Sermons tagged with Salvation

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. You guys say what you want about me, but I'm good at hiring worship pastors, apparently. I had no help. There was no teams or anyone else involved. It was solely my decision, and it was a good one. I'm sticking with it. No, just messing around. If you're here for the first time and I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that. Please come shake my hand in the lobby. That would be fantastic. And I think there's one more free mug out there left. So if you leave in the middle of the sermon, I'll know what you're doing. I hope that you guys enjoyed the Lent series. As we wrap that up, we're moved into a new series called the Letters of Peter. With the Lent series, there was a devotional and I heard a lot of feedback that you guys really, really enjoyed that. And I loved getting to hear from all the different voices in the church. And we will definitely find a reason to do those in the future. That's not the last time you're going to see a church devotional like that, because I really thought it was very good for us as a church. If you are looking for what to read in your quiet times, we do have a reading plan. It's available online. It's also on the information table in the lobby. If you don't know where the information table is, we have a coffee table and an information table, and I trust you to figure it out. It's a small lobby. But if you are curious about what to read, grab that reading plan and read through the letters of Peter with us. I'm excited to be in 1 and 2 Peter. I love the books of 1 and 2 Peter. Every time as a staff, we sit down to brainstorm what it is we're going to talk about and to kind of map out the series for us. This ends up on the whiteboard. Somebody will say, usually me, we could do 1 and 2 Peter, and then we write it up there, and then we have other ideas that we like, and we move on. And this time, it just hit right, man. It just felt right. It was up there on the board, and Kyle said, maybe this is the time that we're actually going to do it. And I said, you know what? Darn it, it is. I love Peter, and we're going to follow up the Lent series with these letters from Peter. So I'll say a couple things up front. We're not going to go through verse by verse or even theme by theme. There's just not enough space to do that. So I hope that you will read along with us so that you can get the full message of the letters of 1 and 2 Peter. These letters were written to the early church in the first century AD in Asia Minor. They were written to Gentile people, so they were not written to Jews. Most of the New Testament was written with kind of a mind towards Jewish thought, Jewish culture, Jewish inheritance. Peter wrote his letters to Gentiles that lived basically in modern day Turkey. And the idea with these letters is that they're meant to be circulated around the churches that are in that area. The other reason I like these letters is because they're written by Peter. And I can relate to Peter, just in overall holiness and usefulness to the church. Thank you, Harris. Peter was the dummy. Peter was one of these ready fire aim guys. He was, Peter would start running his mouth before he really even knew the end of the sentence. He just had words to say and out they came. My dad likes to say about me that Nathan, because my family calls me Nathan, Nathan having nothing to say, thus said. That's Peter. That's what Peter does. He just, he hops out of the boat and he walks on water until he sees a wave and then he sinks. He's the one that says, no, Jesus, I won't deny you. And then he does it three times. He's the one that steps up and answers all of Jesus's hard problems, hard questions. He'll take one for the team. I got this one, guys. That's Peter. He's just hard charging and he's out there. But Peter writes these letters at the end of his life. The years have softened him. They've made him wiser and more measured. And this is his message to the church. And I find great comfort in that because it gives me some optimism that maybe one day I can be a little bit more wise like Peter. Maybe one day I can quit doing dumb stuff and maybe I'll season into it like Peter did. But I love where Peter starts his letter. You would expect maybe if you thought about it, I don't know, but this is a murky time in church history. Their faith is 30 to 40 years old. We're talking about, we're talking about 60, 70, 80 AD right now as these letters are circulating. So they have this murky faith that's not based on 2000 years of good sound doctrinal biblical teaching. They don't have a canonized New Testament. They have some confusion abounds and false teachers are there kind of influencing them. And so Peter writes to this culture and these churches, and I would expect him in that context to write a book, maybe like Romans, what Paul wrote to the church in Rome, that really is the most detailed theology in the whole Bible in chapters one through eight. It's basically, here's what we believe and here's why we believe it. And then the rest of Romans is, here's what we're supposed to do in light of those truths. Or maybe Hebrews, which is just this high Christology, this high view of Jesus, of who he is and who he was and what he still does for us. Maybe I would start there, but that's not where Peter starts. Peter actually starts with suffering. It's like the first thing he addresses right out of the gates. And it's interesting to me that he would do this. And I think he does it because this is a culture, first century AD, very familiar with suffering. They knew what it was to grieve. They knew what it was to hurt. They knew what it was to lose. This is a culture and these are churches that are being actively persecuted, arrested, beaten, killed for their faith. This is a culture in which infant mortality is high and life expectancy is low. They knew what loss was. They knew what grief was. They had to walk through suffering on a regular basis as a regular part of life. And what Peter, I believe, knew and knows is that suffering can very often derail our faith. And it's why I wanted to open up the series talking about it as well. Because though I think we would admit that life in the 22nd century is markedly easier than life in the first century, we are the spoiled billionaire kids of history and the way that we get to live our life. But on the other hand, it's similar. Everybody in this room knows loss. Everybody in this room knows grief. Everybody in this room has been hurt by something that's happened in their life in a deep and profound way. Most of us know what it is to get the phone call that you or someone you love has a disease that's going to be really tough to battle. Most of us know what it is to have life not go the way we wanted or the way that we planned to sit in the midst of shattered dreams. We know what hurt is. We know what pain is. And we know that suffering has the power to dismantle our faith. We know that it has the power to tear it down. Which is why whenever I have the opportunity as your pastor to talk about suffering, as not fun as it is and as somber as it is and as serious as it is, I'm going to stop and I'm going to slow down and I'm going to talk about it with you. Because we have to do everything we can as a church and as individuals to fight against this pernicious idea that sneaks into the church over and over and over again, that somehow when I choose God, that somehow when I accept Christ, that Jesus is going to protect me from pain. Yeah, I'm going to have to go through some things. I mean, it's not all just going to be rosy. Life doesn't get to just be completely awesome all the time. There's going to be seasons of unhappiness, but the really bad stuff, God's going to protect me from that. If I follow God, he will not let anybody that I love get a disease that they don't deserve. If I follow God, everyone who dies, I'll be able to explain why they did. If I follow God, he's going to protect my children. If I follow God, he's going to bless me with children. If I follow God, he's going to protect me from failure. That idea sneaks in over and over and over again. And I think part of the reason it sneaks in is because it's so easy to preach. I would love to bring you in here and tell you, listen, the more you believe in God, the better your life's going to be. Now go live the good life. But that's crap. That's not true. And so we have to push against it every opportunity that we have. This idea that somehow my belief in God protects me from pain. So when suffering comes up in the Bible, we're going to talk about it. Because if we believe that about suffering, that my faith in God protects me from pain, then when we experience pain, we will no longer have faith in our God. Some of you have walked that road. The erroneous expectation, the misguided expectation that Jesus protects me from pain, only to find out that he doesn't. And then to reject the Jesus that was supposed to protect you, and he didn't. That failure of faith comes from understanding suffering wrongly. But I think this morning that what we'll see is if we understand suffering correctly, if we understand it biblically, if we understand it accurately, then it can be something that actually strengthens us. It can serve us. So let's look at what Peter says about suffering. Let's look at Jesus's role in that suffering. And then let's look at our responsibility in that suffering. This is just an old-fashioned work-through-the-text sermon, which they are my favorite to do, because I just stick to God's Word. Peter says this in of a loved one to persecution, Peter? Those kinds of various trials that have grieved me for a little while? Trials that grieve me for a little while are when I remember that Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays. That grieves me for a little while, and then I go to PDQ, all right? But what he's talking about here is not that. It's deep loss. It's deep persecution. It's deep grief and deep suffering. And he says, though you endure these trials for a little while, if necessary, and not if necessary for you as if God is putting them on you, if necessary because broken things happen in a broken world, and sometimes that necessitates suffering. Paul is similarly flippant in Corinthians, where he says that we suffer from light and momentary affliction. Again, I love the flippancy with which the New Testament refers to really, really deep, hard, depression-level suffering. Light, momentary affliction. Grieved with trials for a little while. And so what we see from this attitude of Peter as he presents the topic of suffering, sandwiched with the gospel, as we'll see, is simply this truth. Suffering will happen, and we don't have to understand it. Suffering will happen. It will. