Sermons tagged with Spirit

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

20 years ago, Grace was launched by a courageous group of faithful believers with a dream to expand God's kingdom in North Raleigh. Part of this dream was establishing a permanent home to serve as a launching point for this ministry. Through the years, God has used Grace to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping and dreaming, now is the time for Grace to go home. Good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor. This is a big, special morning. I'm so excited to get to share with you. I am in the habit of praying before I get up to preach, and in both services, I've just prayed that God would give me the strength to kind of keep it together without just blubbering like an idiot, because it's just, I feel so excited about what Grace is stepping into and getting to share this with you. On most Sunday mornings, on all Sunday mornings, I feel like my job as the pastor is to get up and open the Bible and share with you what I believe is teaching us together. My job is to teach scripture. I try to anchor everything I say in scripture and simply open it up and explain it to us in a way that is hopefully compelling or convicting or inspiring, whatever God has for us that morning. I feel like that's my job. But this morning, I'm going to take a little bit of a departure from that and just share with you what's been going on for the last 18 months. If this is your first time with us or your first couple times with us, this is not a typical Sunday morning, but it's the right one for the life of the church now. So if you allow me that license, I'm just going to share with you this morning and not preach at you this morning. Hopefully, I never preach at you, but you understand what I'm saying. In September of 2018, we went on an elder retreat to a farm in Youngsville. We had our sitting elders, and then we had three of our elders that had been recently nominated and appointed but weren't yet voting. They were junior elders. I still consider them junior elders. And we all sat around talking and dreaming about grace. And two of our elders, Bill Reith and Burt Banks, said that it was time that we start discussing the 10-year plan for grace. What's our 10-year plan for Grace Raleigh? Their very corporate 10-year plans seem important in that world, and so they thought we should have one too. And one of the items that they had on the agenda to discuss was the question of, do we want to own our own permanent home in North Raleigh? Do we want to be owners or renters? Historically, we've been renters, and so this was the question of, do we want to own one day? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, the response of the room was, yes, this is what we want to do. And uncharacteristically, during this discussion, I remained quiet. You may find it hard to believe I'm vocal in meetings. I don't have a problem saying what I think, and sometimes I feel like that's the role, so I should share my two cents. But in this particular elder meeting, as these decisions were being made, I stayed very quiet. And I stayed quiet because I carry with me an acute awareness that this is not my church. This is not my building. These are not my dreams. The church's goals are not my goals. This is our church. This church existed long before I got here. This church existed and did things and people poured into it and developed a life here long before Nate arrived. And so I'm acutely aware of the shoulders that I stand on and that my job is to steward the dreams and the hopes of us, not me. And because that's such a huge decision, I didn't really want to be the driver of that. So I stayed quiet. They quickly decided, yes, we want to be owners. And so then the natural question is, okay, what's the timeline for that? When do we want to begin to make decisions to take us down that path? And very quickly and overwhelmingly, again, the answer in the room was right away. We need to start making decisions right away. We need to start moving towards that now. And I remember thinking, I can still remember where I was sitting. I was sitting on the fireplace looking at those couches and chairs and couch, and I can see the dim room around me. And I remember thinking as everyone discussed this, why don't we pump the brakes a little bit? Let's just, let's chill out. Like I'm, it's a big enough challenge to fill a 200 person auditorium. Let's not build a 400 person auditorium. Let's just wait. I'm not really sure I need that pressure in my life, you know? And then in my head, I'm also thinking, and I'll tell her story in a second, but we had just then that month moved out of a season of tremendous debt. We haven't even announced to the congregation yet that we were out of debt. And now here we are signing up to go into more debt. And I'm going, gosh, maybe we should just like chill out. Can we just be healthy for a little while? But these were the decisions that were made. And I began to understand why we were making those decisions. And so that had set in motion a series of events. Shortly after that, we formed a building committee. And it was their job to go out and figure out how much are we going to need to spend to accomplish what we need to accomplish. So they went out and they looked around and they came back to us and they said, this is kind of what we think. This is what it's going to cost. This is what we think monthly debt service on it would be. And so this is kind of our goal. And so then once we had that goal, we realized we needed to get capitalized. So we formed a capital campaign committee last spring and asked them the question, this is what we want to do. Let's come up with the best way to do it. And so we've been working behind the scenes for 18 months now and are ready to present to us, the church, everything that we've been hoping and dreaming and praying and thinking about. But to understand the decisions that have been made and why we feel like now is the right time, I think we also need to understand the story of grace. Because we have some here who have been here since the very beginning. We have others who have come recently, and I'm not sure we all remember exactly how we got here. So like the video said, in 2000, there was a core group of faithful believers, a group of people from St. Andrew's Presbyterian over on Falls, that said they had a vision and a dream for starting their own church. A church that would be a light in the community that they love so much. A church that would strengthen faiths and strengthen families and watch people come to know Jesus and watch faith get deepened. Watch people walk with Jesus with more depth. They wanted to impact the community of North Raleigh, and so they banded together and they launched, at the time, the church called Grace Community Church. The very first Sunday, this church met on the lawn at the YMCA, and they had no idea what to expect. And that first Sunday, over 1,200 people showed up and sat on the grass and listened to that preacher preach and sang songs together. Everybody was blown away by what happened. And it was that Sunday that God, for the first time, whispered into the ears of those who cared so much about grace and believed in this place, hey, this church is special to me. My hand is on this place. I'm gonna use this church. I'm gonna use this place. Grace matters to me. And so that core of people believed that and believed that God's hand was on this place and believed that God had big plans for grace and believed that God was moving to make this an effective church in his kingdom. And so very quickly they needed space. So they started to meet at a storefront that used to be a Michael's. It affectionately became known as St. Michael's. And the idea was never that that would be a permanent location, but that that would be a temporary space until they had the health and the finances to build a permanent home. That's been the goal from the very beginning. It was just deferred because they needed space so quickly. But then having outgrown Michael's and not yet being totally prepared to go out in health and build a building, they made the decision to rent a space over on Meridian Drive. It was a larger space, 600-person auditorium. They were filling it up and going and blowing, and it was a really, really special time where it was easy to be enthusiastic about grace. Understanding that they weren't yet home, but that soon, when they were ready, they would have a home. And during that season, it was incredibly evident that God's hand was on grace. It was evident that God cared about that place. There was a thriving student ministry, a thriving children's ministry, wonderful people and wonderful families being strengthened and coming to know the Lord, and God worked in that place. But it was also during that season where there was some turmoil and some tumult in grace. There were struggles and trials and dreams got deferred and difficulty to walk through as a church. And it was during this season that some of that hopeful core that helped to start grace with all those dreams began to wonder if God's hand was still on grace, began to wonder if God still had plans for this place, began to wonder if the brightest days of grace were still ahead or if they were already behind. And so grace began to dwindle, and grace began to struggle, and those dreams got deferred. And it was in this season, in December of 2016, that my story intersected with grace. I still remember it was December 8, 2016. I had my first interview with the Pastoral Search Committee. They had asked me to block off enough time for a two-hour Skype interview, which I thought was excessive, but what do I know? I'm not making the rules. So that day, I started to prep and plan for the interview. So if you know me, you know that I don't like to be unprepared. I don't like to be caught off guard. I like to know what to expect. If you ask for a meeting with me, I'm probably going to say, yeah, that's great. What do you want to talk about? Because I got to know it's going to eat me up inside if I don't, if I can't prepare and think through everything that needs to be said. And so going into an interview, you better believe I'm going to be ready. So I started to dig into grace. And at the time on the website, they had a history of grace, just the events that happened year by year. And so I read through that history and I saw the ebbs and flows and the triumph and the trials. And then they had their elder minutes online. So I started to read through the elder minutes for the past couple of years. And I got done with all of that and I thought, yeah, I'm going to cancel this interview. I don't really want to be a part of this church. I got done with that research, and honestly, my conclusion was, I just don't see God's hand on this place. I don't have a lot of hope for that church. So I don't think I'm going to go there. I don't want to waste anybody's time. I need to cancel the interview. And as I opened up my computer to email Holly, who was then chair of the committee, it occurred to me like, come on, big time. You're 36. You don't have big enough britches yet to start turning down interviews. Just take it. Use it as practice. Let's see what happens. So I did. And I did the interview. And it was funny because in the interview, I gave the most honest answers ever because I didn't care if these people liked me. I wasn't trying to get anybody to like me. I was just telling the truth. And then at the end of the interview, they said, do you have any questions for us? I said, yeah. I mean, I've looked at your history. I've read through it all. Grace has been a hard place to be a part of for several years. And they all kind of started smiling, nodding their heads. I said, so there's a lot of churches in Raleigh. What are you doing there? Why do you go to that place? What's so special about it that you're clinging on? And Holly got a big smile on her face. And she said, because we love this place. These people are special to us. Our kids grew up here. Grace means a lot to us. It's our community. And we believe that the best days are still ahead for grace. And everybody nodded and smiled and agreed. And I believed it too. And I realized that God's hand was here and that there was reason to hope for grace and that I too believe that the brightest days were still ahead. It was hard to believe that when I visited in February for my like official visit interview weekend and I came to a service and there's less people in the service that Sunday than there are in this room right now. But I still believe that God wanted us to be at this place, and that God wasn't done with grace. And so in April of 2017, my wife and I, Jen, and our then one-year-old daughter, Lily, moved up to