Sermons tagged with Empathy

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors of grace. Somebody over there is stinky because this side is full. You guys, I don't know what you're avoiding over here, but this is ridiculous. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in May in the rain. I keep expecting for us to get over. There's always a bump in attendance in the spring, January, February, March. And that usually lasts until Easter. And then you guys go to the beach like for the whole until August. I don't see you again. So I keep expecting that every week and you keep showing up. So I'm just I'm going to threaten you with this. You keep showing up. We're going to two services in the fall. OK, you just have to deal with it. I also just want to praise God sincerely for this. Gibby, our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, Gibby. We have too many Aarons around here, so I have to give them all nicknames, except for Aaron Buchanan. He's just Aaron, which makes sense. If you know him, that fits. Gibby's sick as a dog this morning. Like legit could barely talk to me when he got in this morning. He was late. He was later than he normally is because he's sick. So he can sneeze in the lobby now. But you wouldn't believe how often we look at each other on a Sunday morning and go, I feel terrible. I don't know if I can preach. I don't know if I can sing. And we just pray for God to give us 30 good minutes. And He always does. He always does. That was fantastic. I was moved to tears. It's so fun and good to be a singing church, especially since I inherited a bunch of frozen Presbyterians eight years ago. We've had to work on that a little bit. If you know, you know. This morning we continue in our series that Haley mentioned called FAQs, where we sourced some questions out to the small groups, solicited some responses, and just said, hey, what is it that you're curious about? What do you want to know? What questions do you have? And so we took kind of the most common ones and we said, let's talk about these on a Sunday. And I'm particularly excited to talk about this topic this morning because I feel it's so important. And it came up a lot in a bunch of different ways. But it's basically questions about understanding the doctrine of salvation. What does it mean to be saved? How do I know I'm going to heaven? Am I going to be saved forever? Can I lose it? Why does the question we're going to focus on at the beginning of our time this morning is why does God accept deathbed confessions, which is an interesting question, but there was a lot of questions around this doctrine of salvation and seeking to understand what it does mean to be saved and having a better understanding around that. And I think it's such an important question because once we get into church world, we kind of stop asking about salvation because I think we feel like we're supposed to know. And so we're embarrassed to ask. But here's what I know is that my understanding of salvation has worked progressively through my life that with each year or decade that passes, I come to understand salvation and what it is a little bit better. And I think that your understanding of salvation should progress as well. Even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, there's a reason you're in church on a random May in the rain. And it has to be because you're at least curious. You're at least thoughtful about it. And so I would love to have the opportunity to tell you more about what it means to be a Christian. And I want the Christians in the room to understand their salvation more deeply. Because it's my suspicion that everybody here who is a Christian has at some point in their life, and many of you, and I have to, I hope that you'll trust me this morning that I'm not trying to be hard on anybody. I'm not trying to make you feel small for the way that you think. I'm not trying to make you feel uneducated or dumb. I just think this is a necessary phase of our understanding of our salvation that every Christian goes through. And I also know from experience that many Christians spend their entire life kind of misunderstanding the doctrine of salvation and being overly reductive about the incredible miracle that it is and what it actually means. And so this morning, what I'm hoping to do is to give us all a more rich understanding of our salvation. So either we're kind of locked into how we initially understand it, and this will kind of open up our minds and help us understand it better, God and more grateful to him for the miraculous event and process of our salvation. So that's where we're going this morning. That's what I want to do. To get there, I want to start with this question that came up in our emails, which is why does God accept a deathbed confession? This is an interesting question because it belies the motives behind it. And the motives behind that question generate a lot of the other questions that we have around salvation. This question comes most of the time from a sense of jealousy or resentment or entitlement or frustration. This question is most likely, and if you're the one that asked this, please hear me. It makes sense to ask it. I understand why you would. Every Christian has asked it. It's asked so often that Jesus talks about it in the Bible, and we're about to go to exactly where Jesus answers this question. But I want us to understand why we're asking it first. Let's just put it out there and be honest about it, because all of us do it. And again, I don't want anyone to feel bad for asking this question. I just want to understand why it comes up. The main motive in my estimation behind this question, why would God accept a deathbed confession, is essentially this, if we're going to use real language. I've been saved for decades. And I've been denying myself and keeping it between the ditches and trying to follow God's rules for years. And I've lived without the freedom of a pagan. And I'm going to use the word pagan this morning because a pagan is someone who doesn't believe in God. I'm not trying to be dismissive