So friends, our teaching scripture this morning comes
from Psalm 91 in the New Living Translation.
It says those who live in the shelter of the Most High will
find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
This I declare about the Lord. He alone is my refuge, my place
of safety. He is my God, and I trust Him,
for He will rescue you from every trap and protect you from
every deadly disease. He will cover you with His
feathers. He will shelter you with His
wings. His faithful promises are your
armor and protection. Do not be afraid of the terrors
of the night, nor the arrow that flies in the day.
Do not dread the disease that stalks in the darkness, nor the
disaster that strikes at midday. Though 1000 fall at your side,
though 10,000 are dying around you, these evils will not touch
you. Just open your eyes and see how
the wicked are punished. If you make the Lord your
refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will
conquer you. No plague will come near your
home. For He will order his angels to
protect you wherever you go. They will hold you up with their
hands so you won't even hurt your foot on a stone.
You will trample upon lions and cobras.
You will crush fierce lions and serpents under your feet.
The Lord says I will rescue those who love me.
I will protect those who trust in my name.
When they call on me, I will answer.
I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them.
I will reward them with a long life and give them my salvation.
This is the word of the Lord. Hello, I am Carl, we met earlier
about the work day thing. Seriously if you're going to
come out I would love to hear from you, especially if you have
things called skills. I don't like ripping weeds is
not a highly technical gardening task, but it could be that I
take out native species or something if you don't watch me.
So the Gauntlet Throne. I need your help.
Let's start with another little chunk of prayer so that I can be
ready and you can be ready. Deal.
OK. You know, I'll be mostly quiet.
I don't know. Shout out if you need to.
Holy Spirit. Calm.
All right, You guys good. It's quick for me.
I don't know. We're all right.
All right. We had a little silence earlier,
so I'm going to hope you're OK. If it wasn't long enough, you
know, text me. Not right now.
So OK, this is a series on the passions, right?
We started a couple weeks ago. Jared introduced a series.
He did a great job. If if you're new to the series,
like this is your first time here in a couple of weeks or you
just been totally zoned out the whole time, fair.
I get it. You might have heard of like the
seven deadly sins. This is like an earlier
iteration before that happened. So the passions comes from a
list from a vagarius. We'll be quoting from him a lot
today. I forgot to look up how his name
is pronounced. Did I do it right?
Vagarius sounds good. OK, looking to the rest of the
teaching team. So.
But yes, passions, right? So what are they?
Passions, Jared's talking about are desires or attitudes.
These things are made by God. OK, So in Christianity, desire
is not bad. Some of you learned different
where you grew up. You were like secretly like a
little Buddhist and that's OK. But but we, we desire things.
God gives us healthy desires, gives us healthy attitudes and
things like that. But these desires and attitudes
can become disordered. And we talk about the passions,
we're talking about disordered desire, disordered attachments
and attitudes. These are oversized reactions.
When we don't get what we want or when we overvalue something,
we make something bigger than it really should be in good order.
OK. But again, this is a very
Christian thing. We believe in transformation,
right? That we can, by God's grace, he
can work on us if we make ourselves available to take
these outsized passions and bring them into the correct
focus. So then we have these godly
attachments, desires and attitudes.
So that's, that's the whole series.
That's what we're doing with this passions series.
The passion that we're exploring today is acedia.
Everybody knows the word acedia, right?
I didn't, I, I had never heard of it until we started the
teaching team series. And so I immediately was like,
well, I want to do that one. I don't know what it is.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was like
super obsolete in 1930, like by 1930, like we're done with this
word forever kind of thing. In fact, the primary references
at that time that they're using because the English like to hold
on to old things, right, were from like the the 13th and 17th
century. Even then now when the world
wars came, suddenly we had a use for the word again.
We'll get to that in a minute. So it came back into some
fashion as a way to deal with some of the terrible malaise
that came from the world wars. And then at scene of resurgence,
as we have in recent modernity begun to re engage as a whole
church with the monastic tradition because the word
acedia has a a strong link to monasticism.
OK, so if I had made slides, they would say this Acedia, what
is it? Do I have it?
What do I do about it? Acedia, what is it?
Do I have it? What do I do about it?
A quick side note, I wrote a whole section about why we
stopped using the word acedia, why it went out of fashion that
I'm like super interested in. But when I finished the sermon,
it was a three-part sermon and they did not give me 3 weeks so
I had to cut that section. But I just have to tell you
about it if you ever want to talk about it.
