It's good to be back. I think the last time I was here was 2003. I am one of Mike Slaughter's few friends and am willing to come out publicly about that. Let's pray together. Jesus, we welcome You, we invite You here. God, touch each one of us where we are. Help us hear Your voice. Help us respond the way You would want us to respond to your heartbeat and we thank You now in Jesus' name. Amen!

One of the most troubling times for me was when I was 12 years old. I was raised in a Jewish family and I went to a camp every summer. It was a Jewish athletic camp, which as I have gotten older, I have come to realize there really aren't that many Jewish athletes. We call that an oxymoron, when two terms are incompatible like "jumbo shrimp" or "United Methodist." So I went to this camp every summer and it was a great camp, it was so much fun. It was a six-week camp so it was great for my parents because they could ship me off. It was great for me because I could get away from them. It was in a little town called Minong, Wisconsin, in the woods and it was a beautiful place. My last year, I came back to Nashville, Tennessee, where my parents were living. When I got back home, my parents asked me, "What do you want to have for dinner?" It was my choice. I am a steak and potatoes guy, so we did that. We had dinner and then we watched my favorite TV show, Mission Impossible. How many of you remember the original Mission Impossible? Teenagers, put your hands down. I am talking about NBC, CBS, ABC - three channels and remember it was black and white. This was pre-remote control days too. Actually, the kid was the remote control.  Halfway through the show, my dad went to the TV and turned it off. I said, "Hey, why did you do that?" And he said, "Your mother and I have something to tell you: we are getting a divorce." I was twelve years old; I had lived in the same house; I had gone to the same school. I had never met anybody that had been from a divorced family. No one in my neighborhood had ever experienced divorce and it was like someone got a saw and cut me down the middle. I started to cry. I ran out of the room. I stayed up most of the night trying to talk my parents out of it. It obviously didn't work and I finally fell asleep. When I woke up, my mom said, "We're moving from Nashville." I was thinking like down the street. She said, "We are moving to Cincinnati, Ohio. I was like - Oh! Bengals! And so we drove 350 miles, and I was so angry I didn't say one word to my mom that whole trip.

I was so angry when I moved to Cincinnati, I started on this journey of figuring out what life is about, what is most important. I am not proud of it but I got into the party scene. I went to Ohio University a.k.a. Harvard on the Hocking. We call it Harvard on the Hocking. The Hocking River was about three feet deep. When I was nineteen years old, I had an encounter with Jesus Christ that started to turn me around and change my life, because I was asking the hard questions of life about what is most important. I found out that I wasn't the first person to ask that question. There had been people that had asked that question long before me.

I want you to turn to Mark 12 in your scriptures. A man came to Jesus and was searching and asked what is most important. In Jesus' day, a lot of the rabbis were big on debate and so one rabbi said, "The most important of the commandments was Psalm 15" and people would read Psalm 15 and say it could be. Another of the rabbis said, "No, no, no, no. It is what Isaiah says through justice." And then another says, "No, no, no, no. It is walking humbly with God." And so there was this ongoing debate about what was the most important. You've got to understand that in the Jewish community there were 613 commandments. Someone figured that out. And so the rabbi came to Jesus saying, "Can you tell us what's the most important?" We pick it up in Mark 12:28, "One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, (I love that, way to go, Jesus, good answer.) he asked him, 'Of all the commandments, which is the most important?' 'The most important one,' answered Jesus, 'is this: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' Then he added the second one. "The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these." And then the guy said again, "Well said, teacher. (I can imagine Jesus going, appreciate it, thanks, thanks.) You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, 'You are not far from the kingdom of God.'" And I love this line, "And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions." I think it's funny, you can imagine the nervousness when he was telling them this is what's up, and this and this and this and people are like okay, I don't think we should ask him any more questions for awhile.

