Sermons tagged with Church

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. If you're in the back there, that looks pretty crowded. You'd like some more room. We got two completely empty rows right here in the front. Just get up in front of everyone and come sit right here. That's where we make the latecomers sit, so we parade you in front of everyone. This is the first part of our new series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going to be going through the Gospel of Mark for a long time. For about 12 weeks, it's going to carry us all the way until Easter. And so I'm excited to kind of steep in this book together in Mark's Gospel. As we approach the gospel, it begins in a way, at the beginning chapters of the gospel of Mark, there is a story that's ubiquitous in all of the gospels, and they all have this towards the beginning. And it's kind of, in my view, a story about people who had disqualified themselves from a particular service. And we'll talk about why in a minute. But it reminds me of a time when I disqualified myself from something, which was my freshman year of college. You may not know this about me. I got my degree from a small Bible school called Toccoa Falls College that I would not recommend to anyone. That place was boring. I did meet Jen there, though, so that's nice, but we both hated it. But my freshman year, I went to Auburn University. I went there because it was February or March, I think, and I had not taken the SATs or applied to a college yet, and one of my good friends that I played volleyball with every afternoon said, hey, I'm going to Auburn, would you like to be my roommate? And I said, do you have an application? And he goes, yes. I said, will you fill it out for me? He goes, yes. I said, great, send it in. And so then literally two weeks later, I get home from school, and my mom's like, what's this? It's an acceptance letter from Auburn. It was never even on the radar screen so I'm a freshman year I go to Auburn University Auburn does not have an intercollegiate men's soccer team but they did have a club team and for those of you who don't know what a club team is it's it's a glorified intramural team you try out for it and then you go play other schools in the area that also have club soccer teams and so I thought I'd go out for this team because I play, I'm not trying to brag, I played all four years in high school. I was a four-year letterman at Killian Hill Christian School. Now, it didn't matter to me that the entire high school consisted of about 100 students. Roughly 50 of those are boys. Roughly 20 of those have ever touched a soccer ball in their life. And about five of us had, like, played consistently. So that didn't factor in. I thought I was good at soccer. My junior year, we won the state championship. I was the MVP of the state championship game. My senior year, I made All-State. So I go to tryouts at Auburn thinking I'm somebody. Michelle Massey's back there grinning at me because she even played actual Division I soccer and knows the difference, right? She knows what I was about to walk into. She succeeded where I failed miserably. So I go to tryouts the first day and there's like 250 people there. 250 to 300 grown men are there. I had, the most people I'd ever seen at a tryout was like 25 and everybody made it,. The coaches took him because he felt bad for him that's why we got pudgy seventh graders with state championship patches on their arm right now because the coach felt bad for them. So I go to tryouts and I'm looking at my competition. Now when I was a freshman in college this may be hard to believe but I was a hundred and fifty five pounds soaking wet. All right I it's a little, I put on a few since then. I was a skinny little nothing. And I'm looking at these guys that I'm now trying out against and they have like hairy chests and muscles and stuff. And I am out of my depth. And I was just immediately so intimidated. And that was the, that was the day where I realized I wasn't an athlete, right? I had, previous to that day, previous to that tryout, I had always thought I was pretty athletic. And then when I went to that tryout and I watched other athletes actually do athletic things, I realized you're a coordinated white kid. You are not an athlete. And so I did the best I could to go through the tryout, had a good attitude, tried to keep my head up, do the best that I could. But by the end of it, I just realized this ain't it. And so they got us together and they said, hey, listen, we're going to whittle. There's 250 of you. We're going to whittle it down to 50. If you're invited to the tryout tomorrow afternoon, we're going to put your name on a list in the student union. Go to the student building, whatever it is. go there and the Foy Student Union Center and We're gonna post a list of 50 names if your names on the list you're invited to come try out again tomorrow We'll whittle it down to 25 Well, I got up the next day and do you want to know what I did not go do? That's right walk to the Foy Student Union Center to see if my name was on the list I knew pretty good good and well it wasn't. I took myself out of the running for that. I went ahead and told them, you don't fire me, I quit. Before you, even if my name's on the list, I'm not trying to, I don't like your attitude. Like I'm not going. I knew that my name wasn't on that list, not even worth the seven minute walk across campus to figure it out. I completely took myself out of the running. And what we see at the beginning of Mark is something that we see when this happens in the other Gospels, where we have some people who have either been told by themselves or by others, you're not good enough to make the team. You're out of the running. You're disqualified. Now, as we dive into Mark, I would be remiss if I didn't give just a little bit of background on it. I'm not going to do much because not much is required, but every gospel, all four of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written to different audiences. Mark is written to the Romans and it depicts Jesus as a servant. So Mark is the fastest moving gospel in the Bible. It's very quick, very fast paced from task to task to task because Mark is painting Jesus as a servant. That's what he's doing, and he wants to see that this is where we see like he must become greater, I must become less. This is where we see the greatest, whoever is greatest of you must be the servant of all. Those are Mark's words. And I would tell you if you've never read a gospel before, Mark is a great one to start with. It's incredibly, as far as gospels are concerned, action packed. It just goes from event to event to event. He doesn't dally in the inefficient details. But that's the gospel of Mark, and that's where we're going to be. And the series is called Mark's Jesus. This is the Jesus that Mark saw as he heard the stories from Peter. And so in this first chapter of Mark, the other gospels tarry a little bit at the beginning. Matthew and Luke kind of focus on genealogy and the Christmas story and the early years. And then the Gospel of John focuses on the ministry of John the Baptist kind of paving the way for Christ. But Mark jumps right into it. And halfway through the first chapter, Jesus is already calling his 12 disciples. And we have maybe the most famous call here in Mark chapter 1, verses 16 through 20, where Jewish educational system. Because if we don't understand the Jewish educational system, then some of what happens here doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right? Some of what happens here is curious. Have you ever wondered why the disciples just immediately, he's in the boat with his dad. He's doing his job. This is his future. And Jesus says, follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. And he's like, see you dad. And he goes, he leaves his job. We'll talk more about the call of Matthew, the tax collector, but Matthew's collecting taxes when Jesus calls him and he gets up from his career and he follows Jesus immediately. Have you ever wondered why they do that? I think when I was growing up and I was, and I encountered these passages, I just assumed that it was because they know who Jesus is. Jesus is Jesus, and so they want to be around Jesus because they've heard about Jesus and they want to follow Jesus. And that's not true. They didn't know yet that he was the Messiah of the world. They didn't know yet what that meant. So they're not following Jesus because he's Jesus. There's something more at play there. And when I explain to you kind of how the educational and rabbinical and discipleship system work, I think it might make sense to more of us. So I'm going to get in some details a little bit, but this helps us understand the calling of the disciples and then therefore our call so much better. So if you grew up in ancient Israel, if you grew up at the time of Christ, then you would start Jewish elementary school at about five years old. And Jewish elementary school would go from the age of five to 10. Boys and girls would do it together. And in these first five years, you would study the first five books of the Old Testament, what they called the Tanakh. And this was the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. You'd spend the first five years of your education studying those five books, and the goal was to memorize those five books. This is a culture with oral tradition. Memorization is heavy. People aren't writing things down and taking notes. So the idea of memorizing large swaths of text like that is not as anathema to them as it is to us. It was very approachable for them. We've lost that part of our brain a little bit with the ability to write things down all the time. But they would try to memorize the first five books of the Old Testament and become a master of those. Then at the age of 10, you would graduate to what I believe was called Beth Medrash Middle School. From 10 to 11, the girls, the Jewish girls, would learn Deuteronomy. They would focus more in on Deuteronomy for the worship aspects of it, and then they would look at Psalms, and they would look at Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, the wisdom books, because the women in Jewish history at this time carried the bulk of the load for the worship. So they were the ones that led the worship at the beginning in the temple. Now you guys can do what you want to to make jokes about Aaron's profession in your head, all right? I'm too dignified to do that, so I'm just going to let you do it. But that was the women's responsibility early on. And so from 10 to 13, middle school girls focused on that. And at 13, middle school girls graduated. Now help your mama, help your grandmama participate in the gathering, participate in the leading of worship. That was the role. But little boys would study the law and the prophets. So they would study the rest of the Old Testament or the Tanakh, and they would try to become masters of that. Then at 13, they would take a little break and they would go home and they would learn their father's profession. So if your dad was a fisherman, you'd go, you went home and you learned how to fish. If your dad was a tax collector, you'd go do that. If your dad, if your dad was a carpenter, you'd go be a carpenter, right? That's why it's important that we know what Joseph's profession was because that was Jesus's future had he not stayed in the educational system. So you would go and do that. And then around age 15, if you wanted to do more than that, if you wanted to continue your education, you would go find a rabbi that was legally allowed within the church to have disciples. And you would say, can I follow you? Will you be my rabbi? And if that rabbi said yes and accepted you as a student, which was very exclusive and