Incognito Mode - Joshua 7

In church, and, welcome to Love Your Neighbor Day, more about that at the end of the service. Let's start our message today with a little trivial audience participation. raise your hand if you know what this symbol stands for. We have a few, a few, a few about the same as in the 8 o'clock. One person in the 8 oclock told me afterwards, they raised their hand, but they thought it stood for Einstein bagels. It does not. That is the sign in Google Chrome, a web browser for incognito mode. What incognito mode is is when you don't want people to know what you're doing on the intern Internet, you go in incognito mode. Now, there's some useful things for this. If you were searching for a gift for your spouse or someone else, and you don't want that showing up in the averagevertisement feed or the history, you could go into incognito mode, more often than not the way it's used is people use it so people can't see the things they're doing on the Internet that they shouldn't be doing. They're digitally trying to to cover their tracks. We all have incognito modes in our life. Hopefully not right now, but you can look back and say, Was there a time in your life or maybe a place in your house where you would hide things?" He said, "I don't anyone to know I'm doing this. I want you to I'm looking at this or maybe you're on a diet and you go, "I'm just going to hide this food somewhere where no one can see it. because I don't want them to know I'm doing it. You went into incognito mode, maybe with your employer. There's things you're doing, you're like, "I don't want them to know I'm doing this. I don't want them to know that I'm not where I'm at, and maybe you two turned off that tracking on your phone where people can see where you are. You've gone incognito, but you know what I mean. You know what we do, and we think we're going to hide from our employer, from our spouse, maybe even from God, the things that we're doing. The actions that we're taking. I want us to look today at Joshua chapter 7, on page 182 of your household Bible and the seat in front of you you need it, to see what we can learn from a man named Aiken, and his attempt to go into incognito mode by burying some devoted things that he had taken out of Jericho and the result that he has and how we can learn from that today. The main idea I want you to take away from the message today is this, is that you can't live an incomeognito mode with God. Trying to do so is harmful to you and others. You can't live an incognito mode with God trying to do so is harmful to you and to others.. Quick background of how we got to where we are. The people of Israel came out of Egypt with Moses leading them, and they wandered in the Sinai Peninsula because they were disobedient about going into the promised land, the land of Israel, that God said they would capture. So for 40 years, they wandered in the Sinai Peninsula, till that whole generation died. Joshua, who was Moses's kind of right hand man, has taken over as lead leader. He has led the nation across the Jordan River, God dried up the Jordan, as he dried up the Red Sea with Moses. They came across the Jordan, camped near Jericho circumcised the nation, they had passedover, and then last week, Matt talked about how they came to Jericho, this highly fortified city, and God miraculously knocked the walls down, and they took this city. They had this massive victory, the first victory as they move into the land that God had said, "I'm going to give this land to you." If you look back in Joshua 6 and verse 17 and 18, they'll be on the screen. God had given some instructions through Joshua about when you go to Jericho, there are things that are devoted to destruction. All of Jericho was devoted to destruction The Hebrew word is harem, and it means that everything in this is going to be given over to God, to either be put in the sanctuary or to be destroyed completely because it's so contaminated that it would be deadly for the people. And you can see in Joshua 16 and 17 at the very end, Joshua tells them, "But you keep yourselves from the things devoted to destruction, lest when you have devoted them you take any of the devoted things things and make the camp of Israel a thing of destruction. Joshua told them plainly, "Don't take anything, destroy it all. If you take it, you're going to then make yourself, and the nation a thing devoted to destruction.. He gets this from Moses in Deuteronomy 7, it's on the screen. You can see, Moses, given the same commands before they go into the promised land, towards the end of verses 24 and 26, it says this,You shall not covet the silver or the gold that is on them, or take it for yourselves unless you be ensnared by it. For it is an abomination to the Lord of God, and you shall shall not bring an abominable thing into your house and become devoted to destruction, like it. You shall utterly detest and abor it, for it is devoted to destruction. Now, one of things we need to recognize that as