Resentment: a biblical lesson

SPEAKER_00: Good morning. I'm going to do something different today. Last week I told you that we would look at a New Testament passage with the same themes as Nehemiah, but the more I worked on it, the more I decided there was a better passage to do. I don't know about you, but Nehemiah sometimes seems a little too perfect and a little hard to relate to. So I want to look at a different kind of leader, a different person in the Old Testament, um, who is a little, at least for me, easier to relate to. We're gonna look at Miriam and her leadership, because in her story we see someone dealing with resentment and someone dealing with life that isn't fair. I remember an incident when Brendan, our oldest, uh, was still a baby and he was nursing. Dave and I had recently finished our biblical studies program and we had been asked to go on staff at the McKinsey Study Center, which is a study center kind of like the one we have here in Charlottesville. And so we were trying to make this transition from student to teacher, which was a really awkward thing to do because everyone still saw us as students and thought we didn't know anything. And they were probably right, we didn't know that much. But anyway, Dave was asked to speak at this conference and I really wanted to do it. It was a fairly big conference and it was our first chance to be seen as like real teachers. And he had been given a topic that I had spent a great deal of time studying, but I'd never had the chance to teach. But I couldn't go. I was nursing a baby and they didn't ask me anyway. I was so jealous. To make matters worse, Dave asked me to help him with the topic because I'd spent so much more time on it than he had, and I okay, so I I swallowed my bitterness and I gave him all my notes and he pursued his preparation with a glee that just made me want to throw up. And then finally the day of the conference came, and I stayed home by myself with this cranky baby in the rain on a Saturday. We were in Oregon, so it was always raining. And there I was all day alone, just you know, I remember sitting there with this this monster screaming in my ear, as my son is crying unconsolably, thinking, here I am, dealing with this cranky baby, and my husband is out teaching the Bible. Well, to make matters worse, he came home to rave reviews. I mean, everybody loved him. So I asked to see his handout, and do you know what he had done? He had taken my handout and put his name on it. He didn't even change a word. In fact, the only thing he changed was to take my name completely off and put his name on the top and kind of pass it off as his. And I got so angry, and we had this huge fight. Well, actually I had a huge fight because I was the only one yelling. And he looked at me, you know, perplexed with this attitude of like, but we're married, we're one, this is the gospel. What's what's the big deal? Well, all I can say is it's a really good thing that God wasn't around me that day like he was around Miriam in the days of Moses, because I had a problem. And the problem was not Dave's, the problem was mine. I was focused on glory and not good. And what we're gonna look at today is Miriam, because she was Moses' big sister, and she had the same problem with her baby brother that I had with Dave. So today we're gonna look at how God dealt with her and what happens when you focus on the glory rather than the good. Well, we're gonna start in Exodus uh chapter two, and then we're gonna move to Numbers 12, and we're gonna look at the story of Miriam. Alright, so we're looking at a different kind of leader today. Alright, so let me go back. Um I am so confused now. Alright, so this is where we meet Miriam, and I just want to set the stage, and this should be a very familiar story to you. Notice at the end of Exodus 1, 22, Pharaoh commanded all his people, saying, Every son who is born you are to cast in the Nile, and every daughter you are to keep alive. So here we are. This is in Egypt, this is after the time of Joseph. There's a new Pharaoh on the throne who and um he does not remember Joseph or who Joseph's God is, and he is the Hebrews are there in slavery, they're multiplying, he's afraid of them, and they're the numbers, and so he decrees that all uh male children will be killed. So this is where we meet Miriam. So two Exodus 2 1. Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi, and the woman conceived and bore him a son, and when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got him a wicker basket and covered it over with tar and pitch. Then she put the child into it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile, and his sister, this is Miriam, stood at a distance to find out what would happen to him. Then the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile, with her maidens walking alongside the Nile, and when she saw the basket among the reeds, she sent her maid and brought it to her. When she opened it, she saw how the child, and behold, the boy was crying, and she had pity on him and said, This is one of the Hebrew's children. Then his sister, this is Miriam again, said to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women, so that she may nurse the child? And the Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Go ahead. So the child went and called the child's mother. Then Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I shall give you your wages. So the woman took the child and nursed him, and the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. And she named him Moses because I drew him out of the water. More