Sermons tagged with Sin

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this very hot July Sunday. Hopefully it'll cool down and we can get back outside soon. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. To know the Bible, to be around church culture at all, is to know some of the main characters of the Bible, some of the people that are a little bit more prominent in the Bible. Even if you've not spent any time in church at all, we've heard of David and of Moses and of Paul, but there are some other people in the Bible that give us great examples of behavior or character that we should emulate that are worth exploring. And so we're investing our summer series in looking at some of these heroes that are a little bit lesser known in the Bible. Now, full disclosure, when I told Jen, my wife, what I was going to be preaching about this week and who I was going to be preaching about, a guy named Naaman in 2 Kings 5. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in front of you. But we're going to be in 2 Kings 5 today looking at the story of Naaman. And so she pointed out, and I should tell you, that he is not really a hero. Okay? Like he's not, what he does isn't really great. So I told her what I was going to be preaching about and she goes, well, he's not really like that heroic. And I said, well, nobody cares. It's just like, it's just obscure heroes, but this is an obscure story. What's it matter? She was like, it matters. So if it matters to you, I apologize. I beg your forgiveness. All right. But I'm just not going to, I'm not going to check that box today. So this is more like an obscure story. Nonetheless, I think we can learn a lot from the example of Naaman. So if you look in second Kings chapter five, there is a general by the name of Naaman. He's the head general in the Syrian army, which was a really powerful army at this point in history. They're far more powerful than Israel. Israel is like a third world country at this point in history. They're really not impactful on the geopolitical scale. The Syrian army is, and Naaman is the general of this army. And so you have to figure, if you just think about in the ancient world ways to get famous, that pretty much the king in general is it. They didn't have Instagram. They didn't have any influencers back then. So like Naaman, that was all you got. So he had risen to prominence. He was at least regionally famous. If not, at the time, world famous. He was a heavy hitter. He was an important dude. And Naaman comes down with leprosy. We see leprosy through the Bible. It's in the Old Testament and it's in the New Testament. Leprosy was a disease that you got in your skin. I think you can still get it now. It's just we've fixed it. But you can still get it in your skin, and it begins to eat away at your skin, slowly but surely, killing you from the outside in. And to get leprosy was to receive a death sentence. If you contracted leprosy, somehow it was eventually going to eat away at you enough that it was going to kill you. Leprosy was certain death. And it didn't happen a lot in the upper echelons of the socioeconomic scale, but somehow or another, Naaman, maybe from his time spent out on the battlefield in foreign countries and things like that, Naaman contracted leprosy. And of course he feels like he's going to die. But on their last conquest through Israel, they brought back a little Jewish girl to serve Naaman's wife. And she hears that Naaman has leprosy, and she says in 2 Kings 5, she says, Oh, that my Lord would go, my Lord Naaman would go to Israel. There's a prophet there who can heal him. Now, she's talking about a man named Elisha. In the books of 1 and 2 Kings, there's two incredible prophets. I've said there's some of the most underrated figures in the Bible, Elijah and Elisha. One day I want to do a series through their lives, maybe next summer. It's just phenomenal stories. They were tremendous men of faith that God entrusted with tremendous power for the miracles that they would do. And apparently he had cured people before, even of leprosy. And so this little girl that they took back from Israel says, oh, that my Lord would go back to Israel and find Elisha, he could heal her. He could heal him. And so Naaman's wife goes to Naaman and says, hey, there's a prophet back in Israel that can heal you. Like, you should go back there. And so he decides to go. And I wonder, and I try to do this as I read stories in the Bible, and I would encourage you guys to do it too. Sometimes if we read stories in the Bible, if you were to open up your Bible and read 1 and 2 Kings, the stories move so fast. The narrative moves so quickly. There's so little nuance. It's just this happened, this happened, this happened, and then this is the end of the story. So I like to try to slow down and read the humanity into things and figure out what would I be thinking, what would I be feeling if I were in that situation. And I think that when we do this, when you'll read it on your own and you'll put your humanity into what's happening there, I think what you'll get is that the story starts to come alive for you a little bit. And so Naaman hears the testimony of this Hebrew girl and decides that he's going to travel hundreds of miles away to a third world country that's going to take him several weeks to do to go see a faith healer in the backwoods of Israel. Now what would it take for you to do that? If you got a diagnosis that nobody wants, it was a death sentence, you're definitely going to pass away. This is going to claim your life. But if you travel to the Dominican, to the back of a mountain there, there's a faith healer and he's going to make you feel better. How desperate would you have to be to go? Naaman went. He's not a believer. He doesn't believe in the Hebrew God. It's just a weird faith healer in the backwoods of a third world country, and he goes. And before he goes, what does he do? Naaman is so very American. He packs up all of his stuff, and he puts together a small fortune, some changes of clothes, which apparently are a big deal. Like if you wanted to be wealthy, have two jackets. So he puts together some change of clothes to offer to the person that's going to heal him and to the people around that person. He gathers together some livestock and some gold, and he takes a small fortune with him. Because when you get sick, what do we do? If you're diagnosed with something tough, what do you do? You marshal all your resources, you pull everything together, and you go to the best place that's going to treat you, and then you compensate them for their treatment. That's what Naaman's going to do. So he loads everything up, heads to Israel. He gets to Israel, and he tells his king he's going to go. He asks permission from the king of Syria, hey, there's a prophet in Israel, can I go see him? King of Syria says, yeah, sure, go ahead. Gives gives him a letter to carry with him to present. So he goes to Israel. He goes and he sees the king. And listen, what kind of a dude do you have to be to get the audience of a king when you just wander into a country? You have to be a big deal. So the king hears Naaman's here. Oh no, what does the general of the Syrian army want? And Naaman presents him with a letter. And the letter's from the king of Syria, and it says, be pleased to heal my servant Naaman of leprosy. And the Bible says that the king went and tore his clothes, because at this time in history, that's how you express anguish and sadness and despair and anxiety. And I've always wondered if these people had like spare, like tearing clothes that they got from Walmart. Like when I got sad, I would be like, time out. And then I would put on those things and probably pre-snip them and then tear them and then put on my nice kingly garb and be like, okay, that's terrible for those clothes. I don't know what he did. Maybe he just, he could tear outfits all he wanted. But he goes and he tears his clothes and he expresses this great sadness. Why has the king of Syria put this on me that he expects me to provoke him for war? Because it's an impossible task. I can't heal somebody from leprosy, much less the general of the most powerful army in the region right now. There's nothing I can do about this. This is a death sentence for him too. It's an excuse when Naaman goes there and he eventually dies because the king doesn't cure him. Then the Syrians can get ticked off at Israel and go sweeping through there again. And so the king, he's anxious. He is worried. He is in anguish. And word gets to Elisha, the chief prophet, that the king has gotten this letter. So he sends word to the king and he says, I've heard that you've torn your clothes. I hope it was the cheap ones that you got from Walmart. If you would just send Naaman to me, I'll take care of it. Send Naaman to me, I'll heal him. So the king says, okay, here's Naaman's address. You go and, or here's Elisha's address. You go and you see him. And I love how Naaman arrives. He goes to Elisha's house and it says, he arrived on his horses and chariots. So he brings his whole entourage with him. He arrives on his chariots. Nobody in Israel can afford a chariot. Israel has zero chariots. And so this is a huge deal. This is like when they line the streets for some political figure and on the line of Tahos come through and you're like, I don't know where, but somewhere in there, there's somebody that's important. So Naaman creates his own processional and arrives at the gate of Elisha's house, almost with this sense of, I'm here, congratulations. And he tells them, I'm here. And what does Elisha do? I love what Elisha does. What would you do? What would you do if one of the most famous people in the country showed up at your house, showed up at your office, and whoever works the front desk came to you, and they're like, excuse me, Nate, Peyton Manning's here to see you. What would you do? I don't know. I thought all week about who do I say that everybody recognizes as famous? I don't know what to say. Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, whoever you want, Justin Timberlake, take your pick. Somebody shows up, they're super famous and they want to talk to you. What would you do? I would be like, Aaron, Steve, Kyle, which is, that's the staff here. Sorry, I'm out. I got to go talk to them. Like, I got to, I got to go see them. I would, hello, I'm the senior pastor. It's good to meet you. I'm glad that you're here to see me. Right? Of course, we would soak that up, wouldn't we? What's Elisha do? He grabs an intern. Hey, name is at the gate. Would you go tell him that if he'll dip in the Jordan River seven times that he'll be healed and he'll be good to go? Like, what's Elisha working on? Like a proposal? Like, I'm busy. But he just says, hey, go tell Naaman if he'll dip in the river seven times he'll be healed. And so the intern goes down and tells this to Naaman. And this is how Naaman receives it. If you have a Bible, you can look in 2 Kings 5. I love what he does. Verse 10 says, and Elisha sent a messenger to him saying, go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh will be restored and you shall be clean. He doesn't even let him in. He's like, there's no reason for you to come in here and all that stuff. Just go to the Jordan River. You'll turned and went away in a rage. Naaman's ticked. He's ticked. I remember when I first got out of college, or when I was finishing up college, I sold cars. People don't know this about me, but I sold cars for like six months. And I was on the phone with a guy one day. He was a good old southern boy. And we were kind of going back and forth on the price of a truck. You know, he's got to ask for a price, and I've got to hang on. Let me go check with my manager, and I come back with the price. And it's a whole deal. It's real silly. And so we're going back and forth. And finally he goes, listen, son, am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? Because I need to be talking to the man. And I had to admit, I was not the man at Hayes Chrysler. Sir, you are talking to the boy. It was a very low moment in my life. If you know me well, you know that I need more of those and you do not feel sorry for me. And I had to admit, I'm not the decision maker here. That's what Naaman thought. Am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? He wanted to talk to the man. He wanted to be made over. He wanted to be fussed over. He wanted Elisha to come out and, oh, it's so great to have you. I'm honored to heal you. And then he wanted the chance after the healing to be able to offer his small fortune, right? He wanted to be able to offer a one-for-one exchange. None of us likes to get help without being able to reciprocate that help, without being able to feel like we in some way earned this or deserve this. He wanted to be able to compensate Elisha, and now he's robbed of that chance. He's not treated like he expects to be treated. Elisha is supposed to make this big scene and wave his hand over him, and I call on the name of the Lord and yada, yada. And he's like, no, just, you're good. Just see the water over there? Just go get in it. And he's going, I traveled hundreds of miles and brought all this stuff for this? You kidding me? I have rivers back home, and they're better than this backwoods river. And so he storms off. He takes his ball and goes home, and he sulks like a little kid. And a little while later, his servants go to him, and it's a loose paraphrase, but essentially they say, Naaman, what do you have to lose, man? You're out here. Just go do it. Just go do what he says. And I can imagine them saying, like, what's the worst that can happen? You get some Jordan River on you. You go home and you rinse off in the Farper. It'll be all right. Just do it. And so he goes after he's calmed down. He dips in the Jordan River, and he's healed of his leprosy. When he sees that he's healed of his leprosy, he's overjoyed. He rushes back to Elisha, and he tries to give him all the stuff. He tries to compensate him. Thank you. Here's this fortune that I brought. And Elisha's like, I don't need it. I didn't do that for your stuff, man. I just did that for you. God told me to heal you. I healed you. I don't need it. And he keeps trying to give it away to whoever will take it. And then a guy named Gehazi, one of Elisha's servants comes to him and he's like, actually, you know, on second thought, Elisha really does need the stuff. And Naaman gives him the stuff. And then Gehazi gets in trouble for taking the stuff. And