Sermons tagged with Reflection

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for your presence there and here. It is with some excitement that I get back into the pulpit this weekend. The elders several years ago made a decision that I would get a stay from preaching in the month of July, and our staff carries the torch. And I don't know about you guys, but I thought Aaron and Aaron and Kyle each preached the best sermon I've ever heard them preach, and I thought that they carried the torch well in July. So I'm very grateful to have such a deep bench here at the church that can serve us in those weeks. And then Doug Bergeson preached last week, and he did fine. But I'm very grateful that we have those voices in our church, and I'm very grateful for when we get to hear from other voices. I'm also grateful that I get to continue on this morning in our series in the life of Moses. We took a brief break last week for Ministry Partner Sunday, but this week we're jumping back into Moses and we're going to carry Moses through the end of the month into Labor Day weekend. And then the second weekend in September, we're going to begin a new series called Gentle and Lowly. I will tell you more about that. There's going to be a book. We're all going to read it together. If you'd like to, I think it's really going to bring us together as a church. I'm very excited for that series. But before that, we have this, where we are continuing to look at the life of Moses and how God used him to lead his people out of Egypt and eventually into the promised land and establish this new nation. As we look at the portion of the story on which I want to focus this morning, I want us to attempt to shed a mindset and adopt a new one that may be best illustrated by my daughter this past week. This last week, I had an opportunity to go on a cruise. My parents are cruise people. They like cruises. Some people are cruise people. You're weird. Some people are not cruise people, okay? But we went on a cruise, and as part of this cruise, it was a really wonderful experience. My sister and her three girls and her husband came along as well. It was one big family, and it was a really, really great experience. The last full day we were there, we docked at Royal Caribbean's private island called Coco Cay. Perfect day at Coco Cay. Except it rained the whole time. So our joke was, it's a pretty okay day at Coco Cay. Coco Cay is home to, there's this Daredevil's Tower. And off this tower in the middle of the island spit five different water slides. The apex is Daredevil's Peak, which is the tallest water slide in North America. And Lily did it. My nine-year-old daughter chose it, and she did it, and I was so proud of her. There is nothing that that has to do anything at all with my sermon. I'm just proud of Lily for choosing to do Daredevil's Peak because I did it and I was, you know, you cross your feet and your arms like this and I'm like wiping off my eyes because I'm trying to save my contacts so I don't have to walk around in a fog for the rest of the day. And I'm giggling to myself thinking, and I said out loud, holy crap, this is fast. Holy crap, this is fast. But she did it. Great. Here's why I bring that up. Because on your way up the stairs, there's different slides that you can do. And the very lowest is like some sort of racers. The idea is that you start each one at the same time and you see who gets to the bottom first, which spoiler alert, it's whoever's fattest. That's who gets to the bottom first. That's how that works. I won a lot of races this week. And there's like this burgundy-ish slide that's enclosed, and then there's a yellow slide that's open, and you kind of like slosh on the sides of it. And as we were going up the stairs, Lily said, Daddy, we're going to do this later, but don't do the yellow slide. And I said, why, baby? And she goes, because I think I saw on YouTube that people fly out of it. They just fly like right off the sides and they just, just careen into Daredevil's Peak, right? And this was a legitimate concern of hers, that Daddy, please don't do this slide because you might fly out of it and die. There's, there's legitimate danger at the top of the slide. And I just remember thinking, sweetie, you don't know how liability works. There is no one on the planet that is more incented to make sure that no one flies off this slide than Royal Caribbean. They're insured for this. That's not going to happen. You could find someone who weighs 450 pounds, put them in a speed suit, grease them up, and they're still not flying out of that slide. Okay? No one's flying out of that slide, but I thought what a quaint, wonderful thing it is to be nine and to believe that you are in such peril at the top of this slide that you may not make it to the bottom. When's the last time you had that kind of wonder and naivety in your life? When it was a possibility to do a water slide and it end fatally. Of course we're not scared of that. Of course I know that I'm not going to fly out of it. Of course I know it's perfectly safe. Of course I was never scared at any point to do any of these slides because they're insured by American companies, which means you're not going to die on them. But Lily didn't know that. She still has this nine-year-old sense of wonder where danger is possible on water slides. And there is something about life that chips away at our wonder, isn't there? There's about