Stories From The Bible That Will Give You Hope

Welcome. Before we begin, how was your day? Whatever you’ve been through, whatever’s been weighing on your mind, bring it with you tonight.

Maybe there’s even something you’ve been praying about. I’d love to hear about it down in the comments.

Tonight, we’re going to slow everything down together and step into the word of God.

I hope these timeless stories can help ease your mind into rest. There is something about a hopeful story that does what nothing else can do.

Arguments can inform the mind. Evidence can satisfy the intellect. Doctrine can build the framework of what we believe.

But a story, a real story told slowly, told honestly, told with all its mess and all its beauty intact.

A story gets inside you. It finds the place in your chest where the worry lives.

The place in your gut where the fear has been quietly sitting for months. The place in the back of your mind where you have been carrying the question you haven’t quite been able to voice yet.

The question that sounds something like, “Does any of this actually work? Does God actually show up?

Does the story actually turn? Or is that just something people say when they don’t know what else to say?”

The Bible has an answer to that question. And the answer is not a lecture, not a theological argument, not a carefully constructed proof.

The answer is a story. Actually, nine of them. Nine of the most hopeful, most human, most breathtakingly honest stories ever told.

Stories of people who had every reason to give up, who were in situations that looked from the outside completely and permanently hopeless, where the evidence pointed one direction and the promise of God pointed the other, and where quietly and sometimes dramatically and always faithfully, God showed up.

So settle in, get comfortable. There is no rush. We are not going anywhere fast.

We are just going to sit together for a while and let these stories do what stories are meant to do.

Find us in whatever place we are in and remind us hope is not naive.

Hope is the most accurate thing in the world because it is based on the character of a god who has never once broken a promise.

Let’s begin. The first story starts in a pit, not metaphorically, an actual pit. A dry system in the ground somewhere in the land of Canaan.

Empty of water but full of something far more terrible. The sound of its occupant’s voice crying out from the bottom while the people who put him there sat a little distance away and ate their lunch.

His name was Joseph and he was 17 years old. Now to understand why Joseph ended up in a pit, you have to understand the family he came from.

Because his family was complicated in the way that only families shaped by generations of pain and dysfunction can be.

His father was Jacob, the man who wrestled with God and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

The man who had 12 sons by four different women. The man who, for reasons that are never fully explained in scripture, but are painfully human in their familiarity, loved one of those sons far more visibly than all the others.

That son was Joseph. Jacob gave Joseph a beautiful coat. He favored him openly. He made no effort to hide it.

And his brothers who watched this favoritism with the accumulating bitterness that only comes from years of feeling invisible beside a favored sibling grew to hate Joseph with a hatred that had been building for a long time.

And then Joseph made it worse because Joseph was young and probably not as wise as he would later become.

He had dreams, vivid, symbolic, clearly significant dreams and he told his brothers about them.

Dreams where their sheav of wheat bowed down to his sheath. Dreams where the sun and the moon and 11 stars bowed down to him, he told them, and their hatred burned hotter.

The day it happened started like an ordinary day. Jacob sent Joseph to check on his brothers who were grazing the flocks at Sheckchham.

Joseph put on his coat and went. He walked for miles. And when his brothers saw him coming in the distance in that distinctive coat, something dark crystallized in them.

Here comes that dreamer, they said, “Let’s kill him.” One of the brothers, Reuben, the oldest, talked them out of murder.

“Throw him in the pit instead,” he said, secretly planning to come back and rescue him later.

So that is what they did. They grabbed Joseph when he reached them. They stripped off the coat, they threw him in the pit, and then they sat down and ate their lunch.

There is something about that detail that has always stopped me, the casual cruelty of it, the way human beings can commit a terrible thing and then carry on with the ordinary business of the day.

Sandwich, water, the afternoon sun, and their brother’s voice coming up from the pit. Then traders appeared on the horizon.

Ishelites heading down to Egypt. And Judah had an idea. Why not sell him instead of leaving him to die?

At least we’d make something from it. 20 pieces of silver. That is what Joseph’s brothers got for him.

He was pulled out of the pit and handed to the traders. He watched his brother’s faces as he was led away.

He watched until he couldn’t see them anymore. And then there was nothing around him but strangers in the long road south toward Egypt away from everything he had ever known.

17 years old alone. And not a single thing about that moment looked like the beginning of a story that would one day save millions of lives.

Egypt, a foreign land, a foreign language, foreign food and foreign customs and foreign gods on every corner.

And Joseph arrived there not as a tourist or a student or a diplomat. He arrived as property, as cargo, as a human being with a price tag.

He was sold to a man named Potifer, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, a man of significant power and influence in the Egyptian court.

And Joseph was put to work in his household. And here is the first place in the story where the Bible says something quietly remarkable, something that could be easy to rush past, but deserves to be stopped at and considered.

The Lord was with Joseph. Not the Lord rescued Joseph from slavery. Not the Lord made Joseph’s circumstances comfortable or fair or anything close to what he deserved.

Just the Lord was with Joseph. That is a different kind of promise. Not the promise that everything will be easy, but the promise that you will not be alone in the hard.

That the same God who is sovereign over the ending is also present in the middle, in the pit, on the road, in a foreign household, in the places that make no sense, in the seasons that feel like punishment, even when they are actually preparation.

The Lord was with Joseph, and Joseph somehow kept going. He worked hard. He was trustworthy.

He brought such integrity and wisdom to everything Potterer gave him to manage that Potterer eventually put him in charge of his entire household.

Everything Potterer had was in Joseph’s hands. Things were getting better slowly, quietly. The story seemed to be turning.

And then it got worse. Poter’s wife wanted Joseph. And when Joseph refused her day after day with a faithfulness that was rooted in his fear of God and his loyalty to Piper, she destroyed him.

She grabbed his cloak. He fled. She kept the cloak. And she told her husband a lie so convincing and so complete that Potterer had Joseph thrown in prison.

The prison where the king’s prisoners were kept. From the pit to slavery, from slavery to the captain’s household.

And just when things seem to be turning from the household to prison. This is the part of Joseph’s story that is hardest to sit with because it is the part that is most honest about what faithfulness sometimes costs.

He had done nothing wrong. He had held the line. He had refused to compromise.

And the consequence of doing the right thing was losing everything he had managed to build again.

There are people reading this script right now who know what that feels like. Who did the right thing and paid for it.

Who were faithful and got punished for it. Who prayed and trusted and held on and then watched things get worse instead of better.

For you more than anyone, Joseph’s story is written. Because the Bible does not skip this part.

It does not fast forward to the palace and pretend the prison didn’t happen. It sits in it.

It acknowledges it. It lets the reader feel the weight of it. And it says again quietly in the middle of the worst of it.

The Lord was with Joseph still in the prison in the unjust consequence of a faithful choice in the place that felt like the farthest point from anything that could ever be called a plan.

The Lord was still there. The prison is where two men came into Joseph’s life.

Officials of Pharaoh who had fallen out of favor. The chief cup bearer and the chief baker.

Both of them landed in the same prison and both of them had dreams that troubled them deeply.

Joseph noticed they were distressed. He asked them about it and they told him their dreams and Joseph interpreted them.

The baker’s dream was grim. The cup bearer’s dream was hopeful. Within 3 days, Joseph said, “The cup bearer would be restored to his position.”

And he asked the cup bearer one thing. When you are restored, remember me. Mention me to Pharaoh because I was taken from the land of the Hebrews and I have done nothing to deserve this prison.

3 days later, Pharaoh’s birthday, the cup bearer was restored exactly as Joseph had said.

He walked out of the prison and back into the palace and he forgot Joseph completely for 2 years.

Two more years. Can you feel the weight of that? The door opening. The one person who could get a message to Pharaoh walking out and then silence.

Two more years of the same prison walls, the same routine, the same injustice still unadressed.

Two years is a long time to wait when you already feel forgotten. When the favor you asked for slipped someone’s mind, the moment the sun got bright enough and the food got good enough and life got comfortable enough.

2 years. But God is not bound by the memory of a cup bearer. And the moment he was ready to move, he moved.

Not a day early, not a day late, exactly on time. Because God’s timing has never once been governed by human forgetfulness.

Pharaoh had a dream. Two dreams actually. Seven fat cows devoured by seven thin cows.

Seven healthy heads of grain swallowed by seven thin ones. He woke up troubled. He called every wise man and magician in Egypt.

Not one of them could interpret the dreams. And that is when the cup bearer finally remembered.

He told Pharaoh about the young Hebrew man in the prison. The one who had interpreted his dream and the baker’s dream two years ago with perfect accuracy and Pharaoh sent for Joseph immediately.

Joseph was brought out of the prison. He was cleaned up, given fresh clothes, and brought before the most powerful man in the ancient world.

Pharaoh told him the dreams. And Joseph said something before he even began the interpretation that reveals everything about the man he had become in 13 years of suffering.

He said, “It is not in me. God will give Pharaoh the answer. Not I will interpret your dream.

Not watch what I can do. Not finally my moment has come. Let me show you what I am worth.

It is not in me. God will give Pharaoh the answer. 13 years of pit and slavery and prison.

And what they had produced in Joseph was not bitterness, not self-promotion, not the desperate grabbing of an opportunity to finally prove himself.

They had produced humility. They had produced a man whose first instinct in the most important moment of his life was to point away from himself and toward God.

Suffering in the hands of God does not produce cynicism. It produces character. And Joseph walked into Pharaoh’s throne room with more character than any palace education could have given him.

Joseph interpreted the dreams. 7 years of abundance followed by 7 years of devastating famine.

And then he told Pharaoh what needed to be done. Store grain during the abundant years, build reserves, appoint a wise and discerning man to oversee the process.

Pharaoh looked at his officials, and then he looked at Joseph, and he said something that would have been extraordinary under any circumstances.

But given that Joseph was a Hebrew slave who had just walked out of prison an hour ago, it was almost impossible.

Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom is the spirit of God?

And then Pharaoh gave Joseph his signate ring, his fine linen robes, a gold chain around his neck, a chariot, and a title, second in command over all of Egypt.

Only Pharaoh himself would be greater. From the pit to the palace, from a prison cell to the second highest throne in the most powerful empire on earth, and Joseph was 30 years old, 13 years after his brothers threw him in that pit.

The 7 years of abundance came. Joseph stored grain in massive quantities. He had two sons.

He named the first one Manasseh, which means causing to forget, because God had made him forget all his trouble.

He named the second one Ephraim, which means twice fruitful because God had made him fruitful in the land of his suffering.

In the land of his suffering, not in spite of the suffering, in it, through it.

The fruitfulness came not after the pain was erased, but in the very place where the pain had happened.

That is the God of Joseph. And he has not changed. The famine came exactly as predicted, and it spread not just through Egypt, but through all the surrounding lands, including Canaan, including the land where Jacob and his sons still lived.

Jacob heard there was grain in Egypt. He sent his sons to go and buy some, 10 of them.

All except the youngest, Benjamin, whom Jacob kept close because he couldn’t bear to lose another of Rachel’s sons.

The 10 brothers arrived in Egypt. They stood before the man in charge of all the grain distribution and they bowed down to the ground before him.

Joseph recognized them immediately. They did not recognize him. They were bowing to the dream, the dream he had told them about 20 years earlier.

The one that had made them so angry they threw him in a pit. And Joseph held himself together.

He spoke harshly to them, tested them, watched them. He needed to know who they had become.

Were they the same men who had sold their brother for 20 pieces of silver?

Or had 20 years changed something. He sent them back to Canaan with their grain.

And over the course of several visits, he watched them. He saw their guilt. He heard them say to one another, “Surely we are being punished because of what we did to our brother.