Let's get coffee and talk about why it went out of use.
That will placate my word nerd and we can move on.
OK, so acedia from the Greek, who knows the prefix A without,
not without. And then who knows the word
kados? No one kados is care.
So without care, no care, don't care.
That's acedia in the most literal Greek expression and I
had usage in regular Greek language.
In the Iliad, Homer uses it to describe soldiers that do not
care about a fallen comrade, right?
They're just, he died and they just leave him there.
Who cares? So we're we have some usage in
regular Greek life, but it finds special use in monasticism.
If you look through the Bible for the word acedia, you will
have a bad time. The word acedia is not in the
Bible at all. So we're going to turn to the
tradition of the church here to the monastics to to get a sense
of what they were using the word for that the form us today in
the series. So yes, Evagrius, like I said,
he makes these lists of passions in the 4th century.
He's calling them the 8 evil thoughts, which sounds like a
really great children's book to me.
Look at some of you and make it happen.
And Acedia is something that when he writes it down, he
didn't make it up. He's he's bringing it together
at on the list. But it was already in use in the
monastic communities that had been happening in the deserts.
So what what they called it is the noonday demon.
Maybe like Aya novel there, but very interesting.
And it actually comes from, believe it or not, the teaching
text that we use today. Now, you might have said, Carl,
I've listened very carefully because you're very tuned in.
They did not say noonday demon. I would have remembered so the
early church mothers and fathers that the text that they're
working with got to remember the New Testament is not like fully
canonized for a minute. And so we're working with a
document called the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a Greek
language translation of the Old Testament.
OK. And I'm going to read you an
English translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old
Testament. And this is what we're going to
have. So in Psalm 91536, you shall not
be afraid of terror by night, or the arrow flying by day, nor the
evil thing that walks in darkness, nor of calamity and
the evil spirit at noonday, the noonday demon.
So when Avagrius is talking about these 8 evil thoughts,
he's playing fast and loose in an interesting way with sort of
a literal sense of a like a demon, a tempting spirit, but
also like a bad thought or a bad desire.
And we're sort of interchangeably moving through
these things. Does it make sense to you that
have you ever had a thought that it's like this feels like a
temptation thought? Like maybe this is kind of maybe
it's kind of a thought, maybe it doesn't really matter how
literal we are. That's what what kind of space
we're in here with the noonday demon.
But he describes it in this fashion.
The demon of Acedia, also called the Noonday demon, is the most
oppressive of all demons. That's a bold claim.
He attacks the monk about the fourth hour. 4th hour is noon,
so we're we're tracking and besieges his soul until the 8th
hour. First of all, he makes it appear
that the sun moves slowly or not at all.
So here for a modern we're saying he keeps staring at that
clock and are those hands moving backwards, what is happening and
that the day seems to be 50 hours long.
I love how caddy this like 50 hour day.
Then he compels the monk to look constantly towards the windows.
Hey, what's going on outside to watch the sun?
Has it moved to jump out of the cell?
So if you're not familiar monastics, well, bedrooms called
itself. So we'll come back to that.
That's where they stay and study and and and rest and stuff to
watch the sun, to see how far it is from the 9th hour to look
this way and that. Further, he instills in him of
the the demon instills in him the monk, A dislike for the
place just to say the monastery and for the state of his life
itself, a dislike for manual labor and also the idea that
love has disappeared from amongst the brothers and there
is no one to console him. OK, are we coming home to a
feeling? Now I'm stuck in this place and
you know what? Now that I notice it as the day
drags on, do you remember how nobody cares about me anymore?
And like people used to talk and be nice to me and now they don't
and no one cares and no one takes care of me.
And also how much does it suck to hoe the garden?
OK and should there be anyone during these days?
So in a period of of the CD attack who has offended the
monk? This to the demon uses to
further his dislike of the place.
Wasn't Samuel such AI won't say swears bad man this morning to
me. So rude.
He leads him on the desire of other places where you can
easily find the wherewithal to meet his needs.
Pursue a trade that is easier and more productive.
Man, if I could just get out of this monastery I used to be a
sail maker like that was awesome.
I could make a living at what am I doing here.
He adds the demon that pleasing the Lord is not a question of
being in a particular place for scripture says that divinity can
be worshipped everywhere. That's right, man, I learned
like we worship in spirit and truth.
