Sermons tagged with Encouragement

All right, well, once again, good morning. It's good to see everybody. This morning in the sermon, my goal really, more than to get you to feel or to convict you or to challenge you or encourage you, is simply to get you to think. So the goal this morning is that we leave here thinking, and I would tip the cap a little bit and say, in depth about our faith and the reasons behind our faith. And so I would begin with this question. You have it there in your notes in front of you. Why are you a Christian? Now, I understand that there are some people in the room who you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian. You're here because you're exploring or you're considering or you're curious. And to that end, I am so grateful that you trust this place to help you on your path to answer some of those questions. That really, really is very honoring and humbling. And we hope that we hold that well. If you ever want to talk about beliefs that you may or may not have or things that you're considering in a nonjudgmental way, I would love to do that with you. I promise I'm open to whatever your thoughts are. If you are a Christian, however, I would ask, why is that the case? If we could sit down and have coffee together or beer, whatever you prefer, not wine though, that's gross. If we could sit down and we could talk to each other and I could say, why is it that you're a believer? What's the reason for your faith? How would you answer me? I feel like that answer is very, very important for reasons that we're going to explore as we get into the text. And my goal is for you to leave here considering that and hopefully to arrive at an answer to that question that feels substantive, that feels good. And I want to tell you why I feel like that question is such an important one. It's important for many reasons, not the least of which is that it comes up in 1 Peter chapter 4. Peter writes about this question. He poses it to the people who received the letter. And I know that we took a break this last week, and then we missed, or two weeks ago for Mother's Day, and then we missed last week, and so now we jump in the middle of the letters to Peter, and we might have forgotten the context and some of the things going on. So, so that we're all on the same page, and we can appreciate the importance of Peter weaving this into his letter, I wanted to just remind us that Peter was the disciple that I feel like I can relate to. He was the ready, fire, aim disciple, right? He was the one that would always speak first and think later about the things that he just said. He was always sticking his foot in his mouth. He was always the one that was going out first. He was the one jumping in the water. He was the one who would answer Jesus's hard questions. And sometimes he was right. And sometimes he was, he was spectacularly right. And he was honored for that. And other times he was spectacularly wrong and he felt shame for that. And I can relate to Peter a lot. And his letter gives me hope that even dummies like me might be able to grow up one day and be remotely wise. And so in Peter's old age, in his measured, weathered wisdom, he writes two letters to the churches in Asia Minor, which we know pretty much is modern day Turkey, with the intent of them being circulated around the churches. And these are churches that have people in them who are not of a Jewish background, but largely of a Gentile background, meaning they are first-generation believers. They are just coming into this faith. And to them, he writes the same encouragement, the same question that I posed to you just a few minutes ago, why is it that you are a Christian? He phrases it in a different way, but it leads to the same question. This is what he writes in 1 Peter 3. Sorry, I misspoke earlier. Verses 14 through 16. So Peter encourages the early church in the first century, be prepared with an answer when anyone asks for the reason of the hope that you cling to. Now, what is the hope that they cling to? Where does their hope rest? Well, their hope rests in the same place that our hope rests, and our hope rests in the promises of Christ. The hope that we have as Christians, what we hope for in the future, rests in the promises and in the actions and in the victories of Jesus. The hope that we have as Christians is the same hope that they had as Christians, that Jesus really did live, that he really did die on a cross in Jerusalem, that he really was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and that Easter really is true, that he really did raise himself from the dead after three days, and in doing so, conquered sin and death for the rest of time. And then as he went back up into heaven, before he did, he made promises. He made promises that he was going to prepare a place for us. He made promises that he was going to return again to retrieve his bride, the church, to retrieve his brothers and sisters, the children of God the Father. He made promises to us that he's going to come back and get us. That one day, and I say this a lot, he made promises to us that one day all the wrong things would be made right and the sad things would be untrue. Those are the promises that we cling to, the promises of Jesus. Just this week, I was on the phone with a lady who had just lost her dad moments earlier. And she was crying, and it was hard. And those are, it's this really weird juxtaposition, my favorite and least favorite conversations that I have in my role, because what an honor it is to be there as people endure that sort of pain, and to be the one that they call to talk to. I never carry that lightly. But the hope that she clings to is because her father was a believer and professed a faith, and she's a believer and professes a faith, that when she said goodbye to her dad, it wasn't goodbye forever. It was goodbye for now. That's the hope that we cling to because Jesus promised us that. The hope we cling to is one day we'll be at the marriage supper of the Lamb, that one day we'll be in heaven in eternity, that we will see our Jesus face to face. That's the hope that we cling to. It's the same hope that the early church clung to. That's where we are similar to the audience that Peter wrote to in the first century. Here's where we're dissimilar, but in some ways kind of close still. In the first century, everyone was a first generation believer. Maybe, maybe, maybe there was a second generation believer, meaning they were the first ones in their family to come to faith. There could have been some children in the services where this were read whose parents were believers and they were therefore believers. But I could say with almost certainty, there were no adults receiving this letter the first time it was read in the very first edition, maybe a couple hundred years later, but there was no adults receiving this freshly whose parents were believers and who bestowed it upon them. That is highly, highly unlikely. So we have a bunch of first generation believers. And we have a bunch of first generation believers in a culture and in a context where this Christian religion seems like some weird