Sermons tagged with Strength

Well, hello. This is the last part of our series in Ephesians. We've been going through Ephesians now for six weeks, so this week we arrive at Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6 is a famous passage. It's got the armor of God starting in verse 10, and that's where we are going to land this week. I've been excited to get here and have thought a lot about the best, most effective way to approach this passage. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Ephesians chapter 6. If you don't have a Bible, I would encourage you to grab the one in the seat back in front of you and go ahead and turn there so that you can be looking through the text as we go through it together. I always think it's helpful if we look at it and we process it at the same time in the same way. So as I approach the text this week, I actually, I did the normal research that I do, but I wanted to call a buddy of mine who has some experience in combat. This particular guy did what we see on the movies. He's a special forces guy over in Iraq, Afghanistan. And they would do night raids every night where you drop in, you go into somebody's home or a compound or a building, you have a target and then you have the secondary targets and you try to either eliminate or obtain them. That's the technical term for kill or kidnap them. So you go in and you do that, and that's what they did every night. And then for part of the career, they watch on the screen as the rest of the team does it. It's like the stuff you see in the movies. And so I thought, I want to know what his perspective is on this text. And so I gave him a call, and we talked it through, and I love military stuff. I am too feeble of body to have been effective in it, but I like to hear about other people who are. And so we talked at length about things, and he shared with me two things that I thought would be really helpful for us as we approach this passage. He told me that in a good raid, when you would go in and you've got your target, he's in the house or he's in the compound or whatever it is, and you're bringing these special forces operators to bear on the target, you're trying to obtain the target. I think we kind of picture that in the movies as depicted as a firefight, like you drop in from a helicopter and like everybody's, they're armed and you're armed and you fight your way into the compound and you get the person. But he said really and truly what they would try to do rather than just landing close and letting them know, hey, we're here and inviting the conflict, that what they would try to do whenever they possibly could is drop about six kilometers away from the target and then sneak in, walk in under the cover of night without being detected. And what he told me was an effective raid would end with no shots being fired. That they would get into the compound, into the home, into the building, into the area, and that they would have their primary target and the secondary and the tertiary targets, and everybody would be at gunpoint before the lights would get flipped on, and then the lights get flipped on, and everybody surrenders and go home. His words were, actually, if they decide to resist at that point, that's on them. I thought, well, gosh, I would not resist. But he said those were the best raids, was when there was no shots fired at all, when the enemy didn't even realize that they were in a conflict until they were already captured. I thought that was interesting. I'll tell you why in a minute, but I wanted to talk about this other point that he made too. He said the most dangerous time for him and his teams was actually not the firefight. It was not when they were engaged in combat. They were prepared for that. They had a plan for that. They knew where everybody was going to be. They knew where all the targets were going to be. If the enemy did something, they knew how to counter that. They were ready. They're not worried at all about once they're engaged in conflict. The most dangerous point of any raid for them was actually the approach to the target. Because you don't know while you're approaching the target if they can see you. You don't know if they're about to open up machine guns on you. You don't know if you're about to be under attack. You don't know if you're about to be ambushed. The most dangerous time, he said, was as they were approaching the target. And he actually noticed in his early years of doing this, in the early months of doing this, that as they're approaching the target, he's not really aware of what's around him. His head is already in the compound. He's already at the plan. He's going through, when we get here, I'm going to go to the eastern wall, and we're going to breach this door, and there's going to be this many people, and yada, yada. He's going through this in his mind, but he noticed that the veterans, the guys who had done dozens if not hundreds of these, seemed to be almost talking to themselves the whole way up, concentrating on other things. And he learned that what these guys are doing is they're constantly assessing their surroundings. They're constantly preparing themselves. If we get attacked now, I can duck behind that wall. I can go behind that rock. That car will provide cover. We can return fire from here. They're constantly, every hundred feet, redoing their attack plan and their defense strategy. If we get attacked, if they throw it open on us here, then I'm going to go here, and my men can go here, and we can attack, and then we can counter like this. And in both instances about the plan and the strategy of these raids and the danger encountered in these raids, it occurred to me that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't realize you're in one. The most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't yet realize that you're in it. Those guys sitting in the compound getting raided, they were trying, the strategy of the U.S. military is to avoid making them aware that they're even in combat until it's too late. Do you see that? A good raid is when there's no shots fired. It's when they don't even know that they are under attack until it's too late for them to do anything about it. They wanted to withhold that information from their opponent for as long as possible because the most dangerous time in any conflict is when you don't know you when you're in it. And then walking to the target. The most dangerous time was that they might be in a conflict before they're ready to be in a conflict. They might be in an ambush. They might throw it open on them before they're ready to be in that conflict. And I thought, oh, how interesting as we think about spiritual warfare, that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when we're in one and we don't realize it. And this, I think, is what Paul is trying to open our eyes to in Ephesians chapter 6. And it's why he writes what he writes. At the end of this letter, he's written this letter to this church, not necessarily to Ephesus, but to the churches surrounding Ephesus, and it ended up camping out in the church of Ephesus. But to many churches, to many early churches, he writes a letter. He describes what salvation is. He says what we do because we're saved. How should we live and how should we live in the home and in the workplace and with our children? And then he finishes up the letter with a warning followed by an encouragement. And the warning has a lot to do with the point that we just made about being unaware of the conflicts that we're in. Look at what he says, beginning in verse 10. We're going to go 10 through 12 right now. Paul writes, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God. We're going to talk about what that is in a second. That you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. This is such an important verse. Listen to this verse. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul is saying, listen, listen, listen, you need to know this. Listen, hey, pay attention. We are in a conflict. We are in a battle. To be born into the world is to be born into the midst of an eternal struggle of good versus evil over God versus Satan. To be born into the world is to be born into a conflict where there are elements warring against and for your very soul. So wake up. We're in a battle. And if the most dangerous point of any conflict is to be in it and not be aware that we are in it. Then what Paul is doing is he's grabbing the church in Ephesus and he's grabbing our attention 2,000 years later and he's going, hey, listen, you need to know. Everything's not okay right now. Everything's not safe right now. You are in a conflict. Whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are in one. And we don't like to talk about this a lot. We don't like to think about this a lot. I certainly don't like to preach about it a lot. But if we believe that the Bible is true, then we have to believe this uncomfortable truth about our reality, that Satan is real and that he is against you. We don't like thinking about it. We don't like talking about it. No one comes to church going, you know what I hope Nate talks about? The devil. But here's the truth. Satan is real and he is against you. And I would add, he is smarter than you, he has more energy than you, and he is more passionate than you about his goal. And his goal is to hurt God any way he can by tearing people away from his eternal love. And then once you are signed up for his eternal love, once you have received salvation and you have God's love, then his goal is to tear you away and to ruin you from being effective at all at bringing other people into a knowledge of God. It's to make you so ineffective in your faith that you have no impact whatsoever in the kingdom. He is at war against you. This is why Peter says in his letter, 1 Peter 5, at the end, he writes a letter to the church as well. This is just a general epistle that floated around to all of the churches in the ancient world a few years after the death of Jesus. And he finishes his letter the same way. Verse 8 in chapter 5, be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We've all watched those nature shows, right? You've seen the gazelles out on the Serengeti? They're just like chilling out, munching on grass or whatever it is. And there's a pride of lions in the bushes waiting for the one that they're going to devour. Those gazelles are in a conflict and they don't know it. And their adversary is prowling around waiting to find someone to devour. Incidentally, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's too important to pass up here. Who are the ones that he always gets? Who are the ones that the lions always get? The ones that wander away from the herd. Church, a small group, consistency, and a family of faith, it's important. The further away we wander, the more vulnerable we become. But I thought it was interesting that the two fathers of the early church, I mean the two pillars, the guys, if you were in the early church a couple years after Jesus passed away and then goes back up into heaven, If you're in the early church, you know that Peter's the guy. There's the apostles, but Peter is the leader. He is the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And if you go outside of Jerusalem to any of the churches, Paul is the guy. And both of these pillars of the church wrote a letter to the general churches. And at the end of both of their letters, they both said, wake up. We are in a conflict. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to think about it. But we exist as physical people in a spiritual realm and there are spiritual forces that are against us. Satan is real and he is against you. And he is smarter than you and he is more dedicated than you. So make no mistake about it. We are in a conflict. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, and this is for Christians and non-Christians alike. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to choose purity in this world. Try to choose sexual purity in this world. And tell me that you don't every day feel forces pressing against that. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to raise a kid. For these boys that were up here, those of you who have kids who are grown, as you look at the Janczewskis who are up here with their two little boys and all the triumphs and all the trials that are in front of them, try to tell them that they're not in a conflict for the souls of their boys. Listen, when I talk about passages like this, when we encounter passages like this, there's kind of two ways to respond to them. If we believe in that fight or flight doctrine, some of us have in us fight. That when you start talking about conflict, you start talking about fight, you start talking about spiritual warfare. I open up a sermon with talking about special forces in Iraq. Some of us in the room are like, I'm in, let's go. What you got? Some of us like that stuff. There's others of us in the room who are a little bit more like my wife. She's sweet, man. Fighting, that's not her thing. Conflict, that's not how she does. I start talking about spiritual warfare, she's like, nah, you have fun with your warfare. But here's the thing. She's in just as much of a conflict as I am. This isn't just for a select few. Whether this passage speaks your language or it doesn't, whether you are fierce or whether you are timid, whether you fight or whether you would choose flight, wherever you are on any of the spectrums, be very clear, we exist in a conflict and Satan himself is warring against your marriage. He is warring against your children. He is warring against your friends. He is warring against your family. He is warring against the things that you love the most and his goal is to steal your life from you and to make you as ineffective as possible by catching you up and all the entrapments of the world so that you do nothing for the kingdom. If you hear nothing else this morning, please don't leave here. Wandering through the field, eating grass like a gazelle, unaware that you're in a conflict. As I thought about this passage as your pastor, I wondered, including me, how many times do we sit at home flicking through our phone while there is a night raid being planned against us? We are in a conflict. And because we are, Paul finishes the passage. What do we do? Because we're in a conflict, because it exists, because Satan is real and he is against us, because he's prowling about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, what do we do? Well, the rest of the passage gives us the answer. In verse 13, he starts it out. He says, therefore. Now, hopefully you've heard me say this before. A little bit of biblical interpretation. This is high-level graduate school stuff. Whenever you see a therefore in Scripture, you have to ask, what's it there for? I know, it's very technical. What did he just say that allows him to say what he's going to say? So what this therefore means is, because you're in a battle, here's what you need to do. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm, stand therefore. Having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, He finishes by saying, praying at all times. So if we're in a battle for our marriages, for our families, for our children, for our friends, for our very souls, if we are in a battle, what do we do? We put on the whole armor of God. And I've seen a lot of people go through and break down each element. What's the belt of truth? And what's the helmet of salvation? And what's the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness? And we could do that, but I would just make two points about that. It's boring. And ultimately, it's not super helpful. What we need to know, those are the defensive elements of God's armor. And what we need to know about them is that the defensive elements, the armor that we put on to protect us from the onslaught of the devil is essentially salvation. It's the idea of clothing ourself in salvation. If you want to look back at each one of the elements, they're an element of salvation or something that comes to us as a result of salvation or something that is required so that we can receive salvation. But it's this idea of if we are going to stand firm, because we are in a conflict, what do we do? We clothe ourself in the salvation that God offers us, and we stand firm. I love at the beginning it says, when you have done everything you can to stand, stand therefore. Stay. And I've always pictured in my mind, I don't know how your mind works as I've thought about this passage, I've always pictured this weathered soldier as I think about a mature believer who just stands there with the shield of faith decked out in armor and the evil one is sending the flaming darts towards them and they just weather it. They're just a bulwark in the storm of conflict, and they will not back down, and they will not retreat, and they just stand there, and they take it. That's what I've always pictured. And then I talked to my buddy about this passage, and I said, when you read this passage as a soldier, what do you see? And he said, you know, it's interesting as I read it this week that the only thing I was really interested in was the weapon. He said, as a soldier, when he looks at this and it gets to the armor part, he's like, yeah, that's great, that's great. What's my weapon? What can I fight with? He said, in the special forces, they keep talking about building these like Iron Man suits that make you like impenetrable or whatever, like a juggernaut on the battlefield. And that nobody in special forces is really that interested in these because they don't care. That's not about defending ourselves. It's about what's my weapon and how do I attack the enemy? And he went through a couple of doctrines of attack of the United States military. And the commonality that they had is when you get in a conflict, the best defense is a good offense. When you get in a conflict, the thing you're trying to do as quickly as you can is attack, attack, attack. We do not stand there. They're not just standing there taking it, just weathering the storm of bullets. They attack as quickly and as forcefully as they can. So when he reads this, he wants to know, what's my weapon? How do I go on offense? How do I attack the person who's attacking me? I loved that. That changed my paradigm for me. Because so often I had this picture of the Christian life of somebody who just stands there on the hill, weathering the throes of the evil one, weathering the battle, just standing there as a bulwark and being defensive in this posture of, I will not move, waiting on Jesus. But that's not the picture that the word of God paints. And that's not the picture that my military friend has in his head because there's a weapon here with which we can attack and beat back the attacks of the evil one. It's similar to the wording that Jesus uses when he announces his church. When Peter says, you are Jesus, the son of the living God. And Peter says, yes, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church. And we know that part, but what comes after that? And the gates of hell will not overcome it. The gates are not offensive, they are defensive. Jesus paints this picture of his church forcefully attacking the powers of evil. And so for me, it changed the way I think about what a successful soldier looks like. A successful soldier in this conflict is not one that just sits back and holds up the shield of faith and weathers the storm. It is one that presses forward and attacks. So he wanted to know, in this armor, what's my weapon? What do I get? Our weapon, according to the text, is God's word. The sword of the spirit, which is God's word, is what Paul says. Our weapon, what we use to beat back the attacks of evil against us and our families and our loved ones? Our weapon is God's word. And so to me, the question becomes, why is this the weapon? What's so effective about God's word? And so you can look at the claims that God's word makes about itself. In Hebrews, we're told that the word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. Jesus tells us that God's word will not return null and void. There is this power and efficacy to it. But as I thought about it on a practical level, there's plenty of reasons why God's word is the most effective possible weapon against the schemes of the evil one. But there's two that I wanted to highlight this morning. The first is that God's word speaks eternal certainty, eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. God's word speaks eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. If there are forces working against us, then one of the things that they want to do is