We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would not listen.

That is why this distress has come on us 20 years later.” They still heard him.

They still remembered his voice from the pit. And Joseph heard every word, and he had to turn away from them and weep.

The moment came. Joseph could not hold himself together any longer. He sent all his servants out of the room and he stood there with just his brothers and he wept so loudly that the Egyptians outside could hear him.

And then he said the words that changed everything. I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?

His brothers could not answer him. They were terrified. This was the man they had sold, the man they had betrayed, the man who now held every piece of power in the most powerful nation on earth.

And they were standing right in front of him with nowhere to go. But Joseph said, “Come close to me.”

And they came and he said, “I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt.

And now do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.

God sent me. Not you sold me and ruined my life. Not I survived in spite of what you did.

Not I am going to make you pay for every one of those 13 years.

God sent me. God sent me ahead of you to preserve your lives to save the lives of thousands of people I will never meet.

To be in position for a moment that none of us could have seen coming.

You meant it for evil. God meant it for good. That is the sentence that holds the entire story of Joseph in its hands.

And it is one of the most extraordinary declarations of faith in the face of suffering that any human being has ever made.

Not despite the pit, not despite the slavery, not despite the prison through it, inside it, because of it.

God was working the whole time without stopping, without forgetting, without losing the thread for even a moment.

Joseph’s story ends with reunion and restoration. His father, Jacob, comes to Egypt. The brothers are settled in the best of the land.

The family is together again. And Joseph, the boy they threw in a pit, is the one who feeds them all.

The dreamer came true. And the reason this story has lived for 4,000 years. The reason it has been told and retold and wept over and leaned on by people in every kind of suffering imaginable is not because it is a fairy tale with a happy ending.

It is because it is honest about the cost. It doesn’t skip the pit. It doesn’t skip the slavery or the false accusation or the prison or the two extra years of being forgotten by the cup bearer.

It sits in every one of those chapters long enough to make them real. Long enough for the reader to find themselves in them.

And then it says something that goes against everything our circumstances try to tell us when they are at their worst.

God was working the whole time in every chapter. Even the ones that felt like abandonment.

Even the ones that felt like punishment. Even the ones that made no sense and seemed to lead nowhere.

He was working building something in Joseph that could not have been built any other way.

Positioning something in the world that no human strategy could have arranged. Moving pieces on a board so large that none of the players could see more than their own square.

But God could see the whole board. He always can and he always does. Whatever your pit looks like right now, whatever your prison is, whatever chapter of your story feels like the furthest thing from a plan, he is working the whole time without stopping, without forgetting.

He was with Joseph and he is with you. The second story begins on a road, a dusty road in the ancient near east.

Two women walking, both of them exhausted, both of them grieving, both of them facing a future that looked from every human angle completely empty.

One of them was named Naomi. And Naomi had lost everything. She had left her homeland Bethlehem in Judah years before with her husband IMC and their two sons during a time of famine.

They had gone to the land of Moab, a foreign land, a land with different customs and different gods and different ways of doing things.

And there in Moab, the losses had piled up. Her husband IMC died. And then after her sons had married Moabitete women and they had lived in Moab for 10 years, both of her sons died too.

Three graves in a foreign land. And Naomi left in Moab with her two daughters-in-law, Orpa and Ruth.

When Naomi heard that the famine in Judah had ended, she decided to go back to Bethlehem.

And she urged her daughtersin-law to go back to their own families. Go home, she said, find new husbands.

You are young. You have a future. I have nothing left to offer you. I am empty.

That word empty. Naomi would use it again later when she arrived in Bethlehem and the women of the town came out to greet her.

They said, “Is this Naomi?” And she said, “Don’t call me Naomi, which means pleasant.

Call me Mara, which means bitter. Because the Almighty has made my life very bitter.

I went away full and the Lord has brought me back empty. Empty. Bitter. Brought low by losses she never asked for and never deserved.”

That is where Naomi was, sitting in the rubble of a life that had not gone anything like she had planned.

Opa kissed Naomi goodbye. She wept, but she went back to her own people, which was the reasonable thing to do, the practical thing, the thing that made the most sense for a young woman with her whole life ahead of her.

But Ruth did not go. Ruth clung to Naomi. And when Naomi urged her again to go back, Ruth said something that has been spoken at weddings and funerals and moments of commitment and devotion for 3,000 years.

Not because it is a romantic statement, though it is that, but because it is one of the most beautiful declarations of covenant loyalty ever recorded.

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go, I will go, and where you stay, I will stay.

Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die.

And there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.

Where you go, I will go. Ruth was not just choosing Naomi. She was choosing Naomi’s God.

The God she had presumably learned about through years of marriage into a Jewish family.

The God who was now the only God she wanted. And she made that choice on a road with nothing ahead of her but uncertainty.

No guarantee of how it would turn out. No promise of a happy ending. Just the choice.

I am going with you. I am going with your God. Whatever comes next, we face it together.

That is the seed of the whole story. A choice made on a road in grief by a foreign widow with nothing.

Who decided that love was worth more than security and that the God of Israel was worth more than the gods of Moab.

They arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest. And Ruth went to work immediately.

In the ancient world, the law of Moses made provision for the poor and the foreigner.

Landowners were not allowed to harvest all the way to the edges of their fields.

They had to leave some grain behind. The poor could come and glean, gather the leftover grain that the harvesters missed.

Ruth went to glean in whatever field she could find. And as it turned out, and the Bible uses a phrase here that carries the quiet weight of divine providence, as it turned out, she found herself working in the field belonging to a man named Boaz.

As it turned out, as if by chance, as if it were coincidence. But by this point in the story, the reader already knows better because the same God who was with Joseph in the pit is the same God who directed Ruth’s feet to that particular field on that particular morning.

Boaz noticed her. He asked his foreman who she was, and the foreman told him, “She is the Moabitete woman who came back with Naomi.”

She asked permission to glean after the harvesters. She has been at it since morning and has barely stopped.

And Boaz went to Ruth and said something that made her bow to the ground and ask why he was being so kind to her, a foreigner.

He said, “I have been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law, how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with the people you did not know.

May the Lord repay you for what you have done. May you be richly rewarded by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.

Under whose wings you have come to take refuge, the same language of the psalms, the same image, the shadow of the Almighty, the God who covers the ones who run to him.

Boaz told his workers to pull some grain out of the bundles deliberately and leave it for Ruth to find.

He told them to make sure she had water to drink and food to eat at the midday meal.

He protected her, provided for her, made sure she was safe in a world where a foreign woman gleaning alone in fields could have been very vulnerable.

Ruth came home that evening with more grain than she should have been able to gather in a day.

Naomi looked at it and asked where she had been. And when Ruth told her it was Boaz’s field, Naomi came alive in a way she hadn’t in a long time.

Because Naomi knew something Ruth didn’t. Boaz was a relative of her late husband IMC, what the Bible calls a kinsman redeemer.

Under the ancient laws of Israel, a kinsman redeemer had both the right and the responsibility to buy back family land that had been sold in hard times, to redeem what had been lost, to restore what had fallen.

And Naomi, who had called herself empty and bitter, who had told the women of Bethlehem that the Almighty had made her life bitter, began to see something she had not been able to see on the road from Moab.

She said, “The Lord has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.

He has not stopped. Through all the losses, through all the grief, through all the bitterness and the empty feeling of a life that had given way beneath her feet, he had not stopped.

She just couldn’t see it from where she was standing. And now, standing in a small house in Bethlehem, looking at a pile of grain that her foreign daughter-in-law had brought home from a field belonging to a relative she had forgotten about, she could see it.”

The story of Ruth and Boaz unfolds over the course of the harvest season. Ruth continued to glean in Boaz’s fields.

Naomi, revived now with something that looked remarkably like hope, began to make a plan because there was a legal pathway through the kinsman redeemer tradition that could restore everything they had lost, land, security, family, future.

There were steps to be taken, ancient customs to be followed, a process that required courage from Ruth and faithfulness from Boaz and the surrender of a closer relative who turned out to be unwilling to take on the responsibility.

And Boaz was willing. He made that clear at the city gate in front of the elders in the proper legal form.

He declared his intention to redeem everything that had belonged to IMC and his sons, to take Ruth as his wife, to carry the name of the dead on their inheritance so it would not disappear.

And they were married. And Ruth conceived, and she gave birth to a son. And the women of Bethlehem came to Naomi, the same women she had told to call her Mara, the bitter one, the same women who had watched her arrive back in the city emptied and grieving.

And they said something to her that is one of the most tender moments in the entire book.

Praise be to the Lord, who this day has not left you without a kinsman redeemer.

He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons has given him birth.

And Naomi took the child and held him in her arms and cared for him.

The women gave the child a name, Oed, which means servant. And Oed was the father of Jesse.

And Jesse was the father of David, the foreign widow on the road chose a god she barely knew.

And God wo her into the royal line that would produce the greatest king Israel ever had, and eventually the King of Kings himself.

The thing about Ruth’s story that I want you to sit with is this. Ruth had no idea what she was walking into when she said, “Where you go, I will go.”

She had no idea she was stepping into a story that would echo for thousands of years.

She had no idea that the child she would one day hold in her arms would be the grandfather of King David.

She had no idea that her name would appear in the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth at the very opening of the New Testament.

She just made a choice on a road in grief with nothing but love and a decision to follow a God she was only beginning to know.

And God took that choice and built something with it that she could not have imagined in her most hopeful dreams.

That is how God works with our small faithful choices. We make them in the dark.

We make them not knowing where they lead. We make them because love compels us and because something in us recognizes that the God of Israel is worth following even when the road is dusty and the future is uncertain and the loss is still fresh enough to sting.

And God takes those choices and he builds cathedrals out of them. Ruth’s story is also Naomi’s story.

The woman who came back from Moab calling herself bitter. The woman who felt that God had dealt hardly with her.

Who sat in the rubble of her losses and could not see how any of it could ever be made right.

And what God did was not erase the losses. He did not bring back a limc or the sons.

He did not pretend the grief hadn’t happened. He built something new inside the grief.

He brought a daughter-in-law whose love was better than seven sons. He brought a kinsman redeemer.

He brought a grandson to hold. He is the god who redeems, who buys back what was lost, who restores what the locusts ate, who makes something beautiful in the land of suffering.

He did it for Ruth. He did it for Naomi. And he is the same God today.

The third story takes place in a temple. But before we get to the temple, we need to understand the woman who is going there.

Because her story begins not in a moment of grand spiritual drama, but in the quiet, grinding daily heartache of a longing that won’t go away.

Her name was Hannah. And Hannah desperately wanted a child. In the ancient world, baronness was not just a personal grief.

It carried social stigma. It was sometimes interpreted as a sign of God’s disfavor. And for Hannah, there was the additional pain of living in a household where her husband Elena had a second wife, Panina, who had children.

And Panina made sure Hannah felt it. Every year when the family went to Shiloh to worship and offer sacrifices, Panina would provoke Hannah year after year.

The Bible says she kept provoking her in order to irritate her because her womb was closed year after year.

The same journey, the same worship, the same provocation from Panina, and the same grief that Hannah carried into the temple like a stone she couldn’t put down.

Elena loved Hannah. He gave her a double portion at the sacrificial meal. He said to her, “Why are you weeping?

Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than 10 sons?”

He meant well. He truly did. But there are griefs that love cannot fix. There are longings that even the most devoted spouse cannot satisfy.

There are places in a person’s soul where only God can reach and Hannah knew it.

And so she did the only thing left to do. She went to the temple and she prayed.

Hannah prayed in the most raw, unfiltered, completely unself-conscious way a person can pray. She wept bitterly.

