Sermons tagged with Compassion

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, man, that's got to, that may be the grooviest song I've ever walked up to stage to, so pretty excited about that. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, and if you receive like our email communication, our Grace Vine, then you came, then you woke up this morning anticipating to see Nate preaching from stage and talking about marriage. And guess what? So did I. I woke up to a phone call this morning that Nate was sick and that he wasn't going to be able to come in and preach this morning. And so here I am. And I know that Ashlyn and I are probably like 98% towards solving marriage because we've officially hit two years as of a few days ago. Yeah, I didn't do that, but you know what? I'll take the applause. I'm feeling nervous up here and your applause is soothing me, so thank you. But while we're close to solving it, let's give it about six more months and then I'll do my marriage sermon for you guys. But no, so Nate at some point is going to serve you well by hopefully getting to preach a sermon on a prayer for marriage. But this morning, instead, I'm going to let you guys get a peek behind the curtain as to some stuff we've been doing in youth group on Sunday nights. So for those of you who don't know, on Sunday nights is when our sixth through 12th graders meet. We all come, we meet in here, we get rid of a lot of these chairs because they're in the way of fun. And we set up games, we set up all this different stuff. And then ultimately, we always have some sort of message and some sort of small groups and whatnot. And the last few times we have been meeting, we have been discussing and reading and going through this one simple verse in Deuteronomy 6, 5. So there's not going to be any slides. So like, that's kind of your like wink, wink. If you want to grab your Bible and read along, this is probably your time to do it. Because I'm going to pause here and I'm going to be any slides. So like, that's kind of your like wink wink. If you want to grab your Bible and read along, this is probably your time to do it. Um, because I'm going to pause here and I'm going to pick up on asking, and you don't have to tell me verbally because that would just be too wild, but with a, with a nice head nod or a nice head shake as anyone in here set up or, or, or did anyone have new year's resolutions this year? I've actually apparently heard that three people for sure in this room had New Year's resolutions, as Haley just told me. So I'm very glad to hear that. But I've got, all right, I got to see some heads moving. Yay? Nay? We've got some people who did. I am the king of setting New Year's resolutions. And I would not say I'm the king of New Year's resolutions, because that probably means actually doing the things that you set. And I'm not good at that. But boy, do I love thinking that I'm going to do things in the new year. This year, I went classic. I went very cliche. I didn't want to, you know, get too interesting or get too whatever. And I was like, you know what? It's probably time I got in shape. I wear big enough clothes to where people still go, nice, you look nice. No, you don't need to. It's like, trust me, you'll never see me with a shirt off, but if you did, you'd be like, ah, that's a bummer. And even getting in shape, you're still not going to see with my shirt off, but at least it wouldn't be false. But I was locked in in December. You know, we're going to see our families. We traveled in a week's time, about 29 hours on the road. And through that time, I'm like thinking through what I'm going to do when we get back. You know, I'm going to eat all of this bad food and do like nothing that's helpful or useful or important to my life and my being while I'm at my family's house because it's Christmas and Christmas doesn't count as we all know. But once I get back, like I'm doing stuff, hey, what can I cut out? What is something easy that I could get better? I could eat a little bit healthier here. Or what are some workouts that I would do that would really benefit what I'm looking for? I did research. I've got the Nike Training Club app and you can can highlight, and you can find different workout programs, or I bookmarked workouts. Oh, this one's perfect for me. It's like, I don't know any of this stuff, but I'm acting like I'm an expert when I'm scrolling through that app. But I'm figuring out, I'm planning it out, I'm locked in. And honestly, as I'm driving, and I'm like, man, my back hurts, that's probably a core thing. All I'm thinking of is like, this is going to be wonderful when I'm finally here. I'm locked in, I'm ready. I know the stuff. I've done the research. I'm excited about it. I have all of this will. My heart is ready to be healthy. And yet, as I told my students last Sunday when we were talking about some of this stuff, the most I've done is one night, I think Saturday night, because I had been thinking about this message, I decided to lay on the floor and do some sit-ups while we watched TV. So I'm like 10 sit-ups in to a new year, which is less than what I had planned, which is less than what I had been ready to do. And ultimately, as I thought about that, and as I began to think more about New Year's resolutions and why I'm simply the king of starting them as opposed to continuing them, what I recognized and what I realized is I am so good at having the heart that is ready to do the thing. I am so good at having a will of doing a thing