Sermons tagged with Identity

We are in the fourth part of our series now called With, where we've been reading through together and then discussing on Sundays the book With by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani. I want to thank Doug Bergeson last week for doing a phenomenal job filling in for me as we learned about life from God. Because I either have less courage or more sense than him, I'm not going to start my sermon by singing to you. I don't think that I could ever do that. If you missed that last week, watch the sermon at least for the song at the beginning that you may have missed. It was really, really great. As we've been moving through this series, we've been looking at different postures that we adopt before God that ultimately become harmful for us. They do more to hurt us than they do to help us. And this week we arrive at what I think is probably the sneakiest and maybe most damaging posture that we can adopt that is wrong. And I think that if you spent any time in the church, if you grew up, especially for those of you who grew up in church, if your memory, as far back as you can remember, when the doors were open, you were there, then I guarantee you this is going to be hitting on some nerves for you. If you've been a part of the church for any number of years, for any length of time, then there are going to be some things in this posture that resonate for you. I told you that when I read this book first in 2013, I've never read another book that caused me to stop, put it down, pray, and repent more than this one did. And this chapter in particular, this dude read my mail. So if it feels like at some point in the service I'm stepping on your toes, just know that that's not condemnation. That's not accusation. That's empathy. This is me. I almost made this sermon just a confessional, to just confess to the church body how I've walked through this posture. But as we approach this posture, this life for God, I wanted to share with you an experience that I had years ago. I think it was 2007, in about April or May of 2007. Jen and I, my wife, we were moving back home. We had lived our first year of marriage in Columbia, South Carolina, where I was going to go to seminary. We decided not to do that, so we moved back home, and I was going to pursue being a teacher, being a Bible teacher at a private high school. I didn't know which one. I was applying and hoping for the best. That's a really difficult job to get. I was really foolhardy in my efforts, but that's what we were trying to do. And there was a position that came open that somebody told me about. I didn't see it on any of the websites. Somebody told me about it, just word of mouth. And so I sent my resume in to them. And I ended up getting hired at this school called Covenant Christian Academy and became the Bible teacher there. At the same time, they were looking for a science teacher. And this is again in April or May. So this is, if you know anything about school world, this is after the hiring process. Hiring starts in February or March for the upcoming year. So this was actually too late in the year. So it was odd for them to even be hiring at this point. And they advertised very low key this Bible position and this science position at the same high school for three weeks. And in three weeks, I wonder how many resumes you think the science teaching position got. Three. I wonder how many resumes you think the Bible teaching position got. 60. In three weeks, barely advertised. And that's always stuck out to me. I thought that was odd. In my process to come here, I was looking for different jobs. This was back in 2017. There was a church in Kingsport, Tennessee, which if you know anything about that area of Tennessee, it's booty. There's nothing there. It is an undesirable area of the country. It just is. Being honest with you. I know somebody from there. They will confirm this. A church there had an open position for a senior pastor and received over 500 resumes from a search firm. Now, why is that the case? Why is it the case that this undesirable, this school that I got hired at, my starting salary was $27,000 a year in 2007. It was podunk out in the country, the far-flung suburbs of Atlanta with a school that had a cafe gym notarium. Like that's how, it was not this glamorous thing. Yeah, we got 60 resumes in three weeks. How's that happening? How is a church in the corner of Tennessee really not around very much at all getting 500 resumes in a year? Why is that happening? I think it's happening because of this life for God posture that we adopt as churches. The life for God posture says this, and I'll explain to you why I'm thinking this way in a minute, but the life for God posture says this, God's love for me, God's value for me is equal to my accomplishments for him. God's value for me, God's affection for me is equal to my accomplishments for him. The more I do for God, the more he values me. The more things I accomplish for God, the more he loves me and approves of me, the more valuable I am in his kingdom. It's this mindset that says, if I want to be a good Christian, then I have to go and do. I have to go and perform. I have to go and be a professional Christian. And this is why I think there's so many resumes when jobs like that open up because there's so many people who grew up in the church, who have been around the church and have been in this vice grip and this pressure cooker of if you're going to be a good Christian, then you need to be a professional one. If you really, really love God, then you'll go make a huge impact for him. If you grew up in the church, you felt this pressure of if someone's a really good Christian, they're going to leave everything and go be a missionary somewhere. They're going to go be a pastor. They're going to go start a ministry or a nonprofit. If you're just kind of a regular okay Christian, go get a business degree, make some money, and tithe so that the good Christians can go do the job. And now listen, I say that, and we chuckle at its absurdity, but you can't tell me that you haven't felt that pressure. You can't tell me that that hasn't felt true, that there's this economy within the church, that the more I do for God, the more valuable I am to him. The more I perform, the more he loves me. The more I do, the bigger the accolades get, the bigger crowd I draw, the bigger Bible study I have, the bigger following I have online, whatever it is, then the more the people around me and my God admire me. And this is a tricky, sneaky, pernicious posture, partly because