Hope Blog

▶ 1:00:13

Matt opened with a pun about a Roman emperor who somehow never made it past his
teens — Constantine — and then waited, with visible patience, for the room to get there. From that
he went straight to the premise: shepherding would not be necessary if sheep always walked in a
straight line and knew where they were going. God put shepherds in the flock for the same reason.

1. Why the gifts need shepherding at all

▶ 1:01:50

A great deal in the Bible is clear. The complications arrive with the people, and with the fact
that this is a relationship with depth and new layers rather than a fixed idea. “God’s not just
like a couch,” Matt said. “Once you have it, you have it, it’s just a couch.”

▶ 1:03:11

The human factors he named around the gifts were specific: insecurity, which most of the room
was probably carrying and each assuming was theirs alone; pride, which reinforces it; a legalistic
zeal that grows where confidence in the gospel is thin. From there come comparison, spiritual
person points, dismissals of someone else’s experience, harsh words. All of that can happen when a
church embraces the gifts. Matt’s answer was not to back away. “The opportunity cost of leaving
that on the table is far greater — besides, we could just be screwy about something else.”

2. The argument he actually wanted to settle

▶ 1:04:28

This was material cut from the earlier message on tongues for length, and the question is the
one that divides believers who otherwise agree: who has the Spirit, and what does it mean to be
baptized in him? Some hold firmly that you may be saved and still lack the baptism of the Spirit
unless you speak in tongues as proof.

▶ 1:05:29

Matt began by conceding the strongest point on the other side. There is more to the Christian
life than saying a prayer and retiring to Bible reading. Our Christian life is
not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit.
And God is not limited to one register: the
still small voice
happened to one prophet on one day; other people got fire out of the sky.

▶ 1:06:44

Could God make everyone baptized in his Spirit speak in tongues? Certainly. But the conversion
accounts in Acts do not report it —
Paul on the Damascus road,
the Ethiopian official,
the Philippian jailer,
the Bereans,
Crispus and his household.
Paul certainly spoke in tongues later — he says
he did it more than any of them
— but at the moment of his encounter, which would have been the obvious place to mention it,
nobody does. “Where we go wrong,” Matt said, “is not in hungering after the gifts. It’s forcing
onto people one-size-fits-all templates.”

3. Every preposition is already taken

▶ 1:09:06

Then a stack of texts, read in sequence, each answering the same question from a different
angle. God
establishes us in Christ, anoints us, puts his seal on us and gives us his Spirit in our hearts as
a guarantee. Sealed with what, and who is the “us”?

▶ 1:11:07

The audience is believers, full stop. And the prepositions keep piling up:
God has given us the Spirit
as a down payment;
God’s Spirit dwells in you
as a temple;
the Holy Spirit dwells within us.
Matt lingered on the phrase “in our hearts” — not the aorta, and not only corporate, because we do
not share hearts. He is in the congregation and in each person in it.

“He’s in us, he’s on us, he’s around us, he’s among us, and we’re sealed with him,” Matt said.
“That’s taking up all the space. There’s no preposition where he isn’t.”

4. Rivers, not a reservoir

▶ 1:13:31

Which raises the obvious objection: is that it? You get saved, he is there, and nothing deepens
for the rest of your life? People plainly do grow in their relationship with the Lord. The verse
Matt called the most helpful in the tension:

▶ 1:14:49

Three things out of one dense sentence. It is whoever believes, not the Marines and
the elites. It is a river, and a river is not a one-time event — you live beside it, it is always
there, and it is never the same water twice; it ebbs and floods and returns to normal. And John
says outright that the rivers are the Spirit. The expectation that a life with God should
graph as a flat line is what sets people up for disappointment when the retreat high gives way to
a morning of forgotten sandwiches and traffic.

▶ 1:16:56

The timing in that verse matters too. The Spirit came when Jesus was glorified — not because
the disciples prayed long enough. Their sequence is not a mold each of us has to re-enact
individually. “We are not reenacting the same timeline over and over again as cycles. We’re living
in the same timeline, just farther down.” He is the baptizer in the Spirit; we are not the buyers.
“We don’t purchase him with prayer points and coupons.”

