Sermons tagged with Peace

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that as well. Just a little disclaimer. Panthers fans, it's a total accident that on the day that my Falcons play your weak-willed Panthers that I brought this cup and then face the Falcon towards you. I didn't mean to do that. Here, I'll do this so it doesn't distract you. But you know. We are in the third part of our series called Gentle and Lowly where we're looking at the character of our Savior. And we're seeking to learn more about him. By going through, this is a book, Gentleman Lily is a book by an author and pastor named Dane Ortlund. We had 60 copies. You guys took all of those, which is wonderful. And when I say took, I don't mean steal. I mean, you took them, and I presume you paid for them. I have not looked into the numbers because I don't know how. But if you would like to get a book and read along with us, there's a reading plan for the book and it's available. And if you don't know how to find it, let me know or let us know and we'll help you find it. But before I just jump into what we learned about Christ this week, I wanted to approach it this way. Sorry, now every time I do that, you're going to remember my dumb joke at the beginning of the sermon. I wanted to approach it this way. I think one of the things in life that's really fun to think about is the things that you find to be underrated. I think car rides and silence when you're by yourself, not like with other people, because that's weird, although that is also underrated, because you don't have to talk the whole time, you know. But car rides and silence are underrated. I drove from Atlanta to Raleigh one time without listening to a single thing, and it was actually pretty nice. I think not owning a pet is underrated. I think we overvalue that. But here's one of the things I realized, Jen and I realized was vastly underrated a few weeks ago. Chili's. Chili's, as a restaurant, is crazy underrated. So when Jen and I were in college, any time we would want to go on a date, and this was like 2001, 2002, when we met, when we wanted to go on a date, Jen, where do you want to go? Chili's. And she'd get the same thing every time. And I'm trying to bounce around the menu, and we went enough times that A, I knew her answer. B, please don't make me go to Chili's. I hated it. Just like now, as a grown-up, I hate sushi. I didn't used to hate sushi, but it's what Jen chooses every time, and it may as well just be a tasteless nutrition brick for me. I don't care for it anymore. But I think it was during the summer. Jen had the kids, and we were texting back and forth. We're like, let's meet for lunch. And so I said, where do you want to go? We were kind of bouncing ideas. And you know that exercise when you're trying to decide where to go with your spouse. I don't care. Yes, you do. What you'd like for me to do is play the game of guess the places you don't want to go. And I don't want to play that game. So eventually, one of us said, how about Chili's? And we said, fine. So we go to Chili's, and we get our normal order there, which is chips and queso, a triple dipper with Southwestern egg rolls, sliders, and boneless buffalo rings, hot sauce, sometimes honey chipotle if we're feeling crazy. The kids get their thing. Then all four of us share a molten chocolate lava cake. We get out of there for like $40, $ bucks. Everybody ate everything. And then here's one of my favorite parts about Chili's is they have the kiosk on the table now because my least favorite part of any meal when I'm out to eat is waiting for the check and then waiting for the check to be brought back to me. Because when I, when I ask for the check, when I swipe the card, I am, I'm. I'm a fast leaver. People sometimes offer me rides places. Hey, we're going to the same place. Do you want to ride? No, thanks. Because I don't want to leave when you want to leave. I want to leave before you do. So I'm a fast leaver. So when the check comes, I'm ready to go. And if it's slow service during the apps, when you bring the mains, I will ask for the check right then. Because I don't want to wait on you at the end of the meal when I'm full. Anyways, they've got a kiosk. You swipe your card whenever you want. You get to decide when you leave. You don't have to wait on anyone else's permission to go get in your car. It's great. So then after this Chili's experience, Jen and I looked at each other in the car as we were leaving and she was like, you know what? Chili's is always good. And I was like, it is. It always satisfies. Then, like a month later, we went on a date. Or a couple weeks, I don't know. And when you go on dates, you do the thing where you look around, you find the locally owned, you do the Yelp, Raleigh's Top Restaurant. You find somewhere fancy and nice and worthy of the occasion, and you go. And so we went to some restaurant, I don't remember where. And it cost twice what Chili's did for two people, not four. And we get in the car and we're driving home and I was like, how was that? And she's like, it was good. It's fine. And I was like, yeah, mine was fine too. It was good. It wasn't twice as good as Chili's. And so now, when we go out to eat, should we go someplace fancy? Maybe try Chili's. I would encourage you. There's one right across the street, Triangle Mall. Go there for lunch. Tell me I'm wrong. You're going to have a great experience, okay? I just think it's underrated and that we're too fancy for it, and I think that's funny. And I wanted to introduce this idea of things that we underrate because as we sit here in this series and we focus on the character of Christ, we focus on the theology of Christ, and we try to get to know our Jesus a little bit better. I think that there is a thing about the theology of Christ, about the character of Christ, about the miraculous experience and life of Christ that we as believers deeply undervalue. And I think it's this. We do not properly value the condescension of Christ. I do not believe that we properly value the condescension of Christ. I do not believe that we properly value the condescension of Christ from heaven to earth. And when we hear that word condescension, I think we tend to think of it in negative terms. I try to never ever preach in a way where you're condescended to, where I've put myself on some level that you're not yet at, although that's a little bit difficult to say since I'm literally on a level that you are not right now. But figuratively, I work really hard to never condescend to you, which is super easy because I really don't think I'm better than anyone in this room. As a matter of fact, I think there's plenty of ways in which I'm worse than a lot of you. And we as a church do not condescend to each other. We're all humans. We're all equal. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. We all have our triumphs and our failures. We do not value person to person condescension. And when someone condescends to you, it ticks you off. And when you see someone else being condescending, you think they're a jerk, and you're right. But this word is good when we apply it to Christ, because he literally did condescend. He went from heaven to earth. He went from deity to human. He gave up his divine being to take on human nature. And I intentionally didn't say he gave up his divine nature to take on human being, human nature, because he did not give up his divine nature. Because we believe in our theology, whether you know this or not, we, Grace, would embrace a theology that says Jesus was 100% man and 100% God and the same being while he was here. This, if you like fancy words, is referred to as the hypostatic union. So he never gave up his divine nature, but he did give up his divine being to come and be with us. And I think it's important to choose the word condescend because it kind of arrests our attention because of the negative connotation we give it. But it forces us to deal with the reality, no, no, no, he really did. He really did give up a great deal to be placed on par and live as equals, as an equal with us. And I think that there's two big reasons, maybe even three, why we don't properly value the condescension of Christ. And the first I want to point out this morning is I think we fail to think about what it cost him to come down here. I think we fail to think about what did Jesus give up to become human? And he gave up his divine being, at least for a time. He gave up being in heaven forever. He's the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. He holds the keys to death and Hades. He lived in heaven in a perfect union with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, surrounded by angels. In Isaiah chapter 6, we have a description of the throne room of God in which seraphim are flying around the throne, and there is no roof, and the robes of God fill the temple with glory, and we are told that Jesus sits at his right hand, and the angels are singing, holy, holy, holy, glory to God in the highest. He left that for Nazareth. And I was trying to think, what did Jesus give up to come be with us and live in our squalor? And there was no apt comparison. And the reality of it is, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what heaven is like. But here's what I'm certain of. That if one day, if we believe in Jesus and we go to heaven, when we get there, we will marvel at the fact that our Savior gave up this to come to this. And I don't think that we often enough reflect upon, as believers, what it meant for Jesus to give up divine being to take on ours. And I'll tell you, I tried to think of an example or an illustration of this, and they all fell so woefully short and fell apart so easily that I thought, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to say we don't know, but it's a lot. I think we fail to consider what Jesus gave up to condescend to us. I also think we fail to consider what we gain by his condescension. Because I think, we think, we immediately go to the cross. We immediately go to, well, yeah, Jesus was supposed to do this because that's the story of the Bible. As Christians, we encounter scripture and we're told the story of the Bible and it's very quickly within this story that we realize God had sent his son Jesus and so we just kind of accept it as reality. I think it's the same way that we think about being born in the United States versus being born in Afghanistan. Do you realize how much better your life is because you were born in the United States than if you were born in Afghanistan and how random that lottery has to be? Like, I don't think any of us, maybe July 4th. What a good country. But other than that, we don't walk around in gratitude for it. I'm not saying that we should. I'm not being an advocate for that right now. I'm just saying, comparatively speaking, our lives are easier than people who were born in less fortunate countries. And we were born in the fortunate country of Christianity, and we just accept the facts and truths of Christianity without ever considering how fortunate we are to exist in them. And the place that we miss that the most is what do we gain from the remarkable condescension of Jesus Christ to take on humanity? And I think that the answer to this question is best summed up in Hebrews chapter 4 verse 15, where the author of Hebrews writes, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet he did not sin. And I'm going to read 16 too, because we're going to come back to it later. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. So in this verse, two things I see that we gain. The first thing we gain is that statement, he's able to empathize for our weakness, for he has been tempted in every way, just as we are. Do you understand that his temptation is just the same as ours? There's this famous story in the Gospels where Jesus is tempted by Satan. He's fasted in the desert for 40 days, and Satan comes to him, and he says, you're pretty hungry. This is paraphrase. He says, you're pretty hungry. Why don't you see that rock? Why don't you just turn it into bread and eat it? Satiate your hunger. And Jesus refuses to do that because he's going to honor God and he's going to keep his commitment. And this temptation is probably more ubiquitous to us because none of us, I don't think, have fasted for 40 days. We fasted for a day or two and we understand the pangs of hunger. But we might look at that and we go, I can't relate. But here's how you can. What Jesus did in that moment is choose holiness over his appetite, is choose discipline over what he wanted. He refused to be led by his appetite. Instead, he chose to continue in his service to the Father. And in Philippians, Paul is condemning people. And the way that he condemns them is he says their God is their appetite. Their God is their belly. And what he means is whatever their little heart wants, it gets. They're like, we're like spoiled children with rich parents who give us whatever we want so we'll be quiet. And what that verse means is they gave way to their desires, whatever they were. They wanted more drink, they had more drink. They wanted more food, they had more food. They want to experience that pleasure, they will experience it. They want to be tempted by this person or by that person, they will give in to that temptation. They want to be lazy, they will do that. And as humans, we know. We constantly give in to our appetites. We constantly give in to whatever our little heart desires. And in Jesus, we have an example of someone who fought that temptation, representative of myriad things. Then, Satan says, bow down to me, and I'll give you the kingdoms of the earth. He tempts Jesus with power. Compromise yourself in this way and I'll grease the skids of success over here. Compromise yourself in this way and life will go a little easier. Compromise yourself in this way and you'll save a little bit of money. Do I need more examples? Where we're tempted to compromise ourselves in such a way, compromise our morals and our standards and what we believe God wants us to do and even things that we told God we would do so that we might have things easier on the other side, right? Then in the last one, he says, you're God. Throw yourself off this cliff and let the angels come and rescue you. He tempts him with ego. Oh, you think you're God? Prove it. Right? Someone condescends to you. What do you want to do? You want to get them right back. Someone sends you an email, a customer, a client, a co-worker, a family member, sends you an email that condescends that you don't really appreciate, what do you want to do? Right? And I'll confess, sometimes I type those out. I just get it out. And then I look at it, and I send it. No, I'm just kidding. I press delete. I press delete, and then I give it 24 hours and I type it again. We are familiar with this temptation. In word and action indeed. Jesus faced all the temptations we do. To put a finer point on it. I know this is weird to think about Jesus in this way. But Jesus was a single man. Jesus was a powerful man. Jesus was a man that a lot of people liked. You don't think he ever thought about