Sermons tagged with Leadership

My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here, so thanks for being here this morning on this special weekend. Kids, thank you so much for being here. I know that I made these services too early for you on Metta weekend, and I feel terrible for you that you had to get up as early as you did, especially like the 15 girls that were all in the same house taking showers at the same place. Most of you are unshowered, and that's all right. But we are so happy that you guys are here. I will try to go quickly for you guys to keep you engaged. But while we had just a Sunday in-between series, we just wrapped up our Lessons from the Gym series. I'm going to tell you about our upcoming series here at the end of the service that I'm really excited about. I wanted to pause and focus on the church's responsibility with the next generation as we sit here at the tail end of Metta Weekend. All of these kids got here on Friday night and have been hanging out, learning about Jesus, talking about spiritual health, talking about sitting around the table, how their health affects other people for the whole weekend. And this is meant to kind of be the capstone for that weekend. And you know, a lot of y'all know that I cut my teeth as a student pastor. That's what I came up doing. So I've had a lot of weekends like this, a lot of weekend retreats, and I love them because there's so much, first of all, there's so much fun that was had. I got a couple videos texted to me last night of my wife lip syncing on stage. So it looked like that was probably a good time. If you text me, I'll be happy to send those out throughout the congregation. It looked like a good time. They were having fun. There's stories that come out of those weekends. We believe, as Connor was saying, in connection and friendship here. And so connection and bonds are formed over weekends like that that matter for a long, long, long time. So I believe they're hugely important. But most importantly, what happens over the course of those weekends, every time when you slow down, this happens to anybody, it's not just students, it's adults, it's everybody. When you slow down for 72 hours or 48 hours or however long it ends up being, and you just kind of cloud out everything else, you get rid of all the other stresses in life, and you just focus on what God has for you in this time, you always walk away with a desire to grow closer to Jesus. You always walk away with a little bit of more of a spiritual awareness, of an awareness of your spiritual health and a desire to grow in spiritual health a little bit. Weekends like this always generate these commitments and decisions that really excite me. Because some of these kids, I know them, they walked in this weekend and they have a faith, but as a result of this weekend, they're very likely, some of them going, you know what, I want to take my faith more seriously. Spiritual things matter to me now. I want my faith to be the most important thing in my life. I hope some of you guys made that decision this weekend. Some of them came in, I've seen that happen before. You come into a weekend like this and you're under the impression because you grew up in church that you're a believer, that you're a Christian, but then you go through the weekend and you realize, oh my goodness, I've never really known Jesus. And so for the first time in their life, they come to know Jesus. Other people come into the weekend and they know that they're not a believer. But by the end of the weekend, they are a believer. And it's phenomenal and powerful and important. And hopefully life-changing decisions have been made and will be carried out through the years. That's always my prayer. It's always my hope. And I always love to hear the stories. I can't wait to sit down with Kyle and to talk with Jen, my wife, who leads the upperclassmen girls, and hear the stories and the conversations and the commitments that came out of this weekend. And even as I get excited about those things, I've been in ministry long enough to, in the back of my mind, be wary of something that tends to happen. And it's going to feel, when I bring it up, like I'm being a little bit of a Debbie Downer. I don't mean to do that. Also, if your name is Debbie, that's a really stinky phrase for you. I'm sorry. I'm sure you're a lovely person. But I don't mean to be a downer about it, but whenever I have a weekend like this or see a weekend like this, I'm always reminded of a passage and a principle that we find in the book of Judges. Judges is in the Old Testament. It's, I think, the seventh book of the Bible off the top of my head. And it follows this book called Joshua. And in the book of Joshua, there's a man. Can you guess what his name is? His name's Joshua, and he follows Moses. Okay, so Moses has led the people out of slavery in Egypt. He's led them in the desert for 40 years. He's moved them around. He started the religion that we look to as Judaism. That's really the precedent to our religion. He began kind of our faith. He's given the Ten Commandments. He's written some books of the Bible. And now he's reached the end of his life. And the Hebrew people are on the banks of the Jordan River, and they're poised to cross and take over this land that was promised to their forefather Abraham several hundred years ago. But Moses sins. God doesn't let him have the privilege of doing that. And so there's a guy named Joshua that succeeds Moses, and he takes over leadership of the Hebrew people. And it's under Joshua's leadership that they cross the Jordan River. They go through what was then the land of Canaan, and they win these unbelievable battles. Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, some of you might be familiar with it. They didn't even have to fight. The walls just came down and team Jericho gave up, right? There was these five kings, the five kings of Ai that got together and conspired against Joshua. Overwhelming odds. And God gave Joshua power. He stopped the sun. He held it still. And Joshua won this incredible battle. So they sweep through Canaan, just conquering the cities, clearing out the land, and claiming it for God's people. Some of his tactics were so good that they still study them in war colleges now. Okay, so Joshua was a bad dude. He knew what he was doing. So they conquer the nation of Israel. They get there. They settle down. And then in Judges, they start their civilization. And so he looks at all the different people. There's 12 tribes of Israel. He looks at the head of all the tribes, and he says, okay, this is your land. This is your assignment. This is your land. This is where you guys live. And he divvies up the nation. And it's all settled, and it's all done, and God has done a great work. And then Joshua reaches the end of his life. In verse 6 of chapter 2 of Judges, you can just listen. It says, when Joshua dismissed the people. So he gets them together. He says, you guys go live in these places, and he dismisses the people after all these great victories. And the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua and who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. And then Joshua, the son of Nun, servant of the Lord, died at 110 years old. They buried him in the boundaries of a certain place. And then in verse 10 it says, And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. So the generation of Joshua, this triumphant generation that has seen all these miracles of God and has watched God do all these incredible things for them, and were by all accounts a very faithful and devout generation, they all were gathered and they went to their fathers. So that generation passes away. And then this verse happens, and it's a heartbreaking verse. It says, And then after that is just verses of how they messed up. it says, after other gods. And that happens to us too. We leave the faith and we begin to prioritize other things. To chase after other gods doesn't mean that we erect idols in our home. It simply means that in our life we prioritize something over our relationship with God. We value something more than we value God. That's what it means. And so that's what happened to the generation that forgot about God. And it's, to me, an ominous and a foreboding and a heartbreaking verse. We have this generation of people who were walking with the Lord, who were a devout people, who saw God move in incredible, undeniable ways. And their children rose up going to church, going to weekend retreats, doing all the things that you do in the church. But yet somehow they forgot about God. And they fell away. And they prioritized other things over God. And the truth of it is, this isn't just something that happens in the book of Judges that's a thousand-year-old principle. This is something that we see happen too. If you've spent any time in the church, you've seen it happen. I have a group of buddies, my closest friends in the world. I love every one of these guys. I would do anything to help them. They are my good, good friends. I hope that you have friends like this. It's eight buddies. We're on a text thread. One of them has been my best friend since kindergarten. We