Sermons tagged with Salvation

Well, good morning, Grace, and happy Father's Day to all the dads. This is a special day for those of us that have great dads to get to honor them, so I hope that you're able to do that today. And dads, I hope that you get to spend the day however it is that you want to spend it. This Sunday, we are in our series called Still the Church, where we're looking at the book of Acts, the story of the fledgling church and how it started and all the things that went into the beginning of this institution getting off the ground. It's the institution that 2,000 years later on another continent we participate in. It's the institution, the thing that is the bride of Christ that Jesus died for, that he came to start, that he left the disciples in charge of. And so we've been moving through the story, unveiling and uncovering the practices and the principles and the philosophies of the early church that we can still apply to our church 2,000 years later here in Raleigh, North Carolina. Today we arrive at the conversion of easily the most influential follower of Christ who's ever lived. A man who grew up by the name of Saul of Tarsus, and God changed his name to Paul. Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. He did a lion's share of the missionary work immediately following the birth of the church. It's Paul that we look to who's responsible for spreading the gospel all over Asia Minor, who gives us a lot of our theology and the things that we understand about Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit and how they relate and how salvation works and what exactly it is we're all doing here. He's a hugely influential figure in the church. I would argue one of the most influential figures in history. And so today we arrive at his conversion. It's an important point in the book of Acts. It's an important story in the book of Acts. After his conversion, the rest of the book really mostly just details his ministry. That's how important and influential he was. So it's right and good that we stop and we go, what was it that converted him? And I think that there's a special insight that we can get in the events of his conversion, in the events of his conversion, that can apply to us right now. I believe that we're invited into the same thing that Paul was invited into, and I want us to see what that is this morning. So as we approach the story, you can find it in the book of Acts chapter 9. I hope you have your Bible with you there at home. I hope you guys are in the habit of watching these sermons with your Bibles open, of interacting with the text. There's nothing that can replace opening up God's Word and interacting with the text on your own, particularly if you have family and children around to go through it with them, because I want you to go through and pull out your own nuances and your own details from the story. More importantly, I never want you to accept what I say about the Bible at face value. I want you to do your own work and do your own thought and read it for yourself and make sure that what I'm saying is true to what God is communicating in here because I'm trying my best to communicate to you clearly what Scripture says, but I'm also human and I'm going to mess up. And I'd love a church full of people who are going to catch me when I do that because we're all reading our Bibles too. I would also love a church full of people who are gracious when they send me the email about catching me. But I hope you're following along in Scripture. In Acts chapter 9, we see Saul of Tarsus, who's a young and upcoming Pharisee, who's been given permission, special instructions from the high priest in Jerusalem to go to Damascus. The church was blowing up in Damascus and it was starting to cause a ruckus. And so Saul gets commissioned by the high priest to go to Damascus and snuff out Christianity. And we'll see later, we're going to look back at a verse in chapter 8, that Paul was ravaging the church. He was arresting people. He was putting people to death. He was pulling them out of their homes and throwing them in prison. He was doing everything he could, Saul was, to stamp out the church. And so he's on his way to Damascus to stamp out the new movement there. And Jesus appears to him in the clouds, knocks him to the ground. And he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And Saul says, who are you? He says, I'm Jesus. I'm the one that you are persecuting. And after seeing Jesus, Saul converts. He believes. He realizes that he's been spending his life trying to stamp out this movement that God himself appeared to him and said, hey, stop doing that. I want to use you to grow the movement that you're trying to stop. And it must have been an incredible scene because he had an entourage with him. And it says that they could hear the voice, but they couldn't see what Saul could see because he could see Jesus. And as a result of that, something like scales went over his eyes. And the text tells us that though his eyes were open, he could no longer see. And he went and rested in a place in Damascus for three days. And scripture tells us that it was three days without eating or drinking. So he is weak, he is feeble, he is blind, he is scared, but he's converted. And after this conversion, we see in Acts chapter 9 that the Lord appears to a man named Ananias. Now, Ananias was a righteous man who lived in Damascus. He was a devout follower of God. And the conversation that they have is incredibly interesting to me. I want you to look at it with me if you have your Bible. I'm going to pick up the story in Acts chapter 9, verse 11. In verse 11, the Son, or the Holy Spirit that appears to him. Scholars are unclear. But the words in my Bible are red, which indicates that at least the editors of the ESV think that it's Jesus who's speaking to Ananias. We hold that loosely, but that's probably a pretty good guess. So Jesus is talking to Ananias. And I just want you to pick up on this. This is one of those details that we're likely to just breeze right by. Ananias is just chilling out, and the Lord appears to him in a vision. And Ananias is apparently so used to discoursing with the Lord face-to-face in a vision like this that he just responds to him. He just talks right back to him. God says, hey, Ananias, there's a guy named Saul of Tarsus. He's in Damascus. I've blinded him. He's expecting you. I want you to go heal him. And Ananias responds. Ananias says, hey, listen, what he said is a very nice way of saying, I know who that is, and I don't want anything to do with him. You can find some other sucker. I don't think so, God. So let's just get together on this. Ananias is so righteous and so devout and so faithful that when the Lord appears to him in a vision, he just responds right back to him as if it's casual conversation. I don't know about you, but if the Lord appeared to me in a vision, I would spend the next 12 to 24 months trying to figure out if I really saw the Lord in a vision and what to make of it and what it meant and if I could trust it, and then I would write a book about it and start a ministry. If the Lord appeared to me in a vision, I would be terrified. And Ananias just talks right back to him. He says, yeah, I don't think so, God. I can't do that. Are you kidding me? I know who that is. He's going to kill me if I go. And God's response is profound. To me, this statement is so packed with truth that it's one of the most profound statements in the whole Bible. Look at what God says to Ananias. When Ananias hesitates and says, I don't think so. I know who that is. He's going to kill me. This is how God responds to him. Verse 15. Whoa. Ananias says, no, I don't think so, God. I don't want to do that. That's dangerous. I know who that is. And God says to pause. I want to pause this sermon right here. I'm going to leave that sermon here, and I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to talk about something else. Okay, so let's pause on this sermon. I try to do the best I can usually to follow one thread and not get sidetracked with other things, but this is such a big deal that I wanted to pause and say it and preach it for a second and then jump back into this sermon. So pause with me right here if you can, and we're going to talk about, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Okay, I'm over here different. This is parenthetical, okay? I'm within some parentheses. I just want to say this. There exists in Christendom, in faith, this insidious doctrine, this harmful and hurtful belief that to be a faithful Christian is somehow an insurance policy against pain and suffering in our life. Somehow or another, and I'm not exactly sure where we developed it. We assume that because God is love, that a loving God would never allow me to hurt in a way that is profound. And by the way, I am the sole arbiter of how much pain is too much pain. And so we walk through our lives with this erroneous and harmful belief that because I'm faithful, because I follow the rules, because I do my part, because I play my role, and I'm faithful to God and I live for him, that because of those things, he is going to insulate me and protect me from pain in my life. That because I'm faithful, God will navigate me through the raindrops of tragedy. And I think it's worth it because it's so dangerous and so damaging because what happens is people believe that and then pain happens in their life, tragedy comes into their life, and it shipwrecks the faith that they built on false assumptions that God never promised. Nowhere in the Bible are we told that when we follow God, our problems go away. Nowhere in Scripture does he promise that when we love him and obey him, that we won't encounter pain and hurt in this life. Paul, one of the most faithful people who ever lived, one of the most passionate people, most purpose-filled people for the gospel who ever lived, easily the most influential Christian who ever lived on the Mount Rushmore of faith, that there is anyone who deserves the blessings of God and the protection of God and to be able to circumvent tragedy in his life, it's Paul. If there's anyone who deserves God's protection, it's Paul because of service rendered to God. Yet Paul himself in one of his letters details his suffering for God. He details the times that he was beaten to within an inch of his life with the same punishment that Jesus received before he was crucified, the 39 lashings of the cat of nine tails. He details the times that he was mocked and that he was persecuted. He details the times that he was stoned and left to die on the ground. He details the times that he was shipwrecked, the times that he was so sick that he was sure he was going to die. Does it sound like based on Paul's life that Christians get to dodge the raindrops of tragedy? We don't. They're a part of life. They're a part of this fallen creation. And the more quickly we can move away from that expectation, the more holistically we can offer our faith to God and the better understanding we can have when tragedy and pain do befall us. Back over here in this sermon. Thank you for allowing me that freedom. The phrase that I really want to key in on in God's response is not, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. The phrase that I want us to let ring in our ears today is that God says about Saul that he is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. And in his sovereignty and in his great sense of irony, God had even prepared Saul for this moment. See, Saul of Tarsus grew up in the religious system. He grew up as the star student. He went to the Ivy League equivalent schools. He was a young, up-and-coming Pharisee. He was going to step in and be in the Senate and lead the nation. He was very likely a future high priest of Israel. He had all kinds of potential, and God had prepped him and groomed him for this moment. He had prepped him and groomed him to lead. Saul grew up exposed to the best possible training. He grew up learning the Old Testament inside and out, and he didn't know it, but he was learning it inside and out so that when Jesus appeared to him, he was able to uniquely connect all the dots from the Old Testament to the New Testament. And we see him do it in remarkably succinct and accurate ways all through his writings. God was preparing him for what was ahead. He exposed him to leaders and leadership. He learned how to peddle and exchange in the respect of men. He learned how to commandeer a room. He learned how to orate. He learned how to do all of these things for what he thought would be the sole purpose of stamping out the very movement that he was going to take those gifts and use them to advance. God and his sovereignty knew this. And if that's not enough to see that even when Saul thought he was preparing himself to do the exact opposite of what he was going to do, God was already using him. This is remarkable to me. This is something that I discovered years ago and I've been wanting to preach about it ever since. I'm so thrilled to get to share this with you this morning. But if you look back at chapter 8, beginning in verse 1, it says, Last week, we look at Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who with boldness and faith stuck his face in the wood chipper and spoke truth to power, knowing that they were going to kill him for it. And while they killed him, there was a young man named Saul of Tarsus who held everyone's coats and approved of what they were doing. And after that, he began to ravage the church. There arose this uprising from within traditional Judaism to stamp out this new movement of believers. It says is in trouble. Stephen has just been martyred. The powers that be, the authorities have decided that they do want to actively stamp out this movement. They're not going to be patient with it any longer. And Saul becomes the epicenter of this persecution. And as a result of this persecution, the