Ep 024 || The Tower of Babel

Well hey, Pando family, we are so glad that you decided to be here with us today. It is Brandon, Derek, back with you, part of our online team here at Southeast Christian Church. We're here with you for the Pando exclusive podcast that comes out each and every week where we talk about the sermon from the previous weekend, and hopefully some things that will help you grow in your faith in Christ. And so, Brandon, we started a sermon series this past weekend, first week after Easter, where we got to see, what was it, 740-some baptisms here at Southeast? Oh yeah, 745 I think is what Bryson said, it was crazy. Just this past weekend, which is so cool, and I know that there have been a few letters over the years where you guys have written us to let us know how much just witnessing those baptisms encourage you and inspire you, and our prayer is that that's done the same for you this week. And for y'all that are watching, if you ever have questions about what baptism means, what that looks like, feel free, you know, ask your chaplain at your prison what that looks like for you, and what we believe about that, but at the same time, feel free to write us. We would love to answer some of those questions. Brandon, but back to the sermon, we jumped into a brand new sermon this last weekend called Journey of Faith, continuing to go through the Book of Genesis as a church for the next, what, like 15, 16, 17 weeks left? Yeah, we still got a while to go, yeah. For sure. So we still have quite the journey. Yes, of faith. Journey of Faith through the Book of Genesis. But this week we're talking about a story that may not be one of the stories that's as commonly known as like Noah or Adam and Eve, talking about the Tower of Babel. And so, Brandon, I'll just kind of set you up to talk about kind of what are we looking at here, because context, we're just coming out of Noah, right? Yeah.

So in Genesis chapter 9, the floodwaters recede, God makes His covenant with Noah, establishes the rainbow in the sky and all of that, and we have this idea for just a brief second, like, okay, the flood has happened, we've wiped out sin, like maybe everything is gonna be great now. Yeah. And it's not. Like it almost immediately starts to this cycle of sin and disobedience happening again. And Genesis chapter 10 begins to illustrate that for us with the genealogies of Moses' three sons. He had three sons that were on the ark with him, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Like it sounds like the three stooges, like I don't know. But Shem, Ham, and Japheth, they are the three sons and they begin to make families of their own and we start to read, if you read through chapter 10, it's a lot of names and a lot of people group names. And basically what it's telling us is that these three sons kind of set up the people groups that the Israelites would have known through the days, that they're kind of the beginning part of people groups like the Amorites and the Jebusites and the Hivites that we'll read about as you go a little bit further into the Old Testament. So when you get to the descendants of Shem, the oldest of, or yeah, the older brother of Japheth anyway, you read through, you're reading through the descendants and you come to this kind of note, I think it's verse 25, it says, Eber had two sons. The first was named Peleg, which means division, for during his lifetime, the people of the world were divided into different language groups. His brother's name was Joktan. So you start there in verse 25, like, wait a minute, the people were divided into different language groups. Like, what are we talking about? So you get to Genesis chapter 11, it's like, well, let's go back and let's talk about that story. Right.

So Genesis chapter 11 introduces us to this account of what is called the Tower of Babel. And we're told like at this point in time that mankind had grown pretty numerous. I'm not sure that there's a timeframe given in terms of how long... Yeah, I was gonna ask, do we know like what the kind of like an accepted timeline would have been between them getting off the boat and being here at the Tower of Babel? You know, I don't know. That would be a good question. I think the only clue that we do have is, you know, it says in 928 that Noah lived 350 years after the Great Flood. Okay. So we at least get the idea that this is happening after Noah's time. You know, that at the very least, we're almost 400 years. So people are still living at that time a lot longer than they do now. Yes. Yeah, that would seem to be the case. Interesting. There are all sorts of theories about why that is, exactly. Not for today's podcast. Let's, we'll dive deep. It's conspiracy theory time. For sure. So anyway, yeah, I mean, it's a few centuries after the flood and, you know, mankind decides they're gonna gather together and they are going to build a... a tower to reach up into the heavens. And the reasons for this are very telling. In Genesis 11, verse four, it says, come, let us build a great city for ourselves with a tower that reaches into the sky. This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world.