volume? All right, how's that better? Let it let us know if it's not loud enough over there. Yep. If it's not loud enough in the next room, just rattle the uh the wall there. Okay, so what we have here is Moses is born and his mother devises a plan to save him, and her plan involves Miriam. And Miriam has to persuade Pharaoh's daughter not only to take care of the baby, but basically to give him back to his natural mother. Now I suspect Miriam's parents came up with this plan, but they probably rehearsed her. You know, they probably talked to her about it and role-played a little bit and had her say, What would you say to the Pharaoh's daughter, so that she got the words right and the attitude right, and she had to be in the right place at the right time. And at this point in the history of Israel, salvation is depending on Miriam. Because Moses is the one who's going to deliver them from Egypt. Moses is the one who's going to play that role of prophet, and God is using Miriam at this point to keep him safe and to and to further that plan. So we see her as a young girl following God, being courageous, being faithful. The next time we run into her is in chapter 15, and this is after all the events of the Exodus. We don't know how old she was in relation to Moses, so I'm not sure how old she was when when these events, but I imagine she wasn't, you know, 10 or 20 years older than him, maybe seven or eight, maybe less. But now we see her at the end of her life, and she Moses had written a song, not the end of her life, at the end of the Exodus period. And Moses has written a song to celebrate God's deliverance, and Miriam, who's called a prophetess, it says in Exodus 15, 20, and Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took the timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dancing. And Miriam answered them, Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted, the horse and his rider. He is hurled into the sea. So you see, she starts this dance, and all the women follow her, which suggests that she had some leadership throughout this time period, some maybe charisma or enthusiasm, uh, so that when she starts something, everyone follows her. She's identified as a prophetess, which probably means God had been using her throughout her life in events that we don't have that weren't recorded for us. Presumably, while Moses was off in exile, you know, he you remember he killed an Egyptian soldier and had to flee for his life, and so for what is it, 30 years or some period, some long period of time, he's off in Midian um caring for his father's-in-law's sheep. Well, somebody's got to be leading the people back home, and I suspect that fell to Miriam and to Aaron. So um we get this picture of Miriam as a leader of the people. So now turn to Numbers 12, because this is where the problem starts, and this is the part I can relate to. So Numbers 12, verse 1. Then Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman. And they said, Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us as well? And the Lord heard it. Now the man Moses was very humble more than any man who was on the face of the earth. And suddenly the Lord said to Moses and to Aaron and to Miriam, You three come out to the tent of meeting. So the three of them came out. Then the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud and stood at the doorway of the tent, and he called Aaron and Miriam. When they had both come forward, he said, Hear now my words. If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I shall speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my household. With him I speak mouth to mouth, even openly, and not in dark veins. And he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then when you n were you not afraid to speak against my servant, against Moses? So the anger of the Lord burned against them, and he departed. But when the cloud had withdrawn from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow. As Aaron turned toward Miriam, behold, she was leprous. Then Aaron said to Moses, O my Lord, I beg you, do not account this sin to us, in which we have acted foolishly, and in which we have sinned. Oh, do not let her be like one uh be like one dead whose flesh is half eaten away when he comes from his mother's womb. And Moses, her father, had uh and Moses cried out to the Lord, O God, heal her, I pray. But the Lord said to Moses, If her father had but spit in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days? Let her be shut up for seven days outside the camp, and afterward she may be received again. So Miriam was shut up against outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not move on until Miriam was received again. Afterward, have were the people moved out from Hezaroth and camped in the wilderness of Parm. So you see what happens here. Miriam grumbles against Moses in the same way I grumbled against my husband. God asks immediately, strikes her with leprosy. Moses prays, Have mercy, heal her, and he says, Okay, for seven days. So this raises a lot of questions for me. And we're gonna look at two of them. First was why was Miriam punished and not Aaron? And that that's an interesting question. We're told they both grumbled. And the other one, why does God act so decisively and swiftly? Why why does this, of all things, merit that kind of punishment? So that's where we're gonna we're gonna go. We're gonna answer those questions and then we're gonna look at so how do you deal with that kind of resentment or that kind of of jealousy? So um, why was Miriam punished and not Aaron? I think