Sermons tagged with Perspective

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you were here this morning, thank you so much for braving the elements and coming. You had to really, really want it. If you're home watching in your warm, dry sweatpants, nobody likes you today. You made a selfish choice. But we're glad you're joining us online. This is the second part of our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're walking through the Gospel of Mark all the way up through Easter. So for several more weeks, we're going to be entrenched in the Gospel of Mark, and we're calling it Mark's Jesus because it's a view of Jesus through the lens of Mark, which comes through the lens of Peter. And I realized in the fall that we have not spent time together in the gospel of Mark. And so it's high time we do that. And so what I would say to you as a disclaimer is the way that I laid out the series is just to go through the series or go through the gospel of Mark and kind of make a note. Anytime I got to a passage that I thought, yeah, I want to teach that. Yes, I think that could help grace. Yes, that's something that we need to talk about or discuss or bring up or whatever it is. And so I just kind of went through and haphazardly just kind of wrote things down and then planned out the 12 or 13 weeks or however long it is. So what I would say is I'm not going to cover every chapter of Mark. I'm not going to cover every story. I'm not going to encapsulate the whole book in this series and in what we're trying to do. So I would highly encourage you, if you're going to be a part of Grace for this whole series, grab the reading plan. Kyle, I assume the reading plan is going through Mark, yes? Twice. Okay, two times. There you go. Kyle does our reading plan. It's back there on the information table outside the doors. Grab that reading plan and go through Mark with us. Allow God to speak to you from the gospel of Mark in ways other than what is dictated by the whims of Nate. All right. Let God walk you through that book as we go through it as well. As we approach the text this morning, I'm reminded of a story that happened about 10 years ago, I think maybe even a little bit before that. This is back when I lived in Georgia outside of Atlanta, and one night, I'm somewhere in the threes, 3.30 or so, Jen jostles me awake, and I can tell that it's a little bit urgent, and she says, I can't remember if she said, your sister's on the phone, or I just talked to your sister, but for some reason, my sister had called in the middle of the night, and I looked at my phone, and I had several missed calls from my mom, and at the time, my phone was on silent, so it didn't wake me up. So somehow it's relayed to me from my sister that mom has fallen. She's home by herself. She's fallen going to the restroom in the middle of the night and she's called the ambulance and somebody needs to get over there and I lived really close. So I scramble downstairs. I get in my car and I go see my mom. And when I get there, she's on her bedroom floor. My brother-in-law's there, but he doesn't really know what to do. She's on her bedroom floor laying on her back with a gash over her eye. And her glasses kind of shattered. And there's a big old split in her forehead. And there's blood everywhere. And it was a big, scary mess. It's not the way you want to see your mom. And she had gotten up to use the restroom in the middle of the night and came back and had lost consciousness. And when she did, she fell against the wall and hit a doorframe with her forehead. And there was a big pool of blood there where she had hit. And then she managed to get over to the bed and call the ambulance and start calling family. And this is not something that was expected. My mom would have been 53, 54 at the time, which is not when you expect people to start falling in the middle of the night. I don't know what the age is that you get to where when your family gets the call that mom and dad fell in the middle of the night, they're like, yeah, that probably checks out. It's probably Doug's age. Whatever Doug, whatever you are, Doug, that's probably what it is, where Molly would be like, yeah, that makes sense. Walker, go check on dad. But it's not 54, all right? That's not it. And so it was a little bit unusual. And I'm with mom. The paramedics get there, and I'm trying to walk them through some stuff. And they get her loaded into the ambulance, and I decide to follow. I'm going to the hospital, following the ambulance to the hospital. And I'm praying the whole time. I'm thinking about her. I'm thinking about, like, let's not let the scarring be bad. Let's get her stitched up. Let's let her be okay. Let's not let her have a big, gruesome scar over her eye because dudes think scars are cool. And my understanding is that women are not as inclined towards scars as we are. So she probably didn't want that on her forehead. So I'm worried about that. And I'm just worried about in general that she's going to be okay. And so I'm praying for her. And we get there and they put her in the ER. And I'm standing next to the table holding her hand. And a nurse comes in and starts stitching her up. And there was a few different times where I had to kind of like look down or sit down because I was about to lose consciousness too. I would make a terrible, terrible nurse. I cannot do that. I can't handle it. But we got through it. And the whole time, I'm just kind of, God, let this go quick. Let somebody get to her quickly. Let us not have to wait for a long time. Let's let her be taken care of. I'm talking to my dad. He's out of town. He's on his way back now in the middle of the night and all those things. And so they get her stitched up, and she's fine. She's lucid. She was good the whole time. But they said, we want to try to figure out what was going on. So they asked her, like, what was happening? And she said, well, I was just having severe abdominal pain, and I think I passed out just because of the pain coming back from the restroom. And so they ran some tests, and they found out that she, is it pancreatitis? Is that what it is? When your pancreas is going to burst? What is it? Appendicitis, thanks. Yeah, she had appendicitis. Pancreatitis is a different thing. She might have that, I don't know. But at that time, she had appendicitis, and her appendix was going to burst, and it was causing a great deal of pain. And because she was at the hospital, they were able to get in there and remove it and get that out. And it was actually turned out to be a good thing that this is what happened. I've got a good buddy who goes here to the church, and some of y'all know him, know his story as well. A few years ago, his appendix burst, and they didn't know about it until it ate away at his intestines. And then he ended up in the hospital, and his wife was told he might have a bag for the rest of his life. That's bad news. And what he's had to walk through for the last two years is way worse than a gash in the head. I guarantee you he would trade a few weeks of recovering from a gash over his eye for the last two years that he's had with his guts and his organs because his appendix did burst. And so this whole time when I'm going to mom and I'm seeing her on the ground and I'm looking at her and I start to pray for her and I start to be concerned with her, in my mind, her most urgent need is this gash over her eye. Her most urgent need is to get that stitched up, to get that healed up, to get that knot scarred up, and to move on with her life. That's her most urgent need is we're going to the hospital. That's the thing I want to get addressed the most. As we're there and I'm holding her hand, that's what I want to get done the most is let's get this thing stitched up. What I did not know is that there was something far more urgent going on with her that I couldn't see and that I wasn't aware of. And if I'd have known that, I would have been praying that that got healed up. But because I didn't know that, if you somehow made me aware that mom was up in the middle of the night and that she was experiencing some pain trying to get back to her bed and that she was about to pass out, I would have prayed, God, don't let her pass out. Let her make it to her bed. But what she needed to do is pass out to go to the hospital so she didn't wake up with a burst appendix. God was actually, I believe, moving in that moment to get her where she needed to be because she was home alone and too stubborn to call the hospital and get there on her own. And it could have been a very different story had that fall not happened. And I bring that up because I think we see a similar dynamic in this story in Mark chapter 2. Mark chapter 2 is home of what I believe to be the most audacious ask for a miracle in the whole Bible. And when I say that, I'm just going to let you guys in on this because it's driving me nuts. I said that when we were going through the walkthrough. I said, hey, I was telling Laura who's running the slides, hey, I'm going to talk about the most audacious ask that's ever been made about yada, yada, yada. And then Greg Roberg, the keyboardist, said afterwards, he goes, did you say bodacious ask? And I said, no, audacious. And he goes, oh, because all I could think was good gracious ask bodacious. So if you are from a generation that knows why that's funny, laugh it up. All right. If you don't actually hear, let's make this easier. This side of the room, ask this side of the room after the service. They've got you. All right? So now that's messing with me. And I was like, Greg, you couldn't tell me that after the sermon. You had to mess me up before I get up there and preach. But in this chapter, we have, I'm going to call it a bold ask for a miracle. And you probably know what it is, but I think we have some lessons that we can learn from this. So what I want to do is kind of go through it a few verses at a time and talk about what's happening and see what we can learn from this person getting healed by Jesus. Starting innaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door. And he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing them a paralyzed man carried by four of them. Okay, so here's what's going on. I read one verse extra. I just want to set the scene. Jesus is going back home to Capernaum. We know that Jesus is from Nazareth, but at some point in his adult life, probably being trained in the temple there in Capernaum, he made Capernaum his home. Capernaum is on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. So if you go to Israel and you think about the type of topography and landscape that you would expect to see there, what you'd probably expect is kind of a desert, rocky, mountainous terrain. And in the southern part of Israel, that's absolutely the case. But in northern Israel, it's very lush. And there surrounding Galilee are green hills and mountains and trees and vegetation. And it's really, really pretty. And so nestled into this, along with the villages all around the Sea of Galilee, is Capernaum. It's a prominent fishing village in north Israel. And that's where Jesus is. And he goes home, it says, to preach to the crowds. And it's standing room only. People hear that Jesus is coming back, and they start clamoring in. There's no room anywhere. It's like the opposite of this room this morning. There's no room anywhere at all. Everyone's coming in. They're standing out in the lobby. They're standing outside. They're standing on the roof. They're standing on the front porch. They're all craning their neck to try to hear this Jesus teach. There's no space at all. Everyone's clamoring in towards Christ. And in the midst of this, we see this happen probably a couple of hundred. And these guys show up with their friend. Four of them are carrying him on a mat, ostensibly a cot, one on each corner. And they're trying to carry him to Jesus to ask Jesus to heal him because he's paralyzed. And I don't know if they were disorganized, hopeful miracle receivers and just got there late. I don't know if they found out late after everybody else. But for whatever reason, when they get there, they can't get to Christ and Christ can't see them. So they start figuring out what to do. And it's always been