Covered In The Garden

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. I'm going to share you a little shame story myself. I didn't have this in here at first, but I thought maybe this is a good illustration of it. I was a thespian, okay? I know, you've got to say that right. So I was in a lot of plays and musicals and things like that. Not as good as these guys over here, man. I think you've got to see them when they're in action, okay? Let me tell you. But anyways, in high school I was in debates and I was in speech. We called it forensics. I don't know why it was called forensics in Michigan. So I was in, I think it was extemporaneous speaking, which is you got a topic, you had five minutes to plan it, and get up and speak. That was a competition. That was one of the types of competition, and so I decided to do extemporaneous speaking. And I got up, and I don't remember what the topic was, and I start talking, I get done with it, there's a crowd about this size listening to me, and at the end the judges, there were three judges in the back, and the one said, by the way, your zipper's down. I don't remember anything else. They probably don't remember anything else. That was a shame moment. Do you understand that? Embarrassing. Now, I could get over that pretty quickly. And it wasn't anything I actually did. Well, maybe I didn't check, but it's really nothing wrong. You can have shame affect you when it has nothing to do anything with anything. It's not the same as guilt. They do go together often. They do overlap. You are still smiling about that, Kyle. Has that ever happened to you, where it was like, no? The zipper thing, no? Anybody else have the zipper thing happen to them? Okay, okay. So it's not just, yeah, okay. Wardrobe malfunction, big time, right? So this series, so it can be that. That's not quite the kind of shame that we're going to be looking at mostly in this series. The kind that we're looking at in this series is more the chronic, hidden feelings that we get that don't seem to get resolved easily. I mean, that was a simple fix, right? You just go, whoop, there, okay, I'm done. Next situation, nobody knows about it. Nobody needs to know about it. But the shame that we experience often in our society, and that we have felt sometimes, it just feels like you can't get rid of. So we're starting today, and we're going to explain how you are covered, but not with a plastic or paper bag. But you are covered with the glory, the honor, the prestige of Jesus Christ himself. And you are royalty. You are beautiful. You are splendid. You're going to shine like the stars someday. And right now, it might not seem like it, but that's your destiny and your direction. That's what it means to have the status of being the children of God. You are being given everything that Jesus has, and has had from eternity as your gift. So that's kind of behind it. I probably could just stop there, but we're going to get into this a little more. So why even cover shame? I think Werner Mischke in his book, he calls it the global gospel in his book. The global gospel, he says, the majority of the world deals with honor and shame all the time. And he says this, the longing for honor and the struggle to avoid shame are universal. Individuals and families, kinship groups, and communities, peoples, and nations all endure the pathologies of shame and the struggle for honor. Whether the issue is sexual abuse and trafficking, HIV, AIDS, racism, or slavery, mental illness, disabilities of various kinds, ethnic cleansing, the identity challenges of refugees and immigrants, the perpetual passions of tribalism or nationalism, or simply the ubiquitous competitive pursuit for greater social status, honor and shame are central to the human condition. So shame is kind of behind most of the conflicts in the world. This week, if you do, you don't have to, I'm not telling you, you've got to look at the news, but if you do, and if you just notice, or if you're working and you notice in the office or in the classroom, just see if you see the honor-shame dynamics going on, okay? On the sports field this afternoon, football, it's all about honor and shame. It's not about, that's why we cheer, why we celebrate, why I love being a fan of the winning team and how I will diss the losing team and walk away from it. By the way, I think we had a student, I'm going to name him, he's not here today. Grant, last week, went to the game, the Dolphins against Denver Broncos, and what was he wearing? A Denver Bronco jersey. This person has a new name, 70-20, one of the highest scoring games in all of the NFL. That is shame, and feeling like, well, he's decided he's gotten rid of the jersey, he's putting them away, he's going to burn them, you know, no, I don't think he'll burn them, but he's going to not pull them out for a couple of years. That's shame. He doesn't want to be covered with ...