Sermons tagged with Courage

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.

It's good to see you guys. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor here, believe it or not. And I'm so excited about 2019. I feel like 2018 was such a wonderful year for grace, was such a wonderful year for the church. And we've enumerated all the things that God did for us last year. But I feel like, gosh, we are just poised to do really good things this year. We have a solid staff team, a good, great folks around us, and we are really ready to push this year. So I'm excited to see what the Lord does in the church this year. And I've already been praying for you a little bit, been praying for you as you enter into 2019. And my prayer for all of us, me included, is that when we leave this year, we will leave it closer to God than we are right now. My prayer for you is that 2019 will be a year of marked spiritual change and health in your life, and Jesus will draw you closer to him. That's my prayer and my hope. So we're launching with this series, Thoughts from the Gym, because we kind of felt like it fit into the beginning of the year, New Year's resolutions, and things like that. And a lot of us, like I did this week, are having day one in the gym again, right? The genesis of this series is we moved here in April of 2007. And so entering into the summer, we didn't know anybody. And so Jen said, well, Jen is my wife and we have a little girl named Lily. And so we wanted to join a pool so they could have something to do during the day because they make me work office hours here. It's ridiculous. So they wanted something to do during the day when I wasn't around. And so we ended up joining a pool and we joined a pool at a gym. And I thought, well, as long as I'm paying for this thing, I should try to go, right? And so I went, and it was pretty fun, and as I would go and watch other people work out, I was thinking about things, and there's some thoughts that occurred to me like, man, there's so many parallels here that apply to church and spiritual health, and I just kind of filed them away, and then one day, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. And then one day I shared them with staff and they said, well, that should be a series. You should do that in January. So here we are. And the first one that we're going to do is called day one. And it's the first thing that occurred to me. That day, whenever it was, when I got ready to go to the gym, I put on whatever ratty clothes I had, and I go there, and I'm going to work out. I'm going to do the thing, right? Like you guys have had day ones, right? And I'm going to do the thing. And I don't like admitting this, okay, because I like to think of myself as mentally tough. I don't get easily intimidated, or at least maybe my unearned confidence has told me that. But I don't think I get intimidated a lot, but I was intimidated going to the gym. I don't like to admit that, but I was. Because, you know, if you've been there and you look like me, like there was a season, I got real consistent in the gym. There was a season where I would even be bold enough as to call myself in shape. But due to my affinity for baked goods and sitting, I'm back in like normal shape. All right. So I've got a long road to glory ahead of me this year. But I go and as I'm going, like I walk in and everybody's got on the matching clothes. All the dudes are wearing tight shirts by choice. I'm wearing tight shirts like not by choice. You know, they look good in theirs. I want to look better in mine. I get up on the treadmill and there's all these buttons and, and three of them say start. I'm like, what are you doing to me, Lifetime? I don't know what to do or which buttons to push. I'm pretty sure everyone around me is staring at me going, look at this clown. I'm starting to sweat. I haven't even done anything yet because I'm just nervous that everybody's judging me. Then I go over. I don't even know what. I literally, I'm just there. I have just like, I'm just, I don't, I have no workout plan. I'm just going to pick up some heavy things. Then I'm going to go home and I'm sweaty. And so I like curls, I know how to do curls. So I go over there and I grab a, you know, a barbell and a dumbbell and I, and I'm like looking at the other dudes to make sure that my form is good. And I'm hoping that they don't catch me looking at them and think I'm creepy or weird or something. And it's just the whole thing, I was just nerve wracked the whole time. And that's really not in my character to do that. I just was intimidated. And I realized I was intimidated because I felt like I was an outsider. I don't belong here. All the other people who are like gym people that nobody likes, they are, and I'm just playing around, but the people who are in good shape that we're jealous of, like they are going to look at me and they're going to know, oh man, this guy doesn't belong here. He won't last till February, you know? And so, like, I felt like I was an imposter. And at some point or another, everybody around me was going to know he doesn't belong. And what I realized is, man, this must be the way that people feel when they come back to church for the first time or go to church for the first time. This must be the way they feel. And I was actually glad to have that experience where I kind of felt insecure, even though I feel like I'm a pretty reasonably secure guy. I didn't like the way that felt. And so I was glad I had the experience as, oh my gosh, this must be what it feels like to come to church for the first time after a while. Because if I'm honest with you, I don't have that experience. I have no memory in my life of ever not being in church. I grew up in church. I could go to any church and feel pretty comfortable. And people who are in really good shape, they can go to any gym and they'll feel pretty