Sermons tagged with Provision

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

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this morning. If you're joining us online, we're so glad you're doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. And I'm excited for this morning. And I know this section of the church here, that your general mentality is, yeah, the good part's over, so let's go, buddy. I'll try, okay? I'll try. I've got a lot to cover. I've got to see how adroitly I can move through all of the points and the stories in Moses' life, but we're going to drive to one large point today that I want us to see. This is the first Sunday in our summer-long series on the life of Moses. I think, what's it called? The Life and Journey of Moses. Wonderful. I tell the graphics department, which is Aaron and Carly, that this is what I'm going to preach about, and then they come up with the titles. So I never know what the series is called. We're going to spend 14 weeks in the life of Moses. And the reason we're going to do this is last year, I sat down with the staff and I wrote out all the books of the Bible and all the major characters of the Bible. And then we looked at the last five years worth of series and said, what are the gaps? What are the things that we haven't spent time on that we need to spend time on? And one of the most glaring ones was the life of Moses. And because of how impactful it is and how important it is in scripture. So this morning, rather than settling in on any particular instance in the life of Moses, I want to look at a bunch of them because I believe that they elicit a question. And just for the record, just so we know, Owen won the baptism contest. He did. He nailed it. That was great. I want us to move, we're going to do an overview of the life of Moses, move through and just kind of hit on different instances because Moses' life, more than any other life in the Bible, in my belief, more than any other account in the Bible, elicits a question more than any other story, more than any other person, more than any other life. You could say that Joseph is close, Moses' predecessor. You could say that David is close, but I don't think there's any other life in the Bible that elicits this question this much and kind of defines the story of Moses, which is simply this. God, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? What's going on right now? As we go through the life of Moses, you'll see this pop up again and again. God, I don't understand what you're doing right now. And in this way, I believe we can all relate to Moses because we have all at times asked that question, God, what are you doing? What's going on? I don't understand. When something's going wrong with our children and we don't know how to fix it, God, what are you doing? When someone gets sick and they aren't healed and we love them so much and they're so young, God, what are you doing? When there's big instances that happen, the big calamitous things that happen over and over again, it seems in the news, when wars happen, we say, God, this is not how I would do this. Like, God, what are you doing? When we're trying really hard to be parents and have a baby and we can't, God, what are you doing? And then when you miscarry a baby, God, what are you doing? And so I think many of us, if not all of us, have had a moment and probably a lot more than that in our life where we ask the fundamental question of the life of Moses, God, what are you doing? So what I want to do this morning is show you what I'm talking about. Show you these different instances where Moses or the nation or the people around Moses couldn't help but throw up their hands and say, God, why is this happening? What are you doing? What is going on? And we start it right out of the gate. If you have notes, you just have a list of scriptures on that note. So you can kind of see where I'm going to go. There's not a lot of blanks to fill in this morning, but you'll have the references and you can scratch the instances next to them if you want to, because I'm going to go through these and then I'm going to show you kind of what I believe is the point of all of these things. But right out of the gate, we see this verse, these verses in Exodus chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. So here's the context of this mama putting a baby in a basket and floating that basket down the river. The Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, somewhere between, scholars think it's somewhere between 200 and 400 years earlier, settled into Egypt. Because Joseph, one of the sons of Israel, Jacob, who was to become Israel, Abraham's grandson, ended up moving down to Egypt. It's a whole big thing, but he got in a position of big power. And because of his power and because of famine in the land, his family, his brothers, who would become the 12 tribes of Israel, moved down there too and settled in the land of Goshen, which is part of the land of Egypt. Then you fast forward. You turn the page from Genesis, which tells that story, among some others, but spends most of his time there. You turn the page from Genesis, and you get to Exodus. And in Exodus, what's going on is those Israelites have been there for generations. And the pharaohs that were favorable to them have gone, and there's new pharaohs. And now they're so numerous that the pharaoh at the time is worried that they would become so strong that they would be able to overtake the Egyptians and escape, and they wouldn't have their workforce anymore. So he tells the midwives, the Egyptian nurses that help with deliveries, if a woman has a girl, let the girl live. If the woman has a boy, take the boy's life to cut the male population of the Hebrew people. Well, Moses' mom was able to have him before the midwives got there. And so she was then hiding him, loving him, weaning him, caring for him. And eventually he started making too much noise as kids are wont to do. It did not take my kids three months to make too much noise, I'll tell you that. Eventually he started making too much noise and she realizes they're gonna find out about him and to come take him from me, and they're going to kill him. So the only thing she could do to save his life is put that baby in a basket and float that basket down the river. Just as an aside, I've preached a whole sermon about this on Mother's Day because I think that's what parenthood is. At the end of the day, you put your child in the basket, and you float it down the river, and you trust it to God, right? So she does that. And I can't help but think and be rather certain that during that season and during that time, with this is the kind of the real picture of it, not the personification of it, but a microcosm of it is, God, what are you doing right now? Why are you letting them kill our sons? God, why do I have to float my son down a river? So even Moses's life before he's even cognitive of what's happening around him starts with this question, God, what are you doing? Then we fast forward and we go to Exodus 2, 23 and 25. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. Preceding this verse, in the second half of chapter 2, is the account of the time that Moses came out of, I assume, the palace and was moving through the city, and he saw two Egyptian guards beating some Hebrew people. And he was inflamed with anger, and he went to protect them, and he ended up murdering these two guards. And this was seen by other people. And they reported him to the Egyptian guards. So now there's a price on his head and they're trying to actively arrest and kill Moses. So Moses has to flee. And he ends up fleeing to a place called Midian which was far enough away for him to not have to worry about the law anymore trying to get him. And he falls in with a guy named Jethro who has seven daughters. He marries one of the daughters, Zipporah, and he becomes a shepherd for 40 years. He's in the desert. Far away from the life that he had built and from the people that he knew. He had to flee. And at the end of this fleeing, the people cry out to God, what are you doing? What's going on with this slavery? And I can't help but wonder, this is speculation, you go here with me if you want to, but I can't help but wonder if they thought we had one voice in the palace that could advocate for us that Pharaoh might be sympathetic towards, and now he's just made a mistake and he's gone out into the wilderness. God, what are we doing? Who's going to save us? This is too much. This is too oppressive. And it says God heard their groanings and remembered his covenant with Abraham. Then very quickly in the narrative, we move to the next big scene in Moses's life, which is Moses and the burning bush. That's in Exodus three and four, two of, I think the best chapters in the Old Testament. And I'm not going to belabor this story because we're going to spend the next two weeks in that story. But Moses is in the desert. He's a shepherd. He's tending to his sheep. And he looks over and there's a bush that's on fire and it's not diminishing. And so he wanders over to check it out and the fire says to him, you're on holy ground, take off your shoes. And he's like, oh, this is God. And God says to him, I want you to go to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the known universe, and tell him to let his free workforce go. That's what he says. I want you to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. And so they have a back and forth. And we're going to get into this back and forth next week with Moses' five excuses that I think are pretty great. But the one that I think is most interesting and kind of most indicative of his struggle is in chapter 4, verse 10, where it says, Moses said to the Lord, pardon your servant, Lord.. And Moses says, but why me? I'm not eloquent. I never have been. I'm not silver-tongued. And beyond that, I just spent 40 years talking to sheep in the desert every day. And when he says I'm slow of speech and tongue, there are some Hebrew scholars that believe that that is indicative of a speech impediment, that he could have possibly had a stutter or something that would cause him to speak slowly and unevenly. He was not the man to go have political negotiations with the most powerful leader on the planet. So he says, why me, God? I'm slow of speech and of tongue. And God's response, if you read on, is, I will be adequate for you. I don't need you to be adequate. I will be adequate for you, so go. But it's like, then the question, and in the five excuses, God, what are you doing? You've got the wrong guy. Who's sending me? Well, I am sending you. Who should I say sent me? And God says, I'm not going to tell you my name. Why? What are you doing? He says, no one's going to trust me. And he said, I'll make them. Why? What are you doing? Every excuse is, God, what are you doing? But he goes faithfully, and he goes to Pharaoh, and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no chance. And then we have the famous ten plagues, right? The frogs and the locusts and the blood and the boils and all the things. We have the famous 10 plagues. And now we don't know how long of a period of time the plagues cover. Was there one a day for 10 days? Was there one a week for 10 weeks? It could have been months or maybe even years. There's not a lot of information to tell us what the span of time was during the plagues. But you've got to think that by the time they got to the 10th one, the growing question in everyone's brain was, God, what are you doing? These plagues ain't working, man. Pharaoh's not budging. God, what are you doing? And then the last one is, hey, I'm going to send the angel of death over the camp. And everyone who doesn't do a certain thing is going to lose their firstborn son. We see this in chapter 11, verse 1. Now the Lord said to Moses, I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here. One is, hey, the plagues aren't really working. So like what's going on, God? What's happening right now? And then the other one is, hey, what I want you to do for this particular plague to save your firstborn son is I wanted you to take the blood of a lamb, of a splatless lamb, and I want you to paint it on the doorposts of your house. And when the angel of death sees that perfect blood on the doorposts of your house, he will pass over, which is where we get the holiday Passover, he will pass over your house and move on to the next one. And I can't help but think that as Phil Leverett as the dad is out there the afternoon before Passover with the fresh blood from the lamb that he probably borrowed from Cam, that he's taking the blood of the lamb and putting it on his doorpost and saying, God, what are we doing? This doesn't make any sense. But okay, if this is what I have to do. The angel of death comes. There was great weeping and wailing in Egypt that night. The cry was great. And sure enough, Pharaoh drives them out. Says, okay, get out of here. You're a curse on our nation. Get lost. And here's a funny little detail from this story that I don't know if I'll be able to point out again. But all the housekeepers, all the women in Israel who were housekeepers of the rich Egyptian social class or whatever, they knew that they were going to be leaving the next day. So on their last day at work, they pilfered the Egyptians. And the Bible says, and so they