3 Overlooked Steps to Getting Strong

What's up, y'all? What's up, go sit down. All the folks that are new, they're like, hey, let's see if he's any good, let's not. Hey, yeah. So, it's good to be home, it's good to be with family. It's one of the great honors and privileges of my life that there's literally, Allie and I talk about this every time we come here, there's two places on this planet that we feel at home and that's just a blessing and a privilege for us and I don't know how many times I said this at the men's conference, I've walked up those five stairs hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, but every time I get to do it, I count it a sacred calling to be able to walk up here and do that. So, thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to deliver the word of God again to you today, my family. So, thank you so, so much. And I'm here, yeah, I wanna tell you, I'm so proud of y'all. I'm so proud of y'all because you are continuing on with the legacy that Jim and I inherited, that we continue to carry on from the time that I was here and that you're carrying on to this day. You're reaching lost and broken people, you're staying anchored in the scriptures and you are getting after it. So, I'm so, so, so proud of you guys.

You guys also put up with a lot from me because I was 26 years old when I got here. Yeah, you're laughing, that's a very judgmental laugh. You're like, we did, we put up with a lot. You did, and I have many things I could apologize for today. One of the things that I should apologize to you for is that you had to endure what I call my CrossFit face. And yeah, Jim's laughing down here because he had to have an intervention with me at one point. He's like, hey man, this is a bit much, which is, if Jim has to tell you something's a bit much, it's a bit much, because he goes 100 miles an hour towards everything, right? And so, you guys had to endure that, and it wasn't CrossFit that was really the problem. The problem was I was the CrossFit guy. Like, I talked about it all the time. It was all my sermon illustrations. It was everything I posted on social media. I did two-a-days. I just wrecked myself all day, every day. And because of that, that led to what inevitably happens with CrossFit is I had a lot of injuries that accumulated over time. And at the height of that obsession, and I could call it that, I got into some of the offshoots of CrossFit. And so, I got obsessed with Olympic weightlifting for a little while,

and I started chasing all these different numbers and things like that. And so, I had weights in my garage. And about, I think this was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 years ago, I was trying to clean more weight than I had ever cleaned before. And in my garage, I got under 250 pounds in the front squat position. And all that weight being right here, then my elbow posted on my knee in the bottom of the squat. And so, 250 pounds of weight transferred through my wrist into my elbow. And there was this searing, disorienting pain. Sometimes you've experienced something like that where you start wobbling around. You get very dizzy. You get very nauseous. And you start to wonder, what have I done? And I was convinced I had probably broken my arm. And over the course of a little bit of time, actually the pain that originated in my elbow became apparent. The real problem was somewhere in the wrist vicinity. And so, if you're wondering, okay, at what point did you go to the doctor, get an x-ray? The answer is never. And so, because I'm dumb.

And so, I just continued to deal with the fact that I couldn't bend my wrist for literally a year. Until finally, I was able to start using it the way that I was able to use prior to that. And eventually, I was even able to, I think, lift more weight than I had attempted to lift on that day. And so, somehow I got stronger than I was at that point on, even though something got broken. Now, here's the thing. If I would've showed up here today wearing a cast or in a sling, and you look at me and go, what did you do? And I go, well, I hurt my arm lifting weights. And you go, when did you do it? And I said, well, 12 years ago. You'd be like, that's funny. Why is the cast still on? Why is the sling still on your arm? Because at some point, the cast has to come off, doesn't it? At some point, the broken things, once they're healed, you have to start using them again, don't you? I came across this quote in an Ernest Hemingway novel that I wouldn't recommend, but I was reading a few years ago on vacation. I wouldn't. He's very overrated. But this is a great line. Listen to it. The world breaks everyone. And afterwards, many are strong at the broken places.