Raleigh, and we assumed we became a part of grace. And when I got here, it was not going well. We were very far in debt. Our line of credit had been maxed out. The bank had frozen our credit cards. There were some people who told me like, thanks for coming, but you'll probably be moving home in about six weeks. We just weren't sure about this place. But there was all kinds of things that happened in that first year that I felt like was just God whispering in my ear, Nate, I still care about Grace. My hand is still in this place. I still have plans for it. I'll never forget the Memorial Day offering in 2017, that first year that I got here. My whole goal was to get through the summer without incurring more debt, without begging and borrowing and stealing more money, right? I just wanted to try to get through the summer without going into greater debt. And in the month of May, we were running a deficit. And going into the last week of the year, we needed an offering of $15,000. That year, we were averaging about $10,500 a week. So we needed 50% more, almost 50% more in the offering to come in that week for us to remain solvent and not have to go into greater debt. And I don't know if you know this about church world, but Memorial Day weekend is the worst, okay? It's the worst. Nobody comes and nobody gives. And I don't blame you because if they didn't pay me, I would go to the beach too. Nobody's harboring ill will about that. But the reality of it is, that's the lowest giving Sunday of the year, every year in every church in the history of churches. So to be praying for 15,000, 5,000 more than what we normally get is an absurd prayer. And I prayed it all week and I asked the elders to pray. We didn't send out an email. We didn't ask for money. We just prayed. If I'm honest with you, I didn't really believe that it would happen. That Sunday, $28,000 came in. Not a single huge gift, just faithful giving from people who cared about grace. Without being asked, I was blown away. That will always stand out to me as the first time I felt God's hand on my shoulders saying, hey, listen, pal, you just worry about preaching. I'll figure out the rest. Let's go. And I knew that God's hand was on his place. Later that year, a couple months later, we owed $17,000 to World Overcomers that took over our space on Meridian Drive. And the deal that we got to get out of there, we still owed them money. And I emailed a lady that I didn't know on a committee that I had never talked to and said, hey, listen, I'm new here. This debt is gonna crush us. Can we please defer to the end of the year because we can't afford to pay it over the summer. And she emailed me back and she said, we love God and we love his kingdom and we love his church and you are forgiven of that debt. Don't worry about it. Again, God tells us his hand is on this place. He's not done with grace. And over these three years, I will have been here three years in April, over these three years, we've seen some of the people who thought that maybe God was done with grace begin to come back and breathe new life into it as well. We've seen people come back and believe that, yes, God's not done with this place. We've seen families added. We've seen our young family small group, Virgin, our three-year-old class is stinking full every week. We've seen more kids on the roster than Erin's had in the history of her tenure at Grace, which is now seven years. We're seeing small groups filled up. We have two established services. We're totally out of debt and saving money for the building already. We are in now a healthy place where we are watching faiths being strengthened. We are watching people being connected with Jesus. We are watching a community being built. And for the first time in the history of grace, we really are walking in health. And that's why we believe that after 20 years of wondering and wandering, that it's finally time for grace to go home and realize the dreams that we've dreamt for 20 years. Now, when we say that, that it's time for grace to go home, that we believe now is the time to pursue a permanent home, a permanent building, there's a couple things to understand. The first is when I say permanent home, I'm careful to say that because we could buy land and build or we could buy a building and upfit. We're open to all options. And I think the question becomes, why now? Why build? Why is it that we want to own our own building? Why is it that we want to own our own permanent home in this community that we love? And there's a lot of reasons for this. And in some business meetings that I'm going to tell you about, we're going to cover those reasons. But I think there's two really compelling ones that I would share with you this morning. The first most compelling reason that this is the time for us to go home and have a permanent home to call our own is to simply look around at this space. Now, we're grateful for this space. If this little room didn't exist, we would not exist as a church. No question about it. God gave us this space and allowed us to get our feet underneath us here. But look around. Does this feel like home to you? If you're not sure, sit behind the pole one Sunday and then answer that question. Where I have to walk over here to be able to see you. Hey, guys. Look in the corners because we have no storage. So we just put extra chairs on the sides and put tablecloths on top of them. That's less than optimal. We have a lobby. We say we're about connecting people to people. And a big part of that is our lobby and talking and being able to catch up with friends. The lobby time, honestly, is some of my favorite time of the week every week where I get to buzz around and catch up with everybody and see what's going on. It's too small. Try to hang out there right after the first service. It has to spill out into the front, whether it's cold or raining or whatever. Speaking of going outside, even if it's cold and rainy, have a kid in elementary school and have to walk outside every week, whether it's cold or whether it's fair, whether it's rainy or whether it's dry, and walk past the aquarium store and down the hallway of offices and get your kid in the repurposed children's space. We're grateful for that space. It just doesn't feel like home. If you think this feels like home, get here early on a Sunday morning when we have to get the air and the fans going because it smells like an aquarium. That's a thing. Come on Thursday, I'll show you. We'd love to have a restroom available in the lobby so that people don't have to walk down the children's space to get to it. If you've ever tried to, when that door's open and kids are trying to get into the nursery and other families are trying to get out of the nursery and you're just trying to get by to go to the restroom, there's a choke point over there that definitely does not feel like home. We'd love to have a playground for our kids to play on. I would love for our students, our sixth through 12th graders, to have their own space. Right now they meet in this space, and Kyle, our student pastor, is doing a phenomenal job with them, and he's gotten that. We're growing. We're running about 40 kids a week when everybody comes. But this space still swallows them up, and there's a limit on what they can do. Students like to be rowdy and rambunctious, and that's great, but we have to kind of keep a lid on that because we have not put enough money in Kyle's budget for auditorium repairs, so he's got to stay within some certain parameters. They need their own space that feels like home for them too. We need to invest in our student ministry. We want adult spaces during the week that feel more like living rooms where it's comfortable to sit in and meet in and have small group in so that our adults who come don't have to sit in repurposed children's spaces around white plastic tables and metal folding chairs. We're happy to do that, but we want other people to come too. We want you to be able to invite people to small group and have it feel comfortable and like home when they come. I dream of having some of our folks who work from home to take a day every week and come sit and work with us as a staff and as a community and make it kind of a hub during the days where people just are. We can't do that in our current space. And more importantly, all the things that I just mentioned, the pole and the chairs and the small lobby with the very nice hutch. If you go to Grace and you call Grace home, we don't think about those things. We don't care about those things. Those aren't really that big of a deal to us. But when you bring somebody for the first time because you want them to experience all that you've experienced at Grace, everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over in order to come here. The fact that you can't even see us from the road. We have signs on our building, but it's useless. Why do we even have that? You can't see it. You have to find us. We've joked that we're like a secret club. You only find us if you get invited. Everything that I just listed is something that they have to get over, that they have to get past so that they can be fully engaged here. As they assess whether or not they want to be a part of grace, those are all things that they have to be willing to move past too before they can really receive what God has for them here, before they can be encountered with the beauty and the grandeur of the gospel. And I just want as few things between people and Jesus as possible. I want people to notice as few things as possible that are detriments to what we're doing here so that they feel at home too and they feel freed up to encounter Jesus in this space. And so I think it matters. The next compelling reason that I think it's wise to build now is because it's really, this is not exciting, but it's true. It's fiscally responsible to own. It's the more financially wise thing to do with the resources that we have. Most of you in this room, you own your home. A vast majority of us do. Why do you do that? Because you know that financially it's the best decision for your family. The same is true for us as a church. We believe that it's the wisest thing to do with the resources that we have. Another thing you understand as you invest in a home now in whatever season of life you're in is if you'll do it up front, if you'll be financially wise in the early years of your life and you make sound choices, then later in the decades to come, you'll have the financial freedom to do what's really special to you with your money. You'll have the financial freedom to really spend your resources on what matters most to you. And we wanna do that as a church too. Right now we give 10% of our offerings to missions, to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. And I'm so proud that we do that. But I wanna see that number grow. What if we can get into a facility and get that manageable? And as our numbers and as our budget grows, our property cost doesn't have to and we can give 30, 40, 50% of what we have to things going on outside the walls of grace and be a generous church. It's more fiscally responsible to buy now so that we can be generous later. And just to kind of further drive that point home, we were in that facility on Meridian Drive for 16 years. In 16 years, we spent $5.4 million on rent. And that's conservative because for a season, we rented some extra space that cost more money. It's probably much closer to $6 million. And coming out of that space, we had debt to show for it. We want to make good choices so that that never happens again. That's why we believe that now is the time to act and move and go home. Now, with those things being said, there's some details that I do want to share with you this morning. And then I'm going to tell you about the informational meetings that we have and why we've chosen to go that route. The nitty gritty of it is, and this will be covered in those meetings, so you don't have to remember all this right now, but you're probably very curious. Our goal in the campaign is to raise $1.5 million over two years. We're going to ask everyone to make a two-year pledge and try to have that by the end of two years so that we can do what it is we think God wants us to do. The reason it's $1.5 million is because in the estimates that we have, we want to build a building that's between 400 and 600 people. The auditorium is between 400 and 600. In church world, once you have the auditorium size, you have the algorithms for all your other space. So it's really a decision about how big of an auditorium do we want. This one seats 200. The elders want us to have a 600-person auditorium. I want us to have a 350-person auditorium. I don't need that pressure in my life. But that's the decisions that we're making. We're