The God Who Sees with Rob Morris from LOVE146

Some messages don’t just inform you, they pull your head up and make you look at people differently. We sit down with Rob Morris, founder and CEO emeritus of Love146, to talk about ending child trafficking and exploitation and why this work starts with seeing what others ignore. Love146 has spent more than two decades caring for survivors and building prevention education that helps young people identify vulnerabilities and recognize grooming. The hard truth is that trafficking isn’t only “somewhere else” and the hopeful truth is that communities can learn to protect kids through awareness, coordination, and courage. 

From there, we move into a powerful thread from Colossians: the mystery of the gospel as “Christ in you.” Rob shares a story about how confirmation can awaken a person to what’s already true, and he invites us to live with that same awareness, not chasing perfect certainty but embracing wonder that leads to action. If Christ’s life is in us, it should show up in our attention, our choices, and our compassion, especially when it gets messy. 

The heart of the conversation is the ache of being unseen. We explore why people on the margins can feel overlooked even in a crowded world, how distraction and “othering” strip dignity, and why Scripture shows God repeatedly moving toward those society passes by. You’ll hear stories of Jesus stopping, noticing, and drawing close and a challenge to become light and company for someone in the dark. Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with one person you want to truly see this week.

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Transcript

Introducing Rob Morris And Love146

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You can be seated. That's the last time I'll have you stand up. You are in for a special treat this morning. My dear friend Rob Morris is here. He's the founder and uh CEO Emeritus, I think is his current kind of current role of Love 146. Love 146 is a beautiful organization that was founded in 2002 with him and some friends, and they're working tirelessly, I would probably add, to end uh uh child trafficking and exploitation. And he'll explain more about that a little bit later on, too, as well. But um, but I love what they're doing. I met Rob way back in the late 1900s at my time with YWAM Denver, and there's some other YWAM Denverites here too, but um, he was a teacher there, but uh he this is really his life's work and his mission is to help young people and deliberate them. I love the story in the Hebrew scriptures. The most predominant story in the Hebrew story is this sort of liberation when God liberates the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. And uh it says that God hears the cries of those who are oppressed and he does something about it. And I love that. That's what God does, and that's a theme throughout all of Scripture that God hears the cries of the oppressed and the weak and the poor and the tired and the weary. I mean, that's you this morning too. And uh, he wants to bring freedom and liberation in every single way. And uh, God wants to raise us from the dead as well. And so Rob and his team are doing that. And uh so he's gonna be here this morning with us to preach. I want to encourage you after the gathering to go and visit him and his table out in the lobby. If there's a line, wait, please wait to talk to Rob. He's got some incredible things to share with you, what they're doing. And uh, he'll share some things in here. But please, if you have time to wait and talk to Rob, um, but please after the same after the service and and uh grab him at his table. Uh but would you please in the meantime, this is third time here, would you give a warm central welcome to Rob Morris this morning?