talking to a woman? You don't think that never occurred to him? He was around wine. He likely consumed wine. You don't think he thought about one night just giving in? Having more than he should? Or maybe he abstained totally, but he was around it. You don't think he ever considered it? You don't think he ever considered when the crowds thronged around him and he was exhausted? You don't think he ever considered going, get away from me. Do you understand I'm the savior of the world? Do you understand I don't have time for this? I'm exhausted. Can you just talk to my assistant? Talk to Andrew and he'll set up an appointment for you. Will you leave me alone? You don't think he ever considered being rude or impatient? Here's one that just occurred to me. If I were Jesus, I'd be tempted when everybody around me was hungry to just be like steaks, you know? You don't think he was ever tempted to do stuff like that? Of course, of course he was tempted. Of course he was. And here's why that's such a powerful truth. Have you ever been in a room, a group of friends, a small group, and watched someone confess something that was hard, that was embarrassing, that was private and in the shadows, and they brought it into the light? Have you ever watched someone do that? And then every time I've seen that happen, which has always been people confessing things to me. I'd never have anything to confess to others. But every time I've seen that happen, I've never, I've never, ever seen it not met with comfort and grace. And what's the most powerful thing that can happen in that situation? Even if there's someone who doesn't struggle with that, but they meet you with comfort and grace, how much more comforting is it when they go, I know I struggle with that too. I've watched in groups of men and in circles, small and relatively large, where someone will say, can you just pray for me and my wife right now? We're in a really difficult season. This and this are happening and we're two ships passing right now. And it's not good. And then watch someone else in that circle go, brother, us too. We are too. Or somebody goes, we did that two years ago. We did that five years ago. I've walked that path, man. I understand. And, and the whole space is washed with grace and comfort. You've seen that happen. I think with women, it's, it's more typical that typical that one of them would finally let their mom guilt break through and say, kids suck. And I don't know if I even like mine or want them. I heard John yell one time, I hate having a sister. And I was like, I don't understand that. Sometimes the family is hard. And then there's this sense when a mom will say that, I feel like a terrible mom. I feel like I'm not doing a good job. I feel like I don't enjoy my kids enough. That someone else will heap their mom guilt out too. And then there's this message of grace and comfort that washes over the room. And the reality is marriage is hard and parenting is hard. It's just true. But there's a special thing that happens when we can share with someone else that's had our experience. One of the things I say, and I'm sure it's true of your industries as well, but when I get to talk with another senior pastor, it's just a different conversation. Because they understand things in a way that if you haven't done this, you just don't know. That's not condescending, that's just true. When you talk to someone who has shared your temptations, that's just comforting in a way that can't be expressed. Hebrews tells us that we have a Savior that has. And even though he hasn't given in to them, he understands what they are. And so in his temptation, he offers us grace and compassion. Because of his temptations and because he's faced them and because he's born with us in our weaknesses, we can go to the throne of God. Now here's what else is implied in this about the wonderful condescension of Christ as far as what do we gain from it. It's implied in this verse, I think. It's implicit. And it's explicit throughout many scriptures. Namely, Isaiah 53, calling him Emmanuel, God with us. What we gain from his condescension is his humanity. The fact that he became human at all. Because in his humanity, he offers empathy, condolence, and comfort. In his humanity, he offers us empathy, condolence, and comfort. I pointed out to you the verse John 11, 35 to highlight his compassion. He weeps with us. He's present with us. He's human with us. I've watched people experience great loss. And in that great loss, maybe a wife loses a husband. And it's far too soon. And so she's experiencing this depth of grief. And I've seen people, I've heard people offer her comfort. And it's well-meaning and it's wonderful and it's good and she receives it and she's gracious. But then I've watched somebody come up to her and say, I've walked that path too. I've been a widow for a decade. That's a different level of connection and comfort. Jesus has experienced our grief. Jesus experienced loss. I don't know if you've thought about this. Jesus had a stepdad. So either his dad Joseph, his earthly father Joseph, passed away, or he had an earthly stepdad. Which, by the way, it occurs to me that maybe there was a time when Jesus' stepdad said, look, I know I'm not your dad. And Jesus thought to himself, you have no idea how layered that is. There you go. But if you've lost a dad, or you've had parents divorced, or if you grew up with a stepdad, maybe it was wonderful, maybe it was painful, I don't know. But what I do know is that Jesus has experienced that. Jesus had half-brothers. One of them wrote a book of the Bible, which may be the greatest proof there is of all time that Jesus was who he says he was. Because what would you have to do to get your half-brother to write a book about your deity? He's experienced our pain and our grief and our sorrow and our loss. He's experienced joy. He's experienced triumph. He's walked through all those things. He lived as a human just as we did. And in those things he shares with us. That's what we gain from his condescension, is we gain the fact that he's faced temptation similar to us. We gain the fact that he was a human just like us. And so all the things and all the emotions that go along with humanity and all the ailments that we could experience that go along with humanity, he has too. That's the miracle of his condescension. That's what we gain. Here's another thing that we gain. He chose to experience death so that we don't have to fear ours. He chose to experience death on the cross so that we don't have to fear ours. No passage, in your notes it says Romans 8.39, but after I sent in the notes, I was considering it, and this passage is so much better. It's 1 Corinthians 15, 55 through 57. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. We're told in response to the death and resurrection of Christ, death, where is your sting? Sin, where is your victory? There's an old song that says, hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold the king. In his death, he defeated our fear of our death. In his death, he unshackled us from sin. He said, we don't have to be fearful of death. Last week, last week on Tuesday, one of our wonderful partners, Mike Schenck, passed away from cancer. And before he did, when he was in hospice and incredibly lucid, I was able to go visit with him and his family. It was a wonderful visit. And one of the things that was remarkable to me was the fearlessness, courage, and faith with which Mike was marching to his grave. He knew what was going to happen. And there was no sense of fear in him. He joked. He was confident. He knows his Savior. Looking forward to meeting him. And then Susie's faith was remarkable too. Because if we're being really honest, and I don't mean to be too crass about it, but she's the one left holding the bag. It's worse for her than him. Because now she has to figure out how to do this life post-Mike. But they both had such faith and peace about the horizon they were approaching because Jesus chose to die so that we didn't have to. And now that in and of itself is a remarkable thought. Because death is a ubiquitous experience of all creation. Everything on this earth that was there and that has existed and that did exist faces a death of some sort. Whether it's the slow erosion of a mountain, the eventual fall of a tree, an animal, a bird falling to the ground, or us. Everything dies. It's an experience of creation. It is not an experience of heaven. And what we know about death is it's all awful. There's ways that we die suddenly and we never knew it, and so maybe that experience wasn't bad, but the people around us mourn. But most ways to die are terrible. Some of us have watched people wither away and so much pain that they wish for death. Jesus chose. This is an experience he never had to have. He didn't have to do it. But he knew that by condescending to become one of us, that he would die. And he knew exactly how he would die, which is one of the worst ways humanity has ever cooked up. And he chose that death when he didn't have to. And I don't know how much we think about the fact that he never had to do it in the first place. He came here not only to experience our temptation and our humanity and live in our squalor when he was in heaven. He chose that life, but then he also chose to take upon himself death. It was a choice that he didn't have to make. It's like if I said, hey, after church today, you've got option A, option B. Option A, you go to lunch with people you like. You do Chili's. Thank you. We go to Chili's. We get triple dippers. Let's flood the place. Option A, you go to a meal with people you like. You go home. you watch football, it's peaceful, or you take a nap, or you read, you do whatever your thing is. And then have dinner with the family, have dinner with people you like, go to bed when you want to. Nice, peaceful day. Or, we're going to put you on a plane, and we're going to go let the Taliban interrogate you for information. Which would you choose? Option A or option B? Jesus chose torture. He chose torture. He could have stayed in heaven and had a meal with people he liked, sat at the banquet table. He chose torture, and he didn't have to. And I don't think that we all the time adequately appreciate what it means for Jesus to have condescended to humanity. Because we don't realize what he gave up, and we don't think about what we gained. And what we gained, what he gave up is his divine being. What he gave up is his peace. And what he chose instead is what we would gain. Which is comfort and empathy and temptation. Condolence and compassion in our humanity, and then the possibility to walk towards death without fear, to walk towards death with courage, to walk towards death with peace, and to no longer be shackled to sin. So the condescension, humanity, and death of Christ are a forever reminder of God's provision. The condescension, humanity, and death of Christ are a forever reminder of God's provision, of the way that God provides for us by sending his only son to become those things for us that we could not be, by sending his only son to redeem creation back to himself so that he might create a pathway back to him. And this is the greatest miracle of his condescension because everything that I've just told you gives us peace and comfort and hope in the 40, 60, 80, 100 years that he gives us on this earth. All of that's temporal provision for a time when Paul describes as but a mist or a vapor. He says that we experience discomfort for a short time. Compared to eternity, it's nothing. So Christ's condescension doesn't just provide for us in the short term and in the temporal. It provides for us for all of eternity. It provides for us because he hung on the cross, because he redeemed creation and made a path back to our Father. That is ultimately what Christ's condescension means, but I don't want us to miss what it means for our life on this earth. And so what this all means, and where I want us to go and what I want us to consider is because of the miraculous condescension of Christ, we can in all things look to him. We can look to him in sin. We can look to him in triumph. We can look to him in grief and sorrow and joy and anguish. We can look to him in all things. When we fail, we can look to Christ. No matter how far down we go, we can look to Jesus. No matter how far high we are, we should know we need to look to Jesus. No matter how stressful things are, we should look to Jesus. No matter how broken our marriage or our children are, we should look to Jesus. No matter how much of a failure we feel like, we should look to Jesus. No matter how successful we might feel like we are, we should remind ourselves to look to Jesus in all things. His condescension reminds us that we can look to him for his provision and for God's provision at all times. That's what that miracle means. Now I'm going to pray for us and we're going to have communion together to celebrate that miracle and understand the bread is what was broken, is what was given in the desert to signify God's provision, and we will celebrate God's provision in that way now. Let's pray. Father, thank you for sharing your son with us. Jesus, thank you for condescending to us, for choosing to become one of us, for being tempted like we are, for being a human like we are, for doing that just so we can run to you. Thank you for breaking the shackles of sin and muting the sting of death. Thank you for everything that you do for us here in this life, but most of all, Jesus, thank you for what you will do for us in the next and already have done. May we reflect on that and properly appreciate your coming down to earth and taking on human form. May we walk in gratitude to you with an appreciation of this important part of your character. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. So good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I've got to tell you, I'm really touched by your attendance this morning. Really and truly. Normally I make a joke on holiday weekends about people coming. And this morning I woke up and I got my email. I had a Duke alert that there's going to be some power outages. Shane, you work for Duke. Fix that. Make sure 9-2-2-1 Kirk Hill is not affected. And I was like, man, it's a holiday weekend, and we have a tropical storm bearing down on us. No one is coming. And look, here you are. This is really, really touching and great, and that was really good worship. If you saw Gibby and I talking as I was setting up, I was laughing at him for messing up in the last song and just crying out Jesus in the middle of a line. Thank you, Kristen. You saw it too. And he said, no, no, I didn't mess up. I was just excited about Jesus. And I don't believe him. But I also do know that he is excited about Jesus. I'm also excited to have the princes here with us this morning. They're here with us for a few weeks. Sarah, you're hosting for us when? Next week? Perfect. And she's going to give us an update and tell us everything. So come back then. Well, I'm so happy to have you guys in town. And we are so happy to be the church that you are part of. We talk a lot about building God's kingdom. And you guys are in South Africa building God's kingdom, and it's a part of our heart that's out there, and so we're glad that you guys are with us this morning. So thanks for joining us. If you don't know them, who cares? It's not a big deal, but we're glad to have them, and you should say hey to them after the service and get to know them a little bit, but they're going to be here with us for the next three weeks. Yes. Perfect. So it's a, it's a big morning and I'm happy to have you here as we continue in our series. And if you're watching online or you're catching up later, thanks so much for doing that. That means a lot to us as you enjoy this weekend, doing whatever it is you're doing. We're in our series in Moses and this series, if I'm just being honest, has been a little bit different for me as a pastor and as someone who has to write sermons every week. You guys make me do this. Typically, when I choose a series, I kind of choose a series, and if you're in the meetings with us with staff, we'll have a series idea, and I'll go, that's a great idea, but then I immediately go, what are the sermons? How do we make this compelling? And the way I think about it is, will that preach? Can I make a sermon out of that? But for this series, it's been a little bit different of an experience, because in this series, I'm telling the story, we are telling the story and going through the story of the life of Moses. And we're telling the story really of the Genesis of the nation of Israel. And so it's really less about will that preach? And it's more about what are the essential elements of the story? I heard somebody say one time, this just comes to mind, the radio sports talk guy, that people should go in the Hall of Fame if you can't tell the story of that sport without their name. Then no matter what they did, they should go into the Hall of Fame. Thank you, Zach, for affirming that. And so this kind of works like that. What are the things, if we're going to walk through the life of Moses together and tell the story of the origin of the Hebrew people together and their exodus from Egypt and their intro into the promised land, what are the elements of that story that we just absolutely cannot pass over? That was Freudian there, the Passover. Look at me. What are the elements that we cannot skip that we must include? And one of those elements is the provision by God in the desert of manna. And a little subtext in that story is the provision of quail. You cannot tell the story of Moses. You cannot tell the story of the birth of the nation of Israel without talking about the provision of manna in the desert by God. You have to tell that part of the story. And so this really isn't about does that preacher, does it not? This is about, we have to tell this part of the story. And then what I'm encumbered with rather than does this preach, is this inspiring? What I'm encumbered with is why does this matter to us now? That's wonderful. It's good to learn about our God. And at a baseline, if all we do is look at the stories and learn about our God and his character and who he is, that's enough. And that's a good exercise and it's time well spent on a Sunday morning. But I think we should press further and say, but what do we learn from it that matters to us now? How does that impact me today? So we're going to look at this story of God's provision, but we're going to be asking the question, how does this impact me today? And we're going to do that by looking at two big questions that really, for me, as I read the story, jump off the page and make me go, why is that the case? And I think if we answer those questions and we can find a way that this really impacts us and should matter to us today and our daily lives as we interact with and hopefully pursue God. So I'm going to point to some scripture in a minute. And actually, this morning is the first time this has happened. I bought this Bible. This is called the pastor's Bible. It's got three tassels that hang out of it, which is an obnoxious amount of tassels. And who would ever need three tassels? But now I have exactly three passages from three different books, and I'm using all three tassels, and I'm so excited. So I've used the first one. That one's out of the way. We're in the book of John. That's where we're going to turn first. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. But before I start jumping around to the passages, I just want to make sure that we know what's happening. Moses is moving the Hebrew people through the desert. They've escaped Pharaoh. Pharaoh's army has been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds. And now they're wandering through the desert being've escaped Pharaoh Pharaoh's armies been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds and now they're wandering through the desert being led by God a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night they're following the pillar they're walking towards God if you look at the way that they're supposed to be arranged this tribe next to this tribe in this direction and yada yada yada they were actually marching through the as one enormous cross, which is pretty cool with Jesus in the center of it as the bronze serpent. So, and we'll get to that story. But there comes up the question of numbers and I think it's relevant this morning. There are different scholars say different things. No one's sure. There's a figure in the Bible where it said there were 600,000 men. And so then you extrapolate that out to women and children. And so some scholars say that there was as little as 300,000 people moving through the desert. Other scholars say there was as much as 2.5 million people walking through the desert. So that's a large delta of difference. But regardless of where you would land on that, and I don't expect anyone to go home and really drill down on the number of Hebrew people in the desert, but if you were to, what you would arrive at is there was a lot. There's a lot. And those are mouths to feed. And some of you know that I like history. I like to study empires. I like to read biographies. Last year, I read a biography on Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, by the way, my least favorite general I've ever studied in my entire life. I can't stand that guy. But he's famous for saying, an army marches on its stomach, meaning the secret to war is supplying your army with what they need. And if you've studied history and you've studied war and you've studied people moving across continents, what you know is they are only as good as their supply chain. They can only fight as hard as they have fresh shoes and fresh socks and fresh food coming to them. And if you disrupt that supply chain, you disrupt the army. By the way, this is what made the Mongols so incredible is they didn't need a supply chain. They just ate everything that they saw, and they were the most fascinating force in the history of history, just for the record. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But an army marches on its stomach, meaning throughout history. One of the biggest challenges of moving a large group of people transcontinentally is sustaining them. And this is the challenge that Moses was facing. He's got between 500 and 2.5 million people that he's responsible for, and they have to be fed. And they grumble. This is hard to do. It's hard to sustain ourselves in the desert. I would assume that each family left Egypt with some amount of sheep or cattle or something to sustain them. But eventually those resources start to dwindle. And so they grumble that they're not being supplied for, they're not being cared for. And this is a sufficient gripe, right? Moms and dads, you're in the desert, wandering, following a pillar. Moses says we just go that way. In your head, you're thinking, we should be there there by now and you're not. What's going on? You're worried about your kids because you can't feed them every day. You're worried about your mother-in-law because you can't feed her every day and frankly she's cranky when she's hungry. So it'd be really nice if we could take care of her. Some of you are sitting next to your mother-in-laws. Don't laugh at that joke. I just saw somebody turn their head. Sorry. This is a reasonable gripe. We're hungry. We can't feed each other. And so God says, okay, I'm going to provide you with something. In the morning, you're going to wake up and there there's going to be this white, flaky substance on the ground. Gather it up, and that will be all that you need. But only gather what you need for that day, which we're going to come back to that idea, because I think that's interesting. Only gather what you need for that day, and every day I will provide for you. And they called that substance, it was like a doughy bread, but it was flaky. And they called that substance manna, which to my knowledge means, literally, what is it? It's like the terrible mascot for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Izzy. I've never been more disappointed in my life. As a kid growing up in Atlanta, I was so excited that the Olympics were coming to my city. It was such a big deal. And by the way, Andre Agassi and Brooke Shield stayed at my friend's house in their basement because they were a host home for the Olympics, which was really cool. I'll tell you about that sometime. But the mascot, when they revealed it, sorry, I know it's stupid. The mascot was named Izzy, which means what is it? And it's like, the mascot's Manna? This is dumb. What a stupid mascot. But that's what they named the bread because they didn't know what it was. So they called it what is it? And that became the name Manna. That was God's provision. And then at one point or another, after God was providing the Manna, they would go out and they would gather it. And we'll see in a little bit that some of them gathered more than they should. And they incurred the anger of Moses and God. And then at some point or another, they said the reasonable thing, the thing that we would say, God, it's so nice that you're providing this for us. I'd like some steak. Like, I'd like some meat, some protein. I'd settle for fish. I'll go to Long John Silver's if you'll just make it available, like anything, God, besides just this bread, just this daily bread, right? And so they said they wanted some protein. And so God responded and he sent them some quail. But it turned out that that was kind of a bad ask. And we're going to see that part in the narrative. I'm going to pull that out. But for a portion, God provided some quail. And then they decided they didn't want quail anymore. God got his way, and then they were back on manna, and that's what sustained them through the desert. And the import of this gesture and this provision echoes throughout Scripture, which is why we cannot tell the story of Moses without talking about the manna that was provided. The biggest reason is this. The manna was a picture of Jesus. The manna was a picture of Jesus. Many of you know this. And so I'd like to remind you of this and pull your mind back to it. Some of you may not. But the manna was a very intentional picture of Jesus. And this is one of the things that marvels me about our God and his sovereignty. We know that God sees into the future. We know that God knows all things. We know that God is sovereign, that God plans. And I say often, sometimes things happen in our life, we can't see what's down the road, but God can and he knows and he's guiding us down this path. And I think even as we acknowledge that truth, that sometimes in our limited brains and in our limited ways of thinking, we think to ourselves, yeah, God sees six weeks down the road or six months down the road, or maybe six years down the road. But in this one, he's seeing 6,000 years down the road. And we don't think about God thinking like that, but he was because he knew that this manna was an intentional picture that he was painting of his son. It's an illustration of what Jesus is. And just so you know, that idea isn't something that scholars came up with. There wasn't theologians reading the Old Testament and then reading the New Testament and going, goodness, this seems really similar. I think those two things are connected. No, these are the words of Jesus himself. And we find them in John chapter six. Sir, they said, always give us this bread. Then Jesus declared, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Direct correlation. Jesus is talking to a Hebrew people who are entrenched in their culture and know it well. And so when he says, my father sent you bread from heaven to sustain life because of their natural culture, national culture and institutions, they immediately go back to the time of Moses. We as Americans just got done celebrating the 4th of July. In my house, in my kitchen, we had some friends over and I insisted. I put Lee Greenwood, I'm proud to be an American, on the Alexa as loud as it would go and I made everyone hold their hand over their heart and sing every word that they knew to the song. And it was super fun. And when we think about America, we have some things on the 4th of July that we all celebrate, whatever it means to us. The reality of it is this is the great experiment. This is the great democratic experiment. It's the greatest country to ever exist on the planet. It's the most powerful military to ever exist on the planet. And it's the most wonderful and the most free place to ever exist on the planet. And we ought to be grateful for it no matter what we think about our current state, yes or no. This is a great place to be. And so when we celebrate the 4th of July, we draw upon the history of where we are. In the same way, when Jesus says, you remember God providing in the desert, they draw upon where they had been and where they were. And they immediately understand and go back to God's provision in the desert of manna. It's a direct correlation. And Jesus says, my father gave you bread daily to sustain your life, to give you life. And now he gives you me. I am the bread of life. And the picture is very clear. We are told that when we do not know God, when we are separated from him, that we will surely die. This is the penalty in the Garden of Eden. And so Jesus comes that we might have life and have it to the full. He comes that life might be restored. And so he says, my father sent me to restore our life. Right? He sent me to restore your life and to give you life. He is acquainting himself with the manna and he is saying, I am the bread of life. This is all throughout scripture. So we know that the manna is a picture of Christ. And it's well and good and appropriate that at the end of this sermon today, towards the end of the service, we're going to take communion together. And when we take communion together, we're going to break the bread. And Jesus at the Passover, before he's arrested, takes the bread and he breaks it and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. That is not just a quaint illustration of what's about to happen to him. It is an intentional connection to what the Hebrew person understands