Sermons tagged with Obedience

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. There you go. Now they can see me on video. Isn't that so much better? If you are joining us online, thank you for doing that. And I would just say gently for those who are joining us online, if you're doing that consistently, there is nothing quite like worshiping together as a family. So if you can get here and worship with us, do that because it's a sweet, sweet time, and it's my favorite part of the week, every week when I get to worship with you guys. We are in the third part of our series called Traits of Grace, and these are kind of five distinctive characteristics that make grace, grace. I am a firm believer, and will wholeheartedly share it with whomever is curious that grace is not, we're not nailing it as a church. Okay. We haven't like figured out how to do church the right way and all the other churches are doing it wrong. Okay. They're, they're worse than us. You guys are the good Christians who've really figured out how to love Jesus well. And the other churches are apostate and we should pray for them. Like we don't believe that. We believe that there are plenty of churches in the city of Raleigh that are doing wonderful jobs, pushing people towards Jesus and making disciples. I would even say that there's got to be plenty of them who are doing better than us. But you guys are here this morning. So we're going to make the best of it together while you think about a better church to go to next week. But there's plenty of great churches doing plenty of great things, and so I think it's important for churches to figure out what is it that makes us us? What has God wired us to do? A few weeks ago, we talked about being kingdom builders, and I kind of left you guys with the question of what is your good work? Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so we asked, what is your good work? And I think similarly, it's wise for churches to ask, what is our good work? Every church is supposed to make disciples, but how would God have us go about it? How has he uniquely wired and gathered and impassioned us to do it? And as we were having the discussion about what makes grace, grace last fall, we came up as a staff and then as elders with these five traits. So we've talked about the fact that partners at grace are kingdom builders. Then we talked last week about how partners at Grace are conduits of Grace. We stay connected to Jesus and we pour out all the love and all the goodness and all the grace that we receive from Jesus onto others. We are conduits of Grace. And so this week we arrive at the third trait that we feel like we are at Grace. And I realized this morning as I was reviewing and preparing that I didn't put this in your notes anywhere. So I don't know if this is going to be unofficial or something. I hope I haven't done something wrong and now this one doesn't count. But we are people of devotion. That's the third trait of grace. We are people of devotion. And when I say devotion, obviously that can mean multiple things, but it really means what it meant back in 1985. We are people who have devotions. You have heard me say many times, if you've been at grace for any period of time, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, a lot of you can finish this sentence, is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. That is the most important thing, the most important habit that any single one of us can develop at any point in our life. And I believe that to be true, and we hit on that to be true, and we remind you of that all the time, because I also try to remind you that I am not enough. You can't come listen to me talk for 30 minutes a week and know the breadth and the depth of the God that's waiting for you in this text. You can't listen to whatever I choose to pick out and talk about just this little tiny snippet within here and somehow hope to understand the whole book. That's just not how that works. So it takes more than 30 minutes a week. It takes more than just one small group a week, which we'd love to say is an hour a week talking about spiritual things, but really it's about 45 minutes a week talking about whatever the heck and then about 15 minutes of good spiritual conversation. If you're in a small group, you know what I'm talking about. So that's not enough. We've got to spend time in God's Word, and we've got to spend time in God's presence through prayer. So when we thought about what are we at Grace, what do we want partners to be at Grace? We want to be people of devotion. We want to be people who develop that habit. And as we think about it this morning, I don't know about you, but I feel that when God is speaking to us, he often speaks in stereo. When someone will ask me, hey, how do I hear God's voice? How do I know what he's saying to me? How do I discern God's will for my life? I often will say, one of the first things I'll tell him is, God speaks, when he speaks to me, he speaks in stereo. He tells me from this source and this source and this source and this source, and it just kind of continues to come up in my life. And one of the themes that has been coming up for me in my life before the summer, but in particular the summer, you guys gave me the great privilege and rest of not having to preach in the month of July to just kind of settle and work on some other things in the church and allow God to refresh me a little bit. And it was wonderful. And one of the things that I brought out of there and that seems to continue to come up in my sermons that I'm preaching like when I preached on the law a couple weeks ago and I've seen it come through in themes these last couple weeks and then really we're hitting on it again in my Tuesday morning men's Bible study. I have a men's Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6 30. We meet that early to keep out the riffraff. The only thing the only thing prohibiting you from being there is laziness. So come on and join us. We're not any nicer there either. This is as nice as it gets. But I see this theme in my life and I've seen it in what we're learning at Grace and I thought it worth highlighting this morning, which is simply the beautiful simplicity of abiding. We talked about this last week. We're conduits of grace. And we looked at John 15, where Jesus is speaking to the disciples, particularly four and five. And he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we talked about this idea of all I have to do is stay connected to Christ, and he's going to produce the fruit in my life that I need to produce. I don't have to think about that. I just focus on abiding in Christ. And I think that there is this beautiful simplicity to that. Because we can make Christianity really complicated, can't we? It can be really challenging and difficult. It can be intimidating to look at this Bible, to open it up, to come to service on a Sunday and the pastor says, turn to Malachi. You're like, I've never even heard of that name in my life. I don't know where that is, right? Just to learn just the names of the 66 books, to learn how to find them all, that there's 37 or 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, to learn all, what are all the sins? What are all the things I'm supposed to do? What are all the things I'm not supposed to do? Who are all the people? And how old was Paul? Did he live to be 900? Or is that some other guy? Like it can be a lot. And one of the things that I have a heart for is adults, people who have already gone through life and made a bunch of decisions. And in your 30s, 40s, 50s or later, you decide this is when I want to get serious about my faith and you start trying to learn Bible. And you don't have the background that I've been learning about this since I was old enough to talk. But it can feel like a steep bell curve when you're trying to learn faith and taking it seriously. So I love the beautiful simplicity of really what God asks us to do, which is to simply abide in him. Just simply, you just, just, just focus on Jesus. Just pursue Jesus. Just love others like Jesus loves you. Just do all that. The rest of this stuff, if you focus on abiding in Christ, the rest of this stuff, the rest of Christianity, the rest of life will take care of itself. Just focus on abiding in Christ. And this is, this is an attitude that we see throughout scripture. We're going to look at two other places today where it's pared down and it's made just this simple. One of my favorite pictures of this in the Bible is in the book of Hebrews. In the book of Hebrews, there's Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1, obviously follows. I don't know if you know this. You have to go to seminary to know this, but chapter 12 of Hebrews follows chapter 11 of Hebrews. And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we have this really famous passage that's called the Hall of Faith, where the author of Hebrews lists out all of these heroes of the faith and the acts that they performed by faith. And then when we get into 12, and I'll read it in just a minute, but when we get into 12, we see it begin, So it's this idea that we're on the playing field of earth as those in heaven who have come before us are now watching us in real time, which I think is a really cool thought. And here's what the author of Hebrews says. He says, Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And it's language, I think, that we can identify with. It's language that inspires. We're kind of like, okay, I'm on the playing field. I'm supposed to run this race. I'm supposed to live my life. I'm supposed to do the things that God wants me to do. How do I do that? Well, I throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. I need to run in such a way that I can do what God wants me to do, that I can be who God wants me to be, and I need to get rid of all the things that don't help me run my race. And this, again, is an idea that is replete throughout Scripture. It shows up again and again and again. Paul tells us that we are to fight the good fight. He says that he fights the good fight. He tells us that in this race, we are to run as the one who's trying to get the prize, that we are supposed to cling to our faith. We are told to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. Jesus tells us that other people should see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. So all throughout Scripture is this simple admonition that we need to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. We need to run the race. We need to be who God created us to be. We need to determine what are our good works and how do we walk in them. And you can rephrase all of that and we say we need to be good Christians. We need to grow in our faith. We need to move towards Jesus. And we can identify with this. This is, to me, inspiring. It's easy to understand. Yep, I'm running a race and I do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that's so easily entangled. So I got to stop doing those things so I can do the things that God wants me to do. And sometimes, I think more often than not, that's where we stop. I'm going to try really hard at running this race. I'm going to try really hard to be a good Christian. I'm going to try really hard to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, a good employee or employer. I'm going to try really hard to be a good citizen. And I'm going to do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we act like the next verse doesn't exist. How are we supposed to do that? By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Even in Hebrews, where it uses this language about running our race, doing better, being good Christians, being who God's created us to be, it tells us, it gives us the answer right there. How do I do that? How do I run my race well? By focusing my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How do we produce much fruit? By abiding in Christ, by focusing on Jesus. And so I call it the beautiful simplicity of abiding because there's this thing that happens. When I decide that I want to be a better father or a better husband or a better pastor or a better human, there's a lot of growth that needs to happen in all of those areas, except for husband. I'm nailing that one. When I decide I want to be better at those things, I think our tendency is to go, okay, what do I need to do to be a better husband? And we identify things and we run and I'm going to do more of this and less of this. What do I need to do to be a better wife? I'm going to do more of this and less than this. What do I need to do to be a better mom? I'm going to do more of this and less of this. And we try to white knuckle our way to better, right? That's the American way. I want to be better at these things. I'm going to focus on those things. I'm going to come up with a plan, and I'm going to do it. And Christianity says, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. Just focus on Jesus. Just focus on God. Just focus on abiding in Christ, and I'll take care of the rest of it. So here's how this works practically. I do have a lot of room to grow in being a husband. You know the most effective way for me to be a better husband to Jen? It's to pursue Jesus. It's to wake up tomorrow and say, Jesus, I want to honor you today as I seek to be Jen's husband. How do I honor you in that? How would you have me be a good husband today, Jesus? You want to be a better employee? You want to move up the ranks? You want your career to progress? You can spend a lot of time thinking about the best thing to do and the best person to please and the best way, the best jobs to go for or the best tasks to complete or the right people to make friends with or whatever it is you do to progress in your field. Or you can go to work every day, focus on Christ, and you can say, Jesus, how can I honor you today in my work? How can I honor you today in these meetings? How can I honor you today in these tasks? And then you honor Jesus. And you know what happens? Everything else works out. I was talking in my Bible study group about this idea. Just honor Jesus in what we do. Just pursue Jesus in what we do and let him handle the results. And they said, well, what does that mean practically? I said, for my sermons. My job is to be diligent on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday so that when I stand before you on Sunday, before God on Sunday, I know I've given my best effort. I've honored God in my preparation. I've honored Jesus in my prayer life as I approached sharing this with you guys. And I know that I've done the best that I could in the week that I was given with the time that I was allotted. And I'm honoring Jesus as I give this to you. If I can say that, what happens as a result of the sermon is completely out of my hands. I have nothing to do with that. I don't worry about that. I worry about where my heart is as I prepare, and I'll be the first to confess. Listen, I say that, and that sounds lovely, like how Nate, he's worked diligently on sermons, and he's prayed through them, and he's ready to present them. Yeah, most of the time, sometimes, y'all, I'm winging it, and I sit down, and the very first, y'all are singing, and y'all think things are good, and I sit down, and I'm like, God, I'm so sorry. I dishonored these people. That wasn't worth showering for. I can't believe that I did that to them. So sometimes I don't do it. But on the weeks that I do, then I preach the sermon, and I wash my hands of it. Now it's between you and the Spirit. And somebody in my Bible study said, well, wouldn't that be a great way to approach life? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it would. We should do that with everything. We should do that with how we lead people, with how we love people, with how we be good parents. It's the beautiful simplicity of abiding in Christ. We focus on him, and then he takes care of everything else. And I think that this is a radical message in a culture that wants to try so hard at everything, that wants to have a to-do list for everything, for all the things in life. I'm going to find a way to tackle it, and I'm going to white-knuckle my way to better. And really, the beautiful simplicity of abiding means that we try hard at pursuing Jesus. That's it. That's where we try hard. Christians, you want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where you should put your effort? Put it in pursuing Jesus. And waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. Put it into pursuing Christ and everything else will take care of itself. And there's a lot of ways to pursue Jesus, okay? We do it through worship. We do it, I believe, through godly community and spiritual conversations. We have transparency and vulnerability. We ask good questions. We share pieces of ourselves. We pursue Jesus through his service, through doing his work. Jesus says whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. So we pursue Jesus by helping those who can't help themselves. But I think the primary way that we pursue Jesus is through devotions. One of the primary ways we pursue Jesus is by waking up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. I think it's the fundamental way. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about trying to get in shape and fit into your old mediums. I've got one on underneath this that I have to wear a baggy shirt over it because if I don't, I'll just bring shame on my family. I can't wear this polo in front of other people in public. I used to be able to, there was a time, but when you go to get in shape, you can, you can exercise 30 minutes a day, right? And exercising to me is the easy part. That's, that's, that's the fun thing to do. That's fine. That's good. I can put in a podcast or a book or something like that. That's kind of the easy discipline to gain on. You know what the hard part is? Eating like a rabbit, man. That stinks. Eating salads. That's not fun. I don't like eating right. I just don't. I like eating wrong. Very wrong. But unless you do both, you'll never be in good shape. You won't be in good health. And you can exercise all you want, but until your diet changes, your body really doesn't. And you really don't get that healthy. You can exercise all you want and go to church and do all the things and go to Bible study and have the conversations and serve sometimes and give of yourself and tithe. You can do all the exercise you want, but until your diet changes, your spiritual health won't really either. I believe that our pursuit of Jesus begins here. And that when we do that, when we begin it here, then God handles everything else. This is actually affirmed in the book of Psalms. The very first Psalm, the one that Parker read earlier in the service, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And then look what happens. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. David says, blessed is the man who doesn't waste his time with frivolous things, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in God's word. And on that law, he meditates day and night. How can you meditate on it if you don't know it, if you haven't learned it, if you haven't poured yourself into it? He prays over it. He pursues Jesus in it. And because of that, he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And all that he does, he prospers. The man that David is describing in Psalm 1 did not set about to prosper. That's not the point. He set about to know Jesus. He set about to know his God, to know his law, to know his word. And the happy side effect of that was that God blesses him along his way. I want to be careful when I say that. God's blessings look different than what you think blessings might be. So I'm not preaching that if we get up every day and read God's word that we're going to have all the things that we want. That's not how that goes. But what I am saying is if we get up every day and we spend time in God's word and time in prayer, then we will become who God wants us to be. That's the blessing. And I believe that becoming the people that God has created us to be is the place of greatest peace and contentment and happiness that we can find in life. If you've ever had a season where you were moving, you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do, you know there's no greater peace or joy than that. I had lunch with somebody this week, catching up with them after a long time, and he shifted careers and got a new job. And I said, how's it going, man? And he said, God has affirmed over and over and over again that I am doing exactly what he would have me do, and I have never been happier. It's remarkable how that works. When we walk the path that God has laid out for us, lo and behold, that's where joy is found. I think Psalm 16 tells us something about there being a fullness of joy in the presence of God. And I feel like that's a joy and a peace worth having. So I would also mention to you that nothing worth having is gained by default. Nothing in this life that we have that we really value is gained by default. If you have a good marriage, like a good one, you worked hard at that, Joker. You didn't just fall into that. Unless you're like, if you've been married for like two years, you're like, my marriage is pretty good. We haven't had to work that hard. Okay, forget you. All right. You don't count. Talk to the rest of us in 10 years, rookies. If you have a good marriage, you worked hard at that. You've intentionally spent time together when the kids made it difficult. You've intentionally chosen each other when life tried to prevent it. You've had hard conversations. You've said hard things. You've heard hard things. But you're stronger for it and you have a good marriage and you worked at it. If you have kids who love you, if you have adult kids who love you and want to spend time with you, you worked hard at that. That was not easy. That did not happen by default. If you have a career that you like, that you're proud of, you worked hard at that. That didn't happen by default. If you have good, rich, deep friendships, you've prioritized and valued them over the years. You've made them important. You didn't just default into those. Why would we think that we would default into a good, healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus? We have to work at it. We have to make time for it. So do that. Prioritize it. Make it happen. Find a time when you can spend time in God's Word and spend time in prayer. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody. Start in Proverbs. If you don't know the Bible at all and you want to read it and you don't know what to read, start in Proverbs. You don't have to know anything about anything for Proverbs to make sense. Totally out of context, just start reading it. It's great. Read a gospel, read the book of Mark. It goes very fast and it points you with Jesus very well. Or just pick up and read something you've been curious about, but start doing it. Make it a habit. Be consistent in it. Trust me when I say that there's no greater habit that anyone can develop than that, and do it. Whatever you're currently doing first in the morning isn't as good as this. And if what you're doing first in the morning is sleeping an extra 30 minutes, it's definitely not as good as this. Just hit pause on that other stuff and engage with God first and then go about your day. I do it when I get into the office. I get into the office. I tend to be the first one in the office because I'm the hardest worker on staff. And I have a kid that starts school early and I have to drop her off every day. So I get here early. But the office is quiet and that's when I have my time. That's when I'm able to pray and read God's word and get ready to prayerfully approach my day. Pick a time when you can do it too. Make it happen. Prioritize it. Value it. Last week, I said that we needed to abide in Christ and we're going to talk about how to do that. And I said that when you came back this week, I was going to light some of your faces on fire and really convict you. So here's the convicting thing. What I'm about to say, I'm not saying to you if you're new. If this is the first time you've ever heard a sermon that's imploring you to have a devotional life, then I'm not saying this next thing to you. If it's the second time, maybe the first time you weren't paying attention, or I just did a bad job with it, whatever it was, I'm not talking to you either. But if you've heard this sermon before, I've preached it plenty. Maybe not from this angle, maybe not in this way, but I've preached have devotions. I've preached that a bunch. I've joked around. I'm going to do it one day. I'm just going to walk up here on stage and I'm going to go, hey, good morning, Grace. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate, one of the pastors here. You should read the Bible more. Let's pray. Because that's all you need because you know that I'm right. You know that we need to do this. So if that's you and you still don't have habit, as your pastor, as someone who cares about you, let me just ask you, how many more times will you need this sermon? How many more times? How many more times are you going to sit in this room or a room like this and hear this sermon and go, yeah, Monday, I need to. How many more? Can this one be it? Can this one do it for us? Because there's some people in this room who already do this. They've got a rich, vibrant devotional life, and they've been sitting in here, and they've just been cheering me on. Yes, do it. Please. It's the best. And I want all of you to cheer this sermon on every time you hear it from now on. Next time you hear this sermon, listen, I don't want it to convict you one little bit. I want you to sit in those seats feeling great because you know it's true. And now you're the cheering section because I'm never going to stop preaching this sermon. I'm going to preach it once or twice a year for the rest of my days as long as God gives me a stage to preach on to push people back into God's word and to push people back into prayer. But at Grace, as our partners, when I preach this sermon again, I want you to be the biggest cheerleaders. And I never want it to convict you again. Because I want you to hang in there and develop this habit. And I'll tell you this, okay? Just give you a little pastoral advice. Some of you, gosh, I hope, as a result of this, are going to wake up tomorrow, you're going to read your Bible. And it'll be something that you haven't done in a while. And that's great. You'll set your alarm. You'll make your coffee. You get your vibe all right, exactly where you want to be. This is good. This nice fall weather. This is great. I'm going to have the best quiet time. And you're going to open up your Bible to wherever you've decided to open up your Bible. And maybe, maybe God parts the heavens and the angels sing to you and Shekinah glory shines down directly on your head. Maybe. What's probably going to happen is you're going to get a little something out of it that's encouraging, that speaks to something in your life, or maybe nothing at all. You'll pray. If you're not used to praying, you'll pray for about two and a half minutes. You'll be like, I'm all out. Kind of run out of stuff to pray about. That's okay. And maybe it doesn't feel like the heavens parted and Shekinah glory shone down on your noggin. But I tell you what, if you get up tomorrow and you spend time in God's word and you spend time in prayer, I can promise you this, you'll have a different day than you would have had otherwise. You have a different mindset going into that day than you would have had otherwise. And if you do that several days in a row, I don't know when the heavens are gonna open and words are gonna leap off the page, but I can tell you this, if you do it several days in a row, you're gonna have a different week. And if you can manage by God's goodness and grace to hang in there and string together a couple of weeks like that, three, four weeks, you're going to have a different month. And if you start stringing together months, you're going to have a different life. And that's what we want for you at Grace. That's why we want you to be people of devotion. So let's pray that God gives us the strength of conviction to do that so that we know the only thing we need to try hard at is pursuing Jesus, and he'll take care of the rest. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your word, for the way that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us. I pray that you would give us a heart for it, that you would give us a passion for it, that we would love your word, that we would love this text. God, make it exciting to us as we dive into it. Let us start to piece things together and understand where people go and where they fit and how you're revealed in your word. Let it excite us about you. God, create in us such a hunger for your word that we wake up looking forward to it. Create in us such a hunger for your presence that we desire to pray every day. May we be refreshed in your presence. May we be refreshed by your word. And God, may we become increasingly people of devotion. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you. Well, good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I launch into the sermon, just point of clarity, when Mikey was doing the announcements earlier, there was some pictures of Grace Serves, and there was one picture that one of our elders, the esteemed Doug Bergeson, was in. And in that picture, he appeared to be just leaning up against his rake and resting. And I would love to tell you that that was not typical for the morning, but it was. After that, he was sitting, and that was it for the whole morning. So anyways, we're launching into this new series called Traits of Grace. And this is a series that has been a year in the making, and it's one that I've been very excited to share with you. So I thought that it would be helpful for you to understand how we came about this series and how we arrived at a need for the series and a need for the traits of grace and what they even are so that as we go through them each week for the next five weeks, you'll have an appreciation of where this comes from. So a year ago in our staff meetings, we have staff meetings on Tuesday afternoons, and this is when we talk about things like this. A year ago in our staff meetings, I kind of brought to the staff that I wanted to start doing some more liturgical elements in the church service, which if that's a church word that you're not familiar with, that's kind of from high church, from old school church that's fancy and proper and has an order of service that they go through. There's reading. Sometimes you stand and read. Sometimes there's prepared benedictions. But some of those elements can be really good and really helpful and really encouraging. And some of you come from backgrounds with those liturgical elements. And so we wanted to try to serve everyone in the church and bring those into our service. But as we were talking about what elements to add and what to do, I think it was Kyle made the point that, you know, we really can't just start adding things to Sunday morning services willy-nilly. We really need to know, like, what is the goal of a Sunday morning service? How do we determine if it's good? Is it when people sing loud and the sermon ends on time and people seem to get five or more compliments in the lobby? Is that what a good service means? I heard a snicker over here. I get compliments sometimes. Like, what denotes a good service? And so we started talking about that. What's important to us? What do we want to do? What is the goal of a Sunday morning service? And as we started having discussions about what the goal of a Sunday morning service was, we realized we really can't adequately talk about that until we understand who we are as a church. So what defines us as a church? What are we trying to do as a body of believers? What makes grace, grace? And then let's work backwards to that. And then let's work back into what we should include in our services. And so as I enjoy doing, I pulled out the whiteboard in multiple colors and so that it can all be color coordinated and clear for me up there. I