Sermons tagged with Growth

Well, good morning, Grace. I'm Erin. I do get the privilege of being one of your pastors. And as my daughter just said a second ago, an all-purpose pastor. I just found that one as a funny little whatever. So thanks, Zoe. I appreciate that. And I appreciate everyone being in the building today. I know how easy it is when you hear that Nate isn't preaching to just say that you're going to sleep in that day. I get it, and it's okay. So thank you for coming and giving me someone to speak to. I do appreciate that. And a little, for those of you guys that don't know, Nate is on his way to Istanbul, Turkey. He's going to participate for the next week in helping to train up some Iranian pastors so that they can go and preach the gospel. So he's excited and thrilled. And I just spoke with Jen and the update is, is he's in the air. He's left Germany and he's next stop is Istanbul. So keep him in your prayers as we kind of move forward this week. That would be appreciated. So I wanted to start our morning this morning with a question. And my question to you is, what are you afraid of? And I got to thinking about people's fears. I know what some of mine are. And I decided to do just a little research and see exactly what other people were afraid of. And so I Googled it. And that does count as research. Don't judge. It counts. But I Googled it, and it's amazing how many top ten lists you can find when you Google things. So a couple of ones in no particular order that popped up was aerophobia, which is the fear of flying. And I know there's probably somebody in this room that is kind of up in that category. There was also acrophobia, which is the fear of heights. I fall squarely in that category. You can ask my family. They have lots of stories of me in heights. And none of them are pretty, I promise. There was also arachnophobia. And I know this one is quite a few of y'all because they made a movie about this. It's the fear of spiders. I have an aunt who, strong woman, nurse, nothing bothered her, but a spider could send her screaming in a pass down the road. It was bad. And then there was another one called glossophobia, but it's the fear of public speaking, which, as you can, that one's not one of mine. I know it happens to be a lot of other people's. I've had conversations, and people have told me that they'd rather die than actually stand up in front of a group of people. And so, guess what? Death and dying is also up there on that list. And so are snakes. I may fall in that category too. So there's all of these different fears out there, things that people are afraid of. And this will all make sense in a minute, but you're going to see where my brain goes sometimes. So I was like, what is a fear? What, what, what is a fear? So I looked that one up too. I love Google by the way. Um, and Webster's dictionary defines a fear as a strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. So basically it is some sort of physical response to keep, it helps to keep us safe. It's a way that we're wired that helps to keep us safe okay so that makes a lot of sense but then I got to thinking to my fear of heights is not something that keeps me up at night I don't think your fear of spiders is what wakes you up at 3 a.m. questioning all the things. Am I right? Yeah, probably so. But does that mean that it's not a fear? No. The things that are keeping us up in the middle of the night are things like fear of failure or fear of loneliness or fear of change or inadequacy or judgment or rejection and I think the list could go on and on and you have yours, whatever it may be. These are still real fears, but these fears are caused by a belief system. Something that we've heard, felt, or otherwise. It's not a reaction to danger. It's coming from someplace internal. So how do you combat these fears then? I know how to combat fear of heights, right? I just don't go anywhere where it's tall. That's easy. You can stay away from spiders. Those are easy things that you can avoid. But how do you combat the things that are waking you up at 3 a.m.? What do you do? Again, I googled it. What's the opposite of fears? It's something called faith. The definition of faith is a complete trust or confidence in someone or something. And the writers and Hebrews actually state that having faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see. And that sounds like a really spectacular place to live. Confident in what I hope for, assured in what I do not see, and I wish I could stand before you and tell you that's exactly where I live my life. But I'd be lying. And you know, that's kind of looked down upon in church. So I'll be completely honest. I wish I had that faith every single day. But you know, I'm just like everybody else. I struggle with all these things that happen in my head. I'm a people pleaser. So lo and behold, I'm always afraid. Have I made somebody mad? Or are they judging me? Or am I truly equipped to do what it is that I do? And so the thing about that, though, is that those fears and those things that swirl around in my head, they don't discount the faith that I do have. Because the thing to remember here is, is that when you're afraid, you can still have faith. Because faith isn't the absence of fear, but it's trusting God in the face of it. So your faith is not going to happen without fear. Because what we're called to do then is to not allow this fear to take over, but to learn to trust and lean in to God. And in doing so, our faith starts to become bigger than our fears. So today I want to jump into Mark 5. So I am going backwards from where Nate was. It's just the way I do things. I can't follow along in his pattern. I have to do it my way, right? So I'm going to jump over to Mark chapter 5. We're going to start in verse 21 through 24. I'm going to read those to you, but if you want to grab your Bibles, you guys can follow along. I'm going to do a great deal of probably summarizing as we continue through, just because this is actually a long passage. So 5, 21 through 24, and a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. So here we meet Jairus, who is a ruler in the synagogue. An important point to kind of make here is that this doesn't mean he's a religious leader. He's not exactly a Pharisee or Sadducee. What he is is probably equivalent to one of our elders. He actively takes place in what happens inside of the synagogue. He helps to take care of the building. He's going to be well established in his community. He'll be well thought of in his community and respected. And here he stands with a daughter who is dying. The word that's used here is death is imminent. Like this isn't a long, drawn out process. She's probably got hours to live is what it's referring to here. And so he is coming to Jesus at this moment in his life. And I think back to what are the fears that he had before he took those steps. What fears were going through his brain like what goes through ours. And you can only imagine as a leader in the community. He's possibly fearing loss of status in the community. Or fearing the fact that he's going to lose respect. The other one too is that currently the religious community was not too keen on Jesus, right? They're still not sure who he is at this point. He's out teaching, he's out healing, he's out doing all of the things. He's drawing large crowds everywhere he goes. People aren't quite sure who he is, but the religious community had taken note, and they weren't real happy with him. And so for Jairus to step out, there's a risk, right, of him losing his status completely inside of the religious community. But he does it anyway, right? And Jesus' response to him, which I absolutely love, is he doesn't say a word. Jairus is at his feet and he says, come heal my daughter. And all Jesus does is follow Jairus to his house. Doesn't call him out. Doesn't make a big deal out of it. Just follows him. And so they head off to his house. And if we continue on in scripture, and I'm not going to read this, this is part of the areas where I'm going to kind of summarize things. We meet, they, as they're headed in this large crowd of people on their way to Jairus' house, they come across a woman who is physically ill. She has, scripture states that she's been bleeding for 12 years. She has spent all of her money and all of her resources trying to find a cure. Very unsuccessful. And at this point in time, she's actually worse off than what she was when it started. So she's going to be physically weak. She is an outcast in her community. But she has a belief in her head that if she can only get to Jesus and if she can only touch his garment, she just knows that he can heal her. But what does it take for her to get to him? Because can you imagine what's going through her brain? First of all, she's physically weak. So there has to be this fear of what happens if I don't make it? What happens if I can't get to him through all of these people? I'm going to be like this for the rest of my life. Like my last shot at healing. There's also, I said before, she's an outcast. The thing here is that Jewish ceremonial law stated that she was unclean because she had been bleeding. And by being unclean, that meant that anything or anyone that she touched, she made unclean also. And then there's a whole litany of things that must be done to make that person or that thing clean again. So people avoided her. She had no contacts. She was not allowed in the synagogue at all. We don't know, according to scripture, if she even had a family. But if she did have a family, she would not have been with them. She would have been secluded from them. So I can't even imagine how this woman felt. There was no human touch for 12 years. No one looking at her and making contacts for fear of them becoming unclean. So she makes a choice and she chooses to go to Jesus. Both Jairus and this woman's example to us are huge. That when life gets hard, we can either give in to our fears or we can step forward in faith. Both these people in the midst of places of desperation, places of being like their life was just super hard. They made a conscious choice to choose faith over fear. And I promise you, and I know this in my life, sometimes it's easier to give in to the fear. It's just easier. Because when life's hard, those voices in the head get louder and louder, and sometimes it's just easier to give into that. The step of faith is the hard part, but it's in that hard that we grow and that our faith continues to grow as well. 20, 25 years ago, there was a leadership team inside of a large church in Raleigh. A very large, successful church in Raleigh. There was a lot of things happening inside of this church at this period of time. It was successful, yes, but internally there was stuff going on. Stuff with the denomination people weren't sure There were some decisions that were being made by the large denomination that the leadership team was unsure of There's lots of prayer happening and so on and so forth there was a decision that eventually was made after much prayer except that the leadership team was going to step away from the church and start their own church. They had fears, as you can only imagine. It's a large church in a large area, well-known, well-respected, and here is a group that says, we're going to leave. So there's a chance for loss of reputation. They also know that there's a chance that there's going to be some hurt that happens as they make this decision to pull away. There's lots of places of fear. They also are walking away