Sermons in the Best Practices Series

My name is Nate. I'm the lead pastor here. Thanks for being here on this Sunday, the last Sunday in our series called Best Practices. The idea behind this series is that I believe that there are some habits or some practices, some disciplines that we can develop in our life that are really the best disciplines or the best practices that anybody can develop ever. That if we'll develop these, if we will make these a part of our life, they will make us better wives and better mothers, better husbands and better fathers, better children, better employees and employers, better friends and better neighbors. They will make us better people. More importantly than that, if we will instill these disciplines in our life, we will know God better. We will know him more deeply. We will experience the joy and the peace that we believe God offers. So here's what I'm doing as we move through this together. I'm assuming that if you're here in June, that you care at least a little bit about your relationship with God, okay? I don't you know this in church parlance, in the church business, or whatever you want to call it, but summertime is not like high visitor attendance time. Summertime is people who mean it come to church. So if you're here, I'm assuming that you do care to some degree or another about your relationship with God. If you're here because you are checking it out and you're not sure yet and you wouldn't even say yet that I do have a relationship with God, then I hope that this is a way for you to just assess some things and analyze some things and kind of look at and get a peek at Christianity. But as we've been going through the series, we looked at some practices that are really best for us, like reading the Bible on a regular basis. We kind of looked at how to do that and what keeps us from doing that and how we can make that a part of our life. We looked at worship in the second week. Last week, we looked at prayer and this idea of reducing ourselves to the need to pray. Don't wait for life to do that to us, but go ahead and every day admit that there's things that we need God for and spend time in prayer. And in that way, we can move further to being obedient to that command to pray without ceasing, which is a really challenging instruction in Thessalonians. This morning, what I want to do is kind of clean up the series and mention a couple best practices, a couple spiritual disciplines that maybe are a little bit less heralded, a little bit less known, a little bit more forgotten. These all probably deserve their own week, but I'm excited about our next series. I wanted to get to it. This one's a tight four-week series, so we're going to kind of hit three different things this week. So my hope for you is maybe all three of these things are great for you and you can instill all of them. Maybe you're already doing one or two, but I hope that everybody today can take home something that they want to begin to instill in their life or a discipline that they want to renew in their life. So that's my goal for you. So as we look at these three practices that we're going to cover today, one of the less heralded spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines that I wanted to talk about is the practice of giving, the practice of being generous, the practice of giving of our finances. Now, as I say that, if you're thinking along with me, okay, if you're anything like me, then your thought process might go something like this, okay? We're doing a sermon on spiritual disciplines. First thing out of the gate is that I need to give to the church. It's pretty self-serving, dude. Like, you're going to get up there, you're going to tell me these are things God really wants me to do, and then the very first one is, bam, you should give to the church. Okay, listen, I don't blame you for thinking that. I would be thinking that if I were you, but a couple of things to clarify. First of all, when I talk about giving, it's only the second time I've talked about it since I became the pastor here two and a half years ago. But every time I do talk about it, I want to be sure that we cover this thing biblically. And I want to make some points. There's some ways that we talk about giving that just aren't true. The New Testament, which it doesn't mean the Old Testament isn't valuable, but the New Testament is our authority as we look for ways to live our life. The New Testament doesn't tell us to give 10%, and it doesn't tell us that we have to give to the local church. So when I say that we should give, that we should instill the spiritual discipline of giving, I'm not telling you that you should give 10% of your income to grace. That's not what I'm telling you. So in that way, it's not self-serving. What I'm telling you is the New Testament says that we should be a people who are generous, that we should be a people who give. Jesus talks about giving in such a way that he assumes that you will do it when you give. So it's to happen, when you give, give in such a way that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. We see a story about a widow that gave out of her poverty, and Jesus says that's a better, that's a bigger gift, a more meaningful gift than the wealthy person who gives out of their wealth, because her gift required faith, right? We see these instructions about giving, and we know that to give is a good thing. We know that that's something that the Bible talks about. But again, we're to give to God, give to things that are building God's kingdom. So it doesn't necessarily mean the local church. Paul does talk about this idea that if somebody is ministering to you and you're benefiting from that, that we should make it possible for them to continue to do that, that we should support them. But that's as close as we come to me being able to leverage the Bible to say that you have to give your money to grace. So that's really not what I'm talking about. Now, if grace is doing things that you believe in, that you want to support, then support it. Like Mikey, the guy that did the announcements, which is so well, I mean, he knocked those out of the park. When Mikey did those announcements, he told you guys that we were in Mexico right now, that we had two, that we had a team of students down in Mexico and that we're building two homes. I'll just tell you, those homes are $6,000 a piece. The missions committee that we have here, in their generosity, said, we want to go ahead and pay for you guys to build two houses so that two families who live on a dollar a day or less can have a home that they so desperately need just across the border in Mexico. They were able to do that because 10% of everything that's given to Grace goes to ministries happening outside the walls of grace. So if you've ever given, then you are a part of that. If you'd like to be a part of that moving forward, then you can give and you will be. Or if you'd like to be a part of other things moving forward, give to Addis Jamari, a great ministry going on in Ethiopia where they are cutting off sex trafficking at the front. They're nipping it in the bud before it even starts. They take girls that age out of an orphanage and they put them in a home and they disciple them and they teach them skills because there's a very high likelihood that they would end up in some sort of trafficking industry if they did not. And now they're going to the families that have to put up kids for adoption because they simply can't afford the children that they're having, and they're giving them training and investing money in them so that on the front end, those kids don't even have to go to an orphanage. So be a part of something like that. Be a part of faith ministry where our kids are now building homes for families that desperately need them. The instruction in the New Testament is that we should give and that we should be generous, that we should be conduits of God's generosity. And you may think, how is this a spiritual discipline? I know that that's something that we're supposed to do. I get it that that's instructed in the New Testament, but how are we supposed to do that? Why is that a spiritual discipline? And I would just submit that maybe we don't think about giving as a spiritual discipline because we've heard it taught poorly, or we've thought about it in incorrect ways. I've sat in services and listened to sermons before where people talk about giving as if it's some sort of investment scheme. They'll quote a verse in Micah, and they'll say, if you bring your tithe into the storehouse, then God's going to bless you and fill your barns. And it's almost this idea that if