pulled out the whiteboard and I said, that it can all be color-coordinated and clear for me up there. I pulled out the whiteboard, and I said, okay, and this is over the course of several weeks. I said, okay, what makes Grace Grace? Who are we? Like, just throw out things, our traits, our characteristics. And I started to throw them up on the whiteboard, and we got them up there, and there was some that were true but maybe not as true or maybe not us or whatever it is. And there was some that's like, well, those three kind of seem similar. I think we could combine those into one. And after talking about it for a couple of weeks, we arrived at these five traits. And we said, these things we feel as a staff are the things that make grace, grace. It's what we feel we are as a church. So as I put these in front of you, as we put these in front of you, this is not a new direction for grace to go in. These are not new directives for us to walk in. These are putting words around things and around values and around passions that I hope you all share. And this just gives us common language for them. So this is a process by which we are defining the church and who we are. And before I could just come out with it and say, these are the new five traits of grace, I had to take these to the elders because the staff doesn't decide who grace is. I don't decide who grace is. Our elders do. So I typed these out and I presented them to the elders and I told them the process that we went through. And I said, what do you guys think? Do you want to add to or take away? Do we want to tweak some descriptions? What do we, what do you think of this? And the elders were actually excited about it. I was a little bit surprised. I thought they'd be like, all right, great. You know, run with your traits, buddy. But they were, they were actually a little bit animated by it, so animated that they put it in my yearly goals. At the end of my work year, I'm going to get assessed, and when I do, part of the assessment is how well did we begin to integrate these traits into the culture of the church. So my goal is that all the partners of grace would know these five traits, at least like two or three of them, okay? Just like we all know that our mission as a church is to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people, we want us to start understanding these traits and to start understanding this common language. So much so that when we build a new building, which I'm going to talk about at the end of the service today, when we do that, because that looks like that's what we're going to be doing, we're going to put these in the lobby in some decorative way so that we can see them and be reminded of them and who we are and what makes us us. And I kind of think about it like this. I think it's important for us to have these traits and for us to know what they are because I think it helps us stay focused as a church on what we do. And I think that this is important because I'm not going to belabor the story. This story is not the point of the sermon, but there's this great story in the Old Testament, the book of Nehemiah. A man named Nehemiah, he's a captive of a Persian king and he is higher up in his kingdom and he hears that his home city of Jerusalem has been laid to waste and that the walls are no longer standing. And he begs the king for the opportunity to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the walls. And the king gives him that permission. So he goes back to Jerusalem. He gets a lay of the land for a little while. And then to rebuild the walls, he looks at the families that live in Jerusalem. And he says, okay, you guys, you build the wall from here to here. And then you guys, y'all build it from there to there. And then you build it from the gate to that post. And he assigned portions of the wall to all the families of Jerusalem. And every family had their portion that they built. And I think it's a great picture of what the church is. That in church, we all have our portions of the wall that we're supposed to build. Your family's assigned to these things. Your family's assigned to these ministries and those tasks. But I also think that that's a really good picture of how God builds his kingdom in the cities, how God builds his kingdom in communities. I personally believe that there's plenty of great churches that you could be at this morning. There's plenty of churches that you could be at with good worship, with likely better preaching, with better looking people. I mean, the whole gamut. You could go out and you could find other churches and they would be good churches. I would never argue to you that Grace Raleigh is the one church nailing it in the city. We're just doing great. And everybody else is apostate and they need to get on our level. Like that's ridiculous. There's Catholic mass happening right now where Jesus is being honored. There's other Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, Methodist churches all over where Jesus is being honored and that's good. And so I think that God designed and gives a DNA to churches and assigns them portions of the wall to build in his communities. And I think that there's a portion of the wall in Raleigh that's been assigned to Grace Raleigh. And there's a portion that's been assigned to Summit. And there's a portion that's been assigned to Providence. And go on down the list, we all have the portion of the wall that we're supposed to build. And so as a church, as we think about it, these traits are how we build our part of the wall. This is what we do. This is what we focus on. This is not a statement of faith. This is not a statement of what we believe. That's on our website. That's a different thing. This is believing that Jesus is the son of God and that he came to save us and that we love him with all of our heart. What should we do in light of that belief? These things. So the first trait that I would talk with you about, it's what all the songs are about. You ought to be able to guess it by now, is partners of grace are kingdom builders. Partners of grace are kingdom builders. Now, these traits define us as a church holistically, but they also should define what a partner at grace does. I've actually shifted in our Discover Grace class that we do for people who are coming here and are newer to the church. We spend more time on the five traits than on the old boring stuff we used to focus on. So if you came in previous years and it was boring, come again, maybe it's better. But partners of grace are kingdom builders. This is based on a principle that I've shared with you before. And I would say, if parts of this sermon sound familiar to you, they should. I preached a very similar message to this back in January when I talked about what it meant to be all in at grace in our Consumed series. It was the one that I had to come in and film early, so I was actually wearing a hat for the sermon for the first time in my life. And then a couple of years ago in the spring, we went through the book of John, and when we got to the story of John the Baptist, I talked about this, about building kingdoms. So if this sounds familiar to you, it should, if you're a partner of grace. If you're not yet a partner of grace, this is a great series for you to go, for you to know good and well what you're getting yourself into. But when I say that partners of grace are kingdom builders, the idea behind this is every one of us, every one of us to one degree or another is building a kingdom. Every one of you is building a kingdom. It could be your kingdom. It could be God's kingdom. You could be a real sucker and it's someone else's kingdom. You don't even get any of that. But every one of us is, we spend our lives building kingdoms. We go through adolescence. We grow up. We're told somewhere around college age that we've got to make a way for ourselves. We get a degree or we learn a trade and we jump right into it and we just start building our kingdom, right? I had an old pastor that would use the phrase, the American dream is to get all you can, can all you get, and sit on your can. That's what we do, man. We're just building our kingdom. Look at all my stuff I got. Look at my, I'm the king of my quarter acre lot, right? And now some of us have big dreams and build huge kingdoms. Bezos has got himself a big old kingdom. But compared to God's, it's a little baby kingdom. We build our kingdoms too, and sometimes we have big dreams, and we want to build big kingdoms, and we got big goals, and they include multiple vacation houses all over the world. And sometimes we have smaller goals, and our kingdom is our family, and that's what we pour our lives into. But I want to turn, I want to open our eyes to the idea that every single one of us invests our life building a kingdom. And so the question becomes, whose kingdom are you building? And to answer that question, we define kingdom builders like this. A kingdom builder is one who realizes that all the talents, gifts, abilities, and resources they have were given to them by God for the purposes of building his kingdom, not their own. I know it's a longer note than we normally put up there, but I wanted to be very clear. A kingdom builder, someone who's not building their kingdom, someone who's building God's kingdom, is one who realizes that all of the talents, gifts, abilities, charisma, resources, finances, everything that I've been given or the tools that I use to acquire the things that I have are not mine. I am a steward of those things. And God gave them to me to build his kingdom, not my own kingdom. Many, many, many, if not a vast majority of us in church and outside of church go through life believing that all the talents that we have and all the abilities that we have and all the ways that we can find to build relationships, power, money, whatever it is that we're after, that we just came by those by hard work or luck or some combination of the two and that we're supposed to employ those for our benefit. But to be a Christian, to be a believer, to be a child of God is to understand, no, no, he didn't give you those things to build your kingdom. He gave you those things to be a part of building his, which is a much more thrilling invitation than building our paltry kingdom that will all fade. They all will. I remember when this clicked for me for the first time. I was about 28 years old, and I was taking kids to summer camp. And I had always been marginally athletic growing up, all right? And that's not false humility. I really was. I was good enough. I was marginally athletic, although I don't think I really need to claim that. No one's looking at me going, I don't believe you, man. You were apex predator out there on that soccer field. Yeah, all right. So we're all on the same page here. And I don't, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but you are looking at a member of the 1998 Georgia Association of Christian Schools All-State Soccer Team. So, yeah, I know. I know. I don't want to intimidate people, so I don't bring it up a lot. There was like four schools in that association. I really thrive in low-bar situations. It's been a theme of my life. But I was marginally athletic. I was athletic enough that I could get in just about any game, any sport, and jump in and participate and not embarrass myself and sometimes do well and usually not get picked last. And so that served me well in high school and college and particularly growing up in my culture in the, where you, as a dude, your worth was your ability to play sports. And so I had that ability, and I could jump in. Clearly, I'm no longer in a position where that attribute is relevant. So that is atrophied greatly. I'm not a marginal athlete anymore, but I used to be. And I remember I was going to summer camp, taking these kids, and I had just been hired by this church. It was a larger church with a youth group of about 200, 225. And I was hired as the middle school pastor. And when we went, we had a high school pastor who was a friend of mine. But I knew that when we got back, they were going to fire him, which was an uncomfortable week. But I also knew that these high school kids are really close with him, and they're going to be bummed when we get back from intense relationship building camp. And then they have to say goodbye to their buddy, and they're not going to understand why. So I knew that I needed to create relationships, bridges with these high school guys as quickly as I could, because I was going to need to be there for some conversations when we got back home, but they didn't know that. So I'm racking my brain, how do I even get these guys to talk to me? They don't care about me. I'm the middle school pastor. They don't care about the new guy. They have their relationships. But every day during free time, they'd go down to the ball courts. And so I would too. And we'd roll the basketball out on the court, and I'd get to playing with them, and I'd spend two hours every day playing basketball with these guys. Building rapport, making jokes, and whatever, whatever. And it built a bridge for me so that when we got back and everything hit the fan, I was able to lean on some relationships that I had begun building. And that's when it dawned on me, oh my goodness, God did not give me marginal athletic talent so that I could get people to like me in high school. He gave it to me because he knew that I would spend 15 years of my life in youth ministry and that it is an essential and crucial part of building necessary relationships with the people around you. And I thought, oh, getting to be on the All-State soccer team in 1998 was a happy byproduct to what God really cared about, which was putting me on the courts with those guys in 2010 so that I could build some rapport with them as their pastor. That's the first time it really clicked with me that everything I've been given has been given to me to build his kingdom, not my own kingdom. And that it is so easy to get caught in the pattern of putting our head down and building our own kingdom without remembering regularly that we are to be stewards of the gifts and abilities and the resources that we have. And Jesus actually preached this in the Sermon on the Mount. He addressed this. He talked about it like this. that we can build here on earth. And how eventually, no matter how big we build them, they will fade. The moth and rust will destroy. They will be corroded away. And what we build will not matter. Rather than investing your life in something that ultimately doesn't matter at all, invest your only finite resource in eternal things, in God's kingdom, and things that will matter for eternity. That's the invitation that God gives the Christian. I think it's one of the greatest apologetics for the Christian faith. Where else in this world, where else in our lives can we be imbued with purpose that great as to wake up every day and have the opportunity to build something that will last forever? And yet that's the invitation that God gives us, to be kingdom builders. So how do we build kingdoms? What does that look like? I hope by now you're asking that question. Yeah, Nate, I get it. We're supposed to leverage our gifts and abilities to build God's kingdom. But what does it mean to build God's kingdom? I think this is how we build God's kingdom. We build God's kingdom by adding and strengthening souls. Supposed to be a souls there. Sorry. I must've been moving fast when I put in the slides. We build God's kingdom by adding and strengthening souls. And here's how I know that's true. Because this is what Jesus told us to do. The very last instruction he gave the disciples. He's trained them for three years. He's died. He's resurrected. He's heading back up to heaven to be our high priest and to leave the Holy Spirit with us to guide us as we go. And he gives them final instructions. What does he tell them? Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He says, go, build my kingdom. I'm giving you the keys. You're the only pastors the world has. Now go and tell everybody what you saw for the last three years. Go and make disciples. And because Jesus says go and make disciples and not simply go and make converts, that I know that Jesus wants us to build the kingdom not only by adding souls to the kingdom, by sharing our faith and seeing people come to faith and seeing people trust in Jesus. And again, just so I can be clear, what it means to be a Christian, as I understand it, is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. He's the Savior and Son of God. He did what he said he did. He died. He conquered death. He rose on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which is to come back and make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. You believe those things about Jesus Christ, you're a believer. But it's not enough to just bring someone to the point where they believe those things and we so add them to the kingdom and make the kingdom grow in number. We are commissioned to strengthen those souls that are converted. That's why Jesus says, go and make disciples. So not only do we build the kingdom by sharing our faith and adding people, adding numbers to the kingdom, but we build the kingdom by walking with one another, by helping one another deepen our faith and grow in our spiritual life and become more vulnerable with one another as we share this journey together. We add to the kingdom. We strengthen the kingdom by discipling one another. And that's one of our traits. That's step-takers. We're going to talk about that one. But if you're asking, how do I build the kingdom? You build it by adding and strengthening souls. And so our job is to set about with our lives doing that the best way we can. And I think when I think of people who are building God's kingdom, I can think of so many people at Grace who are kingdom builders, inside and outside of Grace. I think of a man that I deeply respect who's a business owner. And within his business, he has the opportunity to develop leaders. And he sends those leaders out and they start their own businesses. But they grow up within his culture. And his culture is founded on Christian principles and Christian values. And the people that he leads are almost always believers and creating work environments where people are treated rightly and justly and fairly and they're loved. And all the people under the umbrella of his business are people who are loved well and led well. And then he develops people within that and sends them out so that they love and they develop well. Adding and strengthening souls to the kingdom by simply doing. Everybody from the outside would look at him and say, well, he's doing his job. But what he knows is his job is boring. What's fun is developing leaders and sending them out and watching them replicate these cultures. That's what my life is for. I think about Lynn Lemons, who's been given a gift of organization and been given a heart for missions. And she uses that as the chair of our missions committee, who, I don't know if you know this, decides what happens with 10% of our budget and how we partner with ministry partners outside of the walls of grace, using gifts and abilities that she's been given to add to and to strengthen God's kingdom. I think of Phil Leverett. Y'all probably don't know that Phil is our head usher, which is, I hate to say it publicly because it always goes to his head, but he is. He's our head usher. And he shows up early almost every Sunday. And he makes sure everything's in line. If stuff needs to be on the seats, he'll double check that. He'll make sure everyone's scheduled. He's just faithfully devoted to doing that, to building God's kingdom, strengthening souls, adding to the kingdom by making everything in the church work. I think of Debbie Bergeson, who sits in the COVID baby room and just holds a screaming child once or twice a month, just completely nonplussed, shuts the door, just sits there, the kid screams, and mom and dad just hold on for dear life, hoping they can get an hour to themselves and enjoy church and enjoy one another. Just silently, thanklessly doing that week in and week out. I think of some of the moms we have in the church who are devoted to homeschooling. And they get together and they teach their children. And they build them up and they make disciples and they form them and that is their ministry and that is how they build the kingdom. I think of somebody who had an opportunity to become an elder, and he said, not right now. It's not my season to lead the church in that way. We're so busy with all of our schedules. I need to focus on my children and be the husband and the father that I need to be. And he's going and building God's kingdom that way. But I happen to believe that all of us are given gifts and abilities and talents that God intends for us to use to build his kingdom. And I believe that not only because I've seen it, but because it's in the Bible. It's in the verse that Tamara read to us during the worship this morning. Ephesians 2.10, I don't know when or how I stumbled upon that verse, but it was in the early years of me at Grace, 2017, 2018. I was just reading my Bible, and the all-star verses in Ephesians chapter 2 are the two that precede it and talk about salvation. It is by grace that we are saved through faith, that not of ourselves, that it is a gift of God, so that no man may boast. And you always read those, and you're like, yeah, and you highlight those, and those are the important ones. But this one right after it, for the Christian, who understands the doctrine of salvation, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. You know what that verse tells us? Whether you believe it or not, God created each one of you with a design for good works that you would walk in, that he's laid out for you with the sincere hope and with the will and with the desire that as you move through your life and as you move through your faith, your eyes would be opened to what those good works are and that you would walk in them. I believe that this is true of every human that's ever lived, that God has created them and imbued them with certain gifts for a purpose so that they might deploy those to build his kingdom. I think of my uncle, Uncle Deg. Those are his initials, but everybody knows him as Deg. If you knew him in the 80s, you knew him as Flash, so that's the kind of dude he was. There was Camaros and motorcycles involved. Deg is a militant atheist. It breaks my heart. But when he was growing up in the 70s, he went to a hyper conservative independent Baptist church that just ruined his faith. And I don't really blame him for walking away from that God, because I would have too. And I'm grateful that my mom didn't introduce me to that God that she met when she was growing up. But Deg, Deg can tell a story, man. That guy can own a room. He can take over a dinner party. And people follow Deg. People listen to him. And he's smart. And I just know he would have been a great pastor. I just know it. I'd love to go to his church. I think when God formed him in my grandmother's womb, that that's what he purposed him for. But Degg's just lived a life and he hasn't been able to have his eyes open to see his good works. And so he doesn't walk in them. But if you're at grace, let's have our eyes open to that. Each one of us, no matter how talentless, talentless, or insignificant, or unimportant we might feel, your God doesn't think that of you. We don't think that of you. We think that Ephesians 2.10 is true. And that when God formed you in your mother's womb, that he laid out for you good works that you should walk in until the day that he takes you back up to heaven to be with him. Because we believe that, and because we believe, and this is so important, and I'm so glad, Aaron, that you referred to this in your prayer earlier today. When you are walking in God's purpose for your life, when you are walking in obedience, when you are walking in the good works that God has prepared for you, there is no greater happiness or peace. To walk outside of those, to build our own kingdom, to refuse to walk in the good works that God laid out for us, that's where life feels disjointed. That's where we feel out of whack. That's where we beat our heads against the wall trying to find a sense of purpose. But when we walk in the good works that Jesus laid out for us before time, there's no greater peace or joy than being exactly who God created you to be. Parents, while we're here, do you know what you're raising? Kingdom builders. You're raising humans that God formed, knowing the good works that they should walk in. And it is your primary job as a parent to help them love Jesus and be able to identify the good works in which they are called to walk. That's what a successful parent is. Parents of adults, you get to help coach them through it. But because that's what we believe, because at Grace we are kingdom builders and we believe that everybody has a portion of that kingdom to build, I want to leave you with these two questions. I want you, honestly, I want you to think about these, talk about these with your spouse or with your small group people or with some friends at the church. And I would really love it, small group leaders, if we could spend a portion of our small group time this week in our groups talking about these two questions. Not all the time, but just give folks who heard the sermon a chance to respond to these a little bit. Five, ten minutes. Here's the two questions I want you to go thinking about this week. Whose kingdom are you building? And what is my good work? Whose kingdom am I building? Am I building my kingdom or am I building God's? Have I rallied all the resources in my life to make my name great or am I doing it to make God's name great? And then what are my good works? What can I walk in right now? If you don't know, ask somebody who loves you and knows you. But everybody has them. And we all should walk in them. I hope you'll go and you'll think about those things. Whose kingdom am I building? With the time I have here, whose kingdom do I want to build? And what is the good work that God has prepared me to walk in. Let me pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and for how much you love us. God, I just pray particularly right now for folks in the room who just really might not know. Maybe their heart position is, God, I want to serve you. I want to do what you want me to do. I want to build your kingdom, but I don't know what. Lord, would you please show them? Would you have someone who loves them speak into their lives and in their hearts this week? Would you show them the good works that they could walk in, that they might experience your joy as they do it? Father, if there are those of us here this morning who have had our heads down building our own kingdoms, would you convict us of that? Would you show us that in ourselves? Would you help all of us be people who are zealous to build your eternal kingdom? And God, as we do this, I pray for courage and I pray for strength and I pray for the peace and joy that comes with taking the steps of obedience and faith as we begin to live out the purpose that you've given us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, today, Moses and the Ten Commandments. That's enough of that. We are, we are. That was 10, 10 long weeks, friends. Once more time with feeling on that. If this is your first Sunday with us, this is the 10th part of our series, Kids Stories for Grownups. We've been showing that video or a portion of it every week, and I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see it. So I'm glad, I'm glad that that has run its its course and we've got more videos for you in the future. As we wrap up the series, we're going to wrap it up looking at the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. And though it is one of the shorter stories that we will tell in this series, I would argue that it is perhaps the most impactful one that we've covered in these 10 weeks as far as how what happens here in Exodus chapter 20 through 32, what happens there resonates and reverberates throughout all of Scripture. And that when we share this story, we have to ask about the story. What were the Ten Commandments for? Why did God give them? And so we're going to dive into that. But in answering that, I really want two things to happen. First, I want God to stir our affection for Jesus this morning. I'm going to tell you right up front that the whole point of the service and the message this morning is that you leave here with more affection for Jesus than what you entered in with. That's my prayer for everybody, that simple prayer. The other thing about talking about the Ten Commandments and the law is properly understanding the law and the commandments helps us understand our Bible better. So I say often, as often as I can, A, I can't be the only source of Bible that you're getting in your life. 30 minutes a week of whatever Nate chooses to share is not enough. It's not sufficient to learn God's word for ourselves. And you'll learn it with my terrible slant and biases, and you'll be as off kilter as I am. So don't do that. The other thing that I say as often as I can is the best habit that anyone in the world can develop is to wake up every time, wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. To do that and to understand our Bibles better, we have got to understand the law because it shows up over and over and over again in the New Testament. Half the tension in the New Testament is these new believers trying to figure out what to do with the old law. So we might be tempted to kind of throw it away and be like, well, you know, a sermon about the Ten Commandments doesn't apply to me too much because those laws really don't apply to me too much anymore. I don't have to worry about those. That's for Old Testament people. But as a New Testament Christian, we're going to see today how the law turns and puts our affection on Jesus. And we're going to, I hope, have a deeper understanding of God's word as we read it with a proper understanding of the law and the intent behind it. So the story of the Ten Commandments takes place in Exodus chapter 20. And many of you probably think that you know the story. Moses goes up on the mountain. You might even know that it's Mount Sinai. Two points for you. You can get your free coffee on the way out the door today. But in Exodus chapter 20, Moses goes up on the mountain. God gives him the Ten Commandments on two tablets. He carries him back down the mountain. He's like, here's the rules now. This is what we have to do. Except a careful reading will tell you that that's not really what happened. What happened is in Exodus chapter 20, the presence of God rests on Mount Sinai and all the people of Israel, all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrew people who have been wandering the desert and following this God, backed away from the mountain and said, we're terrified. Moses, you go. You do it. You go see what he wants. We're scared. And so Moses goes to the mountain, and from the mountain, the voice of God tells him the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, but he doesn't stop. He actually continues to give Moses laws for his people all the way through Exodus chapter 32. So for 12 chapters there, God is doling out laws. If you carefully study the Old Testament, you'll find that there's about 632 laws, and most of these show up in this discourse from Mount Sinai. And then when he gets to the end of it, at the end of chapter 32, he writes, God writes everything down. He said he gives them the meeting notes. He said, here's what we talked about. Here's the laws for the people. Carry these down to them. And so Moses goes back down the mountain with the stone tablets that do contain the Ten Commandments, but more than likely, because the Bible says things were written on the fronts and backs of them, more than likely is all of the discourse from those 12 chapters. And Moses carries those down the mountain. So if you don't learn anything for the rest of the sermon, maybe you've at least learned something about how the story of the Ten Commandments actually goes. Just to tie a bow on the story, Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain and sees that the people have made a golden calf out of earrings and jewelry, and he's ticked because they need this sign for their God, and he's so mad at them that he throws these freshly inscribed tablets on the ground and breaks them, which I don't know if he was supposed to do that or not, but Moses has a very clear anger issue throughout his life, and this is more evidence of that. God calls him back up on the mountain, and he says, okay, listen, I'm going to tell you all that stuff again, but this time you're writing it down. Okay, Moses has to write it down. God says, I'm not your secretary. All right, I did it before you once. Now you've got to copy it down. So Moses writes it down, brings those tablets back down the mountain, and those are the ones that existed in the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of the Old Testament. That's the story of the Ten Commandments. Now, whenever we cover the story of the Ten Commandments, the right question to ask is, what are they for? What are they for? Why did God give them? To what end? Especially now in New Testament, post-Christ era, or during Christ era, he's eternal, but after Christ was on earth and he's changed everything, and after the crucifixion and the resurrection, now how do we handle the law? Now what is it for? So this morning, we want to look at that story of the Ten Commandments, but then really ask, why did God give us those things? Because understanding this, again, will point us towards Christ and will help us understand our Bibles far better. The presumed purpose of the law, when it was given and when we encounter it, I believe, is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency and in our sufficiency, earn God's approval. When the law is given, there's a very clear path forward. Okay, good. Now I've got a plan. Now I know how to move forward. These are the rules that God wants me to follow. These are the ways that I can relate to him. For his children, there's a very clear path forward. I can follow these 632 laws. I can learn to follow them really, really well. And as I learn to follow them well, I can be spiritually sufficient and I can earn my God's approval. God says, we say, God, how do I make you happy? He goes, here, here's all the rules. Follow these rules super well and you'll make me happy. And I will give you my approval. And we can, in a sense, behave our way into eternity. We can behave our way into harmony with our Creator if we will simply learn to follow these rules well. And this, to us, and to the Hebrew people at the time, had to feel like good news, great, clarity. Finally, we know what to do. Think about it this way. Think about if you could sit down and read the Bible on your own without any knowledge whatsoever of what's contained in those pages. You don't know who Jesus is. You don't know anything about the Bible. You don't know how the story ends. You're reading it from Genesis on, and you're just paying attention to the narrative, trying to figure out how it's going to go. And so in Genesis 1, you see this instruction, hey, don't eat the fruit of this tree. Why not? Don't worry about it. Just don't do that. And then they mess up and they sin. And sin curses the earth. And curses the earth so bad that as you read along, you realize that in Genesis chapter 6, God decides I need to hit the reset button. I regret the way that this is going. And so he sends the flood. And all that's left behind is Noah and his family. And all God does to Noah, his only instruction to him, he doesn't give him the rules. What does God say to Noah? Hey, man, I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? Well, it floats in water. Well, what for? Just trust me, man. Just build a boat. But he doesn't give Noah the rules. And so you're reading along, you're like, man, this God is mysterious. How does he, how is he speaking to Noah and not the other people? And then you get to Abraham. He's called out of Ur of the Chaldeans in the Sumerian dynasty. And God comes to him and he says, hey, man, I want you to give up the future that you thought you were going to have in your dad's estate and I'd like you to move. Okay? Where? Don't worry about it. I'll show you. Man, this guy's mysterious. And how do I know that he's talking to other people besides Abraham? Is he only talking to Abraham? Where is this God? What are his rules? And when does he need us to follow them? Where is the clarity? And yet, Abraham gets to where he he's supposed to go and he meets a king there named Melchizedek who knows the will of God just as well as Abraham does. And we see that God is speaking to people all through this time, but we don't know where and how. And then he doesn't really give any more clarity to his son Isaac or to Jacob or to Joseph. And then 400 years go by and this Moses guy shows up. And what does he tell Moses? I want you to free my people, okay? Where do you want me to take them? I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Just follow me. And you're reading along going, man, this God is tough to follow. And then out of nowhere, Exodus 20. Hey, hey, hey, here's the rules, guys. This is what I want you to do. And I think our knee jerk as people would be to go, good, finally, thank you. Now I've got a plan. Now you're not just this weird cloud that I follow around and try to hear or just trust that Moses is hearing your voice. I mean, how weird would that be? If I got up here and I said, listen guys, I'm the only one who can really hear God very well, so you just need to listen to what I have to say. But that was the situation. And so with the law, good clarity, I have a plan. I can move forward. And don't we love that as Americans? Don't we love a good plan? I know in my life that when things start to go bad, when I'm not happy about what I'm doing at church, or I don't feel like I'm doing my job over here, or I don't feel like this part of my life is going very well and it's caused some pain and I try to figure out the best thing to do, what do I do? I sit down and I come up with a plan and then I work the plan. And there's great comfort in a plan that you think is going to succeed. And then you can work the plan. And so here, God finally gives some clarity. You want to make me happy? Here, follow the rules. And I think our human brains go, great, finally, a plan. I can do this. But I've always wondered, why did it take God so long to give him this plan? Why did God wait so long into the history of his people, a couple thousand years, to give him the rules? I think it's because God wants a relationship with us. And if we go back and we follow those first rules, those first instructions that he gave the early saints, we see that that's all he was really looking for. Adam and Eve, just trust me, don't eat of that. Why? Don't worry about it, just trust me. Noah, build a boat. Why? Just build it. Trust me. Listen to me. Do what I ask you to do. You're safe with me. Abraham, I want you to move. Where? Don't worry about it. Just go. Trust me. Follow me. Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your only son. But why? How? Abraham, don't worry about it. Just go. Obey me. Moses, lead my people. Where? Just follow me. At every instance, the beckoning of God is to follow him. Trust me. Work into a relationship with me. Get to know me. Pursue my heart as I pursue yours. And I think the real reason, when we consider it, that God waited so long to give the rules is because he knew that we would make them into a code, that we would begin to codify our relationship with him. Instead of pursuing him, we would just codify it, make a code of laws out of it, and go, here, this is all I need to do. I don't need the relationship anymore. What God knew is that relationships become contracts when we reduce them to codes. Relationships become contractual arrangements when we reduce them to a code of laws. Imagine if we did this in our marriages. I did a wedding yesterday, and I got to the portion where I did the vows. And at the vows, you vow affection to one another. You make promises to one another to have and to hold, richer for poor, in shape and not. However, we promise we will always love one another. What if instead of exchanging vows, we exchange our contractual agreements that we had negotiated prior to our marriage? And then on our anniversary, we revisited our contracts to see if we wanted to update them at all as ways to maintain the approval and affection of one another. Can't you just hear the contract negotiations? I think I would open with, for weekends in the fall when football starts, from noon on Saturday until when I go to bed on Sunday night, I would like to be able to treat my children like a railroad tycoon from the early 1900s. I would like to sit in my parlor, unbothered by them. Occasionally, they come in, and I laugh at them, tousle their hair, tell them they're cute, and then send them back to the nanny and I watch my football. This would be where I would start. And my wife would inevitably say, okay, but on Fridays and for at least one hour a night, you will engage with imaginative play with your children. You will even do Barbies. Also, once a week, I need some mom time. I need to go to Target, and I need to have lunch with people, and I need to go waste money on Starbucks. I'm going to need to do this, and I would say, okay. Once a week, I would like fresh flowers on the table. What kinds of flowers? You've got to help me out here. Can you imagine if we just negotiated our relationships and went back and forth? You give me this and I'll give you that. It robs it of its heart. It robs it of the love and affection that we experience in those things. The joy of marriage, the depth of marriage is getting to know one another over the years, is knowing when I do this, she's going to feel loved. When I do this, she's going to feel aggravated. When she sees me do this, this is what stirs her affections for me. So that by the time we've been married 30, 40, 50 years, we know each other better than any other soul on the planet. And that connection there was not achieved by making rules and negotiating contracts with each in attempting to follow those rules, we would rob the relationship that we have with him of its heart. And we don't need to look very hard in Scripture to see that he was right and that this is true. There was 1,400 years between Moses receiving the law and the gospels beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where Jesus comes on the scene. And when we get to the gospels, we see Jesus address the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the rule keepers, man. It is their job to read the rules, to interpret the rules, and to tell everybody what the rules mean, and to tell everybody how you're going to follow them. Like, it says don't work on the Sabbath, okay? Well, some Pharisees interpreted that as don't go out and plow the field with your donkey on the Sabbath. That's not allowed. Others were so strict with it that they said, if your sandal has a nail in it, that's heavier than it needs to be because it's metal and you cannot wear those sandals on Sabbath because that's work. So they had to figure out what do the rules mean and how do we apply them and how do we tell people whether or not they're following them. They were the keepers of the rules, the watchers of the rule book, and they should have known as well as anybody how to follow them. And if you follow them well, the way that God intended, their hearts should be rendered to God. They should be some of the greatest, most trustworthy people on the planet, except you guys know, what does Jesus call the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, You're a brood of vipers. You're a bunch of hypocrites who had taken the religious authority that they were given and leveraged it for personal gain and personal power and then set up a system around themselves to protect their personal gain and their personal power. And they were complete hypocrites and their heart was very far from the Lord. They have figured out how to heartlessly follow God's rules and maintain a facade of righteousness. And I just wonder if that sounds like any segments of the church that we have today, where men, and it's almost always men, are in charge and they've set up systems so that they stay in charge and they can personally profit from the spiritual authority that they have. And it's gross. And it happened then and it happens now. Whenever we set up a system around who follows the rules the best, what inevitably happens is people claim that they follow the rules best and that you should follow them, and then they cast judgment on you and they exact taxes from you. And it's disgusting. Which is why I hope that if Jesus saw me, he would at least say, well, you're a messy tomb. You're dirty. And I would be like, that's great, because you're going to wash me off. But that was the condition of the Pharisees. They were a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, because they had so perverted the law over the years as to make it this thing of if you can follow it well enough, you can behave your way into God's affection and approval. And we need to watch it because we do that too. I remember when I was in high school, there was certain rules you had to follow. Every church, every group of Christians has them. Some rules that if you follow these rules, now you're righteous, now God loves you, now you're a good Christian. When I was in high school, if you didn't drink or do drugs, if you didn't cuss, if you didn't do anything with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're not supposed to do. And you're a good Christian. Congratulations. Are you a jerk to everyone in your life? Yes, but you follow those rules, so you're fine. Meanwhile, we take the person over here who has a genuinely good heart and is gentle with people, but doesn't check one of those boxes, and we tell them that they are apostate and they need to go to youth group and probably some camp where they pledge purity or something like that. Every community of faith has its rules that it wants to default to. And we have our rules too. And we have our things where I just need a plan. If I can do this and this and this, then I'll be a good Christian. And without realizing it, we begin to try to behave our way into God's affection and approval. The end of that road is the Pharisees. The end of that road of trying to behave our way into God's affection is frustration and hypocrisy and a heartless obedience to God. And what's more frustrating is, in this following of the rules, it is possible to do it completely heartlessly, to follow the rules and not even love the rule giver. I went to a Christian college. There was lots of rules at that Christian college. I thought they were all stupid. But I followed them. Well, a better example is Jen went to a Christian college. And they had a lot of rules. And she didn't agree with all of them. But she followed them. Not because we had this deep and abiding affection for Toccoa Falls College and just a sense of loyalty to it. Not because we loved the rules and thought they were great. But because that was what was asked of us. And so we did. We can do that with God too. We all know how to go through the motions and follow the rules so it looks like everything's together. Meanwhile, our hearts are empty. And then Jesus comes along and he makes this heartless obedience harder. Jesus makes the heartless obedience harder when he shows up because he starts to redefine the law, to correctly define the law, to fix people's understanding of it, to help them see it's really impossible to follow it without heart. You can't follow the essence of the law without following the heart of the law. And he comes along with what is the single most convicting two verses for any man who's ever lived. He says this in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What that means is, I can only speak for the dudes, every one of us is an adulterer based on what Jesus taught. Now, we should not back away from that and consider it figurative. He meant what he said, and it's