Then Jesus did something radical. He took the well-known Shema, in Deuteronomy 6, every Jewish family prays this prayer, one, two sometimes three times a day. Everyone knew the Shema: Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Every Jewish family knew that - religious or non-religious. So Jesus said that's the most important and most of the crowd was like - we knew that. And then he added a second one that stunned the crowd. He picked a very small scripture out of Leviticus 19:18 which is not even the beginning part, it's the second part of it, "Love your neighbor as yourself." At that point, the audience must have been stunned, because Jesus took two and made them one. The first one is vertical primarily, your connection with God; but the second one is horizontal - it is how you connect with people. Why did Jesus pick out those two verses as the most important of life? Why is Jesus saying all of life is really summed up in two things, love God and love people as you love yourself? Why didn't he pick out something else? Like why didn't he pick out Deuteronomy 14:4, "You may eat sheep and goats," or 14:8, "but not pigs." Why didn't Jesus pick out Leviticus 13: 40-45 where he says "a man who has lost his hair is clean?" Or why didn't he pick out Leviticus 13 that "if he has a reddish white sore, he is diseased and unclean?" Why did Jesus pick the Shema and Leviticus 19:18? Why those? I believe it is because it's the core of life: how you love God and how you love people.

There is a hidden twist to this. It's not just loving people, blanket statement, it's loving people as you love yourself. So the question is: how do I love myself? And is there any correlation between how I like me, love me and how I relate to you? I think there is. So what does it mean to love your neighbor as you love yourself? I believe there are three things. Number one, loving myself means becoming emotionally healthy. I have been thinking a lot about this recently that Jesus is fully God, but he is fully human. Luke 19 says he shed tears. Luke 10:21 says he was filled with joy. The Bible says he grieved, he got mad, felt sorrow, felt astonishment and wonder, cried and got angry at injustice. Peter Scazzero in his book "The Emotionally Healthy Church" says we don't have a frozen Messiah emotionally. We have a Messiah who was totally congruent with who he was and how God the Father had wired him. Jesus understood who he was, his makeup, his DNA. You and I are body, soul and spirit. And part of that DNA that's within each one of us is an emotional being, someone who's got stuff going on inside. I travel a lot and speak a lot, so I meet a lot of people. I meet speakers who are great communicators, but relationally are clueless. I meet church leaders who are busy with church work, but are absent from their kids. I meet people who know every Bible verse seemingly, but they are deeply depressed and angry and don't seem to know it. The Bible teaches us that we are emotional beings, physical beings, soulish beings and we have to get in touch with all that. I believe that for me to love myself means for me to understand who David Olshine is, my strengths, my weaknesses, my likes, my dislikes. Today in 2008, for me to love people as I love myself, first of all means that I get in touch with my relational, emotional baggage and all that I am.

One of my heroes is Coach Tony Dungy who is the coach of the Indianapolis Colts. Two-and-one-half years ago, he tragically lost his son to suicide and he took a hiatus from coaching for awhile. I have just finished reading his book "A Quiet Strength" and I really recommend it, it's a very easy read. Tony Dungy talks about grappling with how to live out his faith publicly as well as privately. A summer and a half ago, I spoke at a camp in Minnesota where the tight end for the Colts named Ben Utecht - who is now a Cincinnati Bengal, bless his heart - was there and he was telling me, "I've never heard Coach Dungy curse. I've never heard him say a mean thing to anyone. What he is privately is what he is publicly and privately." He's congruent. I believe that, as Rob Bell says, everything is spiritual. All that we do is spiritual, and we tend to compartmentalize things. This is who I am at work and this is who I am in my neighborhood and this is who I am at church. I believe we need to get in touch with who we are emotionally. Way too many people are too numb to this. So relationally and emotionally understanding who I am.