from a steady paycheck in a way that they're taking care of their families. But they stepped out. They did it. And then they got together, they prayed, they did all their things. They found a little outdoor pavilion to hold a first worship service to see what would happen. And lo and behold, they got there that morning, they set up their little PA system, they put out some chairs, and they waited. And God did his thing. Because over the hill came car after car after car. And all of a sudden, all of the chairs are full. And the next thing you know is there's a full hill of people sitting in the grass. And I was one of them. And I had my husband, my sweet husband was with me. And Zach was there as well as a two-month-old and a car carrier. And we And so just like Jairus and just like the woman, they followed Jesus. They didn't give in, and they kept moving forward. And just like what happened with Grace, the same thing happens with Jairus and with this woman. And Jesus' response to their faith is immeasurably more than they could have ever asked or imagined. Because in the story of the woman, she now reaches out and she touches Jesus' cloak and she is immediately healed, but Jesus isn't done with her. He knows that she's physically healed. Her bleeding has stopped and she's now physically healed, but he knows she's not healed mentally or physically or mentally or emotionally yet. And that's where he has to take her. So in the middle of this crowd that's pushing all around him, he stops and he says, who touched my garments? Okay. There's a lot of people touching your garments, Jesus. Lots of people. But that wasn't for anybody but that woman. And so many times I've read that passage and I kind of, in my head, I heard Jesus like it was an accusation. Like he kind of wheeled around and was like, who touched me? But really, it was the opposite. It was him reaching out with an invitation. He's like, who touched my garments? He's calling to her to come to him, not to embarrass her, but to continue her healing. And that's what she does. She comes forward. She comes forward in fear and in trembling, and she falls at Jesus's feet. And scripture tells us that she tells the whole truth. This is her whole story. She lays out the good, the bad, the ugly, all of the things from the last 12 years, all of the things that she tried to do to fix herself and was very unsuccessful. All of her pain, all of her suffering, all of it, she laid at his feet. When was the last time any of us laid it all at Jesus's feet? When was the last time we followed her example with whatever our circumstance, whatever it is that has us, and we just laid it at his feet and said, this is my story. This is where I am. This is what hurts. This is where I'm mad. This is where I don't understand. This is what I've tried to do on my own. And hey, I'm sorry. When was the last time any of us took the time to do that? When did we actually give it all up? And you can see here the example that Jesus gives and how he's going to respond because he looks at her and he says, daughter. It's such a term of endearment. And he tells her, your face has healed you. Go in peace and be free of this disease. So those words right there and this interaction with Jesus, what he's now officially done is not only did he heal her physically, but by calling her out, he just healed her in her social status. He just said to everybody that's standing around, she's clean. She can come back to you. So after 12 years, she can now, if she had a family, she can go back to her family. She can go back to the synagogue. She's now reunited with her community. And lastly, I think this is an example to Jairus. Because so often God uses our circumstances and our stories to encourage others. Because remember at this point in time, Jairus is still here. He's not mentioned right now, but he's still here. He's standing there. Jesus has led him to this spot and then stopped it. And can you imagine Jairus at this moment? You have a child who's on the verge of death. You were on your way with your healer. You knew she was about to be healed. And all of a sudden it stops while the healer goes off to take care of somebody else. What goes on in my head is Jairus is like pacing. Like he's got to be like, wait, hey Jesus, like what about me? Don't forgive me. My daughter's the one that's dying. I know she's sick. Well, you can come back. We gotta go. Like, time is urgent here. We need to go. And he's wringing his hands and he's pacing and he's doing all of the things. And yet Jesus is still focused straight in on this woman. And the wait. Jesus, you brought me here and now you're going to make me wait. I don't understand. And so what do we do in these waiting moments? When we know Jesus has brought us to this place, I'm here because you brought me here. Why am I sitting and spinning? And what's happening? Where are you in this moment? And so if we go back to grace, I can say that in hindsight, it's 2020. Remember that? This was a long time ago, but I can look back on what happened with grace and say, in our waiting, it was not our finest hour. The church itself, after that first meeting, took off. It was thriving. We had a building. We had thriving ministries. We were well-known and respected inside of the community. I think at the height of all things, there were five services a weekend. We actually had to take over more space because we were like outgrowing the space that we were in. And it was a lot of space. Let's just say that. There was a lot happening inside of the life of the church. It was fantastic. But somewhere in there, there's a but, right? There's always a but. Because somewhere in there, we, I don't know, we started to lose some focus, maybe. Maybe we got a little too big for our britches. I'm not sure. But our leadership started, and this is my opinion here, but I felt like there was a place of leadership making decisions out of fear and not out of faith, which will guide a church and it will guide all of us in not the best path. And as we continue to have these decisions being made and things happening, we had turnovers in leadership. We had turnovers in staff. We had members that were, and they were members back then. We had members that were leaving. We had, and of course, as members leave, finances shrink. We still had all of this property and all of these bills to pay and money is not quite what it used to be. So there was a whole lot of fear that came into our world and we became so much more focused on our circumstances and how to fix our circumstances. We got to a point where we lost another senior pastor. We were drowning in debt. The staff, by this point in time, I'm on staff. The staff was mentally and physically and in some instances spiritually just exhausted from trying to hold it all together. And I promise you there were some Sundays that we just didn't know if we had it in us to do another Sunday. And that also was another Sunday not only physically, but did we have the money to have the lights on? And so as I look back on it now and I look back in these moments of the wait, right? We were waiting on God's plan for grace. We were waiting to see what God was calling us into because he had led us there. There is no doubt in my mind that we were right where we were supposed to be. But it also felt at this moment like he wasn't there anymore. And we acted like that. We acted like that out of that place of fear. But the thing is, thankfully, we serve a very faithful and loving God. He hadn't abandoned us to ourselves. And just if you check back into where Jairus is and this feeling like he's been abandoned. Lord, you brought me here. I don't know why we're still here. And while he's standing there, his worst fear is imagined. A messenger from his house arrives and he looks at Jairus and says, your daughter has died. And the next words out of his mouth are, basically, don't bother the teacher anymore. Because remember, he had come to Jesus to heal his child. Well, your child is now passed away. There's no healing needed. So release him, come home. And this is where I say, Jesus doesn't abandon us in those moments of our waiting in those moments of our worst fears ever. And I imagine what happened next. And this is how I pictured it, and you all may picture it different, but this is me, is that Jesus looked at Jairus and he took Jairus' face in his hands and he said to him, do not be afraid, just believe. And at that moment, I also read that and went, excuse me, that's easier said than done. But remember, Jairus has just witnessed this miraculous healing of this woman. He's just witnessed all that Jesus did after he physically healed her. And he came somehow knowing that Jesus could do something for him, right? So somewhere in his head, he knows that Jesus is his answer. And all Jesus says to him is choose me. That's all you have to do is choose me. Because you get to choose who you listen to. You get to choose if you listen to fear and doubt or if you listen to Jesus. It's your choice. It's our choice. And I promise you, every time I step up on this stage, I have to choose Jesus in order to drown out all the voices in my head. No judgment on that one, please. But there's a lot, there's a lot in my head that tells me, you know, things like you're not equipped. You don't have anything to say that these people want to hear. Who do you think you are that says that you can get up there and stand and speak? Like those are the voices. Those are the things that are in my head. But I have Jesus take my little face too. And he says, don't be afraid. Just believe. Choose me. And in this story with Jairus, that's exactly what he did. He didn't listen. He chose Jesus. They turned and they went to his house. And as in the end of the story, you can read it for yourself, but they go to his house and his daughter has died. But Jesus says, nah, she's asleep. Come on inside. Takes takes the parents in takes a couple of disciples and he grabs hold of the daughter's hands and he tells her to arise and to walk and guess what that's exactly what she did she stood up she walked Jairus came to Jesus to heal his daughter. And in the end though, his faith was tested. He was pushed into those extra hard places that said, you got to wait a minute to get your healing. You got to hold on with me and choose me. Don't listen to the other stuff because guess what? I've got you and I'm going to make this right. And lo and behold, by choosing Jesus, that's exactly what happened. Because if he had listened to the faith and his fear and his doubt, and he had just gone home, he would have lost his daughter. But instead, she's very much alive. So choose me. You come to this place where your worst fear is realized. And so somewhere right around 2016, 2017, Grace Community Church was at that place. We were at our worst moment. We had, yeah, we were in a bad place. Let's just put it that way. And I would say we were limping along, but, and I'm going to put the but in here, because again, there's a switch. What was left of Grace Community Church in 2017 was a core group of people who loved each other, who loved Jesus and who loved this little church. That's what was here still. And because of that and because of their want and desire, you begin to see us come out of the wait and you begin to see where, hey, Jesus has been with us the whole time, but where he starts to make his move. Because in 2017, I believe too, we had been pruned. We have our core group of people. We had surrendered it all. We were no longer the big cool church on the