good. They won't feel like I did on that first day. But if you haven't been to church in a while or you haven't ever been to church that you can remember, when you go that first day, it has to feel a lot like I felt at the gym that day. And I just remember thinking, man, if someone, as I thought about that and ruminated on it more, I thought, man, if one of the trainers or somebody who looks like they know what they're doing could come up to me and put their arm around me and just kind of give me some pointers like, hey, bro, let me show you how to set this treadmill up, you know? Let me show you how to do some of these exercises. Like these are the machines you want to do so you don't wander around looking like a dummy. Like just go to these things and you'll fit in. And I wish they could put their arm around me and just been like, dude, we've all had a day one. Like it's all right. It's good for you that you're here. And so what I wanted to do this morning, the first Sunday in January, is acknowledge that there's a lot of people here who your New Year's resolution is spiritual in nature. And maybe you're here on the very first Sunday in January because you decided, you know what, I'm going to church this year. I'm going to take my walk with God seriously. I've been meaning to prioritize my faith. This is the year I'm going to do that. I'm all in. I'm going to church this year. That's what I'm going to do. Somebody between services says you guys are resolutioners. If you're the resolutioners that are here and you said, I want to be back in church, then this is what you're doing. And what I want to do is take the first Sunday and address you and say, hey, listen, if this is your first Sunday back in church in a long time, there's five things that I want you to know. Now, this sermon is going to look a little bit different than all my other sermons. I'm really kind of anti-listy sermons. I don't like it when pastors make lists because this is just kind of like a behind the scenes thing a little bit. Lists tend to be lazy. It's super easy to be like, what are five things that are true about that verse? These five things. Okay, I'm just going to talk about them for a while. That's easy. To me, it's harder to make one point. And so that's what I try to do because I think it's best to ruminate on one scripture and move through it. But I thought this topic was so important and there's so many messages that I want to share with those of you who are coming back to church for the first time that I wanted to make a list of those things this morning. Now, here's the thing. A lot of the people in the room, y'all are grace people. You're church people. You're comfortable here. This isn't your first day. This is your first day this year. And you're kind of thinking like, well, this isn't for me. Wrong, pal. It is. Because if I'm saying that this is the message that we want to deliver to people who come to grace for the first time. Who is it that delivers this message? It's you. So these are the things that we want to say to folks who are coming into the fold for the first time or for the first time in a while. So if you're new, these are directly for you. If you are not new, then consider these your marching orders. These are the messages I want you to communicate with your actions and with your words, okay? So the first thing that I would love to say to you on your first visit back to church and in the midst of your intimidation is simply this. We know those feels, man. We know those feels. Now listen, some of y'all don't know what that means. You hired a young, attractive, hip senior pastor from Atlanta, okay? And I know the lingo. This is probably like eight years old. I'm so outdated in my lingo. There's people here who actually know the lingo going, no, you don't. But feels, I know those feels is the way that millennials tell you that they have empathy for you, okay? That's the word that you recognize. It's, I understand that feeling. I've been there before. I have empathy for that. I empathize with you. We've all had day ones and they're hard. It takes a lot of courage to come to church for the first time. As a matter of fact, on your bulletin, if you got one, when you came in on the front of it, there's a note from me. And the first thing I do is welcome people who are new and acknowledge that it was a difficult thing for you to do to get here. Okay. A lot of you have never seen that before because you've been here forever, and no one who goes to church consistently reads the note from the pastor on the bulletin. So that's not even for you. That's for them. We acknowledge that it is difficult. As a matter of fact, I had an interesting conversation with somebody just this last year, a guy who is a longtime partner here, been going to the church for forever. I love and respect this guy mostly because of the free golf he offers me, but I really do like him as a person. And one day we were golfing and he shared with me that he's one of the leaders of our men's Monday night Bible study. And he was telling me about the first time he went. And he said the first time he went, he was intimidated and scared. He kind of had been around church. He was a successful guy, sharp guy, smart guy. But he was going to Bible study for the first time and he was intimidated because he felt like they were going to ask him a question that he couldn't answer or that they were going to start talking about like insider stuff that he didn't know what it was. He felt like the knowledge gap was so wide that he was going to be exposed like he didn't belong there. But he knew in his heart that this was something that he needed to do. It was a step that he needed to take for his own health, and so he did it. And gradually, he was assimilated into the group. He didn't need to be near as intimidated as he was, and now he's a leader of the group. And so