it preys upon something that is in our very nature. It preys upon our desire to be valuable and to be valued. Every one of us is born with an intrinsic need for approval. Every one of us is born with a need in our hearts and our souls for someone to look at us and say, you're enough. I love you. You're good enough. I value you. We all need that. That's why my four-year-old daughter, Lily, everything she does, Daddy, watch me do this. She can't go down a flight of stairs without making me watch her jump down the last two. Now I watch her pause at three and consider it for a minute and then step to the second one and jump, right? Daddy, watch this. Daddy, look at this. Daddy, look at what I colored. Look at what I did in school. And it's all these little things. None of them are super impressive except that she's my daughter and I love her. But what is that in her except for the need to be approved of, the need to be valued, the need to perform, the need for somebody to look at her and say, yeah, you're good enough and I love you for that. And like, guys, we don't lose that need. We don't lose that desire. As you get older, you don't lose the need to be valuable and enough for somebody. That doesn't go away. We just have more nuanced ways of asking for it, right? We see this in young adolescent boys that brag about everything. All they're doing is begging you to tell them that they're valuable and that they're enough. As we mature past that, we let other people tell us that we're good enough, but we don't solicit it. Or we're really sneaky. In my early years of ministry, I used to ask people for feedback on a sermon or on a talk. And listen, I didn't really want your feedback. Don't be critical of me. Just tell me all the ways you think I did great. That's all I'm looking for. That's just a sneaky way to get you to tell me that I'm valuable and that I'm enough and that I performed. It's intrinsic in us to grope for that value. And this posture says the more I perform, the more valuable that I am. Another reason it's really particularly sneaky is we celebrate it in church. We celebrate the stories. I think of Sarah and Casey Prince who grew into adulthood here at Grace years ago, and then they go to South Africa to do God's work there, and we celebrate that, and we should. That's the problem. We should celebrate that. But what we don't do is celebrate like a faith leverant. I mean, she was the online partner of the week a couple of weeks ago. But that's not really celebrating. That's just a joke that's fun. She's a stay-at-home mom. She crafts lessons for her two boys and for her young daughter every day. She prays over them and pours into them and teaches them the Bible. And we don't celebrate that nearly as much as we celebrate someone leaving everything and growing across the world to preach the gospel, when in reality, both calls are the same. Both calls are equal. Both calls are from God. Timothy tells us that we are all vessels in God's house and he chooses which ones he will place where for noble purposes and for other purposes. We're all a part of the body of Christ. We all have our part to play. Yet some reason, for whatever reason, we value some gifts over others and some ministries over other ministries. And one of the reasons we do this is because it feels biblical, right? Like the Bible tells us to perform. If you know Scripture well, hopefully you've already thought of a few where you'd like to raise your hand and be like, but Nate, we're told to do ministry. We're told to preach the gospel. We're told that we should have an impact. And you're right. Paul tells us this over and over again. At the end of his life, he says, I've run the race. I've kept the faith. He says he's fought the good fight. He tells us to run our race as one who desires to win. That's performance. Jesus, as he leaves, his last instructions to the disciples are go and make disciples. The thing I did with you, now you go and do that. Go do missions. Go and do. He tells us to do that. When he calls the disciples, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. I will give you purpose. So he says in Matthew 4.19. So it seems biblical that we should adopt this posture of life for God. I'm going to follow God so that I can derive my sense of purpose and worth and value from him because he tells me to go and do these things. That's why it's pretty sneaky. And it's similar to the other postures, not life over God. Life over God says, I don't need God in my life. I'm going to be the authority in my life. I'm just going to extract his principles and apply them for maximum efficiency like a self-help guru, but I don't really need his authority in my life. That's a different one. But those other two postures, life under God, I'm going to live my life under his authority. Life from God, I'm going to follow God so that I can get blessings from him. Those seem biblical too. The Bible wants us to live our life under the authority of God. The Bible does say that if we follow him, we will be blessed. Those are in Scripture. But what I want us to see about those three postures, those two and this one this morning, is that these postures are the results of following God, but they serve as terrible reasons to follow him. They're the results of following God. When we follow God, those things happen, but they really serve as terrible reasons to follow him. When I follow Jesus, I'm going to live my life under his authority, life under him. That's okay. That's good. That's a result of giving my life to him. When I give my life to Christ, I'm going to experience blessings from him. That's a result of my walk with him. When I give my life to Christ, I'm going to do things for him. That's a result, but they make terrible reasons. And when these things become the reasons that we follow God, I think three really terrible things happen in our life. The first one is this. I want to walk through a little exercise before I tell you what it is. This exercise really stuck out to me from the book, and I wonder if it's true of us as well. I know it's gonna feel cheesy to do this. I have a very high cheese meter. I hate all things that are cheesy. So just trust me, I wouldn't ask you to do this unless I thought it was particularly effective. But I would like for you to close your eyes. If you're watching at home, close your eyes. If you're here, close your eyes. If I look at you and I see that your eyes aren't closed, I'm gonna shame you by name to everyone watching everywhere. But I want you to do this. Close your eyes and picture that you're in heaven