life we're becoming an adult means that we don't awe at things anymore it means that we don't wonder at things anymore it means that we instantly explain things away and if we can't instantly explain it away we know that there is a way to explain it away. We just need to acquaint ourselves with it. And it makes me sad that I can't stand at the top of a water slide with a sense of trepidation in my heart. I was trepidatious about keeping my breakfast down before I did Daredevil's Peak. It turns a lot, and I thought I might get sick. But at no point was I scared for my life. At no point did I think something catastrophic was going to happen, but what must it be like to be nine again and to be fully convinced that Dad shouldn't do the yellow slide because it may not be safe. Grownups, we've lost that sense of wonder. We've lost our ability to marvel. And we very readily explain things away. But I bring that up and I acquaint us with that mindset of the wondrous child because I believe that the passage that we are going to read today stirs up within us that wonder if we will let it. As I read through Exodus, getting ready for this series, and I arrived at this passage, I'm going to be in Exodus chapter 19, verses 16 through the end of the chapter, through 25. And I read this passage. It kind of had this profound impact on me. On the trip, like you do, I read a book. When you go on vacation, you read a book. And so I was reading a book, and this book, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, is particularly profound. And there was one chapter where it ended with this old man knowing that his children were tricking him into retirement and that he was going to go into retirement and die, and he was content with this choice. And he asked his eldest child to keep his knowledge of that away from his other kids. Let them go on thinking they're tricking me. And the way that it was written was so profound that it felt like I would cheapen the book and the thought if I simply turned the page and continued to read. So after I read that portion of the book, I read it again, and then I shut the book, and I put it on the nightstand, and I turned off the light, and I just ruminated in it. Because there are some portions of some stories that get cheapened when you continue on without reflecting on them. And I think this morning, in Exodus chapter 19, we arrive at one of those moments. That if we just continue to charge ahead, reading the life of Moses, we miss the profundity that is bound within these words. If we do not reflect on it. Further, not only do I want us to reflect on it this morning, but I want us to do our very best to reflect on it with the wonder of a naive nine-year-old. I want us to do our best to marvel at these words, to put ourselves in this situation, and to allow the words to sweep us up and to respect what is happening in this portion of the story. God is about to give the Ten Commandments to the Hebrew people. And next week we will look at the law and the commandments and we will talk about why they're so important and so meaningful and how they are the fulcrum on which a huge portion of the Bible rests in teeters. We'll look at that next week. And it would be tempting to get to this part of the story, get to Mount Sinai in the presence of God and just move right into the law because that's the headliner from this part of the book. That's the headliner from this part of the story. But I don't just want to rush headlong into the law and miss how profound the precursor is to that deliverance of the law. The Hebrew people have been wandering through the desert by this point for some time. Months, years, decades. And they come to this mountain called Mount Sinai. And clouds and smoke come to rest over the mountain. And God tells Moses to tell the people this is now a holy place. Do not let anyone touch the mountain. If anyone touches the mountain, they are to be stoned or run through with arrows. This is holy ground. Can you imagine being an ancient Hebrew person, having escaped from Egypt, watched God part the waters and then collapse them in on the Egyptian army and the top 600 chariot drivers in their country. Demolish the army and make you safe. And every day you wake up and you pick up manna on the ground and you feed your family and God provides for you every day. Can you imagine what it would be like? And then, and you're led by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. And then one day you're in front of this mountain and cloud and smoke comes to rest on the mountain and you are told this is holy ground. You cannot touch it. And you're not American. You don't understand science. You don't have all the learning that you have. You cannot explain this away. The only thing to explain it away is this is miraculous and that is from God. And you marvel at it and you awe at it because you have not, your wonder has not been chipped away at by your education and by your experience. And then on the third day, this is what transpires. And this is where I think it's worth taking a holy pause to reflect on what's happening in the narrative. I'm going to read you more verses than I normally do. I simply think that they're all important. And so read said to the Lord, The people cannot come up from Mount Sinai because you warned us yourself. Put limits around the mountain and set it apart as holy. The Lord replied, Go down and bring Aaron up with you, but the