5. The Lord looks on the heart

▶ 1:18:30

Samuel went to Jesse’s house and started at the top of the family, oldest and biggest first.

▶ 1:19:40

Here is the crux, Matt said. What the Bible says about believers having the Spirit is barely
contested. Where it goes sideways is when we start assessing with our eyes — grading someone
else’s experience, or our own against expectations that were never realistic. He offered himself
as evidence, cheerfully: he has, by his own account, a fairly dead-looking face, and nobody
watching it would guess much about what the Spirit is doing.

6. Variety is the design, not the malfunction

▶ 1:21:27

That last clause, Matt said, is all the biblical basis anyone needs for the range of experience
in a room — person to person, and within one person over time. It is the Spirit manifesting what
he wants as he wills.

▶ 1:23:51

The variety is not fixed at birth, either. Reading through
the list of gifts
— wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation — he
landed on the closing phrase: as he wills. Sometimes you walk in a gift today that you
were not walking in yesterday and may not tomorrow. “The Holy Spirit’s not a can of soup, where
you just have it and that’s it. He’s animated. He knows exactly what you need.”

7. A body is not a very large amoeba

▶ 1:25:28

In one
Spirit we were all baptized into one body, and all made to drink of one Spirit. Matt recalled
an illustration that stuck with him years ago: a human body and a patch of pond scum, with roughly
the same number of cells. The body can do advanced things precisely because its cells are not all
doing the same thing.

▶ 1:28:07

Then the insecurity, in Paul’s own words:
because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.
Since being baptized in one Spirit and being joined to one body were equated a few verses earlier,
the sentence translates directly: because I am not like brother so-and-so, I must not be
baptized in the Spirit. People genuinely carry that. It is not true, and the reason is that
the Spirit does not arrive in percentages. “He’s a person. He’s not the Force from Star Wars. What
percent Christ do you have? Isn’t he whole?”

▶ 1:31:21

God arranged the members as he chose, which means difference is not something a church puts up
with. “We haven’t gone far enough unless we celebrate the fact that we have different gifts and
callings, because it’s his choice, and celebrating it is a way of honoring his choice.” And verse
25 names the purpose plainly: that the members may care for one another. The gifts are not there
to establish us.

▶ 1:33:18

Paul finishes with a run of rhetorical questions —
are all apostles? are all prophets? do all speak with tongues?
The answer to every one of them is no. And then he points past the whole argument to
a still more excellent way,
which Matt flagged as next week’s message.

8. What this looks like in a local church

▶ 1:35:42

The last stretch was pastoral advice, and Matt admitted most of it would be review — which is
exactly why he said it out loud. Don’t become over-dependent on one kind of gift: a
church that is all tongues, or all teaching, or all prophecy has traded the body for a uniform.
Don’t become over-dependent on one gifted person. He named the warning sign precisely: a
group where there is no counter-authority, where questioning is technically allowed but
functionally the same as being wrong. Either it curdles into something cultish or the pressure
implodes the individual.

▶ 1:40:47

Don’t become obsessed with your own gifting — self-discovery done in a Christian accent is
still self-discovery, and the point of a gift is to build up someone else. Don’t inflate ordinary
spiritual life with hyped-up language. He described Baptists who would never call themselves
charismatic saying, I’ve been praying for your family out of Isaiah, I just feel like that’s
what God has for you, and Pentecostals describing the same experience with fire and lightning
on the cover. “He doesn’t need hyping. He’s glorious. His work is wonderful.”

▶ 1:45:50

And two on discernment, which he treated as one piece. Whoever acts spiritual must be
spiritual, and whoever acts ordinary must not be — that is bad discernment, and it is the same
error as reading Matt’s face. Everything gets measured by the gospel behind it, by the fruit in
the person’s life, by its effect on the community. Which then requires the harder half: confronting
what is false even when it comes from a friend. A strong gifting on Tuesday does not make anyone
infallible on Wednesday. The first line of defense is not studying counterfeits but knowing the
true and living God.

▶ 1:48:55

“We’re not the brains of this operation anyway,” he said. “The Christian church wouldn’t exist
today if we were. Thank goodness there’s a real shepherd.”