and you're walking before the Father. You're in heaven and you can finally see the face of God. The first time after living the life that you've lived, you can now see his face. What does it look like? What's the primary emotion on the face of God as he looks back at you? What does he feel towards you? All right. You guys can look back up here. I would be willing to bet, just like it talked about in the book, just like I know what my answer is when I do that exercise, I would be willing to bet that a lot of us, if we answer that question honestly, how is God looking at us? We would say that he's disappointed. He's disappointed in me. I should have done more. I should have known better. He gifted me in ways. He gave me opportunities, and I didn't do as much as I could. My Father in heaven has got to be disappointed in me. He does this exercise in the book with a bunch of kids going to Bible college. And their answer was universally, he's disappointed in me. And listen, when we live a life where we feel like God's value for me is equal to my performance and accomplishments for him, I think we have no choice but to walk through life assuming God is disappointed in us. One of the terrible things that happen when we adopt this life for God posture is that we walk through life assuming that our good Father in heaven is disappointed in us and who we are. And sin is no longer this thing that damages our relationship with our Father. It's no longer this thing that necessitated the death of Jesus on our behalf. Sin simply becomes this thing that makes us less effective than we could be. We don't properly think about that either. I wonder if you can relate to that at all, the idea that God is disappointed in you. And listen, I said at the beginning, this chapter eats my lunch. This is me. Even as I sit here and I tell you in the next few minutes God's not disappointed in you, even as I finish talking about God's love for you, I'm just being honest with you. I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm not trying to make a point or be dramatic. I don't feel that. I feel God's stark disappointment in me. And if you're with me there, I wonder what that must do to us. What must that do to our psyches? There's an entire industry of counseling, a vast majority of which is based on helping people get over the fact that they feel like their parents are disappointed in them. We have a whole industry of counseling and psychology that sits down with people and helps them get over the wounds that their parents caused them by never being proud of them, by never telling them that they were enough, by not loving them the way that they needed to be loved. And we as adults have to move through that in our wounding and try to figure that out. There's a whole industry based around it. How much more then must it affect us for us to walk through our life convinced that disappointed in us when we're so sure that he loves everyone around us so much? If I were to ask you, close your eyes and imagine your spouse before God. Close your eyes and imagine anybody in this room or anybody watching online before God. What's God's face to them? You would say it's love. It's joy. It's happiness. So then why do you make his face disappointed at you? What must it do to the way that we think about God, to our heart for him, to just assume that he's disappointed in us? What must it do to the way that we raise our children and teach them about our good God? It's no wonder that maybe some of us have a hard time praying or spending time in the Bible because we think the God that we find there is disappointed in us, like an angry coach on the sideline waiting for us to come off the field. And because of that, because we so often walk through life assuming God is disappointed in who we are and how we've performed, I think it causes a lot of us to kind of give up on being able to earn God's affection that way. And because it does, we begin to look to our peers for affection and approval. And in this way, our service becomes currency for comparison. In this way, we use our service as currency for comparison to others. We do the exact opposite of what Paul talked about in Galatians. Paul in Galatians wrote this striking verse, verse 10. He said, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Paul in Galatians says, listen, we don't live for other people. We don't live for the approval of our peers. We live for the approval of God. But when we adopt this life for God posture, when we try to perform at a rate that earns us his love and affection, we inevitably will realize that we fall short of that. And then we will turn our eyes to our peers and begin to compare ourselves to them. I know I'm disappointing to God, but these schmucks think I'm pretty great, so I'm just going to keep performing for them. A good way to know if this exists in you is to answer this question honestly. And listen, I'm about to step on some toes. I would say I'm sorry. I'm not. But this is me. I experienced this too. How many of you have ever served on a team, participated in a ministry, accepted an appointment to a board or to a committee, or pursued a position in ministry somehow. Not because it was your earnest and fervent desire to use your gifts to further God's kingdom, but because you liked the way that position or that appointment made you look to the people around you. How many of you have served on boards because of how it's perceived by others? How many of you have accepted appointments or desired to be on a committee or on a team because of the respect that it would garner from your peers? Listen, I'm chief among these people. I know through counseling of my own that the whole reason I got into the pastorate was because it was the quickest path of respect I could find in my life. Where I grew up, the people around me, the people that we respected most were the pastors. So I figured if I wanted the respect of other people, I'll just go do that. I can run my mouth for a while. I hope over the years God has purified that motive in me. But I'm lying if I tell you that every week I don't have to fight the grossness inside me that just wants to be impressive to you. If you can relate to that, it's probably because you too have fallen victim to this life for God posture. The more I perform, the more my God will love me and the more of the people around me will respect me. And suddenly our service to the Father simply becomes currency for comparison. And when we do that enough, when we do that enough, one of two things happens. Either we give up and we say, I can't