of those people, of non-believers. It's just pagans easier to say than non-believer? So we as Christians, and we know this, especially those of us that were Christians in high school and college, we are jealous of the freedom of the pagan, right? We're jealous of what they get to do and what we can't do. We've spent our life trying to follow the rules, trying to do the right things, trying to live the right way. And now here's this person who spent their life as a free pagan doing whatever they wanted to do, following any rules that they felt like they needed to follow, never committed to God, no fidelity, didn't put in the work that I did. And now at the very end, they're just going to slip in the door and we're going to the same heaven. That's not fair. I know it's hard to hear that out loud, but I can see about half of you grinning at me right now. You'll all have these smirks on your face like, yeah, that's pretty true. You got me. We've all thought that, and it's okay to think that. It makes sense why we would. It makes sense that we would think that. But here's Jesus' answer to that question. Why does he accept deathbed confessions? This is actually a parable. In the Gospel of Matthew, you can turn to chapter 20 if you want to. I'm going to read you verses 13 through 16, but first I need to tell you what's going on. Somebody comes up to Jesus and they ask this question. And so Jesus tells this story. He says there's an owner of a vineyard and he goes out one day where he can get some day laborers. And I've told you before, Israel was a poor country. They were impoverished. And so there was hubs where you would go and you could get men to come and put in a day's labor at whatever business you owned. And this was their livelihood. This was all that. They just hope they got picked that day. That was their livelihood. And so there's these people and the owner goes and he says, hey, I need y'all to come work for me in my vineyard. I'm going to pay you one denarius. I don't know how much that is. I could have done the research on what it was, but that feels like a waste of time. Google it if you care. I'm going to give you one denarius. And they're like, okay, great deal. So they go with him, they get in the Ford Ranger and they go to the vineyard and they start to work, right? And I don't know why Ford Ranger is funny, but it is. And they start to work and they're working all day. About the middle of the day, some other workers come by the field and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we help you today? And the owner says, yeah, sure. Come on. You can work for me. And so they start working by the middle of the day. And then about the last hour of the day, some other workers show up and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we work for you? The owner says, that's great. Yeah, come on. And they're working for him. So then when the work's done, the owner lines them up and begins to pay them. And he starts with the first group of workers that he hired that morning. Here's your one denarius for your day's labor. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired in the middle. And he says, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired with just an hour to go. And he said, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And the guys that have been working all day are ticked. Like, that's not fair. I worked eight hours for my denarius. That dude worked two hours, worked one hour. He had missed the smoke breaks and the lunch break and everything and just came in during the last hour. That's not fair. And the owner responds to them like this in verse 13. But he answered one of them, I am not being unfair to unfair to you friend didn't you agree to work for a denarius take your pay and go I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money or are you envious because I am generous so So the last will be first. And the first will be last. I love that response. They go, hey, that's not fair. We've been working for eight hours. They've been working for one hour. And you're giving us the same pay. And he goes, what do you care? That's basically the answer. It's my money. Do you care what I do with my own possession? Do you care what I do with my own resources? What right is it of yours to tell me what I should do? I chose to be generous to him. Are you envious of my generosity? You agreed to a denarius. I gave you a denarius. They agreed to this. I gave them this. It's my resources to do with what I want. And so to our question of why does God accept a deathbed confession where the implication is, hey, I've been laboring in the vineyard all day, my whole life. I've been working at this for decades. I put in a full eight hours. And I get my salvation. I get my eternity in heaven. I get my utopia. But they just slid in at the last minute. They don't deserve what I deserve. Maybe we can believe in purgatory so they have to suffer a little bit before they get the glory that I get. This is the jealousy that we express. And in that is implied exactly what the workers were frustrated about. Hey, that's not fair. I've put in my time and my effort. I've done my work. And the pay shouldn't be the same. And here's what this does. When we ask that question and we think that way. And here's what I wanted to talk about. When we think like that, we make salvation something that we think of in terms of being in or out. And very often, there's a lot of questions that Christians ask about salvation, and the motivation behind that question is, am I in or am I out? Did I say the prayer the right way? Am I in or am I out? Am I in heaven or am I burning in hell forever? That's what we're asking. How much sinning can I do and still be saved? Can I lose my salvation or does God hold on to me and I can't lose my salvation? That's an in or out question. How do I, if I feel like I lost my salvation, can I get it back? If someone wanders away, were they ever truly saved? All these questions that we ask about salvation are indicative of this thought process of in or out. And that's how we think about our