We know the world breaks everyone, don't we? I mean, if you've lived like 10 minutes, you would go, yeah, the world breaks everyone. But for some, not all, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places. And the thing that I wanna talk about today is why is that, that some get stronger in the broken places? And how does that occur? If you got your Bibles, I want you to go to 2 Timothy chapter two. 2 Timothy chapter two, we're gonna go through verses one through seven. And Paul is writing to his understudy, Timothy. And I love their relationship because this is an older man who's building into a younger man who didn't have a dad. And so he gives him pictures of what it looks like to be a man. And he's gonna give three really distinctive pictures of how someone gets stronger in the broken places. You gotta understand. Timothy had broken places, y'all. So here's this man who's building into him. Okay, here we go. 2 Timothy chapter two, verse one through seven. It says this. You then, my child, he claims him as his own. Be, here's what we wanna be, strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

And what you've heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others. Share in suffering as, here's the pictures. Here they come, there's three of them. Share in suffering as a good soldier, circle that one, of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. Here's the second picture. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. Here's the third picture. It is the hardworking farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. Here's our goal. You're here today because you wanna be stronger. If you didn't wanna be stronger, you would participate in one of the many other recreational activities that the state of Colorado has to offer on a beautiful Sunday morning, wouldn't you? But you're here today because you wanna be stronger. And so Paul gives us three pictures of how to get stronger, a soldier, an athlete, and a farmer. And he could've picked any images,

but he picks these three because they have at least two things in common. If you wanna be a good soldier, athlete, or farmer, you have to embrace two things. Write these down, resistance and rest. And it has to be both, okay? Because they work in tension and in tandem with one another if you wanna go stronger. If you don't wanna grow stronger, here's all you have to do. Embrace one of them, but not the other one. You tracking? So if you only embrace resistance and you just go hard in the paint and you just, you get after it, you never rest, you never sit down, you always go 100 miles per hour, you always put more weight on the bar, more stress to the system, you will eventually flame out and there will be bodies in your wake. And you'll be weaker, not stronger. If you only embrace rest and never embrace resistance and you just sit on the sofa all day and you just abdicate responsibility while eating Cheetos and doom scrolling, right? You're just gonna be weaker and there will be bodies in your wake. And so we're here today because we wanna grow stronger. So let's look at these pictures, all three of them.

The first one is a soldier. What did it say? Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus, no soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. One of the simplest things about a soldier is here's what they do. They pick up something heavy and they walk for a long distance. They march. Everybody's all into rucking these days, right? That's from soldiers. You gotta be able to carry a burden for a long period of time until you're told to stop and put it down, which means you have to embrace, here's a good word, the discipline of self-denial. I love Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL, writes a bunch of self-help stuff, all kinds of things like that. He always says this, discipline equals freedom, and that's true. You want freedom, then you better be disciplined. He expounds on that in one of his books. He says this, discipline means taking the hard road. Wonder where he got that idea. The uphill road to do what is right for you and for others. So often, the easy path calls us to be weak for that moment, to break down another time, to give into the desire and short-term gratification.

Discipline will not allow that. Discipline calls for strength and fortitude. Now listen, here's what I understand. Some of us get all inspired when we hear a Navy SEAL say stuff, and some of us love self-help stuff and things like that, and then others of us are totally resistant to that. We're like, man, that doesn't do anything for me. Well, it doesn't really matter if that does anything for you because Jocko didn't come up with that idea. He got that idea from someone named Jesus. So if you don't like what Jocko said, here's who we take our cues from. We take our cues from Jesus who said this, and this is far stronger than what Jocko said, by the way. He said it this way. Okay, whoever wants to be my disciple, here's a key word, must, check this out, deny themselves and take up their what? Cross daily and follow me. Remember when Jesus said this, no one had a cross tattooed on their shoulder like I do. Nobody had them dangling from their neck. Nobody wore them in their ears. That would be the most absurd thing ever because this was the most brutal instrument of death that the world had ever devised in the hand of the Roman Empire that was really good at brutalizing people with it.

So no one would willingly and voluntarily say, you know what I wanna do today? I wanna pick up a cross. But Jesus says, deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me. So how about it, every single day, you and I, we got a choice to make, don't we? Man, that alarm clock goes off and everything inside of you is screaming, sometimes maybe just a gentle whisper, but it says, you know what, just stay in bed, abdicate your responsibility, and sometimes we are so tempted to prioritize ourselves above anyone and everything. and the whispers become louder, skip everything, procrastinate, pick up your phone, mindlessly scroll, ignore the kids, put off that hard conversation that you know you need to have for at least one more day. Maybe you'll get to it tomorrow. The problem is none of that will help you grow stronger. If you want to grow stronger, you have to embrace pain. If you want to get stronger, you have to embrace suffering. Here's one of the things that's so important to understand, will you be the kind of person who has practiced suffering daily when the day of suffering comes? Because the day of suffering's coming. How many of you, we did this last night, let's do it again today, okay? So how many of you by a show of hands would say,

