Sermons tagged with Healing

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this very hot July Sunday. Hopefully it'll cool down and we can get back outside soon. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. To know the Bible, to be around church culture at all, is to know some of the main characters of the Bible, some of the people that are a little bit more prominent in the Bible. Even if you've not spent any time in church at all, we've heard of David and of Moses and of Paul, but there are some other people in the Bible that give us great examples of behavior or character that we should emulate that are worth exploring. And so we're investing our summer series in looking at some of these heroes that are a little bit lesser known in the Bible. Now, full disclosure, when I told Jen, my wife, what I was going to be preaching about this week and who I was going to be preaching about, a guy named Naaman in 2 Kings 5. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in front of you. But we're going to be in 2 Kings 5 today looking at the story of Naaman. And so she pointed out, and I should tell you, that he is not really a hero. Okay? Like he's not, what he does isn't really great. So I told her what I was going to be preaching about and she goes, well, he's not really like that heroic. And I said, well, nobody cares. It's just like, it's just obscure heroes, but this is an obscure story. What's it matter? She was like, it matters. So if it matters to you, I apologize. I beg your forgiveness. All right. But I'm just not going to, I'm not going to check that box today. So this is more like an obscure story. Nonetheless, I think we can learn a lot from the example of Naaman. So if you look in second Kings chapter five, there is a general by the name of Naaman. He's the head general in the Syrian army, which was a really powerful army at this point in history. They're far more powerful than Israel. Israel is like a third world country at this point in history. They're really not impactful on the geopolitical scale. The Syrian army is, and Naaman is the general of this army. And so you have to figure, if you just think about in the ancient world ways to get famous, that pretty much the king in general is it. They didn't have Instagram. They didn't have any influencers back then. So like Naaman, that was all you got. So he had risen to prominence. He was at least regionally famous. If not, at the time, world famous. He was a heavy hitter. He was an important dude. And Naaman comes down with leprosy. We see leprosy through the Bible. It's in the Old Testament and it's in the New Testament. Leprosy was a disease that you got in your skin. I think you can still get it now. It's just we've fixed it. But you can still get it in your skin, and it begins to eat away at your skin, slowly but surely, killing you from the outside in. And to get leprosy was to receive a death sentence. If you contracted leprosy, somehow it was eventually going to eat away at you enough that it was going to kill you. Leprosy was certain death. And it didn't happen a lot in the upper echelons of the socioeconomic scale, but somehow or another, Naaman, maybe from his time spent out on the battlefield in foreign countries and things like that, Naaman contracted leprosy. And of course he feels like he's going to die. But on their last conquest through Israel, they brought back a little Jewish girl to serve Naaman's wife. And she hears that Naaman has leprosy, and she says in 2 Kings 5, she says, Oh, that my Lord would go, my Lord Naaman would go to Israel. There's a prophet there who can heal him. Now, she's talking about a man named Elisha. In the books of 1 and 2 Kings, there's two incredible prophets. I've said there's some of the most underrated figures in the Bible, Elijah and Elisha. One day I want to do a series through their lives, maybe next summer. It's just phenomenal stories. They were tremendous men of faith that God entrusted with tremendous power for the miracles that they would do. And apparently he had cured people before, even of leprosy. And so this little girl that they took back from Israel says, oh, that my Lord would go back to Israel and find Elisha, he could heal her. He could heal him. And so Naaman's wife goes to Naaman and says, hey, there's a prophet back in Israel that can heal you. Like, you should go back there. And so he decides to go. And I wonder, and I try to do this as I read stories in the Bible, and I would encourage you guys to do it too. Sometimes if we read stories in the Bible, if you were to open up your Bible and read 1 and 2 Kings, the stories move so fast. The narrative moves so quickly. There's so little nuance. It's just this happened, this happened, this happened, and then this is the end of the story. So I like to try to slow down and read the humanity into things and figure out what would I be thinking, what would I be feeling if I were in that situation. And I think that when we do this, when you'll read it on your own and you'll put your humanity into what's happening there, I think what you'll get is that the story starts to come alive for you a little bit. And so Naaman hears the testimony of this Hebrew girl and decides that he's going to travel hundreds of miles away to a third world country that's going to take him several weeks to do to go see a faith healer in the backwoods of Israel. Now what would it take for you to do that? If you got a diagnosis that nobody wants, it was a death sentence, you're definitely going to pass away. This is going to claim your life. But if you travel to the Dominican, to the back of a mountain there, there's a faith healer and he's going to make you feel better. How desperate would you have to be to go? Naaman went. He's not a believer. He doesn't believe in the Hebrew God. It's just a weird faith healer in the backwoods of a third world country, and he goes. And before he goes, what does he do? Naaman is so very American. He packs up all of his stuff, and he puts together a small fortune, some changes of clothes, which apparently are a big deal. Like if you wanted to be wealthy, have two jackets. So he puts together some change of clothes to offer to the person that's going to heal him and to the people around that person. He gathers together some livestock and some gold, and he takes a small fortune with him. Because when you get sick, what do we do? If you're diagnosed with something tough, what do you do? You marshal all your resources, you pull everything together, and you go to the best place that's going to treat you, and then you compensate them for their treatment. That's what Naaman's going to do. So he loads everything up, heads to Israel. He gets to Israel, and he tells his king he's going to go. He asks permission from the king of Syria, hey, there's a prophet in Israel, can I go see him? King of Syria says, yeah, sure, go ahead. Gives gives him a letter to carry with him to present. So he goes to Israel. He goes and he sees the king. And listen, what kind of a dude do you have to be to get the audience of a king when you just wander into a country? You have to be a big deal. So the king hears Naaman's here. Oh no, what does the general of the Syrian army want? And Naaman presents him with a letter. And the letter's from the king of Syria, and it says, be pleased to heal my servant Naaman of leprosy. And the Bible says that the king went and tore his clothes, because at this time in history, that's how you express anguish and sadness and despair and anxiety. And I've always wondered if these people had like spare, like tearing clothes that they got from Walmart. Like when I got sad, I would be like, time out. And then I would put on those things and probably pre-snip them and then tear them and then put on my nice kingly garb and be like, okay, that's terrible for those clothes. I don't know what he did. Maybe he just, he could tear outfits all he wanted. But he goes and he tears his clothes and he expresses this great sadness. Why has the