were in children's church together. I'm not making this up. His name's PJ. We were in children's church together. We're sitting there. We're eating. They gave us snacks. I don't know. It was almonds. And at the same time, we chewed up our almonds, and we showed them to the's daughter who was sitting across from us. And she was grossed out and we high-fived and we were best friends. And that was it. That's how it went. The thickest thieves ever since, me and Peach. And then I made some other buddies in high school. And all of us still talk all the time, every day. We find ways to hang out at least twice a year. We get somewhere, because we live all over the country now, but we get together, we hang out about twice a year at least. I love these guys. All of these guys, all eight of them, believe it or not, not that this is necessarily a good thing. I think that the church does a terrible job of pushing people into vocational ministry. Like if you're a good Christian, then you'll go find a way to get paid to be a Christian, when really we just need some more godly accountants. But anyways, all eight of these guys ended up at one point or another in their 20s going pro and getting paid to be Christians. So they were in vocational ministry. They did Young Life, or they worked at churches, or they made videos for churches, or whatever it was. We all at different points went into ministry. And so I just say that so that you know that every single one of them at one point in their life would have said that my faith is the most important thing to me. Three and I would say a half of them, that half would be offended if I called them the fourth, have totally walked away from the faith. Totally walked away. Began to encounter questions and issues and events in life. And they would look at me right now and they would say at the best, I'm agnostic. I believe that there's probably a God. I don't think anything beyond that. They've walked away from the faith. They're supportive of me. They cheer for me. They love what's happening here in Raleigh. But they don't affirm it. And they don't claim it. And the one who's the half, I say half because he would still say that he probably has a Christian faith, but it's no priority to him. And for me, it breaks my heart that these guys would grow up in the church. They have good parents who love the Lord. They were in church their whole lives. They grew up. They went into vocational ministry. They prioritized their faith as much as you can prioritize it. But yet in our 30s and now in our 40s, they've walked away from the faith. And I see some of them raising kids with no faith at all, and it breaks my heart. And you've seen it too. For some of you, that's your story, right? You grew up in church, you did all the things, you did the metal weekends, you got the t-shirts, you made the commitment, it was great. Then you got to college and independence happened and you fell away from the faith. And that happens. And I like to position grace to be right here. For those of you who are coming back to the faith after wandering off, I'm like, here we go. Let's go. Let's have fun. Come on. That's okay. And then what happens is a big life event, marriage or children or something like that, or profound sadness over an unexpected tragedy, some big life event will happen and bring you back into the faith and have you prioritize your faith again. And some of you, that's your story, and you've been walking with the Lord ever since to varying degrees. Others of us, we've watched this happen to other people. And it's a really, to me, sad thing, and it's a big, to me, indictment of the church. Because what's true is this doesn't just happen in judges. It's not an isolated thing with my group of friends. It's not unique to your story or to Grace or to some people that you know. Statistics bear out based on research by the Barna Group that a majority of kids who grow up in church, once they get to college, they leave church, they're out of the nest, they experience independence, a majority of kids who leave the church who are youth group kids walk away from the faith when they get to adulthood. A majority. Not some, not a lot, a majority. And that's a really sad statistic. I hate that statistic. I hate it so much that I'm bringing it up to cap off a really fun weekend. Sorry, team. Because I think if we talk about it and we ask essential questions about it, that this can actually be a hopeful and inspiring thing. And so in light of all of that, my story, your stories, the people you know where that happened, and just so we're clear, just as an aside, okay, I've seen so many parents who watch their kids walk into adulthood and walk through seasons where they don't have any faith. And I've seen how it breaks the hearts of parents. And I'm terrified of that. Jen and I talk about that all the time with Lily. But just to say it, it's entirely possible to do all the right things as a parent. It's entirely possible to make all the right choices and put them in all the right places and teach all the right things in your home and just have a child that needs to walk through a season of independence and for it not to be your fault. But all of that begs this question that I think we should answer and look at this morning. The question that our church needs to think about is what can we do to prevent generational fallout? What can we do to prevent generational fallout? What can we do, honestly, as a church this morning, what can we do to make sure that the decisions that were made this weekend stay intact? What can we do to make sure that they stay the course? What can we do to make sure that grace is not a place that sends good, godly kids to college only to watch them walk away from the faith? What can we do to ensure that here we don't have the story of judges and see a generational fallout? That becomes the question, right? And so I think that there are, the answer to this is multifaceted. There's a lot of decent ways to answer this question. I think this question is so important that as we are hiring the student pastor, we interviewed, gosh, we interviewed so many people. I looked at probably 60 to 80 resumes and so did Cindy and the rest of the team. And then we interviewed folks and we finally settled on Kyle. We were just getting tired of looking. We asked to every, Kyle's the best. He's the stinking best. We love that guy. We asked every one of those candidates when we got to the point where we were talking to them this question, what do we do to prevent generational fallout? We didn't phrase it that way, but that was the question, right? And like I said, I think there's a lot of answers to this, and the candidates gave us a bunch of good answers, but I think we see one really good answer that we often forget, that I think if it characterizes grace, we stand a good chance of preventing this cycle from taking place here. And it's a principle that we find in the book of 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy chapter 5, if you'd like, you can turn there. In 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to Timothy. Timothy's a young pastor. Paul is reaching the end of his life, the end of his ministry. Paul was a guy who went around planting churches and then writing letters back to the churches to encourage them, and that became our New Testament. So he's writing two letters to Timothy that become known as 1 and 2 Timothy, and he's instructing him on how to be a pastor, how to lead a church. And so there are some things that are in these two books that are just for pastors or just for elders or church leaders, and that's the application. But there are other things that apply to everyone in the church, and the advice that he gives him here at the beginning of chapter 5, I think, applies to all of us. And so this is what he says. And I'm going to read this and you're going to go, I don't really know how that answers our question. But we'll get there, okay? I think it's a principle here that we find. This is how Paul advises Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 5. He says this, verse 1, So he's telling Timothy, listen, when you're dealing with the people in your church and you need to get on to an older man, maybe there's an older man, he's doing something he shouldn't be doing, do not rebuke him. You entreat him as a father. Do not look around at your peers and those younger and rebuke them. Treat them as brothers. Treat the older women as you would your mother. Treat the women, your peers, and those younger as your sisters. And so what we see Paul telling Timothy is the church is really designed to operate as a family. The church should operate as a family, right? That's what we are. We are a family of faith. Paul talks about this in Romans when he says that if you have faith, then you are an adopted son and daughter of the king with Jesus, co-heirs with Christ, he says. And you know, it's funny. I grew up Southern Baptist. My lovely wife grew up Southern Baptist. And in the church world, we like to make a lot of denominational jokes, right? We like to make fun of people. Often we make fun of Southern Baptist, and that's fine. Most of it is well-earned. But