Grace Raleigh Sermons

All right. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see you. Thanks for spending your Sunday with us. If you're new here and I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Before I just dive in, I just want to acknowledge that second song that we did today. That was Holly's first time leading a song by herself. She did fantastic. The biggest loser in the room is Mike, who's doing the announcements today. The disparity of talent in your union is on stark display this morning, as was mine last week when Jen made her announcement. I was joking with her before the service. If you were here last week, Jen, my wife made an announcement at the end of my sermon. I said, I'm looking forward to what you have to share at the end of this week's sermon. And she's like, I'll get in the car right now. We are in the third part of our series called the traits of grace, where we're going through what makes grace, grace. When we call ourselves partners, what does it mean to be a partner? And what do we expect of our partners? And the first week we said, we're step takers. We take steps of obedience, and that way we allow God to make disciples of us. And I've challenged each of us here to consider what step of obedience God might be pushing us to take. I believe everybody has one, and I've been pressing on you guys to take seriously, take more seriously, lean into with a greater level of depth and intent into your spiritual growth, into your personal holiness. Let's pursue that as a church. And we've given you guys a tool to do that in the discipleship pathways. And more of those are out on the information table and they're also online if you're interested. This week, we arrive at one that's not readily apparent when you read it. It's called Conduits of Grace, and it's kind of like, well, what is that? Conduits of Grace is the way that we think about the word authenticity. Authenticity is kind of the white whale of all organizations. All churches want to be authentic. Organizations want to be authentic. We want authenticity in our politics. We like candidates that seem authentic, that seem like what you see is what you get. We like this trustworthiness that I don't have to second guess you. I just believe that you're authentic and that this organization is authentic. And that's certainly something that we strive for here at Grace is to be an authentic group of people. And one of the things I hear most every now and again, God does me the favor of allowing me to hear positive feedback from other people. It's not often, but sometimes God buoys me by letting me hear it. And the first thing obviously is the depth of scholarship and wisdom that I offer on Sunday mornings. But right after that is humility. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, that's number two. What I hear more often than not is that if you like Nate, Nate's real. I'm just a real person, just a real human. Jen had lunch with a friend last week or week before last. And it was the first time they got the chance to kind of sit down together, no kids around, whatever. And one of the things her friend said is we enjoy Nate because Nate's real. He just seems to be himself. And I try my best to do that. But when people tell that to me, dude, you're just, you're, you're, you're real. You just seem like a, like a real dude. What you see is what you get. You're not trying to put on airs, you know, yada, yada, yada. I always say it is my, it's my spiritual gift to you to behave in such a way that it's very easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm doing that to minister to you guys. So, but what I, what I really do say is, because sometimes I'll say, you seem authentic and you've done a good job of establishing that authentic nature and culture at your church. And I always correct them. I say the church is not authentic and comfortable in its own skin because I somehow brought that culture to grace. That culture existed long before my arrival and is one of the main reasons I chose to come to grace is because of how well the people of grace love one another, because of how accepting the people of grace are. I get to be my real self, my real person, because the people of grace who were here long before I am and who continue to come now insist on that from me. You guys would not put up with a pastor who tried to act like he was better than you all the time, who preached in such a way that says, I've achieved this level. You guys get on my level. We don't do that. That doesn't fly around here. No one walks around grace thinking they're any better than any other person. No one walks around grace thinking that they've got it all figured out, that they're nailing it. They've got their act together. They are really pursuing holiness well. And if everyone else would just be like me, they'd be better off for it. We don't put up with that kind of thing. And so here's the thing, if you're new, and I saw some new faces this morning as we were gathering in the lobby and coming in. If you're new, here's what I would tell you about grace that you should know, is we all of us know that we're screw-ups. Okay, we know that. We know that we don't have our act together. We know that we mess up. We offer grace for that. We love each other in spite of it. There's space for humanity here because none of us have our act together. And here's what we know about you, new people. You don't have your act together either. Okay, we already know you're messed up. We already know that. You don't have to pretend like you're not. We know, and it's cool. Come on. That's who we are, right? We are a church, I believe, of grace, and we are a church of unusual authenticity. And because of that, I think when we talk about this topic, the question really becomes, what is the source of grace's grace? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us who we are? I mean, just last night, I was at a retirement party for one of our great partners, longtime partners of grace, and there was a bunch of people there, 60 or 70 people there, and I happened to be sitting in the living room in a circle of other folks watching the ball game, eating a little bit of food. And there was a younger lady sitting next to me who did not fit in with the old people that were there. And so I looked at her and I said, how do you know the person we're celebrating? And she said, well, I'm her niece. And I go, okay. And so we started talking. She goes, how do you know her? And I said, well, I go to church with her. And she goes, yeah, that's the answer that I'm getting the most. There's a bunch of people here from your church. I said, yeah, it's a good church. We show up for our people. We really love each other. And I said, well, one of my favorite things is the way that everyone's acting now is the same way we're going to act in the lobby tomorrow morning. We're just the same people wherever we go. And she goes, you know, I've been to a couple things, and your church always shows up well and always seems to support. You've got a pretty special thing going on. And I thought, yeah, yeah. Whenever I have anybody come in from out of town and they come to church with us, they always tell us, man, you've got some special people. You've got some people who seem to love well. And it's true, and we do. And so I think it's important to acknowledge why that's the case. So what's the source of grace's grace? As I was thinking about this question, I've told you guys that I preached this exact series two years ago in September and October of 2022. And so when it comes time to do the next sermon, I just go see what I preached about last time, tweak it, listen to it, what I want to take out, what I want to put in. What seems important. What doesn't. It's honestly kind of fun to get a second crack at trying to do a good sermon on these things. And I uncovered this stanza that I wrote to answer this question. And I'm really thinking about it as a confession. And I've been talking with Gibson about it. And I think we're going to try to put it up somewhere, maybe in here or in the lobby, so that we can see it and be reminded of it regularly, because it's one of those things that I want us to bring to the forefront of our attention with some degree of regularity. But if I'm seeking to answer the question, what is the source of grace's grace, here's what I would say, and I think this statement's in your notes. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. That's who grace is. That's who we are. And if there's any bit of authenticity in us, it's because we believe those things. If there's any bit of authenticity and acceptance and grace amongst the people of grace, it's because we start from this approach, from this posture of being guilty yet being forgiven, of being broken yet being restored, of being deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We know that we're broken people. We know that we've messed up. We know that we have stories. We know that we are humans. And because we know that, we begin each day in our life with this posture of being overwhelmed by the goodness of God that he chose to save us and love us, that we are deeply flawed and God sees every single one of the crevices and cracks in our armor and in our character, and he fills them with love and he lifts us up. So we know what's the source of grace is grace. Well, the first thing is we start from this position of humility, knowing that we are broken and undeserving of God's love. And yet he lavishes it on us anyways. Then we acknowledge these things about the father, the son, and the spirit that we are only good because of the father. We know the scripture tells us that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. We know that Jesus tells us in John 15 that we should abide in him and he in us. And if we do, we will bear much fruit. But apart from him, we can do nothing. So we know that it's God alone, God the Father who makes us good. And so we know if there's any goodness in us, if there's any progress in us, if there's any closeness to God that we're experiencing, if there's any spiritual maturation process happening in our life, if we are increasingly displaying the fruits of the Spirit that we find in Galatians 5.22, if we are progressively growing closer to God and developing character closer to that of Christ in the sanctification process, If there is any good in us, we know it is not because we white knuckled our way there. We know it is not because we are more disciplined than the next person over. We know it's not because we are smarter or more righteous or better prayers than any of the people around us or in the other churches around us. We know that anything good in us is from the Father and is a result of the love of the Father, most specifically through sending His Son to die for us, to suffer on our behalf so that we might spend eternity with Him and begin to experience heaven now on this side of eternity. That's why we say that we are not righteous except through Christ. We are only righteous because of Christ. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we become a Christian, once we confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once we do that, God says that the Bible says that when God sees us, he does not see our sin and our unrighteous actions. He looks at us and it says that we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. It's that wonderful passage in Isaiah 1, verse 18, where we feel God put his arm around us. And he says, come now, let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. That word righteous is best understood as right standing before God. We think of a court of law. We are in the right standing before God, not on our own merit, not because we deserved it, not because we've behaved our way to it, but because we are glad recipients of the grace and mercy of Jesus and his death on the cross. So we are only righteous through Christ. And then finally, we understand we are only wise because of the spirit. We are only wise because of the spirit. I think in the first couple chapters of Proverbs, when Solomon's talking about whatever you do, get wisdom. Whatever you do, pursue wisdom. I think that goes hand in hand with the Spirit, and that is the Spirit. The Spirit is the illuminator. The Spirit helps us understand what God is saying in the Scriptures. The Spirit helps us hear the voices in our life that we need to listen to. The Spirit gently convicts. The Spirit compels into obedience. The Spirit guides and illuminates and unlocks different things about Scripture and about