you'll give to the church, God's going to give you even more money. That's dumb. That's not how that works. Charitable giving isn't some sort of divine investment scheme, okay, where God just makes you rich because you give to other people. That's how jerks take advantage of ignorant people. That's how that works. So that's not true. It's not some investment scheme. Will you get blessed when you give? Absolutely. Is it going to be by more money in your account? Probably not. So that's not how that works. The other thing is we get guilted into it, right? God's done so much for you, the least you could do is give a little bit for him. And then it feels like this thing that we have to do out of obligation when really that's not what giving is. The reason I think that giving is a spiritual discipline is because giving builds your faith while we participate in God's goodness. Giving builds our faith while we participate in the goodness of God. I'll tell you why I think this. This was, and I have to preface this story. Jen is against me sharing this story because in this story, we stumbled into some obedience. I feel obligated to remind you that I'm an egotistical jerk and that I don't always do good things. But in this story, I'm going to do something good, okay? But now I feel like everything's balanced and that we're fine. About four years ago, I guess it was, it was December. Lily was due in January. Our only child was due in January. And we had managed to save up some money to have the kid and take the hit of Jen not being in work. Jen worked part-time. I worked at a church. I was a student pastor, a small groups pastor. And believe it or not, I did not make a ton of money. So for us to have money set aside was a big deal. We had about $5,000 set aside. And I'll just be transparent with you. we had not had that much money set aside in our marriage ever. So we were pretty thrilled that we had this amount set aside to be able to have Lillian be responsible for us to miss because she worked part-time as an office manager and she wasn't going to get those hours and we're going to have medical bills and you know how it goes. So we're feeling good about that. Well, then in late November, her car stopped working. So I had it towed to a guy that went to the church, a guy named Kelly McCart. And Kelly was looking at the car. He calls me one day. I was on the golf course. I mean, it's hard. We didn't have any money. By the way, I was golfing during work hours. I was on the golf course. He calls me. I said, hey, dude, how you doing? He says, I'm doing better than you will be. And I went, oh, no. I said, what's up? He goes, it's the engine. I said, ugh. He said, it needs to be replaced. And I'm like, what do I do? Do you think I should do it, or do you think I should just trash it and buy a new car? He goes, I think you should replace it. It's a good car. It's a Toyota 4Runner. I said, all right, how much is it going to cost? He said, $5,000. Son of a gun. So I had to go home, and I think I waited a day or two to tell Jen. You know, like, how's the car? Eh, it's fine. You know, I didn't, I just didn't, she's a very pregnant lady and I didn't want her to have to deal with the stress that I was dealing with. Because it's like, my goodness, how, how are we going to pay our bills in January? Like, how are we even going to make it? I don't want to do the humiliating thing of going to my parents and be like, we're, we're screw ups. Can you please give us money? Like, I didn't want to do that. So I was just really stressed. In the midst of this, it was time to give the Christmas offering at the church that we went to. Jen and I had prayed about it, and we had conferred, and we had each agreed that we, that year, wanted to give $500. But then this thing happened, and now we don't have any money. But it's time for the Christmas offering to happen. And I prayed about it, and I just kind of felt, you know, if I can trust him with $500 when we feel secure about our finances, then I ought to be able to trust him when I don't. And I feel like this is what God has asked us to do. So we said, all right, we'll do it. And we gave the $500. Two days later, friends of ours from the church, our age, not like grandparents or something, peers come up to us, come up to me after a service, and they said, hey, we don't know why, but the Lord just kind of put you on our heart this week. So we just wanted to say Merry Christmas, and they handed me an envelope. I take the envelope home, and inside is a check for $500. Yo. So I kind of start crying a little bit. I show it to Jen. And to me, that was God's way of saying, I'm going to take care of you. I have 1,000 sheep on 1,000 hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I have a thousand sheep on a thousand hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I wish I could chronicle for you the ways that God showed up in January and February so that we didn't have any need. The way that he just took care of all the things that we were concerned about. I think because we were able to stumble into obedience in that situation. But the reason I'm sharing that story is because do you not think that after we decided to give that money and then saw God deliver us in that way, do you not think that built my faith a little bit? Do you not think that helped me trust God even more? And then the cool part is the family that did it, a family called, named the Calders, they had no idea what was going on in our life. And then after they gave it, I shared with them our story. Do you not think that built their faith a little bit? Of them just sitting there going, I feel a prompting that we should try to take care of Jen and Nate. You don't think that built their faith to do that? I think that when we give, we create opportunities for God to show up and show us that he's going to take care of us. When we give, we create opportunities to be on the other end of stories like that, to know that what we gave was used for something far better than whatever we were going to spend it on to begin with. And when we do that, not only does it build our faith, but it allows us to experience the goodness of God as we are conduits of his generosity. That's why I think that giving is a spiritual discipline. Because I think it's something that builds our faith. So if that's not a part of your life, I know, I know that's a tough thing. That's a hard thing. Just practically, it's a hard thing. And there's questions around giving. Do I give 10%? I think that's the tithe. Listen, the New Testament doesn't really tell you a percentage. I think 10% is a good baseline. But I would tell you to just try to get into the habit of regularly giving anything to any ministry that's building God's kingdom. And let God show up. Let that build your faith. Get some experience in participating in the goodness of God in that way. If that's not a part of your life and you want to know God and you want to follow these steps and you want to instill these practices in your life, just find a way that feels right to you. Pray about it. Father, what would you have me do? And give in that way and watch God show up. So that's the first thing that I would encourage you in today is the practice of giving. The second thing is the practice, and you guys are going to be like, what in the world is he talking about? The practice of content consumption. The practice of content consumption. Here's the idea. I'm not going to spend long on this. I don't think I need to make a whole bunch of flowery points around it. I think that you guys can understand this, okay? There's a verse that I love in Philippians. It's one of my favorite verses. It's in chapter 4, Philippians 4, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Now that's a challenging voice. That's a challenging verse. If you think about the things that you allow into your life, the things that you watch, the things that... This steps on my toes, too. The things that you're not even sensitive to on Netflix anymore. Right? The shows that you watch. You're like, but that show has all that stuff in it. Yeah, it doesn't really bother me. Should it? Think about the stuff that you allow into your life. And if it's obedient to this, whatsoever things are just, pure, lovely, commendable, honorable, excellent, there's anything worthy of praise or praiseworthy. Think about these things. How good are we doing at that? And so I just kind of think, if this is something that I want to do, if I want my mind focused on things that are obedient to Philippians 4.8, that are praiseworthy and honorable, and all of those things, that's what I want. How do I do that? How do I organize