there's there's two clues in the text. The first is in 12.1 in that her name is mentioned first, and that suggests that perhaps she was the instigator, so that she goes to Aaron and starts this conversation and gets the ball rolling. And the other, well, let me let me just talk about that for a minute. Of the three si siblings of Miriam, Aaron, and Moses, Miriam appears to be the most naturally gifted. Um when you compare her with the stories we know of the other two, you see Moses fighting battles of self-worth a lot. He um God has to repeatedly remind Moses to do what he's been called to do, um, that yes, he can do it. Moses should say no, send Aaron instead. You know, I I can't I'm not the right spokesman, you you really want someone else. Um so it seems that Moses looks back on his failures and he struggles at least somewhat with self-worth and why would God use him in um i at all. Aaron, on the other hand, seems to have the influence of his office, but not much else. He tends to blow with the wind. So he's appointed high priest by God, and and yet when Moses is gone, when Moses goes up the mountain to receive the law, Aaron fails to keep the people in line. He kind of blows with the wind. So when Moses is gone for 40 days, then the people say, Aaron, make us a golden calf. He says, Hmm, okay, let's do it. And he's kind of, you know, he's blowing with the wind of the people. And later we see him repeat that when Moses fails the Lord by striking the rock at Meribah, Aaron complies with him there. So it's again, he's kind of influenced by his circumstances or the people around him. And I think to some extent that may be what's going on here, that Miriam is grumbling and beginning to res to voice this resentment, and he's then being influenced by his sister and following in that in the wind that's blowing her the wind of her resentment. Miriam, with the few glimpses we have of her, we don't see that. We see her with poise, with charm, with courage, uh, enthusiasm for God. And other than this incident, which we're looking at, we see her in pretty positive light, you know, leading the people in a dance of praise to God. We don't see her mentioned in the Golden Cast incidents. Um and so of the three, we're she she comes across, at least in the text clues that we have, as probably the most confident and the most naturally gifted. So what's going on now is Moses' role is rising and her role is diminishing. As a prophetess, presumably she would have been one of these people who got visions and dreams that God mentions in this passage. But now, with Moses, something new is happening. Now he says in verse 8, with Moses I speak mouth to mouth, even openly and not in dark sayings, and he beholds the form of the Lord. So there's a new kind of relationship going on here that's never happened before. And then when Moses gets the law and he comes back down, then the law is given to everyone, and now everyone can read it, everyone can study it, everyone can hear it, and that changes your need for a prophet. So you see people can begin to uh debate the law, comfort each other with the law, make choices widely based on the law, because now they have this new kind of revelation. So God was giving people this great wonderful gift in the written law and this new kind of prophet with Moses, and as that grows, the role of Miriam would diminish because you don't need someone who just sees visions and dreams as much anymore. So it wasn't really her fault, it's just God's changing his methods, and it's a good thing. He's um he's giving them a new kind of gift. And just as an aside, this is kind of you there's so many parallels between Moses and Jesus, but this is one of them. You see Moses speaking to God face to face openly as a friend, which foreshadows Jesus, the one who would come, who would be in complete union with God and one with him. So it's kind of a there's so a lot of parallels, but that's just one of them I wanted to point out. So what's going on with Miriam then is the problem is not that she's not appreciating God's new gift. Instead, she's beginning to resent it. So in verse 1, she begins to grumble and she complains about Moses' Cushite wife, but I think that's a smokescreen. Because the very next verse she says, Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? It's like, didn't he use us too? Um so what's the problem with the Cushite wife? We don't know much about her. In fact, everything we know is is this verse. Uh Cush was a region of Egypt in the southern, south of Egypt at the time. It was a province during the time Moses was an Egyptian prince. So most scholars speculate that he married this woman early in his life while he was still in Pharaoh's household. Um, because after we get he gets to Midian, when he flees for his life, he appears to be unattached, and there's no time during the events of the Exodus that he could have taken a wife. So he probably married this woman early in his life, in his younger years as a relatively young man before fleeing to Midian, and either she divorced him when he fled or died through illness or childbirth or something along that those lines, because at least the marriage appears to be over when he gets to Midian and asks to marry um Jethro's daughter. At that point, he's unattached. So Cush is what's now Ethiopia, and it was had a primarily black population, so there may have been some kind of racial element to this that he married a non-Jew and he married a darker skinned person, and that could be why Miriam is grumbling. But at any rate, this marriage is in the past, it's over and done with, and