Mental Health - When Body and Soul Hurt | Downtown | July 12, 2026

Spring Lake Church – Downtown

Sermon: Mental Health - When Body and Soul Hurt

Teacher: Jeff Lederer

Passages: Genesis 2:7, Matthew 22:37–38, Job 2:11–13, and 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 

In “Mental Health – When Body and Soul Hurt,” we explore a biblical perspective on mental health through passages including Genesis 2:7, Matthew 22:37–38, Job 2:11–13, and 2 Corinthians 1:3–4. This message reminds us that God created us as embodied souls, calls us to distinguish between sin and suffering, and meets us with compassion in our struggles. As people who are simultaneously saints, sufferers, and sinners, we need God's grace, comfort, and truth as we walk unique paths toward Christ. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

All right. Well, good morning, Spring Lake. I don't know why y'all are on it tonight. This morning. It's tonight. I'm not. Am I still in last night? That's that's different. Usually I make it the the other just the other mistake when I'm at like the Saturday night service. It has been far too long since I've gotten a chance to preach to you guys, so I'm glad to join you. Um my name is Jeff Letter, I'm the care pastor, and so that means I get to oversee a few different areas. So our G4 care groups as well as um our care mentoring team and um congregational care. And so this subject today is one I'm uh particularly passionate about. I love this whole series, honestly. Like just sitting in uncomfortable spaces is what I get to do kind of day in and day out. So welcome, welcome in this space. We're gonna just like sit here for a little bit and meditate and go to some deep spots, but we're gonna talk about mental health in particular this morning. Some of y'all are really excited about that, and others not so much. But I am glad that we can consider these things, really, what holistic discipleship looks like. So I know that this affects everybody in some way, shape, or form. The stats are staggering. Um says one in five adults experience mental illness each year. Um, one in 20 experience what would be serious mental illness. One in seven youth experience a mental health disorder each year, so it starts young. 50% of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14 and 75% by age 24. And then, really tragic stats, suicide is the second leading cause of death among people ages 10 to 24. So, now when I say mental illness or mental disorder, what that means is around 61 million individuals were diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or the DSM, if you've ever heard that term. Essentially, this means one-fifth of people were dealing with a cluster of symptoms that lasted a considerable amount of time and rose to such an intensity that it inhibited their ability to do life the way they desired to. Now, this doesn't include those who are dealing with struggles or symptoms like depression, trauma, or anxiety, the ones who have those things but never reach out for help and never end up in a diagnostic statistic. It hadn't risen to the level of fully maybe inhibiting their ability to function in life. And this was not a blood test. It was on a biological exam that somebody took a blood test and came back with anxiety or bipolar disorder. That's not how these things work. But it's a cluster of symptoms that often appear together that helps counselors and care professionals just understand how best to come alongside folks who are struggling and experiencing these kinds of symptoms. Now, there are certainly biological, there are physiological factors at play, but I just want you to understand the difference between what would be called a mental illness versus, or disorder versus something like cancer or diabetes that has defined tests or biological markers that tell us exactly what's happening. Now, we can argue all day long about the wording, the definitions, the helpfulness of words like illness or health or disease or disorder or syndrome, but suffice to say this area affects all of us. I imagine there's not a person in this space that doesn't know at least one person who's deeply struggling with mental, emotional, or spiritual issues, whether that's depression or anxiety or addiction or trauma or a host of other relational issues like grief. The question for today that I want to answer is how do we understand a topic like this biblically and theologically? Then how do we how do we respond when we or others are struggling through that? And then what can you expect from our care ministries when you step into spaces like G4 or biblical care mentoring? Like how are we going to approach that topic? That's kind of my goal for us today, is to sit in that. Now, in order to understand this rightly, we really have to first understand who we are, what the root problem is, and then what God has provided for his people in areas like this. So to do this, we're gonna go back to the beginning. So we're gonna turn in our Bibles to Genesis 2.7 if you have them, and we'll also be in 1 Corinthians 6, 19 through 20. And I don't often tell you all this, but there's also the UVersion Bible app, and I specifically want to mention that because there's some diagrams and some quotes that come up later, and you might want to look at those a little bit deeper than you'll get a chance to on the screens behind me. And so if you go to the UVersion app, you go to Churches Discover, and I think you click events, you find Spring Lake Downtown, and you'll be able to see some of those things in greater detail. So let's start in Genesis 2, verse 7. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And then 1 Corinthians 6, verse 19 through 20. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own, you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. All right, church, let's pray. Father, we uh recognize that um you have not left us alone in any area to navigate. You have brought your the fullness of yourself to help us to meet us here. I know it is our desire to first and foremost understand what you would have to say in any given topic, including one like this. And would you instruct, would you help us to see you in the midst of those, but also maybe to see ourselves with a little bit more accuracy this morning. And so, Lord, we rest in your care. We ask you to move and pray on this in Jesus' name. Amen. So the the interaction of the body and the soul has been one that philosophers and theologians have been batting around for ages. And there's one quote that's attributed often to C. S. Lewis that says, You do not have a soul, you are a soul, and you have a body. The problem is, C. S. Lewis never said this, and scripture actually speaks against this, as we just read. The mystery is that we are both body and soul. Theologians who most often use the term we are embodied souls to describe the unity of body and soul that we are. Even in our Genesis text, we see that God uses dust to form man materially or physically, and then he breathes into him the breath of life. And oftentimes the word for breath and spirit are interchangeable in the Hebrew and the Greek. It's only upon being breathed into by the Lord that Adam became an apesh in Hebrew, with a similar word being psyche in the Greek, a living being, which would later get connected with this word for spirit or soul, which is ruach in the Hebrew and pneuma in the Greek. Now, when you hear that word psyche, that is the soul word, but we get the word psychology, the study of the soul. As we head into the New Testament, specifically for those in Christ, 1 Corinthians shows us that we get the idea that for anybody who places their faith in Christ, our bodies and souls are united to Christ, and we represent him in ways that mirror the temple of the Old Testament, where God's people communed with him and they made sacrifices. And this text, among others, is why what we do with our bodies matters a lot to the Lord because of the unity that occurs when we place our faith and we place our trust in Christ. Because it involves him. There is a unity between our spirit and our body. In addition to the text we read, we've also learned over the ages that our souls have the ability to affect our bodies, and our bodies do, in fact, have influence and affect our souls as well. Both matter and both have to be a part of any conversation on the subject of mental health. We know that sleep deprivation can affect your emotional capacity, like patience or things like anxiety. Poor nutrition affects your mood. Anyone ever have like hanger hit them or like their blood sugar spike low and you just need some like peanut butter crackers or something to get back to a steady state? Exercise has been proven more effective than any medication for struggles like depression. Just movement. Physical exhaustion can make temptation harder to resist. And then there's one example cited by Paul Tripp was a counseling experience with a guy who had a huge personality change. He became a very angry man, and they discovered that it was the result of an accident that affected the limbic area of his brain that was swollen. They call that the rage center the brain. He got medication and he was fine. But by then his church had already disciplined him for sins against his wife and his family. So Paul had heard what was going on. He immediately sent him to a major hospital for a multidisciplinary examination. Yeah, that's a lot of syllables. And they found out what was wrong with him. It was like a light switch was turned off and on for this change to occur in him. Now, this doesn't mean that he's not accountable for those sins against his family, but it's an important context for what was happening and really how healing needed to occur. In addition to a situation like this, the the medical community even has a category for dying from a broken heart, where someone who loses a precious loved one and their heart begins failing from the grief. This is really our first point that God made us as embodied souls. This is why when you step into many of our G4 groups, don't be surprised when we ask you about sleep or diet or exercise. We'll talk about medications that are taken, the last time you saw a doctor, and daily hygiene type habits that need to be stewarded well before maybe we talk about depression, anxiety, or trauma, because we're trying to get you to a point where maybe we can steward and position your body well to be able to hear well from Jesus. You can do all these things. You can check all the spiritual emotional boxes and perhaps still feel lousy if you're getting like three or four hours of sleep every night instead of maybe seven or eight. And I know for you odd people who are like, I can do it in five or six. I don't understand you. Hat off to you. But the reality is we need it. We need to be caring well for our bodies. But we don't stop there. We know that part of good stewardship is also your connection, your abiding in Christ. So prayer and scripture and worship and Sabbath and community, like these things matter too. And this is why Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. Good stewardship is holistic. Love God with all of you, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, because you belong to the Lord and He desires only good for His people. Here's a diagram we use in our G4 training to seek understanding when folks come for help in the care ministry. And I know it's like really detailed, which is why I recommended you guys