Sermons tagged with Church

The Yo, good to see everybody. Thank you again for being here. This is the sixth part in our series going through the book of Revelation. I have really very much enjoyed going through Revelation with you all. And honestly, you guys have been more enthusiastic about it than I expected because Revelation can be a slog. It can be tough. We just took three weeks working through the tribulation, talking about the wrath of God and all the mechanics of the tribulation best we can. And to me, that feels tedious, but you guys have been incredibly supportive and incredibly kind. And it seemed like y'all have enjoyed going through this with me. As folks have asked me, how is Revelation being received? I say, it seems universally good. However, no one's going to tell me it's bad. No one's going to email me and be like, just so you know, really are looking forward to when this series is over and we can talk about something else. So that might be out there. And if that's you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for hanging with us. But for those of you who have enjoyed this, thanks so much for the encouragement because it's been really, really neat to get to go through it with you guys as a church. This morning, we arrive at Christ's return, the return of Christ. And I said last week that this needs to be the best sermon that I've ever preached in my life, to do adequate justice to the grandiosity of what's happening in Revelation 19. This will not be the best sermon of my life. I just wish that it could be, okay? So let's temper our expectations now. This is a B minus, all right? But in this sermon, we arrive at Jesus' return, at kind of the culmination of God's wrath, the final nail in the coffin. I said we've been walking through the tribulation. We've kind of looked at it through three different lenses. We looked at it in the first week to understand the wrath of God that's poured out in the tribulation, and we defined it. We defined it that week when we looked at Revelation 4 and 5, and Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, qualified to open up the seals and begin to open up God's wrath on his creation. We said he's beginning the seven-year process of tribulation. Now, what is tribulation? Well, we define that as the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on his creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. And this week, he reclaims it. This week, he does the last part of the tribulation. Then we looked at kind of the flow of it, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, and then we looked at the figures of it, and we'll talk a little bit more about the beast, the Antichrist, today. But where we're at in the narrative of Revelation is we're at the end of the Tribulation. God has poured out his wrath. We've had this great battle. There's been a great earthquake. God has sent darkness onto the kingdom of the Antichrist. And then he sends his son to finish up the work. He sends his son to answer the voice of the martyrs that cries out in Revelation chapter 6, the fifth seal. The voice of the martyrs below the throne of God that say, how much longer, God, before you avenge our death? You know who killed us. You see us suffering as your children. How much longer will you let this keep going? And we talked about in that week how we cry out with the martyrs, that every time something in our life happens that seems difficult or hard to understand or seems unfair, every time there's a school shooting, God, how much longer are you going to let this go on? Every time we lose someone too soon, God, how much longer will you let this world be broken? Every time we see something that we can't understand, we cry out with the martyrs and we say, God, how much longer, oh Lord, will you put up with this? And when he begins to open up the seals and begin the process of tribulation, he says, no more. And when he sends his son Christ, when we see Jesus in Revelation 19, that is God putting the final nail in the coffin of evil and saying, now I will make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Now I will rectify things. Now I will restore creation. Now I will answer the groanings that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 8 when we are told that all of creation groans for the return of the king. When we're told that we yearn inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters to experience eternity in the marriage supper of the lamb, we wait for this. We long for this. This is the hope that persists in our faith and keeps us anchored to our savior because we believe that revelation 19 is going to happen one day, that he's going to come get us, and that when he comes back, you guys have heard me say this before, he's not coming back as the Lamb of God. He comes back as the Lion of Judah. And we see this description in Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. So if you have a Bible, you can read along with me. I love this description of my Jesus. Every time I read it, whether it's out loud or just in private, I get chills. I love this picture of him. And I don't know, I don't know if everybody can relate to this. This may just be silly. This may just be me being a dummy, and that's fine. I'm familiar with this territory. It's not unfamiliar. But when I read this passage about my Jesus, that part of me as a little kid that loved to see the hero win in movies, that teenage boy that loved to watch Braveheart win, that loved Gladiator and seeing Russell Crowe's character stick it to him, that little boy that loves Star Wars, that loves to see the hero win against evil, against all odds, that part of us, and I'm sharing that with you because I think that God lays that in us intentionally. I think we love the hero because the hero is a shadow of this reality that Jesus becomes. We grow up learning to love when the day is saved and when the hero makes an appearance because God wove that, I think, into our hearts to appreciate the appearance of his son when that hero returns and appears once and for all. So it's with that preamble that we'll read the description as Jesus comes back to reclaim his creation. This is the description of him that John records. Chapter 19, verse 11. And behold, a white horse. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Gosh. That's Jesus, man. That's Jesus. That's our Savior. When we think of Jesus, when we pray to him, when we sing to him, when we think about him, when we think about being reunited with him in heaven, I believe that it's our tendency to think about the gospel of Jesus, to think about the crucified Christ. And I don't think that's anybody's fault. We have four gospels. We spend time there all the time. I revisit a gospel every spring with you guys. We focus on Jesus at Easter. We focus on Jesus at Christmas. And we see the teachings from Jesus come out of the gospel. And so it's right and good to think about our Jesus as the crucified Christ. It's right and good to think about our Jesus as gentle and lowly. We're actually reading a book, as the staff right now, called Gentle and Lowly, and what it tells us, and I did not know this, but that the only time that Jesus is ever asked to describe himself in scripture, or rather the only time that he actually does it, he describes himself as gentle and lowly. And I think that when we think about Jesus, we think about a humble Nazarene from the country. And that's fine and that's well and good. But that's Jesus in human form. Revelation 19, that's Jesus. You understand? That's who's waiting on us. That's who's coming to get us. That warrior king written on his robe and on his thigh, king of kings and Lord of lords as a callback to Isaiah so that we know exactly who it is. And when you read through this passage, it's unbelievable to me how rich it is with allusions to other parts of scripture so that there is no doubt about it that this is Jesus coming from the very beginning. It says that he was called faithful and true, capitalized. This is a deity. This is Jesus coming. And then it says that only he knows his name, which is, that's Exodus chapter three and four, when God refuses to share his name. That's a throwback to that. And then he says that he was called the word of God, which John is referencing his own writings at beginning of John, the gospel, when he says that the word was with God in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God through him, all things were made without him, nothing was made. And then at the end, king of kings and Lord of lords. John, in this description of Jesus is weaving together all of the scripture to point us to our savior. This is the Jesus, the one who has fire coming out of his eyes and a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. The one who rules with the rod of iron, who has the armies of heaven arrayed in linen, following down as he thunders down to conquer the beast and the dragon and the antichrist. That's the one that sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. That's the one that rules for all of eternity. That's the one that we pray to. And that's the one who's coming to get you. So I want to at least take some time this morning to encourage you. When you sing to Jesus, when you pray to him, when you think of him, when you anticipate meeting him, anticipate the conquering Christ. Anticipate this Jesus. Anticipate the warrior king coming down to settle the score. Anticipate the lion of Judah coming down to wreck shop. To once and for all sweep evil off the face of the planet. And when you do that, when you focus on the conquering Christ, to me, it really caused me to think about this a lot this week, that the conquering Christ renders the crucified Christ all the more miraculous. The conquering Christ, Christ conquering renders Christ crucified all the more miraculous. Because this description in Revelation 19 with a robe dipped in blood and a sword coming out of his mouth and a rod of iron that he rules a nation with, he's gonna tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God with all of heaven's armies arrayed behind him, thundering down to wreck shop. That Jesus hung on the cross for you. That Jesus walked away from all of that, condescended to take on our form, walked with us for 33 years, nurtured disciples to birth a church that would become his true kingdom that he's coming back to rescue so that you and I can sit in here 2,000 years later. He did all that, meek and mild. And when he describes himself as gentle and lowly, yeah, you're not kidding, man. Because look who he is in earth and look who he could be this whole time. This description, this guy, this God, this warrior king, he hung on the cross for you. Not just some sage from the hills of Israel. God condescended for you. He chose to hang on the cross. So I love that moment with Pilate. He's like, are you really a king? And he's like, don't worry about it, Pilate. If I wanted to, this whole place would be smashed. At any moment in Jesus' life, he could have called down these armies and just crushed anybody who opposed him. Caiaphas, the high priest, is sitting there thinking he's got Jesus right where he wants him, and Jesus is just thinking, you have no idea who I am. He dies, he's separated from God. Satan thinks he's got Jesus right where he wants him. Jesus says, you have no idea who I am. Christ conquering, to me, renders Christ crucified as all the more miraculous. And when I think about my Jesus, this is who I think about. He comes to get us and to take us back up to heaven and to start off eternity. And when he comes to get us, he takes us back, we're told, to what's called the marriage supper of the Lamb. He's defeated the beast. He's defeated the Antichrist. He locks them up. It begins the thousand-year reign. We're going to talk about that next week. There's an encore of evil, and then Jesus once and for all throws them in the lake of fire, and that's it. But he comes down. He captures the beast. The armies conquer. He takes his children, he wipes evil off the face of the earth, he purifies his bride, and then we have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And I feel bad for how I'm covering the marriage supper of the Lamb in this series. Because I'm not gonna do it justice. I'm not gonna adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this series. Because I'm not going to do it justice. I'm not going to adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this way of false humility, like, oh yeah, I'm really not doing that good of a job with it. Like, no, I'm not. We just don't have enough time to sink in to everything that's here and even all the symbolism in the marriage supper of the Lamb. But a simple way of thinking about it is the marriage supper of the lamb is the greatest celebration feast of all time. It is the greatest celebration feast that ever was and ever will be. And this should hit home with us. Because what do we do? What do we do when we want to celebrate? I got a little bit of good news last week. Such good news that I went straight to the butcher's market. I bought myself a big old ribeye and I had that for dinner when the kids went to bed. I had myself my own personal private celebration feast. When your team wins, what do you do? You have a feast. When something good in life happens, when you graduate, you have a feast. When people come into town, what do you do? You have a feast. What are we going to do this week? We're going to get together with friends and family. We're going to reflect on the blessings that God has given us, and we're going to have a feast. This is what we do to celebrate. When your kid gets married, and you celebrate kind of transitioning into that season of life. This one has passed. We've formed a new family. What do you do? You get all your friends together and you have a feast. This is what God is doing. It's the greatest celebration feast of all time. In the days of old when kings would conquer and they would come back from conquering another king, what did they do? They feasted. And Jesus is bringing us back to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Why is it called the marriage supper of the Lamb? Because Jesus is getting married. Who's he marrying? Us. The church. His bride. We see throughout Scripture that the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. We see in Ephesians that God purifies his bride. He prepares us. We are made pure for Jesus so that we might marry him in eternity. I don't know how all that works out. It's a word play, but we are made pure by our savior. How are we made pure? By the crucified Christ hanging on the cross. He died for us. He covered over you in righteousness, made you good, purified you, prepared you for this very moment, for the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the church and Christ are united for all of eternity and perfect bliss. And so it's right and good to have a feast to celebrate the marriage. And this feast, man, it's going to be a good feast. The ones that you've lost, they're going to be there. I don't know for certain. I can't find it in Scripture. But I'm pretty sure they're going to serve catfish at this feast. Because my papa is going to be there. He loves catfish. And I know he's got some waiting on me. Your loved ones are going to be there too. Your dads are going to be there. And your moms. And the children that you never got to meet because you lost them too early, they're going to be there. All the saints who have come before us, all the saints that you've loved, they're going to be there. And listen to this. They're going to be the best versions of themselves. They're not going to be sick. They're not going to be unhealthy. They're not going to be unwell. They're going to be the perfect versions of themselves. They're not going to have all the brokenness that hurts us sometimes. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your dad, who you loved, but man, that guy had a temper. In heaven, he doesn't have a temper anymore. He's just love. He's just all the best parts of him. The people who we love, who made it sometimes hard to love them. Jesus has prepared those brides too. Their brokenness is wiped away. And they love you with purity. And you're made perfect too. All the crap in your life, all the stuff that you wish wasn't true of you, all the things that you hope nobody finds out, all the brokenness that spills out of you and hurts the people around you when you don't want to hurt them and you hate that side of yourself, that side's gone at the marriage supper of the Lamb. You're made perfect there. You're made your ideal self there. You're made your eternal self there. And you can love other people finally with the purity that God loves you with. We see the best versions of the folks we love. I am convinced of this. We finally walk in the best versions of ourself and don't have to wonder what it would be like to not have to walk through life as a selfish, egotistical jerk. That one's just for me. I don't know what your thing is. That feast is going to be remarkable. And everybody's going to be there. And Jesus is coming to take you to that. And I think that's pretty great. And as I thought about these things this week, the triumphant return of Christ and the marriage supper of the Lamb and all that it represents and what Jesus really won with that victory. What does it mean for us? Yes, evil is smited. Evil is gone and all the wrong things are made right and all the sad things are made untrue. All that is very true and God wins once and for all and that part of us that loves a hero gets to see the actual hero come storming out of the clouds. He wins those things for us. We see our God claim victory and that's great. But there's something else that occurred to me too. I was prepared. I knew this was going to happen. We're not even to the hard part yet. Jeez, old Pete. Something else occurred to me as I kind of asked the question, what has Jesus won? And what are we celebrating at the marriage supper? And I was reminded of this idea that I have long carried with me, but I've not heard too many other people talking about it. I've actually never heard a pastor talk about this. It doesn't make it a unique idea. It's just one that I've not heard other people mention. And maybe it's because pastors aren't supposed to say things like this and the other ones know better and yours doesn't. But I've long carried with me this idea that faith and hope are burdens. Faith and hope are hard. We celebrate faith and hope in our belief system. We're told that the greatest of all these things is faith, hope, and love. We celebrate faith and hope. We want those. We name our children faith and hope. They are good things. But I, in my life, in my most honest moments, experience them often as a burden, as something to be carried, as something to be chosen. Because faith is a belief in things that you can't see. Faith is what we choose when facts fall short of certainty. Do you understand? There's things that we can know about the universe and about our God and about scripture and about the claims and about life. There's things that can be scientifically proven and broken down and rendered as factual. And then there's what we choose to put our faith in. Then there's certainty. And when facts fall short of certainty, we fill that gap with faith. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're an atheist, there's no way to be totally certain of what you think's going on in the universe. So when we reach the end of facts and we have to arrive at certainty, we fill that gap with faith. So faith is a choice. We choose it. We exercise it. We learn it. We let God speak into it. We let him strengthen it over the course of our life. The longer you walk with God, hopefully the stronger your faith gets, but it gets stronger because it's been tried and it's been tested and it's been a burden that you've chosen to continue to carry. Hope is a burden. Hope is a belief that one day something can be true that I want to be true. Hope, to even have hope, is an admission that right now things are not the way that I want them to be. Right now things are less than ideal. Right now things are not what I want, but I hope, I believe that one day the things that I want can be brought about. Hope is an admission of a shortfall. People who are not yet parents and desperately want to be hope that one day this can be true of us. We, as believers, we read scripture, we hear the stories of Jesus coming down out of heaven, and we hope in that day. We place our faith in that day. We believe that there's going to be a marriage supper. We place our hope in that. We place our hope and our faith in the idea that our prayers are working, that they get to God, that they are powerful and effective and they're not just bouncing off the ceiling. But sometimes, life makes hope heavy. Sometimes life makes hope heavy. When you lose someone too early and your Bible teaches you that your God could have done something about it and you have to be confronted with the fact that he just simply didn't. In that season, you choose hope. And in that season, it's heavy. And sometimes, when life gets hard, and when faith and hope become burdens, and they become heavy, we see people put them down and walk away from them and say, I can't carry this faith anymore. I don't know how to believe in a God that would let that happen, so I'm gonna set down this faith. I don't know how I can still cling to hope when I've been disappointed in these ways, so I'm going to set down this hope. Sometimes faith and hope get heavy, and they get hard to carry. When you grow up in church, being taught a simple faith, and then you become an adult adult and there are things that happen in your world that just don't align with what you were taught when you were a kid and you have to learn how to find this new faith. You have to cling to it and you have to hope and you have to choose hope and you have to find ways to make what you were taught and what you're experiencing mesh and you have to find a whole new way to understand scripture and understand God and to understand how he speaks to you. In those moments, faith can get hard and hope can get heavy and we have to choose them. And I am convinced that the Christian life is simply a series of the decision to choose faith and to choose hope in Christ over and over and over again until we make it to the finish line. My prayer as I prayed before I preached this morning was that if there is anybody in here that's carrying heavy hope that it would get lightened just a little bit today. That we would have the strength and the faith to continue to carry it for a little bit longer. Just get down the road just a little bit further. Because sometimes faith and hope get heavy. And I hate that we don't talk about that as much because we should. And if that's true, if I'm right that they can be burdens, then one of the best things that Jesus wins when he comes sweeping out of the sky is on this day, he lays to rest faith and hope forever. And he says, here, you don't need these anymore. You don't need faith and hope anymore. Maybe that's why Paul writes in Romans 8, he says, for in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. When Jesus shows up, we don't need hope anymore. When he shows up, we don't need faith anymore. There's no more gap between facts and certainty. There's just Jesus. There's no more hoping for one day. There's just Jesus. One day has arrived. Do you understand that when Jesus sweeps down out of the sky, that he lays to rest for us for all eternity, faith and hope. And he says, you can set them down, weary traveler. You're here now. Let's feast. And I think that's a remarkable blessing. Because to be a Christian is to believe that one day these things will be true. To be a Christian is to believe that one day God will set all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. One of my favorite songs in the world is this song called Farther Along. Farther Along, I like the version from a guy named Josh Gerrels, and it opens up. And he says, I wonder why the good man dies and the bad man thrives and Jesus cries because he loves them both. And the chorus is, farther along, we'll know all about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. And it's just this acknowledgement, I think, that faith and hope are hard. Faith and hope are hard, but one day, I won't need those anymore. I can lay that and everything else down at the feet of my Savior. And on that day, when Jesus comes back, there are no more one days. On this day, Revelation 19, marriage supper of the Lamb, on that day, there are no more one days. It is one day for all eternity. There's no more wondering, there's no more hoping, there's no more struggling, there's no more pain. Because on that day, he puts an end to waiting on one day. And I kind of wonder now if that's why Paul didn't say what he said in Corinthians. When he gets to the end of talking about all the spiritual gifts and he says, but now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these, Paul says, is love. And I've always read and accepted that teaching, and it's made sense to me. Love binds. Love is the very nature of God. Love is what unites us together. It makes sense to me that love would be greater than faith and hope. But now I wonder, in light of what I've thought through this week, if maybe love isn't the greatest because when Jesus comes back and lays faith and hope to rest, that love is the only thing that exists for all of eternity. Maybe love is the greatest because it's the only thing left after Revelation 19. And we live in an eternity of perfect love that God designed us for, finally. As I was thinking through this sermon this week, I was pacing in the lobby. And as I was out there, just kind of walking back and forth, thinking through these things, asking myself the question, what has Christ won for us? I noticed on the information table, a bracelet, like a little ringlet. And I picked it up and I saw an inscription there. And I thought, oh, what is this? God, are you talking to me? Let? Speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm working on the sermon. There's a bracelet here. You've got to be working in this. So I reach over, and on the bracelet, it just says, it is well with my soul. Also, if that's your bracelet, it's right out there. It just said, it is well with my soul. And I thought, oh, I love that song. But that's not really helpful. Okay, God's not speaking. And I just kept pacing. And I got done and I kind of had a fully formed idea. And sometimes on Tuesdays when I get a fully formed idea, I get a little bit excited about the sermon and I'll go and I'll tell Kyle because Kyle's always up for a conversation. I said, Kyle, I got it. Listen, I told him about this idea of faith and hope being burdens and that Jesus is going to put those to rest for us. And Kyle started to get a little teary eyed. And he said, he said, that just reminds me of my favorite song, my favorite line from my favorite song. And he quoted me these lines from it as well. And I was like, oh my gosh, God is speaking. I'm just dumb. I always say God speaks in stereo. And Kyle quoted these lines. And he started crying. And I got misty, and I knew that this is what we were supposed to share, and I knew that we were supposed to end the service today with it as well. Because in these lines, we see the author of this song admitting what we've just talked about today. The faith and hope are burdens, and so it is well with my soul. We often sing this song in a response to grief as an admission that I am going to choose faith and hope even though it's heavy today. Now let's sing it looking forward to the day we can lay those things to rest and Jesus has won the final victory and forever we will say it is well with my soul. Stand and let's sing together.

The Pretty epic, huh? I mean, looky there. The sermon is half as good as the video. Y'all are going to leave here with your hair on fire. This is great. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. So thanks for being here. I thank you for watching online or catching up during the week if that's what you're doing. This is clearly the start of our series in the book of Revelation. I have been studying and prepping for this as far back as the summer because Joseph was a fun series. I loved doing Joseph. I love narrative series where we're just telling stories and seeing what we can learn from the story. The prep time on a Joseph sermon is about two and a half or three hours. The prep time on the Revelation sermon is 10 times that for each one. So you got to start those early. But because I've been doing so much studying, I'm very happy to tell you guys that I have all the answers for you. I'm going to tell you very clearly what happens in the book of Revelation. You can't ask me a question that I won't be certain about. And this is going to be a very productive time for the church. So I'm very much looking forward to it. Revelation, for some of us, has a lot of baggage. For some of us, it doesn't have very much at all. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s. And when you grew up in a Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s, Revelation was a big deal. I don't know if you guys realize that or what your church contexts are, but there was a season in church life when having strong opinions about the tribulation and the rapture was just a part of church. I actually talked to a church one time in a former life. I was a teacher at a private high school, and one of the churches was a small country Baptist church. And they said, hey, we're looking for a pastor if you know anybody. And I said, okay, well, you know, I'll keep my eyes out. And they said, but we're only going to hire people if they believe in a pre-trib rapture. That's a non-negotiable for us. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I'm like, oh, you mean that? Like, that's really important to you. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. Well, are you not pre-trib rapture? Because if you're not, I don't want you teaching my daughter Bible. I'm like, rapture is not coming up. All right. We're not covering that in 10th grade Bible. Don't worry about it. I wonder how many of you though have had, like, when I say pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, 1260 days, the four beasts, the man, the eagle, the lion, the ox, the 144,000 Jewish males from the tribes. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You've heard those things before. Okay. And then I won't ask the rest of us, how many of you are like, I got no clue, man. Like, no idea on this. You don't have to raise your hand. But yeah, so like, how do we approach like that wide of a swath of information and knowledge about this book? Because there's some of us that have been a part of really in-depth Bible studies and there's some of us who we've avoided it all together. So in thinking about how to approach the book of Revelation for these next seven weeks, I really thought it was worth noting the tendencies that we kind of tend towards as we approach the book of Revelation. Because again, some of us are very experienced with it, and some of us have never opened it because it's scary or intimidating or whatever. So as we begin, I kind of wanted to begin the series with this thought as we think about how do we approach the book of Revelation. I would contend that most people either overcomplicate or oversimplify Revelation. Most people in their approach to it have a tendency to either overcomplicate it or vastly oversimplify the book. And what I mean is we can overcomplicate it so that we miss the forest for the trees. We can overcomplicate it so much and drill down on things so much and ask so many questions about it. When is the rapture actually going to happen? Because of this verse, I think it's going to happen in the middle of the tribulation. When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? Are people, can you still get saved during the tribulation? What are the four creatures and the beasts and the angels and which angels have which wings and what do they represent and what's going on with the dragon trying to eat the baby and all these different things? what is the mark of the beast? Is it the vaccine? What is all that stuff, right? And so we can kind of drill down and the answer is no, stinking no, that's not the thing. The vaccine is not the mark of the beast. Anyways, we can get so concerned in drilling down on these details that we kind of miss the message of the book. And the thing about all those details that we'll talk about in a little bit and throughout the series is many of them are really not knowable. So to try to figure out what is the creature that comes out of the abyss that has a tail like a scorpion and stings you and it ails you for five months? Is that an attack helicopter or is that a scorpion? I don't know. And you don't either. And there's no way to know. So let's stop worrying about it, right? So we can overcomplicate it and get so mired in the details of the book that we miss the message. But we can also oversimplify it. I had somebody in my men's Tuesday morning Bible study who he's involved in a study in Revelation right now with another small group. He's cheating on me with another small group and it's hurtful. But he said, we were talking about Revelation and he waved his hand and he goes, Jesus wins. That's all you need to know. And listen, that's true. And this is a man who clearly he cares about Revelation and I don't mean to disparage him, but in that moment of just going, meh, Jesus wins, I would tend more towards that camp in my own interpretative approach of it, but that's not enough either. What happens when we overcomplicate or oversimplify the book of Revelation is that both approaches cheapen the message of the book. Both of those approaches really end up cheapening the message of the book in general. If we get so caught up with the details that it matters to us deeply who the 144,000 are and we search through the Bible to try to piece that one together, and we miss the overarching message of the book because of it, then we cheapen the message of the book. If we just dismiss it and say, listen, Jesus wins, that's all you need to know, then we cheapen the message of the book as well because there's a reason that Revelation exists. There's a reason that God called John up to heaven and gave him a vision of what's going to happen at the end of time. There's a reason he told him to write it down. There's a reason that people have died for the preservation of Scripture over the centuries. There's a reason that this book was canonized, was put in the Bible as part of every Bible that's ever been printed. There's a reason that God ends His revelation to us with this book. There's reasons for that, and so it's worth studying. And I would contend that the book of Revelation matters very much to God. And I would actually base it on the way that he starts the book. This is John writing it. Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. Listen to this. This verse, particularly the third verse, tells us that revelation is important to God. This book is important to God. And it says, blessed are those who read aloud, because this was a letter. It was written to the churches. And so there wasn't a bunch of copies. Gutenberg hadn't showed up yet. So there was just one letter and one person would read it aloud. So it's basically blessed are those who read it, blessed are those who study it, blessed are those who invest time in it. So God says that we will be blessed by doing this. And, you know, I was talking to Erin Winston, our great children's pastor, I think a year and a half or two years ago when we were talking about series ideas. And she just mentioned to me that she can't remember Grace having ever done a series in Revelation. And I thought, well, goodness, our church needs to know about this. Our church needs to know this book. We need to kind of demystify it and walk through it and see what we can learn from it. And we wanted to do it for a long time, but then the pandemic hit and this didn't feel like what I wanted to do strictly over video, right? I wanted this to be in person because some of the stuff that we have to talk about in the book is hard. That's not this week, but it's coming. And so I thought that it would be worth it to do this series together. And it'd be worth it to not overcomplicate things, to try to train ourselves to focus on the message of portions of it, rather than get mired in the details, but also get into it enough that we feel like we can understand it. So as we approach Revelation, we do need to do some background work to really understand why it was written. It was written by John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. He was in exile on the island of Patmos about 90 AD is what we think, is when we think it was written. So about 60 years after the death of Christ. He's the last living disciple. All the other disciples have died a martyr's death. He is the last stalwart of the disciples and the bastion of the early church. John really lived a remarkable life. And so God calls him up to heaven and shows him a vision and he writes it down and that becomes Revelation. And what we need to understand is that Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. To be a Christian at this point in history is to take your life into your hands. To be a Christian is to put yourself and your family at risk. It's to go into the catacombs, into underground graveyards, to have your Easter worship service because you cannot be seen in public doing this because you will be killed. It's to know friends and loved ones who have been dipped in tar and used as live torches to light the path into Rome. It's to watch your friends and loved ones get taken and thrown into the gladiator arena with animals that rip them apart. It is a tough time to be a Christian. And so John wrote this letter to them from God to give them hope, to encourage them, to help them hang in there, to help them see a path to a better day. And so when reading Revelation, we can never separate our understanding of it from how the original audience would have understood it. We can never make it mean something that it wouldn't have meant to them. But that also means that it's right and good for us to approach it, mining it for hope. That's the best reason to approach Revelation. It's not necessarily to know what's going to happen at the end of times with great detail, but to cling to the hope that the book offers us throughout it. This is why I love Revelation. If you've heard me preach any messages for any time at all, you've heard me say things like there's coming a day when Jesus is gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. You've heard me talk about Revelation 18 and 19 where he comes down with righteous and true tattooed on his thigh. He comes back not as the Lamb of God, but now as the Lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop. You've heard me talk about that because I take great solace in that in my personal faith. You've heard me talk about Revelation 21 when God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping and crying in pain anymore. You've heard me talk about that because it's in Revelation and it's hopeful and it's what we cling to. So when we read it, our top priority, our first priority ought to be to mine it for hope and to let it encourage us in our faith. That's far more important than some of the other details. And it's important enough to dig in and to see how it might offer us hope the same way it did the early church. As we seek to understand and interpret the book of Revelation, a couple rules of thumb for us as we walk through it together. The first is, it's not completely linear, but sometimes it is. It's not completely linear, but sometimes it's linear. And when I say linear, what I mean is just event after event from start to finish. The gospels are linear. The gospel of Mark starts at the beginning and moves through the story of Jesus to a crucifixion and then ascension. That's linear. It's just, it's all happening on the same timetable, right? Well, Revelation's not like that. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it moves through and it moves, this event happens, and then the very next thing he talks about is the event that follows the one that he just described. But sometimes he jumps. He says, I turn and I saw. And I'll show you in a second what I'm talking about. He says, then I turned and I saw, and it's something else is going on. And the thing that he's talking about over here happened before the thing he just got done talking about. Or it happens years after the thing he just got done talking about. And then in the next chapter over, he's going to talk about the stuff that happens in the middle. And then the next chapter over, he's going to talk about stuff that happened before that. So sometimes it's linear. Sometimes it's not. So you just have to know as you're reading it that he's not presenting us from chapter 1 to chapter 22 all the things in order. Another thing you should know is that it's not completely literal, but sometimes it is. It's not completely literal all the time. Sometimes it's figurative. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes the words that you're reading are actually going to happen. They're descriptive of a thing that really will take place. Sometimes you're reading it and it's figurative language to describe to you in the best way that John can what it will be like. Or because God is intentionally using powerful imagery, it's a picture of other events that have already happened. So as we're reading it and as we're studying through it, and there's a reading plan that will be, it would be on the, is it on the table this morning, Kyle? Okay. It's there and it'll be online as well beginning tomorrow morning. I hope that you'll read through Revelation with us. I hope that you'll be talking about it in your small groups together. But as you read and study, we need to be asking ourselves as we look at the text, is this literal or figurative? Is this linear? Is this happening in order? Or have I jumped back or to a different place? We'll need to know this as we read. Now, some examples of where it's figurative and nonlinear or literal and linear are easy to find. So I'm going to read a passage from Revelation chapter 12. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to my words as I read. This is a famous scene in the book of Revelation. Just listen. I don't know what diadems are. I think maybe crowns. Cool. Let's just go on to the next thing, right? What's going on there? Well, what's happening there is that John is neither being literal, nor is he being linear. Most scholars agree, and it's not certain, so I don't say it with certainty, but most scholars agree, believe it or not, that this is a picture of Christmas. What if I preached that this December 25th, right? What if I made that the Christmas message? Boy, that would be something. Most scholars believe it's a picture of Christmas. It's figurative. It's powerful imagery that God is using to drive home a point. And that in this depiction, the woman very likely represents Israel. The baby is Jesus. The red dragon is Satan. And Satan is trying to thwart Jesus, thwart the efforts of God. But God rescues Jesus back up to his throne, which means God's throne and Jesus' throne. And then Israel is nourished in the wilderness, which could be a reference to their exile in Egypt as slaves, or it could be a reference to the flight of Mary to the wilderness once Jesus is born and they have to go to Egypt for a couple years because Herod is trying to find and kill baby Jesus. The tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the heaven down onto earth, that's a reference to the fact that when Lucifer was kicked out of heaven and became Satan, that he took a third of the demons with him. So this isn't linear because it's Christmas. This happened 90 years before John even wrote it. And certainly not in order with the other things going on in the book. And it's not even linear within its own depiction because it's talking about fleeing to the wilderness and it's talking about the demons falling from heaven, which happened thousands of years before any of this stuff and the rest of the story was ever happening. And then the 1260 days at the end of it is a reference to half of the tribulation period that Revelation divides in half often in months or in days. So it's literally, as far as the time frame is concerned, it's covering thousands of years in a paragraph. It's got a ton going on there. And it didn't literally happen. It's figurative imagery. So that's neither literal nor linear. But sometimes Revelation is those things. Listen to Revelation 21. At the end of the book, John is given a vision. He's carried to another place where Jerusalem begins to descend. A new Jerusalem begins to descend out of the sky. God is setting it Its length the same as its width. And measured the city with his rod. 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall. 144 cubits by human measurement. Which is also an angel's measurement. Which is nice to know. If you're measuring in cubits. You're measuring as the angels do. So well done. The wall was built of jasper while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, then sapphire, a gate, emerald, onyx, chameleon, chrysolite, beryl, and he goes on and on. And then he says, and the 12 gates were 12 pearls, each of the end of the book. It happens at the end of the story. It happens at the end of time. We can read that, see where it's happening in the book, and know that that's how it's going to happen in time. And it's literal. That's not figurative speech about the specific jewels that are going to be the foundation of the wall or the way that the city is going to look or the size of the city. That's a literal interpretation. So again, as we read, we need to ask, is what's happening here, is it literal or is it figurative? Is it linear? Is it happening in the order in which it's presented? Or in its proper context, should it go in another place? When I was explaining this to Jen this week, she was asking how I was going to approach it, and I was kind of walking her through portions of the sermon. And Jen, she's my wife, for those of you who don't know her, not just a lady I talk to sermons about, but that would be cool. I have one of those. When I told her what I was going to do and how it sometimes is literal, sometimes linear, and sometimes it's not, she said, yeah, but, and she's asked the question that you guys all should have by now. She goes, yeah, but how do you know? How do you know when it's supposed to be one and not the other? Well, that's the tricky part. And the only possible answer to it is you have to work hard. How do I know when it's literal and when it's figured if you have to study? Listen, some books of the Bible are really easy to understand. Proverbs. You don't need to study Proverbs. Just read Proverbs. And it says that we should consider the ant and work even when we don't have to. There's no mystery going on there. That's pretty simple. When it says whatever you do, get wisdom, that's simple. Revelation, not simple. If you want to understand it, it takes hard work. It takes discussion. You have to read a lot of sources. You have to listen to a lot of people. There's no easy path to understanding Revelation. I can't stand up here in seven weeks and explain it to you in a way that will make sense and get everything right. I just can't do it. And people who claim that they can are dumb. They're just being intellectually dishonest. Which is why I think it's important for me to kind of share this idea with you, not just for this series, but as you encounter Revelation as you move throughout the rest of your life, which is simply when it comes to Revelation, be cynical of certainty. When it comes to the book of Revelation, when it comes to who you're listening to and what you're reading and how you're talking about it and how people are presenting ideas to you in whatever form you would consume them, we are wise when it comes to Revelation to be cynical of certainty. Now there are some things in the book of Revelation that we ought to be certain about. Jesus is there. He's in heaven. God is sitting on his throne. He's surrounded by angels. There's going to be a new heaven and a new earth. Satan's going to be dealt with. People are going to be judged. We're going to be called up there. Like there's things that we can be certain about, but there's other things you simply can't be certain about. And for someone to present you information in a way where they are certain, where they don't even acknowledge that there's other theologians, there's myriad other views of this particular passage or this particular idea, and they don't even acknowledge that those exist, well now, I don't know if I believe you about anything. I was listening to a pastor that I really like a lot. He's been one of my go-to guys for years. And his church did a series in Revelation last year. And I thought, oh, well, shoot, I'm just going to listen to his and then steal it. That'll really cut down on the prep time here. This is going to be great. But as I listened, he got to a portion, I think it's in chapter four, where there's these four creatures, these four beasts that are really mysterious. And one is like a lion, one is like an ox, one is like an eagle, and one is like a man. And there's this incredible description of them. And the same four creatures are described in Ezekiel, in an Old Testament book of prophecy, with stunning accuracy and similarity to the four creatures in Revelation. There's very little doubt that both authors, that both John and Ezekiel saw the same four creatures. Now, what are they? And what do they represent? I don't know. But the pastor that I really liked when I was listening to him, he said, well, the ox represents this, the lion this, the eagle this, the man this. Does it not? And then he moved on. And he said it as if he was certain of it. And he said it as if there was no other possible explanation than the one that he just shared. When the reality is we only see them in Ezekiel. We only see them in Revelation. Very little explanation is offered about them in either place. So to presume that we know who they are, what they are, what they represent, and why they exist is not fair. It's not intellectually honest. The most intellectually honest thing to say about them is, they're pretty cool. That's it. They matter a lot to God. They're going to be neat when we see them. They're probably going to be scary. It's going to be awesome. What do they represent? I don't know and neither do you. And don't act like you do. We can make educated guesses. There's plenty of room for that. But we ought to be cynical of certainty as we move through this. And I'm saying that, hopefully, not for your benefit in this series, because hopefully I don't get up here and start teaching you things with certainty that I don't understand. Hopefully I'll teach them honestly and present the sides that exist and are merited. But I say that to you as you move throughout your lives and as you encounter other Revelation studies. Be cynical of certainty. So that's how we want to approach the book. I told you that we would mine Revelation for hope. And there's an incredible space to do that in the first chapter of Revelation. And that's where I want us to focus as we finish up the sermon today. I will also say this for those who know your Bibles well. Chapters 2 and 3 in Revelation are the seven letters to the seven churches. They are wonderful letters. They're hugely important. They're incredibly informative for us, not just of the ancient church, but what our modern churches ought to look like. They're a hugely impactful portion of the book of Revelation. They are so important and so impactful that we're going to skip them. Because I'm not going to reduce them to a week and preach them to you like that. So we're going to skip them. I'm going to set them aside. At some point in the future, we're going to come back and we're going to do a seven-part series as we move through those letters together. But if you know your Bible well, and next week we just open up and we get to chapter four, and you're thinking, why didn't we do the seven letters to the seven churches? That's why, because they're too important to reduce to a week. And Revelation would get too boring to expand to 14 weeks. All right, so we're going to do those later. But as we look at chapter one and we begin to move through the story, I wanted to bring us to what I believe is maybe one of the most poignant moments in all of Scripture. And we find it towards the end of the first chapter. We're going to start reading in verse 12. This is John writing. He says, And these are the words of Jesus now, which will always show up in red during the series. and I have the keys of death and Hades. I get chills every time I read this. John is swept up into heaven. He's told, you're gonna see some stuff, write it down. And he looks and there's someone who is white like snow, who is shining in brilliance, who has a voice like raging waters. And he sees him and he's so terrified that he falls on his feet. He falls at his feet. He collapses in fear. And we learn from those words in red that it's Jesus. And Jesus places his hand on John's shoulder, presumably. And he says, Behold, I am the first and the last. I have died and yet I live. Other translations say the Alpha and the Omega. And I have the keys to death and Hades. I've conquered them. Which is a remarkable moment. But it's more remarkable when we reflect on who John was and what John did. Do you understand that John calls himself in his own gospel the disciple whom Jesus loved? You should probably be pretty certain of your standing before Christ if you want to go around touting that nickname. This John is the John that was the disciple whom Jesus loved that may have been, some scholars think, as young as 10 years old when he was following Jesus. He was so close with Jesus. They were such intimate friends that at the Last Supper, Jesus was close enough to John that he was able to whisper in John's ear that Judas was going to betray him before anybody else did. He was able to communicate with John that closely at the Last Supper because John was, of course, next to Jesus because he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. When Jesus was hanging on the cross dying, when he's watching his savior and friend die, Jesus looks at John and Jesus only said a few things on the cross because you had to push up on the nails to do it. And he looks at John and he says, will you care for my mother? John, this is your mother, Mary, now. That's quite the commission. Can you imagine Jesus himself putting the care of his aging mother in your hands? And if you yourself knew that the end was near and that someone needed to care for your aging mother, who would you choose? Your most intimate and trusted of friends. And John went on from that moment and he cared for Mary. He went on from that moment and he led the church and the council. He saw them through this conversion of Gentiles, this difficult period in the book of Acts. He preached the gospel. He spread the word about his friend. And this whole time, he was promised by Jesus. You see it in the gospels when he tells the disciples, where I'm about to go, you can't go. And they said, we want to come with you. He goes, you don't understand. Jesus is telling them, I'm going to die and I'm going to ascend into heaven and you can't come with me. but where I'm going to go, I'm going to prepare a place for you and it's going to be great and you'll be with me there one day. Do you understand that John, he clung to that hope. He trusted his friend Jesus. He trusted his Savior and he spent the rest of his life caring for the mother of Christ. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message of Christ. He spent the rest of his life building the kingdom of Christ. But John eventually ended up as the head of the church in Ephesus, and there he discipled a man named Polycarp and Erasmus, who were the early church fathers that we begin now the church history that leads down to us. John is the linchpin in this. He watched all 11 of his friends, all 11 of the disciples die a martyr's death. And now he's an old man on the island of Patmos writing the last thing that he's going to write. And he's missed his friend Jesus. And he's looked forward to seeing his Savior again. And he spent every day living for his Savior. Every day building the kingdom for his Savior. Every day pointing people towards his Savior. And when he gets to heaven, he sees a figure that he doesn't recognize and he falls to his knees. And out of that figure comes the voice of his Savior, Jesus. Out of that figure comes the assurance that John has waited for and longed for his entire life. Out of that figure rushes the peace that only Jesus brings. He gets his reunion moment. He gets his welcome home. And it tells us that meeting Jesus is the best promise in the whole book. Meeting Jesus face to face, hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, feeling his embrace, that is the best promise in the whole book, man. There's other stuff that happens. We get to be with God. We get to spend eternity. There's going to be loved ones there. It's going to be perfect. There's no more weeping or crying or pain anymore. We're going to experience all of that. It's going to be an incredibly peaceful, joyful existence. But none of it, none of it is better than seeing Jesus in person. None of it is better than your welcome home moment. When he hugs you and he says, I've prepared a place for you. And he invites you to the marriage supper of the Lamb. I was thinking about it this week. What it would be like to finally meet my Savior. And how I would probably feel compelled to say I was sorry. And how he would probably just say, don't worry about it. I've covered over all those sorries. And how we would be compelled to say, I'm sorry, Jesus, I should have done more. And he would say, that's okay. I did enough. I did it for you. And I've thought about that moment when the burdens of hope and faith don't have to be carried anymore. When we can cast those things aside because our Savior is looking us in the eye. After all the stresses and all the struggles and all the triumph and all the worry and all the anxiety and anything else that we might experience, the loss and the pain and the sufferings and the joy, whatever it is, after all of it, we as weary travelers will end our spiritual pilgrimage in heaven at the face of Christ and he will say, welcome home. And maybe he'll even say, well done, good and faithful servant. But that's the best promise of the book. That if we believe in Jesus too, that one day we will see our Savior face to face and we can rest. And if you love Jesus, and that's not the part of heaven you're most excited about, I don't know what to do for you. I hope this series can change that. But more than anything else, as we move through this book, that's what we cling to. That Jesus is there waiting for us. And we'll get that reunion moment too. Where we get to meet our Savior face to face. Now, before I close, I never do this because if I tell you guys that I won't be here for a particular weekend, then what I've found is you don't come, which is mean. That's just mean to whoever is preaching that's not me. But I'm going to tell you this time that I'm not going to be here next weekend. I've got a bunch of my buddies I've talked about before. A bunch of us turned 40 this week, so there's going to be seven of us in a cabin in North Georgia making questionable decisions. We planned this back in the spring before I knew that this would be week two of Revelation, which is a week I'd rather not miss. So when I was thinking about who should I get to preach it, Kyle's great, Doug Bergeson's great, we've got plenty of folks here who would do a fantastic job with it. But there's one person who I know that knows more about the book of Revelation than anybody else I know. I'm not saying he knows the most about the book of Revelation, just more than anybody else that I know, and that's my dad. So dad's going to come next week and he's going to preach Revelation 4 and 5. And you'll get to see half of the equation of where all of this came from. To give you a literal picture of how deeply he loves this book, I wanted to take you to Israel with us. Dad and I had the opportunity to go to Israel, maybe about 2013. And we did the tour. We're up in Galilee. We were there for a whole week or eight days or something like that. And we get down to Jerusalem and we're in the Garden of Gethsemane. And from the Garden of Gethsemane, which is where Jesus prayed the night that he was arrested and then crucified, you can actually see the walls of Jerusalem, and you can see the Temple Mount. And so this is what you see from the Garden of Gethsemane. And you can see in kind of the bottom right-hand corner of the portion of the wall is a gate. That's the eastern gate. And when we were just walking along and we saw that, my dad said, that's the eastern gate. And I said, oh, cool. And then I looked at him and he was crying. And I said, dad, why are you crying, man? It's a gate. And he says, that's the gate that Jesus is going to walk through when he returns. And it moved him. And he doesn't get moved to tears very often. But he was moved by that. Because one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to walk through that gate. And he knows it. And he believes it. And he knows his Bible. And he knows it so well and he believes it so much that it moved him to tears. So I couldn't think of anyone better to come and teach us a portion of the book of Revelation next week. So I hope you'll come. I hope you'll be kind to him. I hope he tells you some stories about me that make you laugh and like me a little bit less. And just you're thinking, oh, he must be an experienced teacher and have done this before for Nate to be asking him to do this here. No, he's an accountant. He's taught Sunday school a bunch of times, and I think it's going to be really, really great. So I hope that you'll give him a warm welcome when he's here next week and know that I'll be beaming from ear to ear watching him online with my buddies. So with that, let's pray, and then I've got an announcement for you guys, and we'll worship some more. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us. God, thank you for this book of Revelation. I pray that we would see clear and simple messages coming out of it. God, I pray that you would give us wisdom as we move through it. Give me wisdom as I teach it. Wisdom that I have no business having. Maybe just a special blessing for these next few weeks. God, I pray that we would always find the hope in it. That we would always see the justice in it, that we would always see the good news that we can cling to, God. Be with us as we go through the series. I pray that it will enliven our hearts to you. I pray that it will increase our passion and desire for you. And I pray that it will give hope to folks who might need it really badly right now. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else? And what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day they're not nearly as big of a deal? What are our big rocks And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Isn't it cute in that video how I assumed that we were just charging right back into normal? And then here we are in masks again. Boy, the naivety as we roll into each wave of this is pretty funny, especially to think back. I can remember back in March of 2020 having conversations. Joe, the moderator of our board, called me in between the 8th and the 15th of March, and he said, hey, I think maybe we need to take a break. Maybe we can't meet in person this Sunday. And I was like, Joe, this is a big decision. I don't know if we should do this. And he goes, no, man, I really think we need to. And I'm like, Joe, listen to me. This is not going to be like a two-week thing. This could go well into April. So who the heck knows? But it's good to see everybody. Thank you for doing your part. And this is the last part of our series called Big Rocks, which if you've been here all four weeks or you've watched online all four weeks and you've watched that intro video of me four times in a row, good for you. That's serious partner of the year stuff right there. This week, as we talk about our priorities in life and approaching this fall, we're going to talk about the idea and the topic of community. And if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've heard a sermon on community. If you've been here, you've probably heard me talk about the importance of community. In our mission statement, we emphasize community by saying that grace exists to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. So you might be tempted when I say that the sermon this week is on community, you might be tempted to kind of glaze over and go, yep, got it. Christian community is important. I'm going to do it. Good. And then start thinking about whatever you've got going on the rest of the day, lunch plans, or if you're me trying to get the grass cut before the thunderstorm start, whatever it is you've got going on, you might be tempted to take your head there when I say that the sermon is going to be on community because we might feel like we kind of get it. But if that's you, I want to encourage you to lean in this morning. Because I hope that what we'll do is I'll leave here or I'll turn off our TVs, wherever we might be consuming this, that we will finish this experience this morning or whenever you're listening, thinking differently about the power and efficacy of community than when we started. I hope that we will be inspired to pursue it as if our lives depended on it. I think the idea of community is incredibly important. And if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the Gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament, if you read the Bible, the New Testament that starts with the gospels, the accounts of the life of Christ, and then on to the end of Revelation, if you read your New Testament and you pay attention, what you'll find is a lot of we's and ours and collective you. Like when Paul writes in the letters that he says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And he says, I pray for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. That's not you as an individual. That's a collective you as the church in Rome or Philippi or Ephesus. The Gospels are written to an audience, are written to a church, are written to a group of people. You find in the New Testament very few personal, singular pronouns. You find very you singular yous. You should do this, you should do that, God did this, whatever it is for just you. You don't find those in the New Testament. What you find in the New Testament is collective we and are. The New Testament assumes that your faith will be communal. It assumes that you have other Christians around you walking in the same direction you are pursuing, the same Jesus that you are pursuing. As a matter of fact, if you go to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that's not in your notes, so you can write that down if you want to. You can turn there if you get bored at some point in the sermon, which is likely to happen. Turn to Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, and make sure that I'm not making this stuff up. That is the quintessential church passage. There is no pastor who has preached more than two sermons on community and has not based one of the sermons in that passage. It is a quintessential church passage. It describes what the church looked like and did in its very infancy. As soon as Christ ascends and we have Pentecost and Peter and the disciples share the gospel, we see 3,000 people come to faith that day. That's the birth of the church. And then Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47 describes what the church did and how it behaved in its infancy. It is the barometer by which all church for the rest of time is measured. And if you read those verses, what you find is collective wheeze. It's communal. The church did this and they committed themselves to the apostle teaching. They devoted themselves to prayer. They met in one another's homes day by day. They were together all the time pursuing teaching, sharing meals, praying together, learning together, pursuing Jesus together. It is a communal activity. Your faith, if you have it, is quintessentially communal, which is why there's a little bit of an issue in evangelical churches with this phrase that we like to use sometimes. Raise your hand if you've ever heard the phrase that Christianity is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Have you ever heard that? Now listen. Christianity is about a personal faith. It's about a personal belief that God is the creator and author of the universe, that to reconcile his creation to himself, namely you, he sent his son to die in your place, and we place our faith in Jesus' death on the cross, and we place our hope in his resurrection on Easter, that one day we will be united with our God and reunited with those who also have faith in our Jesus, and we have a hope that will not put us to shame. To be a Christian, you need to individually believe that and have faith in that, and one of the remarkable things about Christianity is that our God does offer us a personal relationship with him. But listen to me closely. We must have an individual faith, but your faith is not about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ because your relationship with Jesus Christ is not personal. It is communal. We see it over and over again in Scripture. It is a communal faith. It is not just your business. It is our business as a church. We don't see that phrase, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, pop up in the Bible. We see a necessity for an individually claimed faith. But make no mistake about it, your faith is quintessentially communal. It is, I would argue, it is impossible to grow close to Jesus and have a vibrant walk with him totally by yourself. To take your Bible and a prayer book and to wander off in the desert like these mystical people who have existed before us that we somehow, we look at and we think that they were the ones who had nailed faith. And I don't think any of those existed, but the people who just go off by themselves and just totally ensconced in God's word and in prayer, and it's just them and God. you can't have a vibrant walk with Jesus doing that because loving Jesus requires you to love others. If your love from Jesus does not cause you to pour out love onto other people, then you are not expressing the love that Jesus has lavished on you. You are bottling that up. You are keeping that to yourself. To live a non-communal faith is fundamentally self-centered. And we miss out on who Jesus is by not lavishing his love on others in the same way that he loves us. John tells us in his letters at the end of the Bible that if we love Jesus, then we will love others. The Christian faith was not designed to live alone. I think that there are parts of Jesus that you find in loving other people. We cannot come to know Christ in the way that he wants to be known if we are trying to do it void of loving others and serving others and doing his work. This is why the mission statement at Grace is connecting people to Jesus first, but also connecting people to people. Because your walk with God will not be as vibrant and as healthy as it can be if it is void of community as you share your faith. So community and our faiths is vitally important. It's why I think that community is God's primary tool for tethering, comforting, and sustaining his children. Community is God's primary tool for tethering his children to him, for comforting his children in their time of need and for sustaining them in their walks and in the commitments that he's led you to make. Now, I would offer you a caveat here. I need to, if you have notes, if you're a note taker, please write this in your notes. Community is God's primary tool dash outside of heaven. It's God's primary tool this side of heaven to tether us and to sustain us and to comfort us. Because he tethers us with his son. He sustains us with his spirit. He comforts us with Jesus as he weeps with us. But these things, this community I'm going to show you is the way that God gives himself time to work in your life to bring you to a place where you're walking with him. It's the way that God the Father throws his arms around you in times of trouble. It's the way that God comes beside you and sustains you when your faith and your commitments are faltering. So I do not at any point want to replace the work that the Holy Spirit and God the Father and Jesus are doing in our lives and moving in us, but I do want us to see that community is often the tool that they use to work powerfully and effectively in our lives. I say that it's the primary tool for tethering, for kind of keeping us attached to the faith, even at times when we might be wandering off. With that in mind, I'm going to share something with you that I really am not sure that I'm all the way ready to share, because if I share it and then I don't do it, I'm a failure and a quitter. But last week, I committed with some friends of mine to run a half marathon at the end of February. I committed to do this because I'm fat now, and I need to. Somebody asked me before the service, why is your shirt tucked down? Like, are you being serious today? I'm like, no, no, I'm fat. I need to be able to blouse a little bit for the camera, you know? But I'm sharing that with you because if you know me well, you know that I've got a group of really good buddies. One guy I've been best friends with since I was five years old, so we've been friends for 35 years. And then there's eight of us total. We've been friends together, all of us, for at least 20 years. And we talk on this app called Marco Polo. It's probably for high school girls, but we love it and we use it to talk back and forth. We talk every day. And so there's eight of us and we legit, we talk every day. Whatever's going on in the world, whatever's happening in sports, whatever's happening in our lives, we talk about it. Just this morning, I was watching my friend, he dropped his daughter off at college yesterday and was telling us how emotional he got about it. And I'm in my office getting emotional about Lily starting kindergarten tomorrow. And if I talk about it for too long, I'm gonna get emotional in front of you. So we talk about stuff all the time. And then we have different threads for different topics. You know, different things that some of us may wanna talk about, but not everybody does. Anyways, we've got one for exercising. I can't tell you the name of it. There's a cuss word in it, but we've got one for exercising. And I started it. I started it back in January. I was like, guys, I'm fat now. I think I want to start eating well. I think I want to start exercising. Is anybody with me? And seven of them were like, yeah, let's do it. My one buddy, Tim, God bless him. He does not care. And I wish I could be more like Tim. But the rest of us were in there. And so we're encouraging each other every day, right? But eventually, I just stopped caring. I kind of fell off the wagon. Having a nine-month-old or an eight-month-pregnant wife will do that to you. And then so will having an infant and a three-month-old. It kind of takes you out of your regular rhythm. So it's been more difficult, and I kind of just lost my desire to do it, and to the point where they were daily talking about their workouts and the stuff that they're doing and yada, yada, yada. And I would just skip. Like, I wouldn't even listen. I would just fast-forward to the last one, hit play, skip to the end of that one, and so that those didn't show up as new, because I don't know. You people that just leave notifications on your phone, I don't know how you live with yourself. So I would have to go and just skip all the way through it, right? Ignoring it. And then I even became the devil on the shoulder of the people. They would share sometimes when I would listen, like, I didn't do anything today. I've been eating like crud lately. I just don't feel good about myself. And then I'd go out there and be like, come on over. It's great over here. There's barbecue and sweet tea. This is wonderful. Just buy larger fishing shirts and you're good. Like you can just let it all hang out. It's really, really great. It's good over here. But somewhere in that week and a half ago, my buddy got on there and he said, hey, I found a half marathon in Greenville and I think it would be fun if we would train for it together and try to run it together. And something about it, I don't know what it was. I don't know. I had some weakness that day and I said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Like it caught me on a good day. And I said, let's do this. Let's do it. And they were all very surprised that I was into it. But now I think there's five or six of us who are going to do it. And I'm only a week and a half in and I'm just a slow lumbering mess. As a matter of fact, if you live in my neighborhood, Falls River and then Bedford or whatever, and you see me running, can you just do me a favor and avert your eyes? And we'll just both pretend like that never happened. Do not honk at me or wave. I do not want to know that you saw me. I'd just like to live in this world where no one can see me lumbering down the road. But it's been fun to get back to it and to begin to train and begin to exercise and share that with my buddies. And I feel more inspired now to do this than I have in a long time. And I really think it might stick. So barring injury, which is more of a factor than it's ever been in my life, Lord willing, I'll run that thing in February and I'm looking forward to doing that. I share that story because I believe that this is what Christian community does with us for the church. To be a Christian for any amount of time is to go through a season of wandering. It's to go through a season where I was once committed, I once cared very much about my spiritual health, I was once very consistent in going to church and going to small group and reading my Bible and praying on my own, and I can remember seasons of vibrancy in my life, but now I'm just, whatever you want to call it, I'm in a rut, I'm wandering off, I don't feel it right now, I just am not, I'm going through some things and I just not sure that I can really connect with God. I'm not really sure that's a thing that I want. To be a Christian is to have gone through a season of wandering and probably not just one. And what community does is it keeps us tethered to our faith, even in times when we're not necessarily very committed to our faith. I didn't leave that thread because I like my buddies. I wanted to know what they were talking about. I wanted the community there. Even though I wasn't engaged in what they were engaged in, even though I wasn't pursuing what they were pursuing, I didn't want to totally detach myself because I thought maybe one day I will. Plus, I want to know what my friends are talking about. I don't want to have FOMO. So I stayed in there. And then one day, because I was tethered to that group by the community in that group, something caught me right. And I said, yeah, I'm going to make that choice for my health or for my children. Church community does this too. As we're going through a season of wandering, maybe we're not feeling faith right now. Maybe we're not super committed to it. Maybe we're not doing the things in private that we know we ought to be doing, but we keep showing up because we love the people in our small group. We keep showing up because we love to serve on Sunday morning. We keep showing up because that's our community and we don't want to miss out and those are our people. And then one day when you're at church or your small group or you're having a conversation or one day God speaks to you. He shows you something. You have an experience that moves you. Something catches you right. And that's what clicks and you re-engage in your spiritual life and you begin to pursue Jesus again. Our community tethers us to God in a very real way. Don't raise your hand, but I would ask you, those of you who are Christians, has there been a season of your life where if you didn't have Christian brothers and sisters who loved you and who just accepted you, not who came after you and got onto you and tried to convict you for the decisions that you were making, but who simply loved you, have you had seasons in your life that if it weren't for your Christian community tethering you to your faith, that you would have walked away from it entirely? Yeah. Or you're not being honest. God places us in community because he knows there will be times when we wander, and when we do, he's tethering us about this wandering at the end of his book. he writes this, my brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Not only do we have brothers and sisters who love us as we begin to wander and tether us to our faith and kind of draw us back to God as God works on our souls to soften them back to himself. But we also have the opportunity in Christian community, in church community, to be the one that pulls back a wandering brother or sister. To be the one who just consistently loves, who just consistently shows up for, who just consistently says, I'm not here to judge you. I'm just here to love you. I'm here to enjoy you. Not a project friendship, deep, meaningful friendship. When we express that with one another, when we express the kind of community that I've seen at Grace, we are used by God to tether people to their faith and draw them back towards him. You are a tool in his hand used to draw back a wondering brother or sister by simply maintaining community with people even if it feels like they're wandering. So those of you who have wandering friends, which, has there ever been an easier time than now to wander away from the church? Continue to love them. Continue to be that tether that lets them know anytime you want to come back, we're here, we love you. And you can be a brother or a sister that is blessed according to James as we do that. The community here is absolutely a huge way that God keeps us tethered to him and to our faith. Community is also an enormous tool in the hands of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit as they seek to comfort us. We're told in Psalms that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, that he saves those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we're at our lowest, God is at his closest. I've preached from stage many times, John 11, 35, the miracle of that verse. It's the shortest verse in the Bible that says that Jesus wept when he met Mary in her sorrow at the loss of her brother Lazarus. Jesus' response was to weep with her. And we get to preach and we get to claim and we get to know that we have a Jesus who weeps with us. And that's wonderful. But have you ever thought about how he does that? Have you ever thought about how God brings himself close to the brokenhearted? Will he bring his presence and his spirit close to the brokenhearted? Yes, absolutely he will. And he will speak into difficult times. Just yesterday, I was sitting on my porch swing and we've had a difficult couple of days and I felt pretty stressed. And I was just sitting there in the rain because that's what I love to do. And it was a good storm yesterday. And there was just this moment where God spoke some encouragement into my life. And it instantly gave me a peace. And so God will absolutely do that and comfort us in that way. But have you ever considered that the church community itself is also how God wraps his arms around us? Have you ever considered that our church community crying with us is also how Jesus weeps with us? Have you ever considered that that might be why Paul tells us to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn? Because that is the expression of the very body of Christ hurting with those who hurt. Jen told me as I was talking through this sermon with her, she said, you got to tell the Lisa story. And I'm actually glad she's not here. Jen's not here this morning, because we'd be a sobbing mess. But if you've been going here since the end of last year, at least, then you likely know that in December of 2020, December 29th of 2020, just to cap off a real humdinger of a year, we lost Jen's dad, John, to pancreatic cancer. That's who our son is named after. And so in the months prior, Jen had been down there a lot. They're located in Athens. Jen had been down there back and forth a lot. And at some