How Love146 Fights Trafficking

The Brothel Encounter That Started It

The Mystery Of Christ In You

The Ache Of Being Unseen

Scripture’s Unseen People And Jesus

Why We Stop Seeing Each Other

God Who Sees And Our Call

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Good morning. Well, there's a lot of you here. My gosh. Um you don't get to see that when you're sitting in the front row. I thought, oh, there's like 18 people. Um and congratulations, Doctor. That's just not gonna, I'm like gonna let that one go. It's awesome. That is awesome. There's so many great doctor jokes you guys can be playing around with now. Anyway, so good to be back with you. Um, really appreciate, obviously, the invitation, but more than that, your engagement with the work um that Love146 has been doing now for uh 20-something years. Um, it it means a lot. And uh, those of you that aren't are unfamiliar with the organization, again, we have information out and back. There's a QR code that sends you through a magical portal someplace where you can learn some more um information. Um, basically, uh uh we have been working uh since 20 uh 2002 to end the trafficking and exploitation of children. And this isn't something that just happens in faraway places, it happens in our own neighborhoods. I do want to give kudos specifically to the state of Minnesota, and that the state of Minnesota has been one of the best states that we have worked with that are taking on and taking very seriously um the trafficking and exploitation of kids that take place in your um state, which is a really good thing. We won't believe some of the places that we work where there's just this like, what, what? Um, but uh the state of Minnesota has been very, very engaged. Um so yeah, so our programs look like we we've decided to take two approaches. One, we are caring for the survivors, um, uh kids that have been exploited and trafficked. Um, and then we are also doing prevention work. And our prevention work mostly looks like um a curriculum uh that empowers young people to identify their own vulnerabilities and to understand how those there are people out there that are going to take advantage of those vulnerabilities. And that curriculum now is actually being used in the state of Minnesota. I wrote it down this morning, actually. Um the Minnesota Department of Health has been promoting that our curriculum, Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota, actually, as well, um, and the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Um, so it's been really powerful to actually be operating here in uh in your state. And that's why I love being able to come to a place where um, yeah, where there's a level of engagement. Uh so since 2002, we've been able to reach a little over 100,000 kids globally with both of those programs, and that's the kind of work that you make possible. And it started literally because of an encounter. Um, myself and a couple of friends uh were part of an investigation in a Southeast Asian country, walked into um a brothel and saw children that were being sold for horrific reasons, even having the dignity of a name stripped from them, just numbers pinned to their dresses. And the one girl that we named the organization after that her number was 146. Um, and that's how things started. You don't walk away from something like that and pretend you didn't see it and and it didn't happen. Um you're then given a sense of mandate, and especially as a follower of Jesus, understanding that every human being is made in the image of God. Um, and this kind of injustice is an offense to God, and so doing something about it. So thank you, all that to say for being part of that. We deeply, deeply appreciate that. Um, this morning, this this passage in Colossians is such a powerful passage, and it's an interesting one because Paul is like talking about a mystery. He's writing this letter, and I always think about like what would it have been like to receive a letter from Paul? I actually have been thinking, doing a lot of thinking of like, if Paul were to write a letter to us right now, what would that look like? I'm almost afraid to think about what that might look like. Um, but Paul writing this letter, he's talking about this mystery in Colossians. I'm gonna tell you about the mystery of the gospel. I'm gonna reveal it to you. And and I mean, I I don't know if the Colossians knew that anything that, hey, I didn't know there was a mystery, but he's gonna he's gonna reveal it to us. And he says, this is what the mystery of the gospel is. It is Christ in you. And it's such a beautiful, mysterious, wondrous thing. Christ in you. Um, what does that mean? What does that look like? And and like I said in the earlier service, this is something that your doctor is going to be able to expository, you know, do his thing uh um on. But to me, the simplicity and and embracing this, and and Ryan and I had a conversation last night about as I'm getting older, I'm embracing wonder more. I'm I'm I'm less concerned about certainty and more of like, wow, wonder and mystery is is a really beautiful uh thing to be embraced instead of trying to figure it all out. And so here's this mystery of the gospel that he's talking about. Like, what is that? And what is that, what does that look like? And he says, it's Christ in you. And I it reminds me of when my wife, I have seven kids. When my wife was pregnant with our first child who's now in her late 30s, but when she was first pregnant, um, all the signs were there that she was pregnant. We were really excited about the possibility. We really wanted to have kids, and so all the signs were there, but she says, I just want to make sure I'm gonna go to the doctor. And I remember accompanying her to the doctor's office. She went into the examining room. I sat in the