wild to me that they decided, this version says to dig a hole in the roof. Some versions say to cut a hole in the roof. I could do, I thought about doing some research on what ancient Israel, Israelite roofs were made out of. So I could give you the correct way that this happened, but I decided that would be pretty useless because it doesn't matter to help us understand the story. So they're going through the roof, digging through it, cutting through it, whatever it is they're doing. And I've always wondered this. I don't know if you guys have wondered this, those of you who have heard the story, like what was it like in the room? Like if I'm just in here and then all of a sudden, like a saw just shows up, you know, like I'm not going to keep teaching. I'm going to stand. I'm going to be, let's get out. Let's evacuate. All of us, all of us leave right away. This is how it happens. Let's go. But like, is there debris coming down? Is rubble involved? Like, how long does Jesus just keep going? And then you have to imagine this is not a short process. They didn't have power tools. It wasn't a quick process by which they cut a hole large enough for a grown man to be lowered by some sort of elaborate pulley system down in front of Christ. But at some point or another, his friends get up on the roof with a body on a cot, and then they cut the hole in the roof with some tools that they probably had to find. I doubt any of them brought shovels and saws. And then through a great effort, lower this person down into the middle of an assembly where all the focus was on them. That is a lot of effort to get your friend healed. And in their mind, what was their friend's most urgent need? That Jesus would help him walk. That Jesus would heal him physically. They got up that morning when they heard Jesus was coming. And they said, Jesus can heal. Let's take our friend. Let's take him to Jesus and let's let Jesus heal him. He will, if we can get to him. I just know that he will. This is the most important thing we can do with our day. And they marshaled all of their resources to get that man up on that roof, down in front of Christ, so that Christ could help him walk again, could perform a miracle and heal him physically. And instead, when that man lands in front of Christ, Jesus says, because of your faith, you may rise and walk. No, because of your faith, son, your sins are forgiven. And now we're going to read the verses that follow in a second. But what we see in the narrative is that it takes a beat between your sins are forgiven and rise and walk. And I want us to put ourselves in the position of the men who had just lowered him down. And they hear Jesus say, because of your faith, and then their hearts leap in their chest, yes, rise and walk. Because of your faith, your sins are forgiven. What? That's not the need, Jesus. That's not what he needs. He needs to walk. That's not what we're asking for. That's not what we're praying for. That's not what got us up this morning. That's not what got us up onto that roof. That's not what we were praying for, hoping for when we were digging. That's not what we were implying when we lowered him down, that you would forgive him of his sins. That's not what we wanted, Jesus. And in that moment, whether it lasted a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes, in that moment, I think we stand united with those men who lowered their friend in front of Christ because to be a Christian for any length of time is to pray a prayer that you believe is urgent about a thing that matters very much to you only to hear Jesus not give you the answer that you were expecting. No, Jesus, that's not it. This is far more urgent. Again, if I'm somehow able to pray for my mom, don't let her fall. Let her get back to her bed. And Jesus lets her fall anyways. In that moment, I feel betrayed by Christ. No, that's not her need. Her need isn't a gash in her head so she has to go to the hospital. That's not what she needs, God. This is more urgent. Why don't you see what I see? Why don't you understand what I understand? Why don't you do what I think you ought to do? In this moment, we can share in their disillusionment in Christ because he didn't do what they thought he was going to do, what they thought he should do, and what they had been hoping and praying that he would do. And it reminds me of one of my most favorite moments in Scripture. Early in Jesus' ministry, we find the story in the Gospel of John. When John the Baptist is arrested, and he's being held as a prisoner in Herod's dungeon, in Herod's palace. And he has a pretty good sense that he's going to die down there some way or another. And so he gets one of his disciples, John had disciples, and he sends one to Christ. And he says, will you ask Christ if he is the coming one? And this is a, this is a Ram as it's a hint or a clue. It's an allusion to an old Testament text in Isaiah, I believe maybe 35 or 43, where Isaiah prophesied that the one who is to come, the coming one, when he arrives, the deaf will hear, the lame will walk, the blind will see, and the prisoners will be set free. So John sends his disciple to Christ to say, hey, are you the coming one? Are you the one who is to come? Because if you are, then I should be set free from prison and not die here. So are you the Messiah? Are you the guy? Or should I keep waiting? And Jesus tells the disciple, go back to John and tell him that the lame do walk, the blind do see, the deaf do hear, and the prisoners will be set free, but not you, John. And then Jesus says this, and I think it's an amazing, amazing line. Blessed are those who do not fall away on account of me. What that means is, blessed are those who get disappointed by me because I don't do what they think I'm supposed to do. Because I don't do what they think they want me to do. Because I don't do what they think I need to do. And yet they choose to follow me anyways. Do you see that? Blessed are those who do not fall away on a part of me. Blessed are those who are disappointed in me because I do not meet their expectations in the way that they think I should and still choose me anyways despite not understanding. This is the moment that these men are having. This is the moment that we've had. When we're sitting in the middle of a situation and there is a very clear and urgent need and Jesus doesn't meet it and God doesn't answer it that way and we're thinking, no, don't forgive him of his sins. Help him walk, man. That's what's needed. Let's do that instead. We've all been in a place where we've been a little bit disillusioned with Christ. That's why it's important, I think, to continue the story. If we pick it up in verse 6, here's what happens. Now, some of the teachers of the law were sitting there thinking to themselves, why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone? Immediately, Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, why are you thinking these things? Which is easier, to say to this paralyzed man, your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up, take your mat, and walk? As soon as he says your sins are forgiven, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law begin to conspire. And they go, who does this guy think he is? Only God can forgive sins. Who is this guy? What is he doing? This is blasphemous. And Jesus knows their thoughts. And so he looks at them very pointedly. And he says, why are you upset? What's harder to say? Your sins are forgiven or rise and walk? Which one's more difficult? If I say your sins are forgiven, nothing happens. You can't see anything happen. You don't know if that worked or if it didn't. But if I say rise and walk and he doesn't, then you know that I am impotent. He stops them and he says, what do you really think is the most urgent thing here? What do you really think is most important? Why are you thinking this way? The harder thing to do is to heal them, not what I just did. To you is to heal them. And physically, not what I just did. But I'm telling you that the harder thing to do is to forgive him of his sins, and it actually carries weight and merit and warrant. So then he continues in verse 10. But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. So he said to the man, I tell you, get up, take your mat, and go home. He got up, took his mat, and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone, and they praised God, saying, We have never seen anything like this. I think it's really important to understand that Jesus didn't heal this man of his paralyzation until after he had been challenged about forgiving his sins. And he healed him to prove that he had the authority to forgive him. Do you see that? He said, which one's more difficult? It's harder. It's easier for me to just say, I forgive your sins because nothing happens. You don't know if it worked. But if I say rise and walk and then he doesn't, then I'm up a creek. Then I'm exposed. So here, tell you what, because of their faith and because I want you to know that I'm the son of man and I have the power and the authority to forgive sins. And that phrase son of man is from the book of Daniel. It's a quote where he's claiming to be the Messiah, the divine son of God. And he says, because I'm the son of man, I have the authority to do this. Rise and walk and go home. And the paralyzed guy wakes up, rolls up his mat and walks out in full view of everyone that he just got carried past on the way in. And the people saw it, and they were amazed, and they praised God, and the implication is they believed and the kingdom was grown. But look at me. Jesus healed that man to prove that he had the authority to forgive sins. He did not heal that man for the sake of healing that man. And I think that many of us probably think that that's what Jesus should have set himself about doing. Do you ever wonder why Jesus didn't go around ancient Israel with all of these maladies and all of these sicknesses and early infant death and low life expectancy rate and probably terrible cavity issues and all the different maladies that would afflict a low income population like this, why didn't Jesus just set up shop in Bethany just north of Jerusalem and let the whole country come and just heal, heal, heal, heal all day long? I have a feeling that if we were to walk around with Christ and watch how he spent his days, that we in our piety would have a real issue with his priorities. I'll bet that if we were to follow Jesus around and saw how few people he healed that asked him, and saw how few miracles he performed when he could have. And he didn't offer an explanation to us that satisfied us. I bet, and I'd be the first one in line gossiping with the rest of the disciples, I bet we would disapprove of how Jesus spent his time. Because sometimes things to us are far more urgent than they are to him. What Jesus knew is, if I heal this man of his sins, I give him an eternity. And in that eternity, he can walk and hop and skip and run in his new heavenly body. And this life is a mist or a vapor. This suffering compared to eternity is nothing. It doesn't matter. It's inconsequential. And so if you said, if you asked his friends, would you rather him help your friend walk or would you rather him forgive your friend's sins? The implication is that they would have said, no, make him walk. We'll figure the sin out thing later. And Jesus is like, no, you don't understand. That's not the most important thing here. And so what I see in this story and what I want us to reflect on and admit is we are not always right about what is most urgent. We are not in our finite human, always right about what is most urgent. And we have, all of us, prayed prayers where the issue was simple. Heal them, protect them, make this thing go through, make this thing fall through. Heal that marriage, heal that relationship, heal this, heal that, God be in this, God be in that, where we see the most urgent need, protect my children from these things, protect my husband from those things, protect my wife from that pain. We see these things that feel so urgent to us and we lower them down in front of Christ and we go, don't you see what I see? And then Jesus answers those prayers in that urgency in a way that we would not expect and that we would not choose