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. No one lives a full life and doesn't experience some suffering, doesn't experience or see abuse, doesn't experience or see death. I mean, right now, if you just turn on the news, you see what's going on in Ukraine and your mind is just boggled at the suffering that's happening there and the horror of the stories coming out of the towns that the Russian forces have now evacuated. And you know that once you live enough life, there's suffering that happens that you don't understand and that you can't explain. And there's this thing with suffering, with hardship, with grief and with struggle, where the very first thing we seek to do, our knee-jerk reaction is to understand it. Why would God let this happen? Why would God allow that person to die? Why would God allow that person to get this disease? Why would God allow things to not go that way? Why wouldn't God protect my family when he could? The very first thing we want in suffering is answers. Why is this allowed to happen? And sometimes, sometimes there's answers and it does make sense. Sometimes it is struggling for a little while so that you can harden your faith and so that it can be ready and seasoned. Sometimes the thing you're praying for, you're simply not ready for it yet. And if God gives it to you, you're going to mess it up. So you're waiting and you're being prepared. So sometimes when we suffer, we look back on that suffering and we go, oh yeah, okay. I understand why God allowed me to walk through that season. But sometimes suffering happens for which there is no explanation. That we cannot explain away. And this is when we need to be careful with phrases like, oh, everything happens for a reason. Does it? I've told you guys this before, but my college roommate dropped dead of a widow-maker heart attack at 30 with two kids under five years old. What was the reason for that? To make his wife's faith stronger? Get out of here. What was the reason for that? So his boys could grow up with a different dad who loves the Lord. No, my buddy was a pastor. He was one of the best people I knew. If everything happens for a reason, what's the reason for that? I was on the phone this week talking to a pastor. He's been a pastor for 40 years. He's been at one point the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was really great friends with my father-in-law, John. And we were just kind of chatting about it, and he calls me buddy. He said, you know, buddy, I've seen a lot of people pass away. I've seen a lot of people go too soon. But this one, losing John, that will never make sense to me. That's one that I just don't get. And it just makes me think, if there is suffering that happens, that a pastor who's been a pastor for 40 years, who's pastored thousands of people, who's done hundreds of funerals, thousands of hospital visits, he's seen all the suffering. When you're a pastor, sometimes you get a front row seat to that stuff, whether you like it or not. And he's been through it and he's looking at a death and he's going, this one, I don't get, man, there can't be any reason for this. If he can't make heads or tails of it, then what, what hope do we have to make it all make sense? And so something I want to alleve you of this morning, alleviate from you, unburden you of, is the necessity to make it all make sense. Because sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the only explanation for events, like what's happening in Ukraine, is that broken things happen in a broken world. And God in his infinite goodness and his infinite wisdom is choosing to allow those things to happen. He's choosing to allow the world to remain broken until one day he returns and he repairs it. But there's going to be suffering that happens in this life that there is no reason for. And if someone tells you everything happens for a reason, it's only because they've never experienced something that doesn't happen for a reason. And in that suffering, Peter tells us that we should rejoice. In this you rejoice, even though you're suffering. Even when we don't understand it, we should rejoice. And sometimes when we seek to understand it, we just want to make the pain go away. And we feel like if we understand it, it will make it feel better. But when I say that sometimes we just don't get to know why suffering happens, sometimes we're just not going to understand it. That's not me just being practical about things that I've seen in my life. That's actually me being biblical about God being confronted with why. We see it, to my mind, two very prominent times. Once in John chapter 11, when Jesus waits and allows Lazarus to die and then comes to raise him from the dead. And Mary, Lazarus's younger sister, runs out to meet him and he says, to meet Jesus and says, why did you wait? You could have come and you could have done something about this. And Jesus, in that moment, when we lean in and we want to understand why, why do you allow suffering? He doesn't offer an explanation. He weeps with her. He cries with her. We see it another time in Job, towards the end of the book, when Job confronts God and he's like, I need to know. I demand an answer. Why have you allowed all these things to happen to me? The worst suffering that could ever happen in the world happened to Job. And he said, why God, why did you allow this to happen? You owe me an answer. And God said to Job, and we are going to, might be uncomfortable with this. This is graduate level theology. But God said to Job, you lost your place. If I tried to understand this to you, you wouldn't get it. Tell me how I laid the foundations of the world and then I'll explain this to you. Tell me how the oceans know how far to go and no further. Tell me how souls get created. When you can grasp that, I'll tell you. So I have a belief that even though sometimes in the midst of our heart of suffering, we go, God, this doesn't make any sense. That one day when we're in eternity, if our heavenly brains have the capacity to understand and we can understand things like God does. We'll all collectively go, oh, huh. Yeah, that checks out. That makes sense. And I suspect that what we'll find in eternity is that the ones that we grieve so much for losing too early or the lucky ones? Because they got there before us. We don't have the capacity to understand all the reasons and all the suffering that happens around us. And I can't sit up here as a pastor and tell you exactly why God lets a broken world do broken things. But I know that when we get to eternity, if we have the capacity to understand it, we'll go, hmm, yeah, okay, I get it. And so in the midst of that uncertainty and in the midst of our suffering, we're grieved by various things for a little while, Peter tells us to rejoice. How is this possible and what should we rejoice? Well, it follows verses 3 day these wounds will be healed. In what do we rejoice in the midst of suffering? How do we find a way to find joy? How do we find a way to find hope? Because Easter, that's how. Because last week I told you the most important sentence in the Bible is, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen. On that, all of history hinges. Because Jesus came to earth, because he lived a perfect life, because he died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, because he rose again on the third day and left us with the Holy Spirit and ascended into heaven where he's prepared a place for us, where he sits at the right hand of God interceding for you, where he sends the Holy Spirit to chase after your soul and bring you near to him and bring you back to him as he prepares for the marriage supper of the lamb to call you into eternity. He bought your salvation and he's waiting for you and he invites you into that. And in that truth, you rejoice. In that reality, you rejoice. That because he rose from the dead on Easter, we know that he's gonna come back to get us in Revelation. We know that he's gonna come back and that he's gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. We have faith that he is going to do that. And so we know that one day the wounds that we carry and the wounds that we walk in and the scars on our body emotionally and physically, that one day we will not have those anymore because Jesus has won us the next day. That one day we will not sit in that pain anymore because one day as believers, we're going to be in heaven for all of eternity where we will not need faith and we will not need hope and we will just simply sit in the joy of being in the presence of our Father and of our Savior and of the saints. We wait anxiously for that day. That's why I think if you pay attention, the most seasoned believers in the face of suffering and in the face of things that they can't explain will simply say, come Lord Jesus, just come. We don't get this stuff anymore. And so in the midst of suffering, we look to the gospel. We look to our hope. I'm fond of saying on days when I'm not feeling great, which is not awesome, or not often, because my life is awesome and my days are good. On days when I'm not feeling great, when I'm blue, or when I'm down, when I'm discouraged, when something hard is happening, I like to remind myself that not every day will feel like this day. This day is sad. That's okay. Let it be sad. But not every day is this day. Tomorrow's a new one. Maybe it'll be better. If it's not, there's a day after that. Not every day will feel like this day. And that's true in eternity too. If you're sitting in hurt and pain, if you've experienced loss, not every day feels like that day. And if there is scarring in your life that is so bad that it simmers under the surface at all times that can sometimes just jerk us right back into grief, there's coming a day when you can finally set that down and just bask in the presence of your Savior. And so we rejoice in that day and we hope for that day. And it's important to remind us that Jesus doesn't protect us from suffering. He sustains us through it. He doesn't protect us from the suffering. It's going to happen. All right, I can't reiterate that enough. There are no promises in the Christian faith that you get protected from suffering. There is a promise that you will experience it. And in the midst of experiencing it, Jesus will sustain us through it. It says in verse 5, That is us. That God himself is sustaining our faith. He's giving us the power for faith. And so he sustains us in the midst of our suffering. As we look at the gospel, we rejoice in the glorious future that awaits us. We know the people that we love that might already be there are experiencing joy and they are waiting for us too. So in the midst of suffering, we don't look to try to make sense of it here. We look to the fact that later it will not be true. That's what we rejoice in. And that's what Jesus does for us in our suffering. He wins us a future without that hurt and without those wounds. But what do we do in the midst of suffering? What do we do right now? How do we respond to it when life is really, really hard? Well, this is what Peter says we should do. Verse 7. So what do we do in the midst of suffering? What do we do when life is hard right now? How do we counsel people when they walk through suffering? We do it with this knowledge, that your faith, which guards your inheritance, becomes strengthened and results in the salvation of your soul. Your faith, which in this passage says guards your inheritance, the inheritance in verses three through five, that is imperishable, that is unfading, that is everlasting, that Jesus has prepared for you, your inheritance in glory one day. This teaches that somehow it is guarded by your very faith. That the fact that you have faith in that future protects that future. And I know that this calls into question, wait, wait, wait, so like I can lose my salvation if I don't have enough faith or I'm not secured by something besides my faith. No, no, no. God secures you. When you are saved, when you cry out to Jesus as your Savior and God as your Father, God saves you and secures you. But it is your faith that led you to that moment. Your faith is the one thing you're asked to maintain. Your belief in God is the one thing that he presses on you for your salvation. What do we have to do to be saved? We have to believe. What do we have to do to be invited into the kingdom of heaven? We have to believe that Jesus is who he says he is and that he did what he said he did. We have to have faith. But here's why God secures us. Because according to this passage, who powers our faith? God. So what do we do in the midst of suffering? We cling. We choose faith. In the midst of inevitable suffering, cling tightly to your faith and Jesus will sustain you. In a few minutes, Aaron and