priests and the people must not force their way through to come up to the Lord, or he will break out against them. So Moses went down to the people and told them. I know that this may seem obscure to point out on a Sunday morning, but to me it's not obscure at all. To me, it's halting. It's poignant. It's important. God brings his very presence down to the top of the mountain. He has not brought his presence anywhere since the Garden of Eden. But he brings it down here now. And for three days before he brought his presence, there was smoke and fire and clouds covering this holy ground. And then he descends onto it himself and he calls to Moses, come and speak to me. And before he gives Moses the law, which is the reason that he came, he just simply says to Moses, go and tell them, don't come here. This is holy. This is sacred. And I know that it's so hard for us to do, and our American 21st century minds that are so smart, and so educated, and so smug. But can we not envision what it must have been like to marvel at this mountain where it says smoke is lifting from it like a furnace because the presence of God is on it? And there is this man that we revere and he is leading us named Moses. And he's called to the top of it. And he comes down with a message for us. Our imaginations are too atrophied to appreciate this. This point would be better made in the second and third grade room than it is here. Because we're too smart for this. We're too developed for this. We've lost our sense of wonder. We know water slides are safe. And so we read passages like this, and I'm afraid that we miss it. And we go, what's the point? This is the point. Do you see how awful and terrifying God is? Do you see how big He is? Do you see how marvelous He is? Do you see how awesome, in the very sense of the word, that He is. Do you see how awesome in the very sense of the word that he is? And so I think if we just read this and we go, yeah, yeah, get to the commandments, we cheapen the narrative and we miss what's happening here. Because what's happening here reminds me of one of my favorite Proverbs, Proverbs chapter nine, verse 10, where it simply says at the beginning, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This passage personifies, exemplifies, illustrates that point better than any other passage I know outside of the book of Revelation, where it just grabs you and it shakes you and it makes you pay attention to who our God is and how big he is. How fearful must we have been if we were there? If we can imagine what it must have been like to be in the desert and to watch this mountain shake violently and to see smoke rising off of it and to know that our God that we worship, that we just sang to, is present there. How much would that stir us? And how much fear would we have of who that awesome God is and what he must be capable of? It is something that we have lost in 21st century church. But to me, it illustrates and personifies that passage in Proverbs that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And many of us have probably heard that passage before, have heard that idiom before. Even if we didn't know it was from Proverbs, we've heard that phrase, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And what we tend to do is we try to defang it by making fear mean reverence and awe. It doesn't really mean afraid. It means that we just revere God. And I want to be very clear about this this morning. No, no, no. Fear means being afraid. When we were doing the water slides, back to this well, when we were doing the water slides, about halfway up the tower, there was these slides called dueling demons. And at the top of them, there was a capsule. It was clear plastic and it would open hydraulically. And you would step into the capsule and it it would close, and there's water running down your back, and your feet are crossed, and your hands are here. And at some point or another, the sadistic slide worker is going to press the button, and the bottom's going to drop out. Okay? That was the ride. And it was super fun. I was laughing the whole time. It was great. Lily said she wanted to do it. She had said she wasn't going to do it. But she said she wanted to try dueling demons with her cousin Charlotte. And I was like, great, babe. And so we get up there. We wait in line. And it's her turn. And she goes, and I want to watch her in the capsule. And the thing opens like a coffin, you know. And then, and she took one step into it and paused and like looked around. And I was getting ready. I knew she was going to turn and look at me. And I was getting ready to like, babe, you got it. You can do this. You're all right. You know, like I was going to talk her into it. But when she turned and looked at me, the color had left her face. And she just went. And I just, all toughness left. Baby, come here. Come here. You don't have to do it. Walk down by yourself in shame, but you don't have to do it. You don't have to do this. I'm still going to do it. I'll see you at the bottom. I'm not going to miss my opportunity to duel the demon. But when I saw her, I knew she was afraid. She was scared. There's no talking her into this. Fear of the Lord means being afraid. We don't soft pedal it with reverence first. We are actually afraid of him and what he can do. We actually tremble at his might. I don't know if you read it, if you caught it in the narrative, but it's said that the whole camp