king of Syria put this on me that he expects me to provoke him for war? Because it's an impossible task. I can't heal somebody from leprosy, much less the general of the most powerful army in the region right now. There's nothing I can do about this. This is a death sentence for him too. It's an excuse when Naaman goes there and he eventually dies because the king doesn't cure him. Then the Syrians can get ticked off at Israel and go sweeping through there again. And so the king, he's anxious. He is worried. He is in anguish. And word gets to Elisha, the chief prophet, that the king has gotten this letter. So he sends word to the king and he says, I've heard that you've torn your clothes. I hope it was the cheap ones that you got from Walmart. If you would just send Naaman to me, I'll take care of it. Send Naaman to me, I'll heal him. So the king says, okay, here's Naaman's address. You go and, or here's Elisha's address. You go and you see him. And I love how Naaman arrives. He goes to Elisha's house and it says, he arrived on his horses and chariots. So he brings his whole entourage with him. He arrives on his chariots. Nobody in Israel can afford a chariot. Israel has zero chariots. And so this is a huge deal. This is like when they line the streets for some political figure and on the line of Tahos come through and you're like, I don't know where, but somewhere in there, there's somebody that's important. So Naaman creates his own processional and arrives at the gate of Elisha's house, almost with this sense of, I'm here, congratulations. And he tells them, I'm here. And what does Elisha do? I love what Elisha does. What would you do? What would you do if one of the most famous people in the country showed up at your house, showed up at your office, and whoever works the front desk came to you, and they're like, excuse me, Nate, Peyton Manning's here to see you. What would you do? I don't know. I thought all week about who do I say that everybody recognizes as famous? I don't know what to say. Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, whoever you want, Justin Timberlake, take your pick. Somebody shows up, they're super famous and they want to talk to you. What would you do? I would be like, Aaron, Steve, Kyle, which is, that's the staff here. Sorry, I'm out. I got to go talk to them. Like, I got to, I got to go see them. I would, hello, I'm the senior pastor. It's good to meet you. I'm glad that you're here to see me. Right? Of course, we would soak that up, wouldn't we? What's Elisha do? He grabs an intern. Hey, name is at the gate. Would you go tell him that if he'll dip in the Jordan River seven times that he'll be healed and he'll be good to go? Like, what's Elisha working on? Like a proposal? Like, I'm busy. But he just says, hey, go tell Naaman if he'll dip in the river seven times he'll be healed. And so the intern goes down and tells this to Naaman. And this is how Naaman receives it. If you have a Bible, you can look in 2 Kings 5. I love what he does. Verse 10 says, and Elisha sent a messenger to him saying, go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh will be restored and you shall be clean. He doesn't even let him in. He's like, there's no reason for you to come in here and all that stuff. Just go to the Jordan River. You'll turned and went away in a rage. Naaman's ticked. He's ticked. I remember when I first got out of college, or when I was finishing up college, I sold cars. People don't know this about me, but I sold cars for like six months. And I was on the phone with a guy one day. He was a good old southern boy. And we were kind of going back and forth on the price of a truck. You know, he's got to ask for a price, and I've got to hang on. Let me go check with my manager, and I come back with the price. And it's a whole deal. It's real silly. And so we're going back and forth. And finally he goes, listen, son, am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? Because I need to be talking to the man. And I had to admit, I was not the man at Hayes Chrysler. Sir, you are talking to the boy. It was a very low moment in my life. If you know me well, you know that I need more of those and you do not feel sorry for me. And I had to admit, I'm not the decision maker here. That's what Naaman thought. Am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? He wanted to talk to the man. He wanted to be made over. He wanted to be fussed over. He wanted Elisha to come out and, oh, it's so great to have you. I'm honored to heal you. And then he wanted the chance after the healing to be able to offer his small fortune, right? He wanted to be able to offer a one-for-one exchange. None of us likes to get help without being able to reciprocate that help, without being able to feel like we in some way earned this or deserve this. He wanted to be able to compensate Elisha, and now he's robbed of that chance. He's not treated like he expects to be treated. Elisha is supposed to make this big scene and wave his hand over him, and I call on the name of the Lord and yada, yada. And he's like, no, just, you're good. Just see the water over there? Just go get in it. And he's going, I traveled hundreds of miles and brought all this stuff for this? You kidding me? I have rivers back home, and they're better than this backwoods river. And so he storms off. He takes his ball and goes home, and he sulks like a little kid. And a little while later, his servants go to him, and it's a loose paraphrase, but essentially they say, Naaman, what do you have to lose, man? You're out here. Just go do it. Just go do what he says. And I can imagine them saying, like, what's the worst that can happen? You get some Jordan River on you. You go home and you rinse off in the Farper. It'll be all right. Just do it. And so he goes after he's calmed down. He dips in the Jordan River, and he's healed of his leprosy. When he sees that he's healed of his leprosy, he's overjoyed. He rushes back to Elisha, and he tries to give him all the stuff. He tries to compensate him. Thank you. Here's this fortune that I brought. And Elisha's like, I don't need it. I didn't do that for your stuff, man. I just did that for you. God told me to heal you. I healed you. I don't need it. And he keeps trying to give it away to whoever will take it. And then a guy named Gehazi, one of Elisha's servants comes to him and he's like, actually, you know, on second thought, Elisha really does need the stuff. And Naaman gives him the stuff. And then Gehazi gets in trouble for taking the stuff. And that's a whole separate story if you keep reading on. But Naaman responds to this healing with a joyful and generous love. Here, here, take all my stuff. This was given to me. I want to be able to give this to you. And he leaves that space professing that there is one true God, and it is the God of Israel. We get a convert out of this interaction. Now, this is a good story, and it's a good one to unpack in the Old Testament. But how does it apply to us? I think we can begin to understand how it applies to us when we realize that leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. We see leprosy in the Old Testament and the New Testament. When we see it in the New Testament, generally Jesus is interacting with them. If you contracted leprosy, you were sent to a colony. You were quarantined. You were no longer allowed to interact with general society. You were unclean. You were sent to a colony, and you were sent there to die. Can you imagine how depressing leper colonies would be? And Jesus walked into these places and he touched and he touched and he touched and he healed and he healed and he healed in the same way that Jesus walks through a sinful world and he heals and he heals and he restores. The picture of leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. Leprosy was a disease that once you got it, it may have started small. In the story of Naaman, it says that he expected Elisha to come out and wave his hand over the place. So maybe leprosy