Secondly, I believe that loving God and loving people and loving myself involves looking beneath the surface. I call it the iceberg principal. The iceberg is ten percent visible and 90 percent hidden. Have you ever met someone who is angry but they don't know it? Have you ever met someone who is a smart aleck but they don't know it? Don't look at your spouse, okay?  Have you ever met someone who is half-empty and they don't know it? That's because many of us have blind spots. We don't see the stuff that's hidden. Many people are blogging on the internet. It's a good thing I am not a public blogger because I don't have that kind of time, but I privately blog. I call it my little journal. There was a blogger years and years ago named King David and he was really the first blogger. He wrote these blogs called the Psalms. In one of his Psalms, Psalm 51, he confesses this, "I have sinned. Cast not your Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation." He was blogging, pouring out his heart. The Bible has a concept called fasting. Fasting is abstaining from what? Food! Very good, but it is more than that. Fasting is also a biblical concept of ceasing. In fact, the word Sabbath is Shabat. It's a way of saying enough is enough. There is going to be one day of my week I am going to stop, I am going to slow down, I am not going to work. So not only is there fasting from food but there is fasting from other stuff. Have you been around someone who is addicted to their cell phone? Did I hit a nerve? You're talking to someone and all of a sudden, their thing rings, they grab for it and then they are like "just a second" and then they come back . . . and buzz and they grab for it again? Isn't there a time that we need to say to somebody, "Stop! Enough is enough!" Sometimes we need to put down the cell phone. Sometimes we need to put aside the computer. We need to fast, to slow down. I am not going to be able to see what's beneath the surface in David Olshine if I am always moving and going. Stop the insanity, slow it down. Take a pause. Put the pause button on, because if you do, you will start to see some of the stuff inside, because when you see the stuff inside, you can deal with it. And guess what, if I am critical toward myself, guess who else I am going to be critical toward. You! If I don't like myself, I am not going to like you. If I am smart aleck with me, empty cup about me, I'm going to be empty cup about you. I think we need to look beneath the surface. And that is hard work. I didn't know when I started this journey of becoming a follower of Jesus that it would involve me doing some hard work, some inventory of what is going on inside of me. It's scary painful.

I love C. S. Lewis and I love the story he tells in "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader."   There is a boy named Eustace who becomes very ugly, becomes an ugly dragon, because of his selfishness. He runs into Aslan, the lion, the great Christ figure and he realizes that he can start to unpeel himself as a dragon, sort of like a snake. Aslan says to him, "You need to go bathe." But Eustace realizes he can't get in the well by himself so Aslan helps him get in. Eustace says this: "I was afraid of his claws. I can tell you, I was desperate now, I laid flat on my back and let him do it (meaning Aslan). The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart and then when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything that I had ever felt. Then he caught hold of me and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that, it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing, I found that all the pain had gone. After a bit, the lion took me and dressed me with his paws in the new clothing I'm wearing." Let me ask you a hard question: will you allow the claw of Jesus to start to unpeel and strip you and tear off some of the layers to see what's really there? I believe that God often uses pain to change us. I know that is not an easy thing to say and it is certainly not an easy thing to experience, but I believe that it is biblically true that God allows pain to create change. Some of us won't even think about considering change, we don't even want to deal with it unless we hit a wall. I also believe the pain of change is greater than the pain of being stuck, being in bondage of something. How do I know, because I was in bondage to a number of things. I have struggled with a number of things in my life. And the pain of being stuck is more painful than the process of change.

The process of change is not fast, is it? It's actually very slow. So we have to ask lots of questions. When I see this person, why do I recoil? Or, when I see this person, why do I want their affirmation? Or when I go to work, what is it about me that does this, this or this? We have to ask the hard questions to become emotionally healthy, to allow the 'claw' to get in us to unpeel the stuff inside of us. It is hard. That is why some people have great difficulty saying, "Will you forgive me" or "I was wrong" because they are not in touch with that. I believe to love you as I love myself means I need to become emotionally healthy. I need to figure out what is beneath the surface.