as the sustenance of God in the desert providing life for them. It is a picture of God's provision. So the first thing we see and know about the manna that matters to us very much is that it's a picture of Jesus and God's provision and how he cares for us. We must lock that in. With that being true, there are two questions for me that jump out of the narrative that I think if we can examine them and maybe wrestle them to the ground, at least that's what I tried to do this week as I prepared, that it can illustrate and illuminate for us how this story matters to us today. The first to me is the question of stockpiling. God put a very specific provision in there. You are not allowed to stockpile the goods. You cannot keep more than one day's provision. As a matter of fact, this is what it says in Exodus 16, 19. So I, so I can orient us towards this thought. In Exodus chapter 16, verse 19, after God has said only take enough for the day, then Moses said to them, no one is to keep any of it until morning. However, some of them paid no attention to Moses. They kept part of me or not, but my largest pet peeve in life is any form of inefficiency. My second largest pet peeve in life, just for the record, is when you impose your noise on me. I don't want to hear your phone in a public place. But I loathe any form of inefficiency. And so this directive to only gather what you need for today goes against what I believe wholeheartedly about efficiency. Doesn't it make more sense? Carter, I know you agree with me on thinking. I know you agree with us. Doesn't it make more sense on Monday for you and the able-bodied people in your family to go gather as much as you can for the rest of the week so you don't have to do it every day and you know that it's there and you have the sense of security that it's there. And it's not like there wasn't enough. We're not talking about being selfish because we're told there in scripture that whatever was left over fades away, that when the sun comes out, it melts it away. So there's more than enough every day, which means if your family wants to go out and get enough on Monday to last until Wednesday, or maybe even Friday, you can do that. And isn't this how we handle our daily sustenance anyways? When you go grocery shopping, do you shop for one day like a lunatic? Or do you shop for the whole week? You shop for the whole week. Of course you do. And if you're really crazy, you shop for the month at Costco, which we went to Costco the other night and it was closed because the power was out. And I've never been so disappointed in my life because we were at Costco without kids and I was so excited to go. We ended up wandering around the mall aimlessly. But this makes sense to us. This is how we think. We don't think about daily, I'm just going to go to Sprouts and get what I need for one day. That's what crazy people do. You shop for the week so you don't have to do it anymore. So it makes the most sense to stockpile it for the week, right? But God said don't do that. And I don't understand why. Because besides the practicality of it, it would also give you the sense of, okay, food has been sparse. It's been difficult to feed my children as a father, as a wife, as a patriarch of the family. I'd like to know my family's provided for it. It makes me feel good to know that we have five days rations. And there's even a provision, if you read the text, of an amount that you can gather for each eating person in your home. So there's a provision for that that God lays out. And when I read this story, I kind of wonder, like, what's the big deal? Why can't you stockpile manna? And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it's because of this. Because you cannot stockpile Jesus. You cannot store up enough Jesus. If manna is a picture of who Jesus is, and it was always to be intended not just to feed this small group of people relatively for 40 years, but to echo throughout the centuries as to God's provision and what it is, then it's important to know and understand that you cannot stockpile Christ. You cannot gather enough of him on a Monday to sustain you on a Wednesday. You can't go to Christmas and Easter services only and expect that amount of Jesus to sustain you throughout the year. Which right now I'm talking to a group of people who have come to church on a holiday weekend with a tropical storm looming. So you get this. So if you're listening online, this is for you, pal. But in Christianity, I think we do this a little bit. We come to church on Sunday. I get my fill of Jesus. My kids get their fill of Jesus, and we're good. And then I'm going to go throughout the rest of my week and do whatever it is I need to do. And the next Sunday I'll get my fill of Jesus. But that's not how Jesus works. That's not how manna worked. And if you think about it practically, that's not how diets work. If you say you're going on a diet and on Monday you manage against all odds to eat salads with some sort of vinaigrette dressing that's not even good. And then the rest of the week you eat Reuben's and fried foods, which I'm not speaking from experience there, I'm just saying hypothetically. That's not a diet. You can't eat healthy enough on Monday to be healthy on Friday if you don't do it again. And I think the picture that God is painting here with the daily provision and sustenance of Christ is we cannot get enough Jesus on Monday to make us healthy on Wednesday. We should still wake up craving him. This is why at Grace we say one of our five traits is we are people of devotion. And I say often, and I have not said it often enough lately, but this is why I say it, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, and I'm completely convinced of this, is to wake up every day and spend time in God's presence through his word and through prayer. There is not a single greater habit that anyone can develop than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. It's the most important thing. Every day when I get into my office, most days I fail sometimes, but most days the very first thing I do when I get into my office is I get in my office and I shut the door and I read my Bible and I spend time praying over that day. I try to do that every day. We have to do that. We need to get, we need to think of it. Think of a daily devotion in this context of this story as gathering our Jesus every day. Every day we spend time in prayer. Every day we spend time in God's word. Every day we spend time worshiping. And that looks different at different seasons. Sometimes that means you go on a hike, you just walk, or you go on a run and you take your earbuds out and you don't listen to any noise and you just talk to God and you allow God to talk to you and you experience him that day. I'm not saying it has to be formulated every day, but every day we need to be in the habit like the Israelites. This is what the picture is for. It's not to sustain them. It's to remind us for generations of what we should do. We should wake up and gather Jesus. And it's not lost on me that this happened in the morning. Because when the sun gets hot, it melted away. I've always told you, you have your quiet time and your devotional time whenever it works for you. Morning, afternoon, evening, just do it. But that's a little bit insincere because I can't back this up with paperwork, but I kind of think you should do it in the morning anyways. I don't care if you're a night person. Just saying. We should wake up every day and gather Jesus. And we should understand we can't gather enough Jesus on Monday to make that enough on Wednesday. It has to be a daily practice. And so what God's provision reminds us of and what his prohibition reminds us of is we cannot gather enough Jesus to stockpile him for the week. As believers, we must pursue him every day. We must wake up daily and gather Jesus. It's vitally important. The other question that comes up to me in this story, this one's a little bit trickier. It's the provision of the quail. At one point, though God is providing daily, the Hebrew people say, hey, we'd like some variety. Can we get a little bit of a buffet situation going on? Maybe I'd like some Chinese. Like they just want something else besides this manna, this nutrition brick that they get every day. And so God gives into them and he says, okay. And in Exodus, we're told that God provided quail for a little while, but in numbers, we actually get an insight into this portion of the story that provides a lot more color and it becomes very interesting. And it makes me ask some questions. Numbers chapter 11 verses 18 through 20. This is after they've requested the quail. Tell the people, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow when you will eat meat. The Lord heard when you wailed. If only we had meat to eat, we were better off in Egypt. Now the Lord will give you meat and you will eat it. You will not eat it. This is the funny part. This is crazy. You will not eat it for just one day or two days or five, 10 or 20 days, but for a whole month until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it. Gracious God, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have willed before him, saying, Why did we ever leave Egypt? I got to be honest. When you read that, it really reads like a vindictive elementary school kid, right? Who's just mad. You want quail? I'll give you quail until it comes out of your stinking nose, you son of a gun. You whiny little cuss. It's just funny, man. And so when I read it, I'm like, what gives, God? Why are you doing that? It seems like a pretty reasonable request. Maybe nutrition bricks get old. And they'd like to eat some meat. That seems fine to me. But it angered God. And he said, I'll give it to you until you're so sick of it that it comes out of your nose and you loathe it. Why did he do this? Well, the answer is right there in the text. If you have implicit rejection of his provision already. It was an implicit rejection of his miraculous provision. They had become used to it. They had grown to expect it. When Jesus first arrived in their life, when they first experienced God's provision, it was a miracle and they were blown away by it. Look at this. Look at all that we have every day. Oh my gosh, look, I don't have to struggle for my family anymore. I don't have to worry about my kids anymore. It just shows up every day. And I don't even have to worry about gathering enough for tomorrow because I know that it's going to be there tomorrow because God's blessings renew daily. I know that this is going to be great. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're like, yeah, we need some more of God. And they fall into the terrible habit that we do. We have a terrible habit of asking for Jesus and. Don't we? We have a terrible habit of making Jesus not enough. God has miraculously provided for our salvation and for our peace. And his mercies are new every morning. He gives us our daily bread that we can eat of and hunger no more. He makes us a path to righteousness for his name's sake. He makes it so that this life can be viewed as a wisp or a vapor. And that the tragedies that we endure are called by Paul momentary difficulties. God renders those things true by giving us his son, the bread of life. He gives us a hope for a future where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be untrue. He's provided us everything that we need. He gives us his peace in all situations so that his servant Paul wrote, I have learned what it is to live in little and I have learned what it is to live in much. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He has given us peace in every situation. He has defeated sin and shame and death so that we do not need to fear those things anymore. He has given us all that we need, and yet we get Jesus. And we say, but can I also have some quail? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also be comfortable? Can I have you, Jesus, and also go on nice vacations? Can I have you, Jesus, and also drive a car that I'm proud of that signals success to the people who see me? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that no one in my family ever gets sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that I never get sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and can you make sure that my marriage is perfect and that it never struggles and that I never have any problems? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a spouse? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a child? Can I have you, Jesus, and also these other things that I want? Don't we have a terrible habit of craving Jesus and? There have been times in my life when I've been worried about how things were going to go. Where I've been worried that I wasn't going to be the servant that this church needed. And I've thought, maybe I'll lose my job. Maybe I'll need to quit. Maybe they need someone else. Maybe I'm not serving it well. There's been times over the years, for good reasons or bad, that I feared that I would lose everything. And do you know what brings me back to peace in those thoughts? To think, well, I could lose my job. I could lose my house. I'll still have my family. I'll still see my kids every day. Nothing can take their love away from me. Nothing can take my family away from me. My wife and my children. I'll have that. And at the bedrock, no matter what happens, I'll have them. And I'll have their love. And I have some friendships in my life that I know that no matter what happens, that can't be taken from me. And I'm sure that some of you have been there too. If you haven't been there yet, it's just because you're young. You will. But the provision of the quail and the anger of God, I think, reminds us that this is how we ought to think about the provision of Christ. No matter what happens in my life, I have Jesus. No matter what sickness befalls me, what tragedy befalls me, no matter what situations happen in life, no matter what I have or I don't have, whether I live in affluence or I live in poverty, no matter what happens at the end of the day, I have Jesus, and he is enough. And I don't think in our Christian lives we readily enough default to that foundation of love and provision. This is why God gets angry at the request for quail, because it's an implicit rejection and entitlement to what he's already provided us. And so here's what I want to press on us this morning. That when we see this in the Bible, when we encounter manna through Bible lessons or podcasts or sermons or whatever it is we listen to, when we encounter this idea, what I would love to press upon you is this, that the manna in the desert and the provision of the quail should remind us of this. Let's daily gather Jesus and let him be enough. Like the Hebrew people, let's daily go out and gather Jesus in the morning. I need him today. I'm going to spend time with him today. I'm going to appreciate God's provision today. I'm going to reflect on what that means for me today, both today and in eternity. And then let's let that be enough. Come what may, no matter what else happens, I've learned to be at peace with plenty, and I've learned to be at peace with little, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Let's let God's provision each day of Jesus be enough. Let me pray for you, and then we're going to take communion and celebrate that provision. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how you've provided for us. Thank you for your son Jesus. For who he is and for what he means and how he's our daily bread. Thank you that we can eat of him and not be hungry again. God, I pray that we would be people who are people of devotion who daily pursue you and who daily pursue him. Let us diligently, as your children in the desert did, go out and gather him every morning and be nourished by his love and by his peace and by his forgiveness and by his mercy and by his grace and by his humility. Let us be people who pursue him. And God, I pray that he would be enough. There's so many other things that we want, God, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not, but they're nothing compared to him. We consider all things rubbish compared to the surpassing goodness of knowing Jesus. I pray that that would be true of us as we gather him and as we pursue you. I pray that you would also help us to remember that he is enough, that your miraculous provision is enough. Please let us never grow entitled to what that is, but to always marvel at your goodness and at the miracle of your provision. In Jesus' name, in the name of the daily bread, we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you, all 26 of you, for joining us this summer Sunday. I'm sure there is a cacophony of folks joining us online, so thank you for doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Before I just dive in, I feel as a pastor that whenever something happens in our world that enters into the national conscience in such a way that a vast majority of us are thinking about it and processing it, that I should probably pause and address it. And so we know, I think, I hope this isn't breaking news to you. If it is, this is a terrible way to find out. But the United States bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran last night. That's a big deal. And it just makes me want to pause and pray before I just dive into the sermon as if nothing's going on. I have no assessment of what's happening. I have no opinion that I will share with you from here of what's happening. But I do have some prayers. The very first thing I thought of because of my recent experience in Istanbul when I got to sit in a circle with Iranian pastors, the very first thing I thought of was my friends and their safety. And some of them are able to flee to the north and out of cities. But I've been told that many of them have moms and family members that are locked into their apartments in Tehran. How terrifying is that? So the first thing I want to pray for is just for the people that would be impacted by the decisions that are being made by other folks. And then I'd like to pray for those other folks that God would give people in control wisdom and put people around them to have wisdom. So if that's alright with you, I'd like to pray for that and then we do the normal, regularly scheduled programming. Let's pray. Father, you have seen all the wars, and you have seen all the suffering, and your heart has been broken as you watch people suffer who had no hand in the violence that was brought to them. And so, God, we lift up the people on both sides who are being harmed and will be harmed by the escalating violence. We pray, Father, that you would bring peace. We pray that the violence would cease, that people would stop losing loved ones, and that you would bring stability to that region. And to that end, God, we just pray for our leaders. We ask that you would give them wisdom, that you would give them depth of insight, that you would surround them with wise counsel, and that your hand would be on the decisions that are made moving forward. We ask these things with a heavy heart, but we ask them in the name of your son. Amen. Hard right turn. I was invited to a Rick Springfield concert a couple of weeks ago. This is actually sincere, and that's how I wanted to start the sermon before I knew that I would be offering a very sincere prayer about a potential war. Yeah, I was texted by a friend who goes to this church, and let's just call him Keith Cathcart, just for the sake of it. And he legitimately invited me to a Rick Springfield. Is that right, Springfield? Steen. Field? Field. Concert. Hard no. Immediately. No, nay chance. No, no, no. I'm not doing that. I couldn't be. You may as well invite me to volunteer with you at the animal shelter. Okay. And if you know me, you know, that's funny because I don't even like dogs, which is weird. I know that's my problem. Here's the, here's another problem I have. I also don't like music. Okay. I don't. I don't want to go to a concert. If the music lasts longer than our worship set, sometimes Gibby, three songs, too many, too many. I can't stay engaged for that many songs. And if it's louder than, if the music is so loud that I can't talk to my friends, it's like, why are we here? I don't want to be in this place. And then it's Rick Springfield. I thought that was an SNL character. I didn't even know he was real. And I couldn't, I didn't know anything. I was like, what does he even sing? And so I think I asked Jen, I did a quick Google search. I asked Jen, and she told me Jesse's Girl. And I was like, right. I do know that one. I have heard it. I will not sing it for you, but I have heard it. Yeah, thank you, Elaine says. You're welcome, pal. Now I'm tempted to do it just to spite you, you know? I'm not willing to humiliate myself in that way. And it was like, oh, yeah, right. Okay, I think I do know who that guy is. And I think that that's how we think of the 10 plagues. We have a loose awareness that there were plagues. We've heard about them our whole life, most of us. Because if you're coming to church in June, you're like a Christian Christian. You know what I mean? Like you're real Christian. So you've heard of the plagues before. But I bet if I asked you, name all 10, I don't think you could do it. I really don't think you could. I think very few people, Mike Harris just led a study on, I should call you up here and make you do this, Mike. I bet he could get a lot. As I was kind of going through, I'm pretty sure I could get eight of them. But I think as I remind you of what the plagues are, that we're going to go, oh, that's right. There was that one too. And so we'll kind of have that moment together. This morning is unusual for me because I'm not going to open the Bible and read directly from Scripture, which is kind of a cardinal rule that I try to never break. It's just that the plagues are in chapters seven through 11 of Exodus. And there's no one like crucial verse that defines the plagues and what they are. But these plagues that I'm going to list are listed there. And I just didn't want to read you every verse of every plague because that's disengaging. So anyways, that's my personal confession. But here are the 10 plagues, okay? The setting is, most of us know, but in case we don't, the children of Israel are enslaved by Egypt. They're under the thumb of Pharaoh. And God appears to Moses in a burning bush and he says, I want you to go back. I want you to leave my people. I want you to go to Pharaoh. And I want you to tell him to let my people go. I would like for you to go tell Pharaoh to release his economy and workforce. That's what he tells him. And so he goes to Pharaoh and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, I'm not going to do that. And he goes, okay, well then God's going to send plagues on your nation. So he sends these plagues. And I've made this point before a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about it. I don't have, there's no indication of the timeframe of these. I don't know if these were one right after the other, like over the course of a month or a couple of weeks, or if they were protracted out over the course of a year or two or more. I really don't know. And I'm not sure there's an indication of it, but this is what God does to get the attention of Pharaoh. First thing he does is he turns the water into blood. The Nile River, as the account records for us, was turned into blood. After that, there was frogs that swarmed Egypt from the Nile. And I happen to know somebody who is unnaturally and deathly terrified of frogs. This would be the worst possible plague for that person. She would rather get boils all over her body than frogs anywhere. So this would be a particularly terrible plague for some. Then there was a plague of lice, then flies, then there was the death of their cattle, then there was a plague of ash falling from the sky, then a plague of hail, then locusts, then darkness, and then we know the last one, the death of the firstborn. I don't know how many of those you would have gotten, but maybe you just went, oh yeah, those are right. But those were the plagues. And with each plague, God is making a request. Will you let my people go now? And Pharaoh says no. And really at its baseline, the request is, are you going to let me win? Are you going to give me my way? And Pharaoh says, no, I'm going to win. And so he stays stubbornly in his stance and digging his heels in. No, God, you are not going to win. I am going to win. Those are the plagues. But here's what you may not know about the plagues that I didn't learn until probably about 10 years ago. So I grew up my whole life knowing about the plagues and knowing that the point of them was to get Pharaoh humbled and broken so he would let God's people go. The whole point of them was for Pharaoh to finally let God win and for God to claim victory. I knew that, but what I didn't know is this. In the plagues, God was systematically dismantling Egyptian allegiance. In the plagues, God was systematically dismantling Egyptian allegiance. And when I say allegiance, I mean allegiance to their gods. Most of us are probably aware that Egyptians worshipped a pantheon of gods. They had a god for everything. For day and for night and for sun and for moon and for war and for peace and for fertility. That God's for everything. And what we may not know about the plagues is that each plague was a systemic and intentional assault on one of the gods of Egypt. To show the Egyptians and to show Pharaoh, I am more powerful than that God. The water, just for your own edification, the water to blood was an attack on Heket, the goddess of fertility. Frogs from the Nile was an attack on Geb, the god of the earth. Lice was Kepri, the god of creation. Flies was Hathor, goddess of love. Death of the cattle was Isis, the goddess of medicine. Ash was the god of nut, who's the god of the sky. Hail was Seth, the god of storms. Locust, Ra, the sun god. Darkness, Pharaoh, who they viewed as a god. And the firstborn is how you transferred your power to the next generation. It was an assault on that God as well. So in the plagues, God is systematically assaulting their gods and their frame of reference. He's doing it intentionally. Last week, we talked about God as I am and how we said, I am all that you need. I am all the gods, all the time. And here, he's meeting that out, pointing out to them, I'm more powerful than that god. Pharaoh, I'm more powerful than that god. Are you going to let me win now? Pharaoh, I'm more powerful than that god. Are you going to let me win now? This is what the plagues are, and when we realize that, that this was a systemic attack on their gods, it's, to me, a much more powerful story. I do, however, think that as Americans, we have a difficult time relating to that story. Because my assumption and perception of most of you in this room is that in our culture, and particularly in what demographics are represented here, we never really made a choice between this God or that God. I would be willing to bet that very few of you here, if anybody in the room right now, has ever considered, do I want to worship the Christian God, or do I want to worship the Muslim God or do I want to worship the Muslim God or maybe Buddhists or maybe I want to be Hindu and worship thousands of those gods. Maybe I want to embrace Judaism and worship God the Father but not God the Son as he's depicted in Christianity. Most of us here have never chosen between gods. The choice we make in our subculture in America is typically God or no God. Right? We choose the Christian God or we don't believe in God. That's kind of a binary choice for us. So it's difficult to relate to a story where there's a pantheon of gods being worshipped and God is showing that he's superior to those gods. Because if we're here and we believe in the Christian God, we just accept it by default and as fact that he would be superior to what we think are made up gods. Right? It kind of doesn't make any sense to even consider it. And so it's hard to relate to the story because we don't really have a pantheon of gods. We don't think we have a pantheon of gods, but we do. We absolutely do. We don't call them gods because we're intellectually dishonest, but we have pillars of our culture. We have things in the American culture that we worship. We pray to the altar of things that are not God the Father, for sure. We pray to the God of career. We might not ever say it out loud, but we orchestrate our life around it. We worship it. We prioritize it. Do we not? We are defined by our careers. It's a trope, and it's an easy thing to point out, but it's also true. When we meet people, within the first three questions, what do you do? Right? And if they're a stay-at-home mom, what's probably typical, I don't know because I'm not a stay-at-home mom, but what I would think would be the response when they say, well, I don't work, I'm a stay-at-home mom, is that now in that conversation, they feel a little less. And then if they say, I'm the CEO of blank, they feel a little bit more, right? And so we value people based on their careers. And then this is how sick I am about it if I don't keep it in check. When you tell me what you do for work, I go, that's wonderful. What do you want to be doing in five years? I want to know what your career goals are immediately. When I was younger, when I was in my 20s, I woke up early every day and I read books so that I could be what I wanted to be in my 30s. Like we get addicted to this and it drives us. And this, I say this room, we're missing like 75% of the church today. So also people watching later, this room is an accomplished room. This room is a room that does care and has cared deeply about careers. And if we don't watch it, what we find is that we pray at the altar of those and we serve them. So sometimes we get caught up in worshiping the God of careers. Let me tell you another one that I want to spend a little bit of time on because I think it's important and we don't talk about it very much. Sports. Nice 49ers shirt, Tom. Sorry. Tom's an elder. He's a great guy. He's also really funny. We pray at the altar of sports. We allow them to be too much. We do. Years