was just starting to appear. Maybe it was on his arm and he could wrap it up. Maybe it was on his ribs and he could cover it up. Maybe it was in a place where if you looked at him, you didn't know that he had it, but he knew that he had it. And isn't that how sin works? When we have things in our lives that don't need to be there, sometimes we can cover it up. We can wrap it up. We can keep it from other people. And sin, just so we're clear, sometimes that word is misunderstood and it's used to make people feel guilty. But really, sin is anything that happens when we elevate our judgment in our life to equivocate God's judgment in our life. And when we say, no, God, I don't think that I want to do the thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do the thing that makes the most sense to me. That's sin. Whatever that is, whatever that looks like, whatever form that takes on. And when we get that, when we sin, just like leprosy, it is a disease that eats away at us and leads to certain death. Isn't this what Jesus, isn't this what God said in Genesis? He told Adam and Eve that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that you will surely die. And they ate of it and they didn't drop dead. So either God's a liar or he's not talking about physical death. He's talking about a spiritual death. And what he's saying is, if you elevate your judgment to mine and you throw off my lordship in your life and you become your own little God, then you have eternally separated yourself from me. That's a spiritual death. So sin, just like leprosy, leads to a certain death. Leprosy leads to a physical death. Sin leads to a spiritual death. But there's a parallel there. And in this story, Naaman is healed, but we should think about it as salvation. Naaman seeks salvation. And to be healed for his salvation, he had to accept the word of God and be obedient and humble himself and go dip in a river that didn't make any sense. For us to receive salvation, spiritual healing from God, we place our faith in what Jesus did on the cross for us. And in some ways, sometimes it doesn't make much sense. But we accept that free gift from Jesus. As we move through the Christian life and we understand salvation is, yes, an event when we place our faith in Christ, but it's also this ongoing process that the Bible calls sanctification, which just means becoming more like God in character. And that to be sanctified, to become more like God in character, it's every day this decision to trust on God rather than ourselves. It's every day to trust in God's way rather than our way. It's every day to trust in his lordship rather than our lordship. It's the same decision that Naaman had to make every day as we seek this salvation, as we fight off sin. And so what we see in the story of Naaman and what makes it relevant to us is that the physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. The physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. It works the same way. Naaman needed salvation for a disease that would lead to certain death. We need salvation from a disease that will lead to certain spiritual death or eternal separation from God. And what's interesting to me about this and where the rubber really meets the road in this story is, if I were to take you back to Damascus, back to Syria, when Naaman contracted leprosy, and he were to ask you, I need to be healed, what do you think my biggest obstacles are between health and unhealth? What do you think are the biggest things I need to overcome to be healed and to live? We would probably look at external factors, wouldn't we? We would look at the distance between he and Elisha. We would look at the cost. We would look at the probability of it actually working. We would look at all these other external factors. But what we see when we look at the story of Naaman is that Naaman's biggest obstacles for healing were his ego and his expectations. They were internal factors. His biggest obstacles to being healed, to salvation, were his ego and his expectations. He wanted to compensate. He wanted it to be a one-for-one exchange. He wanted to be able to look at Elisha and say, you are going to give me this, and I'm going to give you this. I earned this. I deserve this. It makes sense for you to heal me. We're going to both benefit from this exchange. His ego said that he needed to be able to contribute to it. And isn't that how we work too? I've been in church long enough to hear a line several times talking to people who are considering coming to faith. And they'll say something like, I do think that I want to become a Christian. I do think I want to get back into the church thing, but I just got some stuff I need to clean up first. Or I'll talk to somebody who wants to be baptized. We're going to do a baptism service in September, by the way, so start thinking about whether or not you might want to be a part of that. I've talked with so many people who are thinking about being baptized, but they'll say, yeah, I want to do that, but I've got some things that I need to get in order before I do that. When we say that, what are we doing? Our egos are saying, yeah, I'm going to take that step, but when I do, I'm going to deserve it. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be on my terms. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be because I'm worthy of it. It's going to be because I've gotten through white-knuckle discipline myself in line enough that I feel like I can approach him with a pure heart. When I get baptized, I'm going to earn the right to be baptized. I'm going to bring something to that exchange. It's going to feel like I deserve this gift from God of salvation. When we know that we bring nothing to that exchange. We don't pay God for it. We don't compensate him for his son. We just get our ego out of the way and we accept it. See, to get healed of leprosy, you have to first admit that you have it and that you desperately need to be healed. To get rid of the sin that's in our life, to be aligned with our Creator, to experience salvation, we have to first come to a place where we admit, I'm broken and I need healing. And that's a really hard thing for some of us. We have to come to a place where we admit, my lordship in my life is not working. I need your lordship. It's a hard place for some of us to get to. And what we see from the story of Naaman as we think about it in ourselves is that humility is a prerequisite for salvation. I would be willing to bet, and I don't know everybody enough to say this to you, and I'm sorry if this is too far, but I would be willing to bet that there are those of us who have kept kind of Christianity at arm's length for a while. We've considered it, it's there, and maybe we even think one day I will. Or maybe we think, I know that I should take it more seriously, but one day I will. I wonder if that obstacle between you and just a full bore faith is an ego. Is an, I want to do this on my terms. I'm not ready to accept that lordship all the way. I still think that I'm a pretty good authority in my life. And as long as that exists, as long as we think our rivers back home are good enough, we can't take the steps that God wants us to take. Humility, coming to him humbly, is a prerequisite for salvation. The other thing that got in Naaman's way were his expectations. He said, you're not going to come out and talk to me? You want me to go dip in the river? That's it? You're not going to wave your hand? There's not going to be this big thing and this huge ceremony. I expect that I'd at least get a good prayer out of this. None of that's going to happen. And so often we bring our own expectations to God, and then when he doesn't meet the expectations that we've created in our own heads, we push him off because he's not the God who he said he is, when he never said he would do any of that stuff. Naaman wasn't given those expectations by other prophets who said, listen, when you get to Israel, this is how healings work. That's just what