fringe cultish thing. Why would you be a part of that? Why would you do that? Why would you be one of those crazy people where you have to eat the flesh of the Savior? That's so freaking weird. Why would you want to have anything to do with it? To be a Christian in the first century was to choose to be ostracized and to be put on the fringes of society. And so when you would declare publicly that you were a Christian, it was pretty normal to be met with, why? What for? And Peter tells them, when they ask you why, be prepared with an answer. Be ready. Have a why. Another way of thinking about that why is it that you are a believer is to say, what is your why? So Peter says, know what your why is. Know how to respond when people ask why you have faith. And then he says this, and this is so, so important. He says, yet do it with gentleness and respect. Do it with gentleness and respect. This is not the point of the sermon, okay? But I guess I'm getting to the age where I just feel like it's all right to climb on top of my soapbox every now and again when a chord struck with me. Christians in the public forum, on social media, commenting on Facebook, posting on Twitter, maybe on Instagram, I don't know. When you talk with your friends, when you get beers with the fellows, when you talk with the ladies, whatever it is, if our speech is not marked in contentious situations with gentleness and respect, then we dishonor the Savior that gave us the opportunity to use those words. If our speech in the public forum with people who disagree with us, not just about faith, but about anything, especially politics. If our speech isn't marked with respect and with gentleness, then our speech, no matter what our words are, is not Christian. It must be marked with gentleness and respect. That is the mark of the believer, and that is what will have our words heard. And I think the admonition of Peter here to be prepared with an answer for why you believe what you believe and gentleness and respect is every bit as applicable now in our lives and in our public forums. Our speech, when we answer why we think what we think, why we believe what we believe, because listen, the question doesn't always come up, why do you believe what you believe? Why do you believe, people aren't gonna come up to you and go, why do you cling to the hope that you have in Jesus? That's not how that question comes in. It's why do you believe this about this? Why did you vote this way about this thing? Why do you go to church on Sunday? Why do you prioritize this in your family? You tithe? What for? That's crazy. That's how those questions look in real life. And when we answer those questions, they go back to why, because we have a faith. Why do we have a faith? Well, that's your why. And then it's incumbent upon us to offer those answers with gentleness and respect. Now, here's the difference in our context now in the 21st century and the first century. In the first century, Christianity was this fringe religion that nobody had ever heard of. And if you believed in it, you were probably cultish and crazy. But now, particularly in the Southern United States, which Raleigh like barely counts. I'm from Georgia. Raleigh's kind of Southern. It's not super Southern. We still got some work to do. But in the Southern United States, that's not the case at all. Christianity isn't a fringe religion, it's the religion. It's the assumed one. Everybody knows who Jesus is. Everybody knows what church is. Everybody knows why it exists. Everybody's heard the story of Jesus. If you went man on the street interview, if you just went to Triangle or to Crabtree and just started grabbing people and saying, hey, what do you think about Jesus? You would be hard pressed to find somebody who would go, who? Do you mean Jesus? They would all know who you were talking about to a man and to a woman. If you were to say to them, do you go to church? If they said no and you said why, they'd have a reason. In our context, it's important to understand that if people in our culture are not Christians, they have a reason for that. As we seek to share our faith, as we seek to invite people to church, as we seek to build God's kingdom in Raleigh, in the South, we need to understand that when we engage in spiritual conversations with other people, they know who Jesus is. They know what the church is. And if they don't come to church and if they have rejected Christ, they have a reason for that. It's not that no one has ever told them. I would be shocked to find somebody who grew up in this area or who grew up in the general vicinity, who hasn't come over from another country without a Christian context, but to find someone who's from here and ask them, why is it that you don't have a faith? And for them to have never heard the story of Jesus dying on the cross before. They've heard it, which means if we know people in our life, when we encounter people in our life who are not yet believers, they have a reason for it. And often the reason is that God's children gave them a bad impression of their father. Often the reason that people are not believers is because God's children gave them a bad impression of their father. And this can happen really in two ways. It can happen in the way that you're thinking of, where someone's a hypocrite. You know, we see the pastor who preaches God's good news every Sunday, and then they have a moral failure, and they're off, and they're living some different life. Or somebody says, you know, hey, you come to my church with me on Sunday, and then during the week, they're every bit the hellier than you are, and you're like, your life looks no different than mine. How am I supposed to believe in your God? So there's hypocrisy that can often give people a bad impression of the Father, to be sure. But then it's also the church that does this sometimes. It's also the way the church talks to itself and to other people without gentleness and respect that turns people off. I think of my aunt who grew up in a very conservative Southern Baptist church where Christianity was reduced to moralism and legalism and following the rules. And we obeyed God because he's wrathful and he's sitting in heaven and he wants to get you. And in adulthood, she walked away from the faith. She rejected the version of the God that was taught there, and she should have because that's not the God that we serve. But to her, and this broke my heart when I heard her say it, early in ministry, I knew that she wasn't a believer, and so I wanted to have an honest talk with her about it. And I asked her in all sincerity, when you hear the name Jesus, what do you think? And she said, hatred. And I thought, oh my goodness, that's pretty strong. Why hatred? And she said, because that name has only ever been used to make me feel bad about who I am. It has only ever been used to heap guilt on my head. And I don't want to have anything to do with that name. God forbid anyone ever have that experience at Grace. God forbid it. And so sometimes God's children give people a bad impression of their father, not because of their hypocrisy, but because of their wrong beliefs, because