to shake our faith, is to make us feel like the world is spinning around and there's nothing that can be done about it. Everything's going to hell in a handbasket. This place is getting worse and worse. This is spiraling out of control. I don't know how this just this last week. Last Friday, we had our very first parent-teacher conference. Lily, our daughter, is going to turn four in January, and she's in preschool, and we had our very first teacher conference. Jen was very excited to go, and she said, I'm so nervous about what they're going to say about Lily. I'm like, she's three. I can say anything that matters. Like, it's whatever. And so she goes, and she's got this sweet teacher named Michelle. And Michelle has really, really short hair because we learned that Michelle is a cancer survivor, and now she's fighting cancer again. And so when Jen went, she shared with Michelle that she was about to run home. Michelle says, oh, why are you doing that? And she said, well, my dad has cancer and he's going to get a scan and I want to be home for that. And so then Michelle shared her story. And as Michelle shared her story and empathized with Jen and understood in this unique way what her family is going through, they began to cry together. And into those tears, Michelle began to share verses off the top of her head that had helped her in her journey and that strengthened Jen in that moment. She spoke eternal truth into temporary uncertainty. And then, as they began to talk about Lily, which it turns out that Lily excels at most things that preschoolers should excel at. She has a hard time holding scissors. So if you see her trying to hold scissors, please don't make any jokes. She's very sensitive. But then they started talking about Lily and all the things where she, all the ways that she's good and all the ways where she can grow. And for everyone, Jen told me as she was recounting the conversation to me, she said, Nate, for every one of these, Michelle, she had a passage to go with it. And she wasn't looking at notes. She was just speaking truth out of God's word over Lily and what was going on. She just breathed scripture. She said, Nate, I want to be like that. And as a dad and a husband, I'll try to keep it together and not get choked up. I am so grateful that there is a woman who is in the conflict, who has sharpened her sword, and who is swinging it on my family's behalf. She's speaking truth into my wife and strengthening her against the enemy. She's speaking truth over my daughter and protecting her against the onslaughts there. Because at some point in her life, she has dedicated herself to sharpening her sword so that it's ready for the battle. At one point or another, she realized that her battle is not against flesh and blood. It's against the spiritual forces in the heavenly places that would seek to tear us away from our God. And so she's awake, and she's standing firm, and she's swinging her sword in that instance for my family. And I'm grateful for that. That's why it's the best weapon. It's also the best weapon. We see this in the life of Christ. I'm gonna get my act together now. It's the best weapon because it overpowers the strength of temptation. I believe that there is something supernaturally powerful. I think that there is something supernatural that happens when we speak God's word into temptation. When we face these moments of trial where we want to go one direction and we can call up a portion of scripture that encourages us to go in the other direction. Jesus exhibited this in his 40 days of fasting at the beginning of his ministry. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. At the end of those 40 days, Satan, the adversary, appeared to him and tempted him in three different ways. And all three times, based on my old understanding of the passage in Ephesians, I would expect Jesus to clothe himself in his own righteousness and just stand there and take the temptation as the onslaught comes. But that's not what he does. He returns, he attacks with the sword of the spirit with God's word in all three instances. Rather than standing there and taking it and weathering it, he returns fire with the word of God that overpowers the strength of that temptation, and the enemy goes away. He quotes scripture to temptation. I've seen this in my own life. I don't very often like to set up myself as the example, but I saw this in my life when I was going through memorizing Romans chapter 8. A couple years ago, I just decided that I wanted to memorize Romans chapter eight. And so by God's grace, I was successful at doing that. But when you commit yourself to memorizing an entire chapter of God's word, it runs in your head all the time, whether you want it there or not. The way that I did it is I used my car rides. I had YouVersion up on my phone and and then at stoplights, I would read as much of the passage that I could, and then in between stoplights, I would try to say it back to myself. So it was playing all the time in my head. And during that season of life, I can't tell you how many times something came up, and I went, that reminds me of verse 13. That reminds me of verse 27. That reminds me of verse 39. I can't tell you how many times it came up where that was all of a sudden relevant again to what I was dealing with in life. I can't tell you how many times I was able to speak the truth of that passage against temptation so that I was no longer interested. And with God's word rolling in your head and in your heart all the time, you become far less easy to tempt. That's why we're told to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against God. And I love this truth because you've heard me many times as your pastor say that the most important habit any of us can develop in life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And it is just reinforced all the more this week as I encounter this text. The most important habit we can have is to spend up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer, clothe ourself in our salvation, ground ourself in our salvation, focus on God in prayer, and sharpen your sword. Because you don't know when you're going to have to swing it. You don't know what conflict is coming. There's no announcement about, hey, there's going to be a temptation today. Hey, you and your wife are going to get into a fight today. Hey, your kid's going to deal with something tough today. Hey, you're going to get a really hard phone call today. We don't get warnings about those. And we don't know when the onslaught's coming, but there is a night raid being planned. So we sharpen our sword. So I want to finish with the encouragement today. Threefold. Wake up. We're in a conflict. It is happening all around us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're even comfortable with it or not, it's happening. Stand firm. Persevere. Why do you think at every turn in scripture that the encouragement of the apostles is to persevere, persevere, persevere, persevere? Why do you think that they hold up perseverance as this great thing to be attained? Why do you think that when Paul is ready to end his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. Why do you think we are told to run the race to win it? Why do you think it says, once you have done everything you can to stand, then stand some more. Stand firm. Persevere in your faith. Life is long. Cling to your salvation. And then sharpen your sword. Be a student of this word. Swing it for the people in your life. Know it well to keep yourself clean. And then go fight for others as we advance as God's army. And here's the promise. Here's what I love. This is not fatalistic at all. We don't just stand there and weather it. We push forward and we fight. And if we do this faithfully, if we stand firm, if we wake up and we stand firm and we sharpen our sword and we swing it when life requires it of us, we will win this battle one day because in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is coming back. And when he comes back, he's not coming as a lamb of God. He's coming as a lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop and he's gonna win this conflict. And so we fight until he gets here. Wake up, stand firm, sharpen your sword. Let's pray. Father, you're a good God. You love us so much. God, I pray that we would feel you empowering us. I pray that we would allow you to wake us up to the reality of what's happening around us. Give us the strength to persevere, to stand firm, to cling to our faith and our salvation. Give us the discipline to sharpen our sword. Help us be ready to swing it when we need to. God, I just pray over all the conflicts and all the battles and all the fights that are going on in this room, all the raids being planned and all the places that Satan is prowling. God, I pray that you would help the people in this room fight, that we would fight for the people around us, that we would feel the strength of your salvation and the joy of your spirit.

Well, good morning. It's good to be up here again. I usually start with my name is Nate, but I think we covered that earlier in the announcement, so I'm just going to jump right into things. This week, I had the opportunity to do two things that I think are kind of a special part of the experience of being a pastor. On Tuesday, I got to go visit a couple in the hospital who goes to the church who just had their new baby, Hudson Harper, the grandson of John Susan Turnburg and then the son of Lauren Harper and Brandon Harper. And it was a sweet, sweet thing to go there and to visit with them and to see this tiny little baby that could barely open his eyes and have the opportunity to talk to them and pray with them. And you kind of get invited into these special spaces that you might not always get to experience. I got invited into this hospital room with them, and it was a really great thing. And then Friday, I got to do a wedding for a couple. They were a sweet couple. He was 34. She was 31. This is their first marriage. They waited for each other. They found each other. They dated for two years. And I got to stand there and do their wedding and be a part of that. And that was a neat experience. And then as we're doing the vows, dude can barely choke through them. Like he is so choked up. He's so moved with love for this woman that he is going to marry. It was a really, really sweet moment. It really was. And what strikes me about those moments is they're both so very full of hope, right? They're both so very full of hopes and dreams. If you know, if you've had a kid, then you know what it is to hold that kid and realize, oh my goodness, all the things you hope for them, all the things that you want for them, all the things that you hope are true of them in their adolescence and into adulthood. And if you know Jesus and you believe in prayer, then you pray for them, you hope for them, you dream about them. And when you get married and you stand at the altar and you look at the person that you're giving your life to, you have hopes and dreams about that marriage as well. You have things that you want to be true, stories that you hope God writes in your life. And those are two really hopeful moments. And they remind me that we all have hopes and dreams. You carried hopes and dreams into this room. We all have things that we want. We all have things that we hope are true one day. That's how we are wired. And sometimes life changes those hopes and dreams. If you go back to when you had a kid and then you look at him now, you're like, that's not what I was hoping for. God adjusts those. Sometimes marriage doesn't go the way that we hoped that it would go. But we change them. We augment them. We still have these hopes and we still have these dreams. We have things that we want for ourselves. And it makes me wonder, if we have hopes and dreams for our children, and we believe that God is our Father in heaven, then he has hopes and dreams for us. And I wonder what those are. I wonder what God hopes for us. I wonder what God's will is for us. I wonder what he wants for each of his children. I wonder what he wants for his church. I wonder what he wants for you. I wonder what he wants for the people that you love the most. And I think that we actually arrive in Ephesians chapter three, as we go through the book of Ephesians in our series, I think we actually arrive at a place where we see God's hopes and dreams for us. I think they're articulated through the person of Paul in this prayer. We're going to be looking at Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. In that span of verses, I tweeted out or sent out on social media this week that this is my favorite passage in the Bible. Aaron, our children's pastor, was laughing at me because apparently I have a lot of favorites, but this is like my favorite favorite, okay? I love this prayer. It's a prayer that he prays to the churches surrounding the ancient city of Ephesus. He prays this prayer, a very similar prayer, over the church in Colossae, in the book of Colossians. We find it there. We find it in the book of Philippians that he prays over the church in Philippi. This prayer has made such an impact on me and the way that I think about things and the way that I hope for the people that God entrusts to me that the very first sermon that I was able to choose when I came to grace, I came to grace in April of 2017. And the first two Sundays were Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. And so those had already kind of been determined what was going to be preached that day. But the first passage that I got to choose to preach to my new church was Ephesians 3, verses 14 through 19. When I go and I visit a kid in the hospital that's born, I pray the ethic or the ethos of this verse over them. The takeaway from this prayer, I pray over them. When I pray for Lily, my own daughter, every night, the first prayer I prayed for her was this. The first thing I pray, the thing I pray for her every night, I try to, is this, that she would know God. And when I pray for the marriages that I do, I pray that they would know God. And that's what we see in this prayer. But I don't just expect you to care about this prayer because I do. I don't just expect you to think it's a big deal because I think it's a big deal. And I don't just expect you to accept that these are God's hopes and dreams for you without a little bit of work or a little bit of background because I say they're a big deal. And I think that fundamental to this prayer is really understanding Paul. I think to appreciate the prayer, we have to appreciate the person who prayed it. Now, if I had made these notes later in the week when I was really on my game, I would have said to appreciate the prayer, you have to appreciate the prayer. Yeah, that's better. But this is fine. You have to appreciate the person who prayed the prayer. So who is the person of Paul? I feel like in church we talk about Paul. You've heard me say Paul before, and you know that you're supposed to acknowledge that he's a big deal. But I wonder if sometimes we don't know bits and pieces of who he is, and we don't really know the whole person of Paul. Maybe Paul to you is kind of like Bruce Springsteen to me. I have to confess to you, I don't really know anything that he sang. I don't, I'm sorry. I grew up in a cruel regime that didn't allow me to listen to secular music. And so the 70s and the 80s are totally lost on me until I could start sneaking like Offspring and Dave Matthews in the 90s. Like that's when I started listening to music. Before that, it was just just the Bill Gaither vocal band, which is awesome. I mean, don't hate on them. Some of you are not laughing. You're like, I don't get this. Don't. Google it. You're going to have a great afternoon. But like, I don't know who Bruce, I don't know what he's saying. I'm pretty sure he's called the boss. I think he's from New Jersey. I don't know. You don't have to tell me. I don't really care. And like, this, I was trying to tell the staff, like what songs did he sing? And my first two guesses were Born to Be Wild. No. And Summer of 69. No, that's not true. I think Born in the USA. Is that one? That's literally all I know. They taught me that this week. That's all I know. But my whole life, people will mention Bruce Springsteen. I'm like, yeah, the boss. He's the man. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know anything about him. I just fake it because by this time it's too late to ask any questions, right? I think sometimes we do that with Paul. We mention him in church. Last week you heard me say that he has these things called epistles. That sounds very fancy. Letters that he wrote to the churches. We know that he went around planting churches. We know things about Paul, but I wonder if we really know this person and who he is. Maybe some of you do. Maybe some of you know the deep cuts, like you know the bootlegs, like you know that there's a third Corinthians floating around somewhere out there that we haven't read before. That's actually a true thing. That's a thing that exists. Maybe you know that. Maybe you don't, but I thought we could kind of piece together our knowledge of Paul so we can really appreciate the person that prays this prayer over the church in Ephesus and ultimately over us. Paul was born, Saul, in a city called Tarsus. And he grew up as a Jew's Jew, man. He came up, he was in training, he had just become a Pharisee. And one thing to know about Jerusalem and Israel at the time is that every civilization has a celebrity culture. Every civilization has people that they look at and go, those are the ones that we want to be like. And in Israel, it was the religious leaders. It was the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And so to grow up becoming a Pharisee was to be a part of the celebrity culture of Israel. It was to be young and up and coming. It was to be known. And he was the cream of the crop. He was at the top of the heap. He was the guy. He was the guy with all the potential in Israel. He was a Jew's Jew. And then when Jesus was crucified and his followers, known as simply the way, began to multiply, he said, this is a threat to Judaism, to what I believe in. It's my job to stamp it out. So he took it on his own shoulders to stamp out this young religion of Christianity. And he began to persecute the Christians in Jerusalem. And then he got a special order to go to the next nation over to a city called Damascus and stamp out the Christian movement going on there. And on the way to Damascus, Jesus appears to him and he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? He blinds him and he sends him to a place. He says, you stay here, someone's going to come to you. And then God goes to Ananias, this great prophet that lives. And he says, I want you to go to Saul, and I want you to heal him of the blindness that I'm struck him with. And Ananias says, I don't want to do that. If I go to see Saul, I'm going to get killed. No way. You can find some other sucker. And God says what I think is maybe one of the most ominous lines in the New Testament. Saul is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. For those of you who think that the Christian life, that once I become a Christian, there's no more suffering and God fixes everything that hurts me, I will show you how much he must suffer for my name. That's not in the Bible, this idea that we don't experience hardship once we know Jesus. The one who followed him maybe the best had some of the hardest trials. So Ananias goes to Saul, now named Paul, and he takes the scales off of his eyes. Paul is infused with his purpose. He is the chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles, okay? Gentile is anybody who's not a Jew. So that's almost everybody in this room. And Paul was the guy that God took his infant church that was birthed in Jerusalem, that had a couple thousand followers in this one city, and he handed, I think, this infant church to Paul, and he said, here, I need you to bring this to adolescence. He entrusted it to him. Carry my word, carry the mystery of the gospel, the thing that happened here with Jesus when he died on the cross. Take that to the other church, to the other cities surrounding us in Asia Minor and spread the word of this church. And Paul did his job well because here we are, another continent 2,000 years later. He went off into the wilderness for a number of years. When he felt like he was ready, he presented himself to the council, to the church council in Jerusalem, populated by the disciples and Jesus' brother, James. And he said, hey, I think I'm ready to do my job. I think I'm ready to go tell the Gentiles about this Jesus. Can I