compare to the people around me. I'm nobody. I'm nothing. I don't matter. I'll never matter in the church. I'm just kind of doing my little thing. I'm just staying in my box. People aren't going to respect me and we just forget it. We become discouraged and disheartened and we walk away from all that. Or we just double down and we become me monsters and we just perform, perform, perform. Look at me, look at all the things that I'm doing. When we don't even really want to be doing any of the things anyway, we just want the respect that they'll garner. And what happens when we do that is this last terrible thing that comes from this posture. We become deaf, blind, and numb to God's relentless and continual love for us. When we try to perform our way into God's love, to perform our way into the admiration from others, we become deaf, blind, and numb to the continual stream of God's wonderful affection to us. I wonder how many of you feel that way this morning. I wonder how many of you feel blinded and numbed to the fact that God loves you. I told you earlier that even as I preach that we're not disappointments to God, that he looks at us and he loves us. He's a loving father. We're not disappointments to him. I confess to you that I don't feel that truth. Every time I read about the love of the father, I don't know how much I feel that love. I feel that this performance, this idea of accomplishing enough for him, creates this voice in our head that's so loud that we need to do more, do more, do more, do more, that we drown out the voice of God that is telling us over and over again that he loves us and that we're enough for him. And we know this is true. The Bible shouts it at us. It tells us that the Lord is gracious and slow to anger and abounding in love and he is good to us. It tells us that give thanks to the Lord for he is good. His love endures forever. It tells us that he is love. It tells us that he loved us so much that he sent his son Jesus to die for us. Listen to this. If you're in this room, you probably know that this is true. If you're watching online, you probably know that this is true. The Bible screams at us that God loves us. Do you realize that he loves you so much that when you sinned and you messed up that relationship, he sent his son to die for you. His son whom he loved and whom he was well pleased to die for you so that you could have a path to spend eternity with him. Do you understand? God wants your soul and your presence in his life so much that he sent his son so that he could spend eternity with you. That's the whole reason that he did it? Y'all, I don't want to spend a week with any of you. Right? We don't want to spend that much time with anybody. What would you do to spend a week with a stranger? Nothing. I wouldn't give anything. I don't want to do that. God loves you so much that he sent his son to spend eternity with you. There couldn't be a more clear message of love coming out of Scripture than that truth. But yet we convince ourselves that we're somehow, we're the one. Everyone else in this room, they deserve it. But us, we should know better. And we're the one who doesn't deserve God's love. We're the one who can't hear that voice. We're the one who can't let it wash over us. And so we either get more discouraged or we try harder. And the whole time we make ourselves blind, deaf, and numb to this message of love that comes out of Scripture. And so my hope this morning, more than anything else, is that maybe for a few minutes that voice in your head that tells you that you're not good enough, that tells you that you're not worthy of the Father's love, that tells you He's going to be disappointed in you as soon as he gets to see you, that that voice that tells you to push harder and to do more and that you're not doing your part, that maybe that voice this morning for just a second will shut up long enough for you to hear the actual voice of God pouring out of Scripture, telling you over and over again that he loves you, that you're enough for him, that he waits like the father in the story of the prodigal son with open arms and runs to you. And that if you are here this morning or you're watching and you don't know him, you don't know Jesus yet, he is pursuing you. He is chasing after you. He is leaving everybody behind and coming after just you. He wants you so much that he died for you so that he could spend eternity with you. Can we please stop muting that voice coming out of Scripture and hear it? And accept God's love for us and quit trying to perform for it? My hope as we wrapped up with this posture this week is that over these last four weeks that God has primed our hearts, that he's revealed some things in us about why we follow him, about why we call God our Father and Jesus our Savior. And that as he's primed and readied our hearts that as we come back next week for the proper posture, life with God, that we will be ready and eagerly and earnestly desirous of what that posture is and what it looks like to be before Father for all the right reasons and finally find a way to walk with him that is fulfilling and life-giving and enriching so that we can hear the voice of the Father saying to us every day that he loves us, that we are adopted sons and daughters of the us. You're gracious. You're slow to anger. You're abounding in love. May we believe that we don't have to perform for you. May everything that we do be an outflowing of the love that you offer to us. God, help us to quit trying so hard to earn a thing that we already have. God, if any of us have adopted this posture of living our life for you, and our service has become currency for comparison, and it's driven us to this place where we assume that you're disappointed in us because we're simply not doing enough, may we please just be still this morning. Just calm down. Sit in your presence and bask in your love. May we feel that even as we finish up and sing. May we feel that as we go throughout our week. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. I'm loving getting to share these times with you on Sunday morning. I hope you're watching along with us live. This morning we arrive at the end of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus was the greatest storyteller to ever live. And one of the main ways he taught was through parables, short fictional stories that are used to make a moral point. And this morning, we arrive at a parable that has confused me and dumbfounded me my entire life. Every time I come across this parable, I read it and I go, God, I don't know what that means. I don't know how to make sense of that. I don't know how to apply that. I don't understand it. I even have a note in my Bible. You can't see it, but there's a note right here that says, Lord, help me see this. Help me understand this parable. And that's why I put it in this series, because I wanted to force myself to dig in and do the work and understand this part of God's word that has always eluded me. So this morning we're covering the parable of the shrewd manager. You can find it in Luke chapter 16 verses 1 through 13. So if you have a Bible there at home, I want to encourage you to open that up. Again, if you have family around, open that up and look at God's Word together. Go through it together. It's always a great practice and habit to interact with the text as you're being taught the text. So open up Luke chapter 16, look in verses 1 through 13, and you'll see the parable there that has eluded me for my entire life. As I dug into the study this week, I became more and more grateful that God kind of pointed me in this direction because I love the message that comes out of this parable, and I find it to be an incredibly challenging one for us as believers. And I say as believers because that's an important part of this parable. If you'll look at the beginning of chapter 16, it says, Meaning Jesus has now turned his attention to just his disciples. Previously, he was addressing the crowds, the tax collectors and the religious leaders and the lay people and just the people in and around Jerusalem or Galilee. And now he has turned his focus directly to the disciples. And there aren't too many parables that are addressed just to them. Most parables are told to the crowds, are told to everyone who can hear, and there's this layered meaning. And sometimes Jesus will go back and explain the parable to the disciples later, like the parable of the sower that we covered weeks ago. But this one is just for the disciples. This one is just for an audience that has claimed with their life, Jesus, we are following you and our lives are about your agenda. We have committed to serving you. So if you're a believer this morning, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then it's my firm conviction that God's called us to be disciples, and therefore, as Jesus addresses his disciples in chapter 16, he's addressing us, you and I, as believers. He's addressing an audience that has committed, and this is what we do when we accept Christ as our Savior, to following Jesus and to use our life serving him. That's our commitment. It's the same commitment the disciples made. And Jesus is saying, okay, in light of that commitment, let me tell you something. So if you're watching this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian, I'm so grateful that you're doing this and investing in your spiritual health in this way. And I hope that this helps move you down the road a little bit spiritually. But I want you to know that this one doesn't apply to you yet. This is one that you can just kind of stand back and consider if you want to be a part of that. But if you're a believer, then Jesus is speaking directly to you. And the parable goes like this. He says there was a master who had a manager in his employ. And the manager's responsibility was to manage all of the accounts, all of the wealth of the master. And the master finds out that the manager's not doing a very good job, that he's squandering his wealth, that he's managing it poorly. And he realizes it's time to fire the manager and bring in somebody new. And the manager gets word of this. He realizes that the master is going to fire him. And he's smart. He starts to look out for himself. And he starts to figure out, what can I do to take care of myself after I get fired? And I love the discussion that he has internally. In scripture, we see that he says that he's too weak to dig and he's too proud to beg. So he's got to figure something else out. And I love that because I think a lot of us, if we were put in this situation, we would go, gosh, I am not in good enough shape to do manual labor. And I'm way too proud to go out there and ask for a handout. So I better figure this out. And he gets the idea that what he's going to do is he's going to go around to the people who owe a debt to his master, and he's going to forgive them a portion of that debt to curry favor with them to kind of create his own golden parachute so that when he loses his job, he'll have somebody that'll give him maybe a place to stay or maybe a couple days worth of food or maybe they'll actually give him a job. So he comes up with this plan to curry favor amongst the debtors to his master to take care of himself in his own life. And so he calls the people who owe his master money, he calls them in and he looks at one and he says, what do you owe my master? And the guy says, well, I owe him 100 measurements of oil. And he says, tell you what, take your bill, write down 50 really quick, go ahead and pay it, and we'll call it even, okay? He gives him 50 measures of oil for free. Then the next guy comes in, he says, what do you owe the master? He says, well, I owe him 100 measures of wheat. And he goes, tell you what, sit down, write on your bill that you only owe 80, and we'll just go from there. And he's forgiving them of their debt to curry favor with them. And that's all the way down through verse 8. And I would expect, if you've read other parables, if you've followed along, I would expect at this point for Jesus to use the master to drop the hammer on the manager. And the point would be that you need to settle up your debts. The point would be like, now you have to pay tenfold what you gave them because it wasn't yours and that we shouldn't steal. I would expect Jesus to really give this manager what for. But that's not what he says at all. As a matter of fact, in verse eight, it says that the master commended the manager for his shrewdness. And I've always gotten to that part of the parable and gone like, what? It feels contrary to everything that Jesus teaches. It was dishonest. It was slick. It was sly. It was icky. Why would the master, who in this case is holding the place of God in the parable, why would God, why would the master commend the manager? And it only gets weirder from there. Listen to what Jesus says. Pick it up in verse 8. It says, What? And then he says this. What? What does that mean? My whole life. I mean, I read that when I was a kid. I'm in high school and I'm reading that and I'm like, yeah, I don't understand that one yet. And then I go to Bible college