Sermons tagged with Prayer

All right, guys. Good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and I'm so grateful that you've joined us on this October Sunday. I'm hopeful that we don't have to hear that noise again, but who knows? Who knows? Some of you may have noticed that I'm wearing Georgia Tech colors for no particular reason. I just thought I'd wear them today. But speaking of suffering, speaking of UNC football, today's message is about suffering, so it kind of works out, those of you who stayed up late to get your dreams crushed last night. This morning, we're talking about Great Is Thy Faithfulness. When we planned the series, I knew that I wanted to take at least one week and talk about a hymn. Because hymns are, if you ask me like what songs are you listening to, what Christian worship are you listening to, I have a playlist called Acoustic Hymns on Spotify, and I listen to that probably more than anything. I just like hymns, and so I knew that one of the sermons was going to be focused on a hymn, but I didn't know which one, and so I did what I often do when I don't know what to preach about or talk about. I ask Jen what she thinks. Jen's my wife. She's not just a lady that I ask questions to, and I asked her what I should do, and she immediately said, Great is Thy Faithfulness. We love Great is Thy Faithfulness. It's one of our favorite songs. Jen even walked down the aisle to that in our wedding. And so I dove into the song Great is Thy Faithfulness a few weeks ago to prepare for this morning. And what I was not expecting to find was that this is really a song about grief. It's a song to be sung in the midst of grief. And so this morning is necessarily about pain and suffering and struggle and grief. And we've all walked through those seasons. Some of y'all know our story well enough to know that 2019, early 2019 to the end of 2020, were some hard years for Jen and I. In early 2019, her dad John was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he fought the good fight for almost two years and died in the last days of 2020. And that was probably the first time that we moved through that kind of profound grief at loss. And it really shapes you when you walk that path. In a lot of ways, there's my life before we walked that and life after. And the perspectives are very different. And one of the things that I learned in that season of suffering and loss and grief was, and I know that this is, I'm just getting right to it. I know it. I know this is heavy. I know this is even grim, but it's just true. And this is the way that my mind works. Maybe that's why one of my favorite books in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. But as we were walking with John on his journey to eternity, it occurred to me somewhere in there that best case scenario in life, you walk with your parents into death. When you are born, the best possible outcome for that relationship with your parents is to accompany them as they transition into eternity. That's the best possible outcome. It's a path we all have to walk. In fact, if we don't walk that path, holding our parents' hands as they fade away, if we don't walk that path, it's because something more sad than that happened, right? They lost you. You were estranged. It was tragic and sudden when they passed. I know that's dark and I know that that's heavy, but I think it's a helpful reality to understand that when you are born, hopefully to loving parents, that the best case scenario for that relationship is for you to one day hold their hand as they pass into eternity. If you have walked that path, you know what an incredible honor it is. I was talking with somebody this week who lost their brother, and he was able to sit with him for the last two weeks while he faded. And I just said to him, it's a unique privilege in life to be invited into that sacred space, isn't it? And he said, yes, very much. So I would say, if you are walking that path, if you have walked it, when one day you find yourself walking it, I know that it is not much solace, but consider yourself blessed. It's a blessing from God to walk with a parent, to walk with a loved one in that way. We don't all have that opportunity. But if that's the best case scenario, what that means is life is going to be filled with strife. Life is going to be filled with grief. I make the comment sometimes that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy for their whole life. No one does. Something sad will happen. Grieving, suffering, loss is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Just this last week, within the last week, I went to the funeral of a 40-year-old friend of mine who suddenly passed away. I told you guys about this last week. She has two kids, middle school and elementary school. It's tragic. On Wednesday, I drove to Asheboro and I did the funeral for a man that went to my church in Atlanta who moved up here. And I sat with his kids. He has kids are twins they're both 53 and I talked with his daughter very successful woman she was really struggling and I was talking to her and I just mentioned to her that she had walked through this before and I was sorry that but she knew this path because she had lost her mom and she said said, well, this one, she said, yeah, but this one feels different because I had my dad at that one and I don't have parents anymore. It's hard. I told you I was on the phone yesterday with somebody from our church who just lost their brother. As soon as I hung up that phone call, I called somebody else in our church whose dad just started in hospice care. There is a reality in this life of pain and suffering. And in light of the ubiquity of that human suffering, we can be grateful for a Bible that includes the book of Lamentations. In light of the ubiquity of human suffering and grief and tragedy and loss, we can be grateful for a Bible that includes the book of Lamentations. Now, the book of Lamentations is not a popular one, okay? If you have a Bible, if you were faithful and you brought your Bible this morning, I'm so glad that you did. If you don't have a Bible, you can get one in the seat back in front of you. Turn to Lamentations for me, and you'll be able to look at some of these things as we look at them here in a few minutes. It's five chapters, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations. If you get to Ezekiel, you've gone too far. If you can't find it after a few minutes, use your table of contents or hand it to the person next to you who's a better Christian. The book of Lamentations is a collection of five poems that are laments. And a lament is an expression of anguish or grief. It is an expression of deep sorrow. And Lamentations is not the only place where these laments make an appearance. I told you last week as we were talking about Psalms that there's several different categories of Psalms. And one of the categories is Psalms of Lamentations, Psalmsms of lament. We find poems of lament in Job. We find them in Isaiah. And so all through the Bible, we have these poems and these songs and these writings on laments, on deep anguish and deep grief. And I am grateful for a Bible that has those. I'm grateful for a Bible that does not hide from that part of the human experience. We do not serve a God that seeks to whitewash those things and push those off to the fringes and off to the side while we're happy and joyful over here. And in a lot of ways, I'll talk about towards the end, pain and grief and loss can sometimes seek to drive a wedge between us and God and push us further away from God. And so it would seem to his benefit to kind of cast aside, put pain in the shadows so that we don't acknowledge it. But God, in his goodness and in his wisdom and in his word, has chosen to bring pain front and center and show it to us over and over and over again and even show how the saints have responded to it. So we do not have to be afraid of pain or grief and we don't have to pretend like it doesn't exist. We don't have to whitewash it. And because God doesn't flinch about including pain and grief and the reality of suffering in his word, then we don't have to flinch about including it in our church. The church should not be a place where we take people who are grieving and who are hurting and who are suffering loss and put them to the side and ask them to quietly get over it until they can join our happy, joyful circle again. That's not how church works. That's not how the Bible works. That's not how God works. So that's not how we should work. It is okay and right and good to bring our pain and our grief into the middle of the fellowship and say, this is what I'm doing. This is what was happening to me. And this is how I'm suffering. We should do that. But I'm grateful for a God, for his word that does not hide from the reality of suffering and loss. Because everyone in here, everyone in here over the age of 30 has a place they can go. If I were to ask you what was your hardest time, you have a place where you can go. You have something that you encountered that was sad, that was hard, that challenged your faith. And maybe it was so profound that you even mark your life by it. There was me before that and me after that. And if you are one of the lucky few who says, you know, I really haven't known that season, I'm so happy for you. You will know it. You will. It's a reality of life. We will walk through times of profound suffering and grief. And the Bible doesn't flinch about that. And I have committed to you that I will preach about that reality just as often as it comes up in Scripture. Because shame on us if we perpetuate this idea of faith that tells us if we'll just pray hard enough and love hard enough and be faithful enough that we will dodge the raindrops of tragedy, that God will put a protective shield over the ones he loves the most who are the most faithful. That is not in the Bible. That is not in that situation too. And so God includes it in his scripture. And in doing that, I believe that poems of lament imbue human suffering with a sacred dignity. I believe that these poems of lament, that finding deep anguish and grief in scripture, imbues our suffering that we walk through with a sort of sacred dignity. And I don't really know how best to explain it except to say that I'm fond of reminding myself and reminding you guys when I can that we all stand on shoulders. You are who you are, for better or worse, because of the shoulders you stand on. Because of your mom and your dad and your grandparents. Because of the people who were around you when you were being formed, because of the successes or failures that came before you. You stand on those shoulders. I've reminded us as a church, we stand on spiritual shoulders. We do not, as Grace Raleigh, float out in the ether untethered to church history. No, we are a part of church history. We are carrying the torch for our generation, but we are standing on shoulders that go back thousands of years. We stand on shoulders of faith. And in suffering, I think it's important to acknowledge through scripture that we stand on suffering shoulders as well. The generations who have come before us, they know suffering. They know hardship. And the reality of it is, whether we like to admit it or not, we're the lucky ones. Our generations experience far less suffering than their generations. It was not lost on me, and even in other countries. It wasn't lost on me last week as I was at the funeral for Jodi, that we're in a room, there's 750 people in there because this tragic thing happened. This mom died. And 750 people stopped their Saturday and went to a room and celebrated her life and worshiped God together. While on the other side of the globe, there's Palestinian and Jewish moms dying who are not getting services. They don't have time to stop and bring 750 people in and celebrate that life. Life just marches on. And so, comparatively speaking, we are the lucky ones. But just like getting to walk with your parents in their final hours doesn't make those final hours not sad, acknowledging that we are comparatively lucky doesn't make our hurt hurt less, which is why I think the song Great Is Thy Faithfulness can be one of hope. It can be a profound anthem for us during pain. But to understand Great Is Thy Faithfulness, we've really got to understand the book of Lamentations. So you've got it there open in front of you, and I don't expect you to look at this right now, but it's five chapters. Chapters one and two and three and four are acrostic poems. They're all 22 verses. Each verse starts with a different Hebrew letter, obviously in the Hebrew, not in the English that we are looking at or whatever language you read your Bible in. And then chapter three is a little bit different formulaically than the others. But all five chapters are poems and all five chapters are poems of grief and suffering and strife. If you've ever tried to read through Lamentations, I did, sat down, read it cover to cover before I started to write the sermon on it. It's a hard book to read. It is not a hopeful book. It is not, besides what I'm going to show you, besides this one little nook right in the middle, it is not a faith-filled book. It is a book of despair. And so I wanted to acquaint you with kind of the sense of the book of Leviticus so we can understand the deep anguish that the author is talking about. It's attributed to Jeremiah historically, but recent scholarship calls that into question. But we're going to say Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. Look with me at chapter 2, verses 11 and 12. These are hard verses, but I want you to see the kind of pain that he's talking about here. as they faint like a wounded man in the streets of the city as their life is poured out on their mother's bosom. I cannot think of anything more profoundly sad than that. That a mom clutching her small child as that child's life is poured out on her chest. And I do not think that was a figurative verse, because the book of Lamentations is written in a response and reaction to the downfall of Jerusalem being conquered by the Babylonians and the Jewish people being carried off into slavery. The book of Lamentations is written while the smoke rises from the ashes of Jerusalem in the background and slavery awaits in the foreground. So please understand that to the Jewish mind, to this person, to Jeremiah, and to those who would read it, the anguish they are expressing is because of actual grief that they are seeing. Women and children dying in the streets is what they are seeing as the city is conquered. But it's not just that that they are grieving. This also is a grieving of a loss of a promise from God because God promised to care for his people and God promised to look out for them. He promised to protect them. And more than anything, he promised them that land, the land that they were on. And then God allows a foreign army to come in to destroy his city, the crown jewel of Israel, to lay waste Jerusalem and the temple and take his children that are claimants of his promise and march them into slavery in a land where they don't belong. Back pretty close to where Abraham came from originally. So when they are marching, it is not just the sights that they have seen that have broken their hearts. It's not just the ones that they have loved and lost that have broken their hearts. It's not just the future that they face that's breaking their heart, but it's also the thought, the reality to them that their God had failed them. Their God had broken his promise. Either he was unfaithful or he was weak. But their hopes had been dashed. It's with that that Jeremiah writes these laments. This verse in particular struck me about women and children in the streets as their city was destroyed around them. I wrote this sermon in the days following the original Hamas attacks a couple of weeks ago. And I didn't have to imagine what it would look like to see what Jeremiah was writing about. Because all I had to do was turn on my TV. And you see horrific pain, horrific violence, and horrific evil. I watched a dad celebrate when he found out that his eight-year-old daughter was dead rather than captured because being captured was worse than being killed. That's sad. And my heart breaks for not just the Jewish people who have lost their lives, but for all the Israelis. It's multicultural that have suffered needlessly for this. And my heart breaks for the Palestinians who are caught in the middle of a war that they did not choose to wage. And I don't know the answers there. I don't know the right thing to do. The only thing I know to do is to pray for them. Don't turn our eyes from it and pretend like it's not happening. To be grateful that we don't live in a place where we have to suffer in that way. I've thought over and over and over again what I would do with my young family if I was unlucky enough to be born in Palestine. How do you protect them? And the thought that really struck me as I was reflecting on that and reading these verses is that there truly is nothing new under the sun. Jeremiah wrote these words 2,500 years ago. And here we are right back in the same place. Women and children are dying in the streets of Israel. The suffering until Jesus comes back is unavoidable. And then you flip to the end of Lamentations. The very last verses. This is the time to finish on a high note and encourage God's people. Isn't it, Jeremiah? Not to him. He finishes it this way. I sure do like the sound of pages turning in here. That's good. Verse 21 and 22. Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and you remain exceedingly angry with us. The end. That's the book. It ends with a dot, dot, dot. God, please restore us. Please take us back. Please make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Please, God. Unless you're just going to forget us. That's it. There's no resolution there. Which is why I think that these verses in chapter 3 are remarkably powerful verses. These verses are the only hopeful, optimistic verses in the whole book of Lamentations, and we find them in the dead center. And if you know your hymns, these verses are going to sound really familiar. Look with me at chapter 3 and listen to these words. Verse 21. I love the way he starts this verse off with that phrase, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. This I call to mind, but therefore I have hope. In the midst of all the suffering he's written, he's seen the ashes of Jerusalem are fading behind him as he's led into slavery. He has seen the very worst of human suffering. He has finished the book with uncertainty, but in the middle of it, almost like a nail being driven into a wall with a curtain, just letting it drape there, holding up the last tendrils of faith is this declaration of hope in the middle of it. But this I bring to mind and it gives me hope. Great is your faithfulness. Your mercies are new every morning. You provide for me and I believe in you and I hope in you, God, because I know that you are good. Despite everything that I've seen, despite everything that's happened, despite all the questions that I cannot answer, I know that you are good. And see, I always thought that Great is Thy Faithfulness was a jubilant song. It was to be sung in seasons of plenty. It was to be sung when we realize we're blessed. Great is your faithfulness, O God, my Father. All I've needed, your hand has provided. I have all that I need. Morning by morning, new mercies I see. I thought it was a song to be sung in the midst of plenty. But it's actually a song to be declared in the midst of grief. Which is interesting to me that Jen chose it. We're not too far off. As the song to walk down the aisle, maybe she knew something that I didn't about the years ahead. But make no mistake about it, and I love this. Great is thy faithfulness is an anthem of defiance. You understand? The song, great is thy faithfulness, is an anthem of defiance. And here's what I mean by defiance. Because when you've walked through grief and pain and hurt, you know something to be true. Those things have whispered in your ears. When you are hurting, when you are suffering, when your life is marked by sorrow, that pain whispers in your ear. The same thing it was whispering to the ears of the Hebrew people as they marched away from the ashes of Jerusalem. That pain will whisper in your ear, your God is not big enough. Your God has forgotten you. Your faith has failed you. Your faith is not serving you. Your God is too weak. He's too apathetic. Or your faith is weak. or this is your fault, that pain and grief will begin to drive a wedge between you and God. It will whisper things when you're trying to fall asleep that your faith has failed you and your God has failed you. And if you let it linger long enough, it will work to convince you to walk away from your God. And when you go to the place you went when I talked about your darkest hour, we both know we heard those voices then. We both know we hear them sometimes now. We know people who have let those voices win and have walked away from faith because the pain was too great. So it is those voices that this anthem is defying. Jeremiah was hearing those voices as he wrote Lamentations, and yet in the middle of it, nail in the wall, he hangs his hope. Great is your faithfulness, he declares it, despite everything going on, despite the fact that, God, you could have stopped that and you didn't. God, you made us a promise and it feels broken. Lord, I don't understand how these things can be happening to these people. It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem fair. How can you possibly watch the news and see what's happening in Israel and not be moved? How can you possibly watch the news and see what happened in Maine this week and not be moved and not wonder and not ask those questions that we all ask in the midst of pain. God, why are you letting this happen? And I don't understand. And I can't explain why. And I don't know what to tell my kids. And my faith feels weak. But in the midst of that dismay, I choose to sing with Jeremiah and all the saints, great is your faithfulness. God, I don't understand this, but I know you're good. Great is your faithfulness. God, I don't have enough to get through today, but I know you're going to give me the strength. I love that line, strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, even in the darkest of times. So from now on, for the rest of your life, when you hear the song, great is thy faithfulness, I want your mind to rush to Lamentations chapter three. I want you to see it holding up the tendril of hope and faith and our creator and uncertain times and things we don't understand. It's an actual choice to choose faith in those moments and declare to God, I don't understand it, but great is your faithfulness. And it's an anthem of defiance because when we choose to sing it in the midst of pain, we are telling those voices of pain and grief and fear. Not today. You will not rob me of my faith today. This pain will not take my faith from me. And it will not take it from me because I know who my Jesus is. And I love him I trust him and I know he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And I don't see how, and I don't see why, and I don't know when, but one day he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And so today this pain will not take my faith from me because great is his faithfulness. And I will declare it even when I don't feel it. So in a minute, we're going to sing. And when we do, let this be an anthem. If you're walking through pain right now, sing it. Defy it. Declare it. When you hear it in the future, sing it as an anthem that my faith will not be shaken by the circumstances that I'm walking through. But I know that for me, for the rest of my life, whenever I hear great is thy faithfulness, I will remember it as an anthem of defiance that in the midst of the greatest suffering and the greatest trials, we stand up and we choose to sing, God, I don't understand, but I know you are good and great is your faithfulness. Let's pray. Father, your faithfulness is steadfast. You have never broken a promise. You have never not done what you said you were going to do. There's so much that we don't understand, God. There's so much in life at times that seeks to rob our faith from us. And so, God, we pray that you would give us strength for today. Continue to give us hope for tomorrow. That we would declare this as an anthem against the evil one who would seek to tear down our faith. Lord, if there are those here who are listening, who don't feel like your faithfulness is really great right now. Would you give them the strength to sing? Would you give them the strength to declare? Would you give them the strength to defy today? God, we thank you for being good. Thank you for loving us. We thank you for being faithful to us. Help us see it more and more. In Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is the second part of our series called The Songs We Sing. Last week, we opened up and we did Graves in the Gardens. I gave you kind of a background of worship, and I started to, it's kind of trickled into me some good feedback that you guys are excited about this series, looking forward to it, looking forward to seeing what we've been singing in the Bible, what we will be singing in the Bible. And so I am thrilled to be going through this series with you because like I said, it's one that I've been wanting to do for a while. And last week when I got done preaching and we sang together, I was so encouraged at the voices being lifted up. And this morning we'll have the same opportunity. I'm going to preach about the song that we just sang because it's pulled straight out of Psalm chapter 8. And then we'll sing it again, knowing it better, having a better understanding of what it means in a full-throated, open-hearted way. And then we'll sing some other songs that are really special to us. And then we'll go into our week. So I'm feeling really good about this Sunday. And I just feel like it's worth saying sometimes that I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for my church. I'm so grateful for the love and the community that we experience here, for the handshakes and hugs and laughter and the lobby for the stories of the team coming back from Mexico I'm just grateful for y'all I'm grateful to be here and I'm excited to teach to you out of the book of Psalms this morning now to do a series focused on worship and to not have at least one morning out of the book of Psalms would be sacrilegious. It would be absolutely awful because Psalms is the hymn book of the Old Testament. It is the hymn book of the Hebrew people. It is intended to be sung. A vast majority of the Psalms are intended to be sung. And sometimes there's even instructions about it at the beginning of eight. You don't have to look there yet, but the very first thing it says is to the choir master, according to the Giddeth, nobody knows what that is, a Psalm of David, but they think it's a certain tune to which it's supposed to be sung. So David is even giving this to the choir master. I wrote this to praise our God. Let's sing it to this tune. Let's sing it together. A vast majority of the Psalms were written with the intention of God's body of believers singing them his words back to him, which I think is remarkable. And Psalms is a remarkable book. It sits in the dead center of our Bible. It's the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters. It's divided into five separate books within the book of Psalms. It has the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, which comes in at, I believe, 176 verses. It's a super long chapter of the Bible because it's a beautiful Hebrew poem. There's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, and each stanza, every line begins with that letter of the alphabet as the psalmist moves through. It's the one thing in the Bible that really makes me want to learn original Hebrew so I could hear that psalm read and sung in the original language in which it was intended because I've got a feeling that it is beautiful. I'll just wait until I get to heaven. I'm not actually going to do the work to learn Hebrew. That seems super hard. The seminary I chose, I chose it so I didn't have to learn original languages, so I'm not about to reverse course now, you know? But it's the longest book with the longest chapter, and it's filled with songs. And they're not all praise songs. They're divided up in different ways depending on who you ask and who's doing the dividing. You can find some people that divide them into five different types of Psalms, some as many as 20 and everything in between. But just a few examples of the types of Psalms that you can find in your Bible as you read through Psalms. And shame on me, I realize I haven't done a series in Psalms in the six and a half years I've been here. Shame on me for that. So I am promising you that coming up, we will do a series in Psalms at some point. But if you want to know some of the divisions of the book of Psalms, the different types that we have, there's Psalms of praise. Obviously, there's royal Psalms, Psalms of lament. And we're actually going to talk about those next week. I'm so grateful that our Bible has Psalms of lament, expressions of sadness and grief. There's what's called imprecatory psalms or psalms that are prayed and sung to seek vengeance over our enemies. David had a lot of reason to sing those. You probably don't. You probably don't have many enemies that you should sing imprecatory songs over, but they're in there. Psalms of enthronement and then psalms of pilgrimage. And I think these psalms of pilgrimage are really interesting. And I want to actually point you towards a book for my people who are readers. There's this book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is the pastor that faithfully translated the message to make scriptures a little bit more approachable for people who have never encountered them before. I read his biography last year, and I think it was an autobiography, a memoir, and it was one of the more moving books I've read in a long time. I was really, really touched by the heart of Eugene Peterson. And probably his most famous book is a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. And A Long Obedience in the Same Direction actually moves through what's called the Psalms of Ascent, this group of pilgrimage psalms And I've wanted to, that may be the Psalm series that we do. I'm either going to do it as a series as we walk through the book together, or I'm going to do it as like a Wednesday night course where those that want to come and we move through it together. But if you're a reader, I would highly encourage you to go grab or write down or put in your Goodreads, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But in the book of Psalms, we have all these different categories. We have all these different verses. And one of the things we see that I think is remarkable is that a majority of them are written by David. They're not all written by David. There's some authors that are just referred to as the sons of Asaph. And Asaph was, I believe, the choir master, the worship leader. And then these are his sons that he has passed this responsibility down to. And they've written their own Psalms in there. But one of the remarkable things about the book of Psalms is to see the heart of David just kind of filleted open on the table for you. And I love that God in his goodness includes the Psalms to offset the other stories of David. Because if you read the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, you can also see the stories in 1st Kings but more of details of the story are in 1st and 2nd Samuel and if you read the story of David you see this traditionally masculine macho guy who's fighting and killing and he kills Goliath and he fights lions and bears with his bare hands which you know who hasn't and then there's a song about him him. David has killed his tens of thousands. Saul has killed his thousands. It's just like, yeah, spear-throwing, meat-eating dude. And then you open Psalms, and here's a guy that's brokenhearted. Here's a guy that's highly emotional, highly vulnerable, who displays his tears and his lament and his repentance and his hopes and his fears and his deepest prayers for all of time to see. And the juxtaposition of Psalms and 1 and 2 Samuel kind of brings together this vision of what we can be as people and how multifaceted we can be. So I'm grateful that Psalms reads almost like a prayer journal of David at times. But to me, the most remarkable thing about the book of Psalms is that when we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. When we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. And you can sing the Psalms. Write this down if you want to, if you want something else to listen to. There's this, I don't know, I guess they're just a duet, a duo, I don't know the rules, a band, Shane and Shane. And they have an album called Psalms, where they have set the Psalms to music, and it's one of my favorites. I love it. I've loved it for years and years. You can go find it. It's on Spotify. It's on all the things. And you can sing the Psalms. I would highly recommend it. When we sing the Psalms, understand this, we are joining in to an ancient chorus of all the saints. I spoke last week about how when we worship, when we praise, when we sing out, that we join our brothers and sisters in Christ in unity. It unifies us according to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. When we sing together, it unifies us in this remarkable way. When we walk in Republican and Democrat, we walk in 80 and 20. We walk in stressed and not stressed, successful and not successful in a season of plenty and a season of need. And we lay all of those things down and we praise our God together and it unifies us. And I've just, I just got to tell you, I shared this with the band and the tech team before the service. But this is just a, just such a good picture of how it unifies us. if I don't say it I might die a little on the inside. So I'm just gonna have to Yesterday I was at the funeral for a friend of mine's wife 40 years old perfectly healthy Went on a girl's trip Heart heart attack, died in the bathroom. No other explanation. Incredibly sad thing. Two kids, sixth grader, third grader. So I drive down, I go to the funeral, and the husband's name, my buddy's name is Jeff. There's about 750 people in the room. And in between speakers, they put up a slideshow of Jodi and her family. And they started playing under that slideshow a song called Gratitude. We've sang it here a couple of times. It's going to be the last song that we sing this morning. They started playing Gratitude. And when that song started, Jeff, the husband who lost his wife a week ago, stood up and raised his hands in worship. And so, if you're at a funeral and the husband of the deceased woman stands up and raises his hands, you stand up and you raise your hands. So 750 people stand up and raise their hands to this song too. And then they spontaneously started singing it. And I'm six hours away from my church family, with my old church family, singing a song with myriad other church families, with our hands raised, choosing to praise in a moment of grief, and it just unifies you in a way that nothing else can. It was a remarkable moment. And when we sing it this morning, we join them and their praises to a God in spite of grief. We join Jeff in our prayers for him. We join the other congregations that sing that too. So when we sing the Psalms, we join into the ancient chorus of all the saints. Do you understand? When we sing in a few minutes, Psalm 8, back to God, we are singing it with David. We are singing it with the generations of David and Solomon and the faithful generations of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. We're singing it with Hezekiah and King Asa. We are singing it with the faithful generations, with the remnant that gets taken to Babylon. We are singing these psalms with Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. We are singing these psalms with the Maccabees who lit the menorah in Roman oppression. We are singing these psalms with the generations that cried out in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew We are singing these songs with Jesus himself and with the disciples And with the early churches that met in the basements in Rome when we sing the Psalms We are joining with the underground churches in China and in Lebanon and in Istanbul, singing God's songs back to him. One of my favorite quotes about the Psalms is by Charles Spurgeon, and I'll tell you why he deserves to be the one who writes this in a second. Also, I'm just going to compose myself. We've