She did not compose herself first. She did not make herself presentable before approaching God.

She came to him exactly as she was, weeping, grieving, desperate, emptied out by years of longing and monthly disappointment.

In the daily provocation of a woman who couldn’t seem to leave her alone, she prayed in her heart.

Her lips moved, but no sound came out, just the silent full body prayer of a woman who had nothing left to hold back and nowhere else to go.

And she made a vow. If you will give me a son, she said to God, then I will give him back to you all the days of his life.

I will give him back. Even in the asking, she was surrendering. Even in the pleading, she was releasing.

She was not just asking God for a child to fill her arms and satisfy her longing.

She was asking God for a child she was already willing to give back. A child who belonged to God before he was even conceived.

That kind of prayer requires a depth of trust that goes beyond wanting God to give you what you want.

It requires believing that God’s purposes are better than your plans. That the gift, if it comes, belongs to the giver more than to you.

Now, while Hannah was praying this prayer, the priest was watching her. His name was Eli.

And what he saw was a woman whose lips were moving but who was making no sound.

And he drew the worst possible conclusion. He thought she was drunk. He said to her, “How long are you going to stay drunk?

Get rid of your wine.” Hannah said, “I am not drunk. I am a woman who is deeply troubled.

I have been pouring out my soul to the Lord. Do not take your servant for a wicked woman.

I have been praying out of great anguish and grief.” Eli heard her and something in him shifted.

He looked at this woman who was not drunk but broken, who had not come to the temple with anything to show off but everything to lay down.

And he said to her something simple and something sufficient. Go in peace and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him.

And Hannah left and the Bible says something about what happened to her next that is one of the most quietly beautiful lines in the whole story.

She went her way and ate something and her face was no longer downcast. She hadn’t received the child yet.

Nothing had changed externally. Elcana was the same. Panina was still in the household. The longing was still there.

The womb was still empty, but her face was no longer downcast. Because she had done the thing that changes people even before the answer comes.

She had brought everything to God, poured it all out, left it at the temple, and walked away lighter.

Not because the situation had changed, but because something in her had. She had prayed herself into a place of trust where the outcome was in God’s hands, not hers.

Where the answer was God’s timing, not hers. Where the longing was still real, but it was no longer crushing her.

She had given it to God, and that was enough to lift her face. In the morning, the family rose and worshiped and returned home.

And the Lord remembered Hannah. The Lord remembered Hannah. Four words that carry the weight of everything God is.

He sees, he hears, he holds every name. He forgets no one. And in his time, in his way, he moves.

Hannah conceived. She carried the child. And she gave birth to a son. And she called his name Samuel, which means heard by God or asked of God.

His name was the testimony. Every time someone said his name, they were hearing the story.

God heard a woman weeping in a temple. God heard a prayer that no one else could even hear because the words never made it past her lips.

And God answered, and she named the child after the answer, heard by God. When the child was old enough, Hannah kept her vow.

She took Samuel to the temple in Shiloh. She brought a three-year-old bull, an epha of flour, and a skin of wine, and she found Eli the priest, and she said, “Sir, I am the woman who stood here beside you, praying to the Lord.

I prayed for this child, and the Lord has given me what I asked of him.

So now I give him to the Lord, for his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.”

And she left him there. I want to sit in that moment for a second because it is not a small thing.

This is the child she wept for. The child whose name she speaks every day as a reminder of what God did.

The child whose face she sees in her mind as she crosses the distance between her home and the temple and she gave him back just as she said she would because she was a woman who kept her word.

Even when keeping it cost her everything it had cost her to ask for it in the first place.

Samuel went on to become one of the greatest prophets in all of Israel’s history.

He anointed Saul. He anointed David. His voice shaped the entire course of Israel’s story for generations.

He was the child Hannah brought to God weeping, given back, used for more than Hannah could have imagined when she made the vow.

Hannah prayed again after she left Samuel at the temple. And this prayer is different from the first one.

The first prayer was desperate and raw and barely audible. This prayer is a song, a declaration, a burst of worship from a woman who has come through something and arrived somewhere she never expected to arrive.

She said, “My heart rejoices in the Lord. In the Lord, my horn is lifted high.

My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance. There is no one holy like the Lord.

There is no one besides you. There is no rock like our God.” And then she said something that would echo a thousand years later in the mouth of another woman, a young woman, standing in the hill country of Judea, carrying a child who was not yet born, but whose coming had been announced by an angel.

Hannah said, “He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.

He seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor.” A thousand years later, Mary would sing, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.

The same song, the same God. The same testimony of a woman who came to him empty and left full, who came to him weeping and left singing, who had nothing to offer but her grief and her trust and found that grief and trust placed in God’s hands were more than enough.

Hannah’s song became Mary’s song. And Mary’s song announced the one who was the answer to every prayer Hannah and every other person in the history of the world had ever prayed.

The story is always bigger than we can see from where we are standing. Three stories, one thread running through all of them.

Joseph in the pit, Ruth on the road, Hannah in the temple, three people with nothing visible to hold on to.

Three people for whom the situation from every human angle looked finished, hopeless, too far gone to turn around.

And three stories that prove beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt that appearances are not the final word, that the visible is not the whole picture, that the pit is not the end, the road is not the end, the empty womb is not the end, God is the end and the beginning and everything in between.

What runs through all three stories is something so simple it almost seems too simple.

But it is the thing that made the difference for every one of them. They kept going to God in the suffering, not away from it.

Joseph in the prison, not shaking his fist at the sky, but staying faithful in the only place he had.

Ruth on the road, not returning to the comfort of what she knew, but choosing to follow a god she barely knew into a future she couldn’t see.

Hannah in the temple, not performing religious ritual, but pouring out everything she had in honest, broken, trusting prayer.

They brought themselves to God exactly as they were with nothing polished, nothing cleaned up, nothing impressive.

Just the weight of what they were carrying and the willingness to lay it at the feet of the one who could actually do something with it.

And he did. He always does. Not always in the way we expect. Not always on the timeline we would choose, not always with the specific answer we had in mind, but he does something.

Something only he can do. Something that makes the story better than the ending we would have written for ourselves because he sees the whole board and he is always working.

Even when we can’t see it, even when we can’t feel it, even when the pit is dark and the road is long and the womb is empty and the tears are all used up, he is working still, always for you.

Let these three stories sit with you, not as ancient history, not as religious inspiration that makes you feel good for a few minutes before the ordinary pressure of life rushes back in.

Let them sit with you as something true, as evidence, as the testimony of real people who were in real trouble and found a real God who was really there.

Because if God was with Joseph in a pit in Canaan 3,000 years ago, he is with you in whatever your pit looks like right now.

If God directed Ruth’s feet to a specific field in Bethlehem on a specific morning and built a royal lineage out of her faithfulness on a road, he can direct your steps in the season that feels the most uncertain.

The season where you can’t see the field yet, where you’re still on the road, where the destination is still hidden.

If God heard a prayer that no one else in the room could even hear because the words never made it past her lips, he hears you.

Whatever you are carrying right now that you haven’t been able to put words to yet, whatever is sitting in your chest too heavy to lift into language, he hears the groaning underneath the silence, he hears what you cannot say, and he remembers.

The Lord remembered Hannah. And the Lord has not forgotten you. Whatever chapter you are in, however long the pit has lasted, however dusty the road has become, however many months have turned into years of hoping and not yet seeing, he has not forgotten.

He is working, building something, moving pieces you cannot see on a board larger than you can imagine.

Getting you ready for a chapter that will make the current one make sense in a way it cannot possibly make sense right now.

You are not at the end of your story. You are in the middle of it.

And the God who finishes what he starts is still writing. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep.

You can rest for 8 hours and wake up carrying it. You can take a vacation and come home with it still sitting on your chest.

It is the exhaustion that comes from giving everything you have for a long time.

From fighting hard and believing hard and showing up hard day after day and then looking up one morning and finding that the tank is completely empty, not a little low, not running on fumes, empty.

And in that emptiness, the lies come easiest, the voice that says you are done, that there is nothing left, that everything you gave yourself to was pointless.

That God, if he exists, has either forgotten you or moved on to someone more useful.

There is a man in the Bible who sat down under a tree and asked God to let him die.

He was not being dramatic. He meant it with everything he had left, which in that moment was not very much.

His name was Elijah. And his story is one of the most important stories in all of scripture for anyone who has ever found themselves sitting under their own version of that tree.

There is also a story Jesus told about a father and a son, about the moment a son who had wasted everything finally came to his senses and started walking home.

And what happened on that road is the most vivid picture of the heart of God that human language has ever managed to capture.

And then there is a man named Zakius up a tree in the most unlikely moment of his life about to have his name called by someone he never expected to see looking up.

Three stories, one God always looking, always moving, always finding. Let’s go. To understand why Elijah sat down under a tree and asked to die, you have to understand what he had just come through.

Elijah was a prophet, one of the most extraordinary figures in all of the Old Testament.

A man whose word carried such weight that he announced a drought in Israel and it didn’t rain for 3 years.

A man who was fed by ravens in the wilderness when God told him to hide by the Kerth ravine.

A man who multiplied flour and oil for a widow in Zarapath so she and her son survived the famine.

A man who prayed over that widow’s dead son and the boy came back to life.

And then came Mount Carmel, the confrontation. Israel had been led into idol worship by its king Ahab and his wife Jezebel.

The prophets of Baal numbered 450. And Elijah stood against all of them alone on a mountain with the people of Israel watching.

He proposed a contest. Each side would prepare a bull on an altar and call on their god to send fire.

The God who answered by fire. He is God. The prophets of Baal went first.

They called and danced and shouted and cut themselves from morning until evening. Nothing happened.

No fire, no voice, no response. And then Elijah rebuilt the altar of the Lord.

He dug a trench around it. He had the people pour water over the sacrifice once, twice, three times until the water ran down and filled the trench.

And then he prayed simply, directly, “Lord, let it be known today that you are God in Israel.”

And the fire of the Lord fell. It burned up the sacrifice and the wood and the stones and the soil and licked up all the water in the trench.

When all the people saw it, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord, he is God.

The Lord, he is God.” It was the greatest moment of Elijah’s ministry. The most dramatic demonstration of divine power in his entire story.

And then everything fell apart. Jezebel heard what Elijah had done, that he had killed the 450 prophets of Baal.

And she sent him a message. By tomorrow, she said, “You will be dead just like them.”

And Elijah ran. The man who had just stood alone against 450 prophets on a mountain with supernatural fire falling from heaven ran in fear from one woman’s threat.

That is not a character flaw in Elijah. It is a deeply human moment. Because the adrenaline of the mountain had worn off.

The extraordinary had given way to the ordinary danger of a furious queen with real power and real soldiers.

And a very real promise. And something in Elijah broke. He ran a full day’s journey into the wilderness.

And then he sat down under a juniper tree and he prayed a prayer that is one of the most honest prayers in the entire Bible.

I have had enough, Lord. Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors.

I have had enough. Four words. Not a theological argument. Not a carefully crafted petition.

Just I have had enough. The prayer of a person who has reached the end of themselves, who has nothing left to give and no idea what comes next, who is not performing faith for anyone anymore, who is just sitting under a tree in the wilderness being completely honest with God.

And God’s response to this prayer is one of the most tender moments in all of scripture.

An angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” Not, “What is wrong with you?”

Not, “After everything I have done for you, this is how you respond. Not get yourself together.

You have work to do. Get up and eat. Elijah looked around and there beside his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals and a jar of water.

He ate and drank and then he lay down again. The angel came back a second time, touched him again and said, “Get up and eat for the journey is too great for you.