the band are gonna come up and they're gonna close this out with Don't Stop Believing. I'm just kidding. That would be awesome. I really wish we should have talked about that on Tuesday. But in the midst of our suffering, that's what you do. That's what you do. You don't stop believing in Jesus. You don't allow it to erode your faith. You don't allow it to steal it from you. You don't try to make sense and then argue Jesus away. You just sit in it and you know he's won me a future where one day this won't hurt like it does right now. And I'm going to cling to that future and I'm going to rejoice in that future. And in the meantime, when it's murkiest, when it's hardest, when life is darkest, I'm going to cling to faith. I'm going to cling to the faith that God empowers in me and choose to believe that Jesus is good and choose to believe in the promises of God and choose to believe that he makes graves, he makes gardens out of graves. We choose to cling to the faith when we don't know what else to do. Suffering will happen. It will. It's a promise. Because God knew that would happen, he bought our souls through his death. And he gives us an inheritance that's waiting for us. And so in the midst of that suffering, we don't say to ourselves, this must have happened for a reason. We don't say to ourselves, well, God has a plan. This has to be part of it. No. No, no. We say to ourselves, I'm going to choose to believe in the goodness of God. I'm going to choose to believe in the promises of God. I'm going to choose to believe that one day, if this could all make sense to me, it would, and I would understand it, and it would be fine, and it would be good, and it would be well with my soul, but until that day comes, I am clinging to Jesus. That's what we do in the midst of suffering. And that's how we should encourage others as we walk alongside them and their suffering. Let's pray and the band's going to come up. Father, God, first and foremost, if there is anyone in this room or anyone listening to my voice this morning or later this week who is hurting, who has suffering going on in their life that they cannot explain, that they cannot make sense of, that every explanation of it just somehow falls short. If there are people here or listening who are hurting, Father, would they cling to you? Would they wake up every day and choose faith and choose a belief in your goodness and choose a belief in your goodness. And choose a belief in your son. And in that choice, God, as your word promises, so galvanize our faith that it would be tested and true that as we walk through life many years from now, our faith is strong and our faith sustains and our faith guards. But in the midst of it, Lord, whether it's today or in the future, as we inevitably experience trials again, God, I pray that we would cling to you. It's in your son's name I pray these things. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, my name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. I've got a couple of things for you before I just dive into the sermon. The first thing is that Kyle, who did our announcements, is engaged, man. Yeah. That's right. And she's pretty okay. He's getting older. This is right. No, in all honesty, I can't say much, Kyle. I can't say much. I'm so excited for you. I was sitting over here trying to think about what to say. And I just started like tearing up as I thought about all the things because you guys are perfect. So I'm excited and the church is too. The other thing, let's move away from that quickly so that I can actually preach a sermon. The other thing that I want you to know, and I wanted to say it during this part of the service, not during the announcements, because I actually want you to know about it if you're catching up throughout the week or if you're listening on a walk or whatever it is. I want the whole church to know about this and be prayerful in this. At the end of this year, 2020, what is it, two? Goodness. At the end of 2022, we're going to have three spots available on the elder board. So we're going to spend the rest of this year nominating and naming up to three new elders. And I feel like this is a really big deal because we only have eight elders, including me, max. And so we have an opportunity, or in addition to me, I'm the ninth, Max. And so to put three people on the elder board is a big deal. It impacts the culture of the church. It impacts the culture of the board. And I happen to feel that the people who go on the board are of the utmost importance because I'm trying to constantly remind the elders, this is not Nate's church. It's Nate and Jen's church as much as it's your church, as much as we are partners here and we care about the things that happen here. But this is not my church to lead. This is the elders' church to lead on behalf of the partners of grace. I have been asked to steward grace, but under the direction and leadership of the elders. And the elders, again, represent the wishes of the partners. And I would argue that there is no single portion of grace that has a greater impact on the health, integrity, and character and fitness of the church than to have a board that is healthy and fit and integral. So it's important who goes on that board. So if you are a partner, you're invited over the next month to submit people to be considered to be an elder. The process is we take a month to submit names. We take two months for our nominating committee to kind of talk to those folks and vet those names. And then we take a month for the elders to discuss the people that get there. And then we present them to the partners for a partnership vote. I'll say up front, I don't nominate anybody. I try the best I can to stay out of the process and just receive the people that are nominated by all of you guys. And then we discuss all of that. But I don't want to get too deep into the weeds. I just want you as partners to prayerfully consider who you might nominate to be an elder if you feel led to do that. If you look at the Grace Vine this week, there's a link there. If you scroll down, this announcement is in there. There's a link where you can go to the elder page and there's an online form. We have some forms that you can fill out in person if that's your preference. We just don't have them yet this morning because I oopsied this week and forgot to do that. But we'll have them next week on the information table. So please prayerfully consider that. Now for this week as I get into the sermon finally, sorry for such a long preamble, we're talking about repentance. We've been moving through Lent and kind of pulling different Lenten themes out each week through the devotionals and through the sermons. As I've said each week, I hope that you're being ministered to by those devotionals. I've really, really enjoyed reading through those every week and love all the voices speaking into grace. This week we focus on repentance. And as I got into studying repentance, I was taken aback, honestly, by how often repentance shows up in Scripture. It's all over the Old Testament, this call to repent, to throw off our sinful ways and to move towards God. It's all over the New Testament. All through the Gospels, Jesus calls us to repentance again and again. All of Paul's letters call us to repentance. A lot of the general letters call us to repentance. The end of the Bible, Revelation calls us to repentance. We're called to repentance throughout the whole of Scripture. And as I read that, and as I saw that, and as I studied it, I honestly, I'm not saying this to make a joke. I'm not saying this to make light of anything. I genuinely felt a prick of conviction that I have been your pastor now for five years. Next Sunday is five years, and I have not preached on this. It is to your detriment that I have not. No, it doesn't mean that we haven't talked about the idea of repentance in the service, but I have not slowed down and focused our collective gaze onto this issue that comes up over and over and over again in scripture, and I do sincerely apologize to you for that. I believe I have shortchanged you in not discussing this. And if it is not a part of our regular Christian life, then we have shortchanged ourselves in how we are applying the Scripture. So this morning, I want us to sink in and talk about this principle, this act of repentance. To do that, it's important that we're all on the same page and that we understand what it is. Because repentance can be one of these churchy words like sanctification that we say sometimes and we hear church people say, but if we asked you to say what it was, you would feel very uncomfortable about that. Now, half of you in the room probably know a good definition that I would agree with, which by the way, if I would agree with it, that makes it good. Sorry that that snuck in there. That sounds arrogant. But you would probably have a good definition. But half of us maybe not. So for the sake of the sermon and for the sake of the conversation this morning, we're going to define repentance this way. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. The word literally means to turn 180 degrees. So the idea of repenting is I'm moving this way. I'm committing this sin. I'm suffering from this addiction. I have this habit. I say these words. I hate this person. I'm moving towards sin and I realize it's sin and I stop. But I don't just stop moving towards that sin. I turn and I move back towards Jesus. So there's an action in repentance. Repentance is not a mindset. It's not a place of sorrow that we reach, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. It requires action of us to actually move away from what we are doing and back towards the Father because, I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but it is impossible to be actively sinning and not also actively drifting away from God. If there are things in our life that ought not be there, if there are things in our life that God would tell us, hey, I don't want that to be a part of your life, then that's sin. And to keep it in our life is to actively and intentionally choose to move away from God. And so when we repent, we acknowledge that that is sin, and we stop it, and we move back towards God. So that's the definition of repentance. As I studied this, I also thought it would be worth kind of detailing, and this is my thought, okay? This is me. You guys are adults. If you're Christians, you have the Holy Spirit. You read the scripture. You decide what it means to you. But for me, I actually see in scripture two different kinds of repentance. I see in scripture kind of a call for what I'm thinking of as initial repentance and then a call for ongoing repentance. So in scripture, I see these calls to initial repentance and ongoing repentance. And I'm going to tell you what I mean. We see a picture of initial repentance in Acts chapter two. In Acts chapter two, Jesus has died. He's come back to life. He's appeared to the disciples. He's ascended up into heaven. He's told them to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, the Holy spirit. And they don't really know what that means. And Jesus told them, just sit in this room and wait until the Holy Spirit comes, and then you'll know what to do. And they're like, all right. So they just sit around in this room and they wait. And they wait, and they wait. And then one day, at what we call Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues. And they go out on the porch and they begin to preach the gospel. And everybody who's there hears the gospel in their own language, in their own tongue. And it's important that we note that the people who are there are presumably the same people who days earlier insisted that Pilate crucify Jesus and kill him on the cross. It's the same crowd, right? And so what is Peter preaching to them? He's preaching to them this message of, hey, you know that guy that you killed? That was Jesus. That was the son of God. That was the Messiah who came to take away the sins of the world. That was the one that Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel had been prophesying about for all those years. All those scriptures that you learned growing up, he was the fulfillment of those things and you killed him. So, whoops. And then their response is, oh no, you're right. What do we do? How do we fix this? How can we be in with God? What we would think of, probably, as being saved. How can my relationship be repaired with God? And Peter answers them this way in chapter 2, verse 38. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is an invitation to what I'm thinking of as initial repentance. And before I go on to explain that as an aside, I'm so glad that this morning the Lord laid on my heart a passage that speaks about baptism because we have Easter coming up. And I think at Easter we're going to have the opportunity to baptize at least two folks. And the whole service really is going to be wrapped around those things because baptism is a picture of Easter. You understand? It depicts the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus. It's a reminder of that. It is the oldest of church traditions, and the early church would only baptize on Easter. So if you are one that the Lord has been pricking your heart towards baptism lately, would you please reach out to me? And let's make this Easter one of the most special ones that you've ever had in your life by moving you through the rite of baptism. But Peter calls them to repent and be baptized. And I think an interesting question is, repent of what? Perfectly repent of all your sins? If you need to be right before Jesus, then you need to perfectly repent of all your sins and be baptized and move forward? Well, certainly that can't be the case because no one can repent of their sins perfectly. It occurred to me this, this is true, not even Jesus can perfectly repent of sins because you have to sin first to perfectly repent. Jesus does not know repentance. So literally no one has ever repented perfectly of their sins. So this can't be the instruction of Peter. I think, and again, this is me thinking, that this initial repentance, that what Peter is calling them to repent of is repent of who you thought that Jesus was that you crucified. That guy that you killed, repent of who you thought he was and believe that he was who he said he was. Repent of thinking that he was a teacher or a prophet or an insurrectionist or just some guy or just a carpenter. Repent of those things and believe that he was who he says he was, who is the divine son of God incarnate who came to live a perfect life to die on the cross for you and for me to gain our citizenship in heaven, to secure us a seat at the table for the marriage supper of the lamb for all of eternity. And so I would invite you this morning, if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian. You have an invitation to the exact same initial repentance that the people in Acts got called to. And I would invite you this morning, if the Spirit so moves in you, that you would repent of whoever you thought Jesus was when you came in here. A historical figure, a humble teacher, a prophet on par with Muhammad or Confucius or Buddha. Repent of who you thought he was and accept that he is who he says he is, the divine Son of God who died on the cross for you and for me to secure your seat in all of eternity and to rectify your relationship with your Creator God. That's who Jesus is. And if you didn't believe that walking in here, you're invited into the initial repentance of walking away from who you thought Jesus was and walking towards who we now believe him to be. That's the initial repentance. But I think after that repentance, that's the moment when our salvation begins. The Bible teaches salvation as a process. So when you're saved, are you saved? Are you secured? Are you going to heaven? Yes, but your process is also ongoing. It reaches its completion in our glorification as we enter into heaven. So yes, that begins the process. But then as we enter into this process of salvation and sanctification that is secured for us, that is guaranteed for us, that we will experience in glory, God continues to call us to ongoing repentance as a portion of our Christian life. And he calls us to repentance in verses like this. I'm gonna read it again. Ed did a great job of reading it as we started, but in Romans chapter 2, do you suppose, oh man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness them that God has enough grace to cover over all of your sins. And no, that doesn't mean that you should just go on sinning so that God's grace may abound. That means that you need to realize his grace as kindness and understand that his kindness and his goodness and his grace and his overwhelming patience with you is designed by God and bestowed upon you by God to lead you into a position and a posture of repentance over and over and over again. God's kindness leads us into repentance. We need to be people of ongoing repentance because we are people of ongoing sin. Because we are people that no matter how far we go, there will always be things in our life and in our heart that don't belong there. John Owen, one of my favorite authors, writes about sin that the only way to win the battle against sin is to die fighting it. Otherwise, we just give up. So we are meant to be people who are a people of repentance in an ongoing way. And I think one of the reasons that we don't talk about this as much, and one of the reasons that we get confused about repentance is because we kind of equivocate it with some other Bible terms. We equivocate it with conviction and with confession, I think. That we kind of lump all those together and we make them all mean the same thing. I'm convicted about this sin. I've confessed this sin to God. I'm repenting of this sin. And I think sometimes we equivocate those things and make them mean the same thing, but they are all a part of the same ongoing process of repentance, but they are very different things. So conviction is feeling badly about your sin. Confession is agreeing with God that what it is is sin, and repentance is to actually do something about that sin. Conviction is that prick from the Holy Spirit that we get. Hey, that doesn't belong in your life. Hey, God doesn't want you doing that. Hey, It's really unbecoming to talk to people in that way. Maybe you should think about doing something about this anger issue. Maybe the way you treat your wife, maybe the way you take your husband for granted, maybe that's not holy. Maybe this pattern or practice or habit in your life is not something that pleases God. That's the prick of the Holy Spirit. That's the beginning of conviction. That's where repentance starts. But then from conviction, we're called to confession, where we confess our sin before God, which basically means to agree with God that it is sin, to agree with God that the thing that we're doing that we now feel guilty about is actually sin and is something that doesn't belong in our life. That's confession. And the good news is that 1 John 1, 9 teaches us that if we confess our sins, that God is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So again, I'm not talking about repentance as we earn our salvation. Our salvation is secured. The process begins at that confession, and then we begin to move towards glory as God works to sanctify us, and we work in ongoing repentance. But the idea of repenting requires us to actually do something about it. To illustrate this, I'm going to share this thing about me, and I don't want to share it, all right? This is the very first example that I thought of when I thought of this sermon, and I needed a good example to illustrate this point. And I went to Jen, and I was like, here's what I got so far. I don't want to share it, but I can't think of anything better. And she's like, yeah, think of something better. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I snore like bad. I snore a lot. And I do want to tell you this because A, it's embarrassing, and B, some of you love me and you want me to not experience any displeasure in my life. And so you have advice for me. You have a device or you have an uncle or you have a husband and this worked for them and you're going to want to tell me about it. Okay, but I just, I'm not in a place in my life where I'm ready to receive that. So if you could just respect my privacy during this time, that would be great. But I snore. And when I snore, it makes it hard for Jen to sleep. And when it's hard for her to sleep, it's hard for me to sleep. And I feel bad about it. When we go on family trips, like my sleeping accommodations are sometimes annoying because I snore. And it's a real issue. And every now and again, we'll come to this place where she's like, you should really, like our life and marriage would be better if you would take care of this. And I say, you're right. I agree with you. I've been pricked by you, the Holy Spirit, of my conviction. I confess, I agree with you that it is wrong. It does not need to be a part of my life. And I am sorry that it has gone this far. And then what do I do? Nothing. I go to sleep and I snore. Do I get the devices? Do I like eat well and run and try to get in better shape so I don't snore as much? No, I don't do anything. I agree, I'm pierced with conviction. I confess and agree this is wrong, but I don't do anything. I don't actually take any steps. And listen, if your process ends with confession, then you're just sorry. If your process of conviction ends with confession, then you're just sorry. Do I mean that in the double entendre way of you're sorry that you did this and you're sorry as a human? Yeah, yes I do. I do mean that, let's be very clear. Because you're stopping short of repentance. You're stopping short of action. Sorries don't mean anything. Sorries mean I'm ready to start the path of repentance. Falling on our face before God, you're right, I'm convicted. This doesn't need to be in my life. Give me the courage to get rid of it. That's great. But that's the starting line, man. What are you going to do after that? What are you going to actually do about it? What actual steps are you going to take to make sure that this sin cannot exist and cannot grow in your life? And the other thing is, if we stop at sorry, eventually our hearts get seared. You can't sit in sorry year after year after year and still mean it. Once you sit in sorry long enough, and you who have had crippling and debilitating and ongoing sin throughout your life, you know that I'm telling you the truth. Once you say you're sorry enough times, you stop meaning it and you can't bring yourself to say it because you know that it's as empty as your intentions. And that thing that used to prick you is scarred over now. And that's seared. And we don't experience the conviction that the Holy Spirit has for us. Because we've learned how to mute his voice out of our life by stopping at sorry. When we stop at sorry, we just see our own consciences, and we short-circuit the repentance process. So we have to actually do something. And I work very hard to preach here that it is not human effort that God is looking for. It is the power of the Holy Spirit in us. It is not human effort. It is focusing our eyes on Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. I preached a sermon in Colossians in February talking about if we want to put on the new self, what do we do? How do we overcome the old self? Will we focus on Christ? And all that is true, but when it comes to repentance, the rubber