of their wrong why, because of the way they carry out their faith that is in no way taught in scripture. And so we need to be prepared with our why. We need to be ready to encounter things like that when we have these conversations. And listen, we never know when these conversations are going to happen. We never have any idea when somebody in our circles, when someone who works for us or with us or one of our neighbors or somebody at the ball field will just kind of lob this question over to us. Why do you go to church? Why don't you guys do this? We invite y'all to these parties. Why don't you come to them? Why did you change those plans? Why do you do this thing? The question comes in a lot of different formats, but we need to have ears to hear it when it happens. And like I said, we never know when it's going to happen. Years ago, I had joined a men's tennis team. And I'm sitting there, my very first match. We had practice on, I don't know, Wednesdays, and then we had a match on Saturday. And so I'd gone to practice, and I'm sitting at the match, and I think I was done with my match, and I was just trying to support the team and watch the rest of the guys and eat the stale donuts and drink some Gatorade or whatever it was. And I'm just watching the match. And some dude sits next to me. His name is Brent. And Brent and I get to talking and I asked what he did and he told me and he asked what I did. And I said, well, I'm, you know, I'm one of the pastors at the church down the road. And he goes, oh, you're a pastor. I go, yeah. And he goes, all right, so tell me something. And I'm like, ah, here we go. Okay. What do you, what do you want to know, man? I said, sure, what's up? He goes, all the trains are getting off at the same station, right? Like, everybody believes something, but it's all the same. We're all climbing the same mountain, you know what I'm saying? Which is universalism. Universalism is the belief that at the end of the day, all roads, all religious roads, all spiritual paths lead to God. Even agnostics and atheists who don't believe in God or who believe in a God that doesn't care about them will one day find their way into eternal harmony with or without Jesus. And so he's asking me, you're a pastor, but like, everybody's right, right? And I'm like, yo, you just jumped in the deep end, didn't you? We couldn't start with like an easy one. Like, do we have to go to church every Sunday? Like, that's easy. Yes, of course you do. Otherwise God condemns you forever. That's not true. That's not true. Church should be vitally important to you, but anyway. You just jumped right in the deep end, didn't you, pal? I just want to know. But luckily, I had thought about that a lot. I considered it and been in conversations about it. And I had an answer worth sharing. And so I shared it. And I guess he found the answer valuable enough that he asked a lot more questions. And I spent a lot of evenings in Brent's backyard having a beer with him, answering his questions. And then his wife, Susan, was always off to the side. She would kind of know what we were talking about, but she would do her own thing. And then eventually she started to come to talk to us too until we get a year down the road. And I'm asked at that church to lead a Sunday night service that was totally independent of the Monday morning service. And so it needed its whole crew of volunteers. And Brent and Susan were the ones who volunteered to be in charge of set up and tear down for the service, to put the chairs where they needed to go and put the curtains around the chairs so it felt smaller and more intimate. Within a year's time, God used those conversations to bring them into the fold, to help them find a faith and to get them serving in the church and doing something that they would not have done a year earlier when he sat down and said, so all the trains get off at the same station, right? You never know when those conversations are going to happen. You never know when you're going to have the chance to have them. And if you're sitting here now and you're thinking, I never have those conversations. They never happened to me. Then pray that God would give you ears to hear and eyes to see. Because either one of two things is true. Either you only hang out with Christians and you need to go make some pagan friends. And I say pagan, I'm just messing around. You need to go make some friends who are really great people who don't share the faith that you have. You make some friends with them and it'll come up. Or if you have pagan friends, you're not paying attention because I promise you they've asked you some of these questions. I promise you they've opened the door for spiritual conversation for you to be able to enter it and say, with all gentleness and respect, here's why I believe what I believe. And these conversations, when we get to have them, they ripple for eternity. They have eternal impact when we get to have these conversations. There needs to be a switch that flips in your head where you go, oh, okay, Holy Spirit, all right, all right, I'm done. I'm not just casually talking anymore. I really want to be sensitive to you and what you might have me say. These conversations, when people begin to ask you, hey, why is it that you believe what you believe? And what they're really asking in our culture, as I alluded to earlier, everybody has a reason for not being a Christian if they're not. What they're really saying is, why do you still go? Why are you hanging in there? Your God lets you get cancer. Why do you still have faith in him? Your God let you endure these things. Why do you still put up with him? Church does this and this and this and it's terrible. Why do you still go to one? If you can be prepared with an answer to those questions that's substantive and good and compelling, then God can use those answers to compel them right to Jesus. He can use those answers to compel them towards the Holy Spirit, to allow the Holy Spirit to get into their life and into their heart, to do the work, to draw them into the Father. Being prepared with an answer to these questions when people ask about your faith can literally compel them into eternity if we will be humble and respectful and gentle and thoughtful as we explain to people why we have the faith that we have. But here's the other thing it does for us when we understand our why. Your why not only compels them, but it also guards you. I try to say this as often as I can so that when it happens to you, you will not be surprised, but to be a Christian is to sometimes be dismayed with Christianity. To be a Christian is to sometimes be brought to a place where you're like, why do I even believe this? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? To be a Christian is to experience God not doing something that you thought he would do, not protecting you or a family member from something that you thought he would protect you from. To be a Christian is to sit in a disappointment that you felt like God didn't come through and he did not keep his promises to you. It's to sit in the remains of kind of a broken faith and have to choose to put things back together. Or it's to be promised things in scripture to be told that it's going to be like this to be a Christian and it just doesn't feel that way as you can't seem to get any traction living the life that God wants you to live. There will be times in your Christian faith and in your Christian walk where you come to a place where you go, gosh, I'm not even really sure why I believe in this. This is really hard. Maybe I should just be done with it. This is the whole deconstruction era in our lifetime, right? I saw somebody say, a pastor recently, Tim Keller, he said, let's be honest. It may be possible that Christianity has never had a worse name than it does right now. And so when you are a Christian in the midst of a culture where our church does not have a good name, sometimes it gets challenging to cling to that faith that is derided by so many and questioned by so many. And when that questioning comes for your faith, it's going to be important to you to have an answer of why. I'm reminded of the parable that Jesus told at the end of the Sermon on the Mount about the house built on rock versus the house built on sand. He says, the foolish man builds his house on the sand, and when the rains come and the winds blow, the sand melts underneath it and the house crashes into the ocean, but the wise man builds his house on the rock, and when the rains come and the winds blow, his house stands firm. If we think about the foundation of our faith so it can weather the storms of life, certainly our why is one of the cornerstones, yes? And sometimes when the winds come and the rains blow, I've seen believers who might not have had a good why allow it to be washed away, and so their faith is with it. And so I would challenge you this morning with what is your why? Why is it that you believe what you believe? Why is it that you make the choices that you do to build your life around faith? When it comes up, what will your answer be? You don't need to be prepared to answer every question. You don't need to go home and do a deep dive into universalist theology so that you have a good answer for that. But you need to have a why that's sufficient for you. I know that for me, what I have found, this is just personal, is that the most solid whys are built first on undeniable experiences of God showing up in your life. When I think, why is it that I believe what I believe, the first place my mind goes is because it's the times when I go, well, because I saw God come through here. I saw God speak to me here. I saw God move in this thing there. I saw God, I saw God, I saw God. And so there's enough events in my life that I can point to and say, I can't deny that God exists. I can't deny God's existence because I saw him show up in myriad ways throughout my life. And then on top of that, we build the academic things. We build our understanding and our trust for scripture and our understanding and our trust of doctrine and theology and all of those things. But God shows up for us first and lets us know that he exists. And then we learn on top of that. So I would encourage you today. I told you my goal is to get you to think. If you ride home from church with someone, ask that someone, what's your why? Why do you believe what you believe? And poke them a little bit. Because they might say, well, I believe that the Bible is true. Okay. Why do you believe the Bible is true? I believe that God is real. Okay. Why do you believe that God is real? I believe that Jesus existed. All right. Why do you believe that Jesus existed? Let's sharpen one another and help prepare one another to be ready with an answer that we can share in all gentleness and humility because my prayer for you is that you will find yourself in some of these conversations and that when you do, you will remember that those conversations ripple for eternity. And it is my hope that you will be prepared with an answer and raring to go when someone opens this door in your life to have these conversations. So as you go home today, what is your why? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for who you are, for all that you've done. We thank you for the hope that you give us in your son. We know you bind all that hope together, God. We know that hope rests in you as well. We thank you for the spirit that convicts and leads us to that hope. Father, if there's anyone here who does not know you, I pray they would. If there's anyone here with questions, may they be bold enough to ask them. God, if there are any of us with questions about our faith, may we be courageous and diligent enough to seek out those answers. God, I pray that each of us, within the sound of my voice in this room and whoever listens to this later on, would be prepared with the reason why we cling to you. We'll be happy and eager to share with others why we cling to the hope that we find in you and why that hope brings us so much encouragement in uncertain times. God, would you give each of us the courage to seek it out and help us discover and solidify why we believe what we believe. Strengthen our faith in you, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. It's good to see you. Thanks for being a part of the Mother's Day service. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We hope that it is all that you dreamed. I had one mom come up before the service and say, not that you asked for my opinion. She's a dear friend. I said, not that you, she said, not that you asked for my opinion, but just so you know, baby dedication on Mother's Day is not a gift to mothers. We empathize with you, mysterious friend, and I'm sorry, but everybody else really liked it. I don't know what to tell you. And to those for whom Mother's Day is difficult, Jen and I walked through difficult Mother's Days. For those to whom Mother's Day is kind of just a reminder of maybe something that you don't have or that you've lost or that you've hoped for, and that is unrequited. Our hearts are with you, and our prayers are with you. And I always say that in Mother's Day services, and as I look out now, I get to see some babies that I prayed for, that belonged to some mamas that I hurt for, and that's a real blessing. We're taking a break from our series in the letters of Peter this morning for really, I guess it feels silly to say it since I'm the one doing it, but a special Mother's Day message. But this is something that I will confess to you. I'm really excited to share. I feel really strongly and deeply about what I'm going to share with you this morning. And what I'm going to share with you is actually one of my primary motivators in ministry. It is one of my primary motivators to hang in there in ministry. It's one of the things I care most deeply about. And I will warn you, I've come prepared. I've been on the razor's edge of emotion this morning. I was supposed to pray at the end of the service. There's no way that's going to happen. You'll see why. But I bailed out of that before the service started. Because I'm going to sit there next to Jen and feel the freedom to be a mess if I want to be. But I'm going to do something that I don't normally do this morning and just