The journey is too great for you. Not you are too weak. Not you have failed.

Not you are not capable of what lies ahead. But the journey is too great for you to make it on what you have right now.

So eat because you need more than what you currently have in you to get where you are going.

That is a completely different kind of statement. It is not a critique. It is a provision.

It is God looking at his exhausted servant under a tree and saying what lies ahead is real and you cannot get there depleted.

So let me feed you first. Elijah ate and drank, and strengthened by that food, he traveled 40 days and 40 nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God.

The same mountain where Moses had his burning bush, the same mountain where the law was given to Israel, the mountain of God.

And there he went into a cave and spent the night. Now, notice that God did not rebuke Elijah for running.

He did not appear in the wilderness and tell him to go back and face Jezebel immediately.

He fed him. He let him rest. He gave him enough strength to travel to the mountain and then he met him there.

God did not shame Elijah for his fear. He met him in it, fed him in it, and then gently, gradually walked him through it.

He does the same thing with us. On the mountain, the word of the Lord came to Elijah.

What are you doing here, Elijah? Not an accusation, a question, an open door, a space for Elijah to say what was actually going on inside him.

And Elijah answered with everything he had been holding. I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.

The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword.

I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me, too.

I am the only one left. That is the lie that exhaustion tells. That is the sentence the enemy specializes in.

You are alone in this. No one else understands. No one else has held on this long.

No one else is still trying. You are the only one left. And even you are barely hanging on.

God did not argue with Elijah. He did not immediately correct the theology. He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

And then came a great and powerful wind that tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks.

But the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a still small voice, a gentle whisper.

After all the power and the noise and the drama, a whisper. And when Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Because something in him recognized it, the voice he had built his life around. Quiet now, gentle, right there, still there, even at the end of everything.

Still there, God asked again. What are you doing here, Elijah? And Elijah said the same thing.

I am the only one left. And they are trying to kill me. And God did not argue with the feeling.

He gave Elijah an assignment, three things to do. Go back the way you came.

Anoint a new king over Aram. Anoint a new king over Israel. And anoint Elisha as your successor, your prophet to take your place.

And then God said something that quietly dismantled the lie Elijah had been living inside of.

Yet I reserve 7,000 in Israel. All whose knees have not bowed to Bal and whose mouths have not kissed him.

All whose knees have naja alone the last faithful person standing. 7,000 people who had stayed true, who had not bowed, whose names Elijah did not know because he could not see them from where he was sitting.

But God knew every single one. You are not the only one left. The isolation Elijah felt was real.

The exhaustion was real. The fear was real. But the conclusion he had drawn from those feelings that he was alone, that it was over, that there was nothing left worth fighting for, was not real.

It was the story exhaustion tells when it gets loud enough to drown out everything else.

God did not confirm the lie. He corrected it gently with a whisper and a number, 7,000, still standing, still faithful, still there.

And Elijah got up. He went back. He found Elisha plowing a field. And he threw his cloak over him.

And the work continued. The man who sat under a juniper tree and asked to die had more to do.

And God knew it. And he met him under the tree. Not to scold him, not to shame him, but to feed him and whisper to him and send him back.

That is the God who finds you right where you are. Now, let’s move to a story that Jesus told.

Not a story from history, a parable, a picture that Jesus painted with words because he wanted to show his listeners something about the heart of God that facts alone could not communicate.

He had been criticized again by the Pharisees and the teachers of the law because he was eating with tax collectors and sinners and they were muttering about it.

Why does he welcome sinners and eat with them? And Jesus answered them with three stories.

A lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son. The third one is the one that has broken hearts open for 2,000 years.

It begins with a sentence that tells you immediately how this story is going to feel.

There was a man who had two sons, simple, ordinary. A father, two sons, a family.

And then the younger son does something that in the culture of the ancient near east would have been almost incomprehensibly disrespectful.

He went to his father and said, “Give me my share of the estate.” Now, in that culture, you received your inheritance when your father died.

To ask for it while he was still alive was essentially to say, “I wish you were dead.

I want what I have coming to me and I want it now before you are gone because waiting for you is not something I’m willing to do.

The father could have refused. He could have been furious. He could have thrown the son out for asking such a thing.

Instead, he divided his property between the two sons. He gave it without argument, without manipulation, without attaching conditions or timelines or I told you so is already loaded and ready to fire.

He gave it and the younger son took everything and left. The younger son gathered everything he had and traveled to a distant country.

And there, the Bible says, with two precise and devastating words, he squandered it. Squandered the money his father had worked a lifetime to build the inheritance that represented years of labor and sacrifice and careful stewardship.

Squandered on wild living, on things that felt like freedom and felt like fullness and felt like exactly what he had been missing until the money ran out.

And when it was all gone, a severe famine struck the country he was living in.

And he began to be in need. He found a job feeding pigs. And he was so hungry that the pods the pigs were eating started to look good to him.

He wanted to fill his stomach with what the pigs were eating. And no one gave him anything.

This is the far country. The place you end up when you run from the father.

The place that promised everything and delivered nothing. Where the hunger is not just physical but something deeper.

The hollow ache of a person who has been filling themselves with everything except the one thing they were actually made for.

And sitting in that pigsty in the deepest humiliation of his life, the son did what the Bible says is the turning point of the whole story.

He came to his senses. He came to his senses. He stopped running from the truth long enough to let it catch up with him.

He sat there in the pig feed and let himself feel the full weight of where he was and how he had gotten there.

And he thought about his father’s house where even the hired servants had food to spare and he was starving.

And then he made a decision. He said to himself, “I will set out and go back to my father just that I will go back.

Not I will wait until I have fixed myself enough to be presentable. Not I will earn my way back into his good graces before I knock on the door.

Not I will make a plan and rehearse my apology until it is polished enough to work.

I will go back now as I am smelling like pigs empty-handed with nothing to show for the inheritance except the hole it left when it was gone.

He rehearsed what he would say. He knew he had no right to be called a son anymore.

Make me one of your hired servants. That was the best he could hope for.

Not restoration, not reinstatement, just a roof and food and proximity to the father he had told he wished was dead.

So he got up and he went. Now, here is the part of the story that Jesus told with such specific detail that it is impossible to miss what he was saying about the heart of God.

The son was still a great way off when his father saw him. Still a great way off.

The father was watching. He had been watching. He had not given up. He had not reassigned the son’s room or written his name out of the family records or decided that the door was closed.

He was watching the road. The road his son had walked away on, watching it the way only someone who is actively hoping for something watches a road.

And he saw him coming from a long way away. And the father, this is the part that should make us catch our breath.

The father ran. The father ran. In the ancient near east, a man of dignity and standing did not run.

Running was for children and servants. A patriarch ran for no one. It was beneath the social standing that his culture required him to protect.

He ran anyway, ran down the road toward his returning son, and when he reached him, he threw his arms around him and kissed him.

Before the son said a word, before the apology, before the rehearsed speech about not being worthy to be called a son anymore, before any explanation or confession or attempt to make things right, the father threw his arms around him and kissed him.

And then the son started his speech. Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.

I am no longer worthy to be called your son. And the father interrupted him.

He called to his servants, Quick, bring the best robe and put it on him.

Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it.

Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again.

He was lost and is found. And they began to celebrate. The best robe, the ring, the sandals.

Each one of these things is significant. The robe represents honor. The ring represents authority.

The sandals represent sunship because slaves went barefoot. The father was not restoring him as a servant.

He was restoring him as a son, not what he had lost, not the inheritance, his identity.

He came home hoping for a job. He found a party. He came home prepared for punishment.

He found a robe. He came home with a speech about unworthiness. And the father never let him finish it.

Jesus told this parable in response to people who were muttering about why he spent time with sinners.

And the answer he gave them is this story. This is why. Because this is what God is like.

Not the God who waits at the door with his arms crossed and a list of conditions that must be met before you allowed back in.

Not the God who keeps a careful record of every squandered gift and reminds you of it every time you come near.

Not the God who says you can come back, but you will have to earn back what you threw away.

The God who runs, who throws his arms around you before you finish your apology, who calls for the robe and the ring and the party before you have had a chance to prove you mean it this time.

The God who was watching the road, who saw you coming from a great way off, who recognized your walk even before he could see your face because he has been watching for you because the watching never stopped.

This story has sat at the center of the Christian faith for 2,000 years because it answers the deepest fear that every person who has ever walked away from God carries on the way home.

The fear that it is too late, that too much has been squandered, that the distance is too great, that the sins are too many, that the father will not run this time, that the arms will not open, that this time the door will stay shut.

Jesus told this story to say no to every person who has ever thought it was too late.

No. The father is still watching the road. The robe is still hanging there. The ring is still ready.

The party is still waiting to begin. Come home as you are right now. The father is running.

There is a detail at the end of the prodigal son parable that is worth sitting with because Jesus didn’t end the story with the party.

He went on, “And what comes next reveals something just as important as the father running, the older son, the one who had stayed, who had done everything right, who had worked faithfully and never left and never squandered and never embarrassed the family.

When he heard the music and the dancing and found out what was happening, he was angry.

He refused to go in and he told his father exactly how he felt. Look, all these years I have been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders.

Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.

But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him.

This son of yours, he couldn’t even say, “My brother, this son of yours, and the father’s response to the older son is just as tender as his response to the younger one.”

He didn’t rebuke him. He didn’t dismiss his feelings. He went out to him the same way he had run to the younger one.

He came to where the older son was outside refusing to come in and he said, “My son, you are always with me and everything I have is yours.

But we had to celebrate and be glad because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again.

He was lost and is found, your brother.” The father gently put the word brother back where the older son had removed it.

Jesus left the story there open, unresolved. We never find out if the older son went inside because the story is still going and the question it leaves hanging in the air is still the one being asked today.

Will you celebrate when the lost one comes home? Will you go in? The third story in this part takes place in a city called Jericho.

And it involves a man who had climbed a tree not for exercise, not for the view, but because he was short and a crowd had gathered on the street and he could not see over the heads of the people in front of him.

His name was Zakius. And Zakius was the chief tax collector in Jericho, which in first century Jewish society meant he was in the eyes of most of the people around him the worst kind of person imaginable.

Tax collectors worked for Rome. They collected money from their own people to fund the occupation of their own land.

And they were famous for taking more than what was owed, skimming the excess for themselves.

It was a system built on exploitation, and the people it exploited had no recourse because Rome backed it up with force.

Zakius was not just a tax collector. He was the chief tax collector, the head of the operation, which means he had gotten very good at the part of the job that involved making himself rich at the expense of everyone around him.

He was wealthy. The Bible says it plainly. And in Jericho, where he lived and worked, his wealth sat in the center of a deep and wide moat of contempt, the people he had cheated passed him on the streets every day.

They knew what he had taken, and they remembered. So when Jesus came to Jericho, when the crowd gathered to see this teacher everyone was talking about, when word spread that he was passing through, Zakius wanted to see him, not to be seen, not to be noticed, just to see, to get a look at this person that people couldn’t stop talking about.

And because he was short and the crowd was thick, he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore fig tree, the richest man in Jericho.

Up a tree, hoping no one would notice. Jesus came down the road, moving through the crowd, people pressing in from every side.

And then he stopped under the tree. He looked up and he saw Zakius. And what he said next has a warmth to it that is almost hard to take in when you consider who he was saying it to.

Zakius, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today. He knew his name.

The crowd pushing in from every side. Hundreds of people wanting to see Jesus. People with genuine needs, people with clean hands and good reputations and long histories of faithfulness.

And Jesus stopped under the tree where the most hated man in town was hiding.

And he said his name. I must stay at your house today. Must. Not I would like to if it is convenient.