there is one place where Southern Baptist actually did kind of get it right. Did any of you grow up in a church or have been around people where they called you brother or sister so-and-so? Yeah. There's a guy at my old church named Tim. He used to call me Brother Nate. He was the only dude there. It was 1,800 people. He was this one old school dude going, Brother Nate, how you doing? And I used to love it. Brother Tim, how are you, baby? Like, that's great. I'm not advocating that. That would be weird now just to start that from scratch. But it's a cool attitude that they had in the church. It's one place where they got it, where they said, we're family, and family matters. And I think that this principle is incredibly important to view those who go to church with us, who are in our family of faith, as our brothers and sisters and our fathers and our mothers in Christ. I think that's so important because we live in a culture that's increasingly independent, right? That's increasingly isolated. That's increasingly like, why are you talking to me? Right? We see this in greetings. If I were to just ask you, let's say that you're just in the lobby and somebody walks in that you know, maybe you're in a small group with them, maybe you kind of serve on a team with them or whatever, and they go, hey, how you doing? And you go, great, how are you? And they go, not too good. Tough weekend. Wife's getting kind of sick. Got some real issues with the in-laws. I'm just stressed out at work. I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep my job. It's tough. What are you thinking in your head? You're thinking, I hate that for you. All right, I'm going to get some coffee. Right? We don't want to talk about that. We don't want to engage in that because we're isolated and increasingly we think that's your issue. That's your deal. That's your kid. Hope it worked out for you. That's your marriage. I'll be praying for it. That means I'm going to forget that this happened, right? That's what we do. We become increasingly isolated. But if we look at this principle and we realize that other believers are our family, it should shape the way that we think about them. How do you think about your family? Those of you who are lucky enough to have a family that you love and know, how do you think about them? I've shared before that I'm not as close with my sister as I would like to be. That's my fault. I'm working on that. That's my deal. But let me tell you something. There is nothing I wouldn't do for her. There's nothing I wouldn't do for her. She's got three beautiful daughters. There's nothing I wouldn't do for those girls. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my brother-in-law. Jen's family, I love Jen's family. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my in-laws and for my sister-in-law and for my brother-in-law and for their kids, right? We fight for our families. We love them. When they need something, we are there. We might not talk to them all the time. We might not check in with them every day, but we care about them, and we fight for them. And when their marriages are struggling, we jump in. And when they're depressed, we talk to them. And when we can sense they're down, we take them out. We have fun with them. We try to cheer them up. That's what we do for family, right? Right now, somebody's going to have to do something for their family in the nursery. That poor kid, that's a bummer. We fight for family. They matter to us a lot. And what I want to see is us take on a mindset as a church that no, no, no, no, this isn't your kid and that's not your marriage and that's not your issue. Those are my issues. This is my family. These are my kids. These are my younger brothers and sisters. And what I want you to feel as Grace Church, like if you're here and visiting, you feel however you want to feel, okay? I'm not talking to you right now. You just look in and you take it in, and if you want to be a part of it, that's great. But if you call Grace home, I mean this. Their decisions are your decisions. The commitments they made this weekend, those are your commitments. The things that they decided to do, you fight for those things for them. You pray for those things for them. Not in the flippant way that says, yeah, I'll do that, but in the way that means I will write this down and I will pray over these decisions. You take ownership of the kids who are graduating from here and you say, I will do whatever I can and whatever opportunities I have to fight for their faith as they go into college to make sure that when these kids move on, they don't fall away from the faith. They're the influencers at their school that are drawing other people into the faith. That's what we fight for. We fight for marriages when we see them struggling in our small group. We reach out even when it's uncomfortable because that matters to us because that's my brother and that's my sister and I want to see it work. We reach out to the older crowd in our church and we make sure that they're good and we make sure that they have what they need. We reach out to our friends and our peers who are moving into a season of life where they're taking care of their older parents and we make sure that they have what they need or that they just have a respite. We look for ways to help. Those are not their issues. It's not their marriage. It's not their commitments. It's ours because we're a family. And when this principle really got impressed upon me, I'll never forget it. I was a student pastor at Greystone, and we had a great kid in the youth group named Tristan. Tristan came from a broken home. Now, there are some homes, there are some families that are divorced, and those parents do a phenomenal job of raising their kids together and of blocking them from what is usually carried out from divorce. There are some families who do a phenomenal job of that, but Tristan's family was not one of those. His dad was a mess. He got invited to church by a friend. He started coming to church for a couple of months, and he accepted Jesus. He became a believer. And shortly after becoming a believer, and this guy, I mean, he was a good-looking kid, man. He was athletic. He had everything going for him. He was charismatic. Everybody loved this kid. He comes to a retreat like this. And we didn't even talk about this in the retreat. It wasn't the point of the retreat. It was just a conviction that he reached on his own. And he came after the retreat and he shared with me and he said, Nate, you know, I've decided that I want to save myself until marriage. I'm going to wait until I get married. And I said, that's great, pal. That's awesome. Good for you. Good for you. Let's pray for that. And I was so thrilled for him to reach that conclusion. It wasn't even a thing that we talked about. It was just something that the Lord impressed upon him after becoming a believer, and he said, this is what I want to do. And I was so excited for him. Then Tristan went home, and he told his dad about his new commitment. You know what his dad said? Tristan, don't be stupid. Don't do that. That's a big mistake. You've got to live your life, buddy. I'm telling you, don't listen to those people. Broke my heart. You know what I realized? Kristen was a spiritual orphan. He had parents. He had a biological dad. But he didn't have anybody in his life that he could look up to as a spiritual father and say, I wanna be like that. He didn't have anybody in his life that he could look up to as a spiritual father and say, I want to be like that. He didn't have anybody in his life that he could look up to and model himself after. And when you think about how your parents, those of you who had good ones, influenced you, not a whole lot of it was them sitting you down telling you something in a Bible study format. It was just watching them and what they did and learning from them and how they went through life. And Tristan had nobody that he could look to and see as a spiritual father. He didn't have spiritual brothers and sisters around him in his life outside of church encouraging him. And Tristan, more than anybody I've ever met, needed a spiritual family. And it makes me wonder, how many people here in our church at Grace do we have who are spiritual orphans? Who have parents, but they don't have anybody in their life that's older than them that they look up to and they go, I want to be godly like that. I want to live my life how they live it. I want to learn from them. How many here are just going through life? How many young parents do we have who are just trying to figure out how to be parents without losing their minds at a three-year-old, right? How many parents do we have who are trying to do that, and when they get to a spiritual place in their life, they don't have a parent that they can call and say, Dad, what'd you do in this situation? Mom, how did you handle this when this was happening in your marriage? Because they have parents, but they don't have spiritual parents, and so they come to church where they need them. How many young families do we have in this church who are just going it blind right now, trying to figure it out the