Third and final, I need to get brutally honest. I was a youth pastor for fifteen years before I went to teach youth ministry in a college. My first youth group experience was in Cincinnati, Ohio, at a church called Grosbeck Methodist Church. I had been there for one year and I will never forget this as long as I live. After I had given this talk and had shared about how my wife and I were trying to get pregnant and we were experiencing infertility and I remember getting teary-eyed about it and talking about how painful it was. After it was over, usually the teenagers scatter; but evidently that day I said something that touched a nerve and so a couple of students wanted to talk to me. One girl named Viona stood in the back just kind of waiting until everyone emptied the room. Finally it was just her and me. I was sitting on a little stool and she came up to me and said, "You have been here about a year, right?" I said, "Correct." She said, "I have never liked you." I was thinking to myself, okay, I appreciate the encouragement. Thank you very much. She said, "I have never liked you; I have never trusted you." I asked why. She said, "Because every story you ever tell is always so perfect. It is almost like you have your act together. And today is the first time I have ever heard you admit that you struggled with something. And today I have decided I want you to be my youth pastor. And today I have decided I am going to start trusting this guy." Viona did something for me that day that has revolutionized my life. That is when we get brutally honest with ourselves and we are honest with people about our junk, it sets people free. This was not intended to be a Fourth of July freedom message but it really is. The truth will set you free and when you get honest about yourself and your junk and your strength and your weaknesses and stuff that is not so pretty and you come clean, God does an amazing work and then people respond.

My friend, Keith Wasserman, is the director of a shelter for the homeless in Athens, Ohio, and I love his line - he says, "Jesus is right. Love your neighbor as yourself. It's true. I work with homeless people every day. How you love yourself is directly related to how you love people." Jesus makes it really clear. The way I love him is the way I love people. That's how it is brought down. The way I love God is the way I love people and the way I love people is directly proportional to the way I like me. So the question is, do you like yourself? Do you like what God is making you into? Are you brutally honest about what God's doing in your life?

The secret of all this in my mind is in this little box, it is hidden right here in this box. I am going to show it to you in a second. The Jewish rabbis of that day believed that if you come clean before God, that God will do a repairing work, a refining work. In Matthew 6:6, Jesus talks about going to your prayer closet and get quiet. When I was in college I thought that was literal. So I asked the guys if we could convert the closet into a bedroom. I thought that was a pretty cool thing - my mom thought it was silly. But I actually had half a closet that was kind of my bedroom and if people said that I was praying, I had gone to my prayer closet. Well, I've found out since that Jesus wasn't referring to a room; he was talking about the prayer shawl used by rabbis. The rabbis would get the talis (shawl) and wrap it around themselves. They would get low before God, wrap it around their heads and then they would get really, really quiet. And as they were quiet, they would say, "Lord! I have sinned, have mercy on me." And they would quote Psalm 139. "Test me, oh God, and see if there be any wicked way within me. Search me and know my heart." I believe as we get brutally honest with God and we come clean, God will do what he said he would do. "I will make you new. I will make you a new person." Galatians 6:4-5 says, "Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given and then sink yourself into that. Don't be impressed with yourself; don't compare yourself with others. Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best that you can do with your own life." Don't be impressed with yourself; don't compare yourself with others. Do an evaluation. It says in 2 Corinthians, "Test yourself to see if you are in the faith."

One of my favorite movies is Batman and a new one is coming out next week. He is Bruce Wayne by day and guess who he is by night? Batman! It is easy to pretend, isn't it? It's easy to be one thing during the day and something else into the night. As we come before the Lord's table in a few minutes, I am asking you to say to God, "I am willing to come clean. I'm willing to expose myself. I'm willing to, as Hebrews says, get naked before You. I'm willing to let You do the inventory on me, to show me what's inside of me, so I can get beneath the surface so I can become emotionally, relationally healthy." As I get brutally honest before God, he's going to get real with me. "Father, we thank You for the blood of Jesus that cleanses us from all sin. We thank You for the bread that symbolizes Your broken body for us. Father, before we partake at the table, we get quiet before You and come clean and be brutally honest. God, test me, check me out, search me. We open ourselves wide to You, God, now may you do a cleansing and a healing and a repairing during this time of the Lord's supper. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen