‍Vince Vitale [00:00:42] Hi friends! Jo and I are so glad to be back sharing with you all again and hearing from you again. We've already received a lot of great questions via email and voicemail. Keep listening at the end of this episode to hear how you can ask your question. As 2024 gets rolling, you can expect new episodes of Ask Away regularly. Each episode will be based around a tough question of faith. Sometimes Jo and I will have a conversation, and other times we'll share with you a recording from a recent talk that we've given. In this episode, you'll be hearing a talk that Jo gave recently on the campus of Stanford University entitled Is Christianity Bad News for Women? This is one of my favorite topics to hear Jo speak on. I hope it will be an encouragement to you too. 

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Jo Vitale [00:01:28] It is really good to be with you guys this evening. Thanks for coming out on a Saturday night. That's a big deal. Weekends are busy. I really appreciate that sacrifice that you guys made here today. I hope you had a good day. Mine was fairly typical. I had a projectile launched at my face this morning, and I turned to my two year old and kind of looked at him and he said, "Sorry, mama. I was just practicing throwing pretzels at your head." Standard. I'm sorry. That's about the level of conversation I'm pretty used to these days. Forgive me if it takes me a couple of minutes to figure out how to talk like an adult again. But I wonder how you walked into this room here this evening. Maybe some of you kind of jauntily sauntered in. It was a good day. It's sunny. It's been nice. Others of you, you're stressed. You got a lot going on. Kind of a little more hunched over. Did anybody walk into the room just yelling out, "I'm here, I'm here. I have arrived." Anyone? Anybody do that this evening? No, no, no, that's what I figured. Most of you didn't do that when you came into the room tonight. I have a girl [inaudible] called Charisse [sp]. And when she was three years old, this is how she would enter a room every single time that she walked in the door. Just kind of brimming with this confidence and this certainty that, like everyone in the room, they must have just been sitting around bored, nothing to do, anxiously waiting for her and finally, we could all be put out of our misery because now Charisse had graced us with her presence at last. And so she come in to be like, I'm here, I am here. 

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[00:02:56] And every time she did that, I found it so bittersweet. It was sweet because it actually revealed something really profound about Charisse. It showed that beyond a shadow of a doubt, she knew she was loved. She knew that she could just walk into that room and she would get a great welcome. She would always be received with love. But it was bitter because I also figured, you know what, there's probably going to come a day when she stops walking through doors like that. That day will probably come, and I dreaded the day that it would stop and the reasons why. And I wonder how many of us used to walk through the door like Charisse, so certain of our welcome, so confident we were safe, so assured of love. But even if we used to do that as kids, somewhere along the way, most of us lost that, right? We lost walking into rooms that way. And I think just that life taught us otherwise. It taught us something else about what might be waiting on the other side of the dorm. And for some of you, that feeling of discomfort might be rare. For others of you, it's like a constant battle sometimes to walk through the door. But one way or another, I doubt there's anyone here who hasn't, consciously or not, had to adopt various coping strategies for managing other people's impressions and expectations, and also managing your own fears about what awaits you in the next room. If you live this way long enough, it is exhausting. It's exhausting, and you just kind of start to wish, like, I wish I could just come as I am and that would be enough. If I could just come as I am. 

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[00:04:28] I think maybe some of you even might have had to overcome those feelings just to get here tonight. Perhaps being in a Christian space is new to you. It feels uncomfortable. If that's you tonight, then I just want to thank you for your courage. And I'm really glad that you're here. Really glad you're here. Maybe it's this very question that we're talking about tonight that has given you pause. Maybe this has been your hesitation. I grew up in a Christian home, so there wasn't actually a point where Christian spaces were new to me. If I were mid-teens, I was actually convinced of the truth of Christianity, and I was really taken with the beauty of Jesus Christ. And I've actually had a lot of experiences which had just given me personal confirmation that God was real. But as I got into my late teens, it was this question that really I began to struggle with. Specifically the question of what kind of welcome should I expect as a female approaching the Christian faith? What was I going to find in the room if I kept going with this in my life? And I can still remember reading the novel The Great Gatsby as a teenager, when the words of Daisy Buchanan lodged in my mind. And this is what she has to say about her daughter. She says, "I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl could be in this world, a beautiful little fool." And as I read that, I found myself questioning what the Bible has to tell me too. Is my purpose just to be like ornamental and decorative? To be seen but not heard. 