talk to parents. Those of you who dedicated your babies. This is for you. And those of you who are family members, this is for you. And then parents in the room, this is for you. And I don't normally do this because I don't want to exclude any portion of the audience, but I'm going to take the license and the liberty here on Mother's Day to just talk to the parents in the room. And as I do that, I wanted to begin by asking you this question and get you thinking about this along with me. What sort of legacy are you leaving for your children? One day when you're gone and your children, Lord willing, have their own families and their own people in their life who love them, what will your legacy be to them? Because we're all leaving one. Make no mistake about that. We are all of us legacy builders. We all leave behind something. And there are myriad legacies to leave. We could leave an affinity for a sports team. We could leave a legacy of being a Red Sox fan or an unfortunate Panthers fan, whatever your legacy might be. We can leave behind fandom if we like. I'm going to continue to pray for your children, Shane, as you bestow that legacy on them. It's unfortunate. We can leave behind a legacy of generosity, of kindness, of hospitality, of grace. And then we all know, and I think our greatest fear as parents is to leave behind legacies that our children do not want to emulate. To leave behind legacies that wound those who have been entrusted to us. Of sin and struggle and failure. And make no mistake, we will all leave some of those too. But God in his goodness can clean up that mess for us. But we all leave legacies. We are all building them. And I think it's good to remind us of that because it's a sobering thought. It's an arresting thought. And if we just go throughout our days, I don't think that we pay attention to that. I don't think that we are reminded of that. I don't think that we are aware of that. We can be so hurried and harried that we're just trying to get people to the next thing. All kidding aside, getting kids up and getting them bathed and getting them ready to be seen by the whole church and then having the whole church laugh at your child. That was nice. And Jen had to do it by herself. That's stressful. You're not thinking about legacy when you're trying to dry a kid's hair and just get them in the dang car. Can you just sit down? We've been doing this for six years, all right? You know the drill. Get in the car. You're not thinking about legacy. You're not thinking about legacy when you're driving them to soccer practice and when you're picking them up and when they're out of town and when you're just going throughout the day and trying to decide another day what in the world dinner is going to be today. You're not thinking about legacy. But whether we like it or not, realize it or not, we are every day building a legacy for our children to follow and to walk in. And so more pointedly, what sort of spiritual legacy are you leaving behind? What will they learn about God from you? How will they see his love in you? Mamas, how will they watch you love their daddy in such a way that compels them to either find someone like you or be more like you when they grow up? Dads, how will your children see you love their mom? Will it be in such a way that compels them to love just like you did or to demand that someone loves them like you? What sort of legacy of marriage and family will we leave for our children? What sort of legacy of godliness will we leave for them? Will they see you open your word daily? Will they hear you teach them the principles of God as is dictated to us in Psalm 78 and in Deuteronomy and in Numbers? Will they not only hear you teach those things, but watch you walk them out and believe in and trust in your integrity? Will they know in their hearts that who you are on Sunday is every bit who you are on Wednesday night too? And is every bit who you are as you go into and out of your workplace? What sort of spiritual legacy will you leave? Because I am convinced, having watched children grow up in the church for 40 years, Having experienced adulthood myself, having watched my friends and my peers enter into adulthood and into parenthood and go through life, I am convinced that this is true, that you cannot overstate the value for an individual of growing up in a home where that child knows, my God loves me and my parents love me and they believe in me. You cannot overstate the value of that truth in the life of an adult. God, my creator, loves me. My mom and my dad, they love me. And God and my parents, they believe in me. And I want desperately for this church to produce children who know those things are true. I pray most ardently for the families in this church who are raising kids that those kids will grow up and they will know my God loves me, my parents love me, and they believe in me. You cannot overstate the value of those truths and the impact they have on our lives as adults. And to that end, some of us in the room, as we all acknowledge that we build legacies, some of us are legacy carriers. Some of us inherited a rich and deep faith from our parents, and it is our job to pick up that banner and to carry it forward with faith and with consistency and with passion. And we stand on shoulders of people who have come before us, who have chosen to prize Jesus in their life and have bestowed that richness of faith upon us. And our job as the carriers is to pick up the banner and go with it. And if you are a carrier of a legacy, you know the blessing that that is. You know the advantage that gives you. If you lived any life as an adult, you know the wealth that that has to grow up knowing, man, my God loves me and my parents love me and they believe in me. And to enter into adulthood being certain of those things and to have your own children and not have to worry and not have to be confused. What does godly parenthood look like? Because your parents faithfully modeled that for you. So all you do is you take the baton and you run with it. So some of us are legacy carriers. And you know the blessing of what that is. Others of us are tasked with being legacy starters. Others of us have parents, grew up in homes that may have been wonderful, may have been full of love, and maybe your parents bestowed upon you some wonderful traits of kindness and graciousness and generosity, but you did not learn from your parents what it was to love Jesus. You did not see godliness and devotion to Christ modeled in your home on a day-to-day basis. And so you don't know what that looks like as an adult. You're a legacy starter. You're a legacy beginner. You are tasked with making the decision to say, the generations that came before me, they didn't value godliness. They didn't teach the love of Christ in their home. They just were clouded and they didn't see it and they didn't have it. And I've entered into adulthood and I'm gonna draw a line in the sand that from now on, the generations that come in my family that have my last name will know that Jesus loves them. And you make a choice that moving forward, the name that you're giving to your kids is going to