And Bryson brought this out on Sunday, but what we're talking about is really kind of double-barrel disobedience out of these people, is, you know, number one, this is gonna make us famous. We are going to make a name for ourselves is how it literally reads. And the basic idea is, like, we want people to see our greatness. We want people to know how good we are. We wanna know how people, we want people to know how technologically advanced we've become as a society. So we want to be famous. But then the second thing is, it will keep us from being scattered all over the world. Like, God has been very clear since with Adam and Eve, like, I want you to be fruitful and multiply and scatter across the earth. Like, God wants to fill the earth with people. So they're rejecting this command that God has given. Yeah, so they're very blatantly saying, like, hey, we wanna stay here. We wanna do what it is that God would have, we don't wanna do what God would have us to do. We wanna stay here and make a great tower, make a great city to our name. And, you know, we're told that the city, where they're building this tower is in the plain of Shinar or in the land of Babylonia,

which later on in the history of Israel would become very significant because Babylon is kind of the symbol for disobedience and for opulence and all of this. And that's because, you know, years later in the history of Israel, thousands of years later, the nation of Israel will be conquered by Babylon. They'll destroy Jerusalem. They'll take them back to their city, try to train them in the ways of Babylon. And so, you know, this is introducing us to, I think what becomes a continued motif or image throughout the Old Testament and even into some of the new is that Babylon is this symbol of disobedience and wickedness, the people who are set against what God would have us to do, they live in Babylon. Yeah, it's so interesting because right before this, you know, God is, like we talked about last week in Kyle's Easter message is that, you know, we were seeing this world full of sin and wickedness being buried underneath this body of water, right? And as the water, you know, subsides, that this new earth, new creation comes forth and God's kind of setting this, creating this reset, you know, where it's like, okay, I'm gonna save a remnant, they're Noah and his family, and then I'm gonna use them to kind of repopulate the earth. And again, it's not that, you know, God made some mistake and he's trying to fix his mistake, that's not what it is. It's that for us as humans, like we're just so broken,

like we're so broken, we're so wicked, there are things that are in us that are uncontrollable. And I think we start to see this again very quickly. I mean, one of the things that Bryson had mentioned was Genesis chapters three through 11 track the downward spiral of humanity into tragedy and death. Yes, yeah. Which is very apparent here in the Tower of Babel and this story. But when we think about this tower, one of the things he was talking about was, and I may get this word wrong, it was the first time I had heard it, I had to write it down. Bryson said the Tower of Babel was most likely a ziggurat. Yeah, a ziggurat. A ziggurat, a temple tower, right? So trying to, he was talking about like, they're trying to manufacture these sacred spaces to encounter the gods and that sort of thing. So tell us a little bit more of that. Like, what does that mean? Because when I hear tower, I think of like, like, all right, like, what's the big deal? Like, it's just a tower. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting because normally when I think of the Tower of Babel, I think of like the Leaning Tower of Pisa a little bit.

Like we're building this sort of thing that's going over the sky. I also think of like, you have like an obelisk, like kind of the Washington Monument kind of tower. You also would have like a minaret, which is kind of the traditional kind of Muslim shaped kind of tower with, yeah. But a ziggurat in that day, it was more like of a wide based structure that you would build up, you know, into the heavens a little bit. It wasn't extremely tall, but the idea of it was that you would largely begin by building these things on high ground. And because like Bryson said, in that day, it was thought that gods lived in the high places, that if you wanted to connect with a god, you had to go literally up a mountain. Like you think about the Greek, this would be thousands of years later, but you think about like the Greeks and their ideas of like Mount Olympus. Well, the gods live on the mountain. And so your task was. would be, you know, I want to build a tower, I want to build something that reaches up to where God is because I can obtain for myself getting into his presence or getting into his place. And that's really what they're trying to do here is we're gonna build this sort of temple