point she came home. After Thanksgiving, she came back with me and we were home. And John has a brother-in-law named Edwin who's a doctor. And Edwin and Mary stayed with John. And Edwin told me, Nate, go back home, take your family. We don't really know what's going on with John. But when you need to be here, when it's time for family to be around him, we'll call you. I said, all right. So we came back. We were back for about a week. No, it was just a couple days. It wasn't even a week. And it was the Sunday of December 6th. And at the time, we weren't meeting in person because we'd had a COVID flare up, and so we were just chilling out for a little bit. And so I had to come that morning on December 6th, and we did a live service. So we had worship worship and then I was to preach, right? And five minutes before the service started, my phone rings and it's Edwin. And he says, you need to get down here. So I said, all right. So I called Jen. So we need to get down there. I'm going to go ahead and preach this sermon. And then we'll hop in the car and we'll go home. Let me tell you something. I have no idea what I preached December 6th. I have never been less present for a sermon in my whole life. If you watched it and got something out of it, the Holy Spirit is good, okay? Because my mind was not on that sermon. And I got done and things felt so urgent that I literally, and I never do this, I just pulled off my mic and everything. I set it down. I got right in my car and I drove away. Steve was still playing. The band was still going. Folks were still here. I just got in my car and I left. And when I got in my car, I texted Steve and Kyle because they were both here that morning. And I said, hey, I'm so sorry for leaving so quickly. Here's what's going on. We got to head home. And I go home. I get Jen and we're scrambling to get out the door. We scrambled to get out the door so quickly that to pack for this trip, I just opened up the biggest suitcase I have and dumped all my dirty clothes in it and then grabbed clean clothes and threw them in there, zipped it up, and we headed out the door. I can do laundry where I'm going. I don't know how long I'm going to be there. But that's the kind of urgency that we were trying to get out the door with. In the middle of that, somebody rings our doorbell. And we're like, who's ringing our doorbell on a Sunday morning? And we look, and it's Lisa Goldberg, Steve's wife. And she's at our door, and clearly Steve had called her or texted her and told her what was going on. And see, Lisa's mom passed away of pancreatic cancer a few years prior. Actually, right before, right as Steve and Lisa were moving here to become a part of Grace. And she knew the road that Jen was about to walk. So Jen goes and answers the door. And Lisa has a little gift bag prepared for her and hands it to her and just gives her a hug and starts crying. And Jen was telling me about it this week, and she said she can't even remember Lisa saying any words. Maybe I'm sorry. They just hugged for a really long time. And then we got in the car and we left. And that hug and those tears meant more to Jen in the following weeks than they did in the moment. Because in the moment, she didn't know the hell that she was about to walk through. But Lisa did because she had walked it. And so that provided her with comfort as she walked through that period. You can't tell me that that morning wasn't Jesus coming to our door and wrapping his arms around my wife. He did. That's how he weeps with us. That's how he comforts us. That's why he tells us to weep together. Because when we do those things, we're the hands and feet of God. We're the hands and feet of Jesus wrapping ourselves around people who are hurting. That's how God expresses his love to us. That's how we express ourselves as the body of Christ. He places us in community so that our community can comfort us when we need it. So that he can be close to the brokenhearted. So that we can experience having a God that weeps with us. That's what community does. And it also sustains us. And this is my favorite. Community sustains us. There's this great picture in Exodus. Exodus chapter 17. I'm just going to tell you the synopsis of it, but the story is in verses 8 through 16. I'm going to be a mess. David, can you go get me a tissue? Do you mind doing that? Thank you, sir. Oh, Wes is on it. Thanks, Wes. That's why Wes is an elder, because he does things like that. Oh. That's why Cindy's a resting elder. Thank you. All right, give me a second. I'm sorry. Especially if you're watching online. You're just going to watch me turn my back. All right. Does anybody else need some of these? I saw a couple of tears out there. In Exodus 17, there's a guy named Amalek who's brought his armies against Israel. Moses is the head of the nation at this point. Joshua is his general. Moses is too old to lead people into battle. And so Moses tells Joshua, you go down into the select some men, go down into this valley and you fight Amalek. And as you fight him, I will be up here and I will have my hands raised to God. And as long as my hands are raised to God, then you will win the day. And Joshua says, okay. So he goes down and he begins to fight Amalek. And as he's fighting Amalek, Moses is on the top of the mountain with his hands raised. And as his hands are raised, then what he said comes true. And God is with Joshua and Joshua is winning the battle. But battles are long and Moses is old. And I guarantee you, he had lived a life of shepherding for 40 years. If you wanted to have a hold your hands over your head contest, he would crush everybody in this room. But at one point or another, no matter how strong you are, you'd get fatigued. And he needed to take a rest and let the blood get back in his shoulders. And when he would rest, the army would begin to be defeated and the battle would go towards Amalek. And so he's in this struggle of trying to hold his hands up, but not having enough strength to do it. And they're losing the battle if he can't hold his hands up. So what happens? Well, his brother Aaron and his friend named Hur, H-U-R, are next to him and they find a rock and they put a rock behind him and they tell him to sit on it and then they stand. I love this picture. They stand next to him and they hold his hands up so that he doesn't have to anymore. That's the best picture of community in the Bible. Because each of you, your husband, your wife, your friend, your Christian, your son, a daughter, a brother, a sister, if you're a woman in this church who's married and you have children, you've got a marriage that you're holding up, that you're offering to God. You've got children that you're trusting to God. You've got concerns in your own life. You've got your own faith that you need to carry. You've got your own stresses and your own anxieties and your own worries, and you're facing those battles. And life is long, and I don't care how strong you are. At some point or another, your hands get tired. At some point or another, you think, I don't know if I can do it with this marriage. I don't know if I have the energy it takes to make this thing go. I just don't know if I can pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can continue to love these kids the way they need to be loved. I don't know what to do. I can't pick my hands up anymore. I don't know if I can walk in faith. I just can't see it. I have so many questions. God's disappointed me in these ways. I just don't know if I can keep doing this anymore. And when you're on your own, you're right, you can't. This is why we're placed in community, for our friends to come up beside us and grab our hands and say, hey, buddy, I got you right now. I will fight for your marriage right now. I will hold your hands up and fight for your faith right now. I will stand beside you and hold your hands up for your children and for your business and for your health and for your love of Christ right now. I will stand in this gap for you, and I will be the strength that you don't have. That's what community does for us. Our friends come alongside us, and they hold our hands up, and they give us the energy and the strength for the battle that we can't fight right now. And that's what community offers to others. This is why I think that community, this side of heaven, is the most powerful and effective tool that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit use to tether us to him, to comfort us, and to sustain us in our faith and the commitments that he's led us to making. And I'll end with this because I think this is important. Community is a choice. It's a choice. That kind of community, that kind of community where someone shows up at your door just to wrap their arms around you because they know what you're about to walk through, that kind of community that grabs your hand and holds you up when you can't do it, that kind of community that loves you when you're wandering and keeps you tethered to your faith so that you can wander back. That kind of community, that doesn't happen by default, man. We don't just stumble into that. That kind of community we show up for. Sometimes in small groups, I'll talk about it in a second, we sign up for. And then we let the Lord do his work in bringing us together and knitting lives together. We have to choose that community. Just last night, some friends of ours had a birthday party. And our childcare fell through, and so we had to figure out what to do. And so we decided that Jen was going to go to dinner, and they were going to go to drinks afterwards. Jen was going to go to dinner, and then when she got home, I was going to go and have a drink or two with our friends and then come back. That's what we decided we were going to do. Well, Jen stayed at dinner until like 9.15. I needed her to be back at like 6.15. Do you think, listen, I don't know how well you guys all know me. You think I wanted to go anywhere at 9.30 on Saturday night? No, I was in my gym shorts with paint on them and a big baggy t-shirt and Crocs and I was unshowered. I didn't want to go anywhere. But I also knew that I couldn't get up here today and preach about community if I wasn't going to prioritize my own. So they got Saturday night and ate and I showed up just how I was dressed. And we had ourselves a grand old time over at, I think, Tonic in Wake Forest. We have to choose community. It's not always convenient. You're not always going to want to go to small group. You're not always going to want to prioritize it. Parents of elementary and middle school age kids, you'll never be in a busier season in your whole life. It's so hard right now to prioritize small group. Do it. Community is a choice. It's an essential tool that God has placed in our life to bring us closer to him, to experience his love of us. In a minute, I'm going to talk more about small groups. But I want to encourage you here at the end of the sermon to sign up for them. If you're not in one, join one. Step into this community and let's begin to pursue it together and let's let God use this place to further connect us to him. Let's pray. God, thank you for you. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for who you are. God, thank you for our friends. Thank you for the people who love us, who we get to share life with. Thank you for our brothers and sisters who draw us back in our wandering. Thank you for the ones who comfort us. Thank you for the ones who sustain us and hold up our hands when we are too weak to do it. God, give us the desire and the conviction to choose community. To choose to live our faith with those around us. Remove any obstacles that we might have, whether fabricated or real, and knit us together, God, as a church family, that we might love one another well, that we might express your love for one another well. That we might support and sustain one another well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is our summer series called One Hit Wonders. And I have an explanation for what the series is and why we're doing it. But really, the most honest, transparent thing to say is this is really just a vehicle so that we can stop and highlight some of the passages that we don't pay attention to as much sometimes. That's really what it is. To pull these passages out of the Bible that maybe in a normal sermon series we wouldn't normally hit. This morning we're going to be in the book of Micah, which if you have never looked for the book of Micah in your Bible before, now is probably a good time to start, okay, because it's a hard one to find. So you're going to need a few minutes before I get there. So if you have a Bible, open to Micah chapter 6. If you don't know where it is, I was trying to think of helpful ways to tell you that, and there are none, okay? It's just like most of the way through the Old Testament, probably use your table of contents if you need to, and good luck. But we wanted to, for the next six or seven weeks, take some time to highlight some of the passages that we just don't get to talk about in church as often. And so this morning, like I said, we're going to be in Micah chapter 6. As we approach Micah chapter 6, I wanted to tell you about a friend of mine. This is a friend of mine who grew up in North Georgia. I'm just going to grab a name out of the air. We'll call him Alan. Alan grew up in North Georgia. In his late teens, early 20s, I'm unsure of the exact timing, small town, he's driving around one night and doing something he shouldn't do, speeding or whatever. I forget the details of the story. But the fuzz gets after him, right? The law catches him and the blue lights come on. And here they come after Alan. And Alan thinks, maybe I can outrun these guys. Maybe I can duck away and not get in trouble because my parents are going to be mad. I think the story goes, pulls into a driveway and thinks he's hiding out. The officer pulls up behind him. He knows good and well who it is. The officer knows good and well who's driving this car because, again, it's a small town in North Georgia. He gets out of the car and he pulls his pants up likey police officers did, you know. And he looks at him and he says, son, you done boogered up. Which I just love that phrase. That's just such a good southern phrase. Son, you done boogered up. And you know it. Like you know you're in trouble. You messed up. You know you messed up. And now you know that there's going to be consequences. And I bring that up because I think we've all felt like that. Oh, man, I done boogered up. I think that we know people who have messed up. We have people that we probably could have said that to in our lives. And I think the tendency there, when we mess up real bad, is to try to figure out what can we do to make it right. I think of a husband who's messed up in some significant way. He's just been drifting away from the family for a while. He did one big dumb thing. He's not paying attention to the kids. He's a grump whenever he comes home. He's selfish in the way that he spends his time. Something, some way that a husband can mess up and we're all capable of messing up. Wives are not. Wives are great and we just need to try to get on board with them. But husbands mess up and when we mess up, I've been in so many conversations with guys after they've messed up and they think to themselves, what can I do to make it right? What can I do? I've boogered up. What can I do so that my wife knows I love her? Should I give her a day at the spa? Like a girl's trip? This is really bad. Do I buy her a new car? Like a hundred roses spread throughout the house? Like is this what I do? Do I buy her jewelry, like something big and nice? Like, what's the grand gesture that I can do that when she is the recipient of it, she will go, oh, he loves me. Everything's good. You're forgiven. That's what we're looking for, right, is that grand gesture. But here's the thing. Here's the thing about marriage when we really mess it up. And when the husband comes to me and he says, what can I do? What can I buy her? What can I give her? What big extravagant thing can I do for her? I always say like, dude, she doesn't want a day at the spa. She wants you to do the dishes. She doesn't want a hundred roses. She wants you to cut the grass without complaining about it. She doesn't want a big grand gesture. She wants you to get up with the kids when you don't have to. She wants you to offer to do bedtime and bath time. She wants you to clean the kitchen. She wants you to do these small, consistent behaviors that spring from a sincere love. And you know what she wants? She wants you to be a good husband, man. You don't get to act however you want for a month and then spend a bunch of money at the end of the month and be like, see, we're good. Grand gestures are never in a real relationship. In a relationship where we genuinely love one another, where the other person matters to us, grand gestures are almost never the thing that communicates the love that we feel for them. And the truth of marriage and the truth of relationships is that when we mess up, what we really need to do to make it right is just small, consistent, simple behaviors over time that flow out of a sincere love. Show them. Don't tell them that you love them. Don't tell them. Don't make some big promise, some big commitment. I promise I'm going to get up every day and I'm going to do this and I'm going to come home and I'm going to do this. Don't do that stuff. Just start doing it, right? And I'll just throw in this little tip. I don't like to give tips for my marriage because I don't like to set myself up like I'm some sort of good husband here, But this one I think I've learned. If you'll be consistent with these little things over time and do the dishes and get up with the kids and show on a daily basis that you love her, the pressure's kind of off for the big grand gestures. You don't have to do those as much. Now, if you can do both of them, I would imagine that's really firing on all cylinders. I have not experienced that. I try to invest in the little things, you know. But the grand gestures aren't really needed as much. And you know what's interesting to me is that that's how we as people work. Just give me the consistent things. Just show me that you actually love me. Just be a good husband. Just be a good friend. Just be a good wife. Just be a good son or a daughter. That's what we need. And what's interesting to me is that God is no different. If we think about our relationship with God, to be a Christian for any amount of time is to come to the conclusion that we've done boogered up. We've messed it up. I've disappointed God. I ought to know better by now, and I'm still doing this. I didn't even know I was capable of becoming this version of myself, and now look at me, I feel shameful. To be a believer is to come to a conclusion at some point or another that we have let God down, that we have messed up. And I've talked with people. I've felt these emotions. What can I do to show God that I love him? I get on my knees, I'll pray, I'll commit. I used to work at a summer camp, man. And the summer camp, I got to the point just callously and skeptically. At the end of the week, we would do a campfire, right? And there's a campfire and we sing songs and we've been pumping these kids, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus all week. And it's good. And the things that happen at camp are wonderful are wonderful and life changing and I trace a significant event in my spiritual formation back to the first time I went to a particular camp. So I think that they're incredibly effective in the lives, in our spiritual lives. But these campfire moments where these kids come forward and they make these big grand promises. I'm going to go home and I'm going to break up with my boyfriend and I'm never going to talk to them again. I'm going to make a bunch of new friends and I'm never going to do this. You're just kind of sitting there as a counselor and you go, I made that promise. You're going to fail. You're not going to do that. But it's our tendency to want to try to find these promises to make to God, to make this big grand gesture. God, what do you want from me? What can I give you? What do you ask of me? I want to show you that I love you. And this is actually the same place that the ancient Hebrew people found themselves. When we get to the book of Micah, I'm not going to give you all the background to the book of Micah for the sake of time and your interest level. But what I will say is that God's people, the Hebrew people, the Israelites, were far from him. They had been wandering from him. They had thrown off his rules. They had thrown off his reign and his sovereignty, and they had begun to live by their own rules. And because of that, they were suffering in their sin. And by the end of Micah chapter 6, these prophets would try to shake them and get their attention. And by the end of Micah, they had gotten, Micah had successfully gotten their attention and they were ready to repent. They're ready to come back to God. And so they go to God and they say, what do you want from us? We've messed up. We've done, boogered up. What do you want from us? And that's kind of, that's the questions that we see in verses six and seven. So I want to