Sermons tagged with Disciples

All right. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. First things first, to my Wolfpack friends, no jokes this morning. Well done. That was a fun run. You guys should have enjoyed that. I hope you had fun. I'm sorry it ended with an 8'11 buzzsaw yesterday, but that was a good run, lots of fun. I tried, just so you know, I pulled out, I have one shirt that's Wolfpack colors, a black and red flannel. I pulled it out this morning, and I'm fat, so I had to switch it out to the big boy shirt, but I was with you in spirit, I promise. Also, before I jump into the sermon, I don't normally do this, but there's something coming up I want to tell you about, and I want to tell you about it because of what's been going on, excuse me, kind of behind the scenes in discussions with our missions committee and on our elder board. So you probably heard Aaron say a few minutes ago something that we say regularly, which is 10% of everything that's given goes to ministries happening outside the walls of grace. It's our conviction to be generous as we ask you to be generous. And so the missions committee, which predates me, that was here before I got here, is the group of people from the church with a heart and experience in missions who determines where that 10% goes. They determine who we partner with. So we have three local partners and three international partners, and they're the ones that make sure that we're partnering with the right people in the right ways. And one of the things that they've been talking about, and one of the things that the elder board has been talking about, and so as two separate bodies, we've been talking about this together, is how can we get the partners of grace, you guys, more involved with our ministry partners beyond just passively giving and seeing 10% of that go to ministries outside the walls of grace. And so we've been actively looking for opportunities for our partners, church partners, to get involved with our ministry partners outside the walls. And so we've got that opportunity coming up next Sunday. Addis Jamari is one of our ministry partners that we support. They're doing wonderful work with families and orphans in Ethiopia. The thing that's near and dear to my heart is poverty is so pressing there that when a young family or a young mother has a child, she's very often faced with the decision of, do we give this baby up for adoption because we can't afford it, or do we lose our home or lose something else? Do we keep this baby because we're not sure that we can feed it? Which, to my knowledge, no one in faced that choice that's an excruciating decision and so by supporting them we're able to provide those mothers the resources they need to to keep their babies at home and not have to give them up for adoption which is a huge huge deal so to that end as we seek to continue to support at a story there's a trip this summer some of the teens are going and beyond the teens we have three adults from our church who are also going and so there's a fundraiser for that trip and it's a trip this summer. Some of the teens are going. And beyond the teens, we have three adults from our church who are also going. And so there's a fundraiser for that trip, and it's a way to get involved. There's a barbecue next Sunday. Wes, where is the barbecue? It's at Falls River Slim Club. That's right. Okay, so Falls River, the Greenway Club over at Falls River. There's a barbecue. You can go there. You can get some food. You can take it home, watch the Masters. You can also contribute food to that, and you can just show up and volunteer. It'll probably be a good place to hang out. There's more information about that in the Grace Vine, and you can talk to Wes after. He's one of our elders, and he happens to be married to the lady running the joint, so he knows more answers than I do. So I just wanted you guys to be aware of that as an opportunity for us to begin to partner with our ministry partners. Now, as Mike alluded to, this morning we are starting a new series called The Treasury of Isaiah. I am particularly excited about this series because I think this series was Jen's idea. Jen's my wife. I think it was her idea back in the fall when I was asking her what we should talk about, and she said you should do some stuff out of Isaiah. And that's tough because Isaiah is 66 books. It's a book of prophecy in the Old Testament. It's got all the themes of prophecy in it, and it's 66 books long. And if I tried to preach through the book of Isaiah, you guys would probably find another church, and I would probably find a new job. So I don't think that's what we can do. But there's so many wonderful, rich texts in this book that what this series gives us an opportunity to do is to dive into those and begin to learn them and see them and appreciate what they are because we don't often spend time in Isaiah on a Sunday morning. So we're going to do that for the next seven weeks. Now next week, I'm going to work to give you an overview of the role of a prophet and prophecy and what it is. And we'll look at a big sweeping view of the messianic prophecies in Isaiah, the prophecies about Jesus. But before I can even do that, I have to jump into this text in Isaiah chapter 1. If you have a Bible, and I hope you do, I hope you're bringing your Bibles, I hope you're marking them up. This is a mark-up passage. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. In Isaiah chapter 1, we have these nine verses in Isaiah 10 through 18. And I know that I say that things are my favorite, but this is, and I mean this without equivocation, my favorite passage in Isaiah. In Isaiah. Okay? Maybe in the Bible, but definitely Isaiah. And I'm not even interested in approaching the rest of the book before we talk about this because I love the deep conviction of this passage. This passage kicks you right in the teeth. If you didn't come for that this morning, I'm sorry a little bit. But we see God speaking to his people in this passage about as harshly as you see him speak. And I'm the kind of person that needs you to do that to me or I'm not going to listen. So I love this passage. I love the conviction of it. I love the challenge of it. I love the relief of it. And in this passage, we find the very nature of the gospel. So my hope and prayer is that this passage can become for some of you what it has been for me for so many years. This is a hugely important passage. For just the slightest bit of context before I start to read it, this book is written to God's people, to the Hebrew people, to the Israelites. It is written to them at a time when they are spiraling morally away from God, when they have lost their way. And the role of the prophet Isaiah is to convict God's people. And that will become a very clear goal of his as we read this text. But God's chosen people, they have every reason to be following God. They know are they to me, says the Lord. I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and of fattened animals. I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of your blood? Listen. your worthless assemblies, your new moon feasts and your appointed festivals. Listen, I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Yo, God is big mad at his people. He's incredibly angry at his people. You can tell it with the way he starts off because he says, hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom, you people of Gomorrah. Listen, Sodom and Gomorrah to the ancient Hebrew mind were synonymous with evil. Those cities represented what evil was. It would be like calling a conservative Southern Baptist the mayor of Las Vegas. All right. It's it's when they think of that place, they think of sin and evil and debauchery. And they think of themselves as a shining people city on the hill. We are the chosen people of God. And guys go, no, no, no, no, no. Listen, listen, you sinners. Listen, you evildoers. You've lost your way. And then he goes down and he details for them. Here's what's interesting. He's not mad at them for the traditional sins that we would think of God being angry about. He doesn't say you're debaucherous, you're gluttonous, you're filled with lust, you're sleeping around, you're selfish, you're greedy, you're hoarding, you're oppressing the poor, you're mean and unkind to one another. He doesn't say those things. He actually gets onto them for doing things that he's asked them to do. Did you catch that? Look. He says, God, you asked us to give these sacrifices. The blood of bulls and lambs and goats, they mean nothing to me. God, you asked us to do that, he says, I detest them. They are a burden to me. It wears me out to have to deal with you when you show up on Easter. These are harsh words from God. And the question worth asking, if God is this angry with his people, then why does God hate the very actions he's prescribed? They were told to do those things. There's a whole book, the book of Leviticus, that details in painstaking detail exactly what they're supposed to do. If you've ever tried to read through the Bible in a year, two-thirds of you stopped in Leviticus. And it was because the book of Leviticus is laying out all of these things. When do we offer incense? When do we offer prayers? When do we offer sacrifices? What kind? When? Bulls and lambs and goats. When do we do that? When are the calling of convocation? New moons, new Sabbath, all the festivals? How do we do those? That's all in Leviticus. God has given them in detailed instruction exactly what he wants them to do. And now here in the book of Isaiah, he is raining down fire on them for doing those things. So why is it that God hates the very actions that he's prescribed? Because what God wants is the heart behind those actions, not the letter of the law and the actions themselves. We are told by David that God can despise sacrifices, but a fearful and contrite heart he will not despise. That God requires mercy and brokenheartedness, not sacrifice. God is interested in the heart behind the actions and the motives behind the obedience. He wants to see day in and day out that they actually love him and care for him, not just when they show up at church and go through the motions. I think of it like this, how the people of Israel were acting and what God was frustrated about. When I was in college, I think Jen and I started dating when we were, I was 20. So somewhere around the age of 20, 21. We're dating. And I had not really been in a serious relationship before this. I had been in relationships, but they weren't serious. And I didn't really know how to be in a relationship. I'm still not positive that I do. I think it involves vacuuming. And so we're dating. She knew how to be in a relationship. And she looked at me one day and she said, I can tell something's wrong and I'm kind of probing. And eventually she just says, I just don't feel very special to you. And I said, oh, I'm sorry. You are. So I don't really know how I handled that conversation. But we parted ways. She went back to her dorm, and I went back to my dorm. I lived in an on-campus house named Beulah. She lived in a small women's dorm named Troy Damron, and they were kind of reasonably close to one another. I went back, and I thought, gosh, my girlfriend doesn't feel special to me. I need to figure something out here. So I came up with a plan. I went to Walmart, and I bought a king-size bed sheet. And this is not going where you think it's going. This is a Christian college. So I got a king-size bed sheet, and I lay it out on the living room floor. And my roommates are watching me do this, and I trace out in big block letters, Jen, you are very special to me. Love, Nate. I draw it out, and then I get the Crayola markers, and I'm coloring it in. I went through a whole pack. I was up to like 2 or 2.30 a.m. This is painstaking work here that I do, and then I sneak over to her dorm. We still have the sheet somewhere. I know that we own it. It's somewhere. I went over to her dorm and I tack it to the pillars on her front porch. So it's facing the front door. So everyone who comes out that door, the seven or eight girls that live there, they will see that clearly Jen is special to Nate and she will know beyond a shadow of a doubt what she means to me now. Let me tell you something. That did not get the response I thought it would. It turns out that what Jen wanted was for me, through the little things of day-to-day life, to indicate to her that I cared about her, that she was special to me. What she didn't want was a big, dumb, grand gesture with block letters that would provide sermon illustrations for decades to come. What they were offering God is the block letters. You are special to me, God. Happy? And God says, no, absolutely not. And what they were guilty of doing, and this is why God is coming down on them so hard, is they were going through the motions. They were going through the motions of their faith. They were doing the bare minimum required of them to be seen as in the faith. We're still good. I'm doing my sacrifices, God. I'm coming to the special assemblies. You know, can't make it every week, but Christmas and Easter, I'm your guy. And they were just going through whatever they decided was the bare minimum of what their faith required of them to prove to God and whoever else that they were in. And it's interesting to me that in the corporate world, we now actually have a term for this. It's a new term that we've been blessed with by the Gen Zers called silent quitting, where people who have corporate jobs understand that HR, God bless them, can sometimes make it really difficult to fire your butt when you deserve it. And they realize that they have some job security, not going anywhere, so they make a conscious decision to put in the minimal amount of effort possible that will still allow them to keep their job and collect a paycheck, while fairly clearly communicating to everyone around them, I couldn't care less about this job. Just in it for the check. Doesn't mean anything to me. Now, I know that's a harsh way of depicting that, and I do actually see some positives to it, but I'm not making a joke. I think work-life balance got ridiculous, and the next generation is course-correcting for us a little bit. It's just going to be wonky. Anyway, sorry, that's social commentary. What God is telling the Israelites is, you're silent quitting on me. You're putting in the least amount of effort possible to still appear as if you're a people of faith. But you don't really care about me and what I've asked you to do and where your heart should be. And if you are at all like me, in my old Bible, I had a note next to these verses that said, Dear God, please don't ever get this angry with me. I never want to give God a reason to be this frustrated with me. That he says to me that when you bow your head to pray for me, to pray to me, I will not listen to you. When you come to church, you are trampling my courts. When you get up on Sunday and you put on your church finest and you show up at church, it is a burden to me. I am weary of your hypocrisy when you show up and pretend like you love me. And I want to write, God, please never be this angry with grace. And if you're like me, you're wondering, when and how do I go through the motions? When and how in my faith have I simply been giving God lip service? When and how have I silently quit on my faith? When the things I'm doing are just to be seen, are just to be considered in. I thought about enumerating the ways we can go through the motions. But I really think the more interesting thing to bring up when we consider how we might do this is to think about two things. I know for me, if I want to be honest about examining my life, about when I'm going through the motions of my faith, when I'm giving God the actions but not my heart, is to think through what motivates me when I do spiritual things. When I get up in the morning early to read my Bible? Am I getting up to read it so that I can check a box and say I've been spiritual today? Or am I getting up to read it because I just want to know the heart of God more? Because I'm curious about the scripture and I want to dive in in a fresh way. Do I get up to read it so that my Bible can be on my desk and my daughter can come down the stairs and see