the spiritual life. And so we understand, Grace, this is who we are, that if we have gained any biblical knowledge at all, if we feel like we have a deeper understanding of God now than we did five years ago, if we feel like we're walking more deeply with him, if we feel like we're able to teach a little bit, if we feel like we're able to lead a little bit, if we've made any progress in wisdom in the last three to five years of our lives, we readily acknowledge that is not our work, that is not our doing, that is not our effort. All we did is get out of the way so the spirit could grow us in wisdom. So when you ask what is the source of grace's grace, I believe it's this confession. That we are guilty yet forgiven. That we are broken yet restored. That we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. And that we carry with us every day an acute awareness. That we are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace. And so when we walk in light of that, when we spend every day aware of God's goodness in our lives, we spend every day aware of his grace, aware of our forgiveness in light of our brokenness. When we spend every day in light of that, we become these gleeful recipients of the grace of God. and that's what allows us to turn it out onto other people and make them recipients of the grace of God as well. I think it works like this. Follow along if you can. Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. The more gladly we receive the grace that God offers us, we acknowledge all the good things in our life as grace. Grace is something that we get that we do not deserve. Then the easier it is to pour that grace out to other people. I think of it in terms of this verse. I love this verse. I mention it with some regularity, John 1, 16. And from his goodness, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I see this verse every day. It's over my couch in between a picture of Lily and John. We have another frame that has this verse in it, Lily and John are our children. And it says, It's not a verse that I remind myself of enough. But it carries with it this idea of God so full of grace, he's overflowing with it. And if we'll position ourselves properly, we can be the gleeful recipients of that grace. And before you know it, it's going to fill us up so much that we're going to start spilling it on the people around us from his fullness, not from his, not from his dearth, not from his lack, not from his scarcity, not from his limited supply from his fullness. We receive, you could even put in that word, never ending, unending, unyielding grace upon grace. And it allows us to spill that out to other people in our lives as well. Think about this. And maybe you get nothing else out of the sermon, but to potentially do this in your life? What do you think might change in your mindset if you were to write that verse down and put it somewhere where you saw it every day? What if this week, this month, you said, you know what, I'm going to make sure that I allow God to bring that verse to my attention every day. And every day you saw somewhere, sometime, and from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you went into work aware of that verse, how much more gracious would it make you with your employees and with your employer and with your coworkers? How much more patient would it make you in traffic? Now, some of you would overcome and you'd still get mad and cuss in traffic, but it'd be harder, right? How much more patient would you be with your children, with your spouse? How much more gratitude would you walk in if you simply made yourself aware every day that from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I don't think it could possibly be a bad habit to commit to doing that for a little while. And allowing God to bring that to the forefront of your thought every day. And see how he uses this gratitude for his grace to springboard into other people and be a conduit of grace to others. This is why at Grace We Say, we are conduits of grace. We are conduits of grace. And this is something we mulled over, workshopped a little bit, but here's what I like about this word conduit, even though it can be a little bit confusing. A conduit is nothing except a pathway from a source to a recipient. That's all it is. It's just a pathway. It's only job. The only job of a conduit is to stay plugged into the source and to stay plugged into a recipient so that the energy of the source can get to the recipient, so that the grace of God can get to the people who need it most. When I wrote this sermon a few years ago, Lily was six and didn't understand how electricity worked. Now I think she'd probably do better than this, although I've not quizzed her on it recently. We were in the playroom, and the vacuum cleaner was in there, and the cord was just kind of lazily on the ground, because you guys, I don't know how that goes in your house. But in our house, vacuuming is one activity. Winding the cord up is another activity that could take three to five business days. So it's sitting there. And Lily goes to step on it or around it. And she stops. And she freezes up. And she's trying to figure out how to get around. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I don't want to get electrified. And I said, no, no, sweetheart. You're fine. That's not plugged into the wall. That cord's not plugged into the wall. There's no electricity in that cord. You don't have to worry about it at all. And it occurs to me that that's what a conduit is. If we're not plugged into God, if we're not receiving his grace, if we're not abiding in Christ, we're as good as a limp cord laying on the ground doing absolutely nothing. That cord has to be plugged into the wall before it matters at all, before it's remotely doing its job. And it's really only any good if it's also connected to the vacuum cleaner. If it's connected to nothing, then it's just an extension cord. And all we did is move the source of grace from there to here, but we're not doing anything with it if it's not plugged into a recipient. So it's our job as conduits of grace to remain connected to Christ. And we're going to talk about this next week. We talk about abiding in Christ and being people of devotion and then connected to the source where we are to spill