he conjured up. And so when it didn't go according to his plan that he created in his own head, he rejected the plan that God presented him with because it didn't meet his expectations. But if you examine them, he had no right to those expectations. And so often I think we push God away because he doesn't meet the expectations that we created. And here's how this works. We have a tendency, if you think about it, and you think about who God is, we have a tendency to remake God in our own image. For most of us, God is simply the best possible version of us. I think about the things that I value in me, and we assume that God must be those things. And we never do it intentionally. No one would admit to this. No one would be like, oh yeah, totally, I do that. But if you think about who you think God is and how you think he should respond to different situations, what you picture God as is the best possible version of you. It's this version of you that you'll probably never attain, but God is probably that. So then when stuff happens in our life, we think, how would the best possible version of me respond to this? Well, it would respond this way, and that's not how God is responding, so he's not fair. When the God in heaven said, hey, I never gave you those expectations. I never promised you that. When we enter into a season of pain and suffering, when something happens in our life that we feel like isn't fair. And we say a loving God would never let this happen. He let it happen to person after person after person in the Bible. He let it happen to his own son. He let David's infant son die. We can go through story after story after story in the Bible where people who loved God and served him well had to deal with incredible pain. So where are we getting the expectation that when I go to God, everything is going to be good? We made that up. When I go to God, everything is going to go well for me. I'm going to close the sale. I'm going to do the business. My kids are going to finally behave because I'm raising them according to the right standards. Who gave you that expectation? Where are we getting that? Now, the expectation that God gives us is that all things work out in eternity. And that one day when we meet him, everything will make sense. I am confident there are things that are happening even now that I do not understand and I can't pretend to explain. But here's what I trust. One day I'll get to look God in the eye and if I even still care about all the stuff that happened here, if I were to ask him, God, why'd you let this stuff happen? If he would explain it to me in my heavenly form, I would go, okay, that makes sense. Can I get back to worshiping you now? I think so often our expectations that we generate, that God never signed up for, keep us from going to him and knowing him fully. Even expectations on the other end of the pendulum. Sometimes our expectations are, I've done so little. I've known better and not responded to it properly for so long that there's no way that God could accept me. And we let those expectations of God's response keep us away from him when that's not at all what he says. It says in Luke 15 that he's the father that runs to us and waits for us to come back to him. So in the story of Naaman, we see a person like us who was in need of salvation. We see a person like us and like me who very often keeps his ego and his expectations as an obstacle between him and the God that he desperately needs. And my prayer for you, even this morning, even as I was kneeling and praying before I would come preach, is that God would give you the courage and the honesty to see where your ego and your expectations in your life, and in my life, this is a me too thing, are keeping us from knowing God the way he wants to be known. Help us to identify those. Give us the courage to move past those. And if we do that, what will be the result? Look at what Naaman did. I believe. I'm in. Take all my stuff. I don't need it anyways. Naaman's response after humility and receiving the salvation was a joyful and generous love. The result of humble acceptance is a joyful and generous love. It's a love so big and so generous that I have grace for you as I watch you struggle through life. I have grace for you as I see clearly that your ego is keeping you from knowing everything about God that you could know. You have grace for me as you see my wrong expectations keeping me from knowing God well because you know that you've been met there with grace too. We have this contagious joy when we accept love in that way. Scripture tells us, Jesus tells us in Matthew that we are to honor God, that we are to love people in such a way that others will see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. That without us ever telling them about our faith, they will see our faith lived out and go, there's something different about them and I want it. Paul says in 2 Corinthians that we are led in a procession by Christ and that through us, one of my favorite phrases in the Bible, spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. This thing that just wafts into the lives of others passively as we move through their life and they look at us and they see something that's different. You know what's supposed to be different? A joyful and generous love. You know how we come by that love? By humbling ourselves before God and freely receiving his salvation and his love and his affirmation every day. And then we move through life like Naaman did after he got healed. So my prayer for you is that if there are places in your life where either your ego or your expectations are keeping you from knowing God, from submitting to him, that you would have the courage to see those things. And then ultimately, my prayer for us is that we would move through life like Naaman did at the end of this story with a joyful and generous love of God and love for others. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. We thank you for your word, for the Bible, for how rich it is, for everything that we can learn from it and see in it. God, I pray that you would help us to go and to read it on our own and to see the pages come to life and to, God, really study and invest in it. God, speak to us through your word even this week as we read it in the quiet of our own houses and offices. Father, I just pray that you would give us the courage, the clarity, the conviction to see where our ego, our expectations may be keeping us from you. If we see those, God, give us further courage to get them out of the way. And finally, Lord, let us love people with a generosity and a joy that can come only from you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. 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.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. I don't think you guys got the memo. It's Memorial Day weekend. You're supposed to be like at the beach and stuff, and here you are. So this is fantastic. I'm super encouraged by our Memorial Day crew. Just for the record, to throw this out here before I get launched into the sermon, if you are ever here while a staff member falls off the stage, the appropriate response is laughter. Don't feel bad about that. Don't feel like you have to wait and see if we're all right. Even if it's Aaron, you just laugh, all right? That's funny. And if you had fallen off the stage, that would be the best. That would be amazing. Actually, they're all rooting for me. Now they're all like, they're not even going to pay attention. They're just going to root for me like to fall off the stage. I'm going to stay right here. This is the third part in our series called The Forgotten God. For the unindoctrinated, for those that may not be as familiar with Christian theology, we believe that the Bible teaches that our God exists as a trinity or the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And the idea is we talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to him. We hear about him. He's all over the Bible. We talk