Not if you don’t mind. Must. As if this was not an optional detour, but the exact reason he was in Jericho.

As if the feet of Jesus had been pointed at that sycamore tree from the beginning of the journey.

Zakius came down immediately and he welcomed Jesus gladly and the crowd muttered, “Of course they did.”

Because the crowd always mutters when grace goes to people the crowd has decided don’t deserve it.

They said, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner. He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

As if that were a criticism. As if Jesus didn’t already know exactly who he was having dinner with.

As if the whole point wasn’t precisely that he was going to the house of a sinner.

Because sinners are who he came for, not as a compromise of his holiness, as the expression of it.

Because holy love does not stay away from the broken. It goes to them. It looks up into the tree and says the name, “What happened at Zakius’s house that evening?”

We are not told in detail. We don’t have the record of the conversation over dinner.

We don’t know exactly what Jesus said or how long they talked or what the precise moment was when something cracked open in Zakius.

We just know what Zakius said when they stood up. Look Lord, here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor.

And if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.

Half of everything given to the poor and restitution four times over for anyone he had cheated.

Four times was the standard the law of Moses required for the most serious cases of theft.

Zakius was not making a minimum gesture. He was making a maximum one. He was not giving the least he could get away with.

He was giving more than he needed to. Something had happened to Zakius at that dinner table.

Something that could not have been manufactured by willpower or social pressure or the shame of public opinion.

Because public opinion had been against him for years, and it had never moved him before.

What moved him was being seen, being known, being called by name by someone who had no obligation to stop under his tree, someone who had every reason by the standards of the crowd to keep walking and who stopped anyway and looked up and said his name and said, “I must come to your house.

I must. As if Zakius mattered enough to be a must. And Jesus said something when he heard what Zakius had declared.

Something that is the summary of this entire story and of every story in this script.

Today salvation has come to this house. For the son of man came to seek and to save the lost.

To seek and to save the lost. To seek and to save the lost. That sentence is one of the most important in the entire gospel of Luke because it tells you the operating principle of Jesus’s entire ministry.

What he was doing, why he was doing it, who he was doing it for.

He came to seek, not to wait for the lost to find their way back on their own.

Not to leave the door open and hope they notice. To seek actively, deliberately, specifically with names, with direction, with a must.

Elijah was hiding under a tree asking to die. And God came to him there, not to the mountain, to the tree, under the tree, with bread and water and a whisper.

The prodical son was still a great way off. And the father ran down the road to meet him before he arrived, before he finished his apology, before he had made any gesture of restoration.

Zakius was up a tree trying not to be noticed. And Jesus stopped underneath him and said his name and said, “I must come to your house.”

Under the tree, down the road, up the tree. God finds people in the strangest places, in the most embarrassing positions, in the moments that are the least impressive and the least polished and the furthest from what anyone would choose for the moment of their encounter with the divine.

And that is the point. The seeking is not conditional on the person being findable.

It is not dependent on the lost one making themselves easy to locate. The shepherd leaves the 99.

He searches until he finds. And when he finds it, he does not put it down and point it toward home and say, “Get yourself back from here.”

He puts it on his shoulders and he carries it all the way home rejoicing.

That is the God of this story. And he has not changed. Let’s sit with Elijah for another moment.

Because the part of his story that matters most for the people who need it most is not the fire on Mount Carmel.

It is the juniper tree. The fire on Mount Carmel is the part of Elijah’s story that gets preached, that gets celebrated, that fills the highlight reel.

The moment of supernatural power. The altar that burned. The 450 prophets silenced. The rain coming after 3 years of drought.

The juniper tree is not a highlight. The juniper tree is where you end up when the highlight is over and the adrenaline is gone and the extraordinary has given way to the ordinary.

And you realize that Jezebel is still out there and you are still tired. And the fear that you thought the miracle would take away is still sitting right there in your chest where it has always lived.

The juniper tree is honest and the people who need Elijah’s story most are not the people standing on the mountain watching fire fall from heaven.

They are the people who were on the mountain once and haven’t been able to find their way back.

The people who used to have faith that felt like fire and now struggle to get out of bed.

The people who gave everything they had to something that mattered and found themselves empty.

For those people, the juniper tree is sacred ground because God came there not to the mountain, not to the place of fire and power and public victory.

To the tree, he came with bread and water and a gentle touch and a question that opened a door and a whisper after all the noise had passed and a correction so quiet and so specific that only someone who was listening very closely could hear it.

7,000 still standing. You are not alone. And then the assignment, the road forward, the next thing.

Not because Elijah had figured everything out, not because the fear was gone, but because God does not leave his people under the tree.

He feeds them there and then he calls them forward gently at the pace of the journey.

The tree is not the end. It is just where he finds you before he sends you.

The prodigal son’s story is about three things that are so simple that we sometimes miss how profound they are.

The first thing is the moment he came to his senses. There is something important about that phrase.

He did not come to his senses when someone came and found him. He did not come to his senses because a preacher showed up at the pigsty.

He came to his senses because the misery of the far country finally became louder than the appeal of it.

Sometimes that is what it takes. Sometimes the only thing that will wake us up is the smell of the pigs.

The hunger that nothing in the far country can satisfy. The hollow emptiness of having everything the world offers and finding it weighs nothing, is worth nothing, fills nothing.

If you are in a far country right now, if the life you ran toward is starting to feel like what it actually is, the hunger you are feeling is not punishment.

It is a gift. It is the mercy of a God who loves you enough to let the far country be exactly what it is.

So that the contrast with the father’s house becomes undeniable. The misery is not the end.

It is the beginning of the journey home. The second thing is the moment he got up.

He didn’t wait until he felt ready. He didn’t wait until the feeling of unworthiness went away.

He got up from the pigsty while he was still covered in it and he walked toward the father.

Not because he was sure of the reception, not because he was confident it would go well, but because the alternative was staying and staying was worse.

And the third thing is the moment the father saw him coming still a great way off and ran.

The getting up is yours. The running is his. You take the step. He covers the distance.

Zakius’s story is worth sitting with one more time because there is something in it that is easy to overlook.

Jesus said to Zakius, “Today salvation has come to this house. Not today you have earned your way back into right standing with God.

Not today. Today you have done enough to make up for what you did. Not today.

You have proven yourself worthy of a second chance. Today salvation has come. Salvation came to the house like a guest because Jesus went there because Jesus stopped under the tree and said the name and said, “I must because Jesus initiated because Jesus sought.”

Zakius did not climb the tree to be found. He climbed it to see. He had no idea that the act of wanting to see would result in being seen.

He had no idea that his small, shy, hide in the branches attempt to get a glimpse of this teacher would result in a dinner invitation that would change the entire direction of his life.

That is the beauty of grace. You reach out to see Jesus and he says, “I see you.”

You make a small uncertain move toward him and he makes an enormous certain move toward you.

You whisper and he answers. You run and he has already been running longer. You look up and he is already looking down.

This is not a doctrine. This is a person. The same person who is described in Luke 15 as the shepherd who leaves the 99 to find the one who searches the whole house for the one lost coin.

Who runs down the road for the one lost son? Who stops under the one tree for the one lost tax collector one.

He is a God who goes after the one. Who counts everyone. Who knows the name of everyone.

Who considers no one too far gone and no situation too hopeless and no tree too undignified to look up into.

You are not lost to him. You have never been lost to him. He knows exactly where you are.

Let’s bring these three stories together for a moment. Elijah, the prophet who had just seen God’s power move in the most extraordinary way, running in fear, sitting under a tree, done, empty, asking to die.

The prodigal son, a young man who had wasted everything his father gave him, sitting in a pigsty, hungry, ashamed, certain the best he could hope for was a servant’s job.

Zakius, the most hated man in Jericho, wealthy but despised, hidden up a tree, trying to see without being seen.

Certain that whatever this Jesus was offering, it was not for someone like him. Three people, three different kinds of lost.

Elijah was lost in exhaustion, in the aftermath of something great that had given way to something hard, in the gap between what faith had produced on the mountain and what life looked like in the valley after.

The prodigal was lost in consequence. In the wreckage of his own choices, in the kind of broken that you bring on yourself and cannot entirely blame on anyone else.

In the far country that he chose and that delivered exactly what far countries always deliver.

Zakius was lost in isolation, in the wealth that had purchased his comfort and cost him his community, in the life he had built that kept everyone at arms length because the only way to maintain it was to keep taking and keep justifying and keep not looking too closely at the people he was hurting.

Three different lost places and the same God showing up in all three of them in different ways with different words at different speeds but with the same direction toward always toward under the tree down the road up the tree he always comes toward he never stops coming toward there is a reason these stories have survived for thousands of years a reason they have been told in every language and in every culture and to every kind of person in every kind of condition because They are not just about Elijah and a nameless younger son and a tax collector in Jericho.

They are about the person reading this right now. The person who is tired in a way that sleep cannot fix.

Who gave everything for a long time and found themselves under a tree asking God if maybe it is time to be done.

If the fire has gone out permanently. If there is anything left, there is bread right there beside you.

God’s provision is not contingent on your energy level. His care does not wait for you to pull yourself together.

He comes to the tree. He touches your shoulder and he says, “The simplest and most sufficient thing, get up and eat.

The journey is too great for you to make it on what you currently have.

So, let me feed you first.” And the person who is in the far country right now, who knows exactly how they got there and is not entirely sure how to get back, who has rehearsed the apology and is still afraid the door will be shut, who has told themselves they have gone too far this time, done too much, wasted too much, too many years gone, too many bridges burned.

The father is watching the road right now. He has not stopped watching. The robe is hanging there.

The ring is ready. And when he sees you coming, still a great way off.

He will run. You take the step. He covers the distance. And the person who is up the tree, trying to see without being seen, who wants to believe this is real, but is not sure there is a place in it for someone like them who has their reasons for staying hidden, for watching from a distance.

He sees you. He has always seen you. And he is about to say your name.

The thing that ties all three stories in part two together is the same thing that tied all three stories in part one together.

God’s movement is always toward, always, without exception, without condition, without the prerequisite that you have to be in a certain state or have reached a certain level of readiness or have dealt with a certain amount of your mess before he will come near.

He came near to Elijah under the tree. Not after Elijah got up and started moving.

While he was still lying down asking to die, he ran to the prodigal son.

While the son was still a great way off, not after the sun had proven himself, not after he had worked off some of the debt, while he was still walking toward the house, still smelling like pigs, still not home yet, he stopped under Zakius’s tree, not after Zakius had made restitution and changed his ways.

Before any of that, when Zakius was still the chief tax collector who had cheated everyone in town, the movement is always first.

The grace is always first. The initiative belongs to God. And this is important for a very specific reason.

Because it means you cannot outrun it. You cannot out sin it. You cannot outdistance it.

You cannot get to a place so far or so dark or so broken that the seeking stops.

Because the seeking is not driven by your condition. It is driven by his character.

And his character does not change. He is the God who finds, who runs, who says names, who stops under trees, who sends angels with bread, who whispers in the quiet after the noise, who is right now, wherever you are reading this, coming toward you.

All that is required of you is what Elijah did and the prodigal son did and Zakius did.

I want to say something before we move into the final part of this script.

Something that feels important to say out loud. These stories are not just for people in dramatic crisis.

They are not only for the person in the pigsty or the person under the juniper tree or the person up the sycamore fig tree.

They are also for the person whose life looks fine from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.

For the person who is not in a dramatic far country but has slowly over years drifted to a place where God feels distant and the faith feels flat and the fire that once burned has settled into something they can barely feel anymore.

For that person, the story of Zakius might be the most relevant one. Because Zakius didn’t climb that tree out of desperation.