out the grace that we are getting. And progressively in the Christian life, listen to me, progressively in the Christian life, and this is what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we talk about kingdom builders, which I think is the apex trait for us. Increasingly in the Christian life, we come to acknowledge ourselves as mere conduits. Nothing that we have is for us. All the gifts and all the grace and all the goodness that we're given is not for us. It's coming from the source and is intended to go to the recipients in our life, not sit here. If we just sit there and sponge it up, we do nothing. We don't turn it out at all. If we don't stay connected to the wall, if we don't stay connected to the source, we're useless no matter how many relationships we have, no matter how many people we're plugged into. It doesn't matter. So our job is to remain plugged into Christ, abide in Him. We'll talk about that next week. And plugged into our communities and the people around us so that we can be a conduit of the grace that God gives us walking in this humility. Now as we think about our job as conduits of grace, something I didn't talk about last time that upon thinking about it and talking with Gibson, he pointed this out to me. I think there's kind of two applications as I wrap up here on how we offer grace. And I think the way that we do that is we transfer productive and passive grace. As conduits of grace, people who stay connected to Jesus so that we might connect him to others, connecting people to Jesus, people to people. As we do that, there's really two ways to transfer that grace. We do it productively and we do it passively. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Productive grace requires selfless sharing. Here's a verse that Gibson pointed out to me in 1 Peter chapter 4 that I love and I thought fit in perfectly well. 1 Peter chapter four, verse 10. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. I'll read it again. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. In this verse, there's this idea that each of us have been given gifts. Some of us have hospitality. Some of us have leadership. Some of us are speaking. Some of us are just being generally attractive, charismatic people that draw others in, whatever your gifts are. We've all been given different gifts. And the longer we go in this Christian life, the more we realize that we were given those as acts of grace. If you're talented at something, that's God's grace on you. And he made you talented at that so that you might bring other people into the kingdom with you, so that you might be a conduit of that grace. And the grace is the gift. And so we ought to be looking for ways to apply our gifts to forward God's kingdom. That's why, again, we're going to spend a whole week on this, but it's that verse in Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has prepared for us that we might walk in them. We have all received different gifts, and we proactively exercise that grace and be conduits of that grace by looking for places to use those gifts. He's made some of us, especially in this church, incredibly hospitable. I've always said, I started saying the last couple of years that at Grace, we lead the league in church ladies. We got the best church ladies of any church out there. And last night, they were on full display. We had this party going. Where we went was a house that some friends of ours bought in retirement. And the whole point was to host people. And then there was other people over there helping out with their gift of hospitality. And there was 60 or 70 people there. Half of them are from grace. And what that does is the other half of the people there get to experience grace, get to be around our community and see our love and see our camaraderie. And it pushes the needle towards Jesus. It absolutely does. Some of you, I mentioned Holly already, so I can pick on her again. She's been given a gift of raising her voice. God created that gift. So she's up here sharing it with us so that she ushers us to the kingdom together. She's also apparently got heck of a gift with muffins because they're out there on the information table and they're delicious. She shared those with us this morning. Some of you are excellent small group leaders. Some of you are excellent with the children. Some of you have hidden talents for announcements. We all have different things that we're good at. Those things are God's grace to us that we might exercise them in his kingdom. So that's how we pursue being a conduit of grace productively and intentionally is to use our gifts to transfer that grace. But we are also passive conduits of grace. And passive grace requires humble gratitude. Passive grace requires humble gratitude. And here's what I mean when I say passive grace. There's a verse in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 2 or 3, that I found years ago. And for whatever reason, recently, I feel like God has just kind of been bringing it back up. It's just something that I've been thinking about, chewing on. It feels so relevant. But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession. And that's a reference to Roman Empire. I'm not going to get into it and nerd out on history. But what a general would accomplish, would achieve a great victory in the field. They would come back to the threshold of Rome and they would wait with their army outside the city and the city would throw them what's called a triumphal procession. And the conquering general would enter first with all the conquered people and his armies behind him. It was this great thing of honor. You didn't get very many in your life, if any. And so Paul is hearkening to that when he said, Jesus leads us in triumphal procession. We are the ones he's conquered and claimed. And then he says this great phrase at the end of the verse, we are led by triumphal procession by Christ and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You catch that? We are led by Christ in this triumphal procession through life. And as we go through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. And I love that imagery because fragrance is passive. It's just there. It just emanates. It just is. And it means that when someone moves into your presence, they're going