a lot about God the Son in the form of Jesus. We see Jesus a lot. We just did a whole series on his life for 12 weeks. But sometimes we forget about the Spirit. We know he's there, but we don't familiarize ourselves with him or his roles or his influence in our lives. Last week, we said we've been talking about that what the Spirit does is he continues Jesus's ministry both through us and to us. This week, we're going to look at how he continues Jesus's ministry to us and the roles that he plays in our life. Last week, we looked at his continuation of Jesus's ministry through us and the spiritual gifts. And I brought up that there was two spiritual gifts that are often misunderstood, tongues and prophecy. And I promised that I would write up a little something to help you understand it if you're curious about my stance, not our stance, my stance on those gifts. So that's actually typed up and printed out and on the information table if you want to grab one on your way out. To the five of you that read it, I hope that it's good. They'll be there as long as there are copies, so for eight months. This week, I want us to look at the roles of the Spirit. How does the Spirit continue Jesus's ministry to us? And when I say Jesus's ministry to us, one of the things that Jesus was doing with the disciples is he was showing them how to become more like God in character, more like him in character and in disposition and in love and in heart. And so now the Holy Spirit does that in us as well. We're taught that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on our salvation. So we believe that if you are a believer, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you have the gift of the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit does certain things for you. I saw one author, he listed out 50 things that the Holy Spirit does. We're one service now, so I've got extra time. So number your paper, one through 50. No, I'm just messing around. I'm going to do five, but there's more than what we're doing this morning, right? But the Holy Spirit plays roles for us. And as I was thinking about how do we understand who the Holy Spirit is for us and what he does for us and how he helps us, as Jesus talked about, I was reminded of this clip of the 92 Olympics in Barcelona. This is, we're going to watch in just a second, this is my favorite Olympic moment of all time. Number two, for those interested, is Carrie Strug in the 96 Olympics when she does the vault with her sprained ankle. But this is my favorite one of all time. I watched this as an 11-year-old boy, and even in the moment, I thought, my goodness, something really neat is happening here. And I thought it was a really good picture of who the Holy Spirit is for us. So I wanted us to take a second here at the onset and take a look at this video. Storbritannia Terima kasih telah menonton! That's his dad. Terima kasih telah menonton I'm going to make a small tree with a small tree. Stenbergsforskning I love that clip, man. It's great. First of all, I mean, if you're blessed to have a good dad, like, that's what they do. And so now as a dad, like, I understand that even more. But every time I watch that clip, I cry. I get a little misty. And so I was in my office this week trying to find the right version of it on YouTube. And so I was watching it, and it finishes, and I'm in my office crying by myself. And then I start laughing at myself for crying by myself. And so if you'd have walked into my office at that moment, I would have looked absolutely hysterical. Like, you probably just would have slowly shut the door like, Nate's lost it. This is terrible. And going on with your day. But I love that clip because dude's running. He's trained for the Olympics. He's poured his life into it. And he tears his hamstring, right? And I can appreciate the heart of the dude that says, no, forget this. I'm finishing this thing. And he gets up and he goes and he's going to finish this thing. And then here comes his dad fighting off people. And I love, you guys giggle both times, I love when some other guy comes over and tries to help. He's like, get away from us. Get out of here. I've got this. I'm taking care of him. I love that. And I think it's a good picture of who the Holy Spirit is for us. And I think about us that we can all relate to that sprinter. That sprinter's name is Derek. I think in our life we've all felt like Derek. When we didn't know what to do or where to go, we felt like we were all alone, that we were just limping through life, trying to get this thing figured out. And darn it if we couldn't just use a hand. I sat with somebody this week. We have the young girl Molly that sometimes plays the violin for us. Her father passed away this week far too early. That's a heartbreaking thing. And I was sitting with somebody from our church this week as we took them lunch. And we were talking about, his name was Mac. We were talking about Mac passing. And she just brought up that there's just been a lot of people in the last couple years in her life who have passed away. She knows a lot of widows who are widows far too early. And she kind of broke down. She said, I don't understand. It's been really hard for me. I don't know how to make sense of this. I believe in my God, but I don't know why these things happen. She felt like Derek. And sometimes that moment is deep and it's grievous and it's intense and we just don't know what to do. We feel like him. We're all alone. Other times we just kind of look around and we're like, gosh, I've been carrying this weight for a long time. Goodness, it's felt like it's been all on my shoulders to lead this family, to lead this business, to decide on my career, to raise this child, to be in this relationship. Sometimes it just feels like it's all on us and that we're just limping through life. And if we're being really honest, we just wish sometimes we could have a hand. And this is true even of the toughest sons of guns in here. Because some of us are wired in such a way that you never ask for help. You never need anything from anybody. You're quick to help other people, but if other people offer to help you, no, I'm good. I'm fine. And I know that mentality. But let me tell you something. Even the toughest, most independent people in here, you have moments in your life, if you're being honest, where you feel like Derek, and you could really use a hand. That's why I think Jesus' words in John 16 should comfort us so much. And let me just say, if you're sitting here going, I've never felt like Derek, boy, you need to feel like him more than anybody in this room. And I think that's why Jesus' words bring us so much comfort. We started the series with this verse in John chapter 16 where Jesus says, it's better for you that I leave so that you can receive the comforter. And we talked about that's an absurd statement because wouldn't it be great to have Jesus right next to us all the time? But Jesus says it's better that I'm not here because if I don't leave, you can't receive the comforter. And we just talked about how can that statement possibly be true. But this week, I want us to actually look at a different portion of the verse. So come back to it, but zero in on a differentper, and that's capitalized, and some of your Bibles may say Comforter, will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And this is going to be important later. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. I say that these should be words of comfort to us because of what that word helper means. The word helper or comforter in your Bible, and I don't do this a lot because normally I think it's pastors just showing off, but in this point I do think it's important. The original word there is parakletos. parakletos, which literally means to come alongside. And that's the word that Jesus uses to describe the Spirit. It's all through the book of John. It's alternately translated as advocate, helper, comforter, or teacher. It can mean all those different things, but sometimes we see it helper, sometimes we see it comforter. But what he's saying is, if I don't leave you, then the one who's going to come alongside you will not come. And that's why I say that clip was a good picture of who the Holy Spirit is, because what did that father do? He came alongside his son, and he helped him through the race. And this is the picture of what the Holy Spirit does for us. When he rushes into our life, he comes alongside us, he fights his way to us, he picks us up, and he stays beside us through life. He is our ever-present helper. And so it should bring us great comfort. And as I was doing the research on this sermon, I realized that there's a lot of different roles that the Holy Spirit plays. There's a lot of different things that he does for us. I said that one author listed as many as 50. But what I realized as I looked at this is, wait a second, Jesus calls him the comforter. Jesus calls him the helper. So the Holy Spirit's role is to help us. The Holy Spirit's role is to come alongside us. That's his big umbrella role. And then underneath that umbrella, sometimes he takes on different shapes or different forms, depending on what we might need most. And the Scripture kind of tells us or shows us the different forms that he takes on for us. So we're going to talk about the roles of the Spirit, but his role is to help us. And that role looks differently depending on different seasons of life and different wiring. So one of the first ones I want us to look at is that sometimes he's the comforter. Sometimes the role that that takes on is that the Holy Spirit is the comforter. And this is easy to see that when we're grieving, the Holy Spirit is there and he is with us. And the Bible says that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. We know that when we are grieving and when we are hurting that the Lord is near to us. But to be honest with you, this was a hard one for me to relate to. I've not walked through a lot of tragedy in my life. There's not been many times where I was so broken and so grieved, maybe once that I can think of, where I felt like I needed to run to God. But I also felt like the role of comforter in our life is more prevalent than that. The other thing I know about myself is that I'm kind of emotionally broken. Like I don't really like feel emotions to the same degree that other people do. Like I'm a little bit weird in that way. And one time I was really sad about something and I called Jen and told her I was down. And her response was, Nate, those are feelings. And I said, well, you can keep these. These are terrible. I don't like feeling this way. I don't get down a lot. I probably should. I just don't get affected by much. I get grumpy about things, but I don't get sad about things where I feel like I need comfort. I don't feel like my life calls for a lot of comfort. So I actually went to some people on staff. I went to Aaron, our children's pastor, and I went to Steve, our worship pastor, and I said, hey, when you hear that the Holy Spirit is your comforter, how do you relate to that? How does that strike you? What does that mean to you? And they both gave me the same answer, and I thought it was a great one. They said, when I think of the comfort of the Spirit, I think of peace. And I thought that's so true. And often the comfort that the Holy Spirit offers comes in the form of peace. Often the comfort that he gives us is not patting us on the back and saying, hey, it's going to be okay, or giving us the plan like, hey, I'm going to comfort you by showing you exactly how it's going to work out. Sometimes that's not it. Sometimes it's just the peace that he offers us. I got to participate in the funeral that happened on Friday for Mac McElroy. And I peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. That peace of God is delivered to us through the Holy Spirit. And the comfort comes in the form of, I think, the Holy Spirit getting near us, putting his arm around us, and saying, I know that you don't know how this is going to work out, but I do. And saying, I know that you don't know what you need to do in this situation, but I know. I know that this doesn't make sense to you right now. I know that you can't make heads or tails of this. I know that it feels like a loving God wouldn't allow this to happen. I know that this feels confusing and it doesn't fit into your theology. I understand that. But I understand it. It makes sense to me. I know that you don't know how this is going to be okay or how life will ever be okay, but I think the Holy Spirit, as he comforts us, whispers into our ear, but I know how it's going to be okay. And I know how this is going to work out. And the Holy Spirit is what enables people, those Christians, to face the unknown with certainty and with peace. One of the greatest blessings of my life has been the privilege of watching my grandma, my mama, walk to death with perfect peace. She was diagnosed in February a couple years ago with ovarian cancer. It was advanced stage, and she said, you know, I've lived a long life. I'm pretty good. My husband's in heaven. My kids don't need, like, my support on a day-to-day basis, so I can pray for them. I can pray for them from heaven, so I'm just going to refuse treatment and live out the last couple months of my life in peace. And she walked. I had coffee with her every other week and talked to her about it. And she walked to death with perfect peace and no fear. You know how she did that? The Holy Spirit whispering in her ear, Linda, I know that you don't know how this is gonna work, but I do, and I've got you. So sometimes the Holy Spirit helps us by taking on the form of a comforter. Sometimes he's the illuminator. This may be the most important role of the Spirit. Sometimes the Holy Spirit is the illuminator. It tells us in 1 Corinthians 2, I've got it there on your notes, verses 13 to 14. Paul writes this, and we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Okay. What this means is, if we want to understand spiritual things at all, it is the Holy Spirit that enables us to understand those things. Do you understand that the Holy Spirit is the activator of your faith? That if you would call yourself a Christian, that in the days and weeks and years before you were a Christian, you were wandering around, the Bible says, blind, unable to see the truth. And the only way you can see the truth that it takes to become a believer is for the Holy Spirit to illuminate that truth in your life, to do the work in your heart so that you'll be turned on to the things of God. None of us comes to faith because we sit down and intellectually pursue faith. We come to faith because the Holy Spirit, in whatever way he works, illuminates for us our need for God. That's how we come to faith. None of us has faith without the Spirit. And then as we walk through life and we seek to understand spiritual things, the Holy Spirit explains them to us. He directs our paths in such a way that spiritual things make sense to us that beforehand they couldn't. That's why I truly believe if you're not a believer and you're trying to come to grips with Christianity, but the deal for you is I have to understand everything about what I'm getting into to be able to take the step of faith to be a Christian. You never will, because the Holy Spirit has to act in our life to bring that about for us. I think it even works like this. The Holy Spirit, part of his role is to illuminate God's Word. I have notes in my Bible where I was reading a passage, and I went, gosh, I don't understand what that means. And I wrote down and dated it. Father, please show me what this means. Spirit, please help me with this one. I don't understand this. And I wrote it down and I dated it and I just made it a prayer. And I can tell you that there's been a couple of times when I come back through my Bible, I'm reading it again, and I read a passage and there's a note off to the side of it that just says, Lord, please help me. And I