Sermons tagged with Family

Christmas is coming. The Advent candles mark this season of waiting. They help us pay attention to our longing for a Savior, for Jesus, the reason for our Christmas celebration. He gave us our first gift, our greatest gift, His love, which is perfect because we live in a world starving for love. We live lives starving for love. We're lonely, longing for a place to belong. We crave affirmation because we wonder if we really even matter. We long to be known and understood and accepted, don't we? Our whole selves, our real selves. In the midst of our shame and feelings of unworthiness, we desperately want, no, we need to be loved as we are. We long for Jesus because he loves like that. We read it over and over again in the Bible. We love because He first loved us. God is love, so you can't know Him if you don't love. And this is how God showed His love for us. God sent His only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they have done to our relationship with God. Friends, if God loved us like this, why can't we love each other? God's great miracle at Christmas was to love us up close, personally. Emmanuel, it means God is with us. So today we light this second candle of Advent as a reminder of God's love because the God who loves us knows we need his love. So he came to earth to be with us. Jesus coming means that we have that love. You are loved. Receive it. Welcome him into your home, into your brokenness, into your hurt and your shame and your sadness. Welcome him into your heart, into your places of joy and celebration and thanksgiving. Ask Jesus to fill you with the light of his love so that you can be light in a dark world. Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to get to be back with you up here preaching. Last week, Erin kicked off Advent for us. Erin is our wonderful children's pastor, and she did a phenomenal job kicking off Advent at Grace. If you didn't get to watch it, I would very much encourage you to go and do that. If it gets boring while I'm preaching, just jump over to our messages page and watch that one instead if you missed it. I wouldn't blame you. She did a great job of framing up Advent in that it's a season of expected waiting. It's a season where we as believers prepare ourselves for the coming of the Messiah and all that it means. And so every week we focus on a different thing that Jesus brought. Last week was hope. This week is joy, or this week is love. Next week is joy. The week after that is peace. And then on Christmas Eve, we get to focus on Jesus. So this week, as we settle into this idea of love, I wanted to take you back a couple of years ago. It's a Saturday night, Sunday morning, about 2 a.m., 2.30 a.m., something like that. And Jen and I are awoken by our dog, Ruby, barking. I have a golden retriever named Ruby. If you know me, you know I would like to not have a golden retriever named Ruby or any dog by any name, but Jen loves her, and so we keep her, and Ruby is about as good of a dog as you can have. I have a friend that has a dog named Rocco, and Ruby is way better than Rocco, but at about 2 o'clock, 2.30 in the morning, we were awoken by her barking, and she never barks inside. And so we were both a little bit startled, and I go scrambling down the stairs, but I fully expect I'm going to get down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window, and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal, but as I'm going down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal. But as I'm going down the stairs at our old house, we moved back in April. At our old house, as you're going down the stairs, you can see the front door and then you can see like the window pane next to the front door and then the stairs going down our front porch to the sidewalk. And as I'm going down the stairs at 2.30 in the morning with no shirt on, I'm looking out that window and I see two men start to walk up my porch stairs. It's two dudes in their 20s. And I was instantly terrified. What are these guys doing here in the middle of the night? And what I should have done in the moment is stopped, turned around, gone back into my room, grabbed a gun and a phone and called 911. That's what I should have done. Instead, what I did was leap down the last eight stairs into my small foyer and press myself up against the glass panel right as they came to the stairs. And when I saw them, it was two guys and one of them was carrying a beer bottle, but he wasn't carrying it like he was drinking it. He was carrying it like he was about to swing it. And I thought, oh, it's about to go down. It's happening right now. So I thought maybe they are just trying to like sneak in and steal a couple things. So I press myself against the glass and I bang it as hard as I can. And I say, get off, get off my porch, get out of my house, get off my property. And they start to argue with me. At one point, I'm trying to get them to get off my porch. At one point, he holds a phone up against the glass and he says, is this your address? And I say, yeah, but that doesn't matter. Get off my property. By this point, Jen's at the top of the stairs. Lily's two years old at the time. She's crying in her room. I'm flipping out. I am waiting for my door handle to start jiggling. And when it does, my plan is to go to the kitchen and get a knife and come back and meet them. Like, I'm ready. But then I keep telling them to get off my property, and they go, they treat me like I was a crazy person. They walk back off the stairs. I go upstairs. I get my gun and a phone, and I told Jen, look out the window and tell me what you see. And she says, there's four men standing at the end of our driveway. And I'm like, I only got five shots, you know, so let's make sure that I'm careful. And so I call 911. They send somebody out. The guys start to walk down the street. Long story short, they were just out probably partying, got an Uber to a place they thought they were supposed to go, put the wrong address into the Uber and ended up at my house and ruined my night. Now, here's why I bring that up. I sat in Lily's playroom staring out the window until 4.30 in the morning, like not moving a muscle in case they came back. But I bring that up because I want to ask the question, what is it about us? What is it about me that when I saw a threat to my family, I jumped down the stairs and bang on the glass and have a plan to go get a kitchen knife and fight two dudes who are trying to break into a house? Like, listen, I don't want any of you to take advantage of this. I've never been in a fistfight. I don't know how valuable I would be. I know that I would fight dirty, and I know that you'd really have to hurt me to get me to stop. Other than that, I'm pretty sure I'd be terrible at it. If I started fighting these two dudes, I was going down. But that didn't even occur to me. I just instantly threw myself in harm's way because two people that I loved were upstairs. And I ask what is it that would make me do that because I am certain that any of you who love anybody would have done the same thing. Any dads who are listening would have not have hesitated to do and react in the exact same way that I did more or less. Any mamas listening would do whatever they had to do to protect their kids. We would do anything for the people that we love. And I think the reason that we do that is because we do genuinely and deeply love them. I love my wife, Jen, and I love my daughter, Lily, and I would do anything for them. Of course I would do anything for Jen. Do you realize that my wife Jen and I have been together nearly 18 years? We've been married 14 years. She puts up with me daily and weekly. You understand that? Like I'm a gross human. I have terrible manners when there's nobody around. She puts up with that. I'm a pain in the rear. She puts up with that, and she loves me, and she supports me. Of course, I'll do anything that she needs. I loved Lily when she was born, but I love her even more now. Just this last week, she's in the back seat singing along to a Wren Collective song, and I turn around. She's in a big girl booster seat now, and I start crying like a moron because I just can't believe that I get to love this girl. Like, I just love her so much. And you would do the same for your families and for the people that you love because love is this compelling thing because typically when we love people, they've done something to warrant that love, right? That's how it goes. They've showed up for us. They've listened to us. They've hugged us. They've cried with us. They've laughed with us. They've seen us at our worst. They hope for our best. Like the people that we have in our life who we love, who if you think about, if they picked up the phone and they called you and they said, hey, I need this, you would do anything to be able to provide that for them. Those people have typically reciprocated the love that you offer them. That's kind of how love works. It builds and we reciprocate it. That's what makes God's love for us so miraculous, because he didn't do that. He didn't wait for us to earn it. He didn't watch you live your life and then decide to love you. He didn't wait for you to reciprocate his love and then say, yeah, now my affection is growing for you. As a matter of fact, this is how Paul writes about God's love in Romans chapter five. I'll pick it up to deserve it. He loved us before we did anything at all to deserve it. We had never even existed. We weren't even a figment in our parents' or grandparents' imagination. God just decided that he loved us and he sent his son, his only son, whom he loved and whom he was well pleased. Jesus came down and he died for us even before we deserved it. And make no mistake about it, this was a huge sacrifice. Jesus came down and the night that he was arrested to be crucified and to die for you and I, out of his deep and abiding love for us, he prayed in a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. And he begged God, stressed to the point of sweating blood, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please don't make me walk this path of crucifixion. I'm scared. I don't want to. And then he did because he loves us. He loves us when we've never done a single thing to deserve it. The only approximation I think we have of this love in our human experience, the type of love that God lavishes on us, is when we hold our brand new baby. If you're a parent or an aunt or an uncle, you know what it is to hold this child that is hours old and know in your soul you would do anything for this kid. For your heart to be so full of love that you can't stand it. We know what that love is. But God's love is even bigger than that because not only have we never done anything to deserve it, but he knows everything we're going to do. Imagine holding this child and knowing all the worst things that this person is ever going to do or be capable of and then trying to have that type of love well up within you. There'd be mixed emotions there, right? This is why I think God's love for us that he gives to us without ever earning it is miraculous. But the bigger miracle is that he continues to love us without borders. The bigger miracle of God's love, it's a miracle that he loves us before we deserve it, without deserving it at all, but he loves us knowing that we're never going to. He loves us without borders. This is why I know that's true. Because in Romans 8, Steve brought it up as a devotion a few weeks ago, and it rings so true this morning. Romans 8, to me, is the greatest chapter in the Bible. We did eight weeks in Romans 8 a few summers ago, and it finishes this way in what I think is the crescendo of hope. For it says, We cannot be separated from that love. And I phrased it that way, love without borders. God loves us without borders. This is a concept that I actually picked up from my counselor. And he was talking about human relationships and the borders that our love has in human relationships. And to me, it really makes a lot of sense that we love people in our life, but we love them within certain parameters, right? We love people within certain parameters. Kyle Tolbert's here this morning, Christmas Kyle, you may remember him earlier in the service. And I love Kyle. But if I'm honest, I love Kyle with some parameters. There's some borders around his behavior and around his actions. And if he ventures outside of those borders, it's going to impact my affection for him. This is how we love everybody. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a reality of life. If you think of me as your pastor, hopefully we have some sort of mutual affection for one another and you have an affection for your pastor. But you have parameters around me. You love me with borders. You give me affection with some boundaries. And if I were to go outside of those boundaries, then your affection for me would change. Just would. And it works the same way for our great partners. If I'm being honest, I love the great partners. But if I'm being honest, I love you within some boundaries. There's some things, there's some parameters around your behavior that if you were to do this thing or that thing, it would change my affection for you. And now some of these borders are necessary for our own self-protection, right? Like husbands and wives love each other, but even in those, the most intimate of relationships, there's borders around that love. Jen loves me very much, and she's offered me very generous borders for the continuation of that love, but if I begin to act in a way that's harmful to her or to Lily, well, now I'm acting outside the bounds of the love that she's offered me. So sometimes as people, we need these boundaries and these borders to protect ourselves. That's why I think God's love is phenomenal. That's why I think that's the biggest miracle of God's love. Because he loves us without borders. He puts no stipulations on our behavior. He has no expectations on us. He just says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I've given you my son. I've given you everything. I've made a path so that I can spend forever with you. That's how much I love you. And if you really think about it, this is so powerful because we know that we love with borders. We know that other people love us in some ways contingent upon our behavior or the parts of ourselves that we allow them to see. And so very few of us, very few of us in life are fully known and fully loved. We reveal bits and pieces to ourselves. When you have an acquaintance, someone that you meet, whatever your public persona is, whatever that is, you present that to them. And the more they get to know you, the more the layers begin to peel back. And you're like, will you accept this layer? If I show you this side of myself, will you continue to love me for who I am or is that going to cause a fissure between us and now you can't love me like that anymore? And so we're very careful about who we let in and how vulnerable we become to people because we don't want to do anything to disturb the relationship that we have. And even in our most intimate of relationships, very few of us are fully known by our parents or our spouse or our close friends. There's always portions and pockets that we hide. Are these people over here who get this version and these people over here who get this version? And there's not a Venn diagram in our life of where somebody who fully knows us would intersect and know all the parts of us. And it's a sad thing to not be fully loved. It's a sad thing to pine, to be known and to be seen and to be vulnerable and yet to be accepted anyways. And it's an incredible gift that God gives us to love us without borders. Because none of those expectations are there. None of those parameters are there. Every time we realize our vulnerability to God, we are met with the warmth of his love. And so, God loving us without borders, what that means is this means that we are fully known, fully seen, fully vulnerable, and yet completely and limitlessly loved. We are fully known, we are fully seen, we are fully vulnerable, we are completely exposed to God the Father. All the things that we've done that would bring us shame. Some of the things that we have sworn to ourselves we are going to take to our graves. God knows about those things. The moments in our past that when we think of them they're painful because we don't like that version of ourself or what we did that night or that season or whatever it was. Jesus was with us in those moments and he was loving us anyways. The things in our future, the things that we're capable of, the thoughts that we have, the critical things that we think, the awful attitudes that we espouse and we continue to foster, Jesus is with us in that ugliness. And he loves us anyways. In our vulnerabilities, when life is heavy, when everyone in the world expects us to be strong and inside all we say is, God, I need you. I'm not strong enough for this. I can't do it. I can't be who they want me to be. God says, I know. I love you. I'll make you who you need to be. The miracle of God's love is not just that he loved us before we'd done anything to deserve it, but that that love perseveres regardless of what we do. And in him we are fully known, we are fully vulnerable, and yet fully accepted. And this is the thing that we all pine for. This is what we want. More than anything, that's what we want. If you think about your actions, think about your actions as an adolescent. Think about yourself in high school and then in college. Everything you did screamed, will you accept me now? Am I good enough now? Have I earned the world's affection and acceptance now? And the older we get, it doesn't change. That desire doesn't change. Am I good enough now? Am I enough now? We just learn more nuanced ways to pine for it. And I think what happens is, even though as Christians we know we are loved deeply and fully and completely and without hesitation, I think we tend to forget that. We go throughout our years, we go throughout our days, and we know that we have the affection of the Father, but for some reason we pine for it in other places, and we look to it from other people, and we put on other facades because maybe they will tell me that I'm enough. And I was trying to think about what this would be like, and I remembered one night this summer when I went over to Greg and Laura Taylor's house, and I was in their backyard. And now they have maybe the greatest backyard setup I've ever seen in my life. I was over there with a bunch of guys and we all made a pact to never show our wives this backyard because we don't want to do near the amount of work that Greg has placed into it. At the end of his yard, you go out, there's a deck and then there's like a water feature and there's like sidewalk and a garden, and there's probably like live dancing gnomes there. They just were off that night, and they were walking to the end of the yard. At the end of the yard, there's a fire pit, and the fire pit is level on the ground that you're walking on, but it's on a slope, so the end of it is about four feet high. So it's stacked up from the ground. It's stone that Greg hand laid. He probably hand hew it too out of his own rock. And he just laid it there. And then in the middle, there is a pit. It's like two feet deep. It looks like a big stone donut. And there's chairs all around it. And there's wood, like endless amounts of wood for fire. I have no doubt in my mind that Greg researched the best possible firewood and then chopped it down by hand and then brought it to his house on a burrow. And there it is. It's ready. We're waiting for the fire. And so I want you to imagine being invited over to the Taylor's house, which, lucky you, and sitting around this fire. You've got all the wood you could want. It's the perfect fire. It's the perfect environment right there on the edge of the yard and the woods. It's really peaceful. And it's cold out. And he's got drinks and he's got s'more setups. And you're sitting in there at that fire. And you get up. And you start to wander through the woods. And you're gone for a few minutes, long enough for Greg to go, hey, what are you doing? And you go, I'm just grabbing some wood. And he's like, you don't have to, man. I got all this. I brought it in last week. You're like, no, no, no. I'm going to make my own fire. He says, what? Why? I have a perfectly good fire over here. And you go, no, no, no, I'm just getting a little chilly. Just thought I'd make my own. And you just go wandering through the woods, picking up like wet twigs and a couple of leaves, and you wander out of the woods, and you've got this bundle, and you set it down, and we think, okay, they're going to get it together and come sit with us and warm themselves on this good fire. And then you start to walk back in the woods, and we go, you still going to build your fire? And you're like, yep, yep, just one second. And you just keep going back and you try to make this fire and it's never gonna be as good as the one that's in the pit. His wood's way better than yours. His fire's gonna be infinitely better than yours ever could be. And you don't even have s'mores. Like, what are you thinking? I think sometimes we forget that God loves us fully and completely, and we go pining for it in other places. I think we tend to forget, and we build our own fires. We tend to forget that God loves us, and so we wander into the woods, and we get these cruddy sticks and twigs, and we assemble our own little sad fire over here with God's got the one raging over there, and he says, just come on. I've got everything you need. Just warm yourself. It's here. Come in. He invites us into his love. And we go, no thanks, God. Actually, I do want the warmth that that fire provides, I'm just going to make my own really cruddy version of it over here. And I think that this is why we need Christmas. And this is what the Advent season does for us. Because Christmas is our yearly divine reminder that God loves us without hesitation, without borders, and without end. It's this time once a year as we observe Advent. And Advent is a time of expectant waiting where we prepare our hearts for the coming of the Messiah because so often we just flippantly say, yeah, Jesus is the reason for the season. Or we post something ridiculous. I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but it's ridiculous. Santa kneeling at the crib of Jesus as if to say like in this house, Jesus is a bigger deal than Santa. Yeah, no kidding. We do all these little things to kind of give this token appreciation of Christ. And sometimes we forget to just slow down and let the weight of the gift that he is sit on our shoulders. We say that God is love. We sing that God loves us. But how often do we sit in the reality of this love? How often do we sit and let it wash over us that God loved me before I did anything to deserve it, knowing I would never do anything to warrant it. And he loves me. He is the only being in the universe to pick up our own things and to build our own fires as a replacement for the love that God offers us. And so Christmas exists as this time once a year where God beckons us back to his love to warm ourselves at his fire and to remind us of who we are and how much he loves us. So as Christmas approaches, let's not observe it for another year, flippantly regarding giving passive intellectual assent to the love of God, but let's sit in the majesty and the miracle of it and be together grateful for it as Christmas approaches. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you so much. We love you, as your word says, because you first loved us. God, without that, we know that we never could. We could never have the slightest inclination to love you. Father, if there is anybody listening who doesn't know your love, who has not received your love, if we are out in the woods collecting our own wood, trying to make our own fire, trying to fabricate what it is that you've already created for us, God, I pray that we would drop all that junk right now and rush to you. Lord, if there's anybody who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. For those of us who, like me, move through this season with so much urgency and so much purpose and this feeling of busyness that can sometimes produce in us a flippancy as we consider your love, may we slow down and be hit with the weight of it this morning. Father, as sincerely as we can say it, we say thank you for your love and thank you for your son. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.

So this Sunday we're talking about parenting. We're in the middle of a series now called I Want a Better Life, and we're focusing on four elements of our life that I think that we would all agree that we want to improve upon. Last week we said I want a better schedule, so we talked about some biblical principles to build our schedules in such a way that we'll invest our time in ways that are beneficial, that we don't regret, that really get accomplished what we want to get accomplished with our time and with our days. Next week, we're going to say, I want a better marriage. And so we're going to look at some biblical principles around building a strong marriage, which I know that, again, no one in this service needs, but the second service is desperate for this message. So we're going to go ahead and move forward with that next week. And then the last week of the series, in the end of January, we're going to say, I want a better me and look at mental health. I've been diving into some research on that already, talking to folks, and I'm excited to share with you whatever it is I learned between now and January 26th. I think that's going to be an important Sunday. But this Sunday, we want to focus on parenthood, and I want better kids. And we all know, fundamentally, that if we want better kids, that we need to be better parents. I used to watch that show, The Nanny, or The Nanny, I don't know what it's called. The one with the lady that would like swoop in and fix your broken children, whatever show that was. And what I found when we watched that show, Super Nanny, what I found when we watched that show was it was never the kid's fault. Like you watch the previews, kids are disasters. And then the nanny would come in, she's supposed to talk to the kids. And what she would do instead is talk to the parents. And it was always the parents that needed to change the way they were approaching parenthood. And so when we say, I want better kids, what we mean is we want to be better parents. And the temptation is that when this is the topic, that for those who are not in the throes of parenthood, currently in the trenches, it's kind of for us to take a step back and say, well, maybe this one's not for me. But I would say if you don't yet have kids, then having children is like this great unknown in the future. We have no idea how it's going to go. So maybe this can help to orient you so that we have some good principles as we approach parenthood. If you're in the throes of it, hopefully you're locked in. You would readily admit, I don't know what I'm doing. I heard people, I heard multiple people in the last couple of weeks when asked, and this is not because I asked them, it just came up in conversation, when asked, you seem to have good kids, what do you do with them? They would say, we just make it up as we go along. Like to be in the throes of parenthood is to kind of not know what we're doing. We've never done this before. And then a lot of us are facing parenthood with having adult kids, kids who are out of the house. And now you have to walk through this transition of how do I support and encourage and advise them as parents without trying to be tyrannical or controlling or dictatorial to them and allow them to be the adults that God created them to be. So I hope that the principles that we talk about this morning can help us no matter where we are on the spectrum of parenthood. And when you think about being a parent and how to be a better one and where we get our information, it's true that a lot of us Google and that there's not a handbook out there. And what we as church people do and what I do is turn to the Bible. God invented parenthood. What does he have to say about it? But here's one of the little secrets of the Bible that all family pastors, senior pastors, children's pastors, and student pastors know, and parents if you're diligent, the Bible really doesn't have a lot to say about raising kids. The Bible really doesn't have a ton to say about parenthood. It's difficult to turn to a passage. If you think about marriage, you go to Ephesians 5, and it's a seminal passage on marriage. This is what marriage is all about. We don't have that for parenthood. We get bits and pieces throughout Scripture, pieces of advice or commandments or encouragements. In Deuteronomy, and this one's profound, so we're going to come back to it later in the sermon. In