9. Ask for more

▶ 1:50:08

He closed by agreeing with the Pentecostals one more time.
We have not because we ask not.
So ask — and why stop at a second filling? Why not a third, a fifth? The cartoon version has you
saved, then baptized in the Spirit once, and Matt refused it on the grounds that it implies he was
absent in between. He wasn’t. The language strains here, and Matt said so: like knowing a spouse
for years and knowing them more, or like someone already in the room who comes very close. We are
rooted in the fact that we have him, and we still
long for the day we see him with unveiled face.

▶ 1:52:09

His prayer said it better than any of the argument had: “Come, Holy Spirit. I say that knowing
you are already here, but I don’t know what else to say. Guard our faith that you are here, and at
the same time give us the faith to ask for more.” Then, because it was the obvious way to end a
message on the gifts, the heart ministry teams came forward to pray with anyone who wanted it.

▶ 0:55:59

Before any of the teaching, Matt took what he called a micro congregational meeting on something nobody had asked about. A church member had posted a documentary on Realm; Matt had commented under it, and he wanted to say the same thing out loud.

Why a church that preaches Jesus still talks about everything else

He gave the opposing argument its best form first. J. Gresham Machen, writing in the 1920s, watched American denominations shift their focus onto morality and social justice and then lose ground on both fronts — no converts and no social change either. Healthy churches, Machen argued, preach the gospel loudly and proudly, grow, plant, and change society through converted hearts. “That’s my best argument for why Jesus should be the main deal,” Matt said, “and that’s why he is the main deal here.”

▶ 0:58:10

And then the turn. You cannot preach Jesus the way Jesus preached him without pricking somebody. He confronted his own culture; so did the apostles Paul sent into pagan cities. Matt reached back to his own message from the previous year — have enemies, love them — and drew the line: the goal was never to avoid upsetting anyone. He told about the trans woman at his martial arts gym who knows he will not wrestle women and asked him, reasonably, which definition of woman he was using. He told her the old-fashioned one. “Everything was fine. It doesn’t have to be high energy, high octane. No one has to blow up dynamite.” His conclusion: there is no Jesus-only message that leaves the rest of your life untouched.

Starting from zero: the two views worth knowing

▶ 1:03:23

Matt assumed no one in the room knew anything, which he warned would frustrate some people. The cessationist-versus-continuationist argument he set aside as uninteresting. The live question is what the gift is. The Pentecostal view: a personal prayer language, spirit to spirit, that you yourself may not understand and Google Translate will never render — glossolalia. The other view is equally charismatic but holds that tongues are human languages the speaker has not learned — xenolalia. An English speaker has an encounter with God and begins praying in Russian; maybe there is a Russian in the room, maybe he is meant to go to Russia.

His method for the hour: read the texts, show how each view handles them, then say where he lands.

The backstory in Acts

▶ 1:05:41

Matt was careful about what is and is not the gift here. The wind is a sound; the fire is an image. The gift starts at “began to speak.” And the crowd that gathers hears each one in his own native language — Parthians, Medes, Elamites, the whole list (Acts 2:5–12).

▶ 1:07:13

Some Pentecostals read that as a hearing miracle: ecstatic utterance on the platform, translation in the ear. Matt gave the standard reply and clearly found it strong — the text says the Spirit gave them utterance, so the miracle sits with the disciples, and a hearing gift would make the separate gift of interpretation redundant. The same pattern recurs at Cornelius’s house, where tongues are the evidence that the Spirit has fallen on Gentiles (Acts 10:44–46), and at Ephesus, where Paul lays hands on disciples who had not heard there was a Holy Spirit (Acts 19:1–6).

▶ 1:09:03

One detail he wanted remembered: Luke wrote Acts after 1 Corinthians was written and circulating, and Luke and Paul travelled together. That becomes an argument later.

Paul’s list, and a question with an assumed answer

▶ 1:11:32

In Paul’s catalogue of gifts, tongues and their interpretation sit alongside prophecy and discernment, all apportioned by one Spirit “as he wills” (1 Corinthians 12:10). Then the string of questions — are all apostles, do all speak with tongues, do all interpret (1 Corinthians 12:27–31). “The answer to those is an assumed no on all counts,” Matt said.