we be in the look at this story of Aiken, is when we think of what he's going to do, which is take some of these things from Jericho, we just think of it as material things, like he took some money. But in the context of what's going on and what Moses is wanting against in Joshua, is that all that's connected to idol worship, to being unfaithful to God and connecting with an idol and taking those things into the nation of Israel. God had said through Joshua through Moses, "Don't do this. If you do this you will become devoted to destruction just as those things were. So, if we can to look at Joshua, verse 1, look what happens. We see broken faith after the very first victory that Israel covets a devoted thing. But the people of Israel broke faith in reg regard regard to the devoted things. For Akin, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, son of Zah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of the devoted things in the anger of the Lord burned against the people of Israel. It's interesting. We'll talk about this a little more later, that it starts with the people of Israel broke faith. And it highlights one person, Aikin, who did the thing, but the entire nation is implicatedated in his action. They had broken faith by taking this devoted thing We'll see in a little bit what that is. It's some silver coins and a gold bar and a cloth, piece of cloth, probably connected to idol worship and connected to the Jerichoites and how they would worship these idols. But here we don't know what it is, except as readers, we know what's happened. No one else knows. At the time, no one knew at 8 Aiken had done but the writer of Joshua was telling us, "Here's what's happened. This man named Aiken, and he gives this whole family line, that's going to play out in a little bit. But he says, "Israel broke faith. They did this thing. There's this ominous note that sounded in verse 1. And it says that God became very angry, that he burned with anger against Israel. We need to pause here for a second. We'll talk more at the end about this. God's anger, we can become so anesthetized and think, oh, God, whatever. You're not who cares? You're not angry. Are we just take his anger very lightlyly? We read this passage, and it says, he burned with anger. What Aikhen had done was so serious that God just didn't go, "Oh, no big deal." He said, it made him burn with anger because it jeopardized the entire nation all of the people. And so God is deeply angry about this, and we need to, as we read scripture, let God be angry at what he wants to be angry at, and then we need to adjust and say, God, I should be angry at those same things. If I'm not angry, then something's wrong with me. I'm the one not seeing this correctly. You're the one that gets to tell me why something is so bad. Even if I think, man, that doesn't seem so bad. If God says it's terrible, it's horrible, don't do it, then we need to line ourselves up with that. What we see, though, we keep reading in verses 2 through 5, we see the result of this broken faith, and we see that Joshua learns that ignorance isn't bliss. Joshua didn't know this it happened. Look what happens in verses 2 to 5. Joshua sent men from Jericho to AI, which is near Bethavenaven, east of Bethel, and said to them, "Go up and spy out the land. We've seen Joshua do this kind of thing before where they're spying out the land to see what's going to happen." And the men went up and spied out AI, and they returned to Joshua and said to him, "Do not have all the people go up. but led about two or 3,000 men go up and attacked AI.D not make the whole people toil up, therefore they are few. So about 3,000 men went up there there from the people, and they fled before the men of AI. And the men of AI killed about 36 of their men and chased them before the gate as far as Shabarm, and struck them at the descent in the hearts of the people melted and became as water. What a shocking turn of events from Jericho, where they had marched around the city, and the walls had fallen. What a shocking turn of events that they just send a few thousand. They said, "The city's so small, it'll be so easy." They send a few thousand people up, and they're turn and they're fleeing away, the Israelites are at this weaker force. 36 people die. There's this moment where this greater power that Israelesites, who the hearts of all the nations in the land of Israel, had melted because they crossed the Jordan, and here, this small city they said, "We only need a few thousand, has put the flights those few thousand, and killed 36 of them. The nation of Israel must have been, like, "What's going on here?" Last year, I'm an Alabama Crimson T football fan. There's no need for that, Wayne. We talked about this after the first service. We won't have any of that. Much like Israel, we got a new coach. We went from Nick Saban, who's kind of like the Moses of college football to Joshua Kalen DeB Boer. And then we played Vanderbilt. We said, "Hey, this end up a few thousand people. It't won't take that much." And they beat us. And we're like, "What's going on?" We just start wondering, what's happening? Why has this happened? This shouldn't be taking place, and yet Israel is lost, and 36 people have died. And we need to remember it that. This is where the actions of Ain had effect beyond just himself. It wasn't just he did something, and God was mad at him. He had said the whole nation of Israel was implicated. 