I'm DJ and this is Faungercast, changing your commute since 2015. So this next few weeks we're talking about do-overs. And I want to challenge you, I ask you to take part, let's make this a community activity, but I'm not going to ask you to do something I'm not willing to do myself. So I would love for you just to share, because the do-overs that we're usually willing to share with people are the silly things we might have done in life.
And so I want to ask you to share those this week on social media. It might be a picture of something that you can get or it might be a store you can post on Facebook. We just hashtag that do-over. But like I said, I'm not going to share, I'm not going to ask you all to do that without me sharing one myself.
So I have a lot of things I've regretted in life that I should have realized when I got started it might not have been the best thing to do. And I've told my wife, Mary, I was going to tell the story. She said, well, I can make a list of things for you. So she's right, I've got a long list of them.
This is one of my favorite ones. So I had a great wife. And when we were married six months, she let me fulfill a dream I've had for a long time. And she got me to buy a motorcycle.
It's like I called her and said, hey, Pavlos is this international student on YouTube. He's selling this motorcycle. He only wants like 400 bucks for it. What do you think?
And she said, well, are you going to buy it? And I was like, yeah, I am. And so I bought this motorcycle. And the only problem was it was a 1981 Yamaha SR250.
If you know motorcycles, what you realize is that 250 stands for 250 CCs. It's not a very big motorcycle. Like my Harley I have right now is 1,200. The second problem was I actually weighed more than this motorcycle did.
It was really there. It's a picture. But back there. Yeah, this was the day I sold it.
I mean, this was not a very big motorcycle. Like this is the kind of bike. Like somebody weighs like 115 pounds buys as a first bike, not something that I buy. But I love this thing.
And but it was blue and it was ugly and it had been dropped a bunch and all the plastic was cracked and everything. So what I decided to do is I ripped off all the plastic. And I got a can of flat black spray paint and I rattled can of the entire motorcycle flat black. It looked like something out of Mad Max and I loved it.
And then I realized it needs to be a little bit fancier. So I decided I was going to repaint the gas tank again. But I was actually going to take the gas tank off this time to repaint it. The previous time I just picked the front of the seat up and sprayed down in there and called it close enough for rock and roll.
And so I went to take the gas tank off. I realized there was still some gasoline in the gas tank. So I was trying to find something in my garage just like 11.30 at night too because I brought ideas happen way too late in the night, right? And I get like this Halloween candy tub that was in the back of our garage.
And I pulled that out and I'm screwed the pitcock. And I drain all the gasoline into the Halloween candy tub. I push it aside and I pull the gas tank off. And I do everything I need to do to prep the gas tank.
But I realize I've been out there for an hour after this happens. I can smell this gasoline really, really bad. So I realized I'm going to have to do something with this gasoline. Well, we didn't have a lawn mower so I couldn't pour it in the lawn mower.
And there's no telling how old the gasoline was. And I had all the spider webs and dirt and stuff from the Halloween candy tub. So I just needed to dispose of it. But this is by now it's like after midnight.
I was like, how do you get rid of gasoline? Well, we got poor off somewhere. We had this cistern in our backyard. Our house was built in about 1910.
We had a brick in water cistern for rainwater runoff that probably predated the house. It was about 10, 12 feet deep, about 8 feet across. It was bricked in so it was solid. And it was concreteed over.
And there's just about this much of an opening on top of it. We were supposed to be a lid, but there wasn't a lid. So we kept a cinder block on top so the dachshund wouldn't fall in. Because the hole was like dachshund shicked.
It's like perfect. It doesn't have a cistern. And so I poured this gasoline down the cistern. There's like standing water and some trash down there.
I was like, oh, no, it feels like a quarter or maybe a half gallon of gasoline. So I go about my business and whatever. And I realized this gasoline smell is actually gotten worse. So I need to find something to do with all the gasoline that's at the bottom of the cistern.