true. But until Jesus said this, plenty of us are going through life going, if I just don't commit adultery, the physical act of it, with someone else's spouse, then I'm squared away. I'm righteous, I'm good. And Jesus says, no, no. If you even look at them with intent, you're guilty. And then we all go, well, then I'm guilty. He even says that you've heard it said that we shouldn't murder anybody. Thou shalt not kill. And all of us, I would hope, can check that box. Yeah, you know, 40, I'm going 41 years. I'm in my 42nd year so far, no murders. Really nailing that one. But if you've hated someone in your heart, then you're guilty of that as well. And you go, oh, well, then I guess I'm a murderer. And the more you examine the law, the more frustrated you should become. Those of you in your life who have tried to white knuckle your way to holiness, who have just tried through sheer determination, I'm going to be a good Christian. I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to do what God asked me to do and behave our way into God's affection. What always happens? You fall on your face. And when you fall on your face, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you go, I wasn't holding on tight enough that time. Now, this is the time when I'm going to white knuckle my way to God's affection. And Jesus, in this gentle way, whispers in your ear, no, you're not. No, you're not. And so when we examine the law and we hold it up to ourselves, what we realize is this is impossible. It brings us to this inflection point of frustration where sooner or later, sooner or later when you've fallen off the horse enough times, when you've tried to follow the rules well enough, when you've tried to behave your way into God's affection and approval, and when you've disappointed him again and you've let him down, and you've got to pick yourself up again, sooner or later you're going to say, I don't want to do this anymore. And it's at that point that a lot of people walk away from the faith because they believe that faith is following rules well, and it's not. But the law has to get us to this point where we surrender. We say, I can't do this anymore. There's no possible way I can follow the law. And when we're there, when we understand that we cannot behave our way into heaven, and I know, I know, listen, I know that I say that, and all the Christians in the room go, yeah, no, it's God's grace. I cannot behave my way into heaven and into God's affection. And yet, you live out your faith like that's what you can do. You know intellectually that you can't behave your way into God's approval for you. And yet, boy, you try, don't you? I'm just talking to myself here. So lest we sweep aside, no, I don't do that. Yes, you do. We all do. But it's at that point when we realize that we can't, that we're ready to hear the message from Romans 8, 1 through 4, where Paul writes about this exact thing. And I'm going to read it to you, and it's going to be a little bit murky, but there's a couple phrases we can key in on to really help us understand what he's talking about. He writes this. He washed off our tombs. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Paul says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For those of us who trust in Jesus and his sufficiency, our tombs are clean. We are alive in Christ. He's taking care of us. Because God has done, by sending him to die on the cross, to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death and to have a perfect resurrection, God has done what the law, listen, weakened by the flesh. But he sent his son who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. He sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to perfectly follow the law, the only person in history who's ever done it, to die a perfect death, to have a perfect resurrection, to ascend back into heaven, and then begin, according to Romans and Hebrews, to advocate to the Father on our behalf. And in that action, he covers over our weakness, and we are restored into the life of the Spirit and into harmony with our Creator and into affection from our Father God. That's what Paul is saying in Romans. He's telling us the purpose of the law is to show us our need for Jesus. And so in light of that, I told you at the beginning, we presume the purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency. And in our sufficiency, so earn God's approval. But what we see through a careful examination of ourselves, standing up against the law, what we see in the teachings of Jesus is that was never the purpose of the law. The purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual surrender and in Christ's sufficiency, receive God's affection. You see the difference? When we act like it's to achieve our own spiritual sufficiency, we butt our heads up against the wall until we reach a place of surrender. And we say, Jesus, I can't follow the law. You followed it perfectly. I'm totally reliant on you. I'm done trying. I'm done trying to behave my way into heaven. I'm done trying to behave my way into God's affection and into my Father's approval. And I surrender to you. I confess, you died, you lived a perfect life, you died a perfect death, and then you resurrected for me. And you are my path to harmony with my creator. And I am insufficient entirely to do that at all. I am completely and totally reliant upon the sufficiency of Christ and his death on the cross. That is my only path to affection with my father. And then in Christ's sufficiency, we receive, not earn, God's affection, which is far better than approval. We don't want our dads to simply nod in a condescending approval to us. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're okay. Yeah, you're allowed. We don't want a distant, heartless approval from our God. We want that affection. We want Him to love us. We want Him to take joy in our joy. We want Him to mourn when we mourn. We want Him to hurt when we hurt. We want Him to love when we love. We want to know that our Father God is right there. We want his affection. And to get that, all we have to do is surrender. Quit trying so dang hard. And what it looks like is this. How about, how about instead of deciding all the things you're going to do to live the life that you think God wants you to live and to be the person that you think God wants you to be and all the plans and all the rules and all the white knuckling that we're going to do, how about we scrap that? And how about we make our only plan is to wake up every day and remind ourselves of the love that Jesus has for us. I heard one pastor call this preach the gospel to yourself. Remind ourselves that we fall at the feet of Jesus, that we rely on his sufficiency, that we trust in his perfect life and in his perfect death, and that God, the Bible says that this is love, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Before we earned it, before we deserved it, before we had any claim to it whatsoever, God sent Jesus to live a perfect life and die a perfect death so that we could experience eternity in heaven with him, so that we could walk in the affection and the love of our Father, so that we could be at harmony with our Creator. Remind yourself of that every morning. Remind yourself every morning, Jesus loves me. My Father loves me. Not for who I'm going to be, not for how I'm going to behave, but He loves me because He sent His Son for me. And if anyone were to ask me, why does God love you? I would point to the cross and I would say, because of what Jesus did, not because of anything that I've done. And remind yourself of that overflowing love every day. I love that verse in the book of John that says, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Remind yourself of that grace every day. And what you'll see happening is when we surrender to Christ and we remind ourselves of his love, that our affections for the people around us are stirred as well. We'll be more gracious with our husbands and our wives and our children and our friends and our co-workers and the bad drivers. When we daily remind ourselves to surrender to Christ's sufficiency, when we choose surrender over sufficiency, God stirs our affections for Jesus. When we simply remind ourselves, I am insufficient, I have nothing to offer, Jesus has everything to offer, and I rely on that. When we remind ourselves of that, God stirs our affection for Jesus. And in stirring our affection for Jesus, he stirs our affection for one another, which by the way, isn't that the whole point of the law anyways? Didn't Jesus say that loving God with all your heart, soul, and your mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the whole law and the prophets? This is how it does it. Instead of trying to be a people who are worried about the rules and all the right behaviors for Christians, which, by the way, will stop us from looking at other Christians and saying on social media, well, it's pretty unchristian. I thought you said you were a Christian and now you're da-da-da-da-da. If we would move away from a rule-following Christianity and towards a daily surrender to that Christ, we will find waiting for us an affection for Jesus and an affection for others that will help us walk in harmony with the law anyways. So the whole point of the law and the whole point of this morning is to grab our faces and point them to Christ and help us remember that he alone is worthy of our affection, that he alone is worthy of our devotion. And if we would quit trying to follow the rules so darn well and fail and get up and try hard again, if we would just surrender instead of trying so hard, surrender to the sufficiency of Jesus, that he would fill our hearts with affection for him, that that affection would overflow to others, and then we would finally be people who keep the law and walk in devotion and affection to Jesus. So I said my prayer for you at the beginning was that you would leave here with your heart stirred more for affection to Jesus than when you came in. That you would leave here desiring Jesus more than you did when you entered in. And my further prayer is that that would be a sustained thing, that some of you, gosh, maybe a few of you, would finally quit trying so hard and just wake up tomorrow morning and say, Jesus, thank you for loving me, and see where that leads. In a minute, the band's going to come up, and we're going to sing a song called Jesus, We Love You. There's a chorus in there, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Let's stand and sing this song as one church with one voice and one agreement and one surrender to pour everything out at the feet of Jesus and let him stir our affections for him. Let's pray. Father God, we are grateful for you. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the law so that we can see how much we need you. God, I pray that we would want more of you, that we would simply want more of Jesus, that we would want to know you better, and that in that pursuit we would feel a freedom from the things that trip us up, from the things that seek to hold us back, that so easily entangle. But that maybe, God, by focusing on you, by focusing on your son, we can run the race that's set before us as we were finally, finally intended to run. Focus our eyes on you, Jesus. And let us trust you to take care of everything else. In Jesus' name, amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along, and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks mailman Kyle. This week, Gideon. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. And if I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Right now, while I'm preaching, probably wouldn't be an appropriate time, but after that would be great. As a pastor, I often find myself in conversations where questions like this are asked. Questions like, hey, people talk about being able to hear from God. I'm not sure that I can hear from God. How do I hear God's voice in my life? How do I know his direction? How do I know what God wants me to do? Sometimes that manifests itself in questions like, hey, I've got this job opportunity. We have this opportunity to move. We're trying to make a big decision about this or that or what to do with our children. How do I know what God wants me to do? Sometimes this conversation will take on the shape of, hey, I've been a Christian for a while, and I just feel like I'm in a rut, and I don't really know how to get it back. What do I need to do? How come I'm not grown further in my walk yet than I have already? Why is it that I feel behind? Or sometimes it's conversations with people who are new to the faith or relatively new to the faith. And they just kind of feel like they're not getting traction. It's not taken off for them. What is it that I need to do so that I can grow in my faith? And I think that to be a Christian for any amount of time is to, at some point, to have asked those questions or questions like them, or at the very least, to feel this sense of, gosh, I thought I would have grown past this by now. I thought I would, I see other people talking about this rich, deep faith, and they seem to hear from God, and they seem to have this courageous faith that other people would seek to emulate, but no one would seek to emulate me, and I don't know how to get from where I am to where they are, but I know that I'm not content here. If that's you, and if you've ever had a thought like that, then Gideon's your guy. Gideon may be the most relatable story in all the Bible. Gideon, I find to be a character that resonates with me and with us as I tend to go through it very, very much. Because in Gideon, what we see is we see typical Bible hero stuff. By the end of the story, he's threatening kings and he's conquering armies and he's sitting on, he wasn't on the throne, but on the magistrate seat, I guess, as the judge of Israel. And he judges Israel for 40 years and he's the unquestioned leader of the country right underneath God. And so that's typical Old Testament hero stuff and none of us can relate to that. You're not about to rule over the United States for 40 years, although it may go better if some of you did it. I don't know. But we're not about to do that, right? But the beginning of Gideon's story, he's timid and he's fearful and he's characterized by doubtful hesitancy. The beginning of Gideon's story, we can relate to very much. And so as we go through this story, there is this overarching question that becomes very important to us if we feel like we can relate to Gideon in any way, in his fear and in his timidity and in our uncertainty of how to live out our faith. The overarching question, I think, over the narrative of Gideon is simply, how does Gideon move from doubtful hesitancy to confident clarity. How does Gideon begin with this rickety, secondhand, doubtful, timid faith and move to a place where he is the judge of Israel for 40 years, moving and acting with confident clarity? Because the guy at the end of the story barely resembles the guy at the beginning of the story. So the question becomes, how does that happen to Gideon? To discover this, we should look at the story of Gideon. I love the story of Gideon. I know that I say I love all the stories that I tell you, and it's true. I do. But this one in particular is special to me because I had the chance to go to Israel in 2013. And I've always loved the story very much. And in the story, they go to a brook and some soldiers drink from a brook. And when I went to Israel, they take you to that brook and they say, this is the stream of Gideon and this is the field of Gideon. And in the crease of my Bible, I have grass from the field of Gideon that I'm not going to pull out because I'm afraid I'll break it, but I'll show it to you after the service. But I've got grass in here from Gideon's field next to the brook that shows up in the story. So when I get to tell the story of Gideon, I get excited because you could say that I get giddy about Gideon. That one just occurred to me. Where's Kyle Tolbert? Is he in this room? That was just for you, pal. That was it. I don't care if anybody else laughed, buddy. That's great. You