Beth Moore - Warm-Hearted In A Cold-Hearted World
You may be seated. I've gotta tell you guys something. I have actual humans in the room with me today to teach for the first time in several months. What a wild thing to think that somehow over these last months the Lord has just brought us all back where all the glamour is out of the picture, as it should be, where we're just like stripped bare of all the things that would give some kind of indication that a Holy Spirit was among us that may not have come at all. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? That we have gotten so good at creating an environment where he seems to be. That if he did not show up, I just wonder how in the world would we even know. Can anybody get into that with me? And now, we're just like sort of stripped bare of all that, and we are fully reliant, and those are the kinda conditions that I think lead to revival.
I want you to turn with me in your Bibles, if you would please, to two different places, and you might keep something in each of them so that we can go back and forth. We'll go back and forth a couple of times. I'm going to read first of all from Ephesians chapter 4. I'll start you at verse 17 in just a moment. Ephesians 4, verse 17, but I'd also love for you, if you would please, to get Matthew 24 and verse 12 ready. So, I'll read it second after I read the portion in Ephesians 4, verse 17.
[quote]Therefore, I say to you and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ! - assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.[quote]
Now, I have two more verses to go there, because I'm about to read verses 1 and 2 of chapter 5, but I'm just gonna say this to you. If you like to write in your Bible, right at the end of chapter 4 of Ephesians is a really great place to put "no, seriously". Anybody get that with me? No, no, honestly, that we get to, it says put away all bitterness, wrath, and anger and clamor and slander, along with all malice. Be kind with one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. No, seriously. This is our calling. Verses 1 and 2 of chapter 5. Now, I do not know why in the world, when they began to put chapters and verses in our Bibles, they would split it from the verses before. So, would you just, like, take it out of your mind's eye for a moment, move that chapter 5, because verse 32 moves straight into verse 1 of 5.
"Therefore", because he's just described, this is some of the reality. This is what it looks like. "Therefore, be imitators of God, as dearly loved children, and walk in love, as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God". Now would you glance at Matthew chapter 24, and then we will leave something right there and go back to our Ephesians text. It will be our primary text for this evening. Matthew chapter 24. God, bless the reading of your Word. "Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved".
My hope this evening is to serve my family. And as much as I love my flesh-and-blood people, my husband and my children, my daughters, who are the best friends I have in this world, my three grandchildren, and my siblings. I love my siblings. I love my nieces and my nephews. I love my family. I love my extended family, but I'm part of a family that transcends flesh and blood, and to Christ it comes first. And because my deepest devotion is to Christ and my deepest service is to his body and I'm serious about it, I'm a Jesus follower, as many of you are, and my people are my brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul says it this way in Galatians chapter 6.
I am part of the household of God. On every occasion possible, he says, do good, especially to the family of God. And this family of God is important to me, and it's made up of every ethnicity and will ultimately be made up of every tongue, tribe, and nation under heaven, so I don't just speak to people this evening who look something like me. My family is every shade of brown and black and white. And I'm so thankful for the grace of being able to tell you that even if my staff were the only people listening tonight, it would still be a people that were shades of brown and black and white. There is a family code in most of our families, a way of doing things, but the family code of the household of God transcends the family code of our natural relatives, spouses, children, cousins, grandparents, and grandchildren. And this actual way of life is not meant to be theoretical or simply theological. It was meant to be actual.
What he's telling us here, we'll read it, and we'll amen it. And, I mean, that sounds so good, but these were words not just for learning, but for living. That this was supposed to be our reality. That this is what we look like living out the calling of Christ because of the family that we're part of, because the blood of Christ surpasses every natural bloodline. So, I wanted to come together with you this evening to think through what is the way of he who says that he is the way, the truth, and the life? What is his way? What is his way? What is his manner?