check out the U version app, but we'll explain what's going on here. So from the outside, from the outside, we start with who God says we are, and the goals developed in biblical care arise from our understanding of ourselves in relation to the God who made us. With God as our Father, Christ as our Savior and hope, and the Holy Spirit who applies the person and the work of Jesus to our lives from the inside out, as revealed in God's Word. The outside pieces are the foundation of our identity. That's where authority is derived. It helps us understand the difference between what's true and what's false, and how we determine goals and what true healing or freedom actually looks like. And as you can see as you move into the middle a little bit, struggles also have multiple factors like physical bodily struggles, such as chronic pain or illness, or how God made our brains to function, as we mentioned earlier. There's the volitional aspect, which is habits or choices we've cultivated, and how God's made us as beings who settle easily into habits. The hard part is those are both good and bad, as we can tell with those who struggle with addiction. Then there are circumstances and environments that have shaped or influenced us, like our family of origin or our work environments, what kind of support systems we have, trauma that comes upon us. And then there's the cultures that we just reside in. In addition to the reality of, of course, that we are spiritual beings. We are made in the image of God, and we have an enemy that seeks to attack us and isolate us. And on top of that, we also have this internal battle going on between our flesh and our spirit for essentially what it looks like to glorify God day in and day out. All of these things are a part of that. Meanwhile, at the very center, the person in the middle has to then interpret all of these avenues and decide what meaning they're going to assign to each area, how they understand who they are, first and foremost. Like as they're one who is pressed in by all these factors, how much of their identity has been saturated and all these things pressing in on them. Who is God in the midst of it? What is his role in their lives? Is he punishing them? Is he kind? Is he present? And what it looks like then to steward these other areas in the healing process holistically and involving all of them. Paul Tripp is known for pointing out that we are revelation receivers and interpreters. We're not computers who receive raw data in and then we just have raw data come out. Like we don't have one set of stimulus come in and then it automatically produces an action. That's a machine. We receive revelation from all these different sources, including God, and then we have to assign meaning to each area, which is where, honestly, where some of our dysfunction comes in, because we start to believe lies based on our interpretation. And we need the Holy Spirit and others to help us see what we can't see because we're just simply too close to our situation. And then you've got heightened emotions that give information, but they can also at times muddy our perception of our reality. Now, I say all of this intentionally, making this sound really complex because I want us to understand that oftentimes it is. Can something like worry turn into sin when we don't trust God? Sure, absolutely. Is every experience of anxiety because of sin? Well, if you mean sin with like a big S, as in because Adam and Eve sinned, our bodies are now fallen and they're not functioning the way God originally intended, then yes, it's all anxiety is caused by sin. If you mean is anxiety always present because you personally did something, you personally sinned as like a cause and effect, then no, not necessarily. To reduce a complex issue down to that creates a host of problems, including what are we gonna do with texts like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, who demonstrates all the markers of like an anxiety or like a panic attack. I don't know of any faithful believer or theologian that's gonna look at that and say, Jesus sinned, or that bubbled up out of the sin in his heart, and that that's why he was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. No, Jesus rightly experienced fear. He invited his closest community to pray with him and for him, and then he ran to the Father for hope and salvation. It's actually a beautiful picture of how to approach something like this when you're pressed heavy. Was he immediately relieved from the anxiety or sorrow? We aren't told, but his prayers seemed to indicate that despite what he had going on, what he felt, God was enough to sustain him for what he was about to endure. The sinful rebellion of Genesis 3 is the root of every form of evil, sin, and suffering in our world, bar none. We had perfect communion and a secure relationship with our Maker, with no fear, no shame, no suffering, and we traded that in for our own rule and reign and our desire to determine what was good and bad for ourselves. In the wake of that, you see the first appearance of fight or flight instincts show up as Adam and Eve hide when they hear the sound of the Lord, instead of being delighted and looking to embrace God as they had walked with him in the cool of the day. There's a disruption that has now been marked in their relationship. As a result, God would then also inform them of the curse of their choice, would also create enmity, would create disharmony between the two of them as well, as well as a struggle to be fruitful in their labor and fruitful in the formation of their families. If you look throughout Genesis, infertility becomes a huge part of the story generation by generation. So this Genesis 3 story, this is the root of our problems