I can't reach now. So it takes me some newspaper. And I wadded up and I make a newspaper stick about this big. And I go over where the cistern is.
And I like the newspaper stick on fire. And then I proceed to drop the newspaper stick down the cistern. And absolutely nothing happened. Y'all thought that it will have been you.
No, it didn't happen. There was too much water down there. It's all the gasoline dissipated and just fumed out. And so I went to bed the next morning and married with me up.
And she was furious. She was like, what on earth did you do last night? She didn't think that she knew me pretty good. She didn't think there could be no municipal problem that caused me to smell.
I did something sweet but last night. And she was like, I told her what I did. And she's like, well, is that legal? I said, oh, no, it's totally illegal.
And she said, well, what are you going to do with the police? I'm trying to find a gas smell. And I was like, well, this is in Central Kentucky. And I said, well, I'm going to blame it.
I'm pretty sure it's a mess lab there next door neighbor has in their backyard. And so the police never came. Everything's all right. And I learned a lesson about how to not dispose of gasoline that day.
But I needed to do over it. There's multiple things in that scenario that I should not have done. Doovers can be silly. A lot of times we joke about that kind of stuff.
Like these famous like redneck moments. I love the videos, pop up on Facebook. There's also some serious things in our lives that we doovers. There's things that we need a replay of.
We need another chance that sometimes it's something that we can't control. And we need for that whole situation to be changed. I'm going to talk about one of those this morning. And sometimes we hit the point we need to do over because somebody else has done something to us.
It's great we affected our lives. Alice is actually going to share next week about one of those moments. But what we learned last week is this that no matter what, I love that the songs that Sarah sang us wanted she led us in were fantastic because they tell a story of a God who's never not chasing us. Who's never not giving us doovers.
Whatever we need. We talked last week about how that's going to be just the reality of our life. That God's always going to give us those doovers. He sent us on Jesus Christ's world to be that ultimate doover.
So we're going to just continue the story. Look at another story of a dramatic second chance today. It's going to be from the book of Joshua. It's about a woman named Rahab.
So we're going to open that up. You can find it in Joshua 2 if you brought your Bibles. If you didn't you can read it on your phone if you so choose to or you can read it on the screen behind me. But Joshua 2 is where we'll start off our story of Rahab this morning.
So verse 8 through verse 15. Before the spies went to sleep that night Rahab went up on the roof to talk with them. I know the Lord has given you this land she told them and we are all afraid of you. Every one of the land is living in terror.
For we have heard how the Lord made a dry path for you through the Red Sea when you left Egypt. And we know that you know what you did to Saihan and Aghatu, Emorite kings east of the Jordan River, who's people you completely destroyed. No wonder our hearts have melted in fear. No one has the courage to fight after hearing such things.
For the Lord your God is the supreme God of heavens above and the earth below. So please swear to me by the Lord that you will be kind to me and my family since I have helped you. Give me some guarantee that when Jericho is conquered you will let me live along with my father and my mother and my brothers and sisters and all of their families. We offer our own lives to guarantee for your safety to be the men who are agreed.
If you don't betray us we will keep our promises and be kind to you when the Lord gives us this land. So to kind of catch everybody up to where we are is we're familiar with the story of Moses. We all sing Prince of Egypt if we're younger and we might have memories of Moses the Cecil B. DeMille movie.
So Moses led hundreds of thousands of Israelites. We call him Hebrews really at this point in time out of Egypt. And they do amazing things and he performs amazing miracles to let Pharaoh to turn them loose. And so they cross the Red Sea and they spend an entire generation wandering around in the desert.
It's the book of Exodus where we learn stories about that and we also have the really really weird books like Leviticus and Numbers in Deuteronomy that explain what it means for God to take this ragtag bunch of people and to turn them into a holy nation. So they spend this generation wandering in the desert and then they come to Moses dies and a man named Joshua succeeds him as a leader. And all these Hebrew people are camped out on one side of the Jordan River and this land that God has given them that he promised their ancestor Abraham hundreds of years ago is right there across the river. And they're about to get into it.