that's a whole separate story if you keep reading on. But Naaman responds to this healing with a joyful and generous love. Here, here, take all my stuff. This was given to me. I want to be able to give this to you. And he leaves that space professing that there is one true God, and it is the God of Israel. We get a convert out of this interaction. Now, this is a good story, and it's a good one to unpack in the Old Testament. But how does it apply to us? I think we can begin to understand how it applies to us when we realize that leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. We see leprosy in the Old Testament and the New Testament. When we see it in the New Testament, generally Jesus is interacting with them. If you contracted leprosy, you were sent to a colony. You were quarantined. You were no longer allowed to interact with general society. You were unclean. You were sent to a colony, and you were sent there to die. Can you imagine how depressing leper colonies would be? And Jesus walked into these places and he touched and he touched and he touched and he healed and he healed and he healed in the same way that Jesus walks through a sinful world and he heals and he heals and he restores. The picture of leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. Leprosy was a disease that once you got it, it may have started small. In the story of Naaman, it says that he expected Elisha to come out and wave his hand over the place. So maybe leprosy was just starting to appear. Maybe it was on his arm and he could wrap it up. Maybe it was on his ribs and he could cover it up. Maybe it was in a place where if you looked at him, you didn't know that he had it, but he knew that he had it. And isn't that how sin works? When we have things in our lives that don't need to be there, sometimes we can cover it up. We can wrap it up. We can keep it from other people. And sin, just so we're clear, sometimes that word is misunderstood and it's used to make people feel guilty. But really, sin is anything that happens when we elevate our judgment in our life to equivocate God's judgment in our life. And when we say, no, God, I don't think that I want to do the thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do the thing that makes the most sense to me. That's sin. Whatever that is, whatever that looks like, whatever form that takes on. And when we get that, when we sin, just like leprosy, it is a disease that eats away at us and leads to certain death. Isn't this what Jesus, isn't this what God said in Genesis? He told Adam and Eve that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that you will surely die. And they ate of it and they didn't drop dead. So either God's a liar or he's not talking about physical death. He's talking about a spiritual death. And what he's saying is, if you elevate your judgment to mine and you throw off my lordship in your life and you become your own little God, then you have eternally separated yourself from me. That's a spiritual death. So sin, just like leprosy, leads to a certain death. Leprosy leads to a physical death. Sin leads to a spiritual death. But there's a parallel there. And in this story, Naaman is healed, but we should think about it as salvation. Naaman seeks salvation. And to be healed for his salvation, he had to accept the word of God and be obedient and humble himself and go dip in a river that didn't make any sense. For us to receive salvation, spiritual healing from God, we place our faith in what Jesus did on the cross for us. And in some ways, sometimes it doesn't make much sense. But we accept that free gift from Jesus. As we move through the Christian life and we understand salvation is, yes, an event when we place our faith in Christ, but it's also this ongoing process that the Bible calls sanctification, which just means becoming more like God in character. And that to be sanctified, to become more like God in character, it's every day this decision to trust on God rather than ourselves. It's every day to trust in God's way rather than our way. It's every day to trust in his lordship rather than our lordship. It's the same decision that Naaman had to make every day as we seek this salvation, as we fight off sin. And so what we see in the story of Naaman and what makes it relevant to us is that the physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. The physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. It works the same way. Naaman needed salvation for a disease that would lead to certain death. We need salvation from a disease that will lead to certain spiritual death or eternal separation from God. And what's interesting to me about this and where the rubber really meets the road in this story is, if I were to take you back to Damascus, back to Syria, when Naaman contracted leprosy, and he were to ask you, I need to be healed, what do you think my biggest obstacles are between health and unhealth? What do you think are the biggest things I need to overcome to be healed and to live? We would probably look at external factors, wouldn't we? We would look at the distance between he and Elisha. We would look at the cost. We would look at the probability of it actually working. We would look at all these other external factors. But what we see when we look at the story of Naaman is that Naaman's biggest obstacles for healing were his ego and his expectations. They were internal factors. His biggest obstacles to being healed, to salvation, were his ego and his expectations. He wanted to compensate. He wanted it to be a one-for-one exchange. He wanted to be able to look at Elisha and say, you are going to give me this, and I'm going to give you this. I earned this. I deserve this. It makes sense for you to heal me. We're going to both benefit from this exchange. His ego said that he needed to be able to contribute to it. And isn't that how we work too? I've been in church long enough to hear a line several times talking to people who are considering coming to faith. And they'll say something like, I do think that I want to become a Christian. I do think I want to get back into the church thing, but I just got some stuff I need to clean up first. Or I'll talk to somebody who wants to be baptized. We're going to do a baptism service in September, by the way, so start thinking about whether or not you might want to be a part of that. I've talked with so many people who are thinking about being baptized, but they'll say, yeah, I want to do that, but I've got some things that I need to get in order before I do that. When we say that, what are we doing? Our egos are saying, yeah, I'm going to take that step, but when I do, I'm going to deserve it. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be on my terms. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be because I'm worthy of it. It's going to be because I've gotten through white-knuckle discipline myself in line enough that I feel like I can approach him with a pure heart. When I get baptized, I'm going to earn the right to be baptized. I'm going to bring something to that exchange. It's going to feel like I deserve this gift from God of salvation. When we know that we bring nothing to that exchange. We don't pay God for it. We don't compensate him for his son. We just get our ego out of the way and we accept it. See, to get healed of leprosy, you have to first admit that you have it and that you desperately need to be healed. To get rid of the sin that's in our life, to be aligned with our Creator, to experience salvation, we have to first come to a place where we admit, I'm broken and I need healing. And that's a really hard thing for some of us. We have to come to a place where we admit, my lordship in my life is not working. I need your lordship. It's a hard place for some of us to get to. And what we see from the story of Naaman as we think about it in ourselves is that humility is a prerequisite for salvation. I would be willing to bet, and I don't know everybody enough to say this to you, and I'm sorry if this is too far, but I would be willing to bet that there are those of us who have kept kind of Christianity at arm's length for a while. We've considered it, it's there, and maybe we even think one day I will. Or maybe we think, I know that I should take it more seriously, but one day I will. I wonder if that obstacle between you and just a full bore faith is an ego. Is an, I want to do this on my terms. I'm not ready to accept that lordship all the way. I still think that I'm a pretty good authority in my life. And as long as that exists, as long as we think our rivers back home are good enough, we can't take the steps that God wants us to take. Humility, coming to him humbly, is a prerequisite for salvation. The other thing that got in Naaman's way were his expectations. He said, you're not going to come out and talk to me? You want me to go dip in the river? That's it? You're not going to wave your hand? There's not going to be this big thing and this huge ceremony. I expect that I'd at least get a good prayer out of this. None of that's going to happen. And so often we bring our own expectations to God, and then when he doesn't meet the expectations that we've created in our own heads, we push him off because he's not the God who he said he is, when he never said he would do any of that stuff. Naaman wasn't given those expectations by other prophets who said, listen, when you get to Israel, this is how healings work. That's just what he conjured up. And so when it didn't go according to his plan that he created in his own head, he rejected the plan that God presented him with because it didn't meet his expectations. But if you examine them, he had no right to those expectations. And so often I think we push God away because he doesn't meet the expectations that we created. And here's how this works. We have a tendency, if you think about it, and you think about who God is, we have a tendency to remake God in our own image. For most of us, God is simply the best possible version of us. I think about the things that I value in me, and we assume that God must be those things. And we never do it intentionally. No one would admit to this. No one would be like, oh yeah, totally, I do that. But if you think about who you think God is and how you think he should respond to different situations, what you picture God as is the best possible version of you. It's this version of you that you'll probably never attain, but God is probably that. So then when stuff happens in our life, we think, how would the best possible version of me respond to this? Well, it would respond this way, and that's not how God is responding, so he's not fair. When the God in heaven said, hey, I never gave you those expectations. I never promised you that. When we enter into a season of pain and suffering, when something happens in our life that we feel like isn't fair. And we say a loving God would never let this happen. He let it happen to person after person after person in the Bible. He let it happen to his own son. He let David's infant son die. We can go through story after story after story in the Bible where people who loved God and served him well had to deal with incredible pain. So where are we getting the expectation that when I go to God, everything is going to be good? We made that up. When I go to God, everything is going to go well for me. I'm going to close the sale. I'm going to do the business. My kids are going to finally behave because I'm raising them according to the right standards. Who gave you that expectation? Where are we getting that? Now, the expectation that God gives us is that all things work out in eternity. And that one day when we meet him, everything will make sense. I am confident there are things that are happening even now that I do not understand and I can't pretend to explain. But here's what I trust. One day I'll get to look God in the eye and if I even still care about all the stuff that happened here, if I were to ask him, God, why'd you let this stuff happen? If he would explain it to me in my heavenly form, I would go, okay, that makes sense. Can I get back to worshiping you now? I think so often our expectations that we generate, that God never signed up for, keep us from going to him and knowing him fully. Even expectations on the other end of the pendulum. Sometimes our expectations are, I've done so little. I've known better and not responded to it properly for so long that there's no way that God could accept me. And we let those expectations of God's response keep us away from him when that's not at all what he says. It says in Luke 15 that he's the father that runs to us and waits for us to come back to him. So in the story of Naaman, we see a person like us who was in need of salvation. We see a person like us and like me who very often keeps his ego and his expectations as an obstacle between him and the God that he desperately needs. And my prayer for you, even this morning, even as I was kneeling and praying before I would come preach, is that God would give you the courage and the honesty to see where your ego and your expectations in your life, and in my life, this is a me too thing, are keeping us from knowing God the way he wants to be known. Help us to identify those. Give us the courage to move past those. And if we do that, what will be the result? Look at what Naaman did. I believe. I'm in. Take all my stuff. I don't need it anyways. Naaman's response after humility and receiving the salvation was a joyful and generous love. The result of humble acceptance is a joyful and generous love. It's a love so big and so generous that I have grace for you as I watch you struggle through life. I have grace for you as I see clearly that your ego is keeping you from knowing everything about God that you could know. You have grace for me as you see my wrong expectations keeping me from knowing God well because you know that you've been met there with grace too. We have this contagious joy when we accept love in that way. Scripture tells us, Jesus tells us in Matthew that we are to honor God, that we are to love people in such a way that others will see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. That without us ever telling them about our faith, they will see our faith lived out and go, there's something different about them and I want it. Paul says in 2 Corinthians that we are led in a procession by Christ and that through us, one of my favorite phrases in the Bible, spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. This thing that just wafts into the lives of others passively as we move through their life and they look at us and they see something that's different. You know what's supposed to be different? A joyful and generous love. You know how we come by that love? By humbling ourselves before God and freely receiving his salvation and his love and his affirmation every day. And then we move through life like Naaman did after he got healed. So my prayer for you is that if there are places in your life where either your ego or your expectations are keeping you from knowing God, from submitting to him, that you would have the courage to see those things. And then ultimately, my prayer for us is that we would move through life like Naaman did at the end of this story with a joyful and generous love of God and love for others. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. We thank you for your word, for the Bible, for how rich it is, for everything that we can learn from it and see in it. God, I pray that you would help us to go and to read it on our own and to see the pages come to life and to, God, really study and invest in it. God, speak to us through your word even this week as we read it in the quiet of our own houses and offices. Father, I just pray that you would give us the courage, the clarity, the conviction to see where our ego, our expectations may be keeping us from you. If we see those, God, give us further courage to get them out of the way. And finally, Lord, let us love people with a generosity and a joy that can come only from you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, I'm Doug Bergeson. Wait, wait, you've got to be kidding me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just a few months ago when Kyle Tolbert, our youth pastor, came up here to speak? And before he uttered a word, before a single word, good or bad, was out of his mouth, you were applauding him. What do I get? I'll tell you what I get. I get bubkis, nada, nothing. Let me tell you something. It's not lost on us, those of us who are asked to speak in the middle of July, but never ever at Christmas time, and for sure not at Easter. It's not lost on us that we're not on God's A-team. We get it. We're not stupid. So given that, it might be nice if you tried to be a little bit more encouraging and supportive. So let's try this again. I would not have done that. You know, the Bible's very clear that we're to test and approve what we hear, to be discerning about what's being taught, not just to accept it willy-nilly. And here you all are already clapping for me, and you haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. Come on, people, you're better than that. Anyways, hopefully it's obvious that I'm just goofing around, as I'm not only thrilled to be here, but I feel immense privilege to be sharing this morning. And just for the record, far from expecting applause, my desperate and sincere prayer and hope is that God will make what I say clear and useful to you all. I'm really excited about this new sermon series that we're starting. In the past, when I've been asked to speak, I've always kind of hemmed and hawed, wanted to think about it. But when Nate called me this time and explained that the new series was going to be on the obscure heroes of the Bible, I was, for some strange reason, I was enthused, and I immediately jumped at the chance. A big part of it might be that it's just different than the norm, and different is sometimes really good. Mix it up a little bit, move off the beaten path. But more than simply serving as a nice change of pace, there's a much more consequential reason for studying these obscure heroes. They have a lot to teach us. Now, there are plenty of times when I wish the Bible was easier to understand and didn't avoid so many questions that I'd like answers to. Wish that it explained a whole bunch of things better. A little less ambiguity and mystery would sometimes be nice. But in response to that wish, I've heard it said that God, whose Spirit inspired every word written, must have included what He thought was important, what He thought we needed to know. So rather than worrying about the stuff that wasn't included, we'd be much better served paying attention to the things and those people and those events that God did include in his word to us. And that brings us back to our sermon series. God saw fit to tell us about these characters and their stories. And for that reason, we are not going to ignore or gloss over or relegate these heroes to a footnote any longer. Instead, we're going to exploit them for all their worth and see what they can teach us, what they can reveal to us, how they might strengthen and encourage us. The Apostle Paul said it this way, for everything that was written in the past, even obscure heroes that maybe we've never heard of, was written to teach us so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. As I said, I was surprisingly enthused when Nate called me. Not only was I pumped for the series, but one name immediately popped into my head and I knew that was my guy. That was who I was going to talk about, Gamaliel, the great Pharisee and teacher of the law, and what he wisely concluded when confronted by the incredible boldness and defiance of Peter and the other disciples in the earliest times of the Christian movement. Now, how many of you have heard of Gamaliel? You don't have to raise your hands. You know, just wink or smile as I look around the room. Nothing but a sea of blank, expressionless faces. That's perfect. But before we get to Gamaliel, I need to set the table a bit for you, provide the backdrop to help explain why what he does, what he acknowledges is so valuable to me, that his was the first name in all the Bible that popped into my head. In other words, I need to make sure that we're on the same page with respect to one significant foundational point in order for us to see why Gamaliel, who himself is not even a believer in Jesus Christ, is a hero for us today. The key foundational point is to identify the overarching story of the Bible. Some of you are probably going, oh, sheesh, we're not going to be out of here until Tuesday. Not to worry, not to worry. It's not that daunting a task. In a nutshell, the opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, reveal that God's loving intent was to provide all that we, His creations, need. Our job, our part of the bargain, is to trust that He is both able and willing to do that on our behalf, and for us to resist the temptation to want to decide for ourselves what's best. The rest of the Bible is just a long and involved telling of our incredible struggle to trust in God rather than ourselves, as well as the remarkable lengths God goes to to make it possible for us ultimately to place our full and abiding confidence in Him. Now, most of you are probably familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The garden was a fantastic place. Those two have a great life. It's a really sweet setup. There's only one rule, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, growing up in church, I didn't fully understand the significance of the boundary God established for humankind. My general sense was, you know, God likes rules. He's kind of a stickler about rules. And Adam and Eve got in pretty big trouble because they broke one of them. Well, as I've later come to understand, what actually happened was a much bigger deal than simply breaking a rule. What actually happened struck at the very heart of God's intent for creation. In allowing them to eat from any tree but the one, God was establishing the critical boundary for Adam and Eve and for every human since. God was saying, if you want to enjoy all of the good of my creation and live in my kingdom, you have to trust that I and I alone know what's best for you. And even more than that, you have to trust that I'm both able and willing to provide it to you. And so the questions that's faced Adam and Eve, as well as you and me, is do you believe that? Are you convinced that God knows what's best for you and that He is intent on providing it at all times and in all circumstances? When Eve first faced that question, the fate of all humanity hung in the balance. And what did she decide? Well, it turns out Eve wasn't completely convinced that God could be trusted. And she decided and felt the need to trust in someone else. Eve, that's who she decided to trust. She just trusted in herself instead. And now the serpent was cunning and planted the seed in Eve's mind that although God was certainly able to provide what was best for her, He wasn't willing but was holding something back. The serpent said, come on, Eve, you won't die. God's only worried that if you eat that fruit, you'll be like Him and be able to decide for yourself what's best, then you'll be your own God. And that has been humankind's struggle ever since. In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, it wasn't a question of God was willing to provide for his people, but if he was even able. Written at a time when Christ followers were just undergoing terrific persecution, with their very lives at stake, the facts on the ground were so difficult and so dire that only a nut job would conclude that somehow God was still in control and still in charge. And into that terrifically difficult and stressful situation, the Apostle John shared a vision of being transported up to the throne room of heaven where God sort of pulls back the curtain for a second just to show what's really going on behind the scenes. The message, no matter how things look from your perspective, I am God and there is no other. I have your back now and I have it for all eternity. Nothing can ever separate you from my loving care. Your faith and trust are well placed. God is asking each of us, do you believe, are you completely convinced that I'm both able and willing to provide the very best for you? That's the central question running throughout the entire Bible, and it's the central question of our human existence. But our struggle, our temptation, is to say in all different ways, well, God, to tell you the truth, in this particular area of my life, or in this particular relationship, or in this circumstance at this particular time, I'd like to have a say. I'd rather decide for myself what's best for me, what will make me most content, most comfortable, most safe, most fulfilled, most affirmed, most successful, most happy. After all, wouldn't I know better than anyone else what's in my best interest? That's exactly what Eve did. That's exactly what I do. And that is the root of all sin, a failure to trust in God's promise. We're just not entirely convinced, not enough to give up complete control. A famous passage from Proverbs that many of you probably know by heart is, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight. But that's not easy. Our world and our culture constantly bombard us from every conceivable angle with arguments that God, even if he does exist, is neither able or willing to provide what's best for us. That life demands we take charge and we're better off when we do. Non-stop appeals to be our own little lords of our own little lives. Now we're going to do a little audience participation here for just a minute. I'd like you all to close your eyes. Alan, keep your eyes closed. Okay. Imagine that you're on the seventh floor of an office building. You are alone, and it's dark. An electrical short circuit has knocked out the lights and started an intense fire, which has engulfed the entire floor and will soon breach the room you're in. The smoke coming in under the door and through the vents is overwhelming, forcing you to drop to your knees. Your eyes are burning and you're beginning to cough uncontrollably. You can open your eyes now. Suddenly, off to your right, you hear a violent pounding on the outside of the far wall. Then the blade of an axe comes crashing through and soon the shape of a firefighter appears in the opening and he shouts, come on, follow me, I'll get you out. Wouldn't he be surprised if you yelled back, oh, thanks, buddy. I'm good. I got this. Of course, no one would do that. No one trapped and on the brink of perishing would respond that way. We would not only listen to the firefighter's commands, we would literally cling to him. We would follow his every word because we implicitly trust him. Not only does he know what he's doing, but he went to great lengths to find and rescue us. And it's plain as day that we desperately need his help. My illustration borders on the ludicrous because we'd never do that. Yet that's what we say to God all the time. I'm good. I got this. Now maybe some of us hear this illustration and say, that's not me. I'm good at trusting. My faith is rock solid. Maybe that's true, at least on the surface. But even for those of us who trust God fully in most areas of our lives, I bet that there are little nooks and crannies. I appreciated you using that earlier. Little pockets where we don't. A relationship, a decision, a priority, a behavior, perhaps, for which we're not convinced God's preferred course of action serves us best. So we plot the course by our own wisdom. We decide for ourselves what's best. And when we do that, we forfeit some portion of the abundant life that God so desperately wants for us. Sadly, doubting God's promises, not being fully convinced that he is both able and willing to provide the best for me in all of life's situations, happens far more than I even recognize. The decision to trust in my own judgment is typically very subtle. So subtle, in fact, that I don't even realize that I'm doing it much of the time. I'll share an example from my own life, but first I have to give you some context. Twenty-six years ago, we moved down here from New Jersey. I quit a really good job on Wall Street. We sold our dream house that we only lived in for two years. We left our beautiful little town and all our friends. We had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn. We moved for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was my concern that it was all too consuming and that only over time does the true cost of that kind of investment in one's career become apparent? And by that point, it's often too late. The damage has been done. I believe back then, as I still do today, that wherever your treasure is, wherever you invest most of your time, your energy, your ambition, that's where your heart will ultimately be found. And I knew that for