waiting room, waiting for my wife to come out. And I'm telling you, a different person came out of that examining room. You know, she was like Moses coming down off the mountain. Her countenance had changed. She was glowing, radiant, almost floating out of the examining room. And she's like, We're going to have a baby. And we went crazy in there. And it was like literally a physical change, like something happened in there, right? And so, and I think about that, I think nothing physical actually changed. She was pregnant before she went into the examining room. So nothing physical changed. What changed was this person, because he had authority, has MD after his name, like some people have a PhD after their name. Um, there's some clout there. There's an authority that comes with that. So that when he confirmed to her what she already kind of knew to be true, it's something connected. There was an awakening that happened in her when he said it's true, there's life in you, and everything changed. Well, you go, you just you just heard this passage of scripture coming from Paul and the inspired word of God, who God this morning comes to you and he says, There is life in you. Christ is in you. Yes, it's a mystery. You're not gonna figure it all out, but there is life in you. And that awareness and that understanding should have that effect on us. We should walk around with that sense of awareness of like, whoa, there is life in me. There's life in me. And that life should be expressed through how we live our lives and have the same impact on the people that are around us day in um and day out. And so, yeah, so that I love that passage. And I love even like, you know, you you guys are obviously fans of children, you know, and and I love when you do evangelism with kids, how there's this literal sort of sense. Like you, when you have you, when you talk to a kid and you say, Man, you just accepted Jesus in your heart. What does that little kid picture? All right, he pictures this little guy with long hair and a beard with a white robe living inside his heart, and they'll go around, you know, to their kids, to their classmates the next day and say, guess what, man? Jesus is in me. And his classmates are freaked out and all of that and everything. But there's this beautiful sense of reality and of like, wow, this is real, um, that I think we could learn from. You know, children are great when it comes to mystery and wonder and all of that. I think we can learn from that stuff. So even within that context of the mystery of the gospel of Christ in us, Christ in us, even in the form of the image of God, the reality is um that yes, as believers, we have the spirit of God that that dwells in us. But even beyond that, there is the image of God that dwells in every human being. And even in human beings that we would typically look at as the other, um, not like us. Um, the image of God dwells there. There is a presence there as well. And so when I think about that, um I'm uh something that has been just burning in me over the last year is this sense of people who live in the margins that feel unseen, that that are not seen by the majority and what the impact of that is. I've worked with kids now um for many, many years who live in this place at oftentimes of a almost a despair of feeling unseen. The only people that have seen me are those that wanted to do something, um, that that that wanted to take advantage of my vulnerability. And so that thing of being unseen, some people call it invisible. People talk about people as being invisible. Man, there's a lot of invisible people groups out there. There's a lot of invisible children out there that are, and it's they're not invisible. In fact, we did uh I asked the the director of our survivor care program in the Philippines to ask our kids in our care there, what do you think about being called invisible? How does that how does that make you feel? And almost all the comments were pretty negative. Kids are, I don't like being called invisible. One kid in particular, one of the younger kids, with had this beautiful childlike sort of like reaction to that was like, invisible? That's impossible. Only superheroes can be invisible. And it's this beautiful sort of like, it's true, you're right. Only superheroes, people are not invisible, but people oftentimes remain unseen. And and notice the responsibility is different there. If you were able to be invisible, it's you're bad, right? But man, if you're unseen, it means it's the person that's supposed to be seeing you's bad. The responsibility exists in those that should be seeing and yet are not. And so people remain unseen. And so I think, I mean, you've probably experienced this, some of you in this room. Maybe when you were a kid, you were the kid at the lunchroom table that nobody wanted to sit with. That's despairing. There's that sense of feeling unseen by people that you desperately want to be seen by. Maybe you've experienced it at work. Man, I'm the one that gets passed over every time for the promotion or the raise. My boss doesn't see me. He doesn't see the work that I do day in and day out. He doesn't see the work that I take home at night. I feel unseen. Some of you feel unseen even within the context of your family. It's a horrible, horrible feeling and a despair that comes along with that. The scripture is filled with people who are unseen. Remember the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda. 38 years he was paralyzed. The pool of Bethesda was this fountain in the in the in the heart of the town that that people would come, people that were infirmed, people that had diseases, people that were sick, people that were disabled, would gather at this fountain because every once in a while an angel would come and trouble the waters of this fountain, sh stir