she is dredging it up. You know, it's like, well, I never did that. I don't have any little skeletons in my closet like Moses does. And hasn't God only spoken, you know, he spoke through Moses, sure, but didn't he also speak through me? Um and that's the resentment. So the Cushite wife, I don't think, is the problem. The problem is Miriam resents the way God's using her, and she's jealous of the way he's using her baby brother. You know, and she's probably, you know, how can God use me with Moses in the spotlight all the time? You know, he's he's robbing us of the opportunity to use our gifts. Aren't we God's spokesmen too? And notice that Moses never wanted the glory. You see, from verse 3 it says, now the man Moses was very humble more than any man on the face of the earth. So the text goes out of the way to tell us that Moses was not about his own glory and his own fame. He was the most humble man on the face of the earth. He didn't ask God to appear to him, he didn't ask for this meeting, he didn't want to appoint himself to live over the people. In fact, the first time God comes to him, he says, No, you know, send Aaron, not me. Um And look back in chapter 11. There's another interesting story along those lines. Similar theme, 1126. But two men had remained in the camp. The name of one was Eldad, and the name of the other Medad, and the Spirit rested upon them. Now they were among those who had been registered but had not gone out to the tent, and they prophesied in the camp. So this would have been something like what Miriam presumably did. The Spirit of God would come upon her and she would prophesy. Now these two men are doing it. So verse 27. So a young man ran and told Moses and said, Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. Then Joshua, the son of Nun, the attendant of Moses from his youth, answered and said, Moses, my Lord, restrain them. So Joshua's kind of got the same idea. He's afraid that these two guys are eclipsing his master's role, that they're out there prophesying, and that's Moses' job, and he should be the one doing that. So he's trying to protect Moses. And in 29, but Moses said to him, Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them. So you see, Moses, instead of being protective and saying, Ooh, that's my job. I gotta get out there in front of the cameras in the spotlight, he says, No, I long for the day when God will give his spirit to everyone and people like me will not be needed, when everyone will understand and hear the word of the Lord. So you get the impression from Moses that he's not trying to push Miriam out of the spotlight, he's not trying to eclipse Aaron, he doesn't care for his own reputation. The problem is not him, it is Miriam and Aaron's resentment. So we've got this little kind of sibling rivalry going on, and Miriam resents the fact that her baby brother is uh eclipsing her role and her making her particular gifts a little less useful. And she vents her frustration in verse 1, God hears in verse 2, he calls a meeting, verse 4, he chastises her in five through eight, and he leaves in nine, and it's like, she's leprous. It's like, whoa, that what happened? Um and then you see Aaron pleading, Moses, can't you do something? So that raises the question: why does God act so swiftly and decisively? And why is this seemingly such a harsh punishment? He gives her this painful disease, he publicly disgraces her and expels her from the camp for a week, and the whole nation has to wait. And when I first read that, I thought, isn't that out of proportion? I mean, Moses killed a man and got away with it. You know, I mean, he killed the Egyptian soldier, and God didn't come and make him lepros, and Aaron made the golden calf when asked, and he didn't get leprosy, and that, you know, remember from chapter 9 of Nehemiah, that's like on the all-time worst sins list, you know, they say, even when we made the golden calf, God did not abandon us. And it shows up in Scripture with that kind of language several times of even at that point God was still kind. So, why would God act so swiftly with Miriam? I think the answer is that her sin was subtle, but it was just as deadly. And when Moses killed the soldier, he knew something was wrong immediately. His sin was obvious. There was a person who used to be living, who used to be breathing, and is not. And you can't deny that. Something has changed. Something that was living is now dead, something has gone wrong. Likewise, with Aaron, when he made the golden calf, he had immediate unmistakable evidence that this was wrong. Moses comes down the mountain and flies into rage and has this public proclamation where he melts. The golden calf down and grinds it into powder and makes them drink it, so there's this visible, tangible public acknowledgement, this is wrong and you shouldn't have done this. Resentment, on the other hand, is something we can hide. It's in our hearts and we can fool ourselves that it's not really a problem. You know, we can think about it and relish it and justify it and talk about, well, life isn't fair, and I I worked hard for that, I deserve it, and we can keep it secret so that people walking by us have no clue that we even have a problem. You know, it's you can and I'm sure you all have been there, I know I have, you know, it's not fair, why don't I get to do that? I worked hard for that, I deserve it. You know, my husband got to go teach a conference when I did all the work and everybody loved him, and you know, I didn't commit any of these big flagrant sins. You can just see Miriam saying, I didn't marry a Cushite