me, I couldn't keep doing that job in that city for very long without it, for all practical purposes, becoming my treasure and stealing my heart. Okay, so we did everything they tell you not to do all at the same time. Moved to a different part of the country, changed careers, sold houses, bought houses, had another baby. Deb had just turned 33, and I was 35. The plan was that I would invest our modest nest egg in the financial markets to support our new downsized life, and we'd live happily ever after. Now, fast forward 15 years. I'm meeting Jeff Hancock, who is Grace's teaching pastor at Carolina Ale House. I think it was on a Wednesday afternoon because that's when they had their specials. It's true. Jeff and I had a relationship built largely on a strong and abiding shared love of beer and for the places that happen to serve beer. Is there any stronger foundation for a friendship? Nevertheless, that was ours. So we'd get together every so often. And that particular afternoon, as soon as I sat down, Jeff asked if there was something wrong. And I started weeping and began to share with him how I was in the midst of suffering what for me was a breathtaking financial loss in the futures market. How I couldn't sleep, how it had stolen all of my joy, how it affected all of my personal interactions, including my most cherished ones with my wife and kids. Excuse me. With the child in college and two in high school, how it jeopardized everything Deb and I had planned. That loss was wreaking havoc in my life. Now, I shared with Jeff that afternoon that, yes, I was obviously sad to have lost so much of our nest egg at such a critical time. Yes, I was sorry for my stubbornness, my stupidity. Yes, I was sorry for my arrogance not to respect the markets. All that was true. Yet the reason I was weeping, what most undid me, was what the loss revealed about where I placed my trust. How it betrayed the fact that much of my confidence, my security, and my hope was wrapped up in our little nest egg, and that the notion that I trusted God was clearly not true, if not a bald-faced lie. And that is what makes it so tricky, because a lot of the time our struggles to trust are in those gray areas, things which in and of themselves don't strike us being all that bad or sinful. Nevertheless, we are not doing what God is asking us to do, to trust him with everything and in every situation. We simply aren't convinced that his way is always the best way. In answer to his question, do you believe that I am both able and willing to provide all that you need, we are saying no, not always. In the example I just shared from my own life, my answer was clearly no, I'm not completely convinced. In addition to trusting you, I would like my nest egg back. When we worry about things, even very serious things, we are wrestling with the question, will I trust God with my crisis? Is He capable to handle it on my behalf? Once again, our worrying says no, as it reveals that we're simply not convinced that God can handle the situation, or at least not to our satisfaction. According to the Bible, worry is the opposite of trust. When we choose not to forgive someone, contrary to God's clear desire and instruction, what are we doing? In not so many words, we are saying, I don't believe that God knows what's best for me. What about how we spend our money? I like to think that I include God in those discussions. But what I really do is only involve him in the discussion about the small portion that I might realistically earmark for charity. Concerning the other much bigger chunk, the 80, 90, or 95%, I say, wait just a second, God. Stay in your lane, buddy. I gave you some. This over here is for me to decide what to do. Scripture encourages us to confess our sins to one another, even and perhaps especially the deepest, darkest, and most shameful ones. My immediate response is to say, no, thank you, over my dead body. No way can that possibly be in my best interest. We're encouraged as believers to always be prepared to share why our hope is in Jesus Christ. I don't do it. I don't want to offend this person or turn them off. I don't want to be thought a weirdo or a creep. I'm a confident person generally. I'll share my opinion on almost any topic with almost anyone. But for some strange reason, I don't trust that God will have my back if I share my faith. God says be thankful at all times and in all circumstances. But I don't want to always be thankful, and there just so happens to be things in my life that I'm not thankful for. Yet having a spirit of appreciation and thankfulness is one command of God's that I've come to acknowledge clearly leads to joy and abundant life. I think of the people I know who are most pleasant and encouraging to be around, the ones that are most nutritious for me. Almost without exception, there are people who live life in a spirit of thanksgiving. The old saying is true, it's not happy people who are thankful, it's thankful people who are happy. Ironically, even knowing this, there are still times when I choose to defy God's good intent for my life and instead choose the way of the woe-is-me, self-pitting grumpus. Now, I could go on and on, but if each of us took a deep dive into our motivations for doing some things and not others, for worrying about things over which we have little control, for habitually engaging in certain behaviors or responding in certain ways, for placing so much importance on what others think, we would understand more clearly that, at least in those instances, we're not fully convinced that God always has our best interests at heart or that His way is always best, that He is completely trustworthy in all of life's circumstances, that He is intent on giving us life to the full, the life that is truly life, if only we would trust. And that, at long last, brings us to our hero, Gamaliel. What he offers is a simple proof, evidence to bolster our conviction that the God we worship deserves our full confidence and trust. I've never been a fan of belief for belief's sake. Don't care how sincere it might be. In other words, if I'm going to believe that God always has my best interest at heart and is able and willing to provide it to me, I want it to be true. More than that, I need to be convinced that it's true if I'm ever going to fully trust in it. Otherwise, as we've seen this morning, I'm going to succumb to the temptation to lean on my own wisdom and judgment. This is where the battle lines are drawn and the war for my trust is waged. And this is where Gamaliel's cool logic and reasoning come through in the clutch. Now let's go to the story in the book of Acts and jump into the action. Our story takes place in Jerusalem, not long after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christian church is in its infancy and growing rapidly. The Jewish establishment is nervous and on edge. The disciples, Peter and John, have just healed a beggar who had been crippled from birth. Everyone was amazed, and when Peter saw their reaction, he said, men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if it's by our own power or godliness that we had made this man walk? You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. By faith in the name of Jesus, the man you see and know was made strong. It is in Jesus' name and the faith that comes through him that has given this complete healing to him, as you can all see. While they were still speaking, the Jewish leaders, none too pleased with Peter and John's message, arrested them and threw them in jail for the night. The next day, they were brought before their rulers and elders and teachers of the law who questioned them about the healing. By what power or what name did you do this? And Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, replied, Let me interrupt our story for just a second to point out what remarkable change can happen in the hearts and minds of ordinary men and women when convinced of God's truth and imbued with His Spirit. Just a short time ago, these same disciples were the gang that couldn't shoot straight, timid and wavering, untrusting, unreliable, and unconvinced. Now look, there's hope for all of us. Now back to our story. The Jewish leaders were astonished by the courage of Peter and John, especially when they realized they were ordinary unschooled guys and weren't sure what to do as they had to admit that the healing was a fantastic, outstanding miracle which they couldn't deny. And they couldn't really punish them because everybody was running around praising God because of that miracle. So they issued some threats and ordered Peter and John not to speak about this Jesus. However, even after the imprisonment and threats, the disciples continued to preach, teach, and heal until the high priest and his associates could not stand it any longer and arrested them again. But that night, an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail in order the disciples to go back to the temple and tell the people the full message of this new life. When all the rulers assembled the next morning and sent for Peter and John, they were surprised to learn that although the jail was locked and secure, nobody was inside. The Bible says they were puzzled by this. I love the understatement. I bet they were puzzled when they later learned that the men were back in the temple court preaching and teaching. They went and got them, but not by force for fear of what the people might do. The high priest again questioned them, and now reading from Acts 5, 28 through 39. This is the high priest. We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, he said. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man's blood. Peter and John and the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. When they heard this, they were furious and wanted to put them to death. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. Then he addressed them, men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago, Thudas appeared, claiming to be someone, and about 400 men rallied to him. He was killed, and all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too wasailed, and the apostles were let go. And now here, for you all this morning, is the $64,000 question of the day. If Gamaliel, the wisest and most esteemed teacher of the day, could be here with us this morning, is there any doubt that he would conclude if their purpose is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men. You will only find yourselves fighting against God. Well, it hasn't been stopped. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. No other power or movement or belief system has come close. Down through all the centuries, across every people group and culture on earth, and reaching the furthest corners of our planet, God has been on the move, faithful to all his promises. The prophet Isaiah wrote about God's faithfulness this way. and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. And that's why Gamaliel is a hero to me. His wisdom and insight remind me again that God is true to his word always and is going to do what he promised to do. If I'm going to trust God completely and not rely on my own wisdom, but surrender control in all areas of my life, not just some of them, I need that assurance. Our God is both able and willing to provide all that we need. My hope and prayer for all of us this morning is that the words of the Apostle Paul might be our words. I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. Thank you. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for loving us. Thank you for all these people who carved out time on a hot Sunday morning to come to know you better and to worship you. Lord, thank you for pursuing us. Obviously, forgive us for all the times that we are trust wavers. We're simply not convinced that you're completely trustworthy in all of life's situations. Thank you for the hope that you give us through your son. And it's his name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Welcome to Grace. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We want to acknowledge you. So to the expectant moms, congratulations and hope. And to the new moms, congratulations and hope. And to the experienced moms, we are grateful to you. And to the young moms, we empathize with you. And to the hopeful moms, we pray for you and with you. And to the grieving moms we empathize with you and to the hopeful moms we pray for you and with you and to the grieving moms we offer you our condolences and our shoulders as well. So to all the moms represented in the room, we love you and we are grateful for you. As we launch into this new series called The Forgotten God, I wanted to start where Jesus starts in John chapter 16. We've been doing a series in John since February all through the spring, and so as we free up from that and launch into a series on the Holy Spirit, I thought it appropriate to go to John. So turn in your Bibles to John chapter 16, okay? And in that, in John chapter 16 and verse 7, we find this, what I think to be, an absurd statement. One of these statements that when you hear it, your first reaction is, that's not true. There's no way that's possibly true. Moms have said one of these things, okay? A lot of moms in the rooms, maybe not modern millennial moms because we have different ways now, but when I was a kid and I got in trouble, I got the belt. Before I got the belt, what did my mom tell me? This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. I would always think, I'll trade you. If that's your concern, we can swap, like, you don't have to experience that pain. Let me save you from that, right? Like, when you're a kid and you hear that, you don't believe it. Like, that's not true. That's ridiculous. There's no way that's true. But then as you grow older, you realize that really is a true statement. I heard one of these absurd statements this week. I was so grateful that somebody in my small group gave me an example. I have somebody in my small group. I do a younger person's small group, young people, no kids. A guy named Connor. He is one of my current favorite humans. He's one of the most enthusiastic people. He does the announcements for us sometimes. He's going off to Colorado soon to be a medic out there for the summer. So anyways, I can say this, and he can't defend himself for a couple of months. He's at my house, and he and I got to talking about our love for sushi. I like sushi, and he likes sushi. And I'm like, oh, well, you got to tell me, like, what's the place? Like, where's