and that we would not ask for. And then we get disillusioned with Christ because he didn't meet our expectations. We don't know what's most urgent at all times. If I could have protected my mom from that fall and saved the gash on her head, I would have done it. And in so doing, I would have made the decision that ruptured her appendix and put her in much more grave danger than that fall. Because I don't always see what's most urgent. It's why I'm so grateful that Romans chapter 8 and verse 26 tells us this, that in the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans or groanings too deep for words. We are taught in Romans, the greatest chapter, Romans 8, that the Holy Spirit, we don't know what to pray for as we ought because we don't know what the most urgent need is. And so the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The Holy Spirit is literally in the throne room of God as we pray, saying this is what Harris prayed, Lord, but this is what he really wants. This is his heart, but this is what he needs. It tells us that Jesus is our high priest and that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. This is what Anna prayed. This is what she really needs and wants, God. This is what's going to be best for her. Don't give her what she asked for that's going to be worse. And listen to me. It makes me so grateful that there is a Holy Spirit in heaven who hears my prayers and translates them correctly to the Father. I am so grateful that I have a Holy Spirit interceding on behalf of Lily and John, my children. That I have a Holy Spirit interceding on behalf of Jen. How many things would I choose as a father or as a husband to protect them from? How many things would I choose to fix? How many things would I choose to just wave a wand and make go away? Because clearly it's the most urgent need in their life. If you're a parent and you've ever watched your child go through pain, and listen, Lily's nine, so the kind of pain we're talking about is pretty minimal. Some of you have watched your kids struggle to have children or deal with addictions or deal with failures or deal with hardships or deal with being alone. You've watched your children walk through real pain. And if you could wave a wand because it's their most urgent need, you would wish that away. But aren't you glad that the Holy Spirit is interceding for you at the throne of the Father to make sure that your prayers are the right prayers when they get to God's ears. I know that I am. Because I don't want my wisdom and my viewpoint to dictate what happens to my children and to my church and to my friends and to my wife. I want to entrust that to a Jesus that has a different plan than me, that sees things more urgently than I do, and that correctly prioritizes what me and the people around me really need. We have a hard time with this, and I know many, many people, me included, and close friends, who have entered into a rocky time in their faith because Jesus didn't see an urgent need that they did. Because Jesus didn't think something was as urgent as they did. Because Jesus didn't answer the prayer the way that they had hoped he would. And because of that disappointment and disillusionment in Christ, they've moved sometimes away from Jesus, sometimes further away from Jesus, sometimes they've allowed that disappointment to drive a wedge between them and Jesus. And I just want to submit to you that if God isn't answering your prayers the way you'd like, maybe he has better plans. Some of you have petitioned God hard for things, and you've not gotten the answer you wanted. Is it possible that he sees a more urgent need than you? If I think about the things that my parents would have prayed away for me as I was growing up and some of the different struggles that I had, I'm so grateful now that there was a Holy Spirit interceding that allowed those things to go on because they made me into who I am. Now this doesn't work, and I'll be the first to admit, this doesn't make sense of every unanswered prayers. There's some prayers in my life, there's some things that were urgent in my life that I took to Christ and I took it to him for years and I saw it as very urgent and he could have healed if he wanted, he could have prevented if he wanted, and he didn't. And it still doesn't make any sense to me that he didn't. I still don't see the better good that came out of that. So this idea doesn't cover every unanswered prayer that we'll encounter in our life. But for a lot of them, if not most of them, maybe Jesus isn't answering our prayer the way we want because he's got a better plan. And if we'll just wait and see, one day we'll see it. I'll close with this story I'm a great time in there. I Had a friend growing up named Jenny pain and As adults we ended up in the same church and she was a small group leader for me and and she told me this story one time and a testimony video that she did. And I did not know this growing up. But Jenny was a little girl, I don't know how old, four or five years old, and she had two brothers. And she found out that her mom was pregnant. And so she immediately, in the way that earnest children do, she immediately got on her knees and started praying every day for a baby sister. She desperately wanted a baby sister. And she even went as far as to ask for a baby sister named Jessica. That's what she wanted specifically. I would like for that child to stop making that noise. Pray with me about that. Thank you, Ms. Erin. Don't we have a hallway czar? This is unbelievable. I can power through. I can power through normally. This is great. Yeah, go bang on the wall there, Haley. All right, we're going to agree to be grown-ups and tune that out. Jenny prayed for a baby sister named Jessica. And however many months after those prayers began, her mom had a baby. That was a little boy named Johnny. And Jenny was devastated. It took her several years to believe in the power of prayer again. Her parents could not convince her to pray because she had prayed, and she got John, not Jessica. John grew up, got to the age where you go to college, went to college, started making some poor choices with poor friends. I mean low-quality friends. I don't mean they were low socioeconomically. And he washed out of college. And those bad decisions caused him to join a construction crew down in Florida where he continued to kind of let his life not reach its potential by continuing to make poor choices. And at some point or another, he met a girl. And that girl really wanted him to go to church. And through her influence and her being a little bit different cut of cloth than the girls that normally talk to him, he started to get his life back together. He started to pursue God and make wise choices. And before you know it, Johnny's a respectable adult. He's engaged. And Jenny finds herself sitting in the wedding party of her new little sister named Jessica a few months after that. God had a plan. He knew that Johnny was going to need that Jessica more than Jenny did. And so even her most urgent prayers didn't get answered the way she wanted because God saw something different. And I don't know what you're praying for. I don't know what you're lowering down in front of Jesus. I don't know what you see as most urgent in the lives of the people around you. But I do know that Jesus may not see it the way you do. And because of that, you should be grateful. You should be grateful that you're trusting things to the wisdom of Christ and not yours. And in time, he will answer those prayers in the way that is best for us because we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for good. On this side of eternity or on that side, we know. We can trust a Jesus who sees things differently than us. Keep praying your prayers. Keep your faith. Blessed are those who do not fall away on account of him. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your servant Mark who wrote these stories down for us. We thank you for a Jesus who sees us and who knows us. God, we thank you for a Holy Spirit that intercedes for us and groanings too deep for words. And that we are entrusted to their wisdom and not our own. God, if we find ourselves in a situation where we're praying and we feel like something is so urgent and we know exactly what you should do and we know exactly how you should address it and we can't stand to see this pain and we can't stand to see this hardship and God, don't you care too and can't you not stand to see it? God, give us patience for your perspective. Give us a faith in your sense of urgency and let us entrust ourselves and those we love the most to you and watch your plan unfold in their life. Give us faith, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and every now and again, as your pastor, and as a part of Grace, I just kind of get overwhelmed at how good God is to us. So this isn't the sermon, but one of my favorite parts about communion is just getting to see everybody walk by, and I get to know names and stories. And Jen commented to me, we've got about five very pregnant girls in the church right now. And each of those babies was prayed for fervently and is being prayed over. And what a blessing it is to see that happening. Bert, I'm about to start crying. If you could get me some tissues from the coffee bar, that would be great. I'm being serious, Bert. Snap to it, please. We've got folks in the church fighting cancer with relentless faith, recovering from strokes with faith. We've got faces, thank you, sir, that I'm happy to see every week, including birds. We've got tremendous friends and friendships and communities. And we are just tremendously blessed. We are chock full in our children's spaces. We are parking people at big lots. And it's just an exciting time to be a part of grace. And it's also a humbling time to be a part of grace in this community. So I just wanted to express that and hope that you feel it too. I also wanted to pray at the beginning of my sermon, so this kind of works out, because we've got a team going to Mexico Saturday. How many years have we had a relationship with faith ministry? A lot of years, decades. We've got some really sweet relationships down there. Unidos, unidos. Right, Jeff? He's got the t-shirt on. How many people are going this year? Okay. So we're going to pray for them. We're going to express some gratitude for grace. We're going to pray for the families that are about to grow. And we're going to pray for those fighting hard through difficult times. And then I'm going to try to get it together and give you the sermon I'm supposed to give you this morning. So let's pray. Father, we're grateful for this place and this family. Me, maybe most of all, this morning. We thank you for the love that's represented here. We thank you for the young women who are about to be young mamas and the young men who are about to be fathers. God, we thank you for those in our midst who are fighting hard with faith through challenges that they did not foresee and do not welcome and yet embrace as a part of a journey for you. We thank you for the growth that we see in our children and our children's ministries. And we just pray, God, more than anything, that we would be good stewards of those young souls for the time that they are entrusted to us. And I pray the same thing over everyone else that calls Grace home, that we would take good care of the folks that you have entrusted to us. We lift up our team going to Mexico and we just pray that you would continue to further those relationships and that those who are going would be moved towards you and that those who are going for the first time would be indelibly impacted by what happens there. In Jesus' name, amen. Alright, let's try this again. Run the bumper again. Let's just do that for funsies. I'm being serious. Do it. I'm going to mute my mic and blow my nose, and then we're going to have like an actual sermon. All right? Thank you. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This morning we are finishing up our series called The Traits of Grace where we're answering the question, if you're a partner of grace, which we don't have partners, we have members. We walked through that for a week. So if you're confused, you can listen to that sermon. If you're a partner of grace, this is what we want you to become. This is what we're trying to build you into. If you were to ask what should define someone who's been a partner of grace for many years, it would be these five traits that we've been walking through for the last five weeks. And so this week we arrive at what I believe to be the ultimate trait of a partner of grace. I think all the other traits build to this one. And so I'm just going to come right out the gates with it. If you're taking notes, you can write this down. At Grace, we are kingdom builders. At Grace, we are kingdom builders. We've got these five traits now emblazoned on the wall over the glass doors and the windows out in the lobby. As you walk out the center door, the one in the dead center on purpose is kingdom builders. This is something that we want every person at Grace to become. And this idea of being kingdom builders began to germinate for me about a decade ago in a staff meeting at my previous church called Greystone Church. Greystone is a church in suburban Atlanta. It's one of these kind of big multi-campus churches where you get simulcast out to multiple campuses when you preach, that kind of deal. And we took a staff retreat down to a lake house. And there's about 25 or 30 of us. And we're sitting in this brainstorming session where the lead pastor, Jonathan, who in many ways has been very gracious with me over the years. We're sitting in this brainstorming meeting where he's asking this question about Greystone. What defines people at our church? What do we want to instill in them? What defines us as people? What's in our DNA? And I kind of broke in and raised my hand and I said, I think we need to build a church of kingdom builders. And I kind of explained why I thought that, which is going to be some of the things that I explain to you in a minute. And Jonathan, like he listened to me. He was kind. He goes, yeah, that's great. That is super important. And then he didn't write it on the whiteboard. And I don't know if you've been in those meetings, those brainstorming meetings where you have an idea, you feel like it's a good idea, you say it, and whoever's in charge of the meeting goes, that is good. That is very good. Thank you so much for sharing that. Does anybody else have any ideas? And it doesn't go on the whiteboard. And when that happens, it's infuriating. And I know because I watch my staff get angry with me when I don't put their ideas on the whiteboard. When you do that, it hurts a little bit. So I thought maybe he didn't understand me right. So a few minutes later, I kind of approach it in a different way. You know, I'm nothing if not persistent. And he's like, yes, that's a good idea. Not right now. And then we move on again. And I thought maybe, I know, I know what'll do it. And so I explained it in a different way and because this is a Mike Tomlin's he's a coach of the Steelers he says that young young people getting involved in their profession have all the ideas and none of the responsibility that was me I had all the ideas and have any of the responsibility of execution so I mentioned it again until finally he said, Nate, we've heard you. It's a great idea. That's not going to work with what we're doing. We don't need to talk about that anymore. Okay. That's kind of what it takes sometimes for me to hear you. So I said, okay. But I couldn't let go of this idea that this seems so clear to me. And then about, I would say, seven years after that, I'm in a meeting at my church with my staff asking the same question. What are the traits of grace? What's important to us? What do we want to produce and who do we want to become? And I hadn't thought about it in a while, but it occurred to me. And so I said, hey, I just want to throw this out there. I think we were meant to be kingdom builders. And I explained why. And the staff responded enthusiastically. Yeah, that's good. Put that up there. And I know that often when there's someone leading a meeting and there's people who work for that person, that they are incented to support the ideas of that person. So that might not be authentic. But I will also tell you, and Aaron Gibson's in here somewhere. He will tell you if I'm lying, that sometimes I present ideas in staff meetings and it's just met with crickets. Just uncomfortable silence because no one wants to tell me it's a bad idea. And I go, okay, that didn't get any traction. We won't do that one. So I do feel like I can trust him. And then I presented it to the elders and the elders liked it too. So that became one of our traits, kingdom builders. Then maybe about a year after that, I was in a conversation that I believe I've told you guys about before with someone who was going to become a very good friend. And this guy was pressing me on grace and on my leadership. And he was saying, what do you want for grace? What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be true of grace in five years, ten years? What's your vision for grace? What's your vision for your leadership? What do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of you in five years, ten years? And I answered by saying, well, I've had these experiences in the past and I don't want to replicate those for people who work with me or for people who come to church with me. I've seen church do these things. I don't want to do those things. And after a while, he stopped me and he said, I've heard a lot about what you don't want to be, but I have no idea what you do want to be. And I realized in that moment that I had really never had a greater vision for grace than simply being healthy. And that grace required a greater vision than that. So I chewed on that for months. And finally, I came to this conclusion that this is why this idea has been germinating all along. Because I believe that grace needs to be filled with people who are passionate about building God's kingdom. I believe that the best work that we can do is to produce people who want to spend their lives building the kingdom of God with every ounce of energy that they have. And really what I would say is I want to produce a church full of people who are or are becoming John the Baptist. I want to produce people who have the same mindset that John the Baptist had, who are becoming more and more like John the Baptist in practice. And here's what I mean. Jesus called John the Baptist the greatest man ever born of a woman, which means Jesus thinks that John the Baptist is the greatest man to ever live. That's an incredible statement and a remarkable stance, and it's worth wondering why does Jesus think that, and I think, I think that this is why. John the Baptist, about 30 AD, was an elite rabbi that was allowed to have disciples. So I don't know how much you know about Jewish culture and Jewish context, but at this time in history, in Judaism, the rabbis were the pastors. Rabbi simply means teacher. And there was presumably hundreds of rabbis in Jerusalem at the time of John the Baptist, but there was this elite class of rabbis, the best of the best, that were allowed to have disciples, and John the Baptist was one of these elite rabbis because we see him having disciples with him. And he had built, in our words, in our terms, in our context, a very successful ministry. He would not, John the Baptist would not identify this way or with this, but in our context, the way to understand him best is to say that John the Baptist was a very successful pastor. If he were a modern day pastor, he would be invited on all the podcasts. He would speak at all the conferences. He would have a large church with multiple campuses. He would have this huge ministry. He'd be a best-selling author. And listen to me. I don't think that anything that I just said defines true success for a pastor. I have a much deeper respect for men and women who humbly serve their community in the name of God, in the being virtually unknown but faithfully pour their life out into a community and manage to retire as a pastor because they kept it between the ditches the whole time. I have a much greater respect for those people, for those men and women, than I do for people that have skyrocketed into Christian fame. Not that I don't respect that. I just don't think that's how God measures our success as people, how big our ministry is. But by the world's standards, what I want you to see is that by every measure, John the Baptist was a popular pastor with a successful ministry. He was baptizing people. People were following him and listening to him every day by the hundreds. Hugely successful and locally famous. And then Jesus comes on the scene. And John the Baptist actually baptizes him in the Jordan River. And Jesus and John the Baptist are cousins. And just so we're clear, John the Baptist is different from John the Apostle. John the Apostle was a disciple of Christ. He was the disciple whom Jesus loved. He wrote John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and Revelation. That's a different John. John the Baptist is the cousin of Jesus who paved the way for him and was prophesied about and who was eventually beheaded by Herod. Different Johns. And people started peeling away from John's church, again, crude language, but for us to understand, started peeling away from John's church and going to Jesus' church. And some of his disciples come to him, and they go, hey, you're losing members. People are not following you anymore, they're following Jesus. And this is John's response. And I think the heart of this response is why Jesus thinks John the Baptist is the greatest man to ever live. Verse 26, chapter 3 in the book of John. And said to him. And they say, John, that guy that you baptized, Jesus, people are following him now. They're leaving you and they're following him. And John the Baptist says, good. That's the way it's supposed to work out. See, John had spent his adult life building a kingdom, amassing a ministry, building a following, establishing a name for himself, becoming successful. He had spent his life building a kingdom. And then Jesus comes on the scene and Jesus begins to peel off portions of that kingdom for himself. And John's disciples come to him and they go, hey, this kingdom that you've been building, it's shrinking. And John says, no, it's not. It's growing. It was never my kingdom. Those were never my people. I was always just holding them for Jesus. I'm part of the bridal party. He's the groom. When he shows up, I don't get disappointed because everyone's paying attention to him and not me. That's dumb. I did a wedding yesterday and I'm in line to walk everybody in and the groomsmen are talking about, is it right over left or left over right? And I looked at them and I said, doesn't matter. No one's looking at you at all. John the Baptist knew his place. He's in the party. He's not the party. And so when Jesus shows up and his disciples say, hey, he's taken your kingdom. John the Baptist says, no. He's just claiming what's his. It was never mine to begin with. They were never following me. I was a conduit to Christ. I was never baptizing them in my name. I was always baptizing them in his name. And then he says that remarkable phrase, he must become greater and I must become less. That rings true in so many different scenarios for so many different reasons. And I would say in our life, one of our great challenges as Christians is to really understand what that means, that he must become greater and I must become less in every situation. So here's what I want you to see this morning. And here's why I believe this idea is so crucial and critical. Because I talk about people trying to build ministries, talk about people trying to build kingdoms, and I know that at least over half of us, if not more of us in here, we're not trying to do that. We're not trying to build a big ministry. We're not trying to build a big kingdom. We've got very humble goals in our life. But what I want you to see this morning is this. We are all building a kingdom, all of us. The question is, whose kingdom are you building? We are all building a kingdom. Make no mistake about it. The question is, whose kingdom are you building? Even if you're sitting here and you're going, my life is small. I have humble goals. I want to raise a good