it there and I get the good dad award for today? Or am I doing it because I want to pursue the very heart of God? When I listen to worship music in the morning with Lily in the car, am I doing it so that she thinks daddy listens to worship music in the morning? Or am I doing it because that's what sets my heart right for my day? When we go to Bible study, we attend small group. Am I doing that because I want the people around me to think that I'm spiritual and I'm the kind of person who reads my Bible and attends small group? Or am I doing it because I want to be spiritually nourished by my community of faith? When you come to church, are you doing it because you're supposed to and there's somebody that you want to see and you want to keep up appearances? Or are you doing it, are you getting out of the car with the thought, God, speak to my heart and move me closer to you today? When you perform spiritual actions, prayer for a service, prayer before a meal, leading a small group, attending a small group, showing up and partnering and serving with something in the community, what is motivating that service? Is it the way that service will make you appear? Is it how it positions you in the eyes of others? Or is it because you can't help but serve your God? Let me tell you. When we do spiritual things for the way it makes us look to other people, we are going through the motions, and our hypocrisy is burdensome and wearying to God. The other thing that we think about to assess if we're going through the motions. Can I say with authenticity that I'm the same person on Friday night that I am on Sunday morning? Is there one version of me that everyone in my life sees? And you see it on Sunday morning. You see it on Monday afternoon. You see it when my kids are driving me nuts. You see it on Friday night and I've got some freedom and I can cut loose. You see it on Saturday at the tailgate. Am I the same person everywhere I go? Or do I put on different faces for different people to appear in different ways at different times? Because if we are not the same person in all of the pockets and circles of our life, then somewhere we're going through the motions. Either we're faking being like the world, and we don't really mean it, or we're faking being godly, and we don't really mean that. And normally, people who are walking with Jesus and zealous about him don't bother faking it for the world. What motivates your spiritual actions? How consistent is your character with the people that you see? Are there different versions of you? Because if there are, you might be going through the motions too. And this temptation to go through the motions of our faith without meaning it with sincerity, without being properly motivated, is a trap into which the historical church has fallen in over and over again. There is not a single person here who's been a Christian for more than three days who has not at some point gone through the motions. You may be sitting right now in deep conviction, thinking, Father, I've been going through the motions for years. And if you are feeling that, good. I'm not going to disavow you of that. Sit in it. It's helpful. And we should be asking, if all of those things are simply going through the motions, then what things does God want from me? What does he want me to do? What actions does he require of us that can begin to shift our heart towards him and prove to him that we're in this for him? What does God actually want from us? I'm glad you asked because Isaiah answers that question. In verses 16 and 17, he says this, wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. What does God actually want me to do? If he doesn't want me to go to church and pretend, if he doesn't want me to just do sacrifices and tithe and go to small group, what does he actually want me to do? I'll tell you what he wants you to do. He wants you to stop doing evil. Learn to do right. Defend the cause of the oppressed. Seek justice. Defend the widow and the orphan. Care for those who can't care for themselves. That's what he wants his Christians to do. That's what he wants his children to do. He wants you to go do the things you can't fake. Go do the stuff you have to really mean. And listen, this verse 16 and 17, this resolution, stop going through the motions. Stop faking your faith. Stop being insincere and burdening me with your hypocrisy. Go and do what I actually want you to do. And what is it that he actually wants us to do? It's to defend the cause of the fatherless and plead the case of the widow. It's to pursue justice and correct oppression. And I don't know of sitting with a group of men Friday morning talking about this topic and I became so frustrated with how I was taught my faith because I don't know where we decoupled justice and defending the cause of the fatherless and the widow and caring for those who can't care for themselves. I don't know where we decoupled that from the message of the gospel, but somewhere along the way in our churches, we made it optional and it's not. James tells us at the end of the Bible, true religion that is pure and undefiled before the Lord is to do this, is to take care of the widows and the orphans. Why is it widows and orphans? Because in the ancient world, those two were down and out. If you're an orphan, they did not have orphanages that you could go to that would feed you and care for you until you were 18 and send you to college. You begged in the street until you died. If you were a widow, your husband had died, and you did not have children to care for you and bring you into their home, you begged until you died. There's no social safety net. So when God says care for the orphan and the widow, does he mean specifically them? Yes, and he still does. But what he really means is those who can't care for themselves. That's why in the laws in the Old Testament over and over again, we see this principle of gleaning. When you're plowing your fields, leave the corners of them unharvested so that the sojourner, the alien, the homeless, the oppressed, the marginalized, the widow and the orphan can eat off of your field. That's theirs and it actually belongs to them. And if you harvest all of your field, then you're actually stealing from the oppressed and participating in the oppression. I'm not going to belabor this point too much because we may have a whole series about this coming up. But whenever we see the heart of God revealed, it is always for those who have less than us. When you see the idea of giving in the New Testament, it is almost always associated with giving to the poor. When you see Jesus handle the poor, he says, whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me. When Jesus begins his ministry, he goes to the poor, blessed the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. You see him caring for the oppressed. So if we want to do the things that God really wants us to do, then we have to, in a non-nebulous, very specific way, get involved with caring for those who can't care for themselves. Go to the Ades Jumari thing next week. Dip your toe in it. See what it's like. Start to talk to people in your community and find out how you can be a part of that. This is not a theoretical, metaphoric instruction. This is a literal instruction. That if we are guilty of going through the motions and the thing that God wants us to do is to care for those who can't care for themselves. So let's get active about that. Now here's the thing that I love about this passage. Because you might be thinking to yourself, why is this one your favorite? This is a little rough. Here's why. Because it doesn't end in verse 17. In verses 10 through 15 we have this tremendous conviction. You're going through the motions and your hypocrisy is burdensome to me. I'm weary of you. And then in 16 and 17, we have this very high challenge. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Stop being dumb. Learn to be good. Go and do it. What do I want you to do? I want you to care for the poor. Go care for the poor. Go. But then we get verse 18. And verse 18 is the best. And verse 18 kind of, to me, feels like this. Sometimes in my home, my daughter Lily and I can clash. We're very similar. And that means that sometimes our words get sharp. And sometimes there's a little battle of will about whose words are going to be louder. And I win those. But sometimes I wish I hadn't. And whenever we clash, whenever she's gotten in trouble and she feels bad, I always go find her or she'll come to me and I'll pull her alongside of me and I'll hug her and I'll kiss her little head and I'll say, I love you. I'm proud of you. It's going to be okay. You're going to do better. I'm going to do better. Because I don't want it to end with the conviction and the challenge. I want to call her alongside and I want to comfort her. And when I read verse 18, to me it has the tone of God coming alongside us, putting his arm around us, and telling us it's going to be okay. Here's what he says in verse 18. Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. I love that verse because we experience the conviction of 10 15. And the challenge of 16 to 17 to go make it right. But then in 18, God sidles up next to us, puts his arm around us, comforts us and says, but hey, this isn't all on you. You've messed up, sure. But though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. How does he do that? Through shedding the blood of his own son that's prophesied about later in this book. So that when God looks at you, he doesn't see all the times you've walked through the motions. He doesn't see all the times you've failed to help the poor. He doesn't see all of your shortcomings and misgivings. And he is not burdened by you or weary of you. He sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ and he is happy to pull you up alongside him and put his arm around you. So really, this is the reason why I love this passage. Because Isaiah 1, 10 through 18 is the gospel. It is the gospel. Do you see this? See, I think a big problem with the American church is that we start the gospel message at verse 18. We start the gospel message at verse 18. We begin it right there. Hey, guess what? Jesus died on the cross for you, so you're not accountable for your sins. Hooray. Just accept him and walk with him. And I think that's the reason why we have people going through the motions in their faith. Because all they need to know is, what's the minimum amount I have to do to stay right with God for that salvation to count for me? What are all the things I can do over here that I'll be forgiven for eventually? What's the minimum amount of the things that I need to believe so that I'm in and God loves me and that salvation accounts for me? And what do I have to do? What's the get in the door price for this salvation? Because we started the gospel at verse 18. But when we do that, we cheapen the power of the gospel. The power of the gospel operates in direct proportion of our realization of our need for it. The power of the gospel resonates more deeply with you the more deeply your own sin resonates with you. The more deeply your own shortcomings resonate with you. And that's why we experience the relief of verse 18 because we have the conviction of 10 through 15. Oh my goodness, God is so angry. And then we have the challenge of 16 and 17. Go and start doing right, but God, that's so hard. And then we have the relief of verse 18. And so what I want us to do now is I'm going to read all nine verses in the tone and inflection in which I think they're intended. And we're going to collectively feel the relief of verse 18 when we get there. And you in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who asks this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing me meaningless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. New moon Sabbaths and convocations, I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your new moon feast and your appointed festivals, I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. Though they are like crimson, I will make them like wool. That's the power of the gospel. The power of the gospel is to feel deeply the conviction in 10 through 15. And if you're here this morning, I've prayed that you would feel the necessary conviction. If you have been going through the motions, in part or in whole, it's not news to God. Confess it to him. If you're challenged by 16 and 17, and you think honestly about your life, and you go, gosh, I don't know what I'm doing for the poor and the oppressed. I don't know what I'm doing to correct injustice. Then let that conviction determine you to find ways to get involved in that. And then, and then, once we've sat in the conviction and we've sat in the challenge, then sit in the comfort of verse 18 and the gift of the gospel and allow that gratitude from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. Allow that grace that has been poured out from you from his fullness that it's not all on you to go do all the right things, but that God is already working in and through you and you are forgiven for the times when you've fallen short. Let the gratitude of that motivate the right behaviors and let the things that look like going through the motions be an outpouring of the faith that you've expressed through helping the poor and seeking justice for the oppressed. But we will never do those things if we do not allow God to bring us to a place of tremendous gratitude and comfort of the words of the gospel and the promise that we can reason together and though our sins are like scarlet, he will make them as white as snow. So I'm going to pray. And as I pray, if you need to pray to God on your own, do that. If you need to confess to God that you've been going through the motions of your faith, confess it. If you need to confess to God, I'm not doing anything for justice or oppression, confess it and ask that he would show you what to do. And if you are not overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the gospel and him covering over your shortcomings, ask God to fill you with gratitude. And if you are filled with gratitude, express that to him. As I pray, you pray, and then we'll have a chance to sing together. Father, thank you for your servant Isaiah. Thank you for the power of your words through him. God, we know that at different times and in different ways, our hypocr forget the conviction, but that we will allow the power of your word to rest on us. Father, I pray for myself and openly confess I go through the motions all the time. But Lord, I pray that you would imbue my actions with a sincerity filled with gratitude. I pray that for the people here as well. God, give us the courage to be convicted and to confess. Show us ways to get involved with what matters most to you. And Lord, would we leave here with just a deep gratitude for your sending your son to cover over our sins. And though they are like scarlet, you will make them white as snow. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you so much for making grace a part of your Easter celebration. I just want to mention real quick to just some of you. Not everyone will have noticed this, but some of you did, and I feel like it needs to be addressed. In that last song, there's a line that says, all that I have is a hallelujah. And if you, being grammatically correct, change it to an alleluia while you were singing, then you're fine. Okay, that's okay. And God's still honored with your correct grammar. We have been moving through a series called Final Thoughts. And I know on Easter that we have friends and guests and family members who have not been a part of the previous weeks. So to give you just a little bit of context for where we are and what we're talking about as we reach the ultimate sermon in this series. In John, in the Gospel of John, chapters 13 through 17, Jesus is with the disciples in the upper room the night that he's arrested. So Jesus is about to be arrested and then tried and then crucified. And then three days later, we find the empty tomb and he's conquered sin and death. But right before that happens, he's celebrating Passover with the disciples. And after Judas leaves to betray him, Jesus gets serious and he starts talking to the disciples and what's known as the upper room discourse. And it's all of his final thoughts to download to them before he goes and he does what he needs to do. So these are hugely impactful words that we find in John 13 through 17. And we've spent seven or eight weeks in those words. This week, we arrive at a text that I'm going to read here in a little bit that talks about Jesus is going to die and they're going to grieve, but he's going to turn that sorrow, that grief into joy. And so as I was reflecting on this passage, it was required that I would reflect upon grief. And so what I wanted to do this morning, just to celebrate Easter, the most joyful day of the year, is to invite you to think about the time of your deepest grief in your whole life. But really, I do want you to go there. And I know it doesn't make a whole lot of sense on Easter, but it will. Each one of us, if we're old enough, have experienced something in life that brought us tremendous grief. Each one of us has walked the path of sorrow. If we haven't, we will. No one dodges the raindrops of suffering their whole life. And as I was reflecting on grief that I've experienced personally, that I've experienced through others, this occurred to me that grief doesn't just mourn what you lost, but also what you thought you would have. There's this two-pronged element to grief. I don't know what it is, where your mind went when I said, when's the time in your life of great grief? Very rarely does that grief only grieve and experience pain over what was lost. Very often that grief is also mourning over what we thought we would have. I remember the first time in my life when I experienced profound grief was when Jen and I miscarried our first child. We had struggled a lot to become pregnant. And when we finally did, we were overjoyed. And then we found out about eight weeks in that we weren't pregnant anymore. And that grief hit us like a wave. That grief hit us like a wave. And as I've reflected on it, obviously I was sad over the life lost, but really I was grieved over the life I thought I was going to have now. Now I get to be a father. Now Jen gets to be a mother. Now we get to be a family. Now we're off and going. This is the next stage in life, one that we've longed for so much. Now we're there. And then we're not. And we're grieving the future that we were anticipating. If you've lost a loved one too early, too soon, and only those that love others get to decide what that is. But if you've lost someone too soon, you don't just grieve who you lost. You grieve the years ahead. You grieve the grandkids that won't know them. You grieve the stages of life when you can't call them. When you sit in the wake of a divorce, a shattered marriage, or a shattered life, you're not only grieving over the marriage that was lost and the covenant that was broken, but you're grieving over the loss of growing old together, of watching grandkids together. You're grieving over the life that you thought you would have. And so, very often in grief, there is a mourning not for only what was lost, but also for what we thought we would have. And this, I think, is the grief that we find in the disciples that Jesus is referring to in this passage. In John chapter 16, verses 19 and 20, Jesus tells the disciples, I'm going to die, and then I'm going to come back from the dead. And the disciples, just like you and I would in that moment, go, what do you think he's talking about? They still didn't understand. And he says, while the world is rejoicing, because the world crucifies Christ, while the world is rejoicing, you will mourn and then I will turn your mourning and your grief into joy. Because you're going to be sad. You're going to be hurt. And this grief of the disciples, what I think of is Saturday. Friday is the last supper. Saturday, they're sitting in the midst of the unknown. Sunday, we find an empty tomb and questions are answered. But on Saturday, the grief that they're experiencing on Saturday is the grief of a future lost. Because what we know about the disciples is that even at the death of Christ, even as Christ hung on the cross, as the crucified Messiah was there, the disciples did not know what he really came to do. The disciples still thought that Jesus came to be an earthly king on an earthly throne, ruling an earthly kingdom. They still believed that Jesus was going to rise to the throne of David, take over Israel, and then Israel would be his international superpower, and Jesus would be the king of kings from the throne of David. And we know this because on their way into Jerusalem, the Sunday before Easter on Palm Sunday, they're following Jesus, arguing about who gets to be what in this new kingdom. I get to be the vice president and I get to be the secretary of defense and you have to be the secretary of transportation. They were arguing about those things. And so we know that the expectation of the disciples was for Jesus to establish this perfect earthly kingdom and be an earthly king. And when this man is hanging on the cross and he breathes his last, so is the last breath of that dream breathed. So is their future dead. They don't know now what the point of everything was. They think it's over and it's lost and it's done. And on Saturday, they sit quietly in a room together trying to figure out what just happened. Because on Friday, they scattered, scared that they would be associated with Jesus and then tried like him. And so the sheep scattered. On Saturday, they get back together and they go, what did we just do? What did we just lose? And they're sitting in this grief over a future that they thought Jesus was going to bring about. They thought by hitching their wagons to this guy that this is our future. This is our life. We will be men of prominence. This is going in this direction. And when it stopped going in that direction, they were miffed and mystified. They were grieving the loss of a future that they presumed Jesus would bring about for them. And in this way, I believe that we can relate to the disciples. I believe that we can very much sit in the grief that they were sitting in. All of us, I believe, have grieved a presumed future with Jesus. All of us have grieved over the loss of a future we thought we would have with Christ. We know this. And I believe that many of us in different ways and in different times have grieved a future, the loss of a future that we thought Jesus was going to bring about. We gathered around someone we loved. We gathered around someone we cared about who got cancer too early or got a disease too soon or had an accident and we were praying for their recovery. We've gathered around. We've gathered two or more in Jesus' name and we've asked in Jesus' name for them to be healed. And he could have, but he didn't. And maybe we thought that Jesus was going to let this person be in our life longer than he did. And then he did it, so we grieved the loss of that future. And we grieved the loss of the future that we thought Jesus was going to bring about. We prayed for a child for years. We got pregnant. We lost that child. Now Jesus has let us down because we thought he was going to bless our future and bring about that future for us. And he didn't then. He did later. Some of us have become Christians. believing because of maybe poor teaching, maybe being overly presumptuous, that when we get saved, our life gets better. When I give my life to Christ, he protects me. And now there's this umbrella, this force field around my life that prevents me from pain, that prevents me from hardship. And we found out subsequent to our salvation that that's not how that works. And the future that we thought that we were bringing about by inviting Jesus into our life isn't what happened. And so now we're grieving the disappointment that we have at Jesus not doing what we thought he was going to do. Maybe when we were young children, we were handed a simple faith by the leaders around us and by our parents. And then as we grew up and we began to experience complicated life, we realized that this simple faith was not adequate for the life that we were experiencing. And that tension became so great that eventually we made the difficult decision to step away from faith, to deprioritize it in our life. Because we were told when we were little that Jesus was going to bring about a certain kind of future that he didn't bring about. And so now we're grieving the loss of that future, and we're grieving stepping away from who we grew up and how we grew up and what we were taught, and that hurts, and that's a painful thing. And it's painful to know that in making that choice, you're also hurting the people who taught you that faith. And so now there's communal grief over this future that we thought Jesus was going to bring about. And he didn't. Maybe we are parents and we did everything we could to train up a child in the way that they must go. And then we watched them depart from it. And Jesus did not bring about the future that we thought he would. So we grieve the loss of that future. There are more examples. We could go on. But I would contend that a vast majority of us in this room have grieved as the disciples grieved over a loss of a presumed future we thought Jesus had for us. Because we can relate so deeply to the disciples and their Saturday grief, it should interest us a great deal. How Jesus manages to turn that grief into joy. That sorrow into laughter. And here's how I think that grief got transformed to joy. I think that our grief turns to joy when we discover what Jesus was really up to. Our grief turns to joy when we discover what Jesus has really been trying to do. The verse that Aaron shared in worship, when they saw Jesus, they were, they sprung to joy so great. They stood up, they were in disbelief. It was a joy that brought about disbelief. This is so amazing. This is so fantastic. I can't believe it's happening. I'm going to stand up, arms raised, mouth agape. I can't believe this is going on. That kind of joy. How does Jesus turn that deep grief of a lost future into a joy that is speechless? By showing you what he's really been up to. And what he was showing the disciples in that moment and what they began to progressively understand over the next 40 days leading into Pentecost is that Jesus did not come to establish an earthly kingdom here. He came to establish an eternal kingdom there. He did not come to make this place perfect. He came to craft a perfect eternity for you forever and for the disciples forever. And what he was showing the disciples is, guys, what I have imagined and what I came to do is so much bigger and grander and more marvelous and more wonderful and more miraculous than anything you've imagined. I did not come to sit on an earthly throne and be an earthly kingdom that is beneath me. I came to establish an eternal throne and an eternal kingdom and to make a way for you to be there with me. That's why Jesus tells the disciples in the upper room discourse, I'm going to my father's house and I'm going to go prepare a place for you. And I'm the way to that place. And Easter makes Jesus the way to that place. And I just happen to think, to be naive enough to cling to this idea, that Jesus will also turn our grief into joy. And he will do it when we see what he's really been up to. What he's really been doing behind the scenes, what he's really been working on, how much bigger and more grand and more miraculous his imagination for us is than what ours is. Some of us have the opportunity to see this in this temporal place, in this world. We've seen the child grow up in the way that they're supposed to go and then wander away from the faith. And it hurts us, and we watch them, and they make mistakes, and they run into walls, and they trip over themselves, and we want to stop them, but we can't. And we just pray that they would come back, and then one day they get married, or they have a kid, or some life event happens, or something stark in their life goes on, and they come back to a faith. And when they come back to the faith, they do it with this vibrancy and this ownership that would have never taken place had they not had those years in the wilderness. And now, with a decade of hindsight, we see those necessary wanderings that solidified the faith of our children. We can think back, many of us, to moments of grief in our life when we shook our fists at God. and we said, this isn't fair. How could you let this happen? And a decade hence, with hindsight, we know exactly why it happened. We know exactly why it was fair. And we see exactly how God was working in ways that we couldn't fathom. And that's just here in this world. Because if you want to know what Jesus has really been up to, if you want to know what he's really doing, we find that in Revelation. I love this passage. I preach it at every funeral I do because it is the most hope-filled passage I can find in the Bible. This is what Jesus has really been up to in Revelation 21, verses 1 through 4. longer any sea. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, look, God's dwelling place is now among the people. Listen. And he will dwell with them. They will be with his people, and God himself will be with their God, and he will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away. That's what Jesus has been up to. I say if you come not on Easter, I say very often that when Jesus returns, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. This is how. He did not come to make this earth perfect for us now. He came to make a path to the perfect new earth and new heaven that he's creating. If you want to know what Jesus is up to now, he's preparing a place for us so that one day we will be sitting before the throne of God and we will be with our God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things. Death and abuse and divorce and grief and loss and illness and sickness and sadness, the former things, will have passed away. And Jesus punched our ticket to that perfect eternity. Do you know how he did it? Easter. He did it with the empty tomb. He did it by overcoming sin and death and shame for you and for me. And so when we celebrate Easter, we call it the most joyful day of the year. Because on Easter, Jesus conquered death so that when we die, it's not goodbye forever, it's goodbye for now. When we pray for healing, that will be answered either in this life or the next when we place our faith in Christ and what he did on the cross and what he proved on Easter. We follow a Jesus that turns our grief into joy. So I don't know where your head went when I asked you what your greatest grief was. I'm confident some of you are walking through it right now. I'm confident all of us have more grief waiting on us in this life. But what I'm certain of is, no matter what that grief was, is, or will be, that Jesus has turned that grief into joy. And when we find out what he has been up to, it will be so much bigger, more miraculous, more wonderful, more awe-inspiring, more mysterious than we could ever imagine. And that's the future that Easter wins for us. So let's go celebrate with our families. Let's smile and laugh and enjoy and eat well. But let's do it knowing that whatever grief we have experienced or will experience will be turned into joy because Jesus died on the cross and conquered death and sin by raising from the grave. And he's gone to prepare a perfect future for us. And when we find out what he has been up to, it will blow us away even more than it shocked and surprised the disciples, and we will stand mouth agape in joyous wonder at what Jesus has been doing. Let's cling to that and continue to celebrate Easter together. Let me pray for you. Father, we're so grateful for Easter and what it is and what it represents. Thank you for covering over our sin and our shame. Thank you for making a path through your son to experience a perfect eternity with you. God, we thank you that your imagination is bigger than ours, that your hope for our future is better than ours, that what you can envision for us and what you want to do for us is so much more than we could ask or even think to imagine. God, if there are those here with us this morning or listening online who are grieving, would you give them belief and hope that you will turn that to joy? God, would we revel in the power of Easter and what it is and what it means? Give us good celebrations with our family. Give us good thoughtful discussions with our friends. And God, help us today celebrate you and all that you've done to bring us into this perfect place that you're preparing. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday morning. Before I just launch into the sermon, a couple of things. First off, NC State has been the butt of many of my jokes, so I need to stand up here and take it like a man. Well done, NC State. Good job. We'll look forward to your disappointment in the first weekend of the tournament. And then we've got more, far more importantly, we've got two rows of students over here. They just did a, what, Kyle, what was the weekend called? I don't even know what it's called. Great. That's perfect. That's what we're preaching about this morning. Pay attention, kids. This is for you. That's right. That's right. Because they knew. They're in a preaching schedule. That's great. So they've had a great weekend. God's been doing some cool stuff there, so it's great to see them. This morning, we continue our series. I forget what part we're in, six or seven, of our series called Final Thoughts, where we're looking at the Upper Room Discourse, which is this collection of things that Jesus said from chapter 13 in John all the way through chapter 17. It's the last things he said to the disciples before he was arrested and tried and crucified for me and for you. And so we arrive at the end of it in John chapter 17 with what's famously called the high priestly prayer. And this is a fantastic prayer. It's hugely important and we can't miss the context of it because Jesus is praying over the disciples. Now it's 11 men because Judas has left to betray him. It's these 11 men who are going to be leading the church. They are in charge of making sure that the message of the gospel goes into Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, to the corners of the globe. These men are in part the reason why we sit here on a separate continent 2,000 years later. And so Jesus has been training them for three years. And here's the catch. They still don't even yet know what their job's going to be. They still think, and I don't have time to get into all the context of it, but they still believe that in a little bit, Jesus is going to ascend to the throne and they're going to be the vice president and the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War and agriculture and all the rest they think they're going to be important in this Israeli government that Jesus is going to set up they still don't understand what he really came to do and one of the things he came to do is to train them to lead the church so right before he dies and initiates that process, he prays over them to God. And John, one of his devoted disciples, captures this prayer. And here's what's remarkable about this prayer, and here's why every Christian ought to know it and read it. Because at the end of this prayer, do you know that Jesus prays for you and for me? He prays for us. He prays for the church, for those who would believe according to the words of the disciples. And because our Savior prayed for us, we ought to spend some time there. We ought to know this passage, be familiar with it, and know what Jesus' petition is. So I'm going to read the portion where he prays for us. It's longer than I normally read in a sermon because I've been in services before, and I believe that when someone reads a large swath of Scripture that it's noble to do that, it's also disengaging and hard to listen to. So I don't do it very often. But this morning, we're going to read the whole part where he prays for us, all seven verses, and then we're going to come back to verse 21 for the bulk of what we're going to be talking about this week and next week. But look at what Jesus prays for us. Beginning in John chapter 17, verse 20. My prayer is not for them alone, meaning the disciples. I'm not just praying for the disciples is what Jesus is saying. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message. That's us. Brought to complete unity. We could spend 12 weeks in that prayer. But I want to draw your attention to the beginning of it. I want you to notice what Jesus prays for us. I want you to notice what he asks God to do in us. And I want you to realize it's his only petition in this prayer on our behalf. He says this in verse 21, that all of them, Father, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also prayer before he prays in Gethsemane, that he prays for the church. He prays for all of those who would come to believe in his name from the message of the disciples. And in that prayer where he prays for his church, he makes a singular petition. Jesus's unity is Jesus's only petition for his church. That we would be one as he and the father are one. Unity is Jesus' only petition for his church. It's the only thing he prays for. He prays that others would come to know. He prays that we would know their glory. But the first thing he prays for and the only petition he makes that he asks of God is that we would be unified. That we would be one. And then Paul echoes this in Ephesians. Ephesians chapter 4. If you have a Bible, you can turn over there with me. I have mine marked, so I'm cheating. I'm definitely going to beat you to it. But in Ephesians chapter 4, he talks about it in verse 3 and then down in verse 13. Paul writes this, make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. And then he gives them some more instructions and caps off that section, verse 13, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. So what we see, based on what Jesus teaches us and what he prays for, would they be one so that the world may believe in me? And then what we see in Paul, would they be one so that they might be mature? Is it this idea of unity, unification in the body of Christ, big C church and little c church, what we see is that unity is essential to evangelism and maturity. It's essential to evangelism and maturity. The church can never be as effective at reaching a lost world when we are not unified. And according to what Paul writes, we will never reach a state of congregational spiritual maturity if we cannot find ways to be unified in this congregation. It's amazing to me how important unity is to Jesus, how many times it shows up in the Bible. David even writes in the Psalms how lovely it is when brothers dwell in unity together. It's amazing to me how common the message of unity amongst the body of believers is in the Scripture and how little we talk about it. Myself included. I've preached here, I'm finishing seven years. I don't know how many Sundays I've sat in John 17, but it's not been enough. And I don't understand why this message for unity isn't something that all Christians take very, very seriously. It's a command of Jesus. It's his only petition for his church, that we would be one and that we would be in him. And so if unity is that important to our Savior, then we need to talk about it. So we're going to talk about it this week and next week, and we're going to talk about it and frame up the conversation like this. I want us to think about, and this is what I've been thinking about, what are the biggest threats to that unity in the church? What do we see in the church dividing us, causing us to section off, causing us to judge Christian brothers and sisters as right or wrong or godly or not? And so the first thing I see that's a threat to our unity as a church, and when I say as a church, I mean Big C Church, but I have to talk specifically about Grace, because we don't have any say in any other churches. What I see as a threat to the unity of our church, one of them is our beliefs. The insistence through the decades and through the centuries that all Christians think the same thing about all the things. This is why we have so many different denominations. Why we are fundamentally disunified. We're going to talk about that next week. The other thing that threatens our unity as much as or more than anything else in America in 2024 is politics. So we're going to talk about that this morning. And I know that when I say that, the air goes out of the room. I've just stuck my face in the wood chipper, and we're going to see how this goes. I know some of you, this is your first time. I hope you've watched online before and know that we don't do this every week. Some of you brought your parents today. Great. Have fun at lunch. As they encourage you to find a new church. But I think that the disunity in our culture has gotten to such a fever pitch that we have to talk about it. And just so you know, everything that I'm going to say this morning, I've run by the elders. We started talking about it in the fall. I told them I knew that we were going to need to do this in 2024. The response was not enthusiastic. And then a few weeks ago, once I finalized my outline, I sat down with them at an elder meeting and I went through it with them. I've only done that with one other sermon in my tenure here. And I finished and they all said unanimously, that's a good message, church needs to hear it. And I said, great. So I'll have a job in May. And my least favorite elder, Doug Bergeson, looked at me and he grinned because he can't help. And he says, well, there's a lot in the delivery. And then what I saw this morning, he just walks up to me and stuck out his hand. He goes, good luck. And then walks away. Okay. There's two big reasons I feel like we need to talk about this as a church. The first is a personal conviction of mine that when there's something that enters into the national conscience of import, something that matters, like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey entered into our national conscience. We were all thinking about them the whole time during the football season. That's not really important. I don't need to address that in church. But when there's something of import, of weight, that enters into the national conscience, something that we're all thinking about as we go throughout our weeks, something that we're all talking about, something that to various degrees we're all aware of. Some of us are really, we have a lot of political opinions. We feel very strongly about what we believe and what our ideology is and why we believe it. And we're very involved and we watch, we consume all the news and all the podcasts. That's great. Some of us hate it. We just put our head in the sand because we want to avoid it because we wish it wasn't so divided and tough right now. But wherever we are, we're all thinking about it. And to me, as a pastor, it's my conviction that when something of weight enters into the national conscience and I don't address it, at best I'm negligent and at worst I'm cowardly. So we have to talk about it. And we have to talk about it because we should all be asking this question, and I know that we are. How should a Christian navigate the divisive climate of 2024? How should a Christian navigate this divisive climate of 2024? And we've heard this said in plenty of corners, and I don't think it's inaccurate, that this is one of, if not the most, divided time in our nation's history. There's been other times in our history where we've been divided. Obviously, the Civil War was pretty divisive. The era of Martin Luther King and the Vietnam War, I did not experience that, but I understand America was divided then. But I'm not sure that our country has ever been more ideologically divided. So extreme, so combative, and frankly, so judgmental of the side that's not you. We saw this in COVID. We saw it play out where we make everything political. There's a worldwide pandemic. It's a health and science issue. And how long did it take us? How long to run to our corners and begin to lob grenades at the other side for not thinking what we thought about how this should be handled? How long did it take us? Weeks. Before we kind of figured out, okay, who's going to be on what side? And what do I need to do to align with my side? And then we begin to judge the other side for not being as smart as us about science. And I remember in COVID, me personally, but I think you guys can relate. Thinking that everyone who took their mask off before I did, everyone who started going maskless in public was a right-wing lunatic. And everybody who wore their mask a little bit longer than I thought was necessary was a flaming liberal. That's what we thought. Sides had a uniform in COVID. It's ridiculous. I've lived this one out personally. Talk about how everything's divided and we assign politics to everything. The first few years I was here, I drove a Nissan Leaf, okay? And I got made fun of viciously for that. And here's the thing, I should have, all right? If you drive a Leaf, you're a nerd, okay? Deal with it. I did. But do you know that because of what I drove, and I drove it to save money, by the way, which I did. $220 cost of ownership in three years. It was worth it. But do you know that because of what I drove, people assumed I was a Democrat? Because of the car I drove. Not anything I said or preached. Not because of which news channel I consumed from, which that's a dead giveaway. They thought because of what I drove, I was a Democrat. And if you drive a Ford pick-em-up truck, people probably think you're a Republican. And if that pick-em-up truck is a Ranger and it's more than 20 years old, you are definitely a libertarian. 100%. Our culture is crazy divided. And I've been watching as a pastor for years. And I'm telling you, the way the church has behaved in that division grieves my heart. And we're talking about it in church because that divisiveness has begun to creep into the church. And since it's beginning to divide the church, we have to talk about it in the church. And here's how I know it's entered into the church. Because of this one question that we've heard, that we've asked, that we've been asked. How could you be a Christian and vote for blank? How could you possibly be a Christian and vote for blank? I told Laura, the lady running our slides this morning, that I left that blank open for her. She was free to put whatever she wanted there. She really wussed out. How can we be a, how could, this is, we asked this. How could you be a Christian and vote for him or vote for her? How could you claim to have a faith and back a party that is not aligned with your faith according to what I think your faith should be? How can you be a Christian and be happy about that policy, be happy about that ruling? How can you be a Christian and be sad about that policy or that ruling? Where what we do, and this is so important, is we begin to judge people's faith by their politics. The way that we think about politics should flow from the way that we think about our faith, that they should matter and be related. But where we get into trouble is when we start to judge the faith of a Christian brother or sister based on their politics and guys I'm telling you judging a Christian by their politics makes no more sense than judging my politics by my car it's foolish and we should be bigger than that. But we hear it over and over and over again. And so I would say this to us this morning as a church. If my politics cause me to question or cut off a Christian brother or sister, then I hold my politics too tightly. If I hold my political ideology so firmly that I judge the faith of a Christian brother and sister who doesn't vote like I do, or just overall intelligence, then what that tells me is that I'm holding my politics too tightly and I need to recalibrate. And listen, I know that this happens in this church because you have confessed it to me. Because I have had conversations with you on both sides where you will say something to me, you know, I love so-and-so, I just have a hard time understanding how they could vote that way. And it causes me to question them sometimes. On both sides. And that's damaging to the church. That's damaging to our unity. Can I just tell you? I've had the privilege of talking with plenty of folks from Grace about political issues who disagree with me a lot. But in that disagreement, and in our conversations over beers or dinner or whatever, you know what I have found about the side that thinks differently than