and I encounter it again with all of the classes that I've taken. And I'm going, yeah, I'm not really sure. That's very clear. And then I go to grad school, and at some point or another, I got this Bible. I got this Bible as an adult. In my 30s, I wrote this note, help me to see this. Still, at every stage of my Christian walk, I read this story. I'm dumbfounded by it. I put it down, and I go, yeah, I don't see it. And so as I dug into it this week and looked at what other people said about it and thought about it, and as I prayed through it, I think I came to the conclusion that there's these two clarifying questions that can help us understand the parable. That if we'll ask these two questions about the parable, I think we can begin to understand it better and then apply the challenging message from it. The two questions to help us understand the parable better are what ability is Jesus acknowledging and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? What ability in this parable is Jesus acknowledging with the disciples and to the disciples and to us, and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? I think if we'll answer those questions, we can arrive at an understanding of this parable that is really very helpful and challenging. To that first question, what ability is Jesus acknowledging? I believe as we look at this, he's acknowledging within all of us the ability and the knack and the knowledge to play politics. Now, no one says that they like politics, right? No one says that they like playing politics. You'll never meet anybody who's like, you know what I love? I just love kind of sch it. We know how to do it. How many of your boss's jokes have you laughed at that weren't funny? How many times do you share a story just to get the reaction in the room that you need so that people will look at you and think you're great? How many of your father-in-law's jokes have you laughed at that are not funny? Now, I know that my dad is going to be watching this sermon, and dad, you need to know that 100% of Jen's laughter has been authentic over the years. Every bit of it, you're hilarious. But for the rest of us, how many times have we laughed at our father-in-law's jokes when they're not funny? How many times have we said nice things that we don't mean because it's the right thing to do? Parents, we play politics with our kids. We know how to ask them to do certain things to get our way so that they don't resist us, so that they just go along with us. Wives, you know how to do this to your husbands. You know exactly how to frame up a suggestion so that the big weekend project is his idea and not yours, right? Even our kids know how to do this. My daughter is four and she knows how to play politics. She knows how to use everything at her disposal to further her agenda. There have been nights when she'll get up out of bed and I'm the first person that she sees and she knows she's supposed to stay in bed, but she'll hug me and she'll say, Daddy, will you lay down with me? And I'll say, sweetheart, why do you need me to lay down with you? You need to go to bed. And she says, because I'm lonely. She's not lonely. She sleeps in that bed by herself every night. She's not lonely, but she knows that I'm a sucker. She knows that I'm going to have sympathy for her. She knows I'm going to feel bad for her and that I'm easy to take advantage of in that state. So she says, Dad, I'm lonely. Will you please lay down with me? She knows what she's doing. And what Jesus is saying in this is that we all know what we're doing. We even have words and phrases for it. We know what it means to grease a palm. We know that we're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. I don't know what that means, but I know that I shouldn't do it. We know that we're not supposed to bite the hand that feeds us. We all do this. We all have used our own shrewdness, our own ability, our own wit, our own charm, our own whatever innate abilities that we have to advance our own agenda. And he's telling the disciples, you know how to do this too. I think what Jesus wants us to see in part of this parable is that we all have a little bit of the shrewd manager in us. We all do. What that manager did is he marshaled the resources available to him, both internal and external, to further his own agenda. He used his own talent and his charm and his wit and his intellect and in concert with the wealth of the master to further his own agenda, to build his own kingdom, to serve himself. He made it about him. And what Jesus wants us to see and wants his disciples to see is that we all have this ability. We all have certain gifts and talents and innate abilities. We all have internal and external resources that we use at different times to build our kingdom and to further our agenda. We are all shrewd like the manager. We've all done it. Because we've all done that, because there's a little bit of that manager in all of us, the second question is hugely important. And answering this question is really when the light bulb started to go off about what this parable is about to begin with. The second question we asked is, with whose wealth is the manager being generous? With whose wealth is the manager being generous? And the answer is the master's. It's not even his wealth. It's the master's wealth. And again, I think this is where the disciples started to realize what Jesus was talking about. And this is where I started to realize what Jesus was talking about. He's trying to get the disciples to acknowledge, listen, the resources that you have, the money that we have, it's not your money. It's God's money. He gave it to you. Everything that you've been entrusted with, the resources that we have, the money that we have, God's made you a steward of that. That's his money. That belongs to him, and he's entrusted it to you. And I think we take it a step further, and we look at the shrewdness of the manager and what that requires, and we acknowledge that the gifts that we have, we didn't earn those gifts. We didn't place those gifts in ourselves. We didn't give ourselves those things. God did. And so I can almost see Jesus looking at the disciples and going, Peter, your courage and your willingness to be the first one out of the boat, your willingness to say the difficult thing, I gave that to you. That's not your resource. That's mine. John, your empathy and your love for others and your depth of knowledge and insight, I gave that to you. Matthew, your knack with money, I gave that to you. Those are all gifts that were given to them by the