and setting my heart on what I want to do and what I want to value in the person that I want to be, but I have a much more difficult time at marrying that heart and that will with action. I have two, a left and a right hand, so handshakes like this don't look right, but that's a handshake. What's in my head, what's in my heart, often stays there. Especially when it comes to resolutions, when it comes to setting and walking out goals, when it comes to doing those things. And I wonder if any of y'all have felt the same way. Speaking of what Haley mentioned, there's people in this room that have the New Year's resolution of joining a small group. What I know for sure is that those people know the importance of joining a small group. They know why it's valuable. They know why it builds and grows their faith. They know why building relationships with friends inside of a small group is deeply beneficial to them and to their hearts and to their lives. But as long as that's all that happens, as long as it's only what's in your heart, then it's incomplete, right? Because then you're still just sitting there on a Tuesday night when all of your peers are meeting together and growing together. And it's the same with anything that we do and with all of those things. And so now I'd like to come back to what I think we learn and what I think we begin to understand in our faith if we want to marry and we want to couple our heart and our action. And that is in Deuteronomy 6, 5. So some of you guys open with me and we can read it together. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with everything inside of you. I understand that. I understand what it takes to do that. I get to know Christ. I come to church every week and I get to learn about this God that loves me so deeply and so uniquely. And I get to learn about Jesus, God's son, this savior who God sent down to live a perfect life and yet die so that I can experience an eternal life with God in heaven through salvation, simply through faith. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart. That is easy and understanding and tangible. I can tangibly understand, okay, how do I go about that? What does it look like to love God with my inside? Well, it looks like going after and pursuing God. Sitting in church and learning more about him. Waking up and reading scripture and spending time in prayer. Sitting in small groups and listening to how the Lord works and how the Lord moves and allowing our hearts to be shaped and molded and changed and transformed in the goodness and in the love of God. But as we move forwards, the point of these verses is not simply to internally love God, but it's to love God with all that we are. I learned some Hebrew as I was reading through some of this, and so guess what? We're all learning some Hebrew this morning. The word soul here is actually translated to this word called nefesh in Hebrew. And nefesh, while it's translated in our Bibles as soul, the nefesh more has to do with the soul of who we are as a physical presence in this world. Who we are and the people that we are as we are living in our lives. And when we understand that, and then when we translate might to being with everything and with all that we have, the goal and the purpose of this is not simply to love God internally, inside of our hearts, worshiping him and loving him, being like, God is the best, I've got this down. The goal and the point of this is to recognize and to realize when we put these three words together, love God with all of our hearts, our souls, and our might, is to say that every part of your life should be dedicated to loving God. So yes, do all of the things to where you can continue to fall in love and be transformed internally in your heart by this God that loves you, created you, and wants a relationship with you every single day, but at the same time, just like me trying to do a New Year's resolution, if you're simply starting internally, then this call is incomplete in your life. And so then the question becomes, okay, well, what does it look like to love God with our physical selves? Does it look like, oh, well, I guess like if my body needs to love God better, maybe I should like raise my hands during worship, which, hey, you know, try it maybe. But I love that Jesus actually gives us this perfect and beautiful definition and explanation in Matthew 25. And so if you want to read with me, because we're going to like, it's going to be a few verses. So here's what I'm going to do. Normally what I do with students is I say, first one to find it, yell out the page number. Well, guess what? I'm the first one to find it. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to yell out this page number and it is page number 984. If you have one of the Bibles in the back of the seat in front of you, we are going to be reading verses. We're going to start in 31 and I'm going to just read this story. So if you guys are committed, I am going to read for a chunk. Sometimes that can get boring. And so let's all just like lock eyes and go, you know what? I'm not going to be bored because this is God's word and it's probably good. So we're going to lock in and we're just going to do it. So if you will read or listen along with me, please. He will put the those on his right, I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me. Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in or needing clothes and clothed you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you? The king will reply, I will tell you the truth. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. How do we love God in our lives? We do so by loving his people. How do we serve God with our physical presence? We serve the people that are in and amongst us within our lives. One of my favorite stories in all of the Bible is the story of King Josiah. So much so that if Ashlyn and I ever have a kid, I've asked that we could name our son King Josiah. I haven't decided if I want to do like King Josiah and then still give a middle name or if I just wanted to be King Josiah Talbert, which would be sick, which Ashlyn said no. So maybe if you guys are moved enough, if you could just have a couple words with her this morning, that would be great. Thank you. But I love the story of King Josiah because Josiah became the king in a weird and difficult and troubling time for a few different reasons. Let me go ahead and give you the background. This is how King Josiah's story starts out in 2 Kings as I turn and make sure I found it. In 2 Kings 22, I'm just going to read 1 and 3. Don't worry about finding it. I'll just listen along. Josiah was eight years old when he became king. Awesome. Genuinely, I would have thought you'd at least have to be 10 to be a good king, but he ended up doing it at eight. And he reigned in Jerusalem 31 years. Here's his description. Here is how he is described before his story is even told. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left. Josiah's descriptor as a king is that he did what was right in the eyes of God, and he followed after the footsteps of the one chosen king, David, that God had placed in front of him. Josiah took over a kingdom in Jerusalem, a group of people who had been set into this place to be God's chosen people, to be a people that would experience the love of God, who would get to have their hearts truly transformed by God. And through that, that as a part of the covenant that God made with his people in Israel, in Jerusalem, that his people would not only love him, serve him, and whatever, but that they would go and that they would bless the entire world. Their call was to know God, was to love God, and was to bring God and to bring goodness about the world through God. This was not a covenant or a call that Josiah had ever heard about. Because Josiah took over rule of a nation that was completely walking in opposition to God. What we learn actually in this story is it was a nation that was actually moving forward into exile. That soon enough after Josiah's reign, that Judah was going to be taken over by another nation and the people within that, but within Jerusalem were going to be taken into exile. Why? Because they had fallen short of their covenant. For generation after generation, they had walked farther and farther from God. And that is where Josiah took over. And about 18 years into his reign, he came into contact with a high priest. He encountered a high priest, and this high priest basically brought him, Josiah, for the first time in Josiah's life, the law or the word of God. And through Josiah being able to interact with this word of God, he was able to learn who God was. And as he was able to learn who God was, he was completely transformed. Truly burdened by the fact that he had lived such a life that would be walking anywhere except towards God because he realized for the fullness of the love and the goodness that was offered by God and his heart was completely changed. This child, I mean, even still at 18 plus eight, you do the math, he was 26 at this time. This young guy with all of the power in his, with all of the power you could ever ask for was forever changed and his heart was forever marked by the fact that he had encountered this God who loved him. And upon that encounter, and upon learning about this, and upon having God change and mold and shape his heart to becoming a new person, changed everything he did and everything he valued. And so, as he turned back around, the rest of his reign as king was a reign that was marked by, I'm going to continue to lead and I'm going to continue to serve my people the best that I can. But what I recognize now is while I'm doing that, the only way I can do that well and the only way I can truly love and serve my people rightly is if I do so for God, in God, and through God. He rebuilt the temple so that his people would have a place that they could go and encounter God. He got rid of all of these false idols so these people wouldn't have these temptations in front of them to walk and to go and serve other gods. He made the word of God readily available and made the word of God a foundational piece of these people who lived there. What Josiah did is when God got a hold of his heart and transformed his heart, he realized that that would be incomplete unless he turned that love around and he showed it and he gave it to his people. Josiah offered the love and the goodness of God to his kingdom because he knew that a heart for God is not enough. But a heart for God only takes full effect when I turn that around and I share that with my kingdom. And guess what? I know that none of you are kings. You're kings in like the cool sense. Like I think you're all kings and queens. You're awesome. You know, great. But all of us have kingdoms. All of us have a kingdom that we are living and, as Nate often says, that we are building. You have a family at home. You have people that you interact with on the way to work, inside of work. You have sports or you have kids that are at sports and you're standing around with parents. There are kingdoms that all of us have in our lives. And if we want to truly live out this Deuteronomy 6, if we want to truly love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and might, then that means that as we are taking steps forwards and growing in our love of God, then at every step, we should be taking steps forwards just along with it of loving the people that are in our lives. Because guess what? God placed them in front of you for a reason. There's this old hymn that I think is beautiful that I love. It's called Christ Has No Body But Yours. We're called to love people out of the love of God, certainly to make our faith whole and to make our faith what God describes and how it's described in Deuteronomy and throughout scripture. But we're called to do the same because guess what? Christ isn't here. Christ hasn't been here for 2,000 years. God takes up residence inside of his believers, inside of the people whose hearts he has gotten a hold of. And through us and through our hearts, Christ has a body now. And through our hands, our feet, our actions, our lives, our words, we share the love of God that we have experienced so that these people can experience the same. There are people in your lives and in your worlds that will not know God the same way if we don't bring it to them, if we don't tell them about him, if we don't show him his love, who he is and what he's done. And so as we normally wrap up in students, I always send to small groups. And when I send to small groups, I normally want to have a couple things, a couple tangible things that I can grab onto. And it's normally, hey, you know what, this week, let's do this. So if you're willing, since I've decided that this morning, I'm letting you guys into what a youth group would look like, I'd like to do something similar. And I'm going to give you guys the same call. So if you find somebody who looks like a student, ask them how they did it. They might can give you some help. But what I asked them to do and to think about was this. If we're trying to marry the heart with the action, then to really love people this way requires us not simply to do it because we're supposed to, but to do it because our hearts are truly for these people. So maybe you have someone in your world right now that you can think of this week. Someone who you know in some way you could serve well or you could love well. You could love or serve uniquely to your relationship with that person. Maybe it's a group of people. Maybe it's a small office and this is the people. So, write that person down. Write that group down. And here's what I want us to commit to. Not simply going, you know what, when I get to work, I'm going to be really nice to those people. But when I wake up in the morning, before I ever interact with these people, I am committed to praying for them. Praying that God would mold and shape our hearts to having a deep burden and a deep love for these people, that I can love them in a way that is going to glorify the God that is sending me to love them. And in and through that, as you interact with them, being prayerfully aware of what the Lord would have you be in their life. When I translate these Matthew verses, feeding the hungry, taking care of the sick, what I translate it as is this. Everyone has different needs, and everyone needs love in a certain way. So my call for everyone in here is this week, whether it be one person, two people, a few people, can you be the people that loves these people well? Can you be the people that serves them? And can you couple this heart that you have for our God that loves us so deeply with the actions of letting these other people know just how deep that love is through how we love them. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. I pray that we never grow tired and weary in growing closer to you and diving deeper into your love. But God, I just pray that it never stops there, but that you give us a heart for your people. You give us eyes to be able to see where we can serve and where we can love in any possible way that would glorify you. Lord, allow us to be prayerfully aware of the people in our lives and how we could show you to them. We love you so much. We are so thankful that you let us come and be here to rest and to worship in your love. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. I just want to say up front, if I seem a little bit off my game this morning, it's because Greg and Liz Roberg took my seats, and I was very thrown off having to sit right there. I really don't know what to do with myself. Do not appreciate this at all. This is going to be a difficult Sunday, but we're going to get through it together. We are continuing our series called 27 from last summer and this summer, where we're moving through the 27 books of the New Testament. Next week, we will tackle 1st and 2nd Corinthians. I will not do them justice. I didn't want to do them together, but it's just the way the timing worked out. This week, we're going to focus on the book of Philemon, which handles this idea of talking a slave owner out of punishing a runaway slave. So it's super just easy content. I hope you brought your guests this morning. This is the perfect sermon for that. But as we approach Philemon together, I kind of wanted to frame it up like this. Can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else? Typically in those situations, it's someone that we care about or someone that we interact