Sermons tagged with Commitment

What up? I'm Nate. Thanks for being here. I get to be the pastor here and they let me do the sermons and stuff, so it's good to get to see you if I haven't gotten to meet you already. In case you're wondering, cookout and baggy clothes is the key to this body. So, I mean, you guys can have it too. It's really easy. This is the last part of our series called Lessons from the Gym pursuing and prioritizing our spiritual health. And one of the things that we've been saying is implicit in your attendance in church is that to some degree or another, you care about your spiritual health. Maybe a little bit, we may be dipping our toe in the water. It may be a big, huge deal, a life-changing moment, and you're really taking it seriously. But all of us, to varying degrees, say by being here that we care about our spiritual health. And so we've been walking through that for the month of January. I've been really excited about the series because if I'm honest, I had some trepidation going into it. I wasn't sure if we should do it. For different reasons, I was insecure about it. But you guys have been really nice and kind, and the feedback has been good. And my prayer throughout this has been that we would be, that 2019 would be a year for all of us of marked spiritual growth and maturity, that we would finish the year closer to Jesus than we were when we entered the year. So we've been talking about that pursuit, and I hope that you guys are committed to your spiritual health. I want to talk this morning about a principle in Scripture that I think is one of the most forgotten, underrated, undertaught, undernoticed principles in the Bible and really highlight that today and talk about the ramifications that has for us as we seek to become people who are more spiritually healthy and walking with Jesus. To do that, I want to go back to a place where I was at several years ago at my previous church called Greystone Church outside of Atlanta. I was going to Greystone and they ended up hiring me as the student pastor. And so when I took over, I had a group of small group leaders that worked with the students that were volunteers from the church. One of the guys was a guy named Toby. Toby was a, he was a regular dude, couple kids, job, the whole deal. And Toby's story that he shared with me was he, earlier in his life, I mean, as an adult, but years prior, he was an alcoholic. And that's what he dealt with. That was his cross to bear. And he was very far from Jesus. He never accepted Jesus as his Savior. And then one day, God got a hold of his heart in this incredible way, and he comes to know Jesus as his Savior. He becomes a Christian. He lets God in, and he gives his life over to that. And on the day that he accepted Christ as his Savior, moving forward, he said he has never had another sip of alcohol in his whole life. He goes from walking one way, being an alcoholic, kind of a slave to that, that's a big part of his life, and then the very next day after accepting Christ as his Savior, no more alcohol in his life ever. Now listen, the point of this illustration is not to tell you that alcohol is evil and that you should never have a sip of it. The point of it is, in Toby's life, his conviction was that he shouldn't because it was unwise of him. And God cured him of his alcoholism just like that. And if you guys have been around church for any amount of time, and a lot of you guys are church people, you've seen and heard stories like this, right? Where somebody had an addiction to a substance or some other thing. Somebody was just a big jerk, or they were greedy, or they were selfish, or they were myopic in their thinking, or whatever it was that tended towards unhealth, that was them. And then they got saved. They accepted Jesus as their Savior, and God changed their heart in a 180-degree turn. The very next day, they're totally different people. They were never that person before. We've seen stories like that, or they were never the person that they were before. Again, you guys know this, right? And then we look in Scripture, and we see sometimes indicators that this is kind of the norm. This morning, I want us to look at kind of the life arc of a guy named Paul. Paul was probably the most influential Christian to ever live. He wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. And in the book of Romans, which is the most theologically detailed book in the New Testament, maybe even in the Bible, he's outlining for us what we call the doctrine of salvation, or really why we believe what we believe about how a person gets saved is the word that we use. And when he's outlining that, he gets to the part in Romans 5 and 6 where he starts talking about accepting Jesus and what it means when we become a Christian. And in Romans 6, he says that when you become a Christian, that the old person is gone, the old version of you, the things that you used to do, the things that you used to be interested in, the pursuits that you used to have, that person is dead. He has been put to death with Christ. He or she has been put to death with Christ. And now you walk as this new creation in Jesus. So the version of you that used to be, what Paul says, a slave to sin. You