my life around those things? I think part of it is the content that we consume. And I would ask you, for in your life, besides Sunday morning, besides whatever comes out of my mouth on Sundays, which, that's a low bar, what spiritually nourishing things are you getting in your life? What else is spiritually nourishing you? Outside of random conversations you might have with your friends that you do find encouraging or conversations that you might have with your spouse that you find encouraging, what is in your life that is there to spiritually nourish you, to build you up spiritually? For years and years and years, for centuries, the only option has been to read. And if you're not a reader, if you don't like doing that, which I totally understand, then it's really difficult to consume any spiritual content during the week that's spiritually nourishing in any way, because reading was the option. If you are a reader, I would encourage you, make books that are spiritually encouraging a regular part of your discipline. In my personal quiet time, when I'm really doing it well, when I'm really walking in consistency, I'll read the Bible. I'll let that push me into a time of prayer. And then when I'm done praying, I'll read a spiritually formative book until Lily wakes up. That's kind of how it goes. So if you're a reader, then choose books that nourish you spiritually. But if you're not, I just want to, on a practical level, let you know that there are some really great options out there for you. And I want to talk to you about this idea of harnessing the dead spaces in our schedules because we're all very busy. But there's these things called podcasts that you should really listen to. They're phenomenal. If you don't know what podcasts are, ask someone around you after the service. We will give you a one-day moratorium of not making fun of you or even calling you names for that. Just ask somebody around you, what's a podcast? How do I find them? How do I assess them on my phone. All of you have phones and you can get podcasts on all of them, okay? These podcasts are great because all of the sudden I can listen to sermons from all over the world. I can listen to people have discussions about things that are spiritually formative from all over the world. I can listen to all kinds of people. Do you understand that for centuries and centuries and centuries, the only spiritually building, nourishing thing that people got was whatever their pastor said on Sunday. And that's a bummer. Now you have access to the best pastors in the world who are preaching every week and you can listen to their sermons every week. So I want to encourage you to look for the dead spaces in your schedule. If you have a commute over 10 minutes, use that to listen to something that's spiritually formative. If you go on a walk with your dog, put in some headphones, listen to something that nourishes you spiritually. When you're at the gym, can we just all agree that almost everybody in this room is old enough to no longer need pump-up music? Nothing that you're doing requires you to be pumped up, okay? Nothing. Nobody in this room, I'm looking at you right now, nobody in this room, except for maybe Mikey, is lifting any amount of weight that requires you to be jacked. So just listen to something. Listen to something that's helpful. Listen to something that informs you, that nourishes you, that encourages you, that's spiritually formative. I have a buddy, he goes to the church, I'll tell on him. He's not here this week, and we'll see if he mentions anything to me because he listened to the sermon. But Shane Smith, and he has Smith, he has to drive to Durham every day for work, and he started listening to sermons on his drives. That dude texts me questions a couple times a week. He's asking me stuff. He's wanting to understand Scripture. He's saying, hey, I heard this taught to me. What do you think of this? He is chewing on it. He's considering it. He shows up to my 6 a.m. Bible study. I have watched his life change over the past several months. And one of the biggest things is because he takes time in his day, he looks at that drive not as a burden but as an opportunity to consume some content that's going to nourish him spiritually. And it's changed him and his family. Look for those opportunities in your life and find things that we can listen to. On your bulletin there, I emailed some people in the church who I know listen to podcasts, and I compiled some there for you. So there's recommendations there if you need some. The other thing I would say on this point is there's an app called Audible. And that you can subscribe for like 14 bucks a month and download books. You get one book a month and then they read it to you. You can listen to it. So if you're not a reader, but you're jealous of all the people you know who do read and seem to have things to contribute at parties and at like Bible study and stuff, and you'd like to be one of those people, you can game the system and have somebody else read it to you while you cut the grass. That's really great. So you can subscribe to Audible and you can get these books going in your headphones. So I just want to impress upon you this idea of consuming content that can help you. I think it's a discipline that we should all have and be careful with. The last one I want to talk about today is the practice of fasting. The practice of fasting. Now, fasting's an interesting thing. Fasting shows up in the Bible a lot. And fasting, if you spend any time around church, is something that we've heard of. If you grew up in a Catholic environment or an environment that observed Lent, then you know the idea of fasting for 40 days from certain things. And so we all kind of understand what fasting is. But as I thought about it this week, to put it in front of you, there's a couple things that I thought were interesting. First of all, we can fast for a bunch of different reasons. In 1 Samuel, we see David fast because he's mourning. He's lost his son. He's mourning the loss of his son. And so he fasts and he's brokenhearted before the Lord. We also see David fast in repentance. He's done something that he very much regrets. He made a moral misstep. He sinned before the Lord. And as a form of repentance, he pursues God by fasting. And maybe that's what some of us need to do. Maybe some of us have something in our life that's just eating our lunch that we'd love to not be a part of our life, but it just persists and it just pervades and it's just always there. Have we ever fasted over it and said, God, please take this from me? There's this really interesting passage in the New Testament in Matthew where Jesus says that this type of demon is only cast out through fasting and prayer. Like it somehow intensifies our prayer. We can fast when we're seeking guidance. In Acts chapter 13, it says that the church was getting together, and after a season of prayer and fasting, that they set aside Paul and Barnabas to go on their missionary journeys. We can, when we don't know what to do, when we don't know what's next, we can set aside some time to fast and pursue God in that. But I think maybe the most interesting thing that I saw about fasting is that Jesus just assumes that you do it. See, I think that when we hear fasting, there's a part of us that goes, okay, that's for like, that's for the ninja Christians, right? That's for the Navy SEAL Christians. Like, I'm just regular, just getting by, trying to not do dumb stuff Christian. That's for like super intense, big time Christian. Okay. Do you know in the New Testament, there's no delineation. There's no stages of Christians. You don't get to be like a white belt while that dude's a black belt. You don't get to do that. We're all on the same path moving towards the same goal of walking with God and being disciples of God. And part of that path is this assumption by Jesus that we would fast. Because he tells us in Matthew, he says, when you fast, don't do it like the religious hypocrites do it. Don't walk around with a sunken in face and all sad and be like, what's wrong with you? Be like, I'm fasting because I'm super spiritual. Don't do that. Splash water on your face. Fake it. Try to sneak it by people. Don't let anybody know what you're doing. But the interesting thing to me is this assumption by Jesus that it's a part of your life. And I know that for me, I'm not speaking for you. I'm sure that I'm behind the bell curve on this and you guys are all way ahead of me. But for me, until recent years, that was not a regular part of my life. I still, I fast with the elders from time to time, and I'm still bad at it. Honestly, half the time I fast with the elders, I have to email them the day before and be like, guys, I'm so sorry. I made a lunch appointment tomorrow, and I'm definitely going to eat tacos. So I kind of ruin that for us. It's true. The elders are nodding their heads at me right now, like, yeah, we know. And they're secretly grateful for it, so don't let them talk bad about me after this. They like it when I do that. But it's not really a part of our lives. We don't do it as a regular thing. I bet most of us in here can't remember the last time we did it. But see, Jesus assumes that we fast. And he doesn't assume that it's for, the super intense believers. It's for all of us. And the more I looked into it and thought about what it meant and what it was and why would Jesus assume that we did this, the more apparent it became that it's this picture of something. There's a book by a girl named Margaret Feinberg. I think that's her last name. Is that her last name? Yeah. And it's called Taste and See. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, told me about it, and I started reading it. It's really good. It's gotten me firing on a bunch of different things. I'm really considering doing a whole series on food. I feel like I'm an expert on this. I could bring a lot to the table. See what I did there? Yeah. Okay, I feel like I could do a lot with that, and I want to expound more on this later. But fundamental to this book is this idea that God could have created us any way he wanted to. He could have had us nourish ourselves any way he wanted to. We could have gotten our energy from the sun. We could have worked on photosynthesis like plants. He didn't have to make people who had to eat. He didn't have to make people who had to eat so often, but he did. And it's interesting to think that maybe he did that as a constant daily reminder of our spiritual need for him. As a constant daily reminder that our appetite for food, our body's appetite for food should be the same as our spirit's appetite for God. And in that way, fasting is a physical reminder of a spiritual need. The more I started thinking about this, the more I realized that food is a picture. Every time we sit down at a table and we eat because we need it, that's a physical picture of what our spiritual body needs. And so when we fast, it's an acute reminder of that. It's an intense reminder of that. It forces us to focus on this picture that exists with us every day of our life. And every time we feel the hunger pangs in a fast, that's why some people say, well, you can fast from different things. You can fast from alcohol, or you can fast from social media, or I'm going to put down my phone, or I'm not going to do this, or I'm not going to do that. I'm going to fast from TV. And those are fine. But there's nothing quite like fasting from food. Because it's a physical reminder of a spiritual need. And as we feel those pangs of hunger, gosh, I wish I could eat right now. That's a reminder. This is how your spirit longs for God. I've even gotten to the habit of, on the occasion when I'm actually good at fasting, I'll get a little headachy. And it's really tempting because I still have a lot to do in my day. I'm usually still about to go to an elder meeting. I have other things that I have to accomplish. I'm trying to get a sermon done, whatever it is. And it's tempting to eat something because I've got to stave off this headache because I can't really do my job if I'm not feeling well. So I need to take care of myself. And I'll start to go down that road. But it's a reminder. The way that your body begins to ache because you haven't had food is the way that your spiritual body begins to ache when you're not locked into God. We don't feel it as acutely, and we don't feel it as immediately. And I think that's why God gives us this physical reminder all the time. When we don't eat, we know it. And when food is good, and the meal is good, and we're around other people, and we're around our friends, it's one of the best experiences in life. And I just think it's this one-for-one picture of our need for God. So fasting serves as an acute reminder of our spiritual need. And if nothing else, it brings to the forefront of our mind our spiritual need for God. And so if fasting isn't a regular part of your life, I would encourage you to try it. Try it and let that drive you into prayer. Try it and let that take you into a place where you admit and acknowledge your spiritual need for God. I had a friend who, he's got three boys. This is the worship pastor I used to work with in another church. For all three boys, the week they were born, he fasted for a week and prayed for them. Because those were his boys, and he wants them to grow up to be godly men, and so he pursued the Lord after them. If you've got a big decision coming up and you don't know what to do, have you fasted about it? If there's a sin in your life that's just kicking your tail and you'd love to be done with it, have you fasted about it? If you'd like to get into these spiritual disciplines more but can't seem to find that in yourself, have you fasted about that? I want to encourage you to consider the spiritual discipline of fasting. Now, as we wrap up the series, to me, there's this key question, the answer to which dictates all of our actions after being asked the question. So as we wrap up the series in light of all of these practices, the practice of reading scripture, the practice of worshiping God, the practice of prayer, of giving, of consuming the right content, of fasting, all these different things that we can instill in our life so that we could pursue God better, I think that there is a key question. And when I say key question, what I mean is the answer to this question really determines all of your actions after you answer it. And I get this idea from a book that Jen and I have recently been given. A lot of you know that cancer has become part of our reality and our family in 2019. And so when that became a part of our reality, people started giving us different things and somebody gave us a book. It's called Chris Beats Cancer. And at the beginning of this book, there's a question. And the question is, do you want to live? And it may seem like a simple enough question, but it's really profound in how you answer it. Do you want to live? Because what's about to follow in that book, what he's about to tell you to do, is for most people a radical change in your lifestyle and your diet and your habits. So he sets it up with, do you want to live? The implication is, if the answer is yes, then you'll be willing to do whatever it takes to live. If the answer is no, that's a different conversation. And for those battling that disease, that's a more tricky question than you would think. So I think it's this key question. Do you want to live? If you do, then you will do whatever it takes to accomplish that. And I think that there's a key question for us as we consider our relationship with God, and it's this. Do you want to know God? Do

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Before I get rolling, you should know that your Christmas offering is at work, okay? We got the new lights installed over the weekend. I think they look amazing. I think Steve and the team did a phenomenal job. We had some volunteers here sacrificing some time and a specialist in who's running the lights for us this week. So we are very fancy. And we're very grateful for all their time. So let's say thank you to them. And if you gave to the Christmas offering at all, then you helped with this. So thank you so much as we continue just to kind of take steps forward in excellence. We're starting a new series this week called Best Practices. And to start the series, I wanted to take you back to, I think it was about 11 years ago, in 2008, I'm on a trip to Honduras. I taught at a school at the time. I was the high school Bible teacher and the chaplain, those poor young minds. And the trip that we took every week was, or every year was to Honduras. And so because I was a chaplain, I got to go. And the guy that led it was a guy who lived in the States named Mark Searcy. He's actually, he grew up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina. I think I said that right, tobacco. And he became, at the age of 19, he got married and he felt compelled to be a missionary. And so he moved to Haiti to farm there and to be a missionary in Haiti and ended up fleeing because they feared for their lives. The government was kind of chasing them down. And so they flew out in the middle of the night. And then they became missionaries in Honduras. And then at this season of life, I think