with regularly. But can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else in your life? Really, the question is, can you think of a time when you felt compelled to confront someone and you needed to have a hard conversation? You needed to try to convince them, hey, what you're doing is not good. You need to do this, not that. You need to think this way, not that way. Now, we do this in our house every day because we have a three-year-old and every day we sit down and we try to have lunch and we make for lunch something that we know he likes because we've seen him eat it before. He may even have the audacity to tell us in the preparation, I'd like to have this, and we'll make him that. And then we sit at the table, and he no longer wants that. And we engage in the painful negotiations of trying to get a three-year-old to eat his stupid lunch, right? It is very difficult to compel someone to change their thoughts and behavior. And on some levels, we do this often, particularly as parents. But there are other situations in life where we feel compelled to do that, and the stakes are much higher than whether or not they nap well after the meal. There are times in life when we notice a friend, maybe a co-worker, maybe a family member engaged in habits and patterns that are not good and we feel compelled to confront them and say, hey the way you're thinking about this is not right. The things you're doing are not best for you. We feel that it's our responsibility. We think about it, we pray about it, and we know we need to go to them. We need to have that hard conversation. There are times in life when we have to do that. Some of you, as I mentioned that, are thinking of a real life situation right now where you know you need to do that. So the question this morning is, how do we act? What do we do when we feel compelled to confront? And where I want us to start is with this idea of this is the way that the world does this. The way the world confronts, attempts to seek to change the mind and behaviors of individuals, is to demonize and degrade. The way the world confronts is to demonize and degrade. Now, if you don't think that's true, I would like to invite you to watch TV ever. Especially in 2024, an election year. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of highly paid strategists and highly skilled politicians who are trying to convince you how to think and how to behave and who you vote for. How do they go about doing that? By demonizing and degrading the opponent. That's how they do it. That's why we have the phrase attack ads. That's what the world does to try to convince people. We demonize and degrade. They immediately attack each other. And if you think about this interpersonally, when you're talking with someone who doesn't align with your political views, and you tell them who you think you might vote for in whatever race you might be thinking about, do they respond by talking to you about the issues or did they respond by immediately attacking your candidate, telling you why your candidate is a worse candidate than their candidate? This is what we do to try to change minds. We demonize and degrade. We talk down about the people that need to change and we degrade them and we make you feel guilt and shame to change your behavior. More pointedly, I have seen and am guilty of, I've seen parents do this. I've met with people who have adult kids. And they have, those kids are making decisions that they don't agree with. That they think are wrong. That are not good for them. And they'll sit and they'll tell me. I told them I'm disappointed in them. I told them that's not how I raised them. I told them that's not who you're supposed to be. I told them that they shouldn't do that, that you were raised better than this. You shouldn't be making those decisions. That's not how we taught you. And when we do that, not intentionally, not intentionally, but when we do that, we're falling into the pattern of the world and the way the world confronts by demonizing and degrading the person. Often, our default setting, when we are compelled to confront, because it's the pattern we've inherited from the world, often our default setting is to use guilt and shame to compel someone to change their behavior or their way of thinking. Isn't it? How often do we do that with our kids? How often do we do that with our peers, with our friends? How often do we do that with our spouses? When we get on to one another and we talk down to one another, trying to guilt and shame them into being who you think they need to be. I think this is the pattern of the world. And I bring that up because I think the letter to Philemon gives us a much better model of how to confront. Here's what's going on in the book of Philemon. It's a short book. It's one chapter. I bet very few in the room have a verse from Philemon that they love. All right? I don't have anybody, I've never been to any of your houses and seen a verse from Philemon on the wall. Okay. We often don't pay attention to it. We don't regard it. We don't think about it, but the message within it and the model that Paul gives us is critical and crucial to our lives and absolutely applicable to everyone in here. So what's happening in Philemon is Paul came into the company of a man named Onesimus. And Onesimus was a slave owned by Philemon. And sometimes you'll hear pastors or people or teachers try to talk about slavery in the New Testament as if that was really more like they were employees. It's not how we think of