have no choice but to sin. And when we talk about sin, what we understand is a church word that we use a lot of times, but sin simply is living as though God's standards for your life don't matter. That's what sin is. And so when we live a life of sin, we are far from God. We are separated from him. We are a slave to sin. We have no option but to do things that displease Him. And then, the moment we become saved, says Paul, we are a new creature. We can walk in freedom. We're not a slave to that anymore. The problem with stories like Toby's and the ones that you know in your life and passages like that that seem to indicate that this spiritual change and transformation is this instantaneous, momentary thing where we're going one way one minute and then the next minute, because of Jesus, we're walking in the other direction and we're not the same person anymore. The problem with that and hearing stories like that is that they end up, for most of us, being more discouraging than they are encouraging. And they're scourging in the same way that I was discouraged at the gym. I told you that I started taking my physical health seriously. At the end of 2016, I was 204 pounds. I wish I had a picture of Super Chubby Nate. You guys would really love it. But I was 204 pounds, which for me, I graduated college at 155, man, like soaking wet. So I've always been a beanpole. So that was pretty big for me. And I started going, man, like I can't even, like when I just stand still, I have two chins and that's not good. So I got to do something about this. I'm going to have to tuck it. It's just there. So I was like actually taking pictures, like trying to stick my face out, you know, so that way, anyways, it was bad. And I thought, how about instead of taking pictures like a weirdo, you just get healthy. So I started to pursue health. And I would get in the gym and I would work out. I'd really rep it out good, you know, like whatever it was. I felt really tired. I was really sweaty. And I'd get down into the locker room, changing for the shower or whatever it was. And I'm looking in the mirror, you know, there's mirrors all over the place in these stupid locker rooms, and I'm kind of doing like the subtle flex, like, you know, is there anything there? Like give it a little, like squeezing the pecs. Y'all quit looking at me like you never do the subtle flex. You bunch of liars. You all do the subtle flex. So I'm looking at it, trying to figure out, is there anything different about me? And it was depressing because the answer was no. It took a long time. It probably took about three months before I was able to look in the mirror and go, okay, I'm starting to notice some differences. It probably took about five or six months before anybody in my life looked at me and said, you know, you look a little healthier. You look a little skinnier. Are you losing weight? It took a long time to start seeing the after picture that I wanted to see. It probably took about 10 or 11 months for me to get to the place where I said, okay, I think I'm pretty happy with the way I feel and the way that I look. It took a long time. And it was a bummer to realize, getting into the gym, that just because I go to the gym and just because I'm now trying to eat right and I'm watching my calories and I'm watching my sugar and all that other stuff and I'm doing the exercises, just because I'm doing that does not mean that I'm going to get instantly healthy. Just because I have a good week doesn't mean I'm going to see results. And what began to dawn on me is, man, getting healthy takes a long time. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? You spend your years doing whatever it is you're doing to get to the place of unhealth that drives you to the place to pursue physical health, and you've been eating whatever you want, you've been doing whatever you want, you haven't maintained a discipline of exercise, and it's going to take a long time to shed those years of unhealth, right? And I realize, man, everybody who's walking around who's healthier than me, like they've made a long-term commitment to this. It's not a result of just one good week or one good month, but they are really staying the course to get physically healthy. And what occurred to me is it's the same with our spiritual health. It takes a long time to get spiritually healthy. It's the same deal. If you're walking through life acting as though God's standards for your life don't matter, and so you're walking in unhealth, and you're allowing things to come into your life, whatever it is to come into your life, to come into your head, to come into your heart, to come into your person, and then you just allow those things to sit there and generate within you whatever they generate, and you perpetuate in this unhealth. When you decide to pursue spiritual health, doesn't it make sense that it would take a long time to shed those layers of unhealth? And what we need to realize this morning is it's great to make a decision to commit yourself to spiritual health. It's great to make a decision to follow Jesus. It's great to get on your knees at somewhere in the month of January and say, Jesus, I want you. I want more of you. I want to grow nearer to you this