. It will bring difficulty. But it'll bring joy. All right. Look at this argument they have. When you see verses 30 to 31, the clarity he's got. These guys just want the evidence to go away. They just want it to disappear. And he comes with very clear basic logic. He's not educated. He's not claiming to be educated. He just talks back to them in a confident way. We're going to wind the world. He's this confident. We'll talk about a minute. But they're so aggravated with him. They just start shouting louder. They can't get rid of the evidence. So they look for an opportunity to malign his character. Find a way to undermine it when they can't. It just becomes who can yell the loudest. When you find yourself breaking down into shouting and argument, especially over spiritual things, this should cause you to stop and say, Lord, what's this really about? Because this man is confident. But he just keeps saying, I don't know, but I know this. Whereas they start screaming and yelling, they're upset that he's even doing this. There's a peanut's cartoon that Charles Schultz did where Lucy is talking with Charlie Brown and all of a sudden she hits him. And then she turns around to her friends and she says, I had to hit him quick. He was starting to make sense. That's what happens here. They recognize that if they go any further down this path, their world's got to get shattered. And so we either got to shut him up or we've got to do some hard rethinking of everything. The ground is quaking underneath them. It is a crisis. All right. This is the problem for the Pharisees. Their fear that the status quo, the predictability, would be shaken up. So they call the parents. This is really devious on their part to pit family against family. It tells you how desperate they are. But look what the parents do. You catch this? Here come the parents. And they stand by their boy but they don't really stand by their boy. See, they come and they see him and verse 22 tells us they stood by their son. They said, this is him, but they don't say we trust him. They don't say if he says it so, it's so because they are afraid of being kicked out of the synagogue. Now, told you a minute ago, this is not just you don't get to go back to that church. This is an ethnic cultural identity. If you get kicked out of the synagogue, you are pushed completely to the margins. This guy was destitute as a blind beggar, but he had a place in society and people were involved with him. If he gets pushed out, if they get pushed out as parents, they lose everything. See, here's the problem. For the Pharisees, for the parents, blindness was working for them. When they were blind to Christ and they had the status quo, it was working in their favor. Things were going pretty good. And the problem comes when Christ does something that flips on its head that would involve them losing everything they've got. It's easier for the blind man than for them to deal with. Let me put this differently. One of my friends heard the story of this guy. You know, whenever there's a capital campaign in the church, a lot of times the church will look for people to come up and give a testimony. And unfortunately, a lot of times they'll go to the richest guy in the community. And this church had the richest guy in the community come up front and everybody knew his story. He'd been the poorest guy in town and now he was the richest. And he got up and he says, you know, back when I was about 22 and I was dirt poor, I got my first job and first day on the job. Got paid the first time, the first dollar to my name. And then I went to church that night. And they were having the capital campaign, just like we're having now. And they said, you should give your testimony. I mean, I'm sorry, back up. And he said, he went there, somebody gave their testimony. I was convicted by what they're doing, what they're about. And I put in the only dollar I had, the only dollar to my name. I put it in the offering plate. And he kind of stepped back and he smiled smuggly, looked at everybody else out there and he said, and that's why I've done so well. Ever since. Just kind of looking down on the congregation, explained to them why he was so blessed and they weren't. And he said, and there it is. And he walked down and sits back down in the front row. Besides the little old lady who sat there her entire life, dirt poor, always up front, always listen to the preacher, always engaged in soaking up what's going on. And this little old lady had the gumption to lean over to him and say, I dare you to do it again. And there it is. You want to know why? The gospel comes first to the outsider. Why Jesus most readily connects with the people in the margins of society. It's because they know blindness is not working for them. But for the rich, the powerful, the most successful, it is hardest for them to get it. Why Jesus kept saying it's like, I can't go into the eye of a needle. It can happen because I'm a miracle worker. But it's hard because you think the blindness is working for you. It's working in your favor. Instead of realizing I didn't get here by my own effort. I didn't bring about my own success. I needed God. See, that is the problem here for these parents, for the Pharisees, really even for the neighbors. If blindness is working for you, it will keep you from Jesus until you realize I need help, which means either you need a crisis or a good gift from God makes you realize, life is so good, I didn't do this. I don't deserve this. Do you need to wait until things go wrong to realize you're not doing this on your own? All right. So what is so good about this blind man? Look at this. He has incredible confidence. Why does he have so much confidence? His confidence comes from the fact that he knew it wasn't his work. I'm going to say it that way because his confidence comes from his lack of confidence in himself. He knows from being a beggar on the side of the street that a lot of these other people who've got things so good, they don't just have it so good because of what they've done. He arrived on the planet without sight. And