36 men died. And we as humans, when we see people who have done something wrong and people die because of it, we feel it. It disturbs us. Back in 2018 and 2019, there were two airline flights, A Yon Air flightlight 610 in an Ethiopian Airline Flight 302. They were both Boeing 737A planes, if you remember the stories. Boeing had put out this massive kind of 737. There were software problems in the plane. And the engineers knew about it, the software designers, the company did, Boeing knew about this. And what it would do is it would cause the plane to nose down repeatedly. And they knew this could happen, and they weren't doing proper training for the pilots and two flights over about six months' time, crashed this lion airline and Ethiopian Airline killing 3 346 people. And people knew that there was a problem. Now, I imagine you're sitting in your seat going, "That's so wrong. Something needs to be done. There's been no criminal prosecution of anyone in Boeing. There's been some monetary compensations to the tune of a billion plus dollars. But now you're going,Well, that's not right. There's not enough money. Something has to be done. These people who knew they were doing wrong, they knew it was wrong and let it happen. This sense that, how do we account for this? Joshua had sent the people up to fight, they had lost, and now, their hearts, the Jewish people's hearts were melting. They're the ones that are terrified. They're They're the ones that aren't sure what's going to happen. And what we see is that Joshua himself is in despair and his belief in God's promises begin to waver. Look at verses 6 to 9. It says, this's in Joshua Torres clothes. That's a sign of grief and remorse, and fell to the earth on his face before the ark of the Lord, until the evening, he and the elders of Israel. And they put dust on their heads. That's another sign of being in distress and mourning in that day.And Joshua said, "Alas, O Lord, God, why have you brought this people over the Jordan at all? If you've read through Exodus, you're starting to hear some similar language, right? The Jewish people, when they came out of Egypt and got into the wilderness, and they didn't have food, they didn't have water. They said, "Why did you even bring us out here? Did you just bring us out here, God, to let us die?" Joshua saying the same type of thing? Why did you bring us over the Jordan at all? To give us into the hands of the Amorites, to destroy us? Is that why you brought us? God had already promised Joshua that he was going to work through them to conquer these people, and how Joshua's wavering Would that we had been content to dwell beyond the Jordan. I wish we had just stayed on the other side of the Jordan. I wish we had just stayed and eat Egypt, is what the people said to Moses. Joshua is concerned about what's Sabbio says, "O, Lord, what can I say when Israel has turned their backs before the enemies for the Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land will hear of it and will surround us and cut off our name from the earth." Joshua is now worried little AI has defeated them, and now all the other tribes, all the other kingdoms are going to be confident, their hearts have melted, but now their hearts are strengthening, and they think they can defeat Israel. He says, they're gonna come and surround us, and they're gonna wipe us off the map. Wee won't have a name. And then he says this, And what will you do for your great name?" God had, through his commitment to Abraham, and then through Moses in the nation of visual, connected his name to the promises he had made, and Joshua says, "What's gonna happen to your name, God? If we get wiped out, if they destroy us, what happens to your name? Joshua was wavering, not sure what to do, and God, as we continue to see, gives him an answer. He says, "A now, Remove the devoted things. God's going to reveal to Joshua why 36 men died, why they lost at A.I. Look what it says. And the Lord said to Joshua, "Get up. Why have you fallen on your face? I mean God is, like, down the business, and they're like,L's let's deal with this and move forward. Get up. Why have you fallen down like this? Pay attention, by the way, how God uses corporate language here. He doesn't say ain till later. Israel has sinned. That's the whole nation. They have transgressed my covenant, that I commanded them. They have taken some of the devoted things. They have stolen and lied and put them among their own belongings. Therefore, the people of Israel cannot stand before their enemies. They