I want you to know that we've been there before. We understand how you feel. And to those of us who have been here for a while, understanding what it is to come to a new place for the first time, I would like for you guys to begin to run new people through a grid. Okay, so when you bring friends to church for the first time, when you have friends that bring friends to church for the first time, or when you see somebody here that maybe you don't recognize, I want you to have a grid or a question that you ask them, okay? And this question comes from the biblical imperative to be hospitable. This isn't just a thing that we do to be nice. Did you know that hospitality is actually one of the spiritual gifts? See, Christians believe, the Bible teaches that once you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit, part of God, gives you a gift or a propensity in a certain area that you may not have had before or heightens it in you. And one of those gifts is the gift of hospitality. And you can tell who has the gift of hospitality because when you go to their house for something that's not even a big deal, they have like all the trays and all the platters set out. They're the ones that own the cupcake towers. They usually have the folded piece of paper in front of everything. Like you haven't seen cupcakes before. Like these are the chocolate ones. And you think to yourself, I'm never inviting them to my house because they're going to know what a degenerate I am, that I only have plates, right? Like those people are wonderful and I love them and they have the gift of hospitality. It's a gift. It's a thing. And if we as a church, as God instructs us to do in scripture, are going to express that gift of hospitality to folks who are with us for the first time, then I think the question that hospitality asks is, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible? Right? Isn't that the question? And listen, when you bring your friends or your loved ones to church and you say, I like it so far. It's pretty good. Worship's great. Sermons are all right. You should come and check it out. And you bring them, and you're hoping that there's a good experience for them, right? Don't you want everybody around you to be thinking, what can I do to make this experience as comfortable as possible? Which, by the way, I don't know if you realize this, that's our only growth strategy, all right? We don't do mailers. We don't send things out. We don't fleece the community with invite cards. We thought about over Christmas getting a bunch of, a big stack of invite cards and going to the apartment complexes right down the road and handing them out, going door to door and just giving them to people and putting a banner out in front of the church and inviting everybody in. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's not us. The point is not to get rear ends and seats. The point is not to fill up rooms. It's to bring people closer to Jesus. And the best chance we have at bringing people closer to Jesus is to bring in people who have relationships with you. So our entire growth strategy is to do things on Sunday morning that add value to your life and excite you so that you bring your friends to come see it too. That's it. And then we want to take good care of them once they get here. So when you bring those people, I want the filter that we view them through to be, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible here? And that looks like different things for different people, right? We've got to be savvy about this. Sometimes an extrovert visits and they want to meet everybody, right? Like last service, a new guy came. His name was Stuart. And I got introduced to Stuart. And Stuart chatted me up and he clearly wanted to meet everybody else. And so what Stuart wanted is for everybody to get to meet him. And that's great. But sometimes people aren't like him. Sometimes they're like me. I haven't had to visit a new church in a while, but if I did visit a new church, here's the experience I would want. I would want to go there and have one person acknowledge my existence and then leave me alone, right? Let me sit in the back. Let me take it in. I have to decide if y'all are crazy. Don't talk to me, right? And so when people come here for the first time, true story, they're coming in and they're going, are these people weird? Are these people normal? Do they make me laugh? I don't know about that video. That guy's a weirdo. Right? They're kicking the tires and sometimes they just want to sit in the back and take it in. And the thing we can do to be most hospitable is to give them their space to be introverted and assess. And that's what we need to have the wisdom to do. Sometimes it means showing them where the coffee is. Sometimes it means showing them where the restrooms are since we tuck them away in the kids' hallway by choice. And then sometimes we show them how to check in their children, right? Or we tell the kids to get out of the way so we have a room for everybody to sit down. That's the kinds of things we have to do. So I want us this year to begin to think as we see people that we don't recognize at church, what can I do to make them as comfortable as possible? That's what hospitality asks. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is this. This is important. If you're here, if you're here and you have resolved, I'm going to go to church, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to take my walk more seriously, whatever your New Year's resolution is, I hope that you've made a spiritual New Year's resolution. If you haven't, I would highly encourage you to do that. You can just call it like a January 15th resolution or something like that. It would be great. But listen, if you made a resolution, particularly spiritually, I just want you to hear me say this, okay? You're going to mess up, and that's okay. You're going to spit the bit, man. You're going to blow it, and that's all right. If you made a New Year's resolution to come to church more often, three Sundays, four Sundays a month, whatever it is, you're going to do something on a Saturday that makes you feel like maybe I shouldn't go to church on Sunday. It's going to happen. You're going to wake up late. You're going to have a reason to not prioritize it. You're going to miss a couple of weeks in a row, and then you're going to feel like, man, I fell off the wagon. That's going to happen. If you made a New Year's resolution to watch your mouth, like, you're going to cuss in traffic. Like, eventually, that's going to happen. Try not to flip anybody off when it does. Make sure your windows are up. Like, it'll happen. We are going to mess up our New Year's resolutions. Like, we're going to fail. And that's okay because I can make a long list for you of people in the Bible who were heroes of the faith but failed miserably. Moses is a hero of the faith. He led the people out of Egypt. He's the dude that carried the Ten Commandments down the hill. He's a big deal. He messed up so badly late in life that God didn't even allow him to enter into the promised land that he led God's people to. Abraham, the man to whom we trace all of our spiritual lineage, he committed a sin so bad when he slept with another woman that was not his wife and had a child that we still feel the ramifications of that sin today. David, the greatest king Israel ever had, the one from whom Jesus came, the throne that Jesus will sit on, messed up so bad that he became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer and God took his child as a result of his sin. Samson messed up so bad that many theologians don't even know if he ever even really knew the Lord. Peter in the New Testament, the leader of the disciples, messed up so badly that he denied even knowing Jesus three times in one night. If they messed up, you will too. And so will I. But here's the thing I want you to know. Spiritual progress is brought about by perseverance, not perfection. You hear me? Spiritual progress, spiritual success is not brought about by perfection. It's brought about by perseverance. The difference between spiritually healthy people and spiritually distant people is not some sort of moral fiber where one exceeds the other. It's simply perseverance. It's the willingness to, when I mess up, to get myself to stand back up, to dust myself off, and make the next decision of faith that I said I was going to make. It's to get up, refuse to listen to the voices in your head that tell you, here you go again, you've messed it up again. It's a refusal to listen to those and to get back on the horse and to make the next decision of faith in front of you. This is such a biblical idea. Perseverance is so important in the Christian life that many of the New Testament authors wrote about it. Paul wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. He was one of the most influential Christians to ever live. And over and over and over again in his letters that he wrote to the churches that we now read that make up our Bible, he encourages perseverance. He says to run the race, run to win the race. He says at the end of his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. I have finished the race. And he says that as an example for us, he says that we should be poured out like a drink offering, okay? He encourages us to persevere in our faith. James, the brother of Jesus, holds perseverance so high in his economy that he says that we should consider suffering pure joy because it rots within us perseverance. It brings about within us perseverance and the ability to stick to things and to be steadfast. Peter, the leader of the disciples, values it so highly that in one of my favorite passages in the first chapter of 2 Peter, he makes a list of the attributes that Christians should seek out in their life. And in the middle of that list, he puts perseverance there. And it's a building list. And what Peter says is, perseverance is so important that you cannot experience brotherly kindness or godliness or love until you learn perseverance. It's a building block to the rest of the faith. Perseverance is the key to progress in spiritual health, not perfection. If you allow yourself to be discouraged and quit the first time you mess up, it's going to be really hard to see any progress. But if you will acknowledge that this happens to everybody, even heroes in the Bible, and you give yourself the grace to get back up and take the next step of faith in your life, regardless of what you did yesterday, that's perseverance. And that will bring about a spiritual progress. So you're going to mess up, and that's all right, as long as you get back up. Number three, the third thing I want you to know on your visit back to church, we love your questions. We love your questions. They're great. And I say that because we get intimidated about asking questions, right? We get in our own head. We don't want to ask questions. Questions show vulnerability and they admit that I don't know something and that you might be better than me at it and I don't want to feel dumb. So we don't ask questions and we just continue being dumb, right? That's what we do. I was at the gym and I'm working out. I'm doing, I think I was doing some tricep thing. And there's a dude like there, he's just a couple of feet away from me and he is just a bear of a man. He's just, he's been working out for 12 hours a day for the past 10 years of his life. Like he's just, he's just huge and intimidating. And he's got his, he's got his hat on backwards and he's got his, he's got his earphones on and the whole, the whole deal. And he's just going and he's like, he's lifting like three of me as he does the thing that he's doing. And I, but he was doing an exercise