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[00:05:53] Now, I know that not all of you will have struggled with this question, but I hope you're still engaged with it tonight. Because at some point in your life, you'll probably be close to someone who does. And when that time comes, I hope that they'll find something meaningful not only in the answers that you give, but also in what is demonstrated by the life that you live as well. Because right in this moment, we are living in a culture that's an uproar over that very sentiment. With so many women feeling not just unheard, but unseen. A few years back, one of the UK's most popular national radio stations [inaudible]. So I was listening, and BBC radio four, they ran a series called The Misogynist Book Club, in which every week they discussed a book which was considered to have been particularly oppressive towards women throughout history. And now coming in at number two is 50 Shades of Gray. No real surprises on that one. But guess which book beat out 50 Shades of Gray? The number one spot is the most oppressive book towards women in human history, apparently. Any guesses? The Bible. You see, this isn't just an academic question that we're engaging with tonight. It's one that has real life consequences. And in fact, this question had never felt more pressing to me than when I gave a talk on the campus of U.C Berkeley a few years ago now that just happened to coincide with International Women's Day. As you can imagine, at the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, International Women's Day is a big deal at Berkeley. 

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[00:07:17] And all day these women were out in the streets. They were protesting and yelling. They were marching. There was a lot of anger and hurt, actually, on the campus that day. You could just hear in their voices that there was a lot of pain. But right in the middle of this kind of crazy, hectic scene, there stood a girl right in the busiest thoroughfare of campus and she was wearing fishnet tights and a short denim skirt, and she was topless and she just had a paper bag over her head with just the eyes cut out. And you could tell that people didn't really know what to make of this public spectacle. Some people reacted out of shock by laughing at her. Other people just kind of swiftly turned their eyes away and they just hurried on by. But if you got closer to her, if you approached her, then you could see written across the top of the paper bag with these words, "All five of my rapists are getting away with it." And then you looked into her eyes and they were just completely haunted. And for the sake of confidentiality, I'm going to call her Rachel. As I stood there, just shocked with tears in my eyes, staring at Rachel and watching this crowd float awkwardly around her, I found myself wondering in that moment the most important question I think can ever be asked. What would Jesus Christ have to say to her? What does the God of Christianity see when he looks at Rachel? And as I reflected on that, three responses came to my mind that I want to share with you tonight. Three reasons why I've personally come to believe that even in a world where bad news is not just a headline for women, but often that tragically experienced reality, the singular hope that the Christian God has to offer is not only extraordinary, but it is life changing. 

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[00:09:05] My first reason for walking through the door is this. Only God can ground the intrinsic worth of every human person. It's often assumed if we could just take Christianity out of the picture, then all of our problems, the gender equality or the root of patriarchy would just melt away. I actually think the opposite is true. Without God, from a purely naturalistic perspective, it is hard to justify why what happened to Rachel, specifically somebody that you don't even know, is such a big deal. If our live is just cosmic evolutionary accidents, if we're nothing more than a collocation of atoms, then on what basis do we assign value or significance to another person, let alone equal value? We talk about human rights, but what are we grounding them on? And if we're just dancing to our DNA as Professor Richard Dawkins would poetically put it, then in this game of survival of the fittest, why shouldn't we say that one life is of greater value than another or that might makes right, or that it's every man for himself? You know what, every man for himself, that world is not a good world for women. The every man for himself world. By contrast, what we find in the Bible is a radically different account of human worth. And it's positioned right on the very first page, because before we're told anything else about human beings, this is why we begin, says God created humankind in his own image. In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. 