church scatters. They leave Jerusalem. In fear, they flee from Jerusalem. And this is the part that I think is fascinating. What is Saul doing? Saul is doing everything he can to stamp out this new movement. And as he seeks to stamp out this new movement with arresting and with cruelty and with beatings and certainly with some violations of some rights, the Christians in Jerusalem grow fearful. And what do they do? They scatter to the surrounding regions. And I read one time, what do they do when they scatter to these surrounding regions? When a family of Christians flees to another city in these surrounding areas, to Damascus or to Ephesus or to wherever else, and they get there, and they're in this new city, and they don't know anybody, and they're trying to figure out life. Who are they going to look for? They're going to look for people that have something in common. Who has something in common? Other Christians who just fled Jerusalem because of persecution. And in these cities that they scattered to, they began to band together in these small groups of believers. And what do these groups of believers do? Well, they're from the original church in Jerusalem. They devoted themselves to the apostles' preaching and to the breaking of bread and to prayers. And they invited one another in one another's homes and they took care of one another as any had need. They began to be the church. Don't you see that when Saul applied pressure in Jerusalem in fear, the Christians scattered to surrounding cities. When they got to those cities, they band together with other Christians that had things in common and began to exercise and express the church as a body there. And in doing so, started all these little churches all over Asia Minor that were there as seeds for Paul to come and water later when he's preaching the gospel willingly. Isn't that cool? Saul was doing everything he could to stamp out the church. And God said, great, I'm going to use your efforts to grow it. The very thing he was trying to avoid is the very thing that he caused. And God in his sovereignty knew that if the Christians are comfortable in Jerusalem, they're just going to keep the word there, and the spread of this gospel is going to be slower. So he allowed Saul to apply a little bit of pressure so that they might scatter and plant churches in the surrounding areas so that when Saul later became Paul and went out to preach willingly, that there was seeds planted and the churches that he was sent to grow were ready for it. What we see in chapters 8 and 9 of Acts and what was before the conversion, and in God's purposing of Paul after the conversion, is that God was going to do what God was going to do, whether or not Saul chose to do it. God was going to do what he was going to do, whether or not Saul chose to do it anyway. It was going to happen. Let me tell you something. If somehow Paul manages to reject the conversion, he sees Jesus, he's healed of the scales, and he still says, no, I don't want any part of that. I'm going to continue to persecute the church. If some reason Paul rejects that invitation by Jesus himself, do you know that the church is still getting built? Do you know that God's word and God's love is still going to prevail? Don't you understand that if Paul turns God down, that there's still a church today in Ephesus and Thessalonica and Galatia and Philippi and Tyre and Sidon and all the other places. Don't you understand that? The church existing wasn't contingent upon Paul. God simply invited him into the purpose of doing it. He didn't need him. If Paul doesn't rise up, then he rises up Barnabas or John Mark or Luke or Peter or James or John or some other unknown hero that gets to play that part. God didn't need Saul. He didn't need his talents. He invited him in to the joy of purpose. He invited him in to a life of meaning. He invited him in to a life of service that would matter for all of eternity. He invited him into this incredible joy. And the same is true of us. God's created us and designed us and purposed us in ways seen and unseen for things in his service and in his kingdom. His desire for all of his children is that we would be used in mighty ways to grow his kingdom. He's designed you and purposed you for that. In the same way that Saul was being prepared to go out and lead the church when he was growing up, not knowing that's what the preparation was for, so has God laid those tracks in your life to uniquely prepare you for what's ahead when you didn't even know what you were being prepared for in the past. I want you to understand that when God offers an opportunity for you to serve, for you to be used, for you to obey him, for you to walk with him, for you to live in submission to him, that he's not asking you to do this out of a sense of duty. He's not guilting you into it or twisting your arm so that we serve out of this sense of ought. I want us to realize that when God invites us into service, that you are invited into the joy of purpose. You're invited into this joy of purpose. God doesn't need you to do these things in his kingdom. He's inviting you in so that you might participate and sit on the front row and see the joy of people coming to know God. Paul himself is a testament to this. Paul suffered mightily in this ministry, yet he was invited into the joy of purpose. And he was able to write one of the most famous verses and misused verses in the New Testament, Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Preceding that verse, he says, I've learned how to be joyful when I have nothing. And I've learned how to be joyful when I have plenty. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Paul said, he's the one that said, to live is Christ and to die is gain. To live is purpose and great and wonderful, and to die is to be in the very presence of God. The only reason to be alive is to execute God's purpose for my life. He found great joy there. He found so much joy there, and we're going to actually preach a sermon on this in a couple of weeks. He found so much joy in the purpose of serving God that when he is arrested and in a prison in shackles in the middle of an earthquake in Philippi, he is singing praise songs to his father. That's how joyful Paul was, walking in the purpose of his God. And that's the joy that you're invited into. And listen, I think that the same is true today. God doesn't need us to get things done. He's going to do them regardless. I came to Grace in 2017, April of 2017. And when I got here, it really didn't look like the church was going to be a church for very much longer. But in God's goodness and in His sovereignty, according to His plan, He's flourished, Grace. Even in COVID, even in quarantine, we continue to flourish and just do remarkably well. I can't get over it. It's so amazing. But I firmly believe that God's hand is on this place. And that if I didn't raise my hand and say, yeah, I'll go, that sounds great. I'll do that, God. That if I didn't get to come up here and do this, that somebody else would have gotten to do it. If me and Jen didn't move up from Atlanta to become a part of grace and get to sit on the front lines and see everything that God's doing here, then somebody else would have had that experience because make no mistake about it, God was going to grow grace. God was going to flourish grace. God was going to do with this place exactly what he wanted to do with this place, regardless if I decided to come or not. I just got invited to participate in what's happening here. And it's a tremendous source of joy. For years, Grace has been building homes in Mexico. We send a couple teams down every year and build multiple homes every time we go almost. We've built dozens of homes over the years because God cares for the people in Mexico that they're getting built for. You know what I believe? Those homes get built with or without grace, man. Those homes get built with or without our teams, with or without our money. God's gonna take care of those people. You know what he let us do? He invites us into the joy of purpose. He invites us in to see and to build relationships and to be a part of what he's doing for our sake, not for his sake. He doesn't need us. He doesn't need our money. He doesn't need our teams. He doesn't need us to go down there and build the homes. We don't even know how to lay cinder block anyways. You know what he's doing? He's inviting us into the joy of purpose in Mexico so that we can experience a full life in him. Think of Steve and Lisa. Steve is our former worship pastor and our current technical director. And Lisa's his great wife, and they have a ministry called Side by Side where they partner, they come alongside couples who are struggling in their marriage and they seek to restore them to wholeness. And over the years, they've had the opportunity to walk many couples through that and see them restored to fullness in their marriage. But here's the truth. God loves those couples. And if he can't direct them to Steve and Lisa, he's going to direct them somewhere else. God's going to rescue those couples. He's simply inviting the Goldbergs in to participate in the joy of his purpose and what they're doing. That's what service is. That's what the Christian life is. God's going to do what he's going to do regardless of if we want to do it or participate. The invitation of the Christian life, the invitation of a life of service like Paul lived, is to simply participate in the joy of purpose. It's an invitation that I hope that you'll accept. I hope at Grace that we don't serve out of a sense of ought, that we don't obey out of a sense of duty, that we don't resentfully go along with these things that we don't desire, but that we would see in following God as an invitation to experience the joy of purpose. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for the story of your servant, Paul. We thank you for his humility and his service and what he left us and what we learned from him. Father, I pray that each of us would experience the joy that is found in serving the purpose that you created us for. May we walk in that joy. Let us throw off senses of duty and senses of ought and embrace this desire to experience what you're doing, to see it firsthand. Thank you for inviting us into what it is that you're doing. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Grace, this week there's a man named George Floyd who was killed by a police officer. George was a black man, and you can't help but think that his race was a white woman who, in a racially fueled fear, weaponized the black man's race against him in a threat. And those instances are the most recent that have come into the national conscience. But there are just more instances in a long string of events that have happened that have pointed to the fact that we live in a culture with simmering racial tension. We live in a place where racial inequality is real. And I didn't think it would be right to get up here and just start preaching about Acts as if those things hadn't happened this week. I didn't think it would be right to meet together as together as we can be on a Sunday morning now and not acknowledge those things and pray for the racial divide and the wounds in our country to heal. And I didn't think it would be right to start this Sunday as a church and not earnestly ask our God together, what can we do, what can grace do to be a part of healing this divide? What portions of it as a greatly and majorly lily-white congregation can we own? And how can we contribute to closing the divide that exists in our culture? So I wanted to take a minute as we begin and pray for George Floyd and his family and pray for the racial divide in our country and pray for wisdom, for grace, as we seek to find how the Lord would have us be an active part of the healing of these wounds. So would you please pray with me? Father, our hearts are broken that we live in a place where things like this happen. Our hearts are broken that these incidents are not isolated. They're just the ones that we see. We know that you see all the incidents. We know that you have seen all the injustice. And we know that your heart breaks over injustice far more than ours ever could. So Father, first we pray for your heart in the face of these things. Break ours with yours. Father, we pray for the family of George Floyd. We ask that you would bring a healing that only you could bring. We pray for the attitudes that underlie the fear of Amy Cooper. And ask that you would solve those and bring those to the fore so that we might confront them and deal with them with equanimity and with justice and with grace. And Father, we ask that you would guide the partners and the leadership of grace and show us how we are to contribute to closing this divide and healing these wounds. Show us the path forward as we grieve, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. This morning is part two of a sermon that I'm calling Early Church Distinctives. Last week was part one. Hopefully you have your notes and you've got them numbered one through three. This week is going to be four, five, six, and seven. And last week I opened up with a short fictional story, really a parable, about a boy that was firing arrows at a barn and the arrows would land in the midst of a sea of red and then he would walk up and paint a target around the arrow and go, look, I hit the bullseye. And we talked about how, you know, this happens and this is applicable in a lot of organizations and institutions. It's a good parable about the dangers of mission drift. And often we start things without even knowing what we're going for, without even knowing what the goal is, without even knowing what the target is. And so we are asking last week as a church, how do we know that we're hitting the target? Another way to think about it is if Jesus and Paul were to come into the church on a Sunday morning when that's allowed, would