Running From God

Kylen Perry: Porch, how are we doing? Are we doing okay? Hey, it's great to see you. Thanks for making the time to be with us this evening. I'm so glad you would be here. I'm really excited for tonight. I don't know about you. I don't know how you're feeling tonight. I am personally very excited. First, we have some fall weather rolling in, which is praiseworthy. Right? Can I get an amen? That's a good thing. Yeah, love that.

I'm really excited that you're here tonight. I don't just say that. I actually mean that, truly. I do not take it for granted that you would be in this room with us every single Tuesday. Part of me always wonders, "God, are they going to come back?" Yet you do. So we're going to keep showing up, and I think God has good things in store. We also are really excited because we have young adults from all over the nation tuning in tonight.

Everybody, give it up for Porch.Live. I love what God is doing around the globe. It's so cool that we get to be a part of what he's doing in your life. We truly mean it that we believe God can be with any person, anywhere, and at any time, and that includes those of you who are tuning in. Special shout-out to Porch.Live Fresno, Boise, and Dayton. I'm so glad you're here. Also, we have some very special friends who are tuning in with us from Alaska. We're really glad y'all are on too.

The last thing I'm really excited about is the person you're going to get to hear from tonight. We're taking a brief pause in our series Disciple, because we wanted to introduce to you someone we're really excited to tell you about. As you've heard me say from this stage before, something I feel a personal passion for, as a young adult ministering to young adults, is finding the next generation of communicators, people I think we should be listening to and learning from.

So, I'm excited because tonight I get to introduce to you someone I think fits that bill really, really well, someone I think is a trusted voice on any platform she stands on and is also a trusted voice in my own personal life as I've gotten to observe her from afar and then do ministry alongside her in different capacities and learn from her myself.

So, I'm really excited to introduce to you a good friend of mine. Porch, I need you to do an exceptional job, like, the best job… She's from Portland, you know. You've got to give her a big Texas welcome when she comes to the stage. Would y'all give it up for my good friend Brenna Blain?

Brenna Blain: This is my third time in Texas. Something about me is when I get really excited about something, I tend to assimilate to the culture a little bit much. So, the last time I was in Dallas, I went to Tyler Kingston Mercantile and bought out almost the entire store. I got this shirt that said, "Texas" on it, I got a bandanna, and for the next six months, I would wear cutoff jeans, my Texas shirt, and my bandanna when I would go preach places.

It started to happen that people would be like, "Oh, a Texas shirt. Are you from Texas?" and I'd go, "Well, not technically," because I was just so in love. I think I come by this enthusiastic love and adoption of adoration for places because something about my mom, which I think my siblings would also agree with, is if there's something she loves, not only does she go all in on it but she wants us to love it too. I think that's maybe how all of my siblings and I ended up in musical theater.

My mom would sometimes try to convince us that we loved the same things she did in ways that I think she thought were incredibly subtle but really were not. I remember my mom had this fiction author she just loved. I would walk into my mom's room at night, and she'd be lying in bed with tears streaming down her face. I'd be like, "Mom, what's wrong?" and she'd be like, "It's…it's…this book." I'd be like, "What the heck?"

One of the books my mom read… I think she read it several times. When I got a little bit older, she started to say, "Hey, Brenna, I think you'd really love this book." I'd say, "No," and then go to bed. I'd be sleeping, and I'd wake up, and I'd have this pain in my back. I'd be like, "What the heck is that?" I found the book in my bed one night. My mom snuck it into my bed. I didn't think much about this book. It was some Christian romance-type book.

I remember my mom would say, "It's based off the book of Hosea." I thought, "Yeah. Never read it." Somehow, I escaped not only four years of not reading that book but also four years of high school not really even reading the Bible, and certainly not the Prophets, because I had this perception that, first, they were incredibly boring and, second, they had nothing to offer me. Then the book of Hosea completely changed my life. So let's read today.

"When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, 'Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.' So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son." Skipping to Hosea 3, it says:

"And the Lord said to me, 'Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins.' So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley. And I said to her, 'You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you.'

For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days."

For context, the book of Hosea is an interesting one, because there is so much meaning packed into just six and a half pages that make up the book in our modern Bibles. But with all things in the Word, it is important that we look at it with the understanding that all of it matters. All of it matters, every single paragraph down to the words that were God-breathed and not just written to the people living in that specific time period but were also given for us.

Another thing that makes Hosea interesting is there is not just an abundance of poetic forms, like many of the prophets we see in the Bible, but it holds a narrative about Hosea himself that is intertwined within the pages of his prophecy to Israel. You see, God did not just say to Hosea, "Here's your calling. I'm going to use your words." He said, "Here's your calling, and I'm going to use your life."

You guys have been focusing on the topic of discipleship, the submission of your life to the creator God of the universe because you see and know he is trustworthy, but the reality is some of you are here and don't buy that. Maybe a friend has been dragging you along or maybe you're here because some feeling has been nagging you, because you grew up in the Bible Belt and this is just what good people do. So either out of shame or guilt or strange obligation, you are here, but if you had it your way, you would be someplace else.

Or maybe you're here as someone who shouldn't be. You got the courage to walk through the doors, and you think to yourself, "If anyone knew what my actual life was like, I would be unwelcomed. If anyone knew I'm actually a sex worker… Sure, I'm involved with serving, but I blow all my money on OnlyFans. If anyone knew I'm actually transgender… If anyone actually knew the hatred I feel for certain groups of people…"

So, you hear the Scripture being read and zone out, because it's not interesting or relevant to you, or you read Hosea and there is an ache in your heart, because you don't identify with Hosea. You don't identify with God. You don't look at these faithful leaders and see yourself. Instead, you see the unfaithfulness, the brokenness, and the humanity of your life, and you say, "That's me. I'm too far gone. I'm too disobedient. I'm too uninterested in Jesus to even have space at the table."

Even being here in this room today is starting to feel uncomfortable to you, and you're just trying to honor whoever invited you or the curiosity that brought you through those doors. I've been tuning in the last few weeks, watching, listening, and praying. I believe God is doing something in this space, and we have to press into what that is.

The reality is if you don't care, if your heart is running, if you are uninterested in this entire night, it's not going to mean anything to you, but before we let that happen, I believe God is wanting to say, "Awake, O sleeper. I have something for you." I don't know what that is. It's not a secret, but I am not wildly prophetic, so you will have to lean into what the Holy Spirit is doing in your heart tonight, but as you hear these words, as you hear Scripture, pay attention to what you feel the Holy Spirit is doing in your heart.

What are the odds that you're feeling something just now subtly stirring? Maybe I said something out loud that identified you in a church building for the first time in your entire life, and you're trying to figure out how to leave or if you're going to close your computer and walk away. Don't. First, before you leave, can I just tell you about a time that I desperately wanted to leave?

I had grown up in the Christian church, but after being abused at a young age, I started to wrestle with things that felt unsafe for Christians to wrestle with. I was depressed and suicidal by the time I was a freshman in high school while also wrestling with my sexuality. I lived life often looking over my shoulder as if to say, "God, are you even there? Do you even see me or is all of this that I have experienced just made up?"

I was nervous to tell my parents that I had deep doubt, so I never wanted to say, "I don't want to go to church," but I think my parents knew I was wrestling with a lot. So, at the end of eighth grade, they said, "Hey, we would like for you to be in church, but it doesn't have to be our church. If you just find a place, we'd love for you to go there."

Somehow, I found a youth group that was the dream for me. No one there talked about sports. (Sorry, Texas.) Almost everyone there listened to alternative music, and someone knew I could play a few instruments, so not even after one week of going, I got asked to join the worship team. Even though singing songs to a God I wasn't sure was even there felt odd, it was so much better to me that I had something to do during worship, that I got to focus on playing an instrument than have to sit through and actually think and contemplate what worship even was.

Worship had this overwhelming effect on me. When I would have to sit there, I would see these people around me singing words of adoration, affection, and praise to a God who had let me be abused, who had let me get to the place where I no longer wanted to live. It was like everyone around me was in on something, was experiencing a God I never knew without me. I would just want to scream. That continued for all four years of my time in high school.