read those to you first. We be right with God. They realize they've messed up. They want to fix it. God, what do you want from us? What can we do? Can I offer you oil of a thousand rivers? Do you want a hundred calves that are a year old? Do you want my firstborn, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Now they're getting into hyperbole. Whatever you want, God, I'll give you. Whatever grand gesture, whatever I need to do, whatever promise. You want all my money? You want me to stroke a check for everything in my bank account? I'll do it, God. Just tell me that you love me and that we're good. This is the place of desperation that they've reached. And it's a place, again, as believers, that I believe that we are familiar with. God, I've messed up. I've become someone that I didn't know I could become. What should I do now? How do I make this up to you? What do you want from me? Whatever you want, I will do. And I love God's response in verse 8. You know how you can make it right with me? You know what you need to do so that we can be good? I'll tell you. Verse 8, he has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. I'll read it again because it's worth it. He has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. I love this passage because it distills down so much the complication of scripture. You know what God wants from you? You know what he wants you to do? He wants you to seek justice. He wants you to love kindness. He wants you to walk humbly with him. Really, at the end of the day, God wants what we want when someone has messed up with us. He wants us to just simply show him that we actually mean it, that we actually love him. He doesn't look for a big grand gesture. God asks for simple behaviors born out of sincere love. And if I had the notes to do over again, I would put the word consistent in there. So if you're a note taker, put that in there for me so I feel better about things. God asks for simple, consistent behaviors that are born out of a sincere love. If we want our wives to forgive us and to know that we mean it, be better husbands. You want God to forgive you and know that you mean it, be better children. He doesn't need the oil from a thousand rivers. He's got all the oil he could want. He doesn't need your bank account. He's got a big one. He doesn't need your time and your energy and your talent. He created everybody, and he can use a donkey to speak to people. He does not need me. You want to show God that you love him. You want to know what God wants from you. It's simple, consistent behaviors born out of a sincere love. And I really love the simplicity of this truth. I love how resonant this is and what it does for us in our thinking about our spiritual life because I think it's entirely possible for someone to be new to the faith and be intimidated by it. This is a thick book. It's a complicated book. It's hard to know everything in here. I would bet if you're a student of the Word, if you listen to sermons regularly, I very much hope that you regularly encounter things that you did not know before, that you had not heard before. I think it's part of the Christian experience for there to be a spiritual question that we can't answer because we don't know the Bible well enough, or to learn something about Scripture and see it be incongruent with another part of Scripture and not know how to harmonize those things. And so I think that Scripture itself can be intimidating. I think that the idea of living a Christian life can be intimidating. The idea of being spiritually healthy can be intimidating and it can be big and it can be confusing. And sometimes it's hard to know where to begin. And for those of us that feel like that, kind of mystified by the whole Christian life and all the learning from us that it requires, this verse is incredibly helpful because it takes everything that we're trying to piece together and distills it down into the simplest form. Listen, just seek justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God. Just do those things and the rest of it will help make sense. Seniors, as you go into your own lives and you make your own decisions for what you want your faith to be and how you want to live that out. You will have any number of messages coming from the world about what it should look like and how it should be shaped and what you should believe and what you should think is right and who you should affirm and who you should do all these things for. Listen, if your faith seeks justice and loves mercy and walks humbly with God, you're on the right track. For the rest of us confused about our faith sometimes, intimidated by what it means to be a Christian and not really sure, is this a sin? Is that a sin? Is this right? Is that wrong? How do I do this? What do I do there? Do this first. Seek justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. I think the opposite is true too, the way that this simplifies things. Some of us have been walking with God for a long time. Some of us know the Bible very well. And some of us have the tendency and the mindset to kind of get entrenched in the details, to get mired in the details and in the dogma and how it all pieces together in a good systematic theology. And we like to deep dive into books and parse out individual words and sentences and tenses and understand what does this mean in context and this and how does it relate to this. And we can fire off all those things and do those studies. And listen to me, those studies are valuable. They're good. They're profitable. They're beneficial. They build us up. They're helpful. It's good to understand the Bible on a granular level like that. But if that's the only place that we live, is on that granular level, if that's the only place we go and we get mired in the details, sometimes we forget about the themes of the Bible and the whole purpose of the Bible. And this verse kind of helps to pull us up out of that and help us give a 30,000 foot view of the Bible and go, I need to seek justice. I need to love mercy. I need to walk humbly with my God. And it helps to pull us down. If our heads are in the clouds and we're confused, it helps to bring us down and center us. So this verse is a wonderful, settling verse. We love it so much that we have it displayed in our home to remind us consistently that these are the things that we need to champion in our house. Because they're so vital, because Micah in this book, in his message to the Israelites and then in turn to us, highlights these things as vital practices, seeking justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with God. I believe it's worth our time to think about this morning what it means to actually do those things. What does it mean to seek justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with God? And so as I thought about justice, and some translations, mine says that you should do justice. Other translations say that you should seek justice. And so as I thought about it, I thought of this idea. I don't think that what he's telling us to do is to seek justice for ourselves. I don't think that we should do justice for ourselves. I don't think that we're to seek out our own justice. And justice is someone getting what they deserve. Whether it be a warranted punishment for a sin committed or whether it be a right wrong. Someone's been treated unfairly and we're trying to right that wrong. And I think more often than not, the type of justice that we're supposed to seek for other people is not punitive justice. We shouldn't be trying to punish them, but we should be trying to restore people who have been mistreated. And this idea of seeking justice, again, is not for us. I don't think the message of seeking justice for yourself is really congruent with the gospel message. Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile, that we're to reciprocate evil with kindness. So I don't think it's really congruent in the gospel message that we should in 2021 be running around concerned about our own justice. I think the heart of God is that we would seek justice for others. And so here's the thing about justice. And this is for me, okay? This is something I thought of this week. So try it on with skepticism. This is not gospel truth. I didn't get this from some smart pastor or theologian. I made it up, okay? So you try that on for whatever it's worth. If it fits in your life, good. If not, it doesn't hurt my feelings. But here's what I think about justice, particularly as we seek it for other people. Justice always flows downhill. If we're going to seek justice for others, we can really only seek it for those that don't have the voice or influence or power that we do. We don't seek justice for people who have a greater voice or influence than us. If Jeff Bezos is wrongfully imprisoned, he doesn't need your help. He doesn't collectively need our help. He's good. We can't get him any resources or voice or influence or power that he doesn't have access to. He's fine. But we have a girl here named Jen Taylor who's involved in a ministry called Refugee Hope. There's a whole community of refugees that live behind the Falls Village Shopping Center over there on Falls in the News. And on July 11th, we're going to actually have a whole Sunday dedicated to highlighting our ministry partners, and we're going to get to talk to her, and I'm really excited about that. But those people who live in those apartments, they don't have the voice and the influence that Grace does. If we want to seek justice, we seek it for people like them. A really easy application of this, because you might think, I don't have voice. I don't have influence. How do I seek justice for other people? An easy way to do this is when a kid's getting bullied. Right? We're on the cul-de-sac or we're at the park or we just happen to notice and we see some older kids picking on a younger kid. Nothing riles me up more than watching a kid get bullied. I used to be a teacher and there was a kid getting bullied in my class and I sent him to the office to get something I didn't need and I laid into the girls that were making fun of him and they cried and I felt better. Maybe someone needed to seek justice on me after that moment. But we can insert ourselves there. That kid's not getting treated fairly. I want to let them know that that's not okay to do. This community of people isn't getting what they deserve. I want to be an advocate to get them what they deserve. I have a friend who started a ministry. He became aware of a trailer park community that was 85% Mexican immigrant. And the children were English speakers and the parents were not. And it was really hard for them to make their way in society. And so they got involved simply by bringing a turkey for Thanksgiving one year. And that developed into a multi-state ministry called Path Project, where they go and they partner with these people and they get adults in there to teach the adults English as a second language. They teach them to go into the schools and be advocates for their children so that they can seek justice on their own behalf. And that's what godly justice looks like, is using our voice to bring about fairness for someone who doesn't have the voice or the influence that we do. That's seeking justice. And I say that because if we're growing in our walks with God, if our hearts are beginning to beat more like his, then we will be people who regularly seek justice for those who don't have the voice that we do. And I think it's important for us to point that out in church because I grew up in church. I grew up in church in the South. I know what institutional religion looks like. And I have watched over and over again people in the church choose to use their voice to try to convince victims that they're not victims instead of trying to help the victims that are being hurt. If we're growing in our heart with God, we will be far more interested in helping victims than we are in trying to convince them and others that they're not actually victims. And if they'll just suck it up, if they'll just take ownership, if they'll just do what I did, then they'll be okay. That's not what the heart of God says. And I don't want to be a part of a church that is more interested in trying to convince others that they're not actually suffering than they are in actually doing something about the suffering. So we need to be a church that seeks justice, that leverages our voice and influence to help people who don't have the voice and influence that we do. As we seek justice, we're also told to love kindness. And I don't have any great insight to you on what kindness is. You're grown-ups. I think you'd get it. If you don't know what kindness is, just go talk to my wife. She's really nice. She'll tell you. We know what it is to be kind. But what I wanted to think about as we think about this idea of kindness is that kindness is most helpful, it is most effective where it is least warranted. Kindness is most effective where it is least warranted, right? We know this. It's really easy to be nice to someone who's nice to you. Again, my wife, Jen, she just drips kindness. And I have watched people in my life who I know are not kind people, and they are just butter in her hands. They just respond with kindness to her because that's how she acts towards everyone. It's really easy to be kind to someone when they're kind to you. But what about being kind to people that we don't have anything to gain from? Right? We've heard this before. You can tell someone's character by how they treat somebody they have nothing to gain from. What about when I don't need anything from you? I don't need you to like me. I don't need your money. I don't need your support. I don't need you to play my kid in the game. I don't need you to give my kid a good grade. I don't need this sale to go through. I don't need anything you have to offer me. There is nothing. You are literally bankrupt in my economy. You have nothing that I need. And yet we'd be kind to that person anyways. What about when someone is unkind to us and we feel like they don't deserve our kindness? Isn't that when kindness is most effective? When someone's been unkind to you, when everyone around you is telling you, yeah, you can be a jerk back to them, you need to put them in their place, and we choose to respond with measured kindness anyways, isn't that a more effective kindness? And when we are kind in these incredibly effective ways, I'll tell you, it makes an impact. When I was six or seven years old, I went with my church at the time, Grace Fellowship Church, to my first overnight summer camp, Word of Life Camp down in Florida. And I was newer to the church and young, and most of the kids on the trip were a little bit older than me. And so I was pretty intimidated by the whole deal, right? And so it's the classic scary moment of getting breakfast on the first morning and looking at the cafeteria and going, I don't have any friends here. I don't know what I'm going to do. You know, that terrifying moment of where in the world am I going to sit and how's this going to go? And so I just find a seat, sit down in the middle of the table somewhere. And I'll never forget the pastor's wife, a woman named Jody Hoffman. She comes and she sits down across from me. Which, as soon as she did that, I felt more important. I felt valued. I felt seen. I felt like this breakfast was going to be okay. Because here's the pastor's wife sitting down with me. And I remember at the time, even at six or seven years old, having the wherewithal to acknowledge this as kindness. She's not sitting here because she wants to. She's sitting here because she knows I'm alone and I'm scared and she wants to be kind to me. And now she's going to make conversation with me even though she doesn't know how to do that. And listen, that in and of itself is a remarkable act of kindness. I'm the pastor. I love your children. I want my hugs when they get here, and I want my high fives when they get here. I don't want to have breakfast with them. I don't want to do that. She sat down and she had breakfast with me. Not only that, I was so nervous about this breakfast and not messing it up, that somehow or another when I reached for something, I knocked over my milk. I knocked over my milk directly into her tray of French toast. I felt terrible. I'm scrambling. I'm apologizing. I'm near teary-eyed. I'm so, so sorry. I'll get you some more French toast. And she calms me down. She puts her hand on the table. She says, Nathan, it's okay. Calm down. It's all right. It's all right. I said, no, I'm so sorry to ruin your breakfast. And she said, I actually, I like milk on my French toast. And I'm like, you do? Yeah. Sometimes at the house I do this when there's no one else around. I like to, I like eating my French toast like this. Really? She goes, yeah, look. She takes a bite of it. That woman sat there and ate milky French toast for a whole breakfast so some dumb six-year-old wouldn't feel bad about himself. That's remarkable kindness. It's remarkable kindness. And listen, I promise you this. Here's what I promise. She doesn't remember that. I haven't talked to Jodi in years, but if I could talk to her this morning and say, do you remember the time at Word of Life that I dumped milk on your French toast and you ate it anyways? I promise you she had no recollection of that. That was probably the third milky French toast she ate that week, okay? She's just that kind of person. She's that kind of nice. It meant nothing to her than just being kind in the moment. But here we are 35 years later and I remember it and it stands out as this mark of kindness that someone treated me with. That kindness when it's least warranted is most effective. Maybe there's someone at your work who's not being kind to you. Maybe your boss is running your rag and maybe there's a co-worker who's not treating you with the respect that you deserve. Maybe you're kind of getting run over there and it's getting frustrated and you want to stand up for yourself, but you keep being kind because of your witness and because that's how you're wired. And let me tell you something, even if that person isn't responding to your kindness the way you wish they would, the people around you see it and they're going to tell your story for years. We have an opportunity to be kind to people that we get nothing from. They're going to remember that for years. My father-in-law, you know I like to brag on him. He lived in a community where they had a joint landscaping service. People who would come around and cut the grass. It was part of their HOA. It was part of the deal. He doesn't have to pay them anything. He doesn't owe them anything. He can't get any more or less service out of them without going through this big contract or whatever. He's got nothing to gain from being nice to these guys, yet every time they came, he would have a cooler full of drinks and fruit to refresh them on the summer days. They knew when they got to his house. You don't think they remember that house? Do they remember the people who worked there? When we have opportunities to show unwarranted kindness, it is incredibly effective. And lastly, God tells us that we should walk humbly with him. We're to walk humbly with our God. And so I was thinking through, how do I explain this humility? How do we walk humbly with our God? And the only conclusion that I could reach is that the deeper you go, the more humble you become. The deeper you go with God, the more you walk with him, the more you know him, the more your heart beats like his, the more humble of a person you become in your faith. I actually think of it like this. A few years ago, reading a book, I came across like this, a bell curve. And the idea of the bell curve was the ignorance of expertise, and I thought it absolutely applied to what we're doing. So we created this for you today to kind of take a look at. I think that this is how we get to humility. I think at the beginning of our Christian walk, we have this ignorance of beginning, right? We're just starting off. We don't know the whole Bible. All I know is that I'm a sinner in need of God and Jesus' sacrifice, and I'm putting my faith in that, and I'm going to kind of trust the people around me to show me the way. I love these people. I love the church people who are in the ignorance of beginning. There's no pretension. They're willing to ask any question. These are the people that always ask the good questions in Bible study. I love having these people in Bible study. Those people in the middle, arrogance and familiarity, they're bummers in Bible study. I don't want them anywhere near my Bible study. They know all the answers. They know everything. They're really, really smart. They can answer all your questions for you. But the ones at the beginning, man, they got the great questions. And they're not arrogant at all because they don't think they know any more than anybody else. Then what happens is we start to learn a little something. Start to piece some things together. We come to church often enough. We've got our Bible kind of scratched up and marked up. And then eventually we get to this arrogance of familiarity where we know enough to start being able to answer questions. People are coming to us asking