mean something different than the name that you got when you were a kid. You're a legacy starter. And for you, I pray the hardest. I don't know if it's fair. I don't mean to neglect anyone else, but you're the ones I love the most. You are the ones for whom I carry the most hope because I know it's hard to start a legacy. I've seen the wounds that you enter into life with. I've seen how hard it is to choose faith when you don't know the way. And I, with you, hope that your kids don't have to figure that out. I hope that they don't have to learn the lessons that you're learning. I hope that they don't have to walk the path that you've walked. I hope that you can walk it for them so that they might be legacy carriers, so that they might carry the baton on from you. And I pray hardest for you because I do think that your path is more difficult and because that's who my parents were. I won't get into the details because it's probably not appropriate here, but for different reasons, each of my parents had to draw a line in the sand and say, our name is going to mean something different when we give it to our children. And it did. And they've said it. And I get the blessing of being a carrier. I get the blessing of standing on shoulders and I've watched them struggle and I've watched them try and I've watched them prize Jesus in our home. And for those of you who are legacy starters, I want you to grow old and look at your children and see the struggles but know that it was worth it. And if you play your cards right, one day, one of your children could be the pastor of a tiny church straddling an aquarium store. And church, as we seek to surround these families. As we seek to surround these families. And at the beginning of the service, we stood, all of us. We are part of building that legacy too. In our small groups and in the ebbs and flows of life. As passions might wane, as other things in life might seek to interfere with the goals of the families and the parents. It's our job as a church to step in, to rally around, to protect, to pray for, to support, to challenge, to convict, to hope, and to see these families through as we all leave legacies. Grandparents, you're leaving one too. Your children will remember how you loved on and cared for their children. It's great if you're the fun one. Be the godly one. Be the praying one. Be the supportive one. Be the one that fights for their marriages. Be the one that loves your children well. And your children will inherit that legacy too. And let us remember remember as we seek to build these legacies, as we surround the parents who seek to leave a wake of godliness behind them, that our goal is not to raise well-behaved 10-year-olds. Big deal. Our goal is to release grown adults into the world who know that God loves them, that you love them, and that God believes in them, and that Christ died for them. Our goal is to raise grown adults who know that God loves them and he cherishes them. When I pray for my children, I pray that they would know God better than I do. I pray that they would love Jesus more than I do. And I pray that I would see things in their walks and in their journeys that inspire and convict me. I pray that they will go further than I do. And to put a fine point on it, what we are praying for is Ephesians 2.10. Ephesians 2.10 says that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And I love that verse because it tells us that God created us intentionally, on purpose, so that one day we might walk in the good works that he has laid out for us, that he has designed us for, that he has gifted us for, that he has turned us towards in our various bents. But as I think about it this morning, it occurs to me that that is the job of the parent, is to know and acknowledge that your children are God's workmanship. And they were created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has purposed them for before the beginning of time that they might walk in them. So as a parent, your role is to raise children who have ears to hear and eyes to see the good works that God has created them to walk in and then have the courage and the faith and the love and the passion and the freedom to walk in those good works. That's what we pray for. That's what we hope for. That we will release out of grace for generation after generation legacy carriers, not starters. That we will release generation after generation at Grace kids into the world who know that they are God's workmanship and they are seeking out the good works that they might walk in that God intentioned and purposed them for. That is our hope and our prayer for the families of Grace. And that is the challenge to the parents of Grace. And in light of that challenge, as we wrap up the service today, I'm going to invite the band up to sing a prayer over us. It's a song called The Blessing. And it's pulled straight from Scripture. It's pulled straight from Scripture most pointedly. You'll hear these words that are written in Numbers chapter six. The author writes this, the Lord spoke to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons, this is how you are to bless the Israelites. You should say to them, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace. This song is an amalgamation of a passage in Deuteronomy that tells us to teach the word to our children, to put it on our walls, to repeat it to them in our coming and in our going. It's an amalgamation of this passage in Numbers and even the passage that we read from Psalms, a generation after generation, that if we can establish a legacy, then generation after generation can take that baton and run with it. And so this song is a prayer. And I'm going to invite you to just sit and let it be sung over you, parents. And in the song, there's this word, amen. And in the case of this song, it means I agree, I affirm that, yes, Lord. So in light of our role as parents, in light of our responsibility to leave behind a legacy worth following, I hope that you'll receive this song as a prayer over you before we go back out into our weeks.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. It's good to see you. Thanks for being a part of the Mother's Day service. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We hope that it is all that you dreamed. I had one mom come up before the service and say, not that you asked for my opinion. She's a dear friend. I said, not that you, she said, not that you asked for my opinion, but just so you know, baby dedication on Mother's Day is not a gift to mothers. We empathize with you, mysterious friend, and I'm sorry, but everybody else really liked it. I don't know what to tell you. And to those for whom Mother's Day is difficult, Jen and I walked through difficult Mother's Days. For those to whom Mother's Day is kind of just a reminder of maybe something that you don't have or that you've lost or that you've hoped for, and that is unrequited. Our hearts are with you, and our prayers are with you. And I always say that in Mother's Day services, and as I look out now, I get to see some babies that I prayed for, that belonged to some mamas that I hurt for, and that's a real blessing. We're taking a break from our series in the letters of Peter this morning for really, I guess it feels silly to say it since I'm the one doing it, but a special Mother's Day message. But this is something that I will confess to you. I'm really excited to share. I feel really strongly and deeply about what I'm going to share with you this morning. And what I'm going to share with you is actually one of my primary motivators in ministry. It is one of my primary motivators to hang in there in ministry. It's one of the things I care most deeply about. And I will warn you, I've come prepared. I've been on the razor's edge of emotion this morning. I was supposed to pray at the end of the service. There's no way that's going to happen. You'll see why. But I bailed out of that before the service started. Because I'm going to sit there next to Jen and feel the freedom to be a mess if I want to be. But I'm going to do something that I don't normally do this morning and just talk to parents. Those of you who dedicated your babies. This is for you. And those of you who are family members, this is for you. And then parents in the room, this is for you. And I don't normally do this because I don't want to exclude any portion of the audience, but I'm going to take the license and the liberty here on Mother's Day to just talk to the parents in the room. And as I do that, I wanted to begin by asking you this question and get you thinking about this along with me. What sort of legacy are you leaving for your children? One day when you're gone and your children, Lord willing, have their own families and their own people in their life who love them, what will your legacy be to them? Because we're all leaving one. Make no mistake about that. We are all of us legacy builders. We all leave behind something. And there are myriad legacies to leave. We could leave an affinity for a sports team. We could leave a legacy of being a Red Sox fan or an unfortunate Panthers fan, whatever your legacy might be. We can leave behind fandom if we like. I'm going to continue to pray for your children, Shane, as you bestow that legacy on them. It's unfortunate. We can leave behind a legacy of generosity, of kindness, of hospitality, of grace. And then we all know, and I think our greatest fear as parents is to leave behind legacies that our children do not want to emulate. To leave behind legacies that wound those who have been entrusted to us. Of sin and struggle and failure. And make no mistake, we will all leave some of those too. But God in his goodness can clean up that mess for us. But we all leave legacies. We are all building them. And I think it's good to remind us of that because it's a sobering thought. It's an arresting thought. And if we just go throughout our days, I don't think that we pay attention to that. I don't think that we are reminded of that. I don't think that we are aware of that. We can be so hurried and harried that we're just trying to get people to the next thing. All kidding aside, getting kids up and getting them bathed and getting them ready to be seen by the whole church and then having the whole church laugh at your child. That was nice. And Jen had to do it by herself. That's stressful. You're not thinking about legacy when you're trying to dry a kid's hair and just get them in the dang car. Can you just sit down? We've been doing this for six years, all right? You know the drill. Get in the car. You're not thinking about legacy. You're not thinking about legacy when you're driving them to soccer practice and when you're picking them up and when they're out of town and when you're just going throughout the day and trying to decide another day what in the world dinner is going to be today. You're not thinking about legacy. But whether we like it or not, realize it or not, we are every day building a legacy for our children to follow and to walk in. And so more pointedly, what sort of spiritual legacy are you leaving behind? What will they learn about God from you? How will they see his love in you? Mamas, how will they watch you love their daddy in such a way that compels them to either find someone like you or be more like you when they grow up? Dads, how will your children see you love their mom? Will it be in such a way that compels them to love just like you did or to demand that someone loves them like you? What sort of legacy of marriage and family will we leave for our children? What sort of legacy of godliness will we leave for them? Will they see you open your word daily? Will they hear you teach them the principles of God as is dictated to us in Psalm 78 and in Deuteronomy and in Numbers? Will they not only hear you teach those things, but watch you walk them out and believe in and trust in your integrity? Will they know in their hearts that who you are on Sunday is every bit who you are on Wednesday night too? And is every bit who you are as you go into and out of your workplace? What sort of spiritual legacy will you leave? Because I am convinced, having watched children grow up in the church for 40 years, Having experienced adulthood myself, having watched my friends and my peers enter into adulthood and into parenthood and go through life, I am convinced that this is true, that you cannot overstate the value for an individual of growing up in a home where that child knows, my God loves me and my parents love me and they believe in me. You cannot overstate the value of that truth in the life of an adult. God, my creator, loves me. My mom and my dad, they love me. And God and my parents, they believe in me. And I want desperately for this church to produce children who know those things are true. I pray most ardently for the families in this church who are raising kids that those kids will grow up and they will know my God loves me, my parents love me, and they believe in me. You cannot overstate the value of those truths and the impact they have on our lives as adults. And to that end, some of us in the room, as we all acknowledge that we build legacies, some of us are legacy carriers. Some of us inherited a rich and deep faith from our parents, and it is our job to pick up that banner and to carry it forward with faith and with consistency and with passion. And we stand on shoulders of people who have come before us, who have chosen to prize Jesus in their life and have bestowed that richness of faith upon us. And our job as the carriers is to pick up the banner and go with it. And if you are a carrier of a legacy, you know the blessing that that is. You know the advantage that gives you. If you lived any life as an adult, you know the wealth that that has to grow up knowing, man, my God loves me and my parents love me and they believe in me. And to enter into adulthood being certain of those things and to have your own children and not have to worry and not have to be confused. What does godly parenthood look like? Because your parents faithfully modeled that for you. So all you do is you take the baton and you run with it. So some of us are legacy carriers. And you know the blessing of what that is. Others of us are tasked with being legacy starters. Others