turn their backs before their enemies, because they have become devoted to destruction. I will be with you. That you is plural, by the way, in the original language, so I will be with y'all no more. unless y'all destroy the devoted things among y'all. Get up, consecrate the people, and say, "Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, for thus says the Lord God of Israel, "There are devoted things in your midst. O Israel, you cannot stand before your enemies until you take away the devoted things from among you.In the morning, therefore, you shall be brought nearby your tribes. In the tribe that the Lord takes by shall come near by clans, and the clan that the Lord takes shall come near nearby households, and the household that the Lord takes shall come near man by man. And he who is taken with the devoted things shall be burned with fire, he and all that he has because he has transgressed the covenant of the Lord, and because he has done an outrageous thing in Israel. Again, we need to let God tell us what's outrageous and what's not, even if we think it's not. He says, "Y've done an outrageous thing, you've transgressed my covenant, you've sinned. You have taken into your midst a thing that has devoted you as a people to destruction now." Again, this was been tied into idol worship And all of the language is plural, and he says, "I'm gonna go tribe the big group, down to clan, down to family group, down to man by man. I'm gonna tell you who this is. Aiken is awareare of this, I believe. He could have come forward at any time and said, "I was the one. He doesn't. We don't know why he doesn't. I imagine just looking at my own life. There's a sense where he's going, "Maybe God doesn't know. Maybe I can keep this hidden,'cause he's tried to keep it hidden so far." But when we read this, I think as modern day people in the United States, we are very intividualistic, right? And we tend to go, well, my sin's about me and it affects me, and I'm the one that's impacted by it. And so why is the whole nation suffering here? So, most of our life, we live very individualized and cut off from how our actions affect others, and we don't think about it. There are certain areas in our life, though, where we recognize that the actions of one can affect the many. Sports is one of those. Team sports, especially, where we recognize the actions of one person can impact an entire team, an entire fan base, as an example back in 2018. There were two teams in the AFC Championship. Who knows what those teams were, Matt, Do you know? You do know. It was the Patriots and the Chiefs. A minute and one second to go in the fourth quarter., Tom Brady throws an interception. Game over, Chiefs are going to the Super Bowl. Except D Ford lined up offsides on defense. If you're a Chiefs fan, you, you're having trauma right now. You're remembering this horrible day. The Patriots get the ball back. Tom Brady goes and scores a touchdown. We're devastated. But Mahomesomes drives back down, the kick a field goal, tie it up, and then Tom Brady wins in overtime, and the Chiefs don't go to the Super Bowl. Why? Because D Ford lined up offsides. One guy, and the entire team doesn't go, and the entire fan base doesn't go. One guy's action, that's corporate solidarity. So when you read in the Old Testament about the nation of Israel, you have to think of it like like a football team. One person's penalty affects everyone on the team. Now, that's true, even in our individualized society, we're going to see later, that our actions impact others But here, God is repeatedly, the whole nation is in trouble because someone has taken a thing that was devoted for destruction. Keep reading with me." So Joshua rose early in the morning and brought Israel near, tribe by tribe. Imagine the sin. All right, we have all the tribes. This is thousands and thousands of people and the tribe of Judah was taken, so I just need this group of people." And then he said, he brought near the clans of Judah, so he each tribe had different kind of clans, and the clan of the Zerahites was taken. Achan's in that group, and he brought near the clan of the Zaraites, man by man, and Zabdi was taken. That's the family group. And he brought near his household man by man, and Achin, the son of Karmi, the son of Zabdi, son of Zah of the tribe of Judah was taken, pointed out individually, "You're the one." Then Joshua said to Aan, "My son, give glory to the Lord, God of Israel, and give praise to him,And tell me now what you have done? Do not hide it from me. This is an interesting line. Let me stop here.Cause Joshua tells to Aikin, "Give God praise, give him glory." And often, when we hear those kind of words, what we think about it it's Sunday morning, we just did it, we were sang worship songs. We're telling God how amazing he is, how wonderful he is, how great he is. But here we see what Joshua wants aching to do is confess that confession, when we confess our sins and ackowledgeledge God's worth, that we are