Why am I even here and I could I could do anything anywhere.
Where's the word is hoeing holy like he joins these suggestions
with the memory of his close relations and of his former
life. He depicts for him the long
course of his lifetime. The demon right the hey, you're
going to be in this self forever, doing nothing while
bringing the burdens of asceticism before his eyes.
Don't you love getting up in the middle of the night to pray?
Don't you love bearing with these rude, irritating brothers?
And he deploys every device in order to have the monk leave his
cell and flee the stadium. So Acedia for Vagius is this
really important demon that yet seems to be some of the most
banal, right. If you think about the seven
deadly sins, lush and gluttony and greed and wrath, they they,
they're like the big deal ones. This one becomes sort of sloth
over the years. It's like, you know, when you
want to, you don't want to hang out like it doesn't seem like a
big deal. And yet for a Vagius, it is
because, unlike so many of these other passions, this strikes at
the root of the willingness to do anything in particular.
All the other passions are more particular to a particular slice
of life and desire. This strikes at the the center
of all energy and capacity to do anything right.
And it has a particular importance that it finds its
home here in the monastic. Being a monk is hard.
You guys, I don't know if you know, but like living in a cell,
the same routine every day, being under strong authority.
You have a rule of life, you have vows.
Like it's a hard life. And so it's easy to see how one
would become distracted in some other tellings of this, There's
a a student of a vigorous called John Cassian.
He talks about how how monks will think about different
monasteries, like, oh, we wouldn't do that one monster.
It's so much better than this monster, which I love like for a
month, Like that's as good as it gets, like totally better
monasteries. So there's a ton of writing
about this in the monastic community all the way from a
vigorous in the 4th century all the way up through.
We'll talk about Aquinas later. We'll talk.
We're we're skipping over Gregory the Great.
We're skipping over mostly John Cassian.
Let's jump ahead to sort of a 20th century expression of this
Acedia concept. OK, so this is Roberta Bondi
from To Love as God Loves. I am sponsored today by Inner
Varsity Press or whatever Roberta Bondi says it is.
It is a great book, though. In fairness, Acedia is restless
boredom that makes our ordinary tasks seem too dull to bear.
Nothing seems right, life has lost its savour and it all seems
like somebody else's fault, so that the only alternative is to
leave everything and go off somewhere else.
We may experience it as a restlessness that makes us hate
our jobs. Some experience it as a boredom
with a marriage that they may seek to cure with affairs.
Others change residences at periodic intervals.
Or, and I love this this this book is from the 80s, but it
feels modern to me, take up dangerous hobbies.
Like so bored. It's time to start, I don't
know, parasailing or something. Maybe that's not dangerous and
I'm going to hear from the parasailing community or go out
and spend money. And I love this.
I think that that Roberta is correct.
Whatever the attempted solution tried, however, the result is
the same. Restless boredom with life.
You cannot cure acedia by doing cool stuff.
It doesn't work. Can't cure a bad marriage with
an affair. Can't cure a bad job with the
good job. Now maybe a little bit, we'll
talk about that restlessness, listlessness, boredom, unease,
discomfort with what is before you.
And I think I wanted to be clear.
One of the things that I think is lost in the sloth, laziness,
translation of this is acedia of the the working out.
The churning of acedia can be expressed in activity or
inactivity. Either way, Kathleen Norris in
Acedia and Me says much of the restless boredom, frantic
escapism, commitment phobia, which I think is great, and
enervating despair that plagues us today is the ancient demon of
Acedia in modern dress. So mostly I've been telling you
stories about this thing. It's really hard to pin down,
and I think that's why in part I said I wasn't going to talk
about transition of the word, but why we haven't held onto the
word it. It holds a lot of concepts
within it. Andrew Crislip says none of the
modern and medieval glosses convey the semantic range of the
term. The monk.
The seal says the word is so pregnant with meaning it
frustrates every attempt to translate it.
But what is it? What is acedia?
It is when faced with the the realities, the life that is in
front of you, a discomfort and incapacity to stick with it and
be in that and a desire to find a way out.
We're going to talk a little bit more about boundaries at the
end, but apparently I'm talking about it right now.
Don't misunderstand me to say that you've got to stay in a
dangerous or bad situation here. When I'm talking about
perseverance and I talk about staying, it does not mean
staying in a place that is that is bad for you.
Vital to understand. And in point of fact, staying or
going in many ways is not the thing.