go? And they said, yeah, you have our blessing. So he went for the rest of his life on four missionary journeys. Some scholars say it was three journeys. some say four. The reason there's a debate is that his last journey, he was arrested and then put on a ship and taken to Rome. On his way to Rome, they shipwrecked on this island of Malta, and then eventually they got to Rome. And the whole time, Paul, because he's Paul, was sharing his faith and inspiring churches and writing letters. So some consider that his fourth missionary journey. The important thing to know is for his entire life, he traveled around and he planted churches and he inspired people and he brought people to the gospel. He had what was called a traveling seminary. It wasn't called that then, but we call it that now. He always had people who were younger than him, men and women that he was training up so that they could lead churches too. Timothy is his most famous disciple. He actually, the books of 1 and 2 Timothy were written letters from Paul to Timothy when he made Timothy the pastor in Ephesians. He sent Timothy to Ephesus and he said, that's going to be your church now. Here's some letters to guide you as you lead them. Paul was a great man. He is the most influential Christian to ever live. Paul literally said, and he meant it, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted to be with God so badly that he considered it a good thing if he were gonna die. But he understood that to be here was to serve God, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted death, not in a morose way, not in a suicidal way, not in a depressed way, but in a way that he said his picture of what eternity was was so great that he wanted that more than whatever this life had to offer. I spent a lot of time over the years, I haven't done it lately as much to my detriment, but for a while I was reading a lot of biographies. I love reading biographies about people that have done incredible things, men and women that have impacted history through the years. And whenever I read these biographies about good and bad people, people that did great things, people that did terrible things, I try to look for the commonalities. What is it about these people that make them great? What do they have in common through the years, whether it's Genghis Khan or whether it's George Washington or Steve Jobs? What do they have in common that helped them do these great things? And the one thing that I found in the biographies that I've read is that the thing that these great people have in common is this remarkable singularity of focus. They have this ability in their life to be laser focused on this thing that they think is so important. Above and beyond everything else, often to the detriment of other things that most normal people prioritize. A lot of times what they did, the great thing that they do, costs them all kinds of things in their personal lives. But they have the singularity of focus. And as I study Paul, without a doubt, he has the singularity of focus on God's church. He will not be distracted. All he ever cares about is building God's church and the people in God's church. And Paul had hopes and dreams for you too. He had a desire for you. And he had a desire for grace, just like he had a desire for the church in Ephesus. And if we wanna know what Paul prioritized, I think you can look at his prayers. This prayer is important because it reveals what Paul most values. The reason this passage is important is because it's revelatory to us. It tells us what Paul most values. If you were to go to Paul and you were to say, what's the, to you, if you could only ask for one thing for a church, what would it be? If we went to him and we said, if you could, Paul, if you could only pray one thing over grace, what would it be? I think it would be this. If you said, Paul, what, if you could only pray one thing over my marriage, over my kid, over me, over the people that I love, what would it be? I think it would be this passage. I really, truly do. And I think what's said in this prayer reveals his priorities for us. So let's look at what Paul prays over the churches around Ephesus, and I think over the New Testament church of which we are a part. He says this, That's Paul's prayer for you. If you were to say, Paul, what do you want from me and my family? This is it. This is what he wants. And I think it's worth going through sentence by sentence and making sure we really understand what it is that Paul's asking for us here. So if you look at verses 14, and I've actually asked Lynn running our slides today to just leave it up on the screen so that we can look at it together. If you look at verses 14 and 15, for this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. Paul is saying, listen, Ephesus, I want you to know, church, I want you to know, I pray for you. I pray for you. And when I do, here's what I pray. Now, it's interesting to note he gets on his knees. It's a posture of submission. God, your will be done, not mine. It's acknowledging that God is Lord over the whole earth, that all the churches are his. But really, the heart of this is Ephesus, church, I pray for you regularly. And when I do, let me tell you what I pray for. We see in 16, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being. And there's a purpose to that prayer that he wants to be strengthened you. He wants you to be strengthened in your inner being by his spirit so that there's a purpose to that prayer. Okay. That's not just one thing that he wants. He wants that for you because it leads to something else. And the thing that it leads to is so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, okay? Those first two things there, that you would be strengthened with power in your inner being by his spirit so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. That's salvation. That's what he's talking about. To understand what it means to become a Christian is for the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to spiritual truths that you had not yet seen. If you're a believer, then what's happened in your life is at some point or another, your eyes were opened and you realized, oh my goodness, because of choices I've made, I'm at odds with my creator. I have no way to repair my relationship with my creator, and I need something, some supernatural action so that I can be reunited with my creator. And then you realize through the Holy Spirit, because he's working in your heart and in your mind, that that's Jesus. The Holy Spirit's first work in your life is to turn you on to your need for a Savior, and then to open up the doors of your heart so that Christ can take residence in your heart, that Christ would dwell in your hearts through faith. This is a salvation experience. The very first thing that Paul prays for all of us is that we would be Christians, that we would be saved. If you're here this morning and you're not a part of a church and you're not a part of the church because you're not yet a believer, you just came with somebody or you wandered in, we are so glad that you are here. And I want you to know that Paul prays for you. He prays for you that you would become a believer. And not just mental ascent, not just, yeah, I think so. But that you would be strengthened in your inner being. And that phrasing, that denotes your heart, your guts, your core, and your bones down to the fiber of who you are. Be strengthened with the Spirit, I think, so that you won't doubt. So that you'll know that you know that you know that Christ has you. That he will take up residence in your heart, and that you know that you are a believer, that you will be strengthened to your core and have this confidence in knowing that God has you. He prays that for you. But he doesn't stop there. He doesn't just want you to be a believer. He doesn't just want you to know Christ and for Christ to take residence in your heart. But the result of that, and I think this is a beautiful thing, it says that Christ would dwell in your hearts in faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love. I love that phrase. When we're confident in the work that the Holy Spirit has done, we've been strengthened in our core. When Christ has taken up residence in our heart, the result of this, of knowing that we are saved, is that we are rooted and grounded in love. And as I thought about this phrase, I thought, man, this is a really appropriate phrase for 2019. Because we are a people and we are a culture that is becoming more and more aware of the idea of health. All of us, we express it in different ways. Some of us are old school tough guys and we would never really admit this. We just have other ways of saying it, but it's the same thing. We want to be mentally healthy. We want to be physically healthy. We want to be spiritually healthy. We want to be emotionally healthy. We want to be healthy people. Now, some of you, the best way that you have to be emotionally healthy is just to convince yourself that you don't have any of those and then go through life, okay? So that's how some of you have achieved emotional health. If it's working for you, I don't want to mess you up, but we all seek it. We even have little phrases that kind of tip us off and remind us that not everyone's healthy and that's why life happens this way sometimes. Sometimes somebody will say something to hurt your feelings and you'll go to someone who loves you and you'll say, man, so-and-so said this and gosh, it really bothered me. And they'll remind you that, you know what? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. You ever heard that? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. And that's true. Sometimes people who are unhealthy get their unhealth on you by saying regrettable things. Sometimes we see behaviors in others that are gross to us. Just last night, I wasn't gonna use this, but I am now. This will be fun. Jen and I got to go out on a date. It was nice. We went to Second Empire. It was a good restaurant. There's a six-top next to us, and there was a guy there who his voice was loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear all night. He was an insufferable cuss words. And he went on and on about how, I'm not kidding you. He was like in his fifties. We learned how much he could bench. We learned what kind of car he drive. We learned what he did for a living. We learned the people that he knew. We learned the resumes of everybody at the table. It was, he almost ruined our dinner. If my date had to been so pretty, it would have been a waste of a night. Let's pray. But here's the truth. That guy, he's pretty insufferable. He was a me monster. He needed people to like him. He's just not healthy. He hasn't found his true value and his true worth. So he wants you to know those things about him so that you go, you're something. And if you're smart, if you're empathetic, when you're around people like that, and I didn't do it last night because I was neither smart nor empathetic, but right here I can figure it out. You offer those people grace and you go, they're not healthy. They haven't yet found their worth, their sense of being and belonging. And what this verse is telling you is, once the Spirit has moved in your life and strengthened you, once Christ has taken up residence in your heart, man, you are loved by your creator who sent his son to die for you. And you have all the sense of worth and value that you'll ever need if you'll trust it. He gives you your identity. He imbues you with purpose. He tells you every day that he loves you and that you're enough. And if we believe that, if we hear it, and if we walk in it, then we can be rooted and grounded in love. We can be spiritually and emotionally healthy people, and then out of that help, love others. That's the picture of what it is to be a believer, is to be somebody who's healthy enough to know, I'm loved. I don't need affection from other people. I'm affirmed, I don't need other people to tell me I'm special because God does. And then in that freedom and in that confidence, move and love other people. That's a picture of what health is. And I think so often our lives are not rooted and grounded in love. They're rooted and grounded in a myopia or in a narcissism. They're rooted and grounded in anxiety or in things that we can't control. They're rooted and grounded and characterized by a depression or by places where we're not trusting. They're rooted and grounded in ambition and greed and self-consumption. And Paul's prayer is that we would be people who are healthy, who know Christ, who are rooted and grounded in love. Once we are rooted and grounded the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Then he prays, I want you to go deeper into this love of Jesus. I don't want him to just take up residence in your heart. I don't want you to just express his love to other people. I want you to go deeper and deeper into this love that Jesus has for you. I kind of think about it like the ocean. If you go to the ocean and you walk up to it to your knees just before your shorts get wet, you can technically say that you've experienced the ocean. But have you experienced the depths of the ocean? You can walk out there until the waves are breaking over your head and you can feel it kind of swirling you around a little bit. You can feel the power of the ocean. Have you experienced the depths of the world's oceans? When I go to the ocean, what I like to do, and I know this is a terrible choice, and one day I'm just not going to come back, and that's how it goes. I swim out until I get scared. Every time I go to the ocean, I do it. I like to do it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I swim until I get scared. And then I turn around and swim back. Now, I never get scared because, oh my gosh, I'm so far out. I'm not going to have the energy to get back. I become acutely aware that I'm at shark depth and that they've seen me. And I cannot, as much as I try to get that thought out of my head and they're not interested in me, there's other things to eat. they don't want me. As much as I try to reason with myself, I just, there's sharks here, man, and I swim back. But even swimming out as far as I can until I get scared, have I experienced the depths of the ocean? If you've been on a cruise ship and you've had the opportunity to look in every direction and see nothing but the ocean. If you are a marine biologist, a maritime explorer, and you get in a submarine and you go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean, have you experienced all that there is to experience in the ocean? No. You can devote your life to exploring it and you will only ever scratch the surface of what it has to offer. This is the love of Christ. Just because we've been up to our waist, just because it swept over us and we felt the power of it a couple times, just because we were able to venture out far enough so that we got scared does not mean that we have experienced all that the love of Christ has to offer. And Paul's prayer is that your life would be this experience of an ever-deepening understanding of the love that God has for you, understanding that until we get to eternity, we will only ever scratch the surface. You could devote your life to understanding the love that Jesus has for you, and we still won't comprehend it. And then finally, he says, for all of this, that you would be filled with all the fullness of God. Thanksgiving's coming up around the corner. And when it does, we go to Dothan, Alabama, and we have the best meal of the year. It's phenomenal. And about 10 to 15 minutes before that meal, every year, what do I start doing? I start going through the kitchen. There's the turkey, and I pick up a little piece of that turkey and have some turkey. There's a deviled egg. I'm going to sneak like six of those, and I'll have a couple of dev you know? I start to kind of pick at the food. But I'm not full yet. Because what's going to happen is we're going to pray, and everybody's going to get a plate, and they're going to go. And I'm always going to go and wait and let everybody else go first because I don't want to have to worry about portion control when I get there. And when I get up to that food, I'm even thinking this year, I'm going to go to Walmart and buy some of those khakis with like the elastic waistband here. So I got some Thanksgiving pants, you know. I'm going to make some irresponsible choices at Thanksgiving. I'm going to have a big old food baby. And I'm not going to stop until I get the meat sweats, right? That's what America does, man. Yeah. That is full. That's full. When we taste on Sunday morning and we get another taste at small group, we get another taste when we get up in the morning, we get another little taste when we listen to something in the car. Let us not be satisfied with that. Let us be filled with all the fullness of God. That we would know him. And that's the heart of the prayer. All of this, if you had to sum it up, what does Paul pray for us? If you had to sum it up in one sentence, what does Paul want for us more than anything? That you would know God. That you would know Jesus. That you would be filled with the fullness of him. That you would have an inkling of the height and the breadth and the depth of his love for you. That you would be strengthened with power in your inner being. That you would be healthy from that health that you would love. That you would be overwhelmed by God and be full of him every day. That's the number one thing that he prays for you. I think that's remarkable. I think it's remarkable, particularly when you think about the things that he didn't pray. If you look at these churches, these churches in the ancient world, life expectancy was like, what, 40, 45? I can't back that up with paperwork, but I feel pretty confident with that guess. Sickness was very much a part of these churches. Loss was a part of the lives of all the people in these churches. Yet Paul does not pray for health. He does not pray in this prayer. He does in other places, but in this prayer, if he can only pray one thing, he doesn't pray for healing or spiritual health or physical health rather. He doesn't pray, even though he planted this church, he wants it to grow. He wants to see them add numbers day by day. He wants to see this church flourish and be bigger in five years than it is this year. He wants that for this church. He doesn't pray it. He doesn't pray, may your ministry be successful. May God give you favor in your community. He doesn't pray for prosperity or wealth or success or health. He prays that they would know God. Now, does Paul want all of those things? Sure, absolutely he does. And at other places in the Bible, he prays for some of those things. But what's the first thing that he wants? That they would know God. It makes sense to me that he doesn't pray for church growth. Because if your church is filled with people who have mined the depths of the love of Christ, who are filled with all the fullness of God. You don't think that church brings in other people? You don't think that church is a powerful force in the community in which it sits? You don't think that person who is filled in that way isn't an influencer at their place of work? He doesn't have to pray those other things. He prays for the fundamental thing. He doesn't pray for health. I think he doesn't pray for health because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very situation that is going to bring about the answer to this prayer, which is to make you closer to God. He doesn't pray for prosperity because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very struggle that's going to bring you closer to God. And earlier I said that Paul's prayer reveals what he most values. Our prayers reveal our priorities. And if our prayers reveal what we most value, what do your prayers reveal about you? And the times that you pray, for some of us, it's every day. For some of us, it's for our meals. For others, it's when we're at Bible study and someone asks us to pray. We go, well, here we go. For others, it's rarely. It's in dire situations. But when you pray, what do you pray? When you go to God and you ask for something, what's the first thing you ask for? What have you prioritized above everything else? Is it situational? Or does it transcend that? I think the first thing that we should pray in every situation based on this prayer is, Father, let what's happening now conspire in some way to bring people closer to you. When we get the diagnosis, I think first we pray, God, we don't understand this. We hate this. This breaks our heart. Let it conspire to bring people closer to you. And then we go, and if it's still your will, God, could you please get rid of this because this stinks. When we find ourselves between jobs or between purposes, our first prayer should be, God, in this time, when I try to figure out what's next, I pray that the events of this time would conspire to bring me and those around me closer to you. And then the next thing. When something happens in the life of our child, God, I pray that whatever's going on right now, even though I don't understand it, will it please conspire to bring them to a place where they know you better? Will that please be the result of this? And then, Father, do these things. The question I want to ask you is, how should Paul's prayer shape our prayers? How should what he prays for shape what we pray for? How should what he hopes for shape what we hope for? What are your wildest dreams for your kids? Do they start with that they would simply know God? I pray for Lily. I pray that she'd marry a nice man that loves the Lord, that takes care of her, that loves her better than I ever could. I pray that she knows God better than I ever do. But the first thing I pray for her above anything else, any of her character traits, where she goes and what she does, the first thing I pray for her every night is she would know God. When we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, what do we pray for them? When we respond to tragedy, what do we pray in the face of that tragedy? When we respond to triumph, this is where we need to be the most careful. Everything's going great. What do we pray in the face of that triumph? Because we all have hopes and dreams and things that we want in life. But God has those for us too. And I don't know about you, but I want my hopes and dreams to align with his. I want our hopes and dreams as a church to align with what God wants for us. I want us to be people who more than anything else want us and those we love to know God. Let's pray. Father, we love you. You pursue us with a reckless love. You fill us with that love. You offer it to us freely. And God, you call us to it. I pray that we would hear that call, that we would feel it, that we would give into it. Lord, I pray over grace that we would be people who are strengthened in our inner being through your spirit, that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith, that we would be healthy people who are rooted and grounded, God. And because of that, because of that health, because we know your love so much, that we would mind the depths of the love of Christ that he has for us, that we would know with all the saints exactly what that is, and that we would be filled with all of your fullness, Father. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