so that we can access God, so we can put ourselves in the place where God is. And it's interesting if you go through the rest of the Old Testament, you'll see one of the things that God tells the people and one of the things that especially the Northern Kingdom of Israel is condemned for later on in the history of Israel is that they are worshiping in the high places. This idea that if I go up to this place, then that automatically gives me the access I need to God. And, you know, so it's a very self-centered way of worship, I guess, to say, if I build myself up, then I'll be worthy enough to worship God. Okay, gotcha. And I think that's what they're getting at here is not just like we can attain the status of God, we can attain God's favor even if we build this tower and get to where he is. So do you think the, and this may be an unanswerable question just based upon the writings and scripture we have, but have you ever read anything to like, would these people have, like I'm assuming that over the years and through tradition and through their family, they would have learned about this God that had saved this remnant in Noah, right? In his family. Like, do we have anything historically

that kind of speaks to like, what would their knowledge of God has been or was? Not particularly. I mean, I will say like one of the things that's been interesting over time or even to read different takes on it is almost every culture in that area, almost every culture in that day has some flood narrative, right? Like there's some knowledge of, oh, there was a worldwide flood. And for a long time, people would say, oh, well, this shows that what the Bible is talking about is inaccurate because every culture has it, right? Like it's a part of all of their stories. But then you start to think about it, it's like, well, no, that doesn't mean it's not true. Like that probably means more like it actually did happen. Right, people are trying to figure this out. Right, like they know something happened, they just kind of disagree over exactly why it happened. And so like I would say there's some sort of shared knowledge at least about what happened, some shared knowledge about what happened, even though the particulars on exactly who did it and why they did it disagree. I think the general idea here is though, is just this system of maybe what we would call religion, this idea that I can get up to where God is, I can do this for myself.

Yeah, and so I think even in the midst of that question, regardless of what that looked like for them, Bryson encouraged us and reminded us of a couple of things. And you had talked with us already. It's talking about like, okay, well, like they're building this tower, right? They wanna make a name for themselves. They want themselves to be famous. Right, so like what's the issue? Like what's the problem with that? Well, Bryson gave us two examples, right? So what is the pride of Babel, right? So number one is that they wanted an identity apart from and above God, right? They wanted that. And number two, they wanted will and decision-making apart from God. And so because of this, right, God steps into the situation and scatters the people, divides them, changes languages, confuses language, and sends them on their way. But why, well, let me back up just a second. Because I think when I read that, all of us, no matter if you've been following Christ or you don't follow Christ at this moment, you kind of see, okay, the main issues here with these people is that they wanted an identity apart from and above God. And number two, that their will and their decision-making, they wanted that to be apart from God.

I think no matter who you are, you kind of, you hear those and you're like, well, okay, well, that sounds all too familiar. Yeah, yeah. And like the example that Bryson gave was that it's not so much that I'm gonna go out and build this magnificent tower to show how great I am. But if I were to be honest, there's a lot of that going on inside of my heart that I'd be willing to admit. So where do you kind of see that going on in our world today in the midst of who we are and just culture in general? Oh man, like I think that... It's quite hard to pick a few examples. Yeah, I mean, it's tough to kind of think about that because like there's a... sense in which these two problems you're talking about, wanting to get an identity apart from God, and then I'm blanking on the second all of a sudden. Yeah, the will and decision-making. The will and decision-making. Like all of those things are all of, like all of the problems, all of the problems stem from those sorts of things is that I'm trying to find my own sense of identity in these things. I'm trying to find my own sense of accomplishment apart from what God has already done for me. And that, like, that's where we get tricky in all sorts of areas. Like, you think a lot about, you know, so often we are having more and more in our culture, like, questions of identity. And, well, who is someone? And, you know, one of the refrains that our world, you say, well, you get to, you decide who you are. Well, that's not, like, biblically accurate, really, in any sense. And that's, I think, what the Babylonians are, the people building the Tower of Babel are trying to do. They're trying to say, well, it doesn't matter, you know, what God wants us to do. It doesn't matter who God says we are. What matters is that we make this name for ourselves,