they look around grace and everything that we're doing and say, yeah, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. This is the target that we painted for you. So last week we asked the question, how do we know that we're hitting that target? How do we know that what we're doing as Grace is right? That Sunday mornings and small groups and children's ministry and student ministry and the philanthropic ministries that we do, how do we know that all that is right and good? Well, in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have a seminal passage that defines the early church. It paints the target for us. It shows us these are the things that the early church was characterized by. What's going on in the passage is Jesus has gone into heaven. He's left the disciples with the keys to the kingdom. They've received the Holy Spirit. They went out and they preached to thousands of people this gospel of repentance. Repent of who you thought Jesus was when you killed him and accept and walk in faith in the fact that Jesus and when he challenged them to repentance, it says about 3,000 were added to their number. And then those 3,000 formed the church. And right after that, we get Acts 2, 42 through 47, and it tells us the very things that defined the church. So last week, we looked at the first three distinctives that we see as defining the early church. This week, I want to look at the next four, four, five, six, and seven. And we said last week, there's different ways to group these together. You could pull out four distinctives or nine, but we're doing seven. And so last week we talked about the fact that they were devoted to the apostles' teaching, meaning they were eager learners. They were devoted to fellowship, meaning they were devoted to Christ-centered time together, and they were devoted to prayers, meaning that they were committed to the spiritual disciplines that they expressed in that day. So this week, as we continue to ask, how do we know if we're doing it right? What does God expect of his church? I want to continue to look at these distinctives that define the early church. By way of review, I wanted to take a minute and read the breaking of bread at the prayers. This week I want to start out by looking at that phrase that they sold all that they had in common and gave to any who had need. And we want to sum that up by saying that the fourth distinctive, if you're keeping your list there, is that they were known for generosity. They were known for their generosity. And it's interesting what's happening in this passage because what's literally happening is as the church is formed, everybody is selling whatever they have and giving it to the church leadership and saying, here, this is for the greater good. You guys use it for whatever you need to use it for. Obviously, my family's going to have some needs, but we trust you to provide for those. Here's everything that we own. Please use it to provide for everyone here, which is a super high bar. That's really daunting. Can you imagine if when we had our new members class at Grace, when we did Discover Grace and we talked all about Grace and who we are, and then we got to the end of it and it was like, okay, if you want to be a partner, here are the requirements. You know, you need to commit to Sunday morning attendance. You should be a believer. We'd like to see you in a small group. Also, small thing, if you could just kind of sell everything that you have and write a check to the elders, we'll take it from here. That would be a pretty tough sell. That's a pretty tall order. But to understand what's happening here, we need to feel the freedom to apply the principle and not necessarily the practice, because the principle is far more important. First, we need to understand what's happening in ancient Israel, in Israel at the time of Christ. Israel is what we would think of as a third world country. There's lots of joblessness. There's lots of poverty. There's lots of hunger. There's lots of suffering. There's no medical system really to speak of. And so suffering and need and want in Jerusalem was great. And while it was great, there was no infrastructure to provide for those who had fallen through the cracks of society. And what we understand is that God has intentionally designed the institution of the church to undergird society as a safety net to catch those who have fallen through the cracks of familial care. God first assigns to care for others. He first assigns family to care for family. This is why over and over again in Scripture, God makes a point of saying that if you love me, if you want to express true religion, then you'll care for the widows and the orphans. We see this in James in the New Testament, that true religion is to care for the widows and the orphans. We see it in Isaiah in the Old Testament, where God says, if you really want to please me, then plead the cause of the fatherless and take up the case of the widow. And what he's saying there is, and even in Deuteronomy when he says, look out for the sojourners, for the aliens, for the ones that don't have a family and can't support themselves, what he's saying in all that is, the church needs to serve in society as a safety net to care for those who fall through the cracks of familial care. We're supposed to be there and be helping them. And when there is a need, we are supposed to meet it. God has designed the church as an institutional safety net for society. And so in that time, there was no government. There was no Medicare. There was no welfare. There was no food stamps. There was no health care. There was none of that. And so the church was the only hope for the person who didn't have a family and was in need and couldn't support themselves. But now in our culture, thankfully, we have another safety net, which is the government. We do have a societal infrastructure to watch out for people who fall through the cracks of familial care. But still, the church undergirds all of that, and people who cannot be cared for by their family and cannot be cared for by the government, God looks at us, the church, and says, now you, you care for them. So we're still there, and it's still our responsibility, which is why the point from this part of the passage is that we need to be generous. We need to be conduits of God's generosity. We need to have a grieving heart for those who hurt and reach out to help those who can't help themselves. We need to be glad providers for those that are not provided for by their family or provided for by the government. We need to rally around them and be generous in spirits and be conduits of God's generosity. Another way to think of it perhaps is like this. When I became a senior pastor, I learned eventually about a thing called a designated giving fund. I'd really never heard of that before. It might shock you guys to know that I'm not a financial titan. I don't really know all the ins and outs of all that stuff. It's all news to me. I just try to spend less than what I make. That's pretty much it. But I found out that there's these things called designated giving funds. And how this works is you have money and you give a portion of that money to this fund that a company or an individual manages. And a lot of people will give money to this individual and they manage all the money in a fund. And that money is earmarked for charitable donations, charitable causes. And whoever you give your money to, they just sit on it and they hold it for however long you want to. And then when something pricks your heart, when something touches you, when you see a need that you'd like to meet, you pick up the phone or you type the email and you let the person managing your money know, hey, I would like you to send this much money to this person because they need it. This matters to me. I'd like you to allocate my resources to that person or that institution for those people. That's how a designated giving fund works fundamentally. And what it's made me realize is that we're all God's designated giving funds. That's what stewardship is. We've heard about this idea of stewardship before, that everything we have is God's and not our own. We've heard about that. But the more I thought about it this week, I've realized we're all God's designated giving funds. He allocates a portion of money to us. He entrusts it to us. And every now and again, he picks up the phone or he writes the email and he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this thing matters to me. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to them. I'd like you to allocate some of those resources to these people. That's the principle of what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, is they're expressing the Lord's generosity. And I think increasingly, and I know that that's a tall order, and I know that you may be very far away from viewing everything you have as really belonging to God. And that's, I think, a progressive revelation as we understand God. But I think one of the marks of spiritual maturity in a church and in an individual is when the church and when the person understands that we're really just designated giving funds for God. He's allocated a portion of his resources to us as individuals and to us as a church. And every now and again, he taps us on the shoulder and he says, hey, this matters to me. I'd like you to shift some of those resources over there to them. And that's how we're to serve. It's the mark of the church to be generous. The fifth distinctive that I see in this text is that they were committed to gathering. It says they gathered day by day in the temple courts. It's this old school way of church. You know, when I grew up, we were there every time the doors were open. We went Sunday morning, we went Sunday night, we went Wednesday night, every week. That was the deal. The doors were open, we were there. That's kind of old school church. Now, increasingly, if someone is a regular church attender, it means they come to church maybe twice a month. But the early church was committed to the gathering. It mattered to them. It mattered to them to come together when they were able to be in the temple learning and praising and fellowshipping together. The early church intuitively and instinctively understood the power and efficacy of being around one another, the power and the efficacy of the gathering. This is why in Hebrews we're told to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. Because there's something special about being in the same place. And if nothing else, that's what this time of pandemic and isolation has taught us. Across the board, across the country, almost universally, church engagement and virtual attendance is declining. And as we've talked about that as a staff, and I've talked about that with the elders, I've just made the point that, you know, online church, this ability to participate in church in our sweatpants and the comfort of our own home, that's been a thing for at least 15 years, maybe longer. And there's a reason why it hasn't taken off. There's a reason why it hasn't overtaken in-person church. Because even now in the 21st century, we understand that there's a power and an efficacy that's difficult to capture in simply being together, in experiencing the teaching together, in laughing together, in and worshiping together and sharing together in the lobby, we understand that that is important. It's why at Grace, if you do come to a Discover Grace class, that one of the things we do ask our partners to commit to is to prioritize Sunday morning service. Because we believe that the gathering matters. And I can't wait until we are able to gather again. It's a distinctive of the early church and it ought to define our church. The sixth distinctive is the one that, of all of them, probably fires me up the most. I get so excited about this, and I think that it defines the early church. They were defined by communion and community. They were defined by communion and community. We see in verse 42 that they were devoted to the breaking of bread. And then again in 46 that they gathered in one another's homes and they broke bread together. It happens two times. And then all throughout this passage, we see they, they, they, collective, collective, collective. It's always about others. And the church is a fundamentally communal institution. It is fundamentally involved with others. I've said often it is impossible to live out the Christian life on an island. It is impossible to grow closer to Jesus void of the influence of others in your life. We absolutely, our souls need to be surrounded by godly Christian community. That's why at Grace, our mission statement is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people because we believe that we cannot deepen our connection with Jesus void of connections with others. And I believe this so fervently that I would say to you, if you're listening this morning and you're not sure that you have Christian community in your life, ignore everything else that I'm saying. Put it all on the back burner. Just take it and set it aside for a later date and get Christian community in your life. Stop right now. Quit listening to me and pray that God would provide for you a community of faith who supports you, who love you, who have permission to tell you the truth about yourself and to tell you what Jesus says about you. We desperately need Christian community in our life. And the early church was a communal thing, and that persists to this day. But it wasn't just about community. It was about communion. We see that phrase, the breaking of bread, and we automatically think that this is an expression of community and hospitality, and it is. And for all of history, for all of history, that has been how we've expressed hospitality. Food has been the fundamental way that we've expressed community. Once you get to know somebody a little bit, maybe you have a common