open to buying land and building, but we would rather buy a building and up fit. Buying land and building takes more time and takes more money. The only reason we would do that is if there's a piece of land that's so attractive that we just couldn't pass it up. We want the building to be as close as possible to Capitol and 540. This puts us in range of everyone who calls Grace home. That's an optimistic goal. I was having lunch the other day with somebody who's been buying and selling land in the Raleigh area for probably 30 or 40 years. And when I told him where we wanted to be, he audibly laughed at me. But we think that God is going to look out for us. He'll give us the place that we need to be. If we were to buy and build, that could cost as much as $4.5 million, and $1.5 million allows us to borrow what we need to make that happen. If we want to go a little bit smaller, build and upfit, that is going to cost somewhere around $3 million. So 1.5 over two years positions us to do whatever it is we think we need to do. Now, to raise that money, we formed a campaign committee. And the campaign committee began, got a book written by an expert who's done 100 of these. And we started to read, what's the best way to go about this? And what we quickly learned is all the experts have a set way that you're supposed to go about raising funds for a project like this. What they wanted us to do is tear out all of the givers at grace and take like the top 15 families and I would go meet with them personally. Then you take the top 30 or 40 families and the elders go meet with them individually, share all the information, ask for a pledge. And then you take all the other families and we'll just get to you whenever we get to you. We're busy. We've got a lot of things going on. That's how it goes. You tear them out, you have the meetings, and the experts say by going and sitting down in someone's home and presenting to them and making a personal ask, you're gonna get more juice out of that lemon. That's the best possible way to get the funds that you need. That's the way you need to do it. And so because that's the way we need to do it, that's what we set about doing, is figuring out a way to do that. Now that was a challenge because at Grace, we have a long history, nobody knows what anybody gives at Grace. There's one person who knows how much people give. That's a guy named Tom Ledoux. He is our finance manager. He's living his best life in the villages in Florida right now. So you don't have to worry about running into him at Harris Teeter. And in between games of golf, he does our finances. We get a great deal on it. I love that guy so much. And he's the only one who sees what everybody gives. So to tear out our givers, I would have to start learning some stuff that is none of my business. But this was the way we need to do it. This is the money we need to raise. And so we started talking with the elders about it. One of the elders raised a concern. He's like, I'm really not comfortable with that. I don't think that we should do that. I think that we should just ask everybody all at once and let them respond however they want to and let the Holy Spirit move. And my response to him was, I think you need to go play in the forest and sing with the animals. Like, that's Pollyanna stuff, man. We got to get real. But the more I thought about it, and the more we prayed about it, the more I became convinced that that way to raise funds was just not right for grace. The more I thought about going into homes and presenting and asking, the less comfortable I got with it. The more, honestly, the more I saw it being the plans of man trying to figure out the best way to go about this and not making room for the Spirit. And so I thought rather than going to you individually and making an ask that I would just ask you corporately and trust you. I've tried as I've led Grace to trust you to be adults who love Jesus and love this place and trust you to go home and pray about it and allow the Holy Spirit to direct as if he saw fit that you would be sensitive to that and trust the pledges that come in. Another reason I didn't want to do the individual meetings is I began to think about it. And this is really what drove it home for me is, I don't want anybody in the church who gives to the campaign to think that their gift is valued any different than any other gift. We have some families in our church that because they've made wise choices, because God has blessed them, they really do have great means. We have some families in the church who have the ability, if they wanted to, to give in ways that were really impactful for the campaign. They give a lot of money. And that's wonderful. And then we have other families in the church that are far closer to mine and Jen's end of the spectrum that are in their 20s or in their 30s and kind of trying to figure out how to get life together. And some of us even living paycheck to paycheck and any amount that would be given would be really sacrificial. And if these families are able over the next two years to cobble together five or $10,000, I don't want to value that $10,000 any less than I would value the $100,000, $150,000. Because even though the amounts in those two gifts are different, the faith is the same. The sacrifice is the same. The spirit of generosity and obedience is the same. And I don't want to be a part of a system that makes those two people feel any different for what they gave. Because every bit of it is special. Every bit of it is impactful. I got a text this morning from a good friend of mine who just knew that this morning was when we were launching the campaign at the church. And they're a family like us. And he just said, hey, proud of you, rooting for you. Julie and I are committing $1,000 to the campaign this year. I started to cry in my bedroom. It's the same sacrifice. It's the same generosity. The gifts aren't different. And I don't want to treat them that way. So rather than going to your houses and doing an individual ask, we're having these informational meetings and we're asking corporately. There's three informational meetings. You have them on the cards in your seats. They're all identical. We're just asking that you would come to one of them. If you want to come to all three, because you just love this kind of stuff, knock yourself out. But we're asking that you would come to one. We hope that every partner and everybody who calls Grace home will come to at least one of these meetings. At those meetings, we will roll out for you all the things that we would have if I came to your house and sat down with you and talked to you. The type of ask that we're looking for, all the details of the campaign. There's an FAQ sheet on the huts that will give you a little bit more information if you have questions right away. We will go through all of those details. We'll have people from all the committees here that you can ask questions of. There'll be some give and take. And I think that those are going to be some good times for us at the church. That's where that's going to happen. We're hoping that you will come to those. And for the next five weeks, we're going to talk about the next steps of grace. Because I believe that the building, pursuing a permanent home, is just the first step that we need to take as a church that's now walking in health. The question facing grace now is, God, what would you have us do with this health? And so over the next five weeks, we're going to answer that. It's going to culminate in a pledge Sunday on March 1st, and we'll find out if this is a realistic dream. But as I close today, I would just share this with you. I was reminded in my preparation that in July of 2017, we had a business meeting. It was to talk about how to financially make it through the rest of the summer, how to exist as a church. And I remember there was somebody in the back of the room who stood up over there, and they said, hey, and they kind of talked to the room and said, hey, we just need to all give a little bit more and we'll be okay. And I was able to say to him and to everyone, actually, no, you don't. You don't need to give any more. This church is generous and doing everything that it can right now. You don't need to give us any more money. We need to be more responsible with the money that you're already giving us, and we're going to do that. And then I made a promise. I said, as a matter of fact, if you'll trust me, I'm not going to ask you for more money again until we're ready to build a building. So now here I am, three years later, because of God's grace, we've been able to keep that promise, asking you to consider participating in the campaign as we seek to go home. Asking you to consider participating in this above and beyond what you give to operational budget. So the invitation is to go home and just begin to pray and to think and to plan and earnestly ask God, God, how would you have us participate in this campaign? We'll have those informational meetings. We'll have our services for the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, we're gonna come and celebrate and submit our pledges together and we're gonna see what God is gonna do. In the meantime, if you have any questions, my door is open. I will meet with you, talk with you, answer whatever questions I have. If you'd like an individual meeting, we can have that. I'm just not going to impose that on you. But that's the invite. Let's go as a church and pray how God would have us be involved with what he's doing here and the next steps of grace. Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. We know that your hand is here. We know it's on this place. We know that what happens here matters to you. God, we believe as a body that it's time for us to take this step of faith and pursue a permanent home in this community where you've planted us. So God, I earnestly pray that if that's your will, if that's from you, let us marvel at how you make it happen. God, if that's not your will, if this needs to be our home for a while, then make it abundantly clear that that's your will and let us celebrate that too. God, we simply humbly ask that your will be done and that we walk in obedience to what that is. Father, be with these families and these individuals as they go and pray. I pray that they would be sensitive to your spirit. I pray that their hearts would be opened, would be moved by what moves you and that you would guide and direct us to exactly where and how you would have us participate. God, I cannot wait to see all that you do in this season of grace. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

I hope that you guys are getting excited about the holidays as they are coming up. I know that we are decorated at my house and we've got big plans here at Grace. I'm really excited about the Christmas series that we have coming up and all the things that we have planned for you in December. So I hope that you and your family will be a part of that. I'm very excited for our December series. This week we are in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. Technically the fifth chapter, but the fourth and fifth chapter, you'll see why in a minute as we move through this letter from Paul to the churches surrounding the city of Ephesus. As we jump into this week, I wanted to start at a book that was written a few years ago. There's a guy named Charles Duhigg that wrote a book called The Power of Habit. If you're a reader, you've probably heard of it, and you may have even read it, and you know that it's a good, interesting book where he says a lot of things about the habits that are in our life, how we can harness them for good. I really enjoyed the book. I didn't implement any of the things that he told me to, but I acknowledged them as very good ideas that seem wise. One of the things that he noted that he presents was the idea of what he calls a keystone habit. He says a keystone habit is a habit that you can adopt that if you will just focus on this one small change in your life, that it's going to manifest itself in other areas of your life. That kind of one habit can be get disciplined in other areas. It'll have almost a trickle-down effect if you pursue it as a foundational habit. And he says the best example of this, of a keystone habit, is exercise. In his research, he found that people who exercised regularly were people who tended to be more disciplined in what they ate. They were better at managing their time throughout the day and focusing on home and focusing on work, maintaining a better work-life balance. They were overall more disciplined people because the discipline of exercising on a regular basis kind of spilled into other areas of their life. And I really identified with this because like a lot