block. We were just this little peeled back tiny church who, mind you, was selling off stuff all the time. We were, that's where we were. We were in a bad place, but we gave it up. We quit trying to fix it. We quit being afraid all the time. And somewhere in there, something happened. We were gifted this building as much as we all have things to say about this building currently. In 2017, this building, oh, it was beautiful because it took our expenses and cut them dramatically. We could now focus on getting ourselves out of this horrible debt that we were in. Now, we still don't have a lead pastor at this point in time. And so our leadership teams, our elders are coming together saying it's probably time that we find somebody to lead this little pack of ragamuffins, for lack of a better word. And so the search begins. Now, the other thing just to mention is for an experienced lead pastor, we did not have a pretty resume and we didn't look really good. It's not someplace that they were just clawing to become a part of. So we had to step out in faith and take a chance. And that's what we did. Because remember, we're coming from a place of faith and not fear. And we hired a 36-year-old associate pastor who had zero experience leading a church. And his name is Nate, by the way. But the thing was, is that Jesus knew that Nate was the person for this church. And so he put him in place. And from that point in time on, we continued to walk this path of faith. You watched as our teams got healthier. You watched as we were no longer Grace Community Church and we became Grace Raleigh. We began to find our identity and who it was that God was calling us to be as a community, as a body, and then who we are to be to those around us in our community. You began to see the health. Our partners are all here and part of what it is that's happening inside of Grace. And guess what? These decisions are being made now. We have no more debt. We've actually purchased land. We've gone ahead and we've designed a future building. We have asked you as partners to come alongside us and where we believe that it is that God is leading us in our next step of obedience. And that's to build this building. And I stand before you today and I honestly believe that we as a church stand in our Jairus moment. That moment where God is looking at us and holding us by the face and saying, do not be afraid, just believe. This is the path that I have called Grace Community, Grace Community, sorry. This is the path I have called Grace Raleigh to take. Step out in faith with me. I've got you. And so I ask, what are you as the partners of grace believing for our sweet little church? Are you believing that our next step of obedience is to build this building? And if you truly believe that that is your next step of obedience, what are you doing to walk in it? And so as we close this morning, I will also say to you too, what fears do you have that keep you from all that God has for you? What is it that holds you back from realizing what it is that he has in store for you, the plan that he has as you take your next step of obedience? What do you need to lay at his feet? And what do you need to do to clear your brain, your mind of the fears and the doubts and choose him? Will you pray with me? Lord Jesus, thank you. Thank you for these examples of people who trust you, who love you, who choose you. Thank you for the example that they give us of doing it scared. Those next steps of obedience are not easy. The next steps of obedience are scary. But we know that you've got us. If you brought us here, you're going to walk with us through it. So thank you for loving us. Thank you for being faithful to us. And thank you for loving this little church that you call Grace Raleigh. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. 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.

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you had a hard time parking, get here sooner. I don't know. I don't have anything else I can tell you. All right, we've got so many spots. That's it. And then you're at Big Lots or whatever that's about to be. Thanks for continuing with us in our series in Mark. As we approach this week's sermon and text found in Mark chapter 7, you can go ahead and turn your Bible there if you like. Many of you know, if you've been coming since the beginning of the year, that I started going to the YMCA this year. I started going to the YMCA in January to exercise. Brad Gwynn sees me there. He's my accountability partner. I'm told that there has been about six people who have checked in with him to say, is Nate really going? Is that really a thing that's happening? Yeah, I'm going. And I like it there. I like going to the gym at the Y. There's a lot of things about the Y that I like. I like when you walk in, there's a sweet lady named Miss Ellen that says hey to you and learns your name. And when you leave, she tells you to have a fantastic Monday or have the best Wednesday. And then she hits a little secret button under the desk and it opens both the doors for me. So I don't have to touch them. That's fantastic. There's the soft, there's a soft, chewy ice that you can get as soon as you walk in that normally you have to overpay for at Chick-fil-A, and now it's just there, free. It's great. And you go, and then you work out. It's so fun. But my favorite part, my favorite thing about the YMCA over there on Six Forks, or off Six Forks in Bailiwick, is, and this is why it's probably my favorite gym that I've ever been to, is there is not a single person in that gym that's good looking. Not a single one. Every single one of us are just middle-aged, average people trying to stay on top of things, right? Just trying to get the blood pressure down. That's all we're doing. There's nobody in there preening and praning and taking pictures of themselves. There's no cute outfits or chiseled bodies. We're all just moms and dads trying to get ahead of it. That's all we're doing, and I love it. And it's different than the other gym I used to go to. I used to go to another gym down the street. It's a little bit more expensive than the YMCA. That's a fancy gym. And I was easily, without question, the ugliest person in that room every time I exercised. Except sometimes I'd run into Alan Morgan and then I had some company, you know? But for the most part, it was just me and all these millennials that were chiseled as all get out. And I'm just like, they, to me, those people, those people work out to get better at working out. You know, at some point or another, like you got to exercise to be healthy. You have to, you don't have a choice. Somebody told me that when you turn 40, you get on a downward escalator and the, unless you exercise, you can't even stay at the same level of health that you were. So you've got to exercise to be healthy to some degree. And everybody at the Y is there to be healthy. People at this other place, they're there to look better than everybody else. You know, they've got their phone set down and they're taking pictures and they're looking at themselves in the mirror and they're doing all of this stuff. And the stuff I would never be caught dead doing in my whole life because I have dignity. And also no muscles to speak of because that would be a waste of time. But I look at those people and it's like, gosh, you're working out to get better at working out. You're exercising to get better at exercising. Like at some point or another, there's a diminishing return on the health value of this. and now you're just making your whole self about it just so you can get better at exercising. And then sometimes, and not all those people, I know some people who exercise to exercise, they're in tremendous shape, and they're wonderfully generous, kind, great people. But then there's others who really highly prioritize it, and then that kind of becomes their value system. They start to judge other people based on how good they are at exercising and what you're allowing into your body and what you're doing. And I'm doing this thing and I'm eating, I'm eating nothing. But what are those things that Aaron has in the refrigerator next door? Protein balls. I'm eating nothing but protein balls. This is a thing now. I thought it was leftover cookie dough from something and I threw it away. I got in trouble because I downed her lunch. But that becomes like a whole subculture where they exercise seemingly just to get better at exercising and then to let other people see how much better they are than them at exercising. And it's not the kind of exercise that I want to do. And I bring that up because in Mark chapter 7, I believe that what we've got here is an instance of the Pharisees acting like some folks who exercise just to exercise. My thought here is the Pharisees based their spiritual worth on how well they exercised. The Pharisees based their spiritual worth on how well they exercised. They based their spiritual worth, their holiness, their spiritual maturity, their spiritual health, and the spiritual health of others on how well they exercised, on how well they followed the rules, on how well they performed their faith. And I'm going to show you what I mean. In a minute, I'm going to read verses 14 and 15. But the preamble, excuse me, I'm going to do that a little bit, getting over a cold this week. The preamble begins in verse 1 of chapter 7. And you can look there if you want. Jesus is sitting down with the disciples. This is somewhere around the Sea of Galilee. So some folks from Jerusalem had come up to talk to Jesus. And they sit down and they're eating a meal together. And the Pharisees and the teachers of the law notice that the disciples didn't wash their hands before this meal. And so they go up to Jesus and they go, why is it that your disciples don't honor the traditions of the elders and wash their hands before they eat. They are unclean and should not be eating that food. Not to mention the laws from our elders about ritualistically washing pots and kettles and cups and plates. They are violating all sorts of rules right now, and you don't even seem to care, Jesus. What's the deal with that? And Jesus says, essentially, yeah, the rules you're talking about were made up by men. They were made up by your forefathers and our ancestors and our elders. And now you apply them as if they're gospel truth, but those are not the rules of God. Those are the rules of man. And you've gotten so good at following the rules of man that you are willing to set aside the laws of God and not follow them so that you can follow the laws of man. You have it exactly backwards. What's going on in this Pharisaical culture and the culture of the Pharisees is that they based spiritual health on how well they exercised. It was a competition to see who could follow the rules better. In ancient Israel, there was 630-ish laws. You have to say ish because rabbis don't agree on how many they are, which is, you know, that sounds about right with the rabbinic culture. So the Pharisees knew every single one of these by heart. They knew what they were. They knew how to follow it. They knew what it meant. They knew how to stay in line with it. And they followed every one. And they were meticulous in their rule following. Down to the types of garments they would wear during the day. Some of them considered it work. If you had a nail in your sandal, that was metal and you can't lift that on the Sabbath. So you can't wear those sandals on the Sabbath. They were that strict about it. When the