Sermons tagged with Eternity

Good morning, Grace. It's so good to get to spend some time with you in this way. I'm really hopeful that we can be together again in person, but for now, caution is winning the day, and so we'll get to enjoy church in our different living rooms wherever we are. This is the last part in our series called James, where we're going through the book of James, and we're going to land today in what I believe to be is a very hopeful passage on prayer. I think that this is a really encouraging and empowering passage, and my hope is that by the time I'm done, that you'll feel empowered by prayer as well, and you'll be inspired to cling to prayer and to persevere in prayer. As we approach this topic, I'm reminded of Memorial Day 2017. 2017 is the year that I got to come to Grace and become the senior pastor. And some of y'all know this story, so if you do, bear with me. But maybe it can be a little reminder. And for those who don't know, when I got to Grace in April of 2017, things weren't great. Financially, we were really struggling. We were in debt. We didn't really have a way to go into more debt. We didn't have any more lines of credit to tap on. And so it was a little bit dire. And my goal was simply to just make it, to make it through the summer, to make it into the fall, to see if we could get a little bit of momentum going. And I'll never forget, we were headed into Memorial Day weekend, the last weekend in May. The person handling the finances at the time told me, Nate, we're in trouble. We're going to be behind on some bills in May. We're already behind on giving. We need giving to be really good this weekend. And I asked what the number needed to be, and they said we need $15,000 this weekend. $15,000 was more than we had brought in any single week in 2017. We were bringing in like $8,500 or $9,000 a week. So $15,000 was, that was pie in the sky. That wasn't going to happen. And on top of that, it was Memorial Day weekend. And you may not know this about church world, but one of the things that pastors are aware of is Memorial Day weekend, that service is the lowest attended service and the lowest giving service of the year, every year in every church in the history of America. That's just how it went. And so not only do we need more giving than we've had in any single week for the whole year, but we needed a Memorial Day weekend, which feels impossible. So the finance person told me that in the middle of the week, and honestly, I didn't tell anybody. I just knelt and I prayed. I said, God, we need something here. We need a miracle. This church can't go into debt. I'm not ready to move back to Georgia yet. I just got here. We need you to show up this weekend, God. And so we had the services, and I went into the office on Monday, and usually Tuesday or Wednesday, I get a little financial update, and so I'm just hitting refresh on my email browser, just waiting for the news to come in. And I think it was Wednesday morning, the news came in. I see that I got the email from the finance guy. I break out in the cold sweats, and I click on it, and I immediately just lost my mind. $28,000 came in Memorial Day weekend 2017. I couldn't believe it. It wasn't $15,000. It wasn't just a little bit shy of that. It was $28,000. That was the biggest single weekend giving in all of 2017. I couldn't believe it. I was floored. And God made it apparent that he answers prayers. He made it apparent that day to me, Nate, my hand is on grace. My hand is on you. I answer prayer. I hear you. I've been moved by prayer. And here you go. Here's your answer to prayer. And so that stands out in my memory as a time when prayer buoyed my faith. When prayer bolstered my faith. When I prayed fervently for something in the quietness of my own heart and in his word. And I hope that you have stories like that too. I hope that there are times in your life that you can remember where you prayed fervently for something and God answered. God delivered. He gave you what it was that you needed. He reconciled that relationship. He healed that person. He brought that thing back. He saw you through that circumstance. I hope that if you're a believer that we all have instances and times that we remember God answering our prayers. Because instances like that, like Memorial Day for me, like whatever it is that you think of when you think of answered prayer, instances like that help us believe in passages like this. If you have a Bible at home, I want you to look at James chapter 5. I'm going to pick it up in verse 13. This is what James writes about prayer. You know, when I was a kid and I encountered that verse, I encountered it in the King James Version, and it said, Other translations say that the prayer of a righteous person is powerful in its working. And I used to think, well, yeah, sure, like the prayers of righteous people, of those people that we write about in the Bible, of those pastors that are really good people, like the righteous people, as I'm thinking about this as a kid when I encountered the verse, those are the people who have effective prayers. But here's the deal. If you're a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, you're righteous. You're as righteous as you're ever going to get. Because Scripture teaches us that when God looks at you, he sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ. Therefore, your affectionate and fervent prayers are powerful in their working. They availeth much. Christians, I want you to know based on this passage, your prayers work. When you're grieving, go to God in prayer. When you're joyful, praise him in prayer. When someone is sick, pray over them. When a situation is bad, pray over it. Your prayers work. They are powerful in their working. They work to much avail. And sometimes we have stories in our life that remind us that this passage is true. But here's the flip side of this passage. Here's the thing that I wish that someone would have told me somewhere along the way. I wish growing up, I would have heard a pastor talk about this passage in the way that I'm about to talk about it. I wish that somewhere in my formative years, back when I knew what it was like to have a pastor, that one of them, and maybe they did and I just didn't pick up on it, but I wish that one of them would have talked about the fact that sometimes this passage actually makes us doubt our faith. Sometimes passages like this make us actually not believe the Word of God, make us wonder if God really does keep His promises. And I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I had to encounter this question the hard way. But I think if I'm being honest, that when we read passages like this, that sometimes we tend to doubt it. And that makes us doubt the truth of Scripture. When this slapped me in the face, and I wish that someone had walked me through this before it happened, was in the spring of 2010. From 2007 to 2010, I taught Bible at a school called Covenant Christian Academy. And there was a kid in the class that I was a sponsor for named Alex Williams. And Alex was a great kid. He was just a charming guy. He had this winning smile. He would do anything for you. Super nice guy. I loved Alex, and I love Alex to this day. And Alex got a lot of those traits from his dad, Ron. And during high school, during his high school years, Ron contracted cancer. I forget which kind. And we watched Ron slowly deteriorate. Alex was an athlete, and Ron was always on the sidelines, whether it was football or basketball, cheering. He was the loudest voice there. You could always hear him. He was boisterous and loud, and it was really fun to have Ron around. But the cancer began to eat away at him until in his senior year, Ron would attend in a wheelchair. And I can remember the spring of Alex's senior year, we prayed over Ron. Fathers and coaches that were involved in that school who were elders in that church, according to the passage here, came together, I'll never forget it, in my classroom at Covenant. And Ron sat in the middle of us and somebody even brought oil to anoint him which is something that some denominations still observe. And we poured it over his head and we placed our hands on Ron and we prayed, we prayed a prayer of faith that Ron would be healed. And then weeks later, Ron died. And I remember thinking, how can this be true and our prayer not be answered? God, you said that if we would do these things, if we would gather and we would anoint his head with oil and we would pray, God, you said that he would be healed. You said that he would be raised up. And he's dead. God, you didn't keep your promise. And I'd be willing to bet that you have that story too. I'd be willing to bet that for most of us believers, we can point to a time in our life where we prayed fervently for something in accordance to God's will. We asked in his name. There was two or three gathered there and we asked in his name. And he promises to give us what we asked for. We prayed for healing that didn't come. We prayed for more years that weren't granted. And it makes me want to ask, what do we do when it seems like this passage isn't true? What do we do when it seems like this isn't true, when it seems like this can't be trusted, when it seems like these are just the words of James that make us feel good but aren't really a truth that we can anchor ourselves in? What do we do when it feels like this passage isn't true? And again, I wish that someone would have talked about this with me. Because I think the thing that you do is you go back to the passage and you read it again. You go back to God's Word and you ask, what did I miss? What did I presume that I didn't see the first time? And so when we read it again, here's what we find. It says, What we notice here is that there's a future tense. He will be healed. He will be raised up when we pray the prayer of faith. But there's no sense of the timeline of this. There's no sense of when it's going to happen. And here's the reality with Ron. Ron was healed. He wasn't healed in the temporal. He was healed in the eternal. Ron was raised up by God. He wasn't raised up in the temporal. He was raised up in the eternal. And so the reality is that he will heal us. He will raise us up. He does answer those prayers. And it took me a minute to figure that out. We were praying fervently, God, heal Ron. And he did. He just chose to heal him for eternity rather than heal him for a few years. God, raise him up. He did. He raised him up into heaven where he's no longer sick, where he lives in a utopia, where he walks with his Savior and he waits for his children. The truth of it is that Ron was healed, that Ron was lifted up. And this is a concept that even my four-year-old gets. My four-year-old Lily somehow understands this. A few weeks ago, we were back home visiting Jen's family. And if you've been following along in church, you know that Jen's dad isn't doing very well. And truthfully, he looks pretty sick. And after Lily spent some time with him, just Lily and I were in the car, we were driving somewhere, I think to pick up breakfast or something, and she said, Daddy, how come Pawpaw's not getting better? He's sick, but he's not getting better. How come he's not getting better? And I said, well, sweetheart, there's kind of two kinds of being sick. There's the kind of sick where it just lasts for a little bit and then you get better, like a cold. And then there's the kind of sick where you just get sick and you stay sick and you don't get better. And she said, okay. I said, does that make sense? She said, uh-huh, yes, Daddy. And then she thought about it for a second, and she said, but when Pawpaw dies, he won't be sick anymore. And I looked in the rearview mirror, like, where did this four-year-old get this? I said, that's right, sweetheart. He won't. And she goes, yeah, because he'll be in heaven with Jesus. And you don't get sick in heaven. And I said, yeah, that's true. And she goes, and then one day when I die, I'll get to see him again too, and neither of us will be sick. Right. That's it. And I think that if she can get it and comfort her own four-year-old self about her pawpaw who's going to pass away soon, and