cosmically on a big level, on a universal level. But we've got to stop assuming that someone's personal sin is the cause of their suffering. This is an emotional prosperity gospel that teaches if you check all the right spiritual obedience boxes, then you shouldn't be struggling mentally, emotionally, and spiritually the way you are. Because frankly, it's not true biblically or historically. Now those things can correspond, and sometimes repentance from sin is what is needed, but we've got to be able to approach people as sufferers and sinners while recognizing that as believers, we're always carrying those realities intention. Mike Emlet beautifully captures this reality. Scripture reveals that God ministers to his people as saints who need confirmation of their identity as children of God, sufferers who need comfort in the midst of their affliction, and sinners who need challenge to their sin in light of God's redemptive mercies. Saint, sufferer, and sinner. All three of these are simultaneously true of every Christian you meet. If this is the way God sees and loves his people, then we should do the same, using these broad biblical categories to guide our overall approach to the people in our lives. They are signposts for wise love. And this is why, really, as a part of our G4 ministry and really in the care ministry in general, one of our big points is we must recognize there's a difference between sin and suffering. Now, I wish I could say that the church or God's people have always done an historically awesome job of handling this topic in people's lives, but sadly it just wouldn't be true. And it's not because God's left us to fend for ourselves to figure this out or that he hasn't equipped us well, but rather it is our interpretation of these issues where hurt and damage have occurred. To highlight one mistake we can make, I want us to use a case study from the oldest written book of the Bible in Job. If you want to turn to Job 2 in your Bibles. Now, if you'll remember, the book of Job starts off with like a righteous man named Job who's honored God in his life and his family, and then he is attacked mercilessly by Satan, first with the murder of his family, the robbing of his wealth, and then the robbing of his health. Job, through all this, does not sin against the Lord in his response, but instead he mourns in sackcloth and ashes, and he utters the famous line that we actually now sing, The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. It's a beautiful moment. This is where we pick up as Job's three friends come after hearing all that's happened to Job in Job 2, verse 11 through 13. When Job's three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Namathite, heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him. They began to weep aloud, they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was. If you see their original agreement was they were going to sympathize and comfort him. That was their mission. And at this point, this is beautiful, this is embodied, this is incarnational Jesus with flesh on ministry to someone who has just endured tremendous suffering. There's a coming alongside him, there's no like pat answers, there's not quick biblical proof text to try to cover over the hurt, but rather just acknowledging, as we see so often in the Psalms, that this situation hurts. And the best thing I can do initially is just be present with you to let you know that you don't have to walk through this alone. Now, the problem with our friends come when they open their mouths and they try to start diagnosing and offering their perspective of why this has happened and what Job needs to do. Here's a highlight of the best hits from their voices, starting with Eliphaz. Job 4, verse 7. Consider now who being innocent has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? As I've observed, those who plough evil and those who sow trouble reap it. So Eliphaz, he's starting out strong with basically like you had to have done something wrong, Job. Like, that's that's how this works. Like, things don't happen like this unless you've done something to deserve it. You must have done something to bring this on, which we know from our text he didn't. Next, let's hear from counselor number two, named Bildad. Then Bildad the Shuhite replied, How long will you say such things? Your words are a blustering wind. That's rough for someone trying to bring comfort. Does God pervert justice? Does the Almighty pervert what is right? When your children sinned against him, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin. But if you will seek God earnestly and plead with the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, and now he will re he will rouse himself on your behalf and restore you to your prosperous state. So Bildad's taking it a step further. He's also insinuating that not only was Job's suffering brought on because he sinned, but also his children's sin led to their own deaths as well. And then what Job needed to do was just humbly repent and plead with God to restore him. And once again, counseling someone who is in deep suffering, having been sinned against, that repentance from their own sin was what was required. So let's round out the three friends and see how Zophar responds to Job. Yet if you devote your heart to him strengthly. Stretch out your hands to him. If you put away the sin that is in your hand and allow no evil to dwell in your tent, then free of fault, you will lift up your face, you will stand firm and without fear. So to put skin on this, imagine inviting your friends into a hard season of suffering that you're walking through, and then each of them progressively starts questioning, trying to figure out, going on a sin hunt to determine