slavery. Bull hockey. Yes, it's exactly how we think of slavery. Whatever you think of the worst slavery, that's what this slavery was. That's what Roman slavery was. You are owned and you have no rights and your owner has all the rights there in charge of you. That's slavery, the bad kind, really the only kind. Onesimus had gotten separated from Philemon. It's unclear whether he ran away or there was maybe a shipwreck or an incident or something like that, but he had gotten away from Philemon, and he was in the company of Paul. And Paul is writing this letter to Philemon to be carried by Onesimus to request that Philemon would release Onesimus, receive him as a brother, and let him go back and continue his work with Paul. So Paul, listen, is writing to someone who's a slave owner, who's apparently also a believer. And we know from our country's past that it is entirely possible to be someone who ardently believes in Jesus Christ and someone who owns slaves without the cognitive dissonance that those things do not correlate. We know it is entirely possible as Christians to have a blind spot in our life to sins and moral ineptitude that we simply don't see, but we commit all the time. Philemon is in the middle of one of those situations. He's a slave owner and a Christian, and those things don't go together. So Paul is writing him to address that problem and to request Onesimus. And the way that he does it gives us a roadmap for how we are to confront people when we need to in our lives. So I'm not going to read the whole book. I could. It wouldn't take very long. I would highly encourage you to read it. I'm just going to highlight a couple of verses, but you should sit down and read this and follow the narrative all the way. But this kind of helps us follow along with his reasoning. If we start in verse 4 with the question of how does Paul confront a Christian brother who's got a moral blind spot and needs to change their thoughts or behavior, this is how sake of Christ. Now listen, if you had a friend who was a slave owner and you wrote them a letter to get them to knock it off, I don't think you would start your letter, I always thank my God whenever I remember you. It's a remarkably gracious opening for Paul to start this way. He immediately says to Philemon, this is, I'm grateful for you. I love you. Here's why I'm grateful for you. Here's our joint goal together. That's how he chooses to open. Then once he dignifies him, says, I love you. God loves you. We have this joint goal together. I'm grateful for you. I pray for you. Then he says this, and I think this is fascinating. Therefore, although in Christ, this is verse eight. Therefore, although in Christ, I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do. Yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. Paul says it out loud. He says, hey, listen, I could be bold in Christ and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you're doing wrong. I could bully you into what we're supposed to do right. I mean, this is the most influential church planter, pastor, Christian of all time who's not named Jesus. And he has every right and every authority to burn the face off of Philemon. Right? He's got every right to just let him have it. To get after him. And he acknowledges that he does. I could, in boldness, correct you in the name of Christ, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to choose to appeal to you, and I love this phrase, on the basis of love. And I think it's important to point out that I believe that there is a twofold love that Paul's talking about there. I think it's on the basis of love for Jesus and a basis of love for Philemon. Because Paul loves Jesus and he knows that Jesus loves Philemon. So he knows that he is approaching someone for whom Christ died, whom Christ is pursuing, whom Christ is shaping and molding and cultivating and sanctifying. And it is good to remind ourselves in moments of confrontation when someone's not behaving or thinking the way that they should, to first remind ourselves to appeal to them on the basis of love and allow that first love that we think about to be Christ's love for them. Remind ourselves, I am going to sit down and talk with someone that Jesus loves dearly, that Jesus gave his life for, that Jesus pursues and calls to and sanctifies and forgives and redeems. And this is what Paul does at the onset of the letter when he says, I thank my God when I remember you. He talks about this commonality that they have in Christ. So there's this two-fold love when we confront. First, we remind ourselves that this person is loved by Jesus. This person is saved and pursued by Jesus. Then we remind ourselves that we love them too. We love them. If we did not love them, we would not be in this situation. If we never confront them, we can't possibly love them. If we just allow people in our lives to be in patterns and habits that are not healthy for them and we don't say anything, then we're not truly loving them. So to love them sometimes is to address the issue. And when we do that, we should remember that they are loved by Christ and they are loved by me and I'm going to approach it in that way I'm going to appeal to them on the basis of love not guilt and shame so once he says that I could get after you I'm not going to do that I'm going to appeal to you on the basis of love. How does he do that? We see that in 15 and 16. This is Paul appealing. It's going to be fun. So he says, here's what I want you to do. I'm appealing to you on