activity or something, but eventually you're going to say, hey, let's grab lunch. Let's get the wives together and let's go to dinner. Let's get the families together and y'all come over. And increasingly that means we go somewhere and we experience a food together, but the most intimate time, the most special times are when people are invited over to the home. When you invite people into your home, there's a special care taken. You clean up the house. You let them know that you care about them, that they matter to you. You try to think of the special thing that they like, of the appetizer that they went nuts over the last time, of the dessert that you can remember in conversation that they said they like. If you're making steaks and there's somebody who doesn't like steak, you make sure and you have chicken to make them feel thought for and cared for. You make sure that there's something for their kids so that they know that their kid is important to you as well. There's this special power of hospitality, of welcoming people into our homes and expressing community in that way. And when the tradition of communion started, that's where it started. It started in someone's home as Jesus and the disciples sat around and broke bread together. They sat around and they were having a meal together. They were expressing community. It was the Passover supper. And you know, we observe communion in our churches. Most churches observe it like grace does. At grace, we do it once a month in the service. The elders stand on either side at the end of the sermon. I'll go through the story of communion and when it started and we'll have a particular thought that we go with. Then we spend some time in prayer and then we line up and we get we get the bread, and we dip it, and we go back to our seats, and it's an austere, respectful time, and that's right and good. But communion didn't start that way. Communion started in community. Communion started around a table. When Jesus took the bread, and he looked at the disciples, and and he broke it and he began to hand it out. And this was not an unusual practice. Every home didn't have a knife. The way that you serve bread was to take the loaf and tear off a portion of it and give it to your guests. So what Jesus did was not a new thing. This wasn't unusual to the disciples or anyone else who could have seen it. It was a ubiquitous, common part of the meal. And in this moment, Jesus takes the thing that we do every time we express community and he imbues it with purpose. And he says, every time you do this, do what? Line up in church and get in the line and tear off the bread and dip it in the wine and spend some time praying? No, not that. Every time you do this, every time you gather in community with me as your focus and you break bread, you serve the bread to the people who are in your house. This common activity that was mundane until this moment. Jesus says, every time you do this from now on, I want you to remember me. I want you to remember that I'm the bread, that I'm the bread of life, that my body was broken for you. Similarly, he takes the wine and he pours it. It's a totally common mundane activity. It happens in every dinner party ever where the host takes the glasses and pours the drink. And Jesus says, whenever you do this, whenever you do what? Gather in church and dip the bread in the wine? No, whenever you experience community together and when you serve the drinks, I want you to stop and remember me and feel that and see that as my blood that is poured out for you. Remember my crucifixion and that I am the tie that binds here and that I am what brings you in common with one another and that I am what reconciles you with the heavenly Father. Remember that. Communion didn't start in church buildings. It started at dinner tables. It started in community. And Jesus took these mundane expressions that are a part of every communal gathering around the table, and he said, from now on, when you do these things, don't just let them be a passive thing where you just serve the bread and you serve the drinks and you move on. I want you to stop and I want you to remember me. That's communion. Communion is always an expression of community. Communion always draws us into community and community should always focus on communion. So I think the challenge for us at Grace, who love community very much, we're real good at community. That's one of my favorite things about this church. We love having people over. We love getting together. But the challenge for us is when we do, when that bread is served and when it's broken, when the drinks are poured, it is right and good and obedient to pause and to pray and to say, Jesus, thank you that you are this bread. Thank you that you are this drink. Thank you that you make tonight possible and that you make our relationship with you possible. We're having fun here tonight, Jesus, but we want to pause and we want to say thank you for making this possible and we want to remember you because that's the instruction of communion. Not once a month when you're in church, come to the front and take the bread and dip it in the wine. That is a shadow. That is a mimicry of the actual communion. And it is right and good to do it in church. But it is forgetful and wrong if we don't do it together in community. So let the challenge be to grace as we commune, as we gather, as we express hospitality and we all begin to fling our doors back open and have people over. Can we please take a moment in those times and do things in remembrance of Christ and make communion more a part of our community. Finally, the seventh distinctive is that this church had a contagious joy. I want to read for you the last portion of scripture so that you kind of know what I'm talking about. It says, They gathered together every day. They invited people into their homes. It's not a stretch to think that they would just invite their neighbors in too because there's a meal and you should come have fun with us. They gathered in the temple courts. They pooled their resources and gave to anyone who had need. No doubt that brought people in who had need, who experienced this genuine community and love for the first time in their life. And then in all of that, as they met with glad and happy hearts, they praised their God and it said that they won favor with all the people. Not just the people of the church, but the people around them, which means that the people of Jerusalem at large began to take notice of this infectious community of joy that was the early church. And because they began to take notice of that, because they won favor with the people surrounding them simply by being an expression of the church and exuding that contagious joy, because people saw that, this passage ends with, and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Their contagious and infectious joy led to the salvation of souls. It's really interesting to me that two weeks ago I talked in Acts 2 about the fundamental and foundational repentance of the church. It's a confession that I've been wrong about who I thought Jesus was and I'm going to walk in the belief that he is who he says he is. And out of that confession and repentance, 3,000 people were added to that number. And now in Acts 2, 42 through 47, we see more people being added to their numbers. And the confession and repentance is what drew people in at the beginning, but now at this point in the church, what's now drawing people in? Now what's drawing people in is the favor that their infectious joy is winning with all people. Now what we're seeing is the church cranking on all cylinders. We're seeing the results of what happens when people are devoted to the apostles' teaching and are eager learners, when they're devoted to fellowship in Christ and their time together, when they're defined by community and communion, when they're known for their generosity, when they're experiencing joy, and all of that is working together to cause the people of Jerusalem to look at the church and go, what's going on over there? That's different. I want to be a part of that. That's why when we have Grace's big night out, whenever we can do that again, I cannot wait. I always tell Compass Rose where we have them. They say, do you want to just rent it out? Should we shut it down and just invite Grace people? I always say, no way. I want the other folks of Raleigh to see our community because I believe our community is infectious. This is how the church ought to work. This is how we draw people in. And I believe, Grace, I absolutely do, that even though we are in a time of trial right now because we can't meet together, that as soon as we can fling the doors open and as we move forward, I think grace is going to be stronger than it ever has. And I think if we will commit ourselves to these seven distinctives, that if we will be eager learners, that if we will devote ourselves to Christ-centered time together, that if we will be known for our generosity, committed to spiritual disciplines, if we will be committed to the gathering, if we will see the importance of community and communion, I think if we will do all those things, it will produce in us an infectious and contagious joy that the people of Raleigh will notice and come to. And I hope that's what we will be. I hope that we will be a church in the 21st century that embodies all the distinctives of the church of the first century. And I'm so excited to see where we get to go from here when this season of quarantine is over. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so good to us. We can't fathom how you love us. We can't fathom how you look out for us. We are collectively thrilled that we get to be participants in your church, in your kingdom, in your bride that you came to rescue. Thank you for Jesus, who is the tie that binds us together and reconciles us to you. God, I pray that we would be every bit as unflinchingly the church in the 21st century as they were in the first century. Give us boldness to go where you would have us go. Give us zeal and energy to get there. Give us a devotion to you to sustain us. Give us an infectious joy to draw others in. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. I hope that you're having a great Memorial Day weekend. If you're one who has the opportunity to be watching from the beach or a mountain cabin or a lake house or something like that, good for you. I hope that you've had a good, restful weekend. For the others of us, I hope that you enjoy this unique Memorial Day weekend. And thanks, as always, for watching this morning or this week. This morning, we continue in our series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts and looking at some of the practices, philosophies, and principles from the early church that still apply to us today. And hopefully we're getting a sense of the shoulders that we stand on and the roots that we share in common as the book of Acts details the beginnings of this fledgling church trying to find its way and figure out who it is and what it is going to do. And that was 2,000 years ago, and here we are 2,000 years later, and the church has looked very different over the years, has it not? Over the years, the church has changed in dramatic ways. And historically, there have been churches where people, the pastors would dress in robes and wear fancy hats. And then in other churches, you wear suits and dresses. And then in other churches, you wear jeans. And now in isolation, we wear sweatpants. As we watch this together, there is about a 98% chance I will be in my sweatpants as the pastor. And so church has changed a lot. There's churches that are high church and are in cathedrals and ornate buildings shaped like crosses and everything has a meaning. And there's different conclaves and there's different areas and there's different prayer centers and then other churches are in places that are next to aquarium stores and in warehouses with a pole in the middle of them. Some churches are highly liturgical, meaning they observe this order of service that was passed down generation after generation and do the same chants and the same verses and the same songs and they stand together and they kneel together and they pray together and they cry out together. And other churches don't have any liturgy whatsoever. We just do whatever we want to each week. Some churches observe the Lord's Supper every day or every week and others a couple times a year. In some churches, there's no microphones at all. And in others, there's a light show and laser show and smoke machines and everything else. And it just kind of makes you wonder over the years as we've adapted and adjusted and evolved and changed from this early church in the book of Acts and all the different iterations and expressions of church over the years, it makes you wonder how we even know we're doing it right, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but I've wondered a lot if Jesus or Paul were to walk into the doors of grace on a Sunday morning, would they look around and go, you guys are nailing it. This is exactly what we intended to start. Would Jesus go, yes, this is exactly what my bride should look like? Would Paul say, yes, this is what I gave my life to begin was what's happening here at grace. I kind of do wonder if we're doing it right. It reminds me of a story as we think about how do we know if we're doing church correctly. I've told this story before. It's a short fictional story. It's a parable that's made up, but I think it helps us make a good point this morning. The story goes that there is a man walking along a country road, and in the distance he sees a barn, a red barn. And on the side of this barn, there's a bunch of different targets. And in the middle of every target is an arrow just in the dead center of the bullseye. And then he sees a young boy with a bow and a quiver of arrows who's been apparently