The posture of the heart and the mind in the staying or in the
going is what we're going to talk about.
Jesus, I think is tempted in the desert with acedia, right?
So some of you who grew up in the fish may remember after
after being baptized, Jesus goes off into the desert and fasts
for a long time before going off to do the rest of ministry
right. And he goes through a series of
temptations from the devil's, what the text talks about.
Maybe somebody in one of the Sermon on Gluttony, we'll talk
about that passage. I don't know.
But the last, the last temptation of Christ, that's a
different thing. But in this particular sets of
temptations in Matthew 4/8 through 10, this is the last one
in this section. Again, the devil took him to a
very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the
world and their splendor. All this I will give to you, he
said. If you will bow down.
And worship me and Jesus said to him, away from me Satan, for it
is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only then
the devil left him and the angels came and attended him.
It's important, I think, to understand what it, what's
what's at stake here. It's I think in a plain reading,
you just get a sense of like, oh, the devil's trying to get
Jesus to bow down to him. And, and that, that, that that's
the thing. And it doesn't even really feel
particularly tempting. If you're God, why bow down to
the devil? Just like jog on, we're done
here. Like, what are we doing?
Where's the real temptation? Right.
And here's where I think the temptation is an Acidia based
temptation. What Jesus knows is in front of
him is an incredibly hard road to be a a homeless wanderer
teaching people who are mostly not going to get it, people who
are mostly in it for the miracles, right?
Mostly in it for the food and things like that.
With disciples that he chooses that are really not going to get
it and are going to be terrible to each other.
And things bickering about who's on the right and left.
And at the end of it, the reward is death on a cross.
And that does not sound like a super great way to bring the
Kingdom of God, right? Seems like a dumb idea.
Boring is maybe not the right word, but there's a dullness to
it, A hardness to it. And So what?
The real temptation is here. It's like, hey, I, I'm the
devil, I'm the Prince of this world.
Why don't you skip all of that crap and be the king Now you'll
save people, you'll help people out.
Now, today, you can do this. Now be the king, be the good
king. I'll, I'll let you run
everything. So there's a temptation to get
out of the churn, out of the hard stuff, out of the dull
stuff, out of the terrible stuff and skip ahead.
That's the temptation of a seed. It's like, hey, why are you like
in this thing? Why don't you just kind of round
it, Skip ahead, get out of it. Jesus turns to Scripture, the
truth of God and perseveres. And when he does, the devil
leaves him and he is cared for. More on that later.
Do you have a sense now for what acedia is making sense?
Some kind of, I know it's narrative, it's broad, it's
meant to be, it's a vague old Greek term, but I think we've
got something. OK, so next question, Do I have
it? Do I have the Acedia?
I miss that. This is a little silly.
I, I am a child of my age and Zoolander is a big movie for me.
I love him. Zoolander, he says.
I'm getting that black lung pop. That's what I was thinking
about. Oh, I wrote this.
Do I have it for some of you? You know right now that this is
something that you struggle with.
When we were talking through this stuff, it was resonating
with you. It was hitting beats for you.
It makes sense. You're like, yeah, I, I, I had
it a while ago and you just kept talking.
I know that to be the case because when I was preparing for
this sermon, I was like, I got the Acedia pop, which is great.
It's like couple weeks ago I didn't know what ACD was.
Now I got it. I struggle with the CDA.
It's not the same as depression. I know because I've had that.
It's not the same as laziness. So I got that too and I want to
point this out. Maybe a small fraction of you
will be wondering about this. It's not the same as ADHD, OK,
Like when you read some of these descriptions, I cut some of them
out. They're like the figures is like
they don't even want to read the scripture for 10 hours at a
time. It's like, well, it's not the
same as that. But there is an interplay
between all of those things. And if you're a person that
struggles with all of them, some of them you're going to find
they talk to each other and they go back and forth and push you
from 1:00 to the other. But they're not the same as
Acedia itself. For me, looking at like how
Acedia comes home, for me, it's like not so much about dullness
or boredom as like a deep discomfort with the way that
things are. And for me, I can be avoidant in
the way I pursue relief in Acedia.
We have the best technology in human history.