Pharisees, when the super religious would tithe, they wouldn't just tithe from their money. They would go into their pantry and tithe off their spices, their thyme and their cumin and their paprika. They would go in there and they would literally tithe 10% of everything that they had to the temple. And they took great pride in how well they followed the rules. And they took great pride in following the dietary restrictions and only eating what they're supposed to eat and only eating after they've ritualistically cleansed and only eating off plates that are approved by God and by their elders. They were incredible at following the rules. And the problem with this is they got so high-minded about it that they just followed the rules to get better to follow the rules so that they could remain in power and oppress the people they were supposed to be serving. So they're supposed to serve the children of God and spur the children of God on towards God and encourage them and model for them what it is to walk with God in a mature and godly way. And instead, they lorded the rules over people and criticized them for not being as good at it as they were. And they discouraged the populace. Can you imagine growing up in that kind of environment, what your response would be as an independent thinking kid, you wouldn't want any part with your parents' religion. I can't imagine that this would turn generations on to the idea of following God. It pushed them away, and it made God more untouchable, and it was just a way for them to establish their power and their superiority and keep their thumb on the people of God. That's what they did. And so Jesus says, God didn't make up those rules that you're worried about. People did. And then he says this. This is the statement of the day. Mark 7, 14 and 15. Again, Jesus called the crowd to him and said, listen to me. Everyone understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. So Jesus gets everybody together. He's been questioned by the Pharisees in front of a crowd of people. And so now they went public with it. He's going public with it. He says, hey, hey, listen, I want to tell you something. Listen to me. Nothing that goes into the body from the outside can defile it. What defiles somebody is what comes out of their body. And so the Pharisees are saying, no, no, no, we're righteous and we're holy because we refuse to eat these things and we wash these things and we follow these practices and nothing comes into our body that's not ritualistically clean. And Jesus says, yeah, that means bupkis. That doesn't matter at all. What matters is what comes out of your body. Think about it this way. God is far more interested in our productivity than our receptivity. God is far more interested in what we produce from our bodies than what we receive in our bodies. He's far more interested in producing within us the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He's far more interested in watching you increase in those fruits in measure over the course of your life and your walk with him. And God is far more interested in the fruit that you produce than what you choose to drink at the end of the day. He's far more interested in what you say and what you do and what you produce than what you intake. He's far more interested in how you treat other people than what your threshold is for what you will and will not watch on Netflix. He's far more interested, our God is, in what you produce with your body than he is in what you receive with your body. And when I say what you produce with your body, I think back to what we talked about last week and this idea that I harp on as much as I can and I will continue to do it. My biggest prayer for anyone that ever calls grace home is that you would increasingly understand yourself as a kingdom builder. We have the simple concept that everybody spends their life building a kingdom. Everyone does. And so the question becomes, whose kingdom are you going to build? Are you going to build your own temporary kingdom that will fade away and ultimately not matter? Or will you invest your life building, being part of building an eternal kingdom that will never fade away? My goal and prayer for each of you for as long as you call grace home is that you will become increasingly aware of the fact that you were created as a builder of the kingdom of God. And so when we say productivity, God is interested in what we produce and in what we do. What we mean is we want to produce godly character, fruits of the Spirit. We want to be sanctified, grow closer to Him. But He also wants us to produce for His kingdom. And last week we talked about this. It's a good segue from last week into this week. It's funny how the Holy Spirit works sometimes. That to produce in God's kingdom, to build God's kingdom, to be productive in it, is to grow His kingdom in breadth and depth. To grow it in breadth by reaching people and inviting them to Christ and inviting them to church and having spiritual conversations with them. And in today's day and age, simply showing them that it can be normal to be a Christian and you don't have to be an unreasonable nut job. We can kind of hold it together. And to grow the church in depth. To grow us in our spiritual depth, that's discipleship. Evangelism, breadth, discipleship, depth. So it is our job to be productive in that way. And last week, I challenged you. Think back to the wake of your life. Are there people in your life who would say, I'm closer to Jesus now because I met that person. I'm closer to Jesus now because God moved them through my life. That's the kind of productivity that God wants to see in his kingdom. And he's far more concerned with how well you love other people and push people towards Jesus than he is with how well you follow the rules and how buttoned up you are. And this is hard because as believers, we tend towards legalism. We always do this. We want to know what the rules are. We want to know how well we're supposed to follow them so that I can be either good or bad. When I was growing up, there was a phrase, and if you did this, you were a good kid, that I don't smoke and I don't chew and I don't go with girls who do. And if you did that, you're a good kid. Now, I'm so glad that I changed my standards on that because Jen smokes like a freight train and I love her to death. The joy of my life. I think she tried a cigar one time. Did you try a cigar one time? Yes, you did so. You lie. I'm in trouble. That's all right. Well, we always like to set up these standards about personal holiness and the rules that we should follow because it kind of gets easier. And then we start following the rules to get better at following the rules. And we forget that it's far more about what we produce than what we receive or how buttoned up we live. God cares about us loving our neighbor towards him. He cares about us being people of grace and kindness and authenticity. He cares far more that you are a person of generosity than he cares about how much you chose to spend on your car. You understand? He cares far more about how you treat other people than the specific language you use when you're treating them in a certain way. He cares far more about what comes out of you, about what we produce, the love that we produce in others, than he cares about the standards that we would hold for ourselves. And that's the point that Jesus is making. Because the Pharisees are the far end of rule following equals spiritually good. And what Jesus is showing them is you're hypocrites and your hypocrisy is actually destroying your faith and the faith of those around you. This is why Jesus says that he wants people who worship in spirit and in truth. And when I think of productivity, what I want to produce in my life, there's these two verses that haunt me because they make the bar so very high and I am so very far from hitting it. But I've always said I'd rather look at the standard and be honest about not meeting it than lower the standard so I can feel better about myself. And I've always invited you to do that with me. But there's a passage in Matthew, Matthew chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says, let your light shine before others so that others might see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that we should live our lives in such a way that people who come into contact with us, even if they don't speak to us, even if they don't ask us about our God, even if we don't get to talk to them about church and about faith and about what we do and why we do it and what we believe, even if we never get to do that, all they do is see us. All they do is watch us interact with the cashier or interact with the co-worker or move through a crowd or be in a space. All they do is see us. All they do is watch us interact with the cashier or interact with the coworker or move through a crowd or be in a space. All they do is watch us, but that we should let our good work shine before men so that by simply watching us interact in the world, they would see our good works and so glorify our father who is in heaven. What God wants for his children is for your walk to be so radical and your love to be so noticeable and your generosity to be so mind-blowing and your kindness to be so unusual that as people watch you, they go, that person is different and I want what they have. That's the productivity that Jesus is talking about. He's far more interested that people would see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven than we would follow the right rules at the right time. The other standard I think of, and I love this one, is in Colossians 3. It says that Jesus leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You know when you walk past somebody that smells good? You weren't thinking about it. It just kind of wafted over to you, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's nice. That's how it should be when people interact with us in the world, That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That simply by interacting with us, by moving past us, they would go, huh, that's different. That's nice. It's this standard that's so high and so seemingly impossible to reach, but that's who Paul tells us we are in Colossians, and that's what I want us to be. What if, what if, Grace, we were like this so much. What if we held ourselves to that standard that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. This unaggressive, unobtrusive, unobtrusive just scent that wafts off of us that these are people who know and love God. What if that was so pervasive that somebody brings a friend to big night out and they go, these people are different, this community is different, and I think I want to be a part of it. What if that fragrance were so pervasive in us that by someone just coming to our worship or by someone just sitting in with us or by someone just watching us interact before and after a regular Sunday service, when none of us did anything intentional, they got an impression that these people know and love God. What if we were that productive in our faith? That's what God is concerned with, not the rules and how well we follow them. Now, this so far is a particularly grace message because grace people are not rules not rules people. I don't know how long you've been here, but those of us who have been here for a while, we don't care for the rules. We don't follow them. They're there to be broken. We're pretty irreverent about the rules. And so, so far, all the grace people are like, yeah, this is great. God cares