All right, well, good morning. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. But thanks for being here on this September Sunday. I'm excited to be back in the fall in two services and to be in our new series called Feast. What's going on here is that God, using Moses, carrying the Israelites out of Egypt. They were a nation of slaves. The Israelites are God's chosen people. They're living in the desert. And we see this in the first five books of the Bible. And the books of Leviticus and Numbers really kind of give us the details of God's effort to help Moses kind of construct a civilization or a society. If you think about it historically, it's about 500,000 people coming out of slavery. It's all they've ever known. Now they're an independent nation or group of people, and they're trying to figure things out. So God gives them laws and the Ten Commandments. He gives them religion. They assign a priestly class, the Levites, to set up the tabernacle and put expectations and provision around how these people are supposed to interact with their God. They install a government. Moses names elders and everybody looks out for their tribes and it works kind of like that. And one of the things that God does for this new society is he gives them six festivals or six holidays, and he says, every year I want you to celebrate these six events. And last week we talked about this idea that really what a holiday does is it stops us in the midst of our year, in the midst of our crazy life, as everything just kind of gets going and blowing and we focus on all these other things. What a holiday does is it stops us and it narrows our focus in on things that are important to us. And so to me, it's really interesting to look at the six holidays that God installed in the Old Testament for his chosen people and ask ourselves, what is it in these holidays that God wants us to remember? What is it that he wants us to celebrate? What was it that he wanted his chosen people to stop and slow down and focus on for a little while? And so as we approach the holiday this week, last week was Feast of Trumpets. It kicks off the Jewish New Year, and I had a good time. We kicked the service off with a shofar. I thought it was a really fun service. I really went home last week going, man, this fall is going to be really, really great, really, really fun. As we approach this week and the festival that God had, I wanted to go back a couple of weeks to a podcast that I was listening to. There's a guy that does podcasts. I think it's called Armchair Expert, a guy named Dax Shepard. He's an atheist. He's not a believer. It is not a church-friendly podcast. I'm not like, go listen to this and you'll be spiritually enriched. But what he does is he talks to other people and he has these actual meaningful, vulnerable, deep conversations. And I've found in my life that conversations like that, where you can just really get down to things that matter and learn about people and be honest and vulnerable with people, those kinds of conversations really kind of give me life. I like those. And so I like listening to his podcast. And he had a guy on named Danny McBride, I think. He's an actor, comedian, whatever. And they're talking, and they were talking about growing up being forced to go to church. Danny grew up in the South, I think maybe even in North Carolina. And he was forced to go to church, but he never wanted to. And so as soon as he was old enough, he quit going. And he really doesn't claim to have much of a faith now. Dax grew up, sometimes his grandparents would make him go, but he is a devout atheist now. He's very open about his atheism. But they got to talking about going to church when they were young. And then one of them made the comment when they were old enough to not have to go anymore. I think it was Dax. He was like, you know, I kind of missed it. I liked having to do something, being made to do something that I didn't want to do. And Danny said, yeah, you know what? I found that I kind of missed it too. I wonder why that is. And Dax said this thing that I thought was incredibly interesting coming from an atheist. He said, I think that there is a human need to repent, a need to make ourselves right with our Creator. There's an author named C.S. Lewis who was around in the early 1900s, World War II. He was an English professor at Oxford and was an atheist as well. But he made this intellectual journey from atheism to theism to eventually Christianity. And he wrote a book that chronicles that journey called Mere Christianity. It's a Christian classic. If you've never read it, it's absolutely worth the time. The language is a little bit tough. It's hard to understand. Sometimes you're going to have to reread passages. If you're like me, you're going to have to really reread them a lot. But eventually when you understand it, man, it is one of the best books I think ever written. And in his argument for God and explaining how he arrived at a belief in the Christian God, the first thing he does is talk about, lay out some proofs for God for himself. Not trying to convince you, and I'm not going to go through those proofs this morning, but he starts making the case for why he came to the conclusion that there has to be a God. And then after he concludes that there has to be a God, he makes a reasoned argument that he has to be a perfect God. And then he says this, and it stuck with me. I've always thought it was so interesting. He said, and since there's a God, and since he is perfect, we have no choice but to conclude that he is offended by us, that he's angry with us, because we're not perfect. And we know intrinsically that there's a God who created us and that we have displeased him in the way that we've acted because we haven't lived up to his standards. And I just think that these two different thought processes by people who were or are atheists coming to the conclusion that, you know what, and they wouldn't say it like this, but I say it like this, written on the human heart is a longing to be made right with our creator God. I think it exists in each one of us. I think if you're here this morning and you're not even a believer, somebody drug you here or you're kicking the tires, I think that you might even agree with me that there is something that wants us to be right with God, right with the universe. If you're a believer, you know this feeling very well. And it's for this need, it's to address this feeling, this thing that was written on us, this need to repent that God placed on the calendar the holiest of holidays that we now know as Yom Kippur. And that's what we're going to look at this morning. Now, Yom Kippur is what it's called in the Hebrew culture. And those words together, Yom means day and Kippur means atonement. So it's become known as the day of atonement. But Kippur can also be translated as covering, the day of covering. And so it's the day on the calendar that God provides for his people so that you can be sure, so that the Hebrew people, the Israelite people can be sure that they are right before their God. It addresses this intrinsic need within us to repent and know that we are right before our creator God. And so it's on this day that all of the sins of the priesthood, of the high priest, and of the Hebrew people are atoned for in a ceremony that we're gonna go through that occurs at the temple in Jerusalem. It's the day of atonement or the day of covering. It's the provision that God makes so that his people can be right before him. And to me, it's a remarkable day. Most of you have probably heard of it before. Most of you who pay attention to cultural things probably know that it's a Jewish holiday and it's the holiest, it's the highest of the holidays. It's celebrated so reverently that every 50 years, the day of atonement becomes a year of Jubilee. And on the 50th year, on that year of Jubilee, all debts are canceled and all land is given back to the family. It's a really important holiday in the Hebrew calendar. And on this day, everybody went to the temple. So to help us as I kind of walk us through what happened at Yom Kippur, we have to kind of have a working knowledge of the temple. So I actually found this picture that I wanted to show you. This is the temple. If you go to Jerusalem right now, in the city is a museum that I've been able to go to. And in the middle of that museum is a replica that's probably about as big as this room of ancient Israel at the time of Solomon and immediately following. And in the middle of the city is the temple complex. And this is the temple complex. And so what you see here, I just kind of want to walk us through there for a couple of things. That big building in the middle, the tallest part of it, that is the holy place and the holy of holies. We're going to talk about it in a second, but that building was basically divided in two by a curtain. The front portion of it was the holy place. The only people allowed in the holy place were Jewish priests. And then the other side of that is the holy of holies. The only person allowed there is the high priest. And then outside of that through the door, you see the inner courtyard. The only people allowed there are Jewish males. And then outside of that building and more of the space is the outer courtyard. Only Jewish people are allowed in the outer courtyard. And then this roofed area to the left of the screen, that's where the Sanhedrin met. That was like their senate. That's where the government met. All the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Zealots, their representatives would meet there and decide on things. So that's kind of, when I talk about the temple for the rest of the morning, this is what I'm talking about. And it's important for us to know that on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, the focus of all of God's people was on the temple. On the Day of Atonement, on this day, on the holiest of holidays, the focus of all of Israel, of all of God's people scattered wherever they were, was on the temple. And so what they would do is they would come from all over the country. And having been there, it's not super far. You can get there in a couple of days if you're walking from the top of the country to Jerusalem in the center or from southern Israel to Jerusalem. So everybody has the chance to come and gather in the holy city at the temple, the holy place where the presence of God is. The presence of God was said to be in the holy of holies. And so on this holiday, the highest of days, all of Israel would gather and clamor into Jerusalem. And then on the Day of Atonement, as many people as could fit into that temple complex would fit into that temple complex and wait for the priest to perform the ceremonies and the rites and the duties that went along with Yom Kippur. And the priest was also a focal point of this day. And as I learned this stuff, I'm going to walk you through kind of what that day looked like. I was fascinated by all of these things. I hope that it doesn't bore you, but for me, I'm kind of a history nerd, so as I was reading this stuff, I really, really ate it up. But the priest would come out. First of all, he would start to fast the day before. Everybody would fast the day of. Every good Hebrew would fast the day of Yom Kippur, but the priest would fast a day early, and then he would stay up all night. Members of the Sanhedrin were assigned to watch him and make sure he didn't fall asleep, because he was likely an older guy, and our population of people who are the age of what the high priest would have been know that it's kind of hard to stay awake during one of my sermons. So I can't imagine staying awake all night. So the Sanhedrin would kind of watch him and poke him and make sure he didn't fall asleep. And then after that, they would hand it off to the priestly elders and they would make sure that he would stay awake. And then very early in the morning, the ceremony would start and he would go into the temple, I would assume surrounded by thousands of people, and he was wearing his traditional priestly robes, which were laced with gold as is detailed in the book of Leviticus. And he would go behind a curtain to like a bath and he would ceremonially bathe himself, which I'm guessing wasn't awkward for them. They would have been like, yeah, I mean, he's just taking a bath. For us, that's weird. But for them, he would take a bath behind the curtain and it was fine. And then when he was done, he would put on white priestly garments specifically for Yom Kippur, for the Day of Atonement. And he would begin to perform the ceremonies and the rituals of the day. And the first one was he would go to the altar in that outer courtyard in front of the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, and he would take a bull. And he would place his hands on the head of the bull, and he would repeat this prayer of repentance because this bull was dying for the priest and for his family. This was his personal atonement and the atonement for the rest of the priesthood for all of the sins that had been committed in that year. And so he would atone for his sins, and his sins were symbolically transferred from him to the head of the bull, and that bull would die in his place and in the place of his family. It's a sacrificial system. And then the blood of the bull would drip into a bowl, and he would hold that, and that would be prepared for something in a second. Then, in this really kind of interesting ceremony, there would be two goats that were brought to the high priest. And he would take one goat, they would draw lots, which was their way of playing paper, rock, scissors. And he would decide which goat got designated as for the Lord and which goat got designated as the scapegoat. And the one that was designated for the Lord, they put a white cord around its neck. And the one that was designated as the scapegoat, they put a red cord around its neck. And then after doing that, the priest would then say a prayer. And in this prayer, the name of Jehovah was elicited. And I think it happened like eight times throughout the day. And every time the priest would say the name of Jehovah God, the entire assembly would fall on their face and worship God. And then stand back up and he would continue. to God, and then you would walk through this curtain. And this curtain I always heard about growing up separates the Holy of Holies from the holy place. And I always heard in Christian school and in Bible college that if you put a team of oxen on either side of that curtain and they pulled against one another, that they would not be able to tear that curtain. It was an impenetrable layer. And in the Holy of Holies was the Ark of the Covenant. It was a box that you weren't allowed to touch. Inside this box was the stone tablets that God gave Moses the law on and the staff of Moses. On top of this box were two golden angels. And it's thought that their wings were pointed out and their heads were bowed and that their wings were touching each other at the tips. And where they touched would create what was called the mercy seat. And it said that the very presence of God rested on that mercy seat. And there was only one person alive allowed to go in there, and that was the high priest. Because it was the very presence, the holy presence of God. And if you went in there and were impure, anything about you was imperfect and not worthy of God's presence, then you would fall dead in an instant. They were so worried about this. This was so sobering and such a concern that in the white priestly garments of the high priest, they wove bells into the hymns so that when he would move, you could hear him moving. And before he went into the Holy of Holies, they would tie a rope around his ankle so that if the bells stopped, they'd just start pulling. That's how serious it was. Can you imagine being guy number two? And they had to pull him out and be like, well, you've got to put on that robe now. That would be really scary. But that was the seriousness and the sobriety that surrounded going into the Holy of Holies. And it's only the priests that even saw the high priest enter. The Jewish males are outside. Maybe if they have a certain vantage point, they can peek in and see. But the other, the people, the throngs up on the walls and on the roofs, they can't even see him going into the Holy of Holies. And that's where the presence of God rested. And when he got in there, he would take the blood of the bull and he would sprinkle it on the mercy seat and he would sprinkle it on the curtain and he would say a prayer and that was for his family and then he would step out. And when he stepped out, he went and he took the goat that was designated as for the, and he sacrificed that goat. And this was the beginning of the atonement of the sins of the people of Israel. He would take the blood of the goat, he would pray a prayer, he would read a scripture, people would fall on their face and worship God, and then he would go back into the Holy of Holies, and he would sprinkle the blood of the goat on the mercy seat and on the curtain, and this was the atonement for the people. Then he would step back out and he would take the scapegoat. And there was a designated priest in a particular causeway of the temple. And he would send the scapegoat to that priest. And that priest would then walk that goat out of the city limits into the wilderness, traditionally 10 to 12 miles. I don't know how long this took, but I do know that if I were an ancient Hebrew person, that waiting for the goat to get to the place would be my least favorite part of Yom Kippur. I'm not a man of a lot of patience, and that's 12 miles away with an old priest. I would get pretty bummed out about that. All along the way, there was 10 stations, 10 booths where they would eat and drink and then move on. And once the scapegoat got far enough away, the priest would then sacrifice that goat. And then he would camp there overnight and not come back into the city until the