He climbed it out of curiosity. Something in him had heard about Jesus and wanted to see.

Not necessarily to be found. Not necessarily because he had hit bottom, just to see.

And sometimes that is enough. A flicker of wanting, a small movement toward, a quiet admission maybe only to yourself, that you wonder if there is more than what you currently have.

That you are curious about the person everyone seems to be talking about. That you would climb a tree if it meant getting a better look, if that is where you are.

The tree is not too undignified. The curiosity is not too small. The wondering is not too vague.

He stops under trees. He says names. He says, “I must come to your house even when you were only trying to see.

Let yourself want to see. That is enough to start with because the God who found Zakius up a tree in Jericho is the same God who sees you in your ordinary Tuesday wondering if this could be real.”

It is. He is. And he is already looking up. Part two has given us three people who were found in three very different places.

Under a tree in the wilderness, in a pigsty in a far country, up a tree on a street in Jericho.

Three places that have nothing in common except this. God showed up in all of them with bread and a whisper and a party and a ring and a name called out in the middle of a crowd.

He is the God who finds you right where you are. Not where you think you should be.

Not where you wish you were. Not at the place you are aiming for. Right where you are in the exhaustion and the consequence and the isolation and the wondering and the hunger and the hiding.

Right where you are. And the finding is never just for you. It never ends with you.

Elijah was found under the tree and sent back with a purpose that would shape the history of Israel.

The prodigal son was found on the road and brought home to a party that the older brother needed as much as the younger one did.

Zakius was found up a tree and his transformation rippled out to everyone he had cheated.

Salvation came to his house which included everyone in it. When God finds you, he is not just reaching one person.

He is starting something. He is restoring something. He is sending something out into the world that you cannot yet see the full shape of.

You are not just a lost sheep. You are a lost sheep who when found gets put on the shoulders of the shepherd and carried home while he rejoices.

And the rejoicing happens in the company of heaven. The angels celebrate because everyone who is found sends a ripple through the whole story.

You matter that much. You have always mattered that much. There is a kind of hope that only shows up in the fire.

Not the hope that comes easily. Not the hope that lives in the good seasons when things are going well and the prayers are being answered and the path forward is clear and the people you love are healthy and the work of your hands is bearing fruit.

That hope is real and it is good. But it is a different kind. The hope we are talking about in this final part is the kind that is forged.

The kind that gets made in the places you never asked to be. In the furnaces and the long dark nights and the seasons of imprisonment that nobody chose.

In the moments when every visible evidence says the fire is going to consume you and there is no way through and no way out.

And then something happens. Someone appears and the fire that was meant to destroy becomes the place where God becomes undeniable.

Three stories for this final part. Each one a fire of a different kind. Three young men thrown into a furnace so hot it killed the soldiers who threw them in.

A woman who had been sick for 12 years who pressed through a crowd to touch the hem of a garment.

And two men singing in a prison at midnight with their feet in stocks and their backs bearing the marks of a beating.

Three fires, three impossible situations, three moments when the only thing left was to trust the God who was already in the flame.

And three of the most beautiful demonstrations of what happens when that trust holds. Sit with us for this last part.

Let these stories do what they were always meant to do. Not just inform, not just inspire, but reach into the places where the fire has been burning the longest and remind you you are not alone in the flame.

To understand the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, you have to understand where they were and how they had gotten there.

They were Jewish young men taken from Jerusalem as captives during the Babylonian conquest. Carried to Babylon, the most powerful empire in the ancient world, and placed into a training program designed to produce officials who would serve the Babylonian court.

They had new names given to them, Babylonian names, an attempt to erase the identity that their Jewish names carried.

They were taught the language and literature of Babylon. They were immersed in a culture that was not theirs, designed to be absorbed, assimilated, made into something useful to an empire that had no interest in the God they had grown up worshiping.

And yet they held on in subtle ways and then in very public ways. They held on.

When the king’s food and wine were offered to them as part of their training, they asked to eat vegetables and water instead.

Not because the food was bad, but because accepting the king’s food meant participating in something that compromised their devotion to God, and God honored it.

They came out of that 10-day vegetable diet healthier than the young men who had eaten the royal food.

Small faithfulness. In a place where no one would have blamed them for blending in, in a culture that was doing everything it could to reshape them into something else, they held on to the small thing, the quiet daily decision to be different.

And that small faithfulness prepared them for the moment when the stakes went from a dietary choice to a furnace.

King Nebuchadnezzar built an image, a statue of gold 90 ft high and 9 ft wide.

And he commanded all the officials of his empire to come to the dedication of the image.

When the music played, everyone was to fall down and worship the golden statue. Anyone who did not would be thrown immediately into a blazing furnace.

The music played and everyone fell down. The whole plane of Babylon bowing to a 90- ft statue of gold at the sound of the music except three men, Shadrach, Mach, and Abednego remained standing.

Now the king gave them a second chance. He brought them before him. And he said to them with a threat that was barely disguised as an offer, “Is it true that you do not serve my gods or worship the image of gold I have set up?

I will give you one more chance. When the music plays, if you are ready to fall down and worship the image very good, but if you do not worship it, you will be thrown immediately into the blazing furnace.

Then what god will be able to rescue you from my hand?” It is a good question, a reasonable question actually, from a human perspective.

The most powerful king in the world, a furnace so hot that the men who operated it would be killed by its heat, and a 90-ft statue of gold that the entire empire had just fallen before.

What God will be able to rescue you from my hand. And what the three young men said in response is one of the most faithfilled, most honest, most beautifully human declarations in all of scripture.

They said, “King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter.

If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from your majesty’s hand.

But even if he does not, we want you to know, your majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.

Read that again slowly because every word matters. We do not need to defend ourselves.

They were not going to spend their final moments trying to argue their way out.

They were not going to make a deal or find a compromise or frame their faith in language that made it more palatable to the king.

They simply told the truth. Our God is able to deliver us. That is the confidence.

That is the theology. The God we serve has the power to get us out of this.

We believe that. But even if he does not, we will not bow. But even if he does not, that phrase, those five words, that is where faith lives.

Not in the guarantee of a specific outcome. Not in the certainty that God will do what we are hoping he will do in the way we are hoping he will do it.

But in the commitment that holds even when he doesn’t. Even if he doesn’t rescue us the way we want to be rescued.

Even if the fire comes, even if the answer is no. Even if the path goes through the furnace instead of around it, we will not bow.

We will not trade the real god for a golden substitute. We will not let the threat of a furnace be louder than the faithfulness of the one we serve.

That is not naive. That is the deepest, most tested, most unshakable faith available to a human being.

Nebuchadnezzar was furious. The Bible says his attitude toward them changed. And he ordered the furnace to be heated seven times hotter than usual.

Seven times. So hot that the strongest soldiers in his army were killed by the heat as they threw the three men in.

And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego fell bound into the blazing furnace. And then Nebuchadnezzar leaped to his feet in amazement.

He said to his advisers, “Weren’t there three men that we tied up and threw into the fire?”

They said, “Yes.” He said, “Look, I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods.”

Four men, three went in, four are walking around, unbound, the ropes that tied them when they were thrown in, burned off by the fire.

The very thing that was meant to kill them, the fire that Nebuchadnezzar had stoked to seven times its normal heat, had burned away their chains and left them free, walking around in the middle of it, with someone else, a fourth figure, walking with them in the fire.

The Bible does not tell us definitively who the fourth figure was. Nebuchadnezzar described him as someone whose appearance was like a son of the gods.

Many scholars and theologians believe this was a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus, the one who would later say, “I am with you always, present in the furnace, before the incarnation, before the manger in Bethlehem, before anything, walking with them in the fire, unharmed, Nebuchadnezzar went to the entrance of the furnace and called them out.

Shadrach, Meach, and Abednego, servants of the most high God, come out. Come here.” And they came out of the fire.

And the officials who gathered around them saw something that the Bible records with quiet precision and enormous significance.

The fire had not harmed their bodies. Not a hair of their heads was singed.

Their robes were not scorched. And there was no smell of fire on them. Not a hair, not a scorched thread, not even the smell.

The fire touched nothing it was not supposed to touch. The chains were gone. The men were unharmed.

And the only evidence that they had ever been in a furnace at all was the testimony of the people who had watched them go in and come out.

Nebuchadnezzar praised the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The man who had just commanded his entire empire to worship a golden statue declared that no other god can save in this way.

He issued a decree that no one in his entire empire could say anything against the god of these three men.

Three people who would not bow, who stood while everyone else fell, who said, “Even if he does not, we will not worship your statue.”

And who walked out of the furnace that was meant to end their story not just alive but completely untouched and with someone having walked through it with them.

The fire did not destroy them. The fire revealed something. It revealed who was with them.

It revealed a presence that could not be seen on the plane when everyone was bowing.

But inside the furnace when it was just them in the flames, he was right there.

The story of the three men in the furnace is not a story about a miraculous escape from suffering.

It is a story about a miraculous presence in suffering. They did not avoid the furnace.

They went in. The fire was real. The heat was real. The chains were real.

The threat was real. And in the middle of all of it, someone was walking with them.

That is the promise that carries this story across 26 centuries and makes it as relevant to someone reading it today as it was to the people who lived it.

Not that God will always take the furnace away. Not that faith is a shield against the fire, but that he goes in with you.

When Isaiah wrote the words that God spoke to his people in Isaiah 43, words we touched on in an earlier script, he wrote them for this exact moment.

For the person who is in a furnace right now, who did not choose the fire and cannot see the way out.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. The flames will not set you ablaze.

Through, not around, through. Not rescued before you get there. Through with him beside you, not a hair singed, not a robe scorched, not the smell of smoke left on you when you come out.

Whatever your furnace looks like, whatever fire you are walking through right now, whatever the Nebuchadnezzar in your life has stoked to seven times its normal heat, there is a fourth figure walking in it with you.

You are not in the fire alone. You have never been alone in the fire.

The second story in this final part is one of the most tender and most human encounters in the entire Gospel of Mark.

We are in a crowd, a large, pressing, jostling crowd of people trying to get close to Jesus.

The kind of crowd where everyone is pushing and no one is particularly careful and the idea of personal space is a luxury no one is affording anyone.

Jesus is moving through it on his way somewhere. On his way to the home of a religious leader named Gyrus whose 12-year-old daughter is dying.

Gyrus had come to Jesus in desperation and fallen at his feet and begged him to come and heal his daughter.

And Jesus was going. And in the crowd somewhere in the press of bodies and elbows and noise was a woman.

She had been sick for 12 years. 12 years of bleeding that the doctors of the day had no solution for.

She had spent everything she had on medical treatment. She had gotten worse, not better.

She was, by the standards of her religious community, ritually unclean, which meant she could not participate in worship could not be touched without making the person who touched her also unclean.

12 years of sickness, 12 years of spending everything she had. 12 years of isolation, of being the person everyone avoided touching, of watching life happen around her while she watched from the outside.

She had heard about Jesus and she had come not to stand in front of him, not to call out to him, not to ask for an audience or an appointment or a conversation, just to get close enough to touch the edge of his garment.

If I just touch his clothes, she said to herself, “I will be healed.” She pressed through the crowd.

It could not have been easy. Every person she touched, every body she brushed against in the pressing crowd, she was making unclean by the standards of her religious world.

She was violating the boundaries that her condition had placed around her for 12 years.

But she pressed through. She got close enough and she reached out and she touched the edge of his garment and immediately her bleeding stopped.

The Bible says she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

Not gradually, not probably, immediately. She felt it. The thing that had defined 12 years of her life stopped in an instant.