meets the road and you got to do stuff, man. So think of it this way. The Holy Spirit empowers, but we act. The Holy Spirit empowers us for repentance. Before you knew Jesus, repenting was impossible. The only thing you could possibly repent of was who you thought Jesus was and then move in faith and the Holy Spirit breathed life into you and now it's possible to repent of all the other things in your life. That's what Romans is talking about when it says that we are no longer a slave to sin. Now we have the option to repent. So the Holy Spirit empowers us to repent, but it is us that must take the action. It is us that must produce the activity of repentance. If that's true, then what does it mean to repent? What does it mean to actually repent of a sin? And this is the part, honestly, that I'm most excited to talk to you about. So if you've tuned me out because my word salads have just gotten confusing up until this point, then pay attention now because this is important. How do we actually repent? By taking steps to make it as darn near impossible as we possibly can to not allow that sin to on-go in our life. How do we repent? By taking actual action steps to remove temptation and distraction from our life that will cause us to commit that sin again. Not just white-knuckle discipline of, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, but to figure out why you do that, to figure out when you do that, to figure out what triggers you to do that, and to remove those things strategically from your life. If your issue is looking at things on your phone that you shouldn't look at, saying another prayer and saying another I'm sorry and doubling down on how much you mean it isn't going to do anything, and you and I both know it. So invite some accountability into your life. Have a scary conversation with someone who will meet you with grace, I promise. Take action steps to reduce your screen time on that phone. Let someone else put a passcode on your phone so you can't get to the apps that tempt you. Do whatever it is you have to do, but take the steps so that that can't tempt you anymore. If you struggle with anger or anxiety to a point where it cripples you and it begins to be harmful to the people around you, if you struggle with those things, go to counseling. Don't just pray, God, please make me a happier person. Make me a more patient person. Please don't let me be angry. God's gonna answer your prayer by going, great, here's a wonderful counselor to help you figure out why you're angry all the time. Go to counseling. If your marriage is rocky, yeah, start praying with your husband or your wife. But also pray that God would find you a good marriage counselor so that you can work those things out. If we want to move away from a bad marriage, we have to move towards a good one. If we want to move away from anger, we have to move towards peace. Take the steps that are necessary to get that sin out of your life once and for all. If it's an addiction that hounds you, shed some light on the dark corners of your life. Tell people about your addiction. Ask them for their help. Get the things out of the house that you're addicted to and refuse to bring them back into the house until you know you can handle them responsibly. Take the steps that you need to take to move away from the sin that is in your life that is entangling you and causing you not to live the life that God wants for you, not to be the person that God created you to be and is experiencing this stunted Christian life here that God does not want for you because we keep the sin in our life. Get rid of it, man. Take the steps. Do what it takes. Don't just be sorry. I don't care if you're sorry. And sometimes, eventually, according to Isaiah chapter 1, God doesn't care if you're sorry either. Do something. Let's take some steps and move away from the sin that hounds us. When we do this, when we repent, if it's true that sin pushes us further away from God, then when we repent, we are choosing a pursuit of his presence. We are choosing to be obedient to what Peter writes as he reiterates Leviticus, be holy as God is holy. We are choosing to pursue holiness and we are pursuing the very presence of God. To repent is to move away from sin and to pursue the presence of God. And my Bible in Psalm 16 tells me that in God's presence, there are pleasures forevermore. the full so that when I pursue the things of Jesus and when I pursue holiness and when I move away from the things that have been dragging me down for years, that I'm actually going to begin to experience the life that God always wanted for me. The rewards of repentance are intuitive. What would it be like to finally walk without guilt for that thing? What would it be like to finally be the person that everybody else around you thinks you are but that you know you're not? What would it be like to finally live a life free of this sin? That's the reward of repentance. The reward of repentance is the presence of God. And here's the thing that dawned on me this week. Repentance affords us the opportunity to begin to experience the fruits of our salvation here and now. Here's what I mean. Salvation is a process. Salvation is not completed until we are glorified in heaven forever. You are secured. I'm not preaching against that, but the salvation process goes on throughout the rest of your life. And in heaven, one day you will be glorified in your new body and you will experience the presence of God. And if we repent, and if that repentance takes us closer to the presence of God, then you have a very real opportunity to begin to bring heaven down into this place to experience flashes and moments of what heaven will be like here in this place when we walk in the goodness and the gifts that God gives us. When I sit with my family and we're all smiling and we're all happy and Jen and I can't believe the blessings that we are experiencing on this sunny day on the floor of our living room, I've got to believe that that's just a taste of what heaven is like. And when we repent and we move into God's presence and into the good things that he gives us in our life and away from the things that would seek to thwart these good things in our life, I have to believe that we are experiencing the presence of God and the pleasure of God and just a small fraction of the eternity that awaits us when our salvation is complete. So when we repent, it affords us the opportunity to begin to experience some of the fruits of our final salvation here and now. I want you to see desperately because it can be a scary thing to repent. If I take the steps I need to take to be serious about this thing in my life, I'm going to be ashamed. Some people are going to think differently than me. I'm going to give up some freedom that I don't want to give up. I'm going to have some accountability that I don't really want to have. And so there's some things about repentance initially that could bum us out. But I've experienced this in my own life and I know that it's true. Greater joy awaits us on the other side of genuine repentance. I don't know what else to tell you, man. On the other side of genuine repentance is a joy that's so much greater than whatever it is that's dragging you down. So I pray that grace will be full of people of repentance. Will be full of people that the Holy Spirit convicts. That we move to a place where we say, yes, this stuff does not belong in my life. Will be full of people who confess and say, yes, God, you're right, I'm sorry. But full of people who don't stop at sorry, but allow the Holy Spirit to empower you to actually move away from things. My prayer as I got up to preach was that God would soften even the hardest of hearts, and that those of us who have soft hearts, that God would cradle those two and usher them into a gentle repentance. Because there is so much greater joy found walking away from sin and towards our God. Maybe that's why we're taught in Romans that it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. Because he knows what waits for us there. Let's pray. Father, Father, I pray that we would be people of repentance. Give us eyes to see the things in our life that don't belong there. Give us ears to hear your spirit as he convicts us. Give us tenderness in our heart as we confess. And God, empower us through your spirit to move towards you, to leave behind the things that drag us down and to move towards you who gives us life. God, give us the courage, the conviction, the desire to repent, to name the things or the thing that doesn't need to be in our life right now and offer it up to you. And ask you for the power to move away from it and give us the courage to take the steps that you lay out before us. That we would not be people who simply stop at sorry. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.

It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This feels like a danged reunion after not seeing you guys for three full weeks. Three weeks ago, I showed up and I said, hey church, let's kind of get our button gear about church a little bit. And then God gave us two weeks off just to see if we would really mean it. So here you are. These are the ones. This is great. I have been so thrilled to get to preach to you guys again this week. I'll mention it later, but I got sick in the middle of the week and thought I had COVID. I do not. Three COVID tests later, I'm certain of it. But I had to call Kyle on Thursday and be like, I don't think God wants me to preach in 2022 like at all, because you might have to go this week. But I got lucky. It was just strep. So here I am. Before I dive into it, it's just strep. You take antibiotics, you're good the next day, nobody cares. And what do you want it about a sore throat for? So it's just strep. It's great. Before I dive into that, I wanted to remind you guys after the service today is Discover Grace. It's a class with me, which, who could turn that down, for about an extra hour where I just tell you more about who Grace is, who we are, what makes us tick, why we do the things that we do. If you want to join the church, become a partner, we have partners here, not members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. And we're looking for folks to contribute to what God is doing here as we band together and build God's kingdom through Grace Raleigh. So if you'd like to participate in that, just stay in this room. It'll be immediately following the service, which means if you're here and you're not going to be a part of Discover Grace, get the heck out of here, man. We've got things to do. No, congregate in the lobby or outside if you can stand it, but we're going to try to get started in here so that those folks who participate with kids can get their kids and get them home for lunch. The other thing is that I've been touting now for three weeks. I don't even know if it's worth the wait. It's a special announcement that I have for you guys. Just something I wanted to share with the church. Two years ago, February of 2020, when we were naive babies and didn't know what pandemics were, we did a campaign series called Grace is Going Home. And I kind of put in front of you as the church that at that time for 20 years, now for 22 years, Grace has never had its own permanent home. We were founded in 2000 and have always rented our space and kind of moved from space to space. And we've kind of been a church of wanderers and wonderers, wondering when we would find our home. And we believed in 2020, at the beginning of it, that God was moving us to find and step out in faith and pledge towards a permanent home. And you guys as a church pledged $1.5 million, which I was blown away by. And at no point did I expect that to actually come in, but it was a very nice gesture that we made there at