Deuteronomy, we're told that we need to teach the Bible to our kids. We need to write it on the walls of our house and instill it into our children. We're told several times throughout the Bible, namely in Proverbs and in Hebrews, that a loving parent disciplines their child. Proverbs tells us that we should make punishment a part of our house and a part of our culture, that punishment should be a thing that's a good idea. There's one spot, and it's interesting to me, apparently this was an issue in the early church, but it says, parents, you should not intentionally tick off your kids. So if any of you are out there just really just putting the screws on them just to watch them squirm, knock it off, all right? The Bible says to quit it. So we're not supposed to do that, but there's not a lot of, hey, this is how you raise kids according to God's standards. So as I thought about this topic, and of course my desire and belief that it's my job to approach it biblically, I just began to think through the relationships that we see in Scripture between parent and child. We don't get a lot of glimpses of parenthood in Scripture. So without an idea, sometimes you come up with an idea, I want to talk about this thing. Let me go to the Bible and see what it says about this thing or see if it confirms what I'd like to say. This time I didn't do that. I try to never do that. I just went to the Bible open-handedly. I thought through the relationships that I see in Scripture between parents and children, and I thought, I wonder if there's a theme that we can pull out. I wonder if there are principles that we can see. I wonder if there's some commonalities between them. So the first one I thought of was Abraham and Isaac. God made promises to Abraham. Those promises were going to come through his son. He gives him a son named Isaac. And when Isaac is somewhere in his adolescence, God comes to Abraham and he says, hey, I want you to offer Isaac to me on this mount that I'm going to show you three days journey away. Certainly what Abraham was expecting. It's certainly not what he would have chosen for Isaac, but that's what God asked him to do. So he takes him three days journey and he goes to offer him to the Lord and right at the last moment, the Lord intervenes. But the exercise for Abraham was to trust God's plan with Isaac. Then I thought about Moses. Comes a little later in the Bible. Moses was born as a slave in Egypt and Pharaoh was killing all of the firstborn sons of the slaves, the Hebrew people, Abraham's descendants. And so his mom hopelessly, perilously puts an infant baby in a basket and literally floats it down a river and hopes for the best. She just has to say, I have no control over this boy's life. Here we go, God. I hope that it works out. That's a picture of parenthood we get from Moses. Fast forward a little bit in the Bible, you see Hannah. Hannah's a woman married to a guy named Akina, and she wants a baby really badly. She can't have one. We've walked through that. Some of y'all have walked through that. That's a hard season of life when you want to experience parenthood, and that's being withheld from you. She's praying so intensely for a child in the temple that Eli, the priest, thinks that she's drunk and gets on to her. And she says, no, I'm not drunk. I'm just praying intensely for a child. And the Lord's good to her and blesses her with a son and she names the son Samuel. And as soon as Samuel is old enough to eat solid food, she takes him to the temple and drops him off with the priest Eli and says, here, this was a gift from God. He's not mine, he's yours. I want him to serve God with his life. That's a picture of motherhood from Hannah. Fast forward a little bit further, there's a guy named Jesse. He's got eight sons. And one day, that same kid, Samuel, shows up at Jesse's house and he says, hey, I need to see your boys. And he goes to the youngest son, David, and he says, Jesse, David's gonna be the next next king of Israel. God said so. He's going to be a man after God's own heart. And we don't know what Jesse's profession was. We know that David was watching the flock, so we can guess that it was agrarian. Maybe they had some fields and maybe a farm, maybe a couple different types of livestock. And David was doubtlessly supposed to be a part of the family business. But Samuel shows up as a representative of God and says, hey, Jesse, I've got to change the plans with David. Here's what he's going to be. He's going to be the king. Then you think about Mary in the New Testament. And God didn't waste any time with Mary. As soon as she got pregnant, an angel shows up and talks to her and says, Mary, you're pregnant with a baby boy. The boy is from God. His name is gonna be Jesus and he is the Messiah. Mary, don't make any plans for this one. I got my own plans for this one. And as if to drive the point home, when Jesus was 12 years old, his family was in Jerusalem for the holidays and they leave leave to go back to Bethlehem. And Mary and Joseph, his parents look at each other and go, where's Jesus? Is he with you? They go back and they find him in Jerusalem in the temple asking the rabbis questions, which is another way to say already teaching the rabbis. As if to drive home the point, this boy's got his own plans. God's got an agenda for this one. And so if you look at those models of family dynamics in the Bible, if you look at those models of parenting in the Bible, to me, there is a clear theme. For parents, it may be a disturbing one. It may be one that we don't want to think about. But I think that the biblical model of parenting is releasing your children to God's plan. I think the biblical model of parenting is to release your children to God's plan. What does the Bible have to say about parenting? What are the examples of parenthood that we have in Scripture? I think over and over and over again, that's why I chronicled five of them and not two of them, over and over and over again, we see this model of God's expectation of believing parents to be releasing your children to God's plan, not your own plan. And this might not seem that profound or insightful to you. It might not be much of a surprise that you show up at church and the pastor says, hey, if you want to raise kids biblically, you got to raise them according to God's plan. You got to release them to God's plan. But I think that's a much more difficult challenge than we realize at first. I think that's a more profound command than we understand. And I think that because of this. In our culture, we've kind of all agreed that stage moms and over-aggressive sports dads are not good elements of the culture, right? Like we don't, we've agreed that we don't really support that. When an overactive stage mom gets like super involved and begins to live her life through her daughter, we all agree like, come on man, knock it off. That's not fair to that kid. When a dad does that, when there's a stage dad or a sports mom or a sports dad, and he does that to his kid, we all agree like,, come on, don't do that. You're damaging that child. I read a couple years ago an autobiography by Andre Agassi. He's a professional tennis player in the 90s and the early 2000s, one of my favorite athletes growing up. He grew up in Nevada, and his dad was an over-aggressive sports dad. And when he was four years old, his dad got a ball machine and souped it up so that it could shoot balls at 90 miles an hour. I'm not making this up. And he put it on legs and stood it up at the net so it could fire balls at his four-year-old's feet. Not like easy ones where you can hit here like you're supposed to, would fire them at his feet and then yell at him to return the balls. Like, it was nuts. And he forced tennis onto his kid. He forced him to do that. And what Agassi says in his biography is it took him into his adulthood to realize that he didn't even like tennis. In fact, he hated it for everything that it represented to him. So we all agree that's not who we want to be as parents. Is the over-aggressive stage mom or the sports dad or however it works out. We don't want to do that. But here's what we need to understand. We all have a little stage parent in us. We all have a little bit of an over-aggressive sports parent in us. Because what is the sports parent doing? What is the over-aggressive helicopter parent doing when they decide that this is what my child's going to be? All they're saying is, this is what I want for my child, these are my plans for my child, and this is how I'm going to bring it about. They have the kid, they go, this is what I want for the kid, and this is how I'm going to bring it about, and they force it upon the kid. And the truth of it is, we all have some of that in us. I was just talking to some parents that recently had a child, and they made the comment that a lot of parents make. They said, you know, I thought that I understood what it meant to love a kid, but then as soon as I held them for the first time, I could not believe how much I loved them. I could not believe what it felt like to hold a kid. I could not believe that my heart had that much space for love. And when that happens, when you love somebody that profoundly, you begin to want things for them. It's a very natural part of parenthood. You want for them. You want them to be successful. You want them to be good people. You want them to make you proud. You want the best for them in life. And so without even realizing it, we by default begin to make plans for our kids. And our plans almost always include wanting our kids to be successful. And every house, every family, every little ecosystem, there's small tweaks and small differences. All of our families with all of our different last names, we all have different versions of success, but we all want our kids to be successful. And so we try to put them on a path towards success as we've defined it. We all want our kids to be happy, but each one of our families and our different ways, we define happiness according to our own ecosystem, and we drive our kids, we plan for our kids to find the happiness that we want for them or to find the goodness that we want for them. Each of our families, we have our own moral codes. We have our own set of values where we champion this value over this value in our house. In our house, the debate is which value or character trait is more valuable. One of us says that the most important thing for our children is to be kind, and the other one says the most important thing is for them to be intellectually independent. You guys can try to figure out which camp we are in on that. But we all have that. And what we do when we have kids is we push them towards our definition of success, towards our definition of happiness, towards our definition of good, and that's the plan that we make for them. And we're not, most of us know better than to be the over-aggressive, dictatorial, Andre Agassi's dad firing tennis balls at their feet. Most of us don't slide that far, but to some degree or another, we all have plans for our kids. We all have hopes and dreams for them. We all have definitions of success and happiness that we're chasing. And that's why this is so difficult. Because biblical parenthood is to release your children from your plans to God's plans. The picture of Moses' mom releasing him down the river and hoping for the best is a picture of biblical parenthood. God, I don't have control. Anyways, I'm trusting them to you. And it's not just whatever you want for them in their life is good with me, God. I release them from my definition of success to God's. I release them from my definition of happiness to God's. I release them from my definition of good to God's, which I think is a big deal because a lot of us say, and I'm not thinking of anybody's kid here now, but a lot of us say, oh yeah, so-and-so's a good kid. And when we say that, what do we mean? We tend to mean that they get good grades and don't do any dumb stuff. That's a low bar for good kid. Isn't it? Everybody's a good kid then. He's a good kid. Why? Well, he's still in school. He's managing not to fail out. Great. We release our children from our definition of those things to God's definition. We release them from our plans and hopes for their future to God's plans and hopes for their future. And it is a much more profoundly difficult thing because suddenly we're not shaping them into being replications of ourself and what we want. We are freeing them up to be who God created them to be. To be a biblical parent is to have the mindset and the understanding of God created them and one day they're going to up, and hopefully they'll come to know God. And when they do, they're going to be my brother and sister in Christ, and they're going to be an adopted son or daughter of the Creator God. And it's up to Him to decide what He wants to use these children for. And my job is to steward them until they're ready to be released. So if that's what we're supposed to do, how do we do it? I think there's two foundations for biblical parenting that I wanna share with you this morning. The first is consistently prepare. We have to consistently prepare. I think in your notes, there's a word prayerfully. I just like the word consistently better because I feel like it makes a better point. We have to consistently prepare our children. Listen, if the goal is to raise a child that is released into the wild, to walk in God's identity for them, to be the person that God created them to be, to execute the plan that God has for their life, which I believe he has a plan for everyone's life. If that's what we're supposed to do, to release them to walk in God's plan, how can they walk them. That's why I think this verse in Deuteronomy is so important. I alluded to it earlier. In Deuteronomy, at the beginning of the Hebrew people, God is saying, this is what I want your culture to look like. This is what I want my people's society to look like. And he's talking about his word and how valuable it is. And he says this, verse 18 of chapter 11, you shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. Listen, you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in rarely try to use this stage to try to say like, hey, you need to do this. But this is an instance where Scripture gives me a foundation to say, parents, your children's spiritual health is your responsibility. Your children's discipleship is your responsibility. God set up His culture, He set up His people, and He decided it is your