salvation. And this is the place where many of us get stuck for our whole lives. But what I want us to see is that in or out salvation is a small salvation. Thinking of it that way reduces it to something that it should have never been. And if you're there, if you think about it this way, if you've thought about it that way, I don't want you to feel bad because that in or out mentality was probably handed to you by a well-meaning teacher in your church who also adopted that, who never got a more expansive view of salvation. I got saved when I was four. I was four and a half years old. We went to a special service on Sunday night, and the teacher taught us about the doctrine of hell. And I don't know if Aaron Winston's in here, but if I find out that we're teaching our four-year-olds about hell and scaring them into salvation, that's not going to be okay. They taught us about hell. They told us what it was. And they said, do you want to go there? No. No way. That sounds terrible. What's in heaven? Well, you sing a lot. I mean, that's better than hell. Okay. What do I have to do to go to heaven? Well, you have to believe in Jesus. Deal. What do I do to believe in Jesus? Will you repeat this prayer after me? Okay. You say the words and I'll do them too. And I was saved into an in or out understanding of salvation. What four-year-old isn't going to take out a fire insurance policy by threat of hell. Of course I got saved. God in his goodness has progressed my understanding of what salvation is over the decades. But many of us get saved into this kind of faith where for us it's a matter of are we in or are we out? And when we think of it that way, we become the jealous workers in the vineyard that get upset that we've been, and some of you will understand this reference, we've been the good brother in Luke 15, the one that stayed home and worked. And then the prodigal son comes home and God lets him into heaven and throws a party for him too. And we're like, what in the world? I've been doing my part the whole time. Because for us, salvation is, am I in? Am I going to heaven? Or am I not? And many of us get saved. And with this reductive view of what salvation is, we spend the rest of our lives just trying to stay in and trying to understand what's going to keep us there. But I think that there is a much bigger, better view of salvation. And I think it's presented to us in plain language in the greatest chapter in the Bible, Romans chapter 8. I'm going to read to you what Paul writes about what salvation is. But before I do, I want you to understand where we're picking this up. The first eight chapters of Romans, the first seven chapters of Romans, are a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. It's a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. Now, also, I want to pause here before I read. I forgot to say this, and I want to make sure that we're clear on this. When I talk about salvation, when I say saved or not, I want to just pause and be very clear that we understand what this means together, okay? The way that we explain salvation at grace, and when I say we, I mean me, because I'm the one that does it. The way that we explain salvation at grace is to say, to be saved, to be a Christian means that we believe Jesus is who he says he is. He says he's the son of God who's come to take away the sins of the world. We believe that. We believe that it means that Jesus did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life. He died a perfect death and he resurrected and rescued us from death and sin and shame. And it means that we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which in Revelation 19 is to come crashing through the clouds to reclaim us and his creation and restore it back to himself and its original glory. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And that to become a Christian, all we need to engage in is the fundamental repentance of Christianity, which Peter describes to us in Acts. He's preaching a sermon. Jesus has been crucified. They're hanging out in the upper room for 40 days trying to figure out what to do. The Holy Spirit descends on them. Peter goes out to the crowd and he preaches. And the sermon is, hey, that guy that you killed was the Messiah and he came to save you. And the crowd believes him. And they say, what do we do? We messed up. And Peter says, repent and be baptized. Repent of what? I believe it's the fundamental repentance of salvation, which is to repent of who you thought Jesus was before you came to agree with him about who he says he is. So to be saved, we repent of who we thought Jesus was before we moved into this moment and this process of salvation. And we accept who he says he is from his word. That's what being a Christian is. Now, Romans is the most detailed theological lesson we get in the Bible. And the first seven chapters are written to help us understand what salvation is and what God did in it and what his responsibility is, what our responsibility is. Then in Romans 8, he culminates that seven chapter argument with what I think is the greatest chapter of the Bible and the culmination of the glory of salvation. And he proclaims to us what salvation is. So I want you to hear how Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 8 and see if this can't begin to expand our view of salvation. I've got my old Bible out. This is the ESV. I was reading this passage this morning in the NIV as I was going through the sermon. Sorry, sorry, DeVos. I know I bought you a Bible and now I'm ruining it. And I just didn't, I don't like the way the NIV reads. This is way better. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read you from the ESV. This is the soaring doctrine of salvation that Paul gives us. Verse 19. And I'm going to read all the way down through verse 30, so buckle up. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons in God. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. In hopes that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what he sees, but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Okay, lock in. You may have faded away, and you're not paying attention to the words anymore, but these three verses are super important. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And this is the important part. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. This is Paul's soaring description of what it means to be saved and what salvation is seeking to do and what God is seeking to work in that salvation. So the first thing that we see is in the very first verse where Paul says, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. What Paul is saying here is, whatever we had to suffer to be Christians, whatever we had to suffer to be in and to build God's kingdom, whatever that work was for the day in the vineyard, and we've put in our time, whatever suffering we've endured for the sake of the kingdom and for the sake of God is not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. In other words, there is no possible way you will spend any time at all being saved, being a Christian, being a child of God, and come to regret it. It is impossible that you would be a Christian your whole life and serve God your whole life and get to heaven and be jealous of the people who partied in college. That will not happen. As a matter of fact, what I want us to see, and Paul's talking to a persecuted church, to people who actually suffer. Very few of us, if any, have suffered for our faith. The bar to entry in the American evangelical church is so low that it costs us nothing to come. We have not suffered. Furthermore, the Bible makes it very clear that life with God is the best life possible. Scripture is replete of verses and passages that remind us that being a Christian is the best life possible. And I can go through the Rolodex, John 10.10, that I talk about all the time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy. But Jesus says, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full, have the most rich, full life possible. We're told in Psalms that at God's right hand are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence, there is a fullness of joy. We're told again in Psalms that one day in his courts is better than thousands elsewhere. We're told that we serve a God in Ephesians that is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. We're told in John that from his fullness, we receive grace upon grace. We're told these things over and over again in scripture, that life with God is the best life possible. It's the fullest life possible. And so the reality is that if you're a Christian who's been saved your whole life and someone slips in at the last minute and they get to go to heaven too, you shouldn't feel jealousy. You should feel empathy because you just got to live your whole life with God and they missed out on all that joy. It is to our advantage to be picked up early and work in the vineyard all day. It's the life that we should desire and what we want. We should not feel jealousy to the deathbed conversion. We should feel empathy because they had to go through their whole life without God. And that's what salvation is. It's not in or out. It's with or without. You understand? It's not am I in, am I in, am I going or am I not? It's do I, am I living life with God? Am I abiding in him or am I not? And when someone is not saved, when someone doesn't know the Lord, the great tragedy is that they go through their life without experiencing the joy of the Lord and the joy of heaven. Without experiencing that relationship with him and the richness and fullness of life. We should not be jealous of that. We should be empathetic and continue to invite them in because through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. We needn't be jealous of the people who don't put in the work that we do. Because there is joy in that work. So right off the bat, Paul's not talking about in or out. Paul says with or without. And that there is no suffering that will not make it worth the glory that is to be revealed to us. Then, in the rest of this passage, we see this. And this is an important phrase. I want us to rest on it for a little bit. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. This is why this is important. Those words, process is important, restoration, renewal is important, and I want to show you why. But first, we're going to go to that word process. Because I think that many of us think about salvation as this moment in time. I wasn't saved. I prayed the prayer, said the confession, did whatever moment you look to where your belief changed. I wasn't saved. Then I prayed the prayer. I am saved. Done. And that's not true. Salvation is a process. And we know that salvation is a process because of what Paul writes in verse 30 that I said was really important. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. That's a process. So let's walk through it so we understand it. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom God knew before time were going to accept his invitation to salvation, he also called them to himself. With the urging of the Holy Spirit, he called you to himself. It wasn't your work that found God. It was God calling you to himself through his love and through his kindness and through his goodness. Now, I know that some of you in the room are Calvinist and you care deeply about these words. I am not and I don't. So I'm not going to last a long time there. OK, but those whom he predestined, he also called those whom he called. He also justified that justification is what many of us think of as the moment of our salvation. That's when you were set righteous. You were clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You were set right in the court of God. You were justified before him. You are no longer guilty. You were absolved from your sin because Jesus died, lived a perfect life and died a perfect death. You are now justified before God. And the good news is that in the culmination of this chapter, there's this incredibly powerful verse of the assurance of salvation where Paul writes, So once you are justified, Paul says, I am convinced that nothing can unjustify you. Nothing can unsave you. But the process doesn't stop there. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he also justified. Those whom he justified, he also glorified. Now Paul speaks as if it's already been done because the work has been done. But we are not yet glorified. We are glorified when we occupy our bodies in heaven. We are glorified when we sit in the presence of God. I love that verse that he sneaks in there in the middle. We do not hope for what we see. We hope for what we do not see. So we wait for it with patience. Meaning, when we get to heaven, we don't need faith and hope anymore because we have God there. So he says that glorification is coming later. So what I want you to understand about your salvation is that it is in process. It's not done. When you are justified, you're secure. You will not be unjustified. But there is another step. And that doesn't happen until eternity. And that's what's in this text. So it's a process, I said, and that's the process. It starts at predestination, at call, at justification, and it's finished at glorification when we're in eternity with God forever. But it's also a process of renewal and restoration. We think about salvation as just our issue. It's just me and God. It's just for me. Jesus died for me, but that's not what we see in the text. In the text, we see that we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies, the completion of the salvation process. But so does the world groans in the pains of childbirth waiting for its redemption and restoration as well. So what I want us to understand about salvation is it's bigger than you. It's about restoring all of creation. When God made heaven and earth in Genesis, he made it perfect. He was pleased with it. And I am convinced that it looks completely different than our earth now. And we have mucked up this earth with sin and brokenness. And that one day he will restore all things. He will return and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he will be with us and we will be with our God and the former things will have passed away. And he'll create a new heaven and a new earth. And he will have restored creation back to himself and its original purpose. So when Jesus dies on the cross, he's not just dying for souls. He's dying for everything that he created to restore it back to himself. Because we're told in Romans that all of creation groans for the return of the king. The earth groans for God. And when we think about salvation as being in or being out, we miss virtually everything that's said in Romans 8. We make it so overly reductive as if to think that what we're teaching the kids over there is the greatest understanding that we ever need of this incredible doctrine. And we miss out on what it truly means to be saved. Here's the last thing that I want us to understand about salvation. Being saved allows us to experience glimpses of heaven here and now. If being in heaven is being with God and not being in heaven is being without God, then as people, we are literally experiencing either hell on earth or heaven on earth. Sometimes we get glimpses of what it is when we're in God's presence, at moments with our children, a hike, a sunset, a hug, singing. When we raise our voices, every time we sing and you guys sing loud and Aaron backs off and it's just us, every time that happens, I have to stop singing because I start crying. Because that's what heaven will be like. We will sing together. And so in being believers, we get these glimpses of heaven and what it will be like. And we usher God into our life and and we invite him in, and we allow him in. This is, again, why we should not be envious of the person who gets saved on their deathbed and got, oh, you got this whole life of freedom. No, we're actually taught in Romans that we are slaves to sin. We're slaves to this bondage of corruption, but that by being saved, we are finally free from sin. We live with more freedom than anyone. We should have more joy than anyone. I said this on Easter. Easter is the most joyful day and we are the most joyful people because of the hope that we have in Christ. So I want you to see this morning. I don't know if you can tell I'm fired up about it because I really want you to understand what it means to be saved it's not it's it's too small to understand it as am I going to heaven or am I not am I in or am I out with all gentleness that's a childlike understanding of our faith. And as we grow, and as we move towards glorification through our sanctification, we should allow God to deepen our understanding of what it means to be his child. And we should understand that he's going to restore all of creation to himself, not just us. And we should understand that every day we get to live as Christians is a day that we spend in the presence of God. And at his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. In his presence, there is fullness of joy. We should be happy and proud and grateful if we're already laboring in the vineyard because of our understanding of what salvation is and how much God loves us through it. So let's progress in that and develop a far more deep, rich, helpful, gratitude-inducing understanding of what it means to be saved. Let's pray. Father, thank you for saving us. Thank you for sending your son. Thank you for sharing him with us. Thank you for watching him suffer for us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore creation. Thank you for who you are. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that your Holy Spirit would beckon them even now to desire to be with you and begin to experience glimpses of eternity here in this life. For those of us who are saved, God, thank you. Thank you for calling us to work early. Thank you for letting us labor in your vineyard. Thank you for the joy that it brings in what it is. God, we pray all these things in the name of your son, Jesus. Amen.

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

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

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