best they can? How many older families do we have in this church who have kids in college or in young adulthood who don't quite know how to be parents, who don't quite know how to encourage faith in their kids, who don't quite know their way around it, who don't have anybody to look up to and anybody to call and say, hey, how'd you do this? My kid's making these decisions. It's breaking my heart. What do I do? How many people in our church don't have somebody to call when that happens? How many folks in our church are taking care of their older parents and don't know how to bear this burden in a godly way? How many folks in our church are retired and they're looking around going, what do I do in retirement? How many spiritual orphans do we have here? The answer to that question impresses upon me the need that we have to see ourselves as family. What I want you to understand this morning, what I want you to see is that we have a generational responsibility to reach both forward and back. We as a church, as individuals in the church, we, and when I say we, I mean you, buddy, we have a generational responsibility to reach both forward and back. To look at the generation in front of us and grab somebody and pay attention to them and go, how do I do this? How do I navigate life? And to reach back behind you and to grab them and say, let me show you how to get through this season of life. Let me fight for your commitments that you're making. We have a generational responsibility to do this. We have to. And I think, listen, I think if we do this, I think if we do this, we protect the commitments that they made. What if all of them had a room full of 20 and 30-year-olds who were reaching back and pouring into them and helping them and being a contact for them after they went off to college, kind of like their small group leaders are right now? What if our young families with young kids are pouring into the people in our church that are just getting married and started out and don't have young kids yet? What if our parents with kids in the youth group are pouring into our parents over here with kids in the nursery? What if our parents with kids in college are pouring into those below them, right? What if we actually did this and we actually looked out for one another? Can you imagine the health and the sustainability of grace? I've said as your pastor often, I don't care about growing big, I care about growing healthy. Is there a healthier way to grow than this? Than to accept our generational responsibility to reach both forward and back? So how do we do this? What does it look like practically? Because it's great to say it, but what do we do? And this is a tough answer, but here's one of the things I think we do. I think there's really two things that we do. First, we intentionally put ourselves in multi-generational situations, okay? If you don't have anybody who's older or younger than you right now that you could reach out to and you'd be like, hey, let's grab coffee. And listen, if you do have that, do it. If you have somebody that God's been laying on your heart to reach out to and be like, hey, I wanna learn from you, can we grab some coffee? Or if you have someone who is younger than you and God's been placing them on your heart and for some reason you can't get them out of your head, send them an email. Be like, hey, let me buy you coffee, I just wanna hear more of your story. Everybody's up for coffee. And listen, as a dude who knows literally every 30-something and below in this church, all of them would love to get an email from someone older than them going, hey, let's talk. All of them. None of them would turn it down. I know it's an awkward thing, but I promise it will work out. So if that's not an option for you, what do we do? We put ourselves in multi-generational environments. A great example of this, I'm going to pick on him. I've got a buddy at the church named Ben. Ben's a good dude. He's from Wendell, by way of Tobaccoville, so he's still got that accent that we like, right? And I have a Wednesday morning Bible study. It's at 6 a.m. to keep out the riffraff. And so at 6 a.m., the dudes come. There's 10 or 12 guys that come every week. And what I love about this is it's multi-generational. Connor comes sometimes. Connor comes. He's the youngest. We got folks who are near in retirement. We got everybody in between. And I love it. And Ben has flat told me, because we're buddies, bro, I'm not waking up to hear what you have to say about the Bible. I'm getting up because there's older men in this group and I want to be around them. It's an intentional decision that he's made. It's the right decision. And he makes a fair point. I wouldn't get up to hear what I have to say either. But he's intentionally placed himself in a multi-generational environment so that he can begin to learn from those above him, and he's pouring into those who are younger than him in different ways. You can do that too. As we have Bible studies, sign up for them. There's a Bible study here on Monday nights. It's a bunch of old men who would love to really, like Harris right here, who would love to pour into younger men that are interested, right? Do that. Put yourself in those environments. Sign up for something like that. When you're in your volunteer teams, look around and take notice of who else is there. One of the greatest strengths of grace is that we are multigenerational and generationally diverse. We should take advantage of this. The next thing that you do after you've placed yourself in those environments is you honestly, you pray. And you ask that God would help you to notice the opportunities you have to have real conversations. And instead of throwing those out, you engage in them. And you watch the opportunities come up. And you begin to learn from other people who are older than you. And you begin to see people who are younger than you that may be struggling a little bit. And it becomes perfectly acceptable and comfortable to shoot them a text and go, hey, I just wanted to check on you. You doing good? You wanna get some coffee? Grace, I think that if we'll do this, if we'll embrace our generational responsibility to reach both forward and back, if we will intentionally place ourself in multi-generational environments and then be prayerfully sensitive to what we can do there, I think we'll be a healthy place. I think we'll be a church that operates as a family. And I think that we will be a place that beats the odds and does not graduate generation after generation that walks into college and falls away from the faith, but that we will be a church of unique health and vibrance because we look out for each other and we fight for each other as family because we, like God, see everybody else here as our brothers and our sisters in Christ. Let's do that. Let's fight for each other and let's fight for these kids. All right, let's pray. Father, we love you. We're so very grateful for you. Lord, I'm so grateful that you filled this church with folks from all different generations, all different times, all different ages and demographics. I pray that you would begin to bridge those gaps, that you'd begin to look out for us or help us look out for one another. Help us see one another as brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers. Help us fight for one another and take a vested interest in one another. God, give us the courage to send an email or a text. Give us the courage and the bravery to step into an environment that may not be the most comfortable for us. And make this a place, God, where faith is fought for, where commitments are owned by everyone, and where your help, God, and your love and your vibrancy abound. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Thank y'all for being here. It's so good to see you. I'm actually the pastor here. They let me do it, which is silly. But my name is Nate, and it's good to see all of you. And again, thanks for being here as we start out January in 2019 together. We have launched the new year with the series Lessons from the Gym. And that started in 2017, that whole year. For whatever reason, I had an uncommon burst of discipline, and I spent more time in the gym that year than I ever had before. And while I was there, just some things occurred to me. I observed some things and learned some things, and I began to see a lot of similarities between going to the gym and trying to get physically healthy and coming to church and trying to get spiritually healthy. And so I just kind of kept track of these things. And as we approached the new year, we knew that some people would be making some resolutions to get physically healthy. I mean, I had my first day back in the gym already this year. It went really well. I was throwing up tons of weight. And then some of us have some resolutions to get spiritually healthy. And we want to meet those and foster those as well. And so as we start the year together, I thought I would share with you some of the things I learned or thought about while I was doing that. Last week, I shared with you my experience in going for the first time and how that could be intimidating when you go to the gym for the