For Acedia, there is like more content available to you
instantly on your device than you could watch in 1000
lifetimes. Like unending stream and they're
always making new stuff. For me, it's it's the YouTube or
Reddit that is my go to when I, when I just shut off and not
deal with what's in front of me or more insidious in many ways,
the way I manifest an active so as called escape from Assidia is
flights of fancy imagination. Oh man, I'm going to I'm going
to go and do this and it's going to be so great.
We're going to move to New York City.
I'm going to live in Sesame Street, right?
Start making lists of things that will fix my life.
You know when I buy my 2 channel preamp for my computer?
Oh, then I can really record, right?
Lists and lists ideas, writing it all out of all the great and
awesome things I'll do. And then I don't do any of it
anyway. So the noontime demon wins
twice, getting me to be so-called active while actually
changing and doing nothing. I don't even really flee, which
is in some ways a mercy. So you can leverage laziness
against yourself sometimes. But what it's all about is never
really sitting with what I'm really feeling and what's really
happening, doing anything to avoid that.
And definitely not inviting God into any of it.
That's I think a great hint for you if you're trying to
determine, am I going through a discernment process?
Am I like considering what is good or am I lost in the CDA?
Who's invited to the party in the heart and mind?
Just you and your resentments or is God in there too?
By the way, God is happy to come to a party with you and your
resentments. You don't have to kick the
resentments out to invite God. Super good with it.
Don't be afraid of that. But when it's just you and your
your parts that are trying to escape, probably acedia.
This is where I wrote down about boundaries, context, so you can
blow off steam sometimes, you guys, I'm not saying like if
you're not studying or working every hour of every day, you've
got the acedia and you're in big trouble.
Scroll a little bit. Take a minute, like, chill out,
have some fun. You know, you can leave places
sometimes, whether that's to get out of a bad thing or to go to a
new thing. Maybe God says I want you to go
live on Sesame Street. So far, no.
The key is your posture in it. Is it something that has a sense
of of peace and invitation? Is it something in the terms of
resting that brings genuine rest and new energy?
I find in the CD of moments scrolling, it's like a stasis,
right? It's just like time freezes.
I went in anxious and then I wasn't anxious for 30 minutes
while I was watching YouTube and then I'm anxious again.
Like nothing really changed. So that's not useful.
Steam release, right? We want to look for things that
are genuinely restful, genuinely connecting to God in our
circumstance. God, God does know where you're
at in these things. He knows you and he will like
help you with these things. And if you find yourself as a
person saying, I genuinely don't know, Carl, if I'm like in a
place of discernment or blowing off steam or what's going on,
this church is really this, this church has been working on how
to do discernment together for decades.
Like we have been working on this stuff and we we've got
resource. So hit us up.
We'd love to help. All right, so some of you, this
is making sense. This is hitting for you.
There might be some of you here who have been nodding.
I have no idea what I'm talking about.
In your heart, God bless you. We'll get to your passion in a
minute, I promise. But if this doesn't make sense
to you, that doesn't mean check out.
Not that you would. Everyone's looking.
It's fine, but but it's an opportunity to learn what you
can so you can love the rest of the community.
Well, right. And when, when we get to yours,
that one went for you and the people that don't get that will
listen and learn. And this a community thing.
We we do this together. I've been talking about this
solo a lot, but we work on it as a, a church body.
Amen. All right.
If you're on the fence, if you're like, some things make
sense, some things don't. Look for the ways in which you
find yourself unable to engage in the good work in front of
you, the good thought in front of you.
Look for the ways you distract yourself with activity or
inactivity rather than deal with thoughts that are hard,
uncomfortable or boring, and see if anything makes sense to you.
OK, So what, Zidia? Do I have it?
What do I do about it? I so loved Jared's picture at
the beginning of the series about getting a massage.
Now I have to clarify, I personally loathe the concept of
massage. A stranger touching me is like
somewhere around getting shot. I think would be.
I've never been shot and I have been touched by strangers, so
I'm not sure but but as a concept, I love it, right?
When you get a massage, you don't do the work.
The good stuff that happens is not your stuff.
This, this business does not get the job done, right.
So there the work is being done to you, but you have to schedule
the massage. You got to show up for the
massage. You got to get on the table,
right? So I love this picture when it
comes to letting God do the work, we do the work of showing
up. So here's some ways you can show
up for the massage. When it comes to Acdia, there's
a great list. So Thomas Aquinas writes about
this later on in I wrote it down, 13th century.
And then Evangrius had a list too, of how to deal with Acdia.
