Sermons tagged with Love

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. There you go. Now they can see me on video. Isn't that so much better? If you are joining us online, thank you for doing that. And I would just say gently for those who are joining us online, if you're doing that consistently, there is nothing quite like worshiping together as a family. So if you can get here and worship with us, do that because it's a sweet, sweet time, and it's my favorite part of the week, every week when I get to worship with you guys. We are in the third part of our series called Traits of Grace, and these are kind of five distinctive characteristics that make grace, grace. I am a firm believer, and will wholeheartedly share it with whomever is curious that grace is not, we're not nailing it as a church. Okay. We haven't like figured out how to do church the right way and all the other churches are doing it wrong. Okay. They're, they're worse than us. You guys are the good Christians who've really figured out how to love Jesus well. And the other churches are apostate and we should pray for them. Like we don't believe that. We believe that there are plenty of churches in the city of Raleigh that are doing wonderful jobs, pushing people towards Jesus and making disciples. I would even say that there's got to be plenty of them who are doing better than us. But you guys are here this morning. So we're going to make the best of it together while you think about a better church to go to next week. But there's plenty of great churches doing plenty of great things, and so I think it's important for churches to figure out what is it that makes us us? What has God wired us to do? A few weeks ago, we talked about being kingdom builders, and I kind of left you guys with the question of what is your good work? Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so we asked, what is your good work? And I think similarly, it's wise for churches to ask, what is our good work? Every church is supposed to make disciples, but how would God have us go about it? How has he uniquely wired and gathered and impassioned us to do it? And as we were having the discussion about what makes grace, grace last fall, we came up as a staff and then as elders with these five traits. So we've talked about the fact that partners at grace are kingdom builders. Then we talked last week about how partners at Grace are conduits of Grace. We stay connected to Jesus and we pour out all the love and all the goodness and all the grace that we receive from Jesus onto others. We are conduits of Grace. And so this week we arrive at the third trait that we feel like we are at Grace. And I realized this morning as I was reviewing and preparing that I didn't put this in your notes anywhere. So I don't know if this is going to be unofficial or something. I hope I haven't done something wrong and now this one doesn't count. But we are people of devotion. That's the third trait of grace. We are people of devotion. And when I say devotion, obviously that can mean multiple things, but it really means what it meant back in 1985. We are people who have devotions. You have heard me say many times, if you've been at grace for any period of time, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, a lot of you can finish this sentence, is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. That is the most important thing, the most important habit that any single one of us can develop at any point in our life. And I believe that to be true, and we hit on that to be true, and we remind you of that all the time, because I also try to remind you that I am not enough. You can't come listen to me talk for 30 minutes a week and know the breadth and the depth of the God that's waiting for you in this text. You can't listen to whatever I choose to pick out and talk about just this little tiny snippet within here and somehow hope to understand the whole book. That's just not how that works. So it takes more than 30 minutes a week. It takes more than just one small group a week, which we'd love to say is an hour a week talking about spiritual things, but really it's about 45 minutes a week talking about whatever the heck and then about 15 minutes of good spiritual conversation. If you're in a small group, you know what I'm talking about. So that's not enough. We've got to spend time in God's Word, and we've got to spend time in God's presence through prayer. So when we thought about what are we at Grace, what do we want partners to be at Grace? We want to be people of devotion. We want to be people who develop that habit. And as we think about it this morning, I don't know about you, but I feel that when God is speaking to us, he often speaks in stereo. When someone will ask me, hey, how do I hear God's voice? How do I know what he's saying to me? How do I discern God's will for my life? I often will say, one of the first things I'll tell him is, God speaks, when he speaks to me, he speaks in stereo. He tells me from this source and this source and this source and this source, and it just kind of continues to come up in my life. And one of the themes that has been coming up for me in my life before the summer, but in particular the summer, you guys gave me the great privilege and rest of not having to preach in the month of July to just kind of settle and work on some other things in the church and allow God to refresh me a little bit. And it was wonderful. And one of the things that I brought out of there and that seems to continue to come up in my sermons that I'm preaching like when I preached on the law a couple weeks ago and I've seen it come through in themes these last couple weeks and then really we're hitting on it again in my Tuesday morning men's Bible study. I have a men's Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6 30. We meet that early to keep out the riffraff. The only thing the only thing prohibiting you from being there is laziness. So come on and join us. We're not any nicer there either. This is as nice as it gets. But I see this theme in my life and I've seen it in what we're learning at Grace and I thought it worth highlighting this morning, which is simply the beautiful simplicity of abiding. We talked about this last week. We're conduits of grace. And we looked at John 15, where Jesus is speaking to the disciples, particularly four and five. And he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we talked about this idea of all I have to do is stay connected to Christ, and he's going to produce the fruit in my life that I need to produce. I don't have to think about that. I just focus on abiding in Christ. And I think that there is this beautiful simplicity to that. Because we can make Christianity really complicated, can't we? It can be really challenging and difficult. It can be intimidating to look at this Bible, to open it up, to come to service on a Sunday and the pastor says, turn to Malachi. You're like, I've never even heard of that name in my life. I don't know where that is, right? Just to learn just the names of the 66 books, to learn how to find them all, that there's 37 or 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, to learn all, what are all the sins? What are all the things I'm supposed to do? What are all the things I'm not supposed to do? Who are all the people? And how old was Paul? Did he live to be 900? Or is that some other guy? Like it can be a lot. And one of the things that I have a heart for is adults, people who have already gone through life and made a bunch of decisions. And in your 30s, 40s, 50s or later, you decide this is when I want to get serious about my faith and you start trying to learn Bible. And you don't have the background that I've been learning about this since I was old enough to talk. But it can feel like a steep bell curve when you're trying to learn faith and taking it seriously. So I love the beautiful simplicity of really what God asks us to do, which is to simply abide in him. Just simply, you just, just, just focus on Jesus. Just pursue Jesus. Just love others like Jesus loves you. Just do all that. The rest of this stuff, if you focus on abiding in Christ, the rest of this stuff, the rest of Christianity, the rest of life will take care of itself. Just focus on abiding in Christ. And this is, this is an attitude that we see throughout scripture. We're going to look at two other places today where it's pared down and it's made just this simple. One of my favorite pictures of this in the Bible is in the book of Hebrews. In the book of Hebrews, there's Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1, obviously follows. I don't know if you know this. You have to go to seminary to know this, but chapter 12 of Hebrews follows chapter 11 of Hebrews. And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we have this really famous passage that's called the Hall of Faith, where the author of Hebrews lists out all of these heroes of the faith and the acts that they performed by faith. And then when we get into 12, and I'll read it in just a minute, but when we get into 12, we see it begin, So it's this idea that we're on the playing field of earth as those in heaven who have come before us are now watching us in real time, which I think is a really cool thought. And here's what the author of Hebrews says. He says, Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And it's language, I think, that we can identify with. It's language that inspires. We're kind of like, okay, I'm on the playing field. I'm supposed to run this race. I'm supposed to live my life. I'm supposed to do the things that God wants me to do. How do I do that? Well, I throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. I need to run in such a way that I can do what God wants me to do, that I can be who God wants me to be, and I need to get rid of all the things that don't help me run my race. And this, again, is an idea that is replete throughout Scripture. It shows up again and again and again. Paul tells us that we are to fight the good fight. He says that he fights the good fight. He tells us that in this race, we are to run as the one who's trying to get the prize, that we are supposed to cling to our faith. We are told to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. Jesus tells us that other people should see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. So all throughout Scripture is this simple admonition that we need to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. We need to run the race. We need to be who God created us to be. We need to determine what are our good works and how do we walk in them. And you can rephrase all of that and we say we need to be good Christians. We need to grow in our faith. We need to move towards Jesus. And we can identify with this. This is, to me, inspiring. It's easy to understand. Yep, I'm running a race and I do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that's so easily entangled. So I got to stop doing those things so I can do the things that God wants me to do. And sometimes, I think more often than not, that's where we stop. I'm going to try really hard at running this race. I'm going to try really hard to be a good Christian. I'm going to try really hard to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, a good employee or employer. I'm going to try really hard to be a good citizen. And I'm going to do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we act like the next verse doesn't exist. How are we supposed to do that? By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Even in Hebrews, where it uses this language about running our race, doing better, being good Christians, being who God's created us to be, it tells us, it gives us the answer right there. How do I do that? How do I run my race well? By focusing my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How do we produce much fruit? By abiding in Christ, by focusing on Jesus. And so I call it the beautiful simplicity of abiding because there's this thing that happens. When I decide that I want to be a better father or a better husband or a better pastor or a better human, there's a lot of growth that needs to happen in all of those areas, except for husband. I'm nailing that one. When I decide I want to be better at those things, I think our tendency is to go, okay, what do I need to do to be a better husband? And we identify things and we run and I'm going to do more of this and less of this. What do I need to do to be a better wife? I'm going to do more of this and less than this. What do I need to do to be a better mom? I'm going to do more of this and less of this. And we try to white knuckle our way to better, right? That's the American way. I want to be better at these things. I'm going to focus on those things. I'm going to come up with a plan, and I'm going to do it. And Christianity says, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. Just focus on Jesus. Just focus on God. Just focus on abiding in Christ, and I'll take care of the rest of it. So here's how this works practically. I do have a lot of room to grow in being a husband. You know the most effective way for me to be a better husband to Jen? It's to pursue Jesus. It's to wake up tomorrow and say, Jesus, I want to honor you today as I seek to be Jen's husband. How do I honor you in that? How would you have me be a good husband today, Jesus? You want to be a better employee? You want to move up the ranks? You want your career to progress? You can spend a lot of time thinking about the best thing to do and the best person to please and the best way, the best jobs to go for or the best tasks to complete or the right people to make friends with or whatever it is you do to progress in your field. Or you can go to work every day, focus on Christ, and you can say, Jesus, how can I honor you today in my work? How can I honor you today in these meetings? How can I honor you today in these tasks? And then you honor Jesus. And you know what happens? Everything else works out. I was talking in my Bible study group about this idea. Just honor Jesus in what we do. Just pursue Jesus in what we do and let him handle the results. And they said, well, what does that mean practically? I said, for my sermons. My job is to be diligent on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday so that when I stand before you on Sunday, before God on Sunday, I know I've given my best effort. I've honored God in my preparation. I've honored Jesus in my prayer life as I approached sharing this with you guys. And I know that I've done the best that I could in the week that I was given with the time that I was allotted. And I'm honoring Jesus as I give this to you. If I can say that, what happens as a result of the sermon is completely out of my hands. I have nothing to do with that. I don't worry about that. I worry about where my heart is as I prepare, and I'll be the first to confess. Listen, I say that, and that sounds lovely, like how Nate, he's worked diligently on sermons, and he's prayed through them, and he's ready to present them. Yeah, most of the time, sometimes, y'all, I'm winging it, and I sit down, and the very first, y'all are singing, and y'all think things are good, and I sit down, and I'm like, God, I'm so sorry. I dishonored these people. That wasn't worth showering for. I can't believe that I did that to them. So sometimes I don't do it. But on the weeks that I do, then I preach the sermon, and I wash my hands of it. Now it's between you and the Spirit. And somebody in my Bible study said, well, wouldn't that be a great way to approach life? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it would. We should do that with everything. We should do that with how we lead people, with how we love people, with how we be good parents. It's the beautiful simplicity of abiding in Christ. We focus on him, and then he takes care of everything else. And I think that this is a radical message in a culture that wants to try so hard at everything, that wants to have a to-do list for everything, for all the things in life. I'm going to find a way to tackle it, and I'm going to white-knuckle my way to better. And really, the beautiful simplicity of abiding means that we try hard at pursuing Jesus. That's it. That's where we try hard. Christians, you want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where you should put your effort? Put it in pursuing Jesus. And waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. Put it into pursuing Christ and everything else will take care of itself. And there's a lot of ways to pursue Jesus, okay? We do it through worship. We do it, I believe, through godly community and spiritual conversations. We have transparency and vulnerability. We ask good questions. We share pieces of ourselves. We pursue Jesus through his service, through doing his work. Jesus says whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. So we pursue Jesus by helping those who can't help themselves. But I think the primary way that we pursue Jesus is through devotions. One of the primary ways we pursue Jesus is by waking up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. I think it's the fundamental way. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about trying to get in shape and fit into your old mediums. I've got one on underneath this that I have to wear a baggy shirt over it because if I don't, I'll just bring shame on my family. I can't wear this polo in front of other people in public. I used to be able to, there was a time, but when you go to get in shape, you can, you can exercise 30 minutes a day, right? And exercising to me is the easy part. That's, that's, that's the fun thing to do. That's fine. That's good. I can put in a podcast or a book or something like that. That's kind of the easy discipline to gain on. You know what the hard part is? Eating like a rabbit, man. That stinks. Eating salads. That's not fun. I don't like eating right. I just don't. I like eating wrong. Very wrong. But unless you do both, you'll never be in good shape. You won't be in good health. And you can exercise all you want, but until your diet changes, your body really doesn't. And you really don't get that healthy. You can exercise all you want and go to church and do all the things and go to Bible study and have the conversations and serve sometimes and give of yourself and tithe. You can do all the exercise you want, but until your diet changes, your spiritual health won't really either. I believe that our pursuit of Jesus begins here. And that when we do that, when we begin it here, then God handles everything else. This is actually affirmed in the book of Psalms. The very first Psalm, the one that Parker read earlier in the service, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And then look what happens. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. David says, blessed is the man who doesn't waste his time with frivolous things, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in God's word. And on that law, he meditates day and night. How can you meditate on it if you don't know it, if you haven't learned it, if you haven't poured yourself into it? He prays over it. He pursues Jesus in it. And because of that, he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And all that he does, he prospers. The man that David is describing in Psalm 1 did not set about to prosper. That's not the point. He set about to know Jesus. He set about to know his God, to know his law, to know his word. And the happy side effect of that was that God blesses him along his way. I want to be careful when I say that. God's blessings look different than what you think blessings might be. So I'm not preaching that if we get up every day and read God's word that we're going to have all the things that we want. That's not how that goes. But what I am saying is if we get up every day and we spend time in God's word and time in prayer, then we will become who God wants us to be. That's the blessing. And I believe that becoming the people that God has created us to be is the place of greatest peace and contentment and happiness that we can find in life. If you've ever had a season where you were moving, you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do, you know there's no greater peace or joy than that. I had lunch with somebody this week, catching up with them after a long time, and he shifted careers and got a new job. And I said, how's it going, man? And he said, God has affirmed over and over and over again that I am doing exactly what he would have me do, and I have never been happier. It's remarkable how that works. When we walk the path that God has laid out for us, lo and behold, that's where joy is found. I think Psalm 16 tells us something about there being a fullness of joy in the presence of God. And I feel like that's a joy and a peace worth having. So I would also mention to you that nothing worth having is gained by default. Nothing in this life that we have that we really value is gained by default. If you have a good marriage, like a good one, you worked hard at that, Joker. You didn't just fall into that. Unless you're like, if you've been married for like two years, you're like, my marriage is pretty good. We haven't had to work that hard. Okay, forget you. All right. You don't count. Talk to the rest of us in 10 years, rookies. If you have a good marriage, you worked hard at that. You've intentionally spent time together when the kids made it difficult. You've intentionally chosen each other when life tried to prevent it. You've had hard conversations. You've said hard things. You've heard hard things. But you're stronger for it and you have a good marriage and you worked at it. If you have kids who love you, if you have adult kids who love you and want to spend time with you, you worked hard at that. That was not easy. That did not happen by default. If you have a career that you like, that you're proud of, you worked hard at that. That didn't happen by default. If you have good, rich, deep friendships, you've prioritized and valued them over the years. You've made them important. You didn't just default into those. Why would we think that we would default into a good, healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus? We have to work at it. We have to make time for it. So do that. Prioritize it. Make it happen. Find a time when you can spend time in God's Word and spend time in prayer. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody. Start in Proverbs. If you don't know the Bible at all and you want to read it and you don't know what to read, start in Proverbs. You don't have to know anything about anything for Proverbs to make sense. Totally out of context, just start reading it. It's great. Read a gospel, read the book of Mark. It goes very fast and it points you with Jesus very well. Or just pick up and read something you've been curious about, but start doing it. Make it a habit. Be consistent in it. Trust me when I say that there's no greater habit that anyone can develop than that, and do it. Whatever you're currently doing first in the morning isn't as good as this. And if what you're doing first in the morning is sleeping an extra 30 minutes, it's definitely not as good as this. Just hit pause on that other stuff and engage with God first and then go about your day. I do it when I get into the office. I get into the office. I tend to be the first one in the office because I'm the hardest worker on staff. And I have a kid that starts school early and I have to drop her off every day. So I get here early. But the office is quiet and that's when I have my time. That's when I'm able to pray and read God's word and get ready to prayerfully approach my day. Pick a time when you can do it too. Make it happen. Prioritize it. Value it. Last week, I said that we needed to abide in Christ and we're going to talk about how to do that. And I said that when you came back this week, I was going to light some of your faces on fire and really convict you. So here's the convicting thing. What I'm about to say, I'm not saying to you if you're new. If this is the first time you've ever heard a sermon that's imploring you to have a devotional life, then I'm not saying this next thing to you. If it's the second time, maybe the first time you weren't paying attention, or I just did a bad job with it, whatever it was, I'm not talking to you either. But if you've heard this sermon before, I've preached it plenty. Maybe not from this angle, maybe not in this way, but I've preached have devotions. I've preached that a bunch. I've joked around. I'm going to do it one day. I'm just going to walk up here on stage and I'm going to go, hey, good morning, Grace. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate, one of the pastors here. You should read the Bible more. Let's pray. Because that's all you need because you know that I'm right. You know that we need to do this. So if that's you and you still don't have habit, as your pastor, as someone who cares about you, let me just ask you, how many more times will you need this sermon? How many more times? How many more times are you going to sit in this room or a room like this and hear this sermon and go, yeah, Monday, I need to. How many more? Can this one be it? Can this one do it for us? Because there's some people in this room who already do this. They've got a rich, vibrant devotional life, and they've been sitting in here, and they've just been cheering me on. Yes, do it. Please. It's the best. And I want all of you to cheer this sermon on every time you hear it from now on. Next time you hear this sermon, listen, I don't want it to convict you one little bit. I want you to sit in those seats feeling great because you know it's true. And now you're the cheering section because I'm never going to stop preaching this sermon. I'm going to preach it once or twice a year for the rest of my days as long as God gives me a stage to preach on to push people back into God's word and to push people back into prayer. But at Grace, as our partners, when I preach this sermon again, I want you to be the biggest cheerleaders. And I never want it to convict you again. Because I want you to hang in there and develop this habit. And I'll tell you this, okay? Just give you a little pastoral advice. Some of you, gosh, I hope, as a result of this, are going to wake up tomorrow, you're going to read your Bible. And it'll be something that you haven't done in a while. And that's great. You'll set your alarm. You'll make your coffee. You get your vibe all right, exactly where you want to be. This is good. This nice fall weather. This is great. I'm going to have the best quiet time. And you're going to open up your Bible to wherever you've decided to open up your Bible. And maybe, maybe God parts the heavens and the angels sing to you and Shekinah glory shines down directly on your head. Maybe. What's probably going to happen is you're going to get a little something out of it that's encouraging, that speaks to something in your life, or maybe nothing at all. You'll pray. If you're not used to praying, you'll pray for about two and a half minutes. You'll be like, I'm all out. Kind of run out of stuff to pray about. That's okay. And maybe it doesn't feel like the heavens parted and Shekinah glory shone down on your noggin. But I tell you what, if you get up tomorrow and you spend time in God's word and you spend time in prayer, I can promise you this, you'll have a different day than you would have had otherwise. You have a different mindset going into that day than you would have had otherwise. And if you do that several days in a row, I don't know when the heavens are gonna open and words are gonna leap off the page, but I can tell you this, if you do it several days in a row, you're gonna have a different week. And if you can manage by God's goodness and grace to hang in there and string together a couple of weeks like that, three, four weeks, you're going to have a different month. And if you start stringing together months, you're going to have a different life. And that's what we want for you at Grace. That's why we want you to be people of devotion. So let's pray that God gives us the strength of conviction to do that so that we know the only thing we need to try hard at is pursuing Jesus, and he'll take care of the rest. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your word, for the way that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us. I pray that you would give us a heart for it, that you would give us a passion for it, that we would love your word, that we would love this text. God, make it exciting to us as we dive into it. Let us start to piece things together and understand where people go and where they fit and how you're revealed in your word. Let it excite us about you. God, create in us such a hunger for your word that we wake up looking forward to it. Create in us such a hunger for your presence that we desire to pray every day. May we be refreshed in your presence. May we be refreshed by your word. And God, may we become increasingly people of devotion. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that. We have a wonderful apparatus for that to happen after the service today at the Hootenanny, so we hope that everyone will stop by for that. Before I jump into the sermon, I just felt compelled to say this as we sing that last song. I run to the Father, I fall into grace, I'm done with the hiding, and I run again and again and again. I run to the Father. And it was just, it occurred to me that this weekend I had the opportunity to go out and see a good friend of mine. Lives a couple hours away. And I've just, I'm tired, you know. I mean, it's just life. It's nothing in particular. I have two young children and I'm a pastor. And sometimes you just get busy and I was tired and I just needed some time to kind of refresh. And so Jen saw that, and she sent me, and I went. And he's a good friend, and he loves Jesus, and he loves me, and my soul is refreshed for going. And it occurred to me as we sing that song, Run to the Father, that sometimes that means running to his people that he's put in your life so that he can use them to refresh you. So if that helps you in your week, if you feel tired, if you want to run to the Father, if you're done with the hiding, sometimes that's why he puts his children in your life so that you can run to them and he can refresh you through them. So just throwing that out there if that encourages any of you. This week, we're in part two of our series, The Traits of Grace. And I told you guys last week that these five things that we're going through starting last week are the defining characteristics of who we are as grace. So if you've been going to grace for years, these should sound very familiar to you. These should be an articulation of things that you already value, of things that you're already passionate about, of characteristics that you already see displayed in the church and in the partners of the church. And I told you last week that the elders were so animated by this and the staff was so excited by these things that we are going to make these a regular part of the church. We're going to bring these back all the time and make sure that our series are hitting on them and that we have them displayed in the lobby of the new space that we're going to be building and all of those things. So I've been excited to go through this with you guys. That's intense. You're not missing it. Whoever that is is not missing calls. I'll tell you that. You are reachable. You're on top of it. So these are articulations of who we already are. They're not a new direction for us. So if you're a longtime Grace partner, these should feel very familiar and affirming and give you the direction to run in as a partner. If you're newer to Grace, then you've picked the perfect time to start coming to Grace so that you can learn exactly what we're all about and decide if that's what you're about as well. So this week, we arrive at our second characteristic that I'll get to in a few minutes. And this characteristic is really based on something that I sensed in my interview process with the church back in 2017. And it's something that people pick up on all the time about Grace and Grace folks. One of my favorite things to do in my job is I get to go out and grab lunch or a beer or a coffee or whatever with people who are newer to the church. I get to know them. I get to know their story. I get to ask, how'd you end up at Grace? What brought you here? And all of those things. And it's a really, truly fun part of my job. So I would say if you're new to grace and this is your place, you're going here and we haven't gotten a chance to have a face-to-face yet and hang out, I would love to do that if you would reach out to me. Because sometimes I don't know how to reach out to you. So if you want to reach out to me and do that, I would love to do that. But without fail, in those conversations, when I hear their story and I say, so what brought you to grace? Like, how'd you find us? And then why are you staying? What keeps you here? Without fail, one of the answers that I hear literally almost every time is, Grace is just real. Grace is authentic. They're just real people there. Nobody's putting on airs. Nobody's walking around the church like they're holier than everyone else, right? Because you're not. Like, we're just a real authentic place. We're a real authentic group of people. And I think that works out really well for us because that's like the buzzword right now, right? That's what everybody wants to be. Everybody wants to be real. Everybody wants to be authentic. Everybody wants to be trustworthy and transparent and all the things because we live in a society where we've seen everybody debunked and everybody's messed up and everybody's got secrets and everybody's got something to be ashamed of. And so we don't believe any more than anybody's holier than thou. And at Grace, we don't either. We believe that we're all messed up. And people notice that. And they like that. And they say, yeah, it just feels real. It feels honest. It feels authentic. And then what they'll usually say to me, and I know this feels like me patting my own back. I'm really not. What they'll usually say to me is, you know, you're real as a pastor, like you're authentic in who you are, and that's trickled down to the church that you lead. And I'll always correct them and say, no, no, no, like I am real as a pastor. And what that means to me is I will never, ever, ever speak down to you. I will never be the pastor that says, I've figured out spiritual life and how to be holy, and I'm here to help you get on my level. I will never, ever do that. I'll do that for you, but I will never do that for others. I will never speak down to us as a congregation. I will always speak to, I will always share in conviction when it's time for that. I always share an insight when it's time for that. And nobody here will do that either. But I always tell them, it's not me that made grace authentic. It's not me that made grace gracious. When I was in my interview process, I specifically looked for a church where I could be the same person I was Wednesday and Friday night as I am on Sunday morning. I did not want to have to be any different or pretend that I was anything different. I did not want to be at a church where there's pressure put on the pastor to be the moral exemplar, the most spiritual, right-walking person in the room. I didn't want that because I knew I couldn't be that. And Grace hired that intentionally. I went to a church that was already real. I didn't create a culture of authenticity here. I was attracted to the culture of authenticity that already existed. Which, by the way, there's a couple people walking around with some gray Grace Riley shirts on. Those are the OG shirts. All right, that's the first Hootenanny shirt. So those are the people who were authentic to me when I got here, and all I've done is participate in a culture of authenticity and acceptance and grace that already existed. So the real question becomes this morning, because as we were putting up our traits on the whiteboard as a staff, and we were brainstorming, what are the traits of grace. One of the first things that went up there is authentic, real. That's who we are. We don't put on airs. And so I wasn't just going to say that authenticity was a trait of grace because that felt insufficient, right? That feels cheap to just write that down. Yeah, everybody writes that down. I was more interested in what's the secret sauce there? What was it about the people of grace long before I got here and half the people in the room got here that made this place a place that's authentic and humble and real? Really, the question we're asking this morning is, what is the source of grace's grace, right? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us loving and accepting of all the people who come in? What makes us feel like nobody thinks we're better than anybody else? And as I thought about that, I started writing things down. And I wrote down this little stanza. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's a poem. Maybe it's a benediction. It's something that I think I might bring up over like repeatedly and read to us again. And it's in your notes. If you have notes today, if you're watching online, you can download those at the bottom of our live page and they might still be attached to the Gracevine. I don't know what we do. But you should have access to those. And on your notes is this paragraph or whatever it is, this benediction that I wrote out. But if you were to ask me, what is the source of Grace's grace? I would say it's this. At Grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed because of the Spirit, and all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace and goodness in our life. We understand, each one of us, when we walk in this room, we have an acute awareness that we are guilty of breaking harmony with the Father. We are guilty of making wrong choices. We are guilty of sin. We are broken. We are broken humans. And we are deeply flawed. Every one of us that I know at Grace walks around with an acute awareness that we do not have it all together. There's not a single person in here who I think would claim to have it all together. We know that we don't. We know that we're screw-ups. And here's the thing. If you're new to Grace, I just want to go ahead and relieve you of this tension so you don't feel like you have to put on airs either. We know you're a screw-up too, okay? We know that you got stuff that you don't want anybody in this room to know about. We know that. If it's not now, it's in the past. We know that. We all have that. We're all broken. We've all failed. We're all deeply flawed. That's part of life. That's part of humanity. It's part of who we are. And yet, what we know is that we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. That we are guilty and yet forgiven. That we are broken, but we are restored. Because our good Father did that for us. Because he sent his Son to wipe those things away. We are blemished and yet we are righteous and clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And we know that all the goodness in us is because of the Father. Because when I look at grace, I see a lot of good. I see a lot of good people and good faces. I see a lot of people that I have watched be servants over the years. I see a lot of kindness and a lot of grace. I see a lot of love. When people who I know visit on Sunday morning, they say, man, you really have a loving congregation. I said, yeah, we do. We have sweet people. I see a lot of goodness here. But I know that you know that you're only good because the Father has made you so. You're not good because you did it yourself. You're not good because you're somehow better. You don't serve well and love well and offer grace because you're somehow superior to other people. No, you're good because God made you good. You're good because God imparted on you goodness. You're good because you know and you understand as a partner of grace that your righteous deeds are as filthy rags without Christ. That there is nothing good in you until you meet God. And so though there is goodness here, and though there is sweetness here, and though there is mature belief here, none of us are under the impression that that is for any reason than because God the Father loves us and makes us so. You know, grace, that you are righteous because of the Son. You know that when God looks at you, if you believe that, if you're a Christian, which is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You know that if you believe that, that you are now clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And so when God looks at us, he sees his children, that he can't wait to welcome into heaven and sit at his banquet table for the marriage supper of the Lamb. He can't wait for that. And he looks at you and he sees righteousness, but it's not because you've white-knuckled your way into God's favor. It's because Jesus simply loves you, and Jesus died for you. And so we know at grace, yes, we are righteous. It had nothing to do with me. And so when other people come to grace, you can be righteous too, and it doesn't have to have anything to do with you. At grace, I know people who are wise. We have wisdom here. I'm very grateful for it. As we went through the process of buying the land, I was so relieved, and you ought to be too, that I had nothing to do with those decisions. We had professionals in the room who were seeing us through that, who were very kind to me and kept asking along the way, Nate, we think we ought to do this. Are you okay with this? Why are you asking me? All right, your vote is my vote. I don't know. I'm not going to tell you no. I'm going to do what you think we should do. We had wisdom in the room. When we meet as elders, there's wisdom there. When I interact with the staff, they have wisdom there in their ministries. When I interact with you, I see wisdom. But we know that we're not wise on our own accord. We're wise as a result of the Holy Spirit working in our life. We're wise as a result of the Holy Spirit sanctifying us and drawing us near to Him and drawing us near to Christ and imparting that wisdom and giving us those experiences that we need so that we can lead the church well. We know that if there is any wisdom here, it is not us or our own attributes. It is the Spirit working in us and through us that makes us wise. So we know that we are guilty and we know that we are fallen and we know that we are broken and yet restored. And we know that anything good in us is from God the Father and anything righteous in us is from God the Son and anything wise in us is from God the Spirit. And we walk in that humility. And all of that is grace. Grace is simply getting something that you do not deserve. So all of those things, the restoration and the forgiveness and the wisdom and the goodness and the righteousness are things that we do not deserve. But God lavishes on to us because he loves us. I am reminded of John 1 16, one of my favorite verses that says, from his goodness, we have all received grace upon grace. And it's just this picture, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. It's just this full, this picture of God being full of love and full of grace and full of goodness and full of mercy. And that spills out onto his children and it fills us up. And then as grace, as a church, we are filled up and we pour out that grace and that goodness and that love on the people around us. That's what gives grace its grace is the fullness of God and being gleeful recipients of the grace that he freely offers. And here's the thing, being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. Did you follow that? Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. This is what I think of when I think of the personality of grace almost more than anything else. We know who we are. We know we're not big deals. We know we're all just bundles of insecurities trying to make our way through life and find Jesus as we do it. We know that. We know that God pours his grace onto us. We are gleeful recipients of that grace, and as such, we happily and gleefully give it out to whoever we come in contact with. This is why the second trait of grace is that we are conduits of grace. Last week, we said we are kingdom builders. This week, we are conduits of grace. And I really do think that's the perfect word, conduit. It turns out in our little logos here, it's difficult to illustrate. So that's the cross. We just kind of, we punted collectively on that one, but the rest of them are great. We are conduits of grace. A conduit is something that is attached to a source and transfers what's in that source to another source. If you look it up, it can be a person or an organization that serves as a pathway for the attributes of another entity to another entity. And that's what we are. We stay plugged into the source. We are gleeful recipients of God's grace and goodness. And we pour that out on the people around us and the people who walk through these doors and the communities in which we exist and the circles that we walk in. We pour out God's grace and goodness onto others. That's what we do. That's our job. That's why we are conduits of grace. It doesn't stop with us. It flows into others. That's why it's poured into us to begin with. Jesus actually talks about this. In the verses that Caroline read so well earlier in the service, John 15, beginning unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. With grace, we abide in Christ. We stay connected to Jesus. Think of the branch, of a branch on an apple tree. As long as that branch is connected to the trunk, every season, whenever apple season is, I don't know, every season that it's apple season, that branch is going to produce fruit. Every season that it's not connected to the trunk, it's not going to produce fruit. That's just how it goes. When it's connected to the tree, it cannot help but produce fruit. Likewise, Christians, when we are connected to Jesus, when we are abiding in him, when we are walking with him, when we are connected to Jesus, we cannot help but bear fruit. So there's a couple ideas that we should talk about there. First, what does it mean to bear fruit? I had somebody ask me this week, is that the fruit of the Spirit that we find in Galatians? And I think that's just two separate passages using fruit, but it's not necessarily the same fruit. In Galatians, it's talking about the personal fruit of our character that we bear and the people that we become when we walk with Jesus. But in John 15, I think what he's saying is it's ministerial fruit. It's growth. It's pouring into others. It's seeing other people grow closer to Jesus as a result of our influence in their life. The language that we would put around it at Grace is, abide in me and I in you, and you will build much of my kingdom. That's what it means. It means producing that fruit. And I love how these traits do tie in together. And so when we abide in Christ, we walk with Christ, we pour that love, that grace, that goodness, that philanthropy out on other people and other organizations, and they flourish too. And that is the fruit that we bear. And so you also ask, what does it mean to abide in Christ? How do I do that? We're going to talk about that next week when I talk about being people of devotion. And if you heard me say that, and in your church Christian brain, you went, oh, devotion, yeah, got it. I know that sermon. Then I would just say to you, you're exactly who I'm preaching to next week. So come, and I might light your face on fire. That's what next week's going to be. I'm just telling you right now, I'm going to get after you next week, okay? So come on. And I don't do that a lot, but as I was preparing it this week, I thought, yeah, I think this is time. So I'm just giving you the heads up. Maybe next week is the time for waffles and pancakes. I don't know. At the house watching online. Anyways. Yeah, he's getting worked up. I'm going to turn this down. But when we abide in Christ, we remain attached to the trunk. We remain connected to him. We pour his grace and love out onto others. We cannot help but do it. An easy way to think about that, I got the perfect illustration this week as I was hanging out with the family. We were in our bonus room upstairs that we use as a playroom, and Jen had recently vacuumed the playroom, and because of that, the cord was laying on the ground in the middle of the room. Because Jen does this thing where she vacuums. I don't think she's wound a cord in her entire life. That's my job. Her job, vacuum. My job, put up the cord. So I had not done, in your defense, I had not done my job yet. I hadn't done what I was responsible for, and that's on me. So we're sitting there playing, and Lily's kind of like on the floor, and she reaches and she touches the cord of the vacuum and kind of jerks back. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I didn't want to get electrified instead of electrocuted, which is great. We have a thing. I don't know if this is probably terrible parenting. When our kids say words incorrectly, we don't tell them. We just love it. We just, for years, anything that happened before today, whether it was three years ago or yesterday was last day in our house. And we, I know, I know, I know we miss those days. So we're not going to correct it. She didn't want to get electrified. And I said, oh baby, you don't, you don't have to worry about that. See that cord's not plugged in. It doesn't have any power. There's no juice in that. That cord is limp and useless and dead. And as I was explaining to her why she didn't have anything to fear, I was like, oh, this is great. This is perfect for Sunday because that's what it looks like to abide in Christ and not. That's what it looks like to be connected to Christ and not. That cord can sit there as a conduit of the electricity that's going to run the appliance. But until it's plugged into the source, it's not doing anything. Nothing's happening there. It's got to be plugged into the source for it to be effective in what it needs to do. Similarly, if we just get an extension cord and plug it into the source and it's not connected to anything on the other end, nothing happens. It's a glad recipient of the power coming from the source. It's a glad recipient of grace, but it is not yet a conduit because it hasn't transferred the contents anywhere else. It just sits there. And I think a lot of us sometimes, if I'm being honest, can fall into the habit of simply being extension cords. We're plugged in. We're doing our church thing, but we're not pouring out to anybody. We're not connected to any people on the other side of that producing fruit there. And so I think as a believer, and more pointedly as a partner of grace, we think of ourselves as conduits plugged into the source and plugged into the people so that we can be a glad conduit of grace that is freely given that we transfer to others, of love that is freely given that is transferred to others, of goodness and of mercy that is freely given to us that we can transfer on to others. Which is why we say this all the time around here. It's why we do everything we do. It's our mission statement. The five traits are basically an unpacking of this. What we say every week at Grace is that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. We are conduits. We stay plugged into Christ and we pour, we let his grace and goodness and love and mercy flow through us and we pour it into the lives of the people that we are connected to. And when you come to grace, we want to connect you to others so that they can be a part of that and you can be a part of that. This is really the beautiful simplicity of the Christian life, this idea of abiding in Christ, of being conduits and remaining plugged in. Because when you really pay attention to the Christian faith, which can seem intimidating if you're new. I have somebody in my men's Bible study who grew up Catholic. And I would never presume that this is true of all people who grew up Catholic, but he said for him and his experience with Catholicism, he'd had no encounter, very little encounters with the Bible. And so this is all new to him, and he feels like he's playing catch-up in his 60s. It can be very intimidating to try to learn Christianity mid-flight. And God knows this, and he makes it simple for us. He says, hey, listen, you want to know what I want you to do? Just abide in me. You know what my job is as a pastor? It's not necessarily to tell you all the details of all the things. It's to push you there. It's to push you to the cross. Every week to push you to Jesus. That is our singular, I don't know if you know this, that's our singular goal for a Sunday morning service. You know how we determine if it was good or not? Were they pushed a little bit closer to Jesus when they left than they were when they got here? Do we push them a little bit closer to God? Did we encourage them towards the Father? Was worship sweet and ushered them into the presence of the Father in such a way that made them feel a closeness with Him that maybe they hadn't felt in their week just yet? Was the sermon something that was good or convicting or encouraging or enlightening in some way that pushes us closer to Jesus? All we're trying to do is move the needle a little bit every week that you would get closer to Jesus, that you would abide in him more, that you would be plugged into him more, that you would sense his grace and his mercy and his goodness and your love and your life just a little bit more. So that in that growing and in that closeness, you would offer those things to others. And as I thought about the fact that we are a church that is authentic, we are real people here. It occurred to me that this really is a spiritual thing. Because if you were to, in your mind right now, think of the person in your life who you picture as the most spiritual person you know, one or two people, whoever that is, the person in your life that's closer to God than anybody else you know, I would bet you my paycheck that that person is one of the most gracious people you know. I would bet you my paycheck that whoever you're thinking of is one of the kindest, the gentlest, most gracious, accepting, loving people that you know. Because I think the more we receive Jesus' goodness and forgiveness and affection in our life, the easier it is to pour that out onto other people. So grace, we are conduits of grace. And to finish up, I would remind you of why, and then we'll pray. We are conduits of God's grace because we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. And we acknowledge that anything good here is you. We acknowledge that anything righteous here is you. Anything wise here is you. Father, may you create in each of us an increasing desire to be plugged into your son, to abide in him, to walk with him, that we might bear fruit, that we might be conduits of the goodness and grace that we receive from him and pour it out onto others. Would you create in us and in this church an attractive, appealing Christianity? One that I dare say is different than the one portrayed in culture. A Christianity that is not condemned but one that welcomes. Would you create in us a faith and a devotion to you that others want when they see it? That when others come into and out of our lives, they see our good works and so then glorify our Father who is in heaven. Make us your conduits as we go throughout our lives and our days and our weeks. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, today, Moses and the Ten Commandments. That's enough of that. We are, we are. That was 10, 10 long weeks, friends. Once more time with feeling on that. If this is your first Sunday with us, this is the 10th part of our series, Kids Stories for Grownups. We've been showing that video or a portion of it every week, and I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see it. So I'm glad, I'm glad that that has run its its course and we've got more videos for you in the future. As we wrap up the series, we're going to wrap it up looking at the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. And though it is one of the shorter stories that we will tell in this series, I would argue that it is perhaps the most impactful one that we've covered in these 10 weeks as far as how what happens here in Exodus chapter 20 through 32, what happens there resonates and reverberates throughout all of Scripture. And that when we share this story, we have to ask about the story. What were the Ten Commandments for? Why did God give them? And so we're going to dive into that. But in answering that, I really want two things to happen. First, I want God to stir our affection for Jesus this morning. I'm going to tell you right up front that the whole point of the service and the message this morning is that you leave here with more affection for Jesus than what you entered in with. That's my prayer for everybody, that simple prayer. The other thing about talking about the Ten Commandments and the law is properly understanding the law and the commandments helps us understand our Bible better. So I say often, as often as I can, A, I can't be the only source of Bible that you're getting in your life. 30 minutes a week of whatever Nate chooses to share is not enough. It's not sufficient to learn God's word for ourselves. And you'll learn it with my terrible slant and biases, and you'll be as off kilter as I am. So don't do that. The other thing that I say as often as I can is the best habit that anyone in the world can develop is to wake up every time, wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. To do that and to understand our Bibles better, we have got to understand the law because it shows up over and over and over again in the New Testament. Half the tension in the New Testament is these new believers trying to figure out what to do with the old law. So we might be tempted to kind of throw it away and be like, well, you know, a sermon about the Ten Commandments doesn't apply to me too much because those laws really don't apply to me too much anymore. I don't have to worry about those. That's for Old Testament people. But as a New Testament Christian, we're going to see today how the law turns and puts our affection on Jesus. And we're going to, I hope, have a deeper understanding of God's word as we read it with a proper understanding of the law and the intent behind it. So the story of the Ten Commandments takes place in Exodus chapter 20. And many of you probably think that you know the story. Moses goes up on the mountain. You might even know that it's Mount Sinai. Two points for you. You can get your free coffee on the way out the door today. But in Exodus chapter 20, Moses goes up on the mountain. God gives him the Ten Commandments on two tablets. He carries him back down the mountain. He's like, here's the rules now. This is what we have to do. Except a careful reading will tell you that that's not really what happened. What happened is in Exodus chapter 20, the presence of God rests on Mount Sinai and all the people of Israel, all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrew people who have been wandering the desert and following this God, backed away from the mountain and said, we're terrified. Moses, you go. You do it. You go see what he wants. We're scared. And so Moses goes to the mountain, and from the mountain, the voice of God tells him the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, but he doesn't stop. He actually continues to give Moses laws for his people all the way through Exodus chapter 32. So for 12 chapters there, God is doling out laws. If you carefully study the Old Testament, you'll find that there's about 632 laws, and most of these show up in this discourse from Mount Sinai. And then when he gets to the end of it, at the end of chapter 32, he writes, God writes everything down. He said he gives them the meeting notes. He said, here's what we talked about. Here's the laws for the people. Carry these down to them. And so Moses goes back down the mountain with the stone tablets that do contain the Ten Commandments, but more than likely, because the Bible says things were written on the fronts and backs of them, more than likely is all of the discourse from those 12 chapters. And Moses carries those down the mountain. So if you don't learn anything for the rest of the sermon, maybe you've at least learned something about how the story of the Ten Commandments actually goes. Just to tie a bow on the story, Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain and sees that the people have made a golden calf out of earrings and jewelry, and he's ticked because they need this sign for their God, and he's so mad at them that he throws these freshly inscribed tablets on the ground and breaks them, which I don't know if he was supposed to do that or not, but Moses has a very clear anger issue throughout his life, and this is more evidence of that. God calls him back up on the mountain, and he says, okay, listen, I'm