to smell that. It's going to waft. When someone moves out of our presence, it's not there anymore. When someone moves into our presence, we don't have to say, hey, I showered and put on cologne today. They can just tell. You don't have to announce it. It doesn't have to be forceful. It doesn't have to be in your face. It doesn't have to be intentional. It's just passively. This is made aware to you. And I just think about this idea and how beautiful it is that it's possible for us to be walking in so much humility and so much grace and walking in lockstep with God so closely that when people move into and out of our life, that our knowledge of God is like a fragrance that passively passes on to them that they just experience as good. That's being a passive conduit of grace. And how do we do that? How do we live our lives so that through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God so that we are passive conduits of grace to all the people that we meet and interact with and influence? I think it's by remembering this. Remembering this confession. At grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church full of people who love you, who are full of forgiveness and grace for one another. God, I pray that if there are people here who are visiting grace or might not consider themselves a part of us yet, that they would feel some of that. That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you. That this would feel like a place that's a little bit different, not because we're better in any way, but just because we love each other well and we walk in humility. God, would you please bring to our mind every day this week that from your fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Please help us walk in the humility of the realization that everything we have from you is good and undeserved. And God, would we spring forward in glad humility at your overwhelming generosity. God, be with us as we go. Him ascend behind and before. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. I just want to say up front, if I seem a little bit off my game this morning, it's because Greg and Liz Roberg took my seats, and I was very thrown off having to sit right there. I really don't know what to do with myself. Do not appreciate this at all. This is going to be a difficult Sunday, but we're going to get through it together. We are continuing our series called 27 from last summer and this summer, where we're moving through the 27 books of the New Testament. Next week, we will tackle 1st and 2nd Corinthians. I will not do them justice. I didn't want to do them together, but it's just the way the timing worked out. This week, we're going to focus on the book of Philemon, which handles this idea of talking a slave owner out of punishing a runaway slave. So it's super just easy content. I hope you brought your guests this morning. This is the perfect sermon for that. But as we approach Philemon together, I kind of wanted to frame it up like this. Can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else? Typically in those situations, it's someone that we care about or someone that we interact with regularly. But can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else in your life? Really, the question is, can you think of a time when you felt compelled to confront someone and you needed to have a hard conversation? You needed to try to convince them, hey, what you're doing is not good. You need to do this, not that. You need to think this way, not that way. Now, we do this in our house every day because we have a three-year-old and every day we sit down and we try to have lunch and we make for lunch something that we know he likes because we've seen him eat it before. He may even have the audacity to tell us in the preparation, I'd like to have this, and we'll make him that. And then we sit at the table, and he no longer wants that. And we engage in the painful negotiations of trying to get a three-year-old to eat his stupid lunch, right? It is very difficult to compel someone to change their thoughts and behavior. And on some levels, we do this often, particularly as parents. But there are other situations in life where we feel compelled to do that, and the stakes are much higher than whether or not they nap well after the meal. There are times in life when we notice a friend, maybe a co-worker, maybe a family member engaged in habits and patterns that are not good and we feel compelled to confront them and say, hey the way you're thinking about this is not right. The things you're doing are not best for you. We feel that it's our responsibility. We think about it, we pray about it, and we know we need to go to them. We need to have that hard conversation. There are times in life when we have to do that. Some of you, as I mentioned that, are thinking of a real life situation right now where you know you need to do that. So the question this morning is, how do we act? What do we do when we feel compelled to confront? And where I want us to start is with this idea of this is the way that the world does this. The way the world confronts, attempts to seek to change the mind and behaviors of individuals, is to demonize and degrade. The way the world confronts is to demonize and degrade. Now, if you don't think that's true, I would like to invite you to watch TV ever. Especially in 2024, an election year. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of highly paid strategists and highly skilled politicians who are trying to convince you how to think and how to behave and who you vote for. How do they go about doing that? By demonizing and degrading the opponent. That's how they do it. That's why we have the phrase attack ads. That's what the world does to try to convince people. We demonize and degrade. They immediately attack each other. And if you think about this interpersonally, when you're talking with someone who doesn't align with your political views, and you tell them who you think you might vote for in whatever race you might be thinking about, do they respond by talking to you about the issues or did they respond by immediately attacking your candidate, telling you why your candidate is a worse candidate than their candidate? This is what we do to try to change minds. We demonize and degrade. We talk down about the people that need to change and we degrade them and we make you feel guilt and shame to change your behavior. More pointedly, I have seen and am guilty of, I've seen parents do this. I've met with people who have adult kids. And they have, those kids are making decisions that they don't agree with. That they think are wrong. That are not good for them. And they'll sit and they'll tell me. I told them I'm disappointed in them. I told them that's not how I raised them. I told them that's not who you're supposed to be. I told them that they shouldn't do that, that you were raised better than this. You shouldn't be making those decisions. That's not how we taught you. And when we do that, not intentionally, not intentionally, but when we do that, we're falling into the pattern of the world and the way the world confronts by demonizing and degrading the person. Often, our default setting, when we are compelled to confront, because it's the pattern we've inherited from the world, often our default setting is to use guilt and shame to compel someone to change their behavior or their way of thinking. Isn't it? How often do we do that with our kids? How often do we do that with our peers, with our friends? How often do we do that with our spouses? When we get on to one another and we talk down to one another, trying to guilt and shame them into being who you think they need to be. I think this is the pattern of the world. And I bring that up because I think the letter to Philemon gives us a much better model of how to confront. Here's what's going on in the book of Philemon. It's a short book. It's one chapter. I bet very few in the room have a verse from Philemon that they love. All right? I don't have anybody, I've never been to any of your houses and seen a verse from Philemon on the wall. Okay. We often don't pay attention to it. We don't regard it. We don't think about it, but the message within it and the model that Paul gives us is critical and crucial to our lives and absolutely applicable to everyone in here. So what's happening in Philemon is Paul came into the company of a man named Onesimus. And Onesimus was a slave owned by Philemon. And sometimes you'll hear pastors or people or teachers try to talk about slavery in the New Testament as if that was really more like they were employees. It's not how we think of slavery. Bull hockey. Yes, it's exactly how we think of slavery. Whatever you think of the worst slavery, that's what this slavery was. That's what Roman slavery was. You are owned and you have no rights and your owner has all the rights there in charge of you. That's slavery, the bad kind, really the only kind. Onesimus had gotten separated from Philemon. It's unclear whether he ran away or there was maybe a shipwreck or an incident or something like that, but he had gotten away from Philemon, and he was in the company of Paul. And Paul is writing this letter to Philemon to be carried by Onesimus to request that Philemon would release Onesimus, receive him as a brother, and let him go back and continue his work with Paul. So Paul, listen, is writing to someone who's a slave owner, who's apparently also a believer. And we know from our country's past that it is entirely possible to be someone who ardently believes in Jesus Christ and someone who owns slaves without the cognitive dissonance that those things do not correlate. We know it is entirely possible as Christians to have a blind spot in our life to sins and moral ineptitude that we simply don't see, but we commit all the time. Philemon is in the middle of one of those situations. He's a slave owner and a Christian, and those things don't go together. So Paul is writing him to address that problem and to request Onesimus. And the way that he does it gives us a roadmap for how we are to confront people when we need to in our lives. So I'm not going to read the whole book. I could. It wouldn't take very long. I would highly encourage you to read it. I'm just going to highlight a couple of verses, but you should sit down and read this and follow the narrative all the way. But this kind of helps us follow along with his reasoning. If we start in verse 4 with the question of how does Paul confront a Christian brother who's got a moral blind spot and needs to change their thoughts or behavior, this is how sake of Christ. Now listen, if you had a friend who was a slave owner and you wrote them a letter to get them to knock it off, I don't think you would start your letter, I always thank my God whenever I remember you. It's a remarkably gracious opening for Paul to start this way. He immediately says to Philemon, this is, I'm grateful for you. I love you. Here's why I'm grateful for you. Here's our joint goal together. That's how he chooses to open. Then once he dignifies him, says, I love you. God loves you. We have this joint goal together. I'm grateful for you. I pray for you. Then he says this, and I think this is fascinating. Therefore, although in Christ, this is verse eight. Therefore, although in Christ, I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do. Yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. Paul says it out loud. He says, hey, listen, I could be bold in Christ and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you're doing wrong. I could bully you into what we're supposed to do right. I mean, this is the most influential church planter, pastor, Christian of all time who's not named Jesus. And he has every right and every authority to burn the face off of Philemon. Right? He's got every right to just let him have it. To get after him. And he acknowledges that he does. I could, in boldness, correct you in the name of Christ, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to choose to appeal to you, and I love this phrase, on the basis of love. And I think it's important to point out that I believe that there is a twofold love that Paul's talking about there. I think it's on the basis of love for Jesus and a basis of love for Philemon. Because Paul loves Jesus and he knows that Jesus loves Philemon. So he knows that he is approaching someone for whom Christ died, whom Christ is pursuing, whom Christ is shaping and molding and cultivating and sanctifying. And it is good to remind ourselves in moments of confrontation