that I did not recognize. Like I've never seen this before. I don't know what that is. And my curiosity got the best of my good sense, as it often does. And so I decided I'm going to ask him what he's doing. And so I go to him, and I'm like, excuse me, sir. You know, scrawny white guy, excuse me, sir. And he pulls his headphones on, and he looks at me and goes, what? And I'm like, oh, I wanted to be like, my bad, nothing. I'll talk to you later. And I said, you want me to spot you? No, I said, I said, dude, I don't mean to be weird, but I've never seen anybody do that exercise before. And I'm just curious, like, what muscle is that working? And he kind of laughed and he pulled his headphones off and he goes, here, man, let me show you. And it was, he said, it's this, like, you got to do this. It's working. I don't know what that's called. The lat, we'll call it. I don't know what it is. And he says, do this, you know? And he kind of like, he showed me, he's like, can you feel it back there? I'm like, yeah. And like, we like joked around, we exchanged names. We grabbed coffee later and I was just messing around about that. But like, we were kind of buddies. And like, now I see him. I'm like, hey man, how you doing? And we'll do the little fist pound every now and again. I'll ask him a question or whatever. But like, that question broke down that wall. And I didn't know. And I would have never known. But I asked the question. And if you're new to the faith, you should ask your questions. If you're old to the faith, you should ask your questions. Do you know that before I was a senior pastor, if you can't already tell, I worked with youth for a long time. And I got to sit in a bunch of rooms with students, and I still love hanging out with students. And one of the big reasons I love hanging out with students is they haven't developed the fear that you have about asking questions. So they'll ask whatever they want. But now when I do adult Bible studies, sometimes people lean forward and they ask me questions about scripture and what it says and yada, yada, yada. Can I tell you that adults ask the same questions that students do? They don't get any better or smarter. The only difference is you sat on yours for 30 years and they just had the guts to go ahead and ask it. I was in a men's Bible study. I do a men's Bible study on Wednesday mornings at 6 o'clock. That keeps out the riffraff. People don't come kick the tires at 6 a.m. You've got to want it. Everybody's welcome. You've just got to be there on time. I'll lock the door and wave at you. So they come in. They come in, they sit down, and we're going to the book of John. And in the book of John, there's two Johns. There's John the Baptist and the Apostle John. And one of them says, hey, there's some Johns in the Bible. Are they the same or is that two different dudes? And that's a hard question to ask because if you've been around church for any time at all, you feel like you should know that question, right? Except like three or four other dudes in the circle, their eyebrows go up and they're like, yo, like what's the answer to this? Because they didn't know either. But because that one guy had the guts to ask a perfectly reasonable question, why in the world would you be expected to know that there's two Johns in the book of John if you haven't spent your life looking at it? Why in the world would you be expected to know that? Because he had the guts to ask the question, everybody got to learn, right? And listen, I don't want you to feel remotely intimidated about not knowing anything about the Bible. If you don't, that's great. If I tell you one Sunday, hey guys, listen, we're going to be in the book of Mark. You can go ahead and turn there if you want to. If you don't know where that is, please lean over to your neighbor and go, where's Mark? That's fine. Why in the world would you be expected to know that Mark is the second book in the New Testament if you haven't been around church in a long time? I try my best to not leave anybody behind, to not assume any knowledge on your behalf, to bring everybody up to speed. But sometimes I mess up. And when I do, man, you should have the courage to ask questions. In Bible studies, ask questions. Long-time church people, ask your questions. Don't be scared of them. They are good, and they are positive, and they follow this biblical model that I love of the Ethiopian eunuch. There's a guy in Acts. He's an Ethiopian governmental official, essentially, and he's on a chariot, and this guy, Philip, sees him reading from the book of Isaiah, and he walks up to him, and he says, hey, that's Isaiah. Do you understand what you're reading? And the eunuch responds in such an incredibly bold way. He says, how can I unless someone explains it to me? Isn't that refreshing honesty? Someone comes up to us, hey, you're reading Isaiah. You understand what that means? Yeah, you want some tips? And in our head, we're like, I don't know anything. Please don't ask me any questions. This doesn't make any sense. Have the boldness to be like that guy from Ethiopia and say, how can I know this unless someone explains it to me? Ask your questions. The fourth thing that I want you to know is that we are rooting for you. We're rooting for you. We believe in you. There is this thing in our culture, and I'm sure it's in all cultures. Whenever you start a new initiative, everybody around you doubts you, right? Like when I go into the gym on day one, I've had a lot of day ones, I feel the same way every time, that everybody's looking at me in their matching clothes and in their good shape, and they're looking at me going, yeah, it'll be nice seeing you in January because because you ain't making it to February, pal. And then I can have my treadmill back, and you'll be out of the way, right? Then we can keep the weights like where they need to go instead