woman, I don't have these skeletons in my closet, and you think you're all right, but because resentment is this hidden disease of the soul, and God's going to expose it. And the good news is he loves her too much to leave her there. He loves her too much not to deal with it. I think that's what's going on. He knows her heart is troubled, and he's not going to let that sin fester. So he I think by giving her leprosy, leprosy does on the outside what resentment does on the inside. So it's a way of making her sin visible and tangible and symbolic. If you think about it, resentment disfigures the soul and leprosy disfigures the body. You know, leprosy is the disease progresses, your limbs and skin becomes gnarled and bitter and painful. If you let resentment grow, it becomes this festering kind of wound that makes you painful and isolates you. Resentment can make others stumble, as we see Miriam here leading Aaron into the uh kind of this resentment. And the same way leprosy made the nation wait. Everybody had to stop and wait for a week until she uh went through this this period. So again, you have this parallel of leprosy is doing on the outside what resentment's doing on the inside. Resentment isolates us from others, lepers were quarantined. They had to be separated so the disease wouldn't spread. And in the same way, when we let that resentment grow and it builds up, instead of working side by side with people, we begin to resent them, we begin to turn away from them, we begin to harbor thoughts about them. So I think what God is saying to Miriam is look, I'm going to show you on the outside what leprosy, with leprosy, what resentment is doing to your soul on the inside, and I love you too much to let this problem go unnoticed. So, why wasn't Aaron punished as well? The only other clue we have is we see Aaron immediately confessing his sins. As soon as God leaves the tent, he cries out, don't count the sin against us. We don't see that from Miriam, so my speculation, again, it's speculation, is that she had not yet seen her problem, that she hadn't come to that the humble place that Aaron Aaron had come to. And that we at least see him confessing immediately. We don't see her. So, what does that mean for us? So look, this here's a woman who was a leader, a prophetess. She was used by God. At one point, the salvation of the nation is in her hands, as she must save her baby brother from the Pharaoh's knife and and get him into Pharaoh's household to be raised. And yet, then she has this problem where her role changes, her b her baby brother's role goes higher, and she resents it. So that happens to us, right? I mean, how do we deal with that? I think the lessons to learn are there's three of them. The first one is God never promised that we would be equally gifted in this life. So life isn't fair, and that's just the way it's going to be. He didn't promise that we would all be equally wealthy or equally happy or equally thin or equally smart or equally visible and that everybody would get to be up front in the spotlight. Um He didn't give us all the same parts to play. He gives us different roles to play, with different paths to walk, different stories to tell. And he chooses to make us unequally gifted because he has a story to tell and we get to be part of it. So the first thing to realize is in this life we are not going to be equal. And that's the same point Paul makes in Corinthians when he to the passage you're probably familiar with when he talks about we're all a body of Christ, and some are hands and some are feet, and some are eyes, and so some are big toes. You know, we all don't get the same path to play, but we are all in one body. The good news is on the things that matter, we are equally gifted. And what's in when it's important, we are the same. So we have the same inheritance, we have the same Lord, we have the same grace, we have the same salvation, nobody has more of Christ than anybody else, nobody has more of God's love than anybody else. We are in the things that matter, we are fellow heirs of the grace of life. We are equally gifted in that sense. We have the same Lord, the same hope, the same love, the same forgiveness. And that's what matters. And what we have to realize is that when we argue over roles, it's like a group of kindergartners arguing over who reads the best. Well, the fact is, none of them read very well at all. They're kindergartners. And we're down here saying, Oh, who's the best teacher? And, you know, why can't I be Diane Balch, you know, I or I want to be Paige Brown. Why did she get to play that role? And I have to play this role. Well, we're all kindergartners. God is in the process of growing us all up, and we all have different roles to play in different ways in different ways we work out this body of Christ. And to compare our roles is like kindergartners comparing uh who can read the best or uh, you know, who has the most paper clips. It's it's it's really not that important. Our roles are nothing compared to the glory that's going to follow, and that's where we're equally gifted. You know, if I give one child uh assign them the responsibility of mowing the lawn and the other child has the responsibility of setting the table, they are different roles. They both function in our family household. It doesn't mean I love them any less, it doesn't mean one is less important or one is better. They're just different roles I've given them to play. And that's, I think, what we have to realize. And it's so that was my problem because I was focused on the glory and not the good, because I was