he was in his 50s at the time, he led trips back down to Honduras with some of the people that he met down there. And so we partnered up with Mark Searcy. And I loved Mark. He has an easy laugh. He's a good old boy. He always had in his chest pocket a miniature bottle of Tabasco sauce for any of the food that they might eat or encounter in Honduras to kind of just make it more palatable. Like, he was a good dude. And the first night we were there, Mark says, hey, I'm going to do a Bible study. So whoever wants, just come on up to my room. We'll sit out on the porch and we'll do a Bible study. I'm like, great, I'm in. So I go up there and a couple of the kids go up there and dude starts teaching out of the Bible and he opens up his Bible. And I don't know about you, but when other people open up their Bible, I'm always like, I want to see how marked up is this thing, right? Because I heard one time, show me a Bible that's falling apart, and I'll show you a life that isn't. So I wanted to look at his Bible and go, man, what's in there? And what I saw is that it was marked up to high heaven. There was highlighters, four different color highlighters all over the place. And he starts to teach in this southern draw and this easy speak and kind of the occasional giggling. And I'm loving it. I'm eating it up. This dude knows his stuff. He knows his Bible. And I've been in Christian school. I've got a seminary degree. And I'm listening to him and I'm like, I've never heard anybody explain the Bible like this. I'm all in. And then he finished, and he said, any questions y'all have, we can just stay up. I love God's Word. We can just stay up talking about it as long as you want to. I kept that dude up until 2 in the morning, 3 nights in a row, asking him questions about the Bible. Until every night, he was like, Nate, I've got to go to bed. And I was like, okay, me too. And then we'd just be exhausted the next day. I loved it so much. And his knowledge was so effusive and so easy. Any question you asked him, Mark, what'd you think about this? What about this? How do I make sense of this? He would go, okay. And he would know the story to go to or the exact reference to go to. He didn't have to take his phone like I do and Google that. Let me Google those keywords. Oh, that's in Colossians. No, he just knew and he would turn there. And then he had this cross-reference system. Everything that was highlighted had notes out to the side and those were other verses that talked about the same thing. And so he'd off the top of his head, flip to a page, read you that verse, talk to you about it. And then he'd go like, well, actually it would be helpful if we could do this one and this one and this one. And so he'd flip over and just verse after verse after verse. And I found out that there was a method to his coordination. Each highlighter meant something different. And it was amazing. I loved hearing the Bible for Mark Searcy because he knew it so well. And you probably have known people like that in your life. Men or women who were such students of God's Word, who loved it so much that you felt like you could ask them any question and they could give you a verse to help you answer that question. And I think as believers, whenever we hear that somebody has a knowledge of the Bible like that, we all go, I wish I knew the Bible like that. Don't we? I wish my Bible looked like that. I wish people could ask me a question about spirituality and I could just give you a verse. Anything. I wish I knew the Bible like that. And I think that we know that if we did know the Bible like that, that we would be better at life. We would be better parents. Maybe, I mean, growing up, my dad, if we missed Sunday, if we were traveling on a Sunday, it's not like we got to lay out of church. We had just family church, which was way lamer than normal church. So I wanted to be in town on Sundays just to avoid my dad's sermons. But he would give these sermons and he knew the Bible and it stuck with me all these years later that it mattered enough to him to open up scripture and continue to teach it to us. And for some of us, if we thought of the idea of doing family church, of teaching our family the Bible, of opening it up for our children, we would probably be intimidated by that. We might not know where to turn or what to do, and maybe we wish we could do that. From time to time, we'll talk about doing a devotional in the house. Maybe we wish we could do that. Maybe we wish that when we opened up, that when we went to work and people would ask us questions about what we think and what we believe and how do I deal with this situation, I bet we wish we knew where to turn. I think when we hear about people who know God's Word really well, it's a very natural and common thing for us to think to ourselves, I wish I did too. But the question really becomes then, how can we do that if we don't study it all the time? Those highlights in Mark's Bible, and they were from cover to cover, they didn't happen in a day. That was years of waking up every day and spending time in God's Word, spending time in prayer. What I say are the two most important habits that any person can develop ever. That's years of effort. That's years of learning. That's years of seeking things out. That's years of prioritizing studying his Bible. How can we ever know it, those people that you admire? How can you ever know the Bible like them if we don't study it like them? How can we ever know God's Word like that if we don't read it every day? How can we ever be truly helpful, as helpful as we could possibly be to those in our circles of influence, to those on our tennis team, to those that we work with, to those that we happen to hang out with or are in some club with, or how can we ever truly be as helpful to our neighbors as possible if we don't know God's word to help them and how can we know God's word if we don't prioritize it and study it every day? We know this to be true. As a matter of fact, I think that to a room full of what are probably, I'm guessing, mostly Christians, whenever you talk about reading the Bible, you get the exact same reaction as when somebody talks about their diet, right? You have a friend, and they're losing weight. They're just withering away. And you notice them, and you're like, yo, what are you doing? You look great. You're going to have to buy all new clothes. What's going on? And they tell you about their diet. Oh, I'm doing the keto diet. I'm doing, I'm no carbs, no sugar. I'm just, I'm the starvation diet. I haven't eaten in three weeks. Like whatever it is, like some new thing, I'm doing this diet. What do you always say to yourself or sometimes out loud to them? I should do that. You see somebody and they're just looking healthy. What are you doing? They're like, I took up swimming. I'm running. I'm running with a group of people three times a week. It's really great. What do you always say to yourself? I should do that. Right? Because we know it's good for us. Somebody, maybe you're talking to a friend and they're telling you about this new budgeting technique. Man, me and my husband, me and my wife, we've been kind of budgeting. We're doing this and this and this. And you always, personal finances, we go, I should do that. When we hear, hey, we should read the Bible, all of us in our heads go, I should do that. No one's here to argue with me about that. As a matter of fact, I've worked really hard to not let it out that this week was going to be about reading the Bible because I was afraid that we would hear that it was about reading the Bible and go, oh, yeah, I know. Like, I should do that, right? And we know all the verses. We know what Scripture says about reading Scripture. We say that it's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. We know that the word of God is living and active. We know that God's word will not return null and void. Whatever we invest in it, we will get a return on that investment. We know that we are supposed to hide it in our hearts, that we might not sin against God. There's this idea that by memorizing the Bible, that by consuming it, that by learning it, it somehow operates as a preventative so that we don't do the things that we don't want to do anyways. We know that. We know that we're supposed to hide it in our heart. We know that we're supposed to put it on our walls and instill it in our children and teach it to the next generation. Like, listen, guys, we know the verses about reading the Bible. And if you don't, if those were new to you, then now you do. We know that we're supposed to do that. As a matter of fact, if the point of this morning was only, hey, go