of you, I've had seasons in my life where I have been regularly exercising. Clearly, I'm not in the middle of one of those seasons now, but I've had them before. And I've noticed that when I'm in those seasons, I am more disciplined in general, that that habit kind of spills over into others. And so as I encountered this idea, of course, because of the way that I'm wired, I thought, I wonder if this has spiritual applications. I wonder if this can help me in my walk. The way that we're phrasing the question this morning, you have it there on your notes, says, I wonder if there is a habit that can change the way that we obey. I wonder if there's one single habit, if there's a keystone habit, if there's one small thing that we could do, that if we'll just focus on this, that what happens as a result of that habit will manifest itself in other places in our spiritual life, and it will change the way that we obey. This morning, I want to propose to you that I think that there is one. I think that there is a keystone habit given to us in the text in the middle of Ephesians chapter 5 that we can kind of latch onto and seek to implement in our life. But to properly appreciate what it says in the middle of chapter 5, we have to really appreciate what's going on in the book of Ephesians. And what's happening in the book of Ephesians is you can really kind of divide it right in half. The first three chapters of Ephesians are establishing the idea that we are saved, that we have the gospel. Chapter 3 is the mystery of the gospel. Paul prays that we would know Christ more deeply. We spent time a couple weeks ago on that beautiful prayer beginning in verse 14, going through 19 of chapter 3. In chapter 2, we're given the most succinct yet complete explanation of salvation that I think there is in the Bible in Ephesians 2, 8, and 9. Then we're told in verse 10 of that same chapter that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. We have purpose for our life. So he spends the first three chapters invested in this idea that like, hey, we are believers now and the gospel is for everyone. So now that you have the gospel, now that you have faith, the back half of the book is committed to answering a question that we all have. It's a question that we've all asked, whether you're a believer or a non-believer, it's a question that you've asked about the Christian faith. And that question simply is, it's a common question that we've all asked, how should I live? How should I live? You might ask it like this, in light of the fact that I'm saved, in light of the fact that I know Jesus, that I call God my Father and Jesus my Savior, what does God expect of me? Because we approach the text with this question, but there's a lot of stuff in here. It's confusing, at times intimidating, at times it seems impossible, and sometimes it feels contradictory. I'm supposed to do this in this situation and this in this situation, and I don't know how to tell the difference between the two. And so we always come back to this question, how should I live? I think if you're not a believer this morning, but you're here at church, you're kicking the tires, you're trying to figure out faith and how you feel about spiritual things, I think one of the questions you would be asking is, if I do become a believer, how do I live? What's expected of me? What am I supposed to do? To be a believer is to wonder, am I doing this right? How should I live? I think we would all like to get a little bit better or maybe a lot a bit better at obeying God. How should I live? I think that's the common question that we ask after we realize that we are believers. And so Paul dedicates the back half of Ephesians to answering this question. Ephesians 4, 5, and 6 are Paul's answer to this question. I truly believe that if Paul were here this morning and you could ask him, hey man, I'm a believer, how should I live? Like, what should I do? If we could ask this common question to Paul, I honestly believe he would say, well, it's funny that you asked. I actually addressed that in chapters four and five of the book of Ephesians. So let's look. And as I was studying, you might be wondering, why are we in chapter four if we're supposed to be in chapter five this week? As I was studying last week, I realized I was going through chapter four and I'm just, I always open up the Bible when we're going through a book like this and I kind of go, okay, God, what do you want us to know? There's so many things that we could highlight. What's the thing that you want us to know? And so as I was praying through chapter four, studying chapter four, I realized that four and five really go together. That from 417 to 521 is really one big long thought that I'm thinking of as the conclusion discourse. He's been building to this question, how should we live? And he even opens that question in chapter 4. Chapter 4 starts out with a verse that tells us that you should live a life worthy of the calling that you have received. So the question becomes, how do I do that? And beginning in chapter 4, verse 17, he answers that question. So I want you to do this. I want everybody in the room, if you'll do me the favor, of going ahead and opening your Bible. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Grab it and let's go through it. Open to Ephesians chapter 4. If you don't know where Ephesians is, just wait until the person next to you opens their Bible to it and then then take it, all right? They're going to love you and be gracious, and they'll get another Bible, and they'll open it there. So that will be fun. But open to Ephesians chapter 4, beginning in verse 17. 417 through 521 is one long continual thought, one long discourse, and we're going to be interacting with the text today to see how does Paul answer this question of how should I live? How does he back up what he says at the beginning of 4, that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? What's his answer to this question of how we should live? And I want to propose to you this morning that there's two answers, one in chapter 4 and one in chapter 5. The first answer that he gives us in chapter 4 is by walking in our new identity. That's the first answer that we see in chapter 4 of Ephesians. How should we live? We should live by walking in our new identity, and here's how I know that's true. We're going to put up on the screen verse 22, but I'm actually going to start reading in verse 17 so we can understand what's happening in verses 22 through 24. Paul writes this, now this I say and testify in the Lord. Oh, I will also say just by way of, I don't know, being nice that if you have a blue Bible, that's NIV. I'm reading out of the ESV. It's not going to word for word match up, but you'll be able to follow along. Verse 17, now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. All right, it's worth some clarification here. When he's saying that you must no longer walk, the you there is the church, anyone who calls himself a believer. And when he says Gentiles, that's his way of saying outsiders, people who don't yet have faith. So it's basically, you shouldn't walk like people who don't know Jesus because you do know Jesus. That's what he's saying. So when we see the word Gentiles, just think people who don't know Jesus yet. Verse 18, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and they have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But this is not the way you learned in Christ. All right, let's pause right there. He says, you must not think and act like the Gentiles do. You must not think and act like someone who doesn't know Jesus. And then he gives us the characteristics, some of the defining characteristics of people who don't know Jesus. And it's a pretty rough list. He says some harsh things about people who don't know Jesus. And so I want to be very clear that people who don't know Jesus are not worse people than people who do know Jesus, okay? The people in your life that you know that are not yet believers, we're not calling them bad people. Paul's not calling them bad people. And I don't want anybody in this room thinking that you're somehow better than the people outside of this room who are still in their sweatpants because we're not. We're all broken and we're all bad at this, okay? So we're not calling ourselves better than them. The difference is people who don't know Jesus are blind to their sin. They're sinning, they're acting outside the will of God, and they don't know that they are. And when they're acting outside of God's will and they don't see their sin, they perpetuate that sin, their consciences get seared to that sin, and eventually they end up encouraging that sin. That's the pattern. And it's not because they're bad or a different kind of person than you. It's simply because they are living in the dark and they do not yet see their sin. And what he is saying is, that's not how you live. That's not you. If you know Jesus, you've seen your sin, you acknowledge Jesus for who he is, you realize your need for him and how he cleanses you of your sin, and so you were taught a different way. Assuming that you have heard, I'm in 21, about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self. This is where we're getting our answer to walk in our new identity. To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So he presents this idea, don't walk like you used to when you didn't know Jesus, walk like you do know Jesus. He actually talks about this in a lot of his letters, the idea of an old self and a new self. In Romans chapter 6 and 7, he talks about it at length, and he actually, Paul paints for us the picture of baptism, the video that we watched of Jim being baptized. In that baptism, what Paul says in Romans 6 and 7 is that when we are baptized, we are buried with Christ in death. Our former self, our old self who didn't know Jesus, who was blind to sin, is buried with Jesus in the burial and then raised to walk, come out of death into life, raised to walk into newness of life. The very act of baptism is an acknowledgement that the former self is gone and the new self is here. And so if we are going to live life as Christians, then we should walk in our new identity. Romans 8 tells us that our identity is adopted sons and daughters of the king. We're told that we are loved as much as we can ever be loved, that we no longer have to perform or clamor or stretch or claw to get anyone to affirm us, to get anyone to love us, to make ourselves good for anyone, because God fills us with affirmation, tells us that we are good, tells us that we are loved, and then invites us to operate out of that love as we serve as a conduit of his love to the people in the world. We walk in this new identity. In our new identity, Romans tells us that we are no longer a slave to sin. Before we know Jesus, we have no choice but to do evil things because we're blind to them and we don't see them as evil. But as believers, we now have a choice. We're separated from that. And then to help us walk in this new identity, he gives us some behaviors that we should embrace and some behaviors that we should avoid to kind of say, this is what a new life is going to look like. And so he says this on down through the chapter, picking up in verse 25. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with his neighbor. 