got a long way to go here. This is premature. I can't afford this. I only have one tissue. Jen's laughing at me the hardest, she knows. It's been an emotional weekend. Back off. All right. Spurgeon writes this, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. I love that. The book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. That when we sing Psalms, we are mounted on wings of eagles and we soar in the presence of God. Now let me tell you why Spurgeon has a right to write that sentence and should rightly be pointed out in any sermon on Psalms. If you don't know who Charles Haddon Spurgeon is, he was a preacher. He was loud. He had combed back hair and a beard and a belly, and he suffered from gout, and he liked to drink whiskey. So, just saying, he was called. He was and is called the Prince of Preachers. He holds the world record for preaching to the most people in one space at one time without a microphone and being heard. One time he was preaching in an auditorium. This is in the late 1800s in London. He was preaching in an auditorium, going through what he wanted to say, and some janitor in a hallway that he couldn't see bowed on his knees right there and accepted Jesus listening to Charles go through his sermon. It's an amazing story. The volume of work of Charles Spurgeon is unbelievable. The amount of books that he wrote. You can look up any of his sermons online, and they're long, wordy, lengthy sermons. And it was said of him that people would come from all over the world to hear him preach, and what they would say is, yeah, the sermon's great, but you need to listen to the man pray. He was known all over the world. He wrote tons of books. He ran a seminary out of his church. He wrote books for the seminarians that I have, that I refer to regularly, that still help me and my approach to pastoring and preaching and all the things. But his whole life, he worked on one book that became a three-volume set called The Treasury of David. It's a commentary on the book of Psalms. And he carried it with him wherever he went. He worked on it for decades. He would work on it for a bit. He'd put it back down, he'd pick it back up. You better believe that I've got the treasury of David in my office. And that every time I preach out of a psalm, that's the first place I go. If you're someone who appreciates materials like that, go get it. It's not like super expensive. Find it on Amazon with a cheesy cover. And he writes in the intro to his magnum opus, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. The book of Psalms is worthy of our study and it's worthy of our singing. And we ought to acknowledge when we're singing it back to God because when we do, we join into that ancient chorus of all the saints through all the decades. Now this morning, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 8. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to turn there. And I'm going to say this this morning. I don't try to get you to do a lot of stuff because I want it to matter when I ask you to do something. So I intentionally don't try to put pressure on you to do things. I just want you to be a good Christian adult and do what you want to do and do as the Spirit moves you. But I'm going to encourage us as a church to begin to bring our Bibles to church for Sunday mornings. Some of you like to read through apps. That's fine. Read your app. Bring it. Have your phone out. I'm giving you permission to have your phone out in church. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not scrolling something that you shouldn't be scrolling during a church service. And if you are someone who likes to read the Bible on your phone, that's fine to have it out. Just make sure that the screen is visible to the people next to you, okay? So that they can smack you if you're cheating and you're checking a score or something. But let's be people who bring our Bible to church. Because here's what I want for you. I want you to sit, and I want you to have your Bible open. And when something strikes you, I want you to be able to write a note. When you see a verse that you like, that you want to remember, I want you to be able to highlight it. I want your Bibles to serve you as kind of these spiritual journals where when you flip through them, you see where you've been. You know that God's spoken to you there before. When you go to different places, you have notes on the sides and you have dates and you have prayers so that as you flip through your Bible years from now, you see times when God was faithful. I can't tell you how many passages I have written beside them. What does this mean? God help me understand. And then I'll hear sermon on it, or I'll hear somebody teach about it. I'll read a book on it, and I'll turn to that passage, and I'll go, oh, I think I understand this now. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. I want to encourage you to bring your Bible to church. Open it up. Make notes about what I'm saying or what God is saying to you. And then let me just tell you this. If things get boring, as they often do, you can start flipping through your Bible like you're source checking me or you're just interested in something. And then you look double spiritual. The people in your row are going to be like, yo, they're cross-referencing Nate. That's, look at, look at them. That's super spiritual. So just bring it, man. We'll probably make you an elder if you start doing that stuff. And you're just doing it because you're bored. It's so many benefits. Let's start bringing our Bibles if we don't already. But right now, what I want you to do is grab the Bible. If you don't have one, grab the one in front of you and let's read Psalm 8 together. It's only nine verses and I thought it would be well worth it to spend some time reading it together this morning. Find Psalm 8. It says this. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Verse 9, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. What a wonderful, declarative psalm of praise. This is the psalm that we sing from. This is the psalm that when I'm done talking, we will sing from again. And as we look through it and we go through it together and see what it has to offer, I think there's such depth of wisdom and goodness here. I love the way that the psalm starts. Verse 1, if you look at it in your Bibles, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. What I love about this, and this is a point that Spurgeon made, not me. What I love about this is the inadequacy of that declaration. This is a psalm that is clearly meant to glorify the majesty of God, that is clearly meant to frame him up among the stars, that is clearly meant to swoop us up and to carry us away into a reverent awe of the majesty of God. This is a big deal psalm. This needs to resound through the generations. And so we would expect some honorifics to go along with the Lord's name, wouldn't we? We would expect some more adjectives to be there. How majestic and all of your grandeur and the worthiness of your ways and whatever else. We would expect it to be this grand entrance as we open this declaration about God. And yet it's not that. It's this humble, oh Lord, our Lord. That's the best David could muster. Oh Lord, our Lord. It feels so inadequate for the moment, but that's why it's so good. Because to start a majestic psalm that way, so humbly, is to confess without even having to say it out loud, my words are inadequate for your greatness, oh God. What else could David say but oh Lord, our Lord? What else is fitting? What honorifics should he put there that would adequately capture who our creator God is? There's nothing worthy enough of writing. So he just humbly puts, oh Lord, our Lord. And so when we sing those words in a few minutes, when we say, oh Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name, we are admitting in that song and in that declaration and with our voices and in our hearts that we are inadequate to adequately title God's glory and goodness. We are inadequate to adequately express and explain and capture who he is. And so we surrender to the simple, humble, oh Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name. It's such a good beginning of the psalm to start it with humility and with simplicity as we confess through our words and our spirits, our inadequacy to capture who our creator God is. Verse two, we're actually going to look at in a second. That becomes important when we start to think about how Jesus employed this psalm. But verse 3, I love, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. Psalm 8 proclaims that God has told the story of himself through his creation. The song that we are singing based out of Psalm 8 is called Tell the Story. And it talks about how creation tells the story of God and how we participate in that. When we look at creation, when we look at a sunset or a sunrise, when we're on a plane and we can look out and get that unique view of God's creation and his earth, when we hike and we see beautiful things, when we look into the heavens and we marvel at God, when we get away from the city and we can actually see the stars, when we do those things, the heavens are declaring the glory of God. They're preaching to us about the presence of God. The purpose of creation is to tell the story of the creator. And since you are his creation and you are the only one imbued with a voice and entrusted with a voice, then it is our responsibility to cry out to God in ways that the rest of creation cannot do. It is our responsibility to make sure that the rocks don't have to cry out to our God because we're going to do that because we are the part of his creation that was made to praise him. And so we do it loudly. We do it vigorously. We do it openheartedly. And I'm reminded in verse three, as it points to God's creation, kind of declaring who he is of Romans one, Paul writes about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the Lord has revealed himself in creation so that no man is without excuse. Through the millennia, men and women and children have looked at God's creation and marveled at the creator. The sun, the moon, and the stars tell the story of our God and who he is. And then we move into verses four and following what could be a little bit of a confusing portion. Because as I read it earlier, you may have picked up on the difference. If you were following along in an NIV, if you're using one of our Bibles this morning, then you're reading an N NIV maybe you pulled up an NIV on your app or that's what you carried in this morning but what you saw is in verse 4 when it says what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him your version says them so the ESV and some other versions say him and your version and some other versions say them. And so the question becomes, why is there a difference there? Why does that matter? Why is that important? Well, the Hebrew word there can be translated either way. And so some translations choose to say them because clearly some of these verses are referring to us, to humankind. I mean, when we read it, especially verse 4, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? That's not talking about Jesus. Who is Jesus that you would care about him, that you are mindful of him? Obviously, it's not talking about Jesus. It's us. Who are we that you would care about us? And to this point, just to bring this home, I do like that verse. I'm going to pause here. We're going to get back to him and them. But I like this thought, who am I that you would care for me? Why do I matter to you? I don't know if you've ever experienced someone singling you out in a way that made you feel special. You're like, why are you paying attention to me? Years ago, a few months before I moved to Raleigh, my pastor growing up died. He had had an aortic aneurysm, survived for a few years, developed an infection, and he passed away. He was very old, though. He was about 62, I think. He was too young. And his church had grown pretty significantly, and they had started other churches. So the people who were there were in the thousands. There was so many people who wanted to pay their respects for Pastor Buddy that they had to have a visitation the night before at the church. And the line was over an hour long to talk to the family. And when I got there, I hadn't been going to that church in years. I worked at another church. I grew up with, I grew up at that church and Buddy has three kids, Gabe, Joy, and Spring. Joy's my age. Gabe's a few years older than me. But Gabe and I, we were buddies growing up. We played Goldeneye together. He was my Goldeneye buddy. I don't know if that resonates with any of you. Like four of you, they're like, yes, Goldeneye buddies. But we weren't like super tight. And I really didn't expect to talk to anybody. I was just showing up because I have a lot of respect for Buddy and I love that family. And before I could get in line, I heard Gabe call my name. And I'm like, cool, I get to skip the line, which I love doing. And I go up to Gabe, and he hugs me, and he says, it's such a funny question. He goes, dude, what are you doing? Like, you got anything going on? I'm like, I'm at your dad's visitation, man. This is what I'm doing. You know, like, I didn't say that, but I said, no, I'm not busy. And he goes, come on. And so he leaves the line, and he takes me back to a hospitality room where there's Zaxby's. I'd love to say it was Chick-fil-A. It wasn't. There's Zaxby's. And he sits down, and he just wants to talk with me. And I just remember thinking, why are you talking with me of all these people why do i why am i the one that gets your time why are you treating me like this and in that case i really do think it was because i knew him when we remember growing up we we were at the church running around together we were the ones running around in in the service after it was over before there was thousands of people going there. And I guess nobody else kind of knew the family like I did. But the whole time I'm sitting there, I just felt such privilege of why in the world do you care about talking to me right now? And I feel like that's what the author of Psalms, David, is describing. God, why do you even notice us? Why are you calling me out in a crowd? Why do we matter to you? That should not be something that's lost on us, that God sees us, that he calls our name, and he says, hey, come here, let's talk. That's a remarkable thing. And so back to the he, him, and them. There are some verses that are very clearly talking about humankind, us. But there are some verses that are very clearly talking about Jesus. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You gave him dominion over the works of your hand. You have put all things under his feet. Clearly that's talking about Jesus. And so the question becomes in Psalm chapter 8, in verse 5, is the psalmist talking about us or Jesus? Yes. He's talking about both things. He's talking about both us and Christ. Again, because clearly there are some verses here that could not apply to Christ. Who is Christ that you should consider him? That doesn't really work out. He's part of the Trinity. So that has to be for us. But he has not put everything under our feet. He's put everything under Jesus' feet. So clearly that's for Jesus. And I'll tell you how I know that's for Jesus, because Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews also thought that it was for Jesus. If you turn to Hebrews, you'll see, I forget the chapter. I think maybe I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah, chapter 2. The author of Hebrews is comparing Jesus to the angels, saying that he's superior to the angels. To do that, he quotes Psalm 8 and uses it to point back to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 25 through 27, this is one of the times that you could flip and check me if you're bored and you'd look super spiritual. Paul is talking about Jesus and he's telling the people this is who Jesus is. He's the one that Psalm 8 was referring to. He's the Messiah that we are waiting on. The whole earth is in subjection to him. That is who we serve. And then Jesus himself uses this psalm to prove to a group of Pharisees that he's actually Jesus. He uses it to tick them off, which, you know, I'm a fan of. But this is what he says. Matthew 21 verses 15 and 16. I cheated. I had it marked. So I got there extra fast. Jesus says this, well, this isn't Jesus yet, but he'll talk soon. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. Now they're indignant because for, for someone to declare Hosanna to the Son of David is to declare them the Messiah. It is to declare them God incarnate. And they were not willing to accept that about Jesus. So the children acknowledged who Jesus was before the adults were willing to acknowledge it. They were indignant. Verse 16. And they said to him, Do you hear what these are saying? Like, you need to tell them to be quiet if you have any sense. And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read? Which is hilarious. Have you never read? That's like asking a Tennessee fan if they don't know that they got their tails kicked yesterday. Yes, of course they know that. Of course they do. Have you never read? It's ridiculous. Have you never read? Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise. It is a direct reference to Psalm chapter 8, where Jesus says, yeah, have you not read that Psalm? It's about me. So how can I be sure that Psalm 8 is about us and Jesus? Because Jesus told me. He uses it as a proof text to say, yeah, I am Hosanna, the son of David. And so what this means, what all this means, and I don't want you guys to miss this. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of our God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. That's what's packed into these nine verses. We declare the majesty of God. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We declare God is grand. God is big. God is huge. We declare it along with the churches down through the centuries. We declare glory unto God. We marvel at his wonder for us. Who are we that you should pick us out of a crowd, that you should call us, that you should talk to us, that you should care about us, that you should know us, that you would want my praise. Who am I that I matter to you, God? Why in the world did you send your son for me? So we marvel at God's love as we sing. And then, and then we declared glory for the risen Savior. We shine him in glory, understanding that Psalm 8 is also a messianic psalm that talks about Jesus and declares his glory and puts him in dominion and says the world is under his feet and we are in that world so we are subservient to him. So in this psalm, as we sing it and as we move through it, we declare the glory of God. We wonder at his love for us and we declare the glory of our risen Savior all in those nine verses. And if this all doesn't stir your soul to sing, I can't help but think I must be a terrible pastor. Because as I studied this, as I prepared this morning, as I thought through this, I couldn't wait to sing with you guys. If I were you, I would want me to shut up so I could start singing. That's what I would want right now. And so I'm going to do that right before I do. I just want to show you the words we're about to sing. And I want to show you the verses that they come from. So when we sing this song together, when we, in a few minutes, join the ancient chorus of believers who have been singing this song through the centuries. When we join the churches all over the world who have been singing this song and who might even sing this song or sing from the songs this morning. I want us to know what we're singing. So let's look. The first verse, the first words, O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name. That comes directly out of verse 1. Directly out of verse 1. We're singing that right back to God. And then the words right after that in the song are your glory on display. The works of your hands show us who you are. That's verses 2 and 3. Do you see? That's verses two and three when it says the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. We're singing those words back to God. That's where they're pulled from. On down we see verse three highlighted again where it says, O Lord, our Lord, you light up our world, the sun, moon, and stars. Declare who you are. Declare who you are. And then finally, we see verse 4, and O who am I, unworthy one, that you would give your only son? Who are you to care for me? Amazing love, how can it be? That's where directly out of verse 4, we wonder and marvel at the love that God has for us, that he would notice us and care about us. And then the whole psalm declares the glory of Jesus. Anytime we sing about Jesus, who am I that you would send your only son? That's Jesus. That's who we're singing about. And then we say and we declare, tell the story. As we sing, God use me to tell your story of creation. I would remind you, all of creation was made to tell the story of God and declare praise for him. We're the only part of that creation that was given a voice to praise him. So let's use it together as we close out in these songs together. I'm going to pray and then Aaron and the band's going to come and we're going to sing together. Father, you are worthy of our praise. You are worthy of our adoration. Our words and our praise and our declarations are insufficient for you. They are inadequate for you and who you are. We admit that, God, as we look to sing to you. Lord, would you fill our lungs with praise for you? Would you fill our hearts with your grace and your goodness and your love that we might pour it back out to you? Would what we experience as we sing now not simply be something that makes our Sunday morning better, but will it carry us on a wave of praise into our weeks and maybe wash back up on these shores next week ready to praise again. God, fill our hearts with praise. Fill our hearts with joy. And let us do now, God, what you created us to do, to sing your praises back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. I appreciate you being here on this October Sunday. This is the first Sunday where I'm really seeing a lot of sweaters and flannels, and it's just making me so, so very happy that it's cool weather finally. Nothing in my life requires the temperature to ever be above 70 degrees. So I'm very happy to be in the fall. We are wrapping up our series, as Kyle mentioned earlier, this Sunday called Transformed, where we're talking about God transforming us in different ways. This morning, we're going to be focused on transforming our love from conditional to unconditional love. How do we move from conditional love to being able to offer unconditional love, which is a lot more challenging than we might think at first. And in a way, the next series that we're doing is called The Songs We Sing, and it's one I told you about last week. I'm very excited about it because it's one that we've wanted to do for about two and a half years, I think. I've had it in the kitty. I've wanted to do it. We weren't sure the right time to deploy it, and we felt like this fall was the right time. This is what we want to do. And so it's really going to be a six-week series focused on worship. We're going to look at individual worship songs and where they come from in Scripture, imbue them with not more meaning, but the meaning that they had from the author that wrote them and see them in Scripture so that they can mean more to us and really move through a theology of worship learning why we do it. So I'm very excited for that series, and I hope it will be a very meaningful one in the life of Grace. This Sunday is almost like kind of part one of that. It's a transition between transformed and between the songs we sing because we just sang this song, Reckless Love, the reckless love of God. And that's where we're going to rest today. As we approach the idea, I wanted to share with you an idea about love that I encountered years ago, two, three years ago, and it stuck with me, and it's really, it's kind of transformed the way I think about love, and it definitely helps me as I counsel with couples who are going to get married as I do premarital counseling and all of those things, and you'll see why in a minute. But this idea that was presented to me about love is the concept that we all love with boundaries. We all offer our love with some boundaries around it. I'm going to love this person or this thing, but I'm going to love them within some parameters that I've set up. And if this person or thing ventures outside those parameters, I will no longer love you. I'm going to love this puppy until it goes to the bathroom on my bed. Then that is outside the parameters of love. I no longer love this puppy. That scarred me for my whole life, right? Maybe I wouldn't assume that all of you love me. I think some of you do. Maybe you feel kind thoughts towards me. I would hope that none of you exist in open hostility towards me, but maybe you have some affection for me as your pastor. But if I got up here next week and I told you how to vote next year, some of you would be like, that is outside my bounds of love. I no longer feel those feelings of affection towards you, right? There's plenty of things I could get up here and say that would be outside your boundaries of affection for me. There's things that could come up about stuff in the shadows that you would go, well, that's outside, that behavior is outside the bounds of love that I would have for a pastor, so I'm out. You see, we all love with boundaries. We all love with parameters. And this is just kind of as an aside, something that I always say to the couples that I'm doing premarital counseling with. It's important in our marriages to love with broad borders, big expansive boundaries, because the truth of marriage is people don't stay the same. When you get married, you're not just committing to loving that person that you're married, but you're committed to loving the version of them that unfolds 10 years down the road. When we walk the aisle, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we have children, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we get into our careers, when we start to learn ourselves a little bit more, new hobbies open up and those changes, new desires and passions open up and we evolve as people, or at least we should, and those changes. So even this notion in marriage of looking at your spouse and going, you're not who I married. Yeah, no kidding. This shouldn't be unless you married a real dud. So we love with broad borders and allow the person in our marriage to become whoever they need to become, whoever God designed them to be. And that's the love that we should offer to other people is borders that are broad and wide and generous and gracious where we allow God to work in the lives of these people and we don't set tight parameters of our love around the objects of our love. But you can also make an argument that we love with boundaries because these boundaries protect us. We love with these boundaries because life has taught us to love with boundaries. Because those boundaries protect us from hurt. When love goes unreciprocated, when you care a great deal for someone, and at no point in this for the rest of the day am I talking about a romantic love. I just want to be clear. I'm talking about phileo love, the brotherly love, an affectionate love. If we offer our love and affection to somebody over and over and over again and it goes unreciprocated, then eventually it's going to hurt too much to offer that love and we're going to stop. If we offer someone our love and trust and they betray us and they show us that they're not worthy of our love, enough times eventually it's going to hurt so much to offer it to them that we are going to stop. So we naturally develop these borders around the love that we offer to other people and to other things because after those things have hurt us enough or disappointed us enough, we withdraw our love because it hurts too much to extend it. I have a friend that I've had since high school. Really good buddy of mine. And it's probably four or five years ago now, it kind of came to light that his wife was an addict. She was addicted to pills. And it was profoundly impacting their marriage, obviously. And he, for years, had tried to love her in spite of, and eventually had to let other people in on the struggle that they carried together. And it led to her doing things that were not legal to acquire the things that she felt like she needed. And she became more and more distant from my friend. They together had three kids. She had a daughter from a previous relationship but was so close to my friend that she called him dad. So they ostensibly had four kids together and she was completely absent. And I watched him love her faithfully through that. I watched him think the best of her and hope the best of her. Continue to try to rehabilitate and rejuvenate her. And then the time came when she eventually broke down and she needed to go to rehab and rehab lasted several months for her. And I watched him hold together the pieces of his life, try to raise four kids that ran the gamut in age from elementary school to high school. I watched him try to hold everything together. He's an accountant. He had a really good job and his bosses knew what he was going through, but they had to pull him aside and be like, dude, we're not getting any productivity out of you. You can't do your job well right now. We need you to do better. And they worked with him and they worked with him and he felt the pressure and he felt bad. During the season of life, he and I would talk on the phone two and three times a week. And you could just see him spinning out of control and falling apart at the seams. And eventually his bosses came to him at work and they were like, we hate to do this, but you need to look for another job. Because if you stay here, we're going to have to fire you and we don't want to do that. His life was hard. And then in the middle of this, as she's gotten out of rehab and has started to go to different meetings throughout the week. What I felt was inevitable, unearthed as true, she was unfaithful to him as well with somebody in the rehab group. And even in the face of that reality, my friend continued to love her, continued to hope for her and for them and for their best future. And it was hard to watch. And I began to just gently tell him, it may be time to move away. It may be time to move on for your sake and for the sake of the kids. The language I didn't have was, she's ventured outside of any boundaries that should be required of you. And it may be time to admit that she's never coming back in. And he still couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. Still determined to love her. And one day we were on the phone and he said, man, it feels like I'm just throwing myself against a brick wall. And I get up and I dust myself off and I don't know what to do. And I said, dude, not to make it about me, but he decided it was time to make that decision. And so they separated and eventually divorced. And if you fast forward now, now he's living in the Brady Bunch. He married a lady. I think she has three kids. They have seven kids in this house. And it's nuts, but he's happy and she loves him well. And the whole experience actually brought him back to God. But there are times in life when those boundaries are necessary because they protect us. We offer very little boundless love. I can really only think of two situations where we approach offering limitless love to someone or something. The first is to our children. Most parents have incredibly generous borders around the love for their children, and this is a good model for how God loves us. The other place where we seem to have boundless borders around our love is in our sports fandom. We just, NC State fans, you know this. You know this well. Every year, every year, maybe they'll be good. Maybe they won't disappoint me. Maybe they'll take a step forward. And then they just slam into the brick wall of mediocrity. And what do you do? You get yourself up. You dust yourself off. The next year is going to be different. And here's what's awful. Here's what you do is you impart that on your children masochistically. These people that you love boundlessly, now you parade them to the game with you so it becomes a part of their soul. And now they're Wolfpack fans too. Great. They get to endure a life of pain. And I know this masochism well because Lily's a Georgia Tech fan. And I know that we had a big victory last night. Whoop-dee-doo. Guess what? We're still bad at football, and we're going to be bad at football for decades. We offer very little boundless love in our life. And because we are used to offering our love with boundaries, and we are used to receiving love with boundaries, we understand that when someone shows us affection and love and care, that there's some parameter, there's a fence that we need to stay inside of. We get that concept. Because we give and receive love with boundaries, we assume that God has boundaries too. We assume that there must be some parameters around the love that God offers to me because every other experience of love in my life carries those parameters and I know that I need to stay within them or offer within them, and so God must love me in that same way. And the thing that happens that I've seen being a Christian for as far back as I can remember is that when you're in, when you're in the church, when you've been a long-time Christian, you hear about the boundless and the reckless love of God, and you're like, yes, amen. That's absolutely true. To the sinner out there who's disappointing God with every word, thought, and action that they have, who's so far from God, they come to know him, and they get the good news, the good news of the gospel. Hey, God loves you boundlessly. He loves you recklessly. He loves you with no parameters at all. Just be swept up into that love and ushered into heaven. We love that message. That's a good message. That's the Christian message. That's the miracle of the gospel. The problem is that once we receive that love and feel that love, we move into the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ in character, and we start to disappoint God, and we start to let him down down and we start to return to some of the sins that we employed previously and we slide into and out of fervency, into and out of spiritual attendedness, into and out of faithful pursuit of him. There are times when we run our race well. There are times when we take a breather and we walk and there are times when we just sit down and consider whether or not we want to continue the race at all. And we assume, Christians, that we have ventured outside the parameters of God's love. And the love that he once had for me, he still has, but not as much because I've tainted it. Because I should know better. Because I know what I'm going to go do. I know what I'm planning to go do. I know that if you put me in this situation with this group of people, what I am capable of doing. I know my private heart conditions. I know my prejudices and my biases, and I am not going to be letting those go anytime soon. So God must be disappointed in me. I think that's how most Christians go through their life. To put it more pointedly, if you were God, would you still love you? If you were God in heaven, would you still love you? Let's make you God and me you. And you offered for me the thing that you valued the most in all of your existence, your only son. You sent him and you watched him die for my sake. And I saw that gift and I saw your love and I saw your sacrifice and I saw his suffering, the same suffering that you watched and I I said, thanks for that. And I put it in my back pocket. And then for the rest of my days, I lived as if that weren't true. I lived outside of gratitude for it. I did whatever I wanted. You said, I'm doing this for you. Let me be the Lord of my life and I'll give you the best life possible. And I said, I'm going to accept your eternal life. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, save it for a rainy day. And I I'm actually gonna choose my version of a good life because I think I know what it is better than yours. Yours seems lame and boring. Mine is super awesome and fun. So I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And every now and again, I'm gonna lean towards Jesus. I'm gonna make it look to everyone around me like I've got my act together and I'm doing the right things and I read my Bible and I pray and I make wise choices. But you and I both know that I'm really not living under your lordship at all. But at the end of my life, when it comes time, I'm gonna pull out that card and be like, so I get in, right? Would you still love me? If that was my attitude towards your gift? There's a reason that most of us feel like God is disappointed in us. There's a reason why when I ask a question like, if God still loves you, if you were God, would you still love you? And it's because we've been programmed to assume that God's love works the same way ours does. That there's parameters, there's borders, that there's a limit. But thank God that this human God, this God that loves like a person, is not the God at all that's described in Scripture. Thank God that the God in Scripture is described as offering a love that is utterly impossible for us and unknown to us outside of knowing him. And I'm going to read some scriptures and go through and show you this never-ending reckless love of God from scripture. But as I do that, the temptation, I believe, for us Christians in the room is to say, I know that. Yeah, I know God loves me no matter what. I get it. He loves me no matter what. He loves me recklessly. He loves me to the end of the earth. He removes my sins as far as the east is from the west. Some of you can probably guess the verses that I'm going to use. I know God loves me. Yeah. Listen. You know God loves you here. But when's the last time you felt God's love here? We know intellectually he loves us. Do we walk filled with the love of God through our days and offering that freely and graciously to others? Do we live out that verse from his goodness? We have all received grace upon grace. The initial grace is God's And from his fullness, we receive that and we spill it out onto others. Do you walk through your days knowing here, deep in your soul, that God loves you and it's the only love that you ever need and you can stop chasing it in other places because he is all sufficient for you? Do you walk in a heart knowledge of God's relentless love of you? I don't. I know I don't. Because every now and again I do. And when I do, those days are different. When I walk with a soul knowledge that I am loved by the creator God, that he finds no fault in me because of his son, I'm a better husband, I'll tell you that. I'm a more patient father. I'm a more gracious friend. I'm a more diligent pastor. I'm a much more patient driver. Do you go through your days with some sort of mental assent that yes, there's a God and he loves me? Or do you go through your days feeling it beat in your chest and in your soul that God loves you deeply and there's nothing you can ever do to change that? So as I go through these verses, don't be the pious Christian that gives intellectual assent to what I'm going to say, but let God's love rest on your soul this morning. That you might know and accept and walk in the fact that you are loved deeply by your creator. This is what he says in Jeremiah 31.3. I've just got a list of passages here that I want you to hear this morning. The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Now he's speaking here in Jeremiah to God's people, to the Israelites, but we know that if we are Christians, if we profess a faith in Christ, then we are God's people too. And so this verse, and God's love applies to us, he loves us in an everlasting way. And so he remains faithful to us. Nehemiah says, back in the desert when you freed us from slavery and we were wandering around for those 40 years, we trampled on you. We rejected you. You gave us manna every day and we didn't care. You gave us laws and we didn't want them. You gave us provision and we didn't care for it. We wanted to actually go back to Egypt and worship their gods. We stubbed our, I don't know the right phrase. We snubbed our nose at you. Is that a thing? We refused your help. And by all rights, you should have rejected us. But you didn't. Because you're slow to anger and you're abounding in steadfast love and mercy. And he did not forsake them. And then John writes at the end of his life, 1 John chapter 4. Your notes have 9 through 11, but the first three words are from verse 8. God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. I mentioned the sacrifice of Christ earlier. That is the picture of love. That is love literally becoming flesh and suffering for us, with us, to bring us with him into eternal not suffering. And he leads off this section, John does, by saying God is love. He is the personification of love. You cannot think of pure love and be thinking not of God. Any person who's ever existed without a knowledge of God, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, when they think of love, when they feel love, they are thinking of God, they are feeling God, even if they don't realize it because God is love. He is found in that emotion. He is found in that desire and in that affection. God claims to be love itself. And if that's true, then I would like for you to allow me the license to reword Paul's famous poem on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If we replace the word love, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, does not boast. If we replace that with God, because God is love, then it reads like this and resonates with me. God is patient. God is kind. He does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. He does not dishonor others. God is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails. That's the love that your God offers to you. He loves you with an everlasting love. And because of that, he is steadfast in his faithfulness to you, even when you are unfaithful to him. He always persists. He always hopes in you. He never fails you. He keeps no record of your wrongs. We sing that song right before the sermon, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. And it's funny to me, when that song first came out, there was debate in theological circles because theological circles like to have stupid debates to justify their existence. And there was a school of thought that the recklessness there was that shouldn't be in a worship song. We shouldn't attribute that to God. That's a negative thing. That means he's foolhardy. It's some sort of error that he's making in loving us. And I always thought that was absurd. God's love is reckless because he loves with no regard for himself. God's love for you is reckless because he's the only entity in eternity that can love with a boundless love with no parameters to protect himself. God will slam against the wall of your apathy over and over and over again for your entire life and get himself up and dust himself off and heal himself up and chase after you again. And eventually, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to Kool-Aid man through that brick wall of yours. He's going to get you. But in the meantime, he's going to keep coming. And our sin and our obstinance and our apathy can keep holding him at bay, but he's not going to stop following you. He's not going to stop pursuing you. He's not going to stop chasing you. You're not going to hurt him enough that he has to withdraw and retract and say, I just can't do it. It hurts too much to continue to love her. He's just going to keep coming because that's the love of God. I've gotten into this habit recently that I would honestly highly recommend for my Bible readers. When it's time for my reading time in the morning, I've started trying to figure out what's the thing I'm feeling or thinking about the most right now. And then I read the book of the Bible that I feel like most aligns with that. If the book's short enough, I just read the whole thing. And so this morning, knowing that I was preaching about this, I sat down to read Hosea. Some of my scholars in the room know that that's what the whole book of Hosea is about. An overview of the book of Hosea is there's a prophet, I bet you can guess his name, and he is told by God to go marry a lady of the night named Gomer, which could there be a more tempting name for a lady of the night than Gomer? God says, I want you to go marry her. I want you to make her an honest woman. Go pay the bride price, and I want you to marry her. And your marriage to her is to be a picture, is to be a picture of my marriage to Israel that has gone and been unfaithful to me and cheated on me with other gods and with other priorities and yet I'm still choosing them. So you're gonna go marry her as a picture for how I love you. They got married, They had three kids. After they had three kids, she left and she went back to her old ways. Because I think when you're in a lifestyle like that or others like that, that it's difficult to always fully depart from them. She went back to her old ways. And God said, Hosea, go pay her bride price and marry her again. And he did it. And then she left him again and he went and got her again. And the whole book is a picture of God's love for Israel, God's love for you and me. So I sat down to reread it this morning and I didn't even get through, I didn't even get it past the second chapter because in the second chapter we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids, yeah, it's the first chapter. Because in the second chapter, we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids. Yeah, it's the first chapter. She has the kids and God, whenever she gets pregnant, God tells Hosea what to name the child. And I don't remember the actual names. One is just real. I don't remember the rest. But the first name of the first child meant not my people. And he said, you're going to name your child not my people because Israel, not Judah, Israel has betrayed me. Israel has talked and acted and walked and thought as if they don't want to be my children, as if they don't care to be my people, so now they no longer will be my people. So you will name your first child as assigned to Israel, not my people. You will name your second child as assigned to Israel, not my God, because in word and thought and action, they have betrayed me as their God. They no longer want me as their God, so I'm going to grant them their wish. You name your second child, not my God. The third child, I want you to name no mercy, because through their words and through the thoughts and through their deeds, they do not want my mercy anymore. So name the child no mercy, for I will not show them mercy. And as you read it, you think, this makes sense. I know this love. I understand this judgment. I get this reciprocity. I offered myself to you. I made you my people. You acted as if you didn't want to be my people. Eventually, you're not. I made myself your God. You acted like you wanted other gods to worship Baal or whatever else. So eventually, I'm not your God. I offered you mercy. You said, no thanks, we don't need your mercy. Fine, I'm not going to offer you my mercy. And then you read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is this long poem. And in it, he details the unfaithfulness of his bride, Israel. And then all the things that he was doing behind the scenes to provide for her, care for her, love for her, that she didn't realize. And then ultimately, she still spat on him and who he was. But even after that, chapter two ends with this verse. It just sat me down right there in my seat. It just blew me back. Even after that, after Israel does nothing, they have not apologized. They have not looked at the example of Hosea and been like, oh no, what do we do? They are not repentant. They are not sorry. They have not come back to God at all. And in the midst of that, God says this, and I will have mercy on no mercy. And I will say to not my people, you are my people. And he shall say, you are my God. Even after not repenting, even after continuing to stomp on the love of God, continuing to betray it in word and in thought and in action, and reject it in word and thought and action, God says to those people, I am your God, you are my people, and I will show you mercy. And he says that to us. His love is overwhelming and never-ending and reckless. And he pursues you. And I don't want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because here's what happens when you feel it and you walk as if you're loved by God. God's reckless love creates a protective sanctuary from which we are able to offer boundless love as well. How do we transform, transition from offering conditional love to unconditional love? By walking in the deep heart knowledge of the boundless love that Creator God has for us. When you can walk with it here, you can offer it everywhere. Reject me as many times as you like, brother. Creator God loves me. I don't need yours anyways. Say whatever you want to say about me. Betray my trust as many times as you need to before I wear you down and before you accept this love too because God loves me. I don't really need yours. I'm loving you for you. If we want to be transformed from offering human conditional love with boundaries to offering divine, holy, Jesus-enabled and Holy Spirit-inspired love to others, then what we must do is walk in a deep knowledge of the reckless love that God offers to us. I hope you'll go from this place and do that. Let's pray. God, every time I pray, personally or corporately, I pray that I or we love you. And we do. You know that we do. We're just not good at it. So God, would you make us better? And God, would the only effort that we make towards loving you and others more, would the only effort that we make towards that be? To attempt to live in a knowledge that we are loved recklessly and endlessly by you. Would that reality transform our lives, our hearts, how we love, how we live? God, we thank you for your son, the personification of your love, the embodiment of your love, and how he was poured out for us. God, I pray that we would leave this room more certain that you love us, feeling more deeply what your love means than we did when we came in here today. Help us receive and offer your reckless love, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, and happy pumpkin spice latte season. It is truly the most wonderful time of the year. All the smells, all the fragrance. I'm even wearing my fall colors today. Maybe, I don't know. My wife was asleep when I left, so there's a very good possibility I don't match right now and have no clue. But I'm so glad that you decided to join us today. My name is Aaron, and I get to serve as the worship pastor out here, and I'm so excited to share with you, honestly, something that's been on my heart for the last couple of years. I think around the end of 2020, this really started to just burden me a little bit. And to kind of set up and get our mind going in the right direction, have you ever considered how to navigate the tension of opposing desires within yourself, right? Like, have you ever considered how to navigate a pull in a couple of different directions, specifically around this topic today of compassion? Because I don't think it's possible for anyone to really say, oh, you know what? I'm nailing the compassion game. I have the perfect amount of compassion, unless you don't like dogs. Then, clearly, you today is for you very specifically. Like, no one would say that. If you are, like, you would probably be the person who tries to convince me that, like, the devil didn't get to make cats. That's just not true. I'm joking. My goodness, it got serious. Like he doesn't like cats. It's better than not liking puppies, okay? That's a, no, like all of us would agree. I want to be a more compassionate person. I want to be a person who is kind. I want to be a person that whenever people see me, they see someone who loves well, who they can come to and will understand what it is that will meet the needs of the people who they love. All of us would want to do that. Even if you are a compassionate person, what that's going to do is push you further into compassion and say, you know what, I really could be a little bit more compassionate. And the tension that we feel is today, one of the things that our world really reiterates is this self-focused lifestyle, right? Like self-care, self-love, self-appreciation, self-forgiveness, self... And listen, that's not bad. I love all of those things. I think there's a time and place for all of... I had a membership at one point to a place on Falls. It's called the Float Spa Therapy. Have you ever heard of that? Me either, until I saw it, and I found out that what they do is they put you in a room, stick you in a dark bubble, and you float in salt water. I cannot tell you if it is either a spa or therapy, but I can tell you, you don't have to see the world for an hour, and it is wonderful, right? Like all of this idea, just this stuff, I don't do that anymore because I realized there's other ways to do that. But like there's this pull towards self, and that's a good thing. That's not bad until we become so focused on self-care. We become so focused on self-love that the people around us, the people that God has placed in our life for us to love well, well, they become the problem. They become a challenge. They become a hurdle in my route to taking care of me. And there's the tension. It's good to love yourself well, but we can't forget what Paul said to the church at Philippians. In Philippians 2, he said, do this, do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, consider yourselves more important than others. I'm sorry, consider others more important than yourselves. So I'm going to go back and start over because really what I want to talk about today, nobody else matters. It's all about you, right? So no, consider others more important. Reading's tough. So consider others as more important than yourselves. Next slide. Everyone should not look to his own interest, but rather to the interests of others. And that's the tension that we feel, that we want to live a life that cares for people. But what do you do when people become the problem? When people get in the way? And this is especially true if you're a Christian, right? Not because you're better than anyone else, not because you think you're better than anyone else, or because you're trying to be better than anyone else, but it's because of the example set by Jesus, by the guy who we've devoted our lives to, by the guy who we've said we want to try to become more and more like him. Jesus lived a life that was marked by compassion. I don't remember who's, I think maybe Andy Stanley said this. I can't quite remember. It sounds like something he would say. He said that people who were nothing like Jesus actually liked