okay, there has been at least a full season of my life that can only be described with one word, and that word is suffering. Anybody? Yeah, me too. And you want to prepare ahead of time because the day is coming. And if you're right here, like right now going, well, I've never had a season like that. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. It's coming. So you better prepare for it. You know what won't help you prepare? Netflix. What will help you is being immersed in the word of God because here's what you're gonna discover when you immerse yourselves in the scriptures. You're gonna flip every page and you're like, she suffered, he suffered, they suffered, the church suffered, Jesus suffered. It seems to be a theme of the scriptures that God's people suffering, but that suffering is for a purpose in the hands of our Savior. So here's the thing, okay, so us older folks, like if we're a generation X and older, we need to apologize to you who are younger, and here's one of the things that we need to apologize for. We have coddled you to death. We coddled the fire out of you, and it's not your fault.

We did that to you. I'll give you some evidence. I mentor a young man who's in high school now. I started mentoring him when he was in third grade, which meant that when he was getting out of fifth grade, he invited me to this thing called a fifth grade graduation, and I was like, why is that a thing? That's just moving on to sixth grade. That's what that's called, and so I remember going to, I went to his fifth grade graduation, and my expectations were all out of whack. I thought, well, this would be very brief. They'll mention three of the smart kids, and they'll give everybody else, I don't know, a blessing or something. I don't know, you get to go to sixth grade. Great job, I guess, and so I go, and this is, I promise you, not an exaggeration. 200 of them in there, every one of them got a special award, every one of them. Now, here's the question. How much do you think those kids who received an award valued those rewards? None, because they're smarter than we give them credit for. They can look around and go, everyone got one. If everyone's exceptional, no one's exceptional, but these kids have been told their whole lives, you're a beautiful snowflake, man. You are the best ever at everything, and listen, that's a lie from the pit of hell, all right?

Now, some of you are deeply offended. Let me tell you what I just didn't say. I did not say that all those kids weren't valuable in the eyes of God. I did not say they were not valuable image bearers of God who Jesus came to seek and save. Like, I didn't say that at all. I'm just saying some of them are really bad at math, okay? Not everybody's the best athlete, or no one is the best athlete, but we have coddled you so much, and it's not your fault, and it hasn't prepared you. And I don't know if it works this way in the state of Colorado, but it works this way in the state of Kentucky. This blew my mind with some of my kids. When you fail a test in the state of Kentucky now, and I went to school in the state of Kentucky growing up. This was not the case when I was growing up. If you get a bad grade, you can just go back to the teacher and say, can I do it again? Did you know this? This was a thing. They'll give you a redo over and over and over again until you get a better grade that you're satisfied with. And here's the problem with that. There are some things that happen in life that are pass or fail, and if you fail, there's bodies in the wake. So here's what's gonna happen one day.

One day, one of these beautiful snowflakes is gonna have something that resembles a job, right? And somebody's gonna march them into an office and go, this doesn't get to be your job anymore. And this is gonna be the most unfamiliar feeling to them that they've ever had in their whole life, and they're gonna go, wait, but I'm a beautiful snowflake. You've been privileged to have me here. What do you mean I don't get to work here anymore? And they're gonna say, well, the reason is you didn't do a good job. It's called a job. And so we have crippled you, and we have hampered you, and we are sorry, but this is one of the wounded places that you're going to have to get stronger in. If you wanna know why we see these big fits being thrown on college campuses across our nation, it's because we have taught a generation, or two, or three now, that everything in the world should orient. It's around their thoughts, their feelings, and their sensitivities, and then when they get out into the real world and that doesn't work, they run into a wall called reality, and it's our fault for teaching you that. And then, and then here comes Jesus, who says, deny yourself. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Jesus. This is the era of self-care,