family. I want my children to love me when they grow up and want to come back home. I want to love my spouse and love and serve them well for the remainder of my days. I want to be a good friend to the people around me. I want to be a good part of the church that I love. We might have humble goals, but make no mistake, that's still our kingdom. It's a kingdom of safety and security and affection and compassion. It's how we leave our mark by leaving children behind us or a family behind us. So even if we have humble goals, we still have goals of building kingdoms. And oftentimes those kingdoms are our own. We're not building those for God's sake. We're building those for our own sake. Others of us are on the other end of the spectrum. I have a friend that I talk to often. He's a couple years older than me. He's like 45. And he talks about how driven he feels all the time. How even if he had the money to retire forever right now, he's like, I don't think I could just do nothing. I don't think I could just bounce from pleasure to pleasure. I have to build something. I have to wake up every day and spend time knowing that I'm building something that matters. He very much struggles with rest. He relentlessly pursues the building of his kingdom. And some of us have big lofty goals. We want to build the company. We want to build the ministry. We want to leave the legacy. We want to climb the ladder. We want to get to this position. We want to do this thing and make these impacts. Whether or not we build a kingdom operates irrespective of our ambition. Do you understand? No matter how ambitious you are or are not, you will spend your life building a kingdom. The question I want to put in front of you is, whose kingdom are you building? I would remind you of what Jesus says in Matthew. Do not put about it. Friendships rarely echo for eternity unless they're intentional. Family in and of itself doesn't echo for eternity. The company that you build doesn't echo for eternity unless you're using it for the kingdom of God. The wealth that you amass, the friends that you get, the power that you hold, the impact that you make doesn't echo for eternity unless it's for the sake of God and his kingdom. So God says, invest your life in things that will ripple throughout eternity. Don't invest your life in things that are buried with you. It's this hugely important principle. And it's important to me that you understand as I hope to compel you to consider what it looks like to build God's kingdom with your life. I don't want to talk about it in vague terms of building God's kingdom. I want us to understand exactly what it means to build it. To build God's kingdom is to actively and intentionally, this isn't in your notes, but you can write it down if you want to. To build God's kingdom is to actively and intentionally grow the kingdom in breadth and depth. It's to actively and intentionally grow the breadth of God's kingdom and grow the depth of God's kingdom. When we grow the breadth of God's kingdom, that's evangelism. When we grow the depth, that's discipleship. Evangelism, telling other people about Jesus, bringing them along with us. I tell you all the time, as much as I can, the only reason you are on the planet and not in heaven right now after you became a Christian is so that you can bring as many people with you on your way to God's kingdom as you possibly can as you live your life. So we're constantly looking for ways to expand the breadth and the reach of God's kingdom by sharing our faith. And in the South, this is really easy for us. You might think it's really challenging to share your faith in the South because it's saturated with the gospel. I actually think that makes it easier because I try to tell you, if you have friends or family members who live in the South and don't go to church, they don't claim a faith, I would be willing to bet you lunch that they have a good reason for that. It's not because they've never been invited. It's probably not because they don't have any experience with church. It's because whatever experience they do have with church wasn't good. Whatever experience they do have with pain and struggle has made them move away from the faith, not towards it. But if we went to your neighbors right now who are still at home, have no interest in going to church this morning, it wasn't even a thought for them, should we go? It's a Sunday for them. And you said, why isn't church a priority? They wouldn't be like, why is it what now? Why isn't what a priority? Why don't you know Jesus? Who? They know. They have answers. So in the South, if we want to be effective evangelists, our antenna are always up to have conversations with people about spirituality because here's what's really interesting in the Southern United States. Your explanation for why you're still in church. Your explanation for why you're still here. Your explanation for why you still claim a faith, why you've chosen to prioritize it, and it's important to you. And if we can have conversations not about, here's why you should be a Christian, here's why you should get back in church, but conversations about, here's why I still believe, here's what faith does for me, here's what I see and why I can't walk away. If we can have those conversations, we can start to open people's minds to a different church experience and a different experience of Jesus and their personal lives and maybe move them towards the kingdom of God and grow that kingdom in its breadth. And then as kingdom builders, we grow it in its depth. We grow the depth of the people who are Christians. We make disciples. At Grace, we call this being step-takers. Understanding that discipleship is nothing more than taking the next step of obedience that's been placed in front of you. And so we come alongside young mamas and we say, hey, here's what I've learned in my journey of being a mom. We come alongside young men and we say, here's what I've learned in my journey of being a father. We come alongside young divorcees and we say, here's what I've learned in my journey as a single woman or a single man. We come alongside parents. We come alongside young believers. And we walk them through that area of life and we grow them in their breadth, in their depth. So when I say, what is it, when I talk about building a kingdom and using our life to build God's kingdom, that's what I'm talking about, is using our life to grow it in its breadth and in its depth. We should go through life with our antenna up at all times, looking for opportunities to do just that. And this idea of what it is to build God's kingdom and how devoted we should be to it is really what the Christian life is. And the Christian life is a progressive revelation of this truth. It's a progressive revelation of what it means to build God's kingdom. And really, what the reality of it is, that that's the only reason that we're here. And I'll tell you where this started to occur to me and change the paradigm in a way that I thought about my faith. I was 17 or 18 years old at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge, and the speaker was a guy that really impacted me named Greg Boone. I can't remember if it was my first or second summer there, but at one point he wrote, he drew a circle on a whiteboard, and he said, I want you to tell me the things in your life that matter to you. Tell me about the different parts of your life. What does your life consist of? And so we said family. He draws a family slice. And then we said sports, friends, faith, hobbies, college, education, whatever it was. And so we kind of made this pie chart of all the different areas of our life. And Greg says, it's interesting that you made this sliver of faith. That's your Christianity. That's the part of you that's devoted to God. And we're like, yes. And he goes, okay. God's not interested in your slice. He wants the whole dang pie. And as adults, we do this too. We offer God a slice and he wants the whole pie. I bet if I sat down with you, just like somebody could with me, with no context, and I said, hey, I got a thought exercise for you. Can you draw a circle on a piece of paper? And you did that. And I said, okay, can you just draw up a pie chart of your priorities in your life? And could you try to make the slices proportional to how much you actually feel they're important? You know, we draw a big family slice, right? Some of us would draw a big church slice, big career slice, hobbies, interests, curiosity, whatever else is in there. I'd be interested to know, and only you know this, I've no doubt that virtually everyone in here would have a faith slice. How big would that be? Would it be a sliver? Would it be a huge chunk? Regardless, God's not interested in either of those. He wants the whole pie. He wants all of you. Do you mean God intimately cares about how I conduct myself in business meetings? Yeah, I do. I do because you're his agent in those meetings and through you should spread the fragrance and the knowledge of God. We should be salt in people's saltless lives. We should be lights in darkness. Do you mean that God cares about how I behave in traffic? He actually does. That one stings. Do you mean God cares about how I father? About how much I participate in church? About how much of my finances I give? About how I behave with my friends? About what I watch on TV and whether or not that helps me run my race and build his kingdom? Do you mean to tell me that God cares about what books I read and which people I spend the most time around? Yes, he cares deeply about all of those things. He cares where you live. He cares who your neighbors are. He cares how you carry yourself. He cares about your reputation in your community. He cares about everything, not just your church attendance and not just how much you read his word and not just how much you pray, but he cares about how you treat the person when you're on vacation that you will never interact with again in your life. That interaction matters deeply to God because it is indicative of your character and whether or not your light is shining and the fragrance is spreading. Those things matter to God. That's why I say that this realization of what it is to be a kingdom builder is a progressive revelation throughout your whole life. When I understood the pie chart analogy when I was 18 years old, I thought I got it. Intellectually, I'm there. And every year that goes by, I realize that God is asking me for more, that I've been holding back from him, that I've been considering my piece of the pie. And let me show you how powerful it is when it finally clicks with us, that we are here to build God's kingdom and not our own. I want us to look at Peter, and it's actually Gibson that gave me this point. I thought it was a great one. Think about Peter in the Gospels, what we experience of him. Peter was one of these guys that he was ready, fire, aim, right? Just the first one to speak. My dad likes to say about me, my family calls me Nathan, and he likes to say about me, Nathan having nothing to say, thus said. That's what he says about me. All right. Zach knows what I'm talking about. Nathan having nothing to say, thus says, there are those of us who are just wired, ready, fire, aim. I got it. I'll go. And we see this in Peter, which is why I love him so much. He's the first one. Jesus is walking on the water. Jesus is like, okay. Or Peter says, well, I'm walking on the water too. And he walks on the water for a little bit. And then he sinks. And everybody's like, oh, Peter doesn't have any faith. And it's like, you sissies are still in the boat. At least he got out, you know. Jesus says, Peter, I need to wash all of your feet. And Peter goes, you will never wash my feet. And he says, if I don't wash your feet, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven. And Peter says, well, then don't stop at my feet. Go all the way to my head. He requests a sponge bath from Christ. That's the boldness of Peter. Jesus says, you will deny me. Peter says, I will die before I deny you. And then in his weakness, he denies him three times. Whenever Jesus would ask one of those really hard questions, who do you say that I am? And all the disciples would clam up and not make eye contact and please don't look at me. Peter was the first one to be like, you sissies, I got this. And then he'd answer. And sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong, but he was always the one willing to be out in front. He was always brash. He was always courageous. He was always the leader. And so we see flashes of this giftedness in Peter that's not directed in the right way just yet. And then after Jesus dies and comes back and finds a despondent Peter on the banks of the Sea of Galilee and restores him to ministry. Beautiful. He spends 40 days with the disciples encouraging them. And then he leaves. And he says, I'm going to go to heaven. And I want you to go to the ends of the earth and I want you to baptize them and make disciples. I want you to go. He didn't use this language, but it's our language this morning. I want you, Peter, to go and your job is to grow my kingdom through this thing we call the church in breadth and in depth. Go evangelize to the whole world and go make disciples of them. Grow the kingdom in breadth and depth. And then he sits in the upper room for 40 days waiting for the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes, he realizes what his job is. They go out on the porch. They preach. 