Father. And I think what Jesus wants the disciples to see and in turn us is that everything that we have, everything that we have was given to us by God. It's not our resource, it's his. And just like we marshal our resources and our abilities to build our own kingdom, what Jesus wants the disciples to see is that because the gifts that we have are his, it is his expectation that we would use those and leverage those to build his kingdom rather than our own. I remember when I understood this for the first time, when that particular light bulb went off in my life. I was 28 or 29 years old. I was a student pastor at my previous church. And that church had a pretty big youth group, and the youth group, it had cool kids in it. The kids were athletes. They were funny. They were charming kids. They were sharp. And I started in April or May and took them to camp in the summer and remember thinking,, how am I gonna win these kids over? How am I gonna get them on my side so that I can minister to them? They really liked their previous youth pastor and I was kind of stepping into his shadow and it's like, well, how am I gonna win them over? And that first day, that Monday afternoon, we had free time and as was my habit, I went to the ball courts. And you grab a basketball, and you throw it out on the court, and everybody comes running. And for a few hours, I played basketball with my guys, with the guys in the youth group. And God, for whatever reason, blessed me with a modicum of athleticism, not a lot. And if you think I'm bragging about being athletic, I can remember the specific moment in my life when I realized I was not an athlete. It involved an African soccer player in college running over me, putting me on my chest, scoring a goal, and then jogging back while he winked at me, okay? So I can remember the exact moment in my life when I realized, dude, you are not athletic. But I did have some ability to hang in there with the fellas. And so we played basketball all afternoon. And simply by playing basketball and by being competent and by staying on the court and staying on teams and doing the right thing, I was able to win them over. That afternoon changed things. The months previous, it was really hard to have conversation with those guys. And after that, it was easy. Something clicked. And I fell into place as a student pastor. And it dawned on me there at Look Up. You know, my whole life, I had been reasonably athletic. Not very athletic, but enough to get by. I had been at least a little bit funny. I knew how to kind of charm people. And my whole life, I just assumed that I had those gifts to build my kingdom. Remember in high school, I used those things. I leveraged everything that I had. I leveraged all my resources to get people to like me, to get girls to like me, to get guys to think I was awesome, to get people to want to be my friend. It was all about Nate. I used it to build my kingdom. And it wasn't until look up at the end of my 20s with the new youth group of kids there that I realized, oh my goodness, God didn't make me serviceable on a basketball court for my own good so that I could get people to like me. He didn't give me the ability to come up with a joke or to say a funny thing in the right moment to win people over to me. He has tailor-made me for this season in my life. He knows that the way you win over high schoolers is to be able to run around with them. He knows that the easiest way to connect with any group of dudes is to throw a ball out there and run around and get to know them that way. That's worked on the mission field. When I've gone to Honduras, I can't even speak their language, but I grab a soccer ball and I throw it out on the field and I run around with them and suddenly there's a connection. And I realized in that moment, my goodness, God didn't give me these small gifts so that I could get people to like me for the reasons that I've always used them. He didn't make me kind of funny so that I could win people over to me. He gave those things to me. He tailor made me so that I could connect with these guys that I was going to be ministering to. God knew in my future, he is going to have to connect with high school students, so let me gift him and enable him in such a way that he's going to be able to connect with these kids. And I realized, my goodness, my whole life I've been like the shrewd manager and leveraged all the resources, internal and external, to further my own agenda and to build myself up when God gave me these things to build his kingdom. God gave me these things, not to draw them into myself, but to draw them into God. And since then, I've become increasingly convinced that the Christian life is a gradual realization that all I have is God's, and I'm expected to leverage everything to build his kingdom. I really think that's true. The Christian life is this gradual expectation, this peeling back of the onion of one layer and then the next layer and then the next layer until we gradually understand that everything that we have has been gifted to us for the purpose of leveraging it to build God's kingdom. Yet so often we don't realize that and we use those things to further our kingdom. And Jesus wanted the disciples to see this reality. That if you don't pay attention, if you don't listen to me, you're going to have these gifts and these talents and these resources, but you're just going to be like the shrewd manager and you're just going to use them to build up your own kingdom, and there's something bigger than that going on here. This is why he makes the point that he makes. He says, listen, unless I can trust you with little things, to be shrewd in little things, how can I give you more? Unless you can take that shrewdness and that resources that I've given you and apply those to building my kingdom in little ways, how can I entrust you with bigger ways? If you won't leverage everything you have on this side of eternity, how can I welcome you into that side of eternity? Suddenly, that portion of the parable makes sense. And you know, I see people at Grace doing this in so many ways. I think of somebody at the church who's become a really good friend of mine, who is fortunate and is in a spot in life where they don't have to work. But recently, he had an opportunity come up, like a contract-type deal, a temporary agreement, where he had the opportunity to generate some more income for himself. And he told me, you know, I think I am going to pursue that. But recently, God has laid on his heart just the important work that some nonprofits are doing. And so he