year. It is great to do those things, but it is not one decision or one action or one prayer or one commitment that turns our life 180 degrees and suddenly we begin to walk in health. It takes a long time. That's why I think that this principle in Scripture is so very important and can be so very encouraging for those of us who are longing for spiritual help, but it seems to be taking longer than what we want. I talked to you about Paul. Paul's the most influential Christian to ever live, and Paul has probably the most radical conversion story in the Bible. Somebody who was not a believer and then became a believer. Paul was a guy named Saul who, after the death of Jesus, was actively killing Christians who professed a faith in the guy that had just died and come back to life. He was actively persecuting Christians. And he went to the leaders in Jerusalem and he said, I'd like to go to Damascus. There's been an outcropping of Christianity there. I want to go squelch it. Let me go arrest and kill people. And they said, yeah, go ahead. So he is literally on the road to Damascus, on his way to go kill Christians. And Jesus appears to him. And he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And he gets his attention and he blinds him for three days. And in that moment, God changes Saul's name to Paul and he becomes a believer. And God even goes to another guy named Ananias and he says about Paul, he is my chosen instrument to reach the rest of the world with the good news of me. He is going to build my church in the rest of the world outside of Jerusalem. He's a big deal. And you would expect that a person, the same man who experienced that radical conversion, to go from on his way to killing Christians to now a believer who wrote Romans 6, who explains to us that when we accept Christ, that the old version of us is dead and the new person of us, new version of us now walks in freedom and is no longer a slave to sin. You would expect that that person, if there's ever been 180 degree turn, that it would be him. Except in the book of Galatians, he gives us this little detail about his life that I think is incredibly interesting. He's writing to the church in Galatia and he's kind of giving them his resume. Here's why I can say the things to you that I'm saying. And one of the things he says is this. He says, when I got converted, I went to the Arabian wilderness for three years and isolated myself. You hear me? This guy who was converted radically, who had all the religious training in the world when he was a guy named Saul, who God got a hold of and turned him towards him and said, you're going to be my instrument to reach the rest of the world. Before he went and did any ministry, before he was spiritually healthy, he went and isolated himself in the Arabian desert for three years while God did the work on his heart and on his soul and on his ego and on his mindset and on his values and on his conscience that he needed done before he was healthy enough to go and to minister to others. Do you realize that? It took the most influential Christian who's ever lived three years to go from a place of unhealth to health. And it's not just Paul. We see this in the Old Testament. Moses, a hero of the faith, the founder of the nation of Israel, the author of the first five books of the Bible called the Torah, the guy who carried the Ten Commandments down the mountain and gave them to the people who instituted the law. He grew up in Pharaoh's house, being exposed to training that no other Hebrew had ever been exposed to, being trained to be a leader and learning how to get people to follow him. He got training that nobody ever did because God was preparing him for what he wanted him to do later in life. But before God allowed him to do the thing that he put him on the earth to do, God sent him to Midian to be a shepherd in the desert for 40 years in the wilderness. 40 years in the wilderness. Where God worked on him and worked on his heart and ironed out his arrogance and ironed out his ego and instilled him with the spirit of altruism so that when he began the work, he was ready for it. David, the greatest king Israel has ever seen, the king on whose throne Jesus is going to sit when he returns. As a young boy, maybe 10, maybe 12, maybe 13, was anointed the king of Israel. And Samuel said, you're going to be the next king of Israel. Do you know that between anointment and appointment, there was maybe 15 or 20 years that went by before that was actually fulfilled. And in the meantime, between being anointed king and actually being appointed king to what God wanted him to do, he wandered around the wilderness trying to not get murdered by the other king. Where God worked on his heart and his ego and his humility and his conscience and his values to prepare him for what he needed him to do. This principle of the wilderness runs throughout Scripture, and we often forget about it, or we don't notice it. But I think it's incredibly important to point out, as many of us in the room say, in 2019, I want to prioritize my spiritual health. Because what we need to understand, if we're going to prioritize our spiritual health, is that it's going to take a long time. It's going to take a long