3,000 people become Christians that day. And then we get this wonderful picture of the early church in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47. And day by day, God added to their number those who were being saved. So now this movement is off. Now the kingdom has exploded. And the Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of Israel at the time, take notice of this. They're like, we've got to stop this. What are we going to do? And so they bring in Peter and John, and they put them on trial. Defend yourself. Two chapters later, they bring in Stephen to defend himself, and he becomes the first Christian martyr, and he's stoned to death. Eighty days prior, Jesus had to defend himself on the same charges, and they crucified him. So make no mistake about it. In this defense for what they are doing, their lives are at stake. They've just healed someone, and the authority of Christ, they are preaching the gospel of Christ, and now they're being put on trial in front of the Sanhedrin, and I want you to see their amazing response. Also, if you're looking at the clock, I'm going long. Suck it up. Acts chapter 4. You're going to see verse 9, and I'm going to start in verse 8. name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He says, it's on you. You want to know whose name it's in? It's in the name of Christ, that guy that you murdered. That's what we're doing this in. Incredibly courageous, speaking truth to power, completely vulnerable to the death penalty. They do not care. They're stepping. He is Peter. He's a leader. He is brash, ready, fire, aim. But now he has purpose and he's speaking with incredible courage. Verse 11, Jesus is the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone. Salvation is found in no one else for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. When they, the Sanhedrin and the people around them, saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished. And they took note that these men had been with Jesus. When they saw the courage and the eloquence of Peter that day, they knew we can't touch these guys or we're going to have a riot on our hands. So we've got to step away and try to play this a little bit differently. With his life on the line, Peter boldly proclaims the gospel of Christ and speaks truth to power. And what we see is these flashes of giftedness in the gospels where we get a glimpse into the character of Peter. Now he has a place to put it. Now he has traction in his life. Now he has understanding and context for, oh, that's what these gifts are for. And now he can use them courageously and fearlessly and correctly with efficacy to do his job and grow the kingdom in breadth and in depth. So here's what we see from the example of Peter. And here's what I want you to feel in your life. With the realization of purpose comes the application of our gifts. Each of you, each of you are gifted in some way. I know this to be true because the Bible says it over and over again. Paul talks about in Corinthians that the church is the body of Christ, and everybody is a part of that body, and everybody has a part to play. We're told in Ephesians, I remind you all the time that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we should walk in them. You have a good work to walk in. We're told in Ephesians chapter four that we have the gifts of Christ, of pastor, apostle, shepherd, evangelist, or teacher. Every one of us is one of those five things. We have those gifts. And when we can match those gifts with purpose, we light the world on fire. When we align God's divine purpose for our life with the gifts that God has given us in our life. And we have the narrative traction in our life of a purpose that is larger than ourselves to build God's kingdom. And we look at our gifts and what he's given us and suddenly we have an alignment of purpose and giftedness and we understand for the first time why God made me this way and how we are to use those gifts to build his kingdom. We light the world on fire. That's when magic happens. That's when we add day by day to those who are being saved. That's when you get up in the morning excited about what God has for you. Can I just say to you that if you have noticed in your life that you've been spending your days bouncing from distraction to distraction and from pleasure to pleasure and you're walking listlessly through your days and you're not super motivated for what you're doing, can I just suggest to you that maybe it's because you're living your life, building your own kingdom and you you realize it stinks, and that what you need to realize is that God designed you to build his kingdom, and he's gifted you to do that. And if you can figure out what that means and how your gifts can align with purpose, you will never wake up again wondering how you should spend your day. You will know because you will be directed because when our purpose is revealed, we have an application for a giftedness. So here's my prayer to you. Here's my prayer for you and the prayer that I want you to pray. God, show me how I might be used to build your kingdom rather than my own. God, show me how I might be used to build your kingdom rather than my own. And here's what I really like about this being kind of the apex trait of grace. I'm going to say this and then I'll wrap up. As I was considering what kind of church do we want Grace to be, where do we want to push people, what's our heart, how do we want to grow, what's our focus as a church? You know good and well some churches answer that question and they say missions. We're a missions church. That's what we're going to do. If you're involved with this church, we're going to move your heart towards missions to give and to serve in that way. Some churches say next generation. We're going to focus on the next generation. We're going to invest in our children and in our students. And if you're a part of the church, we're going to move you in that way. Some churches say foster care and adoption. We're going to push everybody in that way. Some churches choose local impact and local ministry. We want to make a big impact in our community. And different churches choose different paths. And I have no critique for any of those paths. but as I thought about this, I didn't want to limit your vision for building God's kingdom to whatever my passion of the day was or whichever direction the wind was blowing in the elder board. We didn't want to limit what people should do with the giftedness that God has given them. If this means you need to leave and start your own church because you've got that fire in you, go and do it. We love you. We support you. If this means you need to move and start a ministry somewhere, go and do it. We support you. But if we can be your home base as you go out into the community and in the world and build God's kingdom, we want to continue to foster that within you and build a church of fierce builders of the kingdom of God. And that can look different ways for different people. For my wonderful father-in-law, they got a lake house. And I remember when they bought this lake house, they were like, we're going to use it to serve the kingdom. And I was like, I bet you are. Sure you are. What, are you going to pray on the boat? But every weekend, while his daughter was in college, 10 or more kids would come and they'd spend the whole weekend being fed and pulled around on the boat by, they called him Professor Benson. He was not a professor, but they were in college, so fit. And they came every weekend. And when those kids graduated, he got invited to weddings. And when they had their first baby, he got texted pictures. And when I had the chance to speak at his funeral, there was a row of about 20 of them that had traveled from all over the country to come pay their respect to John. He used that lake house to build God's kingdom. I know a man who's been successful in business. And he's taken that success and he uses that company to support people who spent their professional years in ministry and now don't have the means to take care of themselves in retirement. They're on the payroll even though they don't do anything because he has a heart for them and how they spent their life. He uses different people in his company to do the finances for nonprofits for free and they give away large portions of their profit, more than 10% to other ministries and he uses his business acumen to sit on the board of nonprofits and help them become effective in their ministries. He has a vision for what it is to use his giftedness to build God's kingdom, not his own. Or maybe, maybe what God has for us to do right now is to build up those children, is to patiently, daily, with consistency and godliness and grace, build the character of our children so that they might enter into the world with a larger vision for what this life can be and simply what they want to do with it. And maybe we can build the kingdom like my mom did. I don't know what it looks like for you to build God's kingdom. But I do know that it's how you should spend the rest of your life. I don't care if you're 85 or 15. Let's pray that we would be a church full of passionate kingdom builders and just see how God lights the world on fire around us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for imbuing us with purpose. Thank you for giving us something to live for that's bigger than ourselves. God, I pray that we would each have a passionate vision of what it is to be used by you, no matter how big or how small that vision might be. Lord, show us how we can use the gifts that you've given us to have a metamorphosis like Peter, where we see these flashes of our giftedness and how you've created us. But God, then we get some traction with some purpose, and our gifts align with that. Let us experience what it is to wake up every day excited to be used by you. And God, where we are building our own kingdoms, we repent and we apologize. And we ask you to help us, reorient us towards your kingdom. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here and making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're new this morning, I have great news for you. You've picked an excellent Sunday to begin attending Grace. I realized in this last week, we're constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better. And I realized in this last week that we have been using one-ply toilet paper in the bathrooms. I did not know this, but that is completely unacceptable. So I found out who was in charge of these purchases, and I said, we've got to do better, and they said, what should we do? And I said, go to the store and find the most expensive kind and get it. That's what we deserve at Grace. So if you're here for the first time, I got good news for you. This is a luxurious experience in the children's hallway. We did make that improvement. I'm not just making that up. This is the last part of our series in Isaiah called the Treasury of Isaiah, where we're kind of acknowledging it's 66 books. It's a ton of stuff that really would bog us down if we tried to go through the whole thing exhaustively. And so I've done my best. Jacob, don't go to the bathroom right now. It's too tempting, he says. I can't wait for him to come back in. I've already got a joke loaded. All right. That was quick. All right. Let's get it. Let's pray. Let's get it together. Okay. So we can't go through the whole book exhaustively, but we can pull out some of the more impactful scriptures and reflect on them as a body. And this was actually supposed to be a six-week series, but I wanted to extend it by a week so that I could talk about this verse in Isaiah with you. It's a short and simple verse that we'll get to in a minute, but I think it's such a hugely impactful concept, and I know of several folks in our body, in the church, who very much need the truth of this scripture today. But as we approach it, I want us to think of a memory that most of us probably have. Some of you may not have this memory for different reasons. This was something that Jen brought to my attention as I was kind of talking through this concept with her. Jen is my wife, for those that don't know. And so she was talking about when she was a little girl and they were taking a road trip and she's in the back of the car. And they did, you know, they were, she grew up in Birmingham, or Birmingham, that's how you're supposed to say it. And they would go down to Dothan for Thanksgiving. They would travel over to Memphis for Christmas. They did road trips a fair amount as children. They drove down to the Florida Panhandle every year. And so road trips were a thing. And sometimes on those road trips, you'll remember from when you were little and still now, it starts to rain, storms roll in. And sometimes it's what Bubba from Forrest Gump would call big old fat rain. It's coming down in sheets. You can't see anything. And when you're a child and you're in the back and you're peering over and you're looking, you can't see anything. You can barely see the car in front of you. And you don't know how your mom or your dad is still driving. In this case, it was her dad. And you start to get scared because it's coming down heavy and it's hard to see. People even have their hazards on, which just isn't a sign. I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you're driving in heavy rain and you put your hazards on, we're in the same rain you are. We know, okay? We know it's a treacherous condition. Just throwing that out there for you to consider, hazard people. All right. You're in the back. It's scary. And you're worried. It feels tense. It's the rain that's so loud that you can't hear and you can't talk anymore. You're just trying to weather the storm. And Jen remembers looking at her dad and seeing the placid, nonplussed expression on his face, and she was fine. He is at peace, so I am at peace. I'm looking at my dad. He's not worried about the storm. I'm not worried about the storm. And as a dad, those of you who have driven through those storms, you've done it plenty of times, you know. I've driven through storms before. I'm going to drive through storms in the future. This one's going to be fine. Even if it's the worst one, this one's going to be fine. And so his peace gave her peace, right? And what it got me to thinking about is what if we could go through life and the storms of life with the type of peace that your dad had when you were a little kid and the storms came and we're driving down the road. Well, God offers us this peace a few different places in scripture, but he talks about it first specifically in Isaiah. In this short, I think very powerful verse where Isaiah writes this about God. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. I really like that descriptor there, perfect. Not just any peace, but a perfect peace, a kind of unthreatened peace, a kind of restful peace. And when I think about that kind of peace, the way to understand it, I think about, because you guys know, I've told you before, I enjoy history. Last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to a biography on Julius Caesar. I try to always be reading a physical book and then listening to a book. I read the fun ones and I listen to the boring ones. It's the way that I get through them. So I'm listening to a biography on Julius Caesar. And they talk about within that biography this idea of Pax Romana, Roman peace. It was a thing that the Roman Empire offered to the conquered peoples. And it kind of worked like this. One of the places that Julius Caesar, he became famous in the Gallic Wars. So he went up into what we understand as modern day France and Belgium and Switzerland and that area. And there was different Gallic tribes. And the way that we think about nations and states is pretty new in the span of human history. Most everybody, particularly in Europe at that time, existed within tribes and clans. And those tribes and clans would bind together, sometimes under a successful warlord, sometimes just out of mutual desire for protection, and they would create these pacts. If you get attacked by another neighboring tribe or clan, then we will come in and we will protect you, and you offer us your protection as well. It was these agreed upon truces. We're not going to attack you, but if anyone attacks us, we'll attack them on our behalf. But these allegiances and alliances would change on a whim. Every five years, every decade, every year, there's different alliances and allegiances to keep up with. This one's attacking us, that one's attacking us. So even while you're in a peace, it's a fragile peace. It's a threatened peace. If you existed in those tribes in that day, even if it wasn't a spring when you were watching your husband or your brother or your son go off to war to defend the tribes, you were still on the lookout. You still knew that any day someone could bring word that the peace that you had has now been broken. It was a fragile peace. And so what the Roman Empire offered is to come in, and now they've conquered all the tribes. And you are now under their protection. So if someone attacks you, the weight and the force and the might of the Roman army is going to defend you. It's not just these inter-familial clashes anymore. Now they're messing with the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, once they conquered you, which sounds bad, one of the nice offshoots of that is you now have a protected peace. You now have a peace that there is no force strong enough to compromise. As long as you like pay your taxes and stuff. But Pax Romana was this kind of empire-wide protected, unthreatened peace. And I think that that's a profound idea for us. Because we understand what it is to exist in a fragile peace. If you have young children, you understand what fragile peace is because you send them to the playroom to give you two moments respite. And they're up there and they're fine. And then they start yelling. Someone's upset. And you go and you broker a peace. You stop playing with that. You give that back to them. You start using your head. You quit being a jerk. Everyone's fine. Okay? And then you leave. And you have five more minutes of a fragile peace until it's broken again by someone's scream. If you exist in a marriage, you know what a fragile peace is. I don't mind telling you because I can't say honestly they're infrequent, but I don't mind telling you that a couple Saturdays ago, Jen and I were enjoying a very fragile peace. Just for whatever reason, on that particular day, with other things going on in our lives, there was just something simmering under the surface all day long. Neither of us could do anything right. We were just kind of, we're at each other's throats, then we apologize and start forgetting, man, I don't even know why I'm mad. It doesn't even make any sense. And then five seconds later, someone pauses in a conversation too long after a question, and now let's get them. So it was a fragile peace. We know what fragile pieces are. And what God offers us is this protected peace, this perfect peace, this peace that is unthreatened and unmoved by forces both within and without our control. It's really this profound peace that allows us, as we go through the storms of life, to think, been through storms before we will go through storms again and this one will be fine even if it's the worst one and what's really profound about that piece is that God is the one driving we are in the back seat looking at the face of our Father who is unmoved by this storm too. This is the kind of peace that God offers his children. However, he doesn't offer it to everyone. We're going to look at who has access to this peace. But before we do, I have just a couple of reflections on what it means to have perfect peace. What is perfect peace and what are the implications for us? And if we think about it together, how can we better understand this idea of peacefulness? Well, the first thing that I would bring to your attention, the first thing that sprang to mind for me is that God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. It's not going to make any sense. Paul writes about this peace in Philippians, famous passage, Philippians 4, you have the peace. When you watch someone walk with this amount of peace and clarity and tranquility, it defies understanding and logic. I think of this great story in the Old Testament in the early chapters of 1 Samuel with the high priest Eli. He's the high priest of Israel, and he's just taken in Samuel to live in the temple who's going to dedicate his life to service to the Lord. And Eli has two sons. I believe their names are Hophni and Phinehas. And they're jerks. They're absolute jerks. They're using their political power for all of the wrong reasons. They're taking advantage of taxpayers, taking advantage of the poor. They're taking advantage of women. They're doing all the despicable things that we hate when people in those positions do them. And one night, God gives Samuel a dream. And the next morning, Eli insists that Samuel tell him what that dream is. And so Samuel finally tells Eli the worst possible news any father can receive. And he says, in my dream last night, God told me that your two sons are going to die soon and they will not be in the priesthood anymore. One of them is not the next high priest. And so in one comment, in one answer, Eli learns the worst thing that any father can possibly learn. You are going to lose your children and you are going to lose your legacy. There's nothing worse than that. And Eli's response, very next verse, doesn't miss a beat, doesn't go pray about it and come back with a prepared statement. Very next verse, Eli says, it is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. That's a pretty remarkable piece. To receive the worst news any father can possibly receive and the response out of the gate, it is the Lord. do what seems good to him that is a peace that passes understanding that is a peace that can't be explained that is a peace that we would marvel at and it is a peace that we should be jealous of the other thing i would say about god's perfect peace, and I think that this is really important. God's peace provides rest for the soul. God's peace provides rest for our souls. There are those of you in here who came in tired this morning. You woke up exhausted. You slept eight hours and it wasn't enough. There are those of you who go to bed being kept up by the things you're worrying about. And when you wake up, your mind is racing just as fast. And when that issue gets settled, the worry monster that exists in your head finds another thing to attack and push into the forefronts of your thoughts so that you never get any rest from the anxiety that you feel and from the things about which you are worried. Some of us have carried burdens of relationships. Our marriage is cruddy. Our children are estranged or drifting. We've received a tough diagnosis. We're watching a loved one walk through a hard time and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we are exhausted. We are exhausted with worry. We're exhausted with worry about things that are outside our control. Which is why it's so important to understand that God's perfect peace gives our soul a place to rest, to stop and to shut it down and to be okay and to not worry about the next thing and to be realistic about what is within and without our control. God's perfect peace offers us rest. And for some of you, that's what I want for you this morning, is to move towards a place where you can finally slow down and rest and tell that worry monster to shut up. But God does not offer this peace indiscriminately. It is offered to everyone, but we have a part to play in the reception of this peace. If you look back at the verse, it says, you will keep in perfect peace who? Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. God's peace is only for the steadfast and can only come through trust. God's peace is only for the steadfast, for those who persevere. Persevere in what? Persevere in their trust of the work of Jesus Christ. And we're going to talk more about that trust and exactly what we're placing it in and how that's helpful to us. But we have to understand that though this peace that God offers is offered to everyone equally, it is not offered without discrimination. There's a part that we have to play. And the part that we have to play is to trust God, is to place our faith in him. And when we do, when we truly trust, when we truly see ourselves as the little kids sitting in the back seat watching our heavenly father drive us through life, when that is our posture and we trust him and we can sit in the back and we don't have to worry about it, when that's our posture, he will give us perfect peace. And when that is your posture, the peace that you can have goes beyond understanding and is unfathomable, I believe, to the non-Christian mind. And I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. Someone that we've seen in our lives or in history go through a remarkably difficult time and yet maintain this consistent, faithful peace despite all the circumstances. And I was reminded of the story of a man named Horatio Safford. Horatio Safford lived in the late 1800s in Chicago, and he ended up writing It Is Well, the famous hymn that a lot of us know. And a lot of you may know the story or bits and pieces of the story surrounding the penning of It Is well. It's the most famous story about how a hymn was written. But I bet that you don't know all the parts. And for some of you, you still have no clue what I'm talking about. Horatio Safford was a Christian man who lived in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was a successful lawyer. He had five children, a boy and four girls, and a wife named Ann. And in the Chicago fire of 1871, Horatio lost a vast majority of his net worth. He lost his practice, the building where his practice was. He lost his home, and he had several properties and holdings throughout the city of Chicago. He lost those too. The fire ruined him. In the wake of the fire, his four-year-old son fell to scarlet fever. So now he's lost a child. Believing that his wife and he and his daughters needed a bit of a respite, they said, let's go to England and take a deep breath over there. As they were planning their trip to England, his plans changed. Something in the States was requiring him. And so he sent his wife Anne ahead with his four daughters and said, you guys go. I'll be there in about three weeks. On the way to England, the ship carrying his family sunk. All four daughters were lost. He received a cable upon Anne's arrival in England. I alone survived. Horatio gets that news. He boards a ship, and he goes to be with Anne. On the journey over, the captain of the ship was aware of the tragedy that had befallen Horatio, and he called, he sent for him, and he said, hey, we're at about the same spot that your family was when they sank. Just wanted you to know. And Horatio sat down in the midst of that tragedy, of being a modern-day Job, where in seemingly one fell swoop, he lost his possessions and he lost his family. And he sits down and he writes the hymn. At the time it was a poem. Years later someone put it to music and it became a hymn. He writes the poem. It is well. It's the famous hymn that we know. And with that context, when you know that he's writing this on a boat over where his drowned daughters rest, having lost a son and everything he owns, going to see a wife that is as crestfallen as him, he sits down and he, listen, he writes these words. This is the first verse of it as well. He writes this, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Cindy, leave that up there, please. Look at that. Look at that and put yourself in his shoes and think about your ability to sit down and write, when peace like a river attendeth my way and when sorrows like sea billows roll. Oh, you mean the same sea billows that just claimed your daughters? The same sea that just cost you your family? That your God created? When you feel like you have every right to be so angry, and yet you choose to sit down and say, when peace like a river attends my way, and when sorrows like sea billows like the ones that claim my family's role, whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. How does someone write that? How is that the response to trials and to tragedy and to the storms that threaten your peace? I can only tell you how by pointing you to the second verse because he explains it to us. Though Satan should buffet. Those trials should come. Let this blessed assurance control. I love this. That Christ has regarded my helpless estate. And has shed his own blood for my soul. How does he maintain perfect peace? Because his mind is steadfast in his trust in God. How does he maintain his perfect peace? Because he knows that Jesus died for him. And what he writes about that death of Christ is so important. And I think so profound. He says, when Satan should buffet, again, a reference to the sea, buffet like the waves on the ship when it sank. When Satan should buffet, when trials should come, the ones that he's been walking through for two years, let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and shed his own blood for my soul. And I love that word that he chooses there. I love that word helpless. Because when we think about our helplessness before God, particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ, I think we tend to put it in the context of this myopic view of the gospel in which Jesus only died to take my soul up to heaven. And so when we think about our helplessness, we think about the helplessness, what it means to be helpless to get our soul to heaven. We think about what it means to be helpless to go from dead in sin to alive in Christ, from in this temporal body to in my eternal soul. We think about our helplessness to make that jump to a perfect eternity with God, and so we need God's help. We need Jesus' help to get us there. But what I want us to think about is that is far from the only way in which we are helpless. We are, every single one of us, every single person in this room can get a call today that changes your life forever. We are one vibration in our pocket away from a profoundly different existence. And let me tell you something. You are helpless against that phone call. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. We may act like a big, tough, civilized society with an important pharmaceutical complex and the most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we can act like we can fight cancer. But we are helpless with who gets it and when they do. Even the most fastidious of us are sometimes helpless against the onslaught of that awful disease and its acquiring. As parents, we are helpless when our kid is driving down the road. Do you understand? Our fortunes could be taken. Our families could be taken. There's so many different ways that life can buffet us. There's so many different trials that could come. And we exist in part because we're Americans and we're the most independent, individualized civilization that's ever existed. We exist as if we're driving down the road, facing the storms of life on our own with the wherewithal to get through them. But listen, you're helpless if a tornado comes along and sweeps you off the road. There is so much in life to which we are rendered helpless. And I don't think we go through life understanding that. We are not grown adults capable of handling the buffets of life. We are newborn babies that are vulnerable to this world and this universe in ways that we don't understand. And so when Christ regards our helpless estate, it's not just our soul's inability to get itself into heaven. It's our inability to protect ourselves from the seasons of life. And it's for that that he shed his blood. It's for that that he died. And that's something that Horatio knew. That it wasn't just the helplessness of his soul, but it was our complete lack of agency to prevent ourself from suffering in the first place. And it's this simple truth, I believe, that won the day for him and wins the day for us. When Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. It's the knowledge in the midst of our trials that when Jesus conquered sin and shame by dying on the cross and raising from the dead, when Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. Whatever this is for you, he conquered this too. There's this great passage that I refer to a lot, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. I won't belabor the passage here, but there's a phrase there, there's a promise that the former things will have passed away. There will be no more weeping, no more crying, no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And I love to ruminate on what those former things are. Cancer, divorce, abuse, despair, orphans, loss, tragedy, awful phone calls, relational strife, being born to broken parents who hurt you because they're hurt. All that stuff is the former things that's passed away. And what we know is those former things, those things that will pass away, the things that exist in your life that are wearing you out and making you tired and making life so difficult right now, the things you go to sleep worrying about, the things you wake up worrying about. Whatever's waiting for you on the other end of that call one day. We can have perfect peace in those trials. Because we know that because Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered that too. We know that because he offers salvation to those who believe in his shedding of blood for them, that even when we lose them, and even when the trial claims them, that we will see them again in eternity. We know that this life is but a mist and a vapor compared to what awaits us on the other side of passing. We understand that. And so in a few minutes, in a few minutes, we're going to sing it as well together. We're going to stand and we're going to proclaim these words back to God. And so my prayer for you in preparation for this and even this morning as I've been praying about the service is that you'll be able to sing that with authenticity. That you'll be able to sing it as well. And if there is something in your life that is so hard that it's hard for you to muster the singing, that it's hard for you to muster the words, then listen to the people singing around you and let them sing on your behalf. And know, know that we can say that though peace like a river attends, when peace like a river attends our way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever our lot, God has enabled us to say, it is well, it is well with our soul. I want to finish by reading you this fourth verse. This fourth verse is not one that is often sung. But as I was reviewing the lyrics in reference to our my soul. I pray that God will whisper his peace to you this morning. Let's pray. Father, we need your perfect peace. We need your protected peace. Everyone in this room is walking through a storm of one sort or another. Everyone in this room will walk through more. And so God, when we do, I pray that we remember that you are driving and that we are resting. Help us find our rest in your perfect peace. Help us remember that whatever it is we're facing, that Jesus has conquered that too. And God, give us the courage to sing and to proclaim and to believe that even if it isn't well with us now, that it can be, and you will make it so. God, whisper your peace to us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.