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[00:10:41] You see, according to Christianity, you are not random. You are intentioned and you're no accident. You are made. You're not just made by God, but you are made like God. Crucially, the Bible spells out that this applies to both male and female. Now, from my 21st century perspective, that may not strike you as all that remarkable, but compare this declaration to other ancient beliefs, such as these words from the fifth century BC Greek philosopher. Plato had this to say, "Only males who are created directly by the gods and are given souls. Those who live rightly return to the stars, but those who are cowards may with reason be suppose to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation." In other words, according to Plato, only men are created directly by the gods. And if you're a cowardly man, then your punishment is that you will be reborn as a woman. So, gentlemen in the room, you have been warned. A radical contrast to this, the Bible says that not only are women like men fully human, but that they too carried the image of God woven into their very identity, rendering them of equal and immeasurable wealth in the sight of the one who created them and purposed them. There is simply no other statement of gender equality like this in the ancient world, and its implications are profound. It also makes sense of why it is that we so instinctively grieve what happened to Rachel at Berkeley. Because what took place was a violation of the most sacred thing in the world, a human person. 

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[00:12:12] And yet, at the same time, if Christianity's teaching about human worth is actually true, then it means that no matter what happens in her life, nothing can strip Rachel of her dignity or make her less than. Her worth will never be defined by anything that she's done or anything that has been done to her, but simply because she is created in the image of God. She is fiercely loved by him and no one can take that away. In Christianity, we encounter a God who sees every person as infinitely valuable. And secondly, because he has bestowed unique value upon human life, the Christian God is also deeply committed to justice for every individual. In other words, he actually cares about what happens to us and he does something about it. And one of the things that I love so much about this generation is your prioritization of justice. You have a deeply ingrained desire to see people treated rightly. And yet it's also kind of a conundrum because if you take God out the picture, then you don't actually have a rationale for expecting the universe to give you a framework for right and wrong. Instead, we're left with this kind of uncomfortable form of moral relativism, where one person's offense is just another person's preference, including appallingly, what happened to Rachel. And yet, deep down, it is hard to shake that conviction that there is such a thing as good and evil. And that our feeling that rape is wrong is not, as Dawkins once affirmed in an interview, just an evolutionary byproduct as arbitrary as the fact that you have five rather than six fingers. 

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[00:13:48] In the words of philosopher Emmanuel Kant, two things fill the mind with ever increasing awe and wonder: the starry host above me and the moral law within me. And in fact, far from abandoning the cause of justice, I think actually often our greatest complaint against the God of Christianity is precisely that we have judged him to not only be unjust, but immoral, and not least in his treatment of women. And if you just go off first impressions, you know what, I can kind of understand why you don't have to read that far into the Bible to encounter appalling accounts of rape, polygamy, incest, female oppression and violence against women. It's that those are some of the very text that I used to struggle with and it's in part what led me to engage in this area of research. And yet, rather than leaping to conclusions, the question that we need to ask ourselves is why? Why is it written this way? What is the purpose of retelling certain events that are genuinely distressing? When we step into the Old Testament, we're stepping into a wildly different world. And so sometimes we do need to work hard to understand the history, the culture, the purpose of the text that we're reading. But when we do, they begin to make so much more sense. Consider just one account with me, which feminist commentators have labeled a text of terror. It's from the Book of Judges, chapters 19 to 20. It's a horrifying tale. 

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[00:15:10] It's the tale of an Israelite man from the tribe of Levi who in an attempt to save his own kin from a mob of violent men who have surrounded the house that he's staying in, who are also Israelite men from another Israelite tribe, he throws his concubine, his mistress, out of the door to them where she's gang raped all night and she is left for dead. At which point the man fighting her dead against the door in the morning, in this further act of appalling desecration, he dismembers her body and he sends out the pieces to the other tribes of Israel, calling upon them to take vengeance, and it results in a bloody battle. Now, there are so many problems with what happens in this account, not only in the crime itself but also in the reaction of the Israelite, supposedly God's own people, whose response was so far short of enacting justice for this murdered and violated women that, well, they're going to war over her in this kind of act of mob fueled rage. They completely fail to hold the initial Levite man accountable for his callous disregard of her. And yet, rather than running from this horror story, when we actually ask the question why is this included in the Bible, it is immediately clear that, far from glorifying what takes place, this is written as a fierce indictment against the people who've turned from God and begun to do what was only right in their own eyes. That is the phrase throughout the Book of Judges. 