first time and you don't know what to do. You feel like kind of an imposter and everyone's kind of looking at you and they're going to figure you out, right? And then it occurred to me that, oh my goodness, this must be what it feels like to go to a church for the first time. It's got to feel uneasy. It's got to be a little bit unnerving, even for those of us with more confidence, which has to be just a little bit intimidating for us to do that. And so I thought, man, what are five things I would love to be able to say to people on their first visit with us at Grace? And what are five things that I want us as a church to be saying to other people through our words and our actions as they come to Grace? And so I would say this, I never do this. I never tell you like, hey, go back and listen to the sermon because that's self-aggrandizing and gross. But for this one, I do think it's important because last week I shared five things that we would love to tell people on their first visit at Grace. And so if you're new to Grace, I would encourage you to go find that online or on the podcast and give it a listen. This week I want to tell you about a meeting that I had with a nutritionist at the gym. As I started to exercise, one of the things I learned is that exercise is good. It makes you healthy. It's very helpful. But if you really want to change the way you look, meaning my goals was for when I sweat, for my sweat to show up on my chest before my belly. That was my only physical fitness goal. But to start changing that, I didn't need to get in the gym. I needed to eat right. And I realized that diet is really more impactful than exercise. So then I started thinking about like, well, how can I diet, right? How can I eat right? Because there's a lot of fad diets out there and they seem unmanageable and unwieldy. And I'm not going to be able to like do those in perpetuity, right? Like I heard somebody say like you have to eat the rainbow every day and that feels like a real hassle. I don't want to do that. I know some people who are on Whole30, which really should be called Whole Hassle. It's so annoying even to be friends with these people when you go out to eat. You may as well just hand a note to the server when you walk in going, I'm really sorry, I'm going to be a hassle for you today. That's not sustainable, right? Because you have to know all these things about food and how to eat. You can do that for 30 days. You can't do that for forever. And so I wanted to learn how to eat right moving forward, something that would be manageable. And so I found a lady who was a nutritionist at the gym and I set an appointment and I went to meet with her. And I was fascinated with what she had to say about nutrition and all the different ways it works and the way that like different bodies respond to different. And I had no idea that it was that detailed. And I quickly became overwhelmed and a little disinterested because I thought, I'm not going to do any of this. So instead, I noticed that her job in trying to help people get physically healthy is a lot like my job in trying to help people get spiritually healthy. And so I began to ask her questions about that. She kept trying to go back to nutrition. I'm like, yeah, that's great. I'll eat some eggs. But let's talk about this, right? And I noticed that she has people come in. She gets to know them, what makes them tick. She comes up with a plan to move them towards health. And then they provide accountability around those people to help them become healthy, and that's really what I do. And from her vantage point, she's seen a lot of people come into the gym wanting to get healthy, and she's seen success stories, and she's seen others that flamed out, and she was telling me the importance of, if you're going to do it, and you're going to do it right, then you really do need a trainer because we hold you accountable. It would be good to have a group of friends or a group of buddies to kind of work out with you or at least see at the gym to hold you accountable there. It would be good if you would do that. Her nutrition and program, she said, was great because you keep a log and she holds you accountable for what you eat and all those kinds of things. And a question occurred to me that I thought had some application at the church. I said, how many people do you see come in? Because when you're at the gym and you're a trainer, January, right, you see us all come in. All the people with our holiday weight on us, like we come in and they see us and they kind of know whether or not we're going to be successful or not. And so I said, how many people do you see come into the gym with the goal of getting physically healthy, but they're doing it alone? They don't have any accountability. They're not hooked up with a trainer. They're not doing the nutrition program. They're just on their own through their own personal discipline. They're just trying to get themselves healthy. How many people do you see successfully do that by themselves? And she very quickly said, less than 5%. Less than 5%. That's nearly impossible. And I thought, oh, how interesting. Because if you think about segments of our culture that are disciplined, people who go to the gym are disciplined, right? And so if you wanted to isolate a segment of our culture that does exhibit discipline that's maybe even above and beyond the mean, you would go to the gym. And what I thought was interesting was even amongst people who are by nature disciplined and have taught themselves self-discipline over the years, less than 5% of them are able to accomplish physical health without other people around them. You cannot get physically healthy alone. And to me, everything in my brain went off as I think about church, because I know that it's entirely true that just like you can't get physically healthy alone, you don't stand a chance of getting spiritually healthy alone. You cannot do that. She said less than 5% of people come in and achieve physical health by themselves. I would say nobody comes into church, regardless of their resolve and their background, void of other people in their life who love them and love Jesus, and moves to a place of long-lasting spiritual health. Nobody does that. You can come to Jesus on your own. You can come to Jesus in the privacy of your own heart, in the privacy of your own home. You can do that on your own. You can get connected with Jesus by yourself. That's absolutely possible. You hear a sermon that compels you. You have a conversation with a friend. You have a big life event. There can be something that just between you and God, you accept Christ and you're connected now to the Father through Jesus. You can do that on your own, but you cannot sustain that growth and flourish in your spiritual health on your own. There is no such thing as a Lone Ranger Christian. I have been doing ministry now, vocationally, for nearly 20 years, which is, I feel old. But when I was 19, I went pro, right? They started paying me to be a Christian, which is, that's all ministry is. It's not a big deal. But at 19, I got involved with Young Life, started doing youth ministry, kept doing youth ministry, started doing some other stuff, got involved in a church. I oversaw small groups for a church of nearly 2,000 people and kind of watched the spiritual maturation process within the several hundred folks that were in those and have just been around church world for a long time. And like the trainer at the gym, I've seen a lot of people come in and out of the church. I've seen a lot of people come into the church with gusto. Something's happened in their life. They really want to pursue spiritual health. They want to prioritize their walk with the Lord. They want to prioritize. They want to get some things out of their life that they've been wanting to get rid of for a long time. They want some things in their life that they feel like they've been missing for a long time. I've seen this happen a lot. And sometimes you watch people, it just takes off. Something clicks and they move towards spiritual health and it's a really cool story. And other times you watch them flame out. And maybe that's part of your story. You go back to church with gusto. We've seen this happen. If you've been a church person for any length of time, you've seen other people do this. And maybe we've done it too. We recommit. We make a commitment. I'm going to get spiritually healthy. I'm going to do this. This is going to be important to me. And so we prioritize our walk with the Lord. But then the spiritual things in our life, church, small group, whatever matters most to us, I don't want to set up Sunday morning like it's the number one indicator of spiritual health. It's not. But our commitment to those things tends to fall away, right? At some point or another, it's going to trickle down. No matter how much energy and effort we have and commitment we have going into it, eventually our enthusiasm wanes. And I've seen people come in and they meet with me and they're on fire and they want to get plugged in and they do all the things, but then like attendance and engagement starts to kind of fall off, right? For a couple