morning. And it said that that scapegoat is the goat that died for the sins of the people of Israel. And it would cover over the sins of Israel. That's where we get the kippur, the covering. It would serve as the covering of the sins of Israel so that when God looked at the people of Israel, he didn't see their sin. He saw the covering. And this particular death was for sins of omission because all of these people, listen, if you're at Yom Kippur, if you've got prime seats and you're watching this, you probably have been going to temple every week and you've been doing your sacrifices every week and you've been making sure that you and God are good throughout the year. But this particular sacrifice were for the sins of omission of the people of Israel throughout the year. And we can relate to this. Those things that you didn't know were wrong until later, that thing that you've been doing for years, and then you find out like, oh my goodness, I shouldn't do that. That's not really pleasing to the Lord. I guess I should stop. Sorry, 2012. Like we know those things, or maybe those little like attitudes that show up, the little flecks of racism that we find in ourselves. And we go, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I used to think that way. These things where we've displeased the Lord and we don't even realize that we have. That's what the Day of Atonement was for, was to say, hey, everything is covered. Everything is taken care of. Once the goat had been sacrificed, there was a series of flags that would be waved by centuries all the way back to Jerusalem. And then once the word got back to the high priest, he would burn the remaining parts of the bulls and the goat that were sacrificed earlier. He would read three scriptures and say eight benedictions. He would invoke the name of the Lord and the crowd, the thousands of people would worship along with him each time. And when he was finally done, after a whole day's worth of ceremony late in the afternoon, he would ceremonially bathe one more time and put his personal clothes back on. And tradition says that he would go home and have a feast with his family to celebrate surviving that day because it was a stressful time for his family. And I do think it's interesting that after the high priest performs all of these duties on a somber holiday, the first thing he does is he goes home and he has a feast. So even on a holiday that's dedicated to fasting, there's still a feast to cap it off at the end. And so as I learned about these things this week and this process and this ceremony, I just began to think, man, what would it have been like to have been in the ancient Hebrew world? And watch this. What would it have been like to grow up with this tradition? What would it have been like to bend one of the throngs of people in the temple watching or listening or waiting and seeing the reaction of everybody else? At a time with no internet, at a time without published books, at a time where the only way you learn is through rote memorization, whatever the previous generation tells you, that's what you retain, and then you teach it to the ones who follow you. And for thousands of years, that's how it worked. What would it have been like to take in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as an ancient Hebrew person? What would it have been like to just be surrounded, to be from the countryside of Galilee and to come in and be surrounded by all these people? To have grown up and have your grandpa or your grandma explain to you every year, Grandpa, we know the bull, like we get it, we know what it means. What would it have been like when you came of age and it was your responsibility to explain it to the younger generation and keep them along? To have grown up seeing this every year, to watch the same high priest perform the same rites every year. What would it have been like to have fallen on your face? Really picture it and worship at the name of the Lord every time. How totally separate and other must the high priest would have been? Don't think about it from the perspective of the Sanhedrin looking down from their VIP seats or from the other priests who would watch the high priest and think that might be me one day and kind of peek out of the holy place and watch his back as he performed in front of the crowds. But what would it have been like to be in the crowds, to be separated and other, to even be a Hebrew woman and not even be allowed in the part where you can see the priest and all you can do is listen. How distant would the priest have felt to you? I know over the years I've gone to different Christian conferences and in Christian world there's these celebrity pastors that write books and do podcasts and have thousands of downloads and tens of thousands of people that go to their church and they feel like little celebrities and you them down there on the stage, and you're like, oh, that's so-and-so, that's so neat. I'm really glad that I'm here, and that's as close as I'll ever get to them. And I imagine that at the best, that that's how the high priest felt, is so different and so other and so separated from you. What would it have felt like to know that he was going into the Holy of Holies on your behalf? To know that in the Holy of Holies was the presence of God, and we're so fearful of the presence of God that the holiest man among us, the most righteous among us, the high priest, is fearful that he might die. He's barely qualified to walk through that curtain. I know that I could never walk through that curtain. What kind of mystery surrounded the holy of holies? What kind of separation must they have felt from the high priest who was arguing to God on their behalf, who was interceding for them, who served as their intermediary? What kind of separation must they have felt from God? What kind of fear must have surrounded what they interpreted as the presence of God? Can you get yourself into the mystery and the wonder and the pageantry of Yom Kippur and what it must have been like to take that in as an ancient Hebrew person and pass that down from generation to generation? And I ask that because I wonder what it would have felt like to be one of these people at the time of Jesus. And to be a devout Jew, to celebrate Yom Kippur every year, it's the highest, the holiest of holidays. And the temple, the focus of all God's people is on the temple, and that's where the presence of God rests, and that's where his people work, his representatives, the priests work and intercede for us and serve as intermediaries for us. What must it have been like to be sitting there and to be a devout Jew and to watch this man who claims to be the Son of God die on the cross, and the moment he dies, you can look across the valley there from the eastern side and see into the Holy of Holies and watch that veil tear from top to bottom. Which is what the Gospels tell us happened when Jesus died. That veil was torn in two. How earth-shattering must that have been for a Hebrew people who grew up believing, rightly so, that the presence of God was on the other side of that veil. Something that was different and other and we're fearful of it and we're separated from it. How earth shattering would it have been for that veil to tear as the Son of God dies on a cross. What I want us to see is that Jesus' death on the cross was the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. Jesus' death on the cross, our God sending His Son to die for us, who lived a perfect life, who died a perfect death on the cross as our eternal sacrifice, is the final atonement. They needed this atonement every year. They needed the high priest to go through it all every year. They needed all the pomp and circumstance and pageantry and majesty and mystery every year to make sure that they were right with God. And then Jesus dies on the cross outside the city as a final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. And what I want us to see here is, I said that for all of history up to the point of the death of Christ that the focus of Israel had been towards the temple. Did you know that even all the synagogues built in Israel are built so that they are facing Jerusalem, facing the temple? And that all the synagogues throughout the world and whatever other nation that exists, they are built facing Israel, facing Jerusalem, facing the temple. All of the Hebrew world, their focus is on what happens at the temple. But at the death of Jesus, at the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur, there is a seismic shift in focus. There is a seismic shift in the focus of God's people because the focus of God's people no longer needs to be on the temple and what happens there. There's actually several shifts in focus and I want to walk us through them very quickly. Maybe the most significant one is there is a shift in focus from the temple to the cross. All of Israel, all of God's people, all of those who would declare faith and believe in God the Father are to shift their focus from what happens at the temple to what happens on the cross. And the cross becomes our focus. That's why we don't place any priority on the temple. That's why we don't have to go there because of what happened on the cross. That's why our church doesn't face Israel. It faces the parking lot. Because the focus is on the cross. So we shift our focus, God's people, from the temple to the cross. We shift our focus from an annual sacrifice to an eternal sacrifice. The book of Hebrews tells us that in this ceremony, in Yom Kippur, that all of the sacrifices are shadows that are cast by Jesus on history. That the bull represents Jesus and the goats represent Jesus. And particularly the scapegoat that was led outside the city into the wilderness to die for the sins of the people. Jesus, thousands of years later, was led outside the city on a hillside in the wilderness to be crucified for all the sins of the people. He is the scapegoat. He is the goat that is for the Lord. He is the bull. Jesus is the perfect sacrifice. And so our focus shifts from annual temporary sacrifices to eternal ones, we're told in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews also tells us that Jesus is now our high priest. And so we switch our focus from a human priest to a holy one. We had a human priest who was fallible, who had ego to deal with, who had all the sins that we have to deal with, to a holy priest who is divine, who intercedes for us. And what I think is amazing about this priest is he's not other. He's not distant and far. He holds us and he weeps with us. And the Bible says he stands at the door and knocks and waits to come into our life. He dies for us. He serves us. He washes our feet. He walks amongst our poor. The high priest that we have doesn't sit and wait for us to come to him at a temple. Surrounded by all the other priests in the pomp and circumstance, he comes to us and he beckons that we come to him. And he offers us an intimate relationship. Not only that, but he advocates to the Father on our behalf. No longer is there this wall of separation between us and God, where the only way to approach the presence of God is to go to the priests, his intermediaries, other people who are our peers. You guys get to bypass me entirely and go right to God, which is good for you because I've got my own issues to deal with. We go right to Jesus and he advocates to the Father on behalf of us. So our focus shifts from a human priest to a holy one. Maybe most interesting to me is our focus shifts from covering to cleansing. Do you realize that in the Old Testament, all the language used to talk about us no longer being guilty of our sin is covering language, that the blood of the sacrifice covers over our sin. It makes us outwardly appear righteous as God looks at us. Even as we go back to the very first sin, the sin in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. What is God's response to that sin? What does he do? He takes animal skins and he fashions them and he covers over their shame. He doesn't cleanse them. He covers it. But in the New Testament, there's a shift in language. He cleanses. He removes it from us. Because when it's just covered, it's still there. We're still sinful. If you get up on a Saturday and you go out and you work all day and you sweat in the yard and you're gross and you come in and you take off your yard clothes and you don't shower and you put on your nice going out clothes, you'll look nice, but you stink. When our sin is covered over, we are acceptable to God, but we are still sinful. And the miracle of Jesus on the cross is that he cleanses us. This is what Hebrews says. This is why the author writes this. Chapters 9 and 10 of Hebrews are really a statement on Yom Kippur. And what they're saying, what the author is saying is that whole deal was a big shadow cast by Jesus on history. It was a road sign pointing to our need for Christ. And what Hebrews 9 and 10 tells us is that Jesus is the sacrifice. He is the high priest. He is, like I said earlier, the final atonement and the perfection of Yom The Bible tells us that he removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. We are clean and invited to walk with the Lord. And finally, and I love this one, our focus shifts from separate to intimate. Again, take yourself back to the place where you were the Hebrew person and you're watching all of this take place and you see the very holy priest, very pompous and pious, and I'm sure he was a righteous man, but he must have felt just very separate and other. You could never even approach him. And then he would walk into a holy place and then a holy of holies and you're three layers removed from the presence of God. And it's only once a year that you go into God's presence. And it's a fearful thing and an awe-inspiring thing. And then in an instant, the veil tears. And when that veil is torn, the separation that was felt between the people and God goes away. And the very presence of God rushes out of the Holy of Holies and into the lives of those of us who would believe. And Jesus becomes our high priest who begs for intimacy with us, who wants to know you. This presence of God that feels different and other and fearful and unapproachable, now we're told he knows the very numbers of hairs on our head. We're told that he weeps with us. We're told that he touches us when we are sick. And I don't think we have an adequate appreciation for what it must have felt like to feel so removed from God and his people to immediately transition into this intimacy that we're invited in so that this God that we would die if we went into his presence undeservedly because Jesus' blood now cleanses us. Romans tells us that we call that same God Abba, Father, Daddy, or Papa. The kind of intimacy that we are invited into. And so as I looked at Yom Kippur and just kind of reflected on what it means, it became very clear to me that what Yom Kippur really is, what we're really celebrating, what God is really doing here, Yom Kippur is God's ruthless and relentless effort to remove all the barriers that exist between He and us. You see? In the Old Testament world, there was priests that existed between us and God. There was sins that existed between us and God. There was sins of omission that we didn't even know about that existed between us and God. And Yom Kippur is when he gets everybody together and he says, look, look, everyone, I am putting things in place so that there is nothing between me and my people. I'm putting things in place so that you know that I want to be with you, so there is nothing that can separate us. There are no barriers between us now. And then when he sends Jesus, who is the perfection of Yom Kippur, he removes all of the barriers and his presence rushes into the lives of those who would believe. And Yom Kippur is God's relentless and ruthless effort to remove all barriers between you and him. He wants nothing to exist between you. And knowing that we are impotent to remove those barriers ourselves, he installed a celebration once a year to tell us, hey, there's nothing between me and you. There are no barriers. There's nothing keeping you from my presence. You are welcome here. And then by sending his son the perfection of Yom Kippur, he says eternally once and for all, you are invited into my presence, so much so that I am preparing a place for you in my very presence for all eternity. And as I thought about the spirit of Yom Kippur and this God who ruthlessly removes every barrier between he and I, what I realized is I am impotent to remove the barriers that are placed between me and God, but I am very capable of putting them there. And as I reflected on myself, it occurs to me that any barriers that exist between me and God are ones that I put there. They're man-made. I built them myself. Sometimes with doubt, because I walked through that. Often with faithlessness and inconsistency. The feelings of guilt that he's ridden me of that I still cling to. Because I can't understand how he could still love me. Oftentimes it's my sin that puts a layer, puts another veil between me and God. And then I got to thinking about you as your pastor and would submit to you. If you feel like there are barriers between you and God, things preventing you from being as close with him as you would like and he would like? I think it's very likely we put those there ourselves. I think based on the heart of God, I see in Yom Kippur that any barriers that exist between us and God are ones that we built. Because he removes all the ones he can. So maybe we have doubt. But we haven't asked God to remove that. So here's what I want to do. In a few minutes, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, the band is going to be playing through a song. And I want to invite you while they play to just stay in your seat and be quiet and pray and reflect. And invite you to pray a prayer for yourself that I've been praying this week. And ask God, are there any barriers between you and I? Ask for the faith and the courage to see those. And then if he's gracious enough to point them out to you, maybe you know them right now, maybe they're blaring in the back of your mind, then pray that God would give you the courage to take the steps of faith to remove them. And so, as we pray together, I want you to have this opportunity to ask God, God, are there any barriers between me and you? Have I hung any veils in my life that need to be torn down? And give him permission to do that. Give him permission to bring down those barriers. Maybe you came today and you don't know Jesus. Maybe you wouldn't call yourself a believer. And so the barrier between you and God is faith. If you're here today and you want to become a believer, you want to accept this atonement, you want to be made right with your creator, that human desire to repent and be made right resonates with you. Then maybe today is the day that you become a child of God. To be a Christian, all you do is admit that I've sinned. I've acted in ways that have displeased my creator. And my sin has placed a barrier between God and I. And because of that, I need the death of Jesus on the cross to atone for me. It's not just cover over my sins, but cleanse them. You pray and you tell that to God. And then you say, from this point forward, I'm no longer the Lord of my life. I'm no longer the decision maker in my life. God is. And I'll do my best to do what he says. Many of us in here have been Christians for a long time, but over the years, we've allowed barriers to develop between us and God, and we don't have the intimacy with him that we want. Take a few minutes and have the courage to allow God to point those out, and have the faith to ask Him to remove those, whether they be doubt, bitterness, or sin, or habits. And on the day that the church looks at Yom Kippur, God's visible effort to remove barriers between he and I and restore the intimacy that we both long for. Take a minute and approach God for that intimacy as well. I'm gonna pray and then you guys sit and pray. And when Steve thinks it's the right time, we'll all stand and we'll finish singing together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are floored and humbled that you have so intentionally removed all the barriers between us and you. God, we thank you for the day of atonement for Yom Kippur and all that it represents, for all the symbolism there. I ask that we would be touched by it, that we would be moved by it. God, I ask that for those of us who came in this morning with a veil that we hung ourselves, with a barrier that we built ourselves between you and us, God, give us the faith to see it and the courage to ask you to remove it. It's in your son's name we pray.