and self-esteem, and self-help, and you're telling me to deny myself. Well, here's the thing, Jesus loves you more than the world does. The world hates you. Jesus has good intentions towards you. And in case you didn't know, like if you ever wonder about his intentions towards you, there was like a day in history that he said, I will be on a cross for you. I will become your sin and shame so that you can become the righteousness of God and live at home with me forever. That's his intentions towards you. The world wants to join with the enemy whose only goal is to kill, and steal, and destroy. And so Jesus wants you to get stronger, all right? Like a soldier. And Paul says like an athlete. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. In other words, there's like an actual right way and a wrong way to play. A winning athlete, by definition, is living life in submission to authority. Not only does that athlete have to submit to like the rules of whatever game or sport they're playing, but they have to submit to the authority of the officials and coaches. They can't just follow their heart

and do whatever they want. Like, I mean, the baseball team's right over here. If you go up there, like one of you bats right-handed or something like that, and you just decide one day you're gonna go up there and bat left-handed, and your coach looks at you and goes, what are you doing? And you're like, I'm following my heart. He's gonna go, you follow your heart right back to the bench, right? Because there's a way to play the game that needs to be played, and you're gonna submit to the authority, not just follow your heart. Proverbs says it this way. I love Proverbs because it's just so blunt. It's written to young men. That's what it is. When we need blunt, I'm not young, but I'm a man. There's a way, this seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. If you wanna keep getting weaker, just follow your heart for the rest of your life. How many of us, let's do a little show and tell again. We would say, man, there was at least one instance, if not a dozen, in our life where we followed our hearts, and what we followed our hearts into was hell on earth. Anybody? Yeah, me too. Do not follow your heart. Hand your heart to Jesus and follow him.

He gives us boundaries and parameters because he wants what's best for us. The world wants you to grow weaker, and it'll sell you things that'll make you weaker. Unrestrained sexual expression is not the best path to take. Problem with that idea of just do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want, is it will lead to hell on earth. It's easier to take shortcuts, but it's not better. In 2012, there was this fascinating study done among what were called the super athletes. They studied like the elite of the elite, like top-performing Olympic athletes, professional athletes, and the title of it caught my eyes. It's titled this, The Rocky Road to the Top, Why Talent, check this out, Needs Trauma. We overuse the word trauma, and it minimizes real trauma, so we don't know what we mean when we say it sometimes, but in this study, what they were defining it as is they recognized that, man, the top athletes all had something in common. They had at some point had a major injury, they had had a major death in the family, or a combination of the two, or they grew up impoverished. The people who did not reach to the top level, they all had some version of what we call in Kentucky, I don't know if they call it this here, daddy ball. You know what I'm talking about when I say daddy ball? So in Kentucky, the way it works is like,

if a dad looks at his son and goes, oh, he's not getting to play on that team, I'll just start my own team so my son can play on my team, and the thing that changed was not that the son doesn't stink at whatever sport it is, it's just that he's got a dad who's gonna make things easy for him until one day things are not easy anymore, and then he can't do the thing that he wanted to do anymore, because reality will hit him in the face. You guys know that I'm a big fight fan, and if you track the lives of great fighters like the top of the food chain, boxers or MMA, almost every one of them comes from some sort of hardship. Every one of them has some sort of broken place, if not a dozen broken places that has helped fuel them to get to the place that they're in. See, Paul seems to be leveraging Timothy's past pain probably from being a fatherless son, and he's challenging him to be strengthened by it for the task at hand as a young pastor in a wild, crazy town called Ephesus, which leads us to the hardworking farmer. What does he say? He says, it is the hardworking farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. Some of y'all got country strong from throwing hay. Some of y'all got country strong from running cattle and dealing with horses and all that kind of thing. There's a kind of strength that gets created

in the daily grind and adversity. And here's something that a farmer absolutely must have. Some of you know this, patience. Patience, man, you're planting crops, you're waiting for God to do what only he can do, but you gotta do the work that you can do so that God can do what he can do. And you pray for rain. James, the brother of Jesus, says it this way, consider the farmers who patiently wait for the rains in the fall and in the spring, they eagerly look for the valuable harvest to ripen. You too must be patient. Hard work and patience go hand in hand for the farmer. You gotta have the work ethic to plow and to plant and the patience to sit on the porch and pray for rain. So here we are, farmers and athletes and soldiers, they all have resistance outside of their control. Farmers face weather that they can't control, athletes face conditions and competitors outside of their control, and soldiers face enemies trained on a foreign soil and circumstances that they did not create. But for each of them, and here comes the part of the sermon some of y'all were hoping I was gonna forget, for each of them, there comes a time where they have to rest. See, here's the problem. We incentivize certain behaviors in our culture. And one of those behaviors that we incentivize is to just burn ourselves to a crisp.