me? That they love Jesus. That they know their scripture. That they're thoughtful in their vote. And that they deserve just as much credit for their ideas as I do for mine. There's this damaging way in the world where we frame up the side that doesn't vote like us as ignorant or silly or stupid or uninformed. And it's so funny to me how both sides think the other side is deceived and that they're the ones that know the right ways. We both think that of each other. Can we, this year, as believers, give people who don't vote like us the benefit of the doubt? Can we assume about them that they've put as much thought into their vote as I have into mine? That their vote is actually reflective of Christian values that they love and hold dear? And we just play those things out differently? Can we this year at Grace give the other side the benefit of the doubt? Let me tell you the biggest reason that we should do this. It's actually because of something that Jesus says in his prayer. I'll refer you back to John chapter 17, this time in verse 14. He says, I have given them your word and the world has hated them for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. He's talking about the disciples. And he says, they are not of this world any more than I am of this world. And I have a note in my Bible off to the side that just says citizens of heaven. And I think that's such an important principle for believers to understand. Once you are saved, once you accept Christ as your savior, once you believe that he is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Once you do that, you become a citizen of heaven. You are not of this world anymore. I brought this up in January to plant a seed of this idea in the congregation that we are citizens of heaven because I knew I was going to come to it in March when it came time for this. Guys, we are citizens of heaven. We are not citizens of the United States of America. We are, but that's beneath our ultimate citizenship. We are aliens here. We do not belong here. We are sojourners. The only reason God doesn't snap us right up to heaven once we become a Christian is so that we can take as many people with us along the way as is humanly possible. It's the only reason we're here. But we are citizens of heaven. We are not citizens here. Listen to me. This is so important. The church is above partisan American politics. We're above it. Politics are beneath us. Do you understand? The church is above that. We exist above the fray. We ought not get mired in silly Facebook debates and arguments with people that only lead to anger and are not productive. We're above that, church. We're citizens of heaven. Our fidelity is to God. Our nation is in eternity. This temporal stuff, see, to people who don't believe, to people who don't have a faith, politics is a huge deal because it's how you bring about change and it's how you affect the world and it's how you form it into what you want it to be. But we skip a step, guys. We're not going to American politics. We're not looking at the president of the Supreme Court or the Senate or the governor or any of that to bring about the will of God. We're looking to God to pull those levers. We serve something higher. And when we get mired in the divisiveness of the world, in the grenade throwing and in the lobbying and in the attacking and in the judgment, we forget who we are. And I'm not saying this to upset anyone or to offend anyone, but maybe it can help us frame up the way we think about ourselves and what our relationship to politics ought to be. And listen, I'm not saying that Christians shouldn't have political opinions. I have a ton. I'm not going to say a single one of them from here. But I'd love to talk with you about them. I'd love to have a conversation. I get so much from talking about different ideas with people. I love it. Be as interested as you want. I have nothing to say to you about that. Be as disinterested as you want. I have nothing to say to you about that. My goal this morning is not at all to tell you how to vote or to even get you to think about your vote. My only goal this morning is to get us to think about how we think about people who don't vote like we do. So here's my prayer. And here's what I want to invite you into with me. Let's all pray that in 2024, grace can be an oasis of unity and a desert of division. Let's make it our prayer that this place, we don't get to impact Big C Church, but we can decide who we want to be here. That grace will be an oasis of unity and a desert of division. This is actually something I'm proud of Grace about. We are a purple church. We have people on both sides. And we play nice together. And I'm so grateful for that. But I think that we have strides to take. I think that we have room to grow. And I want to know that the people of grace, as we're interacting in the community, as we carry ourselves through the rest of this year, and guys, it's only going to get worse. It's only going to get worse. The division and the disunity and all the lob throwing and all the garbage, all the crud, it's only going to get worse. What if, as that happens around us, we can be this oasis of unity that sees ourself above the fray, that understands that we are citizens of heaven first, loyal to our Savior before a country. And we're actually unified. And we actually love each other. And we refuse to allow the divisiveness out there creep into here and disrupt what God wants to do with us. So in 2024, please pray with me that grace will be an oasis of unity and a desert of division. Thank you for listening and for not walking out. If you have questions about anything, I'd love to get an email and have a conversation. I'm going to pray and then in a show of unity, we're going to shout out to God together. Let's pray. Father, we are sorry for where we have allowed our political ideology to color the way we think about your children. And Father, we ask that you would remove that sin from us. Father, I ask that you would remove it from me. Lord, the enemy and the world would seek to distract your church by dividing us with small fights and squabbles. Would you remind us, God, that we don't belong here, we belong with you, that we are citizens of heaven, and that we are above what's happening now. Help us be agents of peace and unity in our various circles of influence. Help us to be beacons that shine above the fray as this is going to be a hard year for our country and for our communities. God, unite us under you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Hi, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I dive into the sermon, a couple things about worship. First of all, Carly B. killed it on that last song. That was great. Yeah, I don't know where she is, but good job, Carly. Her last name is Buchanan, so we call her Carly B. around here. And then the second thing, I just want to let you in on something. And I feel like this is an important matter to bring to the church. Aaron's back there. He knows what I'm about to talk about. I don't know if you noticed during the second song that Carly and Aaron were smiling and looking at me, and I was laughing. Here's why, and I feel like we should all weigh in on this as partners. If you're not from the South, I don't care what you think about this. One of my favorite things about hymns, I'm just totally, this has nothing to do with anything. I'm just telling you a story. One of my favorite things about hymns is how liberal the writers are with apostrophes. In hymns, they'll apostrophe anything, right? And one of my favorite ones is victory. Not victory like an obnoxious carpetbagger. Victory like a southerner. You know what I'm saying? Like victory. It's best in Victory in Jesus, that old hymn. So anyways, last week we're singing that song that we sang, the second one. What's that called, Aaron? I'm not telling. And there's victory in there. There's the word victory in there, but you sing it victory. You know, you sing it like that, but it's not apostrophe. Now it's bummed out. And then like two slides down, we apostrophed flowers, the E in flowers. How do you even, flowers, how do you even say that? That's not a thing. How are we going to apostrophe flowers and not victory? So it just made me mad. And I told Aaron and Carly last week, and I didn't know we were singing it this week. So it comes up and they're both giggling at me and I'm grinning at them. Anyways, now you know too, and we can together peer pressure him to fix the lyrics. So there is an apostrophe and victory as the Lord intended. Okay, let's get started. Actually, these words don't mean anything to you because I know that I'm the boy that cries excited. I know that. I'm excited about everything that I get to preach. I know that I say that to you. I'm really excited about this. This is a sermon that I knew I was going to preach as soon as we planned the series. I knew that we would arrive at this passage, and I've been very much looking forward to diving into it with you. So if you have a Bible with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn it to John chapter 13. This is the beginning of the Upper Room Discourse. You'll remember that this is a series called Final Thoughts. These are the final things that Jesus shared with the disciples before he was arrested and tried and crucified. And so it's just Jesus and the disciples in the upper room, and he has some final thoughts for them, and they're in John chapters 13 through 17. So the back half of John chapter 13, after washing their feet, Jesus starts to share with them. And if you look at verses 34 and 35, I'm not sure that you could definitively say what the most important and profound words of Christ are in his whole life. I don't know that there would be an agreement among scholars or pastors or believers as to what are the most important, most profound words Jesus ever spoke. But I know that you couldn't have that conversation without talking about what we find in those verses. I believe that what Jesus says here is so profound and powerful that hyperbole is lost on the import of these verses. So I want to look at them and read them with you. If you're a believer, I hope these are well-trodden verses for you. I hope you already almost know them before I even say them. And I hope, if you have your Bible with you, that you'll grab a pen and that you'll underline these verses. And that you'll highlight some of the phrases. We're going to spend the whole morning in these two verses, and we're going to look at three profound statements that Jesus makes in this compact section of text. And I hope that you'll take a pen and you'll underline and you'll mark. I hope that you'll make notes for yourself in your Bible. I've learned from a young age that if you show me a Bible that's falling apart, then I'll show you a person who isn't. So let's beat up our Bibles. Let's mark in them. Let's scratch in them. And let's note this passage together. John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. This is Jesus speaking. A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. That's a well-worn passage. This is a passage we ought to be familiar with. This is a passage of which the profundity cannot be overstated. It's so profound and stuck with the disciples so much in their memory that 30 years later, when two people who were in the room, Peter and John, when they write their epistles, when they write their letters to the church to be spread throughout the church and read throughout the church, they both included this maxim in their instructions, in their brief instructions to the church. In 1 Peter 4, 8, Peter says, above all else, love one another dearly. After everything's said and done, love one another dearly. John, in his three letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, over and over and over again, if you say you believe in God and you do not love your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. He brings it back to love, back to love, back to love. Even Paul, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, was not in this room, did not hear this teaching personally, but heard it proclaimed by the disciples after him. When Paul writes his letter to Corinth, he ends it with that famous love passage. And he says, now after everything is said and done, in eternity, these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these? Love. We cannot overstate the importance, the efficacy, and the power of love. And this is what Jesus commands us here. It's how he opens his closing remarks. And so if it's so powerful and effective that everyone who's ever followed Jesus has reminded the people that they lead of this command, then we ought to look at the command and examine it and pick it apart and seek to understand it. And, I think, let the power of it wash over us. So the first portion of the text I want to point you to, a profound statement, is when he says this, a new command I give you. A new command I give you. Underline that in your Bible. Here's why this is profound. We know, because we have the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is God. We understand the deity of Christ. They did not. They did not yet understand the deity of Christ. Certainly not the way that we do. You remember that when they're on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is sleeping in the hull of the ship and the wind and the waves are crashing, that they go down and they wake Jesus up. And he says, peace be still. And the storm calms. And he goes back to sleep, a little bit annoyed that his nap got interrupted. And the disciples looked at each other. And they said, it's in the text. And they said, who is this that even the wind and the waves would obey him? They still do not understand the deity of Christ. In this moment, they understand loosely the deity of Christ, but not like we do. And so when Jesus says this new command I give you, he is placing himself solidly in the Trinity. He is placing himself as God because a new command has not been given for 4,000 years. 4,000 years ago, Moses walked down the mountain with two tablets of stone with a lot more than 10 commandments written on them. If you read the text, you find it was the 10, but then they were covered front and back. There's 630 some odd laws in the Old Testament based on Mosaic law. Nobody in Israel since then had given a new commandment because nobody had the authority to do it. Moses gave the commandments from God himself. God himself wrote on those tablets and gave them to Moses, and no one had questioned it since then. No one gives new commandments. That's not a thing that you can do unless you're God. So when Jesus says this, he's claiming that he is God. And I don't know how to help us understand how radical what he's doing is, but the only thing I can equate it to is our Bill of Rights, our Constitution. No citizen can just decide, I'm going to add an amendment. I hereby declare, and then add an amendment. As a matter of fact, we'll test this out. I'd like to add one right now. I hereby declare as an amendment to the United States Constitution that daylight savings time is stupid and abolished. I woke up an hour and a half late this morning. I should have only been a half hour late. But daylight savings time. It's stupid. And likes it. And nobody needs it. We're long since agrarian. All right. Nebraska can keep it if they want it. We're squared away. Thanks. But that doesn't do anything. I don't just get to add amendments willy-nilly. There's a whole process. If we can't add amendments to a document that some guys wrote 200 years ago, you definitely can't start adding commandments that God wrote 4,000 years ago. But Jesus does. And he says it's a new one. And this commandment, one of the things that makes it so radical, is that this commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. This commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. It's not that Jesus is saying, you don't have to worry about any of the stuff that you've been commanded previously. Go be adulterers. Go murder people. Knock yourselves out as long as you're loving people on the way. You're good. That's not the idea. We get a glimpse of the idea earlier in Christ's life when someone says, what's the greatest commandment? And the response is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the greatest commandments with promise. On these hang the law and the prophets, meaning the entire Old Testament. And so what Jesus says in that statement is, basically, if you'll focus on loving God and loving others, the commandments will take care of themselves. It's not that you won't be walking in obedience or you'll be walking in disobedience to them. It's that you will automatically obey them by default. And so Jesus is being even more succinct here with this new commandment to love others as I have loved you and saying, as a matter of fact, just love others as I have loved you. Because if you're doing that, if you are loving the people in your life as Jesus loves us, you will by default be loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Because you cannot love as Jesus loved if you're not fueled by Jesus. You will by default. you're not going to have an affair. You're not going to go around murdering. You're not going to steal. You're not going to say unkind words. You're going to outdo one another in hospitality. You're going to be generous. You're going to be humble. You're not going to be greedy if we simply love other people as Christ loved us. It's the command that summarizes all the other commands, which makes it such an impactful command. And here's why it takes walking with Jesus to love like Jesus. Because Jesus loved in superhuman ways. That's the second big one I want you to underline. Let me just say it real quick. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. That's the new command. Now here's why this is so radical. Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever let someone into your life? Made yourself vulnerable to them? Given them the power to hurt you? And they have? Which, by the way, I think is vitally important to live vulnerable lives and have people invited into our life who do have the power and the capacity to hurt us because they know us that well and we love them that much. That's okay. That's a good thing. But have you ever done that with somebody who then betrayed you? Who used that exposure to hurt you? I know I've not experienced terrible betrayal, but I've tasted it. I've let people in, shared things, been vulnerable with them, and then that ended up getting used against me. That ended up getting turned towards me. That ended up with them judging me and not loving me. And that's hard. I shared years ago about when I did a sermon on forgiveness about a dear friend of mine whose husband had been having multiple affairs and it all blew up in their face one day. She had five kids under the age of 10. That's betrayal. I've never experienced betrayal like that. But I've tasted what it is to let someone in and then watch them hurt me. And if you've experienced betrayal too, let me ask you a question. If you could go back to when that person who hurt you entered into your life, and there was some sort of divine whisper that came to you and said, hey, just so you know, if you let this person in, they will hurt you. They are going to betray you. They're going to let you down and betray your confidence. If you somehow knew that at the very beginning of the relationship where they entered your life, if you knew it, how differently would you treat them? How much would you let them in? Would you let them in at all? When I think of the people who've hurt me, I go back to those places. If you were to ask me that question, hey, if you knew at the beginning that they were going to hurt you if you let them in, what would you do? I wouldn't be their friend. I wouldn't let them in. If my life forced me to be around them, I would be very guarded. I would have treated them completely differently. How would you treat the people in your life who have hurt you if you knew at the onset that they were going to do that? Would you have loved them differently? Would you have not let them in? Would that relationship have looked different? Something occurred to me as I was thinking through this passage. Immediately before Jesus starts this teaching, do you know what happened? He washed the feet of the disciples. And then he said, one of you is going to betray me. And then it comes that it was Judas. And he looked at Judas and he says one of the coolest lines in the Bible, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And Judas goes to betray him. Don't miss this. Jesus knew. He knew when he invited him in. When he called Judas to be his disciple. He knew. He knew he was going to get betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He knew that. He knew who Jesus was when he walked up to him and he tapped his shoulder and he said, I want to invite you into my life for three years. I want you to spend every day with me. And I know what you're going to do at the end of those three years and you don't even know it yet. Jesus knew, man. And here's what's amazing. Nobody else did. We have no indication whatsoever from the text that Jesus treated Judas any differently than any of the other disciples. When they're sitting around the table, and Jesus says, one of you is going to betray me, nobody went, it's Judas, isn't it? I knew. I could tell. Nobody did that. Because Jesus treated them all the same. You understand that? He loved them all the same. For three years, he loved Judas with the same consistency and compassion and tenderness that he loved John. Polar opposite of a disciple. Is that not remarkable? How could you do that? How could you walk every day with someone who was going to betray you to be killed? Not just hurt your feelings like a little sissy, but betray you to be killed. Was gonna be the one who kissed you on the cheek to identify you to the guard of the high priest so that they could arrest you and beat you and kill you. And you love them the exact same as all their peers. Right before Jesus was betrayed, he washed Judas' feet. His grimy, sandaled, third world feet. So that he could go collect his betrayal money with clean toes. He had the freshly minted, humble love of Christ on his feet when he went to cash his check. And that's how Jesus loves Judas. Now here's what's important. You are Judas. I am Judas. We have, all of us, betrayed Christ in word and thought and deed. All of us have trampled on the grace of Christ. All of us have presumed upon his mercy. All of us have cheapened the blood of his sacrifice with our actions and our attitudes and our words. All of us. We are Judas. And yet, knowing the betrayal that you would bring, Jesus loves you anyways. That's the reckless nature of the love that we just sang about a few minutes ago. He continues to pursue us. He continues to come after us. He knows you're going to betray him in word and deed. He knows that you're going to trample on his death. He knows that you're going to cheapen his blood. He knows that and he loves you anyways. And you push him away and you betray him and you act in a way during the week that you won't act on a Sunday morning or you won't act on small group or you'll watch things that you're not supposed to watch. You'll take in things that you're not supposed to take in. You'll foster attitudes that you know he doesn't love and that he doesn't approve of. But he died for those anyways. He knew that you were going to betray him over and over and over again and he died for you anyways. He went anyways. He washed your feet anyways. He loved you anyways. That's how Jesus loves. So when Jesus says, go and love as I have loved you, that's what he means. Go love other people like I love Judas. It's not fair. They're going to hurt you. Okay, that's how I loved. They're not going to reciprocate. You're going to feel foolish. Okay. That's how I loved. It's going to cost something from me that I'm not going to get back. Okay. That's how I loved. That love is so powerful and profound that loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. Loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. We just spent two weeks on abiding in Christ. Two weeks on what it means to abide in him. If we are not abiding in Christ, there is no possible way we can love like Jesus loved. And what's interesting is the promise of abiding is abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. What's the fruit of abiding in Christ? This kind of love. Sacrificial, reckless love that overcomes betrayal and humanity and hardship. This is the fruit of abiding in Christ. And here's what's remarkable about this fruit. Here's, not only does loving others as Christ loved us keep us in line with all the commandments, not only does it keep us attached to him and abiding in him because it's the only possible way to love like that, but it also becomes our defining marker. This is the third remarkable statement that we find in these verses. The third one, underline this. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples. Love, we are told, church, is to be our defining marker to the world. And it's interesting to me how off the mark we can get. I remember one time when I missed the mark really, really badly. I was 15 years old, and we were hosting at our house Thanksgiving or Christmas for my mom's family that year. And we were a teetotaling house. No alcohol at all, ever. It was demon's liquor. And my aunt came over with, at the time, her roommate, Molly. And they brought with them a bottle of wine. And we didn't have a corkscrew in the house. We didn't have a wine opener. And so my mom said, son, will you go next door and borrow a corkscrew from our neighbor? And I, in my misguided 15-year-old piety, said, absolutely not. We don't drink alcohol in this house. And we're not starting today. Not doing it. God help my parents. I must have been impossible. Don't worry. Have you met Lily? I've got it coming. I'm going to walk the path. I refused to go. And my mom, I think probably a little misguidedly proud of me then, and now she's as ashamed of this as I am, didn't make me. I just said, well, looks like we're not doing it today, Indiana. And they put their bottle of wine back in the car. Now, Deanna and Molly had walked away from the church at that point. And as I reflect back on my actions that day, I'm so ashamed that I thought that the defining marker for my faith that day needed to be my piety and my holiness and the rules that I followed and the things that I did and didn't do. And we get really misguided at church that the best Christians are the ones who have the best grasp on their behavior, who do the things they're supposed to do and don't do the things they're not supposed to do, and the best knowledge of Scripture. We tend to judge someone's faith not by how well they love, which is what Jesus says the defining marker should be, but we judge the faith of others by how well they've reined in their behavior and how much they've learned about scripture. And don't get me wrong, those things are important. God is a God of holiness. He does want us to press towards piety, but the press towards piety, the press towards holiness, the press towards righteousness, the press towards having a guilt-free conscience should be in a desire to love as Jesus loved, not in a desire to prove ourselves and our holiness to others. And what kind of damage, what message did it send to my aunt that day? Rejection? Judgment? Holier than thou? It was a singularly unloving act to not just go get the stupid corkscrew. And instead, they felt judged. There's no way my actions turned them on to the church. There's no possible way I did that and they're like, you know what? I see Jesus in that boy. I want to know that Jesus because I want to start telling other people where they're screwing up. But isn't that historically what we look to to define spirituality. When Jesus says, the defining marker of your faith, how I want the world to know you, is by your love for other people. It ought to be our defining characteristic. And I'm not going to wade too deeply into these waters this morning because I don't have time and it's messy. But I would simply ask you, as you think about where church sits in the culture of America, is that our defining characteristic? Is that what the outside world would say that we are known for? It is, however, one of the things I am proud of grace for. Because I do think there are spots and moments where we do this really, really well. And what we see when we love really well is that love is actually the greatest apologetic. Love is the most compelling argument for Christ, especially in a culture saturated with church. If there's somebody in your neighborhood, if there's somebody you work with, if there's a friend that you have on your tennis team or wherever you go, and they don't go to church, let me tell you something. It's not because they haven't heard about it. It's not because they don't know. It's not because they haven't heard the name of Jesus and they're just waiting to be told. They know. And let me tell you something. The people that you know who don't go to church, can I just tell you, they have a reason. And can I tell you this? It's probably a good one. So the greatest apologetic to a culture of people who have on purpose turned away from the church is to love them well. It's more convincing than any book. It's more convincing than A Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, although that's a great one. It's more convincing than any argument or TV show. Showing them the love of Christ compels them towards Christ. I think this is the way I put it. Loving someone in the name of Jesus compels them towards Jesus. Loving someone in the name of Christ like Christ loves compels them towards Christ. And here's why I think it can be so effective and so contagious. I heard this story a couple of weeks ago, and I was so proud when I heard it. In the fall, we had the Addis Jamari, one of our great ministry partners doing great work with the orphans in Ethiopia, had an event last fall. And whenever there's an AJ event, Addis Jamari, it's like 75% grace people, at least, right? And so one of our partners invited some friends that they used to work with to come to the event and see what AJ does. And the friends that they invited are a part of a church in the kind of way that there's a church where you're on their membership role, which is, and you have to remove your letter and stuff like that, which is, I don't understand. I don't understand it. I got a, germane to nothing, I got a letter early on in my tenure here that someone who I had never met was requesting removal of their letter from this church to this other church down the road. And I just wrote them back and I was like, consider all letters moved, ever. You don't have to ever ask me this again. I don't know what this means. So some churches had their letter for like 20 years, but they don't really go. I haven't been since their kids went around. They're kind of cold to church. But they came to this AJ event. And after spending an evening around grace people, they pulled my friend aside and they said, there's something different here. You guys actually like, you like each other. You guys see, everyone knows everyone's name. You seem to get along. This is not like churches we've been around. We want to find out more about your church. So they did. They went to dinner. They told them a little bit more. And I've gotten to spend some time around them. And they say that they're wanting to start coming. They may be watching online. Hey. But it wasn't an argument. It wasn't an invitation. It wasn't a book. It wasn't a moment of conviction. It was an exposure to a group of people who want to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. It was an exposure to the love and the community shared in the church. And they said, I want to be a part of that. That is a compelling love. The challenge, church, is not simply to love each other that way, but to love everyone that way and to be obedient to this new command. Can you imagine with me the power and efficacy of a church that is zealous about loving as Christ loves. Can you imagine how contagious that faith would be? Can you imagine how exuberant our worship would be every Sunday? Can you imagine how much better I'm going to have to step it up to preach to you because you've been preaching to yourself the love of Christ every day and loving everybody in your neighborhood? Can you imagine the power of a group of people who comes together and takes seriously this new command that Jesus gives us and says, you know what? Everything else is fine. It'll take care of itself. I'm going to focus on the loving. And we took steps to abide in Christ, to walk with him, and we let him produce the fruit in our lives, which is this love. And we love everybody the way that Jesus loves Judas and loves us. Can you imagine what God could do with a church of people like that? I asked you earlier, what do you think the Big C Church is known for? What's our defining characteristic? And I don't know where you went and I don't know what you thought, but here's what I do know. We don't have any say over what other churches do, nor should we, by the way. We barely deserve say here, I question it. But we have say over who we are and over what we do. And wouldn't it be amazing if when people heard the name Grace Raleigh in our community, if the first thing they thought was, that church loves well. What if that were our defining characteristic? Let's make it so, Grace. Let's be Christians who love well. Let's be Christians who make that our identifying trait over and above all the other elements of our faith. And let's watch what God can do with a church of people who love like him. Let's pray. Father, we love you because you love us. We can never hope to love like you without you. We thank you for your reckless, sacrificial love. For watching your son suffer and die the way that he did. So that you could claim souls to heaven that would betray you and trample on you over and over again on our way there. God, if nothing else, would we sit humbly and graciously in the reality of your love for us? And as we do that, Father, would it please compel us to go love others in your name? We ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You guys have not gotten the memo. Church attendance spikes in January and February and then begins to dip in March. There's too many of you here. I hope this is a problem we continue to have. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I've really enjoyed getting to spend the last four weeks in the Upper Room Discourse, the final statements of Jesus to his disciples the night that he was arrested and crucified. And so we are calling this series His Final Thoughts because these are the last things he shares with just the intimate group of disciples. And we find this discourse in John, the back half of chapter 13, all the way through chapter 17, where we get this beautiful prayer of Christ called the High Priestly Prayer. I'm excited to be focused on that for two weeks here in another few weeks. But like Mike, our double-duty coffee guy and announcer guy this morning told us, we spent last week in the concept of abiding in Christ and why it's so important. And last week I said that the invitation to abide in Christ is a gift of simplicity amidst a world of confusion and chaos. That we're all asking ourselves these major questions. Am I making the right decision? And am I being a good fill in the blank, whatever you are. And that when we abide in Christ, the promise there is that Jesus will say yes, that we will do what we are supposed to do and that we will be what we are supposed to be when we simply focus on abiding in Christ. And we left off with this question of that's great, but life is still confusing and chaotic. Life is still very busy. I still have to do carpool. I still have to make the meetings. I still have to make the calls. I still have to do the things. I still have to live a life. So how do I abide in Christ, short of going to a monastery, in my life now? How do I abide? And so that's what we're tackling this week. So this week's sermon, really, if I'm being honest, is more of a seminar. This is intended to be practical and to be applicable to your life. So I would tell you up front that I do not expect everybody in the room to do all the things that I'm saying. Some of us aren't ready for them yet. Some of us have already started doing those things. Some of them it's not new. So I don't expect everything I say and suggest this morning to go, oh my gosh, that's so great. I've never thought about that. But my hope and my prayer is that there can be two or three things that you hear that will change your life because you begin to instill them into your life and it changes the course of your life. So that's my goal for you, that you'd pick up just a handful of things this morning that you can begin to apply in your life right away. As we answer this question together, how do I abide in Christ just day in and day out? How do I walk with the Lord? So to remind us of what we're talking about, I just wanted to start off by reading the passage. It's not going to be on the screen. And we're having some gremlins on the screen this morning. So if all of a sudden it just goes out, don't worry about it. Just keep following along. The only song we have left is How Great Thou Art. Most of you know it. So we'll be all right. If you have a Bible, open to John chapter 15. Read with me verses 4 and 5. This is where we are last week and this week. Jesus is speaking. Remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. And we talked last week about how some translators choose the word remain and some choose the word abide. I memorized this passage or got acquainted with this passage with an abide translation, so that's why I say abide. But the concept is the exact same. So here's what I want to do. As we ask the question, how do we day-to-day abide in Christ? What I want to do is I want to give you three guiding principles for abiding in Christ, and then we want to look at how we can apply those guiding principles to the different areas of our life, to our work or our school, to our home, to our friendships, and then to our alone time. So that's where we're going to go this morning. First of the three guiding principles to how can I daily abide in Christ is simply anchor your day in Christ. If you want to abide in Christ, anchor your day in Christ. If you have been here, if you have come to more than four services, you have heard me say at some point that the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. It's what I consider a keystone habit. There are some habits that are so fundamental that they begat other habits. This is one of those for us, especially for believers. We need to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer for myriad reasons. But if you're a parent, how are you going to teach your children the scriptures if you don't know them? If there's a verse in the Bible that says, I will hide God's word in my heart that I might not sin against you, how are we going to do that if we don't study the Bible on our own? How are we ever going to become acquainted with God's word in such a way that we can teach it and instruct it and know it and it nourishes us if the only bit of God's word are what we're getting from church every Sunday. It just won't work. This Sunday, I just read you two verses that I read you last Sunday. I'm going to read you one more verse in Philippians. That's the verse eight. Aaron read six, or where did you start? Four. Four through seven. And then I'm going to do eight. All right? So that's five verses or four verses, however the math works there. And then two more right now. That's it. That's all you're getting this week if you're not reading the Bible on your own. So we've got to read the Bible on our own. Similarly, we've got to pray on our own. We have to pursue the presence of God. We have to find a spot, get on our knees, and pray. I think posture is important in prayer. I'm not saying you have to do it. I'm just saying it helps me when I pray. And, you know, I know that some people say I'm not a morning person. I like to do my quiet time later in the day. That's fine. Do it whenever you want to do it. But for me, I anchor my day in it. I've got to start out that way. Find a place, find a habit that works for you and anchor your day in Christ by having a quiet time. If you don't know how to have a quiet time, if you're in a rut, if you need some suggestions, if you just like some more information, I've done a couple of things. I wrote a daily devotion guide. It's on the information table out there. We have two tables. We have a coffee table and an information table. You guys can piece it together where it is. This is just a guide on how much do I read, where do I read, when I pray, what do I pray about, how do I pray. And there's some resources in there. So if you're in a rut, there's some suggestions of some places that you can go and know how to have a quiet time. So I made that for you guys if you need it. And then there's also one of these, a Bible translation guide. There's a bunch of different translations of the Bible. A lot of times I get asked which one's right for me, which one should I be reading? And this is the answer, okay? This kind of tells you there's three major approaches to how translations are done, and I detail those, and that might help you as you decide which one you want to use in your daily study. But the first guiding principle is to anchor our day in Christ. We have to start with a quiet time if we're going to hope to be walking with Christ through the day. The second one is to practice the presence of Christ. If we want to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ. I'm stealing this phrasing from a 17th century French monk named Brother Lawrence. I don't know what his actual name was, but when he went to the monastery, he took on the name Brother Lawrence. It's called The Practice of the Presence of God. It is the single best book on prayer I've ever read. I believe for some of you, the thing you're supposed to get from the sermon this morning is to go read The Practice of the Presence of God. You can write that down on your bulletin or type it out on your phone, and then you don't have to listen anymore. As a matter of fact, if you want to leave to just make some space for other people, you can do that. Go get the book and read. It's a phenomenal book, Practice the Presence of God. But one of the things I pulled from that is this idea of being constantly with Christ, just knowing that wherever I go, I'm taking Him with me. And so it taught me this little phrase that sometimes I'm spiritual enough to remember, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, if you're a Christian, he tells us in the upper room discourse that he gives us the spirit. We have his spirit with us. Everywhere we go, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. As I go into a meeting at work, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. As I go into my office, as we go into traffic, as we go into the store, as we interact with the slow person behind the cash register, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, this should be our mantra. This should be what we repeat to ourselves. We take it into and out. We take him with us into and out of every situation. On the golf course, I am with Christ. At work, I am with Christ. At home, I am with Christ. Practicing the presence of Jesus. A story that kind of brings this home for me that I heard years ago. I heard it one time and I've never forgotten it. And I think I may have told it to you guys before, but indulge me. This is not a true story. This did not actually happen. If it did actually happen, it would be super weird. So it's a fable, all right, but it makes a good point. So there's this church, and there's this one guy in the church who's known just to be a phenomenal prayer. He has a remarkable prayer life. He's incredibly disciplined. He's the guy they always call on for the public prayers. Prayers are beautiful. And he's just this monkish spiritual figure in the church. Everyone respects him. Darn it. Chris Lott is a buddy of mine. He's sitting right here. He's looking at me, and I just edited about four jokes at his expense, and then I lost my train of thought because you had some sort of dumb grin on your face because you knew. Because you knew it. You knew I was thinking that, didn't you? Yeah, that's right. All right, well, let's get back on track, buddy. I don't even know what I was talking about. Oh, the story. The story. This godly guy, the story. Well, sorry. Then the lights were shining off your head. I got distracted again. So some guys from the church said, we want to hear his prayer life. We want to hear. He's such a great prayer. I bet his prayer at the end of the day is phenomenal. I want to hear his prayer at the end of the day. I want to know what his conversation is with God when he closes out his day and goes to bed. And so they decide what they're going to do, and this is how we know it's not true, is they hide in his closet. We're going to hide in his closet. We're going to wait for him to go to bed. So they're in there. They're doing whatever you do when you're hiding in somebody's closet. And then he comes in. It's nighttime. It's 930. It's time to tuck in. And so he does his routine. He brushes his teeth. He does whatever he does. And then they're expecting he's going to kneel next to the bed. He's going to pray. But he doesn't kneel. It's weird. He just gets in. And they're like, okay, I didn't think laying down prayer. But maybe he's trying to prostrate himself like Christ did in the garden. Maybe that's what he's doing. He's going to pray that way. And he gets in, and he pulls up the covers, and he rolls over, and all they do is hear him say, goodnight Jesus. And that was it. Which makes a phenomenal point about an active, everyday, constant prayer life, and obedience to Paul's instructions in Thessalonians, pray without ceasing. So if we are going to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ and bring him with us everywhere we go and talk to him constantly. Now, I know some people are actually pretty good at this. Some people are actually pretty good at doing what I just call like kind of sniper shot prayers throughout the day. Just kind of one-offs of God help me here, God help me here, God help me here. And that's great. And then other people are good at the basing foundational prayer where we pray about all the things in the morning. And some people are good at both, and that's really great. But if you are good at one and not the other, then maybe turn the dial on the other and let's see that prayer life start to escalate. But that's practicing the presence of Christ. The third guiding principle, and I think this one's so important, especially now, is consume what draws you to Christ. Consume what draws you to Christ. And I use that word consume very intentionally because I believe we have got to be, if we consider ourselves, if we consider whoever's alive one generation, we have got to be the most consumptive generation of humans that have ever walked the planet. We have to be. We are all day, every day. And the younger you get, the worse it is. All day, every day, taking things in, consuming things, conversation, media, TV, phone, all the time, radio, podcasts, all the time. It's just piped into it. The world has a funnel into our brain, just shoving information in there all the time. I mean, if you think about it, almost, I'm 42, I'll be 43 here in a little bit. So almost 30 years ago, I was sitting in the DMV getting my driver's license. And the DMV has made zero innovations in 30 years. And it's still just as satanic as it was then. It's terrible. It's the worst place on earth. And when you go there, because they have engineered it to make you hate it, it's slow. It takes forever. And when I was waiting two hours to go back a car up into some cones, I, you know what I did for those two hours of the DMV? Nothing. You just sat there and you stared at the wall and you counted bricks and you wondered why it was taking so long, and you thought about your life. You contemplated all the decisions that had led you there. If you wanted something to do at the DMV, you took a book. You took a Sudoku thing or something. I don't think they had invented Sudoku in 1997. But you know what you do now? When you have 30 seconds of dead time, you have 30 seconds of something not entertaining you, don't raise your hand. How many of you at traffic lights grab your phone? He's like, I don't