responsibility. God set up his culture, he set up his people, and he decided it is your responsibility to teach your kids God's word. The temptation is to say, well, I'm gonna join a good church, and the good church is gonna teach them God's word. And that's true, but here's the thing. If your kid comes to everything we offer, everything, some are extreme and they never miss a week, ever. We get them 58 weeks a year. There are 58 hours a year. 58 hours a year. That's what we have to impact your children. The best programs in the world aren't going to make a big, huge dent. 58 hours a year. If your kid is in middle school or high school, it's even less than that. We are here not to fulfill Deuteronomy 11 for you, but to echo what is happening in your home. Parents, it is our responsibility to train our kids to follow God. It is our responsibility to disciple our kids. It is our responsibility to teach them a word. And listen to me, listen. I'm sorry that this is gruff. It's not optional. We don't get to say, oh gosh, you know, that sounds like something I should do, but I just don't know God's word well enough. Listen, I'm sorry. Then figure it out. Learn it, knuckle down. We've got to. It's our responsibility. No one else can fill that void for you. If you feel inadequate to it, guess what? So does everybody else in the room, including me, but we gotta figure it out because it's on us. And I'd rather just know the truth than try to soft pedal it and make us all feel better. Listen, parents, it's our responsibility to train our kids in the word. Dads, your sons are watching you. They're watching you to learn what it is to be a godly man. They're watching you what it is to love people well. Like it or not, step into that or not, assign yourself as a role model or not, to have kids is to sign up for that. They're watching you at every stage of your life. Moms, your daughters are looking at you. They want to know what godly womanhood looks like. And they're watching you to define it for themselves. That's reality of being parents. So for grace, I want us to step into that responsibility, not shy away from it, and definitely don't say, gosh, I just don't feel adequate to it. Listen, nobody here does, but that doesn't mean that we can step away from it or shy away from it. We do our children a disservice by not stepping into that. If we want to teach our children the word, then we have to learn the word. If we want to teach our children how to follow God, then we have to follow God. If we want to teach our children how to walk in the identity that God has created for them, then we have to walk in the identity that God has created for us. That's why I say we consistently prepare, because it's a daily, hourly effort to follow God and to model that for our children. So that's what we do. And the good news is, if you're sitting here going, geez, Nate, I don't know how to do that, there's a parenting small group. We're starting it up. Harris and Aaron Winston have perfect children and made no mistakes, so we thought that they were the best ones to do it. They're the good ones to do it because when I asked both of them to think about leading something like that, both of them went like, why? We don't know what we're doing. I'm like, you're perfect then. You're perfect. Figure it out together. You can sign up for that. It's going to be Sunday afternoons. If you're in the middle of parenthood and want some help and some other people around you to help figure this out and step into the responsibility you have, that's a good way to start. We consistently prepare. And then the second foundation, I think, of biblical parenting is that we continually release. We continually release. I say continually because that release isn't just one moment. As we walk through those stories in Scripture, Abraham and Isaac, he released him to that sacrifice. Moses' mom released him. Hannah released Samuel. It's not just one moment, though. We're building towards a moment of release when we admit I have no control over this life anymore. But it's also a continual release. In every instant and in every way, at every crossroads in their life, what we're asking is, Father, how do I prepare this kid for your plan? How do I release them to what you want, not what I want? I even think about moments of discipline. I've already learned as a parent that when it comes time to discipline, when your kid is acting in ways that are shameful, I haven't seen Lily do this, but I've definitely noticed with other people's kids, that the temptation, the temptation is to begin to discipline them in such a way that doesn't embarrass you. The temptation is to grab them and to get onto them and to tell them things that you need to act in this way. And really what's going on in your heart is because when you don't act in this way, it causes me shame and I feel like a terrible parent. So I really need you to get right so that I'm not embarrassed in front of my friends. That's one reason to discipline. Another reason to discipline is, this is what I think is going to be best for you. But the best reason to discipline is to say, God, when they act that way, I see this trait in them. And I believe that it's possible that you may have instilled that trait in them because one day it's going to be a great strength. How do I fashion that strength so that they can walk in the identity that you've created for them? How do I discipline them according to your plan, not my plan? How do I advise them to go to college according to your plan, not my plan? How do I advise them to invest their high school hours according to your plan, not my plan? God, when they're old enough to pursue a career, how do I encourage them to follow your plan, not my plan? God, when they're old enough to have kids and they begin to lead their family, what can I do to pray for them and rally around them so that they follow your plan for their family, not my plan? It is a continual, perpetual release where we acknowledge these children are not our own. They are from God and we are stewards of them. So I believe if we want to follow the biblical model of parenthood, we have to consistently prepare and continually release. Because that's such a challenge, because those feel like high bars, I thought it would be helpful for us to have a prayer together. So I'm going to put a prayer on the screen. I would encourage you to write it down. I would encourage you to pray this weekly, if not daily, for yourself as you pray for your kids. But the parent's prayer simply goes like this. Father, give me the faith to see your plan for my child, the consistency to prepare them, and the courage to release them. Father, give me the faith to see your plan. Help me know. We see for our kids the next couple of days, God sees the next several decades. God, help me see a glimpse of your plan so I know I can keep them on the right track. God, give me the consistency in my own walk, in my own character, in my own discipline, in my own pursuit to be the model that they need. And give me the courage when it comes time, Father, to release them to your plan, not my own plan. Father, give me the faith to see your plan for my child, the consistency to prepare them and the courage to release them. I'm going to pray for us. I'm going to pray that prayer, and then we're going to transition into a time of communion. Father, we love you. We thank you for the gifts that you give us and our children. God, I pray specifically for those in this room who really want kids. Will you just give them some? Will you just let them experience that part of what it is to be a human? Bless them in that way, God. God, for those of us who do have the privilege of being parents, give us the faith to see your plan for them. Give us a consistency in our walk and in our devotion to prepare them for your plan. Give us the courage, Father, to release them when it comes time. Help us raise kids that are good, successful, and happy according to your definition of those things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Thanks so much for being here this morning. It's good to be back with you. I missed last week on a little trip. You may have seen on social media that I had a mustache for that trip, which is why my beard is so thin today. I promise you, I'm trying to grow my beard back just as quickly as I possibly can so I don't look like the new youth pastor giving you sermons. Speaking of the youth pastor giving sermons, Kyle did an excellent job last week. I'm so grateful for him and his ability to fill in. He's on a fall retreat right now, so your applause means nothing with the students. So we're praying for a safe return and for life change there. I'm so excited to step into the Christmas season with you guys. I love that we're decorated, that we're singing the Christmas carols, that we're getting ready for Christmas. Of course, I love the Christmas season, the reminders and the time that we get to spend with friends and family. For me, it means going back home to Atlanta and getting extended time with friends and family there. And so Christmas is really a reminder of blessings. It's a celebratory time, and it's a time that we really, really enjoy and look forward to. But for those same reasons, Christmas for many people is hard. For those same reasons, because it's a time of family, because it's a time to reflect on blessings, because it's a time to celebrate, for many of us, Christmas is difficult. We know that Christmas and the holiday season is one of the most difficult seasons of the year for some folks. And so before we just jump into Christmas and everything that it is and all the joy of Christmas and rah-rah around here, I wanted to stop and take a minute and acknowledge that for some people, December is hard. For some people, this month is difficult because of old wounds or maybe new ones. This is going to be a difficult season for you. And if it is a difficult season for you, in a room this size with this many people, there are inevitably folks who are not looking forward to Christmas and all the reminders that it brings. And if that's you, I want you to know that we're praying for you, that we care about you, and that we see you. And let's not, in our own lives, just plow through with joy while we ignore the fact that this may be a difficult season for those around us. I would hate to do that as a church. For that reason, because this can be a little bit of a difficult season for some folks, I wanted to talk this morning about the joy of forgiveness because I believe that forgiveness can actually be a key that unlocks a more joyful holiday for the rest of us. I'll tell you where I had this idea. I thought about it in a way that I hadn't thought about it before. A couple weeks ago, I went and saw that new Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks. I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but you should really go see that movie. It was a really great movie. And forgiveness plays an integral role in that movie. And I began to think about it in ways that I hadn't thought of it before. And it actually made holiday seasons better for the people in the movie because forgiveness was extended. And so it occurs to me with a church family our size, it's entirely possible that some forgiveness received or some forgiveness extended could reunite some families, could help redeem some relationships, could very well be the key to unlocking a more joyful and reflective and grateful holiday season for many of us in the church. If not that, as we move forward, forgiveness is a principle that we all have to deal with. So this week is the joy of forgiveness. Next week is the joy of gratitude. And then after that, we're going to do the joy of Christmas. And then the last Sunday of the year is the joy of skipping church together because there is no church, okay? So we all get to experience that joy at the same time and in the same way. But I wanted to talk about forgiveness, not just because I feel like it's helpful for the holidays, but because the Bible makes a pretty big deal out of forgiveness. The Bible has a lot to say about this idea. There's actually almost 90 verses in the Bible that have the word forgive or forgiveness. And a lot of those talk about how God forgives us. A lot of those talk about why we are supposed to give others. And we're going to get to those verses that are represented here in a minute. But as I was looking into the topic of forgiveness, one of the things that I had not considered before is that forgiveness is such a big deal to God. It's so important to God, that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise for us. I had not really thought about forgiveness in that way until I got into what the Bible had to say on the topic, and I see in the Lord's Prayer that it says forgiveness should be a part of what we do every day. If you have a Bible, you can turn it over to Matthew 6, and you can see there Jesus is praying. The disciples have asked him, how do you pray? Like, we know how to pray, but you're praying, and clearly you know how to do it differently than we do, so how do you pray? This is not, we don't just recite these words every day. This is a model for how we should pray. And there's different elements of the prayer. It's very much worth exploring and discussing what are the different things that Jesus includes in this pattern of prayer. But one of the things that he includes is to acknowledge that we are forgiven by God and then to daily and prayerfully forgive those who have hurt us. And I never thought about it that way. I'm not sure that I would have somebody to forgive every day. I don't know that people are offending me or hurting me every day. But as I sat down and I thought about it and I tried to apply this this week, It's a worthwhile exercise to ask ourselves, what hurts am I holding on to? What things am I still grabbing on to? Who do I need to extend forgiveness to? Who am I still dragging through the mud? Who am I still keeping attached to myself in that moment when they weren't at their best? What things do I have to forgive? To God, forgiveness is such a big deal that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise because we'll see later, I believe that there's freedom found in forgiveness. And I actually think it would be a worthwhile exercise for us. It would make the sermon more practical and less ethereal if we would all in our heads kind of think, okay, if I were going to forgive somebody, who could I forgive? If somebody has hurt me, if I needed to walk up to somebody or write an email or make a phone call today and say, hey, listen, I just want you to know that this happened. It hurt me. I forgive you. Who would that be for you? Or would they just say, like, if you said, hey, I forgive you, would they be like, for what? That does not count. You got to have somebody that has hurt you in some way, and you can think about, man, if I were to call them and say, listen, I want you to know I'm not holding this against you anymore, who would that person be for you? I think that's a helpful exercise. As we think about that and we reflect on God's commandment, God's instruction to daily and prayerfully forgive others, it's important to note the motivation that the Bible gives. Because it doesn't just tell us that we should forgive, but it supplies us with a why. I said earlier there's about 90 verses that mention forgive or forgiveness. Most of those, a lot of those are verses about how God forgives us. But a lot of them are encouraging us to forgive others. And most of the time they have a motive there to forgive others that's common amongst all these verses. So we're going to look in our Bibles at Colossians 3.13. But as we look there, I want you to know that that is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. Colossians 3.13 is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. It is the verse. If you want to know, like, what does the Bible say about why we should forgive, that we should forgive, and why we should do it, turn to Colossians 3.13, and it's pretty much the summary verse of what the Bible has to say about this. And Colossians 3.13 says this. I'm going to start in 12. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. So if you wanted to ask, what does the Bible have to say about forgiveness? It tells me to forgive, but why should I do it? That's the verse. That's the archetypal verse that will tell us why we need to forgive. We forgive because God forgave us. You should forgive somebody else because God forgave you. And this isn't an unfamiliar principle for us. Even for those of us in the room who might not call themselves Christians. If you were here this morning, you wouldn't call yourself a believer. You're just kind of kicking the tires around. You're a spiritual person. Someone else invited you to come and you wanted to be nice and so you came. If that's you and you might not believe in the same God that we believe in, you can at least intellectually concede that if there is a God and that God is perfect, they are likely offended by our imperfection, right? That's not that big of a jump. If a God exists that is perfect, we have, in our imperfection, likely offended that God. And so that God has extended forgiveness to us. Now, for Christians, we know the story. We know the drill. We know that God sent His son to die for us because of our imperfection. And we know at times with our life and with our choices that we have trampled on that death, that we have presumed upon it. We all in the room, if you're a believer, I would be willing to bet everything I have that we've had this thought process. I shouldn't do this thing because it's not right, but I know God's going to forgive me anyways, so let's go. We've all had that thought. Even the nicest among us, even the sweetest, littlest old ladies have had this thought of, I know I shouldn't do this thing, but I know God's going to forgive me, so here I go. We've all presumed upon God's goodness and grace in that way, and in that way, disrespected the death of the Son that He sent for us. So the idea that we have offended God and that God has extended to us forgiveness is not a foreign one to a Christian. This is why, this is the reason we're told to forgive others, that we should forgive others. Why? Because God forgave us. There's even a parable about this. Jesus told a whole story about this that most of us know. There was a guy that owed the king, we'll say $500,000. He goes to the king and the king says, listen, I know you can't pay $500,000, so you're good. Like you don't owe me anything. The guy's relieved. He thought he was gonna get killed or put in prison. He's incredibly relieved. He goes and as he's leaving, he bumps into another guy that owes him 50 bucks. And he says, hey, you owe me 50 bucks. And the guy says, I'm sorry, I don't have $50 right now. And he said, you're going to jail. And he calls the cops and he puts them in jail. The king finds out about this guy and he throws the guy that owed him $500,000 in jail. It's a very quick version of the parable. And the parable, the point of the parable is this guy was forgiven for a $500,000 debt. And because he was forgiven of so great a debt, he should have been willing to forgive this guy 50 bucks. And so we forgive the $50 offenses because we recognize that our offenses are more than that. And I would say that this motivation is the right motivation for most offenses. I want to talk about two different kinds of forgiveness today. I want to call this kind of forgiveness immediate forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. Immediate, thoughtful, daily, prayerful forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. When people do something to harm us, they do something to wrong us, they say something mean when they lash out, they act gruff. I had a guy in traffic yesterday that flipped me off. I have no idea why. I legitimately don't. I was just driving along and I came up behind him and then I went around him and he was doing five miles an hour under the speed limit and I went around him and he hung me the bird. And I thought, I don't understand what just happened. I really wanted to stop my car and talk to him. Be like, bro, like I'm not even mad. Just what's going on? That situation, immediate forgiveness. Don't care about that guy. There was something going on in his day that wasn't happening in my day. I hope it helped him out to relieve his stress in that manner. It doesn't matter to me. Most offenses can be forgiven immediately. As a matter of fact, if you think of the people that have hurt you or hurts that you might be carrying right now, I bet if you see what they did to you, the hurt that they caused you in light of the hurt that you've caused others, that you could probably extend them grace. I think about our spouses. If you're married, there are so many, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe it when I tell you this. Some of y'all know Sweet Jen, and you know how great she is. There are some things that she does that get on my nerves, and I have to just give her grace for, I have to forgive her. But every time I do, I try to think of all the things that she's forgiving me for that she doesn't even tell me about. And it makes it much easier to forgive. And so this idea that grace and forgiveness have been extended to us, and if we'll just be empathetic with whoever hurt us, we can extend grace and forgiveness to them too. That's the right response for most offenses. And I would say to you this morning, if it's possible for you in your life with the people who have hurt you, if it's possible to extend immediate forgiveness to them, then it's right and good for you to do it. And you should. Scripture tells us you should. But even as I say that, I think that there are some people here who would say, buddy, you don't understand the way that I've been hurt. You don't understand what's happened to me. What's happened to me was not a $50 offense. There are some of you that when I started talking about the idea of forgiveness, it popped right into your head who has hurt you and how they've hurt you. And it's entirely possible that you can hear me talking up here and be like, that's well and good to just immediately forgive somebody, but buddy, I'm not there yet. Nate, I can't handle that. If you knew what had happened to me, you might even think it's well and good for you to preach that. That's not fair for you to say that I should just go and forgive someone. You don't know what happened. You can't relate. You don't understand. And to that, I would say you're right. I have to admit that I can't relate. There are no great offenses in my life. I've never been faced with a challenge of difficult forgiveness. I've never been faced with the challenge of what I'm calling having to offer processed forgiveness. Some offenses require processed forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is just not practical. It's just not going to happen. The hurt is too deep. The wound is too profound. I just can't turn around and go, you know what? I forgive you. My life is wrecked, but I forgive you because God tells me to. That's just not a practical thing to do. And I want to acknowledge this morning that some offenses require processed forgiveness. I think of a friend of mine who, when he was eight years old, his dad left the house, left him and his brother and his sister and his mom. He grew up without that dad. He was saddled with a stepdad who didn't care about him. In adulthood, his dad passed away early. He was the only one of his siblings who went to the funeral. And he had to sit there and look at this man who caused him a life of pain and abuse and neglect, who had never said a kind word to him, but he showed up at his funeral anyways, and he had to find a way to forgive that man so that he could move on with his life. That's a lifetime of neglect. I've never had to forgive like that. And I admit that. Some of y'all have. Some of y'all are walking through that process. And I want you to know that I think the Bible makes space for this process forgiveness. If you look in Luke 17, Jesus is telling us that we should forgive our brother or our sister who offends us. But he says, pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. Let him know, hey, that's wrong. And if he repents, forgiven. There's this admission in the text and in the teaching of Jesus that sometimes we're not ready to forgive right away. Sometimes there's reasons to withhold forgiveness. Sometimes we're waiting on something before we offer the forgiveness that we're instructed. And I want to be a voice that tells you, that's all right. If you can't get over it right away, that's all right. If the hurt is too deep or too profound, that's okay. You're allowed some processed forgiveness, but we should arrive there eventually. And because I've never had to walk through that deep of a challenge in my own forgiveness, I turned in my research to some people who had and tried to read stories and listen to talks about people who had overcome things in their life. And I ran across a girl, oddly enough, named Sarah Montana. That's a real name. I thought it was fake when I saw it. It's legit. Her name is Sarah Montana, and she gave a TED Talk. The details of that TED Talk are on your bulletin. So if you want to go home and watch it, you can. If you are one that is carrying a deep pain and is struggling through the idea of forgiveness, I think you'll find it incredibly helpful. But in that talk, she shares her story. And her story is, at the age of 22, she had just graduated college, and she was about to start her job and her career working at a hedge fund when she received word that a kid that she had grown up around in their neighborhood had come into their home and murdered her brother and her mom. Instant, deep, and profound hurt. And it was his fault. And so she shared her story and the process of forgiveness. And one of the things she said was that because she believed it to be the right thing, because she thought it would bring her some sort of healing, because she felt pressure from other people to go ahead and do this, she forgave him right away. She said publicly that she forgave him. She came out on the news and said that she forgave him. But she realized years later, she said the words, but she never really forgave him. And in that way, she kept him tethered to her and her life stayed tethered to that moment. And she desperately wanted to be able to forgive him. She even noted that she searched the Bible and she said, the Bible seems real high on forgiveness. It seems to talk really highly of it, but there's not a lot on how to do it. And so she began this exploration on how do I actually forgive? Like, what are the things that I have to do or say? What are the magic words? And in her exploration, she came upon this truth. It's actually an old Jewish truth. It's a teaching of Judaism that you cannot forgive a murderer for the murder because that murder didn't happen to you. It happened to whoever it was that you love. So you have to forgive them. You have to actually name the things that they took from you and forgive them for those. And so for her, she was able to start listing them off. That day, that kid took from her a friendship that she wanted to enjoy for her whole life with her brother that you cannot replicate. You cannot replicate. If siblings are close, you cannot replicate that relationship. And he took that from her. She had to forgive him of that. He took wedding pictures from her. He took the joy of her mom seeing her walk down the aisle. He took from her the joy of her mom experiencing her kids and becoming a grandmother. She had to name the things that he took from her because she couldn't just blanket forgive him for the murders because those didn't happen to her. She had to actually name the things that he took from her. And as she was talking and as I was sitting in this research, it occurred to me this idea about forgiveness that I had never thought of before, that withheld forgiveness exists because a debt is owed. Forgiveness is withheld because a debt is owed. I never considered that before. But isn't that what we do? And our petty little arguments, when we're mad at somebody, when they said something offensive to us, when our spouse hurt our feelings, when somebody we work with hurt our feelings and we give them the silent treatment, what are we waiting on? Waiting on an I'm sorry. The I'm sorry is the debt owed. You've offended me in this way. I will forgive you, but I'm gonna hold on to my forgiveness and I'm gonna hold on to this hurt until you salve it with an I'm sorry. That's the debt they owe. Isn't that so true? This person that murdered her mom and her brother took from her things. He owed her a debt and she couldn't offer the forgiveness until he reconciled that debt. Somebody owes us money, we can't really forgive them until they give us the money back. Someone hurt us in some profound way, we are withholding our forgiveness until they can make it right. When someone hurts us, they take from us our confidence or our security, our sense of self-worth or our innocence. We withhold that forgiveness until they can somehow offer the healing to make it right. And it makes sense to us to say, now you are forgiven. We withhold forgiveness because we are waiting on a payment for a debt that is owed. And isn't it interesting? I never thought about it before, but isn't it interesting how that's how Jesus words it in the Lord's prayer? In the versions that are more accurate word for word, it says, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The language has been there all along. Before we can forgive someone, we have to acknowledge what the debt is that they owe us. What have you taken from me that I am trying to get back? What pain have you caused me that I need you to heal before I can offer you this forgiveness? That's why it was revolutionary for me to finally understand the freedom found in forgiveness and what biblical forgiveness really is. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from your debt because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from the debt that you owe me because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. You don't have to say you're sorry for the thing. You don't have to make me feel better. You don't have to heal my soul because I believe that Jesus is going to pay it better than you ever could. We withhold forgiveness for somebody. We're waiting for them to make us right, to make us whole, to make us feel better again, to give us back the confidence that they stole, to give us back the innocence that they took, to give us back the self-worth that they took from us. And when we forgive, we say, listen, I'm not going to hold you accountable for that debt anymore because I acknowledge that you can't even pay it and that Jesus is going to be way better at paying it than you are. And when Scripture says that we should forgive as God forgave us, isn't that how God forgave us? We offended Almighty God with something that we did, and we owed Him a death, that we owed Him a debt for our offense. And He says, no, no, no, you're released from that debt. You do not have to pay that because I have trusted my son Jesus to pay it on your behalf. And so when we forgive others, isn't it the same thing? When we can look at somebody who represents a life of hurt and pain and neglect and say, you know what? What you did was wrong. The way you treated me was not all right. And you have hurt me profoundly with the choices that you've made. And you owe me for that. But you're off the hook. I release you from that debt because I believe that my Savior can pay it better than you ever could. I don't need you to heal me because Jesus is going to do it for you. I don't need you to make me whole anymore because Jesus is going to make me whole. I think that there is freedom and power in forgiveness because we can finally acknowledge the things that I've been clinging to that I feel like you owe me to make me better again. I acknowledge you can never do that in the first place. So you're off the hook and Jesus is going to pay your debt because he's better at it anyways. That is biblical forgiveness. And my hope and prayer is that as a church and the different families and relationships represented here, that we would walk in that freedom of forgiveness. That we would acknowledge the person who hurt me, it was wrong. And they do owe me. No one's arguing that they don't. But they can never pay me in a way that's going to make me whole. And because of that, they're forgiven. And I'm going to trust Jesus to pay the debt that they owe me for that offense. So as we move into Christmas together, when you think about your lives and your families, first of all, if you're the one that needs to be forgiven because you were dumb, admit it. Make it easier for them. Go to them and say, you know, listen, I want to acknowledge that I owe you a debt and I'm gonna do everything I can to pay it, but I know it's not gonna be good enough and I'm sorry. More importantly, believers, if it is within your power to reconcile a relationship by picking up the phone or writing an email or grabbing a coffee and sitting down and saying, you know what? You hurt me and it's not right and it's not okay, but I've been waiting for you to pay a debt that you can't pay and you don't owe it to me anymore. I'm gonna go to Jesus for the healing that I need for this and I'm gonna love you and your own health too. Then let's do that. Let's have some reconciliations going on this month. Let's have some good conversations that happen this month. Let's pursue forgiveness as a church. And let's experience together the joy and the freedom of forgiveness. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much and are so grateful for you. For the way that you love us, for the way that you forgive us, for the way that you set us free from the things that we have done and the offenses that we have brought. Lord, for those in the room who are hurting, who have somebody in their life that it will just be a challenge to forgive, I pray they would first know and see and feel that you see them, that you are with them, and that you are walking in that pain with them. Give them the strength and the courage and the vision to see that the healing that they are waiting on can only ever come from you. And in your way and in your will, give them the strength to forgive. Reconcile relationships even in this room this morning, God. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

I told Steve this week I wanted the full dance party intro for the sermon, so we are in a good spot. Speaking of being in good spots, before I just launch into the sermon, I just kind of felt compelled to say this. I think one of the things about church that a lot of us would agree that's tough sometimes is that when you show up, you kind of smile and people say, how you doing? And you say, good. And sometimes we mean it and sometimes we don't. And so sometimes church feels like a place where it's not okay to not be okay. And so I just wanted to tell you as your pastor, there's nothing going on with me. It's just, I feel like I need a vacation for about three weeks. Jen and Lily are sick. They're at home. I kind of feel like the weather does today. Just a little tired, just a little run down. I was praying that God would give me energy for this morning that I don't have. And so like, I'm just telling you that I've had better days. There's nothing wrong with Nate. I just would rather be at home in sweatpants right now. I'm being totally honest with you. So if you're there too, and it was a struggle to get here this morning, I just want you to know that I'm with you. And if you're listening online or watching online because you stayed in those sweatpants, I'm jealous. So here's what I want to do. I was reminded as we were singing, and I heard your voices singing out. It was one of my favorite things to do is listening to you guys, my church, sing to God. I was reminded that we're a group of people, mostly care about our spiritual health and are here for what the Lord might have to say to us this morning. That's why we've gathered. So let's pray that that would be good, and then I'll launch into the stuff that I have prepared for you. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for getting us out of bed. Lord, for those who didn't get out of bed this morning but are catching up later, thank you for that time of rest for them that need it so much. God, we just pray that you would tune us into your word and your will. We pray that you would give us energy that we might lack. We pray that you would give us the ability to tune out things that may be distracting right now, and that for a little while this morning, we would hear from you. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen. Okay. I don't normally do this, but I want you to raise your hand. Raise your hand, and I'm not going to ask you to quote it, although that would be super fun. Raise your hand if you think you know what the verse Jeremiah 29 11 says. If you think you know that, okay? It's so funny from my perspective. There's a bunch of people doing this, right? And nobody doing this. That's fine. That's fine. That's a pretty well-known verse, right? It's from the Old Testament, the book of Jeremiah. It says, for I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. Actually, it says declares. It's a big deal. I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. And we like to glom onto that verse. We like to claim that verse. We like to go, oh gosh, it's so good to know that my God has a plan for me. And that's for the most part fun. But that verse is not for you. That verse is one of, I think, the most misapplied verses in Scripture, and it's one of the most misapplied verses in church. We look at that, for I know the plans God has for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans to give you hope in the future. And we go, oh, God has a plan for me. This is great. Except that that's not what that verse means. With that verse, who Jeremiah is talking to is the nation of Israel. And they're in slavery. They're cast out. And they don't feel like their God's looking out for them anymore. And he says to them, listen, I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you. I'm going to bring you out of this and into a time of prospering again. It's a promise to the nation of Israel. And really it has, it's multi-layers to this promise, but it's really a messianic promise. One day I'm going to send my son Jesus and he's going to rescue everyone back to me. And then there's going to be a new heaven and a new earth, and one day I'm going to prosper you. I'm not going to harm you. That's what that verse means. It doesn't mean, Harris is sitting in the front row, okay? Harris is my buddy. It does not mean that God has plans for you, Harris, to prosper you and not to harm you. It does not mean that. That's a promise to the nation of Israel. And if I'm breaking your heart right now, because you love that verse and it brings you comfort, I don't want to rob that comfort of you. Is it revelatory of God's character? Yes. Do I think that God has a plan for you? Yes, I do. But what I want to do this morning is give you a better verse than that to show you that he has a plan. And I want to offer you some sympathy because I think that we glom onto that verse. We grab that verse and we go, yes, this is good. This brings me peace and joy. I think it's such a well-known verse because we want to know that God has a plan for us. We want to know that in the midst of life, in the midst of all the chaos, in the midst of all the things that we can't control, that somehow, somewhere, there is a divine God who is orchestrating all of these situations and that they will work out. We need to know. We need the peace of knowing that everything's not just happening at random, that someone is orchestrating all of these events. We need that peace. And so we grab that verse and we go, yes, God has a plan for me. This is great news. And people have done this for all of history. This is a question that we've asked for all of history. Why am I here and what am I here for? How did I get here and what am I supposed to do when I get here? As a matter of fact, if you remember freshman philosophy in college, one of the things you learn is that all of philosophy boils down to those three questions of origin, purpose, and destiny. How did I get here? What am I supposed to do? And where am I going? And so it's natural if you're a believer and you've been exposed to scripture that you would see a verse like that put up on a wall somewhere or included in a devotional somewhere and that you would attach onto it and go, yes, this is great. God has a plan for me because this answers some of the basic questions of human existence. How did I get here? And what am I here for? That's why I think the book of Ephesians is so good for us to study right now. Because the whole purpose of Ephesians is to tell us our identity and our purpose. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians, and the purpose of Ephesians, the overarching purpose, based on the research that I did and the guides that I read, is to give us our identity and our purpose. It's to answer those questions for you. It's to begin to answer the question, God, do you really have a plan for me? Is there really someone to make sense of all the things that are happening in life right now? God, what is my, who am I and what is my purpose? Where did I come from and what am I here for? The book of Ephesians, scholars believe, was written to answer this question. It's also important to note, as I got into learning more about the book of Ephesians, it's important to note that this letter, this is, first of all, it's written by a guy named Paul. Paul's probably the most influential Christian to ever live. Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. There was different churches all over Asia Minor gathering in the cities, and he would write them letters to encourage them in particular. And those became known as Paul's letters. If you want to sound really fancy in your small group, you can refer to them as Pauline epistles. And everyone will go, whoa, you're really smart. So these epistles, these letters that were written by Paul, are written to churches. And here's the thing that's really important. I just, as an aside, I just want to encourage you to do this. These letters that Paul wrote, Romans and 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, that big chunk in the New Testament, when they arrived at a church, someone would get up in front of the church after the student pastor did the announcements and made fun of the senior pastor that's been going on for thousands of years. They would get up and they would say, this is a letter from Paul. And they would read it. And they wouldn't just read chapter one. They wouldn't just parse out one of the little phrases and spend the Sunday on that. They would read the whole thing, start to finish. These letters are intended to be read from start to finish. Paul did not write this with chapters. Chapters got added hundreds of years later, thousands of years later. We didn't do that. Or he didn't do that. We put those there. It was intended to be read from start to finish. So I would encourage you, as we go through the book of Ephesians, Kyle has made a reading plan for us that's going to take us through the book two times if you read every day. But I would encourage you at some point in the next now five weeks to take some time. It won't take you but 30 or 45 minutes, or if you're Doug Bergeson, about an hour and a half to really sound out the words. To sit down and read it from start to finish. Sit down at some point or another and read the whole book from start to finish. And there you'll start to see the nuances and the points and really the overarching themes of the book of Ephesians come out. So that would be my challenge to you during this series, is to sit down and read it from start to finish and see what comes out to you. It's perfectly fine, like we're going to do this morning, to camp out in one verse, but it's important that we get the whole theme. The other thing I would say as we launch into our series in Ephesians, as I now step into it, Patrick did a great job last week of starting us in chapter one. There's no way I can do all of chapter two this week. If you love the book of Ephesians and you know chapter two well, I'm going to tell you this right up front. You're going to be disappointed today, okay? I'm not going to get to the theological thing that you want me to get to. It's just, there's so much there. I can't cover it all. So I have to invest our time in this one place this morning, but you guys need to invest your time in learning the rest of it on your own. Six weeks isn't enough time to cover all the theology in Ephesians. But that's why Paul wrote Ephesians. And he wrote it, we think, to the church in Ephesus, but really it was to all the churches surrounding the ancient city of Ephesus. And it just kind of found its home base in Ephesus. And so it became the book of Ephesians, but really it's a general letter to the churches to tell us our identity and our purpose, to give us the answers to those questions we've been asking for all of time. That's why he wrote it. And if that's why he wrote it, to tell us who we are and why we're here. Really to answer that question, another way to think about this is if you were to say, God, what's your will for my life? What would you have me do? Some of us are in our 20s and we've got our life in front of us and we're going, God, what do you want me to do? Some of us have lived life and we're kind of midlife and we're kind of going, God, have I been doing what you want me to do? And am I going to do now what you want me to do? Some of us have moved into a season of life that's different. You find yourself as empty nesters or adult children or you have grandchildren and you feel like maybe part of life has run its course and now we're going, now, Father, what would you have me do? We ask this question over and over again in our life. Father, what is your will for us? What do you want me to do? This verse answers that question. This verse is the better version, I think, of Jeremiah 29, 11. It's in chapter 2, verse 10. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. It follows a discourse that's showing you how you get saved. If you need to know, if your question is, how do I get saved? What do I need to do? Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 are the most succinct explanation of salvation you can find in the Bible. And it starts off, we're dead in our trespasses. God loves us. He gives us salvation by grace through faith. That not of yourself is a gift of God, not of works, so that no man can boast. So if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, God's will for you is that you would become a believer. Once you are a believer, God's will for you is revealed in verse 10. And it says this, for we, the church, the Christians, those that call God their Father and Jesus their Savior, for we are His workmanship. His there is God. For we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. You want to know what God's will is for your life? You want to know who you are and why you're here? This is it. You are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you may walk in them. I love this verse. As I was studying personally a couple of years ago, I came across this verse. I had never noticed it before. I had always paid attention to all the other very worthwhile things in Ephesians chapter two. And for whatever reason, when I sat down to read this verse on that day years ago, it leapt off the page. And this is one of those that I've been waiting for the opportunity to preach for a couple of years. And now that it's finally here, I'm going to pitch a dud. But we're going to do our best to make this verse matter to everybody because I love it so much. And the first thing we see is that we are God's workmanship. He created us. And just that sentence right there, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, just that phrase has so much in it. The first thing we see, the first thing that I would note is that that gives us our position in creation. I try to say as often as I can and make this point as often as I can because I think it's a salient one that the Bible starts with a very intentional sentence. In the beginning, God created. And if you were to ask, why does it start that way? You could say, well, that's the beginning of the story and that's fair. But I think there's more more going on there. When we see in the beginning God created, when we see in chapter 2, verse 10, that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that immediately tells us our position in creation. God is the creator, and we are the created. God is the creator, and we are the creation. And I would submit to you that all discord with God, all sin, all disunity, even all lack of joy and happiness can be traced back to our misunderstanding this fundamental relationship. All discord we experience with God, if he is the creator and we are the created, then all discord that we experience is because in our lives we went, no thanks, I'm here. You see, all unhappiness that we experience, all sin can be boiled down to us going, I don't accept the fundamental order of creation and I want to elevate myself to my authority in my own life. Wasn't this the sin of Eve in the garden? For those unfamiliar, the Bible starts with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. There's one rule, don't eat of that tree. And Satan comes up and sidles up next to Eve and he says, don't you want to eat of that tree? And I don't know if she rejects it or not, but he says, you know that God doesn't want you to eat of that tree because if you eat of it, you will become like him. And Eve went, oh, I want to be like him. And she became God in her own life. And that's how sin entered the world. And for us in our lives, when we experience any discord at all, the root of it is we have forgotten our fundamental position in creation. If you don't think that's true, read the book of Job and tell me what God is saying to Job in chapters 38, 39, and 40. He's saying, Job, you've forgotten your place. I'm the creator. You're the creation. So that sentence gives us our position in creation. It also gives us our purpose. It lets us know that because God created us, that he can now imbue us with purpose. Because he made us, he decides what we're for and what we're to be used for. That's not up to us to decide. We don't have to figure that out. We just have to ask God what it is. It also gives us our purpose. And then another thing that we see, I think, is that God takes pride in his creation. This last week, we finally launched our new website. Okay, our new website is up and running, graceralee.org. If you have a chance to go check it out today on mobile or on your desktop or whatever, go look at it. I think it's phenomenal. I think a guy named Hugh Butler did it for us. I think he did a phenomenal job. When you go look at it, I think you're gonna be really proud of your church. That website looks way better than us. That's what I would say, okay? You're going to go, oh man, this is such a good first impression. It's a really good website. And as we were designing it, the designer, a guy named Hugh, we were meeting with him. And I told him, I said, listen, man, you're more creative than me. You're way better at this than I could ever be. I don't want my preferences or what I'm asking you to do to limit your creativity in any way. I don't want the instructions that I give you to feel like they're limiting. I want your creation to have full reign. And actually what I told him is, I want you to be so proud of this website that it's the one you use to show to future clients to get their business. Like, you do whatever you want, just make it awesome. And after he got into designing it a little bit, he said, hey man, would you mind if I put my name down at the bottom of it? If I said that the website was made by HBCO, the name of his company? I said, no, absolutely, go ahead. Because I want him to be proud of what he did. And if you go to the website and you scroll to the bottom of the front page, you'll see website created by HBCO because he's proud of what he created. When you make something, you're proud of it. You guys know this. When you make something in your wood shop, when you put something back together, you show your wife, you show people, you take pictures of it, you text it to your buddies. Look what I did. When you put together, ladies, when you design something new, when you buy a new outfit, Jen does this all the time. I think that's creation. You've created a new outfit for Lily. She brings it home and then I have to go, that's the cutest thing ever. It's just, it's way cuter than the other 20 I've seen this year. Like, that's what you have to say. Like, when we create something, we want people to notice it. We take pride in that. That's what God does with his creation. He takes pride in you. Listen, this sounds flippant. It's not. God didn't make any duds, okay? God didn't create the good ones on Monday morning when he was fresh and then like Friday afternoon just spit out Jeff Lemons. Like that's not how that works. Yeah, whatever, this will be okay. God doesn't make any duds. He doesn't run out of energy. He created you. He is proud of you. He takes pride in his creation. And so in this very first sentence in Ephesians 2, verse 10, we see some huge themes. In this first statement, we see our position in creation, our purpose in creation, and His pride in creation. From the very beginning, it tells us our identity. If you were to ask, who am I? How did I get here? You are from God. If you are a believer, you are his child. It's his will that you would come into his family. And because of that, he's imbued you with purpose and he takes great pride in you. That one sentence at the very beginning, we see our position in creation, our purpose in that creation and his pride in his creation. And then once that's established, God made us. What did he make us for? Well, the very next sentence answers that question. He created us for good works that we might walk in them. I love the idea of this sentence. We don't have to figure out, God, what's your will for me? His will for you is that you would walk in the good works that he created for you. You have to think, God, what am I supposed to do with my life? Well, you're supposed to walk in the good works that he created for you. It's super simple. We don't have to figure this out. We don't have to divine anything or read the tea leaves. We just have to say that we were created to walk in the good works that he made for us, that he predetermined for us. That's our job. That's what we have to do. And it's at this point that I think we can kind of read this in two different ways. And the two ways to receive this passage, to kind of process it, I think, are kind of, you get the two pendulum swings in my marriage. Okay, Jen's not here this morning because Lily has neon green snot coming out of her nose, but if she were here, she would nod her head in agreement. There's me, when I see this, I'm an egomaniac. So when I read that I was created for good works beforehand, that I should walk in them, I go, that's right. I have a lot of talents to offer you, God. Where would you like me to be in your church? Like, yes, this makes sense to me. How would you like to use me? And I feel this grand sense of purpose and design and calling. Now, I'm humbled by that, and that's silly, and God doesn't need me at all. There's a story in the Old Testament where God talks through a donkey, and my dad likes to remind me often, if God can speak through a donkey, then he can speak through you. So don't get a big head, and that's not the word that he uses. He uses the King James version for that particular. But some of us read this, and because we're more maybe confident people, I don't know the best way to say it. Maybe it's just we're jerks. We go, yeah, okay, God, you've given me some gifts. How do I use them for you? But I think most of us process this like my wife does, who tend to think, I don't really have anything to offer. There can't possibly be a lot of good works that matter. My good works in comparison to others are really small. Certainly this verse applies to other people that are going to make a larger impact than me. And I think a lot of us tend to disqualify ourselves from passages like this. Other people were created for the good works. Other people should walk in those. That's really not for me. And I would just humbly submit to you, if that's how you feel, that that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says everyone, we, all Christians, if you're a believer, if you know Jesus, then God created you for good works, that you should walk in them, and those good works matter. And I would further submit to you, if you feel like someone who's on the fringe, who couldn't possibly be used in meaningful ways by God, that he couldn't possibly really have a plan for you, then I would point out to you that the people that God uses over and over and over again, generation after generation in scripture, are the exact people who would feel like you do right now if they were told, God has big plans for you. David would have never believed that. the youngest of eight sons watching the sheep on the hillside. Moses would have never believed that, a shepherd of 40 years out in the desert. Rahab would have never believed that, a prostitute in a forgotten city of Jericho. So if that's how you feel this morning, you're in good company. So these good works are for everyone. And