hitting these bullseyes with remarkable accuracy and consistency. And so the man goes to the boy and he says, listen, you're incredible at this. Can I watch you fire these arrows? Can I just see how you do this? I want to watch you do what you do. You're so good at it. And the boy says, yeah, sure, if you want to. And so the boy takes an arrow out of the quiver and loads it up into the bow and just kind of haphazardly aims towards the barn and fires away. And the arrow just lands in the middle of a sea of red. No target in sight. And the man feels badly. He says, my gosh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to mess you up or mess up your system. And here you've missed the target. And I feel bad. I feel like that's my fault. And the little boy says, oh, no, no, no, no. It's no problem. And he walks over to the barn and he grabs a can of paint and he starts to paint a target around the arrow that he just fired. And I think so often in life, we start things or we do things or we try to execute things without a clear target painted for us. We just charge forward. We just charge ahead. We just do what it is we think we're supposed to do. And then when we get to the end of the road, we paint a target around wherever it was that we landed and we go, success. And sometimes I wonder if we're doing that with church. Sometimes I wonder if we just all get together and we preach the word and we sing together and we pray and we do what we think we're supposed to do. And then when we get to the end of a year, the end of a decade or the end of an era, we go, did we do a good job? And we go, well, yeah. And then we just paint a target around whatever it was that we did and say that was the goal. And so as we think about that, are we doing this right? Would Jesus and Paul show up and look at our church and say, yeah, that's the target that we painted. You're nailing it. How do we know if we are? How do we know if we're aiming for the right target? How do we know if we have the right bullseye in mind as we do church together as grace and as we pursue God as individuals? I think it's an important question to ask because we arrive at a passage in Acts chapter 2 that effectively paints the targets for all churches for all time. I think it's an incredibly useful and helpful passage. I'm going to be in Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47. It is the description, the quintessential description of the early church. If you want to know what should the church look like, what should characterize and define the church, what did God design the church to do, we find it in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47. If you want to ask a question like this, what target was painted for us as a church by Jesus and by Paul? It's this. We find it here. And in this passage are some distinctives that we want to pull out. I'm actually going to pull out seven distinctives. We're going to look at three this week and four next week. I've expanded the Acts series by a week so that we can just sit in this passage, in this text, and walk through and look at the different things that define the early church and should therefore define us as a church. So this is early church distinctives. Look at what we find here in Acts chapter 2 verses 42 through 47. By way of reminder, what's going on as we enter into this passage is in Acts chapter 1, Jesus has been alive for 40 days after resurrecting from the dead. He goes up into heaven, and as he goes up into heaven, he tells the disciples to build the church, to go into all the world, spread the gospel, baptize them, make disciples, build the church. And then he says, wait for the Spirit. Wait for the gift of my Spirit and then go out and build the church. And so they sit around in the upper room waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Acts chapter 2, they receive the gift of the Spirit. They walk out on the porch and they preach. And the results of that message that they preach about who Jesus was and about, hey, you, the crowds, killed the Messiah, the Son of the living God, their response is that they were cut to the heart. They said, what do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. And last week we talked about that repentance as repentance of who we thought Jesus was. That's the foundational repentance of the church. And about 3,000 people, the Bible says, repented that day and joined the church, became Christians. And so now we have this church of about 3,000 people in Jerusalem. And what do they do now that they're a church? Now that there's this infant organization, what do they do? We find exactly what they do in these verses, 42 through 47. And in these verses are the distinctives or the target that was painted for us that we're supposed to be hitting now 2,000 years later. So let's look at the things that defined the early church. It says in verse 42, That's the beginning of the church. That's where you and I come from, is that incredible cataclysmic time of the church's infancy where it's learning to find its footing and learning to walk and figuring out what they're going to be about as an organization. And in this passage, in those seminal verses, are some distinctives of the early church that we should seek to emulate today. And you know, different authors and scholars pull out the distinctives in different ways. I saw one person sum up everything in four basic categories of characteristics, and others might have nine or even more than that. For us, we're going to look at seven distinctives, three this week and four next week, things that define the early church and should define us. So for those of you who like listy sermons, this is good for you. We're going to have seven things. You can number your paper. You can write the thing that I say and then take notes underneath it. If you're a note taker, you're really going to love this. So the first one that we're getting to right out of the gates is exactly what they said. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. So the first distinctive of the church that we are to emulate is that they were eager learners. They were eager learners. They wanted, they wanted, anytime an apostle was speaking, they were listening. They were, they were eating it up. They were vociferous in their desire to learn more about God and his church. And this seems like something that might be obvious, that they were devoted to teaching, but it's important that we understand why they were so hungry for this teaching. We don't think about this a lot, but this was a really uncertain time in church history. We're so used to church. For those of you who are church people, even if you're not a church person, you just have a cursory understanding of church and what we believe. We're so used to having an authority. We're so used to having a Bible, to having a place where we turn to, where we go, is what you said true or false? And we can go here and we can determine if it was. We have a grid to determine truth and we have a rich history of teaching tradition. We have a rich history of theology that we walk into so that we kind of know some of the basic tenets of our faith. We know that most Bible-believing churches are going to affirm that Jesus was the Son of God, is the Son of God, that he was 100% God and 100% man. Most churches are going to affirm that God is a triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that the Bible is God's word and that it is inerrant and that we can trust it and that it is the authority in our lives. Most churches are going to affirm that God is the creator God and that Jesus are the very words of God. There's some basic tenets of our faith that we can agree with that aren't murky at all. But in the time of Paul, in the very early church, those things were incredibly murky. They didn't know what to think of Jesus. They didn't know for sure if he was a son of God or if he was an incredible prophet. They weren't quite sure what to believe. Can you imagine the different beliefs that existed in different groups of friends in the different communities? Can you imagine the old stubborn man who was just certain that he knew what it was that he thought he knew and told everybody that you should do this and you shouldn't do that based on nothing at all but his own presumptions. Can you imagine the difficulty of being a Jew with all the laws of Judaism and then trying to transition into this New Testament, into this new way of believing, into this new era of faith, not sure which things to leave behind and which things to bring forward with you. Can you imagine the difficulty of grafting in the Gentiles? Before this Jewish faith was just for the Jews. They grew up generationally understanding it. And now all of a sudden this faith is for everyone regardless of culture or ethnicity. Can you imagine the difficulty and the tension in grafting that in? A lot of the tension in Acts is that very tension of how do we graft Gentiles into this ancient faith? It was really murky and uncertain. It was a lot like it is now trying to figure out any truth whatsoever about COVID. As I thought about the situation that they were facing, trying to get certainty around the teachings of this new church without any written documents and void of authority outside of the apostles, I thought of us trying to figure out what's true about the coronavirus. I don't know how deeply you've delved into trying to learn the truth about even the numbers and the reporting around coronaviruses, why our cases are spiked or why they're not spiked, or if they really are spiked, or if they really are going down, or if there's going to be a surge or a second wave, or any truth at all around what's going on with the pandemic. I had a friend just this week I was talking to who read an article in one minute. At one time, he sat down, he read an article, and this article said that the hospitalized cases of COVID in the state of Georgia are down around 1,000 right now. And that state has a population of about 8 million, so that's a really small percentage. That's really good, right? Well, then he flipped the page or scrolled down and he read another article about a woman who's created a model online to track COVID cases who was approached by a particular state that asked her to flub the numbers a little bit to under-report the cases so that things look better so that they could open back up. Two totally different stories, and you don't know which one to believe. Who has authority? And listen, I know that that could get political about who says what about COVID, but the truth of it is we can all understand that it's difficult to know what's true. This is the era of the early church. For them, it was difficult to know what was true. It was difficult to know who to trust except for the apostles. The apostles were the authority. The apostles, the disciples of Christ, had spent time with Jesus. They had face-to-face interaction. They were the carriers of the keys to the kingdom. They had the authority. If there's somebody over there in Bible study or small group or after church who is teaching something about this new way of faith and it contradicts what the apostles said, then that person's wrong and the apostles are right. The apostles had the authority. They were the truth tellers of the early church. So people clamored around them every time they opened their mouth to hear what it was they had to say and had to teach because they were the authorities that brought clarity around this new faith. And over time, these apostles wrote down what they were teaching in the form of letters to other churches. And then they wrote down what they were teaching in the form of the Gospels, the account of Jesus' life and his ministry and what he came to do and accomplish and everything that he taught and what was meant. And over time, these writings were compiled together and they became known as our New Testament. And so now, as a modern church, if we want to be committed and devoted to the apostles' teaching, if we want to be eager learners, if we want to hit that target that's painted for us, what that means is we are eager learners of the New Testament. That the New Testament, the books from Matthew to Revelation and our Bible are the ones that we would pour ourselves into, that we would pour over, that we would learn from and pull out from. And it might sound to you like I'm downgrading the Bible or I'm downgrading the Old Testament, and I'm not doing that at all. I love the Old Testament. And as a matter of fact, it's impossible to understand the New Testament without understanding the Old Testament. You can forget understanding Acts, Galatians, Romans, Hebrews without an understanding of the Old Testament. You can forget understanding the Gospels if you don't know the Old Testament. You can forget understanding Revelation if you don't understand Daniel and Ezekiel. But if we want to be committed to the apostles' teaching like the early church was, that means we're committed students of the New Testament, that we are eager learners about God's Word, that we are never satisfied with it. That's why, that we're never satisfied with what we know about it. That's why on Sundays, as long as grace exists as a church, that preaching and teaching will be a centerpiece of what we do together. Not because the pastor is someone special, but because we are collectively devoted to the apostles' teaching. Because we are collectively eager learners. That's why I believe it's my responsibility not just to provide biblical knowledge and insight for people who might be new believers or non-believers or not as biblically literate or experienced as others. Hopefully, if that's you, then you get something every week from what we're teaching. But I also firmly believe that my job as your pastor is to give you things from God's word, is to teach you from God's word a different perspective or a different insight or a different teaching that