that we decide who we are. And I think, I mean, we get ourselves into a whole lot of trouble when we do that, when we start trying to decide our own identity, when we try to build up things that give us a sense of worth and purpose. You know, when we pour ourselves out to get accomplishments or achievements or wealth or whatever, you know, we end up trying to accumulate things that, at the end of the day, we think are gonna give us meaning and that we think are gonna give us value, but, you know, they're powerless to do that, because we are created to find our identity and our purpose in who God made us to be, right, and how He designed our life to work. I will say, you know, it's interesting, and I hope I'm not kind of jumping ahead to next week. No, no, go ahead. We'll see. There's a really interesting contrast. I know chapter divisions are not in the actual text. Like, we kind of added those later. But the beginning of chapter... So, those numbers that we see... Those numbers are not, yeah, those were added in, like, the 1800s, but it's very helpful. It just helps us divide it up and read it. Yeah, it helps us know where we're at. Yeah, like, I mean, can you turn to the middle of Isaiah? All right, where? Okay. You know, I'll find the text by the time he's done talking. Yeah. At any rate, Genesis chapter 11 and Genesis chapter 12, they end with, or they begin, I'm sorry, each with a very interesting contrast, because in Genesis chapter 11, you get these builders at the Tower of Babel who say, come, let us build a tower. This will make us famous. This will make a name for us. This will make our name great. And then in Genesis chapter 12, you open up on the story of a man named Abram, who's gonna become very important throughout the rest of the book of Genesis. And what's one of the very first promises God makes to Abraham? It's in verse two. It says, I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous. I will make your name great, is literally what it says. And so in Genesis chapter 11, you have these people who are like, no, we're gonna make our name great. And it's in Genesis chapter 12 that God comes to this man who he's gonna bless the world through and says, no, no, no, no, I'm gonna make you famous. I'm gonna make your name great. And so the central conflict in our hearts is, I think, am I gonna make myself, am I gonna make my own name great, or am I gonna trust that God

is gonna give me those things that he wants me to have? Yeah, I love that example, because it shows that when we are trying to do things in our own strength, with our own plan, with our own will, and this is really important, apart from God... Right. Gosh, things just don't go well. Yeah. Like, they just don't. And like, for y'all that are watching this right now on the Pando app, like, this may be hitting you really hard, because it's hitting me, really. I guarantee it for Brandon, too. There have been so many times in my life where I've tried to do things my own way, and it just didn't work out, you know? And it literally took me getting to the absolute end of my rope, to where it's like, okay, like, I'm an idiot, you know, yet again, and I still experience this now, right? Where it's like, golly, like, why did I not pray through this? Why did I not seek wisdom or counsel from people in my life for this? And then I end up in this spot, and it's like, well, yeah, like, you didn't do any of the things necessary to put yourself in a position to make a good decision. But it all leads back to this problem that we have as a human before the flood and after the flood, is that we have this thing called sin that is within us that just warps everything in our mind, in our hearts, our desires, and so it really shouldn't surprise us, right? That, I mean, I say so quickly, I'm sure it was several hundred years till we get to this point after the flood of for, you know, maybe an approximate timeline. But it shouldn't surprise us that it's like left to our own accord as humans, we tend to make a mess of our life. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, I thought when Bryson opened up with those like DIY things, like I thought about that a whole bunch. Like man, yeah, this is why, I think my wife was on Pinterest for like a year and a half and then we were like, nope, like it's not helpful.

I can't, we can't duplicate that, it's not gonna work out. But you know, every time you try to fix things on your own, more often than not, if you don't, like you realize you don't know what you're doing and you realize it too late, right? Like, oh, I should have. Past a point of no return. Yeah, like I have, I have already, you know, put an extra hole in the wall, like we're already in trouble here. And you know, I think you see this tension throughout Genesis, throughout the whole of the Bible, right? Is, am I going to trust in God to be who he is or am I gonna take matters into my own hands? Like you see it in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, well like, cause what does the serpent tempts Eve with exactly what the people of the Tower of Babel tend to do with, you will be like God. It's exactly what they're after. Even Abraham, who we just talked about, like he will, he'll hear this promise from God that I'm gonna give you descendants more than the number of the stars. And he and his wife are old and they don't have any kids. And it comes to a point where they're like, well, we can't trust God to do it anymore. So, you know, Abraham sleeps with his wife's servant, Hagar, and has another son Ishmael and that messes up everything. Like everything kind of goes off the rails