Jesus. And it's because he lived this life that they knew that he cared for them. It didn't matter their socioeconomic status. It didn't matter their religious beliefs, their political affiliation. It didn't matter if they did the right thing or the wrong thing. It didn't matter what the case was. There was even laws, religious laws set into place that would prevent you from reaching certain people. In Jesus, it didn't matter. Everyone felt cared for. Everyone felt loved. And if you're a Christian, the reason why you feel this tension so strong is because the Holy Spirit is inside prompting you, pushing you, urging you toward this Jesus type of compassion. So what do you do in those moments? Like, what do you do when you're being pulled in a couple of different directions? Like, one of the most remarkable moments that you can see about in Jesus, because he was a real man. He was fully God, but he was also fully man with real emotions, the same emotions that you and I feel, with the same temptations that you and I have. And one of the most remarkable examples that I could have read about with Jesus, we'll read about today in Mark 6. If you've been around the church very long at all, you've heard this story before. It's the story when Jesus fed the 5,000, the text says 5,000 men, but more likely it was 15,000, including women or children. But as I was studying for this, I noticed something in this text that I believe it changes everything. And it shows us in that moment, in that tension, it's what Jesus does to lift the value of others, to care for their needs. To kind of set up the scene, we're at about the third year of Jesus's ministry. He's been going pretty nonstop, him and his disciples, day after day. There's been a few breaks in between, but the mental and physical exhaustion had to be there, had to be present. And his disciples just got back from a ministry trip. And so what he said to them is, hey guys, let's go and let's rest for a while. Not just was he dealing with the mental and physical exhaustion, but he had also just learned about the death of his cousin, John the Baptist. And it wasn't just any death. He was murdered because of a girl's birthday wish. How awkward of a party would that be, right? Like blow out the candles, what you want? That guy. But that's what happened. And so we've dealt with grief before, but that's, can we just admit that's a different level of grief? And so Jesus is dealing with the murder of his cousin. And not only that, but his disciples, a lot of them had followed John the Baptist in the past. They all loved him. They were mentally and physically exhausted, and they were certainly grieving. And Jesus told his disciples, let's get away for a little bit. Let's just go. Let's rest, and we'll get back to work. But while they were en route, people saw where they were headed. And this is what happened. In Mark 6, verse 32, it says this. So they went away, that's Jesus and their disciples. So they went away in the boat by themselves to a remote place, but many saw them leaving and recognized them. They ran on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. When he went to shore, he saw a large crowd. Let me ask real quick, like, how would you respond in that moment? Right? Like, so Jesus, certainly grieving, likely exhausted, he just wants to get away for a little bit. And he has every right to do so. How would you respond? I know what I would say, but he's Jesus. He can't say stuff like that, right? I bet Peter right next to him said it though. Like, what would you do? So something I'm very aware of in my life that I'm trying to work on. On Sunday mornings, man, I can have a tendency to come across more rude than I am, right? It's because I'm focused. Like I'm focused on the Sunday morning, focused on worship. I'm trying to make sure all the volunteers have everything they need, and just really kind of focused on leading worship well. And sometimes I'm just unaware of people. And my sister came down for a visit a few years ago, and I remember she visited church on Sunday and went to my wife. She said, hey, did I make Aaron mad at me? Is he okay? And she's like, no, no, no, no. No, it's just Sunday morning. Just come back in the afternoon, which that wasn't true because I'm even more ferocious about my nap than Sunday afternoon. I'm like a toddler when it comes to nap time, right? Like Sunday morning, I'm just oblivious and unaware of people. Sunday afternoon, I will fight you if you interrupt Sunday. Like fall, best season. Sunday afternoon, best nap time, right? And so it's just one of those things. I'm unaware of people. And I'm talking about a Sunday morning stress, right? Very nominal, right? But Jesus, in this moment, he had every right to say, hey, guys, I just need a second. Like this is one of those head down moments like, okay, let me try to figure this out. Can I have just a couple of minutes, guys? Hey, just a couple of days. Hey, listen, I know you guys heard about what's happening to John. I know you need something from me. If I can have just a few minutes, we'll be back around through time. Like there's, he's certainly right to do that. But in this moment, he sees something different. He sees something that causes a different type of reaction. In a moment when Jesus is sitting in that tension, I need to take a moment for me. I need to take a moment for my guys. These people need something from me. He's face to face with the people he has been placed here to love well. And he sees something that gives him a different reaction. In verse 34, it says this. When he went ashore, he saw a large crowd and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Then he began to teach them many things. They were like, Jesus, in a moment when he had every right to say, guys, just time out. Need a couple of days. He saw their from their perspective, and it moved him with compassion. Jesus looked at them and felt the pain that they were feeling because he saw life through their lens. Sharing in their perspective caused Jesus to share in their pain. That's what the word perspective, or I'm sorry, that's the word compassion means. It means to suffer with, to pain with, to feel the pain of someone. And it is not possible, it is not possible to feel the pain of someone else while viewing their circumstances through your perspective. Jesus stops. He sees life from their lens and it burdens his heart. I love the word that Mark uses here for the word compassion. It's only used of Jesus throughout the New Testament, but it refers to the internal organs, which was believed to be the seat of the emotions. And so what Mark says here is he saw these guys, and there was such a deep hurt. There was such a longing for them. He shared their passion, and he moved into action. If we can learn to see life through the lens of other people, it will soften your heart towards their circumstances. And circumstances doesn't just mean feeding the hungry. It doesn't just mean giving to the poor. Compassion changes the way you approach things. It changes the way you approach your husband. It changes the way you approach your wife. Compassion restrains your anger. Compassion offers forgiveness. Compassion gives gentleness. Compassion seeks mercy and understanding and walks with people. If we can learn to view life through the lens of other people, what we'll start to see happening is we don't see people as someone we have to walk around. We see people as someone we have to walk with because we share in their pain. Is there someone in your life that maybe we need to seek their perspective a little bit? Let's just admit Jesus had a bit of an advantage there, right? Like Jesus understands people the way, like you have never met someone new for the very first time and told them exactly where they were and what they were thinking two hours before, at least not without a restraining order soon following that, right? Jesus Jesus has an advantage. Like, we've got to go the old-fashioned way. We have to ask questions. We have to seek. We have to consider. Like, how much would it change the way you're feeling in a moment if we were to think about something through someone else's lens? I tried to think about a clever illustration here just to kind of illustrate this point. I thought of several, none of which I'm going to use. Because you've lived this illustration. Like every person in here, at some point in time, has said some variation of this sentence. If they only understood, if they only saw, what just happened? If they could only see how I'm feeling, if they only understood how I was thinking, if they only understood what kind of day I had at work, they would not approach me like, if they only saw this, then they wouldn't feel that like we have all at some point in time realized that if someone else could see through our perspective, it would change the way that they're approaching us. It would change the anger in the situation. It would change everything. It would offer compassion that leads to the things that we crave the most. Reconciliation, hope, peace, love. Because Jesus felt such a pain that it moved him into action. I love what St. Augustine said here. He says, what is compassion but a kind of fellow feeling in our hearts for another's misery which compels us to come to his help by every means in our power? Compassion, especially the compassion that we see in Jesus, is never just a feeling by itself. It's such an understanding and such a sharing of the pain that it moves us. Compassion, Christ-like compassion, is both a feeling and the appropriate action. The goal of compassion isn't to find agreeance that someone's right and someone's wrong, that they need this, and I just do whatever anybody wants me to do. That's not the goal of compassion. The goal of compassion is understanding. The goal of compassion is to sympathize with, to feel the pain of, because it changes everything. It burdens your heart to where sitting still just doesn't make sense. Is there someone in your life whose perspective we need to take a moment and seek? If you don't know where that may be, my suggestion and what I would encourage you to do is to lean into the tension. When you feel that tension again, when you feel the tension that says, I just don't have the capacity right now. I just don't have the energy. I just don't have the time. I just don't have the resources. Hey, I just need a minute. What I believe will happen is the Holy Spirit will tug and say, hey, well, is it possible that this is the moment you should ask a question? You should consider perspective because it burdens you. It burdens your heart and it leads you to a place of action. Let me pray for us. God, thank you. Thank you so much for all that you are, for your love, for your grace. Father, I thank you for how you have, I don't know, Lord, just met us with compassion. I thank you for how you have given us this example of how when we pursue you, it will lead us to pursuing life through the lens of other people, Lord. I just ask that your spirit would guide us, would help us, would move us to slow down, to stop and just consider, is there something I'm not seeing here? Is there something that I can do that will begin to ease the anger, ease the frustration, ease the apathy towards a situation. God, is there something that I can do here to more accurately reflect the compassion that you have shown us? We thank you, Lord. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate again, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You came on the perfect Sunday to meet people. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So after this, we go to that parking lot there and we just kind of celebrate God and his goodness, reflect on the year that we've had. This is something that we do every year. We call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. So it would be dishonest to call it the annual Hootenanny. And we care about honesty here. So it's this sometimes annual Hootenanny. And I hope that you'll stick around and talk to some folks and say, hey, and again, if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. This morning is going to look a little different. You can see I'm going to be talking to a couple of different folks within the church this morning about service and about volunteering. One of the things that we realized, I guess it was in August, I was talking with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, and we realized that we hadn't highlighted service at Grace and volunteering at Grace in a really long time. And we said, it's high time we do this. And then we thought, well, how do we want to do it? Normally, you just preach a sermon about serving and servanthood. And God wanted us to partner with the local church and things like that. And I would bet 75% of you could predict most of the things that I would say in that kind of a sermon. And because of that, and also because I'm always looking for ways to get other voices up here and in front of the church so that we can hear from one another and learn from one another, we thought it would be good and interesting to do this kind of like Ministry Partner Sunday. So in the summer, we have Ministry Partner Sunday where we highlight the different ministry partners that we have outside the walls of the church, and I'll bring them up and talk to them about what they do. And so we thought we would do that with some of our volunteers this morning. Before we do that, just to kind of set up the conversation to set you guys up as you consider your role at Grace or any local church, I did have some thoughts from 1 Corinthians. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. I'm going to start in verse 18. The idea of the church being a body is all over scripture. It's all throughout, particularly the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul. And there's some seminal passages where he talks about this, but this or Romans are probably the two, and this has a little bit more detail. So in chapter 12, Paul is detailing the spiritual gifts. He talks about this idea that God has given each of us gifts that we are to use in his kingdom. One of the verses I highlight often and say to you guys often is Ephesians 2.10, where it says that we are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we should walk in them. And so the idea is that as we live the Christian life, we are trying to determine, God, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What do you have for me to do and to walk in? And so that ties in here in this idea that we're all part of a body. We all have a part to play. We all have a role to fill. We all have something to do. And so it's incumbent upon us to figure out what that is. This is what Paul says. But as it is, he's just talked about the body and the ear needs the eyes and the eyes need the feet and the feet needs the hands and none of them can exist without the other. And then he says, but as it is in verse 18, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them as he says, of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor. I love this passage, particularly as a pastor, because I addressed this a few weeks ago, I think when we were talking about Hebrews in August. But we can make pastors more important than they should be, more valuable to the church than they really are. We can start to feel like staff, the people who work here, we're the most important people, and everybody else is kind of auxiliary, and they're helping. I know that when I grew up in my church, I kind of sensed that. And it's really important for me to point out, as often as I can, in God's kingdom, nobody's more important than anybody else. Nobody plays a more crucial role than anybody else. Leaders are to have a higher degree of accountability because it's our job to teach truth. But that's not a higher value in God's kingdom. And so I believe in grace. All of our partners are equally valuable. Everything we do is equally valuable in God's kingdom and in God's eyes. And so you can't, there's some, sometimes there are people who serve behind the scenes and I will get from them that they don't, that they feel like what they do is kind of small potatoes and it's not. It's hugely important. Everything that we do as the body of Christ is hugely important and matters in eternity and matters to God and is valued by God. Because of that, I wanted us to hear from different portions of our body that play different parts and different roles, and maybe we can relate to some of them. Maybe we'll be inspired to serve. We all have this sheet in our seat, and I'll be going through this at the end of the sermon time today. But I wanted us to hear from people in the church who serve and kind of get to know them a little bit. I felt like it was appropriate on Hootenanny Sunday because we're going out to talk and to be communal and to be a family. So this is kind of a family meeting this morning. Mike and Holly, if you guys want to go ahead and make your way up here and grab that microphone. Oh, you have it? Okay. Is there a microphone over there? There it is. Okay, good. I wanted you guys to hear from parts of the body as well. These are Mike and Holly. This is Mike and Holly Anderson. Just to kind of... I want to say wet your whistle a little bit, but that feels like I don't want to say that. Just at the Hootenanny, ask Mike and Holly what their email names are for each other, okay? I'm just going to, I learned that when they first started coming here. We met for lunch, and I saw what their email names were for each other, and they're great. So ask them what they are. I'm not going to say them from stage because there's children in the room, but just ask them what they are. Mike and Holly, you guys have been coming to Grace for how long? Two and a half. Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And in what capacity do you guys serve? So we fill your tummies every Sunday with yum, warm, yummy coffee. That's what we do. And what made you guys decide that we want to do coffee every Sunday? Because they literally do it every Sunday. I'm like, we can get you extra help. They're like, we're good. We like it. We'll do it every Sunday. So what made you decide, let's get involved, and let's get involved at the coffee level? Okay, so my wife and I, we own our own businesses. so we have an opportunity to do every year, like you do in corporate America, is we do a goal-setting session. And so we go through all of our business plans and all of our personal plans about what we want to get accomplished. And so we usually do that the end of November, early December, every year. And so the year that we were doing this, our personal plans was how do we invest more time, resources, money to Grace? That's kind of where we were. And this was our first. We were eight months, nine months into Grace at that point in time. And just trying to figure out where can we get plugged in? What can we do? How can we get more involved? Small group is definitely something we had just started. And we wanted to figure out how to get further more engaged and so the sunday of after setting those sessions on um that service was all about not being a consumer of grace and how do you be more of a provider as a partner and it really hit it hit us real quick and we shot nate a quick email you guys were just you were just leeching off the the system. We were just little leeching. Yeah, you were dead weight. And so we had lunch with Nate and we said, how can we help? What do we, we want to get plugged in somewhere somehow. And he tried to put us back there in that big old booth back there. And we know nothing about that booth. So we weren't going down that road. And so coffee, obviously with COVID and being very sensitive to what was going on in the world. We thought, you know, that would be a great way for us to kind of really get plugged in and start that back up and really move on. So we just kind of jumped on it and went from there. Now, tell me, Holly, I think it's helpful to get a little bit of y'all's background. Not like, how'd you meet? Not that, but you guys met doing a similar job, and I think that the job that you did contributes to how you guys approach how you do coffee. So what did you do when you met, and how does that help what you do here? Yeah, sure. So Mike and I met. We did sports tourism industry for a long time, so the hospitality industry. We worked for convention and visitors bureaus, and it's all about hospitality and service. And we approach everything in our life like that, our new career now. So we expect a high-level, high-touch service. And so it's the little things, like writing the messages on the cups and having a flavor of the month in creamer. So we never go here. We're always, like, way over the edge, sometimes too much. But it comes from our past and how we met and just high-touch customer service, and we wanted to bring just our love of that to the people that we love here at Grace. Yeah, and that's why you guys are discovering in real time right now that you're going to be planning the golf tournament for us in the spring when we do that. We've both done that before. They're perfect for it. And so they take their professional background and they apply it to coffee. Now, coffee is underwhelming. That is a small thing compared to what you normally organize. But one of the things I noticed right away is the writing on the cups. I don't know if you guys have noticed the writing on the cups, but we don't buy them like that. They do it. And which one of you does it? Mike does it. I have the worst handwriting ever. That's his penmanship on the cups. And I saw him back there this morning. He's got a note on his phone where he's typed up the little messages that he's brainstormed, and then he's just alternating as he's writing those on your cups, just bringing a little bit extra to it every Sunday morning. How have you guys, it's a combo question, so answer it however you like. How have you guys personally benefited from getting to do that for now, close to a year and a half, almost two years? And then most importantly, how have you watched God work to use that bit of service to bring you closer to him? Yeah, we kind of talked about how those kind of coincided, we felt like. And I think so much of it is we love coming here. We love sitting in this building with people that we've just really grown to see as family and friends. And it's been cool in the short amount of time we've been here. And so there's a selfish part of it that's like, I have to get up and go. Like, if I just want to put my PJs on and have coffee and watch Nate for my house, even though he'll give me business about it later, I at least, like, I can't even think that way, right? Like, I know that I have a reason to be here. So there's that selfish reason of I know I have to be because I've committed, but it's also because we want to be here. So I think it's helped that, and it's just helped plug us in. Like, just being here in the morning, I think we've gotten to know, you know, you guys and staff better, which has been really cool, but also the people that serve, too, and really get to see what it takes to make this all happen on Sunday. And it's been really, you know, really neat. We were talking that the church that I was most involved with when I was a little kid and my family was really involved. This is the first time as an adult that I've been plugged in. And it has just felt like the most perfect place. I call my mom all the time and I'm like, I can't believe God brought us here. This is just, it's perfect and amazing. And what I've been looking for for a long time. So That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. Well, we're grateful to you guys for serving. We're grateful to you for planning the golf tournament. And it'll be in the end of April. And we're grateful for the coffee. But if you want to sign up for coffee, they've agreed to relinquish some rights for Sunday mornings. So if you want to partner with them and help or just give them some reprieve and do coffee with them, we would love for you to do that. Now, you've got to rise to their standards, okay? They're tough bosses, but we can still use some help there if that's something you guys want to do. Thanks so much. I'm going to call up Jacob and Elena Farmer. Where are they? Okay. Jacob and Elena are so committed that they drove straight from the beach this morning to be here to do this. Is that true? Yesterday. Yesterday. Oh, yeah, because their dog got a little bit of a struggle. There you go. They've been in here for two weeks. Elena couldn't be less interested in being on the stage right now. I couldn't believe. I knew that Jacob would be game. Jacob's fine. But I couldn't believe. I was like, if Elena wants to do it, I think people would benefit. And I knew that you were going to be like, no, not a chance. And then Jacob said, yeah, we'll be there. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ask any questions. I didn't ask permission. Yeah, sure. Sure. So, um, a little bit of background on them and I didn't have time, nor did I think it was appropriate and sure service, but it would have been fun. Jacob is a huge birdwatcher. So if you like birds, talk to Jacob at the hootenanny and he will love to talk to you about it. I know. And I almost, I wanted to do a slideshow of birds and see if you could identify them, but maybe another time, maybe another time. But after they had been going here a while, Jacob and I got lunch and he told me a little bit about his background, and he kind of let it slip that he could play guitar, that he could lead worship. And whenever, in my position, you hear that someone's musically talented, you kind of go, okay, you want to get involved? I mean, that's a high skill position. That's pretty tough. But I kind of told him, like, I'm not going to tell Aaron. I'm just going to let you sit on it. You let us know when you're ready. And so Jacob's story, and it's one of the reasons I wanted you all to hear from him, is I'm kind of, I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. He had done it a lot, gotten burned out, found a new place, and wasn't sure when he wanted to re-engage and if he even trusted doing that. And so I thought his perspective on why you decided to like, yeah, let's go ahead and sign back up and play guitar and all that stuff. So if you kind of want to fill in the blanks there for that story, that's great. Yeah, sure. So, um, yes, long story short, I've been in praise and worship since seventh grade. So whatever, whatever age that is, 13, um, got burned out. I mean, every, every church I was involved with was a, was a plant we were tearing up, sitting down every Sunday. We were serving multiple roles. Um, and then adding onto that, I kind of got burned a little bit at church as well. So I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth. And we were out of church for a long time. And I was not playing for a long time. In fact, I think the first thing I told Aaron was I probably haven't played in a band setting in close to 10 years. So we can tell, but you're getting there. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my first practice Aaron, Aaron's like, yeah, come, come, come sit in. And then he's like, Oh, see you Sunday. I'm like, Oh, that wasn't at all talked about. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so for me, I guess leading up to it as a series of things, my wife dragging me here into church when I was stubbornly not wanting to be here, her volunteering to serve initially in the children's ministry, you know, just all these things that were poking me. My parents, my dad actually had been borrowing my guitar for over a year, and he brought it back to me at the beach vacation last year in September. And he's like, I think you're going to need this. And so everyone around me was seeing the writing on the wall, and I was feeling kind of the tug on my heart. And I think our conversation, which I was intentionally coming here and hiding. I didn't want to be known. I wanted to be unknown. Because the second you find out, you play guitar. That's right. Yeah, a need. Right. Um, so I was, I mean, and that was impacting my ability to connect. Um, I was, I mean, I think you even made the comments like, Hey, you've been like here for a year or more and I don't know a thing about you. I think that's how you preface like, let's get lunch. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there was something else you said at lunch, um, that I think it was a week later. I talked to Aaron after service and I'm going to paraphrase it. And you probably said it much more eloquently than I'm going to do. Basically, basically you said you want grace to be a place to heal, but not hide somewhere along those lines. No, that's better than I would say. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to actually, and that was just like the final like stab of like, okay, you're, you're hiding you know, you're healed. You there's, there's writing all on the wall that you need to jump back into this. And so that was, you know, the series of events that led up to me jumping back into worship. But I think a couple months before that, I had worked as an usher a couple times, kind of dipped my toe back into the service realm. Yeah. Yeah. And, Miss Elena, in what ways do you volunteer here? This is active service for her to be here right now. Yes. Yes. Right this second is how she's doing it. I volunteer with the kids ministry. Yeah. Yeah. Elena does a kids' men, but we're going to bring up Shane and Carter to talk about that. You don't have to talk about kids' men. We don't even care about that. That's what on my notes are. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I want your notes, but I also, one of the reasons that I think her perspective is so great is because if you are also a person who would literally hate to be sitting where she's sitting and having me talking about you right now, like my wife, Jen, everybody look at Jen. She hates this moment. Like if that's you, sometimes it feels like you got to be out front or whatever. And like you don't. Elena, she's remarkably crafty and creative. And so, yes, yes. And so two summers ago, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings with this, but two summers ago, the Summer Extreme theme was Under the Sea. Is that right? And every week, every year, the week before Summer Extreme, the Sunday before, we decorate, and then we kind of add to it throughout the week, and then we do the stage. And when we did Under the Sea, I walked through here the Monday after they got done decorating and was like, who'd we hire? Like, what happened? Like, anybody who comes every year knows that was amazing. And they were like, Elena Farmer. And, like, she started coming. I was like, this was her idea? And so then we got her going on Summer Extreme for this year. Last year, I didn't even know she was going to do this. I don't know if you all remember, but the Christmas theme was Not Home Alone. And it's kind of a Home Alone feel. She did the auditorium in Home Alone stuff. There was paint buckets, and there was a war map on the drum thing. I didn't even know she was going to do it. I just showed up, and it was done. So quietly behind the scenes, she's using this gift and this skill to make the church better. And she's able to do it without ever having to do this or even get any public feedback for it. And then she's already working on the theme for next year's Summer Extreme, I heard. So we're excited about that. But, yeah, when you guys started coming, you jumped in pretty much right away, just kind of helping wherever you could help. What made you want to do that? I knew, so I guess we had, we'd been married for a while, but we had just had Wren, and so I think she was maybe a year or so. And I knew I wanted to have kids, our kids and future kids involved in church and growing up around church. I wanted them to see that God was like important in our family and to us, and it was a priority. I also knew that I wouldn't be committed and prioritized coming to church if I didn't get involved. So it was very important to me to jump in somewhere and get involved so I would be accountable to come. Now, which one is more fun for you? Is it the decorating part? Because there was one day this year where she and I think Faith and maybe Liz were here until like 1.30 a.m. decorating and getting it done. So y'all get after it. Like y'all work hard. And I would imagine there's an element of that that's fun. At least I hope there is. Absolutely. Which one do you find that you enjoy more? Do you enjoy them the same differently? What do you get from kids ministry? What do you get from doing that behind the scenes stuff? I absolutely love doing the decorating. Like that is, I think having a goal and an idea and just being able to plan it and then doing it with my best friends. Like it's just, it's like a girl's party at night at church and nobody's here with no kids. It's amazing. That's right. They tell their husbands, just need a couple more touch-ups. It's great. A few more clouds. Sometimes he brings ice cream. I mean, it's great. For the kids' side, I love it just because I don't know who I was telling, I guess maybe Aaron a few months ago, that it's amazing to hear the kids retell the stories that they hear and then just to know that you kind of had a part in that relationship that they're developing with God. So that's really cool to see and to be a part of. And what age kids are you with usually? So I am now back with two, three, but I had been with the K through, I guess three, K through two. Yeah, K through third. Yeah. And Jacob, or to either one of you, whoever wants to answer, she's very happy to give that up. How has God used stepping out in faith and serving, going, okay, for consistency's sake, I'm going to do this, or God, I feel like you're just pushing me in this direction. How has God used that to encourage you to draw you close to him, to, to build you up as a, as a believer? Yeah. So existing in that kind of rub or the friction that I was in coming to church, but not wanting to commit, I mean, intentionally, um, hiding, I wasn't, I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. Um, and you know, you mentioned, I mean, intentionally, hiding. I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. And, you know, you mentioned, I guess, what 1 Corinthians, but I think 1 Peter also mentioned something about gifts, about whatever gifts you received, you know, basically serve others and demonstrate God's grace in its various forms, paraphrased. That's good. But for me, I mean, the same reason I've always wanted to be a leader at work is the connection to people and be able to influence people and be able to connect with people to understand how I can best serve people. And that's foundational. I mean, that's arguably one of the biggest parts of my walk, period, right? I mean, I got saved in seventh grade. I started playing place in worship in seventh grade. So, I mean, it's been quite literally foundational to my walk. And so to connect back to that, you know, it's opened my heart in the sermons. It's opened my heart in prayer and quiet time. I found joy in understanding how I can serve others. And I think something else that we really hadn't discussed, but I was thinking about out there, is how his presence fills our home. My kids were six before they heard me play the guitar, right? So, or Wren was six years old. So, and now Praise and Worship is played constantly. I mean, they know what a metronome sounds like now and they probably hate it, but praise and worship fills our house every week. Even the weeks I don't serve, I enjoy tagging along and practicing and playing. So, I think an unintended benefit, right? And so my kids are singing along and they know more of the words to the songs that I play than I do. So that's great. It's unintended. And I think a huge benefit to kind of serving. I love hearing that. And is it just for the record is Aaron now writing you like a rented mule? I mean, are we just driving you right back to burnout? Oh, no, no, no, no. So, well, well, I don't know. Yeah, we have a real discussion here. So, you know, I had never played with in-ears, never played with tracks, you know, hadn't played with a band. He's like, you know, one week of practice and I'm on stage. And then he's like, part of the story, it was before Christmas and I think it was an acoustic set and it was Greg and Carly and Jordan up here. And I remember thinking the whole I was like I probably could play acoustic guitar would probably be nice and that was another thing that kind of pushed me on this journey and I mentioned that to Aaron and he wasted no time and giving me that opportunity to be the solo acoustic guitar up here so I mean