from day one, he was in a bad way. And I'm sure he thought a tone about what if my circumstances had been different. What's amazing is now that he has sight. He remembers what it was like to be blind. And he looks in the same things that everybody else claims to. Because he had nothing, he can look and say, not only do I not need that, but I'm looking at you and how you run things and having been on the underbelly. I don't want in on the way you're doing things. I don't want in on life being like that. The kind of confidence you have is fake confidence. All of your work, all of your talk about God, all of the way that you set up society and you could never help me. He knows people were sometimes sneaking in and grabbing a little bit of the money out of his basket. He knows people were taking advantage of him. He knows those religious people were really fake in what they were doing. He got his first real taste of something different and he wants in on that. Real love and real change. That's what gives him this kind of confidence. I gave you a bad example of a rich person. Let me give you a good example. When William Haslam was an evangelist in the Victorian England, he was going around England. England at the time in Victorian England, the golden era was a Christian nation. So why would they need an evangelist, right? William Haslam is going around preaching the gospel and it is aggravating the churches, the death because people are coming out in droves and hearing the gospel, they're not preaching. Because of that, all the high society types were staying away from it there. Their pastors are telling them I'll stay away from that guy. And Mr. A will call him is one of the well-known people in the community, faithful at the church. He decides he's too curious. He wants to go here, Haslam preach. He goes out. Here's William Haslam preach the gospel and he converts. He comes down front. He makes a public profession of faith. It's what those parents were afraid to do. It's Romans 10-9. The reason our members make a public profession. It's what we're called to do if you stand for Christ but it brings with it heat. And what do you think happened? The word got out. It got out among all of his peers and it got back to his vicar at his church. He's a piscopalian. And the piscopalian minister comes to him at some point and he says, so, Mr. A. I heard you converted. You went to this revival and you've converted. He said, yes, the Lord opened my eyes. And the minister kind of sneered a little and he said indeed sarcastically. Then he said, what, tell me what did the Lord show you? And the guy looks up at a Mr. A. He says, well, he showed me that you preach the gospel backwards. That you preach that people should do good things in order to get God's love. When the good news of Jesus is that God loves people who can't do good things and that's why they get changed and start doing good things. And that's simple statement of the gospel, of gospel love inversion. Resulted in him beginning to be shunned. He was a Sunday school teacher. He lost that post. His peers begin to say, this guy's, he's a little bit on the fringe. He's crazy. He gets pushed out of his peer group. He winds up losing his position. His occupation loses his place in the church is pushed out of the church. What does he do? The same thing that probably this blind guy did with no other identity. He goes to the one who gave in the light. Mr. A goes and joins William Haslam's ministry and helps him in what he is up to. I want you to understand a blind man who had nothing is much more readily willing to give up everything and rejoicing it because his confidence is not in what he's got. It's in what God has done. All right. But, but. Notice this. If you look at this passage, the way that his life changes. Look at verse 11. In verse 11, all he knows is this is a man called Jesus. And then by the time you get a verse 17, he calls him a prophet. And then in verse 25, he's recognizing he's a healer. Verse 27, he sees that he's worth following. He says, are you going to be his disciple? Verse 33, he says he's from God. And then finally in 35 to 38, he is ready to receive Jesus. When Jesus calls himself the son of man, he worships him. We recognize in a Jewish culture. I mean, you might lose your life over worshiping a human being. There's a threat. You'd be threatened to be stoned. But I want you to see even though this man was changed from no sight to sight like that. It still was a gradual development in his faith. Now I say that to you because a lot of people think of Paul. When we start talking about testimony, people think of Paul. And they think, Paul had the Damascus road experience. The light came on and he saw Jesus and his life was utterly changed. And you know, you have a great testimony if you talk about how you were in drugs and then all of a sudden now you're out, your life's radically changed. That's not the only example in Scripture. Some of you remember the hour, the day exactly what happened. That's great. Some of you don't because it happened very gradually over time but you know you were changed. It's the difference between Peter and Paul. Peter was Jesus for three years. But he still didn't get it. It took time for the rock. To get Jesus. It's not just instantaneous change but evident change occurs. This is what so life all three. Imagine you're the blind man. You grew up blind. The only people who took care of you are your parents. And then when push comes to shove, you've finally been given sight. And your mom and dad can take a stand for you. They could take the hit for you. And instead, they let you take the hit. See he gets treated like Christ would be treated because his parents were unwilling to take the hit for him. Now think about that. He saw with his eyes, his new eyes, his parents betray him. He probably leaves at this point and goes with the only guy who's given him anything. The one who's now told him he's God. He goes with Jesus. And what does he see with these new eyes? But the rest of Jesus' ministry, including the one who was supposed to deliver