the basis of love. My hope is that you'll receive Onesimus back. Now, a slave returning to an owner that had run away and stayed separated is someone who is going to be punished. They're going to be punished in a really terrible way. And Paul is saying, don't do that. As a matter of fact, don't just not punish him, but receive him back, not as a slave, but as your brother. And then he continues to compel him. Once you do that, please send him back to me so he can continue the work with me. He's incredibly valuable to me and is helping me a great deal. Please basically free him and let me travel with him so that he and I can work together. This is the request that Paul is making of Philemon. And in this, we see the biblical and Christian model for confrontation, for how we should act and what we should do when we feel compelled to change the way someone behaves or thinks. And I'm summing that model up this way. The world says to demonize and degrade. Christians say dignify and direct. When we approach someone, how should we approach them? What does it mean to appeal on the basis of love beyond simply remembering that Jesus loves them and I love them? It means to dignify the person and direct the person. And I mean direct there in both ways. I mean be direct. Don't beat around the bush. Don't be unclear. Don't imply. Don't be subtle. When we are confronting a brother or sister because we feel compelled to do so, we feel convicted to do that, we need to have the courage and the love and the humility to be direct with them. Here is what I'm asking you to do. And that's exactly what Paul did. He was direct. I'm asking you to receive him as a brother, and then once you do, send him back to me. Release him to me so that he and I can work together. He was very direct in what he was asking. And when we confront, we should love people enough to have the honesty to be direct with them. But he also, before he's direct, he dignifies. I thank my God when I remember you. You are a child of Christ. We have done these things together. We have labored for the gospel together. Here are all the reasons I'm grateful that God was good enough to place you in my life. We dignify. This is the Christian model for confrontation. And just to contrast it a little bit, think about the power of this. And let's say that we have an adult child that's not doing, not making the choices that we think they should make. And we feel like we need to step in and confront them. If the world's way of demonizing and degrading them leads us to say things like, hey, I've noticed this in your life. I'm disappointed in those decisions. I'm disappointed in you, implying I'm not proud of you. And I think you need to change your behavior because your behavior is going to lead to this. And I don't want to see this happen. And we just use guilt and shame to try to compel them to see what we see. I'm disappointed in you. We didn't raise you like this. You need to do better. Let me help you do better. That's one way to do it. But if we do it Paul's way, the way that he confronts Philemon, if we dignify and direct, if we appeal on the basis of love, think about how much more powerful it could be in our lives if we confronted people this way. I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be. What if we started confronting like that? How much better would you receive it if your spouse came to you and said, you're really bothering me. You're really annoying me. You're really doing this wrong. You need to do this better the way that spouses do. Except Jen, she never says that to me. How much better would you receive it if someone you love sat down with you and said, hey, I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be? It's a simple question because here's the thing. We know in our own lives that when we're not being who we're supposed to be, when we're not being who we want to be, when we're not being who God created us to be because we're allowing habits and sins and patterns into our lives that are not good, we know that we know that. We carry it every day. When we're not walking with God and living the life that we're supposed to live and making the choices that we're supposed to make when we're in unhealthy patterns. We are aware of that all the time. We know that it's not good. We already feel guilt and shame. So I don't, no one needs to come to me to challenge me to be better, to point out all the things that I'm doing wrong. I know them. How much more effective would it be if someone were to point out the things that you're not doing well by simply, instead of denigrating you, making you feel more guilt and shame, heaping on what you already feel, if they actually came to you and said, hey, I love you dearly. You matter so much to me. I'm so grateful that you're in my life because of this and this and this. And right now, you're not living up. You're not living as the person that I know you want to be and you know God wants you to be. So how can I better love you towards that person? That's what Paul does. Paul is confronting a slave owner to free a slave, an egregious sin that none of us would ever consider. He has every right to attack him and demonize him and guilt and shame him, and he doesn't do that. That's not how Christians change minds. That's not how Christians confront. And it works in polar opposite. It sits in stark contrast and juxtaposition to how the world does. That defaults to demonizing and degrading and to belittling and to bemoaning and degradation and guilt and