these waters up. And when they did, the first person in the fountain would be healed of their infirmities. And so there'd be a gathering there every day of the marginalized, of the people who are unseen by most of society and everything, would gather there hoping that I'll made maybe today's the day that I'll be the first one to get into that water and be made whole and be like everybody else. And so there was this guy, this guy for 38 years was there. And he was never gonna be the first one in the water because he couldn't walk. But he hoped that maybe somebody will see me. Maybe somebody will have enough compassion on me and pick me up and say, I can't stand another year, another day, you seeing you sitting here. I'm gonna throw you in that fountain the second I see that water start to move. But nobody did that. He was unseen. Scripture's filled with those people. Remember the blind man that was uh sitting on the side of the road begging, um, and and and which is a horrific thing even of itself because of his disability, it affected his economic situation, which is still the case even today. And and here's this guy blind, sitting by the side of the road, and he hears this commotion, and he's like, Hey, what's going on? I hear all this sound and everything, a crowd gathering, and and people that were following Jesus said it's Jesus of Nazareth. He's walking by. And this guy obviously knew who Jesus of Nazareth was heard about his reputation because his first instinct was to call out for mercy. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And what was so interesting is the next verse after after he calls out, it says this it says, Those who led the way told him to be quiet. It's so disturbing to me to think that those that led the way, those were his followers. The followers of Jesus see the unseen person, but instead of having compassion, they're like, no, no, this is about us. Talk about man making the unseen feel even more unseen, and that coming at the hands of actual followers of Jesus who are like, no, we're the in-crowd. You're not it, you're not part of us, you're not part of the in-crowd. What an impact that must have had on that person. And the disciples, I mean, the disciples were called, they were not influencers. Jesus called the marginalized. They called a bunch of ragamuffin fishermen and stuff, and it's like, you know, called him to be, called them to be uh his disciples. They were not known. Today we would do it completely different. You would look for the influencers, right? Who's got the biggest TikTok platform, man? Let's get him to be the disciple to spread the word because man, it'll get out there like crazy and everything. And Jesus is like, no, I'm going to the margins. I'm going to the unseen. Um, and on and on. Hagar, the story of Hagar in the Old Testament, such a powerful story. You have this Egyptian slave who was brought into Sarah and Abraham's house. Um, and Sarah knew that she was not able to have a child of her own. So she had Hagar, her Egyptian slave, basically go in with Abraham to become pregnant so that they could have a child. Can you imagine that situation? And then Hagar having to live in that household, pregnant with Abraham's child and seeing Sarah every day. There's a lot of tension in that house to the point where it says that Sarah became harsh with Hagar for all those reasons until finally Hagar was like, I can't do this anymore. And she fled into the wilderness by herself, completely unseen. Imagine what it would have felt like to be Hagar unseen. Modern times, there's a slide I want to uh throw up here on the screen. This was um uh the House Judiciary Committee hearing from uh just a month or two ago, uh, with the Department of Justice being represented by the Attorney General there. And one of the discussions in this hearing was about uh the victims of trafficking and exploitation of uh Jeffrey Epstein, and um who are all adults now, um these victims, and some of them were in the in the hearing. And there was a senator that said, Um, hey, if you are here and you are a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking and exploitation and his horrific crimes when you were a child, when you were uh a youth, um, and you're willing to, would you be willing to stand? And the survivors stood up. Now, this the crimes against them happened when they were young. Okay, but now they're adults and they stand up. And then she says, I want you now, if you have attempted to get justice, if you have attempted to be seen by those who could help you get justice, whether it's local law enforcement or even the Department of Justice, um, and you have not been seen by them. They have not even recognized you yet, would you raise your hand? And that's what happened. They all raise their hand. They've tried. And and and before we get like all self-righteous and everything about administrations and politics and all that, just so you know, they have tried this since they were young. So they've gone through administration after administration, both Republican and Democrat um administrations, and have still not been acknowledged or seen. And I want you to sp pay special attention to the looks in the eyes of those survivors. That is the look of the despair of being unseen. What the there is an ache there. I've seen that ache in the eyes of children. I've seen that ache in the eyes of the marginalized and who we often um look at as other, and it is an ache and it hurts. So what's what's going on? Why are people unseen, or why do we not see? I think there's a lot of reasons. I think uh oftentimes we're just we're so individualized as a as a culture, right? Or we're just we we've just like gotten sucked into the. I was saying earlier, I I was on a bus um uh recently where I'm I was heading to work, commuting, and um the bus was