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[00:16:32] Which is why when people say to me, "Jo Vitale, how could this story be in the Bible?" My response is actually, how could it not? Particularly in light of the MeToo movement, I believe this to be an incredibly important Old Testament text for women today. Because at a time when victims of domestic abuse and sexual abuse feel not only unheard but unseen, the public record of this account in the Bible stands as this undeniable statement that even though her rapist don't see this woman for who she is, and even though the Levite man doesn't see her, and even though in their reactionary and ill considered response God's own people also fail to see her, God will not allow this woman to go unseen. Instead, he puts her story front and center. He immortalized it in Scripture such that it's been witnessed on the centuries and even thousands of years later, we're still here talking about it tonight. In doing so, God not only confronts us with the horrendous reality of what happens when a culture simply does what is right in that own eyes. But he demands that in our remembering we see it and we don't do likewise. And perhaps for some of you here tonight, one of your greatest grievances against Christianity is that you have seen or experienced evil done by people who claim to act in God's name. And then you saw others in the faith community attempt to bury those same deeds. I don't believe there is anyone who is more appalled by the evil done in his name than God, or more committed to exposing those injustices by bringing them into the light. 

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[00:18:07] That's exactly what we see in this text. A God who refuses to participate in religious cover up, but instead who holds up Scripture as a mirror to his own people to reveal even the most grievous of offenses, and serving as a stark reminder why we need an all seeing God to enact justice. A God who doesn't overlook evil or sweep it under some divine cosmic carpet as if it's just no big deal, but a God who sees victims not as statistics but as real people with immeasurable wealth. One woman in the Old Testament who discovered this for herself was a woman called Hagar in Genesis 16. She's female. She's a slave. She's a foreigner. She's the mistress of a married man who won't protect her from his wife who hates her, and she's made even more vulnerable because she's pregnant. In her culture, it doesn't get any worse than this. By every measure of ancient society, Hagar is counted as worthless. And yet when Hagar is so mistreated that she flees for her life and runs away into the desert, something completely unexpected happens to her there. At the very lowest point of her life, when Hagar has lost all hope, God reaches out to her in a deeply personal and supernatural way, promising her a future both to herself and to her descendants. And in response, we're told that Hagar gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her, you are the God who sees me. And she said, I'm now seeing the one who sees me. 

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[00:19:35]  I also find it meaningful that the God of the Bible doesn't just recognize and redeem women as victims of injustice, but he also empowers women to enact justice on his behalf. Like the prophet Deborah who we read about in the same book of judges mentioned here, how remarkable that over 3000 years before the first female justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, was appointed to the US Supreme Court in 1981, Deborah was appointed to be judge of all Israel. And we're told that she set up a court called the Palm of Deborah where people would travel to hear her deliver judgments and justice. And under her leadership and guidance, Israel enjoyed 40 years of peace. In a world that has all too often overlooked women, the God of the Old Testament sees things differently. He sees women not as disposable, but as indispensable. Far from painting them as beautiful little fools, the Bible celebrates women who have the courage to act, to save lives, even at the risk of their own. Or women who are praised for that entrepreneurial spirit and financial savvy, or women who take initiative to enact justice where it's been overlooked, or women who are praised for their wisdom even when their husbands have acted like fools, or women who have the spiritual authority to challenge kings and speak on behalf of God. And the same high regard carries over into the New Testament. As it happens actually by the first century A.D., attitudes towards women in Jewish society have actually got worse, more oppressive, rather than less. 