of months, I don't see them as often. And then after those couple of months, I just don't see them at all. It just falls off. And as I've watched this process over the years, one of the things I've learned is this, that the number one, and I believe this with my whole heart, the number one indicator of your future spiritual health is the community of people that you have in your life. The number one indicator of whether or not you're going to be walking with the Lord in three years and five years and 10 years is who you have in your life right now that is connected to Jesus and connected to you. It's who you have in your life who loves you and who loves Jesus. You show me a person, and not that anybody ever does this, this is a ridiculous hypothetical conversation, but if you showed me a person and you said, this is Kyle, how do you think he's going to be doing spiritually in five years? The very first question I would ask is, who are his friends? Who does he have around him? Who does she have around her that loves her and loves Jesus? To me, that is the number one indicator, more than whether or not we're getting up and reading our Bible and praying, more than what their church attendance is. No, no, no, no. Who do they have in their life that loves them and loves Jesus? It is the number one indicator of future spiritual health. I believe that community is vitally important. And I believe so strongly that you can't be a Lone Ranger Christian that I think it should be prioritized in church above and beyond almost everything else. And this isn't just my idea. This is not something I've learned over observation in ministry. This is a very biblical idea. If you look at Jesus, the Son of God comes down to earth, lives in Nazareth and the area of Galilee and northern Israel for 30 years, and then at the age of 30, he starts his ministry. And if you're a Bible person and you've read the Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, they all tell the story of Jesus' life. If you've ever opened those up and you've read them and paid attention to them, when Jesus starts his ministry, when he goes public, what's the very first thing he does? He calls the disciples to himself. Does he go, okay, I'm starting, and then just go out and start preaching and talking to people? No. He goes and he gets community around him. We actually see evidence in Jesus's life that he had some very best friends that lived in a town east of Jerusalem called Bethany. And that those were his people. And that those are who he loves. And when he called the disciples, he didn't just call one or two or three, he called 12. And when you watch Jesus interacting throughout his ministry, he's interacting with groups on a group level. You very rarely see Jesus having a one-on-one conversation with somebody. He's always teaching corporately. He's always keeping people around him. Jesus was one who believed in the power of community. Paul, the most influential Christian to ever live, he wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. He was a man, his name was Saul, until God got a hold of him, changed it to Paul, and said he is the chosen instrument to reach the rest of the world. And what he did to reach the rest of the world is he went on three, maybe four, depending on what you think of the last one, missionary journeys where he went around planting churches in cities like Thessalonica and Corinth and Philippi and Ephesus and Galatia and Rome. And then he would write letters back to those churches which have become our New Testament. And when he would go on those missionary journeys, the most influential Christian to ever live, did he go alone because he was so close to God that he didn't need anybody else? No. He had with him what we refer to now as the traveling seminary. Younger men and women that he was training for ministry, that he was pouring into, that he was leaving at certain places. Did you know that there's books in the Bible, 1 and 2 Timothy, that Paul writes to a young pastor because he left Timothy, who was in his traveling seminary, in Ephesus to continue the work there. He discipled him relationally. Even Paul surrounded himself with community. If you read his books, what you'll pay attention to and you'll notice is that friendship mattered a lot to him. The book of Romans, the entire last chapter, Romans 16, is almost entirely greetings and salutations to people who were in Rome to whom he was close. These relationships mattered a lot to Paul. If you look at the book of Acts, where the early church starts, Acts chapter 2, Jesus has lived his life. He's died on the cross. He's come back to life. And then he gave the disciples some instructions. You guys lead the church now. You guys make it go. I'm going to heaven. I'll see you when you get there. And they get together in this upper room and they go, what do we do? And the rest of them go, I don't know, what do we do? And they waited for the Holy Spirit. the Holy Spirit showed up and told them what to do. And so they went out on their balcony and they began to preach to the thousands of people in Jerusalem who were gathered around the disciples to see what do we do next. And when they heard the message of the gospel, when they heard who Jesus was and why he was here, they said, I want in. And the church immediately grew to thousands. Two or three thousand people right there in Jerusalem. That was the birth of the church that we are now a part of today. And in Acts 2, chapter 42 through 47, or chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have the seminal passage on what the early church looked like. Like, if you care about church at all and you want to know, like, are we doing this right? The biggest indicator is to go back to Acts chapter 2 and look at the characteristics of the early church that are listed out in those verses. And we're not going to turn there today because I don't have time to do it, but I'll tell you that the characteristics there are they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the breaking of bread, to eating meals together in their homes. It says they gathered in their homes daily. It says that they pooled their resources and shared them together and gave them to whoever needed them as those needs came up. And then it says that the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. You know what characterized the early church? Community and connection. It's that important. It's not just important in the New Testament, it's important in the Old Testament. In the days of ancient wisdom, Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, wrote the book of Proverbs. And in Proverbs chapter 10, he says, the companion of the wise will become wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. My dad used to say, show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's absolutely true. And then in Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes this. I love the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes has the guts to just be dead level honest with you and tell you the truth. The rest of the Bible tells you the truth, but this one just who love you and love Jesus and are helping foster that commitment. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon says, the more the merrier. The more people you have around you in your life who love you and love Jesus, the better chance you have of maintaining and growing and flourishing in a spiritual health. I believe that this is so important, this concept of connection and community, that if you were to ask me what the most important part of my job is, that's what I would say. Which is interesting because when I took this job, that's not what I thought it was. If someone were to come to you and ask you, hey, who's your pastor? You would say, well, it's a guy named Nate. We're kind of going through a rough patch right now. But then if they were to ask you, what is his job? You would probably say, well, he preaches. We prop him up there on Sunday morning, and he runs his mouth, and then we go home, and that's how it goes. His job is to preach. And when I took the job, I felt like my job was to preach. But the more I've thought about it, I've realized that's not the biggest thing that I do. The biggest thing I do is to create systems and processes that funnel you into connection that matters. The biggest thing I do is get fanatical about connecting you with people once you come here. The biggest thing I can do is activate those of you who are grace people, who are grace partners, to use and leverage your community and your connections to graft others into the family of God so that they have the community that you have and are plugged in in such a way that we propel them towards spiritual health. The most important thing I do is to help us be fanatical about getting other people connected to people who love Jesus and who love them. It is the difference maker in future spiritual health, and it is vitally, vitally important. It's a huge deal. And if you hear that and you think, gosh, man, I hear you. We do have to get people connected, but you should preach, man. We got to learn the Bible. There's other things that are super important. I