you may not have heard before. My hope and my prayer is that even if you've been walking with the Lord for years and years and years and have a very good depth of knowledge of the Bible, that at least more often than not, you're walking away from the sermons of grace and you're going, I didn't know that, or I hadn't thought about that, or I hadn't considered that before. I hope that we all continue to learn together. So as a church, we hit that target by being committed to teaching God's Word. But as individuals, we can continue to hit this target in our own life and be the right version of the church now by continuing to be eager learners, by pursuing other avenues of learning about Scripture. And as I thought about this, I realized that we live in an unprecedented time of availability of the apostles' teachings. There has never in history been a time where we had more information at our fingertips. You can listen to podcasts where people talk about God's Word, where people talk about scriptural things. You can go get a book for very cheap. You can listen to a book. You can play the Bible on your earphones or over your car stereo as you drive down the road. You can listen to the Bible on a greenway as you take a walk or ride your bike. There's so many churches and so many good pastors and so many effective teachers. You can find any of that material online. There is an online conference on church stuff just about every week of the calendar year that you could participate in if you wanted to. We have so many options to dive deeply into the apostles' teaching and to learn more and more and more about God's Word. So my challenge to you in this distinctive is to continue to be an eager learner. Don't be satisfied with what you know about God's Word. Don't be satisfied with what you know about the New Testament, but dive more deeply and with more curiosity and urgency into the depth of God's Word. And let's continue to be eager learners together as they were in the early church. Another thing that I wanted to pull out this morning, the second distinctive that I want us to look at is that they were devoted to spiritual disciplines. They were devoted to spiritual disciplines. We see in this at the beginning of the passage that they were devoted to prayers, it says, plural. Not prayer, but they were devoted to prayers. And as I read and researched this, a lot of people like to go off on what it meant to be devoted to prayer. And that's an important investment of time. However, I suspected that there was more to it than that because it's plural, prayers. And it turns out that it was, that this Jewish audience was in a habit of observing three times of daily prayer. To be a devout Jew at the time was to pray three times a day on schedule, in the morning and in the afternoon at the ninth hour, which is 3 p.m. And let me just, as an aside, if you want to go down a fun Google rabbit hole, Google all the things in the Bible that happened at 3 p.m. It's amazing. I think that there is something significant about that time that we don't even understand yet somehow, because so many things happened at that time in Scripture. They prayed in the morning, they prayed in the afternoon, and they prayed in the evening, three times a day. And different rabbis and different synagogues would have different programs of prayer, different things that you're supposed to focus on during that time of prayer. But what they did is they were a Jewish people who were devoted to prayers, this rhythm of prayers. And then when they converted to Christianity, they continued with that same discipline. They continued with that same rhythm. And I'm calling this a spiritual discipline because they didn't have scripture to read. They had it memorized. They could recite it while they prayed. They could pray it back to God, but they didn't have a Bible to open. And so their version of spiritual discipline was to be praying three times a day. This devotion to spiritual disciplines is why you will always hear me say that there is no greater habit that any person can develop in their life than that of getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. A distinctive of the early church was a church that was devoted to these spiritual disciplines, that was devoted to studying God's Word, that was devoted to prayer. They were disciplined to do that in that way. So if you want to be spiritually disciplined, if you want to be like the early church and be hitting that target in your life, then you need to be committed to prayer. You need to be committed to reading God's Word. Maybe pick a time of the day where you say, this is when I'm gonna read the Bible. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna have coffee, I'm gonna read the Bible. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna go to work, and on my way to work, back when you used to do that, on my way to work, I'm not gonna listen to anything else. I'm gonna listen to the Bible app and let them read the Bible to me as I go into work. On my lunch break, I'm not gonna talk to anybody. I'm pull out my app. I'm going to read the Bible. Pick a time to make that a part of your daily discipline. And I would encourage the same thing for prayer. And maybe the best way to think about it is like this. A couple months ago in our Grace is Going Home series, we talked about discipleship at Grace and how we're going to define discipleship moving forward as simply taking our next step of obedience. So in regards to spiritual disciplines and prayer, I would just ask you, what's your next step of obedience? What's your next step of obedience in reading the Bible? Is it to be more consistent? Is it to start at all? What's your next step of obedience in being more obedient in prayer, in being consistent in prayer? And listen, you may not pray at all. And that's all right. I mean, you're there by yourself or maybe you just have family around you. You don't have anybody to impress. You don't need to lie and pretend like you dive deeply into the ocean of prayer every day. Like, it's okay if you're just sitting there right now and you're going, honestly, I don't really pray very much. That makes your next step pretty easy. Pick a time at all to pray. If the only time you pray is at meals, pick one of those meals and pray about something besides the food. Intentionally pray about friends or family or loved ones. Intentionally thank God for things that he's placed in your life. If you already have a habit of prayer in your life, think about what it would take to go deeper in that prayer. Can you come up with a prayer plan where on certain days of the week you pray for certain things or certain people? Or could you develop multiple times of prayer during the day? I know there's a season in my life when I set an alarm on my phone, and every day it would go off at three o'clock, and I would stop whatever I was doing every day and set things aside and pray. And sometimes I would dive deeply into prayer. Other times it was a quick cursory prayer, and other times I just skipped it and then felt like garbage the rest of the day for skipping it. But it was a good season. I did it for about a year, and as I've been preparing this sermon and thinking through things in my own life, I've been convicted to start that practice again. So for some of you, I would invite you, set an alarm on your phone, and at three o'clock, let's pray every day. Let's just stop what we're doing and refocus ourself on God, and let's pray. And like the early church, let's be devoted to these spiritual disciplines. As I think about prayer for grace, one of the things that we're going to do moving forward and I'm excited to share with you is beginning this Wednesday, the 27th, from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., we're going to fling the doors open of the church and invite you to come and pray here. Whoever wants to come can come and pray. We'll pray together. We'll pray separately. We'll pray socially distant. If you need prayers, you want people to pray over you, come here and I, along with others, will pray over you. If you just want to pray together with others, come here and we will pray together. And as long as we can sustain it, we will continue to do it. We're going to do the first one this week. on the 27th. I'll open the doors at 7 o'clock. We'll see who shows up and we'll pray together. And we'll be a church that is devoted to prayer and spiritual disciplines. The last distinctive that I wanted to focus on today, the last thing that I see in this church that we need to be emulators of is that they were committed to Christ-centered time together. They were committed to Christ-centered time together. It says that they were devoted to fellowship. And you know, over the years, that word fellowship has taken on a lot of different meanings and been applied in a lot of different ways. And it's become distorted to just mean anytime Christians are together, they're fellowshipping, right? But fellowship really isn't just people getting together who also know Christ. But the idea of fellowship is to get together to celebrate the thing that you have in common, to allow something that we hold in common to bring us together and then to spend time focused on that thing. When I think of fellowship, I think of a time that I spent with Steve Goldberg, our worship pastor, and a guy named Keith Cathcart, one of our great church partners. If you've never had the experience of going to a team bar for a game, I would highly recommend it. I am of the conviction that going to a team bar is the best way to consume a sport. It's super, super fun. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, all over the country in different cities everywhere, there will be fans that are fans of a particular team. And when that team is playing, they will gather in one place and watch it together. And this happens here with Steelers fans because Steelers fans are prevalent. They are everywhere. The Steelers are like a religion to them. To some of them, it is a problem that deserves some good and right conviction. And in a state like North Carolina, where there's really no other decent team to speak of, it is ripe for Steelers fans to blossom here. And so the Hibernian over on Falls is actually a Steelers bar. All the Steelers fans come out of the woodwork and they go there decked out in their gear and they watch the games together. And so one Sunday, I decided that I wanted to go with Keith because I love going to team bars and watching sports with other people who are celebrating that. And we even invited Steve. Steve's not a sports guy, but he's a friends guy. And so he came and he enjoyed it with us. And I love the experience because I go to this team bar and I don't know anybody there. I don't have anything in common with them. I don't know what their names are. I don't know what their week was like. I don't know what they did that morning. That morning I was preaching. They probably weren't. I don't have a lot in common with the folks there that I know of. But man, when those Steelers score, I get to run around and give high fives to strangers. I start hugging guys I've never even met in my life. When there's a fumble, we erupt. When the ref makes a terrible call, we boo him and deride him and have the best possible time. And you get to get fully into it. And I don't even really care about the Steelers or the game. I'm just having fun celebrating them with other people. That's fellowship. This thing that they have in common, their affection for the Steelers, brings them together. And then the time that they spent together is spent focused on the very thing that they share in common. That's what fellowship looks like. Fellowship isn't when Steelers fans just get together and talk about business or talk about the stock market or whatever else. It's when they get together and they celebrate the very thing that gives them something in common. So for us, for believers, Christian biblical fellowship is when we come together acknowledging that Christ is what we share in common and the time that we spend together is focused on him. Fellowship looks a lot like Sunday morning church. Fellowship looks a lot like coming here on Sunday mornings like we used to in the old days, saying hey in the lobby, celebrating triumphs and comforting one another with tragedy in the lobby, coming in, sitting in these seats, singing together, proclaiming to God together, listening, learning about God together, being convicted or motivated or inspired together, and then leaving with a sense of camaraderie as we spent time here in the service celebrating the very thing that brings us all together, which is Christ. This is why we will always meet on Sunday mornings. This is why we will get back together just as soon as we possibly can. This is why community is so important to us at Grace because we want to come together and be focused on and celebrate the very thing that we have in common, which is Jesus. And so I want to challenge you in your small groups. Make sure your small group time is fellowshipping. Make sure that's Christ-centered time. In your circle of friends, it's not fellowship just because we get together and we all believe in Jesus. It becomes fellowship once we're focused on him for a portion of that time. So let's begin to think of intentional ways that we can fellowship with one another when we're spending time together. To help us begin to dip our toes back in the water of community and fellowship, we're actually going to begin to support watch parties. We've moved into this weekend, phase two of the governor's plan officially. So we can do this now. We can have watch parties on Sunday morning. I think it would be great if we would invite people over to the house and say, hey, I'm going to be watching my church's service this morning. Why don't you come with me? Or hey, I know that you guys watch it. Why don't you come over here? Let's