Good morning, my name is Nate. They let me be the lead pastor here. If I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. We are finishing up our summer series called Obscure Heroes. I'm really excited about that. Yesterday, I got home from doing a wedding and then on my TV, there was football and it's less than 70 degrees when I woke up this morning and church is full and schedules are normal and small groups are starting, and all the things in life that I love are happening. Fall is the best, and summer is the worst, and this is the last Sunday of summer. Praise Jesus. And so next week, we do the Grace Serves, and then two services we launch into a series that I'm particularly excited about. It was not my idea. Somebody at the church gave it to me. One of our great partners suggested it. We're going to look at the six festivals that God installed into the Hebrew calendar in the Old Testament to see and remind ourselves that God is a God of remembering. He's a God of celebration. He's a God of commemoration. And all of that is worth learning about and celebrating. We're going to have a really fun, worshipful fall. We're going to have the Hootenanny, second annual one. Get your fanny to the Hootenanny. It's going to be the line there. That's going to be on September 22nd, along with some baptism. So I'm really, really excited about what we have coming up for you in the months of September and October. I think they're going to be huge months for Grace. But this morning, we want to finish up Obscure Heroes. I'm so grateful to Kyle for speaking for me last week, just so that you guys know that was planned for a long time because one of the things that I think is super important as a pastor is that you guys, as the church, get to hear other voices. And don't just hear me beating the same drum and playing the same notes every week. I would get tired of me. I know that you guys probably are already. So we want to have other voices and other perspectives speak into the spiritual life and have some spiritual authority here at Grace. So inviting other people up here to give the sermon is always going to be a part of who we are and part of how we do ministry, just so that doesn't surprise you guys as we move forward. But this week, I get to finish up our summer series. We've been looking at obscure heroes, characters in the Bible, people that we see in Scripture that we may not be familiar with, that we may not have heard of before, people who are a little bit less prominent, whose stories we may not know, and kind of asking the question, God, why are they in the Bible? Why do we hear this story? What can I learn from their story and their example that I can apply to my life? And I've enjoyed doing this series with you. This week, we're going to look at what I believe to be is a collection of the most obscure heroes in the Bible. We don't even get their names. They come at the end of Hebrews chapter 11, one of my favorite passages tucked into the most beautifully written book in the New Testament. If you're not familiar with Hebrews, it's a letter. It's towards the end of the Bible. There's this many pages in front of it and this many pages behind it. So it's towards the end, right? And it's a letter. We don't know who wrote it. We used to think that Paul wrote it, but increasingly we don't think that's the case. Basically, the thinking goes, it's too good for Paul to have written. So we don't think that he wrote it, but it's this incredibly beautifully written book. It has this incredibly high view of Christ as the Messiah, as the priest once and for all, as the sacrifice once and for all. And towards the end of it, in chapter 11, the author breaks into this discourse on faith. And he opens up the chapter and he defines faith and says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, it's the belief in things unseen. And then he chronicles all of these heroes, these heavy hitters of our faith, if you're a believer, of our shared faith, and shows us what they did by faith. And to a lot of folks in the church world and theological circles, Hebrews chapter 11 is actually known as the hall of faith. It chronicles a lot of the heavy hitters in the Old Testament. And he concludes it with this idea in Hebrews 12 that we're surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, and so we should run our race too. But as he goes through the book, he highlights the different people. He starts at the very beginning. He starts with Abel, and he says, by faith, Abel offered the sacrifice that God asked for. He gets to Abraham. He says, by faith, Abraham moved from a place called Ur to a place called Canaan because God told him to. Some of us know the story in Genesis 22. By faith, Abraham offered Isaac when he was asked to. By faith, Joseph served Potiphar and Pharaoh. By faith, Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea and brought down the Ten Commandments. By faith, Joshua crossed the Jordan River and conquered Jericho. And then one of our obscure heroes, by faith, Rahab protected the spies and helped the armies of Israel. And so he chronicles all these heroes that we've heard of before. And as he gets to the end of that, the author's kind of made his point. And he says, should I keep going? Should I keep listing off names? And then he offers us some of the judges. Do I need to tell you about the faith of Gideon and of Samson and of Jephthah and of Barak? Do I need to enumerate what they've done as well? And then he starts talking about the prophets and some of the things that they've suffered. And then at the end of the chapter, he doesn't even refer to groups of people anymore. He doesn't even refer to people with titles. He's no longer using names. He just starts telling brief snippets of dozens, if not hundreds of people's stories. And I've always been fascinated by this passage. I think I came across it sometime in high school when I was beginning to read the Bible on my own. And I've always thought about the end of Hebrews 11. Man, who are these people? Because look at what he says about them. It looks like it's on your bulletin. It looks like a typo, like they printed the wrong verses. How could he possibly be preaching from these? But this is what it says. We'll just kind of pick them up mid-thought in verse 35. They wandered around destitute. They gave up their life. They were martyrs. They gave up probably well-being, maybe careers, maybe families for the sake of what we would call the gospel, for the sake of their faith. By faith, they took these steps of obedience that led them down these paths. And what we see, and these are people whose stories are incredible. Probably, if you could know them detail by detail and line by line, on par with any of the heavy hitters that precede them in the chapter, on par with what Moses did or what Abraham did or what Joseph did or what David did, on par with any of that. But there's just too many to enumerate, too many to note. It makes me wonder about all the stories of the people in the Old Testament that we don't even get to hear. And I've always wondered about these stories, about these people. Who were they? Where were they from? How did they come into faith? What did it look like for them? And what we see at the end of this passage, the beginning of chapter 12, when the author wrote the book, there weren't any chapters there. We added those in later. And so it's a continual flow of thought. And he says, therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us, is how chapter 12 begins. And that's the point of the whole chapter 11, is to tell us by faith we should run our race too. But he says, because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and he only lists off like 10, 15 people by name, but then a stadium fills the rest of heaven. And it makes me realize, we know the heavy hitters, we know the all-stars of the faith, but do you realize that heaven is populated with obscure heroes? Heaven is populated with obscure heroes. If you're a believer in whatever heaven looks like when we get there one day, we're not going to just walk through seeing all the heroes of the Old Testament that we recognize. It's populated with these obscure heroes, with people that are mentioned in verses 35 through 38 that are wandering around whose names are not mentioned in this book, who just had the simple faith and simple obedience and whose stories we don't ever get to know. And whenever I see this passage or read through it, I always think, man, what are the stories out there of faith happening on other continents or at other times or in our inner cities or just down the road that we'll never hear and we'll never know on this side of eternity? What are all the stories waiting on us of these faithful people who are these obscure heroes that we find out about when we get to heaven? Because I've always wondered that, what are all the things going on in God's kingdom that I don't know about? I was fascinated and felt privileged to meet somebody that I consider an obscure hero that none of us have probably heard about before in Honduras. About 10 years ago, I was with a school. I was a chaplain at the school and they had a mission trip that they took to Honduras, and so I went with them. And I met a man there that I will never forget. To me, he's a hero. A guy named Israel Gonzalez. This is a picture of Israel and I. This is the last time I got to hang out with him. That's like eight years ago, okay? That's baby Nate. This is what you guys are doing to me. I don't know if you realize that. Every time you text me past 5 p.m., I get another gray hair. But that's me. That's me in Israel, and we're in a house on a mountainside somewhere in a village doing some of the ministry that I'm about to tell you about. But Israel is one of the greatest people I've ever met in my life. I go down to Honduras and I get introduced to Israel and I start to learn his story. He grew up in Nicaragua. He was trained as an engineer, but at some point or another, and he married a woman named Floripe, who was a practicing medical doctor. Very successful family, but at one point or another, God laid it on his heart that he needed to be a pastor. So he said, okay. So he started a church. And eventually the church got to be too much responsibility. So he had to quit his job and focus full time on the church. And one of the things that the church did early on, they were based in a city called Saguarapeque in the middle of Honduras. And Saguarapeque is just in central Honduras. It's surrounded by mountains, and in those mountains are different villages. And when I say villages, I'm not talking about like a quaint village term. I'm not trying to minimize what it really was. I'm not talking like Nightdale and Rollsville here. I'm talking they were villages, just hovels, houses that were built out of cinder blocks, some that were just poles in the ground with canvas wrapped around them. Just groups of people who had lived there for generations and probably still will. Honduras is one of the poorest countries in our hemisphere. It's one of the most dangerous countries, most politically volatile countries in our hemisphere. But what Israel would do to spread the gospel, to spread the good news of Jesus, is he would go into these villages that surrounded Swagwatapeki. And he would need to build goodwill because he would want to tell them about Jesus, but you can't just show up and start telling them about Jesus because these villages are Catholic. And I don't have any problem in the world with Catholicism or a Catholic background, but this was a version of Catholicism in Honduras that was incredibly legalistic. That was very much, you are saved based on what you do and how you behave. You earn your way into heaven. And I have a big problem with any time we tell anybody that they have to earn their way into heaven, because that's not the Bible. They didn't know the grace of Jesus that says, you can't earn your way into heaven anyways, man. Just accept Christ. They didn't know that. They had not heard the beauty of the gospel, and he wanted to present them with the beauty and the mystery and the good news of the gospel, but he had to earn a little good faith with the community members before he could do that. So he would go in and he would throw parties. He would take people from his church, and they would go and they would cook hot dogs for the kids and they would do face painting and they would have games and they would give away little gifts. And then some churches from the states would find out about it. Not too many, mind you. He's only associated with probably five or six churches stateside. And start sending teams down there with little gift bags to give to the kids at these parties. And then Israel would always be off in the corner. He would either be talking and playing with the children, or he'd be off in the corner talking with some of the people who were like the village elders. And then when he would go into homes, they're still cooking on wood-burning stoves. So in these very poor villages in the hillsides of Sugatapaki, Honduras, these people are cooking on wood-burning stoves, and because of that, lung disease was rampant. And he looked at that, and he went, it doesn't have to be this way. And with his engineering background, he designed, invented a stove that can be built in these homes that reduces smoke inhalation by 90%. And we know it reduces it by 90% because some of the teams carried the designs back to Duke and the University of Indiana and said, will you look at these and see if these are legit? And they are. 90% reduced smoke inhalation. Vastly increases the quality of life. So he goes to the village elders and he can build these for $100 a pop. He says, hey, I've got enough to build two stoves. Who would you like to have them? And they start with the oldest women and then work their way down. And so while the party's going on, him and a team are over here building a stove. And after building this goodwill and meeting their needs, the village elders come to him and they say, hey, we don't just want your church to have to come visit us. Can you send us a pastor to start a church and we'll rally around him? So Israel thought, okay. So he began to disciple young men in his church and train them to be pastors. And when a village would ask for a church, he would send these young men out to go be their pastors. Do you know that Israel has founded 14 churches out of his church from young men that he's risen up and sent out. He's installed hundreds of stoves. He's done this with virtually no support from the United States. He doesn't have a big moneymaker here. He just does it. They just figure it out. And he does it faithfully. Do you know that Floripe used to, when they would go into the villages, his wife, these people need medical care. So she would treat them. But there was never enough time in a day to treat everybody that they were going to see. So eventually, God made it possible for them to build a permanent medical facility, a clinic that people come to every day. Get dental care, get medical care, take your kids in to get shots. Minor surgeries happen there. And this is the life that they lead. And now here's the thing, and here's why I marvel at Israel. You might not know this because not all y'all are plugged into this or care, nor should you. But there's like a thing, and it might be gross, I don't really know where I'm at with it, to be honest with you, like Christian celebrity. Once you start a church, and that church grows, you get invited to conferences, you get to speak, you write a book, you do a podcast, and everybody starts to know who you are, and then you get more campuses, and then you do a video video projection and you teach at those campuses too. And now I'm a robot pastor everywhere, right? And bigger grows my kingdom. And I don't know, it would be so hard to protect your ego against what that does to you, but it happens in Christian circles. And these people who build churches, who have 14 churches and a medical clinic that their wife runs, we know about them. They're famous. They show up on preachers and sneakers on Instagram. Like we know about them. But not Israel. Because he's working away in Honduras. And he's one of these obscure heroes. That when we get to heaven, we're going to go. I want to meet the Israels. These people who are serving God in obscurity that most of the world will never, ever know about. I marvel at those stories. And you may be thinking, Nate, that's neat, man. Love 35 to 38. It's people at the end of the chapter. They populate heaven. That's wonderful. That's not gonna be me, man. Probably not gonna be so on and to for my faith. Praise God for that. I'm probably not gonna go to Honduras and like start a clinic. So I don't know what you want me to do here. How are these people, these heroes of the faith, these obscure heroes that did stuff and can't even be named, how is Israel, how are they like us? These people that populate heaven, how can we relate to them? And I was thinking about that this week. And as I was looking at it and working through it, one of the things I realized is, what do these heroes all have in common? They all took simple steps of obedience. What do all these people have in common? As you read through chapter 11 and you look at these heavy hitters of our faith, what do they have in common? The people at the end whose names we don't know, what do they have in common? When I tell you the story of Israel and the things that he's done with his life, what do they all have in common? They all took simple steps of obedience. Simple steps of faithful obedience. None of the people in chapter 11 woke up and said, I want to be great. I want to be a great Christian. We have