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[00:21:00] As the first century Jewish history, Josephus noted, he said that women says the law is in all things inferior to the man. Now this is the world that Jesus grew up in. And yet this comparison only makes his own attitude towards women all the more striking. I have a daughter called Mia. A different one. When Mia was three years old or so, she was in the middle of a Disney princess phase, and so she told her father that her mother was a queen and that she was a princess. And so her dad kind of sarcastically responded, "Oh, does that make me king then?" To which my three year old goddaughter immediately fired back, "Don't be silly, daddy. Jesus is king. You're just a boy." I was so proud. About three years old, and not only did she have really good theology, but she's deflating her dad's ego, in like three seconds flat. Amazing. One of the things I love about the New Testament is this. Jesus never tells me that I'm just a girl. Far from it. For example, by Jesus days, there was a commonly held belief that women succumb to sexual temptation far more easily than men. And therefore, if you caught sight of a beautiful woman, that was to find yourself in grave danger. As one Jewish law code even stated, it is more dangerous to walk behind a woman than it is to walk behind a lion. Surprising. 

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[00:22:20] In that culture, If a man was sexually promiscuous with a woman, then it wasn't the man who was blamed for crossing the line but rather the woman on account of her powers of seduction that led him astray. How tragic it is to think that nearly 2000 years have passed and we're still tangled up in those same blame games today. And yet it was into this context that Jesus preaches the sermon on the Mount, in which he completely turns these cultural assumptions on the head by saying, "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Anyone hearing Jesus say those words would have fallen off their feet, because he is just teaching the complete opposite of what his culture taught. He's challenging his hearers to recognize that lust originates in their own hearts and to take responsibility for it. And he calls them to a higher standard of seeing women not as sexual objects to be consumed, but as human beings equally made in the image of God and fiercely loved by him. Jesus also lived a time when the education of women was so strongly discouraged that Jewish law stated, if any man gives his daughter a knowledge of the law, it's as though he taught her lechery. And yet, when Martha summoned her sister Mary away from what Jesus was teaching him back into the kitchen, Jesus prevents Mary from leaving. Instead, he says that Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her. 

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[00:23:38] Far from stifling the voices of women, Jesus even chooses them to be the first witnesses to his resurrection, at a time when the testimony of women was considered so unreliable that it wasn't even valid in a court of law. It's actually one of the reasons I consider the New Testament to be historically reliable, because if you were just making this up, there's no way that you would choose women to be your primary witnesses. It was just a sure way to be laughed out of court. And yet, Jesus allows the credibility of his resurrection, the most significant historical event of all time, to rest upon that witness. Time again, throughout the Gospels, the narratives of Jesus life we see him going up against culturally oppressive attitudes towards women and completely overturning them, even to the point that his own religious leaders take offense at him. Like Simon the Pharisee who invites Jesus over for a dinner party and then judges him harshly for allowing a woman who was labeled a sinner in that town, and who barged in uninvited to the dinner to not only touch him, but he lets her fall all over him, weeping, washes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and starts kissing him profusely. And into that shocked, judgmental silence, Jesus asked this provocative question. He says, "Do you see this woman? Do you see her? Not as Scandal. Not as a scapegoat for your loss. Not as a sexual object. Do you have eyes to look beyond all of the labels put on her and simply see her?". 

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[00:25:07] How deeply Jesus question mirrors the cry of those protesters on International Women's Day that cry to be seen, that cry to be understood. Yet while I truly felt for those protesters, I also couldn't help but feel a kind of sadness because at the end of the day, all it took was one look at Rachel hidden beneath that paper bag to realize that whatever progress we might make as human beings will never be enough. Never enough because our issues go so much deeper than any legal or political or social remedy can fix. Running all the way down to the problem that Jesus himself identified, the problem within ourselves. The problem with the human heart. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a Soviet labor camp in the 1940s, so he had a pretty unvarnished perspective on human nature, he says this, "If only it was simple. If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and we could just separate them off from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human person, and who is willing to destroy a piece of their own hearts. That's why human justice will always fall short. Because what man-made system can legislate the heart? And the mixed up nature of every one of our hearts with something that Jesus Christ understood really well, and we see him grieving it when he looks out of the city of Jerusalem and unashamed to identify with female emotion, he cries out with the protective instincts of a mother. 