because he tries to do it his own way. You get Jacob and Esau, like, you know, Jacob knows he's gonna get the promise that he's gonna get, you know, the promise that came through Abraham, but he still manipulates his way into stealing it from Esau and creates all sorts of issues for himself along the way. You get further into the Old Testament and you read, we did this last fall in our Bible study, The Once Future King. You read the story of King Saul and then of King David. What's the fundamental difference between them? Is that, you know, King Saul wants to do it for himself. He thinks his way is better and he can make it happen. And King David is a man after God's own heart who thinks, well, I can pursue and chase after what it is that God wants for me. Now, David doesn't always get it right, and he messes up big time there, but I think that's the fundamental conflict in the Bible. It's the fundamental conflict throughout history. It's the fundamental conflict in my own life, right? Is do I trust enough to do this God's way or am I gonna do it my way and just take my chances? No doubt. And, you know, I think for anybody that's watching this and for any Christian ever, or even anybody that's considering following Jesus or reading the Bible and trying to figure

all this type of thing out, is that, like, if you feel like you are broken and sinful and make wrong decisions, and it's like, you know, left to your own devices, if you have to go left or right, and you feel like, gosh, I'm always the one that makes the wrong turn. Well, then the good news is that when you read scripture, you're gonna find a whole lot of people who kind of struggle with the same thing, right? Because you just talked about Abraham. Even somebody that God was going to make famous has become the father of many nations, still made the wrong turn, still chose the wrong thing. King David, same thing, a man after God's own heart, and yet chose the wrong thing. And we see that all throughout scripture. You see it with the disciples. They don't always get it right. But the one who did is the one that we serve in Jesus. But what makes him different is that he is God, right? He is God. And because he is without sin, right? That is why, when we celebrate Easter, that unfortunately for him in that moment is that that made him worthy of dying for us on the cross, right? Because it had to be this pure, unblemished lamb of God that paid for our sin. Because without him, we're still in the sameness

of we can't change. We take the wrong turns, we make the wrong decisions, we have the wrong desires. And that's where in the New Testament, we see this tension between living in the spirit versus living in the flesh. And it's natural for us to live in the flesh. Oh, yeah. Very natural. And it's unnatural to live in the spirit, but that's why when we have the spirit of God, he helps us in living the life Christ calls us to live. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's 100% easy to just think of, to just kind of go with the flow of what your mind wants or what your ego wants or what your body wants or whatever, and just roll yourself off that cliff. You know, of like, there is that distinction that Paul makes again and again and again. Galatians 5, I think, with like the fruit of the spirit, like the fruit of the sinful nature is this. It's this long, right? It's this, okay, nobody- It's almost a whole paragraph. Yeah, nobody wants it. any part of that, but you look at it and it's like, oh, I can see how you'd get yourself talked into those things. And then you get, well, the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control is, you know, those words, we all would look at them and agree that they're good, but man, they're hard to live