more concerned with who's getting the credit for what's going on here, rather than is the gospel being proclaimed? And it's more important that the gospel is proclaimed than that I am the one proclaiming it. But sometimes I lose sight of that. Um so we miss the big picture when we start saying, Well, why did she get a better husband, or why did she get a better job, or why did her why are her kids compliant, or why did they have money and I don't, or why did they get to go to a good school and I had to go to community college, or why did you know, we start comparing who did God give what to and why, and why didn't I get that? And God says, in what matters, you get you are equal. You get the same Lord, the same grace, the same hope, the same forgiveness. And that's what we ought to focus on. Um look at the inheritance to come. And I think part of we need to realize that many of us will be asked to make someone else successful. I mean, that is often our role at some point in our lives. It may be your child getting them through geometry, or getting um your husband through school, or getting uh an elderly parent through a life transition, or um, you know, a spouse or a friend or a boss or a student, and God often calls us to play that role, to make someone else successful, and the way Miriam, in a sense, made Moses successful. And it's not wrong of God, it's not unfair for him to ask him to play the us to play those roles, but it's wrong for us to resent it. And I think the key to ex escaping the resentment is to realize that all of those tasks, those roles are privileges that we get to play in the body of Christ, but they are nothing compared to the glory that is to come. So our goal should be focusing on the good, not the glory. So, what happened to Miriam? We don't actually know a whole lot more about her from Scripture, except in Numbers 20, we're told that she died and was buried in Kaddish. So they don't tell us what happened after these seven days. I like to think that Miriam came out of her seven days having learned her lesson, and just like David went through his wilderness period and Paul went through his blindness period, and Moses, in a sense, goes through his wilderness in Midian, that they all came out of that strengthened and healed and corrected. So I s I like to speculate that Miriam learned her lesson well and that uh was content to do whatever God had her do in the last years of her lives. Interestingly enough, I'm not sure the people learned the lesson, because I think at least part of Miriam's story was to confirm that Moses is God's servant, and that when you grumble against him, there are consequences. And that part of what he was teaching Miriam and all the people watching is this is my servant Moses with whom I speak face to face. Because what happens in the next chapter is um the people refuse to follow Moses into the wilderness, and he says, This is where we're going, and they say, Mm-hmm, no, I don't think we want to go there. And so you see them not listening to God's servant in a way they were supposed to. And I think part of Miriam's story was to teach them, and they failed to see it. But I we don't know what happened with the rest of her life, but I like to think that she learned that lesson. So, let me just wrap up because we're going a little over time. How do we deal with resentment? Um, realize that God never promised that we would be equal in this life. We should expect to be unequal in this life because God's telling a whole lot of different stories. This is not one book with one, you know, with 5,000 main characters. This is one story about what God's doing in history, and we all get to play a part, and our parts are different. We have different stories to tell and different paths to walk. But realize that in the age to come we will be equally gifted. We have the same inheritance and the same Lord, and we're fellow heirs of the grace of life. So everything that's not going to burn in the end, we we are gifted the same. The really good stuff, the the same hope and the same Lord. And in the meantime, we try to, as far as we're able, ask God to teach us to focus on good and not glory, because there's no end to what we can accomplish if we work side by side and shoulder to shoulder, ready to clap and tear for someone else who God may be using in a certain way, or stepping up and you know, taking the spotlight if God called us to do that, realizing we're on the same team, fighting the same enemy, and we're following the same Lord. And then we can strive to do whatever God calls us without caring about who gets the glory. Because in the end, it's all his doing anyway. We wouldn't even be able to do it if he didn't gift us. All right, so let me pray, and I'm gonna skip questions because we have a whole bunch of announcements that I ran over. But you can ask me afterwards. So um, let's pray. Father, thank you that you are a Lord that doesn't leave us in our sin, and that like Miriam, you love us too much to let our sin dwell and and fester within us, and that you expose us, to teach us, to bring it out of us, and to discipline us and turn us back to you. And I pray that as we go through um our lives in this church as a body and as a particular Bible study in our small groups, that you'd be teaching us to be excited about whatever role you have this play, um, whether it's visible or invisible, whether it's upfront or behind the scenes, um, whether it's glamorous or whether it's not glamorous, that we would know that it's all from your hand and it's all part of the story that you're telling. In Jesus' name. Amen.