the beginning of the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit and remember the bottom fell out and everything's the worst and nobody knows if we're going to have any money or we're just going to be trading Bitcoin for the rest of our lives. And it was a little perilous there. And so we just made a decision as a notary board, we're not going to mention it. We're not going to ask people for it. We're not going to send out letters and say, hey, here's what you owe. Here's what you pledged. If you could kind of honor that, like we didn't do any of that stuff. We just kind of mentioned it a little bit. And then at the end of years, we would say, hey, if you want to give more, because sometimes people do that at the end of years, you can give towards the campaign. And so the announcement is that as of the end of 2021, the end of December 2021, we have $1.5 million available to us right now to go get whatever land or building we need to get. I never, never thought that was possible. I can remember being in elder meetings and we said, how much should the campaign be? And I said, I think our goal should be 1.25. That felt high. I was expecting about a million to come in because that's what experts say will happen. But I'm the one that has to drive the train on this thing or so I thought like a dummy.'s the Holy Spirit doing all the work, and he didn't really have to do anything except get out of the way. And the elders were like, let's do 1.5. And I'm like, you're stupid. You're dumb. It's easy for you to say that because you don't have to stand up here and ask people for it. Why don't we just do 2 million? Let's see what happens. We should have. We should have done that. But we did 1.5. I never thought it would come in. Then we hit the pandemic. Never thought it would come in. Our campaign is not even supposed to be done until the end of February. We have two more months. Well, one more month on this now. But I told the elders going into the end of 2021, listen, whatever we get at the end of 2021, let's just take that from God. That's what we need. He's going to provide for us what we need to build where and when he wants us to build. And so after 2021, we're done talking about it. We're done asking for it. There's still some pledges out there that are lingering that I'm sure will come in. I have heard, and I know that there are some of you who will give, but you're waiting until we identify the land or the property. That's okay. I understand that. So I expect more to come in to that end once we find where we're going to go. But guys, we're done. We did it. Campaign's over. We got what we need. Now we just wait for God's direction on land and where to go. And that could be a minute, just being honest with you. That probably won't be this year. Okay. We've had a team of good, sharp people, the best people in the church at this particular thing, looking for commercial real estate for us. They have not stopped looking for the duration of the pandemic and all the stuff, all the office buildings and churches and stuff that we thought was going to come available because of the pandemic, that ain't happening. Ain't nothing out there. So we're looking and we'll see, but we're happy to wait until God makes it clear that we're supposed to move. But the thing I'm most proud of about this is this. We did this the right way. We raised this money as a church with, listen to me, no discernible strategy at all. We didn't have a dumb thermometer in the lobby. We didn't send out trinkets in the mail. We didn't keep you guys updated on, hey, we're at third base now. Let's make that final stretch. No, we didn't do any of that dumb crap. We just prayed. And we just believed that God, if this matters to you, you'll make it happen. And guess what? It mattered to him. This place matters to him. I like to say that God likes grace. I don't know why he does. He just does. He likes this place. And he's going to take care of us. And I'm very proud of the course that we charted through it as a church and the way that you guys responded to it. And I will say this too, the course that we charted is not at all a testament to my leadership. It's a testament to the leadership of your elders. Because when we started this journey, I was all about doing it the way the consultants say you need to do it. I was 100% behind sectioning off the givers in the church, me going and meeting with the people who had the highest capacity to give, doing a silent campaign before the campaign, and doing it the professional way that you're supposed to do it. I was all about that. And I took that to the elders, and the elders gave me really strong pushback. That's not right. That's not a good fit for grace. That wouldn't go over well here. I wouldn't do that. And I like, listen, I'll just tell you guys in the elder meeting, sometimes we get a little pointed. We will, um, we will say direct things to one another. And there was some direct things said in those meetings. And I pushed pretty hard. I believe I may have told one of the elders to go frolic in the forest with the animals if that's how they thought we were going to do it. It's possible that I said that. But through the elders' pushback, the Holy Spirit worked in my heart too, and I became convicted that the way we needed to do it is to just let him do his work. And so I am so grateful to our elders for charting the course for grace. That was the right course and the God honoring course. I am proud of our partners for honoring God with your pledges. And I am just overwhelmed with God's goodness to us and how he brought us to accomplish that goal with no strategy in a pandemic when at times there was zero people or 40 people a week even using the building that we're pledging to build. It's pretty cool. So let's pray and thank God for that and then we'll dive into this series. Father, you are so good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for caring about us. Thank you for pursuing us. Thank you for reminding us, God, in myriad ways that you love us, that you care about this place, that what happens at Grace matters to you. God, I just pray that when the right spot becomes available, that you, through your spirit, make it abundantly clear to every person involved that that's exactly where you want us to be. And Lord, I just pray that we would be patient for you to move there just like you moved in this campaign. We trust you with all of our hopes and our dreams and our future, and we pray that what we hope and want for grace is exactly what you hope and want for grace. May your will be done here. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. Our new series is called Colossians. It's creatively titled after the book that we're going to study. If you have a Bible, you can go ahead and open there. It's towards the middle of the New Testament. It's just a short four chapter book. So maybe a little tricky to find, but hopefully you'll find it and read along with it on the reading plan and those things. I'm going to confess something to you about this series because I think it's actually kind of funny and informative for how I kind of arrived at some conclusions this week. But when you plan a, when you plan series, when we plan series as a staff, we kind of, we'll approach a season, the January to Easter or Mother's Day or whatever. And we'll kind of look at that season and we'll think, okay, what are the series that we want to do in here? And there's always one or two that I know I definitely want to do. And so you take the series that you really want to do and you put those where they need to be. And then you kind of see what your time blocks are and what you have space to do otherwise. And so I knew I wanted to start out the beginning of the year with this series called Consumed. And I knew that I wanted to share with you guys what was on my heart about our need for being consumed by church. And then the others were going to be consumed by community and consumed by making disciples. I didn't get a chance to get to that, but we'll get to those topics in the spring. And then we were able to do a response to what does it look like to be consumed by the church. That was on video that we did, I think, last week. So if you haven't seen that, I'd love for you to watch that one. So we knew we wanted to take January. We wanted to do consumed. And then I'm not going to get into too many details about it, but we've got a Lent series coming up that I think is going to be eight total weeks, maybe seven. I'm not quite sure. I forget. But I'm very excited about that and all the things that we're going to be doing. And we've known since Lent of last year that we wanted to really hammer home Lent and focus on that as a church this year. So you can go, everyone's going to be challenged to fast from something. You can go ahead and begin to prayerfully consider what that might be for you if that's something you want to participate in. So I'm very excited about that Lent series. And so we knew where we needed to place that. And that left us with four weeks here in February to do another series. So I'm looking at the staff. I'm like, okay, we got four weeks. We need a series. What do you want to do? So I've been listening in the fall. I was listening to the book of Colossians with John every morning. I'd get him up. I'd feed him his bottle, and I'd turn Colossians on on my Bible app and then just read Colossians to both of us. It's four chapters. We've got four weeks. How's that sound? Everybody's like, yep, sounds great. Colossians is a good book. Cool, let's go. And then we started jokingly referring to this as the filler series, the series in between the two ones that we actually care about. And we would never tell you that because every series is important, but that's how we were joking about this particular series. Even the graphic, Carly sent it to me and I think the graphic looks really good. Carly didn't love it. She was like, here it is. I know this isn't a big deal series. So what do you think? I'm like, that looks great. That's fine with me. I think it looks really, really good. So even to that, we're focused on Lent, right? So this week I dive into research on our filler series. I'm like, okay, God, what do you got for us in Colossians? And I just couldn't help but chuckle, even just 30 minutes into research and reading and praying, at just how very relevant and necessary this book is for us, at how very rich and good I think it's going to be for us. I'm so excited about what I get to preach to you this morning that I'm a little bit emotional about it. I'm afraid I'm going to cry at times that don't make any sense, so I'm going to try to keep it together. But I'm really excited to share with you this message of Colossians. I think Colossians is tucked away in the New Testament and is typically relegated to Bible studies sometimes. And that we don't really study it very often. And we might not even be super familiar with what it is and what its message is. And the more I have gotten into it, the more I thought, gosh, this is going to be so good for grace right now. So God in his goodness, and maybe in those mornings when I randomly landed on Colossians, the Holy Spirit was preparing my heart for the series that he knew he wanted us to do in February that is anything but a filler series. But one of the things that first tipped me off that this would be a good series for Grace right now is the background on the church in Colossae. Paul didn't start this church. Somebody else was running this church. Paul was actually in prison and he got a letter from the person who was running this church. And the letter basically said, hey, Paul, we're doing great. Our folks love God. Our folks are all in. Our folks are full of faith. They're standing up to persecution. Like