read the Bible more, literally, I think all I'd have to do is come up here and let this be the sermon. Hey, this is part one of best practices for this week. You should read the Bible. Let's pray. And honestly, tell me if I'm lying, 10 of you would be like, yeah, he's right. And you'd go home and you'd do it. Because we know that this is what we need to do. So to me, the more interesting question becomes, if we know we're supposed to do this, and none of us here would argue with me that it's super important to invest ourselves in learning Scripture, then why don't we do it? Why aren't we better at it? That's one of the church's dirty little secrets. I don't know if you know this, and I have to be careful about that. I'm sure there's more that are worse. But one of them is this. Nobody's very good at this. There are some pockets, very few heroes, who have made it a habit and do it daily and have for years. And those are the people who are rock stars that I want to be like. There are others we've experienced, this is where I would put myself, pockets of success where we have months and years where we're very good, and then we have days and weeks where we just forget or we get busy or we just aren't interested then, and we fall away. Everybody struggles with this discipline. I know this to be true because I've spent enough time in ministry and enough time in church that I've stopped being surprised at people who tell me they're going to start reading their Bible. People who we respect, who seem to have it together, and very much do, and are leaders in the church, who will come to me privately, and not just here and just my general experience. I don't want you to start thinking, naming names, like who's buddies with him that doesn't read the Bible. I don't want you to do that. But people are coming, will come to me and be like, hey, because of this experience, I just want you to know, like, I'm really going to get back into God's word every day. And earlier on in my ministry, I would be kind of surprised, like, what? You don't read the Bible? I thought I was the only hypocrite. You're like me? I've talked to pastors. It breaks my heart. I've talked to pastors who are like, yeah, I don't read the Bible every day. My sermon prep is my devotion. I'm like, bro, that's not good for you. So one of the secrets of the church that I just wanted to be honest about is nobody's good at it. Very few people maintain that discipline for a long time. So if you're here and your first thought to, hey, we should read the Bible more, and your first thought was, I should do that. Listen, everybody in the room feels the way that you do. Who's a believer? Everybody feels that way. So to me, the more interesting question is, if we all agree that we should do it, and we know the verses about it, and there's really not a new angle to approach you to convince you to do it, then the more interesting question is, why don't we? So I put a question out on Facebook this week, and I've been talking to people. Hey, we know that we should read the Bible. Why don't we do it? Y'all don't know this, but Facebook's one of the best sermon prep tools that there is. And I got a bunch of interesting answers. And they kind of fall into two categories. One category of reasons kind of tells on our motives a little bit. And the other categories of reasons are really things that probably should be discussed and handled. And so we're going to look at both of them. But I saw a lot of people say, I'm too busy. I just, I want to do it. I know that I should. I just, I'm busy. And that's legit. We're all busy. If you're not busy, we are all jealous of you. We all have more to do than we want to do. We all feel rushed every day. That's life. That's how it goes. And then when we have the down moments, when we can finally rest, we just want to shut everything off. That's not, maybe we don't want to run to Scripture. So some people said that they were busy. Some people said, and I thought this one was particularly interesting, that it's more easy to be comfortable than it is to be convicted. They kind of expressed this idea of, if I open the Bible and read it, I'm going to feel bad about my life. And I don't really need that right now, so I'm going to leave it be. And I thought, honestly, I'm not trying to be overly dramatic. I just thought how sad that to some people we've reduced Scripture to this source of conviction and not a source of hope. And we forget that it gives us promises and good news and offers us freedom in what is best for us, that hope is found in Scripture. And what a shame when we reduce it to the source of conviction, which, by the way, is because that's what's best for us if it does convict, because God has a heart to serve us, right? So some people said conviction. Some people said that they were busy. Some people just said, it's not interesting. I've read it before, you know, like I've read it before. I know it. I know what Ephesians says. And so now I just read other stuff. But one person even, they asked a question and I thought that this was really telling. One person said, you know, I really don't like to read, which is pretty legit. There are some people who just don't like to read and that's fine. I mean, I get that. We got to, that a roadblock that we've got to find a way past. But he said, I don't like to read. It's just not my thing. So I like to try to listen to the Bible in my car sometimes. Does that count? And I thought, what an interesting question. Does that count? Does it count for what? To whom? What score are we keeping here? Who's tracking that with you? Does that count? And you know it really told on him, didn't it? And it tells on us too. Because it's a question I've asked and I've heard before. If I read one verse a day, does that count? If I remember a verse and I say it out loud, does that count? If I read one chapter, does that count? If the chapter's short and it only takes me two minutes, does that count? Count for what? What are you doing? Who are you trying to please when you do that, when you ask if it counts? And it really tells on our motives, doesn't it? All of those questions, all of those excuses so far. When we're asking, does this count? What we're revealing is that we're really reading the Bible out of a sense of ought or duty. I'm doing this because I should, right? We talk about reading the Bible more, and the very first thing we experience is, oh, I should do that. Not, I miss that. I want to do that. I long for that. It's, I should do that. Like do your taxes or not eat meat. Things that really stink. I should do that. And that's what we relegate the Bible to, is this thing that we should do. And so it becomes this duty that we perform out of a sense of ought. And by white knuckle discipline, we get up early and we read the Bible. We get up early, we set our alarm. It's a big thing. We make coffee. We sit down with our Bible or our app or whatever it is, and we read it for five minutes. We're like, oh, gosh, that was great. I need to text out some verses, right? It's this thing that we do out of the sense of ought or obligation. And I don't know how you work, but whenever I do something out of a sense of ought, I always end up resenting that thing. You ever joined a Bible study because a friend asked you to? And you didn't really want to, but you didn't want to tell them no either. And so you did it. And every week that dang thing rolls around. You're like, has it been a week yet? Is it really Wednesday? And you dread it and you complain and you go and it's fine. And you come home and you're like, I'm glad that's over. That stinks, man. You ever volunteer out of a sense of ought? You don't like that. That's no fun. You dread it. The things that I do because I feel like I should out of a sense of ought that I just make myself do out of white-knuckle discipline, I never enjoy them, they never stick, and they never are around for very long. And so it's no wonder if what's motivating us to read the Bible is this sense of ought and should that we fall away from that discipline. It's no wonder that it doesn't work, right? So really we have to start asking, well, what's the right reason to read the Bible? Because I would tell you, if you leave here and you feel a sense of ought that you should, then I would just tell you don't yet. Because I think the only real motive that will sustain us and enliven us as we try to make this a discipline in our lives is to be motivated by a deep desire to know God. And I would ask that question to you. And I think that this is the question for the series as we go through this series called Best Practices. Every week we're going to