ago, I'm a Falcons fan, which is a curse. It's a curse. I don't like it. I don't want to be a Falcons fan. I don't want to be a Georgia Tech fan. I don't want to. I would like to choose other teams, but that's not how sports works, okay? The Falcons are my team. And a few years ago, I was watching them, and every Sunday, I couldn't have anybody around me, and I couldn't speak during the game. I was insufferable to be around and if they lost it ruined my day and Jen finally told me hey it's pretty immature to allow a sports team to impact how you treat your family maybe you should care less is that fair the facsimile thereof? Okay. And I went, she's right. She always is. I'm sure you've picked up on that. And I realized I needed to detach myself from that. I had a friend who at one point in his life, and this is just sick of behavior. This is terrible. He went to 149 straight UGA games, home and away. 149 straight. That's a wild commitment. And God got a hold of him and convicted him. He was like, yeah, I got to stop. And his goal was to get to 200. He's like, I got to stop. I can't do this anymore. Sometimes we make sports too important. I have another point to make here, but as someone who's done funerals and who sits with families and says, tell me about your dad. It always makes me so sad when one of the top three things that they know about their dad is that he liked this team. That's your legacy? Liking a team? Cool. I hope I do more with my life so that when my kids are asked about me, they don't lead with I I like the Falcons, right? So sometimes we make a God out of sports. Now here's the other way we do it. And this is what I really want to say. The culture around sports and in our culture now has gotten so absurd that families begin to worship it without realizing it. Lily played challenge soccer last season. And what that meant is she, we had two practices a week. The practices lasted an hour and a half for nine-year-olds. I was one of the assistant coaches and I thought it was dumb, but it lasted 90 minutes, 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back. We are wrapping two hours plus twice a week into practice. And then there's games on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays. And then one weekend there's a tournament and you know who you play in the tournament, the other four teams that you've already played three times during the season, who cares? It's dumb. And it takes so much time and so much energy and so much money to make this happen. And that's the lowest level of it. And the truth is, parents who currently have kids of the age to play sports, let me just say this objectively to you. You do not have to be very good at a sport to get on a team that will take your time and your money. Okay? So your kid making challenge soccer isn't a big deal. And then what happens is the coaches and the leagues tell us that we have to do more, more, more. And now that's ruling our families. It's consuming our time, talent, and treasure. And I have seen over the years at my old church and at this church, I have seen families that handle this very well. And we have some great examples here of families whose kids are highly athletic and they are still highly involved. And they prioritize things that we would encourage them to prioritize. So some families handle it very, very well. I have watched it wipe off the map other families where they're engaged in church. They're raising their kids in church. They're serving in whatever capacity they're serving and kids and kids grow up and then they get of age when they start to play sports. And then dad starts to think maybe they're good at sports. And then we commit more time to sports and they come less and less and they volunteer less and less. And I see them less and less. And then here's, let me tell you what happens is I've had, I've talked to so many parents when I was a student pastor and I would be talking to them about their graduating senior. And I've heard this comment so many times in my life, you know, we regret that we didn't spend more time getting them to church and less time playing sports. I have never heard the contrary. It would be a weird thing to say to a pastor, but I've never heard anyone say, I wish we would have focused more on sports and less on church. Before we know it, we're praying at the altar of sports, and that becomes our God. So we should check that. We pray at the altar of wealth. In America, if you have money, you're good. You're a good person. You've been successful. You've made good decisions. You may not be morally good, but you've won the game, right? And so now wealthy people, better, better looking because they have more money for better haircuts. Poor people, worse, worse looking because they cut their own hair, right? This is how we value people and we pray at the altar of wealth. We pray at the altar of comfort. We don't want to get our feathers ruffled. We don't want to get involved. We don't want to feel uncomfortable. We make our life comfortable. We make our life predictable so that we don't have to feel discomfort when we don't want to. And if there are pain points, instead of leaning into that discomfort and trying to figure out why it's there, we just figure out a way to alleviate it and never have to deal with it. So we pray to the God of comfort. I could go on and on and on. My point is, when we look at the 10 plagues and the systematic assault on these gods, at first glance, I think we find it difficult to relate to, but if we'll stop and be thoughtful about it for a little bit, what we'll realize is, no, no, we do have a pantheon of gods. And many of us in different times and in different seasons for different reasons have prayed to those gods rather than our God. And so it made me think, what would it look like if God assaulted our gods? What would it look like if God were going to systematically dismantle the gods that we have in our pantheon? And I thought of this season of my life where he dismantled one of mine. This god still creeps back up. I've got to keep it in check. But he exposed me to it and he dismantled it. In my early years as a pastor, I would have people say nice things to me. And sometimes they would say, you should be a senior pastor. And so people would speak potential into me. You've got a future here. Actually, the funniest thing that's ever happened, this is just an aside, it's just funny, is I preached one time at my last church when I was the, I spoke about 10 times a year, and one of my buddy's dads was there. And I preached, and we got done, and his dad came up to me. His dad came up to me. We called him, his name was Doug, but he had the largest noggin I've ever seen in my life, and so we called him Doug the Head. That was his name. So Doug the Head comes walking up to me, and he goes, man, that was, buddy, that was good. And I said, thank you so much. I appreciate that. And he goes, no, no, no, I'm telling you, I've been in the radio business for 35 years. And I go, okay, great. And he goes, no, listen, you could do that professionally. And I didn't say this, but I thought like, you know, they pay me. That was professionally. Thanks. But people would say nice things and they would speak potential into me. And I'm very sure that many of you have had people speak potential into you about different things in your life and so I carried that sense of responsibility with that potential and I had this question in my head can I actually do it and then you guys were crazy enough to find out to give give me a chance. And it went. In April of 17, there was 85 people in the room. In February of 17, there's 85 people in the room. April, there's 100. By January or by February of 2020, we had two good services. The second one was averaging about 100 people, so we reached like a critical mass. And we were averaging about 335 people a week. Bunch of kids, bunch of new folks, things are going and blowing. We do a campaign. We have more pledged than we even asked for and way more than we thought we would. And this whole time as we're growing, I'm telling people it's not about the growth. God is blessing us. This is good. This is wonderful. Nothing that we're doing is about making the church bigger, yada, yada, yada, all the things you're supposed to say. But internally, if I can just be honest, I did it. I'm somebody. Look at me go. This is all God and a little bit me. And I was proud. I was. And I can admit that now. And I'll admit now that I still struggle with that, but I fight it a lot harder and I'm a lot more honest with myself about it. Then COVID hit. So in February, two services, 335 people. Next time we had a service, it was July. There was 40 people wearing masks. If you were here during that season and you did worship with a mask on your face, it was the worst. It was terrible. You can't hear anybody. There's 35 people in the room. It was the deadest worship ever. It was awful. And I got depressed. I started seeing a therapist because all my self-worth just went out the window. And what I realized was, through conversations with him, I was worshiping at the God of respect, of approval, of accomplishment. I was worshiping at the God of proving myself to myself and to anyone paying attention. And do you know what God did with COVID? He systematically dismantled my God. Now listen, I do not want to give you the impression that I think that God orchestrated a worldwide pandemic so that he could teach a real lesson to a small church pastor in Raleigh. Okay? It's silly when we think that. But what I am saying is that he used that to dismantle my God and my life and build me back up. And here's what happened as a result of that. And as a result of the therapy and the counseling that I went through as I kind of dug and dug and dug and went, why am I worshiping at this God? What is the deal? And here's what it did. Here's the fundamental change it made in how I pastor. And it's more, this is more disclosure than I want to give, but I think it's helpful. And I think some of you can relate. I used to write sermons with the goal, I wouldn't state this, I would never say this out loud to anybody at the time, but I used to write sermons with the goal of being impressive. I wanted to impress you when I preached. When I got here, that's why I wrote sermons. Anything else I said was fluff. Obviously I wanted to serve God in all the things, but somewhere in there, I want to impress you. That's probably my main motivation. And now, my motivation is I want to help you. That's what I think about. Is this helpful? I don't think about being impressive. Not nearly as much. Sometimes I'll get caught in that trap, but not nearly as much. When God dismantled my God, I left that season of my life and I went, man, leading grace and doing my job is not about being impressive with people. It's not about growing the church. It's not about big numbers. It's about being faithful in the small things. It's about honoring people. It's about being humble and being honest and trying your best to help the people that God entrusts to you. And so what I used to do when I finished a sermon is I go and I sit in that chair. And what I used to do if I had a bad sermon, I would be upset. And the core emotion was, gosh, that was not impressive enough. And now if I sit there, and sometimes I do, and I might after this one go, gosh, that wasn't very good. It's my criticism and my response is that wasn't helpful enough. Do you see the difference? Here's my point, and here's why I'm telling you this. When we let God win, we win. When we let God win, we win. Pharaoh refused to let God win. And when he finally did, everybody won. I had a God in my life that I was not aware of. And God began to dismantle it. And it was hard to let go. But when I let God win, the people around me won. I can guess at some of the gods that we have in this room. At some of the things that you pray to. But I don't know what they are specifically for you. But I can tell you that sometimes in life, something bad happens. Maybe not plague worthy, but something hard. Our kid gets injured and can't play that sport for a while. We get laid off. They let our department go. The big client that we have bails and now we have to scramble to make up those sales. We get in debt. We get sick. Our kid's having a hard time. It's in a difficult season. Our relationship or our marriage is on the rocks and we're not sure how to repair it. I'm not saying that every single one of those things is an assault on a God in your life, but I am saying that you should stop and ask if it is. And take from the plagues, God, are you trying to win something here? Are you trying to show me that I have something positioned in my priorities and in my life that is out of whack? Have I been finding my identity in my career and not in you? Have I been finding my identity in my kids and not in you? In my house and not in you? In my wealth, in my status, in my approval and not in you? So when we see the plagues, when we're reminded of them, let's be reminded that this was a systematic assault on the pantheon of Egyptian gods, and that same God will still assault our gods and dismantle them for our sake. Because when God wins, we win. But here's the thing, and I love to point this out. You will never lose an arguing match with God. If you want to argue with God, you win. Congratulations. God will not force his hand on us. He loves us too much to do that. He will not make us do things. But he will give us points in time to reflect and say, there's something wrong here. But when God's trying to win, he'll keep a steady hand on it. But you have to let him. You win every argument you ever get into with God. But when God wins, we win. Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a God who loves us. Thank you for being a God that doesn't force yourself upon us, but that gently pushes us in different ways at different times towards you. Lord, if we have been worshiping at the altar of things that are not you, I pray that you would reveal that to us. I pray that we would see it. And I pray that you would give us a depth of conviction and courage to confess that and to move away from that, God, and to move towards you. God, this morning, it's clear to me that we have a lot of people traveling, and so I just ask that you would keep them safe and that their trips would be enriching. I pray for grace as we enter into the summer. God, would you keep your hand on us and bless us? And God, would you help us be people who let you win? In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. If you're watching online, thank you for joining us wherever you are and whatever you may be doing with your summer. This is Father's Day. So happy Father's Day to those to whom it applies. I am a dad myself, so I don't have to show any sensitivity about Father's Day. This is what I love about Father's Day is on Mother's Day, I saw on TikTok this week, which means it has to be true, on Mother's Day, that is the single highest call volume day of the year every year in the United States, because obviously people are calling their moms. That is not true of Father's Day. I saw that Father's Day is ranked 20th as far as like online traffic and phone calls and yada, yada, yada. And I saw a comedian say, I can't even think of 18 other holidays besides like Christmas and Mother's Day. And what I really love about Father's Day is on Mother's Day, we go out to eat, we celebrate mom, we fuss over her, we do all the things. And on Father's Day, all the dad wants is just leave me alone for a day. In some seasons of life, for a day, just leave me alone. If you want to silently snuggle with me while I watch the U.S. Open, fine. But don't tell me about your monsters today, okay? This is our day. So happy Father's Day for those to whom it applies and in all sincerity, if today for any reason is a was on the dad, I was on the phone with my dad this morning talking about Father's Day. He just mentioned to me that Moses is his favorite character in the Old Testament, and he's one of mine too. So it's going to be fun to continue to go through his life this summer. Last week, we looked at Moses in the burning bush. And I said, we're going to spend two weeks in this passage because the lessons in this passage are so profound that they're worth it. I honestly think I could spend six weeks in this passage, but I think I would bore a majority of you if I did that. I may risk boring you this morning with just two weeks, but last week we approached this passage with this, and so this is simply a reminder of how we approached last week. We are all meant to build God's kingdom. We are all meant to be kingdom builders. And I said this last week, I spent time on this last week, but I was talking to a friend who is a regular church attender who looked at the, this is in the lobby 15 minutes ago, who looked at all of the traits of grace across the glass doors on the top of it. And he goes, this looks different. What's different? Did something change here? And I said, yeah, in like September. And he's like, well, I mean, I didn't know. And he goes, what are these? I said, these are the traits of grace. And the apex trait is that we would be kingdom builders. So clearly I need to continue to repeat it so we all get it. But we are intended to build God's kingdom, not our own. And that is the conversation that's happening here where God is telling Moses, I want you to go build my kingdom in this way. This is the good work for which I created you. Now you go walk in it. And we talked last week about how we have, we looked at the five excuses of Moses that ended in, oh God, please choose someone else, which is a wonderful excuse that we all have as we seek to build God's kingdom. And as he presses on us, what we need to do to build his kingdom. But this morning, I want us to focus on one of the responses of God, where Moses asks God, what is your name? When I go, and I'll read the verses in a second, when I go, who should I say sent me? And to my recollection, I could be wrong about this, but in my recollection, I can only think of one other time where God the Father is asked a direct question and kind of his feet are held to the fire. Hey, I need to know the answer to this. Where all of humanity leans in and says, yes, God, what's the deal with this? There's instances in the gospel, because Jesus walked among us, where Pharisees or pastors by or disciples would press on Jesus and kind of demand answers from him. But we don't see this happen to God the Father, in my recollection, but one other time in scripture. And the only other time where I see God being questioned directly is in the book of Job. Now, I hesitate to bring this up this morning because I fear that I will create more questions than answers with this particular example, but I think it's worth pointing out. The book of Job, for those who don't know, a very quick synopsis. Job was the most righteous man on the earth. Satan asked God permission to mess with him, and God said, go ahead. He's not going to betray me. This is a loose paraphrase. And so things start happening to Job. He loses his family. He's wrecked with illness. It's so bad that his wife looks at him and offers the wonderful advice of curse God and die, which Jen tells me that all the time. Just twice though. It's just two times. No, but his wife offers this advice, curse God and die. His friends are offering him advice. Surely you're wrong. And he's not wrong. He's righteous and he is not sin. And he goes to God finally in Job chapter 38 after cycles. And if you've read Job, you know, after cycles of bad advice and back and forth. And he finally goes to God and he demands an answer of God. Hey, why am I suffering? And what he's asking is why are bad things happening to a good person? I, I demand an answer from you. And I had a professor in seminary that was to the whole class was on the book of Job. It was one of the best classes I ever took. And I think of Job as like theology 501. It's not 101, 201, 301, 401. It's graduate level theology. You have to develop, and this is why I hesitated to bring it up, a robust and appreciative and in-depth view of God before you can really appreciate the theology and lesson of Job. But I had a professor say that Job went to God to have a man-to-man conversation and found that he was one man short. So when Job goes to God and says, why are these things happening to me? You owe me an answer. God's response is, it's one of the best lines in the Bible. It's in Job chapter 38. You can look it up. Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Which is what I say to Lily when she argues with me. Right? Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? And you can see, you can feel it in the text. Job goes, whoops. I'm sorry. And so God starts to berate him. Where were you when I hung the earth where it goes? Where were you when I created the moon and stars? Where were you when I created the behemoth and the Leviathan? And I told the tides of the earth and the oceans that you will go this far and no further. And he starts to ask him questions. And Job says, and this is another great line, he says, I am sorry, Lord. I have spoken once. I will speak no further. And God's like, yeah, I'm not done. And he goes on for three chapters and it's the equivalent. It's, it's the conversational equivalent of that movie, uh, that came out years ago. I think it was in the nineties. This may be too old of a reference to use anymore in 2025, but a few good men when, when Tom Cruise is playing a a JAG lawyer, and is it Jack Nicholson or Nicholas? Nicholson? I always get it confused. Thank you, Jeffy. I always get it confused. Jack. We'll call him Jack. Jack Nicholson is a colonel, and he's being put on trial. And there's that great moment where he says, what do you want? And Tom Cruise, I want the truth. And Jack Nicholson screams back at him, you can't handle the truth. Right? This is what God is telling Job. It's an elaborate way of saying, until you can understand and answer the questions that I've asked you, you could not possibly understand my explanation for why I'm allowing these things to happen to you. So maybe just be quiet and trust that I am God. It's the only other time in scripture where I see God's feet being held to the fire and someone is demanding an answer. And God's answer is, yeah, I'm not telling you. Another profound time is in Jesus's life when his best friend, Mary of Beth Bethany shows up and says, why did you let this happen? And Jesus' response is, yeah, I'm just going to weep with you, but I'm not going to answer you. Similarly, in this passage, when Moses asks God, what is your name? We find God's response to be insufficient. Intuitively, it feels insufficient. But I want us to look deeper into this name of God and understand its all sufficiency. Because I think that this is probably, as far as building a theology and an understanding of who God is, one of the most, if not the most, important passage in all of Scripture, or at least the Old Testament. So let's look at these two verses in Exodus chapter 3, verses 13 and 14. And then we're going to spend the rest of the day talking about the profundity that is found within these words. Verse 13, Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they ask me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? He's holding his feet to the fire. God says to Moses, this is his answer. I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you. And at first glance, I think we hear that and we go, what are you, Dr. Seuss? This is how you're answering this question? What is your name? When I go to the elders and I tell them that I need to lead the people out of Egypt, I need to do it in your name. What is your name, God? It's the only place in scripture where God has asked his name. God has many names in scripture. We see most often in the Hebrew Elohim, but Elohim is a placeholder for God. It just means God or Lord in the Hebrew language, but that's how he's most often referred to. And we see other names of God that are given to him by us. I jotted down a few. We see El Roy. When Hagar says that he is the God who sees, he's called El Shaddai, which means all sufficient. He is called Jehovah Jireh, which means he is the God who provides. He's called Adonai, which means Lord and Master. Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals. And Jehovah Shalom, the God of peace. When I was growing up, my mom cross-stitched. Raise your hand. Anybody in here ever cross-stitched? Has anybody done that? David McWilliams. I'm expecting all women, David McWilliams, knocking it out of the park. Good job. Good job representing the dudes with cross-stitching. My mom does that. And in the church lobby, in the church where I grew up, she had cross-stitched this big list of more than a dozen names of the names of God. But these names were ascribed to him by us. God does not name himself, except in this passage, where he says, I am. You tell them I am has sent you. And before I get into kind of the points that I want to make this morning, I do want us to pause here in reverence of the holiness of that. And I do think it's important to revere this moment. So I'm not preaching to you or at you right now. I am sharing with you so that we might feel the weight of what is happening here. These words, I am, were so holy that the Hebrew scribes and rabbis refused to give that a word. They wrote initials. In English, it's translated Y-H-W-H, Yahweh. And we sing, who pulled me out of that grave? He did, he did, Yahweh, Yahweh. And we just sing it and we declare it. But they held that name so much more preciously than we do. I don't think, I tried to think of something that would be relevant in our culture for how they held it. And there's nothing because Americans are irreverent by nature. But this name was so holy that they dared not speak it. They would not say out loud Yahweh. That's why he's referred to as Elohim in the Old Testament. Because they dared not say the name Yahweh. It was unspeakable. And when they had to write it in scripture, they would pause. They would be transcribing scripture, copying it from one piece of paper to another, from one scroll to another. And when they got to Yahweh, where they would see that in the text, they would pause and get up and go ceremonially wash their hands and kneel and pray and then sit back down at their desk and write those four characters and then pause and pray again and then continue with their work. We have no parallel for that kind of reverence in our culture. But this is how the Hebrew people held God's name. This is how sacred this moment is. And I just wanted to say that to you so you would feel the weight of what's happening in this passage. Now, as we jump back and we kind of ask the question, how do we process that? How do we process I am? I am who I am. You tell them I am sent you. There's really two things I would point out here. There's certainly more to learn from this name. But I think this name is frustrating because it's insufficient. It feels dodgy. It feels like God is evading the question. And in some ways he is, but when we understand why, we'll be grateful for that. Because it's's wonderfully so but the first thing that I would that I would say about this name that we should learn and that we should know and that we should reflect on is that when God says I am what he means is this I am all that you need all the time I am all that you need all the time. I am all that you need all the time. In the ancient world, cultures developed pantheons of gods. And the context in which we find this, the Egyptians were the major power. They had a pantheon of gods. And next week, as we look at the 10 plagues, we're going to see how those 10 plagues were a direct assault on 10 of the gods of Egypt. There was, there's pantheons of God. If you studied North Norse mythology, there's pantheons of gods and Viking lore. There's pantheons of gods to the, to the, to the Celtics. There's pantheons of gods to the Greeks and to the Romans, every major society, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas, they've all had these pantheons of gods. And the Jewish tradition is the first one to come out and say, no, no, no, we have one God. And he is all that we need. He is Jehovah Jireh. He is all sufficient. He is all the things. And so when God says, I am, he says, I am all that you need all of the time. I am all sufficient. I am El Roy. I am the God who sees. But you are not going to call me El Roy and suspect that I am only the God who sees because I am also El Shaddai and I am all sufficient. But I'm not just going to limit myself to El Shaddai because I am also Adonai, your Lord and master, and you need to follow me. But I'm not just going to call myself that because I'm also Jehovah Rapha and I heal. And you should pray to me in times that you need. But I'm not just Jehovah Rapha or just Adonai, the Lord and Master. I am also Jehovah Shalom, the God of peace. And I give that to you when you need it. I am all that you need all of the time. And this is wonderful. This is wonderful because we don't need the same God in every situation. We need certain things at certain times. And while I'm here, just let me step aside and say this. We also, for my Catholic brothers and sisters, don't need a patron saint of healing. We don't need a patron saint of fertility. We don't need an additional saint to advocate to our God because our God says, I am. I am. You can pray to me. And what I find wonderful about this is sometimes what we need from God is for him to pick us up. Sometimes we are on the map. And we need the God who heals and encourages. And we need him to lift us up. And we need him to breathe life into us. And we need him to help us see hope and joy again. And we need a God to build us up. But sometimes we need a God to tear us down. Sometimes we're killing it. And we get a little full of ourselves. And we think we're somebody. And we need God to bring us down. We need God to send us to the desert for 40 years to humble us, to prepare us for the work. We need the God that sent David into the wilderness for 20 years to humble him before he could lead. We need the God that sent Paul into the wilderness for seven years to humble him