Chapter 14, read by a Pentecostal

▶ 1:12:05

Three things, in character. Not to men but to God — if this were a human language, someone hearing it would be addressed. No one understands: mysteries, not vocabulary. And the speaker builds himself up, which sounds like spirit meeting Spirit.

▶ 1:14:49

The flute and the bugle that give no distinct note (1 Corinthians 14:6–9) sound like something that is not linguistically decipherable at all. And Paul assumes nobody present will understand (1 Corinthians 14:10–12) — odd in a port city like Corinth, where somebody usually speaks your language.

▶ 1:15:42

Then Paul’s own claim to speak in tongues more than all of them, followed by five intelligible words over ten thousand in a tongue (1 Corinthians 14:18–19) — “kind of a humble brag,” Matt said, and also a clear preference. A powerful private tool; a poor public one.

Matt untangled what he called one of the most confusing verses in the letter. Paul is quoting Isaiah 28:11–12: Israel would not hear her own prophets in her own language, so God spoke his displeasure through captors who spoke a foreign one. The strange language was the sign of judgment on unbelief. Which is why an outsider walking into a room full of it concludes you are out of your minds (1 Corinthians 14:23–25) — the same reaction as the mockers at Pentecost.

▶ 1:18:11

Speaking to himself and to God is where the phrase prayer language comes from. Add “the tongues of men and of angels” (1 Corinthians 13:1), and the Spirit interceding with groanings too deep for words:

Put beside “praying at all times in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17–18) and “praying in the Holy Spirit” as self-edification (Jude 20), the Pentecostal case is coherent.

▶ 1:20:21

Matt then stepped out of character to say what he admires. American evangelicals, he said, live in their heads — the Romans Road, the apologetics, “boom, we’re making more sense than you.” Pentecostals do not have that problem. “They are unashamed. They’re letting their hair down spiritually, and that’s admirable.”

The same chapter, read the other way

▶ 1:21:16

Back to Acts 2 first, where Luke twice says tongues and twice says dialects for the same event, then names which dialects. Luke establishes a human context and never revises it. And since Luke and Paul travelled together and ministered together, why would Luke use Paul’s vocabulary for an entirely different phenomenon? Why be confusing on purpose?

▶ 1:23:16

On the drunkenness charge, Matt made a point worth keeping: drunk people slur their own language, they do not switch into gibberish. “So being drunk doesn’t mean not making sense per se.”

Then the same verses, answered one at a time. “No one understands him” need not be literal — “if I went home and told Mandy nobody understood my sermon, that doesn’t mean nobody did.” Whether you understand yourself is a moot point, since you could equally fail to understand an angelic tongue or Hungarian. Building yourself up works either way: you are praying praise in Farsi, and it is doing you good while doing nothing for the room.

▶ 1:27:00

The instruments are an analogy — Paul says so, “so with yourselves.” What he actually reestablishes two verses later is that there are many languages in the world and none is without meaning; unintelligibility is about the hearer, not about the species of language. A port city does not mean every visitor speaks every tongue.

▶ 1:30:07

Isaiah 28 seals it for this view: the Assyrians and Babylonians spoke real human languages. Confusing, foreign, a sign of judgment — and entirely human.

▶ 1:33:20

And “praying in the Spirit” carries no linguistic freight at all. In Romans 8 it is the Spirit praying, not the Christian, and with groans rather than language. John is “in the Spirit” when a door opens in heaven (Revelation 4:1–2); Ezekiel is brought out in the Spirit to a valley of bones (Ezekiel 37:1); the mystery of Christ is revealed to apostles and prophets “in the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:4–5) — and nobody thinks Hebrew stopped being Hebrew. The Didache uses the phrase three times of prophets speaking plainly to people. The contrast Paul draws is flesh against Spirit (Romans 8:8–9; Galatians 5:16), not human against non-human.

Does it actually sound crazy?

▶ 1:38:01

Linguists have put American evangelicals in scanners and concluded they are not speaking any language — too much repetition, no syntax, only sounds from their own tongue. Matt jumped back onto the Pentecostal side to answer: high repetition and no syntax can still be speech. He has stood next to a man whose entire ecstatic vocabulary was “yeah, yeah, yeah,” and that man meant something by it. Then, gently, the mirror: “Lord, Father God, we just — God, we just ask, Father God, we just.” Diagram that sentence.