them, dying for them. And the realization has to settle in. Well, maybe I shouldn't believe in this guy. Wait a minute. He gave me sight. I can't get around the fact that once I was blind and now I can see my life was changed. Either he's real or he's not. And then when he was raised from the dead, he realizes he got treated like I deserved so that I could get what I don't deserve. He traded with me. There's no love like this. And it catapults us. I mean, when you look at this whole passage and we're speeding through a long section today, this guy is incredibly bold, he's incredibly forthright. He's willing to give up everything. And it just comes down to this one fact. He keeps saying, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. But what I do know is this. Once I was blind now, I see. He keeps the main thing, the main thing. Do you know how God has changed you? If you do, you keep resonating. Just just ruminate on it. What has God done in your life that lets you know this was not you. And this is where we keep changing. Go back to the cross and realize there is no way I could have accomplished this by myself. And you see what God did for you. That's what changes us. That's what catapults us. See, this is a mission's passage. And the problem with Christians is we think missionaries are people who go to Africa like Sam McDonald. We call them missionaries. And then we don't talk about the fact that everybody who is a Christian is a missionary. We are on mission. Christ has given us a mission to wherever he's called us, including Brookhaven. To be on mission. And what does that look like? It looks like this blind man. You realize the end of John, the purpose of John is that we would believe and have life. What does it look like to have life? To believe in Christ. It's this man's confession. Once I was blind, now I see. It took me three days in Uganda trying to figure out with seven years of professional religious education, how do I convey Jesus to these people? I was over complicating it. The question I asked for the next 15 days was simple. You want to hear how Jesus changed my life? Yes. I'm not interested in all that fluff and all your learning. I was there. Tell me why it matters. If people see that Christ has changed you, you know what they realize? That's the image I want you to have walking out of here. Christian missionaries are simply this. You are a turtle on a fence post. If you go out and you walk a farm line out here with just fence with a post in between it, squirrels can run up a fence post and stand on the top of this little fence post. Turtles can't run up a fence post. If you're a farmer, if you're just out walking a fence line and you see a turtle on top of a fence post, what do you know? Somebody picked it up and put it there. That is the Christian missionary. I don't belong here. I don't belong on top of this fence, but there's no way I got that high without Jesus. He took me, he moved me, he placed me. How did this happen, Jesus? Would explain all, you know, I got so many answers, I'll study, I'll try to answer that question, but here's what I really know. Jesus changed me. He altered my life. See, this is the reason. I'll give you a couple of examples really quickly and this will aggravate some of you. Last time I used this example in Chattanooga, I had a woman come up to me afterward and say, I really don't like that example. It really pushes me to Jesus and I don't like that. She did like it, she was being facetious, but Ray Cortes said, one woman in his church after he preached the gospel, that Jesus loved her and she was accepted before she did anything. She came up, she got it, she said, Ray, that means I don't need to color my hair anymore. One more color in my hair. God loves me. I aggravated so many women saying that. But the question is not, do you color your hair? The question is, what's your identity? Do you know the only eye in the universe looks at you and treasures you? He's put you up on the fence post. You're his. Not because of you because you're loved. When we get that, it is life changing. It's the reason that some men that I've talked with, they're willing to put software on their computer that admits that they need help because they would look at things they shouldn't look at. And the problem is once you put that software on your computer and your buddy comes over to use it who doesn't share your same convictions, you can have a conversation. Hey, my accountability partner see everywhere I go on the internet. What? Yeah, everywhere I go, they know. You mean you don't look at, you know, well, no, what's wrong with you? You know what's going on in your world? Christ. You mean your wife didn't make you do this. You wanted to do that. Yeah, I want to be different. I want in on Jesus and out of the lie, you will be a turtle on a fence post when you see and no one else does. Your identity will be so different. It will bring heat. It'll bring scrutiny. But it will bring joy like none other. Because you are daddy's little boy, little girl. Do you see? Do you see? Because when you see, you'll tell others. Let's pray. Lord God, we are preoccupied with all sorts of other things. We get hung up on what other people think of us. Lord, I pray that you would help us rejoice in the fact that we were once blind beggars who have nothing to our name and yet you've given sight. That we wouldn't try to close our eyes again and go back to the blind world. That we would be excited about the fact that you are aggravating us into a better existence. That we can't look down other people because we did nothing by our own effort but that foolish people that we are sitting on top of this fence post. We would be a light for you, not because we're so great because you put us here. Change us, Lord. Change this church. Let us be yours, Father, that you would topple all of our mistaken ideas about you and you would melt us for your kingdom and people who thought they could see Pharisees like us would get real sight and people over Brookhaven would say, if those people can see, I want in. We ask it in your name. Amen.