And it's wild because they're, you know, hundreds and hundreds
of years apart, like over 1000 years apart.
The lists are really like common.
Now, Aquinas might have been copying, I don't know, but but
OK, we'll match up the list. Sorry, let's take a deep breath.
Some ways to show up for the massage for acedia #1 for
Aquinas, he says reorder your thoughts.
Vaguerous here says meditate on Scripture, right?
Which for you know a hardcore monk, that's how you reorder
your thoughts. Do not attach your thoughts to
worldly things. Focus on God with daily prayer.
Passions towards worldly things are not in and of themselves
worthy of blame or praise. Just having a passion, a desire.
That's OK, Aquinas notes. It's disordered passions that
are the danger. So one thing you can do, if you
can get your head together a little bit, however that works
for you. Reading scripture can be great
if you have a good access to scripture.
If you don't, you can work on that.
Sometimes it's just sitting down and thinking.
Some of us are verbal processors.
Talk to a a friend, get your thoughts out there to where we
can move. Unjumble them a little bit. 2 I
love this so much. The modern church forgets about
the bodies #2 take care of the body.
Vigorous Here he just says physical labor because for a
monk like the GM is the whole peas and things, that's what
they do. So but Aquinas a little bit more
broad the the needs of our body can tempt us to sin.
The cure is to give the body what it needs, no more, no less.
So what's great about this one is sometimes you can trick
yourself into doing it when you're really lost in your mind.
Sometimes for some of us, we can have no sense.
No, there's no way I'm going to get my thoughts under control.
There's no way I'm going to get my emotions sorted out, but I
might be able to get myself to go on a little walk, right?
Maybe I can do that. Maybe I can do a little chore,
you know, maybe I can trick myself into doing a little
something with my body that will begin to bring the heart and
mind in line. Maybe I can trick myself into
drinking a glass of water. There are options here.
So it's vital that we take care of the body to avoid these
things. And also the body can be a hack,
a kick start for dealing with the mental emotional part.
It's actually a YouTube has a great video on this from the
pandemic talking about dealing with the body of sort of a hand
crank to getting your systems working properly.
CGP Grey 3 rejoice in God's gifts.
This was just Aquinas. This is a strike against false
humility. So it's easy to compare
ourselves unfairly to everyone else's holiness, material wealth
or status. So we, whether we want to put
ourselves above or below, we love to compare ourselves to
others. And either we can like flog
ourselves. I'm just the worst, you know, or
we can say they're the worst because they're so rich or
whatever it is makes us contemptuous of our own lives,
contemptuous of the lives of others.
It's a false humility. I mean humility.
So we, we want to learn gratitude.
Anybody in 12 step knows about this, right?
We want to find the ways which we be grateful for what's
actually in our life. It goes in line with reordering
our thoughts, but it's a particular flavor when it comes
to being grateful. This next one, Oh my goodness,
just from a vaguerus here, he says tears.
I love tears. Evagrius views tears as a vital
part of the Christian's fight against acedia.
In exhortation to aversion, Evagrius writes Sadness is
burdensome and acedia is irresistible, but tears shed
before God are stronger than both.
Sadness is burdensome and acedia is irresistible, but tears shed
before God are stronger than both.
Monks should pray for tears as a sign of repentance.
Make use of tears to obtain the fulfillment of your every
request, for the Lord rejoices greatly over you when He
receives prayer accompanied by tears.
Acedia over time produces callousness in the heart, Right?
Well, I can't. All I can think about is how I
don't want to be here, how boring it is, and how I want to
escape. How I dull myself with
inactivity or run away inactivity.
What I do is I care less about everyone.
Ah Kados, I care less about myself.
I care less about God. In tears, crack loose a little
bit of care. Cry the most self in Dalton
tears. You want to cry because at least
you're showing some care for yourself and the Lord will meet
you in that. And then cry tears for your
brothers and sisters who suffer and let your heart be taught in
that and know that you cry with our Lord who cries.
Amen. Last one from the list.
Be steadfast and you're resistant.
What am I supposed to be done? I'm so sorry.
Tomorrow, how many OK, it's we're going going long file
complaint at the office. Vegas talks about perseverance.
Aquinas teaches that some sins are overcome by avoidance.
Others, like acedia can only be come overcome by perseverance.
Right. So there are some things in the
seven deadliest, right? The passions that you can avoid.
Like we're just going to stay away from that.
We're just not going to be in that area.