And the first city they're going to come to they're going to have to conquer to get a foothold in this land. It's called Jericho. Jericho's actually, but when we think city we think like big place. Jericho is only about twelve acres.
It wasn't that big but Joshua sent these two spies in to scope things out. While they're in town Jericho gets wind of the fact they're fully aware of who's on the other side of the river just a days more truly. They've heard stories and they find out there's a couple of spies already in their camp and so they start trying to hunt them down in their city. And Rahab hides them and she brings them into her house and she puts them on top of her roof and covers them with flax.
It's a fabric they used to make clothing and to make other things with. One of the interesting things about this story if you look at it across all ages is Rahab's occupation. I mean Alan Martin actually joked about this this week because Rahab's a prostitute. I ask Alan how many times can I say prostitute in church on Sunday morning?
I hear that he's already going, but we've got to talk about this. We cannot shy away from messy places and messy situations in the Bible because if we stay away from the messy situations, how can we then testify to about a God who meets us in the middle of messy situations? How can we testify to a God who's willing to come to us and live with us and be with us no matter what. So we have to talk about these sort of things.
And instead of running away from these kind of situations, what we need to do is we need to be able to run toward stories of redemption. We need to run toward stories where God takes people out of a situation that is harmful and unholy and he lifts them up and he heals them and he puts them in places that are holy. So we've got to talk about Rahab being a prostitute. Now what we don't know is we don't know why, we don't know what was going on.
We know that her external world that she lived in was unholy. She was living in Jericho. And a land that did not know God and its practices were not anywhere close to holy. God told his people and did her on me.
He said, listen, look and be careful and see every single thing they do and do the exact opposite. Don't do anything that they do. So Rahab is there living in an unholy world. She's trapped by sinful culture.
There are some things that we can kind of investigate to figure out. Most likely Rahab had to sell herself into prostitution to take care of her family. We hear her making these promises, he's meant to make sure her mother and her father and her family will be safe. This was something that Rahab did because of poverty.
We don't know what the situation was, we don't know what the matter with her father, why he couldn't take care of the family. But this is something that she was into because she was in an oppressive culture. But in the middle of all of that, Rahab she heard the whisperings of something different. As these people in Jericho were aware of what was going on just a few miles away on the other side of the Jordan River, Rahab was stinking different things because she had heard whisperings of this God.
She had heard whisperings of while she lived in a culture that consistently devalued her, she was hearing about a God who loved and valued his people. The possibility for a different world was there. So she's speaking to this man and she says, we know what you did at the Red Sea. That was like 40, 50 years before this.
This was an entire generation removed away from these people. But she was aware of what happened at the Red Sea and she's talking with them about that because she realized that this speaks of a God who rescues his people and the thing that Rahab needed the most was rescue. A God who loves his people, who will do anything to pull them out of bad and difficult situations. Next she talks about these kings, Og and I took my notes and Sibon.
She realized that God is powerful, that God is in control of these people, that mighty things are happening, that big things are happening, and she's putting this together and she realizes, this is my way out. This is the way that I can be rescued, the way that I can be redeemed. So she tells him, she says, our hearts are melting in fear. Our entire society is collapsing.
We are losing all structure. We don't know what's going on anymore. She's telling these men, we don't have anything left and we don't know what to do. I mean, she's telling her enemies that you can walk right on him and take everything you want.
But then she does something that's really, really different. She takes the option that she has and she starts speaking to them. I'm going to read this for you again in verse 12. Now, swear to me by the word that you will be kind to me and my family since I have helped you.
So where are the words that you will be kind to me and my family since I have helped you? You know, to us, that's a good verse. We look at it and we can tell there's truthful things going on there. But what Rahab's doing is she's taking on this key belief that the Jewish people had and what's called God's loving kindness.