look at a different spiritual discipline. Worship next week and then prayer and then some of the more forgotten disciplines. Some of the best practices that we can have in life and in spirituality. And the driving question for all of these practices really is do you want to know God? Do you have a heart for God? Mark wanted to know God. He wasn't trying to become smarter. He wasn't trying to be good at teaching. He wasn't trying to be an effective missionary or an effective pastor. Mark wanted to know God, and his Bible was evidence of that. The way that it gushed out of him when he got to talk about God was evidence of that. He wanted to know God and so he dove into God's word every day to get to know him better because he understood that there's no better way to get to know our creator God than to read the word that he left us that thousands of people have died for that's been preserved for us over the centuries so that we could have the living God there as we read him. He wanted to know God. Those nights staying up till two, those were pure nights. My motive was to know God. I had never heard the Bible like this. I had never heard it explained like this. I want more, I want more. I want more. And in that moment, it wasn't about being a more effective Bible teacher or prepping for some role down the road. It was just about, I want to know God. And when you wake up every day and one of your prevailing interests in drive that day is, I just want to know God better today. You're going to dive into God's word. And when you're through, you're not going to ask anybody, did that count? Because no one's keeping score. Then the question is, do I know God a little bit better? Do I understand him a little bit better? And so I would say that for many of us, this might be where you can stop this morning and just pray a simple prayer. If you're sitting there and you're taking an inventory of yourself, do I want to know God? First of all, be honest about that. There have been plenty of times in my life, some while I've been at Grace, where if you sat me down and said, Nate, do you want to know God right now? I would have to be honest and go, no, just don't. Which is why one of my regular prayers I prayed at some point every year of my life, if not more frequently than that, is God, help me to want you more. And for some of you, that's all you need today, is to just commit to praying that prayer. God, I don't want you right now. Help me to want you more. Help me to desire you more. Give me a drive that wants to know you, that makes me want to get up and open your word. Give me a drive that wants to understand the Bible more. God, I want to know you. I long for you. If that's not there, the disciplines that we're going to talk about for the next four weeks, those will fade. That's the only proper motive is the desire to know God more. And so I would say for a lot of us, it starts there. Father, give me a desire for you so that I will get up and pursue you more. And these best practices that we're talking about, I think they're best practices because they ignite your desire for God by your continued participation in them, in scripture reading and in worship and in prayer and in the other disciplines. They ignite your desire for God and then they deepen your knowledge of God. That's why they're the best practices. That's why we're going to walk through them for the next four weeks. But the fundamental question to the series, to all of those things, is do you want to know God? For some of you, the take-home needs to be, Father, I want to know you more. Help me. Now, there are others here, I think probably a lot, who you would say, yeah, I want to know God. I mean, I could want to know him more, but I want to know God. I genuinely do. I genuinely want to understand Scripture better than I already do. There's just some things that make it hard for me because I do think that there are some legitimate hangups and some roadblocks that need to be removed so that we can make this a part of our life. Things like when I read it, it's hard for me to understand. I just don't understand. There's big words or there's words I'm unfamiliar with, and I just, when I read it, I don't, it doesn't make sense to me. It's kind of out of context. I don't get it, whatever it is. We'll talk about that. Sometimes that's a translation issue. For some people, one of the comments I got, and I could totally relate to this, was, you know, when I just read words on the page and process them on my own, it doesn't really light me up. What lights me up is getting to talk about it with others. That helps me. Sometimes I come alive in conversation and hearing how you experienced it and getting to bounce reactions off of you. That's really helpful to me. I relate to that. I have a men's Bible study. We've taken a break for the summer because I don't like them that much. But when we start meeting again in the fall, all we do every week, particularly this guy, all we do every week is we read two chapters of the Bible and then we get together and I go, okay, what'd you learn? What'd you see? What'd you experience? What do you have questions about? We start to talk about God's word. So if you're somebody who's a processor who needs to talk about this with other people, get in a group where you can do that. Sometimes that's a legitimate need. One person said, you know, I like to be able to read the passage, but as it's just isolated there on its own, I really don't know what to make of it. I would love it if there was some sort of an explanation of the passage next to it so that I could consume them together. That's a devotional. What you need is a devotional. They're all over the place. Go online, type in devotional, they'll come up and buy one. If you need help or a guide with those, let me know. Email me, write it on your communication card, and I'll follow up with you. But a devotional, somebody, an author has opened it up, they list a verse, and then they have information next to the verse that helps you reflect on what you just read. Maybe that's what you need. If you're having a hard time understanding it, it could possibly be your translation. And this is a little tedious, but every time I talk about this in a Bible study, everybody who's there with me kind of really pays attention. And so my thought is that maybe we don't know this in church, And so I'm going to share this with you. If it's boring, I'm sorry. But when we start talking about Bible translations, there's really three major ways to do it. There's word for word, there's sentence for sentence, and there's thought for thought. The Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek and in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in this thing called Koine Greek, which means common Greek, which is a really solid argument against the King James Version. I'm just saying. As a matter of fact, if you don't understand it and you're reading the King James Version, stop it. That's a hard one to understand, and it doesn't really, it's not super helpful. But the three different kinds of translations, word for word, sentence for sentence, thought for thought. Word for word, what the translator does when they're trying to translate it from Greek to English or whatever the original language was in that verse to English, is they're just looking at the word. They're going, what does this word mean? What's the best possible English word for this word? But if you've ever taken a foreign language, you know that sometimes the sentence structure is not the same. Subject, verb, order, and adjective order is not the same all the time as it is in English. And so you have to minimally reorganize the words so that the sentence still means the same thing. But a word-for-word translation is trying the best they can to stay true to whatever this word is. A great example of word-for-word is the NASB, the New American Standard Bible. That's probably the most accurate translation going right now. I think you can make an argument for Holman. I'm not sure. I haven't looked at it in a while. But that's word for word. It's not very readable. If you look up something in the NASB, it's kind of hard to read. It's less understandable, but the words are right. So if you're doing a Bible study and you really want to know what does this verse say, look it up in the NASB. It can be very helpful. Then there's sentence for sentence. Sentence for sentence is they take it and they go, okay, this is what this sentence means in the original language. What's the best way to restate this in English so that people can read it, but it also stays true to what was written? A good example of this is