plundered them. They took all their gold and all their silver. They just grabbed it all, put it in their dresses, and went home. And so they had some extra nickels on the trip to Israel. And I think that's funny. So they leave. They're driven out. They're in the desert. They've made their escape. And then they get pinned up against the banks of the Red Sea. And they cry out again. As Pharaoh approaches in chapter 14, verse 10, as Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, was it because there was no graves? I love this sarcasm. Was it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? So they're on the banks of the Red Sea. They have a choice to drown or to be slaughtered by Pharaoh's encroaching army. And they're bearing down on them. And they cry out and they look at Moses and they say, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? Did you bring us here because there's not enough graves in Egypt. Is that why you did this? Is that why you did all the plagues and all the things so that you could bring us here to die? What in the world, God, this doesn't make any sense. God, what are you doing? And then we know that God parts the Red Sea. They run through and the army is crushed, but they don't know that. So they're saying, what's going on? They're groaning. Why did you bring us here to die? It doesn't make any sense. But they get through. And they go. And then they're in the desert. And as they're in the desert, they're hungry. Because there's not much to eat. And there are, scholars will tell you that there were probably between 200,000 and 500,000 people moving through the desert. That's a logistic nightmare to feed. And so they're hungry. And they're calling out to God. And I can just imagine being a father watching my children be hungry every day, not sure if I was going to be able to get them food. And watching my wife sacrifice her food for them. I can only imagine how angry I would be. And how sad I would be. And how my sentiment would be, God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us out into the desert to starve? And so they cried out to God. And they complained to Moses and Aaron, and this in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them at twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I and the Lord your God. This is the genesis of manna, something that we probably have heard of before. And he says, tonight I'm going to let you eat quail. It's going to be a feast. But here's the deal. Don't get any more than you can eat. It's like when you take your kid to a buffet. Only get what you know you can eat. And their eyes get real big and you've got to try to figure it out. Only get what you know you can eat. Thank you for laughing at that joke. And then he said, the next morning there's going to be bread. But same rules apply. Don't store it. Don't be greedy. Only get what you need for that day. And so the next morning they wake up and there's these white flakes on the ground and they're like, what in the world is this? And they call it, and that's what manna means. What is it? And Moses says, that's the bread that the Lord has provided. God, what are you doing? We're hungry and we're starving. And why is it this weird bread that we can only take just enough of for the day? What's the harm in stockpiling bread? This doesn't make any sense, God. Why? What are you doing? Then they near the end of their journey in the desert. They're on the banks of the Jordan River. They're looking across the Jordan River at the promised land where Abraham lived and where Israel and his sons migrated from down into Egypt. And now, hundreds of years later, they've returned to claim their promised land. This is the land of milk and honey. The problem is there are now other peoples and tribes that occupy that land. And so Moses and Aaron collected 12 spies and sent them across the Jordan River. And they said, go scout the place out. Let's go figure out what we're dealing with and figure out how to conquer this territory because they knew they were going to have to conquer it. They couldn't just go to them and be like, hey, listen, there's been a big mistake. This is actually ours. So that's not going to work. So they're going to have to war over it. So they send the spies, and then the spies come back with this report in Numbers chapter 13, verses 26 through 29. They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the desert of Paran. There they reported to them and the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. They gave Moses this account. We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey. Here's its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in Negev, the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites live in the hill country, and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan. I just want to say, I dare any of you guys to read those words out loud like that. I had to practice this morning. Thank you, Lord. One of the things that's interesting there is if you read below in the text, the sons of Anak were known to be descendants of giants. And so they were much larger men than the Hebrew people were. And so they come back and they go, yeah, that's the land of milk and honey. Here's the fruit. It's pretty amazing. God was right. He did a good job picking a good plot of land. The problem is there's powerful armies and powerful fortified cities and we can't go. God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us here to a promised land that we're supposed to take over that we've been journeying through the desert waiting on for 40 years now. And we can't even occupy the land because we don't have the strength to do it. God, what are you doing? Now, here's what I want to do. I'm going to go back through them very quickly. All of those instances where they said, God, what are you doing? And I'm going to tell you based on scripture, what God was doing. I'm going to tell you what I think he was up to, because I want us to see a much larger point. You go back to the very first instance of his mom floating that basket down the river. God, what are you doing? Well, I'll tell you what he's doing. He knows that Moses is going to be the first leader of his people that has to install civics and laws and leadership and war and generalizing and trade and negotiations. And there is nobody in the Hebrew community that has ever had any experience at that at all. So what does he do? He takes the future leader and he plants him right in the middle of the palace of the most powerful person in the world and gives him access to the greatest education in the world and gives him access to all the kinds of conversations that country leadership is going