26, be angry and do not sin, which is really hard. I don't know about you, but that's not really how my anger works. Like when I get angry about something, that's not generally the time when I'm making the most rational choices. But what he's saying is there's a way to get angry. And the other thing about anger is you usually don't deserve it. You usually don't have a right to that anger. You think you have a right to that anger because you're being, in my case, a selfish jerk. You usually don't even have a right to that anger. But it is possible to get angry about the right things. And when we're walking in our new identity, we're angry and we do not sin. No more stealing. You guys, in your new life, you can't do that anymore. And then he goes, let no corrupting of stuff. As I read this stuff this week and I realized, okay, I'm supposed to walk in my new identity. What does it mean to walk in my new identity? What are the things that are going to characterize me beginning in verse 25? And I read through that list. I kind of got done reading it and thought like, well, gosh, I don't know if I should be a pastor. I'm not very good at those things. Those are really hard. Those are really challenging things. I mean, to read through that list, man, I do a lot of stuff I'm not supposed to do, and I don't do a lot of stuff I am supposed to do. That's challenging. But Paul doesn't stop there. He gives us the next way that we're supposed to live, because there's two answers. There's one in four, and there's one in five. The first answer is that we should walk in our new identity. And then he gives us a list of behaviors that we should embrace or avoid because of our new identity. And then at the beginning of chapter five, he gives us the second answer. How should you live? You should be imitators of Christ, is what he says at the beginning of chapter five. Be imitators of Christ. Just however Jesus would act, you act like that too. Look at what he says. Therefore, chapter 5, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Then, just to add some detail, this is what somebody who is imitating Christ looks like, but all sexual immorality and just all impurity in general or covetousness must not be named among you as is proper among the saints. So he says, okay, how should we live? Walk in your new identity. Once you're walking in your new identity, be an imitator of Christ. And so I was thinking this week, what does it mean to be an imitator of Christ? What did Jesus do? How did Jesus love us? Well, Jesus offers us a sacrificial love. Constantly putting others first and himself second, he offers us a sacrificial love. He condescended, he gave up his heavenly form, came down to earth, lived a perfect life on our behalf, we need to love others sacrificially, and we need to forgive others faultlessly, and forever, by the way. And if you want more details on what it means to live as an imitator of Jesus, just keep reading chapter 5, and you'll see more behaviors there that you should embrace and others that you should avoid. And listen, it's entirely possible to get bogged down in these different behaviors and a very worthwhile study. If you know your Bible well, you know that Ephesians five is chock full of things that are tough for a pastor to preach through. I even got texts and emails this week like, hey bro, you doing Ephesians 5? What are you gonna do? Somebody said, somebody emailed me and they said, Ephesians 5 this week, I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about it. And I thought, please don't email me that. I don't need that kind of pressure in my life. And while it's absolutely worthwhile to drill down into these different behaviors and into these different stances, I didn't want us to miss the forest for the trees. The trees and the minutia are worth examining, but if we only have one week to look at Ephesians 5, I don't want us to miss the overall point that Paul is trying to make, which is to answer the question, how do we live? And we answer that question by saying, walk in your new identity and then be imitators of Jesus. Offer other people sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And here's a list of behaviors that can help you live that way. So at this point, I think we should arrive at our common response. We ask the question, how should I live? Paul answers that question by saying, walk in your new identity, not your former self, walk in your new self, and then imitate Jesus as you live. And I think that we all have a common response. If you're thinking along with me at all, this has to be what you've concluded too. How in the world do I do that? How do I do that? That's a tough list, man. That's hard. Like, I'm not, listen, I'm telling you as a pastor, as your pastor, for most of you, I'm not good at this list. I violate something on this list. I want to say weekly and be nice to myself, but that's probably daily. That's a hard list, man. That feels impossible. And we can treat it lightly and say, surely God doesn't expect me to do that. I mean, He knows that I can't be perfect. In another place in Scripture, Paul tells us, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And I think we're tempted to read this and go, there's no way I can do that. But I don't think the Bible lets us off that hook. I don't think it makes that space for us to just kind of partly try. I think this is the standard, to walk in our new identity and to be imitators of Jesus. And the great part is this, getting better at these things, to more regularly walk in our new identity, to more regularly be imitators of Jesus, that is a process. It's a lifelong process. I hope that in 2019, you're a better imitator of Jesus than you were in 2018. And I hope in 2025 that you're a better imitator of Jesus then than you are than you're going to be in 2020. I think it's a progressive thing. This progressive growth towards becoming more like Christ is actually called sanctification. It's a biblical word that Paul uses, and it means the process of becoming more like God in character, which is to be better at imitating Jesus. So this is a process that we move through in our, through our whole life. And I think our goal should be that every week we're a little bit better at it than we were last week and be sensitive to the spirit and what we need to do to be better imitators of Christ and to walk more confidently in our new identity. But as we try to answer that question, how do I do this? That's a tall order, man. That's a big task. How am I gonna do that? I think that this is where the keystone habit comes back into play. I think this is where having a keystone habit, if I'm trying to get my life healthy, what's this one thing that I could focus on that might have some spillover into all the other areas of my life that I want to kind of fix or allow God to move in and repair? What's one keystone habit? What's one thing that I could focus on that might help me start nailing some of this other stuff down? I think our keystone habit is our first step. Our first step in this process is to lean into what I'm going to propose to you is our keystone habit that we find at the end of the passage in verse 21. So Paul writes this passage. He writes what I'm kind of calling the conclusive discourse on answering the question, how should we live? He says, walk in your new identity, be an imitator of Jesus. Here's some behaviors to help you know what it is to live that way that you should either embrace or avoid. And then as he caps it off, he says, finally, do these things. And he lands the plane at a really peculiar place, I think. He lands the plane in this verse, in verse 21, because after 21, there's a transition. After 21, he transitions and he starts to give us specifics of how to live. He says, this is how you should organize your home life and your marriage and your work life. And then this is how you should arm yourself for the spiritual life that is a battle. There's a transition after 21. So at 21, he's concluding a thought and this is how he concludes it. Pick it up in verse 15. He says, And then here we have it. Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. He lands the plane on submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. And I want to propose to you that our keystone habit as we seek to be imitators of Jesus and we seek to walk in our new identity is simply chosen submission. I think the common conclusion of our question, how should I live? How do I do that? I think the common conclusion that we have this morning is chosen submission. And that word submission simply means to submit to somebody is to say that when our wills clash, I'll choose yours. When you have a different will than I do for a certain situation, I will submit to you by choosing your will. I at this church am submitted to the board of elders. The elders might not feel that way sometimes, but I promise you that's technically the case. I'm submitted to the board of elders, which means if I go to the elders and I say, hey, I think we should do this thing, and they go, we do not think you should do that thing, then their will is different than my will, so I choose theirs and I submit to it. That's what submission is. And I want to propose to you that this is a keystone habit that unlocks how we can obey in all of those other areas. I think this is the one habit that can change the way that we obey. And we don't just see it here. At another place, we're told to outdo one another in honor, to honor other people more than ourselves, to outdo one another in honor. At another place, we're told to consider others better than ourselves. So this is not just a one-time principle in the Bible. It's something that's woven throughout the New Testament. Jesus says that the greatest among us must be the least, that the greatest comes to serve. So there's this constant idea in Scripture of considering others before we consider ourselves. And the reason I think that this is a keystone habit to unlock obedience in the rest of our life is this. Go back through four and five. Look at the behaviors that are listed there. Look at the behaviors that are listed in chapter 5, the ones that we should avoid. Sexual immorality and covetousness and all impurity. And ask, would it be easier to avoid those behaviors if I lived every day submitted to the people around me? Would it be easier to avoid sexual immorality if I considered other people's needs more important than mine? Would it be easier to avoid coveting things, wanting things for myself, if I considered other people's needs more important than mine, if I were mutually and had chosen to submit to the people around me? Blaise Pascal had great insight on this passage. He was a French philosopher, and I wondered why sexual immorality and covetousness are paired up together in chapter 5. And he says it's because they fall under the umbrella of lust. Lust is to want things for ourself. And he says that lust tethers us to ourselves. It makes us relentless me monsters. And so the antithesis of sexual immorality, the antithesis of covetousness is selflessness. The antithesis of this is mutual submission. We said earlier that we should be angry, but we should not sin. And I kind of presented to you the idea that there's some things that are okay to be angry about, good, righteous anger, and that's a good thing. And then there's other anger that just results in our selfishness or just reveals our selfishness. Is it going to be easier to become angry about the right things if we live our life mutually submitted to other people? At the end of chapter four, we're told to be kind one to another, be tenderhearted, gentle with one another. If you get up every day living your life for the people around you, is it going to be easier to be kind to them, to be tenderhearted towards them? Pick any of the behaviors in four or five, any of the things that we're supposed to embrace and any of the things that we're supposed to avoid. And for the ones that we're supposed to avoid, ask, would it be more natural? Would it be easier to avoid these behaviors if I were living a life of chosen submission to the people around me? And then look at the behaviors that we're supposed to embrace and ask yourself, would it be easier to embrace these behaviors, to incorporate those behaviors in my life if I were living a life of submission to the people around me? I think it's a keystone habit. I think if you're here this morning and you feel like you're in a spiritual rut, you feel like 2019 has been a little tough. I'm not growing like I should. I wish that I were closer to God. I wish that I could get some traction in my spiritual life. My quiet times have been a little bit difficult or maybe even non-existent. I wish I were closer to the Father. Can I just suggest to you implementing this keystone habit in your life? Can I just suggest to you waking up tomorrow and saying, I'm going to do my best to consider the needs of others as more important than mine. I'm going to do my best to have chosen submission to the people around me and that when our wills clash as best as I can, I'm going to choose theirs. Can I gently suggest to you that if you feel spiritually stagnant, that maybe, maybe, maybe it's because you've been living tethered to yourself and we should live for others. And if we'll do that, the rest of these behaviors will naturally flow out of a heart that now belongs to God and is in tune with Him. Can you imagine the beauty of a church that's mutually submitted to one another? It would be an oasis in the community that it would be the only place on earth that didn't have a caste system. Do you understand that? If we came in mutually submitted to one another, it wouldn't matter how much money you make. It wouldn't matter how old or young you are. It wouldn't matter where you got your education. It wouldn't matter what degrees you had. It wouldn't matter what you've accomplished. It wouldn't matter how charismatic you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how attractive you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how capable you were or you are or are not. All that would matter was that we showed up and we loved one another because we were told to in Ephesians to consider others