shame. The Christian model for confrontation operates in a very stark contrast to the worldly model of confrontation. We are to confront in those situations where we feel compelled to. Like Paul does, an appeal to our friends, our brothers and sisters, spouses, children, on the basis of love. How do we do that? We dignify them. We remember that Jesus loves them and that we love them. And we direct them. We be honest with them. And we point them in the way that God wants them to go. Think about how much more powerful it is to appeal to someone on the basis of love and equipping to become who God has made them to be rather than shame and guilting them into who we think they're supposed to be. And here's what I love about this book of Philemon. It's Paul practicing what he preaches. It's one thing to say it. It's another thing to do it. Because in Galatians chapter 6 verse 1, Paul's writing to the church in Galatia. He's giving them instructions about how to be a church and what they need to do. And one of his instructions in chapter six, verse one is this. Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the spirit should restore that person gently, but watch yourselves or you also may be tempted. Paul tells the church in Galatia, and he tells all churches for all time, you who are spiritual, you who love Jesus, you who are mature in your faith, when you feel compelled to confront someone, do it gently. Raise them up with kindness. Do not be harsh in that confrontation. This is the instruction that he gives to the church in Galatia. And then, at another point in his life, Paul's in a situation where there is someone whom he loves caught in a sin and he feels compelled to confront. And how does he do it? He appeals to him on the basis of love. This is how the children of God are to confront one another. Be gentle with one another. Do it on the basis of love, reminding ourselves that Jesus loves them and I love them. And I am here to see them become who God created them to be, not denigrate them and guilt and shame them into better behavior. Now, here's the thing. I've felt like it was important for us as a church and as a family of faith to understand and be familiar with the book of Philemon. There's a reason God's included it in the Bible. We are edified to understand it and know it. And it is a model for us for how Christians ought to confront by dignifying and directing, appealing to people on the basis of love. But I also know that it's not very often in life that we feel compelled to do that, to use the lessons here. It's not very often that we're so compelled by the behavior of a friend or a spouse that we need to sit them down in a serious way and try to get them to change their mind or their behavior. We don't do that very regularly, and not everyone in the room has an instance they're thinking of in their life right now. I know that. So this is one of those sermons that sometimes I encourage you to tuck it away for later. Just be aware of this. And the next time you need to confront, hopefully the Holy Spirit will spark something in you. And you'll remember the message of Philemon. And you'll confront in love and appeal on the basis of love. But here's the other thing that I just want to mention as I close. We confront ourselves every day. We attack and accuse ourselves every day. We have a negative voice in our head that tells us that we're not who we're supposed to be. We're not who God created us to be. If people knew who you were, you would be ashamed. We have negative voices in our head from ourselves where we confront ourselves about our own behaviors and our own patterns every day. And we carry that guilt and shame every day. If you're willing to sit in a sermon and listen to how we should confront others and to know that we should do it with grace and love and dignity and kindness and gentleness. And that's what you would offer to every person in your life if you needed to confront them. Why would you not offer yourself the same love, the same gentleness, the same kindness? So tuck this away for when you do find yourself in a situation in life where you need to confront. Tuck this away. But also use it every day as you confront and convict yourself. Offer yourself the same grace, the same kindness, the same gentleness. Appeal to yourself on the basis of love. Remind yourself that Jesus loves you, he's grateful for you, and he is pursuing you. And when we do that, we will confront ourselves and others as Christ directs us to do it, not as the world does it. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for tucking the book of Philemon into the New Testament. Thank you for the lesson that it offers, for the model that it is of how to confront someone with gentleness. Lord, if there are people who have listened today and feel compelled to confront, I pray that you would give them the courage to do that, the humility to do it well, the love and the compassion to do it with gentleness. And I pray that the recipients would be restored and built up. Father, as we confront ourselves and experience our own convictions, first of all, God, I pray that we would listen and that we would allow you to love us towards health and towards who you created us to be. God, as we go, I pray that we would be more desirous of you when we leave than when we came. I pray that you would walk with us through this week. Bring yourself to our minds and to our consciences that we might focus on you this week and that we might grow closer to you. In Jesus' name, amen.