what you did wrong to bring this upon you. As if we live in a world of karma, good in, good out. Not only is this not helpful and it heaps shame upon the trouble, but it's also never been true of God's people. And we see it spelled out in God's word. This is prosperity gospel at his finest. Obey Jesus. Check all the spiritual health boxes, and you'll have health, wealth, and happiness all the days of your life. Yet scripture gives us a completely different picture. That sometimes obedience is actually a path through suffering where you find God sustain you, that He is enough, demonstrating to everyone and to this world that its pleasures are not your greatest treasure and goal. And you see this vividly in the Beatitudes of Jesus. What is the blessed life look like? It looks like the blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the poor in spirit, those who are persecuted, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. These are the ones, the happy ones, the joyful ones. Every one of the disciples outside of John, we know dies a martyr's death in faithfulness to Christ, not because somewhere they did something wrong to cause it. Multiple prophets dealt with rejection, poverty, and despair while faithfully proclaiming God's word. And then church history is filled with individuals who found God in the midst of their struggle rather than because they had none. And somewhere in history in the Middle Ages, you hear this term dark night of the soul start to show up in a lot of the writings of the church fathers. And it's just trying to give voice and language to this heaviness that they're feeling while trying to figure out why they feel so dry and numb and like that just their prayers aren't heard. Job's response later in the book to his counselor friends sums up the situation well. Miserable comforters are you all. We even see later that God's anger burns against these three friends for their words, and he actually asks Job to pray for them. This is textbook treating a suffering issue as if it was a sin issue. Now, this does not mean that those who walk through suffering cannot respond sinfully to what's come upon them, but we don't counsel them as if they are to blame for what happened to them. We also recognize that for some sin issues, there are contexts and stories of suffering that give us a fuller picture of how that sin became an idol when it comes to areas like substance abuse, addiction, anger, or pornography to name a few. Oftentimes there's trauma that are a part of those stories. This is where each person's story is unique, and often their path of healing may look different, even if freedom in Christ is the same goal for all of them. In short, Christ is the same destination for all, but the path is often unique. We recognize that each person that comes looking for godly and biblical counsel in our ministries to have a unique story. Even though there may be similarities to the struggles that they're encountering, we recognize that the specifics of why a struggle becomes stuck for each person is unique to each of them. And I honestly wish many times that I could like copy and paste someone else's healing journey of freedom onto the next person I meet who's dealing with that issue. And it doesn't work because I've tried. I'm like, okay, this is A, B, C, D, this is what worked for this person. I'm just gonna like try to fast track this and tell you, these are the things you need to do. It never goes well. Each person is utterly unique. Healing and holistic transformation, it comes as the Holy Spirit does that change in the individual as they get personal with God and He meets them in that space and begins healing those areas. The specific areas of our hearts where lies take root, where strongholds become entrenched and hopelessness abounds, it varies a ton from person to person. And then also the time it takes for healing to happen can't be put on a clock. It can't be force fed. And that time and what's needed to be healed looks different for each of us, which is why most of our G4 groups are ongoing. There's not a set number of sessions when you meet also with a biblical care mentor. We're not going to kick you out of those processes while you're still working through the healing process. We recognize that each person's journey is unique. Our desire is to truly help you walk in faithfulness with God and others, progressively growing over the course of time. Now, the hard thing about progress is that it rarely comes in the timing and the speed we desire. And it's very rarely a steady, straight line. This diagram is which I know is busy again, I hope will illustrate what I mean. So if you see in the top there, progress in many ways can be like sound waves where everything is intense and it's out of 10 in terms of like how intense the struggle hits, how long it lasts when it comes, so it's duration, and then how often those feelings of those temptations come upon you, so the frequency of them. Now, for some, I will admit, I've been around those where the change is immediate. It's like a literally like a light switch, Holy Spirit lights them up, they go from intensely struggling to, I don't desire it, I don't struggle with it anymore. That happens. But I think for often many more of us, myself included, it is a slow submission process. It is a long, arduous, we've got to figure this out, lay these things down. And it's a steady growth that ratchets down to where things are not as intense as they used to be. They don't last as long as they used to, and they don't come as often as they did before. On top of that, our goal is helping individuals walk in the fullness of Christ, that he might be enough for you even while you continue to grow in your dependence, your