There's no avoiding acedia. Acedia will come to you, will
come to your root. And so the only way to deal with
it is to go through. The only way out is through.
OK. So perseverance, it's vital.
What they said as a saying back in the day was stay in your
cell. Your cell will teach you
everything. And so many of the writings are
about like, don't leave. Don't, don't leave yourself for
a minute. Don't run off.
Don't leave the monastery. Just stay.
So there's a lot to be said here for a spiritual staying.
Again, don't over read me in terms of you have to not change
anything about your life like but a spiritual staying in one
place. Like I said earlier, it's not so
much the exact things that you do.
It's the way in which you do them.
A posture of in the heart and mind inviting God.
And I want to make it clear, just as with the massage, I, I
just said persevere. No one will succeed on your own.
You can't persevere by yourself through the cedia.
It is irresistible, right? Even when you're but I cried
everything like you said, girl, you're just not going to make it
on your own. These are good tools.
Use them. But we have to find the key to
perseverance. The only way to do it is to take
our tears and our struggles and our suffering and our boredom to
our God who loves us as a father, who loves us as a
mother. And it's the hardest thing to
do. I think taking these kinds of
things, these unbearable things to God is like doing a trust
fall into not knowing if anyone is there.
You can't see God. You have had times when you took
things together. It felt like nothing happened.
So it's terrifying. I'm going to take this to God.
It's hard to do, but he. He does show up in ways.
He doesn't fix it. He just suffers with you.
He goes through it with you. I want to return to our
Scripture again with this in mind of looking for the ways we
can persevere with God and we get Psalm 91 again.
So here I am. I'm in untenable circumstance.
I'm uncomfortable, I'm bored. I'm more than uncomfortable, I'm
in agony. Those who live in the shelter of
the Most High will find rest, real restorative rest, in the
shadow of the Almighty. This I declare about the Lord.
He alone is my refuge, my place of safety when I'm feeling under
attack, when I'm feeling like I can't live with what's in front
of me. He is my God and I trust Him for
He will rescue you from every trap.
Who's in the trap? You found your you have no
hands. You find yourself in life
trapped. You found yourself with a
figurative or real deadly disease.
He will rescue you next slide. Do not be afraid of the terrors
of the night. How many of us have lived
through racing? Terrible thoughts in the night,
though? The arrow that flies in the day,
someone who's coming for you do not dread the disease that
stalks in darkness malaise or and he says our noonday demon.
The disaster that strikes at midday halfway through the day
when you're just like, what the hell am I doing though 1000 fall
at your side, 10,000 are dying all around you.
These are harrowing words for living through something that is
killing many. These evils will not touch you.
Next slide. Just open your eyes and see how
the wicked are punished. If you make the Lord your
refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will
conquer you. So does it say no evil will
touch you and you will always be fine and nothing bad will ever
happen? It says conquer.
No evil will conquer you. If you can rest in God, you will
not be conquered. No plague will come near your
home, for he will order his angels to protect you wherever
you go. I take that to mean we can, in
practice of this perseverance, find ways to have a sense of
God's presence with us all the time.
They will hold you up with their hands so you won't even hurt
your foot on a stone. You will trample upon lions and
cobras. You will crush fierce lions and
serpents under your feet. Probably mostly.
Don't take that one literally, but know that in God's presence,
in our suffering, we can defeat. Lethal.
Enemies of the heart and mind. All right, Lord says I will
rescue those who love me. I will protect those who I
trust, who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will
answer. I will be with them in trouble.
I will rescue and honor them. The Lord honors us.
I'll reward them with long life and give them my salvation.
Next slide, one more. No.
OK, well, I think I have it here.
No, that's it. Sorry, friends.
Let's let's stand, let's have the band come on up Parker,
you're welcome. You have stuff the the
invitation for prayer today is vivarious.
If you are sensing in you that the Sicilia thing has some
purchase and you would like some help with that, maybe just
naming it with another person and inviting someone together to
invite God into that, please come for prayer for that.
If you're feeling really overwhelmed by particular strife
in your life, please come get prayer for that, whether it be
physical, mental, or emotional. If you're feeling a strong
resistance, if this kind of made you mad and you wish I would
have shut up a long time ago, if you're up for it, come and get
prayer for that. See what God meets you in that.
There might be some some resistance happening here today.
God loves you and He wants to meet you in these struggles and
He will. Amen.