out, right? They don't always make sense to us. Like self-control does not always make sense to us. Gentleness definitely does not always make sense to us, but there is this way of life that is counterintuitive to what we think is right. And, you know, we see it described again and again, is that counterintuitive way is actually God's way of, instead of trying to make yourself big, like make yourself small and take the position of a servant and practice humility instead of, you know, being boisterous or wanting your own will in your own way, be gentle and live out of that way instead of doing what you want, regardless of how it affects other people, practice faithfulness and be true to who you're supposed to be, be true to who God has called you to be rather than, you know, just chasing after your own selfish pursuits. And I think, you know, there's so much of a level where each of us, you know, when we are tempted to build those towers in our own hearts, when we're tempted to find our identity, to find our accomplishment and purpose in something outside of God, we just need to step back and say, you know, like God, through your Spirit, show me the right way here, because, you know, my sinful nature, my flesh, it's leading me in a way that's counterproductive, that's not going to do what I want it to do. Absolutely. And I think as we, you know, try to figure out, you know, as Christians, how do we, like, how do we live? Like, how should we live? How should we approach life? And what reminded me, what this conversation reminded me of was Philippians chapter 2, and literally the heading is talking about being like Christ, right? And it's interesting talking about this idea of these people equating themselves with God, or wanting to be like God, or even Eve, Adam and Eve, or wanting to be above God, knowing all these things of the knowledge of good and evil, and yet this is what we see in Philippians. It says, "...do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves. Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others." This is important. Have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, right? So again, this is the same Christ Jesus who we believe came as a baby, existed before creation, we've learned that in the last several weeks, came as a baby, grew up, lived a sinless life, died on the cross for our sins, was in the grave for three days, rose from the grave, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven, like King Jesus. Have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself,

taking the form of a servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient even to the point of death, even death on the cross. And for this reason, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow." Oh, what's the end of that though? And every... And every... I lost my place. Every tongue confess? And every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. I had you say that for a reason, because there are so many ways in which Jesus is the anti-Babel, so many ways. Like one of them is we think we're gonna become God by elevating ourselves to the place of God, where Jesus is in the place of God, and he saves us by making himself humble. Which is so backwards to us. Yeah, it's so backwards. But he's also the anti-Babel because of that last thing you said, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Where do all the tongues come from? From Babel. And all of the languages of the world originate from Babel, and what we did there, and how we messed up. And Jesus is this anti-Babel in that he cancels all that out. That when all is said and done, people from every tribe and tongue and language and nation are gonna come and worship Jesus. And Bryson did a great job of pulling that out of Acts chapter two, is like the anti-tower of Babel, that everyone hears the gospel in their own language. Yes. I mean, what Jesus is doing, like our sin at Babel shattered the human race in a million different directions, right? Because we were trying to be prideful, and that's ultimately what pride does, it separates everybody. Yeah, for sure. But Jesus is the anti-Babel because in his humility, he comes and he dies, and he makes all people one because of what he's done. And I'm glad you went to that verse, as soon as you were starting reading, it's like, oh, it's gonna end with every tongue is gonna confess. Yeah, because he's gonna fix it. He is calling out of the nations of people for himself that undoes what Babel has done. and fixes everything once and for all.

That is so good. Yeah, I'm glad you had me keep reading. Yeah, I was gonna totally gloss over that. But yeah, that's crazy that the story we're talking about is that because of mankind's sinful desire to be like God, to equate themselves with God, he had to divide tongues and languages and scatter people. And to Bryson's point, and to this here in Philippians chapter two, is that where people were scattered at Babel, they are now continually being reunited through the gospel, right? That at Pentecost, in the beginning of Acts, we see the gospel being preached clearly in the tongues of all of these people. And these people there in that moment are amazed that they're able to hear this gospel presentation clearly in their own language. Because you have people that, here in Acts chapter two, that they have different languages that they're speaking, and yet they're all hearing from this one person, right? Because it was, who was it, Peter? Well, it's Peter and all the other apostles are kind of around him proclaiming. So everyone is hearing the gospel proclaimed in their language, that God has given them this supernatural gift of what we would call speaking in tongues, to proclaim in different languages the truth about Jesus. That's just wild.

And it blows my mind when we think about what does this mean about God? He's so, well, actually, one of the things that Bryce had mentioned was that God stepped into this situation with the Tower of Babel and scatters people as an act of mercy, right? Not as an act of like things were outside of his control and he had to panic and just send everybody out. Like he knew, like he knew this Acts two moment, right, was gonna come, like he knew that. And he knows the same things for our lives. Like even when we make mistakes, and maybe this is the conclusion for us in this, is that he, like he knows us. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows our weaknesses, he knows our temptations, he knows our sins and our failures, our shortcomings. And yet Jesus still died for each and every one of us, right? For you, for me, for everyone watching this right now, that you may feel like, man, the thing that I did, like Jesus had to shed more blood for me than he did for you, Derek, or you, Brandon. And I don't think that's true, I really don't. I think Jesus had to die because of the sin of mankind. And yet some of us, right, we may have made some poor choices and some mistakes and we're having to reap the consequences of those things, right? But grace will always be greater than the sin in our life. It will always be greater than the regrets we have, the way we view ourselves.