For them, it's the primary characteristic and the primary attribute of who God is. It's the way that they understand how God works. That God will always be offering loving kindness to his people. If you read the book of Psalms, you'll see this loving kindness spelled out a lot.
And if the Hebrew people realize that since God acts out and loving kindness towards them, they are supposed to act out towards each other in loving kindness. But they're supposed to be the example that God gives them. So here you have Rahab, this prostitute, who is not one of their people, who's living in the land. They're about to conquer.
Living behind a walled city is now looking at them and is using very, very insider language. You know insider language is right? There's insider language and outsider language. This outsider completely flips everything upside down and starts using insider language.
What Rahab's actually saying to hear is, I have acted out in loving kindness towards you. So now I'm assuming you are going to act out and loving kindness towards me. Rahab has inserted herself into the story of God and the story of his people with these words. She pretty much is wrapping up their entire belief of how God works and how God exists and how God loves his people and how God asks his people to be responding by using this word.
She's saying, I understand that God's act out towards loving kindness towards his people. And that his people are supposed to act out and loving kindness towards themselves and towards strangers. So now therefore, I'm going to act out and loving kindness towards you and I'm going to expect you to act out and loving kindness towards me. She pretty much tells them, I'm one of you and there's nothing you can do about it.
Because I know who your God is. And she has completely changed her worldview, changed every single thing about her. And she realizes that she has responsibility for these people. Rahab has learned that redemption, the thing that she's looking for, to redeem her from this unholy place, to redeem her from this unholy people and to put her in a holy place with holy people, that redemption is linked to response.
That she's having to respond to the situation in loving kindness. She's changing her entire framework of how the entire world works and blowing these two spies mind right in front of her. So everything shifts, everything changes. And so we go just a couple more verses in chapter two, and we read this in verse 17.
Before they left them in total, we will be bound by the oath we have taken, only if you follow these instructions. When we come into the land, you must leave the scall at rope hanging down from the window from which you let us down. And all of your family members, your father, your mother, your brothers and all of your relatives must be here inside the house. If they go out into this street and are killed, it will not be our fault.
But anyone who weighs a hand on the people inside this house, we will accept responsibility for their death. And if you betray us, however, we are not bound by this oath in any way. There are some little details going on in here that remind us of parts of the larger story. So I was watching Rainbow Three this week.
And I've been watching all the rainbows this last week because I came on level Netflix. And when I can watch Rainbow, I'm going to watch Rainbow. And I was watching the third one a couple days ago, and there's a little details. I've learned this.
I'm a big fan of movies and television shows. And I've learned whenever there's random information that appears to not matter whatsoever at all, that usually pays off to remember that. And so at the beginning of Rainbow Three, his colonel has gotten captured by the Russian army in Afghanistan, this is set in the mid-80s during the Russian Afghanistan conflict. And so he goes to get his colonel back because the colonel is always the person who's coming and rescued him back.
And he's sitting there with these Afghan rebels across the border and they tell him that there's 10,000 soldiers and 10,000 horses only waiting for the arms to come and take care of the Russians. And so Rainbow goes and gets himself in trouble. It's Rainbow, Rainbow, Rainbow. The bow and arrow comes out.
And it ends up being just Rambo and his colonel and this entire Russian brigade surrounding them, with tanks and attack helicopters and all the stuff in Rainbow movies. And the last moment, we don't know what's going to happen. Then you hear a horse peeps. And you see 10,000 screaming Afghan rebel soldiers coming over the mountains and they found the arms they suddenly need.
So that one little sentence of detail fills you in to what's going to change the whole entire story. And these three verses are these little details that change the whole story. They explained us why this is not just a random situation and a random woman who's learned the right words to say. But the first thing is the color of this rope is a crimson or a scarlet rope.
And it's using a color that's almost always used only to describe blood. And more importantly, if we remember the night of the Passover in the Book of Exodus, when the Egyptians finally released the Israelites. God tells them to kill and slaughter a lamb or have a special meal and they're to spread the blood of this lamb on the doorpost of their house. The mark, this is where God's people live.