guys don't know this, but after I preach or after Kyle preaches, we have about 30 minutes where we talk about each other's jokes and how they were like, we'll always make one joke just for the other person. Just so you guys know, it's a little inside baseball. Probably shouldn't do it. I don't know why I'm talking about it right now, but we do and it's great. So I'm excited to tell you the story of Gideon. When we pick up the story, we're in Judges chapter 6, and we find Gideon in a wine press milling out grain. And you might wonder, why is Gideon in a wine press using it for something that it was not intended for, hiding out from whomever? Well, that's because in the verses preceding it, we learn that the Israelites, God's people, were being oppressed by the Midianites. And that oppression didn't look like just coming in and taking all the way over. That oppression looked like just waiting for the farmers to till their land and produce their crop, and then just going in and taking whatever they wanted, taking all the wealth and all the fruit and all the vegetables and all the livestock back to their cities to use as they saw fit. So they had subjugated the Israelite people. And Gideon, he is experiencing this subjugation. And this is in the period of the judges. I explained this last week, so I won't belabor it this morning, but in the period of the judges, God himself was the king of Israel. He ruled over Israel, and they followed God, and they obeyed him, and they followed his laws, and they acknowledged him. And God would appoint a judge to serve as a judge, a magistrate, kind of a one-person supreme court, and rule over the different disputes that would come up in the land between families and between tribes and individuals. But occasionally, Israel would forget that God got them there, would forget that God was their God, and they would start to live by their own rules and do their own thing and not really care about who God was and what he thought. And they would say, God, your hand over us is kind of annoying. Would you please remove it so that we could just do whatever we would like to do? And God would say, okay, I will, but you're going to have to experience the consequences of your actions. And because he moved his hand of protection from the Israelites, because their actions and their attitudes and their devotion basically said, we're not really interested in your rules or your hand of blessing over us. So if you could get out of our way, that would be great. God said, okay, I'll get out of your way. And then sure enough, the Amorites and the Midianites and the Amalekites and the various ites from surrounding cities and towns would come in and they would oppress Israel until Israel would cry out and be like, God, we forgot about you. We're so sorry. These people are really bumming us out. Could you come in and save us? And God would appoint a judge and raise them up and they would overthrow the oppressors and they would live in peace again until they forgot about God. And so the cycle continues. Judges, before it gets really, really bad, that we meet Gideon. And we see him in the wine press in chapter 6. And an angel of the Lord appears to him, and it's pretty clear that Gideon's not yet sure that this is an angel of the Lord. It appears to him, and he says, and an angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, the Lord is with you, O mighty man of valor. Which is a really interesting comment. Because as far as we know, Gideon was neither mighty nor did he possess any valor. He's just a dude, tread and grain in a wine press. But the angel says, The Lord is with you, O mighty man of valor. This guy and an oppressed people who's never fought a battle in his life and is by no means mighty and does not seem to display any courage in any way. And so it's like, what are you doing, angel? Like, are you making fun of Gideon? Are you being sarcastic here? Because if you are, that's a good one. But I think what's happening here is that the angel knew because God had told him. The angel knew who Gideon was going to become. The angel knew who Gideon was. The angel knew the path that Gideon was about to walk and what he would be as a result of walking it. So he called him what he knew he wasn't yet, but knew he would be, O mighty man of valor. And Gideon's response to me is one of the funnier responses in the Bible. Now the Bible's not really known for its jokes, so when I read it, you're not going to fall over laughing at this, but the honesty of it is interesting. Chapter 6, verse 13. So the angel comes to Gideon and he says, the Lord is with you, almighty man of valor. And Gideon says, are you sure? Because I'm down here. I'm treading this grain in this wine press. You sure about that? Because if God's with us, like our fathers say he is, then why are we oppressed by the Midianites? If God's with us, then what am I doing? And why has the God who's promised us that he's going to protect us, why has he forsaken us? Which I think it's interesting as an aside to see Gideon blaming God for decisions that he and his people made. Gideon, brother, God didn't forsake you. You forsook him. God didn't take his hand off of you. God didn't take his hand of protection off of you. God didn't take his blessing off of you because he just got tired of you. You didn't want it there. So he removed it. And now you're living in the consequences of your actions. And I think it's a good lesson for us. It's not the point, but I do want to make it. Sometimes in life, we walk through hard times because broken things happen in a broken world. People get sick. We lose people too soon. Tragedy strikes. It's not fair and it will never make sense on this side of eternity. And sometimes those things simply happen because this world is broken. But a lot of times things happen because we did them. A lot of times things happen because we kind of said, God, your hand on my life is uncomfortable. Your control and sovereignty over my life is uncomfortable. I don't like it. I'd like to be able to do whatever it is I want to do. So if you could kind of leave me alone for a little while, I'm just going to do my thing. And God says, okay. And then we get to the end of the consequences of those choices. And like Gideon, we're like, God, why have you forsaken me? And like Gideon, he didn't forsake us. We forsook him. So I thought it was worth it to pause. I have a note in my Bible from years ago when I first encountered this story in this Bible. It's interesting how Gideon shifts the blame there to God for something that Israel had done. But to his better point, if God's with us, why am I here? If God's actually good and he actually promised us this stuff, then what am I doing in this spot right here? Why am I down here? And I think that's a question that all of us can relate to at some point in our life. If God's so good and if he's so loving, then why am I down here? Whatever down here is. And so the angel responds to him. And the angel says, the Lord is with you. I promise he's with you. You can go in confidence. And so Gideon says this in verse 15. Please, Lord, how can I save Israel? Behold, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house. And the Lord said to him, But I will be with you, and you shall strike the Midianites as one man. And he said to him, If I have now found favor in your eyes, then show me a sign that it is you who speak with me. There's a lot going on there in those verses. But the first thing we see I think is very interesting. The angel doubles down and says, no, no, no, you're the one that God is going to use to save Israel. And Gideon says, but why me? My father's tribe, clan, is the smallest in all of Manasseh, and I am the youngest of all the brothers. You couldn't have picked a less significant person to lead your charge than me. No one's going to follow me. No one's going to believe me. I am not a mighty man of valor. I've never done any of this stuff before. You've got the wrong guy. But the angel doubles down and says, no, no, no, you are the one. God has chosen you. And so now Gideon realizes he's hearing from God. He's being told to walk in a direction, but he does so timidly. And he says, okay, I need to make sure that you're an angel from the Lord. I need to make sure that I think I'm hearing, that I'm hearing what I think I'm hearing. Will you stay here? I'm going to go make us dinner. And I need to see a sign. I need something so I know that this is the direction I need to move in. And so he goes back to his house. He leaves the angel under the tree. He makes some dinner. There's some hotcakes or something involved. And he serves dinner to the angel. And the angel takes his staff and taps the dinner. And the dinner catches on fire. It was baked Alaska, and he didn't know about it. And so he's like, man, this is amazing. I can't believe this. That's a neat trick and a pretty clear sign from God. Okay, I believe you, and I trust you. I'm in. What would the Father have me do? And the angel says, do you know? Now, this, the following dialogue is a loose paraphrase of scripture. It's in Judges 6, you read it. The angel says, you know those gods that the Midianites erected in the middle of town to kind of snub their nose at everyone and say like, hey, we're the boss now. Like those idols mean that, that's from that Tom Hanks movie. I'm the captain now. That's what those idols mean. Like we're in charge here now. Don't mess with us. We got you. And Gideon's like, yeah, I know the ones. And he goes, listen, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take your dad's bull, the biggest one. And then I want you to take a young bull from your dad. And I want you to go and tear down the idol in the middle of town and then I want you to sacrifice the bull to our God. And Gideon's like, now what now? Because that, friends, is poking the bear. That is walking into the middle of town, these idols that the Midianites constructed in the middle of town to make everybody know we are the boss now. It is not you. Our God is superior to your God. We've got a handle on the situation. Go and tear it down. What do you think is going to happen when Gideon tears it down and the Midianites wake up and they see that it's been torn down? Do you think they're going to show up in the middle of Gideonon City and be like, all right, guys, now come on. Who did this stuff? Fix that idol for us. You guys are the best. That's hilarious. That's not going to happen. They're going to be mad. They're coming for blood. And Gideon's tribe knows that. So they wake up in the morning and word starts to spread. Oh my goodness, somebody tore down the idol. Who was stupid enough to do this? What in the world? We got to figure this out. And so they figured out it was Gideon. They go to Gideon's house. And they're there with their pitchforks, man. They're crying out to Gideon's father. Give us your son Gideon so that we can kill him so that we might mitigate the anger of the Midianites when they come crashing down the hill to come make us answer for this stuff. We've got to be able to show them that we did our part. Please don't hurt us. They're terrified of the Midianites. And Gideon's dad gives this impassioned speech about who they are and they're the chosen people of God and that they need to band together and that they can defeat the Midianites. It probably was a really cool speech. I'd love to see it in like an HBO or Netflix series, this big climatic moment where the tide turns, it shifts. And the people who came to kill Gideon by the end of the exchange are now ready to follow him into battle. Yeah, let's get them. No more. It's Braveheart crying freedom, right? So then word goes out throughout all of Israel. We have a leader now. His name is Gideon and he's going to face off against the Midianites. Send all your fighting men. And as that cry, as that call is going out to the nation of Israel to send Gideon your fighting men in Manasseh where there's going to be a face-off, Gideon gets nervous and he goes to God in prayer. And this is part of the story that you guys may know. It's the most famous part of the story. He goes to God in prayer and he says, God, if you really want me to do what I think you want me to do, if I'm meant to lead these men after a lifetime of never leading a single fighting man in my life, we see no evidence in the text that Gideon had even fought, besides the fact that he had brothers, so he probably got into a couple scraps. But we see no evidence that he was a soldier of any kind. And so he says, God, if you really want this guy who's not a soldier, who's the youngest of all the brothers in the smallest tribe and one of the smallest clan in the smallest tribe, if you want me to lead the people of Israel, I need to know that I know that I know. So please, can you do something for me? I'm going to put my fleece out when I sleep. I'm going to put this lambskin out in front of my tent when I sleep. And if I wake up in the morning and the ground around the fleece is bone dry, but the fleece has dew on it and is wet, I'll take that as a sign from you that I'm supposed to lead these men into battle in your name and that you will give us the victory. So Gideon goes to sleep, wakes up the next day, pokes his head out of his tent, feels the ground around the fleece and it's bone dry. He feels the fleece and it's soaking wet. He's got a sign. God showed him. Ride into battle, mighty man of valor. But that's not what Gideon does. Gideon does this. In Judges 6, verses 39, Then Gideon said to God, Let not your anger burn against know why you picked me either. I'm a total drag. But if you could just do that do trick again, but this time the old switcheroo, then I would certainly know that this is what you want me to do. And so it happens. The fleece is dry, the ground is wet, and Gideon knows that this is what he needs to do. And so he goes and he leads. And it's worth noting at this point in the story that Gideon, he's frightened out of his mind. He's scared senseless. He is timid. He is doubtful. He is hesitant. He does not want to step forward and do this. He needs assurance from God at every turn. And he is right and good to be terrified. He would have been terrified to pull down the idols and have to face off with his townsmen and know that he's going to have to go to battle. And now a call has gone out to make him the general of all the armies of Israel. And he's never led a single person before. He knows he's wildly inadequate for this task and he is scared. But he steps. And it's worth noting that terrified obedience still counts. Terrified obedience? God, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't know what's on the other side of obedience. You're asking me to jump over this fence. I don't know what's on the other side of it, but I know that this is what you want me to do, and I'm scared senseless, God, that I could take this step of obedience, and it could cost me this friendship. It could cost me this relationship. It could cost me money. It could cost me experience. It could cause animosity between me and my wife or me and my husband. It could cause me to take the wrong step with my children that there's going to be ramifications for for decades to come. God, I'm terrified of taking this step. And yet terrified obedience still counts. I would say it's probably the most forming kind of obedience. Some obedience is easy. You get lunch with your friend and you say, I really, I've got this decision to make. I really don't know what the Lord wants me to do. I'm trying to just discern. I feel like God wants me to move in this direction, but I just want to be sure. It's this new job. I get a lucrative signing bonus, better hours, more flexibility, 40% more money, and I get stock options. I just don't, does God want me to take this step? Yes, yes, he. Take the step. Take the step. And then you take us out to dinner. Alright, take the step. That's easy obedience. Some obedience is hard. Some obedience terrifies us. Moving six and a half hours away, taking your one year old away from their new grandparents with a wife who's not sure about whether or not to go. That's