of on your level, you know? People tend to look at you with skepticism, and they don't believe in you. Spouses are the best at this, right? Like, if I tell Jen, like, I'm going to start some new initiative in my life, like, hey, I think I'm going to journal. He's like, all right. Let me know how that goes for you, buddy. You know? Don't they, like our people who know us the best are sometimes the worst at this. I think I'm going to pray 30 minutes every day. Good luck. Why do we do that to one another? So I want you to know that that attitude doesn't make it into here. If you're here and you've been wandering from God for a long time, but you've decided, you know what, I want to get serious about my faith. I believe that Jesus worked in your heart to bring you here. I believe that Jesus has been slowly working on your heart and drawing you near to him for months and years leading you into this day. And I don't believe it's on accident. And I don't for a second doubt the sincerity of the decision that brought you in here. So I want you to know that we believe in you. If you made a spiritual resolution this year, you've been coming to church for a long time, but you've resolved to do this. I want you to know that I believe in you. I don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We only look at you with hope. Man, it would thrill my soul to know and to hear the story years from now of somebody who wandered in here in January of 2019 and had known God or had been around church, but for some reason, when I came here this month, something clicked and I just felt God's presence like I never had before. And my life has been different ever since. I would love to know that story. I would love for someone right here, in here right now, who is far from God to become one of our elders or one of our leaders in the children's ministry or one of our volunteers or small group leaders one day. I believe that story is possible and I believe that you are here on purpose. And so there is no doubt here. We believe in you. This is such an important idea that in the middle of the most theological, theologically technical book in the New Testament, Paul, the author of Romans, stops in chapter 14 and he makes it about encouraging more mature believers, encouraging those who are less experienced. He says this over and over in his writings. He says that we should constantly in Thessalonians, that we should build one another up. The author of Hebrews says that we should outdo one another in kindness and that we should spur one another on to good works. And Paul in chapter 14 of Romans devotes an entire chapter where he's talking to the more experienced believer, and he says over and over and over again, don't pass judgment. Don't judge them. Encourage them. Don't do anything that would cause them to stumble. Don't do anything that would cause them not to grow. Do everything you can to encourage other people as they seek to grow closer to God. And so that's what we do here. We believe in you. And I'm going to ask the grace people, if you're a partner, you've been coming here for a while, I'm going to give you a homework assignment and just ask you to be willing to do this. Will you, every day this week when you pray, will you pray for those people who have made a decision to get back into church in 2019? Will you please just remember to do that? And let's together pray for those folks every day this week. And you guys know that if you're here for the first time in a while, like we're praying for you. And the other thing is, if you've made a spiritual resolution, I want to pray for that too. I would love for you to write that on your communication card and hand that to somebody after the service and make sure it gets to me. I want to make a list, and once a week I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to pray for all the resolutions in the church that have to do with becoming more healthy spiritually. I'm going to do that every week until you tell me to stop, because we want to encourage one another. We believe in each other here. And if you say you're serious about this, then we believe you. The last thing I want you to know this morning, the fifth thing that I would love to be able to say to everybody is this. God is the only reason that any of us are here. God is the only reason that any of us are here. And here's what I mean. Again, at the gym, when I see other people who are really healthy and really fit, honestly, I admire that. I admire that because I know what goes into that. Having failed so many times, I understand the discipline it takes to be in shape and to be healthy because it's not just the time you spend at the gym. It's what you eat and how you sleep. And it's a whole lifestyle thing. And so I look at people who are in shape and honestly, I admire them and I admire them for their character. I admire them for their discipline, for their stick-to-itiveness. When people are disciplined in their profession, when they're successful in their profession, I admire that. I look at the way that they work hard. They wake up before everybody else. They work harder than everybody else. And they put in time when nobody else is putting in time. And I admire that. And in our culture, we have a culture of success that admires success. And we all tend to believe that that success was brought about by personal disciplines that accelerated you beyond your peers, right? And so what do we do when we come into church? We apply the same metric. We come into church and we see somebody who looks spiritually healthy to us, who sets a good example, who may be a leader somewhere or seems godly, or we like the way they interact with people, we like the way that they interact with their family or whatever it is, and we admire them spiritually. And what we tend to do is attribute to them some sort of discipline that won that for