we've got a really good spirit here. And I thought that feels like grace to me. We're doing a good job. The reaction to, hey, let's be all in was so good and was so encouraging. And it made me so proud in our campaign. It made me so proud. I feel like we're doing pretty good. I feel like we've got a good spirit here. I feel like we've got a good thing going. But the leader of the church told Paul, but they're facing tremendous pressure that I'd like you to speak to. And the pressure was essentially to fold into old ways of legalism or to transition into new ways of liberalism. So there was forces being exerted on them from outside the walls of the church and sometimes from within the walls of the church to recede back into legalistic Judaism, where your spirituality is measured by your ability to follow the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more spotless your life is, the more spiritual you are, the more God loves you. That's how we gain favor with God and respect for man. There's legalism following the rules well. Or this slide to liberalism. Actually, none of those rules really matter. They're not important. Those were never actually meant to be rules. Do whatever you want, no matter what, and God loves and accepts you all the time. Which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism, since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts you all the time, which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts us all the time, but it's doing away with any sort of standards that we need to hold in our life and just embracing every ideology that comes along. And I thought, well, that's pretty similar to grace too. Frankly, that's really similar to any church, particularly in the Southern United States. Every church in the Southern United States right now faces that tension from within and without. There are some people that want to drag us back to legalism, right? My parents grew up in Southern Baptist churches where all the skirts had to be below the knees, where you weren't allowed to be seen at the theater, where you weren't allowed to go dancing or play cards or gamble or any of that stuff. And I don't go dancing, and I don't play cards because those are boring, but I gamble sometimes because that's fun. We don't do that stuff anymore. But every now and again, there's a part of us that wants to go back to that familiar legalism, that we've got to follow the rules better. We have to decide. We have to draw lines in the sand. This is a sin and you can't do that and you can do this. And we want to put up barriers around our behavior and define people's spirituality by how well they follow the rules. That's a comfortable, natural place for the human instinct to go. And if we don't watch it, some of us will always slide towards legalism. In the same way, we're in a culture now that's trying to tell us that none of those rules really matter. All the trains get off at the same station. Everything's really the same. It's you have your faith and we have our faith and yada, yada, yada. We don't really need all those standards. There's a push on the church to let go of some of our tenants so that we can be more acceptable to our culture. And so like the Colossians, we are a church that's doing good, that loves God, that has a heart of faith, but exists under some pressure to go liberal or to go legal. And so Paul writes to encourage the church in Colossians. And in his encouragement to the church in Colossae, I think we can find a lot of encouragement to this church here in Raleigh. And so the question becomes, well, if Paul is writing them to then encourage them in their faith, how does he do it? What does he write to them? What's the first thing he points to, to encourage them in their faith? And I thought about, well, if it were me, if I wanted to encourage our church or any church, or if I'm Paul and I was trying to encourage that church, how would I do it? How would you do it? Would you like me do it strategically? I would probably want to talk to the leader of that church. What's going on? What kind of things are they facing? The legalistic crowd. What kind of rules are they really caring about? The liberal crowd. Where are they coming from? What's their ideology? What are they trying to do? And I would have wanted to directly address those arguments. Like an attorney, let's just break this thing down. Let's address all their arguments. Let's build out a nice rebuttal here so to give them a good foundation to stand on. Let's do this thing strategically, right? Well, Paul didn't do it strategically. Paul did it very simply. And it's so simple and it's so pure and it's so powerful that it convicts me that maybe as a pastor, I don't do this enough for you guys. But Paul didn't choose to encourage them strategically. He didn't choose to figure out where they were and kind of read the tea leaves and try to hit them right where their heart was. He just did it very simply. Paul encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus, plain and simple. He encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus. And when I say this, what I mean is he begins in chapter one, verses one through 14 are really kind of this preamble. He says, hey, you know, I think my God, every time I remember you, I think of you in my prayers. This is what I pray for you. The prayer in Colossians looks very similar to other prayers and the other letters that he's written to the church that are basically, hey, I just want you to know God more than anything else. I want you to know God, grateful for your faith, grateful for your testimony from your church. And then he gets into how he wants to encourage them. And this is what he writes. And this is verses 15 through 23. I'm going to stop a couple of times and talk about some things, but keep your Bibles open. I think this passage is worth reading. It's such a sweeping and stunning portrayal of Jesus. And you know, it's funny that I've come back to this because a few years ago in the spring, we did a series in Hebrews. And I said that Hebrews had the most incredible description of Christ in the Bible. And I preached it to you guys. And I got an email from Brandon Reese right over here, who was in the men's group. And he said, that's a great picture. There's an equal one to it in my mind in Colossians. And so now here we are two years later, and now we're talking about that depiction of Jesus in Colossians. And I want you to read it with me, and we'll kind of digest it together. This is what Paul writes, beginning in verse 15. I'm going to take a break there. I want you to understand what's going on here. What Paul is saying is Jesus was present at creation. He's agreeing with the gospel of John that says, through him all things were made and without him nothing was made. He was present at creation. All of creation hinges upon him. All of his existence now rests upon him. He is saying that all things belong to him, that he is the reconciliation. And if you read this, what you really find is that this is what Paul is saying, that all, everyone who's ever lived has held Christ, whether you realize it or not, as the epicenter of your history and the epicenter of your hope. Which means for every person who has ever lived, all of your understanding of your past hinges on Christ and all of your hope for your future hinges on Christ. That's what that means. Even if you go all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first thing they learn is that God created them. How did he create them? Well, according to Genesis 1 and John 1 and Colossians 1, he created them through his word, Jesus. He created them through his son. So Adam and Eve, with a brief two-day history they had, looked back to the creation of the earth with the hope that it was Jesus who actually did it. Their history hinged upon Jesus. And then when they sinned and they fell and suddenly they need reconciliation and forgiveness, their future hope for that reconciliation and forgiveness without them knowing it hinged upon Jesus. And then over the course of the Old Testament, God begins to shed some light on exactly what that future hope is going to be on the Messiah. And we see whispers in Jeremiah and Isaiah and in the prophets as they kind of shed more light on who this Messiah is going to be and what this hinge of history is going to come to do. And then Jesus shows up in the gospels and he personifies God's goodness and loveliness. And we'll talk about that in a second. And he lives a perfect life and he dies on the cross for our sins. And so all of history to that point culminates in the death of Christ as he fulfills his divine nature to do that for us. And then we move forward into the church era. And now as people who exist in 2022, we look back on the death and the burial and the resurrection of Christ as a hinge of history. All of our history is contingent upon him. And then we look forward to, as we preached in the fall, revelations, when Jesus comes down in Revelation 18 and 19 to come back and rescue his church and to take us back up to heaven with us. He is the hope of our future. So for every person who has ever lived, Jesus is the epicenter of your history and he is the epicenter of your hope. Jesus is the confluence of heaven coming down onto earth and earth experiencing heaven. He is the nexus of the spiritual world meeting the physical world. Jesus sits in the middle of everything. Everything. There is nothing without him. Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we comprehend it or not, Jesus sits at the hinge of all history, of all creation, of all love, of all majesty. And that's the picture that Paul is painting to the church in Colossae and to us is this grandeur of Jesus. And he doesn't stop there. I love this next sentence. I think it's verse 19. For in him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. We'll pause there again. Much of what I'm about to say comes from this book that Kyle recommended to the staff called Gentle and Lowly. And I can't recommend it to you highly enough if you're a reader. If you're not a reader, become one. It's good. And read Gentle and Lowly. But I love that phrase in verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What does that mean? This is a clumsy explanation, but it's the best that I can do. I can only try to size it up like this. Do a little mental exercise with me. And just picture in your mind, I don't know how you're gonna do it, just figure it out. Picture in your mind how much you think God loves you. Just how much you think he loves you. And try to wrap your head around that for a second. How much grace do you think God has for you? Wrap your head around that for a second. Grace for your humanity and for who you are and loving you despite of your faults. How much mercy does God have for you? Willingness to look over times you've slighted him or things that you've done. How much compassion does God have for you in your sin and in your hardships? Wrap your head around those things. And then let me tell you this. It's more than that. It's more than that. And now wrap your head around that new reality. But it's more than you can fathom. It's more than that. Wrap your head around that new reality, and guess what? It's more than that. Wrap your head around that reality, and it's more than that, and it keeps going. We cannot comprehend the love and the grace and the mercy and the compassion and the goodness that God holds in his heart for us. It is beyond human comprehension, and I am convinced that the whole Christian life is an exercise in expounding our understanding of how much God loves us and has mercy for us us and then realizing that's not nearly enough to capture how he loves us. And that overwhelming love, that overwhelming goodness, that