going to tell you all that stuff again, but this time you're writing it down. Okay, Moses has to write it down. God says, I'm not your secretary. All right, I did it before you once. Now you've got to copy it down. So Moses writes it down, brings those tablets back down the mountain, and those are the ones that existed in the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of the Old Testament. That's the story of the Ten Commandments. Now, whenever we cover the story of the Ten Commandments, the right question to ask is, what are they for? What are they for? Why did God give them? To what end? Especially now in New Testament, post-Christ era, or during Christ era, he's eternal, but after Christ was on earth and he's changed everything, and after the crucifixion and the resurrection, now how do we handle the law? Now what is it for? So this morning, we want to look at that story of the Ten Commandments, but then really ask, why did God give us those things? Because understanding this, again, will point us towards Christ and will help us understand our Bibles far better. The presumed purpose of the law, when it was given and when we encounter it, I believe, is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency and in our sufficiency, earn God's approval. When the law is given, there's a very clear path forward. Okay, good. Now I've got a plan. Now I know how to move forward. These are the rules that God wants me to follow. These are the ways that I can relate to him. For his children, there's a very clear path forward. I can follow these 632 laws. I can learn to follow them really, really well. And as I learn to follow them well, I can be spiritually sufficient and I can earn my God's approval. God says, we say, God, how do I make you happy? He goes, here, here's all the rules. Follow these rules super well and you'll make me happy. And I will give you my approval. And we can, in a sense, behave our way into eternity. We can behave our way into harmony with our Creator if we will simply learn to follow these rules well. And this, to us, and to the Hebrew people at the time, had to feel like good news, great, clarity. Finally, we know what to do. Think about it this way. Think about if you could sit down and read the Bible on your own without any knowledge whatsoever of what's contained in those pages. You don't know who Jesus is. You don't know anything about the Bible. You don't know how the story ends. You're reading it from Genesis on, and you're just paying attention to the narrative, trying to figure out how it's going to go. And so in Genesis 1, you see this instruction, hey, don't eat the fruit of this tree. Why not? Don't worry about it. Just don't do that. And then they mess up and they sin. And sin curses the earth. And curses the earth so bad that as you read along, you realize that in Genesis chapter 6, God decides I need to hit the reset button. I regret the way that this is going. And so he sends the flood. And all that's left behind is Noah and his family. And all God does to Noah, his only instruction to him, he doesn't give him the rules. What does God say to Noah? Hey, man, I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? Well, it floats in water. Well, what for? Just trust me, man. Just build a boat. But he doesn't give Noah the rules. And so you're reading along, you're like, man, this God is mysterious. How does he, how is he speaking to Noah and not the other people? And then you get to Abraham. He's called out of Ur of the Chaldeans in the Sumerian dynasty. And God comes to him and he says, hey, man, I want you to give up the future that you thought you were going to have in your dad's estate and I'd like you to move. Okay? Where? Don't worry about it. I'll show you. Man, this guy's mysterious. And how do I know that he's talking to other people besides Abraham? Is he only talking to Abraham? Where is this God? What are his rules? And when does he need us to follow them? Where is the clarity? And yet, Abraham gets to where he he's supposed to go and he meets a king there named Melchizedek who knows the will of God just as well as Abraham does. And we see that God is speaking to people all through this time, but we don't know where and how. And then he doesn't really give any more clarity to his son Isaac or to Jacob or to Joseph. And then 400 years go by and this Moses guy shows up. And what does he tell Moses? I want you to free my people, okay? Where do you want me to take them? I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Just follow me. And you're reading along going, man, this God is tough to follow. And then out of nowhere, Exodus 20. Hey, hey, hey, here's the rules, guys. This is what I want you to do. And I think our knee jerk as people would be to go, good, finally, thank you. Now I've got a plan. Now you're not just this weird cloud that I follow around and try to hear or just trust that Moses is hearing your voice. I mean, how weird would that be? If I got up here and I said, listen guys, I'm the only one who can really hear God very well, so you just need to listen to what I have to say. But that was the situation. And so with the law, good clarity, I have a plan. I can move forward. And don't we love that as Americans? Don't we love a good plan? I know in my life that when things start to go bad, when I'm not happy about what I'm doing at church, or I don't feel like I'm doing my job over here, or I don't feel like this part of my life is going very well and it's caused some pain and I try to figure out the best thing to do, what do I do? I sit down and I come up with a plan and then I work the plan. And there's great comfort in a plan that you think is going to succeed. And then you can work the plan. And so here, God finally gives some clarity. You want to make me happy? Here, follow the rules. And I think our human brains go, great, finally, a plan. I can do this. But I've always wondered, why did it take God so long to give him this plan? Why did God wait so long into the history of his people, a couple thousand years, to give him the rules? I think it's because God wants a relationship with us. And if we go back and we follow those first rules, those first instructions that he gave the early saints, we see that that's all he was really looking for. Adam and Eve, just trust me, don't eat of that. Why? Don't worry about it, just trust me. Noah, build a boat. Why? Just build it. Trust me. Listen to me. Do what I ask you to do. You're safe with me. Abraham, I want you to move. Where? Don't worry about it. Just go. Trust me. Follow me. Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your only son. But why? How? Abraham, don't worry about it. Just go. Obey me. Moses, lead my people. Where? Just follow me. At every instance, the beckoning of God is to follow him. Trust me. Work into a relationship with me. Get to know me. Pursue my heart as I pursue yours. And I think the real reason, when we consider it, that God waited so long to give the rules is because he knew that we would make them into a code, that we would begin to codify our relationship with him. Instead of pursuing him, we would just codify it, make a code of laws out of it, and go, here, this is all I need to do. I don't need the relationship anymore. What God knew is that relationships become contracts when we reduce them to codes. Relationships become contractual arrangements when we reduce them to a code of laws. Imagine if we did this in our marriages. I did a wedding yesterday, and I got to the portion where I did the vows. And at the vows, you vow affection to one another. You make promises to one another to have and to hold, richer for poor, in shape and not. However, we promise we will always love one another. What if instead of exchanging vows, we exchange our contractual agreements that we had negotiated prior to our marriage? And then on our anniversary, we revisited our contracts to see if we wanted to update them at all as ways to maintain the approval and affection of one another. Can't you just hear the contract negotiations? I think I would open with, for weekends in the fall when football starts, from noon on Saturday until when I go to bed on Sunday night, I would like to be able to treat my children like a railroad tycoon from the early 1900s. I would like to sit in my parlor, unbothered by them. Occasionally, they come in, and I laugh at them, tousle their hair, tell them they're cute, and then send them back to the nanny and I watch my football. This would be where I would start. And my wife would inevitably say, okay, but on Fridays and for at least one hour a night, you will engage with imaginative play with your children. You will even do Barbies. Also, once a week, I need some mom time. I need to go to Target, and I need to have lunch with people, and I need to go waste money on Starbucks. I'm going to need to do this, and I would say, okay. Once a week, I would like fresh flowers on the table. What kinds of flowers? You've got to help me out here. Can you imagine if we just negotiated our relationships and went back and forth? You give me this and I'll give you that. It robs it of its heart. It robs it of the love and affection that we experience in those things. The joy of marriage, the depth of marriage is getting to know one another over the years, is knowing when I do this, she's going to feel loved. When I do this, she's going to feel aggravated. When she sees me do this, this is what stirs her affections for me. So that by the time we've been married 30, 40, 50 years, we know each other better than any other soul on the planet. And that connection there was not achieved by making rules and negotiating contracts with each in attempting to follow those rules, we would rob the relationship that we have with him of its heart. And we don't need to look very hard in Scripture to see that he was right and that this is true. There was 1,400 years between Moses receiving the law and the gospels beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where Jesus comes on the scene. And when we get to the gospels, we see Jesus address the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the rule keepers, man. It is their job to read the rules, to interpret the rules, and to tell everybody what the rules mean, and to tell everybody how you're going to follow them. Like, it says don't work on the Sabbath, okay? Well, some Pharisees interpreted that as don't go out and plow the field with your donkey on the Sabbath. That's not allowed. Others were so strict with it that they said, if your sandal has a nail in it, that's heavier than it needs to be because it's metal and you cannot wear those sandals on Sabbath because that's work. So they had to figure out what do the rules mean and how do we apply them and how do we tell people whether or not they're following them. They were the keepers of the rules, the watchers of the rule book, and they should have known as well as anybody how to follow them. And if you follow them well, the way that God intended, their hearts should be rendered to God. They should be some of the greatest, most trustworthy people on the planet, except you guys know, what does Jesus call the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, You're a brood of vipers. You're a bunch of hypocrites who had taken the religious authority that they were given and leveraged it for personal gain and personal power and then set up a system around themselves to protect their personal gain and their personal power. And they were complete hypocrites and their heart was very far from the Lord. They have figured out how to heartlessly follow God's rules and maintain a facade of righteousness. And I just wonder if that sounds like any segments of the church that we have today, where men, and it's almost always men, are in charge and they've set up systems so that they stay in charge and they can personally profit from the spiritual authority that they have. And it's gross. And it happened then and it happens now. Whenever we set up a system around who follows the rules the best, what inevitably happens is people claim that they follow the rules best and that you should follow them, and then they cast judgment on you and they exact taxes from you. And it's disgusting. Which is why I hope that if Jesus saw me, he would at least say, well, you're a messy tomb. You're dirty. And I would be like, that's great, because you're going to wash me off. But that was the condition of the Pharisees. They were a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, because they had so perverted the law over the years as to make it this thing of if you can follow it well enough, you can behave your way into God's affection and approval. And we need to watch it because we do that too. I remember when I was in high school, there was certain rules you had to follow. Every church, every group of Christians has them. Some rules that if you follow these rules, now you're righteous, now God loves you, now you're a good Christian. When I was in high school, if you didn't drink or do drugs, if you didn't cuss, if you didn't do anything with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're not supposed to do. And you're a good Christian. Congratulations. Are you a jerk to everyone in your life? Yes, but you follow those rules, so you're fine. Meanwhile, we take the person over here who has a genuinely good heart and is gentle with people, but doesn't check one of those boxes, and we tell them that they are apostate and they need to go to youth group and probably some camp where they pledge purity or something like that. Every community of faith has its rules that it wants to default to. And we have our rules too. And we have our things where I just need a plan. If I can do this and this and this, then I'll be a good Christian. And without realizing it, we begin to try to behave our way into God's affection and approval. The end of that road is the Pharisees. The end of that road of trying to behave our way into God's affection is frustration and hypocrisy and a heartless obedience to God. And what's more frustrating is, in this following of the rules, it is possible to do it completely heartlessly, to follow the rules and not even love the rule giver. I went to a Christian college. There was lots of rules at that Christian college. I thought they were all stupid. But I followed them. Well, a better example is Jen went to a Christian college. And they had a lot of rules. And she didn't agree with all of them. But she followed them. Not because we had this deep and abiding affection for Toccoa Falls College and just a sense of loyalty to it. Not because we loved the rules and thought they were great. But because that was what was asked of us. And so we did. We can do that with God too. We all know how to go through the motions and follow the rules so it looks like everything's together. Meanwhile, our hearts are empty. And then Jesus comes along and he makes this heartless obedience harder. Jesus makes the heartless obedience harder when he shows up because he starts to redefine the law, to correctly define the law, to fix people's understanding of it, to help them see it's really impossible to follow it without heart. You can't follow the essence of the law without following the heart of the law. And he comes along with what is the single most convicting