▶ 1:40:32

He ran a small experiment on the room — a few lines of prayer in Spanish, then in Greek with Erasmian pronunciation, then offered to start beeping in Morse code. The Spanish speakers were unbothered. Nobody thought he had gone mad. In the Greek of the New Testament the word covers everything from “he has a demon and is insane” to Festus telling Paul his great learning had driven him mad — closer to eccentric than unhinged.

Where Matt lands, and the house rules

▶ 1:43:15

He was honest about the weakest Pentecostal argument — the story of the rabbi on the plane who recognises perfect Hebrew is evidence for the other view. He was honest about Jackie Pullinger’s Chasing the Dragon too: praying in a prayer language transformed her ministry, and “we don’t build our doctrine on personal experience.”

▶ 1:44:33

His own conclusion is a shrug with a reason behind it. “Unless I become C-3PO, I’ll never know.” He speaks less than half of one percent of human languages. If someone prays over him in something other than Spanish, Greek or Hebrew, he is lost — and neither view, he pointed out, embraces deliberate gibberish. A prayer language is still a language. Not knowing its rules, he cannot tell the difference.

So the rules at Hope are practical. When the whole room prays at once, pray however it comes — nobody is listening to you, and the cautions do not apply. If you want to bring a tongue to the congregation, expect questions: do you know what you are saying, do you know the language, is anyone here who can interpret. Then it gets sorted out to the side first.

▶ 1:47:43

Some churches do the reverse — stage first, tongue second, hope for an interpreter third. “That would be failing to grasp Paul’s point. He literally said don’t do it that way.” And the motive underneath it got named: “We don’t need credibility. We don’t need to re-up on our Pentecostal bona fides.” You should not feel more spiritual the further you get from Paul’s instruction.

Pentecost is not Babel undone

▶ 1:48:19

Matt closed by dismantling a line he hears often. At Babel, humanity was told to fill the earth and instead gathered in one place, impressed with itself, building upward. God confused the language and they scattered — which is exactly what he had asked for. “If Pentecost is the reversal of Babel, then God did something he wanted, and then undid it. Why would he undo the good thing that he did?”

▶ 1:49:17

Step one, they would not spread out. Step two, they did, speaking many languages. Step three is Acts 2: now that the nations are scattered and speaking, God pours out his Spirit and says this gospel is for all of them. Not a retreat to one tongue, but an advance into every one of them, so that the knowledge of his glory covers the earth as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). “I will make that message known however way I need to, because it’s unstoppable.”

▶ 1:00:46

Matt said he had wanted to bring one of his favorite stories to Baptism
Sunday — not because there is a baptism in it, because there isn’t, but because of
something it shows about God’s nature and character. He read most of
2 Kings 5
aloud and left the last verses for people to finish at home.

1. A great man with an incurable disease

▶ 1:02:09

▶ 1:03:33

Matt slowed down on every clause. “Commander” is sometimes rendered prince —
this is not a lieutenant, this is a five-star general serving a kingdom that was bigger
and stronger than Israel and frightening to it. He is not merely powerful, he is famous,
and famous specifically for a victory the text says the Lord gave through him. He is
honored by his own people. And he has a skin disease with no cure, of the kind that made
people not want to touch him. Matt sat in the strangeness of that pairing: the respect and
admiration of a nation, and isolation, and probably embarrassment, in the same man.

2. The people nobody was listening to

▶ 1:04:10

The next thing that happens is a captive
(2 Kings 5:2–4).
A little girl carried off from Israel on one of these very raids, now serving in Naaman’s
household, tells her mistress she wishes her master could see the prophet in Samaria. Matt
refused to smooth that over. Is she too young to be bitter? Hard to believe. Maybe she just
has a soft heart; maybe she has come to like the family she serves. Whatever the reason,
she is rooting for him — and so, by this point in the story, are we.

Then comes the detail Matt said he likes on its own merits: Naaman goes in and tells the
king of Syria what the girl from Israel said. Two of the most powerful men alive, repeating
a servant girl’s suggestion to each other.