Because lemme tell you something. If our idea of discipleship is to grow in knowledge but we do not look one whit more like Jesus than we did when we started ten years ago, something has gone terribly awry in our discipleship, because all of that studying was so that we could get to know the one who calls us into the imitation of his lifestyle. The psalmist said in Psalm 25, "Teach me your ways, O Lord. Lead me in your paths and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation. For you I call upon day and night".
I want us to stare into the text in Ephesians, and if you mark in your Bibles, you might put a bracket around verses 25 to 32, 25 to 32. And I'm gonna tell you why: because they serve as a parenthetical portion that is going to tell us a little bit about what life looks like in what is being described just before it and just after it, because listen. Listen to the similarities here, because you have starting at 25 through 32, you have things like we're gonna speak the truth to our neighbor. We're gonna be angry at times, but we're not gonna sin. We're not gonna let the sun go down on our anger. We're not gonna give opportunity to the devil, let the thief no longer steal, let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.
It goes into loving one another, being tenderhearted toward one another, and forgiving one another, so all of that is telling us what does it look like. What does it look like when the bare feet of a human hit the hot pavement of Earth trying to live out the followship of Christ? But it's this bracket that is within something he has introduced just before it, and then follows up with it. Listen carefully. Look at verse 22. He says that you were taught "to take off your former way of life, your old self, your old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, the one created according to God's likeness in righteousness and purity of the truth".
So, he's saying we're putting off the old self, and we're putting on the new self, and so it tells us how. This is a little bit about what it looks like, and then it goes straight into, "Therefore, be imitators of God, as dearly loved children. And walk in love, as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God". So, in between it's saying the same thing. You gotta put off the old, be renewed in the spirit of our minds, put on the new, because it is the only way we are ever, ever going to walk in any semblance of imitation of Christ Jesus.
We're gonna act like we think. We're just going to. We're going to live it out, that it's going to come out in the decisions we make, in the behaviors we have. It's just the way it is, and so the reason we continue to feel those same old ways about those same old things is because we continue to operate out of that same old person. And, I mean, we can be in church for years, still with the same old hang-ups because we've got the same old thoughts as the same old person that Christ gave his life to free us from. Paul said something similar in Colossians 3:9. He says, "Put off the old self and its practices".
I love that. I love that. I wanna say that again. "Put off the old self and its practices and put on the new self and its practices". I want you to just meditate on that word "practices" with me for just a moment. Practice, practice, practice. What have you practiced at if I say that word? As different as we, there are not many of us here, but as many as there are we've got that many different things that, for whatever reason, we pursued and we practiced, whether it was as a musician, maybe at the piano, maybe basketball, maybe chess, maybe cooking, maybe learning a foreign language. But one thing we know is that we practice and we practice and we practice and we practice, and we get better and better and better at whatever we're practicing, and I just wanna say to you tonight we are excellent at being our old selves.
Lemme say that again. We are utterly excellent at being our old selves, because we have practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced, and he's going that which you have practiced the most is the very habitual thing you are gonna have to put off so that you can be freed up to live in the renewed mind, in the imitation of Christ. We've had a lotta practice at being our old selves, excellent being our old selves, and nascent at being our new selves. You know, I want you to look at that Ephesians text again, where it says in verse 22 of Ephesians 4, "To take off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires", by deceitful desires, "to be renewed in the spirit of your minds".
Here's the thing. We think that of all the people on the planet we can most trust our old selves. We do, because our old self is the one we are most familiar with, and so it just comes naturally to us that we think that's who I can trust. That's who I can trust, but here's what's so crazy about it. Ephesians 4 says that that old self is deceitful. That even what it wants and how it thinks is just convoluted with lies and deception, and so if we don't choose to yield to the Holy Spirit and operate out of that mentality of the new self, we will - not we might, not we probably will, but we absolutely will. We absolutely will default to our old patterns and to worldly ways of thinking. We absolutely will because it's what comes naturally to us, and we've had a lot of practice at being our old selves.