agree with you. Because of that, I want to ask you to do a little exercise with me, okay? I'm being serious now. You can get a pen. You can get your bulletin. You write this thing down. Or if you're like me and you're going to ignore my instructions anyway, just think about it for a second. Here's what I'd like you to do. If you've spent any time in church, if you're not a church person, this is your first time in church, this is going to be a hard exercise for you. You just chill out for just a second. But if you're a church person, I want you to do this for me. I want you to take 30 seconds and write down the five most influential sermons you've ever heard in your life. The five sermons that you've heard in your life that have impacted you in such a way that's moved you to a place of spiritual sustained health. The ones that you look back on and you go, that one was good. That one really changed me and impacted me. Five most influential sermons in Go. Y'all can't even remember two of mine. All right. Time out on that. If you're really doing it, you can continue it later. It is an interesting exercise. Now I want you to do this. Same piece of paper, same thought process. Make a list in 30 seconds of the five most influential people in your life who have impacted you spiritually and pushed you more towards Jesus. That's an easier list, isn't it? It's a much easier list. And when the pastor asks you to write down influential sermons, you think, oh, shoot, I've got to come up with something here. No, you don't. Here's what I know. Can I just tell you this? Can I just be honest with you? You guys don't remember what I say. I know that. You guys don't remember my sermons. Maybe. I've been here almost two years. Maybe one, maybe two. You don't remember my sermons. And that's okay. You're not supposed to. I've worked the hardest I can to give you something on Sunday morning that's worth showing up to. I don't expect you to remember it on Wednesday. I just hope that there's something over the course of time that we learn about Scripture, that we learn about our God, that we learn about our Savior, that moves us closer to Him, that they can impact us for that day, for that week, but we just push the needle every week. We just push the flywheel every week. There's not one single sermon that moves us in that direction, but do you know what impacts us? People. Over the course of my ministry here, if God blesses me with decades here, you know what will be most impactful to you is the times that I am able to show up at the hospital, the times that we're able to sit around a table together, the times that we served on committees together, the times that we were in small group together. You know what's going to impact you at grace more than my sermons is the friends that you have here that push you towards Jesus. That when you begin to fall away a little bit, they reach out and they grab you and they go, hey, why don't you come back? That when your marriage starts to struggle a little bit, they put their arm around you and they go, hey, is everything okay? That's going to impact you. The people in your life are going to impact you so much more than what happens here on Sunday mornings. And I understand that. Which is why I believe that the most important thing I can do for you is to connect you in community. The other reason I believe this, if we're just being honest, thinking about church moving into the 2020s, which is super close now, which is nuts. And I know you guys probably haven't thought about this. I think a lot more about church than most folks. Do you realize that the only part left of church that you can't download is friends? You ever thought about that? The only part left of church that you can't download is your friends. Listen, I work hard on these sermons. You guys say, most weeks I work hard on them. Sometimes I wing it. You guys say nice things about the sermons. But this is not false humility here. There are world-class speakers and preachers who their sermons are uploaded every week. You can listen to me on Sunday and go listen to six better ones every day of the week. There's better sermons and better preachers out there. That doesn't hurt my feelings. It's just true. And if you're coming to church for the sermons, you can download those. If you're coming to the church for the music, which by the way, time out, wasn't that freaking great this morning? Gosh, that was so good. I'm so proud of the way, the job that Steve has done and the way that they sounded. And it's just, I really like that. And I love singing Reckless Love. But you can get in your car and sing it with the person who wrote it, who got paid to record it, who is really good. You can download worship songs. You've got Spotify. You can dial up anyone you want. You can have a big, long worship session in your car or in your office or in your kitchen, wherever you want it. You can download that. You know what you can't download? Your buddies. People who love you and love Jesus. And so I believe that the churches who emphasize community most are the ones that are going to be healthiest and best as we move into the future. The ones who emphasize community and connection are the ones that are going to actually be healthy because we're paying attention to what matters in the lives of others. And so my goal for you is that you come in here and you get connected with other people. That's what I think about. And can I tell you that that's the reason I chose Grace? That's the reason I came to Grace was because of the tremendous sense of community that we have here. In December of 2016, I had an interview set up with the search team from Grace. It was a Skype interview. It was going to be two hours. And so I woke up that day, I think it was December the 8th, and I began to do research about the church because when they asked me, why is it that you want to work here? I'm not going to go, I don't know, what's on your website? Like I was going to have a good answer for them, right? Which by the way, if you're interviewing for jobs, like you should do that, like research for the company. They appreciate that. So I was just learning because I didn't want to look dumb. And can I just be honest with you? Some of you guys know this story. Others of you don't. So I'm sorry about this. The more I learned about grace in December of 2016, the less I wanted to be here. Because that church at that time was not going well. It was kind of leaking like a sieve. And I thought, I don't think that this is, I got a job I like, comfortable in, I have a family. I'm not moving six hours for that. So I actually opened up my computer to write the email to cancel the interview. But then I thought, time out, big time. You're not so important that you should cancel interviews. Just take it and practice. You need it. So I took the interview. And they asked me all the questions and whatever it was. And then at the end, they said, well, do you have any questions for us? And I thought, yeah, I mean, I don't really care. I said, let's just let it fly. I was interested in this. And I said, you guys, you guys have not been doing well. You've been shrinking for several years. And that church has been through a lot of strife. What are you still doing there? And they said, we're here because we love each other. We're here for the community. We're here because our kids grew up here and this place matters to us. And we're here because of our connection with others. And when they said that, I thought, that's where I want to be. That's what I want to be a part of. A church that values community like that. Because I so strongly believe in it. And as I've come here, I've seen that that is what's most important to Grace. I've watched you guys as we've come and we've grown over the last 18 months. As people come in who maybe haven't been in a while, there hasn't been even a hint of, oh, you're back now. It has only been open-armed welcomes. It has only been warm receptions. And I hope that as you've come back to Grace that you've experienced that same warmth as well. If you haven't, I'm sorry that we have failed you, but I think that's what characterizes Grace. I think it's what we do, and it's what we do best. Which is why, as I came here, and I thought about what are we going to look like in the future? What's going to characterize us? Because we're in Raleigh. There's hundreds if not thousands of churches. All of you guys, this place could fold. All of you guys could be in another church next week, okay? And I know that. So it's important to me to figure out what makes us us. What makes us Grace Raleigh? God has different churches that he's positioning throughout the city to build his kingdom here. What's our niche? What do we need to lean into so that we most wisely invest our resources and our time? And I'm convinced it's community. It's our ability to graft other people in and get them connected. Because of that, in the fall of last year, I began to look at our mission statement. And our mission statement was a good one. Loving Jesus, loving our neighbor, and living faithfully. We said it here every Sunday. It's a good mission statement. And for those of you who