way more about productivity. And if we were the kind of church that said amen sometimes, we would have said it by now. Because this is what we believe in. Yes, absolutely. I need Bill Gentile here this week. Bill Gentile, some of you know him, about four times a year, he says, man, I was so close to amen this morning. I needed him here this morning. Bill, darn you. We like that message. God doesn't care about the rules. He cares about love. And so the implication is, so go do whatever you want. I mean, go behave however you want. Go consume whatever you want. Go put whatever you want in your body. Go watch whatever you want. Go do whatever it is you want. Just make sure that what comes out is love. Here's the problem with that. The right results demand the right input. The right results demand the right input. If what my real goal in my life is, is that through me would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God, how is that possible if I am not daily consuming his word? If I am not daily pursuing him in prayer? If I am not daily tracking down older, wiser, more experienced people in my life who've known God longer than me and asking them questions about how they know God and how they follow God, how can the fragrance of the knowledge of God permeate out of me and into the people around me if I'm not spending my days pursuing that knowledge? How can someone see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven if you're too busy to do those good works? If you're not focused on pursuing God yourself. How can someone see the way you interact with a cashier, the way that you handle things in traffic, the way that you interact with a coworker, the way that you de-escalate something tense at work? How can people see you do that if you're not pursuing God and you're not growing in those areas? How can people see the fruit of the Spirit in your life if you're not walking in the Spirit? So I'm not here to tell you what Netflix shows you should and should not watch, but here's what I know. There comes a point at which too much of that one thing, too dark of that one topic, too much of that kind of input is going to begin to affect the output. It's going to begin to affect how we love and what comes out. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. I'm not here to tell you what language to use and not. I'm not here to tell you what you should consume and what you should not. But what I am here to tell you this morning is what you consume through your eyes and through your mouth and with your body, the receptivity, the things that you receive from the world into you, what you consume absolutely makes a difference in what you produce. We know this to be true. So this is not a sermon begging you to come up with standards. It is one that is telling you that they matter. And when we read passages like this and Jesus says, listen, the rules don't matter. It's about what you produce. Yeah. That's why he reduced all the laws down to one thing. Go love others if I have loved you, which is the most impossible law to follow in the world unless you're following the essence of the other 630. We have to be people who love God and love others. And that has to dictate to us what we allow to come into our bodies and the kinds of things that we are receptive to because how can we ever possibly be the Christians, the kingdom builders that Jesus calls us to be if we're not consuming him and the things of him always. It reminds me of that verse that I love, Philippians 4, 8, finally brothers, whatever things are good, right, noble, trustworthy, of good report, think on these things. If that's not our standard for what we're consuming and what we hold ourselves to, then how can we possibly expect to produce what God wants us to produce? How can we possibly expect to hold up our end of the bargain? See, what we like? We love the no rules thing. We love the standards don't matter thing. That's fun. But if that's really what we think, how can we ever become the people that God has created us to be? How will the fragrance of the knowledge of God ever waft out of us if we never, ever, ever care about the standards that we set for ourselves and what we pursue? And I know this is true because Jesus says this in Mark slander, evil, malice, lust, adultery, lewdness, folly, all those things, they come from inside of me. They come from a value that I've espoused in my own heart. They come from the people that I allow to be around me. And all that stuff gets in there from what I consume, from what I watch and from what I joke about and from what I read and from what I talk about and for the kinds of friendships that I have and for the standards that I hold. All that stuff gets poured in. And if I hang out with people who love money more than anything and love success more than anything, then I am going to adopt their value system. And in my heart, I will allow that seed of greed to grow, that seed of arrogance to grow. And I will begin to make decisions about money and about success and about power and about career that are not in line with producing the righteous life that God desires. Out of me will come that selfishness. Out of me will come that influence from other people. But here's what I think has to be true. If these verses are true, 20 through 23, then the converse must be true as well. If malice and slander and greed and arrogance pour out of my heart because of what I've poured in, then the opposite has to be true, right? That when love and kindness and generosity and mercy and grace flow out of my heart, flow out of my mouth. It is because of what God has placed in my heart. It is because of an earnest pursuit of God. It is because of a healthy sanctification and desire for him. It is because of intentional choices. See, we don't get to produce that fruit by default, okay? You don't just become a Christian and then go about your day as normal, not changing a thing, and then all of a sudden just pouring out of you is love and generosity and kindness. No, there's intentional, difficult decisions that you have to make about how you want to prioritize your time and your talent and your treasure so that God can get a hold of you and move you forward. Last week, I talked about how one of the greatest tools of the enemy is that we're so distracted. We're never quiet anymore ever. We've lost the power to think and to ponder and to wonder. How can we produce what God wants us to produce if we won't stop and take in from him? So when we hear this story in the future, because this is a famous one, when Jesus says what goes into a person doesn't defile them, what comes out does. Often we use that to decry the Pharisees and the hypocrisy of their life, and the rules don't matter, it's all about love, and that's great, and that's true, and it is. But what I think grace needs to hear more than that because if we're going to, listen, church, if we're going to miss the mark on this, we're going to miss it in favor of love and do what you want. Okay? That's our culture. So what grace needs to hear is, yeah, love, but that pours out of what we pour in. That comes out of what we let in. So I have two things for you guys to think about as we wrap up today. First one, and I asked you this in another form last week, but I want you to think about it again. Am I producing, as honestly as you can, am I producing what God wants me to produce? When I look back the last one year, three years, five years, do I see an increase in the fruit of the Spirit, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Do I see myself growing in generosity and kindness and patience? Do I see evidence that the Holy Spirit is working on me and that I've subjected myself to him? Am I producing in the kingdom? Am I pointing people towards Jesus? So it's well and good to not care about the rules. It's well and good to understand this and be like, yeah, I don't have to judge my spirituality and my spiritual health by how well I follow the rules. That's fine. But how well are you producing? And then the second thing I would leave you with this morning is this question. Are the things that I'm consuming helping or hurting my productivity in God's kingdom? Are the things that I'm consuming in my life on the screen, the radio, the phone, the scroll, through the conversations, what I expose myself to willingly and habitually, are the things that I'm consuming in my life helping or hurting my productivity in God's kingdom? I'd love for you to think about those two things as I pray for you, and then we sing to finish up. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the way that you work in our lives. Thank you for being a God that, yes, doesn don't know if I'm producing what I'd like to be producing. I don't know that I'm being used like I'd like to be used. God, would you create in them a fire to make some intentional decisions to put their hand to the plow in your kingdom? Would you show them and show us what we can do and how you'd like to use us? And would that begin by just a simple pursuit and step towards you. And God, as we consider the different things that we consume, I know as I've thought through it, convict us where it's needed. Let it move us to better choices. And God, with the conviction, with that seed of conviction from your word, land on good soil that takes root, that isn't a flash in the pan, that isn't emotional, that doesn't get swept away. But God, as we consider those things in our lives, help us be people that stick to it. We thank you for your son. We thank you for your sacrifice. And we thank you for this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's so good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. I kind of had a feeling that this Sunday would look like this. Last Sunday, people begged out because of the weather, and we have a pretty good every other week crowd. So if everyone didn't come last week, I thought, you know, we might have some folding chairs up this week. So it's good to see everybody. I hope that you had a good week. For those of you that were able to enjoy the snow, I hope that that was fun and a nice reprieve for you. This morning we continue in our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the Gospel of Mark, just looking at different stories and aspects of the life of Christ that Mark records. This week, we get to probably the most famous parable that Jesus teaches. Parables are the way that Jesus chose to teach most of the time. And parables are short, made-up stories that are told to make a point. And stories stick with us better. They help us think through things. They tend to drive the point home a little bit better. I've told you before, in a previous life, I was a Bible teacher and an assistant high school football coach. And the head football coach was a guy named Coach McCready. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam. I love that man so much. And whenever I'd ask him a question about what to do in life, he'd go, baby. And he'd tell me a story. He called everybody baby or everybody sugar. So sugar, sit down. And he'd tell me a story about him and Nam and the way that he had to handle some troops sometime. Or he did about when he ran an envelope factory after that in the 70s. He'd tell me about a problem employee that he would have. And he would never answer my question. He would just tell me a story. And I'd be thinking like, this old man's crazy. Like he's just, he's lost it. He's not paying attention to me anymore. But by the time he got to the end of the story, I realized, oh, and I had some clarity about what I needed to do in a situation. And so Jesus taught in similar ways. He taught through telling stories. And part of this, he tells us, is so that you kind of have to work to understand it a little bit because some of the Pharisees, he says, are ever seeing, but never perceiving, never hearing, never understanding. And so he wanted to teach this way to make things more memorable, to help you along, and to make you work for it a little bit. Now, you may have your favorite parable. You may know a bunch of parables. One of my favorite parables is the one about the unforgiving servant, the servant that was forgiven a ton by the king, this huge debt, and then turns around and he won't forgive a much smaller debt to a peer, and he gets in trouble for that one. And there's different, there's the workers in the vineyard, there's the pearl of great price, there's a bunch of different parables. But this parable that we're going to look at today is actually kind of the apex parable in that Jesus tells it to help us understand how we are to process the rest of the parables and the rest of the teachings of Jesus. So rather than sum up the parable, I'm just going to read it to you. It's in Mark chapter 4. We're going to look first at verses 3 through 8. Then we're going to look at verse 14. Then we'll go 15 to 20. So we're going to do a lot of work in Mark chapter 4 today. So if you have a Bible or you can reach that one in front of you, grab that and let's go through it together. I always try to encourage you, bring your Bibles to church, mark them up, take notes. I've been told recently I'm starting to make up words. So you could keep a list of the words that I'm making up. Tom was right last week. I made up the paralyzation. Yeah, yeah, paralyzation. That's not a word. Paralysis will do fine. You don't have to say paralyzation. So you can keep a list of those if you want to. But bring your Bible, mark them up, and let's have a spiritual track record of where we're going and what we're learning. This morning in Mark chapter 4, Jesus shares with us the parable of the sower. And it goes like this in verse 3. Listen. and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying 30, some 60, some 100 times. So when you hear this parable on the surface without any context, it is a little bit difficult to understand. Like, okay, great. There's a farmer, throws out some seed. There seems to be four different kinds of soils. Four different things happen on those four different kinds of soils. Only one of them's good. But what are you talking about, Jesus? With no context, it's a little bit tricky to understand. And so the following verses, 9 through 13, are the disciples saying, hey, what are you talking about? What do you mean by that? And when you read the Gospels carefully, you see the disciples doing this often. What is he talking about? Maybe they don't even ask each other or ask him because they don't have the guts to do it. But he leaves and Peter will be like, did anybody get that? And they're like, no, we have no idea. And then they just have to try to pick it up the next time. But in this particular instance, lucky for us, Jesus explains it. And we have access to this explanation. Now here's one of the things that's really interesting to me as I dug in and studied this parable this time around. Many, many, many, I'm not going to raise your hand because I don't want to embarrass people who don't raise their hand, but I would bet that most of you in this room have heard that parable before. Most of you in this room, if I say the parable of the sower, you can at least, before you walked in today, you could have at least gotten two out of those four soils right. You know what I'm talking about. And so if you're a church person, we tend to think that that seed that goes out is the gospel. That's us sharing our faith, going throughout the world and planting the gospel. And we tend to make this parable about what we should do to plant the gospel of Jesus Christ, what we should do to share the good news of Jesus Christ with our unbelieving friends, neighbors, and cultures. And when we do that, it makes it reductive. It makes the parable smaller than it's supposed to be, I think. Because we make it this one-time deal. We make it this one-time thing where we throw the seed out, and if you respond to the gospel, there's four different ways to respond to the gospel. Three of them are bad. One of them are good. I'm going to throw out this gospel seed and hope that it lands on the good soil, and then I'm going to keep moving on. But it doesn't apply to us anymore because I'm a Christian. And when the seed landed on me, lucky me, I was good soil, and now this plant springs forth, and I have a spiritual life. So this is good. The way that the parable of the sower applies to me is that it's my job to sow the seeds because we say that the seed is the gospel. But that's not what it says. And that's not what Jesus says. Look at verse 14. This will not be on the screen, but look at verse 14. This is Jesus explaining the parable. The farmer sows the word. The farmer sows the word. The seed is the word, not the gospel. It's the word of God, not the gospel of God. Now, is the gospel part of the word of God? Yes. But so is Ecclesiastes, and the gospel is not abundantly clear in Ecclesiastes. Is the gospel part of the word of God? Absolutely, but God's word is so much more expansive than simply the salvation message. Now, everything in scripture points to Christ in one way or another. There's a scarlet thread woven through all 66 books where you can go through any portion of scripture and show how that eventually is pointing you and leading you to Christ. That's the whole point of it. But when we say God's word is the gospel, we either expand the gospel to include every possible thing that God says, or we reduce the word to just the gospel. And that's not right either. So when Jesus says the farmer sows the word, what he means is the word of God. So for us, that's any teaching based on scripture, any song that we would sing that's based on scripture, any word that we have from Jesus, anything that comes from God's word, any words that come from God, when we hear those, when we are taught those, when we sing those, when we talk about those, when we discuss those, that's the word of God. And so what he's saying is, what Jesus is saying is, the farmer sows the word. And if that's true, and the seed lands more than one time on us, but it's not just when we receive the gospel, it's every time the word of God is spoken or preached or sung, then what we see in this parable is this. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. So for us long-time Christians who always hear the parable of the sower and think it's my job to spread the seed. I've already received the gospel. I'm good. You have received the gospel. But you are, hopefully as a Christian, regularly, daily, multiple times a day, through a quiet time, through prayer, through what we're listening to, through what we consume, through our discourse, hopefully multiple times a day, the seed of God's word is landing on our soil. And this is helpful because we are reminded that we can be different soils in different seasons. I heard one time somebody said that a good book is 50% content and 50% timing. That you can read one great book in one season of your life and it just doesn't hit right. And you can read it 10 years later and oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I suppose that works for movies and TV shows as well for you Neanderthals who don't read. But I think that that's true. And I think that that's true of different sermons. I know for me, there are sermons that I preached. I'll just be honest with you, okay? Haley Lee, she did our announcements last week, did a phenomenal job doing the announcements. She and I were talking before the service and she said, nobody's coming this week because it was just because the weather was miserable. And word had gotten out that she was hosting, and so people said, I'll mail this one in. And I said to her, and I meant this in all sincerity, I said, that's fine with me. This sermon is the worst one I've preached in like six weeks. She goes, what? And I go, yeah, I don't like it. It's not very good. Like I, it is, it's, it honors the text. It is what it is. But the last five I've preached, I've liked more than this one. And she was like, well, do your best. And I tried. And the wild part to me is, um, I'm almost eight years in now. It'll be, it'll be, uh, Easter will be my eighth anniversary. So I'm almost eight years in here. And after doing this for eight years, week in and week out, you know, there's some sermons that you preach. And the only people who say a word to you about them are the ones that happen to make the mistake of looking you in the eye in the lobby. And they kind of see it and they're like, good job. Like, right? And it's only because they saw you. They don't mean it, and I know you don't mean it. That's fine. But then there's others that people, like, pull you aside, and they want to talk about it, and yada, yada, yada. You can kind of tell based on the feedback. And after I preached this one last week, the feedback I got, I was like, oh, okay, God. That must have landed on good soil. That must have been something that people needed to hear. So it's sometimes you preach a sermon, and you think it's going to be great. I'm going to rip their faces off. I'm going to light them on fire. This is going to be fantastic. And people are like, yeah, good job. And then other times I'm like, God, I'm sorry for this one. I'll try better next time. And then he uses it. So different, different teachings, sometimes different songs, sometimes different conversations we have with godly people who love Jesusesus and we just talk about spiritual things hit differently at different times of life and i think that this is tremendously encouraging particularly for those of you with children their soil changes season to season what they reject at one age they may receive at another what the enemy snatches up at one point may actually have time to germinate at another. Those of you sharing your faith and sowing seeds with your coworkers and with family members and with friends and with loved ones, keep spreading it. There's different soils at different seasons, and it may catch them differently if it got rejected the first time. But I think it's tremendously helpful to approach this parable not as a depiction of what happens when we share the gospel. That's a limited understanding of it. But let's approach this parable as an explanation from Jesus himself of what happens when we receive teaching about God's word, when we hear the good news of God's word, and how we receive that and what happens when we do. Because in that way, it continues to apply to us until we enter into eternity. So let's look at the explanations of Christ of each of the soils and understand what they are and what they're doing and identify those things in our own seasons of our own lives. Let's look at Mark 4.15. He describes the first one. Some people are like seed along the path where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Okay. So that's the first kind of soil. It's like seed that's thrown along the path, never even has a chance to get into any soil at all, lands on concrete, lands on hard ground, cannot germinate, and Satan comes by and he scoops it up and he knocks it away. Okay. So how do we understand this soil in our own