when someone's not behaving or thinking the way that they should, to first remind ourselves to appeal to them on the basis of love and allow that first love that we think about to be Christ's love for them. Remind ourselves, I am going to sit down and talk with someone that Jesus loves dearly, that Jesus gave his life for, that Jesus pursues and calls to and sanctifies and forgives and redeems. And this is what Paul does at the onset of the letter when he says, I thank my God when I remember you. He talks about this commonality that they have in Christ. So there's this two-fold love when we confront. First, we remind ourselves that this person is loved by Jesus. This person is saved and pursued by Jesus. Then we remind ourselves that we love them too. We love them. If we did not love them, we would not be in this situation. If we never confront them, we can't possibly love them. If we just allow people in our lives to be in patterns and habits that are not healthy for them and we don't say anything, then we're not truly loving them. So to love them sometimes is to address the issue. And when we do that, we should remember that they are loved by Christ and they are loved by me and I'm going to approach it in that way I'm going to appeal to them on the basis of love not guilt and shame so once he says that I could get after you I'm not going to do that I'm going to appeal to you on the basis of love. How does he do that? We see that in 15 and 16. This is Paul appealing. It's going to be fun. So he says, here's what I want you to do. I'm appealing to you on the basis of love. My hope is that you'll receive Onesimus back. Now, a slave returning to an owner that had run away and stayed separated is someone who is going to be punished. They're going to be punished in a really terrible way. And Paul is saying, don't do that. As a matter of fact, don't just not punish him, but receive him back, not as a slave, but as your brother. And then he continues to compel him. Once you do that, please send him back to me so he can continue the work with me. He's incredibly valuable to me and is helping me a great deal. Please basically free him and let me travel with him so that he and I can work together. This is the request that Paul is making of Philemon. And in this, we see the biblical and Christian model for confrontation, for how we should act and what we should do when we feel compelled to change the way someone behaves or thinks. And I'm summing that model up this way. The world says to demonize and degrade. Christians say dignify and direct. When we approach someone, how should we approach them? What does it mean to appeal on the basis of love beyond simply remembering that Jesus loves them and I love them? It means to dignify the person and direct the person. And I mean direct there in both ways. I mean be direct. Don't beat around the bush. Don't be unclear. Don't imply. Don't be subtle. When we are confronting a brother or sister because we feel compelled to do so, we feel convicted to do that, we need to have the courage and the love and the humility to be direct with them. Here is what I'm asking you to do. And that's exactly what Paul did. He was direct. I'm asking you to receive him as a brother, and then once you do, send him back to me. Release him to me so that he and I can work together. He was very direct in what he was asking. And when we confront, we should love people enough to have the honesty to be direct with them. But he also, before he's direct, he dignifies. I thank my God when I remember you. You are a child of Christ. We have done these things together. We have labored for the gospel together. Here are all the reasons I'm grateful that God was good enough to place you in my life. We dignify. This is the Christian model for confrontation. And just to contrast it a little bit, think about the power of this. And let's say that we have an adult child that's not doing, not making the choices that we think they should make. And we feel like we need to step in and confront them. If the world's way of demonizing and degrading them leads us to say things like, hey, I've noticed this in your life. I'm disappointed in those decisions. I'm disappointed in you, implying I'm not proud of you. And I think you need to change your behavior because your behavior is going to lead to this. And I don't want to see this happen. And we just use guilt and shame to try to compel them to see what we see. I'm disappointed in you. We didn't raise you like this. You need to do better. Let me help you do better. That's one way to do it. But if we do it Paul's way, the way that he confronts Philemon, if we dignify and direct, if we appeal on the basis of love, think about how much more powerful it could be in our lives if we confronted people this way. I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be. What if we started confronting like that? How much better would you receive it if your spouse came to you and said, you're really bothering me. You're really annoying me. You're really doing this wrong. You need to do this better the way that spouses do. Except Jen, she never says that to me. How much better would you receive it if someone you love sat down with you and said, hey, I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be? It's a simple question because here's the thing. We know in our own lives that when we're not being who we're supposed to be, when we're not being who we want to be, when we're not being who God created us to be because we're allowing habits and sins and patterns into our lives that are not good, we know that we know that. We carry it every day. When we're not walking with God and living the life that we're supposed to live and making the choices that we're supposed to make when we're in unhealthy patterns. We are aware of that all the time. We know that it's not good. We already feel guilt and shame. So I don't, no one needs to come to me to challenge me to be better, to point out all the things that I'm doing wrong. I know them. How much more effective would it be if someone were to point out the things that you're not doing well by simply, instead of denigrating you, making you feel more guilt and shame, heaping on what you already feel, if they actually came to you and said, hey, I love you dearly. You