this terrible thing that we do where we think that the better Christian I am, the more known I'll become for my Christianity. Like pastors are the apex of the faith or something. And that's gross. I don't have any marketable skills, so God placed me here, okay? Like it's not a big deal to be a pastor. We think that Christianity should be lived out publicly and that the better you are at it, the more people notice you. And that's just not true. It's just taking a simple step of faith. Abraham didn't wake up and say, God, I want to be great. I want to be written in your Bible and remembered for thousands of years. He wasn't thinking any of that. God said, I want you to move. And he said, okay. Yes, Lord. And he took that step. He said, I want you to offer me your son. Yes, Lord. And he took that step. He didn't have visions of grandeur. In fact, the one person in chapter 11 who did have visions of grandeur, Moses, he grew up in Pharaoh's house. He thought he was really going to be something. You know what God did to him? He sent him to the desert for 40 years until he got rid of those visions. He humbled him. And then out of a burning bush one day, he said, hey, you ready to take that step? And five times Moses said, no, I don't think so. You got the wrong guy. Until God said, Moses, take it. And he took the step of obedience. We've looked at Rahab. We know that she didn't think she was going to be great. She was a prostitute in Jericho. She didn't have high hopes for being a champion of the faith. She just took the step that God put in front of her. Are you going to protect these spies or not? All these people, all they did, and all Israel, if Israel could be with us here today, what he would tell you he did is just simply what God asked him to do. You understand that the kingdom of heaven is built by simple people taking simple steps of obedience. The kingdom of heaven is not built publicly. The Christian life is not lived out publicly. The Christian life is not lived out to applause and everyone noticing you and going, that's so great and you're so godly. That's not how it works. And I'm saying this because I think so many of us here have been living out a quiet and humble faith day in and day out, taking little steps of obedience, being loyal to your God and being loyal to your beliefs. And sometimes in those things we feel forgotten. Sometimes in those things we feel cast aside because people aren't looking at us and giving us credit for who we are and how we're obeying. And I want you to know that based on Hebrews chapter 11 and these people that are listed here, I think that God sees us. I think that God sees you and that the kingdom of heaven is built on your shoulders. The kingdom of heaven is built on the Stephen ministers who just get up and quietly go sit with people who are grieving and they don't say anything. They just listen and they show up. Those are wholly heroic moments. And you might think, man, being obedient doesn't make you heroic, but I would disagree. It might not make you heroic to everyone, but it makes you heroic to someone. I have some friends. They grew up, each of them separately, without great examples in the house of what it meant to have a good godly marriage. They didn't see examples from all of their parents about what it meant to be a wonderful parent. So when they grew up, they had layers of things that they acquired in those homes, and then they looked at each other and they said, let's put our messes together and make a bigger one. So they got married, not knowing how to do any of that because they never had a good example of it. So now they're flying blind trying to figure that out. And they weren't people of faith. I don't know how you navigate that. And then they said, you know what we should do? This is a mess. Let's have kids. Say it too. And then they're trying to figure out how to be parents to those kids. And somewhere along the way, Jesus gets a hold of them. And they started taking these little steps of obedience. They say, you know what we need to do for our family? We need to prioritize church. And even though they're busy and even though they're tired, even though weekends is the only time they have to rest, they prioritize church and so they show up. And even though they're busy and they're tired and they're coming in on two wheels, they prioritize small group. And even though there's a cost to it, they prioritize things that help them be better parents and help their kids be better kids. And I've watched them slowly develop into this household of faith. And I look at that and I go, man, that's heroic. To take those steps when you don't have to, because they're the right thing to do. When you're flying blind, but you're determined to figure it out. So you just take the next step of faith in front of you, and you do it quietly, and no one sees it, but you just do it because you want your kids to have something different than what you had. Listen, we might not ever know about that, this side of heaven, but they're heroes to those kids. My dad grew up without a dad, and he's not a perfect dad to me, but he's a good one. And I'll never know what it is to not have a dad who's not proud of me. You want to tell me that's not heroic? That simple step of faith that he took? The kingdom of heaven is built on people taking obscure steps of faith, taking obscure steps of obedience that we may never see on this side of eternity. It's built in there, holding the crying baby just a little bit longer so that mama can actually hear the sermon and participate in the worship this week. Or maybe just tune out and be sane for a minute. The kingdom of heaven is built by people that we have in this church. I think of Ginger Reith. Some of y'all are not Ginger Reith. I'm sorry, although she's lovely. Ginger Gentry. Just kidding. Ginger Reith is the worst. Let's put that on video. Ginger Gentry. She leads our prayer ministry. And you may have never met her or heard of her. But every week, if you put a prayer request on the card, it goes to staff and elders, but it also goes to Ms. Ginger. And Ms. Ginger lives alone now. And she sits in her house and she puts those things out and she prays for those. And she makes sure that you get a card and she makes sure that people know about it. I had somebody last week come up to me and they're like, man, that Ginger, like she works, man. I said, what do you mean? And he goes, I've been praying for something for months. And so finally I put it in. It hasn't worked out until finally I put it on the connection card so Ms. Ginger could pray for it. And it happened this week. I'm like, yeah, you don't mess around with Ginger, man. And nobody would ever know about that, about the hours that she spends in prayer. I'll tell you some other heroes we have around here. It's about time I publicly embarrassed them anyways. I don't know if y'all know Harris, Winston, or Howard Sauls. If you don't, you're not missing much. But they're married to our children's ministers. And I marvel at them, and I have since I got here. Because let me tell you something about them. Next time we all do something together, on the 22nd, we're going to have the hootenanny. It's going to be great. Look around. While everybody's having fun and talking and laughing, think of what's the cruddiest job that I could be doing right now? What's the thing that nobody here wants to be doing? You figure that out and then you look and one of them's gonna be doing it because they're servants. And we might not otherwise ever notice that or care. Let me tell you something. The kingdom of God is built on those steps of obedience. The Christian life is lived out by just day after day choosing to be obedient to God. Jesus tells us, if you love God, you'll obey me. He makes it as simple as every day taking the next step of obedience. We don't have to have a plan. We don't have to know what the goal is. We don't have to see the whole story arc. All we have to know is, what's my next step of obedience? And so as we finish up the series and we reflect on the heroes that we've learned from for the past eight weeks, I want to put that question in front of you. What's your next step of obedience? What simple heroic act has God placed in front of you? And don't discredit it and don't say, oh, that's not heroic or oh, that's not a big deal. Yes, it is. Whatever that step is, it's a big deal. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe it's to make a public profession of a private decision. Maybe God has impressed that upon you, and next month we're going to have a service. If that's you, write that on your card or reach out to me somehow. Let's talk about that. Maybe your next step is to get rid of that thing in your life that doesn't need to be there. To shed some light on some dark places and take that step. Don't tell me that's not heroic. That's hard. Maybe your next step is to have the conversation. It's to volunteer for the thing. Maybe your next step is getting home and putting down your phone and engaging with family. Maybe it's finally developing the discipline of spending time in God's word and time in prayer every day. Some of you know what your next step is, and you're thinking right now, dang it, I didn't want to come today. Sorry, sucker. Now you're here. I don't know what your next step is, but I know that the kingdom of God is built by you taking that simple step that no one may ever see but him. And that heaven is populated with obscure heroes like we have here at Grace, like you probably are. So I'm just hoping that we can commit as we move into the fall, that we can commit to taking those next steps together. Let's pray. Father, we sure do love you. Really and truly, God, thank you for making faith so simple. Sometimes we make it complicated. Sometimes we make it harder than it has to be. And God, a lot of times we want to know more than we need to. Give us the faith to take the next step. God, if there's someone here and they don't know you today, would they would just, I pray that they would just prioritize finding out. We all have roadblocks. We all have things, God. Maybe their next step is simply digging into those and figuring out what's there and why they're hesitant. Give them the courage to do that. Give us all, Father, the strength and the courage to take the next step. Give us the vision to see it. May we be like the people that were written about in Hebrews. May we be like the people that we'll find out about in heaven. I pray that you would fill grace with these obscure heroes of the faith who quietly build your kingdom for your glory. And it's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, I'm Doug Bergeson. Wait, wait, you've got to be kidding me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just a few months ago when Kyle Tolbert, our youth pastor, came up here to speak? And before he uttered a word, before a single word, good or bad, was out of his mouth, you were applauding him. What do I get? I'll tell you what I get. I get bubkis, nada, nothing. Let me tell you something. It's not lost on us, those of us who are asked to speak in the middle of July, but never ever at Christmas time, and for sure not at Easter. It's not lost on us that we're not on God's A-team. We get it. We're not stupid. So given that, it might be nice if you tried to be a little bit more encouraging and supportive. So let's try this again. I would not have done that. You know, the Bible's very clear that we're to test and approve what we hear, to be discerning about what's being taught, not just to accept it willy-nilly. And here you all are already clapping for me, and you haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. Come on, people, you're better than that. Anyways, hopefully it's obvious that I'm just goofing around, as I'm not only thrilled to be here, but I feel immense privilege to be sharing this morning. And just for the record, far from expecting applause, my desperate and sincere prayer and hope is that God will make what I say clear and useful to you all. I'm really excited about this new sermon series that we're starting. In the past, when I've been asked to speak, I've always kind of hemmed and hawed, wanted to think about it. But when Nate called me this time and explained that the new series was going to be on the obscure heroes of the Bible, I was, for some strange reason, I was enthused, and I immediately jumped at the chance. A big part of it might be that it's just different than the norm, and different is sometimes really good. Mix it up a little bit, move off the beaten path. But more than simply serving as a nice change of pace, there's a much more consequential reason for studying these obscure heroes. They have a lot to teach us. Now, there are plenty of times when I wish the Bible was easier to understand and didn't avoid so many questions that I'd like answers to. Wish that it explained a whole bunch of things better. A little less ambiguity and mystery would sometimes be nice. But in response to that wish, I've heard it said that God, whose Spirit inspired every word written, must have included what He thought was important, what He thought we needed to know. So rather than worrying about the stuff that wasn't included, we'd be much better served paying attention to the things and those people and those events that God did include in his word to us. And that brings us back to our sermon series. God saw fit to tell us about these characters and their stories. And for that reason, we are not going to ignore or gloss over or relegate these heroes to a footnote any longer. Instead, we're going to exploit them for all their worth and see what they can teach us, what they can reveal to us, how they might strengthen and encourage us. The Apostle Paul said it this way, for everything that was written in the past, even obscure heroes that maybe we've never heard of, was written to teach us so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. As I said, I was surprisingly enthused when Nate called me. Not only was I pumped for the series, but one name immediately popped into my head and I knew that was my guy. That was who I was going to talk about, Gamaliel, the great Pharisee and teacher of the law, and what he wisely concluded when confronted by the incredible boldness and defiance of Peter and the other disciples in the earliest times of the Christian movement. Now, how many of you have heard of Gamaliel? You don't have to raise your hands. You know, just wink or smile as I look around the room. Nothing but a sea of blank, expressionless faces. That's perfect. But before we get to Gamaliel, I need to set the table a bit for you, provide the backdrop to help explain why what he does, what he acknowledges is so valuable to me, that his was the first name in all the Bible that popped into my head. In other words, I need to make sure that we're on the same page with respect to one significant foundational point in order for us to see why Gamaliel, who himself is not even a believer in Jesus Christ, is a hero for us today. The key foundational point is to identify the overarching story of the Bible. Some of you are probably going, oh, sheesh, we're not going to be out of here until Tuesday. Not to worry, not to worry. It's not that daunting a task. In a nutshell, the opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, reveal that God's loving intent was to provide all that we, His creations, need. Our job, our part of the bargain, is to trust that He is both able and willing to do that on our behalf, and for us to resist the temptation to want to decide for ourselves what's best. The rest of the Bible is just a long and involved telling of our incredible struggle to trust in God rather than ourselves, as well as the remarkable lengths God goes to to make it possible for us ultimately to place our full and abiding confidence in Him. Now, most of you are probably familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The garden was a fantastic place. Those two have a great life. It's a really sweet setup. There's only one rule, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, growing up in church, I didn't fully understand the significance of the boundary God established for humankind. My general sense was, you know, God likes rules. He's kind of a stickler about rules. And Adam and Eve got in pretty big trouble because they broke one of them. Well, as I've later come to understand, what actually happened was a much bigger deal than simply breaking a rule. What actually happened struck at the very heart of God's intent for creation. In allowing them to eat from any tree but the one, God was establishing the critical boundary for Adam and Eve and for every human since. God was saying, if you want to enjoy all of the good of my creation and live in my kingdom, you have to trust that I and I alone know what's best for you. And even more than that, you have to trust that I'm both able and willing to provide it to you. And so the questions that's faced Adam and Eve, as well as you and me, is do you believe that? Are you convinced that God knows what's best for you and that He is intent on providing it at all times and in all circumstances? When Eve first faced that question, the fate of all humanity hung in the balance. And what did she decide? Well, it turns out Eve wasn't completely convinced that God could be trusted. And she decided and felt the need to trust in someone else. Eve, that's who she decided to trust. She just trusted in herself instead. And now the serpent was cunning and planted the seed in Eve's mind that although God was certainly able to provide what was best for her, He wasn't willing but was holding something back. The serpent said, come on, Eve, you won't die. God's only