she knows that he's going to be better when he gets there, that we're praying fervently for his healing, and the reality of it is God's going to heal him. He's either going to heal him for a little bit or he's going to heal him for forever. And she knows that. And she's already looking forward to the forever healing because that's the bigger answer to prayer. When you pray in faith, when there's faith in God, when the prayer is based on a faith in God that was won by Jesus, then we know that we have eternal life and God will heal us. In order to understand this passage and how it's not contradictory with some of our experiences, we need to understand that we pray in the temporal, but God answers in the eternal. We pray our prayers in the temporal, in the here and now, with the blinders on of just these weeks or just these months or years. We pray urgently for the here and now, and God answers in the eternal. He sees all of time. And I don't think we grasp just how big of a deal eternity is. The Bible tells us that our life is like a mist or a vapor. Paul went through the worst of sufferings, and he says, though we endure these sufferings for a little while. James tells us at the beginning of his book that when you endure trials, consider them pure joy. They're not that bad. How can they say this? Because their eyes are on eternity. They're praying eternal prayers. James can say he will be lifted up because when you pray in faith, they will be lifted up, either for a little while or for forever, but they will be lifted up and they will be healed. We pray in the temporal, but God answers in the eternal. And what that means is sometimes God doesn't answer in the time frame that we want. God doesn't heal the relationship or fix the problem or bring about the answer to the question in the time frame that we would choose. Sometimes we have to wait. We're told to be patient in waiting for God because he doesn't hurry. And sometimes it's answered in eternity. And sometimes it's answered in our life. It's just answered later and in a way that we don't anticipate. I have a friend back home named Jenny. When she was growing up, she was Jenny Payne. Now she's Jenny Smith. And when Jenny was a little girl, she had two older brothers, and her mom was pregnant. And she prayed fervently as a little girl. She wanted a sister named Jessica. And she prayed really hard for this sister named Jessica. And then the birth of her sibling came about, and it's a boy named Jimmy. God doesn't answer prayer. He doesn't keep his promises. Her four-year-old heart is broken. But as she gets older, her faith matures, and she kind of understands, and she accepts that blow. And then one day, her brother starts dating somebody in their 20s, and they start to get really serious. And they end up getting married, and Jenny loves this girl. And Jenny, in her own language, said this girl is like a sister to her, and her name is Jessica. You want to tell me God didn't answer prayer? You want to tell me God didn't hear that four-year-old Jenny praying for a sister named Jessica, and that he didn't answer it? It just wasn't the way that she expected. But God listens. He hears and he answers. We just have to wait. We just need to be patient. We just need to trust him even in the midst of hurting and suffering when it feels like everything is destitute and messed up and this couldn't possibly be picked up and arranged in such a way that glorifies you, God. Even in the midst of that, we need to be patient and understand that God hears, and he's listening, and he's answering prayers. It just isn't in our timetable because we pray in the temporal, and he answers in the eternal. Maybe that's why he precedes this passage on prayer with the passage imploring us to be patient. I don't think it's a mistake that the two are married up there in chapter 5. Look at what he says in verse 7 of chapter 5. He says, Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it until it receives the early and the late rains. Just be patient on the Lord, like a farmer watching the field. If you watch it every day, God, please bring me crops today. God, please bring me crops today. It's going to seem like they're never going to come, but if you'll just be patient and wait for the late and the early rains, like a farmer, God shows up. He'll answer in due time. And then down in verse 11, he says this, James warns us. I'm about to talk about prayer. I'm about to tell you to pray. There's going to be some times when it feels like God isn't answering prayer. So be patient. Be patient like the farmer is patient. And be considered blessed. Remember that those who wait, those who persevere should be considered blessed. And then he brings up Job. It's interesting to me that he would bring up Job as an example there. For those unfamiliar with Job, he is one of the classic figures in the Old Testament. There's a whole book dedicated to his story. He was the most righteous man on earth, and Satan asked permission to tempt him and to tear him away from God. And God said that Satan could do that. And in the course of that, he took away everything that Job held dear. He lost his children. He lost the people that worked for him. He lost his livestock. He lost his wealth. It was so bad for Job that his wife's advice to him was to curse God and die. But he didn't. He held on steadfast to the Lord. And in the end of the story, what we see is that because of his continued faith, because of his perseverance, because he clung to prayer and he continued to believe that God kept his promises, that God restored everything that Job had lost and he built him back up. And I think it's so interesting because if there's ever been anybody who lived that would have had cause to not believe this passage that says when we pray they will be healed and they will be lifted up. If there's anyone who's ever had the right to not believe this passage and say God's not telling the truth, it's Job. Yet he didn't. He was patient and he persevered in his prayers and he clung to God and he believed in the power of, and he clung to God, and he believed in the power of prayer, and he believed in a God that kept his promises. Grace. We can anchor ourselves in prayer. We can anchor ourselves in God's Word. We can trust these pages. We can trust these promises because we serve a God who keeps his promises. And listen, I know that it doesn't feel like that this year to some of us. I know this year feels hard. It feels heavy. It feels like we might not get out of it. We are facing difficulty after difficulty. Candidly, in my family right now, it is hard. And sometimes it doesn't seem like these verses are true, but I'm telling you they are. And we can anchor ourselves in them, and we can trust in them, and we can believe in the power and the efficacy of prayer of those who are righteous. And we can believe that God is listening, and we can believe that God is answering. And if we'll only be patient, and if we'll only persevere, we will be blessed in that perseverance. So grace. Pray. Don't lose heart. Don't give up hope. Don't stop praying. Believe that if you're a Christian, that you're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that your prayers are powerful and effective and they're working. Believe that they bring about healing. Believe that people will be risen up. Go to him when you are hurting. Go to him in joy. And let's continue, no matter what, no matter how bleak things might seem sometimes, to be a people of prayer who choose to believe in the power of it and choose to believe in a God who keeps his promises. Let's pray together. Father, we know that you are good to us. We know that you love us. We know that you look out for us. We thank you that you see things in eternity, that you see past the temporal. God, we thank you that you are orchestrating things in our lives to bring about our pleasure and your glory without us even knowing or understanding. God, I thank you for the gift of hindsight where we look back on seasons of our life that we didn't understand in the moment, but now we see you working. I pray that we would have that in increasing measure. God, for those who feel weak and burdened and maybe even beaten down, may we persist in prayer. Give them strength to be patient and to cling to it and to believe. For those who have been bold in their prayers and are seeing them answered, God, we are so grateful. I pray that they would become ever more bold. And God, I pray for grace. I pray that we would be a church that prays, that we would be a church that believes, and that we would be a church who knows because you tell us that our prayers are powerful and effective. It's in your son's name we pray all these things. Amen.

This morning, we are in the last part of our series called With. We've been walking through a book by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani, talking about our postures before God, which ones are appropriate, which ones are helpful, and which ones are not. And so we've spent four weeks looking at postures that ultimately are not helpful for us, postures that ultimately lead to a spiritually empty life and are ultimately damaging. And so we've kind of just left every week where we talk about a posture, we help each other see that in ourselves, and we go, yeah, that's not good. And then we pray and we go home, and it's been kind of a downer. So this week is the resolution to all of those postures. You'll remember that the first one we talked about was life under God. And we said in this posture, the mindset is, God, I'm going to obey you and submit to your authority in exchange for your protection in my life. I'm going to obey you and then things are going to go well for me. You're going to keep me from heartache and trial. And we saw that that never happens. Life is going to involve tragedy. It's going to involve hurt. It's going to involve loss. And that what we're trying to do when we say, God, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, is we're really trying to control the universe via God. It's our subtle way of regaining control over the things that we fear, and that's ultimately empty. We talked about the life over God posture. The life over God posture says, God, I'm not really interested in your authority in my life. I'm going to live my life over you, but I am going to extract from you and your word some best practices to apply to my life so that things can go better for me. Life from God says, God, I'm going to follow you and you're going to bless me. I'm going to do the things that you want me to do. I'm going to live my life for you, and then you're going to give me all the things that I want. And then the life for God posture says, God, I'm going to live my life for you, and you're going to love me for it. I'm going to live my life making an impact for your kingdom, and because of that, I'm going to be more valuable to you than my peers. I'm going to earn your affection. And we saw that each of these were empty. And ultimately, they're empty because we're following God for his treasures. We're following God because there's a motivation that isn't God, it's these other things, and they fall short. And that's where the life with God posture becomes important. That's the right posture to have before the Father. And in life with God, we no longer use God for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. You see? We no longer use God to acquire the things. We no longer use God to acquire the blessings. We no longer go to him because of what we want from him. We go to him because we want him. We no longer use him for his treasures. He becomes our treasure. This is the right posture before the Lord, to simply be with him because he wants to be with us. The best way I've ever heard this explained, I actually have this explained to me by someone else before I had a child. I have a four-year-old daughter named Lily. But before Lily was ever an idea in 2013, somebody explained this posture to me in this way, and I thought it was perfect. So Eve, if you have kids, this will really resonate with you. Even if you don't yet have kids, I think you'll see the power in this. Lily is my favorite thing on the