overwhelming grace and compassion that we cannot fathom is personified, listen to me, is personified in the person of Jesus. That's what it means when it says the fullness of God, all of his grace, all of his mercy, all of his compassion, all of his love was pleased to rest on the person of Christ. And if you want to know how much does God love me, look at Christ crucified and answer the question for yourself. If you want to know how much mercy and compassion does God have on me, look at Jesus weeping with Mary and know that that's the compassion that he has for you. If you want to know how much grace and mercy does he have for me, look at Jesus with the adulterous woman as he defends her from the death penalty and know that that's the compassion that Jesus has for you. If you want to know how much Jesus forgives you, look at him telling Peter to forgive 70 times 7, which is as many times as is necessary, and know that that's God's forgiveness for you. If we want to know how God feels about us and how much he loves us, look at the person of Christ on whom his fullness is pleased to dwell and know that that's how much God loves us, that that's the compassion that he has for us. That that's the grace and the mercy that he offers us. That's what it means when it says that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell on him and then he finishes up this description of Christ in this way. In verse 21, He says, Why did God send the culmination of all history, the fullness of his love and compassion? Why did he send that down here? To get you. To come and get you. To reconcile you back to him so that he can experience eternity with you. Listen to me. Why does Paul choose, when he needs to encourage the Colossians to hang in there, when he needs to encourage them to stay pure in their faith, what does he do? He points them to Jesus in the stunning depiction of Christ. And why does he do that? This is why. Because Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. I don't know if you think about God's love for you in this way, but God loves you. God desires you. God chases after you. God sent his son to win you. And then he left the Holy Spirit to nip at your heels whenever you run from him so that you would turn and accept his embrace. He is coming for you. He desires you. He is yearning for you. He does not sit back and wait for you. He pursues you. So he sent Jesus to come and get you. And he left his spirit to keep the chase going until you finally give in and give up and say, God, I'm yours. Because that's what he longs for. I told you this week I had strep. On Tuesday, I began to feel a little sick, and so I realized with all the COVID junk going on, I should probably mask up in the house and try to stay away from the kids. Wednesday felt like garbage. Thursday was the worst. Literally, I never get sick ever. I've never been as sick as I was on Thursday in my adult life. But by Thursday afternoon, I got some antibiotics, so Friday I was right as rain, baby. It was great. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm in the house, and I'm with my kids, but I can't touch them. I'm an affectionate guy. I pick up and scoop up Lily all the time. I pick up and scoop up John all the time. I love holding my babies. And there was one night, I think it was Thursday, Jen was laying with Lily singing her songs and I was standing in Lily's doorway with my mask on just waving at Lily in the bed and she waved back at me and she said, I miss you, Daddy. And I had to go cry in my bedroom. I yearned for them. All I wanted to do is scoop them up. All I wanted to do is pick up John and eat those fat baby cheeks. Is grab Lily when she got home from school and make her tell me about her day. She doesn't do it, so I say, tell me three good things that happened. That's all I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is scoop up my kids, man. And it was like this weird quasi-torture sitting in the house looking at them and not being able to scoop them up. If that's torture for me for three days, knowing good and dang well I'm going to get over this and I'll pick them up again, what must it do to our Father in heaven to watch us and so desperately want to pick us up and to hold us and to cherish us and for us to hold him at arm's length. Because Lily waved back at me and said, I miss you. And I knew that she wanted to hug me as soon as I was able to do it again. How much more would that crush your parent heart if you waved at your kid and they said, I miss you. And they said, if God yearns for me the way that I yearn for my children, if God yearns for you and the people you love the way that you yearn for your children, the way that I yearn for mine, how much must it hurt his fatherly heart in heaven to watch his children run from him, begging them, please just stop running. Please just turn around for a dang second and let me hold on to you. I sent my son to catch you. I left the spirit to keep up the chase. How much must it hurt his father's heart to not be able to hold his babies, to not be able to embrace his children, for us to run from him and to wander off from him. When all he wants is for us to be with him. When all he wants is to hold us. When all he wants is his son or his daughter to talk to him. And tell him about our days. Y'all, God, he yearns for us. It's all over the Bible. Jesus says it like this. He says he leaves the 99 sheep that are safe to go get the one who's lost and wandering. And I think that we make such a mistake about how we view the gospel and the love of God in our life. I think that sometimes we have this attitude that God's like, you know, take it or leave it. I sent my son, he died for you. It's there if you want it. It's yours if you don't want it. You don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. I sent my son. He died for you. It's there. If you want it, it's yours. If you don't want it, you don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. Guys, take it or leave it isn't yearning. Take it or leave it is not what we see in the Bible. Take it or leave it is not what we see pouring out of scriptures and shouting at us through the book of Colossians. What we see in the Bible is a father in heaven who earnestly in his guts yearns for you, who wants you, who loves you. And now for some of us, you've never known that love. You've run from it your whole life. You've never accepted Christianity. There's things about it you can't get your head around. And so you're still running. And I'm begging you that you would let God catch you today. I'm begging you that you would let today be the day that you would embrace your heavenly Father. But there's others of us who have been caught, but after we've been caught, there's been the wandering. And in our wandering, sometimes we feel so badly for what we've done that we think God must be disappointed with us. He can't be yearning for me anymore. And so we keep ourselves at arm's length from God out of a sense of guilt or shame. And to you, I would simply ask, if God came after you when your soul was fundamentally opposed to him, why would he not continue to pursue you when your soul feels actual guilt of your sin? If God chased you down and yearned for you and pursued you before you were his child, then how much more does he still love you now that you're his child? Why would he ever stop loving you? Listen, when God forgave us, when you accepted Christ, he forgave you for all of your sins, past, present, and future. He already knew you were going to go through the season of wandering when he chose to save you. He doesn't love you any less. As a matter of fact, God's, I believe, primary emotion as he looks at you in your sin is not anger, but pity and compassion because of what you're giving up to be away from him when he just wants you close to him. Listen, if you've never known Jesus in your life, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you have doubts and you're not sure about your faith, God yearns for you and will chase you down through those doubts. He's still after you. If you are wandering away, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you're holding on to pet sins that you're not sure you want to give up yet, God is going to chase you through those sins and he will chase you down and the Holy Spirit will nip at your heels until we give in and allow him to embrace us. If you are experiencing incredible victory in your spiritual walk right now, good. God loves you and yearns for you on a deeper level than you can still ever imagine. God loves you and yearns for you deeply. And that's all that the church in Colossae needed to know to be encouraged in their faith. And so my prayer for you this morning is that you will walk out those doors knowing in your guts that God loves you more than you thought he did when you came in here. And as I thought about the best way to finish up the service this week, I was reminded of this song called Reckless Love. Because in that song, there's lines of, there's no walls he won't kick down or lies he won't tear down coming after me. There's all these things that God will do to come after us. But the part about the song I like is that it's called Reckless Love. And when it first came out, there was some kind of dumb arguments about whether or not it was really appropriate to use the word reckless because we didn't want to accuse God of being careless or thoughtless or somehow errant in his love for us. But that word reckless doesn't mean mistaken. The word reckless implies this. When you offer your love to someone, when you expose yourself, you make yourself vulnerable to them and they reject you. That hurts. You take that personally. I don't care who you are. And there's only so many times you can offer your love freely and wholeheartedly to someone and have them reject you before you start to guard yourself against it. And the love you offer isn't as much or it isn't as pure or it isn't as grand. Or even maybe you wall yourself off to it entirely because you just can't stand the pain anymore. We learn self-protection. God's recklessness is that he has no self-protection. God's recklessness is you can reject him as many times as you want to and he will never stop coming after you. It doesn't matter how many times we hurt him, he's gonna continue to come after us to get us, to claim us. And so we should sing and marvel at this reckless love. So I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna sing together, but I would invite you to experience the song however you wanna experience it. If you wanna stand and sing, stand and sing. If you wanna sit and you want the lyrics to wash over you, let them do that. If you wanna kneel at your seat and pray, pray. If you wanna come up here to the front and pray and have me kneel over you and pray with you, I'll do that too. However you wanna experience this song, you experience it that way, but I'm gonna pray, the band's gonna come up, and then we'll finish with that song together. Father, boy, you are good to us. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you pursue us. We thank you that you sent your son as the personification and embodiment of your earnest yearning for us. I simply pray, God, that we would be more certain of your love for us as we leave than we were when we showed up. God, we are your children. We are your sons and your daughters. I pray that we would let you love us like that. May we please quit trying to perform. May we please quit insisting that we get our life in some semblance of order before we come to you. May we please tear down all the roadblocks that exist between you and us and just allow ourselves to feel your overwhelming and reckless love for us. It's in your son's name on whom all of history and hope hinges that we pray. Amen.