They'll give you a gold watch if you do it long enough. Throw you a party, put you on a podcast, do all the things for you. But again, in the wake will be bodies because you burnt yourself to a crisp. The people that you were entrusted with, that were given to your care, suffered because you were burning it at both ends. The same God who created the world and stopped and ceased for a while not because he was tired, but to give us a model tells us to put the weight down and rest because here's a newsflash. There is a God and you're not him. Did you know? And so if you put everything down, he's not up there wringing his hands going, oh no, oh no, oh no. What am I gonna do? Scott stopped working. It's not what he's doing. He's not worried, he's not anxious. And so Jesus, who said, take up your cross and follow me, deny yourself, don't miss it, also gave us this beautiful invitation in Matthew 11 when he says, come to me, all you who are, is anyone here today weary? All you who are carrying heavy burdens. Anyone today carrying a heavy burden? This is another sermon for another day,

but here's the thing. He does a brilliant thing with these two words. There's two kinds of tired. There's the kind of tired you get from doing the thing that you want to do and the kind of tired you get from doing the thing that you want to do. The thing that you are entrusted to do, the thing that you love to do, and as good as it is, it'll still make you tired. I love doing this. I'm dog tired, okay? And there's heavy burdens. That's the stuff other people put on you. You didn't ask for it, but it's on you. Anybody got something like that in your life? You didn't ask for it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's on your shoulders now. You're a heavy burden. And Jesus gives the invitation to a whole bunch of people who are both kinds of tired at the same time. Come to me. You weary, come to me. You heavy burden, come to me. And here's what he'll give you. I will give you, shout the word back to me, rest. Does that sound good to anybody? Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you because I'm humble and gentle at heart.

And you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy to bear and the burden I give you is life. And so this circles us back to something that I intentionally just kind of breezed past at the beginning of this passage. And this is the challenge to not breathe past things in the Bible because there are profound things hanging on every word and you don't want to miss it. And here's what I wanted to land with today. The very first verse that we looked at today, did you catch it, said this. You then, my child, be strengthened. That's what we want, right? We want to be strong. We want to get stronger. And then we got to all those pictures and those are beautiful pictures. Those are helpful pictures. Those are great pictures. But what does Paul say actually strengthens us more than anything else? Look, you then, my child, be strengthened by the what? Grace. Grace. Grace. God's grace. Grace that is deeper than all my sin. There's not hardly a sermon that goes by that I don't preach this text

because I learned it from Jim Bergen himself for while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. Listen, while you were at your worst, you weren't even thinking about cleaning yourself up. You weren't even dreaming about doing better. You were at the lowest of the low, Moment in your life that you still wrestle with shame over the tapes that play in your head that you beg god Just erase them. That was the moment that jesus said I won't just die for that I'll become that so that he so that she can become the righteousness of god and stand free And confident before the throne of mercy and grace. That's what he did for you And that's what he did for me And so it is grace grace God's grace that strengthens us and here's the thing I came I flew here today to tell you simply this Grace has a million repercussions a million shock waves, but here's one of them. It leaves us with no excuses You tracking So what am I supposed to say now? Well this place i'm broke. I'm broke, but i'm broken. No, I I healed i'm healing I'm restoring and by the power of my grace I've called you to serve and to lead and to provide and to protect and my grace will Sustain you to do what i've called you to do. So there are no excuses So why do some people get stronger in the broken places and some people don't? The people who get stronger in the broken places are the ones who are experiencing the healing hand of jesus On those very broken places and the way that you can know it is they are an extension Of jesus's healing to other people who have broken places like they have broken places So when I have somebody that's like struggling in the depths of alcoholism, who do I call someone who's struggled in the depths of alcoholism? Someone who's struggling in the depths of pornography addiction Who do I have them call someone who's struggled in the depths of pornography addiction? That's what you that's what you do Paul had something like that