And then Jesus stopped in the middle of the crowd with Gyrus waiting and a dying 12-year-old girl and an urgent destination just ahead.

Jesus stopped and he said, “Who touched my clothes?” His disciples looked at him like he was asking a strange question.

They said, “Master, the crowd is pressing against you and you ask, “Who touched me?”

Everyone was touching him. The whole crowd was touching him. But Jesus said, “Someone touched me.

I know that power has gone out from me.” And he looked around to see who had done it.

And the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet.

She was trembling with fear. She told him the whole truth. The 12 years, the doctors, the money spent, the getting worse instead, better, the reaching through the crowd, the moment she touched his garment, all of it.

She told him the whole truth. And Jesus said to her something that is worth reading very slowly because every word of it matters.

Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

Daughter, not woman, not you, the one who touched me. Not the unclean one who just violated every social boundary by pressing through a crowd and reaching out to me.

Daughter, an intimate word, a family word, a word that did not just address her condition, but her identity.

In a single word, Jesus placed her inside a relationship, not a transaction, a family.

Your faith has healed you. The faith that pressed through the crowd. The faith that was probably embarrassed and probably terrified and probably not even sure it would work.

The faith that reached out anyway. The small trembling everything I have left kind of faith.

That faith that was enough. Go in peace. Peace. Shalom. Not just the absence of the physical sickness, but the wholeness that goes deeper than the body, the restored relationship, the lifted isolation, the freedom from 12 years of being the untouchable one.

Be freed from your suffering. Not only the bleeding had stopped, the suffering was done.

The 12-year chapter was closed, a new one was beginning. All of this because she pressed through a crowd and reached out her hand.

Because she said to herself, “If I can just touch the edge of his garment, because even a small faith, reaching toward the right person is enough to change everything.”

The power went out from him, to her, through a touch, through a moment of trembling, desperate everything I have left faith.

He felt her in a crowd where everyone was pressing. He felt her. There is something about this story that keeps calling me back to it.

And it is not just the miracle. It is the detail of why Jesus stopped.

He didn’t have to stop. He felt the power go out from him. He knew something had happened and he could have kept walking.

He could have let her have the healing quietly and continued on to Gyrus’s house where the urgency was obvious and the need was named and the social standing of the person asking was significant.

A religious leader had fallen at his feet. A 12-year-old girl was dying. And Jesus stopped.

For a woman with no name in the text, no social standing, no religious credentials, no official claim on his attention, a woman who had been invisible to her community for 12 years.

He stopped and he looked around and he waited until she came forward. Why? Why not just let her go quietly healed into the crowd?

Why make a public moment of something she had been trying to do privately? Because he wanted to do more than heal her body.

He wanted to give her back her voice, her dignity, the right to tell her story, the public declaration that she was not unclean.

She was not invisible. She was not a problem to be managed or a condition to be avoided.

She was a daughter with a story worth hearing. In front of everyone who had been pressing around Jesus that day, he made her tell the whole truth.

And then he called her daughter. In front of all of them, the healing was private.

The restoration was public. Because some things need to be restored publicly that were broken publicly.

Some shame needs a public undoing. He saw her. He stopped for her. He named her daughter in front of everyone.

He still does this. Let’s sit with what 12 years means. 12 years is a long time to carry something.

Long enough for it to feel permanent. Long enough for the hope of something different to have faded and been replaced by something more like resignation.

Long enough to have spent everything you had trying to fix it. Long enough to have watched the doctors shake their heads and take your money and leave you worse than when you came.

12 years of being untouchable, of watching people step back when you came close, of living at the margins of a community that defined itself by the boundaries it maintained, of knowing that the word unclean was attached to your name in the minds of everyone around you.

And then one day you hear about a teacher and something stirs. Not a certainty, not a fully formed plan, just a stirring.

If I could just touch his garment. That is not bold faith. That is barely hanging on faith.

That is I have tried everything else faith. That is the faith of a person who has been disappointed enough times that hope feels dangerous.

Who reaches out not because they are certain it will work but because the alternative is continuing to be exactly where they are and it is enough.

It was always going to be enough. Because Jesus is not looking for a certain quantity of faith before he responds.

He is looking for the direction of it, the reaching, the press through the crowd kind of movement toward him.

Even if the movement is small, even if the hand is trembling, even if the theology is incomplete and the understanding is partial and the certainty is fragile, direction matters more than quantity, press through the crowd, reached out, even trembling.

That is the model. And it works because the power goes out from him regardless of the size of the hand that reaches.

The third and final story in the script takes place at the worst possible time in the worst possible place, midnight, in a prison in Philippi, and his companion, Silas, had done something that got them into serious trouble.

They had cast out a spirit from a young slave girl who had been used by her owners to tell fortunes, which meant her owners could no longer profit from her, which meant they were furious, which meant they dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates, which meant a crowd joined in the attack, which meant the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten.

The word for beaten here means flogged with rods. It was not a gentle correction.

It was severe enough to leave lasting marks. Paul would later write to the Corinthians about the times he received this kind of punishment.

He knew what it cost. After the beating, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer, following his orders, put them in the inner cell, the most secure part of the prison, and fastened their feet in stocks.

Beaten, imprisoned, stocks on their feet. Midnight. And this is the moment that I want to sit in for a while because what happens next is so unexpected, so counterintuitive, so utterly unlike what you would expect from people in that situation that it has echoed through 2,000 years of Christian history as one of the most powerful testimonies to the nature of genuine faith.

Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, not whispering, singing. The Greek word suggests they were singing loudly enough that the other prisoners were listening to them beaten in stocks at midnight and singing singing, not complaining, not planning their escape, not writing furious mental letters to the magistrates, not rehearsing their grievances or cataloging their injustices or listing everything that God owed them for getting them into this mess.

Singing hymns to God. The other prisoners were listening, which means the songs were audible, which means Paul and Silas were not quietly humming to themselves in the dark to maintain their composure.

They were singing out loud in a Roman prison with their feet in stocks and their backs bearing the marks of rods.

And then at midnight, suddenly a violent earthquake so powerful that the foundations of the prison were shaken.

Every door flew open. Every chain fell loose. The same thing that happened to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace happened to Paul and Silas in the prison.

The thing that was meant to bind them was loosed. The thing that was meant to contain them was opened.

And the jailer woke up, saw the doors open, drew his sword to kill himself, because Roman law held him responsible for the prisoners.

An escaped prisoner meant a death sentence for the guard. And Paul shouted from inside the prison, “Don’t harm yourself.

We are all here. But we are all here. They hadn’t run in the chaos of a midnight earthquake with every door blown open and every chain fallen off.

They had stayed because the singing had produced something in Paul and Silas that a midnight earthquake could not undo.

A settledness, a peace that the prison could not shake because the prison was not the source of it.

A joy that the stocks could not silence because the joy was not contingent on their circumstances.

They stayed and the staying changed the jailer’s life. The jailer called for lights. He rushed in.

He fell trembling before Paul and Silas. And he asked the question that is the most important question any person can ask.

Sir, what must I do to be saved? He had watched these men being thrown into his prison.

He had fastened the stocks on their feet. He had seen the earthquake. He had seen every door open and every chain fall.

And instead of chaos and escape and the disaster he expected, he found two men still there, calm, calling out to him not to hurt himself.

And he wanted what they had. What must I do to be saved? And Paul and Silas said the answer that has been the answer in every generation since.

Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. The jailer took them and washed their wounds at that hour of the night.

And then he and his entire household were baptized. And the Bible says he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God.

Filled with joy. The man who an hour ago had been about to kill himself because he thought his prisoners had escaped.

Filled with joy because the prisoners who hadn’t escaped told him how to be free, Paul and Silas brought the gospel to Philippi, but the midnight earthquake brought the gospel to the jailer.

The beating and the stocks and the prison and the midnight song brought one family into the kingdom of God.

And the next morning, when the magistrates sent word to release Paul and Silas, Paul revealed that they were Roman citizens who had been beaten publicly without a trial and thrown in prison, which was illegal.

The magistrates were alarmed. They came themselves to escort Paul and Silas out, and they asked them to leave the city, and Paul and Silas left, but not before going to Lydia’s house and meeting with the believers and encouraging them.

The first thing they did when they were free was encourage someone else. What Paul and Silas did at midnight is something that is easy to admire from a distance and very difficult to do up close.

Singing in the prison, not because everything was fine, not because the pain had gone away or the injustice didn’t sting or the situation was comfortable, but because the joy they had was not sourced in their circumstances.

It was sourced in something that their circumstances could not reach. Paul would later write about this from another prison.

He wrote to the church in Philippi, the very city where this midnight earthquake happened.

And he said, “I have learned in whatever state I am to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I have learned contentment is not natural.

It is not the default setting of the human heart. It is learned, practiced, chosen over and over again in the situations that make it hardest to choose.

The midnight prison is where Paul learned it not in a comfortable season in stocks after a beating in the dark.

And what he learned in that prison, he carried with him for the rest of his ministry.

The ability to sing when the circumstances say there is nothing to sing about. The ability to stay when everything has been opened and you could go.

The ability to encourage someone else the morning after your own worst night. That is not a personality trait.

That is a fruit grown in the dark in the middle of the night in a prison in Philippi and it is available to every person who chooses to sing when the circumstances say there is nothing to sing about.

Let’s bring the three stories of part three together. And let’s look at what they share.

Shadrach, Mach, and Abednego in the furnace. A woman who had been sick for 12 years pressing through a crowd.

Paul and Silas singing at midnight in a prison. Three different fires. Three different kinds of suffering.

The fire that is imposed on you, thrown into by forces you cannot control. By the decree of a king you never asked to serve.

The furnace that someone else decided you deserved. The suffering that comes not from your choices but from the world you live in and the people who have power in it.

The fire that has been burning quietly for a long time. Not dramatic, not sudden.

Just 12 years of the same thing. The same limitation. The same disappointment. The same hoping and not seeing, the long slow suffering that does not make headlines but shapes a person’s entire life, and the fire that comes as a consequence of doing the right thing.

Paul and Silas did not end up in that prison because they had done something wrong.

They ended up there because they had done something right, because they had set a young woman free.

And the people who profited from her bondage were furious. Sometimes the furnace is the consequence of faithfulness.

Sometimes you end up in prison because you refused to bow. Sometimes the beating comes because you told the truth.

And that kind of suffering can be the hardest to make sense of because it doesn’t feel like justice.

It feels like punishment for doing the right thing. But in all three fires, the same thing is true.

God was there. The fourth figure, the power going out to meet the reach, the earthquake at midnight.

He was in all of them. And he brought everyone through. There is a moment in the story of Paul and Silas that I keep coming back to.

And it is the moment before the earthquake. The moment when Paul and Silas were singing and nothing had happened yet.

The earthquake had not come. The doors were still shut. The chains were still on.

The backs were still sore from the rods. The stocks were still fastened. It was midnight and it was dark and there was no visible sign that anything was about to change.

And they sang anyway, not because they could see the earthquake coming, not because they had been given a specific promise that God was going to break them out at midnight, not because the discomfort had eased or the situation had improved or the future had gotten clearer.

They sang because of who God is, not because of what God was doing that they could see in that moment.

That is the deepest kind of worship. Not the worship that flows easily in the good seasons when the evidence of God’s goodness is visible and tangible and undeniable.

The worship that gets chosen in the dark that is offered not because of what can be seen but because of what is known about who God is about his character about his faithfulness that is not contingent on our ability to observe it.

The singing came first then the earthquake. And I wonder sometimes if it is always that way if the thing that releases the power of God in a situation is not the absence of suffering but the praise that rises from the middle of it.