better than ourselves and to live a life of chosen submission out of reverence for Christ. This is impossible if we don't know Jesus. We cannot just decide to do this and fuel the submission ourselves. We have to have the love of Christ flowing through us so that we can be conduits of that love to others. But if we'll acknowledge that Jesus died for us, that Jesus offers us sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And he submitted to me when he didn't have to. And out of reverence for him and who he is and how much he loves me and how I love him in return, I'm going to choose to submit to the people around me. We say that our mission is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. How in the world could we be more effective at that than if we simply chose to submit to the people around us and considered what they needed more important than what we needed? How contagious would that be when people would come and be with us on a Sunday morning? How wonderful a testimony would that community be to people who see all the wrong things going on with Christianity and in the media world to come in here into an oasis of submission where they see a fresh version of how Christ's people love one another. How beautiful would that be? How contagious would your faith be if you carried the submission back into your workplace and back into your circle of friends and simply considered other people as more important than you and simply chose this submission as a keystone habit that would unlock our ability to obey God throughout the rest of our life. I pray that we'll do that this morning. I pray that grace would be a church that's defined by obedience to this verse. And I pray that you would choose to be obedient to that. That you would submit to the people around you in your life even this week and experience the power of this chosen submission and watch as it unlocks your ability and God's ability to work in your life as we seek to walk in our new identity and be better imitators of him. Let's pray. God, we love you. You love us for reasons that we genuinely don't understand. God, I'm so grateful that church can be a place where we can just admit that we don't have it together, where we can admit that we're not good at things, where we can admit that we constantly fall short of who you ask us to be, and where we can be met with your grace and your love and your affirmation that that's okay. And you pick us back up and you send us back out. Lord, if there are people here who are far from you, I pray that you would draw them in. If there are people here who are caught up in sin, I pray that you would just bring your gentle, healing conviction. If there are people here in situations that feel impossible, God, would you show them a light? Would you remind them that you make new paths, that you make streams in the desert? God, would we not shy away from the enormous task that it is to be a Christian? Would we not excuse away what you call us to? Simply have the faith and the courage to try to be a little bit better today than we were yesterday. Help us experience the power of choosing to submit to one another, Lord, out of reverence for you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to be up here again. I usually start with my name is Nate, but I think we covered that earlier in the announcement, so I'm just going to jump right into things. This week, I had the opportunity to do two things that I think are kind of a special part of the experience of being a pastor. On Tuesday, I got to go visit a couple in the hospital who goes to the church who just had their new baby, Hudson Harper, the grandson of John Susan Turnburg and then the son of Lauren Harper and Brandon Harper. And it was a sweet, sweet thing to go there and to visit with them and to see this tiny little baby that could barely open his eyes and have the opportunity to talk to them and pray with them. And you kind of get invited into these special spaces that you might not always get to experience. I got invited into this hospital room with them, and it was a really great thing. And then Friday, I got to do a wedding for a couple. They were a sweet couple. He was 34. She was 31. This is their first marriage. They waited for each other. They found each other. They dated for two years. And I got to stand there and do their wedding and be a part of that. And that was a neat experience. And then as we're doing the vows, dude can barely choke through them. Like he is so choked up. He's so moved with love for this woman that he is going to marry. It was a really, really sweet moment. It really was. And what strikes me about those moments is they're both so very full of hope, right? They're both so very full of hopes and dreams. If you know, if you've had a kid, then you know what it is to hold that kid and realize, oh my goodness, all the things you hope for them, all the things that you want for them, all the things that you hope are true of them in their adolescence and into adulthood. And if you know Jesus and you believe in prayer, then you pray for them, you hope for them, you dream about them. And when you get married and you stand at the altar and you look at the person that you're giving your life to, you have hopes and dreams about that marriage as well. You have things that you want to be true, stories that you hope God writes in your life. And those are two really hopeful moments. And they remind me that we all have hopes and dreams. You carried hopes and dreams into this room. We all have things that we want. We all have things that we hope are true one day. That's how we are wired. And sometimes life changes those hopes and dreams. If you go back to when you had a kid and then you look at him now, you're like, that's not what I was hoping for. God adjusts those. Sometimes marriage doesn't go the way that we hoped that it would go. But we change them. We augment them. We still have these hopes and we still have these dreams. We have things that we want for ourselves. And it makes me wonder, if we have hopes and dreams for our children, and we believe that God is our Father in heaven, then he has hopes and dreams for us. And I wonder what those are. I wonder what God hopes for us. I wonder what God's will is for us. I wonder what he wants for each of his children. I wonder what he wants for his church. I wonder what he wants for you. I wonder what he wants for the people that you love the most. And I think that we actually arrive in Ephesians chapter three, as we go through the book of Ephesians in our series, I think we actually arrive at a place where we see God's hopes and dreams for us. I think they're articulated through the person of Paul in this prayer. We're going to be looking at Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. In that span of verses, I tweeted out or sent out on social media this week that this is my favorite passage in the Bible. Aaron, our children's pastor, was laughing at me because apparently I have a lot of favorites, but this is like my favorite favorite, okay? I love this prayer. It's a prayer that he prays to the churches surrounding the ancient city of Ephesus. He prays this prayer, a very similar prayer, over the church in Colossae, in the book of Colossians. We find it there. We find it in the book of Philippians that he prays over the church in Philippi. This prayer has made such an impact on me and the way that I think about things and the way that I hope for the people that God entrusts to me that the very first sermon that I was able to choose when I came to grace, I came to grace in April of 2017. And the first two Sundays were Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. And so those had already kind of been determined what was going to be preached that day. But the first passage that I got to choose to preach to my new church was Ephesians 3, verses 14 through 19. When I go and I visit a kid in the hospital that's born, I pray the ethic or the ethos of this verse over them. The takeaway from this prayer, I pray over them. When I pray for Lily, my own daughter, every night, the first prayer I prayed for her was this. The first thing I pray, the thing I pray for her every night, I try to, is this, that she would know God. And when I pray for the marriages that I do, I pray that they would know God. And that's what we see in this prayer. But I don't just expect you to care about this prayer because I do. I don't just expect you to think it's a big deal because I think it's a big deal. And I don't just expect you to accept that these are God's hopes and dreams for you without a little bit of work or a little bit of background because I say they're a big deal. And I think that fundamental to this prayer is really understanding Paul. I think to appreciate the prayer, we have to appreciate the person who prayed it. Now, if I had made these notes later in the week when I was really on my game, I would have said to appreciate the prayer, you have to appreciate the prayer. Yeah, that's better. But this is fine. You have to appreciate the person who prayed the prayer. So who is the person of Paul? I feel like in church we talk about Paul. You've heard me say Paul before, and you know that you're supposed to acknowledge that he's a big deal. But I wonder if sometimes we don't know bits and pieces of who he is, and we don't really know the whole person of Paul. Maybe Paul to you is kind of like Bruce Springsteen to me. I have to confess to you, I don't really know anything that he sang. I don't, I'm sorry. I grew up in a cruel regime that didn't allow me to listen to secular music. And so the 70s and the 80s are totally lost on me until I could start sneaking like Offspring and Dave Matthews in the 90s. Like that's when I started listening to music. Before that, it was just just the Bill Gaither vocal band, which is awesome. I mean, don't hate on them. Some of you are not laughing. You're like, I don't get this. Don't. Google it. You're going to have a great afternoon. But like, I don't know who Bruce, I don't know what he's saying. I'm pretty sure he's called the boss. I think he's from New Jersey. I don't know. You don't have to tell me. I don't really care. And like, this, I was trying to tell the staff, like what songs did he sing? And my first two guesses were Born to Be Wild. No. And Summer of 69. No, that's not true. I think Born in the USA. Is that one? That's literally all I know. They taught me that this week. That's all I know. But my whole life, people will mention Bruce Springsteen. I'm like, yeah, the boss. He's the man. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know anything about him. I just fake it because by this time it's too late to ask any questions, right? I think sometimes we do that with Paul. We mention him in church. Last week you heard me say that he has these things called epistles. That sounds very fancy. Letters that he wrote to the churches. We know that he went around planting churches. We know things about Paul, but I wonder if we really know this person and who he is. Maybe some of you do. Maybe some of you know the deep cuts, like you know the bootlegs, like you know that there's a third Corinthians floating around somewhere out there that we haven't read before. That's actually a true thing. That's a thing that exists. Maybe you know that. Maybe you don't, but I thought we could kind of piece together our knowledge of Paul so we can really appreciate the person that prays this prayer over the church in Ephesus and ultimately over us. Paul was born, Saul, in a city called Tarsus. And he grew up as a Jew's Jew, man. He came up, he was in training, he had just become a Pharisee. And one thing to know about Jerusalem and Israel at the time is that every civilization has a celebrity culture. Every civilization has people that they look at and go, those are the ones that we want to be like. And in Israel, it was the religious leaders. It was the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And so to grow up becoming a Pharisee was to be a part of the celebrity culture of Israel. It was to be young and up and coming. It was to be known. And he was the cream of the crop. He was at the top of the heap. He was the guy. He was the guy with all the potential in Israel. He was a Jew's Jew. And then when Jesus was crucified and his followers, known as simply the way, began to multiply, he said, this is a threat to Judaism, to what I believe in. It's my job to stamp it out. So he took it on his own shoulders to stamp out this young religion of Christianity. And he began to persecute the Christians in Jerusalem. And then he got a special order to go to the next nation over to a city called Damascus and stamp out the Christian movement going on there. And on the way to Damascus, Jesus appears to him