trembled. The tough, grizzled old men. The women who have seen everything and endured more. The whole camp tremb idea that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, let us not soft pedal it first into reverence. Let us understand first that it is an actual sense of fear where the color leaves our face and we understand what it is that our God is capable of. And we don't talk about this a lot, particularly not in American churches, but he can smite us. He can put his thumb on us and end it. You know your mom used to say, I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it? God actually means it. We should be fearful of God. That's where our relationship with him should start. And when we skip that step, I think we shortchange ourselves. I actually have thought about it this way for years. And I don't know if this will resonate with you or not, but for me, the way that our progressive understanding of who God is isn't very dissimilar from my progressive understanding of who my father is. I was born in the 80s, and when you're born in the 80s, your parents hit you. They spanked you, okay? That's what you got. I got spanked when I was growing up. We don't do it now. If we do it now, we don't talk about it. But I will say that there are times when my children act in such a way, and I think this is why we invented spanking. You have no fear, and you need a knot jerked in your tail. My dad didn't just spank me. And one of the biggest mistakes I made was when I was eight years old, my mom broke the wooden spoon on me and I laughed at her. It was belt after that, from then on out. And if I had anything in my life to do over again, I would strongly consider going back to eight years old and crying and pretending like that hurt. Because the belt was the worst. Not only did we get spanked with the belt, but my dad had a couple of moves perfected that I can't even do to this day. I called it the no-look slap and grab, but when we were in the car, I'd be in the back seat, and if me and my sister got sideways, dad could, without looking, without breaking eye contact with the road, reach back and slap. He had some sort of radar to know where my left thigh was. He could reach back and slap it and grab it and squeeze it. So now I'm dealing with the sting of hitting my leg. And then he squeezes it and he has these fulcrum grips on my leg. I'm in incredible pain. I have no idea what words he's saying or what words I'm using. I'm just trying to get this done with, right? And then he had this other move where he would grab my arm and twist it and just kind of jam my shoulder into itself and walk me across a room. And I'm going like this. It was easier to be a parent in the 80s, I think. But when I was little, I was scared of my dad. For better or worse, maybe I need to work this out in therapy. For better or worse, I was scared of him. I didn't get sideways because I didn't want to get hurt. I watched my mouth because I didn't want the no-look slapping grab. I didn't want to get spanked. I was scared, and so that kept me in line. But eventually, somewhere in middle school, I realized, defects is a thing. He's not going to hurt me that bad. He really is not going to do anything. Or I can report him. I got a leg up. But by that time in my life, I just wanted to make him proud of me. I didn't obey him because I was scared of getting the belt. I obeyed him because I wanted to make him proud. And then at some point in my life, I realized that he was proud of me, that he was proud to call me his son. And my mom was proud to call me her son. And then the knowledge of their pride in me made me love them all the more. And so fear begat reverence, begat a desire to make them proud. The fact that I knew that they were proud of me begat this deep love for them, that they loved and accepted me for who I was no matter what and it was unconditional and I don't think it works very differently with our Heavenly Father but we can't just jump straight to love we have to experience fear and from that fear a desire to make our Heavenly Father proud and from that desire realize that he is proud of us that that He does love us as much as He ever will. And then from that comes this unconditional, reciprocal, grateful love from us towards our Heavenly Father. But it has to start with fear. That's why it says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that that gets a bad rap, this idea of fearing our God. Why would our God want us to be afraid of him? Why would he ask that of us? Because in the 21st century church, in American church, we skip fear and we go straight to the cross. We skip fear and we go right to Christmas and right to Easter. I am forgiven because he was forsaken. I'm accepted. He was condemned. And we get to move right to God. We get to move right into God's presence. We never experience the fear of him. It's like growing up with your grandfather when all he ever wants to do is spoil you. But you forget that your dad has to discipline you. We forget that. And we skip straight to love. And we forget to fear our God. We forget scenes like this in Exodus 19 where we should be awestruck by him and wonder and marvel at his largesse and at his might and at his wrath and at his vengeance and at his anger. Those don't make us comfortable, so we move on from them. But I believe that we cheapen our relationship with our Father God when we are not aware of them. So why does God insist that