I'm improving as a musician selfishly it's nice to have a praise and worship team that's pushing me there. And so, yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess kind of to connect further on to wanting to serve, and I guess people that are maybe apprehensive, everyone's super, super accommodating, right? I mean, I just took three weeks off. I just blocked entire months off, and he hates it, but I do it. And I send him pictures of all the fish I'm catching at the beach. And the birds you're seeing. And the birds, yeah, well, no one cares about that. In fact, if I could get as good as evangelizing the gospel as I could about birds, I think I would be in a better place. That's a separate service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Elena, what would you say, and the last question, what would you say to anybody who's considering serving, not just in kids, although you could, but anywhere who's not serving yet but they're thinking about it? This is more intimidating, sitting up here. I would say just do it. Try it, and if you don't like it, then try a different spot or try somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel like... That's not what I had in my notes. That's not what I had in my notes. It's all geared toward kids. I don't know. You put me on... Yeah, you put me on the spot. Sorry, Elena. She's never doing this again. Never, ever, ever. This is the one time. No, but I think, and I think we would agree on this. There's a sense of accomplishment, right? There's like, there's plenty of days at work that I leave work and just battered and tired. And I'm like, what did I actually get done? I have no clue. But I think we both feel a sense of accomplishment. You know know we mentioned how we're impacting how she's impacting the kids and and the summer extreme and I doubt I'm impacting anybody musically but I have fun yeah but being part of a team right and and and and just having a sense of pride and what we're accomplishing here and what we're doing here at Grace. Yeah, I like that. Thanks, guys. I like that. You can leave, Elena. Shane and Carter. This is Shane and Carter Smith. They serve in children's ministry together. They've also served as small group leaders. Carter actually served on our architectural committee and helped us come up with the design of the floor plan for the building. So she was there for all the meetings. And really, we should just be talking to Carter. She's a lot more valuable to us than you. If we had to pick one. Carter does a tremendous amount behind the scenes. We have a few people who work behind the scenes that whenever I hear their name brought up for something else, I always say to the staff or to the elders or whoever, like, just be careful. Like, they do so much. Like, please don't ask them. Like, offer to take something else off their plate before we ask them to do this other thing. And Carter is one of those. She's, she's, do what? Yeah, right, right, to do this. And then Shane, Shane used to be a bouncer, so he's in charge of security all the time around here, and he's a Panthers fan, and we beat them two weeks ago, and that's great. Thanks for being up here. What's up, Wake Forest? Okay, Shane and Carter, where do you guys serve? Because you guys serve together. Carter, you're on the children's ministry leadership team too, correct? Okay, but you guys serve together. So I started out actually ushering, I don't know, five or six years ago as a way to kind of get involved. And then Erin kept sending us some nagging emails about how much help she needed on the children's side. So being a coach, I was like, I guess I can try helping over there. And I don't know, it was pretty fun serving over there too. Carter, for everyone else, can you tell us what over there is? We teach K-3, and that's the other wing. K-3, so kindergarten through third grade meet over there. Yes, so we teach the kids over there, large group and small group on Sundays. What does that typically look like? Because that can sound pretty intimidating to go teach. Sometimes know, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 20 elementary age kids. You get the lesson during the week. What kind of prep goes into it? Like, what are you guys doing behind the scenes so that you're ready for Sunday morning? And then how does a typical Sunday morning go? Well, Aaron and Julie set up absolutely everything and their team. They have a team behind them. They have everything set up. They email you the lesson plans. They email you kind of an outline for the morning and are available to offer and ask and answer any questions that you have. The kids come in. You do a little activity. You get to sing and dance with them and they get a lot more wild than we do in here. And then we teach them large group and then we break into small group for second and third grade and kindergarten and first grade. And sometimes it's five kids total and sometimes it's 25 total and we just get to all cram back in there. That's great. And Shane, besides Carter Volland telling you probably to do it, what made you decide? because one of the reasons I wanted us to hear from Shane is because we we get we get women to volunteer in the children's ministry more often than we do men and frankly men probably need to just step up to the plate because there's there's not for nothing there's there's there's two genders in all of classrooms, and they should probably be able to look up to both genders as they lead them and guide them and teach them about Jesus. So I think it's good for our boys to see men in their teaching. I think it's good for our girls to see women in their teaching and vice versa. And so we're always grateful when a dad steps up and says, yeah, this is something I want to be a part of. So what made you decide like, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that? Because I didn't, I didn't, I meant to mention this up front. I've asked the volunteers to come up in ascending order of difficulty. So Mike and Holly Anderson running the coffee, and I ran this by Mike beforehand. That's compared now, if we really wanted to get easy, we do like ushers. Okay. But I didn't bring up any ushers. But then the coffee team, right? And then there's the security team, which you just stand out there, and you don't have to listen to the sermon. It's a nice team, actually. And then being in the band, that takes some skill, but I think the hardest ask in the church, honestly, is what you guys do, the K-3. That's super intimidating. It's really difficult, And I think we just disqualify ourselves from the jump, but I don't think we need to. And so I just wanted to hear from you, what made you decide like, yeah, I'm going to take that plunge and go volunteer in that room. Yeah. I think again, just being involved with coaching, you know, coaching different baseball teams and football, I kind of knew what to expect from kids. And I felt like, you know, I could at least teach them. Like I said, Aaron makes it pretty easy on us. She gives you basically a sheet of paper, and as long as you read from it, you can pretty much teach kids a class. For me, I felt like it was almost a way to answer the question of being a disciple making disciples too because I don't feel like I'm ever going to be like a street preacher. I'm not going to go out there, and it's hard to talk to adults, you know, about those situations. But going over there and teaching the kids some of the basic stuff, I just feel like that's a way that you can grow. Just feel like you're, you know, making disciples, somebody else that's hopefully going to grow up and lead this church as well. I love that. I love that a lot. And, Carter, you know, I mean, you guys were here when I got here. Y'all, y'all, y'all been here a long time. You've been serving the whole time that y'all have been here. So it's a part of your DNA and who you are. What is it that makes you continue to serve, continue to come back, continue to sign up and let us put you up on stage and things like that? Like what, what's the joy that you get out of it? Why do you continue to do it? Um, I don't think Aaron would allow me to keep coming to Grace if I didn't serve in the kids ministry. No, we get, I used to teach first grade before I had my oldest son, Cason. So I think that's part of it is selfishly. It's something I do enjoy and I enjoy doing it more for an hour than a nine to five. But we get poured into here every Sunday and it's just a chance to pour into kids. And they are just like little sponges and so excited to be there and so excited to learn and learn about Jesus. They have no hesitation asking hard questions. They have no hesitation expressing their joy through dancing and singing. And they're just genuinely excited to be there. And I find that excitement contagious. And my favorite Sunday to teach back there is Easter Sunday. Oh, wow. Why is that? I mean, I've heard Easter sermons for 30 years. They're pretty good. They're pretty good over here. They're pretty great. The podcast is great. But no, they are so excited. And for some of them, it's their first time hearing it. For some of them, they've heard it for a few years, but each time, something new is clicking for them. The story is unfolding, and they are more excited about the Bible than most of the adults I know. I love that. And last question for you guys. How has God used your opportunities at service, whether it's leading a small group, serving on a leadership team behind the scenes, or serving in the kids? How has God been using that over the years to draw you closer to him and build up your faith? So, I mean, it's for us, obviously, it's been a way to get to know a lot of people in the church. You know, and it's also a way that we feel like, as Carter mentioned, you know, the church pours into us so much. It's a way that we can give back and really help this whole community grow. I mean, we're all here to try and, you know, promote the kingdom. So I feel like it's a way for us to be able to give back. And again, I'm not going to be up on stage doing any preaching anytime soon. So, you know, teaching the kids is a lot easier. Just let me know when you want to. For me, I think teaching takes the focus off of me. It makes me be less self-centered in when I'm getting ready to come to church on Sunday in my prayer life. I'm thinking about the kids, praying for them, praying over what I'm going to be teaching. And so I think any opportunity I can take to be less self-centered is a good one for me spiritually. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming up and for sharing. As we wrap up the morning, just a couple of thoughts. And I say this with some hesitancy because I want to be careful with my words, and I don't want them to be self-serving. That's not my heart at all. But I do think that based on the body passages, body of Christ, spiritual gifts mentioned, he mentioned, Jacob mentioned some in Peter, they're in Romans, they're in Corinthians, they're in Ephesians. They're all over the place. Because we have good works to walk in, because God calls us to be a part of a local church, I don't think it's optional to serve in a local church. And when I say that, I say local church intentionally because I'm not trying to leverage this and the Bible to get you to guiltily serve at grace. But what I can tell you as a pastor and someone who cares about you is, it is God's will for you to be using your gifts to benefit his kingdom. I know that for sure. It is God's will for you to be using the gifts and the talents and the abilities that he gave you to grow his kingdom. Now, many of you are doing that outside the walls of grace, and that's great. I would not reduce serving God and using your gifts to things that can be done here. But I would say that there's a reason that we have partners and we don't have members. Members tend to consume, partners tend to contribute. One of the things I am so humbled by in this church is that it doesn't go with just staff. Unless people are giving of their time, talent, and treasure during the week to sit on elder boards, to sit on committees, to be thoughtful about the church. We have some people because of their professional backgrounds who kind of mentor or pour into or befriend different people on staff. I've watched people in the church come alongside Aaron and begin to help him and give him some advice. I've watched them come alongside Kyle or Aaron Winston or me. And so there's different ways to serve the church and they're not all reduced to this sheet, okay? But here's what I would say. You ought to be doing something. You ought to be doing something to allow God to use the time and the talents and the treasures that he gave you to serve his church and build his kingdom. I don't know why. Well, I would want you to be going to a local church that you love so much that you wanted to partner with them and serve in some way. That's what I would say. Now, what Jacob said is true. And Jacob, the way you said it is better than I said it. We do want grace to be a place for you to heal, but not necessarily to hide. I know that there are people here because I've spoken with you. You have been burned by church. You have been worn out by church. You have been chewed up and spit out and something hurt you or something wore you out or whatever. And this can absolutely be a place to come and rest. But it ought to be restorative rest so that when you're ready to go again, you get going. So I would ask you guys to prayerfully consider, and in a minute I'm going to pray, Tamir's going to come up and give us a little bit more instructions, and then we're going to have a song sung over us while we kind of look over this and think about what we might want to do. Really quickly, if you want to grab this sheet, anything that might not be clear, Worship Team Tech and Production is back there. Those are, besides sound, largely low-skilled jobs, so you can do them, all right? I was joking around with David. David's running the live feed this morning and, uh, there's somebody else here. He's, he's being, he's being, uh, shadowed. Somebody's watching him to make sure that David doesn't mess it up. David runs a software company. So I'm pretty sure he can handle the live stream. And I was joking around with him beforehand. Like, dude, if you get stressed and you need to take a minute and get out of the sound booth, like go ahead. And we were laughing about it. So if you want to get, if you volunteer back there, that's, that's great. You can do that, but that's what the tech and production team is. And it's a vital team that we need greeters and ushers. That's if you're new or you've been coming here for a while, but you're not really plugged in, join one of those teams. It's a great entry point to join one of those teams, start meeting new people. It really doesn't impact your schedule a whole heck of a lot. You get here 15 minutes before you normally would unless you're late all the time, then you need to get here 25 minutes before you normally would and then you don't necessarily have to stay later but you get to meet a bunch of people, learn a bunch of names, shake a bunch of hands. That's a great way to get plugged in and involved. The prayer team is pretty obvious. We send prayer requests out to that. The care team is a big one, too, because we don't want people slipping through the cracks with care. And so the way that care works at Grace is first your small group leader is kind of responsible for you but sometimes people require ongoing care sometimes people are not in a small group sometimes the need is greater than what a small group can provide and we like to have a team that we can call on to go visit people who aren't able to leave their house or where they're living to make some phone calls. We even have a wonderful team of people that serve in something called Stephen Ministry that exists throughout a bunch of churches. And they provide ongoing pastoral care in ways that pastors just simply can't and don't have time for. And there's a whole training process with them. And they do incredible, incredible addition to that things that are not on here we have committees we have a finance committee that helped with the with the money at grace to make sure that everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen we have a personnel committee that serves as kind of the HR department at grace while we're while we're healthy and the staff development department so if you have a background in that, that's a great way to serve. We have a missions committee that determines who we get involved with and what activities we do outside the walls of Grace. So there's different ways that we can help and different things that we can do. But my heart would be, and what I would ask is, if you call Grace home, then prayerfully consider how you might jump in if you're not doing that already. If you call Grace home, take a few minutes right now, and prayerfully consider, God, what would you have me do at the local church where I go, where I can pour myself into? Maybe it's not on here. This sheet is a starting point. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you want to have a conversation about it. That's fine. I'd love to have that conversation. Maybe you can make us a little note on this and tell us what you'd like to talk about or what you think you'd like to offer. That's great too. But if you call Grace home, partner with us, let's work together and let's build God's kingdom together and move this place forward. Let me pray and then Tamera's going to come up and give us some more instructions. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your servants that we got to see this morning and hear from. Thank you for the ones that are doing your work right now so that we could be in here. Thank you for the hands that set up tables and chairs. Thank you for the hands that will be cooking and prepping the meals for us. Thank you for the worship team that's leading us into worship, God. Just thank you for the workers in all the children's rooms who are pouring into our children so that we might be in here and hopefully you're pouring into us. God, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you for grace. We thank you for all that you've done here and all that you are, the way that you're so faithful to us. And God, we pray that in return, we would continue to be faithful to you. In Jesus' name, amen.