the good place around here? We found one we like. We haven't found one we love. Where's the place around here? And he was like, actually, the best sushi. You want to know where it is? I'm like, yes, please. I want to know where it is. He goes, when I go home to Boone, North Carolina, and I stopped him right there. Get out of here. Don't tell me that the best sushi is in Boone. The sushi hub of the East Coast is in Boone, North Carolina. I'm sure it is, Connor. And he's like, no, no, no. And he keeps telling me how great it is. And I keep telling him how redneck he is, that the best sushi he can find is in Boone, North Carolina. And now listen, I didn't believe him at all. It felt absurd to me. And I don't know what's broken in me that I feel the need to correct him right away. And I can't just accept like, oh, that's good sushi. Like that's my fault. Okay. I'm a gross person for that. But when he said it, I just couldn't accept that that could possibly be true. Right? And maybe it is. Maybe it's delicious sushi. I don't know. But in John chapter 16, Jesus makes a statement that when he says it had to be, to me, patently absurd. We would respond to that like, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, or that the best sushi in the eastern coast is found in Boone, North Carolina. Like, that's how we would respond to this, I think. This is what Jesus says. I want us to see it together. And a little bit of context for this verse, what's going on here. John chapters 13 through 17 represent a portion of scripture that's referred to as the farewell discourse. They're at the last supper. They've been doing Jesus and the disciples are eating dinner together. It's the last night they're going to spend together. They've been doing life together for three years. Jesus has been pouring into them, teaching them, showing them how to be disciples and how to do ministry. And he just kind of does this download of important information on them at the end of his life. And in the middle of this, in chapter 16, Jesus is talking to them about the fact that he's going to go away. I'm not going to be here all the time. I'm going to leave you, which is a bummer for the disciples because they're expecting to be with Jesus for the rest of their life. But he's telling them and trying to get them ready for, I'm going to go away, like I'm going to die. I'm not going to always be here. And then this translation, the ESV calls the Holy Spirit the helper, but some translations call him the comforter. So the point of this verse is Jesus is saying, guys, I got to go away, but it's better for you. It's to your advantage that I actually go from you, that you don't have my physical presence with you, because if I don't go, you'll never receive the helper or you'll never receive the comforter, is what he's telling you. And this is how Jesus chooses to introduce the Holy Spirit to the disciples and really to us. And we're calling this series, as Jesus refers to him here as the helper, and we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit, we're calling this series The Forgotten God, because in a lot of ways, that's really what the Holy Spirit is. If you're a Christian, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you believe in a triune God, a God that is three parts, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. They are all God. They are all part of God. I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. I went to undergrad for theology. I got a master's degree in theology. I've been in ministry for 10 years. I've read books on it. And all I can say is, I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. But I know that it exists. I know that it's a thing. I know the Bible talks about it and that all three parts are equal, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we in our churches, large swaths of the church, kind of forget about the Holy Spirit. We talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to Him. We worship Him. We sing songs to Him. We talk a lot about God the Son. We preach about Him. We spend 12 weeks going through the stories about Him. But the Spirit, sometimes we sing to the Spirit. Sometimes we refer to the Spirit maybe without knowing it. The video that we watched before I came up here talking about your presence is welcome here, that's represented by the Spirit. Maybe we don't know that. But very often, particularly in conservative church circles, we forget about the Holy Spirit. Now, I have theories on this. I think that we're afraid of what we don't understand. And if we don't understand something, that we tend to just avoid it. We can kind of understand the idea of a son. We can kind of understand the idea of a father. And so those parts of God, we can kind of grasp a little bit, and we see them a little bit more in Scripture than we see the Spirit. But the Spirit is unknown. The Bible describes it as the wind. You don't know when it's going to come or go. We're told that the Spirit is in us, that you are the temple. As a believer, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that you actually have God in you, which is a really difficult thing to understand or to grasp. You're told that the Holy Spirit empowers you in ways that we're going to explore in this series. And it's, if we're honest, confusing and sometimes intimidating. And I think because of that, it makes us uncomfortable and we tend to avoid the things that we don't understand that make us uncomfortable. And so sometimes we forget the Spirit. But Jesus introduces the Spirit by making what I think is kind of an absurd statement on its face. And so what I want to do today is ask about this statement, how can Jesus' claim be true? How can Jesus' claim be true? How can that possibly be true, that it's actually better for the disciples and better for us to not have the physical presence of Jesus with us, but instead have the Holy Spirit or the helper or the comforter? How can that possibly be true? As we answer that, we're going to draw two conclusions today that each launch their own question. If that's true, then what about this? And if that's true, then what about this? And then those two answers should spark in us a natural question. And those three questions are going to make up the rest of the series. So I'll tell you, at the beginning, you're not going to walk home with the big to-do list today or with the thing that's really going to change your thinking. The take-home from today is to continue to attend and learn about the rest of the roles of the Spirit. Today is a setup for the series as we learn about the Holy Spirit. Now here's why I think that this is an absurd statement on its face. I would have expected Peter. Peter was the one, he was the ready, fire, aim guy. He was the one that spoke before he thought. He just said whatever he felt. That was Peter. I would have expected Peter when Jesus said, it is actually better for you that I go. I would have expected him to interrupt Jesus like I interrupted Connor about the boon sushi, right? Come on, that can't possibly be true. That can't be right. Because think about this. The more I thought about this, the more I felt it was, it had to be difficult for the disciples to accept what Jesus is saying. If you're a believer, if you call Jesus your Savior, how much different would your life be if Jesus were physically present next to you all day, every day, like he was for the disciples? They woke up next to that dude in the same room as that dude, at least in the same house. They spent every day with him. He would go off and pray for a little while, but he would always come back and find him. His physical presence, he was ever present. He was there all the time. If you're a Christian, how much different would your life be if Jesus were right there next to you all the time? Think about that. Can you imagine yourself in a situation where maybe you didn't know what to say? You're talking to your kid, and they ask you a really hard question. You're like, gosh, I don't know. You're in a Bible study and somebody asks a question. You're with a friend. You're just getting a beer or a coffee and they ask a question that's really difficult to answer. What do I do about my marriage? I feel broken down about this and you don't know the right thing to say. What do we do about our child and you don't know the right thing to say? What if Jesus were right there next to you and you could look at him and be like, oh Jesus, what do you think? What should I say? What if you could do that? What if when you're reading the Bible, if you've ever tried to read the Bible, it can be difficult to understand sometimes. And for a lot of us, that's why we don't read it more is because we read it and we're like, gosh, I kind of understand nine words in this book. And then we just kind of put it down and we move on to the next thing. We don't really get what it's talking about. What if when we read the Bible, we could be like, Jesus, I do not understand this part. Can you come here for a second and show me this? That'd be amazing. There's this scene in Luke. Luke's the only one that records it. When Jesus comes back from the dead, he's resurrected, there's these two guys walking on a road to a town called Emmaus, and Jesus appears to them. And they don't know who he is. He's just a dude walking next to them. And it says that Jesus began to explain to them all of the scriptures, which to them was the Old Testament, and how it related to him. Listen, that's the greatest Bible study of all time. If you said, Nate, you can go to any moment in history, it's not hyperbole to say, I very well may go to that moment and be like, can I just walk with Jesus to a mass? I would love to hear him explain how the Old Testament points to him. I would love to just listen to Jesus as he taught about the Bible. Can you imagine? And what if he was right there next to you? Anytime you read it, you'd be like, hey, I don't understand this part. Can you help? What if when you were looking for a church, he could come to church with you? And halfway through the sermon, you could be like, you like this guy? Yeah, me neither. We'll keep looking. But what if he could just tell you? What if he could tell you like, no, he's no good, but man, they need you. Like, stick around. Wouldn't it be great to know for sure? What if he didn't know what to do or a decision to make? Do I take the promotion? Do I take the job? Or do I turn it down? Do I look for a new job? Do I go back to work? What if you could just look at Jesus and be like, what do I do? How about this? You think you'd sin less? Like maybe by a small amount? Are you kidding me? Of course. You'd start to cut somebody off in traffic and Jesus would be in the passenger seat and you'd kind of look at him and be like, you're right. Not that big of a deal, I guess. You created all of this. I guess it's okay. Imagine how much kinder, more gracious you would be. Maybe not you, but me. It would change things. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you came to church for mom. Thank you. I'll try to go fast. But just imagine if there is. If there is a God and he was personified in Jesus and he created the universe and he were right next to you, how much that would change things for you. What if you were hurting, and life was really hard, and you could just turn and lean into him, and just say, Jesus, this one's tough. Can you just be with me for a second? And he offers perfect peace. That's what the disciples had. You understand? That's what they had every day. And then Jesus says, you know what? It's better for you that you don't have that anymore. So the only possible thing we can ask is, how in the world is that true? It's what we wrote down on our paper. How can that claim be true? How is that possible? And so what we're going to do today is try to offer the best answer we can to that question and then understand that that's going to spark more questions that we're going to spend the rest of the series answering. To answer that question of how can it possibly be true that Jesus, that it's better for Jesus to go when we receive the Spirit and we no longer have the physical presence of Jesus in our lives, what I want to do, and you didn't see this one coming, is turn to 2 Kings 2 in the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and make sure that I'm not making this story up. But it's about two guys who I think are the two most underrated people in all the Bible. Elijah and Elisha. They're amazing. Now, some Christians don't know that those are two different people. I've actually talked to people about that. I don't want to belittle you for that. I just think it's funny because we get it confused sometimes. And very few people know which one came first and which one did what. So I'm going to help you out here. This is just an aside. I thought about having Steve make a slide for this, but I thought it's probably a misuse of my authority in the church to text him on a Friday to do work on his off day for a joke slide. So I just didn't do it. All right. But I wanted to do the alphabet and then show you where they landed in the alphabet. Elijah has a J in it, which comes before an S. Elisha. All right. So that's how we remember it. Elijah comes before Elisha because J comes before S. And now listen, offer me grace. I've rehearsed my sermons before I do them, and you guys think I'm doing them off the cuff. I'm not. I've practiced this. And then every time I do it, I get them confused as I'm telling the story. So just give me grace and don't make fun of me, okay? You get up here and you do it, all right? It's hard. But we have Elisha and Elijah, and they are two of the most underrated people in the Bible. I think because they don't have a book named after them or something, but they're remarkable. Their faith is amazing. Elijah was this incredible man of God. Do you know that one time somebody died? A widow's son dies, and Elijah knew the widow. And somebody comes to him and tells him, hey, so-and-so's son has died. Do you know what Elijah's response was? God, why didn't you tell me? How come I'm finding out like this? Can you imagine being that close to God, where he's your personal Twitter feed, where something happens out in the world and you find out about it in some other way and you're like, God, what's the deal, man? How come you didn't tell me? That's how close he was to God. He was in a showdown with 450 prophets of Baal. And in this passage where he brings fire down from heaven from God to light up a