us questions. What does the Bible say about this? What do you think about this? We start to teach it to others. And we start to be pretty confident in this theological system that we've built up, that this is going to have all the answers for life, and I've got the answer if you'll just come to me and ask me. This is where I lived in my 20s and most of my 30s. I hope that I'm on the other side of that now. I hope I'm not an arrogant jerk about my spirituality. Maybe I am, and this is exhibit A, but I hope not. And I think people get stuck there. People get stuck there because they quit learning and growing because Christianity for them is an intellectual exercise of how much of this can I understand and how much of this can I explain to other people and how many answers can I know and am I going to be the one in my circle of friends that people come to for advice? This becomes a place where Christians get stuck. We get caught up with theology and knowing the Bible and this intellectual knowledge never becomes a heart knowledge that we actually live out. And let me tell you something, that place, the arrogance, familiarity, that's a dangerous place. I'm very tempted to go off on denominations and things going on in our church and in our culture. The American church right now precisely because of this, because of people and leadership who have never moved past the arrogance of familiarity. It really gets us in trouble. But I just happen to believe that the more you know of God, the deeper you go, the more about his character that you learn, the more sincerely and honestly you read the Bible and let it rip you open and respond to that, the more humbly we approach God and spiritual things that we eventually arrive at this place of the humility of expertise. And the humility of expertise, we know how much we don't know. So we're not arrogant about the peace that we do. And the humility of expertise, we remember who we were when we had the arrogance of familiarity. We remember how we were teaching other people that you ought not do these things. How we were raising our kids telling them you shouldn't be like this. You shouldn't have that attitude. You shouldn't do this thing. Knowing good and darn well that we did those things. And the arrogance of familiarity to get to the expertise of humility. We know that we've walked through a season where we were the biggest hypocrites around. We're coming to church acting like we've got everything together. We're teaching a Bible study, telling everybody this is what the Bible means, this is what we have to do. And we know good and well that we're not living it out in our own private life. We know good and well that we've become a person that we can't identify anymore. That we've slipped so far into sin that we didn't even know we were capable of that. And yet, in our arrogance and in our hypocrisy, God continued to bless us. He continued to use us. He continued to forgive us. He continued to restore us. He continued to be there every time we cried out for him and said, God, this is the last time I'm going to need you. I'm not going to do this again. And he loved you and he rushed in recklessly with his grace, even though he knew you weren't going to keep that promise either. We've received that love enough times that we've moved into this place of humility because we know who we were and we know who God forgave. And how could we possibly judge other people? How could we possibly think that we're more than somebody else or that we're better than somebody else or that we know more than them because we've seen God forgive us? We know what we walked through. How could we not want to offer that forgiveness and understanding and empathy to others? Really and truly, I don't think we ever get to the humility of expertise if we don't begin to practice seeking justice and loving kindness. I think the way that we get stuck there is just to be satisfied with knowing the things that we know and never learning anything else. Knowing the things that we know and not feeling encumbered with expressing the other sides of ourselves. I have watched people over the years get their heads full of Bible knowledge and it turned them into more of a jerk. Because now I'm right and I don't need you. It's incredibly sad to me when that happens. And I would say to you this, if practicing your faith doesn't cause you to trend towards Micah 6.8, then you need to rethink how your faith is practiced. If as you grow, as you go to church, as you go to small group, as you learn more about the Bible, as you grow in your faith, if it does not trend towards seeking justice and loving to show kindness and walking in humility with God because you know who you are and where you've come from and you want to offer that same love to other people, if it doesn't trend in that direction, you need a new faith, man. This is a hard one for me, okay? It's a hard one for me. I don't know if you guys have pieced this together yet. I do not love kindness. That does not come naturally from me, okay? Any kindness I show is a direct result of the Spirit's hard and arduous work in my heart. But if our faith doesn't grow us and move us into a place where we want to seek justice for others, where we want to leverage our voice for those that have a smaller one, where we love showing kindness more than we love reciprocity, then we need a new faith. And if over time as we grow with God, we don't walk humbly with him because we know who we are and what we've been forgiven of and we want to offer that to others, if we don't walk in that, then we're not growing how we should and we should change how our faith is practiced. You know, right now, as we come out of COVID and things start to feel normal again, right? There's a lot of talk in church world about what does churches look like? And what everybody knows, what every pastor in America knows is essentially we've got to rebuild the church. Okay. February of 2020, for those of you who are around, was like one of the all-time highs of grace. We had record attendance for years prior to going back to years prior to that record attendance. People, you guys were enthusiastic. We had people coming out of our ears. It was super fun. We finished up a building campaign. I don't even know if you guys know that we're still doing that. We're still in the middle of a building campaign. It ends February coming up. I'm going to highlight it in the fall as we kind of make the push for the home stretch, but it's entirely possible for you to have been coming to this church for like a year and this be news to you. It's just kind of been quietly going in the background with faithful folks and it's been amazing. But we're in the middle of doing that. We were really, really humming. And then COVID hit. And within a couple months, I realized very quickly, oh, we're not going to see February numbers again for a while. Might not ever. And that's all right, too. But we're going to have to rebuild this church. We have to rebuild volunteer teams. All of our volunteer teams need new people. All of them. All of them. Most importantly, children and AV. Greg and Laura Taylor, I think we have to pay them to keep them on retainer now. They volunteer so much. We need volunteers across the board. We're going to have to rebuild the church. And as we look to rebuild the church, you know, I pay attention to pastor things, to conferences. I watch videos of guys teaching about growth strategy and yada, yada, yada. And there's all these strategies out there. There's all these things. You develop a goal, and then the goal gives you a vision, and then the vision gives you a strategy. Your strategy gives you tactics, and the tactics give you results. Gross. Gross. Get it away from me. I don't like any of that garbage. Because here's what I think. You give me a church that lives this out. You give me a church that seeks justice and loves showing kindness and walks humbly with God, you can keep your tactics. You're never going to hear me get up here and be like, if you'll just invite one person, and that person invites two people. I hate that stuff. Share your faith. Talk to your friends. Seek justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. If we have a church full of people who do that, we're going to need a bigger building. And listen to me, I mean this with absolute authenticity. More than I've ever meant it. I don't give a rip about growing this church. I don't care about being in charge of a church that's growing and has more people coming. That's not the point at all. The point is to care for the people that God sends us, to be good stewards of the souls that walk through that door that call grace home. And we're not going to be good stewards of them if we've got some stupid strategy to get their butt in the seat and then nothing to take care of their soul after that. I don't care. But if we'll seek justice and we'll love kindness and walk humbly with our God, we'll be ready to care for the people that he sends us. That's what matters to me. If we'll live out this verse, God's going to do cool things with grace because you've been faithful to him. What can happen in this church if we embody that verse? What can happen in your life if you embody that verse? What kind of stories will people be telling from you 35 years from now if you'll simply do these things? What kind of richness and joy and peace can you experience if we'll simply follow God's advice and distill our faith down to these simple practices? I want us to be people who seek justice, understanding that it flows downhill, and use our voice not to convince people they aren't victims, but to help them in their pain. I want us to love kindness so much that we show it when it's least warranted. And I want us to be people who have the grace and honesty to walk humbly with God and empathetically with others. And if we do that, I think God's going to do amazing things in our lives and the life of our church. Let's pray. Father, you are overwhelmingly good to us. You love us recklessly and unconditionally. You forgive us again and again and again. You restore us in the middle of our arrogance. You seek us in the midst of our ignorance. God, I pray that you would draw us into the humility that comes from walking with you, From praying to you. From talking to you. God, I pray for these seniors as they leave their homes and they go to become the people that you designed them and created them to be. Would they be people who whatever else happens to them would seek justice and love, mercy, and walk humbly with you as they learn and try on and exercise their new faiths? Father, for the rest of us, would we be a church, really and truly God, who just does those things? Would we be a church who just seeks you out and then seeks to show your love to other people? Would we be a church that's just characterized by simple, consistent behaviors that spring out of a sincere love for you? We just ask that you would give us a deeper love. Even as we finish and sing here this morning, enlarging our hearts to you and what you're doing in our lives. It's in your son's name we ask all of these things. Amen.

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. What up, faces? Good to see everybody. This is great. Thank you for being here this Sunday morning. It really is good to get to see everybody's faces. I didn't really know what to expect this morning, but this is really, really great. It's good to see y'all. Thank you for joining us online if that's what you're doing. Somebody told me this morning it was a little bit hard to get out of the omelet routine, but they made it here anyway. But if you came to the omelet routine and you're enjoying one right now, good for you and your sweatpants. But we are happy to be here. This is, I think, part six of our series called Faithful, where we're looking at the stories of faithful women throughout Scripture that really have profound impacts on the kingdom of God through simply being faithful and kind of walking in obedience with what God placed in front of them. This morning we arrive at a woman in the New Testament named Lydia. And I think that she is an incredibly relevant figure for us in the New Testament church and particularly for us in the North Raleigh community. And I'll tell you why, but we really don't get much of a picture of Lydia except for this snippet of verses in Acts chapter 16. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Acts chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 13 through 15. A little bit later, we're going to be in Philippians chapter 1. So you can go ahead and mark your Bible if you want to turn there and read with me. But we don't get a lot about Lydia. We just get this snippet about her involvement in the church in Philippi. And that city might sound familiar to you. That is the church that Paul planted that received the letter that we know as Philippians. So a lot in the New Testament is made up of these letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Corinthians. Those are letters from Paul to churches that he planted. And so Lydia plays an integral role in the church that he planted in Philippi. And so this is where we pick up the story. He's gone to Philippi, and he has begun to preach the gospel. This is his very first day. He has just arrived. He goes to the town square. He begins to preach the gospel, and he meets this woman named Lydia. Here's what happens. We're going to pick it up in verse 13. the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. And after she was baptized in her household as well, she urged us saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us. So Paul and his traveling seminary, as it's known in theological circles, Timothy, Titus, Barnabas, some of these guys are traveling with him. There could have been as little as four or as many as eight to ten folks with him as he traveled. They go into Philippi. They go to a place of prayer. So they go to wherever the spiritual place was, and they share the gospel. They talk about Jesus. Lydia hears this message of the gospel, is compelled, says she's in. She, I want to sign up. What do I have to do? They had her fill out a new member card, and she put it in the, she, they talked, and she accepted Christ right there, and then they took the next step of getting baptized, which is, we always see baptism as a step of obedience after faith, and so she took this step of obedience. She got baptized. And it says her household was baptized. So her family members were baptized. And then she looked at Paul, who just rolled into town, and she said, you guys need a place to stay. Come stay at my house. And I love the way that she leverages the spiritual guilt here. If you are willing to validate the faith that I am claiming, if you believe me, then stay at my house. If you don't think that this stuck, you know, you don't think I'm really a Christian, then go stay somewhere else. But if you think that what you just did worked, then come stay at my house. Like, what choice does he have? So he says, okay, I'll stay. Now, in this, just this little short snippet here, I feel like we see so much about Lydia that is really profoundly accurate to us. Before I do that, though, there's one thing in here, in this snippet about Lydia that I wanted to point out. This is not part of the sermon, okay? So let's pretend together that we've entered into a parenthetical expression, okay? I'm opening up the parentheses. Normally when I preach a sermon, I don't like to make a bunch of different points. I try to just make one point to send you home with to think about, but I don't know when I'm going to get back to Lydia and this was too good of a thing to pass up and not mention to you, okay? So while I'm in the parentheses, as I was researching Lydia, it says in the text that she was a worshiper of God. But it also says in the text that God opened her heart to receive what Paul had to say. A lot of scholars believe that she was sympathetic to the Jews that were already there, that had preceded her. So she knew about the same God that we worship, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The same God that Paul was preaching about, the same God that sent his son Jesus. She knew about this God, and she was sensitive to this God, but she wasn't all the way in on this God. She wasn't a practicing Jew. Lydia was from Thyatira. She grew up in a pagan environment. She grew up with Greek and Roman pantheons. That was probably her heritage. And so what we know about Lydia is that she was spiritually sensitive and spiritually seeking. She was open spiritually, but she was not yet decided spiritually. And when Paul came into town and shared the good news of the gospel, talked about Jesus, and she heard him, everything clicked with her. She was sensitive to the Jewish God, and now she'd heard the message from Paul, and now it makes sense to her. Now it clicks with her, and now she's all in. And what I think is fascinating and incredibly relevant for us now is that she was spiritually sensitive, spiritually seeking. And what we see is that God had laid the groundwork, that the Holy Spirit had begun to knead the soul of Lydia and the heart of Lydia as for fertile ground so that when her soul finally encountered the gospel, it would spring forth and respond to it. And so Lydia's conversion has very little to do with the profundity of Paul's words and the effectiveness of his sharing of the gospel and has everything to do with the Holy Spirit working on the heart of Lydia to prepare her for this moment. And I wanted to stop there and point that out so that I could simply ask you, how many Lydia's are there in your life? How many Lydia's will you encounter on your tennis team or on the golf course or in the office or in the neighborhood, the new couple that comes over and you don't want to help them move their things in, but if you do, you might get to have a conversation with them. How many people are just floating around in our lives whom the Holy Spirit has been working on, who are spiritually sensitive and seeking, who are attuned to spiritual things, and who are ready to hear the gospel, are fertile ground for the message of Christ, and they're simply waiting on you, like Paul, to blow into their life and actually share that story. So don't shy away from doing that. We have the opportunity to talk about our faith. We have the opportunity to answer spiritual questions of the people around us. We have no idea how long the Holy Spirit has been working that soil to prepare it for the good news of Jesus. So share the gospel. We have no idea when we're talking to Lydia. Okay, close parentheses. That may be what you needed. The rest of this may stink for you, and maybe it all stinks. I don't know. But hopefully something is effective. But that's that idea. You take that for what it worth. Now, the other thing we see about Lydia, and this is, I think, probably more relevant to our North Raleigh crowd, is that Lydia was a dealer of purple, okay? Now, many of you probably know, you probably picked up in your history lessons somewhere along the lines that purple was an incredibly expensive dye. It was the most difficult dye to create in the ancient world. I think it came from snails and getting it was really, really tough. And so anything that was dyed purple was an incredibly expensive garment. That's why purple is the color of royalty. So she dealt in really high-end goods. Think of her as like she owned Lululemon. Really overly expensive, not worth it stuff. That's what she sold. Then other rich people just flocked to it. This must be what we need. Surely purple is the color. That's what they did. Okay, so this is her. She's walking in affluent circles. She's a successful woman. By all accounts, very few scholars and theologians, she was single. So she was widowed or her husband had left her or something, but she was the head of her household, which is an interesting dynamic in the ancient world that didn't happen a lot. She becomes very influential in the church, which I think is a phenomenal example for the women that are influential in the church now and the elders that we have. But she was an affluent woman. She had things. She had money by all accounts. By all accounts, she probably had a big, nice house. She invited six to eight guys to come stay there and feed them for what ended up being a longer stay than Paul had had at any of the other cities. She was a woman of means. And I think that this is particularly interesting because up until this point, we really haven't seen anyone with wealth and affluence and resources encounter the gospel and sign up to become a part of the church. When we read the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that have the story of Jesus and the disciples within them, we see Jesus say things like, foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but even the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. I've told you before that Jesus and the disciples literally couch surfed and camped for three years while they went around Israel doing ministry. They didn't have a home base. Maybe Mary and Martha and Lazarus' house in Bethany was the closest thing they had to home base. I'm sure they could sleep there whenever they decided they needed to, but they