Called it a thorn in his flesh. We don't really know what it was Man, he begged He pleaded Jesus, would you please take it away? And you know what jesus said no but my grace Is sufficient for you My power will be made perfect in your weakness In your broken place. My strength will be made evident I love the way the message puts it my grace is enough It's all you need My strength comes into its own in your weakness. Once I heard that paul says I was glad to let it happen I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of christ's strength Moving in on my weaknesses now I take limitations in stride and with good cheer these limitations that cut me down to size abuse accidents opposition bad breaks I just let christ take over and so the weaker I get Stronger I become Years ago Man, I had a friend And it came to my attention he'd been cheating on his wife And I was a young cocky arrogant pastor at the time and so I took him to lunch man And I preached a sermon to him I think it was a great sermon. I think I said a lot of right stuff I mean, I mean I challenged him. I told him I said man fast forward Like if you if you keep going down this track, let me tell you where you're going to be There's going to be a train wreck your your family's going to fall apart. Your son's going to hate you your daughters They're not going to want you to walk them down the aisle at their wedding like your your family's going to be fractured even if you get to come to the wedding you're gonna have to sit On like a different row neck not next to the wife of your youth. I mean, I just brought it Oh, man

I just threw the kitchen sink at him and I was like ready For him to be fixed and him to like him to respond and to go you're right I'll I'll do all the things that you tell me to do and let me let me tell you what he did I'll never forget this. I think we're like noodles or something And I preached this great sermon. I'm feeling good about myself. I'm gonna fix this dude And he looks right back at me with these cold dark eyes And he goes, yeah, I know He goes scott. You don't think I'd know all that In fact he goes I know all the darkness I would have to walk through in order for this to get on the right side of where it's supposed To be I just don't want to do it And this young arrogant cocky preacher went well, I don't have an answer for that So we got the check and we walked out the door and we went our separate ways And in my mind it was over it was dead. It was done but god Those are the two best words in the bible, I think And it wasn't because of anything I said to him It was because in that broken place of weakness god decided to do something his wife who was full of grace and mercy and resilience and strength just stayed right there to see What god might do? and him, and here's what I got to experience a couple years ago. I'm here in Colorado, and we're doing a rehearsal dinner. We're rehearsing this wedding, and it hadn't hit me yet, and we're practicing the part where my friend gets to walk down the aisle, and he's walking his little girl down the aisle, and we're just practicing.

This is just rehearsal, and I go, hey man, this is the part where I'll say, like, who gives this woman to marry this man, and it hadn't hit me yet, and he starts to say the words, and he, he can't get them out. Her mother and I, and he's weeping, and I take him by the back of the head, and I hug him so tight, like, here we are, man, but God, and he said those words, and in practice, he goes over, and he sits down next to the bride of his youth, family not broken, family stronger, and just seeing that picture on that evening, and the next day, when we got to do the real thing, that he sat on that front row, and he held her hand, and knowing that I had chalked it up to being dead, and over, and gone, but God's grace was sufficient to bring dead things to life, and that's what I flew here to tell you, and so right now, you may be going, I got a broken place, and I haven't let Jesus touch it, and I haven't told anybody about it, and I haven't exposed it to anyone, I haven't shared it with anyone, and it's been broken for a long time, and you've been wearing a cast for decades, and today, the cast can come off, and you can find the mercy and grace that can change your life, and so here's what we're gonna do,

we're gonna all stand, I'm gonna pray for us, and then we're gonna sing a song about running to the Father, and some of us need to run to the Father today, let's pray. Father God, thank you for your grace, your grace that runs deeper than all of our sin, all of our shame, your grace that can take the pain in our lives, and use it for your glory, and our good, and the good of others. Father, I pray for anyone right now, who right now in this moment hates every word that I said, because they are being prompted and pushed by your Holy Spirit to finally come clean, and to finally say, this is the broken piece, broken part of my life that I've never told anyone about, and Father, my prayer today is that they will finally share that with someone, and that in the sharing, and in the confessing, your healing may begin in that broken place. Because Father, we wanna be stronger, not for our own sake, but for the sake of others, and for your glory. We love you, in Jesus' powerful name, I pray.