3. An army parked outside a prophet’s house

▶ 1:05:18

Naaman leaves with ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten changes
of clothing — not, Matt noted, something picked off a rack at Ross, more likely presented in
a decorated box — and a letter for the king of Israel
(2 Kings 5:5–7).
He asked the room to picture the logistics. You do not take an Uber when you are an
assassinatable man carrying tons of precious metal past highway robbers. There is an
entourage, armed men, servants, probably an announcer, possibly music. It is loud.

▶ 1:06:46

All of which arrives unannounced at the door of a king who reads a letter demanding he
cure leprosy, and tears his clothes: “Am I God, to kill and to make alive?” Matt thought the
panic was entirely reasonable. He is being handed an impossible task by a delegation with
sharp pointy swords, from the nation whose raids stole that servant girl. In his head, he
fails, they get angry, and they burn his palace. It reads to him like a provocation.

▶ 1:08:17

Elisha hears about the torn clothes and sends word: let him come to me, that he may know
there is a prophet in Israel
(2 Kings 5:8–9).
So the whole brigade relocates — horses, chariots, banners, gold catching the light — and
stands outside a house Matt guessed was not a sprawling manor with a nice deck and a keyhole
garden, but the sort of place you would expect out in the boonies. Every neighbor within
earshot came out to see what the noise was.

4. A chore, and a rage

▶ 1:09:30

Elisha does not come out. Matt lingered here, because the text lingers here. The prophet
knows they are there — nobody could miss the clanking of swords and the marching — and he is
not watching anything or texting anyone. He is just inside, being coy, and he sends a
messenger.

▶ 1:11:05

Matt read the offense two ways and said both are probably in there. It sounded
dismissive — you rate your rivers over ours? do you not care that I am a leper? And it
sounded stupid — do you think I just need a bath? I understand the difference between dirt
and a skin condition. What Naaman came for was ceremony. A prophet in a prophet outfit,
coming out, calling on the name of the Lord, waving his hands, maybe shaking a stick,
possibly dancing in a circle. “He got a chore,” Matt said, “and a dumb one, it seems.”
Or, in Naaman’s voice: I came all the way over here, you do not even come out, you do not
hocus pocus me.

Some of that is just what it is like to be important. As Matt put it: when you travel to
another country for healing, you go to the king. “I don’t go to the bed and breakfast on the
side of the road. I go straight to the palace.”

5. “Just do it. Just try it.”

▶ 1:12:39

He is leaving in a rage, and the story is failing, and then his servants catch up with
him. Matt switched translations here on purpose, saying the ESV renders it woodenly and the
NIV carries the emphasis better.

▶ 1:13:05

“I think the effect is just: do it,” Matt said. “You’re already here. What are you going
to lose? Just try it.” And he pointed out this is the second time in one chapter that Naaman
takes direction from someone far below him in rank — first a captured servant girl through
his wife, now his own servants, asking him to go humiliate himself in front of everybody.

▶ 1:13:37

Not restored to his pre-leprosy skin — restored like a child’s. No wrinkles, no scars, no
sunburn, none of the bumps and bruises a life accumulates. Matt did not know how old Naaman
was, but the skin did not come back leathery and old; it came back like a little kid’s. He
called it more than he bargained for. And then the part he kept coming back to: it was
free.

6. What he went home with

▶ 1:14:41

Naaman goes back with his whole company — Matt wondered aloud how far Elisha’s house was
from the river, since the trip had to be made twice, and figured the neighbors were out
again: he came, he left, he is back, what is all this now — and stands in front of Elisha and
says there is no God in all the earth but in Israel
(2 Kings 5:15–19).
Then he offers the treasure, and Matt stopped to untangle the pronouns for the room — it is
just two men and a lot of “he,” the five-star general pressing gold on the prophet, the
prophet turning it down.

▶ 1:15:19

Then the two odd requests. Two mule loads of Israelite dirt to take home — Matt said not
to get stuck on it; the man likely thought in terms of regional gods and wanted to stand on
the Lord’s ground when he prayed, under the Lord’s authority and not the local one. And a
request for pardon in advance: when his master leans on his arm in the house of Rimmon and
bows, he will have to bend too, and he is genuinely worried the Lord will take offense.
Elisha’s answer is three words: go in peace.