go, oh, I understand what that means now. Because the Holy Spirit was good in answering the prayers and showing us what Scripture means. I would just tell you this. If you're having a hard time understanding some things about God, if you're having a hard time understanding some things about theology, if you're having a hard time understanding some of the things that you may read in Scripture sometimes, have you prayed to the Spirit and asked Him to illuminate for you what it means? Have you asked Him to show you? I would challenge you to pray that prayer and see what happens because sometimes the Spirit is the illuminator and he shows us spiritual truths. Sometimes he's our leader. Sometimes he shows us where to go and what to do next. I love the moment in that video when Derek is limping down. He's limping down the track, and his father fights his way to him, and he grabs him, right? And Derek at first looks at him. If you go back and you watch it again, he looks at him with some apprehension. He thinks it's another guy in a suit who's trying to help him, and he kind of looks at him like, no, get away from me. But then he realizes who it is. And when he realizes who it is, he breaks down crying because he realizes it's not all on him anymore. And he turns and he buries his face in his dad. And at that moment when he's burying his face in his dad, he's still moving down the track, but he's no longer looking where he's going. And that's a picture of what the Holy Spirit does for us. His dad has his eyes down the track. His dad hasn't. His dad says, you don't need to worry about where we're going. You don't need to worry about where we're stepping. You don't need to worry about staying in your lane or avoiding all these camera people or crossing the finish line. You don't need to worry about any of that. I got you. I will take you across. And all of his concerns and all of his worries went straight into just focusing on his dad and the comfort that his dad offered. And sometimes this is what we need to do with the Spirit more than anything, is just bury our face in Him, focus our eyes on Christ, focus our eyes on God, and allow the Spirit to lead us into the decisions that we need to make. Because sometimes we don't know what to do. Do I take the job? Do I not take the job? Do I put my resume out there? Do I not? Do I stay in Raleigh? Do I move somewhere else? Do I go to this church? Do I go to that church? We have a dynamic in a relationship that's hard and sticky and if we address it, it's going to blow it up and it's going be really difficult to talk about it, and maybe it's best just to let it lie. What do I do? Do I stick my face in the wood chipper, or do I step back and hope it works out? How do I discipline my kid? What do I say in this particular instance? How do I handle this situation? Oftentimes, we're in a place in life where we could go this way or that way, and we're not sure what to do. I was in a conversation with somebody in my family a while back, and she was in a very stressful situation, and a lot of things had fallen on her that were not typically her responsibilities. And she was really struggling with it and having a hard time with it and was ill-equipped to handle it. It was really very stressful for her. And I spent some time on the phone with her. And I tried to lovingly tell her, hey, where you're at right now in life, the things that are being thrust onto you are too much for you. They're too big for you. You're not wired to handle these things. So you don't need to continue to feel encumbered with all the decisions around the situation because you have a couple of people around you who are smart and who are level-headed and who are thinking clearly and who are capable of helping you carry that burden. So the only decision that you need to make is to trust the people around you who love you enough to make those decisions for you. How does that sound? And she said, that sounds pretty good. I think I can do that. Some of y'all came in here this morning and this is what you need to hear. You have the weight of the world on your shoulders. You have been leading the company or the family or the dynamic or the department or whatever it is, and it has felt all on you for a long time. And you're trying to decide between this and that and what's the best way and what do we do. The only thing you need to do is turn and bury your face in the Spirit and trust His leadership and trust His guidance and say, listen, God, I'm just going to focus on you and you just take me where we need to go. Sometimes the Spirit helps us by leading us. Sometimes the Spirit is the convictor. This is what Jesus says in John, that the helper is going to come and his role is going to be to convict the world of sin. And I feel like this gets a bad rap. This idea of conviction kind of gets, especially now in our culture, it really gets a bad rap, right? We are so touchy about telling anybody that they're wrong about anything. We could hear, man, this guy, he murdered his wife. And some of us would go like, I'm sure he had his reasons. Like we equivocate everything. We won't judge anything at all. We're so scared of it because we don't want anybody to feel bad about anything that they may have done, God forbid. And so when we hear that the Holy Spirit is the convictor, we kind of immediately be like, I'm not into that. Because we feel like that the Holy Spirit is the voice in our head that's shaming us for our sin. The one that's getting on to us when we look in the mirror and we say, look at you. Look at who you are. If everybody knew what you know about yourself, they would not be your friends anymore. She would not be your wife anymore. He would not be your husband anymore. They would not respect you as a parent anymore. And some of us sometimes think that the Holy Spirit is that voice in our head that's shaming us into obedience. But I really feel like that's not how the Holy Spirit works. Have you ever had, I feel like the Holy Spirit works like this. Go with me. I know this is kind of a leap, but just hang with me. Have you ever had those days when you overeat? I never have. I'm assuming that you guys have. But those days when you overeat. Gosh, I've had so many lately. The other day, this happened. This was Thursday night. Thursday was a really busy day. I got up. I had something early, so I left before Lily woke up. I had the whole day. I saw her really quick for like a minute in the afternoon. I snuck up on her at a park and said, hey. And then I went back to work. And then I had meetings that went until like 8.30 at night. And so I was trying desperately to wrap up the meeting and rush home so that I could hug Lily before she went to bed. That's what I was trying to do all day. And I get there and I walk into the room. It's right before she goes to bed. The lights are down. Jen's sitting on the bed. And she says, Daddy. And I'm like, oh, this is the best. And so I hug her, and then I decided to push my luck. I said, can Daddy snuggle with you for a minute? And she said, no, I want Mom to. Dang it. Which is, that's Lily. I mean, she loves her Mama. And so we kind of negotiated. I'm like, well, maybe mom can do it for a little bit and then daddy can. And she goes, okay. I'm like, all right, good. So long story short, I tried to lay down next to her and snuggle with her for a minute, and she just bawled hysterically. The way that any of you would react if the same thing were happening in your life. She just bawled hysterically, right? And Jen's kind of looking at me, and now I realize I'm the selfish 38-year-old jerk that's making this poor girl cry because I want her time and this is really not good fathering. So I relent and I get up. And I'm not messing around. My feelings were legitimately hurt. I was sad when I walked down the stairs. And so I drove to cookout and I ate my feelings. I did. We had decided that week we were on a diet. We were going to be strict. And I had been good that week. I really had. And then I walked down