We have patterns of thinking, the way we process thoughts, the way we process conflict. We practiced how we do conflict. We practiced it for years, but is it a good habit? Is it a godly way of dealing with conflict? How do we do it? Because, see, we're just like, we're still, if it hasn't broken deliberately, still that same old patterns, and we keep wondering, "Why do I feel the same old way about the same old things"? Because I am still thinking like my same old self. Every single one of us has a set of lies we firmly believe, firmly, firmly believe, and they are all wrapped up in the old person, all wrapped up.
So, the more we live out of that mentality, the more committed we are to a set of lies. And lemme tell you something. There is no lie as binding as the one we tell ourselves. Can I get anybody to amen that? No lie as convincing as the one we tell ourselves. Couple of other things about a deceitful heart. It is not teachable. It does not learn. A deceitful heart doubles down, I mean doubles down, and defends its own sins. I started thinking how much self-deception breeds suspicion. Somebody may need to let that roll over in your mind a couple of days. Self-deception breeds suspicion, and I think it's rooted in the fact that we know somewhere deep down inside that we cannot even believe ourselves, so we do not believe anyone else.
If you find yourself or if I find myself not trusting anyone, there is a set of lies somewhere inside that mind that you are extremely committed to, because what you know is you can't believe them because you cannot believe yourself. Get to the root of it. What is it? Listen, the stronghold, if we wanna look for the root of the stronghold in any of our lives, look for the lie. It is always rooted, every stronghold is rooted in some kind of deception. I think that we have translated the renewed mind into an attitude adjustment. I think maybe we go to the Word and go into prayer and when we do get together as a church...
Did you ever think you'd see the day that we would not take for granted that every Sunday, if we wanted to be, we were gonna be gathered with a local body of believers? I mean, it's just nuts. It's absolutely nuts and terribly unsettling, but I think that we have it in our head that this renewed mind is just like an attitude adjustment. "I'm gonna have a better attitude". That could not be further from the truth. Can God give us a better attitude? Well, I mean, goes without saying, but the renewed mind would be closer to a brain transplant than an attitude adjustment. It is literally, it's not a tweak. It's a whole different worldview and one he is wanting us to so lend our minds to that we become adapted to it in our decisions, in our behaviors, in our relationships. Not just a tweak. It's transformation.
Have you ever wished? I wish this on a frequent occasion, so I just wonder if anybody else does this, as well. Have you ever wished that you could just say, "I wish we could just, like, trade brains for just a minute. And could you tell me is it as chaotic in here as I think it is"? Does anybody ever wanna do that? Like, don't you wanna go, "Does your mind think like this? Like, does it just like", I mean, just I've told so many people it's like a group lives in there, and you're just going like, "Everybody sit down. You know, just sit down and shut up. I just need one of you to talk at a time". It's just like all of this, all of this, all of this, and now in Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New, the heart and the mind are inseparable.
I don't mean they're identical, 'cause there are times that in the same segments of Scripture we'll talk about the heart and the mind, and it's coming from two different Greek words, two different Hebrew words in the Old Testament. But the idea of them where we so clearly set them apart, are we head people or are we heart people, that's just not how ancient Hebrew saw life. It just wasn't in their way of thinking. It couldn't be separated. They might be distinct, but they were inseparable, and we see it right here in this text. Look at 4:18. Ephesians 4:18 says this, "They are darkened in their understanding".
Now, how we know that we can think in the same pattern is because he's telling us not to. Now, this I say and insist on in the truth. "That you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds", so he would not be telling us not to if we were incapable of doing it, because this is all about thinking with the new mind and not the old mind. So, he says, "They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of their hardness of heart". This is very, very, very important: because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart.
What the Scripture is telling us right there in that verse is that hard hearts cause ignorant minds. We can take it to the bank, and it's one reason why that we don't wanna be a people or a person, an individual, that just says, "You know, my heart has really grown hard there, and we just go on with it". If our hearts have grown hard there, what happens with a hard heart is it gives us an ignorant mind, so we're not even thinking with wisdom. We're not even thinking with the intelligence, that God would give the sound mind, because the hard heart causes an ignorant mind. You can trust your hard heart to do two things. I can trust my hard heart to do two things, and that is lie to me and make me ignorant. Being ignorant means that I can be absolutely positive "This is what I believe" and it be completely wrong because a hard heart causes an ignorant mind.