the NIV or the ESV. I preach from the ESV and I read the ESV. Those are sentence for sentence, a little bit more readable, but while maintaining accuracy. And then there's thought for thought where they take like a whole verse and the translator says, what is this verse saying? And what's the best way to say that in English? A good example of this is the NLT, or the new living. If you are someone who's never really read the Bible regularly, and it is hard to understand, one of my first encouragements for you would be to start with the new living. You'll pick one up, use that filter on your Bible app. We're going to talk about those in a second. Use that filter there and choose the NLT, and it makes for a more readable, easily understood experience. Sometimes it's just a translation issue. And then some of you may wonder about something like the message. That's not a Bible translation. The guy that did it, Eugene Peterson, said this is not a translation. It's just to help. So it's good to read for overall comprehension, but you should always balance that with something that is an actual translation. So it could just be a translation issue that's a roadblock for us. For those that feel like we need more or you don't know what to read, that's a big question too. I want to read the Bible. I don't know what to read. I do a reading plan, but sometimes, Nate, those stink. So what else could I possibly read? There's an app called YouVersion. Some of us know, a lot of us know about it. Some of us don't. If you do know about it, man, you should be using this thing. It's called YouVersion. It's the Bible on your phone. They have it in the Apple store. And then for snooty Android users, they have it in the Google Play thing. Okay. So they have it there too. It's everywhere. You download it and it's the Bible on your phone in every possible translation ever. So you can figure out one that works for you. And then they have literally hundreds of reading plans. Some last seven days, three days, some last a whole year on godly womanhood, godly manhood, how to be a better husband, how to be a better wife, how to be single, how to be a better parent, how to be a better kid, how to be a better employee or employer, what the Bible has to say about grace or faith or mercy or love, chronological through the Old Testament or through the New Testament. You can find any number of things there, and it will tell you what to read every day when you wake up. And you can keep track of it, and you can take notes in it, and it'll keep track of your notes. It's a phenomenal tool. It's hugely helpful. And one of the best things it'll do, for those of you with commutes who don't like reading, it will read the Bible to you. You don't have to do anything special. You just open it up, and at the bottom of every chapter, there's a play button. You hit that, and it'll just start reading it to you. So you can listen while you walk or while you're in the car or whenever. It's hugely, hugely helpful. So here's what I want us to do this morning. Everybody, when you walked in, you were at least offered a bulletin. I want everybody to take that out right now. If you don't have a bulletin, you can use the back of a communication card, and you can bear down on the Bible that's in front of you. I'm going to give you a little homework. I know that it's summertime and that you didn't expect this and some of you are mad at me right now, but I'm giving you homework and I'm going to ask for everyone to participate because if you're the cool person in your row who doesn't participate, then other people are going to be empowered by your freedom and they're not going to do it either. And so we want everybody to try do this together. So write stuff down, even if you don't mean it, okay? Here's the homework for everybody. Three questions for you today. The first one, what's your goal? What's my goal? As I think about reading the Bible, as I mentally kind of go, I need to do that. What's your goal? What's a reasonable goal for you? It might be to simply, I'm going to pray every day that God will help me to want him more. It may be, I'm going to read my Bible every day this week. I would encourage you to make a goal over this series. It's month long that we're going to be four weeks in this series. I want to set a goal. Maybe it's I read a book of the Bible a week. Maybe it's I read a chapter a day. Maybe it's I read a verse a day. Set a goal for you that's reasonable. Don't get like, don't get your eyes big at the buffet and then bring home more than you can stand, like reasonable. Second, what's my plan? What's my plan? How am I going to accomplish this goal? This is where you need to think through, what are the roadblocks for me? What are the reasons I don't read the Bible more? Is it time? Is it interest? Is it that I need people to talk to? Is it that I don't understand? Is it that I need a devotional? What is it for you? What's your plan? How are you going to make sure that you accomplish this goal? And then last, who are you going to tell? Who are you going to tell? We all know we've made private commitments in our hearts to do things before, and if we just keep it between us and God, we have an incredible propensity to not do that thing. So who are you going to tell? Who are you going to invite into this to hold you accountable? And I would challenge you, if you're married, do not list your spouse there. That's not good. Because listen, I don't know about your marriage, but you probably don't need the added tension of now accountability partners for this new thing on top of everything else. Like, hey, did you pray today? No, but when I do, I'm gonna pray for your attitude. Okay, all right. So don't do that. A friend, somebody who can help you out. Keep track of that together. So today, I hope that there's some emails and some texts going out. I hope that you'll make a commitment to this, that you'll make a plan for this, and that you guys will hold one another accountable. Incidentally, I had this thought this morning. I'm just going to throw this out here. I think sometimes we don't know what to read. We have kind of a loose idea of what we'd like to read, but if we open the Bible, we don't really know what we're approaching. There's narrative books that tell stories. There's books that help us with theology. There's books for wisdom and poetry. There's different books for different things. I thought about typing out summaries of the different categories of the books of the Bible so that you could kind of use as a go-to guide of I'm trying to think about this, what would be helpful? Or as I look at Ephesians, where does that fit in and what is that going to help me do? If you're interested in that, write that on a communication card or email me. And if I get 10 people who are interested, I'll do it. If I get nine, Google. But that's the goal. Take whatever your next step is to make Scripture more a part of your life. If it's, God, I want to want you more, pray that prayer. If it's taking a simple step to overcome an obstacle, do that. Get somebody else involved. And let's be one of the very few churches, I believe, that has a whole bunch of people who are actually good at this because we want God more and we've chosen to prioritize this in our life. All right, I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna move into a time of communion. Father, we love you. God, I know for sure from talking to the people of grace, we want to know you more. A lot of us do. God, I pray that for those of us who might not be feeling that right now, who might just kind of be gliding through life spiritually, that you would ignite in us and in them a desire to know you more. God, I pray that you would help me work in my heart through your spirit to want to want you more. Lord, I pray that as we move through this series, that we would instill these disciplines and practices in our life out of a desire to know you, that you would change the way that we relate to you, that we would walk with you more deeply, that we would love one another more purely, that we would offer one another as a result of these practices more grace and more patience and more earnest and hospitable love. God, I pray that you would use this series in our lives to draw us more nearly to you. I pray for those who do have a goal and who have a plan. God, let them execute it. Give them the courage and the discipline to see it through. Give us grace for ourselves when we mess it up. But God, I pray that we would walk back in here this next week and the week after that victorious in the commitments that we've made. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.