planet. I love doing everything with her. Yeah, that's right, I'm talking about your friend Lily. They picked up on it back there. I love doing everything with her. We've actually, on our front porch, we've turned around our porch swing so it faces the cul-de-sac where she runs around with her friends every day. And I love sitting out there and watching her play. I love watching her play soccer, kind of. I'm the coach, so I also hate it. But I love watching her play. I love when she brings me things and she says, look what I drew or look what I did. I love when she tells me about school. I love when she decides that she wants to talk to me and let me into her little world. I love Lily. But do you know my favorite thing to do with Lily is? Hugs and snugs, man. That's all I want. Hugs and snugs. I want her to climb up in my lap. I want her to let me hold on to her. And I want us to be quiet together. That's all I want. And I don't want us to be quiet together because I'm tired of hearing her talk or make noise. I want us to be quiet together because I just want us to rest together. Burt Banks, one of our great elders, he jokingly told me that he loves his grandchildren until they're too old to sit in his lap. Once they're too old to sit in his lap, he says, I have no use for them anymore. Because those of you who are parents, those of you who have had those little kids, when they're sitting in your lap, or those of you who are grandparents, when you get to hold them and simply be with them and just enjoy their presence, there's nothing better than that. There's nothing better than that. I love watching her play. I love watching her dance. I love it most when she climbs up in my lap. And sometimes I'll tell her, she'll ask me for something. I'll say, you can have that if you come give daddy hugs. And she'll say, how many hugs? And I'll say, a hundred. And she'll go, that's too many. How about 10? I'm like, all right, 10. So she crawls up on my lap, and she wraps her arms around me, and she says, you count. And she starts just pulsing out these hugs. And I always lose count, and I get more than she bargained for. And that's great. And I love those. But my favorite is when she wants to do it. My favorite is when she comes and she gives me hugs. No other reason just to do it. She just wants to be with me. That's the best. Why would we think that our Heavenly Father would want anything any different? He simply wants to be with you. He wants to enjoy your presence. He created you to be with Him. Do you understand it was out of the context of relationship that you were created? Do you understand that God looked around at the Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and said, we need to share this relationship with something. And so He created you so that you could share in a relationship with him. Do you understand that all he's ever wanted with you is not your performance, it's not even your devotion, it's just to be with him and all those other things come. And we see this desire of the Father. This is amazing. I love this part of the sermon, I really do, because I just think it helps Scripture make so much sense. Do you understand that this desire of the Father to simply be with us is seen throughout the narrative arc of the Bible? It's all through Scripture that all God wants with His children that He created is to be with you. If you look in Genesis 3, verse 8, it tells on God a little bit. Now, admittedly, I'm taking this verse totally out of context, and I'm using it to make a point that it was not intended to make, but now they become ultra-aware of everything around them. And they hear God, and they go and they hide, and God's about to come and confront them about their sin. That's what's happening in that verse. But here's what this verse tells on God that I want us to see. Understand that in Genesis 3, right before the fall, right before the fall of man and just as the first sin is committed, that it is perfect. You understand this? Creation is perfect. It is exactly as God intended. Every leaf is laying exactly where God wants it to lay. Every breeze is the exact temperature and pace that God wants it to be. Every day is exactly as cool in the morning and in the evening and at the midday as God wants it to be. Every piece of fruit hanging from the tree tastes exactly as God wants it to taste. Every interaction with every animal that Adam and Eve have goes exactly as God wants it to go. Adam and Eve, their days are mapped out exactly as God wants them to be. And in these days, apparently they were very used to hearing the sound of the Lord walking with them in the garden in the cool of the evening. It does not say they heard what sounded like God walking in the garden. Because they knew that sound. This is what God wanted to do. At perfection of creation, all God wanted to do is come down and hang out with Adam and Eve. You understand that? He created all of this so that in the evenings he could come down from heaven and be like, what did you guys do today? Want to hang out? And it says they hid themselves from the presence of God. They were used to him coming down and spending time with them. They knew what his presence felt like. They knew what it sounded like when he walked through the garden because this is what God wanted, but then sin messed it up. And when sin messed it up, God had to withdraw himself to heaven and say, I can no longer be with you because of your imperfection. The relationship that we had has been broken and so God is no longer with us. And what does God do to fix this? Isaiah tells us. He's going to send his son. And his name will be called Emmanuel. My Bible people know what Emmanuel means, don't you? God with us. And then he sends his son in the New Testament. So first God wanted to be with us. then sin messed it up so he could no longer be with us. You know what he did to fix our error? He came down to be with us. Look at what John writes in the first chapter. He starts off his amazing gospel and he says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made. And he's telling us that Jesus is the word of God. And then you skip on down to verse 13, and he writes this, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. He was with us. And we have seen his glory. Glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. God made all of creation so that he could simply be with us. Then our sin messed it up, and how did he fix it? He sent his son to be with us, to be Emmanuel God with us. The word became flesh. And it's worth pointing out here, do you understand that this is what differentiates Christianity from all other world religions? That we possess the only faith that claims that our God loves us so much that he came down to join us. Our God loves us so much that he gave up his heavenly body, his heavenly realm to condescend to be with us and get down in the muck and the mire and see the worst of us and then die for us to be with us before he went back to heaven to make a path for us to be with him for all of eternity. Do you understand that? We're the only faith that claims that. We're the only faith that claims a God who came down, who loved us enough to be with us because it's all God ever wanted. And then at the end of scripture, in Revelation chapter 21, when all is said and done, Jesus has come down. He started his, he dies for us. He starts the church. He leaves it to the disciples. We carry on that legacy until Jesus's return, which is what we're doing right now is we tell people the great news of the gospel. And then one day in Revelation, God is going to enact the end of times and a series of events are going to occur. And at the end of these series of events, Revelation 21. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and he will dwell with them, and they will be his people. And God himself will be with them as their God. The climax of all of history, to usher in eternity, the very first stroke in the most perfect picture that God could paint for us is that he is with us again, and we are with him. That's all he wants over the whole arc of scripture. He created us to be with us. We screwed it up. So he sent his son to be with us again and make a way for us to be with him for all of eternity. That's all he wants. He just wants to be with us. Everything else flows from that. His perfect picture of eternity begins with his presence with us and our presence with him. And I think that's amazing. And what we see, and I don't have time to fully unpack this this morning. This is when it's really helpful to read the book for yourself and think through it on your own. But what we see when we adopt this posture is that we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. We live life as God intended. When this is our posture, when all we want, when we match God, when God has said, you are my treasure, when we look back at God and we say, yes, and you are my treasure, and all I want is to be with you just as you want to be with me, then when we adopt this posture, we become fearless, free, blessed, and affirmed. And I choose those words very intentionally because they're the antithesis of all the other postures. And life under God, that's a posture of fear. God, all these things are out of my control. I'm really scared. Will you control the universe for me and I'll control how much I submit to you? And when we live life with God, what we see is that eternity is God's presence in heaven and eternity has already begun for his believers that we started this new life in this new body that we know God, we are reconciled with him. And in that way, heaven has been brought down to us, brought down to us by God so that we can begin to experience pieces of it now as we enjoy his presence. And we have to no longer fear death because Jesus conquered it for us. That's why the scriptures say that death has lost its sting. We have to no longer, the greatest fear any of us have in life, God has removed that from us when we live life with him. And the life over God policy, the thing that we, or posture, the thing that we fear the most is that God will be in control of us, that we won't be able to do what we want to do. I don't want your authority in my life because there's joys over here that I want to experience that I don't feel like I can if I'm submitted to you. And what we find when we live life with God is that he came to give us life to the full, that as David said, at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. There is no greater life than to be walking in lockstep with the Father, than to walk with him in the cool of the evening. And in that place, we find total and complete freedom to be exactly who he created us to be. We are everything that God ever intended when we walk with him. So we no longer need that posture. We are blessed. If you were here a couple of weeks ago, you heard Doug's, I thought, brilliant illustration of the kid who asked for a horse and his parents brought them back a car instead. He asked for a horse. They were supposed to get a horse when he became of age, but by the time he became of age, cars had been invented. So his parents gave him a car because it fit the bill of what he was asking for and was so much beyond what he could ever imagine. And he painted this great picture of in our life we ask for so many horses. We want so many simple things, and God sees beyond those so much and blesses us beyond what we could ever ask or imagine, as it says in Ephesians. And when we walk this life with God, we are blessed in ways that we could have never had the audacity to ask for. And we are affirmed. In the life for God posture, we perform so that God will love us, so that our peers will respect us, because everyone needs to be valued. Everybody needs to be told that they're loved, that I see you, and I love you, and that you're enough. And in life with God, when we're with God, when we're just with our Father and we're just basking in his presence, there is that constant voice of affirmation in our life that you are loved and I love you and you are enough. The life with God posture is the antithesis of all the others. And it's the way that we live life finally and fully as God intended. And so to me, the question becomes, okay, that's what God wants. I see it over the whole narrative arc of Scripture. I see it as the antithesis of all the others. It's the answer to them. How do I adopt this posture in my life? How do I do that? How do I practically live life with God? Again, I think it's worth diving into the book where he has four chapters to unpack what I'm going to try to distill down into eight minutes for you. But the first thing that I would say is this. We adopt this posture when we understand that the gospel is not a way to get people to heaven, it's a way to get people to God. I'll say it again. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven. It is a way to get people to God. That's not my thought. That's John Piper's thought. He's smarter than me. I stole it. I think so often we think about being saved. We think that Jesus died to get us to heaven. And when we think about heaven, we think about getting to see our lost loved ones, the people that we're going to be reunited with. We think about the sweet mansion on the streets of gold and how awesome it's going to be in this perfect utopia for all of eternity. And that's great. That's what heaven is. But Jesus didn't die to get us to heaven. He died to get us to God. To reconcile our relationship with him. Because in heaven, the first strokes God paints in the picture are that he will be with us. We will see the face of our God. We will see the love in his eyes. We will see our Savior Jesus and hear his voice for the first time. We will see the presence of the Spirit that's been guiding us as we've stumbled and tripped and fall through life. That is what Jesus died for. To get us to God. Heaven is secondary. That just happens to be where God is. He died to reunite us with him and with the Father and with the Spirit. And a good litmus test for whether or not we think about it like this is when you think about heaven, when you think about getting to be there, who are you most excited to see? Are you most excited to see a lost loved one? Or are you most excited to see the face of your Father God? Are you most excited to be reunited with someone you lost? Or are you most excited to finally get to see the face of Jesus and hear his voice? Now listen, I know that's a terribly unfair question. It's manipulative and mean. I get it. When I think about that, I think about my papa. I loved him as much as you can love anybody. He was my hero growing up. He died when I was 19. I really want him to meet Lily. I really want him to hear me preach. And I can't wait to hug him. And you have the people that you love too. And unfortunately, the older you get, the greater the population of people you want to see is in heaven. But I'm telling you, if what we long for most is to see the people we already know and not meet the God who created us, then we're not quite in a place yet where God has become our treasure. And so if we want to adopt this life with God posture and yearn for the proper things and see the gospel as a way to get to God and treasure what that is, I think the only way to do that is to know him more. I think the only way for our value of God to grow is to know him more, to learn him more, to pursue him more, to engage in the things that he wants us to engage in, to wake up daily. You've heard me say over and over again, the most important thing we can do in our lives is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. We've got to pursue him through his word and not just read it as a way to learn about God, but a way to learn who God is. The highest goal that we could have in our lives is to know God. Because the more we know him, the more we want to be with him, and the more accurately we see what the gospel is, and the more fervently we live our life for him, the more we want to be with him. I think that this is why Paul prays in Ephesians, the prayer that I've shared with you so many times. We've made this the prayer of grace. This was the prayer of Paul over his churches. I love this prayer so much that Jen's cousin, who's a calligrapher, I had her write it out. And we're in the process of getting it framed and putting it in our living room so that my family can see it every day. And this is what Paul prays for us in that prayer. I'm going to skip down to verse 17 of Ephesians chapter 3. He writes, he starts us off, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father. But then he says in 17, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Paul's chief desire for his churches was that they would know God. My chief desire for you is that you would know God. Not that life would go well, not that we would be protected, not that we would be prosperous, not that we would make money, not that we would get the job or have the relationship or dodge that pain or be able to dance through the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That's not Paul's prayer for us. Paul's prayer for us is that we would know God. And in knowing him, he becomes more lovely to us. And in becoming more lovely for us, our hearts and our souls yearn for the proper eternity. If heaven sounds boring to you, you just don't have a very good picture of who God is. Part of that's your pastor's fault. The first thing we do to adopt this posture is we understand that Jesus died to get us to God. Heaven just happens to be where he is. The second thing that we do, and I love this on a practical level for us, and I really want you guys to think about this. The second thing we can do to adopt this posture is we adopt this posture when prayer grows from communication to communion. We adopt this posture when our idea and practice of prayer grows from communication to communion. When we first start to think about prayer, when we first encounter it, when we're a child or when we get saved or when we become interested in it, whenever it might be, I think the very first thing we learn about prayer is that it's our opportunity to talk to God. When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, he said, pray like this, and he talked to God. And so the first way we encounter prayer is to think of it as speaking to God. It's this communication from us to the Father. And then once you study prayer a little bit longer, once you read more scripture, once you're around church a little bit more and you get to know the Lord a little bit better, you understand that you can listen when you pray. That sometimes being prayerful is to be silent before God and to simply listen to him. So now he's communicating with you. But in scripture, there is this deeper prayer. In life, there is this deeper prayer that's simply communion with God. It's this prayer that helps us to pray without ceasing, as we are commanded to do. It's this communing prayer that allows us to be in the presence of God. It's this communing prayer that allows us to pray as we go through our days and through our weeks, even while we're in meetings and conversations with other people. This idea of communing prayer. It's captured in the book by a conversation between Dan Rather and Mother Teresa that I really loved. Dan Rather's talking to Mother Teresa and he says, you know, I hear that you're really renowned for your prayers. So when you pray, what do you say to God? Mother Teresa says, oh, I don't say anything. I just listen. So Dan Rather says, okay. Well then, while you're listening, what does God say to you? And she says, oh, he doesn't say anything. He's just listening. And if you don't understand that, I don't know how to explain it to you. That's a different way to think about prayer. Communing with God. And you know, I hesitated on what to say here and whether or not to share this. Because this is a little wispy. And some of you, I know, I will lose you. And you will think, Nate's a weird hippie. I don't know if I can go to this church anymore. But if we were just friends, I'm friends with most of you. If you and I had the chance to sit down over a drink and talk about prayer, and I'm just talking to my friend, and we got to talk about this, and we said, what, like, this communing prayer, like, what are you talking about? Like, how does that even work? I would tell you this, because this is something that I've been thinking about for a long time. And I have books that lend themselves to this that are good traditional books. I'll be happy to email them to you if you want to know. I think there is something to meditative prayer. I think there's something to meditation. I think in our Western culture, we don't have time for that. We don't have interest in that. We don't have value for that. That's something for weird Eastern cultures. But I think we shortchange ourselves a lot when we just cast that aside. And I would even go as far to say this to my friend over drinks. I think that the other world religions and cultures that have figured out the value of meditation are groping and mimicking the meditation, the prayerful meditation that God intended us to have. I think the reason that they do it is because they're on to something and there is a peace that's found there and that God intended us to find that peace there because for a Christian, he's intended us to find him there. I think there's absolutely something to meditative contemplative prayer where we simply listen and we are simply with God. And if you think about it, how else are we going to crawl up in his lap and be still? I said my favorite times with Lily are the times when I get to hold her and we're quiet together. How else do we do that with our God who is in heaven than to simply be quiet in his presence? And you think to yourself, that's great. How do I do that? How do I just start contemplative prayer? I would say it works like anything else that we try for the first time. This last year and a half or so, I've gotten into cooking. I just like cooking. And now if you want to cook, you don't need a cookbook. You just need YouTube. And so like you just watch videos. And one of the things that I've wanted to learn to cook is the perfect steak. I've gone nuts with this. I talk with my friends about it all the time. It's probably a sin in my life by this point because I think about it so much. But I want to cook the perfect steak. And you can watch all the YouTube videos you want to watch. You can watch all the TikTok chefs you want to watch. But until you fire up the stove and put the pan on it and heat it up and hear the sizzle when the steak goes in and learn what it is when you do this and when you do this, what happens when you dry it and you don't dry it, what happens when it's not hot enough or when it's too hot? What happens when you don't put enough oil in or you need more butter or whatever it is? Until you start to do it, there's no way you can understand it. You can learn all you want about how to cook a steak, but nothing is going to teach you like experience. And when you start to do it, some things start to click and fire off. And I believe that this contemplative prayer works the same way. We can learn all about it. We can read the books. We can think about how we might want to try to do it. But all I can tell you to do is start trying. Spend some time with God. Read His Word. Spend some time in the Bible. Pursue him. Desire him. Let him paint a picture of himself in your life. And then set the Bible down and sit quietly with him for as long as you can stand. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just do it. Just sit down and do it, and then when you can't do it anymore, stop doing it. Who cares how long you did it? And sit in the presence of God. And if you're really thinking along with me, if you're really engaged, you may be thinking to yourself, Nate, did you really just take the church through a book and five weeks worth of sermons so that you could arrive at the conclusion that if we really want to live the life that God wants for us and experience the relationship with God that he intended us to have, that what we need to do is read the Bible and pray more? Yeah, I did. Because it's that simple. Because that's what God wants from us. He wants us to be with him. I hope you will. I hope you will intentionally pursue the presence of the Father this week. And I hope that he begins to open doors of understanding for you that you didn't have previously. And I hope that he will slowly but surely, as we develop a larger picture of him, as we pursue him, I hope that he will become our treasure. And that we will begin to view the gospel as a way to get to God and to Jesus. And not just a way to heaven. Let's pray and then we get to do communion together. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. And to you. Lord, would you open our hearts and our eyes and our minds to what a relationship with you can look like? Would you help us mine scripture for who you are and listen to books and read podcasts and have conversations? Give us time, God, to get out in your creation and simply soak you in in silence. Help us enjoy the rain this afternoon as it pours. May we find a time to go outside in the quiet and just listen to your sovereignty pour down on us and enjoy your presence there. Help us to pursue you through prayer, to see it as communion with you and not reduce it to communication. God, may we as a church live our lives with you and acknowledge that's all you've ever really wanted. Let us experience your presence even today, Father. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