very, very difficult to get into, listen to me, this is not an exaggeration. To become a disciple in ancient Israel at the time of Christ is not dissimilar at all from getting a scholarship to an Ivy League school. It's not dissimilar at all from going to Harvard or Yale or Georgia Tech. It was really like elite. For the new people, NC State stinks and Georgia Tech's the best. That's the basic line of joking that's been present for the duration of my tenure. But it was not dissimilar to getting to go to an Ivy League school. Your future is very bright. And only the best of the best get accepted, get taken on as disciples. And you wouldn't wait for the rabbi to come to you. You went to the rabbi and you would say, can I follow you? And what that question really means is, can I be who you are? Do I have what it takes to do what you do? And the rabbi would decide yes or no, whether or not to take you on as a disciple, as a student. And then from 15 to sometimes as late as 30, which makes sense why Jesus's ministry started at 30, you would train under your rabbi And he would teach you to do what he did. And there was a saying, may you be ever covered in the dust of your rabbi. May you be following so closely behind him on the dusty streets of Israel that his dust is kicked up on you and you are covered in the dust of your rabbi. You're following him to learn to do what he does. Okay? Understanding that, looking back at the text that we read, when Jesus sees Simon, Peter, what are they doing? They're fishing. What does that tell you about where they were in life and what the educational system had told them at some point? Because if at any point you weren't progressing as a student, if you're doing middle school and your teacher's like, nah, you're not really getting it, that's okay. Go home, be a godly fisherman, come to the temple and tithe and serve God in other ways. We're going to let the more elite students serve you in that way. If your rabbi said you're just not getting it, go home at 20 years old, be a godly carpenter. We love you. You're a good person. Serve the Lord in different ways. You're not qualified for this way. So the fact that Peter and James and John are at home with their dads fishing tells us that at some point or another, voices from within or without disqualified them from further education. And make no mistake about it, it's not as if they weren't interested. The ancient Hebrews, ancient Israel, didn't have professional sports. There was no gladiatorial arena. There was no way to make it. There was no way to ascend to the next level of society. There was no way to make your name great. There was no way to get famous. The only path forward to do any of those things, to make something of yourself, to be somebody, was to be a rabbi and hopefully elevate to Pharisee or a member of the Sanhedrin. That was the only way to climb the ladder in ancient Israel. So every little boy wanted to be a disciple one day and wanted to be a rabbi one day. And every father wanted their little boy to be a disciple who becomes a rabbi. That was the almost ubiquitous dream of ancient Israel. And so Peter and James and John fishing with their dad tells us that at some point a voice from within or without told them that they were not qualified to continue in service to God's kingdom in that way. Do you see that? And when I say from within or without, it could have been a voice within, like my voice at Auburn, going, dude, you don't need to go look at that list. You're not making it. Maybe they never went to a rabbi and said, can I follow you? Because they just knew what the answer would be. Or maybe they did go to a few and they kept getting shot down. But for some reason or another, what it tells us is that a voice from within or without had told them that they were not qualified. Somebody told them they weren't talented enough to do this. And then I also think of Matthew and his call. Matthew, who's the author of the first gospel in the New Testament, was a tax collector. Tax collectors were deplorable in ancient Israel. They were deplorable because they were turncoats and they were traders to their people for the sake of their own pocketbook, for the sake of their own greed. Here's how the tax collecting system worked in ancient Israel. Israel is a far-flung province of the Roman Empire, headed up by a likely failed senator named Pilate, because you don't get sent to Israel to be the governor from Rome unless you're terrible at your job and the emperor doesn't like you anymore. It's like being the diplomat to whatever the heck, okay? Go out here. We're going to put you in the wilderness for three years. Pilate's leading ancient Rome. His only, or leading ancient Israel, his only job is to keep the peace and keep the money flowing. That's it. Squelch rebellion, keep the income coming in. How do they make income? They tax the people. They tax the people at a rate that they had never been taxed before in their history. And this rendered many, many, many of the families in Israel as completely impoverished. They are living lives of what we would say is abject poverty. And the way that those taxes got paid is the tax collector, you'd go to the tax collector to pay your taxes, and Rome said it's a 20% tax on all goods and income, and the tax collector would go, oh gosh, looks like it's 22.5% this year. Looks like it's 25% this year. They would just tack on a few extra percentage points to make whatever they could make to get money off of you by being a toy of the empire of Rome. They were turncoats who rejected their people for the sake of their own greed. They were disrespected. They were considered sinful and sinners. They were considered unclean because they handled money all the time. To be a tax collector is to disconnect from your spiritual heritage. It's to choose to live a life that you know disqualifies me from service in God's kingdom. I have put that thought away. I will never think about it again. So Matthew was a person who had chosen a path in life that was completely separate from a religious path and had at some point or another inevitably made the decision due to the cognitive dissonance of the two existing of, I am not going to embrace that religious faithful life anymore. I'm not good enough for it. I cannot do it. I cannot serve it. That is not me. I'm going to make a decision for myself to live greedily and selfishly and indulge in my own sin and in my own desire. That's what he did. So he had chosen a life that anyone around him, including himself, would have said, I am not worthy to be used in the kingdom of God in any way, and I'm good with it. And yet Jesus goes to him and calls him too. Now here's what's remarkable to me about the calling of these disciples. One of the things. Jesus had every right as a rabbi who had achieved an authority that allowed him to call disciples. He had every right to sit back and wait for young men to come to him and ask him if they could follow him. He had every right to stay back and say, hey, I'm a rabbi. Now's the time. If you want to come work for me, let me know. And he doesn't do that. We see him pursuing the disciples. He doesn't wait for Peter to come to him and say, Jesus, may I follow you? He goes to Peter and he says, would you like to follow me? He goes to John and James and says, would you like to follow me? He goes to the tax collector who would never, ever, ever have the audacity to go to Jesus, the rabbi, the son of God and say, can I please follow you? No, he would never have the audacity to do that. His life of sin had disqualified him from approaching Christ. And Christ doesn't wait for him to get over that to invite him. No, he goes to Matthew in his sin, in his deplorable life, in his feeling like crud, and he says, would you follow me? And what do they all do? They all immediately throw down everything and follow Christ. And what we see here is that Jesus has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. Jesus, like his dad, has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. In the Old Testament, God called out to Abraham and told him what to do. He showed himself to Moses in the burning bush and told him what to do. He showed himself to David and told him what to do. He pursued his children in the nation of Israel over and over and over again, generation after generation after generation, despite their rejection, despite their betrayal, despite their refusal to obey him and to follow him and to serve him. He pursues and pursues and pursues. And when that pursuit isn't enough, he sends his son as a personification of divinity to pursue us in human form. It is. That's very good. If you didn't hear that, somebody's phone in the front row, Siri, just to find personification for us in case you didn't know what that was. It's in the back next week. We see Jesus early in his ministry display this pattern of pursuit where he goes to the disciples. He doesn't wait for them to come to him. We see later on when Jesus teaches about the 99 and he says that a good shepherd leaves the 99 and pursues the lost sheep. We see him telling a story of a rich man whose son went off and squandered his money on wild living. And as he came back home, the rich man saw him far off and he went running to him. He pursued him. Our God does not sit back and wait for us to come to him. Jesus says he stands at the door and knocks, waiting for us to let him into our lives. Our Jesus chases after us. He pursues us. He does it gently, but he does it relentlessly. And many of you, I would wager all of you, at one point or another, even at your worst, sometimes especially at your worst, have felt this gentle, relentless pursuit of Christ, have felt Christ whispering to you in the shadows and in the isolation that he still loves you, he still cares about you, he's still coming for you. You've seen how he pursues people in your life. You know experientially how Christ never gives up on you. There is no barrel that has a bottom too far down for Christ to not chase you there. He has an incredible pattern of pursuit. And Jesus continues to pursue us to this day. He continues to pursue you. And what I want you to hear this morning more than anything else is, that invitation that he extends to these disciples that he pursued, Come and follow me. Very, very simple invitation. It's the same one that he extends to you this morning. Come and follow me. Come follow me. Now, here's what's so important to understand about this call and this invitation. The disciples, Peter, James, John, Matthew, Andrew, the rest of them, Thomas, they did not know then at their call, Nathaniel and Philip, they did not know at their call that Jesus was the Messiah and they didn't know what it meant to be the Messiah. The only person on the planet, I believe at this point in history, who knew who Jesus was and what he came to do was marry his mother. I don't think anybody else had an accurate clue what he was doing. So the disciples definitely don't know that he's the Messiah and they don't even really know what the Messiah is. They don't even yet know that he's the son of God. That has not been revealed to them yet. Jesus has not made that public yet. And what we see in the three years of ministry, what we'll see throughout the rest of the gospel of Mark is this progressive revelation and understanding amongst the disciples about who Jesus is. We fast forward a year in and Jesus comes out on the boat and he calms the storm, right? He says, wind and waves be still. And he calms the storm and he goes back down into the hold and he goes to sleep. And what did the disciples say? Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? The last week of his life, Jesus is walking into the city of Jerusalem and James and John are lagging behind him arguing about who gets to be the vice president and the secretary of defense. They still don't get it. So when Jesus calls them and they receive the call, they were not encumbered with all this sense of belief that we encumber that with. They simply responded to who he was and said, okay, I'll go. They didn't know all there was to know about Jesus. They didn't even fully believe in Jesus yet. But they responded to his invitation and they followed. And the same invitation with the same parameters and expectations around it is extended to us and every generation through the centuries to simply follow Jesus. Here's another thing I love about this invitation from Jesus to follow him. He didn't just give them protection. He gave them purpose. He wasn't just offering them, because when we think about Jesus extending an offer, us follow me and I'll make you fishers and men, come follow me, come let me in, I stand at the door and knock, let me into your life. When we think about responding to the invitation of Christ, I think we typically take that to the moment of salvation. I'm going to respond to the invitation of Christ by letting him into my life and I'm going to become a Christian. That's typically where we go with that. But I would say, first of all, I think that this is a daily response to choose to follow Jesus every day. Second of all, when we reduce following Jesus, that moment of salvation to just now I'm in, now I'm a Christian, and that's it. When we make that the inflection point, we reduce the call of Christ down to mere protection. Protection from hell, eternal separation from God, protection from our sins, I no longer have to pay the penalties for those, protection in taking us to heaven, protection in overcoming sin and death. If we've've lost a loved one who also knows Jesus then we know that one day we get to see them again that when we say goodbye to them on their deathbed it's goodbye for now not goodbye forever so we're offered protection over sin and death and sometimes we reduce the call of Christ down to this offer of protection follow me and I will protect you from your sins and from the judgment of God and from the pains of death. And then one day everything will be perfect in eternity. Just hold on until we get there. But no, he doesn't just offer them protection. He offers them purpose. Because what does he say after he invites them to follow me? Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Follow me and I will imbue your life with a greater sense of purpose than you've ever had. Follow me, I have things for you to do. Follow me, I believe in you. Follow me, we're going to do great things. And I'm going to equip you for everything that I want you to do. And he imbues us with purpose that he's got plans for us in his kingdom. And just like then when Jesus asked them to follow and said, come and follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. He also tells us vicariously through the Great Commission, the last thing that Jesus instructs the disciples to do, go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Don't go into all the world and make converts. Don't go into all the world and offer my protection and that's it. Go into all the world and offer them my protection and my purpose. Make disciples and train them to do what I trained you to do. Go and make people who contribute to the ministry and the kingdom of God. We're all kingdom builders pushing this thing forward. That's how we talk about it around here. So he imbues us with purpose. And the same invitation to the disciples there is the one that he offers us this morning. Jesus is not, when he comes to you and he says, follow me, just follow me, just do what I'm asking you to do. It's not a simple offer of protection. It's an offer to imbue your life with purpose. I'm going to make your life matter in the kingdom of God. I want you to experience what it is to do my work and to love my people. It's a remarkable, remarkable invitation. And even as I articulate those things, I am certain that most of us in this room have already found ways to disqualify ourselves with the voices from within and from without from this call of Jesus. I'm certain that there are plenty of you who are sitting there during this sermon, hopefully thinking along with me, nodding along with me. Yes, believe all that. Yes, he calls us and he equips us. Yes, I agree with that. Yes, Jesus offers that same invitation. Yeah, they were unqualified. I feel unqualified, but I'm not yet sold. This sermon is for other people with more talent. It's for people who are younger than me. It's for people who are more charismatic than me. It's for people who have more potential than me, who are better looking than me, whatever it might be. So yeah, I agree, Nate, with the points that you're making, but that's not really for me. And what I want you to see is that that's your disqualifying voice coming from within or without that's telling you stuff that's not true about yourself. There's got to be a handful of us in here who go, yeah, I'm just a mom. That's what I do. I'm just a mom and my world is so small. God can't possibly have a plan for me to be used in incredible ways to build his kingdom. That's not true. We're told that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. God has a plan for you. God has something he wants to do with your life. He has a way that he wants to use you. He has a load that he wants you to carry joyfully and gleefully as you go through your life doing his work. He's created you for that. The problem, and he invites us this morning just as he invited the disciples to walk in that purpose and in that usefulness. The problem is we continue to have these voices that we believe in our head that tell us that we're not good enough, that we're not smart enough. I'm too old. I just teed off on 18, buddy. Like I'm looking at the sunset. That's a young man's game. Let somebody else do that