Now, in our Scripture reading tonight, so this is where we've been. We've been in Ephesians 4. We started at 17. We went all the way to the second verse of chapter 5 in Ephesians, and then we also read Matthew 24:12, and I don't think I read 13, but I'm going to right now. Let me read it to you. It says this: "Because lawlessness", I'm gonna read now out of the CSV, "lawlessness will multiply, or increase, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved". I want you to see with me that we have seen a mention of three different descriptions of the heart, the one in Matthew by inference, the other two just straight out.
So Matthew 24:12, by inference, talks about a cold heart, when our love has grown cold. Ephesians 4:18 talks about a hard heart, and Ephesians 4:32 talks about a tender heart. Now, I find Matthew 24:12 so compelling because, in those two verses in Matthew chapter 24, verses 10 through 12, so three verses, 10 through 12, listen to how many manies there are in the passage, some by inference that are going along with the "and". Listen to what I mean. It says in Matthew 24:10-12, that "many will fall away", and this is the further and further it gets in the kingdom calendar, the closer it gets to the time when Christ will return and he will set up his kingdom, that the further and further we get into that kingdom calendar, we'll know where we are in it. We'll know. All we can do is read signs just like the Word of God says. But here are some descriptions that he gives.
Listen to the word "many". Listen for that key word. "Then many will fall away. Many will betray one another. Many will hate one another. Many false prophets will arise. Many will be led astray". And then it says, "And because of lawlessness being increased, the love of many will grow cold". And the NIV says, "most will grow cold". Here's the thing that I have to face in those passages, that, if it's the "many", then that's the default. If I'm not going to be one of the many that falls away, that betrays, that hates, that becomes a false prophet, that gets led astray, if it's gonna be many, and I don't wanna be one 'em, I have to be deliberate, and I have to be conscious that I wanna be among the some and not the many.
Exceptions will be very much on purpose because, if we don't guard our hearts, by natural default, they are going to grow cold because the world will grow harder and harder and harder. And so will we be part of the many? Like most people in Houston, Texas, in those surrounding areas, I have, just, air allergies, just regular, not anything really huge. But somebody had recommended to me, some number of years ago, "You really ought to get Claritin-D because it will really help all of that". And she said, "But you have to go to the pharmacy and get it. You can't just get it off the shelf".
And so I did that. I went and stood at the pharmacy counter. I showed my driver's license to get it, and I don't know what you do with that, that you need to show your driver's license for, but I don't think I've ever done it because nothing weird has ever happened to me except that I just try to deal with my allergies, but when I went back the second time, so I had taken, I guess, for a couple of weeks, and so I was finally out of it, and then I went back to get it a second time, and, you know, they say that you can ask the pharmacist questions, and so I asked if I could ask the pharmacist a question, and I said, "You know what? The only thing is it makes me drowsy". I said, "Do you hear that a lot"?
And she looked at me. This was the pharmacist. She looked at me completely deadpan, I mean, completely deadpan, monotone, just monotone. Nothing about her voice, and she looked at me just like this. She's obviously not having a fun day. She looked at me just like this, and she said, "It makes one in a million drowsy. Are you one in a million"? And I said, "No, no, I'm not one in a million". And, you know, it never made me drowsy after that. Never, maybe not 'cause, you know, I kept thinkin', every time I would think I was drowsy, I go, "You're not drowsy because are you one in a million? You're not one in a million. Are you one in a million? No, you're not one in million". But what I'm gonna tell you is it may be that it's one in a million that hangs in there and keeps a tender heart in a very, very cold world.