before he could preach. And then other time, Moses needs the God to pick him up and to encourage him and to say, I will supply you with all that you need. Sometimes we need God to bring us low. We need the God of humility. Sometimes we need the God of encouragement. Sometimes we need the God who heals. Sometimes we need the God who hurts for our own sake. Sometimes we need the God of wisdom so that we might speak wise words into a moment. And sometimes we need the God of wisdom so that we might shut up and not say dumb words in the moment. God is all that we need all of the time. And here's what I like about this answer. There's this old Seinfeld bit. And, you know, just for the record, I love Seinfeld. He's the best. It's a running joke in my friend group that I may as well be Larry David's spirit animal. There's a lot of similarities there in our views on life. You take that for what it's worth. But there's this old bit where Seinfeld talks about getting on a plane and how the plane will come over the intercom. And he's like, yeah, passengers, this is Gary. This is your captain speaking. We're going to go up to about, we're going to take off in another 15, 20 minutes here. We're going to go up to 30,000 feet. We expect to cruise all the way to New York City. There's a little pocket of clouds and thunderstorms over West Virginia, so we're probably going to just go around that. And then we expect a smooth landing when we get there. And Seinfeld's like, yeah, whatever. I'm going to get on the plane. You take off. You land in New York. I don't need to know all the details. I don't care what you're going to do. Fly directly through the storm. It doesn't matter. Just land me in New York in an hour. That's what I need from you. I don't need to understand all the things. And this passage to me is God going, what, do you want me to explain it all to you? Do you really want Gary, your pilot to be telling you over the intercom, the, the, the, the nitty gritty of what's going to happen through life? Just sit down, get on the plane, buckle your seatbelt. I'll bring you some peanuts in a minute. And then we're going to land in New York when we're supposed to. All right. I am, I got this, whatever you need, I am your God. And so what we see is that what we think of as an insufficient answer in its insufficiency is all sufficient in its lack of clarity is perfectly clear in In what we would perceive as a lack of meaning and an incomplete answer, upon further reflection, what we find is it's fully complete. Because he says, I am. I am all that you need all of the time. And here's the other thing that we see in this answer. And I've made this point before. I made it in FAQs when we talked about doubts. But I think it's such an important point that we need to reflect on it as much as we can. The other thing that this answer means, beyond I am all that you need all the time, is this. I will not be confined to your boxes. You will not name me. I will not limit myself to El Shaddai, to El Roy, to Jehovah Rapha, to Jehovah Nisi. I will not limit myself. Jordan spoke very eloquently about Emmanuel God with us. But that is not all I will be. I will be more than that. I will be all sufficient. And you and I will not be limited to your boxes. And I love this idea. That we are constantly trying to understand God and limit him. We're constantly trying to put him in boxes. And God says, when we hold his feet to the fire, in one instance in Job, when it's like, hey, what's the deal? Why are you letting this happen to me? God says, you can't handle the truth. All right. So just worship me as sovereign God and trust me to get you where you need to go. And in the second case where his feet are at, are held to the fire, he says, yeah, I'm not good. What's your name? And God said, I'm not going to give you that, man. I'm not going to tell you that. I'm not going to let you name me. I'm not going to let you confine me with a title. Because I can't be reduced to a name. And if I give you that, you'll try to put handles on me and confine me to what that is. And that's not who I want to be. And what's remarkable to me is how little Christians acknowledge this. God never intended to be fully understood. Do you know that? God never intended to be fully understood. If you sit down and you read the Bible cover to cover, when I know many of you have, you'll take away a lot of things from that experience. But one of the things a thoughtful reader will take away from that experience is, goodness, it doesn't really seem like God's that interested in being completely understood by us. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about it, but he had all the chances in the world. He wrote the Bible. He could have made it more clear than this. What are we doing with Esther, man? What's that about? He could have made it more clear. He could have made it a systematic theology. In my seminary and in my training, I took a class called, I think it was two or three systematic theologies where there was this very thick book where the author and all of his wisdom and all of his learning tried to write down all of the things about God. This is how we understand who God is. And these are the boxes and this is how they go. And this is how things relate. And when this happens, this is why. And when this happens, this is why. And it's a book intended to give you a full and robust and workable and applicable theology of God. And the reason that you don't understand why things happen is because you haven't read systematic theology. But I have, and I understand, and now I'm the pastor, and I'm going to explain God to you in this perfectly systematic way that holds up in all the seasons of life. Isn't that dumb? Now listen, that's an easy joke. The men and women who write those are very learned and very thoughtful and would probably agree with my sentiment that it is an adequate effort. So I'm not trying to deride those books. I'm just saying it's tilting at windmills to try to write them. God, do you ever think about this? God waited thousands of years to give us the rules. He gives the law to Moses. We'll talk about that in a couple of weeks. He could have given the rules to Adam. All right, Adam, here's the one rule. Don't eat the fruit on that tree. Oh, you did it. Well, shoot. Well, here are the rules. He didn't do that. He could have given the rules to Noah. He destroys the whole world with the flood. Noah and Hamshim and Japheth are left and their wives. And he could have said, okay, you guys kind of screwed it up that last time. So for the reboot, here are the rules. No. Could have given them to Enoch, who was so righteous that he lived and then he was with God. Could have given them to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. He didn't. He waited thousands of years and he gave them to Moses. If God's goal was to be perfectly understood, wouldn't he have done that sooner? Wouldn't Jesus have spoken in more clarity than intentionally speaking in riddles to thin the herd? Didn't God have every opportunity to present himself to us in a perfectly systematic way that fits inside a book so we can understand him all the time? Yeah. He had every opportunity to do that, but he didn't. So either God's dumb or we're silly for thinking that we can understand him and reduce him to our intellect. And so when God says, you tell them I am sent you, he is saying, yes, I am all that you need for all of the things. But he's also saying, no chance, buddy. I'm not telling you what my name is. I'm not going to let you reduce me to that because you can't possibly understand me. And despite that message being replete throughout scripture, we skip over that and we continue to pursue our systematic theologies to try to understand him. We're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just for David. Yeah, yeah, that's just for them. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Let me try to understand God. And we can't. And we try really hard to understand God. We try so hard to understand God and what he's done that we have this organization called CERN in France and Switzerland. And it is one of, if not the greatest scientific achievements in our generation. That's right. If you're over 60, I just lumped you into my generation. Okay. So we're all one generation today. It's one of the greatest achievements we've ever seen. It's, it's a Hadron collider that's under the ground on the border of France and Switzerland. It's 27 kilometers long and it has magnets inside of it that are colder than space. I don't know how that works. I just read it on their website. Okay. I'm not making this up. Colder than space. I would assume they mean like the cold parts of space and not like next to the sun. That'd be really easy. And what they do is they speed particles around this cylinder, around this tube, under the ground, and they slam them into each other. And the whole point of it is to try to figure out what happened at creation. They are literally simulating the Big Bang. And they're learning all that they can about the way that particles, and I don't know the right words, protons, neurons, whatever. I didn't pay attention in chemistry. My science teacher in high school was a retired Vietnam vet named Mr. Owens. And if you just sat with your test long enough and went to him and said, I don't understand number 10, he'd go, here you go, baby. And he'd write down the answer. You go, thank you. And then you go back to your seat. And then you just wait a few minutes. Mr. Owens, I don't understand number 11. And you think I'm kidding. There was a constant line of three or four dudes. It was always dudes in line to talk to Mr. Owens about the test. And he'd fill it out for you. You go, okay, thank you. And then you'd get an A. So I don't know the words for the things. I think electrons are involved. But they would slam together. And then they would the reaction. And they do it over and over and over again. And they've learned so many things. But do you know that at the height of human achievement, trying to understand the nature of the universe and what God created and how he created it in our terms, that's not what they say they would be doing. Some of them might be believers. I really don't know, but they've created more questions than answers. They've gone in with a theory, a standard theory, and they've tried to disprove it and they can't, but they don't understand why they can't. They're watching particular particles behave and they assume certain things about those particles. And then their experiments reveal to them that the things that they have assumed are not right, but they cannot explain the behavior of those particles. And so the more they dig into God's universe, the more questions they have about how it works, the less clarity that is brought about. Now, they're better questions. They're learned questions. They're more important questions. And here's what I would say, too, just a careful caveat. I've sat in rooms before where a Christian pastor was deriding atheistic scientists. They don't know what we know. They're not as smart as we are. That's dumb. They are. They're smarter than me. They have more degrees than me. They're very learned. They're paying attention to everything. I'm not questioning their intelligence at all. All I'm pointing out is at the apex of human understanding, as we seek to understand God and who he is, we just develop more questions than answers. And here's what I know for sure, that they't know because they can simulate what happens milliseconds after the big bang, milliseconds after creation. But if you say, okay, so those particles slammed into each other and then universe happened. Yes. Great. Where did the particles come from? We don't know. What activated them in such a way that they would collide with each other? We don't know. Does this point to a God? We don't know. Einstein himself, as he studied the fabric of the universe, concluded there must be some intelligence orchestrating the things happening behind us. We try and we try and we try to understand our God. And he told us in Exodus, stop, you can't. We can know our God. We can know his character. We can know that we can trust him. We can know that he loves us. We can trust that he created us. There are things about our God that are revealed to us. There are things about him and about his character that he does choose to share with us. And we can take comfort and solace and courage and faith in those things. But what we cannot do is seek to fully understand him. Because at the burning bush, when Moses holds his feet to the fire and he says, what is your name? God says, no, I am. I'm all that you need and you will not not understand me. And you will not confine me to your intellect. I am too big for that. And so, when we encounter God, and we look at the name Yahweh, and we hold it with the reverence that it deserves. We should respond to God with awe-filled wonder. The same way that Moses did. The same way that the saints of the Old Testament do. The same way that Paul does when he's confronted on the Damascus Road. We should, as believers, respond to God first with awe-filled wonder. This is why Proverbs tells us that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Because until we respond to God as he intended us to respond at the revelation of his name being I am, we cannot hope to understand the rest of scripture and appreciate it and him for what he is. And in all actuality, we should be thanking God for answering Moses' question in that way. Because it feels like an insufficient answer, but upon further thought, it reveals his all-sufficiency. It feels like he's shortchanging us, that he's being dodgy and that he's being mysterious, but what he's doing, he's doing us a favor. Because we can say, thank you, God, for being the God who heals. Thank you, God, for being the God who humbles. Thank you, God, for being the God that lifts up. Thank you, God, for being the God that is sufficient, that brings peace, that brings everything that I need. Thank you for being the God who provides. Thank you, God, for being the God who sees. And thank you, God, for loving us enough for not allowing us to limit you to the boxes we'd like to put you in. Thank you, God, for being so wild and so wonderful and so awe-inspiring that you're too big for a name. So the right response to Moses in the burning bush is to be filled with awestruck wonder and to say, thank you, God, for how big you are and for apparently how much you love me. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for in telling us your name, not telling us. We thank you that you are. That you are who you are and you always will be who you are. Thank you for the solace and the comfort and the peace that we find in that. God, we thank you that there are ways to understand you, that there are ways to know you, that there are ways to become familiar with you. But God, we also thank you for being so wild and so wonderful that you will not fit in our boxes. Thank you for being a God that's bigger than we understand. Thank you for who you are and how you've loved us. In Jesus' name, amen.