to require of him that he would have never had access to if he had stayed amongst the Hebrew people. So he was, God sent him to the palace, I believe with my whole heart, to be trained in a unique way that nobody else could. Then after he gets trained, okay, I'm ready, he murders two people and he gets sent out to the desert. And he stays in the desert for 40 years. God, what are you doing? You trained me up. I have to have a larger purpose than this. Moses doesn't know what he's been trained for yet, but I'm sure that he had an idea of his life that wasn't to flee everything that I know and the opulence of the palace and all the conveniences of life that I experience as this privileged kind of Egyptian Hebrew person. God, why am I here? Well, Moses had to be humbled. This happens over and over again in scripture. God calls Paul. Paul goes to the wilderness for seven years. God calls David to be king. David's on the run for 20 years being humbled. He calls Joseph to be the leader under the Egyptian people. Joseph is a prisoner for 20 years. It happens over and over and over again. And all of those times are instances of God humbling and shaping the character of the person that he intends to use, shaving off the rough edges. Clearly Moses was a hothead. He murdered two dudes. Clearly he didn't have the patience and the grace and the diplomacy to be a leader of a nation. And so God sent him to the desert to be molded and shaped and humbled. Then he calls Moses. And Moses says, you got the wrong guy. What are you doing? I stutter. And God says, hey, listen, you need to learn to depend on my adequacy, not your inadequacy. You're right. You are inadequate for the task. You are not the obvious choice. But I'm choosing you because, and you need to know right now, there's going to be a lot more instances where you're going to be inadequate for the task. And you're going to have to trust on my adequacy. He's teaching Moses to trust him. Then he goes to Pharaoh. And he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no. And then they have the plaguesagues and we go, what is going on with this? God, they're not working. And the last one works. And it's, they had to be saying, God, why this plague? This is pretty rough. This is pretty brutal. And why are you having me paint the blood of a lamb on a doorpost? I'll tell you why. Because if you were to go home right now and you were to take, let's just say Bayer, not like blood and, or DuPont, whatever your choice is, I don't care. And you took that and you were just painting a strip of it on the doorpost. You'd put it in the middle and you'd put it on the sides at about shoulder height. That's the perfect blood of a lamb in the shape of a cross. And by that blood, I will protect your firstborn son. Because God knows 4,000 years later, his firstborn son is going to hang on the cross and shed the blood of a perfect lamb. And by that blood, our firstborn sons are saved and all people are saved for all of time. It's a picture of what God is going to do there. He frees the people. They're at the banks of the Red Sea. God, what are you doing? Did you bring us out here to die? Are there not enough graves in Egypt? He parks the Red Sea. He runs them through it. He knew that Pharaoh and his anger and his frustration and his haste would trudge through the middle of the Red Sea too. And then he collapses the waters on the most powerful army in the world, ending the existential threat to his people. And they get through and they're hungry. Why did you bring us here if you're not going to feed us? So he says, I'm going to give you bread, but you can only take enough for each day. You can't be greedy with it. Why? Because Jesus is the bread of life. And 4,000 years later, he's going to come and live a perfect life and die a perfect death. And he's going to be sufficient for us. He's going to be all we need. We will never hunger or thirst again. Manna is a picture of Jesus and an assurance of God's provision for his people. And that's what he wants us to learn from it. Finally, they're at the banks of the Jordan River. They're about to approach the promised land. And they check it out. They can't do it. Ten of the spies said, no go. But Joshua and Caleb were men of faith. And they said, if this is where God wants us to go, we can. And they led the armies through Canaan under the power of God, conquering their way all the way through what we know of as Israel. And they settled in the promised land. And it's a picture of our promised land where we will ultimately go after our life's journey. And it is impossible for us to get there on their own, but through the power and the provision of God, he's made a way for all of us to enter that promised land. Do you understand that every instance in the life of Moses and what happens with the Hebrew people is an opportunity for God to show his sovereignty and his goodness. Here's what I want you to see from that. This one thing, this one assurance that I want us to keep locked in as we go through this series. God knew what he was doing then and he knows what he's doing now. God knew in every instance when they said, God, what are you doing? God knew. He rarely explained himself, but God knew. And he knew then what he was going to do, and he knows now what he's going to do. He knew their story when they didn't. And they said, God, why are you writing it this way? And he just thought, one day you'll see. You all have things in your life where you go, God, what are you doing? Why is this happening? And let me just tell you, God knows now why it's happening. And you might know later. But God knows now. We don't know. These wonderful kids that we baptize and these great families, we don't know where they're going to go. But God does. So there's going to be hardships in their life, and they're going to cause us to cry as parents and grandparents. And we're going to go, God, what are you doing? He knows now what he's doing. He knows then and he knows right now. So my hope as we go through this life of Moses, which puts on marvelous display the assuring and comforting sovereignty of God. My hope is that as we go through it, we'll see over and over again that God knew what was going on. God knew what he needed, and he's not just thinking generationally, he's thinking millennially. I don't know what's happening in your life. I don't know what stories he will write with you, but God does, and the story of Moses helps us to see that we can trust him. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your sovereignty. Thank you for our ability to rest in it if we would so choose. Thank you for the way that you weave the story of Moses and the Israelites and how you looked after them as a heavenly father in a way that you look after us. God, for those of us who are in the middle of a situation where we don't know what you're doing, would you remind us that you do and that we can trust you? God, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for these amazing baptisms and the pictures that they are and the families that they represent and the prayers that culminate in them. We pray over those children that you would write an incredible story with them. And we are so grateful that you already know what it is. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. As Mike said, if you're on vacation and you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Right now, I want to continue in our series called Mark's Jesus, where we are looking at Jesus through the perspective of Mark's gospel, asking God and expecting God to prepare our hearts and minds as a church to celebrate Easter here in a few weeks. This week, we come to a pretty famous story in the gospels. It's not just in the gospel of Mark, it's in the others as well. It's the story that we probably think of as the rich young ruler. So I'm just going to ruin it off the bat for you. I'm just going to tell you the story really quickly because I think that there's some common ideas that we have about this story that if we will examine it further, we might find to be a bit erroneous and unhelpful. But the story of the rich young ruler for the unindoctrinated is a rich man goes up to Jesus and he says, Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, you have to follow the Ten Commandments. And he says, I've done this my whole life since I was a boy. At which point we all kind of roll our eyes like, nobody can follow the Ten Commandments. What a pretentious guy trying to make a point about who he is and yada, yada, yada. And we kind of demonize him, villainize him a little bit and judge him for his hyperbole about his faith. And Jesus says, okay, since you follow the commandments, since you're a little boy, sell everything that you own and then follow me. And the man hangs his head and he walks away because that's too high of a price for him to pay. This is the story and this is the story that most of us know or are familiar with. You may not have even heard it told before, but as I went through it, I bet even if you're unfamiliar with that part of scripture, I bet it was ringing some bells and you thought, oh yeah, I've heard this before. And we tend to, like I said, villainize the rich man. He didn't have enough faith. He was pretentious about how faithful he was. And then he wasn't willing to part with his possessions to follow Christ. And then we apply that however we apply it. And typically we tend to say, well, you don't really have to sell everything that you own to inherit eternal life, to get into heaven, to be a follower of God. You don't really have to do that. It's about a mentality. You have to be willing to do that. And then we all do what mental exercise. We all trick ourselves into believing that we would give away all of our things for eternal life, that we would happily. I'm open-handed. The lake house is God's. I let a pastor stay there two days a year. And so it's God's lake house. It's a service for him, right? This is what we do. I don't need this car. It just gets me from point A to point B. I can't help that it costs $65,000. We convince ourselves I'm totally willing to give up everything. And then in reality, we don't. So we kind of shy away from the story a little bit because I think it makes us uncomfortable. But I think that if we'll reflect on it, is that Don Sutherland back there? Don. Hey, pal. Last time I saw Don, he's in the hospital. Yeah, praise God. This is great. He was getting calf implants. It wasn't anything big deal. Don't worry about him. Don, you screwed me up. Where am I? Oh, yeah. So here's how I think we can actually relate to this story and to this man in more ways than you probably realize. I don't know how many of you in your life have ever felt wealthy. I don't know how many of you would ever describe yourselves as rich. I know that in this room, we run kind of the gamut of middle class America. There's some of us that are on the bottom end of middle class. There's some of us that are on the high end of middle class. And maybe you are someone who would say, you know, I've been fortunate and I am wealthy. And that's great. But what I want us to reflect on this morning as Americans, this is a point that I've made before. to people to ever exist on the face of the planet. Do you understand that? Even if you wouldn't consider yourself wealthy and you've never thought that you were rich. I remember the time when I felt the most wealthy in my whole life was when I was 15 years old and we bought a new house. We moved into the nice neighborhood where the cool kids were that had a swim in tennis. Evergreen Crossings. It was a new development. In 1995 or 6, the house was $235,000. We bought this house. It had a basement. I had a pool table. We hung out at my house. My dad bought an Acura. Okay? Right. We were highfalutin. We went to Outback like once a month. We were a big deal. That's the wealthiest I ever felt. And then at some point I was, I knew I was going to go into ministry. I can remember laying on my bed, looking at my room thinking this is the nicest house I'm ever going to live in. I'm not going to be able to afford this stuff. so you better get while the getting's good, buddy. But that was the only time in my life I felt wealthy, and I had no perspective of what it actually was. And I don't know if you felt that way or not, but what I want you to see is, historically speaking, everyone in this room is incredibly wealthy. A Roman senator would come to your house and marvel at the conveniences at your disposal. You mean you can just do this and fresh water comes out? You can just drink it? You don't have to send somebody to a well to get it? No, I can watch TV. Your air is conditioned? Talk to me about this. What is that? You have your own soft chairs that you buy on Facebook Marketplace for virtually nothing? This is unbelievable if you think about the extravagances that you have in your life. Last night, do you know what I had for dinner? I had Mongolian beef. I had Mongolian beef. 200 years ago, if you wanted Mongolian beef, do you know where you had to go? Frigging Mongolia. That's where you had to go. I went to knee Asian kitchen and my mom paid for it with her credit card. It's not even real money. It's just pretend money that future dad has to worry about. I don't even care. I ordered all the Chinese food I could. It was delicious. Do you understand how privileged we