Let me tell you, it's not just because we're sinful that our hearts end up getting hard and cold. It is because it's so rough out there, so much bad news, so relentless that, as a pure defense, we will start covering that heart. I was so intrigued. I didn't come prepared to tell y'all this, but I'm remembering it, so I hope I remember it just right. But I did some study, at some point, on what it means to guard our hearts because, of course, the Proverbs say that "From the heart comes the overflow of life, so guard it. Guard the heart".
And then I found out that that word, the form of that same word was used for God maintaining his love, and I had assumed that, when you guard your heart, you're really careful who you love. When God is guarding his heart so that he continues to maintain his love, it was a little bit of a game changer to me because, I mean, we wanna guard our hearts about who we give our affections to, certainly intimacy. But I'm talkin' about isn't that an interesting twist on it that the guarding of the heart would be that we stay warmhearted in a very cold world? That our love, that me maintain the ability to love from a tender place? That's what it means most of all. I was thinkin', for us in Christ, that a cold heart comes one primary way, and that's distance from the Son. Don't you believe it's true? It's a interesting thing.
Remember where the NIV says in Matthew 24:12, "Because of the increase of wickedness", where other translations like the ESV and also the CSB, say, "Because of lawlessness, hearts will grow cold". And, you know, our first natural thought is to think in terms of civic law, like "Stop at a red light", "Don't speed on the freeway", "Don't do the following things that are parts of the law of the city, the county, the nation", but that was not primarily what that meant in his wording in the New Testament. "Lawlessness" in Scripture primarily refers to lawlessness with God's law, divine law, of which he said two things are paramount. Everything else hinges on those. Which commandment is the greatest? "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself".
Such an interesting thing that, when we think of "lawlessness", we're not thinkin' in terms of those laws. Very, very intriguing that Jesus, in Matthew 23:28, accused the most morally scrupulous scribes and Pharisees, specifically, of lawlessness. It says it this way, and I'm quoting now, Matthew 23:28, "In the same way, on the outside you seem righteous to people, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness". We can be devoted to the diligent study of the Word of God, 12 hours a day, and him still look at us and go, "You are completely lawless. You keep every single rule except the law of love".
So how on earth do we keep a tender heart? "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you". I found this is kind of a side note. It's not really where we're headed, but it's worth saying because, if you're like me, one of the biggest things you've ever struggled with in your entire life is forgiving someone that has brought you a great deal of harm and pain. And I found in my years of journeying with God that, when, for the life of me, I cannot get to forgiveness, when I just, I mean, I'll pray it, and I just never do move into it. I still feel all of those same things. I get back around 'em and feel those same things that I found over and over again. If I will ask God to give me compassion for that person, it is the key that unlocks the forgiveness. If I could just enter in to their own brokenness, their own pain, their own ailing, forgiveness comes so much easier.
I was thinking to myself it is highly possible that the leading cause of forgiveness is compassion. What we're studying tonight in the Scriptures applies to any circumstance, all generations, all cultures. Ephesians 4:17 through 5:2, Matthew 24:12 and 13, everything we're talkin' about, all cultures will never outlive the application of the Word of God, never outlive the life of the Spirit in the Word of God, will never last longer than there is life in the Scriptures. But I'd be remiss not to apply the concept to our present crises, a pandemic where we've never been before and other places that we have been and cannot seem to fully get out of. Tony Evans puts it like this: "The racial problem is an unresolved dilemma of America". Why? Why?
I was reading an article here recently, just a few days ago, by David French, and it's entitled, "American Racism: We've Got So Very Far to Go". I'm quoting David French now: "While we write and print millions of words about race in America, why is it still so hard to have a truly respectful, decent, and humble dialogue about perhaps the most complicated and contentious issue in American life? It's a huge topic, but let's start with what I believe is a true principle of human nature, a maxim called Miles's law", and here is Miles's law, "Where you stand depends on where you sit".
