Sermons tagged with Worship

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.

Grace, good morning. My name's Nate. I'm the pastor here of Grace's Virtual Church for at least the next eight weeks. We've never done anything like this before. Churches have never faced a problem like this before, how to do virtual church in the face of a pandemic, in the midst of social distancing and quarantining, but I happen to believe that grace was made for eight-week hiatuses. Grace was made to be sustained by just our connections. It makes me so sad that we can't all be together right now, seeing each other, enjoying one another, singing with one another. I think that's probably what I'm going to miss the most over the next eight weeks is the corporate worship. I can't wait for the Sunday that we get to come back and cry out to God together. But until then, this is where we are. And I believe that we're built for this. We are a church that is built on connections. We say we connect people to Jesus and connect people to people, and those connections matter now more than ever. I believe as the weeks and even the months roll on, we are going to feel potentially more and more isolated and increasingly desirous of connection with others. And so we're going to work very hard as a staff to provide these connection points during the week. I hope that you're watching this live so that you can have a sense of participation with everyone else. I hope that you even got here a few minutes early and were participating in what we think of as the virtual lobby or the chat feature and where this video is being watched. So I hope that you did that. If you're watching this on delay later in the day or in the week, I hope that in this upcoming week, you'll make it a priority to be a part of the church at 10 o'clock every Sunday. I'm excited about those opportunities. We're going to be doing devotions and worship moments. Steve's going to be doing worship moments on Facebook Live. Aaron and Kyle and I will be sharing things, and we're going to do everything we can to have lots of opportunities for interaction. So it's vitally important that if you have Facebook or you have Instagram, that you follow us in those places so that we can all participate and share and watch together. My hope is that as we're kind of allowed by the CDC and the governors to come out of our caves and maybe meet in small groups, that maybe we could progress to watch parties together as small groups in our homes for sermons and for different things. But we're going to get through this. We're going to weather this storm, and we're excited about the opportunities to meet as a virtual church over at least the next eight weeks. We're in a series now called Storyteller, and we're looking at the parables of Jesus. Jesus told short fictional stories to make moral points, and so we are in the middle of that as a church. And I have a parable that I had prepared last week when we had to cancel the services that I was ready to preach about this week. But on Tuesday of this week, I had my men's group here in this space at 6 a.m. surreptitiously against the better judgment of others, and we met. And there was only five of us, don't worry, and I'm going to follow protocol moving forward, and we'll do Zoom calls. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's bedhead for those that still have hair. And we studied Mark 8 this week. And we went through Mark 8. And I've read Mark plenty of times. But this conversation in Mark 8 in verses 14 through 21, I've never noticed it before. It's a conversation between Jesus and the disciples. I've never really noticed it before. It's never really mattered to me before. And I'm not sure if I remember it, but this week as we read it and we looked at it as a group of men on Tuesday morning, it really hit me square between the eyes. And this conversation has really heartened me and encouraged me over the course of this week. And it's been a crazy week. New things come out every day. Every day we see new curves. We're all amateur epidemiologists. We all know what the words flatten the curve and extend the curve mean. We're all looking at other countries to see what's going to happen there. I feel like every day this passage gets a little bit more relevant because every day the fear gets ramped up just a little bit more. And so what I wanted to do for our first virtual service in the midst of a pandemic is take a break from the parables. We'll come back to those next week. I get to do the parable of the Good Samaritan and several others, and I'm really excited to share those with you. But this week, I just wanted to pause and maybe give us a word of comfort from a conversation that happens in the Gospel of Mark. So if you have a Bible there at your house, I hope you do. I hope you'll scramble and grab one and pull it out and be looking at this passage as we go through it together. But in Mark chapter 8, beginning in verse 14, there's this really important conversation with the disciples. I'm going to read part of it to you, and then I'm going to explain to you what's going on. So in chapter 8, verse 14, they had just fed 4,000 people, Jesus did, and now they were going across the Sea of Galilee on a boat. And even though it's called the Sea of Galilee, it's really a lake, but even though it's a lake, it's pretty big. I've been on it, and you can be in the middle of it and not really see anything but water. So it takes a long time to get across the Sea of Galilee. It says this, Now they, being the disciples, had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, this is Jesus, Watch out, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. When we read that passage, we normally focus in on the words of Jesus, which is the right thing to do, that they would beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod. And I've noticed that part before, and it's likely that most of you have too. But the part that never really mattered to me was the disciples' distress over having no bread. So they had just fed 4,000 people. Jesus decided to feed the 4,000 because he noted to the disciples that they had been with them for three days, and some of them were weary and might faint if they had to go home then. So it had been an arduous few days for the disciples as well. Then Jesus takes their bread and he breaks it up and he puts it in baskets and they serve all the people. They serve the 4,000 people. And then after that, they get in their boat at night and they're going back across the Sea of Galilee. And they realize collectively, we only have one piece of bread. And we're not talking like a big healthy loaf here. We're probably talking like a smaller piece of bread like this, and they've got 13 mouths to feed. And this isn't a small problem. This is not like when we're at work and things get jammed up and we realize I'm going to have to skip lunch today, I'm not going to eat until dinner, or I'm going to have to run out and get something, or we don't have any food in the house, or whatever it is. This is a legitimate issue because they're hungry. They've already been pushing themselves. They've already gone without food. They live in what we would understand to be is a third world country. So there's no guarantee that when they get to the other side that there's going to be anything open yet, because it might be the middle of the night or early morning. And there's no guarantee that there's even going to be things for sale. And we don't know what their financial situation was if they had the means to just go buy the bread that they needed. They don't have their fishing equipment with them. They don't have their gear with them. They can't just catch some fish and grill them up and be okay. And so in this moment, the disciples are filled with uncertainty and fear. In this moment, the disciples are filled with uncertainty and fear. They're holding this single piece of bread going, what are we going to do? How is this going to work? We're going to go hungry. How are we going to get out of this? We're in the middle of a lake. We're miles away from shore. We have no energy to sustain us to get there. We have no guarantee that once we get there, we're going to have food. What are we going to do? In that moment, they're filled with uncertainty and fear, and it's a legitimate fear. And it's that part of the story as I was reading it, and the disciples are wringing their hands over what to do because they are legitimately fearful and uncertain about their future, that I realized, my goodness, this is all of us right now. This is every one of us. Our culture, our society, our community is filled with uncertainty and fear. We are collectively the disciples on the deck of that boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, holding on to our last piece of bread going, what are we going to do? This week, I posted on Facebook, I asked people, hey, I don't even really know how to do this, but in the face of the coronavirus and pandemic and social distancing and market crashing, what are you fearful of? What are you scared of? And in a couple of days, I haven't checked it in a little bit, but in a couple of days, I got 53 comments. I've never gotten 53 comments about anything. And what it tells me is, man, people are scared. People are fearful. We are collectively very unsure about our futures. I have a pessimistic friend who regularly throughout the day sends me articles that are more and more depressing about how much longer this is going to take and what it's all going to look like and when things are going to spike. And I know that you have those friends too. You may be that friend. And it's a manifestation of this fact that we, like the disciples, are full of fear and uncertainty. And our fears are legitimate. I was talking to somebody this week. They are a family now of three because some of their kids have moved out of the house, and they overnight became a family of five. Her brother and her son had to move back. She's got a son who just started a job that he loves in New York City. But where he works has been shut down, and he's had to come home on furlough, and he doesn't know what his next step is. He's got to be filled with anxiety and fear. His mom is filled with anxiety and fear because she doesn't know how she's going to cope with five people in the house when there used to be three. It's a different dynamic. I was texting with someone who has kids in college, and he said that, I asked him, is everybody back home? Are you enjoying that? And he said, yeah, yeah, everybody's home. It's been great. So far, we've played games every night. And I thought, that's really great for week one. You're going to be real tired of games in week five. It's a legitimate fear to think through how is that going to look and how is that going to go. And those are small anxieties. Getting enough toilet paper, that's a small anxiety. There's ways around that. There are some things that we're fearful of that we know are going to work out, but there's other things that we're fearful of that we don't necessarily see a path for. My heart breaks. I think of a ministry called Refugee Hope for an apartment complex behind the Falls Village Shopping Center on the Falls of News. Everybody in that apartment complex is an immigrant. Almost everybody, up above 90%, they're immigrants. And almost everybody in that complex, it's my understanding, have jobs that are hourly and not salaried. And most hourly employees are facing a significant curtailing or total deletion of their hours. Wondering when their last paycheck is going to be. Wondering how they're going to make it from here. One of the guys that posted on the Facebook posted the question that I asked about, what are you fearful of? He identified with that fear. He said, man, I work a job that is relying upon new jobs, and I'm not getting any new jobs, and I don't know where the next paycheck is going to come from, and I'm concerned for my family and how I can provide for them in the midst of this economy. We have other people who are immunocompromised, and they live in constant fear. Because one of the really scary things about the coronavirus that we're learning is it seems like it's possible to be asymptomatic and feel entirely healthy, yet be someone who is carrying it and unknowingly infecting other people. We have somebody who comes into the office to process giving, someone from the church, and she had to ask the staff, would it be possible for you guys to just not come in for an hour and a half so I can get my work done? Because she doesn't want to carry something back from us who feel fine to her husband that has some challenges that the coronavirus would really aggravate. I'm walking down, I shop at Walmart at 5.30 in the mornings to get the things that we need, and someone coughs, and I turn around, and I walk in the opposite direction. We don't trust anybody. We can't handshake. We're sanitizing our hands all the time. We are fearful. And I've seen in the past times when we were fearful. I've seen people be anxious. Somebody loses their job and they're not worried about how they're going to make this up. But I'm not sure I've seen a time in which there was so much fear. There was so much uncertainty. I'm not sure I've ever seen a time when everybody could relate. Some people are in retirement or nearing retirement and looking at the stock market and may even be close to pulling the trigger on retirement until these last couple weeks happen, and now we don't know. We're just weathering the storm. And whatever it is that we are fearful of, whatever the disappointments are that we are facing over the next couple of weeks or months as we are in the midst of the uncertainty of a pandemic and how prolonged it will be and how profound the impact of it will be, it occurs to me that we are just like the disciples on the boat holding the piece of bread going, how is this going to be enough? How is this going to be okay? Which is why I believe that Jesus's response to the disciples in that moment is such a powerful response for us in this moment. This is what Jesus says. In the seven for the 4,000, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up? And they said to him, seven. And he said to them, and I love this statement, do you not yet understand? Do you not yet understand? I want to be careful to point out here that Jesus' tone with the disciples is one of frustration. They've just freshly seen the miracle, the feeding of the 4,000. They've been walking with him for a year or more by now. They've seen plenty of miracles, yet they're holding this bread, and they don't seem to be piecing it together that they can have faith in Jesus providing them bread in the future. And so Jesus says, do you not yet understand? So his tone with them is frustration. I believe that Jesus with us in this moment would not take that tone. I think he would take a more empathetic tone. I think he would remind us that he is the God who sees. I think he would remind us that he is the God who weeps with us. I think he is the God that would remind us that he is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. So I do not think that Jesus' tone with us in this moment would be one of frustration, but I do think the message would be the same. That the heart of what Jesus says to the disciples is the heart of what he would say to us. And I find it so interesting in this moment that Jesus didn't point to what he was going to do. He pointed to what he had done already. He didn't point to what he was going to do. He didn't say, I know there's only one piece of bread, but look, I'm going to break it. I'm going to fill these baskets over here. There's going to be enough for all of you. Don't worry about it. He didn't say, I actually stored away some fishing nets, cast them over that side of the boat, and you're going to catch a bunch of them. We're going to grill them up, and we're going to be fine. He didn't say, I know a shop owner on the shore. When we get there, we're going to have a feast. I've already got it set up. He doesn't paint for them what he's going to do. He just tells them what he has done. Because I miss sports so much already, I'll use the sports analogy. Jesus didn't point to the game plan. He pointed to the scoreboard. He didn't tell the disciples what the strategy was going to be. He didn't try to ally their fears by immediately resolving the situation. He didn't put them at ease by saying, don't worry, I have a plan. He just said, do you see what I've done? Do you remember the miracles? Jesus' message to the disciples, what he says is, I have given you bread before. I've given you bread before. He doesn't say, I'm going to give you bread in the future. He doesn't say, this is how it's going to go. He just goes, guys, listen, I've provided for you before. I've given you bread before. Do you remember the 5,000? And they say, yes. And it was more than 5,000. The Bible says there's 5,000 men, which means that there was women and children there. So the numbers are between 15 and 20,000. And on five loaves and three fishes, gee, if three fish, I don't even know, you guys can't laugh at me because you can't talk to me right now. With five loaves and three fish, he fed between 15 and 20,000 people. And there was 12 baskets left behind, an abundance, an overflow. And then a little while later, he did it again. He fed 4,000 and there was another abundance and another overflow. And when they are concerned because they only have one loaf of bread and they're filled with anxiety and uncertainty and fear, Jesus comes to them and he just gently says, hey, I've given you bread before. And I think that's such a powerful message for us right now. I think that's such a powerful reminder for us right now. That in the face of our uncertainty and fear, Jesus reminds us that he has given us bread before. In the face of our uncertainty and fear, in the midst of this pandemic, in the midst of an economic collapse, hopefully temporary, Mark 8 screams at us through the centuries, I've given you bread before. I don't think it was any accident that I stubbornly decided to meet with my men's group this week. I don't think it was any accident that we happened to be on Mark 8. And I don't think it was any accident that over the course of the week, I couldn't get it out of my head and just wanted to share that simple message with you that, hey, God has given us bread before. He's provided for us before. He's met us in the midst of our fear and uncertainty before, and He'll do it again. I think about Jen and I and where we sit right now. In 2007, in April of 2007, we bought our first house. And in May of 2007, the market crashed. And within a couple months, it was worth a fraction of what we paid. And we're sitting there going, great, this is not how it's supposed to go. We're supposed to buy a house and then develop some equity and then sell it and then we're living large. And that's not how it went for us. That wasn't our story. And so here we are 13 years later. We want to be real careful about when we bought a house and how we decided to do it. And we closed on a new one on March the 9th and then found out that day because someone texted me who's not my friend that the markets had crashed for the worst time in history, and we're going, great, clearly, it's terrible for the country for Nate and Jen to buy homes. And it makes us fearful, and it makes us uncertain, this sense of deja vu, and here we go again. But in this passage, God has whispered in my ear, hey, man, you never wanted for anything. You had all the things you needed. You made your payments fine. I sustained you with employment. I've given you bread before. And he'll give it to us again. And Jesus doesn't need for me, he doesn't need to point to exactly how it's going to all work out. I don't need to see the value of my home projected out over the next 10 years by Jesus himself to feel, okay, all I need to know is for him to point to the scoreboard and say, look what I've already done. I think about grace. The last time I preached, the last time I preached, it was a celebration. It was March 8th, and I was going, look at what God did. Look at the pledges that came in. It was above and beyond anything that we expected. Man, these are going to be high times for grace. It is green pastures and sunshine and rainbows ahead. I did not see global pandemic and market crash coming. It is an uncertain time for all churches. But here's what I know. Grace has seen harder times. We've seen thinner times. God has given us bread before, and he'll do it again. He has provided for us in the past, and he'll look out for us in the future. When we launched the campaign, I preached, I believe, on February 2nd, and the main point was me saying, hey, God's hand, in one one way or another has always been on this church, and we believe that it remains. And then when the pledges came in and we celebrated that together, we said, look, God's hand is on the church, and we're going to walk in faith into the future that he's painted for us. And pandemics and economic failures changed nothing. God's hand is still on this place. And we're still walking into the future that we believe he's created for us. And I don't know what your fear is. I don't know what your uncertainty is. And I wouldn't seek to mitigate it or minimize it or dismiss it by saying, hey, God's gonna take care of it. Because sometimes we don't know what it looks like for God to take care of things. But we do know that Isaiah 41.10 is true. We do know that we serve a God that says, do not fear for I am with you. Do not be dismayed for I am your God. I will strengthen you and hold you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. We know that's true and we know we can cling to that. I don't know how God's gonna provide bread for you and your family. I don't know how God is gonna see each and every individual of grace and of those watching. I don't know how God's gonna see us through this season of uncertainty. But I would be willing to bet that God has provided bread for you before. I would be willing to bet that each one of you watching and listening can remember a time when you felt like the disciples on the deck of the boat going, I don't know how this is going to work. And that was years ago, and as you reflect back, you marvel at the way that God provided in the midst of uncertainty. And just because now, instead of some of us feeling uncertain and some of us feeling good about life, just because all of us share this common fear and this common uncertainty, just because it's universal does not mean that we serve a different God or that God can't provide. And I don't know what the weeks ahead hold for us as individuals, as a faith family, as families. And I don't know the uncertainty that you face, but I would simply encourage you in moments of anxiety, in moments of fear and uncertainty, remember Jesus' simple message from Mark 8. Do you not yet understand? I've given you bread before, and I firmly believe that he will do it again. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you, and you are good. You are near the brokenhearted. You tell us that we do not need to be dismayed, that we do not need to fear, that you will strengthen us, that you will uphold us with your righteous and your mighty right hand. And so God, we pray for that. We pray for that strengthening. I pray for the heartening of those who call grace home. I pray for the encouragement of those who are watching this and listening to this right now. Help us remember the ways that you provided bread for us in the past. Help us remember the ways that you've come through for us before. And help us have faith that you'll come through for us again. In this time of trial, God, let us cling to you as I always pray for this church and for the people that you love. May everything that happens over the next eight weeks, over the next months, over this pandemic and this quarantine and this distancing and all these things that we're not used to, may you use these circumstances to conspire to bring us closer to you. And God, we faithfully pray for and anticipate the day when we can come together again and celebrate you. In the meantime, may we remember that you provided for us before. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

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

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning, I'm going to work with the whiteboard a little bit. I've done this to you once before. So to those of you who enjoyed the classroom, I think you're going to like this. For those of you who didn't, I'm going to work really hard to keep you engaged. But this is where we're going to spend our time this morning. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to go sit on a panel for a thing concerning the Enneagram, which is the personality typing du jour going on right now. If you don't know what the Enneagram is, I would say don't worry about it, except that I really believe in it, and I think that you should research it because it's really great. If you do know what it is, then tell me afterwards. We'll nerd out about types and wings and all the other things and where you move in health and unhealth, and it's really great. But I think that we in general care for these personality type things. We like, one of the reasons we like doing things like the Enneagram is we like taking the test, finding out what we are and then reading about ourselves. If you've done Myers-Briggs or DISC or like the color profile, are you red or are you blue or whatever you are, we like to take the test, get our results and then read about who we are. This is why we click on the things on Facebook when it's like, which jungle animal are you? And you're like, well, I'm really hoping for gorilla. And then you get newt and you're super bummed out. So you don't put that on your Facebook profile, right? We're interested in learning about ourselves. And I say that because this week we arrive at the portion of a text where we're given five gifts of Christ, five spiritual gifts that Jesus himself gives to his children, his people. And we're going to spend some time talking about what each one of them are. And I hope that you can at least leave with an idea of a way that you may be gifted. Another reason I chose to camp out here on this passage, because if you read Ephesians 4, there is three different sermons that I wanted to do, and I had the hardest time figuring out which one to do. But I landed here because after we talked about Ephesians 2 in my small group, a couple weeks ago I preached on Ephesians 2, and we looked at the 10th verse of that chapter that says, for you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. And so the big question that Sunday was, what are my good works that God created me for and how do I walk in them? And so when I went to my small group the next day, we had a great discussion. And what I saw was a theme of a bunch of people going, I want to walk in my good works. I'm really not sure what they are, and I don't really know how to tell. And so this can be kind of an answer to that question. What are my good works, and how can I walk in them? Well, what we're going to ask this morning is, God, how have you gifted me? How have you purposed me? And then what can I do in that purpose? So what I would say before we dive into these is that these are gifts from Jesus. If you know your Bible, if you've spent time in church, you've probably heard the phrase spiritual gifts, and you may even know that they're gifts of the Spirit that come out of Corinthians and Romans typically. Gifts like tongues or healing or discernment or things like that. Those are gifts of the Spirit. These are gifts of Jesus that He Himself gives to all of His children to do the ministry of the kingdom. We're going to see in the text why He gives the gifts, but what I would say to you is, if you're here this morning and you're not a believer just yet, you're considering it, then this is a good morning for you to just kind of peek on the other side of the curtain and see what it is to be a Christian and see what happens and what we live for once we become believers. But if you are a believer, then what I would tell you without any shadow of a doubt is that you are one of these five things. Because the text makes it pretty clear that all the saints are equipped in some way. And so we're all one of these things. So let's look at what is said in Ephesians chapter four, beginning in verse 11. It says, and he, he there is Jesus, okay? And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers. So these, these five gifts, he gave these to equip the saints for work of ministry. And so when we see that word saints in the Bible, that's not Catholic saints. That's not like two verified miracles and then a smoke vote by the council and now you're a saint. That's not what that is. This is to be a believer. If you are a believer, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then biblically you are a saint. And so it says that Jesus gives us one of these five gifts to equip the saints for the work of ministry. What is ministry? What is the work of ministry? For the building up of the body of Christ until we attain to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood. And if you were here last week when I preached on the prayer in Ephesians 3, where Paul prayed that we would be filled with the fullness of God, then this next phrase will be very familiar. It says, So Jesus gives his saints, his believers, one of these gifts. He gives us one of these gifts, and it's for the purpose of building up the church, for the purpose of building up his kingdom. If you are a believer, the only reason you are still on the planet and not in heaven is so that you can build others up and build Jesus' church. That's why we all exist. I actually believe that the Christian life is a progressive revelation of just what our life is really all about. It's progressively realizing more and more, I'm here to build the kingdom. I'm here to build the kingdom. I'm here to build his kingdom, not my kingdom. And it's a tough road to get that maturity. But we're to build the church so that all the saints may reach the fullness of Christ. And so that's really everything that we're building towards is the fullness of Christ. This is the point. All of these gifts are given to you so that you can help other people reach this point of spiritual maturity. And as you help other people reach spiritual maturity, then you are taken there as well. You grow into the fullness of Christ as well. So what I want to do, the other thing I would say is if there's no place for notes or there's no outline on your bulletin, it's just a blank piece of paper. So as I get to the one that you think you might be, maybe you write that down. Don't feel like you have to write all of this down. Once we take it off of the stage, you can take a picture of it afterwards so you don't have to write anything down at all. And some of you are like, buddy, I wasn't going to write down anything to begin with. So assuming this is valuable to you, it'll be over there. If it's not, I'll be in the lobby. I won't know if you take pictures of it or not. But don't feel like you have to keep up with everything. So let's jump in and talk about each of the gifts, what they are, and you can be processing which one of these am I, and then how can I use it? That's what we'll come back to at the end. So we'll start with the apostle. The apostle, we hear apostle, we think apostle Paul, we think missionaries, we think things like that, but really an apostle simply our terms, is an entrepreneur. I also apologize for my penmanship and spelling. I briefly typed this into my phone before I came up here to see if that was the right way to spell it. I think it is. I don't know. But hopefully you can read that. Apostles are entrepreneurs. They start things. They're pioneers. They're kind of hard chargers. They don't mind being leaders. They're out in front of everyone else. A longer way to think about an apostle is an apostle sees a need and then builds something to fix it. That's what an apostle does. An apostle sees a need and