two verses for any man who's ever lived. He says this in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What that means is, I can only speak for the dudes, every one of us is an adulterer based on what Jesus taught. Now, we should not back away from that and consider it figurative. He meant what he said, and it's true. But until Jesus said this, plenty of us are going through life going, if I just don't commit adultery, the physical act of it, with someone else's spouse, then I'm squared away. I'm righteous, I'm good. And Jesus says, no, no. If you even look at them with intent, you're guilty. And then we all go, well, then I'm guilty. He even says that you've heard it said that we shouldn't murder anybody. Thou shalt not kill. And all of us, I would hope, can check that box. Yeah, you know, 40, I'm going 41 years. I'm in my 42nd year so far, no murders. Really nailing that one. But if you've hated someone in your heart, then you're guilty of that as well. And you go, oh, well, then I guess I'm a murderer. And the more you examine the law, the more frustrated you should become. Those of you in your life who have tried to white knuckle your way to holiness, who have just tried through sheer determination, I'm going to be a good Christian. I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to do what God asked me to do and behave our way into God's affection. What always happens? You fall on your face. And when you fall on your face, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you go, I wasn't holding on tight enough that time. Now, this is the time when I'm going to white knuckle my way to God's affection. And Jesus, in this gentle way, whispers in your ear, no, you're not. No, you're not. And so when we examine the law and we hold it up to ourselves, what we realize is this is impossible. It brings us to this inflection point of frustration where sooner or later, sooner or later when you've fallen off the horse enough times, when you've tried to follow the rules well enough, when you've tried to behave your way into God's affection and approval, and when you've disappointed him again and you've let him down, and you've got to pick yourself up again, sooner or later you're going to say, I don't want to do this anymore. And it's at that point that a lot of people walk away from the faith because they believe that faith is following rules well, and it's not. But the law has to get us to this point where we surrender. We say, I can't do this anymore. There's no possible way I can follow the law. And when we're there, when we understand that we cannot behave our way into heaven, and I know, I know, listen, I know that I say that, and all the Christians in the room go, yeah, no, it's God's grace. I cannot behave my way into heaven and into God's affection. And yet, you live out your faith like that's what you can do. You know intellectually that you can't behave your way into God's approval for you. And yet, boy, you try, don't you? I'm just talking to myself here. So lest we sweep aside, no, I don't do that. Yes, you do. We all do. But it's at that point when we realize that we can't, that we're ready to hear the message from Romans 8, 1 through 4, where Paul writes about this exact thing. And I'm going to read it to you, and it's going to be a little bit murky, but there's a couple phrases we can key in on to really help us understand what he's talking about. He writes this. He washed off our tombs. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Paul says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For those of us who trust in Jesus and his sufficiency, our tombs are clean. We are alive in Christ. He's taking care of us. Because God has done, by sending him to die on the cross, to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death and to have a perfect resurrection, God has done what the law, listen, weakened by the flesh. But he sent his son who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. He sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to perfectly follow the law, the only person in history who's ever done it, to die a perfect death, to have a perfect resurrection, to ascend back into heaven, and then begin, according to Romans and Hebrews, to advocate to the Father on our behalf. And in that action, he covers over our weakness, and we are restored into the life of the Spirit and into harmony with our Creator and into affection from our Father God. That's what Paul is saying in Romans. He's telling us the purpose of the law is to show us our need for Jesus. And so in light of that, I told you at the beginning, we presume the purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency. And in our sufficiency, so earn God's approval. But what we see through a careful examination of ourselves, standing up against the law, what we see in the teachings of Jesus is that was never the purpose of the law. The purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual surrender and in Christ's sufficiency, receive God's affection. You see the difference? When we act like it's to achieve our own spiritual sufficiency, we butt our heads up against the wall until we reach a place of surrender. And we say, Jesus, I can't follow the law. You followed it perfectly. I'm totally reliant on you. I'm done trying. I'm done trying to behave my way into heaven. I'm done trying to behave my way into God's affection and into my Father's approval. And I surrender to you. I confess, you died, you lived a perfect life, you died a perfect death, and then you resurrected for me. And you are my path to harmony with my creator. And I am insufficient entirely to do that at all. I am completely and totally reliant upon the sufficiency of Christ and his death on the cross. That is my only path to affection with my father. And then in Christ's sufficiency, we receive, not earn, God's affection, which is far better than approval. We don't want our dads to simply nod in a condescending approval to us. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're okay. Yeah, you're allowed. We don't want a distant, heartless approval from our God. We want that affection. We want Him to love us. We want Him to take joy in our joy. We want Him to mourn when we mourn. We want Him to hurt when we hurt. We want Him to love when we love. We want to know that our Father God is right there. We want his affection. And to get that, all we have to do is surrender. Quit trying so dang hard. And what it looks like is this. How about, how about instead of deciding all the things you're going to do to live the life that you think God wants you to live and to be the person that you think God wants you to be and all the plans and all the rules and all the white knuckling that we're going to do, how about we scrap that? And how about we make our only plan is to wake up every day and remind ourselves of the love that Jesus has for us. I heard one pastor call this preach the gospel to yourself. Remind ourselves that we fall at the feet of Jesus, that we rely on his sufficiency, that we trust in his perfect life and in his perfect death, and that God, the Bible says that this is love, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Before we earned it, before we deserved it, before we had any claim to it whatsoever, God sent Jesus to live a perfect life and die a perfect death so that we could experience eternity in heaven with him, so that we could walk in the affection and the love of our Father, so that we could be at harmony with our Creator. Remind yourself of that every morning. Remind yourself every morning, Jesus loves me. My Father loves me. Not for who I'm going to be, not for how I'm going to behave, but He loves me because He sent His Son for me. And if anyone were to ask me, why does God love you? I would point to the cross and I would say, because of what Jesus did, not because of anything that I've done. And remind yourself of that overflowing love every day. I love that verse in the book of John that says, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Remind yourself of that grace every day. And what you'll see happening is when we surrender to Christ and we remind ourselves of his love, that our affections for the people around us are stirred as well. We'll be more gracious with our husbands and our wives and our children and our friends and our co-workers and the bad drivers. When we daily remind ourselves to surrender to Christ's sufficiency, when we choose surrender over sufficiency, God stirs our affections for Jesus. When we simply remind ourselves, I am insufficient, I have nothing to offer, Jesus has everything to offer, and I rely on that. When we remind ourselves of that, God stirs our affection for Jesus. And in stirring our affection for Jesus, he stirs our affection for one another, which by the way, isn't that the whole point of the law anyways? Didn't Jesus say that loving God with all your heart, soul, and your mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the whole law and the prophets? This is how it does it. Instead of trying to be a people who are worried about the rules and all the right behaviors for Christians, which, by the way, will stop us from looking at other Christians and saying on social media, well, it's pretty unchristian. I thought you said you were a Christian and now you're da-da-da-da-da. If we would move away from a rule-following Christianity and towards a daily surrender to that Christ, we will find waiting for us an affection for Jesus and an affection for others that will help us walk in harmony with the law anyways. So the whole point of the law and the whole point of this morning is to grab our faces and point them to Christ and help us remember that he alone is worthy of our affection, that he alone is worthy of our devotion. And if we would quit trying to follow the rules so darn well and fail and get up and try hard again, if we would just surrender instead of trying so hard, surrender to the sufficiency of Jesus, that he would fill our hearts with affection for him, that that affection would overflow to others, and then we would finally be people who keep the law and walk in devotion and affection to Jesus. So I said my prayer for you at the beginning was that you would leave here with your heart stirred more for affection to Jesus than when you came in. That you would leave here desiring Jesus more than you did when you entered in. And my further prayer is that that would be a sustained thing, that some of you, gosh, maybe a few of you, would finally quit trying so hard and just wake up tomorrow morning and say, Jesus, thank you for loving me, and see where that leads. In a minute, the band's going to come up, and we're going to sing a song called Jesus, We Love You. There's a chorus in there, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Let's stand and sing this song as one church with one voice and one agreement and one surrender to pour everything out at the feet of Jesus and let him stir our affections for him. Let's pray. Father God, we are grateful for you. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the law so that we can see how much we need you. God, I pray that we would want more of you, that we would simply want more of Jesus, that we would want to know you better, and that in that pursuit we would feel a freedom from the things that trip us up, from the things that seek to hold us back, that so easily entangle. But that maybe, God, by focusing on you, by focusing on your son, we can run the race that's set before us as we were finally, finally intended to run. Focus our eyes on you, Jesus. And let us trust you to take care of everything else. In Jesus' name, amen.

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along. And that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Today, Jesus calms the storm. We'll be right back. here, and I would love to get to meet you after the service. I'm so glad that you guys chose to make Grace a part of your Sunday, whether you're watching online or here in person, braving the elements. We are very, very grateful for that. We've got two more parts of this series, Kids Stories for Grownups. Today is Jesus Calms the Storm, and next week is Moses and the Ten Commandments, and I'm really excited to share that sermon with you that God's laid on my heart for next week. But this week, we look at what is one of my daughter Lily's most favorite stories in the Bible. I've told you guys before, sometimes at night, she'll ask me to tell her Bible stories. And I love to do that. And this one, Jesus Calming the Storm, is one of her favorites. And, you know, I'm not really sure why that is. I think that this story, if you know it, is one that captures your imagination from the very beginning, from a very young age, the idea of this Jesus, this man who was 100% man and 100% God at the same time was able to calm the wind and the waves. The sky and the sea obey him. And that just captures our imagination, I think. And so it's fun to revisit that story and reflect. And as we do and as we go through that story and we reflect on what we can learn from it and what Jesus has for us in this story and maybe hopefully what he would have us glean from that story. I just wanted to impress upon you that I kind of feel bad every week when I get up, when the worship stops and then you have to start listening to me because I just want to keep worshiping. And one of my favorite things to do is to lay out and listen to my church worship. And as I hear all of you cry out, it's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. And you say, great are you, Lord. I'm reminded that you are God's children and he is in pursuit of your hearts. And so let's let this message and where we go and where we lean into, let's make space for the Holy Spirit to speak to us no matter why we're here this morning and give him the opportunity to draw us closer to the Father, closer to the Spirit, closer to Jesus. So Jesus calming the storm takes place in the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and they are beginning Jesus's ministry. So it's important to put this story in the context of the timeline. For those that don't know, Jesus spent about 33 years on this earth. We think he started his public ministry around the age of 30, and that he spent about three years going around Israel and ministering in the various villages and cities, and then eventually in Jerusalem. And we get that timing from Passovers and things like that in the New Testament, or in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So at about 30, Jesus begins to call the disciples. So if you open up to any of those books that I just mentioned, you'll see at the very beginning, Jesus starts to call the disciples to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men, that kind of thing. And a lot of us know those stories. Well, that marks the beginning of Jesus's public ministry. And then obviously his crucifixion and resurrection marks the end of his public ministry. And so in that first year, early on, this story takes place. So the disciples have just started following Jesus. We'll see from the story that they don't fully know him yet. They really don't know who this man is that they're following. They haven't fully realized who this Jesus guy is just yet. And we'll see that come out in the story, but