are? Do you understand how wealthy we are in that? How little we are concerned with things and the conveniences that exist at all of our fingertips. See, I think when we read this story and it says that a rich man came up to Jesus, that we immediately go, not me. That story's about someone else. That story's about someone else talking to Christ. Because not very many of us call ourselves rich. And even if in the back of our head we know that we are, we tend to not think of ourselves in that way. And so I think what's probably true is that for most of your life, when you've encountered this story, that story has been about somebody else that lives a different life than you. But what I want you to see, Americans, is that this story is about you. This is you leaning in and talking to Jesus. This is you asking this question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? What must I do to follow you? This man is us and he's us in more than one way. I'm going to show you. Look with me at Mark chapter 10 verses 17 through 20. We're going to go all the way through verse 31 so you can leave your Bible open and I'll be coming back to it. But I just want to look at these first four verses real quick. As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. Good teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Why do you call me good? Jesus answered, no one is good except God alone. You know the commandments. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony and shall not defraud. Honor your father and mother. Teacher, he declared. All these I have kept since I was a boy. Okay. So we know that he's rich. That's undebatable, indisputable. That's a fact given to us in the text. He's a rich man, comes up to Jesus. But I don't know if you're like me in that. I've always kind of postured him as someone who is trying to show off to the crowds and elevate himself. What must I do? I want to follow you. I'm righteous. I want to be good. And Jesus says, follow the commandments. And he says, I've done that since I was a boy. I've always kind of read this as him posturing a little bit. But when you look at the story, that's not what he's doing. First of all, it starts off and it says, look at the text. It says he ran to Jesus. He saw Jesus and he ran up to him, which was undignified to do. You didn't run in the ancient world. You guys don't run now unless you put on certain clothes and then you get on the sidewalk and then you jog for a certain amount of time. It's okay to run then, but it's not okay to run anywhere else in your adult life. So he runs up to Jesus. And what does he do? Does he posture in front of everybody? No, he falls on his knees. And he says, what must I do to follow you? So right off the bat, what we see from this man is not someone posturing so that he looks good in front of some crowd that he doesn't know. What we see is this sincere faith and questioning of this man who runs up to Jesus and falls on his knees and says, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Then Jesus says, follow the 10 commandments. And he says, I've done them since I was a boy. And again, I think we're tempted to condemn him for hyperbole here because no one follows the commandments perfectly. But I think if we rephrase it and we think about ourselves, especially if you are like me and you don't have any memory of life outside of church. My memory doesn't go back beyond church because I've been in church since the day that I was born. So for me, faith has always been a part of my life. And if you were to ask me, Nate, have you always lived according to your faith? Have you always lived in your faith? Have you always trusted in Jesus? Have you always kept the tenets of the Bible the best you could? My answer would be sincerely yes. Sincerely I have. And I could say like he said, I've been doing them since I was a young boy. I don't think that he's implying that he's done it perfectly. I think what he's saying is this is the only faith I've ever known. I've done my best to uphold the Ten Commandments my whole life. And so what we see here is the sincerity of his faith. And this is where I think we can relate to him. I want to put it on the screen because I want us to read it and I want these words to matter. We are rich and our faith is sincere. This man was rich and his faith was sincere. Grace, I've been your pastor for eight years. You are rich, whether you feel that way or not, and I know in my heart that your faith is sincere. I have seen your sincere faith. I have seen your true desire for Christ. I know that you relate to this man. I know that you want to follow Jesus. I know that you want to do the things that you're supposed to do, that you want to do small groups, that you want to serve, that you want to help, that you want to reach your community. I know that you care deeply about your faith. And because I know that, I know that you can relate to this man who is not posturing, who is not positioning himself, who is not trying to show off. He went to Jesus and he asked a sincere question, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, live faithfully according to what you've been taught. And he says, I have since I was a boy. And many of you have. And as long as you've known Jesus since he converted you, whether it was as a child or as an adult, you've faithfully followed him your whole life. And in that way, you're just like this man asking Jesus, what should I do to inherit eternal life? And listen to me. Here's how else I know that his faith is sincere. Do you understand what he is having to do to even ask that question? He grew up Jewish. He grew up following the laws. He grew up with a sincere faith. Presumably, he grew up going to temple, learning the Torah, following a rabbi, making his sacrifices, knowing the law. And now Jesus is saying, I am the natural conclusion to that. This is a seed change. This is considering leaving your old religion and following a new religion. This is like you converting from an old faith and transitioning into a new faith. Those of you who have walked from Catholicism into Protestantism and just how reckless we are with our liturgy and everything that we do, it's a shock to the system. It's even more than that to go from being a practicing Jew to this is Jesus. You're the Messiah. I want to follow you. What do I do? Do you understand the radical change that he's undergoing to do this? This is not posturing, guys. He's sincerely going to Christ going, I believe you are who you say you are. I want to follow you. What must I do? And this is the question that we ask Christ. I believe you are who you say you are. I want to follow you. What do I do? How do I do it? Every time