The declaration of trust that goes up from the fire before the fire goes out.

Praise him in the storm. That is not a cliche. It is as a strategy.

It is a declaration that God is bigger than the storm. And declarations like that have a way of being followed by earthquakes.

These nine stories, all of them together from part one through part three. Joseph in the pit, Ruth on the road, Hannah in the temple, Elijah under the juniper tree, the prodigal son coming home, Zakius up the sycamore tree, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace, the woman pressing through the crowd, Paul, and Silas singing at midnight.

Nine stories, nine people, nine impossible situations. And one God who showed up in all of them, in every pit and on every road and at every altar, under every tree and down every road and up every tree, in every furnace and through every crowd and at every midnight.

The same God every time without exception, without abandonment, without the failure of a single promise.

And not one of those nine people had everything figured out. Not one of them was performing perfect faith.

Not one of them was without fear or doubt or exhaustion or the very human temptation to give up.

Joseph had every reason to be bitter. Ruth had every reason to go home to what was familiar.

Hannah had every reason to accept that this was just her life. Elijah had every reason to stay under the tree.

The prodigal had every reason to stay in the pigsty. Zakius had every reason to stay in the tree and just watch.

The three young men could have bowed. The woman could have decided she was too unclean to press through.

Paul and Silas could have sat in silence, but they didn’t. They moved or they sang or they prayed or they pressed through or they stood still when everyone else fell.

And God met every single one of them exactly there. That is the testimony of nine lives across thousands of years.

And it is the most hopeful thing I know. Hope, real hope, biblical hope is not a feeling.

It is not the absence of fear or the presence of good circumstances or the sense that things are probably going to work out fine.

Hope is an anchor. That is the word the writer of Hebrews uses. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul firm and secure.

An anchor does not prevent the storm. It does not calm the waves or bring the sun back out or make the sea gentle.

An anchor does one thing. It holds in the storm. While everything around the boat is moving, the anchor is down in something solid.

And the holding is what matters. The hope that Joseph had in prison was not a feeling that things would work out.

It was an anchor. The Lord was with him. That was the anchor. Not a guarantee of a specific timeline or outcome, just the presence of God, firm and secure.

The hope that Ruth had on the road was not a feeling that Bethlehem would be kind to a Moabitete widow.

It was an anchor, the God of Israel, under whose wings she had come to take refuge.

That was the anchor. She didn’t know what was coming. She just knew who she had chosen to follow.

The hope that Paul and Silas had in prison was not a feeling that the earthquake was on its way.

It was an anchor. The knowledge that the God they served was worth singing to even when the stocks were on and the night was dark and there was no visible sign of rescue.

Firm and secure in something that the storm cannot move. That is biblical hope. And it is available to you right now in whatever storm you are sitting in.

Whatever pit or road or prison or furnace this season has become, the anchor holds.

It has always held for every person in every story we have told today. And it will hold for you.

Before we go to prayer, I want to say something to the person who has listened to all three parts of this script and who is still not sure.

Who has heard all nine stories and found them beautiful. Who has felt something stir in the chest listening to the prodal’s father running down the road.

Who has felt the weight of Elijah under the tree and recognized it because they have been under their own version of it.

Who has pressed their hand against the screen at some point and wished that touching the edge of something was enough to make it stop and who is still not sure if this is real, if this God is real, if the presence in the furnace is real, if the father actually runs, if the name actually gets called.

I want to say to that person, “Your uncertainty does not disqualify you. It never has.”

Thomas was uncertain. He was so uncertain that he said, “Unless I see and touch the wounds, I will not believe.”

And Jesus came to him in the middle of the doubt and offered exactly what Thomas said he needed.

Zakius was not a believer when he climbed the tree. He was curious. He wanted to see.

That was all. And Jesus stopped under the tree and said his name and changed his life.

The woman who pressed through the crowd was not operating from a position of theological certainty.

She was operating from desperation. If I just touched the edge of his garment, that is not a robust statement of faith.

That is a last attempt, a reached out trembling hand, and the power went out from him to meet it.

Your uncertainty is not a wall. It is a door, and the knocking on the other side of it has been going on for longer than you know.

Let it open. We have come to the end of our time together in these stories.

Nine stories told slowly. Nine fires of different kinds. Nine people who found in the middle of situations that looked hopeless a God who had not looked away, who had not forgotten, who had not run out of either power or patience or love.

The God who was with Joseph in the pit is the same God who is with you.

The God who directed Ruth’s feet to the field of Boaz is the same God who is ordering your steps even when you cannot feel the direction.

The God who heard Hannah’s silent prayer is the same God who hears the thing in you that has no words yet.

The God who came to Elijah under the tree with bread and water and a whisper is the same God who meets you in your exhaustion and says, “Get up and eat.

The journey is too great for you to make it on what you currently have.”

The God who ran down the road toward the prodigal is already running toward you.

The God who stopped under Zakius’s tree and said, “The name is already looking up at wherever you are perched in your uncertainty, and you’re watching from a distance.”

The God who walked in the furnace with the three young men is in whatever fire you are in right now.

The God who heard the woman’s trembling reaching out is feeling the reach of whatever small faith you have left.

The God who caused an earthquake at midnight in a prison because two men chose to sing, is listening to whatever you can manage to offer right now.

Even if it is barely a hum, even if it is more cry than song, he hears it and he moves in response to it.

And now let’s pray. Father, we come to you at the end of nine stories, at the end of a long and beautiful journey through the lives of people who needed you and found you, who were desperate and were met, who were lost and were found, who were in the fire and discovered that the fire was not empty.

We thank you for every story you have preserved for us. For the pit and the road and the temple and the juniper tree and the far country and the sycamore tree and the furnace and the crowd and the prison.

For the fact that you did not sanitize any of it. That you let every chapter be as hard as it actually was and then showed up in the middle of every one of them.

Anyway, we thank you that you are not a god who only shows up when people have it together.

That you are not a god who waits at a respectable distance until we have cleaned ourselves up enough to come near.

That you run down roads and stop under trees and send bread to people under juniper trees and whisper after all the noise has passed and say names in crowds and walk in furnaces and cause earthquakes at midnight.

We thank you that you are always moving toward that the direction of your love has never changed has never hesitated.

Has never said this one is too far, too broken, too gone, too long in the far country, too unclean, too hated, too exhausted, too doubtful.

You have never said any of those things and you never will because you are the God who says, “Daughter and son and come and I must come to your house and I will be with you and even the very hairs of your head are numbered and I will never leave you or forsake you.”

We pray now for every person who has listened to these stories today. For the ones who recognize themselves in Joseph, who have been in a pit they did not deserve and cannot see out of, who have done everything right and found themselves in circumstances that feel like punishment, who have been forgotten by the cupbearers and are waiting on a promise that seems to have no timeline.

Lord, let them feel the weight of five words. The Lord was with Joseph. And let those five words become the anchor they need for the weight.

You are with them in the pit and in the prison and in every chapter they never ask for.

You are working even now, even here, building something in them that cannot be built any other way.

For the ones who recognize themselves in Ruth, who are on a road they did not choose, who have lost things they did not expect to lose, who are in a foreign land or a foreign season where everything feels unfamiliar and the future is completely unclear.

Let them hear your voice saying your work will be rewarded. That you see the faithfulness on the road even when no one else is watching.

That you are directing their steps to the right field on the right morning, even when they cannot feel the direction.

For the ones who recognize themselves in Hannah, who are carrying a longing so deep they can barely speak it, who have been to every earthly solution and come away disappointed, who are sitting in the temple of their own prayer life with lips moving and no sound coming out.

Hear them, Lord, the way you heard her. Remember them the way you remembered her.

And in your time, in your way, answer in ways that will carry their name as testimony for generations.

For the ones who recognize themselves in Elijah, who are under a tree right now, who have given everything for a long time and found themselves empty, who asked you in the dark if it might be time to be done, who are afraid that the fire that once burned so bright has gone out permanently.

Come to them under the tree with bread and water, with a touch on the shoulder and a whisper that cuts through all the noise.

Let them hear the still small voice after all the drama. And let them hear the correction of the lie.

You are not alone. There are 7,000 still standing. The assignment is not finished, and the bread you are sending is enough to get them to the mountain.

For the ones who recognize themselves in the prodigal, who are in a far country of their own choosing, who know the smell of the pigsty and the weight of what they walked away from, who have rehearsed the coming home speech a 100 times and are still not sure they can make themselves go through the door.

Come home. That is all we want to say to them. Just come home. The father is watching the road.

He saw you from a long way off and he is already running. You do not have to finish the speech.

You do not have to earn back the name. He is bringing the robe. He is calling for the party.

He is saying, “Your name, just come home.” And for the ones who are in the fire right now, the ones whose furnace was not their choice and whose heat has been turned up to seven times what it should be, the ones whose backs bear the marks of rods they did not deserve, who are in the stocks at midnight wondering if this is all there is.

Look for the fourth figure. He is already in the fire with you. And when you are ready, start singing because the earthquake comes.

It always comes. And you will walk out of this without the smell of smoke on you.

Father, we ask for peace. Not the kind that requires everything to be okay first.

The kind that passes understanding. The kind that guards hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

The peace that Paul described from a prison. The peace that the three young men carried into the furnace.

The peace that put a song in Paul and Silas at midnight. A peace that the world did not give and the world cannot take away because it comes from you.

And you are not moved by the things that move us. We ask for hope.

Real hope. The anchor kind. The kind that goes down into something so solid that the storm above cannot dislodge it.

Let every person who has sat with these stories today go from here anchored in something they cannot see but can trust.

Because the evidence is overwhelming. The testimony is undeniable. The track record is unbroken. You have never once failed to show up.

Not for Joseph, not for Ruth, not for Hannah, not for Elijah, not for the prodigal, not for Zakius, not for three young men in a furnace, not for a woman in a crowd, not for two men in a prison, not once.

And you will not start today. We ask for courage. The even if he does not kind, the stand while everyone else bows kind.

The press through the crowd kind. The get up from under the tree kind. The walk toward the father kind.

The climb the tree just to see kind. The start singing at midnight kind. Lord, give your people the courage to keep going, to keep trusting, to keep reaching, to keep pressing through, to keep their faces lifted toward yours even when the furnace is at seven times its normal heat.

Because you are worth it. You have always been worth it. Every person in every story today proves it.

You are worth the trust, and the trust is never wasted. We close with the same truth that opened these stories.

Hope is real. Not because life is easy. Not because the furnace never comes or the pit never gets dark or the road never gets dusty or the prison never locks its doors.

Hope is real because God is real. And because God being who he is cannot leave the people he loves in the fire without going in after them.

Cannot watch the lost one on the road without running. Cannot hear the silent prayer without answering.

Cannot let the midnight stay forever before the earthquake comes. He is a god of resurrection, of reversal, of the thing that looked finished turning out to be only the middle of the story.

Joseph thought the pit was the end. It was the beginning of Egypt. Ruth thought the road was the end.

It was the beginning of Bethlehem. Hannah thought the empty womb was the end. It was the beginning of Samuel.

Elijah thought the juniper tree was the end. It was the beginning of the whisper.

The prodigal thought the pigsty was the end. It was the beginning of the party.

Zakius thought hiding in a tree was just a view. It turned out to be his whole life changing.

The three young men thought the furnace was the end. It was the beginning of a king praising their god.

The woman thought the crowd was too thick and her condition too shameful. It turned out to be the moment she was called daughter.

Paul and Silas thought the prison was the end of the mission in Philippi. It turned out to be the beginning of a jailer’s family coming home.

You are not at the end of your story. You are in the middle of it.

And the God who finishes what he starts is still writing. Amen.