those stairs and I was like, forget this. So I get in the car, I go to cookout, double cheeseburger, onions, mayonnaise, mustard, onion rings, chicken quesadilla, Coke. All of it. All of it. I wasn't even, stop it. You've done it too. I get back to the house. I ate the cheeseburger and like two onion rings and I was like, I'm full. But I am not a quitter. So I finished it. And I'm sitting there, right? And like ten minutes after I'm done, I do not feel good. I'm having some serious indigestion. And what's the indigestion telling me? Hey, pal, that probably wasn't a good choice. That's the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the voice that talks back to you in the mirror after you overeat that says, look at you, you man, it stinks that it's getting hot. It's bathing suit season and you are not ready. Like that's not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the indigestion that you feel that says, hey, that decision that you just made, that's not what's best for you. The Holy Spirit is the heavy breathing at the top of the stairs that lets you know like maybe a walk would be good sometimes. That's the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the voice trying to shame us into submission. He is looking to love us into health. He's the voice that whispers in our ear, hey, that thing that you're doing with your life, that's not what's best for you. When you feel bad after you overeat, that's the Creator whispering to you going, you were not designed to eat cookout. When we sin and we mess up and we feel this voice in our head telling us, you were not designed to do that. That's the Holy Spirit. That's the conviction of the Holy Spirit. The conviction of the Holy Spirit never induces shame because our shame hung with Jesus on the cross. He took that from you so that you don't have to feel it. But it is a voice telling you, hey, that thing that you're doing in your life, that's not what's best for you. The conviction of the Holy Spirit loves us to health. And for some of us this morning, he's been whispering to us for a while. And we should listen. I like to say that you win every argument you ever get into with God. The Holy Spirit can whisper to you and say, hey, that's not good for you. And you can go, yeah, it is. I think it's fine. And he'll go, okay. You do not want to win that argument. Listen to him. Listen to him. And I think it's important that we understand that the Holy Spirit is never seeking to shame us in this conviction. He's only seeking to love us because it plays into the last role I want to cover today. Sometimes he's the identifier. Sometimes the Holy Spirit identifies us for who we are. Romans 8 tells us that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are, get this, children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs to God and co-heirs to Christ. So the Holy Spirit's role is to identify you for who you are. And I think that this, to me, as you become a Christian, is maybe the most persistently needed voice and role of the Spirit that we have. Because I'm convinced that most of us, when we think about standing face to face with God, feel far more like an indentured servant than we do a loved child, right? I feel like most of us just assume, think about the way that you pray, think about the way that you worship, think about the self-talk that you feel when you even try to do spiritual things. Don't most of us in this room just assume God's disappointed in us? Don't we just assume that if we were gonna be face-to-face with God, that his first primary emotion towards us would be disappointment? We think God's love is for everybody else, God's forgiveness is for everybody else, but not me, I know better. I've been in church for a long time. I know better than what I have done. Doesn't everybody in this room feel like, if you've been a believer for any time, don't you feel like, if you're being honest, gosh, I should be so much further along in my spiritual walk than I am. God has to be disappointed in how little ground I've covered in these last 10, 20, 30 years. Don't we feel like that? Like we're somehow God's indentured servants and we owe him. We need to get better and that his primary emotion towards us is disappointment. To that voice, the Holy Spirit whispers in our ear, you're not an indentured servant. God is not ashamed of you. He is your father, and you are his daughter, or his son, and he loves you, and he is proud of you. When that dad rushed onto the track and grabbed Derek, the sprinter, and picked him up, did you read anything on his lips about him being disappointed for not properly stretching before the race? No, he just picked him up and he said, I'm here. I'll help you. I feel like we have this picture of God that's gonna be disappointed in us for not stretching or eating right the day of race, when all God wants to do is rush into our life and pick us up and help us. What I want you to see is that God's primary emotion towards you is not disappointment. It's delighted love. And the Holy Spirit's role in your life is to identify you as an adopted son or daughter of the King and to constantly remind you God loves you. God delights in you. God is proud of you. And some of you just said in your head, God's not proud of me. Yes, he is. He's proud of you. Some of you just said he doesn't delight in me. Yes, he does. He delights in you. He loves you. He's proud of you. You're his children. And the Holy Spirit's role is to remind you that the Creator God looks down on you and smiles and takes delight. Those of you who have children, you know that your primary emotion towards them is not disappointment or frustration. It's love. Why would we think our perfect heavenly Father is any different than that? So sometimes the Holy Spirit serves us as the identifier. I would ask you this question. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which good on you for being church at a holiday weekend and not even signing up for the whole deal yet. But if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, don't you want that? Don't you want the helper? Aren't you tired of running the race on your own? Aren't you tired of it all being on you? Aren't you ready to let the helper come alongside you and serve you in whatever capacity you need? For those of you who are a believer, I want to encourage you today to lean into the roles of the Holy Spirit in your life. I don't know which one that we covered today resonates most deeply with you. But when I pray in a second, you might spend some time praying and ask God to just help you lean into that part of his spirit. You might ask God to help you trust him as your comforter and as your helper. You might ask him to lead you and to show you. You might ask him to remind you. All you need this morning is a reminder that you are a beloved son or daughter of the King. I don't know which role resonates with you most, but the encouragement this morning is to lean into it and allow the Holy Spirit to be in your life who he is and to do in your life what he's come to do. And let's embrace this idea that it's better for us to have the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit continues to bring you closer to God and draw you into the Father by coming alongside you and being your helper as you move through life. All right, let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for your spirit. Thank you for how he helps, how he comforts, how he illuminates and leads. We even thank you for the gentle conviction of the spirit. We thank you that he identifies us for who we are. God, I pray that we would leave, those of us who are believers, knowing that we are adopted children that you love. God, if there's anybody here who walked in this morning not knowing you, I pray that they would be your child before they leave. Let us give proper weight and value to your spirit and his ministry in our lives, God. Give us the faith to lean into him and to trust him. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.