then builds something to fix it. A biblical example of an apostle, the most famous one, you guys can probably fill in this blank already, is Paul. Paul's the most famous biblical apostle. The need was that the word of God would spread and that churches would begin to exist, that Gentiles would come to faith. And so he built churches to meet that need. He traveled around, spent his whole life building churches to meet the need. Now, what's interesting to me about the apostle is, for the apostle, they love starting things. But once it gets to healthy maintenance, they're bored. Okay, they move on. So if you have a spouse that constantly has new ideas and never sees them all the way to fruition, that could be an apostle. Like the next time they open them up, like, hey, I've been thinking. And you go, oh, geez, what have you been thinking about? They may just be wired to start things. I want to try to have a contemporary example of each of these. One of these examples that's going to embarrass her to know that I said her name and she wasn't around to defend herself is Suzanne Ward, a girl that goes to the church. If an apostle is somebody who sees a need and then builds something to meet that need or to fix it. Years ago, she went to Ethiopia. And when she was in Ethiopia, what she discovered is that they have an enormous orphan crisis going on over there. There's so many kids without families. And in these orphanages, they're ill-equipped to train and to educate these kids. And so when they release them at 18, they age out of the orphanage, they don't have any options. And a vast majority of the girls go into sex work. And it broke her heart. And she didn't do what most of us would do. She didn't do what I would do. I would come home and be bummed out about it and sad for a couple of weeks. And then I move on to the next thing. She came home and was so moved and disturbed by it that her and a friend started a ministry called Addis Jamari. They bought a house out there, and now when girls age out of the orphanage, they move into that house, they disciple them, they move them closer to the fullness of Christ, they give them a trade and release them out into the world, hopefully as godly young women who are now self-sustained. She's so in need, and she built something to fix it. That's what an apostle does. Apostles see that we don't have a certain Bible study in the church to reach a certain demographic, and they go, I'll do that. Apostles see something at the workplace that needs to happen, and they say, I'll head up that program. They see a need, and it burns within them so much that they're willing to build something to fix it. If you're a starter, if you're constantly seeing needs and you think of ways to meet those needs, you might very well be an apostle. It doesn't mean you have to go plant a church. It means you start things for the kingdom. Then we have evangelists. Evangelists are fun. Evangelists, really, when we think of evangelists in church terms, we think of somebody that's out sharing their faith. I went to the NC State game last night. I guess it's probably better said I went to the Clemson game last night. I went to the Clemson game last night, and on the way there, there was a guy up on the corner preaching the Bible to the people passing by. Somebody yelled, go Tigers, at him. I'm not really sure that either of them understood what was going on in that moment. But we think of those kinds of people. We think of people that are going to share the gospel with their waitress every time they go out to eat. Or if you're sitting next to them, I know a guy, if you're sitting next to him on the plane, you're going to hear the gospel on that plane ride. And that's great if you do it well and you do it with sensitivity and you're not obtuse about it. That's great to have that gift. But when we think of evangelists, we think of people who are constantly out sharing their faith. And that's true, but to me, that's too narrow of a definition. Evangelists really are recruiters. They recruit people. They go out and they get people to sign up for something. They go out and in their infectious enthusiasm or in their convincing way, they grab people and they bring them on board. Really, evangelists gather people for a cause. Evangelists gather people for a cause. Sometimes we evangelize about dumb stuff. We're watching a new show on Netflix. It's the greatest show ever. You've got to see this documentary. It's amazing. I just watched In the Mind of Bill Gates. It was really good. Maybe you watched it too, and you're telling all your friends at work, this is amazing. You've got to see this. You're evangelizing that thing. Maybe you hear a podcast, or you read an article, or you read a book, and you're telling all your friends about it. One of the jokes that I make with a buddy of mine who goes here, a guy named Keith Cathcart, he's been going to Mexico for years and years and years. He's a huge Steelers fan. And so every time he goes down, he takes Steelers gear and he gives it out to any of the local Mexicans that work and they're wearing it every year. He's a stealer's evangelist. I hope he listens on time and is convicted by it. What a waste of time that is, Keith. But no, that's what an evangelist does. They recruit people to a cause. And what I think in the Bible, an example of this is John the Baptist. That's what John the Baptist did. He was a voice that prepared a way for Jesus. He got people ready. He recruited them to the cause. He got them to come in. He prepared a way for Jesus so that when Jesus arrived, they were ready. They were there. When I think of it in a church context, not a Pittsburgh Steelers context, I think of Kyle, our student pastor. Kyle has this infectious excitement where he imposes his fun on the room. It's why under his leadership, when he got here, we had about 14 kids coming every week. And then within a year's time, we had about 40 kids coming every week because he's out in the community all the time. He told me he was at Millbrook on Friday night, went to the football game and he started out sitting by himself. And then a kid wandered over. It was like he was probably the apostle of the situation. He championed and pioneered and went and sat next to Kyle, decided that this is an okay place to be. And then within, by the second half, he had 15 kids around him. That's what an evangelist does. An evangelist is a people gatherer. If you throw a party and you can get people to show up, you might very well be an evangelist. You might very well have that gifting. It's possible that we're using it for things that don't matter and we need to attract people to a different kind of cause, but you may be that. Then there's different ways to do it. I know a guy who you wouldn't say his enthusiasm is infectious, but he's at the Y all the time. And I guarantee you, if you work out near him, you are going to get invited to Grace Riley. You absolutely are. We've got two of them. I've got two people at the Y that are recruiting everybody in that gym, and one of them got recruited by the other one. That's evangelism, okay? That's what that is. So if that's you, you're a people gatherer. It doesn't mean that you have to convince people to believe in Jesus. The first conversation you have, you're recruiting them to a cause, to a place where God can begin to work on their hearts. Okay, next we'll look at profit. We think of profit, we think of people who can tell the future, right? We're thinking about people who are talking to us about revelation. Maybe we think about Isaiah who predicted that Jesus was going to come and these are the true things about Jesus. But really, really, that's an overly simplistic view of prophecy. Really, a prophet is just a mouthpiece. A prophet is a mouthpiece. Another way to think about a prophet is they have a message from God. God has laid something on their heart, and they have a responsibility to share it with the people. So the way I think about a prophet is ear to God, mouth to the people. That's what a prophet does. The biblical examples that we'll be familiar with in the church, I mean, obviously, there's five major prophet books and 12 minor prophet books, and then there's other prophets in the Old Testament that are sprinkled in there, like Elijah and Elisha, that we don't get a book from. So there's a lot of prophets in the Bible, but we might recognize Samuel or Nathan. You know, Samuel was like eight to 10 years old. He gets, God wakes him up in the middle of the night and he says, hey, I need you to tell Eli, the high priest, that because his sons are sinful, I'm actually going to take their lives. And so Samuel has this word from God and he wakes up the next day and he has to tell Samuel or Eli, the most powerful man in Israel, what God told him. Hey, God's going to take the lives of your sons because they're sinful. That's an ear to God, a message from the Lord and a mouth to the people. Nathan had to do the same thing. David got into some bad sin with Bathsheba and Nathan had to go confront him. He had a word from the Lord. He had to go deliver it to Nathan, God's people. To me, profit is like the least desirable gift up here. It's a hard road to be a prophet. The Old Testament, there's a prophet named Jeremiah. He wrote this book called Lamentations, which is just super sad. Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet because everything he had to deliver was negative. He constantly had to give bad news to God's people. It would be, and people didn't even, people never even wanted to hear from him. It would be like he would show up at synagogue or what we would recognize at church. And he'd be like, hey, pastor, I just have a word that I want to share with everybody. And literally all of you would be like, why don't you stuff it, Jeremiah? We're tired of this. Like, go kick rocks, man. Leave us alone. And Jeremiah would come up and he'd be like, okay, listen, I know you want to hear this. You're sinful. Like, God's really mad at you. You need to get it together. I'm sorry. And then like leave. Get out of here, Jeremiah. Like they did not like the guy and everything that he was trying to shake them awake, but they didn't want to listen. Their hearts were hard. It's hard to be a prophet. My dad, I think, has this gift. I've watched my dad over the years sit on boards of organizations or of churches or with his business or even with me and wrestle with feeling like God has laid this thing on his heart that maybe only he sees that he needs to share. And it's hard to be willing to go in and say the hard things. But we need the prophets because the prophets guard the church against mission drift. The prophets guard us from getting too far off track. The prophets will come to me and go, this is totally hypothetical because I'm not sure anybody would say this. They would come to me and they would say, hey, Nate, listen, the last four sermons have been great. Fun, entertaining, engaging, they're wonderful. You really haven't talked about the Bible that much. You should probably think about that. That's what a prophet says. That's hard to hear, but they keep the church from mission drift. That's their role. The church needs prophets. So if you are a prophet, lean into that. Be sensitive with it. If you're not a prophet, you have somebody in your life who is, I would tell you to try to honor them and be kind to them and understand that they carry a burden that can be difficult at times. Okay, next I want to go down here to teacher. Okay, a teacher simply is an explainer. That's what they do. A teacher is an explainer. While I'm down here, I'm just going to write all the things. What they do is that they make the text makes sense. And the biblical example of teacher is Jesus. He was a master teacher. And I know that you're thinking like, that's a pretty neat trick you just pulled there, Nate. Wait till you get to your gift and then say Jesus is the example of it. So it looks like you're the best. Okay, listen, listen. Jesus is all of these, okay? He's all of these. He's the only person who's ever lived who's all of these. It's not like I would say like, you know who's a great evangelist? Jesus. And then somebody's in the audience going, I don't think so, pal. Come up with a better one. Like, he's all of them. But when I think about master teachers in the Bible, Jesus has to be the one. He was wonderful with his short parables, his short stories. In the spring, I'm excited. We're going to do a series going through the parables of Jesus looking at his teachings. He was incredible at helping people identify with cultural things going on and then comparing them to God's word. If you read the Sermon on the Mount, what you see right away, it begins with the Beatitudes. He met the people where they were. He read the room better than anyone who's ever existed. He was a master teacher. And ultimately what Jesus did is he made the text make sense. He said, here's the text you've been taught your whole life. This is what it really means. And a good biblical teacher makes the text make sense. So if you are somebody who loves to study, you like to learn, you like to read, you like these aha moments, you want other people to have it. Teachers love aha moments. We live so that other people go, oh my gosh, I never thought about that before. That's like, yes, that's a home run. When people say that to me in the lobby, you can say, hey, nice sermon or whatever else. But if you say like, you know what? I've heard that my whole life. I've never thought about it in that way. That was really great. That my teacher heart wants to explode. Oh my gosh, that's wonderful. Teachers live for those aha moments. So if you're one who likes that, you like to study, you like to learn. And then once you do, you feel like, oh my gosh, I have to tell somebody about what I just saw in the text. You could very well be a teacher. Now here's the thing about teaching is we tend to think that it has to happen in context like this, that if you can't convince people to show up once a week and write down the things that you say, then you shouldn't be a teacher, but that's not true. We think that maybe it should happen in Bible study, and that's not true. We teach the people in front of us, and the more faithful we are to use our gift, the more God will allow us to deploy it in other places. We teach the people who are in front of us if we are teachers. Last, we have shepherds. Shepherds are the caretakers of the church. They are the behind the scenes folks. They are the ones making sure everybody's good. They're the ones making sure everybody has all the things that they need. They're the ones that are going to recognize the needs of others before anyone else. That's why I put them last because the caretakers in the room are the most cool with going last. The apostles had to be first because if I didn't hit them first, they're going to get tired of this and not pay attention at all. And the shepherds are like, listen, as long as you take care of everybody else, I'm squared away. They have a heart for others, a heart for care. They are the caretakers of the church. What shepherds do is tend God's flock. They take care of people. A biblical example of a shepherd is Barnabas. Some of y'all might know who Barnabas is. He traveled with Paul on his first missionary journey. He was known as Barnabas the Encourager. And at the end of that journey, there was a conflict between Paul and Barnabas. The Bible says it was a sharp conflict because there was this guy traveling with him, a younger guy named John Mark, who was a pastor in training. And John Mark did something he wasn't supposed to do. He didn't show up when he was supposed to show up somewhere. And Paul, the apostle, who's rough and gruff and has things to do, says, forget it, leave him behind. He can't come. He's not qualified. He's not fit for the service. And Barnabas says, now, Paul, you're being too hard on him. We need to support him and build him up. This can be a teaching moment for John Mark. And then they get into it and Paul goes his way and Barnabas goes his way. Paul goes and plants churches. He goes and he's the apostle and Barnabas stays and he takes care of John Mark and nurtures him back to health. And then when Paul comes back around, guess who reunites with Paul? Barnabas and John Mark. And they both did what they were supposed to do. They both lived out their gifting. When I think about this in a present day context, I think of one of our elders, a guy named Bill Reith. There's tons of shepherds at Grace, but Bill Reith is so passionate about care, about care ministry. He actually runs something for us called Stephen Ministry. Stephen Ministry exists to sit with people who need care. Because basically how it goes at the church is, if you go to the hospital, I'm going to come visit you one time. I'm going to say insensitive, dumb things. I'm going to pray for you, and then I'm going to leave. Okay, that is not my gift. I like to do it. I like showing up to the hospital. I like seeing and talking to people, but it will not surprise you to learn that my bedside manner could use some improvement. So I come one time, and if you need more than one visit, if you need me to come more than one time, then we have a Stephen minister who will come sit with you as many times as you need. If you need the counsel, come to me and come to the pastor and talk about something that's going on in your life that you can't figure out. I can talk with you once or twice, but eventually it's going to be beyond what I can continue to contribute to. And so we have Stephen ministers that will walk with you through that. They're the caretaking arm of the church. The church needs people to care for one another. We need shepherds to clean up the messes of the apostles and the teachers and the prophets, right? We need those people. So if you're behind the scenes meeting the needs of other person, you might be a shepherd. So those are the five gifts. I hope that you can begin to at least identify with some of them, but a couple closing thoughts about these gifts. They're all pointed at the fullness of Christ. That's the point. They're all driving us as a church, you as individuals and the people that you're pouring into, into the fullness of Christ. The point is spiritual maturity. But what's interesting to me is these gifts here, they go deep, or they go wide, rather. These gifts go wide. The apostles and the evangelists, they grow the width of the church. They go start new things, start new churches, start new ministries. The evangelists recruit people to those things. They grow the numbers of the church. They attract people to the church and to what God is doing. They grow the width of the church. But these gifts here, they grow the depth of the church. They grow it deep. They're focused on spiritual maturity. They're focused on helping you understand the Bible better. They grow the depth of the church. And here's the thing is we need both sides, right? We need to grow wide and we need to grow deep. If we just grow wide, if we just fill everybody, if we fill leadership and we fill staff with apostles and evangelists who just start stuff and gather people to the thing, we're not gonna mature anybody. We're not gonna disciple anyone. We're going to see the kind of spiritual growth that we want. We're not going to get to the fullness of Christ. If we just lean over here, we just want to go super deep all the time. We want to do deep 60-minute sermons every Sunday morning, exegetical studies in the book of Hebrews. We want every discussion that we have to end with like weeping and vulnerability. We only ever want to go deep. And listen, those things are necessary. But when we tilt the scales too far in this direction, we have no ability to attract anyone or to grow the width of what we're doing. You've probably been a part of a church that swung the pendulum too far in one of these directions, and you've seen the fallout that happens when we get the balance wrong. It's a challenge that every church faces to have to get the balance of these things right. But the whole church needs all of these gifts. Which is why, as a closing thought, I would add, I have kind of three closing thoughts for you on these, is the first one, these gifts go hand in hand. They go hand in hand. You need them all. You need the apostle to start the thing. You need the evangelist to recruit the people to the thing. You need the prophet to make sure that we stay on the right path to help us avoid mission drift. We need the teacher to take us deeper into the meaning of the thing. And then we need the shepherds to clean up the messes that everybody else made and who we stepped on as we were doing the thing. We need all of these people in the church. They have to work hand in hand. The prophet needs to know his or her role and be able to hand things off. If I get insistent on like, no, I need to shepherd too. This needs to be what I need to do. No one's getting visited in the hospitals. I'm going to forget to make condolence calls. It's going to be a disaster. But by me, the teacher, working with Bill, the shepherd, hand in hand, the church works as it should. These gifts work hand in hand with one another. The other thing that I would say, and this one to me is important, is that one is good. Okay? One gift is good. I think in the Christian world, if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've probably felt pressure to be all of these. Maybe there's something that you identify with. Maybe there's something that you feel like is your strength, but some of these are your weakness. I've shared already, this one is not my strength here. I don't go through this list and go like, I feel like I'm a shepherd. That's not what I do. But I've felt over the years as a pastor, a lot of pressure to be better at that. And this has taken me some time and some work to get comfortable with the fact that, no, God's wired me to do this. And he's wired me to do a little bit of this. But he hasn't wired me to do that. So I don't ignore that. We put people around us who are good compliments to who we are, but we need to stop feeling the pressure to make ourselves all of these things because we tend to have a strength and we go, I'm good at starting things. I don't finish them well. I don't do the other things well. And then we beat ourselves up because we're not enough of an evangelist because we don't speak truth to power and worry about mission drift because we don't feel like we're a very effective teacher. And I want you to be freed up to know that one is good. Jesus is the only one who is all of them. So don't allow yourself to feel the false pressure of being more than just one of these things. You don't need to be. God didn't design it that way. The last thing that I would say is this, and I would just write it simply like this, is that none equals lies. If you're here and you're looking at this list and you're a believer, if you're not a believer, it's a different story. But if you're a believer, you would call yourself a Christian, God, your Father, and Jesus, your Savior. And you're looking at this list and you're going, gosh, I don't think I'm any of those things. I don't identify with any of that. I don't think I could do any of those five things. But I would tell you this. I think you're believing lies about yourself. If you think you're none, if you're a believer and you think you're none of these, then I think you're believing a lie about yourself. It's possible that God wired you to start things, that you have ideas, that you see needs, and that you want to address them, but you have this voice in your head that tells you that you're too young, or you're too inexperienced, or you're too old, or that nobody's going to listen, or that nobody's going to follow, and you talk yourself out of it, and you go, I'm not an apostle. Or maybe you do have a fire to communicate the text to other people. Maybe you do enjoy learning, and you want to share what you learn with other people, but you have a voice in your head that says, no one's going to listen. Start that Bible study. No one's going to come. You can't do that. Maybe you feel like you're any number of these things, but you've got a voice in your head that tells you that you're not, or you've got people around you who are poisonous, who are telling you that you're not. But what I'm telling you is based on scripture, all the saints get one of these. So if you're a believer and you feel like you don't have one of these, then you are believing lies about yourself. So here's what I want you to do. Okay? A little homework assignment. I want you, if you're in a small group, I want you in your small group to be talking about this. Our small group discussion this week needs to be, which one are you? And then practically, how can I begin to exercise that gift? And maybe we can talk about, how can I know? Maybe you can ask some people to affirm in you what you might be. If you're not in a small group, have the discussion with whoever you came to church with or somebody else who may have heard this in the other service or whatever, but have the discussion with somebody this week, what do you think I am? And then follow that up with, how can I begin to apply that? Because when we'll become really serious about that, we will start to work towards fullness of a knowledge of Christ and get to be a part of God's plan and bringing other people to that fullness as well. And I would even say that our path to maturity in Christ cannot avoid knowing what we are and leaning into that gifting and allowing him to use that gifting in us, in his kingdom. So I hope that you'll go home, you'll consider these, you'll think through these, you'll ask people who know you well and that you'll begin to think of practical ways to apply these gifts as we seek to build God's kingdom together. All right, I'm gonna pray, and then we're gonna move into a time of communion. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for the service. Thank you for a place where we can come and focus on you and worship you. Lord, I pray that you would give us the clarity, and in some cases, the courage, Lord, to acknowledge what our gifts might be. God, put people in our lives who can advise us and tell us what we are. Show us ways that we can begin to apply our gifting. Lord, I pray that we would be a church that is reaching for fullness with you, that is reaching to know you, and who would be thrilled to be a part of other people coming to know you as well. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. Before I jump into the sermon, I wanted to pray for a couple of our Grace partners. Most of us don't know this, but there's a couple that are in their 30s named Matthew and Brianna Brown, and they have been in the process of adoption for probably the better part of a year, I would say, if not longer than that. And they actually flew to Columbia in South America this morning to pick up three teenagers that they're adopting from Columbia, which is amazing. This is our primary way to grow at Grace, is to just go get children and then bring them here. So we're very grateful for that. But really and truly, I want to first of all just celebrate their faithfulness to do that and God's goodness in granting them these children. And then also just pray for them as they're there and as they come back and we surround them as a church family. So stop and pray with me and then I'll jump right into the sermon. Father, we are so grateful for you and the way that you love us. We are grateful that you have adopted us into your family, that you give us this picture. God, thank you so much for what you've placed on the heart of Matthew and Brianna. We pray that you would calm their nerves, that you would give them wisdom as they meet their new children, that you would give those children wisdom and grace as they meet their new parents. God, we can't imagine all the thoughts and feelings and emotions swirling around, but we know that this is a family that you have built and constructed with your will. And so we just ask for your blessing on them. We ask for a safe, good, beneficial trip. We ask for good assimilation as they arrive in the States. And God, we ask for special insight as a church, for ways to love them and show those kids that they are welcome here and they are a part of our family. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen. One of my favorite things about the Bible is that it's not just 66 individual books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament. It's not just a string of 66 individual books that exist independently from one another, like a history book or something, but rather the Bible is a tapestry of stories woven to present to us one big overarching story. And one of my favorite parts about that tapestry and learning more about it as a pastor is to look at the things in the Old Testament that are pictures or signposts that point us to the New Testament and more specifically point us to Jesus. If you spent any time in church, you know of some of these signposts and perhaps the most popular one, the one that's the most well-known, that we're most aware of, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, or this is your first time in a church in a long time, or maybe ever, you would probably recognize the term Passover. It's still a holiday that the Jewish faith celebrates. It's still something that we acknowledge on a regular basis as believers. And to me, it's one of the more clear signposts or pictures in the Old Testament that points to an event in the New Testament that points very clearly to Jesus. And Passover is the fourth feast that we're looking at in our series as we go through all the feasts and festivals that were in the Old Testament calendar that God prescribed in the book of Leviticus, chapter 23. This is the fourth one. We've got two more to go. And for this morning, I did want us to kind of catch up on Passover and know what it is, but then I want us to ask a really important question about Passover and what brought it about. So just so we're on the same page and we understand what Passover is, it's actually the tenth plague that God inflicted on the Egyptian people. The situation is God's people, his chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, have existed in the nation of Egypt as slaves for 400 years. It's all that they know. It's generation after generation. They are a people. They are a people of slaves. And so in Exodus chapter 3, God grabs one of the guys that he's chosen to use, a guy named Moses, and he appears to him in a burning bush. And he says, Moses, I want you to go to Egypt and I want you to free my people. Which is a pretty tall order, because he would lead a nation of slaves against the most powerful nation in the world. Egypt was the worldwide superpower at the time, so it felt like a pretty hopeless errand. But he says, I want you to go free my people. To help you do that, I'm going to inflict plagues on the Egyptians. Moses didn't know that at the time, but over time it became apparent that that was God's plan. And so Moses goes to Pharaoh and he says, you need to let God's people go. And Pharaoh says, you're ridiculous. I don't think so. This is a loose paraphrase of a conversation in Exodus. And then God starts to inflict the plagues on the Egyptian people. The waters turn to blood. There's a swarm of locusts. There's gnats. The day has turned to night. The livestock dies. There's boils. There's other plagues that are inflicted on the Egyptian people to soften Pharaoh's heart. And a couple of times he says, you guys got to get out of here. We're tired of these plagues. And then he changes his mind. He says, nope, you got to stay here. Just kidding, you can't go. So they keep them as slaves. The tenth plague becomes known as the Passover. This was the one that finally softened Pharaoh enough to get him to let the people of Israel go. And Passover, what God told Moses to do is to go to Pharaoh and tell Pharaoh, tonight the angel of death is going to pass over all the nation of Egypt. And that angel is going to claim the firstborn of every family, even of the livestock. And