them, and then we try to duplicate that discipline in our own lives. And when we attribute discipline to other people in different arenas outside of church, I think that that is a good and fair thing to do. But when you attribute discipline to people inside of church, I don't think that that's right at all, and here's why. If you were to go to the person that you admire spiritually, and you to learn more about them and you were to somehow tell them, man, I wish I could have your discipline. I wish I could grow like you. I wish I was as self-disciplined as you are. They would tell you, listen, if there is anything in me that you admire, it has nothing to do with my discipline. I promise you that. It has everything to do with a God that loves me enough to continue to stick with me even when I don't stick with him. It has everything to do with a God working in my heart even when I don't know he's working. Being spiritually healthy has nothing to do with our white-knuckle discipline. And if that's what you are relying on this year to bring you spiritual health and closer to Jesus, let me tell you something, you're going to fail and that's not all right. Because this is the one arena where it's not about you and it's not about your discipline. It's about getting out of the way and accepting the free love that the Father offers so graciously. The author of Hebrews sums this up well in Hebrews chapter 12, some of my favorite verses in the Bible. Hebrews 12, 1 says, That's what they tell us to do. And that's a great verse. It's an inspirational verse. But the problem with that verse is it makes it seem like the impetus is on us to run it well, right? Because the direction is throw off the sin and get everything out of your life that does not help you run the race, that doesn't help you live the life that God has for you to live. Get rid of everything in your life that doesn't make you spiritually healthy so that you can run the race that you need to run. That's the implication of that verse until you get to the second verse, which says, How do we run the race that we're supposed to run? How do we live the life that we're supposed to live? How do we achieve spiritual health in 2019? Not by focusing on the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. Not by focusing on the behaviors that we want to be done with, but by focusing on Christ and falling more in love with Him and allowing Him to work more in our hearts as He draws us near to Him. Can I just tell you that if you're seeking spiritual health this year and you're doing it by identifying some behaviors in your life that aren't good, that shouldn't be there, that we would probably call sin, and you look at this group of things and you go, I'm not going to do these things anymore, and your focus is on the behaviors and not on Jesus, can I tell you that you're going to fail? Because spiritual health is not wrought by white-knuckle discipline. No one has ever in the history of mankind besides Jesus himself gotten themselves closer to God by focusing on their behaviors and trying to be perfect. The only spiritual health anybody in this church or any other church has is as a result of figuring out that we need to focus on God. We focus on God. There's this great verse in Psalms that says, delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And how it works is the more I focus on Jesus, the more I follow the advice of the author of Hebrews and fix my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of my faith, the more my heart begins to beat in sync with his, the more I want the things that he wants, the, I want you to know that that was not won by their discipline and it being better than yours. It was won by them realizing the only thing that matters is how I relate to God. John 15, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All that matters is following Jesus, is allowing him to draw me closer to him. Don't focus on the behaviors this year. Focus on what you can do to draw yourself closer to the Father and allow that drawing to happen to you. Pray more, read the Bible more, come to church more, be around other believers more, but let Jesus draw yourself into him. Fix your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. There's actually one more thing that I would love to tell people on their first visit at church, but it's such a big deal that I'm going to devote a whole Sunday to it next week, and that's you can't do this alone. There is no such thing as a John Wayne Christian. You cannot do this alone. It was designed to be done around other people. So next week, that's what we're going to come back and we're going to talk about. The weeks following, we're going to talk about spiritual health as a lifestyle, as a lifestyle, and then we're going to talk about how long it takes to get spiritually healthy and the stick-to-itiveness that it requires. So I hope that you'll join us for the rest of those in this series as I continue to share with you my thoughts from the gym. I'm really looking forward to this January. I hope you are too. All right, I'm going to pray, and then Steve and the band are going to come up, and they're going to close us out. Father, thank you so much for today. Thank you for this year. Thank you for this Sunday. God, I thank you for the way that I believe you are drawing everybody in here closer to you in just the subtle and gentle way that you do it. Lord, let us know that we are loved by you, that we are cherished by you, that we are pursued by you. I lift up all those here who have resolved this year to do something that they believe will draw them closer to you. Give them the courage to get up when they fail. Give them the faith to lean on you when they don't find strength. And God, let 2019 be a year of marked spiritual health and change for us. Lord, we love you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.