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[00:26:33] Jerusalem! Jerusalem! The city that kills prophets and stones those who were sent to her. How often I've longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers had chicks. But you would not. You wouldn't do it. Jesus says those words looking out over the city that he knows is soon going to kill him. And yet, even knowing what lies ahead, he doesn't falter. Why? Because although human justice may fall short, Jesus Christ was unwavering in his commitment to the cause of divine justice. And for those of us who've never been the victims of serious injustice, perhaps the idea of a God who might judge us may seem disproportionately severe or even just offensive to you, but to the woman standing there with a paper bag over her head, proclaiming that all five of her rapists are getting away with it-- god's commitment to justice, the commitment that we see running all the way from the old to the New Testament and culminating at the cross where Jesus died, that death on the cross being the strongest and most overt statement God could have made, that he is not okay with all the ways that we debase and demean and dehumanize and destroy one another, and that there are some big consequences to that. God's unswerving commitment to justice. That is a hope for her to hold on to the hope that no matter how badly wronged she has been, there will come a day when God will see to it that ultimate justice is served. In the words of Abraham, will not the judge of all the earth do what is right? 

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[00:28:04] Likewise, there will be some of you here this evening who've been treated very badly. And that matters to God. That truly, deeply matters to him. It matters so much that God is not only committed to ensuring justice for each one of us, but moving to my final reason for why I consider Christianity to be such good news for women and all of us, is that a God who doesn't just dispense justice from afar like a detached judge- that's not who the Christian God is-- but he is a God who intentionally enters into a world of injustice to come alongside us in our suffering, even as he rescues us from it. And ultimately, the central message of Christianity for all of us, men and women alike, is this, that no matter how defaced or dehumanized we've been made to feel, no matter what kind of bag or mask we might be wearing over our heads, there is a God who sees straight to the heart of us. A God who looked on Rachel at Berkeley with such compassion that in the person of Jesus he willingly chose to come and live a human life, to see through her eyes, to enter beneath that paper bag, and to wear it from the inside, looking out. On the cross where Jesus died, he too knew what it was like to be stripped naked and exposed like her, to undergo public humiliation and ridicule like her, to become one from whom men hide their faces, to know what it's like to wear nothing but shame and to endure unimaginable physical torture and abandonment. All because he just couldn't bear to stand by and watch Rachel from a distance and do nothing; instead, out of love he came to suffer with her, and he laid down his life for her to free her from the guilt of everything she herself has ever done to wound others, and from the shame of everything that has been done to her, and to make it possible for healing and restoration to have the final word. 

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[00:30:04] It's no wonder that the women who met Jesus in person responded to him the way that they did. They just came running. They fought through crowds to grab onto his clothing just so he'd heal them. They abandoned propriety and started traveling around after him with total disregard for all the scandalous rumors it created. Or Mary, who sat right up against his feet in the position of an honored disciple, or the woman who gatecrashed that dinner party, just like totally scorning the fact that everybody was going to be judging her so hard just so she could fall over and weep at Jesus feet, only just to discover for herself that, yes, she might be flawed like all of us but as far as Jesus was concerned, as soon as she walked into that room, she didn't even have to open her mouth. She was already forgiven much and loved much. Or the woman at the well who, after meeting Jesus, went running back to her town yelling to everyone she met. "Come and meet the man who told me everything I ever did. Could he be the Messiah? Come and see this man. Come and see a man with whom I finally experience what it feels like to be fully known and fully loved." So strong was the women's response to him that Jesus male followers were shocked by it. At one point, we are told that Jesus disciples were surprised to find him talking to a women. And kind of like Simon the Pharisee, they thought their reactions were too much, too scandalous, too bold, too undignified, too extravagant, and their response to excessive in their emotion. 