God tells Moses that if you want protection from this angel that's going to come as the final plague, that what you need to do is you need to go find a lamb. Sacrifice the lamb and then take the blood of the lamb and paint it on your doorposts, on the top and on the sides. And when the angel passes over Egypt, if that blood is on your doorframe of your house, then he will pass over you and the death that was supposed to happen in your house will not occur because I will accept the death of the lamb that died in their place. And so that's what happens that night. The angel of death passes over the nation of Egypt and the families that didn't have the blood on their doorframe lost their firstborn. And it said that the cry in Egypt that night was great. And the next morning, in his sorrow at losing his own son, Pharaoh tells Moses, get out of here. Go. And Moses gets all the people. They take some gold and some jewelry from their Egyptian slave masters, and they go out into the desert, and they begin to search for the promised land. And that's the story of God's rescue of his people out of slavery. He does it through the series of the ten plagues capped off by what's called now the Passover because the angel of death was passing over Egypt and would pass over your home if you had the blood of the lamb on your doorpost. And it's a very clear picture of Jesus in the New Testament. Very clear picture. When Jesus arrives on the scene, he's introduced by a man named John the Baptist. And John the Baptist, when he sees Jesus of Nazareth walking towards him, says, Behold, the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. Jesus was the spotless Lamb. And just like in the Old Testament, the lamb died so that your home didn't have to experience death. In the New Testament, the lamb dies so that we don't have to experience death. In the Old Testament, the lamb dies at Passover so that God says, there's no penalty required here. You guys are right with me. Just like that in the New Testament, Jesus dies, the Lamb of God, and God looks at that death and he says, that's good. There's no penalty required here because the Lamb has died on your behalf. It is a one-to-one picture that points us to the miracle of Jesus in the New Testament. The Lamb makes us right with God in the Old Testament, and then the Lamb makes us right with God in the New Testament. Passover is a picture of salvation. And now most of you here, this was really my challenge this week, you're church people. You know what Passover is. You could have just done this part so far. And so I thought, I wonder, what are the important questions to ask around Passover that can help us now as we reflect on that festival? And the question occurred to me, what was it that brought about the Passover? What was it that the people of Israel did that got God, enacted God, spurred God, was a catalytic event for God to say, now is when I want to enact my grand plan of rescue? Really what I want to ask is, what was their role in their rescue? What part did they have to play? What did they do? If we were to ask the question today, we would say, what's our role in our salvation? What do I have to do to be saved? We've all asked this question before. Before you were a believer, or now if you're not yet a believer, you would wonder, what do I need to do to be saved? What's required of me? What's my role in my rescue? Some of us wonder if we did it right, if we prayed the prayer right, or if we really meant it, or if we really obey enough. We don't really know if we did everything right, and we wonder still, what's my role in my rescue? What's my role in my salvation? What's our role in our rescue? What do I need to do to be saved? What's my role in my salvation? It's all the same question. And I remember when I was 17 years old, I was at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge. I've mentioned it before. And the camp director was a man named Greg Boone. And he asked the same question, but he just asked it this way. He came out and he asked all the students. There's about 300 kids at the camp that year. And he asked us, what do you have to do to be right with God? What do I have to do to be right with God? And it's one of these questions that somebody asks it and you know that you don't know the answer and that to give an answer, you're just going to get made fun of. Like my dad loves these kinds of questions. My dad asked me one time, son, and I was, I mean, I graduated from seminary. I had reason to believe that I could answer this question. He looks at me and he goes, son, what's the Bible about? And I'm like, geez, I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's about God. Like, that feels like a good answer. And he goes, no, it's about missions. Great, great dad, whatever. You're ridiculous. He's going to listen to this. I still, dad, I still think you're ridiculous. So it's one of those questions. He says, what can we do to be right with God? And we all know that we're not going to get it right, but there are those of us for whom the glory of the correct answer is too irresistible, right? If I get this right, if I somehow unlock the code and I'm the one that's correct, then I will get all the esteem of all of my peers and everyone here is going to know I'm the smartest one. So we have to try. A lot of kids had the sense to not try, but some kids did try. And I don't remember how exactly it went, but I do remember it well enough to know that it went something like this. Someone would raise their hand and offer an answer, and they would say, well, you have to pray a prayer. And Greg would say, well, that's fine. Is it possible to pray a prayer that you don't mean? Is it possible to just say words that aren't sincere? A person would sit back down defeated. Yeah, it is. It's not prayer. There's no magic words to make ourselves right. We know that. Somebody else would say, well, you have to be committed. And I remember thinking like, that sounds pretty good. That's convincing. You have to be committed. And Greg says, okay, how committed do you have to be? They're like, like all the way committed? And they go, yeah, and sat back down because they knew they weren't all the way committed. They were a terrible Christian. And then somebody else says, you have to obey. You have to submit yourself to God and be humble and obey. And I remember thinking, oh, shoot. They might have it on this one. And to us, I think that that would make sense. If you were to ask us, what do we have to do to be right with God? What's our role in our rescue? We might say obey, especially in an Old Testament context. Those of us who know our Bible know that in the Old Testament, your spirituality, in some ways, it was very easy for it to drift towards measuring your spirituality on your ability to follow the rules. In the Old Testament, God gives the Ten Commandments. He gives the laws, 600 and something laws. It's like 630. There's 300 and something thou shouts and 200 and something thou shalt nots. And if you follow those and you do it just right, then God will love you and he'll approve of you and he'll bless you and he'll give you all the things that you ever wanted because you were obedient. And that feels right. It kind of makes sense. I obey God, I follow his rules, I honor him, I'll appease him, and then he'll like me and he'll give me all the things that I need. That's probably our role in our salvation, to obey. The problem with that answer, if we look at it for Passover, what was their role in their rescue? It couldn't have been obedience because the law didn't exist. Moses has yet to bring the Ten Commandments down the mountain. They have yet to write the book of Leviticus with all the 600 laws. They don't have any clear laws to follow. They did turn around and paint the blood on the doorframe, but that was just for that one plague. That wasn't what enacted their whole rescue. So the answer in the Old Testament really couldn't have been obedience. And listen, we know in our own lives, experientially, that obedience is not how we bridge the gap between us and God. Come on, church people. We've tried that, haven't we? Haven't you tried? Isn't it exhausting to try to obey your way to God's approval? If I have just the right attitude and I don't lash out at people and I can control my anger and the terrible thoughts that I think I just mutter under my breath and I don't give voice to them, or if I can ever become super, super nice and just never think those thoughts at all, if I'll watch my language, if I'll give to the church like I'm supposed to, if I'll serve where I'm supposed to, if I'll suffer the way that I should suffer and I don't have the fun that they have and I won't laugh at the jokes that they do and I won't watch the shows that they do and I will be very, very disciplined and we'll just white knuckle our lives to God's approval. Isn't that exhausting? Doesn't that wear you out? And haven't you found that at every effort to obey our way into God's favor is futile? And what's more sinister than that is we always fail. We inevitably fail. Do you understand that in the Old Testament, God gave us the rules to show us that we can't follow them so that we would conclude that we have a need for him? And so when we think that we can obey our way towards God's approval, and we try really hard to do all the things, to dot all the I's and cross all the T's and be the person that God wants us to be, and we fail, we assume that we don't have his approval. That our Father's in heaven looking down at us disappointed. And I think that if you get nothing else today, especially if you're someone who's been a believer for a long time, if you don't hear anything else I say, maybe this morning can be the time when you finally, finally, finally let go of the idea of winning God's approval and admiration through obedience. We cannot perform our way into God's favor. And can I confess something to you? I'm 38 years old. I really do believe that I came to know the Lord at the age of four. And that I've been rescued for 34 years. I still cannot figure out how to quit trying to win God's approval through my behavior and through what I do and through how I perform. I still can't figure out how to just know that God loves me and to exist outside of this performance-based economy. Who knows, maybe if I preach hard enough today, I'll finally get it too. So if you haven't figured it out yet, you've got at least me as company. But it's not obedience. That's not the answer. That's not our role in our rescue, obeying our way to God's favor. And so it was at this point in the night that I thought, I think I've got it. I think I'm ready. I'm ready to crack the code. So I speak up and I said, Greg, you've got to love God. You've got to love him. And I felt like I was on good biblical standing for this because Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. How about them apples, Greg? So he says that's a good answer. How much do you have to love God? Like what percentage? Like 100? He goes, yeah. Do you love God 100%? No. And I sat back down. And all 300 heads turned to me aghast. How could you not love God 100%? And I just remember thinking, you shut up, you hypocrites. Like, you don't either. You're judging me. That's not loving. So it was a... But that wasn't the answer either. And that night, after everyone finally gave up, Greg offers us the answer, and he says, nothing. There's nothing you can do. But as I reflect on Scripture and what my life has taught me and a passage that I see in Exodus chapter 2, I don't think that's the answer either. I don't think it's nothing. I think that they did something, and I think we see the something that they did in Exodus chapter 2, verses 23 through 25. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Exodus is the second book of the Bible. And at the end of this chapter, it kind of bridges the gap. Before this, the author of Exodus is setting up what's going on, just what's happening in the culture. And basically what he's told us is there's people, the Hebrew people are slaves. They've been slaves for 400 years, but there's this boy named Moses who was born and he was adopted into Pharaoh's home and he grew up learning to lead. But then God put him in the desert for 40 years because he murdered some people and he needed to be prepared for the leadership. And then God is about to call him in chapter three. But right before God calls Moses to rescue his people for his part in rescuing his people. We see what the people did that I think is because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew. These people were slaves. They had been for 400 years. Can you imagine what it would have been like to be a civilization of slaves? To look your children in the eye when you have them and know that their life is not going to be any better than your miserable life. To know as fathers and mothers, there's nothing I can do to bring about a change for you. To feel that impotent and powerless. Can you imagine how anonymous the people of Israel must have felt? There's no nations around them that are going to swoop in and overthrow Egypt and free them. That's not on the geopolitical agenda. No one's going to pick a fight with Egypt. Most nations probably don't even know that they're there. They're totally unseen and totally unknown. They're completely impotent and helpless. And I think based on the beginning of this passage, it says, during those many days, the king of Egypt died. I think that they were hoping, this Pharaoh stinks. He treats us really poorly. Maybe if we can hold out long enough, he'll die and the next one will be nicer. But the Bible tells us that the next one was worse. And I happen to believe that this is when they gave up their last strand of hope. And in this hopelessness, in this isolation, in this feeling of impotence, the people of Israel cry out to God. They groaned in their slavery. And I think that there's a quality to this cry. I think there's essential qualities to this cry. I think that this was an earnest, admissive cry. Earnest in the idea that God, this is broken. This is not supposed to work like this. We're your people and life shouldn't feel like this. This is not how it's supposed to go, God. You didn't design it this way. Life feels broken. And I think that we felt that before too. God, this is not how this is supposed to go. This feels broken. This doesn't feel right. God, I'm not happy. God, we are miserable. God, we are hopeless. So there's this earnest, honest cry that this is broken. And then there's this admission, and we can't fix it ourselves. The next Pharaoh isn't going to fix it. Some other country's not going to come in and fix it. We're not going to rise up in rebellion and overtake and overthrow. We don't have any options, God. We cannot fix this. We are totally and completely reliant on your favor and your mercy. God, help us. It's an earnest admission. God, this is broken, and we are impotent to fix it. And when they let out this earnest cry of admission, what does God do? I love these three words. It says he remembers them, he saw them, and he knew. God doesn't forget things. It's not as though when they cried out that God was in heaven preoccupied with dealing with something with the angels and went, oh my goodness, man, 400 years goes by so quick. I am so sorry that I left you guys in Egypt. He doesn't forget. It's a way to say that this is when God acknowledged them. He saw and he knew. He didn't just then see. That's not a present tense. It had always seen and he had always known. And that know there is an intimate know. It's an intimate word. It's a word of empathy. Not only did he know what they were going through, but he had personally felt what they were going through. And it tells me that our God never forgets us. He doesn't forget that we exist and we are never at any point unseen, no matter how isolated we feel, no matter how hopeless we might feel, he sees us and he knows. That's why he's called El Roy, the God who sees. Do you know the power of being seen? Of being known? Have you ever been walking through something in your life that was incredibly difficult and had someone come alongside you and say, hey, I've been through that before. I know it's tough. Let me tell you what I learned from that experience. You know how life-giving that is? Have you felt the power of being seen and known? So when they cry out, this earnest, admissive cry, it says, God remembered them, he saw them, and he knew them. And then, the very next chapter, he calls Moses and enacts his grand plan of rescue. But if you were to ask me, for the people of Israel, what was their role in their rescue? I would tell you it was to come to a place where they let out an earnest, admissive cry to God. God, this is broken, and we can't fix it. So for you, what's your role in your rescue? What's your role in your salvation? If you're here this morning and you don't know Jesus, what do I do to be saved? You let out an earnest and admissive cry to the Father, Father, this is broken and I'm impotent to fix it. Father, life was not supposed to feel this way. I have all the things that I want. I have the job that I want. I have the house that I want. I have the family that I want. I have the toys that I want. And I still feel empty. I still don't like the quiet. I still don't like the silence. I'm still uncomfortable with my own thoughts. I'm still not at peace. Father, I need you because I thought that this was going to make me happy and it hasn't. Father, I have all the kids that I want and I'm still not happy. Father, I have everything in my life that I want and it's still not doing it. God, I had that and I lost it and then I reached for this other thing and I thought that that would be the thing that made me feel okay, that made me feel at peace, that made me feel happy and it's not. It's just another lurch at empty. God, I need you because this is broken and I don't know how to fix it. That's what salvation is. What's our role in our rescue to salvation? It's an earnest cry to the Father. What's our role and our rescue from sin? Many of us here, we're believers. We know we're believers. We don't doubt that, but man, there is just sin in our life that we cannot kick. We have things that are growing in the shadows that we are terrified are going to tear us down. We have attitudes that we can't get over. We don't like the way we act when we're angry, but we still have a temper. What's our role in our rescue for sin? It's the same thing. To make an earnest cry to God, God, I'm broken. I don't know how to fix myself. I've tried everything I know how to try to get better at this, to not sin in this way anymore, to not let you down. I've tried everything that I possibly can, and I don't know what else to do. And I think God says, good, because I love you anyways, whether you do this or not. And I'm ready to rescue you if you'll make space for me. What do we do? What's our role in victory over sin? It's an earnest cry to the Father, God, this is broken and I am impotent to fix it. It's the same for spiritual success. What do we do to raise kids who love the Lord? What do we do to have a healthy, vibrant marriage so that when people look at it, they go, man, that is a picture of how Jesus loves his church, which is what the Bible tells us our marriage is supposed to be. How do we live up to that picture? How do we obey Paul and live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? How do we obey the author of Hebrews and run the race that is set before us by throwing off every sin and weight that so easily entangles? How do we do all of that that feels so impossible? We cry out to the Lord, God, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix it. I need you. I think that this is the cry for salvation. And I think it is the cry for a believer every day. Every day that you wake up and this isn't what we say to the Lord, Lord, I'm broken today and I need you today and I'm impotent to execute your will today. Every day we wake up and we think that we're going to step into it and do it ourselves, that our role and our rescue is our performance, we're going to hurt that day. So this morning, I want to invite you to the same thing that I believe Passover invites us to, to make an earnest cry to the Father. Maybe for the first time if we don't know him. Father, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix myself. I need your rescue. I'm going to pray and then the band is going to come. They're going to lead us in one more song. And I want you, as we sing together, make that your cry to the Father. In this song, we'll sing the lyrics, Our Hearts Cry Out. Let's honor Passover today and make a collective cry to the Father. God, we need you. We're broken without you. And it says in Exodus that when his people cried out to him that God saw them. And as we cry out in a few minutes, I want you to know that the God who saw all of his children still sees his child. Let's cry out to him together. Let's pray. God, you are good. You are a good father. Even for those of us who didn't have good dads, you are a good father. God, if there's anything in us that's still holding on to a pride of success or of performance or of being good enough, help us to let that go. Help us be like your children in Israel who cry out to you earnestly and admissively that we are broken and that we need you. God, we feel your rescue rushing into impossible situations even today. In Jesus' name, amen.