are unindoctrinated, the mission statement of a church isn't a huge deal, except that it really serves as kind of the marching orders for a church. The mission statement, what you say it is, has two purposes. It's descriptive to outsiders. As they look at the church from the outside in, what does that church do there? It's descriptive to them. It's prescriptive to insiders. It prescribes for us what we need to do. Our mission is to love Jesus and to love our neighbor and to live faithfully. That's what we're going to do. That's what's going to be expected of me if I go there. And that's a good mission. But this thing I had in the back of my head was the idea that that's a good mission, but that's not graces. That's not personalized to grace. That doesn't make grace unique. That doesn't capture who we are and what we most deeply care about. And to me, the belief in community and commitment to one another, connecting with one another as we connect to Jesus, is what's most important to us. It's what is vitally important to us. It's the reason I came here is because I felt like we were on the same page with that. And so at the beginning of the year, I proposed a new mission statement to the elders, and we had a really great, I would call it a healthy give and take discussion about it. And it was a worthwhile investment of time because by the end of it, we were all on the same page and of one accord. And we came up with a mission statement that I don't believe at all changes the direction of grace. I think it captures what we already do and makes our future more clear. So now, beginning in 2019, the mission statement at Grace Raleigh is connecting people to Jesus, connecting people to people. That's what we do. It's who we are. This doesn't change our direction. It just makes it more clear because we're already passionate about doing this. Because I think you know without ever saying it or thinking through it that the best indicator towards someone's spiritual health is whether or not they're connected to other people who love Jesus and love them. And so when someone walks through the doors at Grace Raleigh, our very first goal for them is that they would get connected to Jesus. But what we understand about the power of community and the difficulty of life is that no one grows closer to him by themselves. And so the very next thing that we have to get, we've got to be fanatical about is getting them connected with community. The shorthand of this is connecting people. Grace Raleigh, connecting people. That's what we do. Who do we connect them to? Well, first we connect them to Jesus and then we deepen that relationship by connecting them to other people who love Jesus and who love them. I hope that fires you up. I hope that you like that. I am excited about that. I've had people ask me a lot over the past several months, what do you think is the future of the church? How big do you think we're going to be? How big would you like to see us become? Where do you think we're going to go from now? What are we going to look like in five years? And to all those questions, I always go, I don't know. That's a lot of pressure, man. I just have to preach. I don't know. And to be honest with you, I don't really care. I don't really care how big we get. That's not really important to me. What's important to me is how healthy we are. What's important to me is how good of a job we do at what I believe church exists for. And the entire time I've been here, whenever anybody would ask and they say, what's your goal for the church? My goal is that on Sunday morning, when somebody walks through those doors, we acknowledge that God has entrusted us with that soul and we are a good steward of that soul. Whether it's for the first time or the thousandth, we need to be good stewards of the souls that God entrusts to us when they walk through those doors. And I believe that the best way to do that is to teach the Bible, connect them to Jesus, and to get them as quickly as we can connected with other people who love them and love Jesus so that we can sustain this desire for spiritual health in their life. We have to do it. I don't want to see people coming in here and fading away. That breaks my heart. So we have to fight for these connections. And the challenge at Grace is to take a sense of community that for years has protected us and sustained us and been inwardly focused by necessity and now begin to turn that out and graft other people into the family that God is growing here. That's what we need to do. Because of all of this, we have small groups. Small groups are the best way to get connected with people at Grace. If you are thinking right now, man, I don't know if I'm connected, I really need to be, then this is the next step for you. I would encourage you to do an inventory and think about your friends. Who are the top five people I talk to most often? Do they love you and love Jesus? Because if they love you, that's great, but if they don't love Jesus, that doesn't do you much good. If they love Jesus and not you, that's not very helpful either. We need both those things. Do you have that? Some of us need to lean into that more. Some of us need to rekindle some old friendships and say, hey, I really need you in my life a little bit more. Don't say it like that. Think of a cooler way to say it, but that's what you need to do. Some of us, you're coming in from other circles of life, and your circles of friends, they might not go to church right now, and that's great. I'm not telling you at all to disconnect from those friends, but what I am telling you is you need some connections in church. You need some connections of people who love you and love Jesus. And so I would encourage you, if you're not a part of a small group, to fill out that piece of paper that's in the seat that you're sitting in. That's an easy informational thing. You just write your name, write the way that you want me to get in touch with you, and then you put when you're available and what you think you might be looking for, and I'll give you a call or shoot you an email. We don't do sign up for a small group anymore like you pick from a catalog. I like to play matchmaker, and as long as I can, I'm going to do that every semester and just spend the time with the individuals and figure out what's going on in your life, what are your needs, what's the general sense I get from you, and how can I best place you in a group of people who are like you, where you're going to feel comfortable and get connected. So my encouragement to you is, if you're not connected, fill that out. And when we're done, in a minute we're going to take communion, then we're going to sing a song, and we're going to be dismissed. And as we're dismissed, at the end of the aisles, the doors, is either going to be an usher or a little table with a basket in it. Just put that sheet in the basket. Those are going to be put on my desk this afternoon, and I'll follow up with you this week and try to get you connected. As an aside, if you're here and you're in your 20s, there's a lot of you here. So many that I'm taking a break from my young family small group, my wife and I are, and we're going to help give some energy to the 20-something small group this semester. So if you're in your 20s and you'd like to get connected here, please indicate that on that white piece of paper and I'll be in touch with you this week. I'm particularly excited about that this semester. But whoever you are, whatever your walk of life is, we have a way to get you connected here and I hope that you will be. And I'm so excited as we move forward that this mission statement is going to characterize us. Because being committed to that, I think and I hope that we're going to to come to a place where we have to choose between do we grow more or do we try to stay smaller because if we grow too big, we can't do this. I wanna make that choice and I wanna choose health. I don't care what we look like. I hope that I get to be here for decades and I don't care what we look like at the end of that but I do, as far as size, but I do hope that we're healthy. That would be success. And I think by staying committed to this, we have a really good shot at that. And I'm going to pray, and then we get to partake in communion. Father, we love you. We're so grateful for you. We're so grateful for the way that you reach into our lives, that you love us recklessly with no regard for yourself, how you pursue us. Lord, we are so grateful for the connections in our life that move us closer to you. We are grateful for the friendships that have sustained us in this place. I pray that you would use those friendships in amazing ways moving forward. God, as people come to grace, may this be a place where they get connected quickly, where they experience community and your love quickly. And may that community serve to move us closer to you. If there's anyone here who's experiencing any trepidation about just taking that first step towards connection, I pray that you would give them the courage to do at least that today. We thank you for who you are and all the ways you love us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.