But that's never the end of the story, right? That through Christ, we can become a new creation, right? And it doesn't necessarily mean that the worldly consequences that we're having to live with immediately go away. And sometimes they may never go away. But what it does mean is that we can be reunited to a family, a family of God. And one of the things maybe I'd like to end on here is that you'd mentioned this earlier, and I think it was a few years ago, Kyle had a sermon talking about the truest thing. Oh, the truest thing about you? What was that again? Through Ephesians, just looking at what Paul says about our identity there. Because if you were, I'll just say, if you were struggling right now to know who am I in Christ and who does he say I am, Ephesians is where you wanna start. Ephesians chapter one is Paul just talking about title after title about who we are as Christ, or who we are in Christ, sorry. Ephesians one, beginning of verse three says, all praise to God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. That's just two verses, y'all. And there's so much in there.

Like, he has blessed us, every spiritual blessing we have because of him. He's already chosen us and loved us, and he sees us blameless and without fault. If you wanna know who you are, that's who he says you are. And Ephesians one is packed with image after image after image. These are the truest things about you. This is who God says you are. Yeah, and I love that because I think for all of us, as we are trying to navigate life, it doesn't matter who we are, where we live, what the color of our skin may be, what language we speak, we all struggle with this thing called sin in our life. And y'all, it warps our ability to be able to live and think and do the things that God wants us to do. And the good news is that we don't have to let sin be in the driver. seat of our car, right? And what following Jesus looks like is that we are allowing Jesus and giving him full and total complete permission to step into the driver's seat, take control of our life, and help redeem so many of the broken things in our life, right? And you may be thinking right now, well, you know, you don't know what I went through when I was growing up. Like, if you knew, then you would understand why I am the way that I am. And I get that, and I acknowledge that, and some of that may be true, and I can see how that would lead you through some pretty dark seasons of life. But Brandon's encouragement that I think is so good for us to just land on today is that knowing that we have this free gift of salvation available for us, knowing that Jesus has accomplished everything necessary for our salvation, and if we put our faith in him, right, if we repent of our sin, that he promises, right, that we will be given the Spirit of God,

right, that the Spirit of God will dwell in us, and that the Spirit will help us live this life that God calls us to live. But we may still have that question. Who are we? Right, who are we? If I'm not supposed to build this tower for myself, right, if I'm not supposed to become like God, then who am I supposed to be? Who am I? Well, then go back to Ephesians 1. If you have a Bible, go back to Ephesians 1, read about who God says that you are. And it's not because you built yourself into this person. It's because Jesus accomplished that for you. And so my prayer, our prayer, is that you'll be able to rest in that this week, knowing that the same God who had to scatter people here at the Tower of Babel, the same God, you're reuniting all of us through Jesus and through the cross. But Brandon, any final encouragements before we head out? No, man. I like that a lot. He's pulling us back together because of what Jesus has done, both individually and corporately. He's pulling it all back together because of him. Amen. Well, y'all, we love you. We hope that this will genuinely give you some stuff to think about this week and to dwell on of, hey, you are not your mistakes, especially when you know Jesus, you are not your mistakes. You are not the things that you've done. We may have some legit consequences and some ramifications that are a part of that, and that's going to be life, but it's not going to inhibit God from working in your life, and especially in your heart and in your mind. But y'all, for all of us behind the camera working today, for Brandon and I, our whole church, we're grateful for you. We're grateful that you watch every week. Don't forget, we launch these every single week. We have different Bible studies that come out throughout the year, and also we have worship services that we try to post every Sunday for you guys to be a part of. Y'all, we love you, and we'll see you next time. See ya.