Because that night, the angel of death was coming and he was going to kill the first one son of all the Egyptians. And if you weren't in your house that night, it was going to be dangerous for you. And these instructions, these men are giving her the color of the rope that she lets down. It's almost like a retailing of the whole Passover story.
The Passover story is like part of that thing that makes the Hebrew people, God's people. And so they're letting Rahab go through this whole Passover moment. And just as a generation ago, the Jewish people waited inside their houses in safety and security and had that blood, that red color marked their doorstep. Rahab is now given instructions to stay inside your house, don't come out, and let this be the thing that marks your house and keeps you safe.
Rahab is being brought into the fold as part of these covenant people, these promised people of God, that her identification and the night of terror and destruction will be the same thing that was identification of those original Jewish people in a generation ago on a night of terror and destruction. Redemption is linked to response. She's acting to do things. The thing we have to realize though inside of all this problem is it's very easy for us to read the story of Rahab and to read these things and to understand the way that she's acting, to think that the only problem that we have in our lives that we need to act more, that we need to do more, that we need to try to do better or do the right things.
And that's not what's going on here. The story is all about grace. Grace being that thing that we can't create on our own, that we can't get on our own, grace has only offered to us by God. But grace has only graced when it exists in tension with something else.
If we don't talk about sin, if we don't talk about unholyness, we can't talk about grace. Rahab is choosing this night to take herself out of unholy place, to link herself with grace, to think about what grace, because she realizes that she needs it and she realizes that she has to respond to these things that God is tugging on her hearts, respond to what God has going on. God is moving towards her, and she has to respond. Our God is active, not passive, but we have to respond.
This is this action of Rahab, the way that you see her working in this is what we have to realize that there's a role of redemption there in place. God's offered us that too over. He offered us that ultimate do over in Jesus Christ. He gave us every single thing we need right there, but we have to respond to Jesus.
We have to respond to grace. We have to respond to the things that have been offered to us. The first part of that is a personal response. We have to realize when we feel God moving in our hearts and our lives, we have to figure out what we're going to do about that.
If you open the back of your connection card, there's a place for prayer requests and on the bottom of it, it's like what's God asking you to do right now? It's fundamentally assuming that God is going to ask us to be doing things. God never lets us instill. This God doesn't sit still.
The second part of that is what's God asking our community, what's God asking our group of faithful people to be doing? What's God asking foundry is a brand new church to do? We also have to realize that sometimes we're the bearers of redemption in the lives of other people, that we're the ones who bring an offer this redemption to people where they might need it. And Lindsay Nadler, she sings on our worship team, and she's a director of a great organization called Project 41, and it rescues women out of sex trafficking.
They're an awareness group for all sorts of sexual sins. It's a response to a huge crisis that Lindsay and her team have made in doing this. We can't talk about the story of Rahab and realize that that's not an issue that's in our lives and in our worlds and surrounds us in Monroe right now. That sometimes God calls us to be those spies who go into unholy places and help folks walk along the road of redemption that Jesus Christ brings them towards.
We've got to assume that that might be the case one day. So we jump forward in the story of Rahab to figure out what is our lasting impact. A couple different places we can go to the book of James, and we can read some things about what James says. Rahab does.
And James, chapter 2, 25 through 26, says, Rahab the prostitute is another example. She was shown to be right with God by her actions when she hid the messengers and sent them safely down a different road. Just as the body is dead without breath, so is faith dead without good works. By Rahab understanding this loving kindness that God gave her, she also understands that the only natural responses for her to then act out and loving kindness.
That we can't have God live in our hearts and say quiet about it. We can't have God live in our hearts and not do something about it. It's just a natural reaction to God being in our lives is that we're going to act out and do things. The book of Hebrews we find Rahab again.