▶ 1:16:42

Here the message paused. The kids who had gone out earlier — “that massive exodus,” Matt
called it — were walked back in a group at a time while he waited. He used the gap to needle
the volunteers: “This was a good day to sign up to be a Sunday school teacher, if you like
light burdens and easy quick lessons.” They had not even finished handing out the snack. He
also said out loud why the sermon was running short: he wanted plenty of time for everything
that was coming after it.

7. Three things worth taking home

▶ 1:17:53

First — and Matt said this was the first point, not the most important one — Naaman is a
beloved leader of a foreign power, and the Lord had given Syria victories through him. We get
stuck reading Israel as the home team, happy when they win and sad when they lose; he sang a
snatch of the old rooting-for-the-home-team line and admitted it was a really ancient
baseball reference. “God is the home team,” Matt said. “When he lifts up and builds, we
celebrate. When he tears down, we still celebrate, because he gets what he wants. It’s God’s
reputation, not Israel’s, that we’re supposed to be rooting for.”

▶ 1:19:14

Second, all that power and wealth and favor, and he was still diseased and still stuck.
No doctor could touch it, and he did not even know there was a prophet until a servant girl
told him.

▶ 1:20:00

Matt brought that straight into the room. We live in an odd time of enormous privilege —
he said he sometimes walks around his middle-class house thinking how the kings of old would
have loved it here, the climate control alone. We touch a device and things appear at the
door. You can buy a tan, a different hair color, a chin tuck, a tummy tuck, a younger face;
he had just learned you can pay to add two or three inches to your femur and be taller. And
still — “even though we live like we’re gods,” he said — we have to be confronted with our
limitations exactly the way Naaman was. Money could not buy him the one thing he wanted.

▶ 1:21:04

“You cannot buy a work of the Spirit.” You cannot buy into the Holy Spirit; you cannot
purchase forgiveness. It has to come in a way that may well feel humbling, even humiliating —
the same way Naaman had to humble himself and wash in what Matt called “the stinky little
Jordan, that dinky little river.” Which is the third point.

▶ 1:21:36

Think about what Naaman actually had to do. An important man, with his entire brigade
watching, taking a bath seven times in a muddy little puddle. No hocus pocus, no waving of
the hand. A simple request that required humility and faith, and nothing else.

8. Tap water in a bucket

▶ 1:22:17

Six people were about to be baptized — two younger children, a teenager, three adults —
and Matt named the culture they were doing it in: a world where we live like kings and queens
and everything is centered on our being happy and gratified at every single moment. What they
were about to do is debasing to the ego, because it lifts up Christ’s name and not theirs.
Instead of “nah, I’m good,” it is a form of admitting need.

Then he inventoried what Hope had not provided. “We did not import waters from Fiji. It’s
tap water in a bucket.” No baptismal gowns gilded with golden thread. No dyed water, no LED
lights, no bubbles, no fog machine, no impressive hand-waving.

▶ 1:23:01

You are not taking a bath. It is an appeal to God, made in humility, acknowledging our
mortality, that sin deserves death, that we are unclean — a confession of sin and limitation
in an age that would rather imagine it will never die, should always be happy, should get
what it wants, and should get it shipped today.

▶ 1:24:15

The fanciness is not what gets it done. The person doing the baptizing does not have to be
perfect, or wearing gilded clothing, or waving their hands through long loud hocus-pocus
prayers that sound impressive. “From heaven’s perspective,” Matt said, “it is a moment full
of glory, beauty, and honor.” It is a respectable event, when you have the right
perspective.

▶ 1:25:01

Because all our earthly glory, wealth, and power is of no effect in saving us from sin and
death. The fatal nature of sin is resolved by one thing only, the precious blood of Jesus
Christ — God the Son made flesh, truly man, who bled for us and identified with us, so that
we can be
baptized
into his death. His name is the one lifted up in the water, because what is really
happening there is the gospel preached again in physical form: that we are
saved by
grace through faith, and not by our wealth, our power, our fancy pools, or our Fiji
water.

And then the buckets came out. Naaman got clean in the river he thought was beneath him;
six people at Hope went down into tap water in front of everybody for the same reason —
because the only name coming up out of it is the one that actually sets people free.