we come to church, we're asking this question implicitly. Every time we go to small group, every time we open our Bible, every time we pray, that's the implicit question in our actions. Jesus, I want to follow you. I believe sincerely in who you are and who you say you are. What do I do? And Jesus' answer is tough. But before he gives this answer, sell everything you own and follow me, we get this glimpse into Jesus. And I've never noticed it before until I was studying for this sermon. And I think it's profound. So we're just going to look at this one sentence at the beginning of verse 21. After he said, teacher, all these things I have kept since I was a boy, the beginning of 21, Jesus looked at him and loved him. Jesus looked at him and loved him. I'm going to come back to this verse. We'll read the whole thing. But I want us to stop on that sentence. This man came to Jesus. In sincerity of faith. Said I believe you are who you say you are. What do I do to follow you? And Jesus says keep the commandments. And he says I've done that. I've lived out my faith. And then Jesus looks at him and is filled with compassion for him. He loves him. And he empathizes for him because Jesus knows what he's about to say. And he knows that when he says it, it's going to discourage him so much that he's going to walk away because it's a price that's too high for him. But before he says it, he looks at him and he loves him. And I want you to know that if we are in this story and if we agree that we are rich and we agree that our desire for Jesus is sincere, then we read ourselves into this text And we put ourselves in that moment. And if Jesus looked at him and loved him, then I'm telling you, he looks at you and he loves you. Jesus looks at you and he loves you. He cares for your soul. And here's why I think he had so much compassion for this man. Because Jesus understands this. Your wealth inoculates you from your faith. I started off by saying we are rich. All of us. And I want you to reflect on that affluence. understanding that the reason that Jesus looked at this man with compassion, because his faith was sincere, is because Jesus knew what he was about to say. He knew he was going to tell him, sell everything and follow me. Show me I'm the most important. And so before he said it, he looked at him and he loved him. And Jesus, this morning, American Christian, looks at you and he loves you. Because what he understands, and what I want you to understand, is that your faith inoculates, or your wealth inoculates you from your faith. You understand being born into American affluence serves almost like being vaccinated when you're a baby against faith, because we have so few times in our life where it's actually required of us with so few times where it's actually required of us. With so few times where it's actually required of us that we actually need to use our faith. I want to read you the rest of this story and then I want to reflect on it together and talk about this idea of our wealth inoculating us from our faith. Serving as a vaccine that prevents us from growing faith. So let's finish the story and then we'll reflect. At this, Jesus looked at him and loved him. Verse 21, one thing you lack, he said, go sell everything you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me. And at this, the man's face fell. He went away sad because he had great wealth. Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, how hard is it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God? The disciples were amazed at his words, but Jesus said again, children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. The disciples were even more amazed and said to each other, who then can be saved? Jesus looked at them and said, with man, Then Peter spoke up. No one who is left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me in the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age. Homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields. Along with persecutions. And in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last and the last will be first. That's the whole story. But Jesus looks at him and he loves him because he knows he's going to tell him, sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and then come follow me. And he knows that he's going to drop his head and walk away. And then Jesus says, and this is a verse, Americans, that should haunt us. It is more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man. Or it's more difficult for a rich man to enter a kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Jesus says intentionally, the wealthiest people among us have the biggest difficulty with faith. And I'm pressing this this morning because I don't think it's something that we think about. I don't think that this idea is something that we're cognizant of. I don't think that we've ever thought of our wealth inoculating us from our faith, preventing us from having faith. And when I say that, here's what I mean. I can remember one time in particular when I was what I call relegated to prayer. Some of you know this story already, so I'm sorry for repeating it, but it's the best example I have of this. Jen and I struggled a long time to get pregnant with our first child, about eight years. And I think it was the fall of 2014, in October, we learned that we were pregnant. We were overjoyed. This was the answer to a lot of prayers. I remember telling my mom in her garage and having to catch her because she about passed out. She's excitable. She's an emotional lady. The whole family was overjoyed. But in December, we learned that we had miscarried. And it was the most profound sadness i've ever endured it was a it was a dark season and i'm grateful for it because as a pastor i've walked with people through their miscarriages and through their struggles and it makes me infinitely more empathetic. But it was a hard season. And God in his goodness, by about Mother's Day the following year, allowed us to become pregnant again. And I can remember finding out that Jen was pregnant and doing all the research I could. What can I do as a father to help bring this baby to term? How can I help? Can I get two jobs? Do I need to stay up 24-7 and help Jen in some way? What can I do? I wanted desperately to do something. I wanted desperately to have some measure of control and some measure of influence on bringing this child to term. This child that would become Lily, that was Lily. I wanted to do, there was nothing I could have been asked to do that I wouldn't have done to try to protect that child and bring them to term. But here's the thing. I was relegated to prayer. There was nothing I could do but pray. And