I had moments where I'd say to God, "Okay. Maybe you are real. Maybe you do care, so I'm going to give you this, this square inch of my life. You're welcome, but you can't have any of this." I would gather it all up in my arms, my depression, my anger, my self-image, my doubt, and I would run to every other thing in this world and would say, "Do you think you could heal me? Do you think you could make me better?"

So, by the time I was 18, I had a lot of practice avoiding God. I was at the age where I needed to decide what I was going to do next after graduation, so I did what any other person running from God would do. I decided I would become a missionary. I thought I was being clever. Like, "God, I'm going to hide from you right under your nose, and you will never find me." You see, the truth was I hated school, and I did not want to go to college, but I loved Hawaii. I wanted to smoke weed, date hot women, and surf.

So I signed up to do six months with a missions group with the expectation that everyone else there would be just like me, not really bought into this idea of God, wanting to do some traveling and just get away. A lot of people there were just like me. I don't know if we all collectively thought we were tricking our parents or our youth pastors or what, but at least a handful of us thought we ran so far and so fast from God he would never catch up.

So, on the third morning, I am there, and we're still in this preliminary free time zone where you could kind of do whatever you wanted to do the first few days. I just wanted to be at the beach, but I had no car, and hitchhiking out of town was difficult. So when they announced they were going to take some vans into town for the morning for worship, I thought, "That's it. I've got a ride. I'll just BS my way through this worship time so at least I seem respectful, and then I'll hit the beach."

So, we get to this place where we're going to have worship, and I book it to the back of the room. I'm like, "This is going to be so weird. I'll just close my eyes and be back here, and I'll get through it, and I'll leave." I had grown up not really knowing the Holy Spirit, and I thought this missions group was Baptist, but it wasn't. So, my eyes are closed, and we're singing some song that everyone knows because it was written in 2007.

I know music well because I had been on a worship team for seven years at that point, and I know there's an instrumental break coming up. So, I'm sitting there, and all of a sudden, the instrumental goes, but people are still singing. I'm like, "What the heck? Who's taking a solo?" Then more voices start to sing, and then some people start talking. I'm thinking, "What the heck is happening?"

My eyes are still closed, but now I'm bothered by what's happening because it seems disrespectful. You know how I shared about sitting in worship and just hating it in high school. I open my eyes, and I see something I had never seen before in my life. I see this girl standing there like this, just singing her own song, her own words, just worshiping. Then I start to look around the room, and I see people praying for people out loud. I'm thinking, "This is weird."

Then the girl who's standing over here like this goes, "Yes, Lord!" I don't know how or what it was, but I remembered how every time I had to sit through worship I just wanted to scream, and now here's this girl embodying all of these negative things that had been pent up inside of me but in a positive way in her worship, and I lost it. I had never seen someone worship with their entire being before.

In that moment, I prayed a prayer I wasn't sure God would even hear. I said, "God, if you are real, if you care for me, if you see me, I want you to let me know, whatever it takes, because this is the most real thing I have ever seen in my life. If there's a chance that my angst, my anxiety, and my anguish could be set aside and I could know you like that, I want you to do whatever it takes to get me to that place." I think the unsaved person in me said, "No, you shouldn't have prayed that prayer."

For the next entire month of being in this environment, it was like I was watching a movie unfold. There were 32 students in my school, so 31 not including myself. It was like every single day, someone else who was living a life much like mine, suspicious of God at best, completely melted. I didn't know what it was or why it was happening, but these people who looked like different versions of me were starting to confess, "I am in love with God."

I was living with these people. It wasn't just their words that were changing; it was their lives, their personalities, their character, the way they interacted with people. They were really, truly being changed by God. During that entire month, I went through almost every prayer and worship session like this. The more this happened for other people, and the more I saw people change, the more conversations I had with myself that said, "No. This isn't going to happen for me. I don't know what they're on, but I don't buy it."