We were so often born into where we sit. And so, I mean, just put whatever issue, any big issue, put it in the middle of it, any actual importance, and imagine, if it's in the center here, how differently it would look to you depending upon where you sit. Even if you were single, you might see that differently than someone who was married or divorced, a single mother sitting from right over here, a special-needs individual or a helper to someone with special needs, an urban family sitting right here, looking at the issue, a rural family, same issue. Sun seems to rise and set on it with a whole different shadow. Poverty stricken, the prosperous, sit in two completely different places, and so, of course, two completely different stands. Wrongly accused looks at the court like this while the assumed innocent looks at it like this.
This one is positive, "It's like this". This one's still banging their fists on the table, "No, it looks like this". Where we stand has everything to do with where we sit. The powerful here, the powerless there. The ones who are seen, the ones who are overlooked. The ones who struggle with mental illness, and among those, the ones who have access to help and those who do not. How different would it be if we were sitting somewhere else? How differently would a situation look in the United States of America, any other country, but let's talk about our own. If someone were brown, or if someone were black, or if someone was white, "where you stand has everything to do with where we sit".
We cannot have cold passion if we will not go sit with people, if we will not enter in with them to where they sit so that we can see it from their point of view. We'll never have compassion if we do not share one another's suffering and share one another's pain. But we will still across the aisle from one another, going, "It's like this", and they'll go, "It's like this". Who is it you're judging? Where do they sit? I have a feeling it's a whole different place from where you sit, whole different place from where I sit. "Where you stand has everything to do with where we sit".
I gotta tell ya something, and with this I'll begin to wrap it up. What has happened to us? I'm not cynical about the church. I love the church. I am, like, consumed. It's my passion. In my sleep, I can dream about it. I love the body of Christ. I love the church. I even love the local church. It saved my life. It saved my life. But somehow, somewhere along the way, we traded going for staying. We were people told by Jesus, "Go". I mean, it's the Great Commission, "Go. Go, therefore, into the whole world. Make disciples and baptize. Go disciple people. Go into the world. Go into the world".
But we trade our going for staying, and we are the sent, but the sent is staying, and when the sent stay, the Spirit goes. If we are staying, church, the Spirit is going to go. If we're not trained up where we have that mentality that we are sent out, that we gather to scatter, and we gather to scatter, and we gather to scatter, my pastor says that to us continually at our church. "Good, so glad you're here. Now we scatter in the name of Jesus". We feel so lost because we've lost our mission, but we have been thoroughly indoctrinated in self-gain in the church, indoctrinate, discipled in the church for self-gain, preaching a Gospel that has called us to self-giving, and we wonder why we are not compelled, and we wonder why we are miserable.
He said, "Therefore, as imitators of God, as dearly loved children, walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us". Walk like him. Love and give. Enter in to the passion and the pain of another. Enter into their plight. Sit with them. Walk with them, and it will change the way we stand. Jesus said, "Go", but we have restyled the Great Commission into a safe commission, and it's become, "Come". In other words, we want diversity, but we want it to be here in a narrative that we get to take control of. So what we're saying is "Come". No, he said, "Go". No, "Come, we want you. We want you, but we want you here in our narrative. I want you. You who are different than me, come sit with me". And he said, "No, I said, 'Go,' and you have made your Great Commission, 'Come.'"
Jesus went. He went where the Samaritan woman would show up. He went to the house of Zacchaeus and Matthew, despised tax collectors. He went even to the Pharisees' house for dinner. He went to Mary and Martha's when they were grief-stricken over the loss of Lazarus. He went across the Sea of Galilee to what the Scripture calls "the other side". And that's where he ran into, very purposely, the demoniac with a legion of demons. This is the most beautiful ending, that narrative. You'd find it in Mark chapter 5, because it ends with the demoniac clothed, it says, and in his right mind, sitting. Out of his mind, every restraint that had been put on him, he had broken, lived in the tombs, in a place of death, and here is in his right mind, clothed, and of all strange things, sitting. And I can tell you this: Because of where he sat, when he got back up to his feet, he had a whole different place to stand because he sat with Jesus.