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[00:31:27] And yet that was never the reaction of Jesus. Now, this was someone so distinctive, so safe, so forgiving, so dignifying, so healing. There was something about the gaze of Jesus Christ that in a culture where women were constantly kept at arm's length and treated with suspicion, these women pursued him just like Charisse. They just came running into his presence yelling, I'm here! I'm here! Because they instinctively understood that with him, they would always find a welcome that they'd never encountered anywhere else. So much has changed in our culture since then, but that invitation from Jesus Christ has not. And that day at Berkeley, as soon as she laid eyes on Rachel, one of my team mates called Madeleine, had the strongest sense of God just saying to her in that moment, out of everybody here on this campus today, I identify with her. I am here for her. And so Madeleine went up to Rachel and began to share some of what I've shared with you tonight. And as she did so, Rachel just started to weep. And then she just threw her arms around Madeleine and she held her so tightly and they just cried together. And then Madeleine asked if she could pray for her, and Rachel said yes. And they just stood there holding hands and praying in the middle of that public square with everyone kind of going past and looking on in confusion. 

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[00:32:39] That was the day that Rachel had her first encounter with the Christian God, a God who sees every person as immeasurably valuable. A God who judges the oppressor and upholds justice, and a God who loves women and men so much that he would willingly lay down his own life for each one of us, just to ensure that nobody, male or female, would be barred from relationship with him or miss out on the full measure of life that he made us for. The Bible puts it this way, "there's neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, nor is there male or female. We are all one in Jesus Christ. From my own experience, I can honestly say I've never met anybody who makes me feel more human, more seen, more known, more loved, more forgiven than Jesus Christ does. And when I look at Jesus, I see exactly the kind of man that I want to spend time with, and exactly the kind of God that it is a privilege to worship. Some of you walked into the room tonight just unsure of what kind of welcome you would receive. In response to that, I believe that God would just say to each one of us here, I'm so glad you're here. I am so glad that you are here. I also just wanted to say that there may be others this evening who've been sitting here listening and as surprised as you all by it, but you've just had a sense that God is here. God is here, and that he's extending an invitation for you tonight to come into his presence and to find a place to belong, a welcome, a home, a life with him. Maybe that's a room that you've never walked into before. But you're here tonight thinking, you know what? If that is actually what God is like, if that's really what he's like, then I would like to know him. 

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[00:34:37] Others of you may have been Christian for a while, maybe a long while, but you've become fearful of your welcome. You've become fearful of approaching God again. Perhaps you got burned by other Christians and you have felt overlooked or unseen in your pain. Or perhaps you've tried to go unnoticed and maybe hide from God, because you know that there are ways that you've just got it badly wrong and you're afraid of what you going to see in Gods eyes if you actually dare to draw close and look at him. But whatever your story is, know that God hasn't lost sight of you. You don't go unseen. You are not lost in the crowd tonight. There is a God who sees you. He knows you in full, and whose love for you is far greater than anything you could comprehend. And all he desires is that we would come closer and to experience for ourselves his forgiveness, his healing, his love, and the life that he's offering. So I just want to give us some moment now, just between yourself and God. Nobody else is invited into this moment. This is just a space for you just to reflect on whether there's an invitation for you tonight that you would like to say yes to, just to reflect for a minute with no expectation, no pressure. But just to take that time and ask, maybe just say, "God, if you're there, then I would like to know you. If you have an invitation for me, I would really like to receive it. If there is a welcome for me tonight, no matter how far I run or how hot I've been trying to shut you out. If you still want me, then I'm here." 

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[00:36:12] Jo Vitale We’re so glad you joined us for Ask Away.

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Vince Vitale If you have a question that needs answering, we’d love to hear it.

Send us an email at askawayquestion@gmail.com or call and leave a voicemail at 321-213-9670.

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Jo Vitale Ask Away is hosted by Vince and Jo Vitale, and produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

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Vince Vitale New episodes come out regularly, so make sure to subscribe.

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Jo Vitale The best way you can support Ask Away is to leave a review. All you have to do is open up the podcast app on your phone, look for Ask Away, scroll down until you see “Write your review” and tell us what you think.

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Vince Vitale See you next time. And remember, if you have a question, it’s worth asking.

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