told me that he is going to pursue that opportunity to make that money, not to keep it for himself, but so that he can funnel that into the nonprofits that he believes are building God's kingdom and doing God's work. That's a man whose eyes have been opened to the gradual realization that everything he has in his life, his ability to close the sale, to do the deals, to manage the relationships, to play the necessary politics within those kinds of deals and structures, that everything that he's been given, he's now marshalling to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think that that is the surest sign of someone in whom the gospel has taken root is that we realize what Jesus is trying to communicate to us in that parable, that, oh my goodness, everything I have is not about me. It's about building God's kingdom. I think about Rob Hounchell. In just this small way, a couple years ago, he realized the church didn't have a bassist. And apparently God has gifted him with some musical ability, so he bought a bass and he taught himself how to play it so he could serve the church in that way. And he stands right back there with no light on him, half the Sundays, and he plays the bass for the sake of the church to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think about Elaine Morgan, who just quietly behind the scenes does so much. Unless you're an elder or part of the missions committee or in the children's ministry, you don't see everything that a woman like that does. And we have a bunch of people like that who show up at all the events and all the things and self to see that, hey, everything we have is God's and we need to leverage it to build his kingdom. But I think we need to see the layers of that unfolding more and more and think to ourselves, God, how would you have me use my resources? How would you have me marshal my abilities to build your kingdom? We need to begin collectively asking questions like, Father, my money is not my money, it's your money. How would you have me deploy it to build your kingdom? Father, you've made me good at building things. You've made me good at starting things. You've made me entrepreneurial. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've given me a business acumen. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've made me diplomatic. I'm a good people person. How can I use that to draw people towards you? God, you've given me a heart of care and of concern and of empathy and passion. How can I use that to express your love in the community and draw people to you and not to myself? We need to begin to ask questions like that and learn the lesson from this parable that everything we have is from God. And it's with his wealth and his resources that we are to be generous and we are to be shrewd and we are to deploy those to build his kingdom. That's why Jesus finishes the parable the way he does. It's the only way that he can finish it. He says, listen guys, now that you understand that I have given you everything that you have and my expectation is that you would use that to build my kingdom and further my agenda rather than your own, you need to understand that no man can serve two masters. There's no possible way you can further your agenda and my agenda simultaneously all the time. Sometimes they're going to conflict. He says at the end, no man can serve both God and money, which I think is another way of saying no man can serve both God and himself. We can't further God's agenda and our own agenda at the same time. They are going to conflict, and eventually we will love one and hate the other. And I think so often in life we straddle the fence where in this way I'm furthering God's agenda, but in this way I'm looking out for myself. And Jesus says, no, I need you all on team Jesus here. Marshall everything you have, all the resources, all the gifts, all the abilities to further his kingdom, not our own. And as we sit and we think about that, what it would look like to use every last square inch of our life, all of the resources available to us to further God's agenda and not our agenda, to build God's kingdom and not our kingdom, I think it can feel pretty intimidating. Almost like sitting at the bottom of a mountain going, gosh, I've got to climb that? How in the world? I don't even see a way to the top. I'm so far from marshalling everything I have to serve God. I'm so invested in building my own kingdom that I don't even know what to do to begin to build God's kingdom. And because it feels like such a lofty goal, I think sometimes we might shy away from it. But if we think of it as a mountain to climb, we don't have to know every step along the way. We just have to know the next one or the first one. And back in another lifetime in February, when we met in person, I shared a sermon about discipleship. I said, at Grace, we're going to define discipleship by simply taking the next step of obedience. So this morning, I would ask you in light of this parable, in light of the reality that everything we have has been given to us by God and it is his expectation that we would leverage that with all of our shrewdness and ability to build his kingdom rather than our own. What's the next thing in your life that you can leverage to build God's kingdom. Not what are all the steps, what's the next step? Not how are we going to climb the whole mountain, just how are we going to take this first step? I hope that you'll discuss that this week in your families and in your small groups. What's the next thing that you can give over to God that you can begin to leverage in your life to further his agenda rather than your own. And maybe we can continue to learn from the parable of the shrewd manager. Let's pray. Father, first we thank you. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. Now, give us the courage to acknowledge them. Give us the courage to acknowledge that you made some of us smart and you made some of us charming and you made some of us good with people and you made some of us humble. You gave us each gifts and abilities, God. Let us embrace what those are and acknowledge that they are from you. And let us leverage everything that we have, both internal and external, to build your kingdom rather than our own. Let us not serve ourselves so often and so diligently that we grow to hate you as a master. But let us serve you so much that we fall more deeply in love with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name 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.

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.