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. My name's Doug Bergeson. I'm a partner here at Grace, and I'm going to start off this morning by giving you all a very, very special treat. I'm going to sing a song from my childhood that some of you will be familiar with. Although I can't remember what I did yesterday, for some reason, this song that I learned in Sunday school when I was only four or five years old remains etched in my memory crystal clear. So here goes. You might want to say a quick prayer for me, but here goes. Oh, the wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. And the rains came a-tumbling down. Oh, the rains came down and the floods came up. The rains came down and the floods came up. Sing along if you know this next chorus. Oh, the foolish man built his house upon the sand. The foolish man built his house upon the sand. The foolish man built his house upon the sand. And the rains came a-tumbling down. Oh, the rains came down and the floods came up. The rains came down and the floods came up. Splat! Now, if you can overlook the singing, you might be thinking, aw, that's a cute little Sunday school ditty. But of course, it's much more than that, as its lyrics are lifted directly from Scripture. And even more than that, they come straight from the mouth of Jesus. It's a reading from Matthew chapter 7. The streams rose and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and theining the way you relate to God, and we're reading this book together, to answer that most central of questions. What does it mean to build one's house on the rock? And while the book doesn't use that exact language, that's precisely what the author in this sermon series are doing as we explore the many ways in which we relate to God. How we try to build our house, our lives, on the rock. If you've heard either of the last two weeks' sermons or are reading along in the book, you know that the author sets the table for where he's trying to take us as readers by describing the primary postures that many of us adopt in our relationship with God. The four postures are life under God, life over God, life from God, and life for God. In his introduction, the author Sky Jathani describes a scene at a 1,500-year-old Roman tomb in Italy where tourists are ushered in to the dark, unable to see the reason they came in the first place. A vaulted ceiling covered in an exquisite mosaic that depicts Jesus as the good shepherd, surrounded by sheep in a starry paradise. However, if one is patient, a light will eventually come on, illuminating the mosaic for just a few seconds before returning to darkness. Each time that light comes on, the visitors are given another glimpse of the world behind the shadows. And just like when the lights come on in the tomb, each of these four postures give us one perspective, one angle of what life with God is like, but it's not the full picture. Standing alone, each of these postures will give a distorted view. This matters a lot because the postures we adopt, that lens through which we view our relationship with God, is critical. And it is that view, that lens, which drives what we expect out of our relationship. And this is where the book is dead on. As what we expect has an enormous and defining impact on how each of us experiences life as a Christian. And it's especially tricky because not only do all four postures contain elements of truth, some more than others, but all four also find some basis and support in Scripture. So unless you don't mind being surprised, disappointed, and disillusioned with the Christian experience, we need to make sure that our expectations match up with what the full testimony of Scripture teaches us to expect, allowing it to properly inform, set boundaries and limits, and provide context for when each of these postures is appropriate in some measure and when they're not. When Jesus came to earth, his message was incredibly radical and countercultural, a message which challenged everyone and flipped the status quo completely on its head. But as the author of our book points out, in the ensuing 2,000 years, we've learned to cope with that message quite well by slowly but surely co-opting Jesus and his message, making him more like us, reflecting our priorities and desires, and less like him. I'm reminded of the chorus from the old Linkin Park song, Numb. All I want to do is be more like me and be less like you. That's not a very good impression of Linkin Park, but whatever. For many, it's morphed into a spiritual Rorschach test. In determining what our relationship with God should be like, we see whatever we want to see. And inevitably, we tend to assume that what we want for our lives is what God must want for our lives. And this assumption that what we want for our lives is what God must want for our lives is especially true of the third posture that we're looking at this morning, life from God. Now let me first say that for those of us who believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior, life, of course, does come from God. But what does that mean exactly? Our author defines the essence of the life from God posture as a relationship in which we are more interested in what God can do for us and how he might bless us than we're interested in actually knowing him. A relationship whose primary value is to help us solve our problems and navigate through life's challenges to achieve what we want. This posture is most often and most easily criticized when it's taken to an extreme, commonly referred to as the health and wealth or prosperity gospel. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s and early 70s, I would sometimes listen on Sunday night to Reverend Ike's radio broadcast. His unrelenting and super upbeat message was that God wanted to bless each and every one of us right now in this life. His sayings included, God doesn't want you to have your pie in the sky by and by when you die. He wants you to have it now with the cherry on top. Or, he added this, you don't have to wait for the pearly gate. Reverend Ike also claimed good health is my divine right. And I remember him saying that God wanted me to have a Cadillac and that he had nine or so, enthusiastically adding, my garages runneth over. Although easy to do, it's not my intent to mock and refute such extremes because I don't think most of us fall into that camp. Furthermore, my complaint with the life from God posture isn't that it's wrong to want God's blessings. It's not. The Bible constantly encourages us to desire God's blessings. Rather, this morning, I'm going to take a different tact than our author in critiquing this posture. As I stated earlier, life is from God, but that's often misunderstood in the life from God posture in two primary ways. The first thing to realize is that God has already blessed us. An implicit premise of the life from God posture is that we have to do certain things and behave certain ways to somehow curry God's favor and procure his blessings in our lives. Whereas in fact, the Bible is abundantly clear that God's plan was to always bless us. Before the foundation of the universe was laid, God's intent was to bless us through his son, Jesus Christ. Before any of us lifted a finger or did anything good or bad, God was blessing us. As the Apostle Paul stated in Romans, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It's like a gift from Amazon that's already been delivered. We don't have to convince someone to send it. We don't have to help order it. The gift has already been given. It's already been sent. It's already been delivered. In fact, it's already sitting on our front porch. All we have to do is open our front door and bring it inside. The life from God posture assumes blessing is transactional. But it was all God. No transaction. As the disciple John wrote, we love him because he first loved us. So the first major misunderstanding of the life from God posture is the notion that we need to get God on our side, working on our behalf. Truth is, he's always been on our side. Before time began, he was on our side. Our job isn't to get God to bless us, but to trust that he already has and will continue to do so. The second big misunderstanding of the life from God posture and what I'll spend the remainder of our time on this morning is the very concept of what constitutes a blessing from God. What does being blessed by God actually look like in our lives? And it's here that the life from God posture in a community of faith like ours operates much more subtly than extremes like Reverend Ike. Yet, it can still wreak havoc by creating expectations which aren't validated in Scripture. Life from God is seductive and appealing because it posits that Christianity is worthwhile because of the way it blesses me. Life just goes better as a believer. But again, what does that even mean? That's the $64,000 question. What does being blessed by God look like in the here and now? Particularly in more affluent societies, the tendency is to think that God wants the exact same things for us that we want for us. And my guess is that's how life from God posture subtly impacts us here at Grace. Although I doubt many of us genuinely believe that being blessed by God involves a bunch of Cadillacs or perfect health or a problem-free life, I would bet that for many of us, God's help and blessing correspond pretty closely to what we think is important. A good family, good health, happiness, comfort, professional success. I could go on and on. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to challenge our conventional understanding of blessing. And if what I have to say rubs you the wrong way, then I'm probably on to something. Although we can learn about God by observing the world he created, God's most intentional and fullest revelation is to be found in Jesus Christ. Jesus was God's best self-revelation, representing in his person and ministry the true nature of God. And as the original book about Jesus Christ, the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments together, is referred to as God's special revelation. So God chose to reveal himself through the written word. And more specifically than that, he chose to do it through a story. A great, sweeping, complex, long, and remarkable story unfolding down through the ages. And as a story, the Bible is really the opposite of a textbook or a theological dictionary. You can't go to chapter 7 and read all that is said about faith. There is no concise, complete treatment of all that is meant by salvation. We might prefer Wikipedia, where we can learn all we need to know in a few short paragraphs, and that can be helpful at times, but that's not the Bible. A story has plot and characters and a variety of storylines that emerge and develop over time. A story can capture the full range of the human experience, providing a richness and depth that simply can't be matched by a more systematic description of principles and concepts. Nuance, mystery, contradiction, paradox, tension, all are part of great storytelling and all are indelible elements of real life. Although I'd been a Christian most of my life, it was only about 20 years ago that I began viewing the Bible first and foremost as one magnificent and seamless story of God and his love for his creation. And I haven't looked back. I'd go even further and say that I believe it is imperative for all of us to approach and understand the Bible in this light. But not because that's my preference or because I say so, but because that's how God chose to do it. And in the Bible, God reveals his purposes and plans slowly and deliberately over time. A progression takes place. Concepts are first introduced in ways that the original audiences and later day readers, such as ourselves, might be better able to get their arms around and understand. But over the course of the story, a certain development, an expansion of the concept takes place until it reaches its fulfillment and climax in the New Testament. As an example, I've often thought that if you were new to Christianity and were just airdropped in on a Sunday morning and heard the story of Jesus in isolation, how weird and bizarre must it seem that Jesus had to die for us. But as you start reading at the beginning in Genesis, one is introduced early on to the idea that God saves by substitution. Something else dies for us instead of us on our behalf. It begins modestly with the story of Abraham and Isaac and is developed and expanded further in God's dealings with his chosen people, the Israelites. But it reaches its fulfillment and stunning climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. Vaughn Roberts, in his book, God's Big Picture, illustrates the value of progressive revelation in this way. A century ago, a father promises his son that he will give him a horse on his 21st birthday. Cars are subsequently invented, and so when the birthday finally comes, the boy is given a car instead of a horse. The promise has still been fulfilled, but not literally. The father could not have promised his son a car because neither could have understood the concept. In a similar way, God made his promises to Israel in ways they could understand. He used categories they were familiar with, such as the nation, the temple, and material prosperity in the land. But the fulfillment breaks the boundaries of those categories. To expect a literal fulfillment is to miss the point. Here are just three quick examples. God uses evil for good, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat to ultimately accomplish his purposes. In Genesis, Joseph's brothers can't stand him and sell him into slavery. But years later, Joseph has risen to a position of such power in Egypt that he is able to save his entire family from famine and keep alive the promises God had made to his ancestors. A fortuitous turn of events to be sure, but that's just a horse. When God's only son, Jesus, comes to earth in human form and is crucified by evil men, but through his unjust and wrongful death redeems the world for all eternity, that's an automobile. God's people wanted a king, and God gave them kings. But even the best, like David, failed and disappointed. That's a horse. But a king who will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace, and who will reign with perfect justice and righteousness forever and ever, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Now that's an automobile. When God redeems his people out of slavery in Egypt and then promises to dwell with them, first in the tabernacle in the desert and then behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies in the temple in Jerusalem. That's something spectacular, but it's still just a horse. But when God redeems us from slavery to sin and death, offering us life through his son Jesus Christ, and God's Holy Spirit takes up residence in the individual human heart, and we, like living stones, are built into a spiritual house where God now dwells, that's an automobile. I explain all this because it's so relevant for our purpose this morning in looking at the life from God posture. For another big concept that undergoes radical development and evolution over the course of the Bible is the idea of how God blesses us. In fact, it evolves so much that by the time Jesus comes and the fullness of God and his redemptive plan is revealed, it's hard to even recognize what God now considers to be a blessing as it's been turned completely upside down. No longer is blessing what might make us happy or healthy or comfortable or successful or respected or understood or liked or safe. Rather, a blessing is anything that moves our hearts and minds to a place more receptive to God's grace. Anything can be a blessing if it helps to convince us of our desperate need for a Savior. Virtually anything can be a blessing if it helps better prepare and position us for eternity. Now, there is no verse that explicitly says that in so many words. But as you move along the biblical narrative, as God's magnificent story of love and redemption continues to unfold, it becomes abundantly clear that this is the case. Certainly, there were times earlier in the story when God did bless his people and reward their obedience and trust in ways that they and we would clearly understand and to which we can all relate. The Israelite sandals didn't wear out in the desert. God gave them food and clothing and so many descendants that they would rival the stars in the sky. A promised land flowing with milk and honey. Military victory, prosperity, long life, and peace. And this makes perfect sense, as God had to convince a primitive people some 3,500 years ago, who had little else to go on, that this particular God was the one you wanted to hitch your wagon to. Blessing them in immediate, temporal, and tangible ways was essential in order to build trust. But as the story goes on, and as God always knew, the power of sin would prove to be too strong. God's material blessings did not draw Israel closer to him, did not make them more inclined to trust, and in fact often had the opposite effect. More needed to be done. And before too long, the entire biblical narrative starts changing from a temporal vantage point, if I obey and if I trust, I will enjoy peace and prosperity, victory and long life, to an eternal perspective and a future hope. As you read on, it's as if your eyes are forced to look up into the distance, start to realize that what happens in this life is not the goal. It's not the be all and end all. What happens is as important, but only as it impacts eternity. God's endgame lies in the future. Children, land, prosperity, and peace in the present, that's a horse. Eternity with God, that's a big old fancy automobile. And by the time we get to the New Testament, the entire tone and tenor of Scripture is remarkably unimpressed with the kind of things we typically consider blessings and focuses entirely on how this life is getting us ready and how we might help others get ready for eternity. Although we should be thankful for great relationships, loving family, friends, health, material comfort, peace and safety, it's in the absence of one or more of these things that we are most acutely aware of our brokenness, of our lack of control, of our need to build our house on the firm foundation of the one and only one who actually is in control. And because of that, God simply is far less concerned about our momentary comfort, happiness, and success than are we. We do our faith no favors when we think of blessing predominantly in terms of what our culture and our world say it is. If you think this is how God blesses you, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Yes, we should be pleased and thankful to God when things go well. But to be honest, good things seem to happen as much to people who don't follow Christ as those who do. Success, comfort, wealth, health, happy marriages, well-adjusted kids, best as I can tell, don't fall disproportionately on believers. Anything that helps prepare us for eternity, anything that helps us move to a posture receptive to God's love and grace, any circumstance that conveys to us our desperate need for a Savior, in God's eyes, can serve as a blessing. On the flip side, anything we normally would consider a blessing turns out not really to be a blessing, not if it works against God's purposes. And of course, the rub is that a great many of the things we associate with being blessed do not prepare our hearts and minds for eternity. Even such universally desirable things as good health, a good job, a good marriage, a good family cease to be blessings if they undermine our sense of need for God, if they lead to arrogance and pride, to a sense of independence and self-sufficiency. If our success and good fortune draw us away from God and not towards Him, then these otherwise good things have become, to use a good Old Testament word, snares. I'm going to read just a few verses from Deuteronomy 8. these decrees that I'm giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You may say to yourself, my power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me. And that's exactly what did happen. Sound familiar? It does to me. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul conveyed the same message, reading from 1 Corinthians 4. that we feel a greater sense of our need for God when things are difficult than when they're easy. Struggles and sorrow, tragedy and injustice are uniquely effective at disabusing us of any thought that we are in control, uniquely effective at reminding us of our insufficiency, brokenness, and desperate need. Yet so many times we question and agonize and wring our hands as to why a so-called loving God would allow a fallen world with so much sadness and evil injustice and injustice. Is it any wonder? Is it really that big of a mystery? Why are we surprised? It's my conviction that a fallen world was always part of God's plan, in part, precisely so that we would struggle. Again, it's that pattern of God using evil for good, how he uses our fallen world to accomplish his purposes, drawing a lost humanity back to himself. The pivotal question for each of us this morning is, when crummy things happen in our lives that do not look or feel anything like blessings, how do we respond? Do they move us to a place of trust or a place of despair? We have a decisive role to play if there's to be any redemptive value in our crummy circumstances. If we do not take advantage of them as opportunities to trust, we run the risk of rendering them meaningless, leaving them just crummy. So when we talk about the posture, life from God, and when we expect to enjoy God's promised blessings, we better understand in what form these blessings might come and over what time horizon they might pay dividends and how best we might respond in faith and trust so that God can actually use those things for good in our lives and the lives of others. I'm going to close this morning with the tiny book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament. Just for curiosity's sake, during these last six months of the pandemic, how many of you have read the book? Let me see a show of hands. I'm just kidding. I already know the answer. Zero. Approximately zero of you have read Habakkuk. Yet Habakkuk is a perfect example. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't have read it if I hadn't been asked to preach, so I'm not casting any dispersions. Yet Habakkuk is a perfect exclamation point for my message this morning of how God blesses and how he operates and what building one's house on the rock really looks like. It's a far cry from the life from God posture as commonly understood by most of us. The book of Habakkuk consists entirely of a short dialogue between Habakkuk the prophet and God. It begins with the prophet complaining to God of how it seems that all the violence and justice and strife that's running rampant in his country of Judah goes unpunished. Why is God tolerating it? God responds by saying, No worries, Habakkuk. I'm raising up the Babylonians, those fiercest and most dreaded of peoples, guilty men whose strength is their own God to swoop in and devour Judah. Upon hearing that, the prophet is flabbergasted and even more of a tizzy, complaining even further to God. What? You've got to be kidding me. How can you allow such a wicked and godless nation to swallow up those more righteous than themselves? You're blowing my mind. Then the Lord answered the prophet a second time. Let me worry about the Babylonians. They will get theirs in due time. However, you, Habakkuk, need to be patient and wait for my appointed time. Though it may linger, it will certainly come. But as for you right now, the righteous will live by faith. It made no sense to him. Nothing he heard was assuring. Nothing seemed fair. But in that moment, Habakkuk leaned in and chose to trust. Listen to his closing words. I heard and my heart pounded. My lips quivered at the sound. Decay crept into my bones and my legs trembled. Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us. Though the fig tree does not bud, Verse 1. and no cattle in the stalls. Yet I rejoice in the Lord. I will be joyful in God my Savior. The sovereign Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer. He enables me to go on the heights. Although he was not happy with what he had heard and thought it violent, unjust, and unloving, Habakkuk moved towards God rather than away, convinced that his God was both able and willing to do the right thing regardless of whether he himself could understand, an abiding trust that God was not only in control, but was also the ultimate victor. And in that moment, Habakkuk was being blessed, all circumstances to the contrary, prepared for an eternity with the God who loves him. That is where the rubber truly meets the road. Even when you can't necessarily see God's goodness or understand his purposes in the middle of the mess, when everything is shrouded in mystery and confusion, do you choose to trust? Do you believe that no matter what seems to be happening at any given moment in this life, that God has already won the victory and always has our best interests at heart? Building one's house on the rock is resting in that knowledge. I began this morning by singing a song about the wise man who built his house upon the rock. It's important to note that it doesn't go, oh, the wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. And before I pray, I'd like to invite Steve and Lisa back up here as we continue to worship. But please bow your heads. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. I pray that you'll convict each one of us and help each one of us understand just how desperately you love us and the extravagant lengths you went to to make it possible for us to be yours. Help us to know that despite the fact that we live in a world where sorrow and unhappiness and disappointment are part and parcel to our daily experience. I pray that we'll be grounded in the fact that you love us and always have our best interest at heart. And we thank you for making it possible for us to have an eternity with you. And it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Amen. Good morning, Grace. Good morning online. Thank you, Steve. That was wonderful. It's good to see everybody. We've got some new folks venturing in this week, Braving the Elements. My name is Nate, for those of you that I haven't gotten to meet yet or for those watching online. This is the last part in our series called A Time of Kings. And as we think about questions like that, I really believe that there's one loud message that should come from the book of Kings. And I want us to see that this morning. And as I think about Kings, and remember I call it a book because originally it was written as one big long book. So as I think about the book of Kings, I really have realized as we've studied it together that this is a tragic book. This book is really sad. It's really sad because of the hope with which it starts and the devastation with which it ends. If you think back to the very beginning of the book of Kings, if you have a Bible at home, you can flip it there. If you have a Bible with you, you can look at 2 Kings 25. That's where we're going land today, and then we're going to jump to, I think, Samuel, and then Revelation, and John. So, you know, we'll be all over the place this morning. But if you think about the way that Kings begins, it's like the climax of hope. David is the king. You'll remember in the very first week of this series, if you've been watching along or listening along, that David is the king, that the nation of Israel clamored for a king, and Samuel the prophet said, you don't need one, God is your king. And they said, we really want a king. We think that a king is going to bring about all the promises that God made to us, because they are God's chosen people. They live in an awareness of the promises that they have received, that the land of Canaan, that Israel is going to be theirs, that they're going to have a multitude of descendants, and that one of their descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And so they cling to these promises. And they don't see them coming to fruition in the time of judges. It was a dark time in the nation of Israel. And they said, you know what? If we have a king, that person can lead us into prominence and be God's chosen person. And so they elected Saul. He made the most sense. He was head and shoulders above everybody else. He was really good looking. When you looked at him, you thought, that guy should be king. If you need a good picture of who Saul was, he looked a lot like me. But that didn't work out. And David is God's chosen man to be king, and he was a great king. He established Israel into international prominence. He, in him, was this man who walked closely with God, who wrote the Psalms, who led well, who conquered enemies, who won victories, and certainly this king is the king that's going to lead us in the prominence that we have been promised. And David asks the father, can I build your temple? I want to build your home. He goes to God and he says, I want to build your home where your presence can reside with us. Because all the way back in the desert, when Moses was in charge, 450 years prior, God gave him instructions about setting up a tabernacle that could move with them. That's where they put the Ark of the Covenant. That's where they had the Holy of Holies. That's where the presence of God rested among his people. And it was time to build God a permanent home. And David said, let me do this. And God says, I can't let you do that. There's too much blood on your hands, but I'm going to make you a promise. And we're going to look at that promise in a minute. He said, among those promises, your son is going to build my house. And so the book of Kings picks up with the end of the incredible reign of David that has launched Israel into international importance. This high watermark in the kingdom. And then he has assembled all the goods and materials so that as soon as his son Solomon takes over, he can build the temple. And he does. And much of the beginning of Kings is dedicated to the dedication and construction of this temple. And there's a beautiful prayer that Solomon prays for the people then and for you and I. It's really wonderful. You should go read it. It's this high watermark in the history of Israel. It's the culmination of 450 years of hope. And you have to think, man, look at us. These kings are bringing about the desired results. They're pushing us into prominence and they're bringing about the promises of God. This king thing is really working out. Hope is high. Then Solomon's son is terrible. They descend into civil war, and the northern tribes never get a good king. The southern tribe gets some that they get to hope in. And in the northern tribes, when it looks like hope is lost and they have evil kings like Ahab, they're putting their hope in kings, and it's not going to be Ahab. He's not going to bring about the future that God desires for us. But God does bring some strong prophets into the reign of Ahab. He brings Elijah, who wins the victory on Mount Carmel, against the 450 prophets of Baal. And you read that and you go, okay, now, now God's promises are going to come true. Now we're going to have the king that we are waiting for that's going to set everything right. It seems like the tide has turned and the hearts of God's people are going to be turned towards him, but they're not. And then God sends Elisha to secede Elijah, and he does twice the miracles that Elijah does. And it's this glimmer of hope that maybe the hearts of God's people will be turned to him, but they're not. And then God sends sporadically these good kings, Hezekiah, who defeated the armies of Sennacherib through prayer, by taking the threatening letter and laying it down before the Lord in the temple and saying, God, please protect your people. And God does because of Hezekiah's faithfulness. And you think, maybe this is a good king. Now, as you're reading the narrative and you're following along and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news, this is when there's going to be good news. And by the end of his life, he's no good anymore. We wait for some generations and Josiah, this glimmer of hope that we talked about last week, comes along. And he eradicates all of the idols and he turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord. But God says, you know, it's too late. My people are already turned away from me. I'm going to take the kingdom from you in four kings. And sure enough, he does. Jehoahaz and Jehoakim and Jehoachin and then Zedekiah and then it's done. Four generations. And the very end of Kings, this book that began with so much hope, a king is going to come and he's going to set everything right and the world for God's people is going to look exactly as God intended it to look. The book of Kings ends like this in chapter 25. I'm going to read you a summary of what's happening in verse 8. This is pretty much what they're looking at. That's the scene as we finish this hopeful book. We watch king after king come in. Maybe he's the one. Maybe the prophet's the one. Maybe the tide is going to turn. And we're waiting for the hero. We're waiting for the uptick. We're waiting for the climax. There's going to be a resolution to this. And at the end of the story, King Nebuchadnezzar sends in his army. They burn down God's temple, Solomon's temple that he built. They burn it down. They burn down the palace. They burn down the homes of all the prominent people in Jerusalem. And they tear down the walls. It's left in shambles. It is an ash heap of a city, and they take all the richest and wealthiest and most capable with them, only leaving behind the most impoverished and the most destitute. That's the picture of God's chosen people at the end of the book of Kings. It's utter devastation. It's utter and complete devastation. And you're reading this book and you're waiting for someone to come along. You expect to turn the page and then it's like, but then this happened and it's not. It's just somebody else telling the story, telling the same stories in Chronicles. There's no page turn here. You're expecting the hero to come. You're expecting the king to come, the right one to come along and restore everything, and it doesn't happen. As I'm studying in my office this week, I'm going, man, this really stinks that the book of Kings ends this way. Really find another story to just talk about and maybe we'll just let them discover this on their own, their own leisure. But it dawned on me that the devastation in Kings is very purposeful. This is really the point of the book. It's meant to end this way when we place our hope in earthly kings. The devastation is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. The devastation in kings is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. They kept waiting on an earthly leader. They kept waiting on someone to come and sit on the physical throne and usher them into prominence and make them a great nation, and it just wasn't going to happen, and God was letting them slowly, painfully realize the thing you're hoping in to fix your lives is not the thing that's going to do