love, and your surrender to him in these ways. As I've heard many testify that we've walked with the strongholds or things that used to own them, like master them, like I can't handle this, are no longer in control. And they feel the freedom to walk in faithfulness to the Lord even as these symptoms come and go over time. Because they don't often just disappear right away. We live in Wisconsin. It gets dark for vast portions of the year, and that often brings struggles back in and struggles with depression and anxiety. There's a number of people in our congregation who are struggling with chronic pain and illness. That's why we have a group for it, a G4, which can be cyclical. Some days you just have a struggle even getting out of bed in the morning. And that's the nature of that struggle in particular. The beauty is being able to look back and see that your worst days are now better than your best days used to be. And the peace of knowing that God is working in and through you is increasing while you continually ask the question: what does faithfulness look like in each season, even as maybe the symptoms come and go? It's the combination of all these things that we seek to understand and approach in each individual who steps into our care ministry, offering grace and mercy for those who are seeking help. The heart of our care ministry in G4 and Biblical Care Mentoring is really 2 Corinthians 1. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. I share that to let you know that each of us, those who lead in counsel and care ministry, we bring our own testimony of Christ, meaning us in our seasons of struggle, which enables us to be gracious towards whatever you're walking through, whether that's addiction or pornography or trauma or abuse or depression or abortion or anxiety, to name a few. If you step in to get help at Spring Lake, you will not be shamed. And we will testify of the waves Christ met us in our hardest moments. This is the reason I tell men of my own battles and freedom from pornography and sexual sin. I tell couples about the lessons that Kara and I had to learn in loving one another as Christ loved us, even when the feelings were not always there. And we could all we could see was like our rightness and the other person's wrongness. And the same holds true for our G4 leaders and our care mentors. Nobody is nailing this 100%, and healing happens in community. So my hope is two things. One, that those who are hurting would know that Spring Lake is a place where it's okay to not be okay, and that we'll walk with you as Jesus meets you where you are. Don't suffer in isolation. We want to help connect you to real care and healing. Even if it's in partnership with other care providers in the area outside the church that we often recommend and refer to, and they refer to areas like G4. The other plea I want to make is for those of you in here who have been freed. You've been healed, you've been transformed in your own journey of embodied soul struggles. Revelation says we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. And your testimony could be a ministry to someone else just by walking with individuals or groups testifying how Christ met you in that struggle while facilitating a study like G4 or gospel-centered marriage. We're going to have a biblical care mentor training coming up in the first of August. It should already be on the events page that you can register for. Where we're going to equip you to minister to others out of the comfort you received from Christ in an area of suffering or sin. And out of that, you'll have the opportunity to serve in an area like G4 or individual care mentoring, using your testimony to minister to others while facilitating a gospel-centered resource in that area. What you walked through was not wasted. And how God met you was purposeful. And there are few things better than seeing God use your story to encourage and minister to someone to help them walk in the light, to trust Jesus to heal those broken areas, to maybe instill some hope, because many have maybe given up hope that anything's ever going to change. Because we've all been there. And we are all in this together. And as the body of Christ, we are better together than apart. So whether you need help or you could be a helper in areas where body and soul hurt, I would just encourage you, take a step and consider what the Lord could do in you and through you, but also healing you so that then you can live into the realities of being a new creation in Christ, which is true. Saved not just from something, but also saved to new life in Him and a mission. Let's pray, Church. Father, we we recognize your faithfulness. You saw our great need. You saw that we couldn't save ourselves. You sent a savior. You recognize that we were in darkness and we couldn't see clearly, and we needed your light to shine the way towards true healing. And I know that there are many of us that are sitting in this space that are struggling. We're in a hard season. And maybe that's one that we can't really see hope for right now. And others of us are in the midst of the battle, and we're we're taking those steps and we're having good days and we're having hard days, and yet you're faithful in the midst of all those things. And there are a number of people, Lord, as well that are in here that could also use what you've done in them, what you've healed in them, what you've freed them from to be a minister and a conduit of your grace in others' lives. And I pray, Lord, that you would press upon all the people in this space to see your goodness, your grace, your mercy, your ability to move in and to work through them. We pray all these for your glory and our joy. It's in Jesus' name.

unknown 33:50

Amen.