and he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? He blinds him and he sends him to a place. He says, you stay here, someone's going to come to you. And then God goes to Ananias, this great prophet that lives. And he says, I want you to go to Saul, and I want you to heal him of the blindness that I'm struck him with. And Ananias says, I don't want to do that. If I go to see Saul, I'm going to get killed. No way. You can find some other sucker. And God says what I think is maybe one of the most ominous lines in the New Testament. Saul is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. For those of you who think that the Christian life, that once I become a Christian, there's no more suffering and God fixes everything that hurts me, I will show you how much he must suffer for my name. That's not in the Bible, this idea that we don't experience hardship once we know Jesus. The one who followed him maybe the best had some of the hardest trials. So Ananias goes to Saul, now named Paul, and he takes the scales off of his eyes. Paul is infused with his purpose. He is the chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles, okay? Gentile is anybody who's not a Jew. So that's almost everybody in this room. And Paul was the guy that God took his infant church that was birthed in Jerusalem, that had a couple thousand followers in this one city, and he handed, I think, this infant church to Paul, and he said, here, I need you to bring this to adolescence. He entrusted it to him. Carry my word, carry the mystery of the gospel, the thing that happened here with Jesus when he died on the cross. Take that to the other church, to the other cities surrounding us in Asia Minor and spread the word of this church. And Paul did his job well because here we are, another continent 2,000 years later. He went off into the wilderness for a number of years. When he felt like he was ready, he presented himself to the council, to the church council in Jerusalem, populated by the disciples and Jesus' brother, James. And he said, hey, I think I'm ready to do my job. I think I'm ready to go tell the Gentiles about this Jesus. Can I go? And they said, yeah, you have our blessing. So he went for the rest of his life on four missionary journeys. Some scholars say it was three journeys. some say four. The reason there's a debate is that his last journey, he was arrested and then put on a ship and taken to Rome. On his way to Rome, they shipwrecked on this island of Malta, and then eventually they got to Rome. And the whole time, Paul, because he's Paul, was sharing his faith and inspiring churches and writing letters. So some consider that his fourth missionary journey. The important thing to know is for his entire life, he traveled around and he planted churches and he inspired people and he brought people to the gospel. He had what was called a traveling seminary. It wasn't called that then, but we call it that now. He always had people who were younger than him, men and women that he was training up so that they could lead churches too. Timothy is his most famous disciple. He actually, the books of 1 and 2 Timothy were written letters from Paul to Timothy when he made Timothy the pastor in Ephesians. He sent Timothy to Ephesus and he said, that's going to be your church now. Here's some letters to guide you as you lead them. Paul was a great man. He is the most influential Christian to ever live. Paul literally said, and he meant it, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted to be with God so badly that he considered it a good thing if he were gonna die. But he understood that to be here was to serve God, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted death, not in a morose way, not in a suicidal way, not in a depressed way, but in a way that he said his picture of what eternity was was so great that he wanted that more than whatever this life had to offer. I spent a lot of time over the years, I haven't done it lately as much to my detriment, but for a while I was reading a lot of biographies. I love reading biographies about people that have done incredible things, men and women that have impacted history through the years. And whenever I read these biographies about good and bad people, people that did great things, people that did terrible things, I try to look for the commonalities. What is it about these people that make them great? What do they have in common through the years, whether it's Genghis Khan or whether it's George Washington or Steve Jobs? What do they have in common that helped them do these great things? And the one thing that I found in the biographies that I've read is that the thing that these great people have in common is this remarkable singularity of focus. They have this ability in their life to be laser focused on this thing that they think is so important. Above and beyond everything else, often to the detriment of other things that most normal people prioritize. A lot of times what they did, the great thing that they do, costs them all kinds of things in their personal lives. But they have the singularity of focus. And as I study Paul, without a doubt, he has the singularity of focus on God's church. He will not be distracted. All he ever cares about is building God's church and the people in God's church. And Paul had hopes and dreams for you too. He had a desire for you. And he had a desire for grace, just like he had a desire for the church in Ephesus. And if we wanna know what Paul prioritized, I think you can look at his prayers. This prayer is important because it reveals what Paul most values. The reason this passage is important is because it's revelatory to us. It tells us what Paul most values. If you were to go to Paul and you were to say, what's the, to you, if you could only ask for one thing for a church, what would it be? If we went to him and we said, if you could, Paul, if you could only pray one thing over grace, what would it be? I think it would be this. If you said, Paul, what, if you could only pray one thing over my marriage, over my kid, over me, over the people that I love, what would it be? I think it would be this passage. I really, truly do. And I think what's said in this prayer reveals his priorities for us. So let's look at what Paul prays over the churches around Ephesus, and I think over the New Testament church of which we are a part. He says this, That's Paul's prayer for you. If you were to say, Paul, what do you want from me and my family? This is it. This is what he wants. And I think it's worth going through sentence by sentence and making sure we really understand what it is that Paul's asking for us here. So if you look at verses 14, and I've actually asked Lynn running our slides today to just leave it up on the screen so that we can look at it together. If you look at verses 14 and 15, for this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. Paul is saying, listen, Ephesus, I want you to know, church, I want you to know, I pray for you. I pray for you. And when I do, here's what I pray. Now, it's interesting to note he gets on his knees. It's a posture of submission. God, your will be done, not mine. It's acknowledging that God is Lord over the whole earth, that all the churches are his. But really, the heart of this is Ephesus, church, I pray for you regularly. And when I do, let me tell you what I pray for. We see in 16, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being. And there's a purpose to that prayer that he wants to be strengthened you. He wants you to be strengthened in your inner being by his spirit so that there's a purpose to that prayer. Okay. That's not just one thing that he wants. He wants that for you because it leads to something else. And the thing that it leads to is so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, okay? Those first two things there, that you would be strengthened with power in your inner being by his spirit so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. That's salvation. That's what he's talking about. To understand what it means to become a Christian is for the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to spiritual truths that you had not yet seen. If you're a believer, then what's happened in your life is at some point or another, your eyes were opened and you realized, oh my goodness, because of choices I've made, I'm at odds with my creator. I have no way to repair my relationship with my creator, and I need something, some supernatural action so that I can be reunited with my creator. And then you realize through the Holy Spirit, because he's working in your heart and in your mind, that that's Jesus. The Holy Spirit's first work in your life is to turn you on to your need for a Savior, and then to open up the doors of your heart so that Christ can take residence in your heart, that Christ would dwell in your hearts through faith. This is a salvation experience. The very first thing that Paul prays for all of us is that we would be Christians, that we would be saved. If you're here this morning and you're not a part of a church and you're not a part of the church because you're not yet a believer, you just came with somebody or you wandered in, we are so glad that you are here. And I want you to know that Paul prays for you. He prays for you that you would become a believer. And not just mental ascent, not just, yeah, I think so. But that you would be strengthened in your inner being. And that phrasing, that denotes your heart, your guts, your core, and your bones down to the fiber of who you are. Be strengthened with the Spirit, I think, so that you won't doubt. So that you'll know that you know that you know that Christ has you. That he will take up residence in your heart, and that you know that you are a believer, that you will be strengthened to your core and have this confidence in knowing that God has you. He prays that for you. But he doesn't stop there. He doesn't just want you to be a believer. He doesn't just want you to know Christ and for Christ to take residence in your heart. But the result of that, and I think this is a beautiful thing, it says that Christ would dwell in your hearts in faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love. I love that phrase. When we're confident in the work that the Holy Spirit has done, we've been strengthened in our core. When Christ has taken up residence in our heart, the result of this, of knowing that we are saved, is that we are rooted and grounded in love. And as I thought about this phrase, I thought, man, this is a really appropriate phrase for 2019. Because we are a people and we are a culture that is becoming more and more aware of the idea of health. All of us, we express it in different ways. Some of us are old school tough guys and we would never really admit this. We just have other ways of saying it, but it's the same thing. We want to be mentally healthy. We want to be physically healthy. We want to be spiritually healthy. We want to be emotionally healthy. We want to be healthy people. Now, some of you, the best way that you have to be emotionally healthy is just to convince yourself that you don't have any of those and then go through life, okay? So that's how some of you have achieved emotional health. If it's working for you, I don't want to mess you up, but we all seek it. We even have little phrases that kind of tip us off and remind us that not everyone's healthy and that's why life happens this way sometimes. Sometimes somebody will say something to hurt your feelings and you'll go to someone who loves you and you'll say, man, so-and-so said this and gosh, it really bothered me. And they'll remind you that, you know what? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. You ever heard that? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. And that's true. Sometimes people who are unhealthy get their unhealth on you by saying regrettable things. Sometimes we see behaviors in others that are gross to us. Just last night, I wasn't gonna use this, but I am now. This will be fun. Jen and I got to go out on a date. It was nice. We went to Second Empire. It was a good restaurant. There's a six-top next to us, and there was a guy there who his voice was loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear all night. He was an insufferable cuss words. And he went on and on about how, I'm not kidding you. He was like in his fifties. We learned how much he could bench. We learned what kind of car he drive. We learned what he did for a living. We learned the people that he knew. We learned the resumes of everybody at the table. It was, he almost ruined our dinner. If my date had to been so pretty, it would have been a waste of a night. Let's pray. But here's the truth. That guy, he's pretty insufferable. He was a me monster. He needed people to like him. He's just not healthy. He hasn't found his true value and his true worth. So he wants you to know those things about him so that you go, you're something. And if you're smart, if you're empathetic, when you're around people like that, and I didn't do it last night because I was neither smart nor empathetic, but right here I can figure it out. You offer those people grace and you go, they're not healthy. They haven't yet found their worth, their sense of being and belonging. And what this verse is telling you is, once the Spirit has moved in your life and strengthened you, once Christ has taken up residence in your heart, man, you are loved by your creator who sent his son to die for you. And you have all the sense of worth and value that you'll ever need if you'll trust it. He gives you your identity. He imbues you with purpose. He tells you every day that he loves you and that you're enough. And if we believe that, if we hear it, and if we walk in it, then we can be rooted and grounded in love. We can be spiritually and emotionally healthy people, and then out of that help, love others. That's the picture of what it is to be a believer, is to be somebody who's healthy enough to know, I'm loved. I don't need affection from other people. I'm affirmed, I don't need other people to tell me I'm special because God does. And then in that freedom and in that confidence, move and love other people. That's a picture of what health is. And I think so often our lives are not rooted and grounded in love. They're rooted and grounded in a myopia or in a narcissism. They're rooted and grounded in anxiety or in things that we can't control. They're rooted and grounded and characterized by a depression or by places where we're not trusting. They're rooted and grounded in ambition and greed and self-consumption. And Paul's prayer is that we would be people who are healthy, who know Christ, who are rooted and grounded in love. Once we are rooted and grounded the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Then he prays, I want you to go deeper into this love of Jesus. I don't want him to just take up residence in your heart. I don't want you to just express his love to other people. I want you to go deeper and deeper into this love that Jesus has for you. I kind of think about it like the ocean. If you go to the ocean and you walk up to it to your knees just before your shorts get wet, you can technically say that you've experienced the ocean. But have you experienced the depths of the ocean? You can walk out there until the waves are breaking over your head and you can feel it kind of swirling you around a little bit. You can feel the power of the ocean. Have you experienced the depths of the world's oceans? When I go to the ocean, what I like to do, and I know this is a terrible choice, and one day I'm just not going to come back, and that's how it goes. I swim out until I get scared. Every time I go to the ocean, I do it. I like to do it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I swim until I get scared. And then I turn around and swim back. Now, I never get scared because, oh my gosh, I'm so far out. I'm not going to have the energy to get back. I become acutely aware that I'm at shark depth and that they've seen me. And I cannot, as much as I try to get that thought out of my head and they're not interested in me, there's other things to eat. they don't want me. As much as I try to reason with myself, I just, there's sharks here, man, and I swim back. But even swimming out as far as I can until I get scared, have I experienced the depths of the ocean? If you've been on a cruise ship and you've had the opportunity to look in every direction and see nothing but the ocean. If you are a marine biologist, a maritime explorer, and you get in a submarine and you go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean, have you experienced all that there is to experience in the ocean? No. You can devote your life to exploring it and you will only ever scratch the surface of what it has to offer. This is the love of Christ. Just because we've been up to our waist, just because it swept over us and we felt the power of it a couple times, just because we were able to venture out far enough so that we got scared does not mean that we have experienced all that the love of Christ has to offer. And Paul's prayer is that your life would be this experience of an ever-deepening understanding of the love that God has for you, understanding that until we get to eternity, we will only ever scratch the surface. You could devote your life to understanding the love that Jesus has for you, and we still won't comprehend it. And then finally, he says, for all of this, that you would be filled with all the fullness of God. Thanksgiving's coming up around the corner. And when it does, we go to Dothan, Alabama, and we have the best meal of the year. It's phenomenal. And about 10 to 15 minutes before that meal, every year, what do I start doing? I start going through the kitchen. There's the turkey, and I pick up a little piece of that turkey and have some turkey. There's a deviled egg. I'm going to sneak like six of those, and I'll have a couple of dev you know? I start to kind of pick at the food. But I'm not full yet. Because what's going to happen is we're going to pray, and everybody's going to get a plate, and they're going to go. And I'm always going to go and wait and let everybody else go first because I don't want to have to worry about portion control when I get there. And when I get up to that food, I'm even thinking this year, I'm going to go to Walmart and buy some of those khakis with like the elastic waistband here. So I got some Thanksgiving pants, you know. I'm going to make some irresponsible choices at Thanksgiving. I'm going to have a big old food baby. And I'm not going to stop until I get the meat sweats, right? That's what America does, man. Yeah. That is full. That's full. When we taste on Sunday morning and we get another taste at small group, we get another taste when we get up in the morning, we get another little taste when we listen to something in the car. Let us not be satisfied with that. Let us be filled with all the fullness of God. That we would know him. And that's the heart of the prayer. All of this, if you had to sum it up, what does Paul pray for us? If you had to sum it up in one sentence, what does Paul want for us more than anything? That you would know God. That you would know Jesus. That you would be filled with the fullness of him. That you would have an inkling of the height and the breadth and the depth of his love for you. That you would be strengthened with power in your inner being. That you would be healthy from that health that you would love. That you would be overwhelmed by God and be full of him every day. That's the number one thing that he prays for you. I think that's remarkable. I think it's remarkable, particularly when you think about the things that he didn't pray. If you look at these churches, these churches in the ancient world, life expectancy was like, what, 40, 45? I can't back that up with paperwork, but I feel pretty confident with that guess. Sickness was very much a part of these churches. Loss was a part of the lives of all the people in these churches. Yet Paul does not pray for health. He does not pray in this prayer. He does in other places, but in this prayer, if he can only pray one thing, he doesn't pray for healing or spiritual health or physical health rather. He doesn't pray, even though he planted this church, he wants it to grow. He wants to see them add numbers day by day. He wants to see this church flourish and be bigger in five years than it is this year. He wants that for this church. He doesn't pray it. He doesn't pray, may your ministry be successful. May God give you favor in your community. He doesn't pray for prosperity or wealth or success or health. He prays that they would know God. Now, does Paul want all of those things? Sure, absolutely he does. And at other places in the Bible, he prays for some of those things. But what's the first thing that he wants? That they would know God. It makes sense to me that he doesn't pray for church growth. Because if your church is filled with people who have mined the depths of the love of Christ, who are filled with all the fullness of God. You don't think that church brings in other people? You don't think that church is a powerful force in the community in which it sits? You don't think that person who is filled in that way isn't an influencer at their place of work? He doesn't have to pray those other things. He prays for the fundamental thing. He doesn't pray for health. I think he doesn't pray for health because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very situation that is going to bring about the answer to this prayer, which is to make you closer to God. He doesn't pray for prosperity because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very struggle that's going to bring you closer to God. And earlier I said that Paul's prayer reveals what he most values. Our prayers reveal our priorities. And if our prayers reveal what we most value, what do your prayers reveal about you? And the times that you pray, for some of us, it's every day. For some of us, it's for our meals. For others, it's when we're at Bible study and someone asks us to pray. We go, well, here we go. For others, it's rarely. It's in dire situations. But when you pray, what do you pray? When you go to God and you ask for something, what's the first thing you ask for? What have you prioritized above everything else? Is it situational? Or does it transcend that? I think the first thing that we should pray in every situation based on this prayer is, Father, let what's happening now conspire in some way to bring people closer to you. When we get the diagnosis, I think first we pray, God, we don't understand this. We hate this. This breaks our heart. Let it conspire to bring people closer to you. And then we go, and if it's still your will, God, could you please get rid of this because this stinks. When we find ourselves between jobs or between purposes, our first prayer should be, God, in this time, when I try to figure out what's next, I pray that the events of this time would conspire to bring me and those around me closer to you. And then the next thing. When something happens in the life of our child, God, I pray that whatever's going on right now, even though I don't understand it, will it please conspire to bring them to a place where they know you better? Will that please be the result of this? And then, Father, do these things. The question I want to ask you is, how should Paul's prayer shape our prayers? How should what he prays for shape what we pray for? How should what he hopes for shape what we hope for? What are your wildest dreams for your kids? Do they start with that they would simply know God? I pray for Lily. I pray that she'd marry a nice man that loves the Lord, that takes care of her, that loves her better than I ever could. I pray that she knows God better than I ever do. But the first thing I pray for her above anything else, any of her character traits, where she goes and what she does, the first thing I pray for her every night is she would know God. When we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, what do we pray for them? When we respond to tragedy, what do we pray in the face of that tragedy? When we respond to triumph, this is where we need to be the most careful. Everything's going great. What do we pray in the face of that triumph? Because we all have hopes and dreams and things that we want in life. But God has those for us too. And I don't know about you, but I want my hopes and dreams to align with his. I want our hopes and dreams as a church to align with what God wants for us. I want us to be people who more than anything else want us and those we love to know God. Let's pray. Father, we love you. You pursue us with a reckless love. You fill us with that love. You offer it to us freely. And God, you call us to it. I pray that we would hear that call, that we would feel it, that we would give into it. Lord, I pray over grace that we would be people who are strengthened in our inner being through your spirit, that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith, that we would be healthy people who are rooted and grounded, God. And because of that, because of that health, because we know your love so much, that we would mind the depths of the love of Christ that he has for us, that we would know with all the saints exactly what that is, and that we would be filled with all of your fullness, Father. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.