life? Well, we don't talk a lot about Satan around here. I've found that doing sermons on the devil are not the most fun. So we don't talk a lot about him, but when Satan comes up, I try to remind you guys that here's what's true, whether we're comfortable with this idea of an enemy or not, that Satan is real and he is against you. Satan is very much real and he is very much against you and your family and your children and your spouse and your friends. And he is constantly scheming on how to break up what God is doing. God is about the kingdom of God and inviting us to be in, participate in the building of the kingdom of God. Satan is about the tearing down of the kingdom of God. And anytime we get serious about building God's kingdom up, Satan gets serious about tearing us down. We're told that he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, that he is a liar and the father of lies, that his native tongue is lies. So we know that Satan is real and that he is against us. And the last thing Satan wants is for God's word to land on someone's life and take hold of it. So he's constantly trying to sweep those away. I don't have specific guesses for how Satan is active in our lives and in our world and in our communities. I don't have guesses for you there. But I do think that in the United States that Satan doesn't have to work very hard. I think he may have even set us on cruise control and gone and tended to other countries where the church is flourishing. Because I think that one of the greatest tools of Satan, I'm absolutely convinced of this, particularly in this generation, in this day and age, one of the greatest tools of Satan is simply distraction. He will just distract you. You stop at a red light. How many of you, don't raise your hand, how many of you, you can't just sit at a red light in peace. You reach down, you grab your phone, you start to do this. You can't just sit for 30 seconds. You're in the doctor's office, the wait is five minutes. You're picking something up to read or do. Because you look like a psychopath if you just stare at the wall. You've got to at least not intimidate other people even if you're not doing anything. But we are easily the most distracted, when I say generation, I mean historical generation, like people who are alive. I'm not talking about X's and millennials. I'm talking about everyone in the room, one generation of history. We are easily the most distracted generation in history. And I believe that that distraction is a tool of Satan to keep us from thinking about what actually matters, to keep seeds from germinating in our lives. We might be very moved by what happens in a service on a Sunday morning, and then as soon as we exit those doors, what do you want to do for lunch? What do you want to do about this? What do you want to do about this? We get into the car, whatever was playing on our phone that morning when we got to church, it starts to play again. And that begins to distract us. It takes our thought away. We've removed all time for contemplation. We've removed all time for stillness. There was one time, some of y'all will remember, I got so concerned about the distractions of the world and our need for stillness and silence that I tricked you guys. I didn't tell anybody. I brought you in here for a Sunday morning service. Emil knows what I'm talking about. Emil, our keyboardist, he remembers this. Me and him were laughing about it because I tricked everyone. And then we did a silent service. I shut the lights down. We played soft music. I put words on the screen and I made you preach to yourself through God's word and I didn't say anything. And some of y'all were like, that was amazing. And others of you said, never do that to me again. You've got to tell us. That's not fair. We have so little space for silence and contemplation in our lives, and I believe that that's absolutely a trick of Satan to keep things from germinating that should take hold. So if you are a person who's constantly distracted, who's constantly looking, who's constantly watching, who's constantly listening, who has no stillness, who has no peace, there's always noise in your life, I just want you to think about whether or not that's a trick of the enemy to keep you from thinking about what you really need to think about and to keep God's word from germinating in your life in the ways that it needs to. The other reason I think Satan doesn't have to work very hard in our culture is that, and I don't want to get too existential here, but we are the result of Greek thought as a culture. We are materialistic. And when I say materialistic, I don't mean we're greedy and we want things, although we are greedy and we do want things, and we are materialistic in that way. But I mean materialistic in that in our culture, if you can't taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, it's not real. We insist that everything makes sense to us. We have even reduced emotions to chemicals in our brains. And until we can understand how those chemicals interact, we refuse to believe that emotions actually exist. We think that we've fabricated everything. We have no space for wonder left in our culture. We have no space for the fanciful. We have no patience for not understanding. And I think it is to our detriment that when we walk outside, we can't see stars anymore because we live too close to the city. There's this great book. I'll just throw this out here. This is for only one person, and I don't know who, but maybe it's you. Write it down. Abraham Kuyper was the Dutch prime minister, I think, in about 1900. He was a Christian, and he was a scientist, and he wrote a book called Wisdom and Wonder about this, about the things that we should try to know and the things that we should be so glad that we don't know and wonder at. We've lost our childlike ability to wonder and to wonder. And when we insist that everything makes sense to us all the time, I think we become way overly reductive with our faith. Because if you're trying to shrink it to what you can understand, I don't need to finish that thought. It's very easy to have a quick emotional response to a sermon or to a song or to a discussion. It's very easy to feel that quick conviction. Churches even know how to do this. Sometimes there'll be a cue at the end of the sermon, and Aaron knows that at that cue, when I say this word, you come up and you start to play soft music behind me, and it's going to make what I say a lot more impactful, right? Like we know those little tricks. I try not to use them very much because I'm not good at them, and then I feel this undue pressure to actually say something that matters at the end, and I'd rather just coast it out. But we know how to have emotional responses to things, and oftentimes church does this. How many times have you left, because I say this all the time, you guys know that I say this all the time. There's no more important habit that anyone in their life can develop than, a lot of you can complete the sentence, than to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. How many of you have heard me preach a sermon on that and prayed at the end and said, God, I am reading my Bible every day, and you didn't make it a week? Multiple times, I bet, we've done that. How many times have I been convicted? I've had more day ones at the gym than anybody that's 44 ever. How many times do we hear things we should do, we receive conviction about it, and we go, yes, this is what I'm going to do, and then we flare out. That's the gospel landing on rocky soil. It flourishes, it shoots up quick. But it doesn't have any roots. And we don't tend it. And it gets crowded out. And we forget it. This is what happens. I've seen this over and over again. I don't mean to be too cynical. But I've seen people who come to church. They're new. They're coming from a different church. Or they're moving into town. Or they started to go to church again or whatever. And they come. they want to meet everybody. They meet everybody. They're such sweet people. They want to meet me. They want me to hear their story. I want to hear their story. They come to the very first Discover Grace that we have or the very first newcomers class that we have, and they sign up for all the things. They are on fire. I just know, I just know, this person's going to leave as easily as they came. There's other people who come and they sit back there and they're just kind of, who are these weirdos? What are they about? Sometimes their worship pastor stops singing and the rest of them just kind of keep doing it. What's going on? Is that pastor for real? Is he always like that? Yeah, yeah. And there's just slow germination. And then after about a year, they're like, maybe I'll help you hand out some bulletins. Great. Often that's signs of seed germinating and taking root because they're taking their time and there's deep soil there. I can remember going to camp when I was 17 and I came home absolutely on fire for God, camp high. And I told my dad, my life has changed. I'm going to make disciples. I'm giving my whole life to Christ. I'm doing all the things. Dad, I just, I can't wait to serve God. And my dad's response was, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom and your sister. Let it take root. Otherwise, I don't believe you. This happens to us, these flash-in-the-pan convictions. So my encouragement to you is if you're convicted about reading your Bible, don't tell anyone that you're going to do it every day. Just set your alarm. If you're convicted about praying with your spouse, don't tell her that you're going to pray with her every day. Just go grab her and say, can we pray? If you're convicted by God's word about something that you need to do or change, don't tell anybody. Just do it and let other people notice your conviction. But let's not be the flash in the pan faith that happens with this soil. The next one, 18 and 19. Still others, like seeds sown among thorns, hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. This is a picture of a cluttered life, of a life that's not correctly prioritized. The seed of God's word lands in a place that's able to convict us, lands in a place where it's able to germinate. The problem is our soil is so riddled with weeds and other things that it has no space where it can grow and call its own. This is a life where we've over-prioritized career. We've over-prioritized physical health, physical fitness. We've over-prioritized sometimes even family or friends. Often it's a life where we've over-prioritized pleasure and rest. And God's word starts to germinate in our life, but as it does, it requires of us. It requires space. It requires energy. It requires effort. It needs to grow. It needs the resources and nutrients offered by the soil that we're following along with the parable and with the metaphor, it needs its resources, but we're taking the resources that are needed to allow God's word to grow in our life and to grow us, and we're allocating them to other things that are not as important. This is the description of a life that's not correctly prioritized. Yeah, I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I've got work. I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I'm already out three nights a week, and so I can't add another night. And so instead of thinking about what's taking us out the other three nights and going, that can't possibly be as important as the spiritual health and the seed within me that is germinating. That can't possibly be as important. So let me