matter so much to me. I'm so grateful that you're in my life because of this and this and this. And right now, you're not living up. You're not living as the person that I know you want to be and you know God wants you to be. So how can I better love you towards that person? That's what Paul does. Paul is confronting a slave owner to free a slave, an egregious sin that none of us would ever consider. He has every right to attack him and demonize him and guilt and shame him, and he doesn't do that. That's not how Christians change minds. That's not how Christians confront. And it works in polar opposite. It sits in stark contrast and juxtaposition to how the world does. That defaults to demonizing and degrading and to belittling and to bemoaning and degradation and guilt and shame. The Christian model for confrontation operates in a very stark contrast to the worldly model of confrontation. We are to confront in those situations where we feel compelled to. Like Paul does, an appeal to our friends, our brothers and sisters, spouses, children, on the basis of love. How do we do that? We dignify them. We remember that Jesus loves them and that we love them. And we direct them. We be honest with them. And we point them in the way that God wants them to go. Think about how much more powerful it is to appeal to someone on the basis of love and equipping to become who God has made them to be rather than shame and guilting them into who we think they're supposed to be. And here's what I love about this book of Philemon. It's Paul practicing what he preaches. It's one thing to say it. It's another thing to do it. Because in Galatians chapter 6 verse 1, Paul's writing to the church in Galatia. He's giving them instructions about how to be a church and what they need to do. And one of his instructions in chapter six, verse one is this. Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the spirit should restore that person gently, but watch yourselves or you also may be tempted. Paul tells the church in Galatia, and he tells all churches for all time, you who are spiritual, you who love Jesus, you who are mature in your faith, when you feel compelled to confront someone, do it gently. Raise them up with kindness. Do not be harsh in that confrontation. This is the instruction that he gives to the church in Galatia. And then, at another point in his life, Paul's in a situation where there is someone whom he loves caught in a sin and he feels compelled to confront. And how does he do it? He appeals to him on the basis of love. This is how the children of God are to confront one another. Be gentle with one another. Do it on the basis of love, reminding ourselves that Jesus loves them and I love them. And I am here to see them become who God created them to be, not denigrate them and guilt and shame them into better behavior. Now, here's the thing. I've felt like it was important for us as a church and as a family of faith to understand and be familiar with the book of Philemon. There's a reason God's included it in the Bible. We are edified to understand it and know it. And it is a model for us for how Christians ought to confront by dignifying and directing, appealing to people on the basis of love. But I also know that it's not very often in life that we feel compelled to do that, to use the lessons here. It's not very often that we're so compelled by the behavior of a friend or a spouse that we need to sit them down in a serious way and try to get them to change their mind or their behavior. We don't do that very regularly, and not everyone in the room has an instance they're thinking of in their life right now. I know that. So this is one of those sermons that sometimes I encourage you to tuck it away for later. Just be aware of this. And the next time you need to confront, hopefully the Holy Spirit will spark something in you. And you'll remember the message of Philemon. And you'll confront in love and appeal on the basis of love. But here's the other thing that I just want to mention as I close. We confront ourselves every day. We attack and accuse ourselves every day. We have a negative voice in our head that tells us that we're not who we're supposed to be. We're not who God created us to be. If people knew who you were, you would be ashamed. We have negative voices in our head from ourselves where we confront ourselves about our own behaviors and our own patterns every day. And we carry that guilt and shame every day. If you're willing to sit in a sermon and listen to how we should confront others and to know that we should do it with grace and love and dignity and kindness and gentleness. And that's what you would offer to every person in your life if you needed to confront them. Why would you not offer yourself the same love, the same gentleness, the same kindness? So tuck this away for when you do find yourself in a situation in life where you need to confront. Tuck this away. But also use it every day as you confront and convict yourself. Offer yourself the same grace, the same kindness, the same gentleness. Appeal to yourself on the basis of love. Remind yourself that Jesus loves you, he's grateful for you, and he is pursuing you. And when we do that, we will confront ourselves and others as Christ directs us to do it, not as the world does it. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for tucking the book of Philemon into the New Testament. Thank you for the lesson that it offers, for the model that it is of how to confront someone with gentleness. Lord, if there are people who have listened today and feel compelled to confront, I pray that you would give them the courage to do that, the humility to do it well, the love and the compassion to do it with gentleness. And I pray that the recipients would be restored and built up. Father, as we confront ourselves and experience our own convictions, first of all, God, I pray that we would listen and that we would allow you to love us towards health and towards who you created us to be. God, as we go, I pray that we would be more desirous of you when we leave than when we came. I pray that you would walk with us through this week. Bring yourself to our minds and to our consciences that we might focus on you this week and that we might grow closer to you. In Jesus' name, amen.