scary. That's scary obedience. But scary obedience is some of the most formative obedience. And so it still counts. And we're all called to it at some point. So Gideon decides to obey. He's going to be the general of the Lord's armies. And 32,000 men show up from all over Israel. It's like an act. We don't know. I searched the text. We don't know how many men the Midianites had. And by this point, they had partnered up with the Amalekites because they see that there's a revolt going on in Israel and they're trying to thwart it. So 32,000 fighting men show up and God looks at that and he tells Gideon, listen, that's too many men. If you guys go into battle and you win and people hear about it, they're going to think that you did it, man. And they need to know that I did it and that you had nothing to do with this. That's too many guys. Go to them and tell them that if anybody's scared, then they can go home. So Gideon goes back to them and he says, if any of you are afraid, if you're trembling, if you've been forced to be here against your will, if you don't want to go, if you don't want to fight, then you go home. No harm done. No one's going to hold it against you. Go home. It'll be fine. 22,000 men leave, leaving 10,000 behind. Which, if I'm one of those 10,000 men, and let's be honest, I would not have been. I'd have been like, all right, we'll see you later on the first chance. But if I'm one of those 10,000 men, I'm going, I made the wrong choice. But we're stuck here now. Let's rush to death together, boys. And God looks at those 10,000 men and he goes, yeah, Gideon, I'm sorry, buddy. That's too many. We need less than that so that people know I'm the one who brings victory. So he says, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take your men down to this brook to get a drink of water. There's going to be two kinds. There's going to be lappers who put their face in the water and lap it up like a dog. They just hoover it right in like some animals. And then there's going to be scoopers who keep their eyes on the horizon and scoop the water and drink from their hands. All right? I want you to keep the scoopers and send the lappers home. The lappers are weird. We don't need them anyways. The scoopers have their eyes on the horizon. They're good soldiers. Let's keep them. So that's what Gideon does. And when he's done with this winnowing process, there's 300 men left, 300 scoopers. And he's like, okay, God, what's the plan? God says, here's what I want you to do. Arm all 300 men with a clay pot and a torch. And I want you at night to go to the camp and surround the Midianites and the Amalekites. And when you give the signal, everyone's to shatter their pots and scream a sword for the Lord and a sword for Gideon. And then you're going to win. There's at least 30,000 men in this camp. But this is the plan. And God in his goodness to Gideon says, if you need a sign, because I know you're that kind of guy, if you need a sign, you don't have to ask for me this time. Take Pura, your servant, and sneak down the hill and listen at the camp of the Midianites and I'll give you a sign. So that's what Gideon does. He says, he could have gone right then, but he takes the sign from God, and he goes down, and he sits next to a tent, and at that tent, he hears some Midianite soldiers talking to one another, and one of them says, I just had a vision, and the soldier says, what was your vision? And he says, there's a man named Gideon. He's an Israelite, and he's going to come down, and he's going to kill us all. And upon hearing this vision, Gideon does this in Judges chapter 7 verse 15, as soon as Gideon heard the telling of the dream and its interpretation, he worshiped. And he returned to the camp of Israel and said, arise for the Lord has given the host of Midian into your hand. There's so much to learn from that response. We can make the whole sermon that response. What was Gideon's response to the good news from God? He worshiped. What should be our response when we get good news from God? We should worship. What should be our response when we struggle to know what to do? We should worship. What should be our response when we're sad and we're down and we're low? We should worship. What's our response when we're at peace? We should worship. He turns and he worships God. And then he goes to the men and he says, let's go. God's given the Midianites into our hands. So they go down and they surround the Midianites and the Amalekites and all 300 of them and at Gideon's signal, they light their torches and they bash the clay pots and there's this great clamor and they yell a sword for the Lord and a sword for Gideon in unison. And the Amalekites and the Midianites wake up, they come out of their tents and they look. And as far as they know, in total darkness, they're surrounded by 300 torches. And on the other side of those 300 torches are the 32,000 fighting Israelite men who have come to destroy them. And so they wake up and they just start fighting whoever they can see. They start to fight each other because they can't recognize who's in their army and who's not. All they know is that there's an invading force trying to kill them in the middle of the night and they start killing each other. And listen, I know that might sound crazy, but even though I have never been a part of hand-to-hand combat, which I know is surprising news, but I've never been a part of hand-to-hand combat, but I have watched a lot of Viking and medieval shows, okay? And I've seen this happen a bunch of times. So I can tell you from pretty good second-hand knowledge, based on the way that the director chose to depict it, that these are incredibly chaotic scenes. And often I watch them and I wonder, they don't have uniforms. They're not wearing flags. How do they know who belongs to who and who's fighting for who? So they rushed out of their tents and all they know is that guy has a sword and I don't know him and I'm going to defend my life. And if anybody tries to escape, we presume that Gideon's army just kind of steps over. It's like, no, no, I don't think so. And then they kill that person. They just kind of wait until they defeat both armies at once. The Midianite king escapes, gets out with a small contingent, and Gideon goes to chase him. The Midianite king goes, and he goes through intentionally territories that are favorable to him, that are going to let him pass through their land without hassling them. But when Gideon tries to go through their land, the kings of those lands are like, hey, buddy, you can't bring your army through here, all right? We don't want to have to support you and your whole crew, so you've got to find another way around. And Gideon, without missing a beat, without waiting on a sign from God, says, hey, listen, listen, listen, listen. We're going to go, listen to me, we're going to go and we're going to kill him. And if you don't let us stay here, when we get done killing him, we're going to come back and kill you. So what do you want to do? And the kings go, we're sorry, Mr. Gideon, you just please use all the land you need. And he goes and he kills the Midianite king and he overthrows the oppressors. And scripture tells us that he faithfully judges Israel for 40 years. And the question to me is how did he go from this fearful timidity in the wine press to this confident courage on the field of battle? Because those are two totally different dudes, man. Those are two totally different guys. The guy in the wine press that talks to the angel, oh yeah, if God is with us, then where is he? Because I don't see him and I'm down here hiding out from everyone because I'm scared. The guy who needs a sign from the angel, who needs two signs from God, who needs to feel good about attacking, like the guy who's needed God's pushing all along the way and can barely hear him and barely obey him. By the end of the story is threatening kings and moving decisively and with confident clarity at hearing the voice of God and acting on the instructions? What changed for Gideon? He experienced God. He experienced God. At the beginning of the story, we get some insight into who Gideon was. He says, if God is here, if he's up there, then why am I down here? And then, I don't know if you saw in the text, he calls him the God of our fathers. If the God of our fathers is real, he didn't call him my God, the God of my fathers. See, at this point in Gideon's life, I would surmise he had only heard about God. Other people had only told him about who his God was and what he did. God was an experience of other people, of the people who came before him. God was not someone that he had personally experienced. He was still their God, the God that he had heard about. And I think this is so important because for so many of us, for so many years, God is the God that other people talk about. God is the God that Nate gets up and preaches about. Jesus is the Savior that other people sing to, that other people experience, that other people cry out to. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit that guides other people, that speaks to other people, that convicts other people. But we haven't personally experienced those things, and we kind of wonder when it's going to be our turn. And I think so many of us can relate to Gideon because to Gideon, God was someone that other people talked about. And to so many of us, so often, God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are things and gods and people that other folks seem to experience and talk about. But we haven't experienced them. And so we talk about them like I talk about Viking battles, secondhand from what I see. And so I think what changed with Gideon is that he experienced God. He walked in terrified obedience. God shows up and says, hey, I want you to go tear down those idols, but I can't, I'm gonna get killed. Just trust me, do it. Okay, can I please get a sign? Yeah, I'm gonna burn your dinner. Okay, I'm gonna go do it. And he does it. And he does it in the middle of the night because he's fearful of the ramifications. But God's faithful to him. And instead of having him be killed by the mob, the mob now wants to follow him. And then all of Israel is coming to follow him and Gideon says, God, are you sure I'm the guy? Are you sure I can do this? And he gets a sign and then another sign and with timidity and fear he steps out and he says, okay. And then God widows down his army to 300 men. And he says, are you sure, God, I need to do this? Yeah, I'm sure. And those 300 men conquer 30,000. And then we see him walking with confidence. Do you see this transition that happens in Gideon? This man who hasn't experienced God and doesn't recognize the voice of God and isn't sure if he can trust this voice of God becomes a man who, without blinking, recognizes God's voice and walks in confidence that God will do what he said he was going to do. So what happened to Gideon, what moves him from this doubtful, timid hesitancy in his faith to courageous clarity in his faith is nothing that he did. It's not following the rules better. It's simply walking in obedience to God. And in taking those steps of faith and walking the path that God called him to walk, he experienced the goodness of God and the faithfulness of God and the reality that God is one who keeps his promises. And Gideon learned the lesson that as long as I step in the path that God has laid out for me, nothing can happen to me that God doesn't want to have happen to me. He will keep his word. He will be faithful to his promises. And the same invitation is extended to us. Quite simply, if we want to experience God and grow in our faith, we need to obey. We need to take a step of obedience. In a few weeks, I'm going to do a whole sermon on the fact that at Grace, we define discipleship and spiritual growth as taking the next step of obedience. So I won't belabor that point now except to say that we believe that everyone has a next step of obedience that's been placed in front of them. And I would contend that if we feel weak in our faith, if we feel timid in our faith, if we feel like our faith hasn't progressed to where it should, if we feel like God is someone that other people talk about, but that we haven't experienced that maybe, maybe, maybe it's because we haven't been taking those steps of obedience, the easy ones or the fearful ones, to watch God come through for us. So we train our spiritual ear to hear the voice of God, to see him in circumstances, and know that's the way that he wants us to walk. And so for all of us, in light of the story of Gideon, as we move from timidity to courage, as we sing, I'm no longer a slave to fear. I am a child of God. As we sing in a few minutes and we say over and over again that God makes us brave. Let's understand he makes us brave by our obeying him, even when we don't know what's on the other side of obedience and trusting that when we get there, God will take care of us. So God, even though I'm scared and even though I don't know how it's going to work out and even though this is a really difficult step for me to take, I'm going to take it and I'm going to trust that you're going to be there for me when I get there. And I'm telling you, the more you do that, the easier the step gets the next time. Not because you've got it figured out and you're great and you're awesome, but because you know that you can trust your God to come through when he says he's going to come through. And so we become brave as Gideon became brave. I don't know what your step is. I have no doubt in my mind that with this many folks in a room, some of you, your step is right here. You know good and well what God would have you do. It may be terrifying. Terrified obedience still counts. Maybe it's to have a conversation that you've been putting off and dreading and avoiding. Maybe it's to mend some fences and offer forgiveness in a place where you're not quite ready to do that yet. Maybe your simple step of obedience is to actually set the alarm 30 minutes early and get up and spend time in God's word and time in prayer like we talk about all the time. Maybe your next step of obedience is to actually turn around and invest in your spouse and invest in your marriage and double down on it instead of finding small ways to escape it whenever you can and see what goodness comes from God in that. Maybe it's to be present for your kids and not try to avoid them so much. Maybe it's to take a step and begin to trust God with your finances and give generously. Maybe it's to deprioritize some things that are getting too much of your time. I don't know what your next step is, but I know that you have one. And I know that if you take it, as happened to Gideon, you will experience God in the taking of that step. You will experience him come through for you. You will walk with bravery as you take step after step, and you will become the person who God has created you to be. So, grace, go from here, mighty men and women of valor. Go from here, wise men and women of grace and patience, kind men and women of goodness and mercy, and obey God and let him make you brave in that step. Let's pray. Father, thank you for being the one constant that we have, the one thing that we can count on, the one constant in our life that will absolutely never, ever let us down. Lord, I pray that you would make clear for those who can hear me what our next step of obedience is. God, what would you press on us that we need to do? What step would you press on us that we need to take, God, and give us the courage to take it? Let us embrace the fact that terrified obedience still counts. You'll take it, and it is sometimes the most formative obedience. God, as a church, make us brave. As a church, give us the faith to take the step of obedience that you lay out in front of us. Let us move as one as you seek to impact corners of the community of the city of Raleigh and Wake Forest and the surrounding towns. Make us brave as individuals so that we might be brave as a church and so walk in your might and in your truth and in your identity and serve you well as we go. It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.