But I had a problem, because we were supposed to do Christian things, you know, because we were missionaries. One of the things we had to do was prepare and preach a 10-minute chapel talk. I signed up for the very last date possible on the calendar because I didn't want to do it. By the end of the month, I had just a few days left until I was supposed to teach, and I couldn't think of anything.

I tried doing that thing where you sit there with your Bible and open to a random page. I was like, "Okay, God. Whatever you want me to speak on, show me now." Every time I opened it, it was Leviticus. I was like, "I can't do that." Then one day, something reminded me of that book my mom was always trying to get me to read, and I thought, "If some lady can get an entire book out of it, maybe I can get 10 minutes." So I flipped to Hosea and started reading.

"When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, 'Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.' So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son."

I closed my Bible and walked away, and for the next 24 hours, all I heard was, "That's you. That's you. That's you. Here are all of these people who have been faithful, who have never struggled with doubt and never wanted to die and never questioned God's plan, and then there's you, like an adulterous woman toward God." I couldn't stop thinking about that.

I don't know if people could tell if I was down or if something was wrong, but I like to think it was the Holy Spirit. I was sitting on the bathroom floor having a little bit of a meltdown, because not only were people around me experiencing a God I felt like I'd never even known, but now I was aware of how deeply unfaithful I had been toward God in the first place. Like, why would God ever even want to change me if I never acted like I ever even wanted him?

As I'm sitting on the floor, I hear footsteps. They're angry, and they're coming in fast in my direction. I panic, because I wasn't supposed to be in this bathroom. The door flies open, and before I'm able to say anything or do anything, I see this student, a girl I had met on the plane on my way to this missions group who had the complete opposite personality of me. She was joyful and loud, she loved everyone, she wanted to hug everyone, and she woke up happy.

She's standing at the door, and I'm thinking, "Why you?" She looks me dead in the eye with some frustration in her face and yells, "You are worth it! You are worth it! Now go finish reading whatever God has asked you to read," and then she leaves. I, deeply confused because, again, I'm not charismatic, wander back to my room. I open up my Bible back to Hosea, and I start reading again where I left off. I finally get to chapter 3.

"And the Lord said to me, 'Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins.' So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley. And I said to her, 'You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you.'

For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days."

As I read these words, I begin to weep. I feel as if the Holy Spirit says, "If that's you, who am I? In this story, if you are the woman, if you are like Israel, then who am I?" As I said earlier, there is so much depth packed into this book that not just every sentence but every word means something.

The literal meaning of the name Hosea… The root of that name means to save, to deliver. Here is a woman who has said to Hosea, "I'm yours. I'm here," and Hosea, knowing her promise would be faulty, still enters into a covenant relationship with her, much like God has willingly entered a covenant relationship with us, an unfaithful people.

Much like us, so much like me, after time not feeling like I was getting what I thought I ought to get from God, this woman leaves her husband and goes into town with the mission of unfaithfulness, probably hoping something else would meet her needs, would make her happy, would give her what she felt like she desperately needed. All the while, she must also wonder, "Does he even see me? Does he care that I've gone?"

There's such a mix of unhealthy but real feelings so many of us have felt about the God of the universe. "I don't care, but does he? I don't want to be faithful. Will he?" The reality is this is far after Deuteronomy takes place, so Hosea could have rightfully said, "I want a divorce." That probably was something on both of their minds, but God speaks to Hosea and says, "Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods…"

"Though they turn to other gods, go and love her again." You see, some of you in here know the pain, the real pain that unfaithfulness causes in the midst of a covenant relationship, so hearing this part of the story feels unfathomable, and even more so that a God who has never sinned against us has the sole right to walk away, yet watch what he does.

Hosea tells us, "So I bought her…" This gives us insight into the view of women at this time. By many cultures, women were seen as property, but not by God. The interesting thing was because Hosea already married her, she would have been seen as his. He literally could have gone into town and said, "This is mine" and taken her back home, but he wants to make something abundantly clear to her in the language and the action of this time. He wants her to know, "You are worth it." So he sacrifices.