watch it together. This is a great opportunity to reach out to your neighbors. I know a lot of us in this time of isolation have grown closer to our neighbors, have met them and interacted with them and spent more time with them than we ever have. What a great vehicle. What a great way to say, hey, this Sunday I'm going to be watching our service. I'd love for you to come over and join us. Let's have a watch party together. I've reached out to the small group leaders and asked them to help facilitate some of these, those of them who are willing. And that's certainly a way to begin to frame up who we would watch these with, but I would just encourage you to watch these sermons with other grace people or other people that you want to invite into your home. And I know that not everyone's going to feel comfortable with this yet. I know some of us are hesitant about that, and that's all right. I don't want you to feel pressure like you have to, but for those of you who are ready to dip your toes back in the water of community, for those of you who are ready to pursue and experience fellowship again, I think the way that we can begin to do that for the next several weeks is to invite people into our homes or to go into the homes of others and watch these services together and begin to experience this community again. And if you want to go early and have breakfast, great. If you want to stay late and do lunch together, great. And if there's kids involved, maybe one parent can take the kids out back and run around with them while the rest of the parents focus on the message. However it is, you figure it out, and however it breaks down, however you're able to accomplish it. I would love to hear more about these watch parties springing up all over the Raleigh area as we experience church together again and begin to dip our toes back into this idea of fellowship. Those are the three distinctives I wanted to look at this morning, to be eager learners, to be devoted to spiritual discipline, and to be devoted to fellowship, to Christ-centered time together. Next week, we'll look at the last four distinctives that I'm excited to go through with you, and hopefully you'll watch this and then watch next week's together, and it can be one concise lesson on who we are as a church, on what we're supposed to pursue, and really answer the question, hey, how do we know if we're doing this right, if we're doing this well? All right, I'm going to pray and let you guys continue on with your Sunday mornings. Father, you're so, so good to us. Thank you for who you are and how you love us. I pray that we would be eager learners. That for those of us who may have set that torch down a while back, maybe you can inspire us again. Maybe you can impassion us again to want to understand more of you and your word. Give us paths and avenues to explore that. God, help us be disciplined in our prayers. Give us the willpower, give us the strength, give us the desire and the earnesty to maintain and to foster these spiritual disciplines. And God, I pray that we would fellowship well, that we would come together and celebrate you, that we would be more intentional about making you the center of our time. And as we consider watch parties, Lord, I just pray that you would watch over us, that you would protect us, that you would bring wisdom there as we begin slowly to experience your community again. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. Here we are again. I'm so glad to be able to share this with you. Before I jump into the sermon, I just wanted to let you know that we are opening up elder nominations right now through the end of April, through April 30. So you have a month to go online to graceralee.org slash elders and fill out a nomination form if there's something you think would make a great elder of the church. Our church is elder-led. The elder board is hugely important to me. At the end of this year, two of our elders, Andrea Hounchell and Burt Banks, will have completed six years serving the church in that capacity, and it will be time for them to roll off. At the end of last year, another elder, Bill Reith, rolled off, and so that means that going into 2021, we can add up to three elders if we wanted to. I will also tell you that we are really hoping to add some women to the elder board. Andrea, like I said, is rolling off at the end of this year, and that will leave us with one woman, Allie Snyder, on the elder board. So we would love to add some ladies to the board and get that good and helpful perspective as we continue on as a church. So if you have someone that you think would make a great elder, please go online to that website, to graceralee.org slash elders, and get that nomination in to us. We would really appreciate that. Now, as I launch into the sermon, last week we took a break from our series, Storyteller, where we are talking about the parables that Jesus, one of the greatest storytellers to ever live, we're talking about the parables that he told. And again, a parable is a short fictional story that makes a moral point. This week, we're jumping into a parable found in Luke chapter 7. So if you have a Bible there with you at home, I hope you'll open it up and look at verse 36. That's where this story starts. This week is going to be a parable embedded in a story. I've been doing vocational ministry now for 20 years. Just recently, I turned 39, and so it's depressing to know that when I was 19 years old, I took my first job in ministry with a ministry called Young Life. So for 20 years, I've been doing ministry vocationally. And during those 20 years, I've seen a lot of things change. I've seen a lot of examples of how to do ministry in some ways not to do ministry. But one of the constants that I've seen is the zeal of a fresh convert, the zeal and the passion for Jesus of someone who's coming to know him for the first time. There's a similar zeal for someone who has grown up in church or grown up considering themselves a Christian, but maybe wandered away or ventured away from the faith. And there's some sort of event that brings them back to Jesus and they have this fresh passion and this fresh zeal for him. For a lot of us, maybe that's our story, that we grew up as believers, and at some point in our life, we wandered away, and then we came back, and we were filled with that zeal and that passion again. And for me, I've been a believer. I've claimed a faith for literally as long as my memory goes back. I accepted Christ at a very young age and don't have much of a memory of what it was like to be in life without faith. And for some of you, that's your story too. And if that's your story, then you can probably relate to me that when I see the zeal and the passion of a fresh convert or someone who's coming back to the faith after a long time away, I'm often jealous of that zeal. I want some of that, you know? I want that passion for Jesus. I want that passion for the Father. I want to be as excited about the faith as they are. And often I'm not just jealous, but I'm convicted. And I wonder, why don't I have that zeal? Why don't I have that passion? It seems like after years or decades of walking with Jesus, of growing closer to the Father, of being guided by the Spirit, that we would have a more natural, deep passion and exuberance for God. It seems like that should grow over time rather than diminish. And if you can relate to that, if you've felt a diminishing in your own life of zeal for Jesus, then I think it would be great to look at the parable that we find in Luke chapter 7 and learn from Jesus what it means to be passionate for Him and try to identify what it is that fuels that passion. In Luke chapter 7, Jesus is invited over to a Pharisee's house. The Pharisee is a guy named Simon. He's invited over for dinner, and you can look in your Bible there in verse 36. He's invited over for dinner, and we pick up the story. He's reclining at the table. The tables back in the day were low, and so you would kind of lay on them with your shoulders towards the table and your feet behind you. And so Jesus was reclining at the table. He's talking to Simon, and as he's talking to Simon, a woman shows up. Scriptures say that it was a woman of the city, which is a nice way of saying that she was a prostitute. So in the middle of this dinner, a prostitute shows up, and she kneels down behind Jesus at his feet. And she begins to weep and cover his feet with her tears. She pulls out expensive perfume, alabaster, and dumps that on his feet. And she wipes his feet with her hair and she kisses his feet. And I can only imagine how awkward that would have been for Simon and Jesus and any of the other guests that were there to watch this woman do this for a prostitute, just to come sweeping into a dinner party and begin to act in that way towards one of the guests. Can you imagine how awkward it would be if you were at someone's house for dinner and in the middle of dinner, a prostitute walked in, a woman of ill repute came into the room and knelt down at the feet of someone and began to cry at their feet and wash them and kiss them? It would be super weird. But that's what's happening at this party with Jesus, at this dinner gathering with Jesus and Simon the Pharisee. And Scripture tells us that Simon muttered to himself, if he knew, if he were really a prophet, speaking of Jesus, then he would know who this woman was and what she did, and he would not allow this to be happening. And it's at this point that I think, before we continue with the story, that it's valuable to try to identify and empathize with what's going on in the hearts and the minds of the people in the story. I think for the prostitute, it's really clear. We don't have to do a lot of work to try to figure out what's going on in her heart and what's going on in her mind and her life. Can you imagine the gall that it would take to go into a house party like that and fall down at the feet of one of the guests and begin to weep and kiss his feet? I've never in my life cared so little what other people thought of me that I would be able to do that. She had to totally brush aside any sense of dignity that she had. She had to be willing and know that the Pharisees, which we'll learn in a second, were the upper crust, the high society. She had to know that those people were going to judge her, that those people were going to think that she was crazy. And she had to make a calculated decision to not care because this is Jesus, the Savior of the world. This is the one that's going to save me from my sins. And so it didn't matter to her, and she threw herself at his feet with reckless abandon. And you juxtapose that with the mindset of the Pharisee. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were the church people. They were the pastors and the elders and the deacons of the day. They were the leaders. To become a Pharisee, you had to know the law incredibly well. A Pharisee was like a senator, except in a religious senate. And so they had most of the Old Testament memorized. They knew it backwards and forwards. They were the ones that were entrusted by God to lead his people. They were the ones that were responsible for understanding scripture, for teaching scripture, for imparting knowledge on people. They were the ones in charge of leading Israel, God's chosen people. And what I think is worth acknowledging about Simon is that he likely thought that he was being magnanimous and generous in spirit to even have Jesus over to his house to begin with. We only see, to my knowledge, one other Pharisee dealing with Jesus on a personal level, and it's Nicodemus in John chapter 3, maybe the most famous of the Pharisees. And Nicodemus, even as open and as willing as he was to have a conversation with Jesus, he would only do it by himself under the cover of night. Yet here Simon is inviting in this radical teacher, this rebellious revolutionary into his home to hear what he has to say. Jesus's message ran counter to the Pharisees. It ran counter to what was accepted in that culture. It was a big, bold move for Simon to have Jesus over to begin with. Which is why, again, I think that it's very likely that Simon felt he was being generous in spirit. Almost a sense of, look at me, look at how open I am, look at how progressive I am, look at how open-minded and generous I can be that I would invite in this rebellious revolutionary to come in and peddle his teachings to my friends. There was probably some piety and some pride there. He allowed Jesus to come into his life, but not so much that he reacted like the prostitute and fell all over himself and fawned all over Jesus, but in a dignified way, in a way that he was in control and Jesus was his guest. And even though it was a big, generous thing for him to do to allow Jesus to come, he probably felt like he was doing Jesus a favor, like he was lending some credibility to Jesus's movement, that this was an echelon of society that Jesus had not been welcomed into yet. And we see even amidst that pride, a bit of skepticism from the Pharisee. We see in the passage that he mutters to himself that if this man were really a prophet, so he didn't even understand Jesus to be the son of God. He didn't accept him as a good teacher. He thought maybe he was a prophet, but now he even had his doubts about that. So he very skeptically allows Jesus to kind of come into this portion of his life and feels, I would argue, that he is being generous in spirit to do so. And it's at this point that I think it's worth asking, to which person do you most relate? The Pharisee or the prostitute? To which person in this story so far do you most relate? If you were to be at a party and Jesus were to show up, when Jesus does show up in your life, when you have an opportunity to praise him or to respond to him, to which response do you most relate? Do you respond to Jesus more like the Pharisee or more like the prostitute? Do