it's important to place it at the beginning of Jesus's ministry. If for no other reason than we can empathize with the disciples and their ignorance in this particular story. On a night after they had gotten done ministering and preaching, Jesus tells the disciples, hey, let's load up in the boat and go across the Sea of Galilee and we'll spend the night in a town over there on the opposite coast. Because when you pay attention to the life of Jesus, what you notice is that it's this always fluctuating balance of being with the people, surrounded by people, people pressing onto him, asking for miracles, listening for teachings, trying to trip him up and stump him and trick him and all those things. And then Jesus retreating for respite and rest so that he can gather his wits like we all need to do before he goes and faces the angry throngs the next day who want more things from him. Kind of like being a mom. So Jesus says, let's go across the Sea of Galilee and we'll rest there. And so that's what they do. Bless you. That's what they do. And they get in the boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee. And as they go across the Sea of Galilee, it begins to get pretty turbulent. The wind picks up and the waves start to pick up and it begins to get pretty hectic in the Sea of Galilee. And I've had the opportunity myself to be on the Sea of Galilee because I'm a pastor. And if you're a pastor, you have to do that. So I went to Israel and I was on a boat in the Sea of Galilee. And I remember being surprised by how wavy and choppy it was and how much the boat was bouncing during totally clear blue skies with very little wind. And some of the waves did crash up over the side of the boat, not in a dangerous way, but just in that way that gets your rear end wet enough to make you uncomfortable for the rest of the day that you're trekking around Israel. And so it became believable to me that a storm could stir up and really make a trip across the Sea of Galilee feel pretty unsafe. And that's what happened that night. And so the Bible tells us in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and we're going to look at the depiction in Mark, that the waves started to pick up. The wind really started to blow. And the waves were crashing over the boat, not in the way that just makes you inconveniently wet, but in the way that makes you scared for your life. And the disciples became very fearful. And it would take something for the disciples to be fearful because many of you know that the disciples were fishermen. Peter, James, and John. James and John were called the sons of thunder. That was their nickname, okay? They were not sissies like Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector. He was an accountant. All right, my dad's an accountant. They are sissies, man. They cannot be trusted on open waters. I'm just kidding. Dad's great. I get seasick. He does not. I'm a pastor. I'm even worse. Anyway, talking about requisite toughness. But you've got James and John and Peter, and they're starting to freak out. They're getting legitimately scared. And so we pick up the story in Mark chapter 4, verse 38, and I'm going to read 38 through 41. This is what they do. It says, And I love that story. It's a simple one. It's a short one, but it's a powerful one. And one of the things that's so neat to me is that the disciples sense that they were in danger. And the hull of the ship is a guy that's older than them. They were not yet in their 30s. They were younger than him, presumably early 20s or maybe even younger than that. It could have been, some scholars think, upper high school boys that Jesus was giving the keys of the kingdom to. And they get scared and they know they're scared. They know they can't do anything about the weather. And so they go to Jesus. And it's clear from the text, they don't know what Jesus was going to do about it because when Jesus does what he does, they're shocked. So they weren't expecting him to calm the wind and to calm the rain and to calm the waves. They weren't thinking that was coming next. They just knew they were in trouble and they needed to go to Jesus. They didn't know what he was going to do. They didn't know how he was going to solve it. They just knew my soul's in fear. I'm going to run to Jesus. And I think that's such a great lesson for us. If nothing else, even when we don't know what he's going to do, run to Jesus when we're scared, run to Jesus when we don't feel safe, run to Jesus when we feel we need shelter. So they run to Jesus and Jesus wakes up. He's annoyed. He's clearly from the text. He was, he was, he was having a good snooze down there. He was out of the rain. He was nice and dry. Maybe it was working as like a little bit of like rock-a-bye baby white noise for Jesus. I don't know. Dude may have been hardcore. But he was sleeping. And I know, I happen to know from personal experience that even the sweetest people in the world, when they are awoken at 3.30 in the morning in the middle of the night and they don't want to be, they're not kind about that. And so Jesus clearly is annoyed with the disciples. He goes up on the deck and he looks at the wind and the waves and he says, peace, be still. And they do. And I've often thought, man, that would be a really cool moment in history to be in. If you could go back to one spot that's got to be in the running. Can you imagine, those of you who know me, how smug I would be on the deck of that ship with my popcorn? If you could time travel also popcorn with you, smart food, white cheddar, please. I would sit there and look at the disciples and be the least scared person laughing at them, be like, you're gonna be fine, just watch. Can you imagine how smug I would be knowing what was going to happen, just waiting for Jesus to come up on the hull of the ship, on the deck of the ship and say, peace, be still. And then it happens and you're like, see, I told you guys. It would be so easy to be peaceful in that moment because we know how the story ends, but they didn't. And so they were scared. And he comes out and he says, peace, be still. And peace, be still. When I hear people cover this story, talk about the story, preach on this story, peace, be still usually gets the focus. That's usually the phrase we stop on is the power of Jesus. And that's a good place to focus. But that's never really caught my attention as something else in the story. The next thing that catches my attention a little bit more is the disciples marveling at who this Jesus was. He goes back down into the stern of the ship, presumably to go back to sleep, this time peacefully, without his white noise. And the disciples look at each other and they were fearful and they said, who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him. See, when they went down into the ship to get him, they called him teacher, rabbi, pastor. They didn't know yet what Jesus was or who he was. They didn't call him Lord. They didn't call him Savior. They called him teacher. They were ignorant as to the nature of Christ just yet. And so they knew that guy could do some stuff. They knew that he could perform some miracles and cast out demons. They had seen a little bit of things. They knew that he possessed a wisdom that was unique in their generation. But they didn't know he could do this. So they marveled at who he was. And sometimes we focus on that. But for me, as far back as my memory goes from hearing this story, the thing that's always captured my attention is Jesus's incredulity with the disciples. He's incredulous with them. He's frustrated. And to me, because look at the text. He says, why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith? Oh, you of little faith. Like, what's the matter, guys? Why are you being so scared? Like, just chill out. It's going to be all right. And it's never made sense to me that this would be Jesus' response because we're taught about Jesus that he's meek and mild. We see him being abundant in patience and grace and love. And from a very young age, it's always seemed out of step with the character of Christ that this would be his chosen response to his disciples at their very reasonable fear. Again, Peter and James and John, the fishermen in the group, they're scared too. When the flight attendant on the plane starts to freak out, it's time for you to get scared as well. So I don't really care what Matthew's doing, but I'm looking at Peter. This is the guy that walks on water a little bit later in his life. And he's scared. So there's not anybody listening to my voice who wouldn't have been scared on that boat too. And to that very legitimate fear, Jesus goes, what's the matter with you? What's the matter with you? Why are you scared? What, you have no faith? Come on. He's frustrated with them. And it's always puzzled me. Why was Jesus frustrated with the disciples? And I want to propose to you two reasons. The first reason that I'm about to share is not the reason. It's a reason, and I think it's worth talking about. But really, the first reason provides a bridge to the second reason that I'm going to get to at the end of the sermon that I think really is why Jesus was internally frustrated with the disciples. But we can't get there without going through the first reason first. So the first reason I would like to submit to you that Jesus was frustrated with the disciples is the disciples underestimated Jesus' power, plan, and love for them. I think very simply the disciples underestimated Jesus. They underestimated Jesus' power. They ran to him because they knew he could do something, but they didn't know that he could do that. And apparently Jesus felt like he had revealed enough to them and instructed them enough that they ought to have known. They ought to have known that he had this special connection with God the Father and that everything was going to be okay. But they underestimated his power and his efficacy and his ability to be able to bring about the change or the provision that they needed. So they underestimated the power of Jesus. They underestimated the plan of Jesus. See, the disciples got called by a rabbi, and in those days, if you understand how that worked, that was kind of going to seminary back in the day. That was preparatory school for being released as a pastor or a rabbi into the wild. And so their expectation is most likely we're going to follow this man for a little while, however many years it takes, four, five, eight, 10 years. And then eventually we're going to be released out into the wild to do, to lead our own ministry. A lot like a young pastor going to seminary, expecting to graduate with a degree that says, I know all the things about theology I'll ever need to know. There's no questions that will ever stump me. And I have good categories for everything that's ever going to happen in my life. And then going to church and starting real ministry and finding out those categories are going to be pretty challenging, pal. You're going to have to learn to adjust those. But that's what a seminarian does. They go to school, they get a degree, and then they're released to church. And so that's what the disciples presumably thought they were going to be doing. Training with this man, learning how to be a rabbi, eventually they'd be released to be rabbis on their own. What they had no idea about was the scope of Jesus's plan for their lives. Jesus wasn't going to release them into the various cities and towns within Israel to do their own personal ministries. No, these were the foundational rocks upon which the church of God was being built. They were the kingdom of God on earth. They were being entrusted with the keys to the kingdom. Two and a half years after this moment, Jesus was going to die on a cross. He was going to raise himself from the dead, conquering death and sin. Then he was going to spend 40 days with them and then go into heaven and say, wait for the Holy Spirit to come. He's going to tell you what you need. And then they were going to launch the movement of God on earth, the intersection of the physical and the spiritual in the temporal God's church, his kingdom here. He had big plans for the disciples. And listen, it's 2,000 years later. We're on a different continent talking about their Jesus. They did a pretty good job. It was a pretty good plan. They did not realize, the disciples, that they were plans A, B, C, D, E, all the way to Z of God starting his kingdom here on earth, of transferring it from the nation of Israel to the kingdom, God's church, the bride of Christ, of which we are a part. See, they underestimated Jesus's plan for them. Pay attention to this. Because they reduced it to what they could envision for themselves. They underestimated Jesus' plan for them because they reduced it to what they could envision for themselves. They didn't make space for what Jesus could possibly be envisioning for them. And then they underestimated the love of Christ. That Jesus actually loved them enough to execute that plan. Because the plan involves Jesus dying the most painful death that that era of humanity could cook up. Suffering through the torment of hell and being resurrected on the third day, conquering death and sin. The plan involved Jesus being separated from his God. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me is one of the things he mutters on the cross. It was the first time in all of time that Jesus and God had been separated even for a little bit. And Jesus endured that. He endured the sufferings on the cross for us, for you and for me, because he loves us. Because the Bible says that love is in that while we were yet sinners, Christ dies for us. That's what love is. And what the disciples did not know and did not understand is that two and a half years from now, he's going to be hanging on a cross and we're going to feel like we've failed and he's failed, but that's the necessary thing that has to happen because he is winning for us a seat at the banquet table for all of eternity. That through living his perfect life, through leaving the keys of the kingdom with us, through dying on the cross, through raising from the dead and leaving that tomb empty, that Jesus was conquering death and hell for all of eternity and there was going to come a day, spoiler alert, when he would calm all storms for all time. But that was going to require an excruciating death. That was going to require limitless forgiveness over and over and over again as he watches us, you and me, trample on that death with our willful actions and our willful rebellion and our decision to not honor the death of Jesus on the cross and our decision on a weekly and daily basis to put ourself as Lord of our life and not Jesus as Lord of our life. And he knew that he was going to die on the cross, that he was going to offer you his love, that we were going to trample on that, and yet still he was going to offer us grace and invite us to a seat at the banquet table in heaven one day where we will be in harmony with our God for all of eternity. The disciples did not know that Jesus loved them that much. They did not know his plan was that big and that his power was that great, and so they underestimated him. And it makes me wonder, do we underestimate Jesus too? Do we forget how powerful he is? Do we sit in a circumstance and render it hopeless as though prayer can't possibly help because Jesus can move mountains, but not that one. Jesus can fix other relationships, but not this one. Jesus can empower other people facing temptation, but not me and not mine. Do we underestimate his power? Do we underestimate Jesus' plan for us by reducing it to what we can envision for ourselves? Can I just tell you, you have no idea what Jesus wants to do with you. You have no clue what Jesus wants to do with a single faithful heart who will be consistent. I see over and over again people who are convinced that they have no gifting, there's nothing special about them or outstanding about them. And so when they hear pastors like me talk about plans that Jesus has for them, they think, certainly that's not me. That's for other people. And it just reminds me of my mama. I've told you guys this story plenty of times. She died of ovarian cancer at 74 or 75 years old, and she was a woman who would sit in sermons like this, and she would think, I have nothing to offer the kingdom of God. I have no talents. I have no skills. Everyone around me is more important and better liked than I am. And yet, because she loved God, she just faithfully loved others her entire life. And when she passed away at 75, there was over 400 people at that funeral. All a testament to how Linda had loved them so well throughout the course of her life. And I gotta tell you, I've done plenty of funerals for people around that age and older. It's not often there's 400 people there. And she's one that throughout her life would have sat in a sermon like this and thought, God doesn't really have a plan for me. Yes, he does. Yes, he does. You have no idea who you're raising. You think Billy Graham's parents and Mother Teresa's parents knew who they were raising? You have no idea who you're friends with and who you're loving on. You have no idea how much an email or a prayer or a phone call or a late night conversation can mean to somebody. You have no idea. Just walk faithfully in Jesus' plan and you let him do what he's going to do. So often we underestimate Jesus' plan for us by writing off ourselves and limiting that plan to what we can envision. And he has such a bigger picture for us. Do we underestimate his love for us? Do we think that we've trampled on his grace one too many times and he's probably fed up with me now? No, he's not. Do we forget that he's promised us in Hebrews that he's at the right hand of the Father interceding for us? Do we, like the disciples, underestimate our Jesus? I think one of the reasons that we do that is because we fail to remember, as the disciples are a good example for in this story, that Jesus has depth just like anyone else. And knowing him takes time. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but very clearly in the story, the disciples simply didn't know Jesus enough yet. Jesus felt like he had revealed enough of himself that they should have faith in him by now, that they should know by now, but they simply didn't know who he was. They simply didn't know by then. And so they doubted him and they were scared and they were anxious and they worried and they were fearful. And so they underestimated him, I believe, because they didn't fully know him yet. And we've got to acknowledge that getting to know Jesus is just like getting to know anyone else. There's depth there. There's layers. I think of one of my favorite people that I've ever met in my entire life, Harris Winston. No, I'm just kidding around. It's not Harris. It's this guy that I used to teach with. It's really not Harris. It's this guy that I used to teach with named Coach McCready, Robert W. McCready. When I started teaching school, thanks Harris for being the punchline for that joke. Anybody could have done it. When I started teaching school, I was in a previous life, my late 20s. I taught high school Bible and was a school chaplain at a small private school outside of Atlanta. In my first year there, I got hired at the same time as this new science teacher and the football coach, Coach McCready. And when I met him, I learned about him that he was a tailback at Auburn in the 60s. And so tough, Southern, good old boy from Alabama. He didn't, actually he did chew tobacco all the time. Now I think about it, he always had to dip in, that guy, teaching at a private Christian high school. Everybody just looks the other way, right? That was Coach McCready, just tough as nails. And he calls me out. The first week, he starts calling me Coach Rector. I'm not the coach of anything, but he just brings me to practice, and he makes me the special teams coach because I know how to kick a ball because I have a soccer background, and he did not because he has a football background. And so I was the special teams coordinator. And he called everybody baby, and he called buses cheese wagons, and he was just a character, man. I could tell you some very colorful stories with colorful language about Coach McCready and some of the things I heard that man say. But then I find out that he was also a Vietnam veteran and that he led 100 Marines during his first tour in Vietnam to the jungles of Vietnam. That'll do something to you. He did such a good job with it that the Marine Corps honored him with a nice, easy assignment doing recruiting in Alabama so he wouldn't have to risk his neck anymore and could wait out the war that way. And Coach McCready hated that idea. So he bugged his CO over and over and over again until he could find a path to get back to Vietnam. And the only way to do it was to go to training to become a recon Marine. So he went back to Vietnam as a recon Marine crawling through the tunnels of the Viet Cong shirtless with a Bowie knife and a pistol. I'm not making that up. That's Rambo stuff, man. That's a tough son of a gun. And he was all of that. He dripped that toughness. He could look at you in a way and no one's ever made me that scared in my whole life. But you get to know him. And I had the opportunity to do that. Seventh period, I was free. He taught seniors a class that he didn't care about who were on the football team, and he just let them sit in the back and do whatever they wanted. It was a really great school. And me and Coach would sit in the front, and we would just have a conversation for an hour. And we'd talk about everything, and we'd talk about life, and he didn't know it at the time, but he was discipling me, and mentoring me, and counseling me, and helping me in my marriage, and helping me learn to be a man, and helping me learn to follow God well, and showing me different ways that faith could look, and I learned about his heart, and I saw him tear up with something special that happened for the boys. The last year I was at that school, he and his wife, by his request, got a little toy poodle, black one, named Pepper. And Coach McCready's policy was if Pepper's not invited, then neither am I. And it never went anywhere that Pepper was not invited. Took him to stores before emotional support dogs were a thing and just dared people to tell him to get out of there because you wouldn't. And I bet over those three years, I got to know Coach McCready better than anybody else at that school. And if I saw him this afternoon, we could stop and we could have a four-hour conversation and it would not be enough. We were thick as thieves, man. But that knowledge of him and who he was and his heart, that came over time. It came over investment. It came over going to see him every day when I didn't have to and us wanting to spend that time together. You have those friendships too. Why would your relationship with Jesus be any different? How can we come to church once a week, sing about Jesus, hear about Jesus, go home and don't think about Jesus for a week, and then show up the next week and think, why am I not closer to Jesus? It's a pursuit. It's a getting to know him. It's exploring him. It's mining the depths of who he is in his word. Learning more about our God. Reading the gospels over and over and over again and printinging on ourselves the character and the heart of Jesus, pursuing him in prayer, spending time with him that we don't have to passionately following after Jesus so that we get to know him, so that we get to trust him, so that we get to love him. And then what happens when we do this, when we pursue Jesus and we know his heart, we get to watch him come through over and over and over again. And we get to watch him calm the storms over and over and over again. We get to see how he's going to do that. I've had that experience to do that as the pastor of grace. When I got here, we were in a heck of a storm. And I'm not going to recount all of that for everyone present, but it was not good times. But I saw Jesus come through. I could tell you a story about a Memorial Day offering that was supernatural that first month that I was here, where God said, hey, I care about this place. How God has had the right people show up at the right times to just affirm for us, I care about this place. This place matters to me. And frankly, I've weathered enough storms with grace, and some of you have too, that we're now just the people on the boat eating the smart pop popcorn with the white cheddar going, this is going to be fun. Look at what God's going to do. The more you know Jesus, the more you trust him, and the less you doubt he will come through. And I asked the question earlier, have you underestimated Jesus? And I would tell you that a pretty good indicator for that is how much we worry, how much we give into anxiety and fear and stress. Now listen, I'm not talking about clinical anxiety that's treated by medications. I'm not talking about an actual chemical imbalance that causes that. I'm talking about your regular, everyday, run-of-the-mill worry. Is my kid gonna get the right teacher? Maybe if I stay up a couple more hours tonight worrying about it, then that will help the situation. And they will definitely get the teacher they're supposed to. Will the deal close? Is my kid going to make good decisions at college? No, but they'll learn from them. Will my son or my daughter meet the right person that they're supposed to marry? Am I going to like them? I don't know. But listen, God is over all of those things. And the longer we walk with Jesus, the less worrisome those things are because we know he's got it. And so a good indicator of whether or not we're underestimating Jesus in our own lives is how much fear and anxiety and worry and stress we carry about the things that only he can control. And this, I think, is the real reason that Jesus was frustrated with the disciples that night. Because the disciples were focused on the outer storm while Jesus was focused on the inner storm. The disciples were focused on the storm out there, things beyond their control. And Jesus is sitting there sleeping in the stern going, guys, if you'll just trust me, you could be asleep now too. If you'll just trust me, you don't have to be scared right now. You don't have to be fearful right now. You don't have to be anxious right now. See, Jesus comes to us and we often miss this and he offers to calm the storms in here. And so often we're like the disciples and we're like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm fine in here. Can you calm the storms out there? Can you make that go away and that go away and that go away and that go away? Can you heal here, here, and here? Can you handle all of those things so that I don't feel any stress? And Jesus is like, I'm offering you my perfect peace so that you don't have to stress at all. I'm offering you my perfect peace so that you can be calm in here and not have to worry about all the things going on out there. Because let me tell you something. To live this life is to experience storms. When Jesus calmed that storm in the Sea of Galilee, how long was it until the next one? Did they just stop altogether? When Jesus fixes that bad news, you've lived life long enough, there's more coming. We've weathered storms at grace. We're in a fun season right now. You think there's not more coming? Maybe you're in the midst of a storm right now, and we want desperately for Jesus to calm it. Maybe we're in a peaceful time right now. Either way, we know that there's more coming, but here's what Jesus offers to us, that he will give us such an internal peace and calm this internal storm in such a way that none of those will ever have an impact on us again. He gives us the option to trust him and walk in perfect peace. Maybe this is what Paul was talking about in Philippians. When he says, be anxious for nothing but in everything through prayer, petition, and with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. He's offering to calm the inner storm. Because on this side of eternity, in this broken world where sin pervades, there will always be storms. And there's coming a day in Revelation 19 and in Revelation 21 where Jesus calms all the storms forever and there's no more storms. And until then, and between now and then, there's gonna be storms out there, but he's offering you peace in here if you'll get to know him and trust him and love him and walk with him. And so that's the invitation to us. That's the invitation that we see as a result of this story. This story is an invitation to know Jesus more. This story is an invitation to go deeper with him, into his word, to pursue him in prayer, to swallows me up, even if that storm is the storm that swallows up someone I love so much, that Jesus has gone to where that storm is and he's conquered that too. And one day I'll exist on the other side of eternity and I'll be with that person again. That's the storm that Jesus has calmed for us. He's won that for us. So let's not look at the story of Jesus calming the storm as a simple story that displays the power of Jesus and the ignorance of the disciples, but let's look at it as a story that beckons our hearts to go deeper with him, to know him more, to trust him more, to walk with more peace and more humility and more grace as we see him come through again and again and again. Let's allow Jesus to calm the storm in here and we won't be so concerned with the storms out there. Let's pray. Father, God, we thank you for calming our storms. Lord, for the folks in here who are walking through them. There are waves crashing over their boat, man. They don't know how they're going to make it out of this one. God, I do pray that you would calm those. But more than that, I pray that you would calm them. Calm their anxious hearts. God, for those of us here who don't know you, who don't know your son, with the depth that we would like to, would you beckon us towards you? Would you call us into your presence? God, give us a daily desire to meet with you, to hear from you, to talk to you, to listen, to praise. God, would you be a part of our conversation? Would you be a part of our friendships? Would you be a part of the way we work and the way we operate and the way we think, be a part of our car rides and our walks and our workouts. Jesus, we invite you into our lives that we might know you more, that we might trust you more, that we might trust your heart more, that you might calm the storms that rage in us from time to time. And we thank you for being the one who calms the storms once and for all. It's in your name that we pray these things. Amen.