soaking wet stack of wood in front of all of these prophets, we have the most sarcastic passage in Scripture, which makes me feel great. That it's there and it's okay. He is being a jerk to these prophets of Baal. And I'm like, get him, buddy. He raises a child from the dead. He's fed by ravens and by angels. He warns the evil king of Israel, if you don't get right, I'm going to bring a drought. And the king didn't get right, so he prayed. And there was a drought for three years. And then when the drought was lifted, he won a foot race against a chariot across the country to go tell somebody about it, carried by the Holy Spirit. Elijah was amazing. And he had this disciple, a guy that was following him named Elisha. And Elisha had spent a good portion of Elijah's ministry with him, watching him. And Elijah had the respect of all of Israel and all the other prophets and all the other religious people in the country. And Elisha was his heir apparent. He was the one being trained to take over the ministry of Elijah when he moved on, very much like the disciples were being trained by Jesus to take over his ministry once he moved on. And it got to the end of Elijah's life. And they actually knew that this was the day that he was going to die. I don't know how they knew that, but they did. And so they go to a town, they walk to a town together. And when they get there, the prophets in that town come up to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, yeah, I don't want to talk about it. And they kind of interact there and they go to another place. And it's the same interaction. And then they end up on the banks of the Jordan River. And there's 50 prophets there. And they come to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, I know, I don't want to talk about it. So they go to the Jordan River. They're trying to get alone so that they can talk. They walk over the Jordan River. Listen to this. This is ridiculous. There's a river in the way. They want to be over there. So what's Elijah do? He takes off his cloak, he rolls it up, and he hits the water, and then the waters part, and they walk across. I don't know of any other miracle of convenience in the Bible but this one, where he's like, God, these are new sandals. I don't want to get them wet. Thanks. And then they walk across the river. They get to the other side, and it says that they're walking and talking together. And Elijah says, before I go, is there anything else I can do for you? Is there anything you want? Is there anything you need? And Elisha says, I want a double portion of the Spirit that is on you. See, Elisha recognized that Elijah had performed all these miracles and did all these great things, but they were not by his own power. They were by the power of the Spirit of God resting on him. They were by the Holy Spirit. And this is the same way, incidentally, that Jesus performed his miracles and lived his life. Everything that he did, the casting out demons, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the sick, feeding the poor, everything that he did was through the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that the disciples were going to be given access to, the same one that we are told we have. It was through the power of the Spirit. And Elisha recognized this power. So when Elijah said, what is it that you want? He said, give me a double portion of the Spirit that's on you. I want to be able to continue to do the ministry that you do. And Elijah's response is, you've asked for a very difficult thing. He says, I'll tell you what, soon I'm going to go up to heaven. And if you see me while I do it, then you'll receive a double portion of my spirit. So they continue to walk and talk. And in this amazing scene, a fiery chariot comes down from heaven, being pulled by fiery horses, and separates Elijah and Elisha. And catches Elijah and sweeps him up in a whirlwind, it says, up to heaven. You understand that Elijah wasn't made to experience death? It's just him and Enoch, one of the guys in the Bible who have never experienced death, those two. He was so righteous, loved God so much, so close to him, God didn't want him to have to experience it. So he sends a fiery chariot down to grab him and take him back up to heaven in a whirlwind. And as he's going back up to heaven, his cloak falls off of him and wafts back down to the ground where it lands on Elisha. And it was a symbolic transfer of the spirit that was on Elijah to the spirit of Elisha to empower him to continue the ministry of Elijah. And I've always loved that story. I've always thought it was amazing. I love the Old Testament. I love the stories and the narratives in the Old Testament. But it wasn't until I was going through the book of John in the fall, getting ready for the series in the spring, where I read this in chapter 16 and I went, oh my goodness. That story in 2 Kings chapter 2 is not there just for what happens in 2 Kings 2. You understand? It's a picture of Jesus transferring his spirit to the disciples. Elijah goes up to heaven still alive. Jesus ascends up to heaven still alive. A portion of his spirit descends onto Elisha so he can continue the ministry that Elijah has prepared him for. And this is what happens to the disciples. After Jesus dies and is resurrected in the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus go up into heaven and he tells them to wait on the gift of the spirit, the same gift that Elisha waited for. It transfers onto them in the form of flaming tongues. They receive the Spirit and they go out and they do ministry. That's the gift of the Spirit. And so one of the reasons that it's better for Jesus to go is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. You see? That's what he's doing with the disciples. That's what he was doing with us. The Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. And that's the gifts of the Spirit. We're going to talk about those next week, what those are and why we have them. But this is what he was doing for the disciples. He had trained them for three years to prepare them to lead the church that he was going to leave behind, to lead the kingdom that he was going to establish here on earth. And they needed to be empowered. They needed to know what to say when they didn't know what to say. They needed to be able to cast out demons and perform miracles. They needed to be able to lead in ways that they were incapable of leading. They needed wisdom that they did not have. They needed to understand scriptures in ways that they did not understand it. So Jesus leaves behind the Spirit, just as Elijah did for Elisha, so that the disciples could continue the ministry of Jesus. And 2,000 years later, you sit here in a church. And at Grace, if you're a member here, we don't call you a member. We call you a partner. And we call you a partner because we believe that the church is an active organization whose job it is to advance forward the kingdom of God. And we're not looking for members to be a part of the club here. We're looking for partners to help us advance it. We believe that there's a job to be done and that God has assigned a portion of that job to Grace Raleigh, and we want to be faithful to the job that he's asked us to do. Furthermore, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, the only reason that God doesn't nab you right up to heaven as soon as you accept him and deliver you into eternal bliss is so that you can stay here and build his kingdom and bring as many people possible with you on your way to heaven. The same reason he left the disciples behind, because we have work to do. So he leaves us his spirit to dwell in us, to continue his work through us. You see? And the Bible says that you have it. Ephesians tells us that if you're a believer, that you have received the spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on your salvation. Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit secures your salvation. He sanctifies you in the process of salvation, and he delivers you into that salvation in eternity. He's active in your life. So the first reason that it's better for Jesus to go is because when he does, we receive the Spirit that empowers us to continue the ministry that he's left behind for us. But that's not the only reason. It's not just outwardly focused. The other reason that it's better to have the Spirit is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry to us. It doesn't just continue Jesus' ministry through us, it continues Jesus' ministry to us. This is the roles of the Spirit. And here's the amazing thing that I realized. As I was thinking through all the advantages of having Jesus physically present in our life, being able to ask Him any of those questions, can you explain the Bible to me? Can you comfort me? Can you help me understand this? Can you show me what to say? What I realized is Scripture pointedly describes the Holy Spirit in those ways. You know what one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is that we're going to talk about more? He's the illuminator. We can't understand the Bible without him active in our lives. We cannot. He explains this to us. We say it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus and go, what does this mean? We can. We said it would be great. He's called the comforter. We said it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus when we hurt and say, Jesus, I hurt. We can. He's the spirit. His name is paraclete, which means to come alongside, to walk through life with you, to help you, to advocate for you. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who could interpret our prayers for us and say what we really mean to God? We do, it's the Spirit. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who will show us what to say when we don't know what to say? We do, it's the Spirit. All the reasons that it would be great to have Jesus physically present in our life are true of the Spirit. We said if Jesus were with us, wouldn't we sin less? The Spirit is with us all the time, and one of his roles is to convict us when we've wandered outside of God's will. All the reasons that we would prefer to have the presence of Jesus in our life are fulfilled in the Spirit. So it's better that Jesus gives us the Spirit because now we don't have to go to a physical presence of Jesus because if he's next to you down the street, then he's not next to me. And I gotta either go to you or get him to come to me. But the Holy Spirit's with us all the time. And he continues Jesus' ministry through us by empowering us and he continues Jesus' ministry to us by fulfilling the roles of Jesus in our life personally. And all of this, so we're going to talk about that in the third week, the roles of the Spirit. The last week, we're going to tackle this question that if you're thinking with me, you should be asking, how do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? How do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I'm told that God is with me. I'm told that God is in me. I'm told that God can help me speak in tongues when I need to do that. I'm told that He can do the miraculous, that he empowers me for his ministry. I'm told that I can turn to him and ask him to understand scripture at any time. I'm told that he comforts me. I'm told that he guides me. I'm told that he's right there and that he empowers me. I'm actually told that when he's in my life, the chains of sin are broken. I'm set free and I can live a new life without sin. That's what the Bible teaches. But I think one of the reasons that the Spirit to us sometimes is the forgotten God is because our experience with the Spirit doesn't always line up with what we've learned about the Spirit. And so how do we synthesize these things? And can I tell you something? You want to know why that one's last? Because I don't know yet. I don't know what I'm going to tell you. If you've been a believer for a long time and you have ideas, send them to me. Truly, this is going to be a group effort. But I felt like it was dishonest and disingenuine to do a series without analyzing that question that's been in my life for so long too. So I'll warn you in advance, the answer won't be complete, but it'll be the best that we can do. And it's a question that we have to answer as we talk about the Holy Spirit. So that's the series. How can it possibly be true that it's better for us that we don't have the physical presence of Jesus? Well, because he's with us all the time everywhere now through the Spirit. He empowers us to continue his ministry through us, and he continues Jesus's ministry to us. And then that begs the question, then how come what I know about the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit? So for the next three weeks, we're going to tackle those three issues and hopefully leave here knowing a little bit more about the Spirit, acknowledging Him a little bit more, inviting Him and His presence and His influence into our life and seeing that played out a little bit more. So I'm going to pray for you through this series that you will see the Spirit living and active and influencing in your life in ways that you never have before simply because you're paying attention to Him and you're praying along with me that you would see His influence. I'm going to pray, but before I do, I want to remind you at the information table we, we have books called The Forgotten God, written by a guy named Francis Chan, all about the Holy Spirit. I found that book to be incredibly helpful, more helpful than anything I'm going to say to you for the next three weeks. So if you really want to dive into this, you can read that book. They're $10. There's a jar there in front of it. You can put the money in there if you want to steal a book from the church to go ahead. That's your deal. I don't really care. But they're $10 if you want, but take a book and read it while we're going through the series. All right, I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue in our service. Father, we love you. Your spirit is welcome in our lives. We're sorry that we don't always understand it. We're sorry that we don't always welcome the spirit. We're sorry that we don't always understand the spirit. God, I'm sorry that I don't always seek to engage the spirit. I pray that as we move through this series together that we would be less intimidated and more in awe and wonder. God, may no part of you be forgotten by us. May we feel the influence of you and see the guiding of you through your spirit in our day-to-day lives even this week. In our parenting, in our work, in our hearts, in our conversations, in our going in and coming out. May we see the influence of the Spirit as you guide us in those things, Lord. It's in your Son's name that we ask these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning. It's good to see all of you. I know those lights hit you, they're bright, goodness gracious. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here, and it's so good to see you. Thanks for being here for the second service and for the last part of our series in John. When we started the series in February, this is, I think, 12 weeks, so it's been one of our longer ones, but I hope that you've enjoyed it. I hope, and my prayer for you has been that you now, as we leave the series, feel a little bit closer to Jesus than you did when we started, that you know him better than you did when we started. I know that there are some themes from the book of John that I will probably always remember that stuck out to me as we went through it as a church this time around. I hope that you can relate to that. Originally, when we had planned the series, we wanted to end it on Easter. At the end on Easter Sunday, that'd be the resurrection story. That's the end of the story of Jesus. Boom, we're done. It's a nice, clean, tidy ending. But as I was studying the book, there's a story in John that's unique to the book of John. It's not in the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, or Luke. It's just in John almost as an addendum. And it's the restoration of Peter. And it's to me one of the most hopeful, life-giving, inspiring, restorative messages and stories that we find from the life of Jesus. And so I thought if it's good enough to be an addendum for John, then it's good enough to be an addendum for grace. And so we came back one extra week in John to look at this story of the restoration of Peter. To appreciate the story, we need to understand what goes into this moment. Eventually, we're going to get to John chapter 21. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and we're going to be at the end of that chapter. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. If you don't like that option, there's a free one on your phone just seconds away. All right. To understand the story at the end of John, we need to understand who Peter was and what's going on in that story. Peter was kind of the de facto leader of the disciples. Many people think he was probably the oldest disciple. He was, some believe, the only one with a wife when they were called. He was a little bit further on in life than the rest of the disciples were. Peter was one of these guys that would always talk first and think later. He was a ready, fire, aim kind of guy. He's my people. I understand Peter, right? When Jesus walks on the water, what does Peter do? He jumps out of the boat. Well, shoot, I'm doing this too, right? Peter always just said things with confidence and everybody around him was like, well, I guess that's right. Jen asked me, my wife asked me sometimes, like, how do you say things with so much confidence? Like, how do you know that to be true? And I'm like, I don't. I'm just saying it. And people seem to go along with things. That's Peter, man. I can relate to him. He just always the first to answer, always the first to have the idea, always out front, kind of regardless of consequences. One of my favorite stories to kind of illustrate the character of Peter, one day Jesus decides, he gathers the disciples together and he says, hey, you guys, I'm going to wash your feet today. Which is like, that's the lowest of the low job. That's like the summer intern as the servant job. That's what you do. And so Peter, responding with some pomposity, with some piety, says, no, Jesus, never. I can never let you wash my feet. I will never let that happen. And Jesus looks at him and he says, okay, Peter, but unless I wash your feet, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God. And then Peter immediately does a 180. Well, then don't stop at my feet. Wash my head and my hands as well. Like that's Peter, okay? And so at the Last Supper, right before Jesus is arrested and tried and crucified, the last time they spend some good time together, Jesus looks at Peter, the leader of the disciples, and he tells him, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter's response is what you would expect Peter's response to be. Never, Lord. I would never deny you. I would not do that. And Jesus says, you're going to. And Peter says, this is a loose paraphrase, agree to disagree, which you never want to agree to disagree with Jesus. You're not in a good spot when that's what you choose. So they leave. Jesus goes and he prays. He brings Peter to pray with them, but Peter falls asleep. John falls asleep. James falls asleep. And then Jesus gets arrested, and he's taken off to the courtyard of the high priest, a guy named Caiaphas. And three weeks ago, we talked about this in the crucifixion story. It was in the courtyard of Caiaphas where Jesus is put on trial, and there were two disciples that actually followed him there. The rest of the disciples dispersed. They ran away. They started worrying about their own necks, and so they ran away to hide so that they wouldn't get arrested too. They figured if they're arresting Jesus, then they're coming for us next, right? And so they all dispersed except for two disciples, Peter and another unnamed disciple, make it to the courtyard of Caiaphas' house. And it's in this courtyard that Jesus was put on trial, that he was falsely accused, that they told lies about him. The one person who's ever existed who deserved this treatment least was getting this treatment. They were blindfolding him and punching him and saying, who hit you, Jesus? You're a prophet. Prophesy about who hit you. And then Jewish tradition says that they were ripping out his beard. So he's beaten up and he's in a moment where he is incredibly loved. This is a man that Jesus has followed every day for three years. He loves this man. He cares for nothing on earth more than this man, and now he's watching him suffer in this way. And Peter's around a campfire as this is happening. And when he gets there, the Bible says there's a servant girl who looks at him and says, hey, don't you know him? Aren't you like in his little group? And Peter says, no, I've never met the man. That's one. A little while later, somebody else says the same thing. Hey, haven't I seen you with him before? Peter says, no, I don't know what we're talking about. I've never met the man. That's twice. And then the Bible says about an hour after that, someone really begins to press him. Hey, aren't you from Galilee? I can tell by your accent, you have to know that man. And Peter gets emphatic. No, I swear I've never met him. And then it says that this is actually, there's this passage in Luke. That's to to me, one of the most intense passages in Scripture. It's something that you may have read before, but we kind of gloss over it. But look at what it says in Luke. Chapter 22, verse 60, it says, But Peter said, Man, I do not know what you are talking about. That's the third time. And immediately while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. And then verse 61, and the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? The time when Jesus most needed people around him who loved him. You are his leading disciple and you just denied him three times because you're scared. And his bloody face turns and looks you dead in the eye. Peter remembered the saying of the Lord how he said to him, before the rooster crows you'll deny me three times. And he went out and he wept bitterly. Can you imagine how Peter must have felt? He had betrayed his Jesus. He had let him down. He had denied him. He had told Jesus over and over again, you can count on me. For three years, Jesus had been prepping him and training him and grooming him to take over the church, to step into his ministry. He was to see Jesus and to help lead the church after Jesus' death. And in the moment when he most needed him, he betrayed him and he let him down. And Jesus turned and looked at Peter. You cannot imagine that eye contact. It says he went away and he wept bitterly. I love this story because I so identify with Peter. And to me, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, then you can identify with him too. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, then the good news is that you don't have to feel bad about any of this. You can just take it all in and watch us as we squirm and feel bad. But if you're a believer, then you know this feeling too. If you're a believer, then you know what it is to feel like you've betrayed Jesus, don't you? Has there ever been a time in your life, maybe in a corporate setting, maybe around some clients, maybe with some new friends that you've made, maybe with some old buddies where you kind of fall back into who you used to be, where you took that part of your identity, your Christianity, and you kind of tucked it away back here and kind of didn't wear it on your sleeve for that week or for that night or for that season because you didn't really want them to know who you were associated with? Have you ever in your life tucked away your identity as a believer because you were kind of ashamed and embarrassed if people were to find out that that's who you were because you had not been acting that way? Can I just tell you? I hope that you don't get too disappointed in me for this, but I've been doing ministry for about 20 years. There have definitely been times in my life when because of how I had been acting or what I had been saying or doing or whatever it was, I kind of tucked away my identity as a pastor. I didn't really want to share it with the group of people that I was with. So when Peter betrays Jesus and denies knowing him, I can relate. When we get this sense of betrayal, I've let my Jesus down. To be a Christian is to be familiar with that. I think we've all had different times and different seasons where we feel like we've let Jesus down a little bit. Maybe we've told him. Maybe we've been moved in worship. Maybe we've been moved by a sermon, probably at another church, and we decided that what we were going to do, we were going to start a new discipline. We were going to start a new thing. We had been moved to conviction. And we say, yes, Jesus, I'm going to get up and I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to get up early. I'm going to make time for you. I'm going to spend time in prayer. I'm going to spend time in your word. That's going to be a discipline in my life. And so we get up and we start to read it. We're following along, but maybe we don't really understand it. We don't hear the angels audibly sing. And so we think we must be doing it wrong. Or we wake up and we kind of do the drop and flop. Like, Jesus, you just show me what you want me to read. And it turns out that because Psalms is in the middle and it's the longest book in the Bible, that God wants us to read Psalms like a lot. So we just, we read that, right? And we don't really know what's going on or what's happening. And for whatever reason, we fall away from that discipline. And then we've told Jesus for however many times, this is going to be a part of my life. And then we fail. And we betray him and we let him down. Or we tell him that we're going to start to give. We understand that believers should give generously, that we should be conduits of God's generosity to us, that we're stewards of the resources that he gives us, and that we should be generous to those that we think Jesus would want to help and serve. And we commit to do this, but things come up and then we don't, and we fall away from that discipline or from that commitment. And we hesitate to even make the commitment again because we messed up the last time, and we don't have much reason to believe that we're going to do better the next time. Right? Or we have things in our life that we don't want there. And so we tell Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm drawing the line in the sand. I'm not going to do that thing again. I'm moved. I'm convicted. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for who I am. I don't want that to be a part of my life. I don't want that to be a part of who I am. Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm moving on by the power of your spirit. Please allow me to be done with that thing. And we move away from that thing. And then three days later or weeks later or maybe months later, we fall back into the thing. So I wonder this morning, have you ever felt like you've betrayed Jesus? Can you relate to Peter? Aren't you glad that in the moment of the height of your betrayal, Jesus isn't looking you in the eye? I think we can all relate to Peter in this moment. The good news is that it gets better. But I think that we can all relate to this idea of letting Jesus down, of betraying him and feeling what Peter must have felt when God looked at him and he went away and he wept bitterly. Which, by the way, when you're confronted with your sin, that's the appropriate response to go away and to weep bitterly. That's a good and right response. And I don't believe that God would steal that response from Peter. I don't think that God would go to him and say, hey, you don't need to do that. I think that's the good and right response when we realize who we are. But he goes away and he weeps bitterly. And then we pick up this story in John chapter 21. In John chapter 21, Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's appeared to the disciples a couple of times, and then in John chapter 21, he appears to them while they're fishing. And it's interesting to me that they're fishing. Because if you think back, my Bible scholars in the room, you know the answer to this. At the beginning of Jesus' ministry, when he's calling the disciples, and he goes to this guy named Simon, son of John, and he renames him Peter, and he says, come and be my disciple. What was Peter doing? He was fishing. For three years while he followed Jesus, what did he not do anymore? Fish. Why? He had a new job. His new job was to follow Jesus. His new job was to be in ministry. His new job was to do what Jesus did, to go around telling people about Jesus, to cast out demons and to perform miracles and to teach the people of Israel about the Messiah that was now here. That was his new job. And so for three years, he hadn't done his old job. He walked away from that because that wasn't him anymore. But after Jesus dies and Peter is walking around with this shame because he let his Jesus down, what does he do? He goes back to his old job. He disqualifies himself. Peter should have been leading the church. Peter should have been gathering the disciples together and saying, hey, this isn't over. Jesus has risen from the dead. We need to continue to serve him. We need to continue to build his kingdom. We have a purpose. We're not done, guys. But instead, what does he do? He gets back in the boat. What I want us to see is that Peter allowed his shame to shrink his vision of what Jesus wanted him to do. He allowed his shame, he allowed what he had done and how badly he felt for it to shrink his vision about what Jesus wanted him to do. Jesus had purposed him and prepared him and groomed him to lead his church. It's what Jesus wanted him to do. It's why he was working with him for three years, why he was putting up with all of his Peter-isms so that he could lead the church. And Peter, because he felt bad, because he felt shame, he walked away from that. He disqualified himself, which in all honesty is the exact same thing that we would do. Would you look at Peter after he betrayed Jesus at the height of his need and go, yep, you're still the guy. You should still lead the church. Would you still want that guy to be in charge of everybody? Would you still want that guy leading the council of the disciples like he is in Acts along with James? Is that what you would still want? Wouldn't you think that Peter would need to enter into some sort of probationary period? Okay, you're good, Peter, but we're just going to keep our eye on you for a minute. Wouldn't you do what Peter did? Wouldn't you step away and kind of slink away quietly and be like, I'm so sorry that I messed up. I understand. I don't even expect you to reinstate me anymore. I'm just going to fish and I'm going to love on you the best I can. Wouldn't you expect that of Peter? Doesn't that seem like the fair human reaction? Don't we do that to ourselves? When we mess up and we know who we are, we know where we come from and we know the we bring into every room, and we know the things that are hiding in the corners and the shadows of our life. When we know those things, don't we do what Peter did and disqualify ourselves? Don't we allow our shame to shrink our vision for who we are and what God created us to do? Can I just tell you that I think the Bible teaches that every one of you who are believers were created, and the non-believers too, we're just waiting for you to get on board. You were created with a purpose and with a set of gifts, with the sole intention of building God's church. With the sole intention of going to heaven one day and on your way there bringing as many people with you as you possibly can. That's the only reason you're alive. It's the only reason you walk on the face of the earth. The Christian life is a progressive revelation of just how true that is. Hopefully you realize now it's more true than you did five years ago and hopefully more than 10 years ago. The only reason you're here, the only reason that Jesus doesn't snatch you into heaven the instant you are saved is to leave you here so that you can bring as many people with you as possible on the way. And I believe that God has imbued each of you with a set of gifts. I believe that God has uniquely prepared you in your life through the circumstances that you have walked through to be effective at reaching other people. And I believe that God has a big vision and a big plan for how he wants to use you in his kingdom. I believe those of you who have jobs that you are the pastors of those teams. That God has put you there to be a light in the dark places, to encourage the other light that is there and to cast light on those who might not know him yet. That simply by watching you, they may give glory to the Father who is in heaven. Those verses are all over scripture. But what do we do? We know our past. We know who we are. And so we allow our shame to shrink our vision of who Jesus created us to be. We excuse those things away. If I said that, I would never be believed. They're going to think I'm a hypocrite. Maybe we want to start a devotional with our kids at the house. Maybe we just want to start exposing our children to Scripture in the home, but then we have that thought, yeah, buddy, but you don't even read the Bible every day on your own, you hypocrite. Well, start then, and then start the Bible study, man. God has these things that I believe He wants us to do, that He's purposed us to do, but we back off of them because of our shame, because we know who we are. And then we just exist in these little holes. God, I'm not going to do that thing. I'm just going to be a fisherman. I'm just going to work in sales. I'm just going to work in accounting. I'm just going to have my job. I'm just going to do my thing. I'm going to go to church and be a good Christian. But that work that you have to do in the kingdom, that's for other people who haven't messed up. And listen, if that's true, if the only people who get to do ministry and get used in God's kingdom are those who have never let Jesus down, then the church would be run by four-year-olds, man. We've got just a slight upgrade here. But that's what we do. We allow our shame and how we feel about ourselves to shrink our vision about what God wants us to do, which is why Jesus's response to Peter is so amazing. Look at what Jesus says in John chapter 21. I'm going to read you the whole conversation and then we'll talk about it a little bit. Jesus had shown up. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. And that's louder than normal. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. They had been out all night. They hadn't caught anything, right? And then Jesus appears on the shore after they bring the nets in. Still not catching anything. And they don't know it's Jesus. It's just some dude. And he's like, hey, cast your nets on the other side of the boat, which is ridiculous. It's almost like making fun of them. The boat's like 12 feet wide. It's not going to make a difference when they put them on the other side of the boat. But for whatever reason, they listen to the guy, they do it, and then they catch more fish than they've ever caught in their life. 30 years later, 30-plus years later, old man John still remembers that they caught exactly 153 fish that day. That wasn't a big deal to John. They pull in the fish, they go in, they have breakfast together, and then Jesus sidles up to Peter for a conversation. This is the first one-on-one conversation that they have had since Peter's betrayal. And let me just ask you before we read the conversation, what would you expect Jesus to say in that moment? What would you expect the conversation to be? Put yourself in Peter's shoes. You did that to Jesus. You've betrayed him. Put yourself in your own shoes. Take yourself to the place where you feel like you've let Jesus down the most. And right after letting him down for however many upteenth times you've done it, he comes up to you. He sidles up next to you and he puts his arm around you and you and him have a conversation. What do you expect him to say? I would expect him to go to Peter. I would expect him to come to me and say, hey, are you sorry? Right? Jesus is good. He's gracious. I don't think that we would expect Jesus to just come down hard on us. We don't know that in his character. But I think we would expect him to put his arm around us and look at Peter and go, hey, Peter, are you sorry for what you did? Isn't this what we do with our children? When Lily messes up, I've got a three-year-old daughter named Lily, when she messes up, which is more frequently lately because she's three, and apparently that's what three-year-olds do. And she hollers and she gets mad. What do I do? I pick her up and I hold her right here. I calm her down. And I say, Lily, are you sorry? And she says, yes, Daddy. I go, okay. And I put her down. I say, go tell your mom you're sorry. We forgive you. Isn't that what we do? Isn't that what we would expect Jesus to do to us? Hey, are you sorry? And then we would expect to go, yeah, I'm sorry. And we would expect to hear him say to Peter, okay, you're forgiven. Because he's Jesus and that's what he does, right? You're forgiven. That's what we would expect. But look at what happens. Verse 15, when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Do you love me more than these fish? I see you've gone back to fishing. That's an interesting choice. I didn't know that you had a new career now. Do you love me more than these fish? Do you love me more than what you're doing? Interesting question. He said to him, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He said to him, feed my lambs. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, tend my sheep. Verse 17, he said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, do you love me? And he said to somebody put it, you done boogered up, son. He messed up bad. He felt terrible. And he walked away from what God called him to because he felt like he had disqualified himself for messing up. And Jesus goes and he finds him. And we would expect Jesus to say, Peter, are you sorry? That's not what he says. He says, Peter, do you love me? Do I still have your heart or has this sin taken it from me? Do you love me? He says, yes, of course I love you. He says, good. Feed my sheep. This is a remarkable statement. Because in John 10, Jesus paints himself as the good shepherd. And he says that the sheep are his flock or the church or people who believe in him. His sheep are the Christians. And so the shepherd looks after the Christians. And so what he's saying is, Peter, for three years you watched me do ministry. You watched me tend to my sheep. And I told you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church. I told you that one day I won't be here. When I'mores you. He doesn't just forgive Peter. He doesn't say, are you sorry? He says, do you love me? I know you're sorry. Because if you love me, then of course you're sorry. And then we would expect him to say, okay, you're forgiven, but sit over here in this probationary period. I'll keep an eye on you for a couple years and see if we can trust you again. That's not what he does. You're forgiven. You're restored. Go and do the thing I created you to do. Go and be the person I created you to be. He says, Peter, you may have disqualified yourself. You may have shrunken back from my plans for you, but I have not. I still have plans for you. I still want you to do these things. You are reinstated. You are restored. And he does it three times. I love the symmetry of those statements. How many times did Jesus deny Peter? Three. How many times did Jesus ask Peter if he loved him? Three. It's like he's saying, Peter, without even saying the words, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. You're forgiven. Go and work. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then you're forgiven. Go and be who I created you to be. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Okay, good, because that's three times that you said that. It's three times I've forgiven you. You can say it as many more times as you want to. I'll forgive you and restore you all those times. Now go and be who I created you to be. And I believe that he says the same thing to us this morning. I believe that he asks us the same question. Do you love Jesus? Grace, do you love Jesus? However mired in sin you might be, however much shame you might bring into the room, whatever might have happened in the past, whatever habits you bring, however many times you've made a commitment that you didn't keep, listen, put all that aside and let's just ask you grace. Do you love Jesus? Then go and be who he created you to be. Go and do the thing he purposed you to do. Say, but Jesus, I've done this and this and this. I'm not qualified. I used to be an addict. I used to do this thing. I'm mired in this right now. And Jesus says, listen, listen, listen, I'm not worried about that. Do you love me? Because if you love me, it means you're sorry. And if you've shrunk away, it means that you feel shame. And Jesus says, go and be the person that I created you to be. Go and do the thing that I intended for you to do. Quit disqualifying yourself. Quit feeling the shame that is not from me. And just answer the question, do you love me? Then go and do the thing that I purposed you to do. Go and feed his sheep. Go and build his church. Go and use the gifts that he's imbued you with. Go live out the reason that he leaves you here. Go and run your race. What I want you to understand this morning is Jesus is far more concerned with what he wants you to do than what you have done. He's already taken care of what you have done. He's removed that from you as far as the east is from the west. Because of that removal, you are free and have the freedom to operate in his love. And if you love him in return, then go and do the thing that he created you to do. Go and be who he created you to be. And that's where I would leave us at the end of the series in John with that simple question. After all the 12 weeks, after everything that we've experienced, after all that we've seen of Jesus, after what we know of him and how he loved us. Do you love him? Does he have your heart? If he does, grace. Go be who he created you to be. You're not just forgiven, you're restored. Let's pray. Father, we sure do love you. You sure are good to us. God, we can't fathom this idea that you would not just forgive us, but that you would restore us. Lord, if there are folks in here who walked into the room carrying a little bit of shame, God, if we are certain that if we could see you face to face, the first thing you would express in us is disappointment. God, I pray that you would take that from us today. That we would see that we are loved, that you care about us, that we would identify with Peter, not just in his betrayal, but in his restoration, that we would feel your arms around us, that we would simply respond to that question of, do we love you? Give us the faith to believe that you forgive us. Give us the eyes to see ourselves as you do. And give us the courage and the strength to go live out and be the people that you created us to be and do great things to the folks here at Grace. It's in your son's name we pray all of these things. Amen.