wrong, what we've done is wrong, our hiding of things is wrong, that's acknowledging God's worth, that he's right, we're wrong, acknowledge it, and that's a form ofilt giving praise to God." And that's what Joshua calls for Ain to do. And Akin answered Joshua, he says, "Truly, I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel, and this is what I did. When I saw among the spoil, a beautiful cloak from Shinar, that's Babylon, modern day Iraq, and 200 shekels of silver, that's about five pounds of silver coins, and a bar of gold, weighing 50 shekels, that's about a pound and a quarter. of gold. Then I coveted them and took them, and see, they are hidden in the earth inside my tent with the silver underneath. Aikin knew he knew what he did was wrong. How do we know that? Because he hid all of it in his tent under the earth. He went into the incognito mode. He knew he was wrong as soon as Joshua said, "Hey, 36 men died, because someone in our camp took things they shouldn't have taken." Aiken knew he was the one because in his tent, buried in the earth, incognito were the things he had taken. And he waited all night and said, "I'm not going to say anything." Until he was pulled forward by Joshua says, "You're the one, tell us what you did When he was completely caught, then he confessed. We don't know what would have happened if Akiken would have come forward the day before, and said, "Hey, I did this." We don't have any idea. He waited until he had no choice. His browser history had been revealed, so to speak speak. He says, "Here's what I did." He took a roughly $200,000 to $300,000 worth of stuff out of Jericho. That's would have been the kind of street value of what was here, we think. The bigger thing he took took, though, was probably things that were dedicated to the worship of the false gods that were in Jericho. The things that God had explicitly said through, Moses and Joshua, if you touch these things, if you try to keep these things, you will be devoted to destroyruction just as they are. So look what Joshua does. So Joshua sent messengers, and they ran to the tent, and behold, it was hidden in his tent with the silver underneath. And they took them out of the tent and brought them to Joshuahua to all the people of Israel. So all the people are implicated and now all the people are seeing what happened. And they laid them down before the Lord, and so what Achin had done is totally exposed in front of everyone, nothing to hide from what he had done. And Joshua and all Israel with him took Akin, the son of Zara in the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold and his sons and daughters, and his oxen and donkeys and and sheep, and his tent and all that he had, and they brought them up to the valley of Akor. And Joshua said, "Why did you bring trouble on us? The wordAor is the Hebrew word that means trouble. And so the valley of Akor is the valley of trouble. Sounds a little bit like Aikin, the Hebrews like to name things after what happened there. He says,Why have you bring trouble on us, the Lord, brings trouble on you today, which is what Moses has said what happened which is what Joshua would told them before they went to Jericho.Th is what will happen if you take any of these things. And all Israel stoned him with stones, they burned them with fire and stoned them with stones, and they raised over him a great heap of stones that remains to this day. Then the Lord turned from his burning anger, therefore, to this day the name of that place is called the v of Akor. What was hidden was brought brought to light here. The incognito mode of Achin was turned off, and it was brought out. And the whole nation is a witness to this. And it says that Aikin and his kids and his animals and his tent, all that he had owned, all that was in that tent where he had the stuff was devoted to destruction. They stoned them, that was a means of execution at the time. They then burned burned them, and then they covered over them with rocks as a memorial that they said was there to this day when Joshua was written. as a reminder to the people of what happened. And you, "This seems so harshsh. If we're honest with us, so, Matt talked about this last week, that when we read the Old Testament, especially in Joshua, there are places where we go, That seems so harsh what God did. When we read this, we have to know how deadly what Aikin was doing was. Leading up to this, the Bible has said repeatedly, as you go into this land, the false gods are going to takept you. Those false gods involve worship of child sacrifice, abominable things. And he says, "They have built up their sin for 400 years. Wow way back before he said, for 400 years, they had been building up their sin, and it was time for that culture, those cultures in the land that Israel is moving into to be removed. And God said, because you have taken their things, you are also now slated to be removed, and Aikin was removed. Now, says his sons and daughters, we don't know how old they