filled with people, and I'm I'm looking at my phone and I just put my phone down for a minute and I look around, and everybody is this. You know what I'm talking about, right? Everybody is this same thing on the subway. You take the subway, everybody's this we don't even look at each other in the eyes anymore. I've had encounters with people where I'm walking down a sidewalk, and I'm not talking about even like New York City, but walking down a sidewalk where there's just one other person coming the other way and you pretend not to see each other. Have you have you done that? Have you been uh either did it did it yourself or was the receipt like what do I oh this is stranger? And we we don't even like we can't even just say hi, like hey, like not we we've gotten to this place where we just don't even acknowledge each other's existence in the simplest ways. So I think there's even that piece that sort of adds to that disconnection um and that's that sense of independence. I think again, we see people as other, whether it's the quiet kid at the that maybe is a little weird at the lunchroom or whatever, and so we stay away or whatever. And for some of us, it's it's race or or nationality or gender or ability. There's a million things that create um the other, even when it comes into this another political persuasion. So they become uh the other. And when we see other, we strip the humanity away from people, and I believe it's basically our humanity where the image of God dwells, right? It's the mystery of the gospel, and when we don't recognize that, I believe it's an offense to God and and and um yeah, and just contributes to the whole thing. So the there's hope here. Here's my hope. In my decades of following Jesus, I've boiled things down to like a few things that I know for sure. And two of those things is God shows up for the unseen. That is a certainty. There's no question about that, that God shows up for the unseen. And when I think about that, you look at the pool of Bethesda scene, right? That guy sitting there 38 years, nobody having compassion, nobody seeing him to have compassion on him, and Jesus walks by, the Son of God. God on earth walks by, and what does he say? It's like he it was like a radar, man, when it came to the unseen. Look at Jesus, all the encounters Jesus has. The radar goes right to the unseen every time. And he sees him and you know the story. What do you need? What do you want me to do for you? He says, I want to be whole. And Jesus makes him whole. He is seen and healed. The blind man, you know, instead of listening to the wise advice of Jesus' followers who said, Shh, be quiet, desperation kicks in and says he cries out even louder, Jesus, son of David, please have mercy on me. And two of the most beautiful words in all the Bible happen next. Jesus stopped. The desperation of the unseen stops Jesus in his tracks every time. Zacchaeus, I see you up there, little man. In fact, I'd love to have dinner with you tonight at your house. His followers freaked out, but he saw Zacchaeus to the point where Zacchaeus later on is so blown away by being seen by this holy man that he basically says, Hey, I'm repenting. I'm gonna sell everything I have and give half of it to the poor, and then I'm gonna pay people back that I ripped off four times what I what I took from them. So over and over again, you see that Hagar has an encounter. Who goes to see Hagar in the wilderness? Not Sarah, not Abraham, God does. Visits her in the wilderness, shows up, she has this powerful encounter, and to the point where she gives a name to God. She's the only person in all of the Bible that gave a name to God, and the name she gave him was El Rohi, which means you are the God who sees me. You are the God who sees me. It's interesting that you don't see Jesus hanging out in halls of power in government buildings with prime ministers or presidents. You see him with the unseen in the margins every time. God's mandate to us in closing is open your eyes and see. Allow him whose name is life, who dwells in us. Yes, it's mysterious, but to live his life through us because he desires to draw close, especially to those who are on the margins. It's Matthew 25 in a nutshell. I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was in prison, I was sick, I was naked, I was unseen, and you saw me. There's a Jewish proverb a friend told me about recently that says, Before every person there marches an angel proclaiming, Behold the image of God. If we lived like that with that awareness and that understanding, I think we would see radical and beautiful things happen in the world where the kingdom of God comes to earth. So this morning, do you feel unseen? Some of you are sitting here right now. It's like, oh my gosh, this is me. Do you feel unseen? He sees you in your pain. He sees you in your weakness, in your vulnerability, in your brokenheartedness, your hurt, your rejection, and he draws close and calls us to do the same. It's messy, it's beautiful, it's joyful, it's complex, it's hard, it's heartbreaking. But man, I've I've learned that when it's dark and it's dark out there, there are two things that bring comfort: a little bit of light and some company. And the joy that it brings us to know that God draws close enough, that there's company in the dark, and then calls us to be that to others is a profoundly transformative understanding. Let's pray. God, would you give us eyes to see? First, your indwelling presence in us, that there would be a keen awareness that there is life in me that is even beyond my own life. And then would you give us the courage to get out of the way so that you can live your life through us and draw close to those all around us who are in the margins, those that we would consider other, but who you consider your own. In Jesus' name. Amen.