time. It's not one decision. It's not one commitment. It's not one prayer. It's a daily decision. It's a daily prayer. It's a daily renewal. And it takes a long time to work out our hearts and get them to a place where God wants them to be so that we can walk in harmony with him. It takes a long time. So those of you who are seeing other people and seeing this instantaneous change and go, why isn't that happening to me? It's not happening to you because that's not natural, and that's not founded. And even Toby would tell you, yeah, sure, it changed my desire for alcohol, but God still had a ton of work to do in my heart. It takes a long time to get to a place of spiritual health. It takes long commitment and daily decisions for weeks and months and years to get to a place where we're healthy. And it takes so very long and is so very arduous because as God is working in us, what we need to realize is he's working in us because we need our consciences repaired, our values reoriented, and our hearts restored. You understand that? It takes so very long to get spiritually healthy because we desperately need our consciences repaired, our values reoriented, and our hearts restored to what they are meant to be. The Bible has a lot to say about this idea of our consciences being seared, is the word that it normally talks about. Being seared so that something that's supposed to make us feel bad when we do it, we do it so often and so regularly that that part of our heart or that part of our conscience is numb and we no longer even acknowledge that anymore. We don't even experience the pains of guilt when we do that thing that we always do anymore because we're so accustomed to doing it. And so God has to peel back layers of scar tissue on our consciences to reorient them and recalibrate them towards him. An easy example of this, I don't mean to be crass, it's just a really easy example. I was in a small group at my old church and I wasn't on staff yet. So people actually told you the truth. Once you become a pastor and you're on staff, nobody tells the truth anymore. It's all like the nice pastor sheen. I would really love to go golfing with someone who would just let some anger go, man. That would be really fun for me. But everybody always acts so nice. And so in this small group where people were actually telling the truth and it was refreshing, we broke up. It was a couples group, and we broke up men and women. And so the dudes were just sitting around talking. And the topic came up of the stuff that you look at, usually on the internet, that you probably shouldn't, well, not probably, that you shouldn't look at, right? And one of the guys said, and he at the time was professing to be a believer. I'm sure he was. I have no idea. He spoke up and he goes, you know, I don't really see a problem with it. And we all kind of go like, that's an interesting take. All right. What's up? And he goes, well, I mean, as long as you're looking and not touching, what's the harm? And listen, I'm not pure as a driven snow by any means, but I kind of thought instantly like, oh my goodness, well, that's not what Jesus says in Matthew. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says, if you look at somebody with lust in your heart, then you've committed adultery with that person. So you're not allowed to do that, buddy. But his conscience was so seared from something that seemed so normalized to him that the very act of doing that didn't cause any pangs of guilt in him at all. Now, the rest of his story is he hung around small group long enough. God began to get a hold of him. He actually became a small group leader and then discipled other people and sent them out as small group leaders in the church. So God used him in really cool ways. But one of the things that I'll always remember is when we first decide to move towards spiritual health, there are so many things that we carry a seared conscience towards that God has to open our eyes and begin to peel back the scar tissue of the things that we've been doing in our life for years and years. And it makes me wonder, with this many people in the room, as we decide, hopefully, collectively, to pursue spiritual health, and maybe many of us have been wandering, many of us maybe have been living as though God's standards for our life didn't really matter. Maybe we've been in a spiritual rut and not really taking things very seriously for a while. Wherever we are, I wonder what sort of scar tissue we bring into this room on our consciences right now. I wonder how much work there is to be done in us so that we feel the pangs of guilt for the things that displease God that have just become so normalized to us that we don't even feel them anymore. So God has to do some work in our hearts and in our consciences to repair them. He has to reorient our values. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but we value basically what's around us. And we get our values from the people that we're closest to. And so most of us default to getting our values from the culture and the world that we live in. And our culture tells us things like the kind of car I drive is super important, which I've clearly rejected with my Nissan Leaf. It tells us that the job that we have is really important. It tells us that we should make as much money as the rest. I don't need to make more money than everybody. I just need to make more money than the guys I grew up with or the girls I grew up with. It tells us that our spouses are important for reasons that they're not important, that status is important for reasons that it's not important. It encourages us to go after power or influence with the opposite sex or to chase money or to prioritize all these things that are values imparted on us by the world that we really weren't designed to pursue. And when we decide to pursue spiritual health and we begin to take seriously the teachings of the Bible and we begin to run our life through the grid of what scripture teaches, what we very quickly find is the values of God and his kingdom are very different than the values of the world. And it takes some work to reorient our hearts and our values in line with things that God values. To quit valuing what our job is so much and start valuing the relationships we have there and the opportunity to minister. To quit thinking about how much money we can get for ourselves and how we can be good stewards of the resources that God allows us to have, to use our job and our influence philanthropically, to use our gifts and our abilities to build up God's kingdom and not our own kingdom, to begin to value other people and their friendship and to see them as people who desperately need Jesus as opposed to people who are simply in our way. It takes a long time to recalibrate those values. Years and months of God working on our heart and ironing out the selfishness and ironing out the ego so that we can be the people that he created us to be. And finally, he has to restore our hearts. I don't know if you've thought about this, but your heart was created to beat in harmony with your creator. It was created to exist in peace with the one that created you. And we've said earlier in a service that every lurch at happiness that we've ever had is really our heart trying to find that harmony with the one that created it. But the problem is when we walk through life without caring about the standards that our creator gives us, without much thought towards our spiritual health, and we allow things into our life that don't need to be there, not because they're bad, even though they might be, but more importantly because they're unhealthy for us, it beats up our heart. It damages our heart, and it begins to beat for things that it doesn't need, and it begins, it lurches to find its happiness in things that will never give it happiness, and we walk away with damage, and we walk away with scar tissue on our hearts because we've been trying to fill it and be in harmony with things that it wasn't designed to be in harmony with. Isaiah in the Old Testament describes it like this. Isaiah was a prophet. He wrote the longest book of prophecy in the Old Testament. And he describes the nation of Israel. The nation of Israel was a nation that collectively had been wandering away from God, not pursuing them, living however they wanted to live as though his standards didn't matter. And wander away from him, that that is the condition of our heart when we come back to Jesus. It is wounded from top to bottom. It needs to be bound up. It needs to be healed. God needs to reorient and restore our heart to what he intended it to be so that it beats with him. And that takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. And it doesn't happen because of a prayer. And it doesn't happen because of a spiritual high. It takes a daily, long-term commitment to allowing God to do the work in us that he needs to do to bring us to a place of spiritual health. The good news about this is when we do it for long enough, when we allow God to work in us for long enough, that things and disciplines begin to feel more natural and that the things we want begin to actually change. And we do see our values begin to actually change and our desires begin to actually change. I liken it to the change that happened in me physically when I was trying to eat better, right? And I was actually doing good and avoiding sugars and eating the stuff that I needed to eat. At first, I was bummed out about it, but then I would have like a cheat day, right? Like I've been doing pretty good. It's been 36 hours since I had anything that I wasn't supposed to have. I deserve a little treat, right? So maybe I'd get a sweet tea instead of a water. And I'd drink the sweet tea, and after not having sugar for like a month, it was gross, right? If you've ever experienced this, you take a sip of that sweet tea and go, oh gosh, how did I used to handle this? This is ridiculous. I couldn't handle it. It was too sweet. I had to switch to half and half. Good news, I'm back on full sweet tea, okay? I just want you guys to know that. Yeah, I know. I know. I got my body back in shape. You take it down, buddy. Or I would allow myself a cheat day. I love baked goods, right? So I would be a sucker. Somebody would bring some donuts, a Bible study or something like that and be like, I'm going to have one of those later in private in my shame, but I'm going to have one. And I would start to eat one and it was just too sweet and I couldn't finish it. And my cravings had literally changed. And I used to be like the fast food king. Like I have fast food way more often than I'm willing to admit to you. And so like I loved a big greasy burger and the whole deal. And so maybe I'd have a cheat day. Maybe I would say, okay, that was a good sermon. I'm going to go get myself a nice big cookout, whatever it is. And so I'd go home and I'd eat it, and I would feel gross, like I needed a nap, like it just didn't sit well on me. And my cravings changed, right? And when I started working out, it was hard to get up in the morning. I didn't want to. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to lose that time. Like when I'd get to the gym, I'd kind of look around defeated and be like, I don't want to do any of this crap. But I would make myself do it. But eventually, you do it enough, and your body wants it. And I would go a day or two without working out, and I'd be like, man, I've got to run or something. Like I just need to like sprint around. This is crazy. I need to exercise. Like my body craved it. And so over time, those things change and it becomes more normalized. But here's the thing that I learned. If you add in enough cheat days, if often enough, more regularly than not, you allow yourself that sweet tea again, you know what happens? You get back on the full deal, baby. Eventually, your body goes back to the same place that it was before. If you allow yourself to eat enough burgers when you've been trying to avoid big, greasy foods, eventually your system can handle it again. And you go right back to the place you were before. If you lose your discipline once you're healthy, it doesn't take much to get right back to where you were before. So I'm going to show you something as an example of this, and I'm being vulnerable here, okay? I believe in vulnerability and authenticity. I think it's what makes church so good sometimes. So I'm going to trust you with this. You can make fun of me for this picture today, and then not again, all right? So that's the deal. But I'm going to show you the opposite of a before and after picture. Okay. Or how it's not supposed to look. I'm going to show a picture up here in a second. And the picture on the left is me healthy. And the picture on the right is me like now. Okay. So look, here's what happens when you lose your, when you lose your standard. See me on the left, like that's like November of 2017. That's when I was like at my most healthy. There's some looseness to the t-shirt there, particularly in the gut area. And then to the right there is me like three weeks ago. All right. That's what happens when you fall back into old patterns is you make butter pants Nate there. Okay. Okay. Please take that now. What I've learned is not only does it take a long time to get to a place of health, but if you lose the discipline that got you to that place, you very quickly fall back into who you were. This is the same spiritually. Many of us have spiritually yo-yoed, haven't we? We get to a place of spiritual health. We allow God, we stick to it enough, long enough to allow the Lord to actually get us to a place where we feel like we're walking with him and then something happens in our life. Typically life starts going well and we quit relying on him so much and we just kind of start walking through life. We get back into our ruts. We allow ourselves the cheat days. We don't maintain the vigilance and the discipline over our character and what we allow into our life. And before we know it, we look exactly like we did before we were healthy. This danger and this truth is exactly why I think Paul seems to be so fanatical about perseverance. As we look at the life arc of Paul, we see a man who was converted and who took three years to get spiritually healthy. And then you look at the letters that he writes in the New Testament to all the churches. There's a couple things in there that you pull out that you go, man, these are themes. These are big deals to Paul. And one of them is this idea of perseverance. He is constantly, constantly encouraging everyone around him to persevere in the faith, to hang in there, to maintain the level of discipline, not only that got you to a place of health, but understand that that level of discipline sustains you as you move through life. It prohibits you from yo-yoing spiritually. We've got to hang in there and continue to make faithful decisions. He encourages this corporately and individually. When he writes his letter to the church in Thessalonica, he praises them at the beginning of the letter. He says, I've heard about you and I want to praise you. Why? For your goodness and your faithfulness and your love and your numbers and your growth and your ministry? No. He says, you want to be a good pastor? Here's my advice to you. They're wonderful letters. And throughout these letters, do you know what he encourages Timothy to do over and over again? To endure in the faith, to persevere, to continue to make faithful decisions, to not fall away from the discipline that got him there, to stand strong. And then as Paul finishes the letters to Timothy and nears the end of his life, he shares this incredible verse about perseverance. These two, actually. They're in 2 Timothy 4, verses 6 and 7 thing to be able to say. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. In my Bible, I have a little note next to it. I don't know when I wrote it, but it says, oh, to say this. Would there be a better thing to say at the end of your life than to be able with a clean conscience to say, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I've kept the faith. And so as we consider pursuing spiritual health, hopefully we've been challenged over the series that this is what we want to do. My prayer for you all month, I repeat it every week, has been that you would be closer to Jesus when you finish the year than when you started, that 2019 would be a year of marked spiritual health for you. As we hopefully commit to that in light of this need not only to allow God the time to work in our hearts to reorient them towards him because of that principle of the wilderness and how long it takes to get spiritually healthy. As we allow God that time and we daily choose to commit ourselves to him to get us to a place of spiritual health and then also continue to choose as we commit to that health in an ongoing way, I wanted to finish the series with this simple question or challenge. At the end of 2019, will you be able to say that you finished your race? At the end of this year, if somebody looks at you in the lobby, we come and we have our Christmas Eve services and we blow them out and they're fun and they're really great, and someone looks at you in the lobby, someone who knows you and loves you well and cares about you, and they look you in the eye and they say, did you finish your race this year? You made a commitment in January. You made a commitment to God. You prayed and you committed and you meant it. Did you run your race? What will you be able to say? How do you want to answer that question? To remind you of that commitment, if you've made it, I've put one of these, we've put one of these in each of your seats. It's just a little wristband. It's a cheesy thing, but I think it makes the point. If you're committed to running your race this year, if you're committed to 2019 being a year of marked spiritual health and growth for you, if you're committed to the daily decision and you understand the principle of the wilderness that this is going to take a long time and you're committed to the daily decision of pursuing spiritual health and allowing God to do the work in you to restore your heart and you're committed to maintaining the discipline once you begin to see the results that you're looking for, then I want you to take this home. If you don't want it, you don't need it, it's no big deal, but if you want it, if you're committed to running your race, I want you to take this with you. And I want you to put it somewhere where you'll see it. Maybe not every day, you don't have to prominently display a white wristband, that would be super weird. But put it in the center console of your car. Put it in your catch-all where you drop off your keys when you get to the house. Put it on your nightstand. Put it in a desk drawer that you see at work. Put it next to where you brush your teeth. Wherever you might see it, wherever you might see it frequently enough to remind you so that when you see it, it is a reminder to go, I'm running my race this year. I'm committed this year. I'm making the decisions that I need to make to allow God to work in me this year. I'm going to finish the race. If someone asks me in December if I finished, I'm going to tell them that I did. What could this year be like for you if you committed and you ran? What could this year be like for you? What could God do in your heart and in your life and through you if you would commit to following him this year? What could God do at Grace if we all did this? If at the end of the year we got to be a church where if someone could come ask us, did Grace run their race this year? What if we got to say yes? What amazing things could we see God do here? I can't wait. Because I think there's going to be a lot of y'all running with me. And so I say let's go. And let's be committed to finishing our race this year. Let's pray. Father, we love you so very much. We're so grateful to you for the way that you've loved us, the way that you've looked out for us. God, I pray that you would call on our hearts even now. I pray that those who are far from you, that you would begin to break down those walls and let your goodness like like a fetter, bind their wandering hearts to you as you have with me so many times. I pray that we would be spiritually healthy, that we would allow you the time to do the work in our hearts to orient us towards you, and that when we finish this year, that we would be able to say with a clean conscience, yeah, I ran my race. Show us what happens in a church when a group of people decide to do that, Father. Give us the strength and the courage and the perseverance and the friends and the people that we need in our life to maintain the commitments that we've made this month. It's in your son's name we ask all these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.

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