we fall at his feet with reckless abandon, not caring at all who is around us and what they think? That prostitute only cared what Jesus thought of her and no one else. Is that how we respond to Jesus? Or do we respond like the Pharisee, feeling a sense of generosity and magnanimity of spirit that we allow him into our lives? Look how open-minded I am. Look how good I am. Look at, even in the face of all the different worldviews, I continue to stay staunch in the faith. Look at how good of a person I must be. Are we sometimes skeptical of Jesus, preferring to maintain our dignity in front of the other people that might be with us rather than fall at his feet and only care what he thinks? I know it's a difficult comparison to make. I know it's a convicting question to ask. But I also know that for me in my life, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do to the prostitute. And my responses to Jesus and the way that I live out my faith, I relate far more to the Pharisee, caring what the people around me think, puffing my own self up with the sense of generosity that I would allow Jesus into my life, accepting him with some decorum and opening up my door so that he can come in, but not fawning all over him, not falling all over myself, not caring what anyone else thinks. And this story so far, if I'm being honest, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do the prostitute. And I don't know where you are on that spectrum. I would imagine all of us are in the middle somewhere. Very few of us respond to Jesus like the prostitute, just fawning all over him the instant we encounter him. And very few of us are as cold as the Pharisee. Maybe we're a little bit warmer than that, but on the pendulum, on the spectrum of responses, I'm far closer to the Pharisee than the woman. And I wonder where you are. It's important to answer that question because of the way that Jesus responds to the muttering of Simon. When Simon says, yeah, when Simon is muttering and says, if he were really who he says he is, he would not be responding this way. And if I put myself in that moment, I would probably be turned off by what was happening too. I would probably be looking at that woman and judging her. Get yourself together. Come on, this is not the place. This is not the time. Have some dignity. Have some pride. I feel like I would agree with the Pharisee more than I would empathize with the prostitute. But look at what Jesus' response is to the Pharisee as he mutters these things to himself. And maybe what his response is to us as we side with the Pharisee in the story. This is when Jesus tells the parable, starting verse 40, and Jesus answering to him said, Simon, I have something to say to you. And he answered, say it, teacher. A certain money lender had two debtors.. One owed $500, the other owed 50, and the debt collector canceled both debts. Which one was more grateful? Which one loved him more? And clearly the answer is the one who was forgiven of the $500. And Jesus says, yeah, that's correct. And then he says this, this is great. Then turning towards the woman, he said to Simon, do you see this woman? I entered your house. You gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little loves little. I love this passage. The prostitute responds to Jesus with the zeal of a recent convert, with the zeal of someone who is very aware of their sin, who feels the weight and the shame that she carries every day and looks to Jesus as the relief of that shame, looks to Jesus as the one who can forgive her of that shame, where the Pharisee goes through his life and he's a pretty righteous guy. He feels like he's a pretty good guy. He owes God a little bit, but it's more like $50 and less like $500. And so when his debt is forgiven, he feels almost this sense of entitlement that he deserves it. And what we realize is that this woman, the point that Jesus is making is she is reacting this way because she is aware of the depth of her sin. And you are reacting to me that way because you're not. And then he compares them. He said, when I came into your house, you wouldn't even give me the most basic of greetings. You're supposed to wash my feet. You didn't do that. She is crying on my feet. You could anoint my head with oil. You chose to not do that. She's anointing my feet with perfume. You could have greeted me with a holy kiss like you're supposed to, like it's customary, but you didn't do that. You wanted to hold me at arm's length. She is kissing my feet. What we see from this parable is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. Our passion for Jesus, that zeal that we talked about at the beginning of the service, at the beginning of the sermon, why is it that recent converts and people coming back to Christ seem to have a greater zeal than those of us who've been walking with him for a long time? Well, the answer is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. That prostitute was very aware of her sin. She was very aware, acutely aware of the condition of her heart and her capacity for evil and that her life had offended the creator God. That Pharisee thought he was squared away. He thought he was pretty good. He was what I think of. He fell victim. He fell into the trap that many longtime church people and believers fall into. He fell into the trap of pretty good. He fell into the trap of going, listen, I've got my things. I deal with some pride. I've got some ego stuff. Sometimes I lose my temper and I've got these quiet sins in the corner of my life. But on the whole, I'm a pretty good guy. And once you start to believe that, you start to think that somehow you're not as sinful as someone like a prostitute. Like somehow your sins aren't as great as theirs. Like, yeah, I'm sinful, but the volume of her sins is so much greater that she deserves, she is going to require a greater forgiveness than I do. We almost have this sense of entitlement that God owes us a forgiveness or that because we're pretty good, because we don't have any glaring weaknesses or glaring sin that people can point to, that we must be pretty squared away. And it's when we fall into that trap of pretty good that our passion for Jesus begins to wane because we forget our capacity for sin. And the point that Jesus is making in this parable, this is very important, the point that he's making in this parable is not, she has sinned so much more than you, Simon the Pharisee. This prostitute has committed so many more sins than you, so she's going to respond to me like this all the time. And you just can't because you're a pretty good guy and you'll never understand the depth of sin that she does. That's not what he's saying. What he's trying to get Simon to see, and I think what he is trying to get us to see, is that the difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not the volume of their sin, but rather his awareness of it. The difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not their capacity to sin. It was not their history of sin. It was not their total offenses against God, but rather it was simply their awareness of their sin. The sin of the prostitute is obvious. It takes five seconds of reflection to identify why she would feel like she wasn't worthy of God, to identify the shame that she walked around with, and to see the volume of her sin and understand her awareness of it. But it doesn't take much longer to identify the capacity and the volume of the Pharisee's sin either. I don't know about Simon in the Bible. He may have been a nice guy. He may have actually been generous of spirit. And it's possible that I'm being unfair to him. But the Pharisees on the whole were a disappointing lot to God. If you read through the gospels, you don't see Jesus be mean to anyone except for the Pharisees. And then sometimes he gets exasperated with the disciples, but he is hard on the Pharisees. He calls them a brood of vipers. At another time, he calls them whitewashed tombs, meaning you look good on the outside, but you're rotting away and dead on the inside. He actually tells some parables to the Pharisees to help them understand that they were the ones that were left entrusted with God's people, and they have run them into the ground. They have done a terrible job of leading God's people, and they have misrepresented the God that they are supposed to represent to his people. The Pharisees did a terrible job with the responsibilities that were entrusted to them. And so if you think about the life of an individual Pharisee, someone who on the outside looks like they have it all together and seems like they're doing pretty good, no major egregious sins, I would wonder how many people had their piety damaged? How many people had a Pharisee turned off to a God that he was supposed to represent because he portrayed through his actions and through his judgment, he portrayed God as someone who was in heaven looking down on people as kind of this cosmic cop making sure that you didn't get out of the lines and exacting revenge on the ones that disappointed him. Because of the model of faith that the Pharisees lived out, how many people had they turned away from the faith? Because of the way that they judged others and they held themselves in higher regard and esteem than anyone else, how many people did they make feel terrible just for having humanity in their life? If you were a Pharisee and you showed a sliver of humanity, you showed weakness, the people around you show weakness or the propensity to sin, they were ostracized. They were cast out. They could not be in the high society, the upper echelon of people. They had to put on airs. And how many, how much damage did that version of faith do, that legalism and that prideful faith that they lived out? How much damage did it do over the years? What we see in this story with this parable embedded inside it is that Jesus is gently, in that miraculous way that only Jesus can do, helping Simon see, Simon, you are every bit as capable of sin as this prostitute is. Your heart is just as unhealthy, is just as dirty, and is just as capable of the most egregious sin as hers is. The only difference between you and her is not how much you've sinned, it's simply your awareness of your sin. And through the centuries, this parable speaks to us too. And it serves as a reminder that maybe some of us have fallen victim of pretty good. Maybe some of us know how to present a pretty good front and make it seem like we have it all together. Maybe some of us have very neatly tucked away the secret sins and our private struggles so that we can put forward a front of this is a version of Christianity that everyone ought to live up to. And maybe we've been doing it long enough that we've even had the audacity to forget our capacity to sin. But Jesus reminds us that all of our hearts are just as capable of sin as anyone else's. That the most egregious evil is two or three bad weeks away from all of us. So, if you relate to me at the beginning and are jealous of this passion and this zeal that new converts seem to have for Jesus, and we wonder, is it possible to recapture that? I would say to you, yes, it is. And that if we want our passion for Jesus to increase, that we need to understand that it operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him, of our need for his salvation and our gratitude for his forgiveness and the sense of delivery when he takes away our shame and that when we fall into the trap of pretty good, we forget that we need those things. And when we're told that we're saved and when we're told that Jesus loves us and when we're told that we're God's children, sometimes that falls on deaf ears because we feel in some ways entitled to those things. But this parable reminds us, no, no, no, the difference between us and the recent convert, the difference between those of us with muted passion and those with exuberant passion is not the volume of our sin or our capacity to sin. It's our awareness of our own sin and our own need and condition before the Father. So if we'd like a heightened passion for God, if we want to move through 2020 and everything that it holds with this undying passion and zeal for Jesus and who He is and what He's doing, then I would say it begins with a simple prayer that I would encourage us to pray on our own every day this week. Jesus, make me more aware of my need for you. It's a bold prayer. It's a courageous prayer. It's a bold thing to do to say, God, I want to see my ugliness so that I appreciate what you've delivered me from. God, I want to see my capacity. I want to understand who I am. I don't want to turn a blind eye to the capacity of sin in my life. I want to see it and understand so that I am more grateful for who you are and the salvation that you offer. I hope that you'll do that. I hope that if you came into this service this week and you would have agreed 30 minutes ago, yeah, I just don't feel the passion for Jesus that I'd like to. Reclaim that passion. Listen to the point of this parable and pray that God would make you increasingly aware of your need for him. And as he does that, I promise you will feel forgiven of more and more and your passion will increase and increase. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. Lord, I pray that you would make us ever aware of our need for you. That none of us would fall into the trap of pretty good. That none of us would feel a sense of entitlement that we somehow deserve your forgiveness, but that we would marvel that you offer it. God, may none of us ever walk in the pride that we are so squared away, that we are so good, that we follow the rules so well, and that we live for you so faithfully that we forget who we are and what you've done for us. Father, as we go throughout our weeks this week, make us increasingly aware of our need for you so that we might have a burning passion and desire for you. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.