it. Boy, that's a whole sermon in and of itself, isn't there? How many slow, painful lessons have we learned putting our hope in the wrong thing? But it's meant to show his people an earthly king will never be enough. And if you're paying attention to the Old Testament, if you're paying attention to the things that God is saying to his people, even in the time of kings, when their hope is placed in an earthly king, if you're listening to what he's saying to his people, you will hear that he is telling them you are looking for the wrong kind of king. I referred earlier to 2 Samuel 7. This is where God made David a promise. It's referred to as the Davidic covenant. It's where he doubles down, he triples down, he reminds the people of his promise to them. And he promises that he's going to send a king to sit on David's throne. And these are the words of God. Look at what he says in verse 14. He says, So he's talking about Jesus here. He's going to be a son for me. He is going to pay a penalty for you. And then when he does that, he's going to sit on the throne forever. This is kingdom language. This is king language in the middle of the time of kings that they're not listening to. And then God sends prophet after prophet that we have in the major and the minor prophets in the rest of the Old Testament to tell them of their coming king, of the coming Messiah, most pointedly in the book of Isaiah. When Isaiah tells God's people, Isaiah is a prophet during the reign of Hezekiah, one of the good kings during this time. And he says that God is going to send someone and that by his stripes we will be healed and that he will be Emmanuel, God with us, and that he will be the King of kings and the Lord of lords. What God is trying to communicate to them that they can't seem to capture is that what they really need is a divine king. What they need is Jesus. What they're waiting on is the Messiah. They continue to look to an earthly king to make their problems right, to make things go away, to confirm and restore the promises of God. And what God is trying to tell them all along, through his promise to David, through the voice of his prophets, is, hey guys, you're looking for the wrong king. You're not paying attention to the right things. You don't need another earthly king. You need a divine king. You need Jesus. And this language isn't just in the Old Testament. We see king language throughout the Bible. You'll remember, if you were here in the spring of 2019, we went through the book of John for I think 12 or 14 weeks. And one of the themes we see is the people of Israel when they meet Jesus continually clamoring to make him king. He had to disappear from their midst so that they wouldn't start a revolution too early. He had to heal people and say, but don't tell anybody because he didn't want word to get out that the Messiah was here. He didn't want to foment revolution. This is why he did his ministry in the far-flung corners of northern Israel rather than coming down south to the capital of Jerusalem until later in his life because he knew that it would set into motion a series of events that he could not reverse because they were clamoring to make him king. They were clamoring so badly to make him king that at the end of his life when he was on trial with Pilate, the Roman governor, Pilate, he was accused by the people who were trying to kill him of being someone who was leading a revolution, who claimed to be the king of the Jews. And he's trying to overthrow Roman rule. And Pilate, you should care about this deeply. And so Pilate asked him, they say you're a king. Is that what you? And Jesus says, yeah, but not of this. You can have this. This is too small for me. I don't want this kingdom. I have a kingdom, but it's not here. If it were here, my angels would come and defend me, but they're not, because my kingdom is eternal. My kingdom is divine. My kingdom is universal. And with his death, he bought our citizenship into that kingdom. And then, as the narrative of the Bible continues to press forward, and we continue to wait for our king, along with the children of Israel, when is our king going to return and set things right? When is he going to restore things to the way that he intended them to be? And we fast forward to the book of Revelation, where we see more king language. In Revelation chapter 6, we have the cries of the martyrs. It's are the exact cries of the hearts of the saints in 2 Kings 25. And God's chosen people are in the middle of total devastation. Their hearts cry out, God, when will you make this right? How are you letting this happen? Why are you letting King Nebuchadnezzar do this? This is evil, God. This is not your plan. This is not your promise. Why is it going this way? Why are you allowing this devastation? It's the same cry that was in the hearts of the martyrs in Revelation 6. God, how long will you let this happen before you avenge what they've done to us? How long will you watch devastation occur in your creation? It's the same thing. It's the same cry of the hearts of the people who had to witness the terror of slavery, who had to endure the persecution of Nero, or the persecution that continues to happen in closed-off countries to this day. It's the same devastation that cries out to God in our own lives when we have a diagnosis or we have a loss or we exist in the rubble of a relationship. And we say, God, this doesn't feel right. How much longer will you let this happen? We need our king to make it right. And in Revelation 19, we get it. It's the most hopeful chapter in all the Bible when we see the king that we've always wanted, that we've always hoped for, that the nation of Israel longed for without realizing it. I love this passage. I always get emotional when I read this passage. Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. This is the appearance of Christ as king as we finish the Bible. The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True. and fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That's Jesus. And when he comes to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, when he comes to fix the devastation, when he comes to restore his creation and claim his throne, he is no longer coming as the Lamb of God. He is coming as the Lion of Judah. And he's going to answer those cries of our heart. And he's going to respond to the devastation. And he's going to speak right to the hearts of the people in Israel, watching their loved ones be carried away as slaves. As the palace burns and the walls lay in rubble, he is going to speak directly to their hearts as he establishes his divine eternal kingdom. And so what I want us to see as we think about the book of Kings and the lessons that we learn from it is that the entire book is meant to end in devastation and allow that devastation to point God's people for their need for Jesus so that they can see that Jesus is the hope of God's people in the midst of devastation. Kings ends that way on purpose. It's not a mistake by God. It's not like God was watching history and go, well, that didn't work out as expected. I was really hoping one of these kings would be the guy. He knew that it would end bad. He told Samuel when they were clamoring for a king, he says, you give them one, but it's not going to end well. And it didn't. He knew this was going to happen, but he let it happen so that his people would see their need for a divine king, and that devastation would point them to Christ. Jesus was their hope in the midst of devastation. And in the same way, our lesson from Kings is that Jesus is our hope in the midst of our devastation too. When things aren't going right, when we identify with the martyrs crying out to God, how much longer are you going to let this happen? You've made me some promises, God. You've said that everything I pray will be yes in your name. You said that if I ask for things that you will give them to me. You've said in Romans 28 that one day everything's going to work out for the good of those who love you and are called according to your purpose. When's that coming, God? Because this stinks. That frustration and devastation is meant to point you to Christ and remind you that we all collectively are waiting for Revelation 19. We all collectively are waiting for the return of our King who will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, who will sit on the throne of David forever, who will restore his creation to exactly what it is meant to restore, who will bring about the reality of Revelation 20 where it says God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things. All the things that caused devastation, all the things that caused us to cry out with the martyrs, those things have passed away because Jesus has won a victory over them. And for all of eternity, we exist in a perfect kingdom with our perfect king. Kings is designed to help us anticipate that future and cling to that hope. And when we experience devastation in our own life, that is there to point us to our need for Jesus. Sometimes it's a simple devastation of our souls. We come to the end of ourselves, and we realize that our way is not working. We realize that there is something about this life that is making me unhappy. There is something that is missing. There is something that I need. That devastation is designed to point us to our need for Christ. If you're here this morning or you're watching online and you're experiencing that devastation of your soul, you need Jesus. You don't need another earthly king. You don't need another earthly fix. You don't need to read another book or a new regimen of discipline. You need Jesus. The devastation of our relationships points us to our need for Jesus. When people disappoint us, it points us to a person who won't. When we lose someone that we love so much and we cry out and we say, God, this isn't fair. Why'd you take them? It was too early. Our King has died for us and conquered that death to assure us that we will see that person again one day. So we turn our eyes with hope to Revelation 19 when faithful and true comes out of the sky. When Jesus comes as the Lion of Judah to restore his kingdom and restore order to the way that it should be. And the devastation of finances and the devastation of just life events and the devastation of disappointment, big and little. Little disappointments are meant to turn our eyes to Jesus and say, yeah, this place isn't perfect. We need you to come make it perfect, God. We usher in, we pray for your return. Come soon, Lord Jesus. Big devastation, huge things from which we don't know if we will recover are intentionally designed to point our eyes towards Christ and say, yes, Jesus, this stinks. We are waiting for you. We are yearning for you. We are inviting you in. Come soon, Lord Jesus. The devastation in Kings is intentionally left in the Bible and is allowed intentionally to occur so that it will forever point God's people to Jesus in the midst of their devastation. If we remember nothing else from the book of Kings, remember that the whole book is designed to point us there. And remember that if you are experiencing some form of devastation or disappointment or disillusionment in your life, that the point of that, just like the point of it happening in Kings, is that you would point your eyes towards Christ and eagerly anticipate the return of your King, who is going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We are grateful for you. Jesus, we need you. Come soon to get us. God, you have watched from your throne all kinds of devastation. You have watched all sorts of divisiveness and violence. You have watched evil. And you are as fed up with it as we are. God, now in our time, it's hard to turn on the news or pick up your phone and not see something that disappoints us, something that breaks our heart, something that seems evil. God, you see it too. We need our king. Would you send him soon to rescue us? And God, while we wait, would you set our eyes on him? Would you set our gaze on you? Would you fill us with your spirit and give us the peace of hope? May we be a people who continually turn our eyes towards you. It's in our king's name that we pray. Amen.