didn't have anything. And when Jesus called the disciples, he didn't exactly call them away from lucrative careers. They're fishermen and tax collectors and carpenters and farmers probably. So he didn't call them away from means into poverty. And then Jesus actually encounters a rich man and he says, what do I have to do? And he says, sell everything you have and follow me. And there's an important principle there, which means I need to be more important to you than your stuff. So if you can prove that that's true, then come on. Otherwise, your priorities aren't there yet. But we don't see in the Gospels a person of influence and means encounter faith and become a believer and get engaged in the church. This is really, to my knowledge, the first time we see this. And I think that that would make this particularly interesting to the American church and even more particularly interesting to the North Raleigh crowd. Because listen, it's not a secret. We know this. We may as well be able to be comfortable with it and talk about it at church. A lot of us, we've got means. We have a couple extra nickels to rub together. A lot of folks in this church, you probably have more now than you thought you would when you were growing up, when you started your career. I'd be willing to bet there's a pretty good chance that for a lot of us, especially those of us who are at the tail end of our career or have already hung it up, you probably have been blessed with more than you expected. There's a lot of affluence in North Raleigh. Just to be honest, we got a lot of people at the church who have means, who have been successful. And that's okay. We have some people who might feel like, I'm not one of those. You might be talking to everybody else. You're not talking to me. I am not a person of affluence. I can relate to you. But listen, if you compared yourself to some of the families that we support at Fox Road, I bet you probably are affluent compared to them. And I know for a fact that everybody in this room, if you wanted to compare yourself to the families that we go to Mexico and build houses for, for $6,000 worth of cinder block, you're pretty affluent compared to them. So to me, when a woman of means encounters the gospel and then begins to interact with the church, we as North Raleigh should lean in and say, how do we do that? What's the example that she sets for us? How does she encounter the church with her wealth and with her affluence and with her resources? Because we are a church that has wealth and affluence and resources to varying degrees. And I feel like it's important to ask this question and to learn from her example because there exists in Christian circles, and I think it's almost uniquely Christian or maybe just uniquely religious, but my experience is Christianity, it's uniquely Christian to kind of feel bad about wealth, right? To kind of feel bad about having. To not want to have too much. To not want to drive too nice of a car. To not want my house to be too big. To not have to, I'm going to get a beach house, but it's going to be modest, you know? Like, I'm going to have a golf membership. It could be there. It's going to be here. It's going to be cheaper. Like, there's some uncomfortable stuff that exists around the things that we have and the resources that are available to us. We're just not comfortable with it. Case in point, I saw this displayed for me a little while ago. Some time ago, I was with somebody that I consider a friend. They're very dear to the family. He's not from here, so don't try to figure out who it is. I was with him, and our families were together. He's older than me. He's like my dad's age, so he's in generation older than me, and it was time. We decided to hop in the car and go get some meat to throw on the grill. So we go and we hop in his car and he's got a new car, it's a new Mercedes. And I hop in the Mercedes and we're riding down the road and I'm looking around and listen, I'm not a car guy. Okay. I don't, I drove a Nissan Leaf for the first three years that I was here. I think that's, that's all you need to know, to know that I'm not a car guy. All right. I don't care, but I am a car interior guy. I like soft seats, and I like big screens, and I like things that you touch, and then they change. Like, I like the technology inside of cars. That's pretty important to me. So I sit in this big, nice Mercedes, and I'm looking, and there's a screen like the whole width of the dashboard, and the seats are-stitched by elves and it is nice in there. It is really nice. I'm certain that a baby animal died for that steering wheel. I'm positive of it. We're riding down the road and I'm like, this is nice, man. Do you like this better? Prior to this, he had a BMW. I said, do you like it better than this? Yeah, for these reasons. Well, what does this do? And I'm kind of just talking to him about his car. It's a new car. He just got it. He says he likes it a lot. And so, great, let's talk about your car. And at some point or another, a few minutes in, he goes, he plays this card on me. Oh, you know, it's just a car. Oh. It's just a car. Just give me point A to point B. Okay, all right, loud and clear. We'll talk about something else. So we talk about something else. Now, I get home. I shouldn't admit this to you. Please don't judge me for this. But when he said, ah, it's just a car, that got under me a little bit. Because I'm like, bull, not just a car. So I Google it. I know, sorry. I Google it. The car's $115,000. Now listen, I don't care if your car is $115,000. It doesn't matter one little bit to me. But don't try to convince me that it's just a car. You don't get to play. Here's the deal. If you spend $115,000 on your car, that's fine. That's between you and your creator. I don't care what you do, but don't come at me with, well, it just gets me from point A to point B. If that's true, buy a Prius, okay? That's a $115,000 Mercedes that does more than that. I've seen it. It's nice. But you know why I did that? Because he's a really godly dude. I wish he would move here and become one of our elders. He teaches a weekly Sunday school class, and he sends me the notes every week. And you guys would benefit way more from his Sunday school class than from my sermons. I'll tell you that right now. They're really good. And he supports his church. He's integral there. His children love the Lord. And I thought about why did he feel the need to kind of, it's just a car. Because there's this thing about wealth and about having things that makes us uncomfortable. And there's those questions that we ask. I need a new car. How nice is too nice? I'm going to buy a new house. How big is too big? I'm going to get new countertops. How nice if they have gold in them? Is that too much? Should I not get that? And within these Christian circles, I think that we're made to feel badly about having means, about having nice things. And so when the gospel encounters a woman who has nice things and has means, I want to see how she responds to it and how she serves the church. Because I think we get caught up in that. How much car is too much car? Do I really need this extra wash? Do I really need this extra thing? Do I really need the Lululemon? Do I really need these need these things? Or should I be giving it to the kingdom? Like, how should this all work? What's the interaction there? And listen, I don't care how nice your things are. And for those of us who might want to judge my friend for having a car that's that nice, I'll tell you this, I can guarantee you that that car cost him less from a perspective of net worth and annual income than my 2015 Highlander cost me. It's got leather seats. It's really nice. And so I have lived enough years to get off being concerned how nice is too nice. I know they'd say they're a believer, but they live like this and they have all of these things. And do you know what they could do with that? I don't deal with that. That's between you and your creator. I don't care. I'm happy when my friends have nice things. It doesn't matter to me. And I think when we start to worry about what kind of things it's okay to have that we get it wrong. We're not thinking about it correctly anyways. What I want us to see this morning is it's okay to have things. What matters is what we do with what we have. It's okay to have affluence. It's okay to be successful. It's okay to have more than you would have expected. What matters is what you do with the resources that you have. This is why the example of Lydia, I think, is so important. Lydia encounters the gospel and immediately, right away, she accepts Christ, she gets baptized, she has her household baptized, they believe too, and then immediately her wheels start turning. How can I use what I have to serve this new church that I'm a part of? What can I do to move this forward? She knows she doesn't need to preach. She's not going to go preach it more effectively than Paul did. They don't have a 401c3. They don't have anything to give to. So what can I do to help this movement that I am now a part of? I know. I have a big house. I have people who can cook. We're going to handle your meals. We're going to take care of you. Come stay at my house. If you do nothing else at all, if you believe me that I am sincere in my faith, please allow me to use my resources to bless this ministry. Allow me to use what I have to move forward God's kingdom by giving you a comfortable place to stay. I almost did a whole sermon on the incredible hospitality of Lydia and how that's rippled down through the years, but I actually think it's more than that. It's not just being hospitable. It's in her head. The switch was flipped immediately. Okay, I'm a part of the kingdom of God now. How do I use the things that I have access to to further this kingdom? And so it's not about what we have. Who cares? It's about what we do with what we have. It's about flipping the switch in our brain that makes us stewards of what we have. A few weeks ago, we did baby dedications, and we talked about this idea of stewardship just very briefly. These children are not our children. They are God's children that have been entrusted to us, and we are going to hand them back over to him. The things that you have are not your things. They are God's things that he has entrusted to you, and you are responsible for how you use them. She immediately got this idea of stewardship and wanted to use her resources to further the church that she was now a part of. And so what we see is that Lydia's faithful stewardship had a profound impact on the church. What we find out later is that Paul and his companions stayed in Philippi for longer than they stayed anywhere else in that journey because they had these good, now budding relationships there. They felt so welcomed there. What we see in the letter that he writes back to the church in Philippi is this incredible warmth from Paul. It's called by scholars the Joyful Letter. It's a very short book. I think it's four chapters, but it's incredibly impactful. It's a great book. If you're just picking up the Bible, you don't know what to read, read Philippians gospel and do his work so that the church could take off there, so that we could have this letter thousands of years later. And if you don't believe me, I'm going to read, I think it's the first eight verses in Philippians, because this is Paul greeting them. So what Paul does is he goes around and he plants churches. And then he goes on to the next place. He leaves them in the hand of capable leaders. And he goes on to the next place. And then he writes letters back to them to encourage them. I've heard these things are going on. I want to encourage you in these ways. He writes letters back to them. This is what makes up a bulk of our New Testament. These letters that Paul wrote to the churches. And at the beginning of the letters, he always says, greetings to you, grace and peace from Paul, an apostle in Jesus Christ, and says a couple of things, and then he gets into it. But I'm telling you, the greeting for the church in Philippi has more warmth and heart to it than any other letter by far. Look at what he says. He says, Paul to this. This is a direct reference to Lydia. That is a warm letter. I love grace. If God takes me somewhere years from now and I write you a letter back, it will not start like this. It will not be this warm. That is an incredible amount of love and warmth. I pray for you all the time. My heart yearns for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. My soul yearns to be with you as it does with Jesus Christ for your partnership with me from the first day until now. You can't tell me that Lydia's instant switch to stewardship, that Lydia's hospitality, that Lydia leveraging her resources to further God's kingdom didn't have a profound impact on Paul and on the people traveling with him and on the efficacy of the church that they left behind through this simple act that we see of hospitality where Lydia says, I have resources, they're yours now, you can use whatever you need. And so the lesson of Lydia is this. Maybe God has given you stuff so he can use your stuff. Maybe God has given you resources so that he can use your resources to further his kingdom and to bless others. Maybe we don't just have more than what we expected because life has just been good and now we're supposed to enjoy it. Maybe we're stewards of the things that we have to further God's kingdom. Maybe he gave you stuff because he wants to use your stuff. And if we will adopt this mindset of stewardship and use our resources for the things of God as directed by God, quit getting worked up about whether or not it's okay to have and just admit that we do and say, okay, God, now how can I use this for your kingdom? He is still in the business of bringing about profound change and impacting eternity out of generous hearts. I remember when Jen and I were, I think we were engaged or just newly married. We will have been married 15 years this July. Can you imagine? Poor Jen, 15 years every day. Jen's parents bought a lake house. A little bit south of Atlanta, there's a lake called Lake Oconee, and they bought a lake house down there. And Jen's sister was in college. And they said they bought this lake house, And then they said the Christian thing about buying the lake house, right? Like, they're doing okay in life. They're buying a lake house. And we're like, oh, that's great, John Terry. You're buying a lake house. And they're like, it's for ministry. Sure. You can minister to yourself on Saturday morning while you're looking at the water. I want to be a part of that ministry, right? And I've seen people say, we're finishing our basement for ministry. We're getting a third house to minister to people because once a year, the pastor stays there for a weekend. So it's God's, right? This is how we do it. And so they said, we're getting this lake house. I'm like, oh, that's great. And they're like, it's for ministry. And I was like, sure. Yeah, you can minister to me and Jen. We'll eat your food. But they meant it. They meant it. And Lauren, who we called the Pied Piper, was always bringing tons of friends, right? Every weekend, John worked at AT&T. He'd wrap up at 4.30 on Friday and he he'd head down the road to the lake house, and Lauren and her friends would meet him there. And every weekend, they'd go down there, and Terry would drive down and meet them, and me and Jen were invited, and it was really thrilling for me to get to ride on the boat and have an opportunity to wakeboard after these chiseled Adonis college athletes were back there doing flips, and then I'd get up there and just kind of fall over and get concussed and want to come back in the boat. I loved going to the lake. But these kids came every week, and they would feed them. They would buy steaks. They would buy tons of stuff, more food than they could know what to do with. They'd throw it all away at the end of the weekend, and they'd do the very same thing the next week. This became such a regular thing that they started to come without Lauren. They started to come without calling. There was one night, I'm not making this up, 10.30 at night, John and Terry are in bed. It's 10.30, they're falling asleep, and they hear, Big John! Big John! And he looks out the window, and there's literally 15 college guys parked in front of his house. And the only one that he knows is a guy named John Collins, who's the one yelling at him. And John says, I told my friends you wouldn't care if we came. To which I would say, you've lied to your friends. I do care a lot, and go away. John goes down the stairs, flings open the door, makes sure everybody has something to eat, makes sure everybody's got a place to sleep. They're sleeping all over the floor. It wasn't a big place. They're sleeping all over the floor like on each other. Next day, he's up at 7. He's taking them out on the wakeboard all day. He tells Terry we've got to get some stuff for them. She goes grocery shopping. They host these boys, right? This happened all the time. They loved him. He was in some of their weddings. He profoundly impacted these boys by literally using that lake house as a ministry, by not getting worked up about, is it good or is it bad or should I or shouldn't I, but saying, God, I'm going to buy this and it's going to be yours. Some of those boys prayed to accept Christ with him. He got to meet their kids. And 15 years after they experienced the generosity, and they called him Professor Vinson, there was 15 of those boys at his funeral. They flew in from Miami and Phoenix and Boston, and they were there, and they were blubbering, and they were talking about the profound impact that John had on their life. They were talking about how he showed them through his generosity and being measured with them what it was to be a man who walked with Jesus. One of them was his pallbearer. One of the pallbearers, he was crying so hard outside of the church that I had to do his part because he literally couldn't. John was a man who had a good job and he was successful. He made smart decisions. But when he had the ability to help, he did. When he had the ability to give, he did. And like Lydia, because the gospel took root in his life, he didn't see his things as his things. He saw them as God's things for him to hold on to and use for God's kingdom. So I would tell you this this morning. The lesson of Lydia is still true today. God still uses a generous spirit in deeply profound ways that will echo through the decades that you have no idea about. He gave you your stuff so that he could use your stuff to further his kingdom. And so what I'm telling you this morning is, in this affluent North Raleigh community, I don't care how much you have. I don't care how much resources you have. I don't care what you buy or any of that stuff. What matters to God is what you use it for, however much or little you have. What matters to God is our attitude towards the resources that he's given us. And so I would tell you this this morning. If you have your things, and you have your wealth, whatever that means to you, you have your resources, whatever that means to you, you have these things in your life, you feel blessed by them. If you're the only one that's blessed by them, if your families are the only ones that are blessed by them, there's a chance we're misusing God's things. There's a chance we're not learning the lesson of Lydia and understanding that God gave us stuff so that he could use our stuff. God gave us resources so that he could use our resources. Can you imagine the type of impact a church like this with the resources that we have can have on our community if we will more and more learn this lesson from Lydia and see these things. When we encounter the gospel, look at the resources that we have, not feel bad about having them, but say to ourselves, how can we leverage these things as a church to impact our community together? The good news is, I think a lot of us get this. We're pretty good at this, but I want to see us do more. I want to see us adopt this mindset. I want to see us learn more and more from the lesson and from the example of Lydia and believe that by being faithful stewards of the gift that God has given us that we can make profound impacts on the decades to come and even eternity. So let's be like Lydia. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. God, for those of us that feel blessed, we just thank you for that. We thank you that we do have more than we could ask or imagine. I pray that we would see ourselves as stewards of the resources that you've given us. I pray that it would matter deeply to us to leverage the things we have to further your kingdom, to reach people for you, to point people towards Jesus. Father, for those of us who feel like we might be struggling, I just, I pray that we would see that as a season. I pray that those folks would be blessed in that they're struggling. God, plant seeds in us, little ideas of generosity and a generous spirit. Give us the opportunity to participate on the front lines with what you're doing and experience the blessing of what it is to bless others with things that you've used to bless us to. Make us as a church more like your servant Lydia. In Jesus' name, amen.