As we read this, are you able to see the story within the story? The narrative of Hosea is not just a beautiful story of faithfulness; it is a foreshadowing of Christ on the cross. We, being God's creation, are his to begin with, yet God has given us agency to make the choices we make. If we want to be unfaithful, he doesn't keep us locked up as his property but allows us to leave. Yet, even after we have left, he pursues us, not in anger, not as a tyrant, not even as the owner of our souls, even though he could, with the snap of his fingers, demand that we come home.

He chose to come after us in an act of sacrifice, to buy what was already his. God sends his Son to die in our place, and through that very action, we become worth it. If we are Gomer, and if we are Israel, God is our faithful Savior. It was in that moment, when I looked back over every single thing that had happened in my life, every time I ran from God, every time I felt like he left me alone, every time I wondered if he saw me, I realized, "I have been relentlessly pursued."

You have been relentlessly pursued. It doesn't matter what you've done. It doesn't matter how far you have gone. It doesn't matter the things you have said, because the one, the only one who is faithful is the one who has bought you for a price and named you and called you and brought you here. I know the reality is that some of you are hearing this and thinking, "Yeah, that's great for other people, but not me."

I have to say if you're feeling that or thinking that, and you're hearing this, might this be a grand gesture of God's relentless pursuit toward you? I think God wants to meet with you, and I hope and I think he's using this right now, as the girl who burst through the door, saying, "You are worth it." What are the chances, actually, that you're in this room hearing this right now and that God said to me, "This is the message I want you to share for that person"?

Maybe you're thinking, "But I'm unfaithful." Yes. "I have been hurt by others, and I have hurt others." Yes. "I am constantly running away." Yes. But what is the picture God has painted for us? It's this. Whether it is the idolatry of the Israelites or the adultery of Gomer, our heart's sinful condition is to wander far from God, but God's promise to us we find in Hosea 2:19-20.

It says, "And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord." His promise to us is his love, his compassion, and most significantly his faithfulness, and with that, by no feat of our own strength but only through his sacrifice, he declares us worthy of being brought home.

So, how should we respond? If you have not made the choice to willingly go back home with God, why not now? Why not tonight? If you have made that choice, would you let today be a deeply joyful reminder to look back and to celebrate God's faithfulness to you? Some of you… I was praying for our time coming up, and I couldn't picture the room because I have never been in a room this big before, so I felt like the Lord started showing me faces and asking me to pray.

As I was praying, I felt like the Lord said some of the people here… Your inclination has been not to sing during worship because God doesn't feel good. He doesn't feel close. He doesn't feel loving. He doesn't feel caring. I've been there. But this last year, I read through the Psalms. I always thought the psalmists were bad songwriters because they repeat themselves over and over and over again.

What I came to realize as I read through it this last year is they don't repeat themselves because they're bad songwriters; they repeat themselves because their hearts are fickle and they need the reminder of God's character in their life that is unchanging. Some of you need that reminding so desperately.

I'm going to do something. I want everyone to stand up really quickly. If you made the choice to willingly go with God… And I need to say this. I know we are in the Bible Belt, and I know I'm asking you to do something deeply vulnerable, but I want to say you are in community. You are in the context of a place with people who care deeply for you. They want healing and rescue for you. They want you to do life in community. They don't want you to do it alone.

So, if you have been wrestling and tonight you either decided, "I'm going to go back home. It feels scary, it feels overwhelming, but I'm ready; I'm ready to go back home," or if you're sitting here going, "I don't know if I want to go back home," I'm going to ask you to sit where you are, and if you're comfortable with the people around you placing their hands on you or just extending a hand so we can pray for you… I want to read our inheritance over us tonight, because I want you to be so aware of what the Lord has done. Would you close your eyes? Psalm 23 says:

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

God, I just ask that you would be in this room and fill in the gaps that I missed, Lord, the ways I stumbled. You are sufficient. You know what is going on in this room tonight. You know what is happening. You know what's stirring in the hearts of those in this place, God. For those who have wandered far off from you, for those who feel like it's too late, or for those who feel apathetic, would you remind them of your deep love for them? God, I thank you for what you are doing. In this room, would you continue to move as we sing in faithfulness? Amen.