know what to do anymore. And you just grab it because you need something to look at, something to inform you, something that you consume. We are the most consumptive generation of people who have ever existed. We have no dead space in our life. So just as an aside, we should seek silence and stillness sometimes so that the Lord can speak to us. But living in the reality of how consumptive we are, when you do consume things, we need a filter. Is this pushing me closer to Jesus or is it pulling me away from him? Is this inspiring me and increasing my desire for Christ or is it decreasing my desire for Christ? The things that we have that take up our attention every day, we ought to at least assess whether or not they are inflaming us and impassioning us towards Jesus or whether they are blunting and muting that passion so that it fades away. We should at least be aware of that. And I'm not advocating that I think it's possible to just pipe spiritual things into ourselves at all times. But I am certain that all of us have some room to grow there. This is the reason why last year I took social media off my phone. Because I just got tired of the time that I was wasting on it and what I was consuming. There's only so many falling videos you can watch in a row before you feel like this can't be edifying twitter just made me angry now i will admit i have tick tock and i need to take that off my phone because it's too often that i'm not doing anything and then now all of a sudden i'm watching dumb videos we need to at least know what we're consuming what are we filling our brains with when we get in the car, when we go on a run, when we sit down at our office, when we have some alone time, when we're doing yard work? What are we consuming? And is what I'm consuming pushing me towards Christ or pulling me away from Christ? So those are the three guiding principles. Anchor your day in Christ, practice the presence of Christ, and then consume what draws you to Christ. If you apply those three things in your life, you will be abiding in Christ. Now, how do we practically do this? I want to look at work, I want to look at home, I want to look at fun, and I want to look at alone. So, at work, how do we practice these principles? Well, one thing that I do, it's the easiest for me in my schedule, is the very first thing I do when I get into the office most days is I pull out my Bible and I read, and then I kneel and I pray. I'm actually lately been thinking I need to switch up that habit, and I'm just saying this for the parents in the room. I have vivid memories in middle school and high school of coming downstairs every morning, and my mom's Bible would be open on the table next to her chair, and there'd be a coffee mug, usually with some lipstick on it. And there was evidence there that she had been spending time in the Word. And that gave me respect for her when she started instructing me on spiritual things. And I don't know what you think it would be like to be my parent, but it wasn't easy. I'll tell you that. But seeing the evidence. Of her dedication to Christ. Gave me respect. And I listened. And so now I've got a daughter. Who's starting to notice things. And I'm going to try to shift. My quiet times back to my office. At home. So that when she gets up. She can see it too. because I have that memory. So parents, if you've got kids growing up in the house, what do you want them to see? Can they see your devotional habits? But for some of us, maybe it makes more sense to have it at work. A very easy way to anchor our day in Christ at work and to practice the presence of Christ at work is to pray before everything. We park. Pray before you get out of the car. Father, remind me that you're with me. Remind me that I'm representing you. Be with me as I go. If you're working from home, when you do whatever you do to tell yourself, now I'm locked in and I'm working, before you do that, pray, Father, be with me today. Carry Christ with you into meetings. Before you go into meetings, pray over the meeting. Before you do the call, pray over the call. Before you write the report, pray over the report. Before you do anything in your work, pray over it. Give it to God. Acknowledge that he is with me and I am with him. And let me just speak especially to the people in the room who lead other people, to the people in the room with direct reports, bosses. It is, I realized it this week, I had not articulated it before, but it's a big goal of mine because we do have, I think, an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. If you're a leader and you call grace home, it is my fervent prayer that the people who work for you would say that their life is better because you're in it, because you care about them and you lead them well. So if you're a leader and you're about to have a conversation with a team member, especially if that conversation is hard or potentially negative or has some conflict or it's critical, please pray before that meeting. Pray before they come into your office. Pray before you pick up the phone. Pray and ask for the Spirit to be with you in that conversation. Practice the presence of Christ in your workplace. How do we practice the presence of Christ in our home? Well, I think it's very similar. One thing, right off the bat, is mom, dad, when you're out and you're working and you're coming home, right? And you know, you know what it is. You're going to open that door. There's going to be a whirlwind of noise. Everything is going to need, everybody is going to need everything from you all at once, right away. You know that routine. Stop and pray. I have a friend who says he, when his daughters were young, he used to pull off the side of the road about a mile short of the house. And he would stop and decompress and take off career hat and put on dad hat and pray that God would be with him before he walked in. And once he felt like he was in the right space, he pulled in the driveway. He was present for his children. He was present for his wife. Stop and bring Jesus with you and that peace into the house. Wake up every day. Spend time in God's word and time in prayer there at your home. Ask yourself, and I think this is a conversation that everybody in the church should have. If you live alone, then you consider it on your own. If you live with other people, talk with them, talk with your spouse. And really ask the question, do we have a Christ-centered home? How often is the name Jesus mentioned here? If we have children still living with us, how often do we talk about faith with them? Did they hear us as adults talking about Jesus? One of my favorite things that I see in my house and that I can brag on because she's not here right now is every morning before Lily and I walk out the door to go to school, I take her to school. I don't still attend. Before we go, Jen grabs Lily and she says, let me pray for you, baby. And she prays. And do you know how non-spiritual I am? Sometimes we're running late. And I'm looking at her going like, yo, the Holy Spirit needs to move you to pray faster. I'm wearing sweatpants. I don't want to walk in that school if they're late. I'm so bad. Every morning, she grabs that little girl, she hugs her, and she prays for her. What a gift to kids to do that. Every night, we do a little devotional with the kids before they, in their beds before they go to bed. We sing them songs. I sing them hym truly the center of your home? And if he's not, how can we make it that way? So that when I'm at home, I'm abiding in Christ. How do we abide in Christ with our friends? Listen, I love friends. Friends are super important to me. I love having a good time with friends. I love messing around with friends. It's great. I think friendships are a gift from God. But how do we abide in Christ in those friendships? And listen, this can be tricky because not all of us, not all of our friends are Christian friends. And that's a good thing because I believe that the most effective form of evangelism is friendship. So we should all have friends in our life who don't know Jesus. We should. But we should also have friends in our life that push us towards Jesus. I learned very young, my dad used to say all the time, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's so true. Proverbs says that. It says if you spend your time in the counsel of the wise, you will become wise. If you spend your time in the council of morons, you will become a moron. It's a loose paraphrase. I explain that in the translation guide out there. And we know that research shows that you become the five people you spend the most time around. We know that. So if we are going to abide in Christ, then we're going to need our friends' help. And if we're going to need our friend's help, then we need friends who are abiding in Christ and who push us in our walk with Christ. And here's what can happen sometimes with friends, even Christian friends, is they'll become, and this is what I call them, they'll become yuck-yuck clubs where you just get together and you don't talk about anything that matters. We're just laughing and swapping stories and making fun of people and telling jokes. And everyone's just laughing and giggling the whole time. And listen, I love yuck yuck clubs. I'm the charter member of several of them. They're fantastic. Or other times people get together and all it is is one big juicy gossesh. And if you don't know what that is because you're not as cool as me, they just gossip a lot about other people. They just get together and eventually it's just going to degenerate into, did you hear what so-and-so did? I was disappointed in so-and-so for this. And we just start throwing names around and talking about other people and it's not productive and it's not good and it's not wise. So listen, what I would say to you is this, if your friends never talk about things that matter, change the conversation or get new friends. If the people you spend the most time with never talk about things that matter, have the courage to change the conversation, to introduce new topics, to actually ask them how their marriage and how their spiritual life is going. Have the courage to change the topic. Have the courage to ask a real question amidst the laughter. Have the courage to cut off the gossip and redirect to another place, or, I'm being honest, get new friends. If you look through your landscape of friends and you see that you don't really have anyone there who spiritually encourages you on a regular basis, then truly, maybe your thing this morning is to begin to pray that God would reveal to you some more friends, some new friends that you can grow with. And while we're here, don't forget what I talked about in January when I talked about the importance of community in the middle of the prayer where it says, along with all the saints, and we talked about this idea of sacred spaces. The one or two or three people we have in our life where we can be completely open and completely honest and completely vulnerable. If we want to abide in Christ, we're going to need those spaces. But I do want to encourage you this morning to consider your friendships. Do you carry Jesus into those as well? Do you find them spiritually encouraging? Are they neutral? Do they push you away? We need spaces where we can go for that. And then lastly, how do we abide in Christ when we're alone? This one's a tricky one. I've been told for a long time that your character is who you are when no one is around. And I think when we're alone, this idea of what we consume becomes incredibly important. When you're alone, and I don't know what alone is for you. For me, alone is the family can be upstairs and I can be in the kitchen with earbuds in. I may as well be alone. I'm listening to a book or a podcast or something or when I'm working in the yard. When you have time to yourself, no one else has any input into you, what are you doing? When you go on your runs or your rides or your hikes or your walks, if you're listening to something, what are you listening to? If you're thinking about something, what are you thinking about? When you're in the car, how do you use that time? You're by yourself, how do you use that time? What do you listen to? What do you think about? When do you pray? When it's the end of the day and the house is quiet and you have your own space, and we all need that, what do you consume? What do you watch? What do you play? What do you listen to? What do you read? In the morning, when you wake up, no one else is around. What does your mind go to? What is it that you want to consume? What is it that you should consume? This is where it's really, really important to know what pushes you towards Christ and what pulls you away from Christ. And this is why I'm careful to throw down standards. You should watch these kinds of shows. You should not watch these kinds of shows. These kinds of books. These kinds of books. Whatever it is. Because it's different for everybody. But what I want to encourage in you is this sense. This filter in your heart. That you allow to be triggered with, this isn't really edifying. I don't really think this is what I need to be consuming. And turn it off, or put it down, or go to sleep, or go on a walk. But we need to be thoughtful and not just consume things by default. So if we want to abide in Christ, remember, we anchor our day in Christ. We practice the presence of Christ. We consume what draws us to Christ. We think about how to apply those principles in our work life, in our home life, in our private life, and in our friend life. And then I would simply say this as we wrap up. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. I've had seasons where I've been radical about this, where I just kind of look at my life and I realize I'm watching junk shows that I don't need to be watching. I'm reading books that aren't bad, but they don't really help me in any way. They don't help me get better. They're not pushing me towards Jesus. Maybe I haven't been having my quiet times like I should. I've stopped. My podcasts are all news. There's nothing spiritually encouraging there. I'm just not consuming anything that's helping me. And I go, oh my gosh. And I do a whole reset. And I just, and I'm just, I'm reading, I'm reading a book, I'm listening to a book, both are spiritually edifying, I'm having good conversations with my friends, I'm reading the Bible every day, I'm praying like I'm supposed to, and all the dead spaces is just spiritual, spiritual, spiritual. And maybe it's just me, I can't go that long doing that. Eventually, I want to know what Dan Levitard thought of the Super Bowl. Like eventually, I just get curious about other stuff. And there absolutely, there absolutely needs to be space for dead time. To just exist. To just rest. And that's fine. We all need that space. But use that space to rejuvenate you so that you're ready to begin pursuing Jesus again when you wake up, again when you get done with work, again when you get done with this. No one can be 100% on with this 100% of the time, but we all have big steps to take. So I hope this morning you've identified at least one or two that you can begin to apply in your life right now and that your day tomorrow will change. And I hope that you will ask, particularly if you have a spouse, is Christ the center of our home? How do we turn that dial a little bit more? How do we make him the center of our home? So I hope that you'll start doing a couple things this week. I'd love to hear stories about what you guys started and how that's worked for you. But I'm going to pray, and then're going to come up and we're going to do one more song together. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this great congregation of folks that love each other so well that I love so much. God, I just pray that if we heard things today that made us go, oh gosh, yeah, I need to do that. God, would you help us do it? Would you help us install some of these practices? It's fine that we know about them, God. But help us not be like the person who looks at himself in the mirror and then forgets what he looks like, hears your word and doesn't obey it. But help us to be the people who obey and to do. And God, would you help us to abide in you? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.