worried that if you eat that fruit, you'll be like Him and be able to decide for yourself what's best, then you'll be your own God. And that has been humankind's struggle ever since. In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, it wasn't a question of God was willing to provide for his people, but if he was even able. Written at a time when Christ followers were just undergoing terrific persecution, with their very lives at stake, the facts on the ground were so difficult and so dire that only a nut job would conclude that somehow God was still in control and still in charge. And into that terrifically difficult and stressful situation, the Apostle John shared a vision of being transported up to the throne room of heaven where God sort of pulls back the curtain for a second just to show what's really going on behind the scenes. The message, no matter how things look from your perspective, I am God and there is no other. I have your back now and I have it for all eternity. Nothing can ever separate you from my loving care. Your faith and trust are well placed. God is asking each of us, do you believe, are you completely convinced that I'm both able and willing to provide the very best for you? That's the central question running throughout the entire Bible, and it's the central question of our human existence. But our struggle, our temptation, is to say in all different ways, well, God, to tell you the truth, in this particular area of my life, or in this particular relationship, or in this circumstance at this particular time, I'd like to have a say. I'd rather decide for myself what's best for me, what will make me most content, most comfortable, most safe, most fulfilled, most affirmed, most successful, most happy. After all, wouldn't I know better than anyone else what's in my best interest? That's exactly what Eve did. That's exactly what I do. And that is the root of all sin, a failure to trust in God's promise. We're just not entirely convinced, not enough to give up complete control. A famous passage from Proverbs that many of you probably know by heart is, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight. But that's not easy. Our world and our culture constantly bombard us from every conceivable angle with arguments that God, even if he does exist, is neither able or willing to provide what's best for us. That life demands we take charge and we're better off when we do. Non-stop appeals to be our own little lords of our own little lives. Now we're going to do a little audience participation here for just a minute. I'd like you all to close your eyes. Alan, keep your eyes closed. Okay. Imagine that you're on the seventh floor of an office building. You are alone, and it's dark. An electrical short circuit has knocked out the lights and started an intense fire, which has engulfed the entire floor and will soon breach the room you're in. The smoke coming in under the door and through the vents is overwhelming, forcing you to drop to your knees. Your eyes are burning and you're beginning to cough uncontrollably. You can open your eyes now. Suddenly, off to your right, you hear a violent pounding on the outside of the far wall. Then the blade of an axe comes crashing through and soon the shape of a firefighter appears in the opening and he shouts, come on, follow me, I'll get you out. Wouldn't he be surprised if you yelled back, oh, thanks, buddy. I'm good. I got this. Of course, no one would do that. No one trapped and on the brink of perishing would respond that way. We would not only listen to the firefighter's commands, we would literally cling to him. We would follow his every word because we implicitly trust him. Not only does he know what he's doing, but he went to great lengths to find and rescue us. And it's plain as day that we desperately need his help. My illustration borders on the ludicrous because we'd never do that. Yet that's what we say to God all the time. I'm good. I got this. Now maybe some of us hear this illustration and say, that's not me. I'm good at trusting. My faith is rock solid. Maybe that's true, at least on the surface. But even for those of us who trust God fully in most areas of our lives, I bet that there are little nooks and crannies. I appreciated you using that earlier. Little pockets where we don't. A relationship, a decision, a priority, a behavior, perhaps, for which we're not convinced God's preferred course of action serves us best. So we plot the course by our own wisdom. We decide for ourselves what's best. And when we do that, we forfeit some portion of the abundant life that God so desperately wants for us. Sadly, doubting God's promises, not being fully convinced that he is both able and willing to provide the best for me in all of life's situations, happens far more than I even recognize. The decision to trust in my own judgment is typically very subtle. So subtle, in fact, that I don't even realize that I'm doing it much of the time. I'll share an example from my own life, but first I have to give you some context. Twenty-six years ago, we moved down here from New Jersey. I quit a really good job on Wall Street. We sold our dream house that we only lived in for two years. We left our beautiful little town and all our friends. We had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn. We moved for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was my concern that it was all too consuming and that only over time does the true cost of that kind of investment in one's career become apparent? And by that point, it's often too late. The damage has been done. I believe back then, as I still do today, that wherever your treasure is, wherever you invest most of your time, your energy, your ambition, that's where your heart will ultimately be found. And I knew that for me, I couldn't keep doing that job in that city for very long without it, for all practical purposes, becoming my treasure and stealing my heart. Okay, so we did everything they tell you not to do all at the same time. Moved to a different part of the country, changed careers, sold houses, bought houses, had another baby. Deb had just turned 33, and I was 35. The plan was that I would invest our modest nest egg in the financial markets to support our new downsized life, and we'd live happily ever after. Now, fast forward 15 years. I'm meeting Jeff Hancock, who is Grace's teaching pastor at Carolina Ale House. I think it was on a Wednesday afternoon because that's when they had their specials. It's true. Jeff and I had a relationship built largely on a strong and abiding shared love of beer and for the places that happen to serve beer. Is there any stronger foundation for a friendship? Nevertheless, that was ours. So we'd get together every so often. And that particular afternoon, as soon as I sat down, Jeff asked if there was something wrong. And I started weeping and began to share with him how I was in the midst of suffering what for me was a breathtaking financial loss in the futures market. How I couldn't sleep, how it had stolen all of my joy, how it affected all of my personal interactions, including my most cherished ones with my wife and kids. Excuse me. With the child in college and two in high school, how it jeopardized everything Deb and I had planned. That loss was wreaking havoc in my life. Now, I shared with Jeff that afternoon that, yes, I was obviously sad to have lost so much of our nest egg at such a critical time. Yes, I was sorry for my stubbornness, my stupidity. Yes, I was sorry for my arrogance not to respect the markets. All that was true. Yet the reason I was weeping, what most undid me, was what the loss revealed about where I placed my trust. How it betrayed the fact that much of my confidence, my security, and my hope was wrapped up in our little nest egg, and that the notion that I trusted God was clearly not true, if not a bald-faced lie. And that is what makes it so tricky, because a lot of the time our struggles to trust are in those gray areas, things which in and of themselves don't strike us being all that bad or sinful. Nevertheless, we are not doing what God is asking us to do, to trust him with everything and in every situation. We simply aren't convinced that his way is always the best way. In answer to his question, do you believe that I am both able and willing to provide all that you need, we are saying no, not always. In the example I just shared from my own life, my answer was clearly no, I'm not completely convinced. In addition to trusting you, I would like my nest egg back. When we worry about things, even very serious things, we are wrestling with the question, will I trust God with my crisis? Is He capable to handle it on my behalf? Once again, our worrying says no, as it reveals that we're simply not convinced that God can handle the situation, or at least not to our satisfaction. According to the Bible, worry is the opposite of trust. When we choose not to forgive someone, contrary to God's clear desire and instruction, what are we doing? In not so many words, we are saying, I don't believe that God knows what's best for me. What about how we spend our money? I like to think that I include God in those discussions. But what I really do is only involve him in the discussion about the small portion that I might realistically earmark for charity. Concerning the other much bigger chunk, the 80, 90, or 95%, I say, wait just a second, God. Stay in your lane, buddy. I gave you some. This over here is for me to decide what to do. Scripture encourages us to confess our sins to one another, even and perhaps especially the deepest, darkest, and most shameful ones. My immediate response is to say, no, thank you, over my dead body. No way can that possibly be in my best interest. We're encouraged as believers to always be prepared to share why our hope is in Jesus Christ. I don't do it. I don't want to offend this person or turn them off. I don't want to be thought a weirdo or a creep. I'm a confident person generally. I'll share my opinion on almost any topic with almost anyone. But for some strange reason, I don't trust that God will have my back if I share my faith. God says be thankful at all times and in all circumstances. But I don't want to always be thankful, and there just so happens to be things in my life that I'm not thankful for. Yet having a spirit of appreciation and thankfulness is one command of God's that I've come to acknowledge clearly leads to joy and abundant life. I think of the people I know who are most pleasant and encouraging to be around, the ones that are most nutritious for me. Almost without exception, there are people who live life in a spirit of thanksgiving. The old saying is true, it's not happy people who are thankful, it's thankful people who are happy. Ironically, even knowing this, there are still times when I choose to defy God's good intent for my life and instead choose the way of the woe-is-me, self-pitting grumpus. Now, I could go on and on, but if each of us took a deep dive into our motivations for doing some things and not others, for worrying about things over which we have little control, for habitually engaging in certain behaviors or responding in certain ways, for placing so much importance on what others think, we would understand more clearly that, at least in those instances, we're not fully convinced that God always has our best interests at heart or that His way is always best, that He is completely trustworthy in all of life's circumstances, that He is intent on giving us life to the full, the life that is truly life, if only we would trust. And that, at long last, brings us to our hero, Gamaliel. What he offers is a simple proof, evidence to bolster our conviction that the God we worship deserves our full confidence and trust. I've never been a fan of belief for belief's sake. Don't care how sincere it might be. In other words, if I'm going to believe that God always has my best interest at heart and is able and willing to provide it to me, I want it to be true. More than that, I need to be convinced that it's true if I'm ever going to fully trust in it. Otherwise, as we've seen this morning, I'm going to succumb to the temptation to lean on my own wisdom and judgment. This is where the battle lines are drawn and the war for my trust is waged. And this is where Gamaliel's cool logic and reasoning come through in the clutch. Now let's go to the story in the book of Acts and jump into the action. Our story takes place in Jerusalem, not long after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christian church is in its infancy and growing rapidly. The Jewish establishment is nervous and on edge. The disciples, Peter and John, have just healed a beggar who had been crippled from birth. Everyone was amazed, and when Peter saw their reaction, he said, men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if it's by our own power or godliness that we had made this man walk? You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. By faith in the name of Jesus, the man you see and know was made strong. It is in Jesus' name and the faith that comes through him that has given this complete healing to him, as you can all see. While they were still speaking, the Jewish leaders, none too pleased with Peter and John's message, arrested them and threw them in jail for the night. The next day, they were brought before their rulers and elders and teachers of the law who questioned them about the healing. By what power or what name did you do this? And Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, replied, Let me interrupt our story for just a second to point out what remarkable change can happen in the hearts and minds of ordinary men and women when convinced of God's truth and imbued with His Spirit. Just a short time ago, these same disciples were the gang that couldn't shoot straight, timid and wavering, untrusting, unreliable, and unconvinced. Now look, there's hope for all of us. Now back to our story. The Jewish leaders were astonished by the courage of Peter and John, especially when they realized they were ordinary unschooled guys and weren't sure what to do as they had to admit that the healing was a fantastic, outstanding miracle which they couldn't deny. And they couldn't really punish them because everybody was running around praising God because of that miracle. So they issued some threats and ordered Peter and John not to speak about this Jesus. However, even after the imprisonment and threats, the disciples continued to preach, teach, and heal until the high priest and his associates could not stand it any longer and arrested them again. But that night, an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail in order the disciples to go back to the temple and tell the people the full message of this new life. When all the rulers assembled the next morning and sent for Peter and John, they were surprised to learn that although the jail was locked and secure, nobody was inside. The Bible says they were puzzled by this. I love the understatement. I bet they were puzzled when they later learned that the men were back in the temple court preaching and teaching. They went and got them, but not by force for fear of what the people might do. The high priest again questioned them, and now reading from Acts 5, 28 through 39. This is the high priest. We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, he said. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man's blood. Peter and John and the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. When they heard this, they were furious and wanted to put them to death. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. Then he addressed them, men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago, Thudas appeared, claiming to be someone, and about 400 men rallied to him. He was killed, and all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too wasailed, and the apostles were let go. And now here, for you all this morning, is the $64,000 question of the day. If Gamaliel, the wisest and most esteemed teacher of the day, could be here with us this morning, is there any doubt that he would conclude if their purpose is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men. You will only find yourselves fighting against God. Well, it hasn't been stopped. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. No other power or movement or belief system has come close. Down through all the centuries, across every people group and culture on earth, and reaching the furthest corners of our planet, God has been on the move, faithful to all his promises. The prophet Isaiah wrote about God's faithfulness this way. and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. And that's why Gamaliel is a hero to me. His wisdom and insight remind me again that God is true to his word always and is going to do what he promised to do. If I'm going to trust God completely and not rely on my own wisdom, but surrender control in all areas of my life, not just some of them, I need that assurance. Our God is both able and willing to provide all that we need. My hope and prayer for all of us this morning is that the words of the Apostle Paul might be our words. I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. Thank you. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for loving us. Thank you for all these people who carved out time on a hot Sunday morning to come to know you better and to worship you. Lord, thank you for pursuing us. Obviously, forgive us for all the times that we are trust wavers. We're simply not convinced that you're completely trustworthy in all of life's situations. Thank you for the hope that you give us through your son. And it's his name we pray. Amen.