work. I'm coasting it in, loving my grandkids. That's not for me. Or I'm too young. No one's going to listen to me. Or I don't have enough education. I'm not qualified enough to do this. Or I'm too inconsistent in my walk. Or I feel like Matthew and the choices that I've made in life have utterly you that you're not qualified for service in the kingdom of God do not come from God. They come from the world. They come from you. And they come from the people in your past who, well-meaning or not, damaged you and told you you weren't good enough and that you couldn't do it. I carry myself plenty of wounds from people that I respect a lot who indicated to me directly and indirectly that I would never make it in ministry. You've had people in your life, well-meaning or not, who have indicated to you in different ways, directly and indirectly, that you don't really have a lot to offer the kingdom of God. You've told yourself that so many times that you now can't even sort out the truth of where these voices are coming from. But here's what I want you to understand this morning. We are not qualified for ministry by our talent. We are qualified by our Savior. We are not qualified for service in God's kingdom by the gifts and abilities that we bring to the table. We are qualified by our Savior and by him alone. Do you think for a second there was anybody in Peter's life? If you know what you know about Peter, Peter was ready, fire, aim. That was him. Peter having nothing to say, thus said. He was always the one out in front, sticking his foot in his mouth. Do you think anybody looked at Peter at this point in his life on the banks of the Sea of Galilee outside the city of Capernaum and went, you know what this guy is? This guy's probably going to be like the very first head pastor of this movement that Jesus is about to birth with his perfect life and death. I bet he's going to be the guy. Nobody said that about Peter. Do you think anybody looked at John, who was maybe 10 to 15 years old at the time of his call? Do you think anybody looked at John and went, you know what John's probably going to do? John's probably going to write a gospel that's different and more influential than the others. He's going to write three great letters that are going to be included in the canon and printed for all of time. And he's going to write the apocryphal book in the New Testament that tells us about the end times. And he's going to die a martyr. He's going to be the last of the generation of disciples to die on the island of Patmos, an honorable death. And he's going to be so close to Christ during these next three years that the Savior of the universe is going to refer to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Not even John's mom thought that was possible. Nobody thought that was going to happen to the two boys called the sons of thunder, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. Nobody looked at Matthew collecting taxes and thought, you know what? This degenerate, who's totally rejected religion religion and the world and rejected his community and the people around him, he's going to become a disciple that writes one of the four gospels that's read by more people in human history than any other book. That's probably what Matthew's going to do. Nobody, nobody but Jesus looked at those disciples before their call and had any clue or any vision about how he could use them in his kingdom. Nobody but Jesus would have believed the plans that he had for those young men. So who are you to look at Christ and tell him that he can't use you? Nobody but Jesus knows what path you can have from this day forward. Nobody but God has the vision for what your life can be in the years that he is giving to you. Nobody knows what your potential is, least of all you. Our talent does not qualify us for service in God's ministry. Our Savior does. But we're so busy avoiding the walk to the student union because we are certain that our name is not on the list, that we don't even try, and we disqualify ourselves from service in God's kingdom. And I just want to remind you of this, that God alone can cast you aside, and he's promised never to do that. You can't disqualify yourself. Only God can do that. And he's promised to never forsake you. Only God can cast you aside and he will not do that. So quit casting yourself aside. This morning comes down to two simple thoughts. Whose voice are you going to believe about who you are and what God has planned for you? The world's or God's? Because a lot of us have been spending a lot of time listening to the world, believing that God's voice is for other people beside us. And the second one is this. Will you accept that simple invitation that tumbles down through the centuries from our Savior, that is the same now as it was then? Will you accept Christ's invitation to follow him and go where that leads? Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a God who pursues. Thank you for being a God who chases. For a God who believes and equips and calls and qualifies. Lord, I lift up those of us in this room who feel particularly unqualified. Who feel that our poor choices, our bad decisions, our lack of discernible skills, at least according to us, disqualify us from any kind of use in your kingdom. Father, would you help our eyes open to the reality that no one but you knows what your plans are. No one but you knows what you can do with a willing servant who will simply follow you. No one but you knows the potential of use and blessing and life that exists in this room. And so God, I pray that we would follow you. And I pray that we would begin to choose to listen to your voice about who we are and what we can do. And that we would refuse to listen to our own that doesn't tell us the truth. Help us to be followers of you and imbue us with purpose to build your kingdom. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.