were. There's two views here, and I'm of the view that they were probably old enough to be complicit in what happened The tents they would have lived in weren't massive, so if Aikken buried something in his tent and they knew about it, they were complicit in the hiding of itself. Scripture doesn't say that explicitly. What we know is that, because of what Aikin did, his family was connected into that action. His sin affected those around him. And when they were then devoted to destruction, the whole nation wasn't wiped out, although the whole nation was implicated in that. We think, God, you're so vicious, you're so hard. But what we don't notice often is that that's the action, that's the result that all of us deserve, is to be wiped out for our sin. We take sin very lightly. I take sin very light.ly. God, I transgress you. I've done these horrible things. Just let me off the hook. Don't worry about it. No big deal. And God's saying, "No, it's a huge deal. It brings death and destruction into the world. And all of us, the wages of sin is death, all of us deserve that, but God, every now and then makes an example of someone. He did this in the New Testament in Acts chapter 5. There was a couple named Ananias and Sapphira, and they had sold a piece of land in and brought it to the church and said,Hey, here, use this to help people. This is everything we got. So we got this much money, here it is, and they held back a piece. So they were going, I'm going to say, I gave you everything, but they can kept some, you know, maybe 20% of the proceeds. They kept for themselves, said we gave you everything." You would think, " that's just a minor infraction, no big deal." They still gave 80% away. It says that both of them were struck dead because they had lied to God about what they were doing. As a church was just beginning and as the nation of Israel is just going to the promised land, these sins took place, and God made an example of those two people, Aikin and his family, and Ananas and Sapphira, to say, this is how serious sin is. This is how big of a deal it is. And then he's gracious to the rest of us that we don't get the same treatment. So we need to make sure we're not confused when we think about, why did this happen? When God gets to set the standard for holiness and righteousness. And he said, "Rove the devoted things." And so thousands of years ago, this happened with Joshua, they moved into the promised land and a man named Aikin, who was an incognito mode, trying to hide something from God, but it got found out, "What do we do with this today? Remember, the main idea, you can't live an incognito mode with God. Trying to do so is harmfulful to you and others. The first thing I want you to recognize that we can think about is that God's Holiness is real and serious. that in my life, I can't speak for you, I can speak for myself. It can become very easy to forget about the seriousness of God's Holiness, that we have access to God through Christ, and it becomes so casual and so common that we forget the utter holiness and otherness of God And then we kind of downplay the seriousness of what we're doing. Like, it's no big deal when I'm doing things that don't please him. It's no big deal. Oh, get over it, God. Come on, it can't be that big of a deal. If he's saying it's a big deal we need to recognize that it's a big deal, our sin is destroying ourselves and those around us. It's a big deal. Every time God gives a negative prohibition in scripture, a do not, thou shalt not." So he told them, "Don't take anything from Jericho. That's a negative command, right? It's not a positive. It's go do this thing. So it's love your neighbor a day." God says,, "Hey, go, love your neighbor." That That's a positive thing." But when he says, "Do not do, do not take anything out of Jericho. Do not commit adultery. Do not lie, do not steal Any negative command behind it are two things that are positive. God wants to provide something better for you and protect you from the negative consequences of that bad thing. So he says,hind every negative command, there's something better that God has for you that if you do the wrong thing you won't get, and he's protecting you from the negative consequences of doing that thing. So he says says, "Do not commit adultery." He goes, "I'm trying to provide something much better for you than adultery will provide, and I'm trying to protect you from the damage that it brings. That's true of every sin, every do not, that God says, "I'm protecting you from my holiness that is going to judge sin, and I'm providing for you something better. Second, we need to recognize that our sin, my sin harms us, and those around us. We tend to, again, be very individualistic. My sin hurts me and no one else. I met yesterday with our free, the Addiction Support Group, and just listening to people talk, and one of them said, you know, when I was kind of deep into my drug addiction I didn't think about anything of what I was doing was bothering