rearrange my schedule around allowing God to grow me. We just say, I can't do that right now. I'm not available for that. I'd like to go to small group, but I'm shy and I don't really feel comfortable doing that. So I'm not going to prioritize that. I know I need to get up early and read my Bible, but it's just, I'm so tired in the mornings and it doesn't occur to us. Okay, well, what were you doing last night? That's making you tired. How late were you up? How do you, how do you, how can you recalibrate? I'll just tell you this, this year, one of my, one of the things I've been doing this year is I try to get up every day at five. I just, I just feel like that's a healthy pattern for me. I try to get up every day at five. And at first it was really tough because I'm not getting tired until 1130 or 12 o'clock at night and I'm only getting four or five hours of sleep at night. But you know what started happening? My body changed. Now at like 845, I'm like, Jen, we gotta get in bed. I got one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in me and then I'm out. And now I wake up at 430 with no alarm. My body just changed. I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, let's do this. So we come up with excuses to not follow through on the things that we're convicted about without thinking about how do I actually tend my soil to make space for God's Word to grow. This is what the author of Hebrews is talking about when he tells us that to run our race well, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. The things that we have in our life that prevent God's word from growing and taking hold and taking root and radically changing us aren't always out and out sin. It's just things that we allocate energy to that is displaced. So I would challenge us this morning as we reflect on this soil, how much are you prioritizing your spiritual health and allowing God's word to grow in your life? And how much have you just allocated just a passive corner of your lot to it so that you can tend to everything else. Lastly is the good soil. Verse 20. Others, like seeds sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop, some 30, some 60, some 100 times what is sown. This is obviously what we want to be. This is obviously what we're hoping for when we share God's word with other people. But here's what's interesting to me about this good soil. In both the telling and in the explanation, Jesus makes sure to make that point, and it reproduces some 30, some 60, some even 100 times. I'm reminded of the parable of the talents, where the expectation of the master going out of town, who he gives the talents to his servants, is that they would produce more, that they would double what they're left behind. We are always expected to produce. The vine and the branches illustration in John chapter 15, abide in me and I in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. Here's the thing, is good soil always bears fruit. Good soil, where the seed is growing, where there is good healthy life, a good spiritual life will always, always, always bear fruit. We cannot both be flourishing and barren within the kingdom of God. Do you see? If we are growing and flourishing, if that seed has taken root, if we are becoming the people that God has created us to be because we are his workmanship created for good works, if we are doing that, then we will absolutely produce fruit without question. Now, what does fruit look like? That's an important thing to understand, and I think it's an important thing for us to have a communal definition of. To produce fruit, and there's a bunch of ways to explain this, but let's explain it this way. Let's understand it this way this morning. To produce fruit means to grow God's kingdom in breadth or depth. That's what it means. If you are producing fruit in the kingdom of God, God is using you to grow it in its breadth or depth. Grow it in its breadth, evangelism, telling other people about Jesus. If you have been producing fruit by growing God's kingdom in its breadth, then in your wake, in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, there are people who would say, because this person is in my life, because Jim Price is in my life, I am closer to God than I was when I met him. It's a wake of people who do not know the Father or are far from Jesus who have moved closer to him because God has placed you in their life. It's growing the kingdom of God in breadth. And so I would ask you, Christians, are there people in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, who would point to you and say, because you exist in my life, I moved from being very far from Jesus to much closer to him. If that's true, then God is using you to produce and to bear fruit. And then hopefully they do that and they do that and they do that. And that's how it gets to 30, 60, 100 fold. And when we produce fruit, we grow the kingdom in depth. We disciple other people. We help people along in their sanctification journey. We help people become deeper in their spiritual walk to take their faith more seriously. And this way you look at the wake of your life and there are people who are in your life who say, yeah, when I met Jeff Lemons, I knew Jesus, but because God placed him in my life, I now know him in a more deep and passionate way. I would never know Jesus as deeply as I do if I had not been friends with Linda Sartorius. When people start to say things like that about you, that means that you are producing fruit. So if we are going to be the good soil, we will bear fruit. It's not we must bear fruit. It's not that we have to try to bear fruit. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All we have to do is try to follow Jesus. All we have to do is make ourselves receptive to God's word. He does the rest. We don't have to come up with some plan. He handles it. Which is why I'm so confident that a byproduct of walking with Jesus is producing fruit, growing God's kingdom in breadth and in depth. And that's what we should be doing. And I would say this, if you look at your life, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, but if you look, if you've been a Christian for three years, at least, and you look at the last three years of your life, and you ask yourself, who's closer to Jesus because God placed me in their life? Who have I had the honor and privilege of walking with as I watch them grow in their faith? If you can't point to anybody, there's a good chance that some of those other soils are happening in your life, that your priorities are crowding out God's word, that the schemes of Satan are actually working on you and keeping things from taking root. There's a good chance that the first three might apply to you. And that's for your soul to search. That's a question for you to answer. But here's how this applies to all of us. Because this is true that this parable, because this is true that this parable isn't just about the moment that we receive the news of the gospel, but it's about every moment that we receive the teachings of God's word. And it's ongoing for our whole life. We're different soils at different seasons because it continues to apply to us both as we share and as we receive. What should we do in light of this parable? What would Jesus have us do? I think it's this, keep spreading and keep tending. Christians, keep spreading God's word. Keep teaching God's word. Keep sharing God's word. Keep singing God's word. Keep inviting people into God's word. And keep tending. Keep tending your soil so that when you hear God's word, you can be receptive to it. To this end, this is not my point. This is a point that I heard another pastor named Alistair Beg make, and I thought it was fantastic. He didn't say it like this, but I am. Beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Church people, beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Here's what I mean. When you've been going to church long enough, when you've heard enough sermons, it doesn't take you but a minute or two to get into a sermon and figure out what the pastor's going to be talking about. You start a sermon, pastor says, open up John 15. You go, okay, we're doing Abiding in Christ this morning. Cool. Open up to 1 Samuel 17. Oh, good, we get to do David and Goliath, right? Open up to Philippians 3. Oh, I can do all things. Or 4. We know what it's going to be about. What I said this morning, we're going to be talking about the parable of the sower. A lot of us went, okay, I know what that one is. And what happens when we already know is that our knowledge inoculates us against truth. We're callous to it. I've heard that before. That's not for me. I actually know some people. I love them very much. They do not go to this church all the time. They have told me. They have told me that they don't go to church on Christmas and Easter because church is always really crowded on those holidays, and they already know those stories. They know what the message is going to be. The message is not for us. It's for the people who don't come very regularly, so we want to make sure that they have a parking space and that they have seats, which is an incredibly well-tuned argument of bullcrap. It's just a smoke screen for we don't want to deal with the crowds. That's all it is. That's all it is. But here's the sad part about that. How do we get to a place as Christians where we say, the message of the resurrection is not for me? The pastor, listen, I'm not complaining, okay? I'm not complaining, I'm not whining, but I know what it is to listen to sermons too. And I know that when I listen to sermons, you know what I want? Tell me something about this passage I don't know yet. Take a different angle. Ooh, I haven't seen it done that way before. We want something new. We want something shiny. We want something that we can chew on. We want something different. We don't want same. And in that way, our knowledge inoculates us from truth because we're not receptive to it anymore. May we Christians, longtime Christians, who already know where the sermon is going before it starts, may we be people who freshly open up our hearts to the truth of God's word so that it might take root in ways that it hasn't in years. And maybe, maybe, if we're not producing very much fruit, maybe it's because we're in spiritual atrophy because we know too much. And those of us who do, let us open our hearts in renewed ways to God's word that it might grow and produce a fruit 30, 60, and 100-fold. I'm going to pray, and we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that is in it. Thank you, God, that its depths are unfathomable. Thank you that we can read the same book in your Bible two dozen times and have it mean something different and reach a different part of us every time. God, for those of us who have allowed our knowledge to inoculate us from your truth, would you please cure us of that? Would you please help us wonder again? Would you please help us be receptive to your word in fresh ways? God, for those of us who are distracted, for those of us who insist on making everything make sense, for those of us who have our priorities out of order. God, I pray that we would see those tendencies in ourself and that we would take very seriously tending our soil to prepare our hearts for your word. And God, here in this family of faith, would you build up healthy people who are flourishing in you and producing fruit beyond their wildest imaginations in whatever way you would have them do that 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.