of us have parents, grew up in homes that may have been wonderful, may have been full of love, and maybe your parents bestowed upon you some wonderful traits of kindness and graciousness and generosity, but you did not learn from your parents what it was to love Jesus. You did not see godliness and devotion to Christ modeled in your home on a day-to-day basis. And so you don't know what that looks like as an adult. You're a legacy starter. You're a legacy beginner. You are tasked with making the decision to say, the generations that came before me, they didn't value godliness. They didn't teach the love of Christ in their home. They just were clouded and they didn't see it and they didn't have it. And I've entered into adulthood and I'm gonna draw a line in the sand that from now on, the generations that come in my family that have my last name will know that Jesus loves them. And you make a choice that moving forward, the name that you're giving to your kids is going to mean something different than the name that you got when you were a kid. You're a legacy starter. And for you, I pray the hardest. I don't know if it's fair. I don't mean to neglect anyone else, but you're the ones I love the most. You are the ones for whom I carry the most hope because I know it's hard to start a legacy. I've seen the wounds that you enter into life with. I've seen how hard it is to choose faith when you don't know the way. And I, with you, hope that your kids don't have to figure that out. I hope that they don't have to learn the lessons that you're learning. I hope that they don't have to walk the path that you've walked. I hope that you can walk it for them so that they might be legacy carriers, so that they might carry the baton on from you. And I pray hardest for you because I do think that your path is more difficult and because that's who my parents were. I won't get into the details because it's probably not appropriate here, but for different reasons, each of my parents had to draw a line in the sand and say, our name is going to mean something different when we give it to our children. And it did. And they've said it. And I get the blessing of being a carrier. I get the blessing of standing on shoulders and I've watched them struggle and I've watched them try and I've watched them prize Jesus in our home. And for those of you who are legacy starters, I want you to grow old and look at your children and see the struggles but know that it was worth it. And if you play your cards right, one day, one of your children could be the pastor of a tiny church straddling an aquarium store. And church, as we seek to surround these families. As we seek to surround these families. And at the beginning of the service, we stood, all of us. We are part of building that legacy too. In our small groups and in the ebbs and flows of life. As passions might wane, as other things in life might seek to interfere with the goals of the families and the parents. It's our job as a church to step in, to rally around, to protect, to pray for, to support, to challenge, to convict, to hope, and to see these families through as we all leave legacies. Grandparents, you're leaving one too. Your children will remember how you loved on and cared for their children. It's great if you're the fun one. Be the godly one. Be the praying one. Be the supportive one. Be the one that fights for their marriages. Be the one that loves your children well. And your children will inherit that legacy too. And let us remember remember as we seek to build these legacies, as we surround the parents who seek to leave a wake of godliness behind them, that our goal is not to raise well-behaved 10-year-olds. Big deal. Our goal is to release grown adults into the world who know that God loves them, that you love them, and that God believes in them, and that Christ died for them. Our goal is to raise grown adults who know that God loves them and he cherishes them. When I pray for my children, I pray that they would know God better than I do. I pray that they would love Jesus more than I do. And I pray that I would see things in their walks and in their journeys that inspire and convict me. I pray that they will go further than I do. And to put a fine point on it, what we are praying for is Ephesians 2.10. Ephesians 2.10 says that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And I love that verse because it tells us that God created us intentionally, on purpose, so that one day we might walk in the good works that he has laid out for us, that he has designed us for, that he has gifted us for, that he has turned us towards in our various bents. But as I think about it this morning, it occurs to me that that is the job of the parent, is to know and acknowledge that your children are God's workmanship. And they were created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has purposed them for before the beginning of time that they might walk in them. So as a parent, your role is to raise children who have ears to hear and eyes to see the good works that God has created them to walk in and then have the courage and the faith and the love and the passion and the freedom to walk in those good works. That's what we pray for. That's what we hope for. That we will release out of grace for generation after generation legacy carriers, not starters. That we will release generation after generation at Grace kids into the world who know that they are God's workmanship and they are seeking out the good works that they might walk in that God intentioned and purposed them for. That is our hope and our prayer for the families of Grace. And that is the challenge to the parents of Grace. And in light of that challenge, as we wrap up the service today, I'm going to invite the band up to sing a prayer over us. It's a song called The Blessing. And it's pulled straight from Scripture. It's pulled straight from Scripture most pointedly. You'll hear these words that are written in Numbers chapter six. The author writes this, the Lord spoke to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons, this is how you are to bless the Israelites. You should say to them, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace. This song is an amalgamation of a passage in Deuteronomy that tells us to teach the word to our children, to put it on our walls, to repeat it to them in our coming and in our going. It's an amalgamation of this passage in Numbers and even the passage that we read from Psalms, a generation after generation, that if we can establish a legacy, then generation after generation can take that baton and run with it. And so this song is a prayer. And I'm going to invite you to just sit and let it be sung over you, parents. And in the song, there's this word, amen. And in the case of this song, it means I agree, I affirm that, yes, Lord. So in light of our role as parents, in light of our responsibility to leave behind a legacy worth following, I hope that you'll receive this song as a prayer over you before we go back out into our weeks.

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

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