anyone else. It was just me. It was the same.Th is I'm the one affected by it. I'm the one who had a bad thing. They weren't aware. Now they were saying now going, "Oh, I fully see what I was doing was destroying those around me. But at the time, I didn't even see, it was just my sin. Don't bug me about what I'm doing. That's our culture, right? There's very much who are you to tell me about what I'm doing? And what we know for sure is that our sins, that it does harm us, it harms those closest to us first. So the closer you are to someone, the more your sin is going to harm them. The more it's going to bring pain and suffering into their life, that our sins are not individuals. they're corporate. That when we live in a way that's not pleasing to God, as Aikin did, the whole nation was in trouble. 36 men died because of what Aikin did. They wouldn't have died it if he hadn't have done it. They would have gone to AI and captured AI. It's very clear in scripture. But because he did this thing, 36 men died, he didn't go out and directly kill 36 men, but his actionsctions led to that. His intention wasn't, by the way, to go, "I need 36 of you to die. So I'm going to take this." He was like, "I'm gonna take this for myself,'cause I want it." And then 36 men died as a result of that. Our sins have consequences that ripple out to the community. And so as we think about God, can I be faithful to you? We need to think not just about ourselves, but about others. And then finally, the admonition of this whole message is turn off incognito mode in your life. Is there something you're hiding that you're going, I don't want anyone to know about this? I've got that secret place. I clicked on the incognito mode on the browser, and now no one knows what I'm doing. At least you think no one knows, right You think you've kept it hidden, but everything will come out eventually. If not in this life, God says, in the end, everything will be brought into the light. There'll be nothing that is hidden that won't be revealed, that there is no g getting away from God. But even in this life, you think, I've got something hidden, I'm not going to say anything about it. No one's going to find out. Just know that your relationship with others, that you're hiding that from, is impacted by that action As soon as we go, I'm hiding things from you, I'm keeping things from you that are damaging to you, that I'm doing, but I'm going to keep them from you, and everything's going to be okay. You've already broken that relationship in ways that you may not even know you're doing. And God has so much more for you, so much better for you, if you will simply confess. And confession involves confessing to God that that you were wrong, and confessing to others, those who need to hear that you were wrong, and then saying, "How do I not do this anymore? How do I live free from this? God is gracious. More time times than not, God isn't going to give the judgment that ae in God, or that Ananias and Safh are God. He's going to let us continue to live and say, how can I confess and then live faithfully from this for you? If you're here today and you have something in your life that you need to confess, some area that you're an incognito mode, I want to encourage you. Take a step of saying, I need to confess that. Grab a connect card and write on there. Heyey, Pastor, reach out, I want to talk. You don't have to put what it is? Just write, I want to talk. I'll reach out this week and we can talk about what that is, and plans for how you can deal with it, how you can confess and turn off that incognitoo trusting God, that if you do what he says, he'll be faithful to do what he has promised to you which is to forgive you for your sins and to move you into an area of faithfulness and your life for him, and you can find the blessing that he has for you. If you'll join me in prayer. Father, we love you. We thank you that you are gracious to us in so many ways. Father, you are gracious when we are hiding things from you and others thinking that we can get away with it. Help us to know, help me to know that I can't. I pray that if there's people here today that need to confess that they will do that, they will find the freedom that you give, help us to trust you in that. Father, I pray that you would be glorified in our life. There'd be nothing in our life that is devoted to destruction, sends that will be wiped away, that we are clinging to, thinking they will bring us happiness. They will bring us joy, that will bring us life, knowing that only you will do that for us. As we sing this song working in our lives, open our eyes to see you, may your spirit bring conviction to those who are yours, and if there's someone here that doesn't know you, Father, that your spirit will draw them to you, and they will put their trust in you for the first time and confess their rebellion against you and their sin against you, and let your light chase away the darkness in their life. in the name of Jesus we pray