if we want to know what are our good works, what can I do? How do I know this to be true? How do I begin to apply myself? I would make these points because I think we find our good works rooted in these truths. I would make these two points. First, everyone matters to someone. Everyone matters to someone. There are people in your life that if you said something nice to them, it would lift them up. If you said something harsh to them, it would tear them down. There are people in your life, whether you know it or not, who are watching you to determine how they should act in certain situations. There are people in your job, at your workplace, and you might not even know this, but they might know that you go to church. And when something happens in the company, when an email goes out, when a meeting happens, when someone goes long or someone says something snide, there are people who are looking at you to determine how a Christian reacts. Everybody matters to somebody. And everybody excels at something. Everyone is good at something. You might not feel like you're good at something, but I'm telling you, everyone is good at something. These last two years, I've gone to Mexico. I've been to Mexico three years in a row, but the last two years, there's been a guy come on the trip named Jacob Gutierrez. Jacob is the son of one of our great grace partners, and their family comes down every year. And Jacob's 24 years old, and he struggles with Down syndrome. And so when Jacob is there, there are some things that he feels like he can't do. There are some ways that he feels like he can't contribute like everyone else. There are some things that he feels like, man, I don't excel at that. But two years in a row, we've sat around the circle at the end of the night. If you've been on a mission trip, you know the circle, man. It's the same circle everywhere on every continent. You work all day, you get to the end of the day, you sit around because you're Christians and you sing songs and then somebody shares the devotion and then you ask the question, all right, what happened today? What did you see today? Let's talk about today. Let's kind of decompress, okay? And so I've seen two years in a row with Jacob in that circle, somebody say, man, I've learned so much from Jacob being here. And I learned it too. And as I watched him interact with everybody this week, I saw a guy with unfailing sweetness and kindness to other people. I saw a guy who never ever acted like he was in a conversation he didn't want to be in. Who never acted like he didn't have time for somebody. Who was never not interested in what somebody was saying. I saw a guy who, if you asked him to stay up all night talking to you, he would, about nothing. I saw a guy that loved people really well. And two years in a row, I'm not making this up, this isn't speaker embellishment, I'm telling you the truth. Two years in a row, I've come home with this indelible impression and thought, man, I need to be more like Jacob. Everybody matters to someone and everybody excels at something. So even if you think, gosh, I'm not sure that I have anything to offer in the kingdom of God. Yes, you do. There are people watching you and there are things that you are good at. We all have our comfort zone. So the question becomes, not do I have good works, but Father, what are my good works? What are my good works? What have you purposed me to do? What do you want me to do? I think a good way to answer that question is to start with, who are the people that I matter to, and what are the things that I feel like I'm okay at? What are the things that I feel like I excel at? You could say, what are the things that people affirm in you? You could say, what are the things that you're passionate about? What are the things that tick you off that make you want to make a change? But I think the most reasonable question for all of us to ask this morning, our Father, what are my good works? What have you designed me and purposed me to do? What am I gifted to do? What am I purposed to do? And there's an answer for everybody. So I would tell you this as your pastor, or if you're visiting as just a guy, that if you were to ask me, what's God's will for my life? I would ask you, I don't know. What are your good works? What has he designed you to do? And this is a layered question because sometimes this means for all of life. This means overarching call on life. My good work, I feel right now, is to be a pastor. And I think that that's gonna be a lifelong call. I hope that it is, that that's my good work. And so sometimes when we ask that, we're asking for this big overarching question. And sometimes God gives us that answer and sometimes he doesn't yet. So the more pertinent question is, God, what are my good works right now? What would you have me do right now? Father, I'm content if I don't get the five-year answer. I'm content if you don't give me the 10-year plan. God, what would you have me do right now? What are my good works right now? And then we ask that question. Say, Father, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What have you designed me to do and how do I walk in them? And I'm grateful at Grace that we have examples of people all over the place who are walking in their good works. I think of Cindy Hayes. She's right here. Everyone look at her. She's right there in the third row. She's super embarrassed right now. Yeah, she's the best. If you're friends with Cindy, ask her about the nickname that she got in Mexico. I will not say it, Cindy. I will not say it, but you should ask her because it's funny. For about nine or 10 years, Cindy has served on our personnel committee. Cindy has a background in HR. She's been doing that her whole career. She's sharp and smart and has kept us legal and has told me many times since I got here, Nate, you cannot do that. That is illegal. Like you will, you'll take the church down in flames with you if you do that. Do not do that. And behind the scenes has protected us and guided us and seen us through hirings and seen us through dismissals and seen us through policy changes. And she did that for about nine or 10 years and just recently stepped off. So I wanted us first to pause and say thank you to Cindy for doing that for us. But I would tell you that for that period of time in her life, that was her good work to walk in. She was doing what God designed her to do. And it probably didn't feel like that to her. It probably didn't feel, she wouldn't have said at the beginning of those nine years, this is my good work and I'm gonna walk in it, Lord. That's probably not what she would have said, but that's what she did. That was her unique talent that she had to offer to God's kingdom and she built a church that way. I watched while we were in Mexico this last week, a guy came with us named Nate, and he's a carpenter. And we went down, and Nate had, he had his wrist was hurt. It was taped up. I think he was faking it to get out of work, but really milking it for some sympathy. But he couldn't pick up things on the job site, and so they told him, man, you can't come to the job site. But back at where we were staying, there was supposedly a wood shop that was filled with clutter and filth and trash and little bits of wood and sawdust and tools that were disassembled and in disrepair. And it was a totally useless space. And Nate decided that that week, what he was going to do is turn that into a usable wood shop for those folks. And by the time he left, that space looked like a professional wood shop. He built shelves. He sorted wood. He threw things away. He assembled tools. He lined it up. He showed the guys how to use the different tools. He told them this was dangerous. You need to sell it as fast as you can. Don't do this. And by the time he left, that place looked like a professional wood shop. And what I know for sure is he had some help. He had some dummies like me carrying wood and going, where do I put it? But we added no talent to the equation. So what I know is that if Nate had not gone, that would not have gotten done. And so that week, that was his good work to walk in. And I really do think that life is just as simple as, Father, what are my good works? And how can I walk in them? And can I share with you what happens when we'll do this for a lifetime? If you'll be a person who will just ask God faithfully, what are my good works? And how do I walk in them? My mom all passed away some years ago. I'm Southern, so I have a mom all. And for the last year of her life, I had the privilege of meeting with her every other Monday to have coffee with her. And as we would meet and spend time together, I learned about who she was. She was a woman, she had an older sister named Ann. My grandma's name was Linda. And Linda was convinced that Ann was more talented than her. She sang in like the school plays. She was prettier than her. All the boys paid attention to Ann and none of the boys paid attention to Linda. My papa actually met her by hitting on Ann. Ann said she was taken and he said, do you have a sister? And she goes, yeah. She's working down the street. So he goes down the street, and they dance together. And he said the first time he felt her in his arms, he knew that this was the one, which is just great because they were together for their whole life. She always felt like kind of the fading flower, the one in the background. She felt overshadowed by her sister. She never wanted to be in the spotlight. My grandfather, Don, had a huge personality. He would fill a room. Everybody loved him, and she was always playing the supporting role to him. Her children, some of them, had a big personality. She was always playing the supporting role to them. She didn't come to know the Lord until later in life. She started having babies at 19. She had four kids. And then somewhere in her late 20s, early 30s, she came to know the Lord because one of her children started going to the local church. And she never thought she had anything to offer. This little, she's tiny, diminutive woman. But she just loved the people that were in front of her. And even though she was never in public, even though she never had the spotlight, one time I remember she felt like her good work was to take a group of teenagers to Peru. The church was taking a mission trip to Peru. She was in her 60s, and she was like, yeah, I'll take them. And she just went. Everybody was shocked. What in the world? So when I did her funeral, even though she was a woman who never had any spotlight, who never felt like she had anything to offer, there was 400 people there. There was a whole section of young families that were representatives of the girls in Peru that she took, who years later said, we want to come honor Miss Linda. She worked at First Union at the time as a bank teller for years. She hadn't been there for 15 years. There's a whole section of people that she worked with who said, we want to honor Miss Linda. There's people coming out of the woodwork saying, we want to honor this woman because she loved us well. And her family, we had no idea that she was this loved. And it made an indelible impact on me. And to me, that's the evidence of a life lived. Saying, Father, what is my good work? And how do I walk in it? And that's what I want you to do too. We don't have to know, God, what's your will for me? What are the plans that you have for me for forever? He might tell us that, he might not. But if we want to know God's will for our life, it begins with that question. What are the good works that you created me for and how can I begin to walk in them? If you need a jump start on these good works, we have sheets in your seats to volunteer here at Grace. And I want to be very careful with this. I did not preach this sermon to get you to volunteer here, okay? I didn't do that. If your vision for what are the good works that I have to walk in is ushering, then you need better vision, man. You need a bigger view than that. Don't laugh too hard, slide guy. It's bigger than that too. It's a bigger vision than that. I'm not talking about how we can all volunteer here, but I will say if you've been coming here, particularly if you started within the last 12 months and you're not plugged in yet to a service team, this is a great way to get plugged in, a great way to get your foot in the door. And if you're asking the question, what are my good works? And you're not sure, a great start is to begin to volunteer somewhere. The last church that I attended without getting paid to show up was a church called Greystone back home. And when I went, I just wanted to get plugged in. And so I said, I don't know what my good works are here, Father, but I'm going to start ushering. I signed up to do that. That led to helping with the students. That led to a small group. That led to a staff position. We never know what's going to happen. But I want you to be people who walk in the good works that God created for you. If you need help getting started with those, we have the service sheets in your seats. The things that are highlighted in red are things that we need particularly right now. I would also mention that not listed on the sheet is a missions team that you can join. So if you're interested in doing that, you can just write that at the bottom. But if you're not plugged in yet or you have questions about that, fill that out. And in a few minutes, Kyle's gonna come up and pray for us and we're gonna do the offering. You can drop that in the basket when it comes by or especially if you're watching online, you can go to our super great website and go to gracerother.org slash service teams and we have a form there that you can fill out. But let us be people who ask God, Father, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? Let's pray. Father, we love you. You're good to us. You watch out for us. You care for us. Father, we know that you have a plan for us. I pray that you would give us the faith to believe that, the courage to ask what our good works are and the obedience to walk in them. God, I pray if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, that they would come to know you. Lord, I also pray for anybody here that may just be feeling a little tired, a little run down. Would you energize them? Would you let them know today in some way that speaks directly to their heart that you care about them? Father, would you use us in incredible ways to build your kingdom and serve your purpose? It's in your son's name we pray, amen.