Hebrews has been showing up all over the last few weeks. I'm excited about it. It's a great book. It says in Hebrews 33, it was by faith that Rahab the prostitute was not destroyed with the people in her city who refused to obey God.
Because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies. It's by her faith, the faith that she found when she understood the reality of God. We can jump back to the very beginning of the New Testament, the very first chapter of Matthew. We can read about Rahab there, starts in verse 5.
And Saman was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab. And Boaz was the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth. And Obed was the father of Jesse. And Jesse the father of King David, and that King David.
And we go verse and verse and verse and go ahead a pretty long ways and we pick this back up in chapter 6. In verse 16, it says Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary gave birth to Jesus. He was called a Messiah. Y'all we serve a God who did not come from perfection, who came from the sloppy mess of this world that we all have to live in.
If Jesus really comes to our world, if he really lives in our neighborhoods, if he's really doing things, and he's really asking for us to do things along with him as he's moving across our community and changing things. And if he really offers us the fulfillment that he promises us, then he can't come from perfection because we're not perfect. So Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, whose story, his own family line is a long string of do-overs. All offers us that do-over.
All offers us every single thing we need in life. Well, to finish Rahab's story, we go to chapter 6, verse 20. When the people heard the sound of the ram's horns, they shouted as loud as they could, and suddenly the walls of Jericho collapsed, and Israelites charged straight into the town and captured it. They completely destroyed everything in it with their swords, men and women, young and old cattle, sheep, goats and donkeys.
Meanwhile, Joshua said to the two spies, keep your promise. Go to the prostitute's house and bring around along with their family. The men who had been spies went in and brought out Rahab and her father and her mother, brothers and all the other relatives who were with her. They moved her whole family to a safe place near the camp of Israel.
Then Israelites burned the town and everything, and only the things they kept were silver, gold, bronze and iron were kept for the treasury of the Lord's house. So Joshua spared Rahab the prostitute and her relatives who were with her in the house because she had hidden the spies Joshua sent to Jericho. And she lives among the Israelites to this day. The story of Rahab is one of the stories of redemption.
It's the story of change. And in this story, we can find hope that no matter where we come from, no matter what has gone on in our life, that God wants us, that God desires us. That last verse that Rahab dwells among the Israelites to this day. We look at her lineage, we realize that her great, great, great, great, great grandson was Jesus Christ.
Rahab lives among us today. That story of grace and redemption. The story of grace and redemption draws us to examining our own heart. It draws us to examine our collective heart as a new church, as a community called Foundry.
But then also it should draw us to examine how we are going and being bearers of redemption to other people. To those who need to hear and see and feel and trust of what loving kindness actually looks like. Redemption is linked to response. And so I ask you this morning what God asking you to do.
Is that simple? Let's go to the Word and Prayer. Father, we want to thank you for calling to us. God, you're not a quiet God and a passive God.
Pure God who has come to our world for us, to rescue us, to redeem us. God, you didn't send somebody else to find us. You came yourself. That's Jesus Christ.
To pull us out of unholy places, to place us back in the unholy story of you and your people in this world. So God, I ask for you to call out to us. What I recognize there are many things going on in this room right now. God, some of us might be doing business with you for the very first time in our life.
We might be finally realizing I have got to respond to Jesus. Not just saying about him like he's not in the room as we said earlier. God, some of us might be responding for the first time. And say, God, we bless you for that space.
God, some of us are responding for the first time in a while, when we're having to realize what that life looks like. God, what does it mean to have an adult faith? God, a faith that can support our families, a faith that can support our kids. God, a faith that can go out into our world, into our offices, into our schools, into our relationships.
To be be bearers of redemption. God, I pray for that space. Also, realize that you might be calling some of us to big things. God, in our areas of influence, the Holy Spirit's running hard and fast, and you're asking us to just keep behind you and follow you there.
So God, we just give witness to all of that right now. Because we expect you to do things in our lives. And what we realize is that we have to respond to the redemption that you offer to us. So God, create an as...