so I prayed. And it's one of the few times in my life that I felt like I had no choice but to have faith. I had no choice but to fall on my knees and pray. See, our money buys us the mirage of independence. It buys us the mirage of independence. It makes us think that there's always something that we can do. It makes us think that there's always a string to pull. There's always a switch to flip. It's the American dream of independence. We are culturally. I can't think of another culture. I was talking about this with my men's group this week. I can't think of another culture in the history of the world that prizes independence as such a high value as we do. We are the American cowboys. We are independents. We pick ourselves up, buy our bootstraps, and we do it ourselves. And part of the way we do that ourselves is we amass wealth around us. And we take care of things. Something goes wrong, we get an attorney. The car's broken, we call our insurance. We don't know what it is to pray that a storm won't come so that the crops last and the next three years aren't terrible. We don't know what it is to be at the whims of Mother Nature living out in the open. We don't know what it is to be impoverished and to hope God will provide the next day. None of us, very few of us, if any in this room, have ever had to be concerned about where their next meal was coming from. You don't know what it is to be food insecure. And so in our wealth and in our affluence, we are so rarely relegated to faith. We are so rarely relegated to prayer that we can almost not relate to people who have to daily live by faith. This is why Jesus says it's more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle because our wealth inoculates us from our faith and buys us the mirage of independence that we don't have. It's only in life's most extreme moments of cancer or brokenness or addiction or abuse. It's only in our moments of helplessness that we allow ourselves to be relegated to prayer. And we lose the mirage of independence. And as American Christians, I just want us to see the chasm between us and the faith that our life requires and the vast majority of human history and the faith that their life requires because ours requires so very little. And a lot of times, it's the fault of our wealth. This is why I think we can juxtapose this story of the rich young ruler and the story of the widow, giving the widow's might. In Mark chapter 12, this is another famous story, 12 verses 41 through 44. Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts, 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. They all gave out of their wealth, but she, out of her poverty, put in everything, all she had to live on. We know this story well. It's a remarkable testament of her faith. We use it for giving sermons. When I scheduled this, this was going to be a giving sermon. But as I studied it, that is not the point that I wanted to make. And I don't want to use the story of the widow's mite to guilt you into giving or giving more. I just want us to reflect on her faith. And here's what I'm willing to bet you. That this wasn't her first rodeo. She gave all she had. I bet it wasn't the first time. She gave all she had and then she said, God, I need you to take care of me. Please. I bet that's not the first time she prayed that prayer. What I'd be willing to bet is that that woman had many days where she was relegated to prayer. That she had many days where she said, God, I have nothing. You're going to have to take care of me, please. She had many days where she just opened her hands and her arms and said, I'm in your hands, God. I hope I can eat today. And so what we see here in this story is very likely not a first time occurrence. What we see, I believe, is a faith that was hard won over time from her daily relying on God over and over and over again for simple provision so that when she gave that day, that was no big deal. If we went, if we all went and cleared out our checking account, just your checking account, not your savings account, not your Bitcoin, just your checking account. If we wrote a check for that total amount and gave it to something that Jesus was doing, said, here, Father, take it, we would be nervous. We would be scared. That would be a life-altering event for us. We would remember that for the rest of our years. I'm just guessing. I don't know. It's not in the text. I can't say it with authority. I bet that lady forgot that day. She cleared out her checking account like she probably had so many other times and simply chose to trust God. So this morning, I don't have an application for you. I'm not preaching this to try to get you to give. I believe God wants us to be generous people. I believe it's biblical. I believe we should. That's not what this is about. I don't want you to feel bad for your wealth. God gave it to you. He made you a steward of it. It's a huge responsibility. I'm not here to guilt you about it. I'm not here to tell you to sell everything and give it to the kingdom, unless you want to build that building, then go ahead. I'm not here to tell you to do that. I'm not here to leverage the widow's might to get you to become a more faithful giver. I'm just here because I want you to consider where you sit in history. I want you to consider how much you actually do relate to this man, that you are rich and your faith is sincere. And I want you to consider as I pray, God, how has my wealth, how have my resources, how has my independence inoculated me from my faith in you? How is it impacting me in ways that I don't see? And how can I step towards living a greater life of faith so that maybe one day I will have exercised my faith muscles enough that I can have the faith of the widow and the widow's might. I'm just here to encourage you to reflect on that. Please do that as I pray and we'll finish up the service. Father, thank you for these stories. Thank you for being honest with us, for helping us as rich Americans see the peril that we exist in. God, I pray that you would use this morning to grow our faith. I pray that we would find ways to be more reliant on you, that we would not allow the resources that we were born into, the culture into which we were born, the things that you've allowed us to acquire, the blessings that you've given us. God, help us to see those things for what they are and help us to see, God, that sometimes they prevent us from having a necessary faith in you. Make us more like the widow, more willing to rely, more easy with our faith. And God, draw us near to you as we finish this service today. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

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