fear is the beginning of wisdom? And how can that be a good thing? A few points to this end. First of all, fear appreciates grace and mercy. Fear helps us appreciate grace and mercy. Here's what I mean. Back to the well of the cruise this week by way of illustration. This was a, my parents were saying, a once-in-a-lifetime trip for our family. My parents are big cruisers. They like to do it, and so they wanted to bring Amy and I, Amy's my sister, and our families along. And so we did the whole thing. And it was really nice, and Dad did it right. And we got to stay in a suite. And that's pretty, I'm not trying to brag, I'm just telling you that we stayed in a suite. It is pretty awesome. There was a curtain dividing our king-size bed from the height of bed, so that was fancy. And we had our own balcony and a chair that you could read on and watch the ocean, which was really, really cool. We had, there was a private suite lounge that your key card got you access to, and from 4.30 to 8, there's free Cokes, so it was awesome. We would go there every day and get Cokes before dinner because at dinner, if you wanted a Coke, they would upcharge you like $5.50 or something. So we'd go get a free Coke and then take that to dinner. But it was like a really nice experience. And at one point, we had told each of Jen and I each did a cruise when we were teenagers with our families. And at one point Lily said, uh, mommy and daddy, when you did cruises before, did you stay in rooms like this? And it was like, no, no, we stayed in an interior room that was tiny. It was like a cave and it was damp. And you had to shuffle sideways to get into bed because there's no space. And you slept sweaty against your sibling. That's what you did. All right. That was traveling when we were growing up. Because when we were growing up, we didn't have grandparents that had been moderately successful. So mom and dad had to foot the bill for vacations. Jen, growing up, went to vacation in Seaside Beach every year before Seaside Beach was bougie and awesome, back when it was just run down like all the beaches in North Carolina. I hate North Carolina beaches. And your barbecue sauce. I'm just throwing that out there. Yeah, I know. They got a house that was a few blocks off of the beach that somehow or another through the Southern Baptist Church relationship network, Jen's dad found this older lady, and he would come down. He was pretty handy. And in exchange for doing a certain amount of projects, his family could stay in the basement a few blocks off of the beach. So she grew up vacationing by trading handiwork for a location that was a bike ride away from the beach. And Lily's staying in a suite with free Cokes in the afternoon and a private dining room going, isn't this how everyone travels? And it's like, no, no, this is not how, this is not how rectors travel. Somebody gave us a courtside seats one time to an NC state game. And we were sitting, Lily and I were on the floor sitting behind the television announcer booth and they were turning around and interacting with her during the commercial breaks. And at one point in the game, I grabbed her and I said, Lily, do you see up there in the shadows the seats against the wall that are really high up and you can barely see? And she goes, yes. And I said, those are rector seats. Okay? These are not. Do not get used to this. But it was just funny to me, Daddy, did you stay in rooms like this when you were a kid? No. No, I didn't have rich grandparents. I stayed with the poor. I stayed in poor people rooms. And we went on one. And it was a treat. But she doesn't understand that. And that's something to work out. Something that Jen and I have to navigate. But to her, what we just did is normal. That's what we're used to. But because I stayed in the dank cabin cave when I was a kid, I can have a deeper appreciation for the sweet. Because it was like Lord of the Flies and I had to fight for one glass of water amongst a bunch of overweight people trying to get to the same trough when I was 16. I can appreciate access to water all I want on a ship. She can't appreciate that. She doesn't have that perspective. And my point is, New Testament Christians are a lot more like her than they are like the Old Testament Christians. New Testament Christians don't know what it is to fear God because we meet Jesus right away. We meet someone who describes himself as gentle and lowly. We don't know what it is to suffer. We don't know what it is to be fearful of God. We've never sat at the base of the mountain and watched it violently shake while we tremble with our friends at the might of our God because we go straight to the cross. We go straight to Christmas and we go straight to Easter and we see Jesus meek and mild. We are the rich billionaire trust fund babies of history born into this soft world where we never have to fear God. And so we read passages like this and they're foreign to us because that's not our God because our God comes meek and mild and, and he loves me, and he died for me, and he accepts me, and I call him Abba Father, and he calls me up into his lap. We forget the awful God that comes before that. We forget the fear-inspiring God that comes before that, and we end up acting like spoiled brats towards our God because we forget to fear him. So fear appreciates grace and mercy. When I have grappled with the reality that not only do I deserve a punishment for my sin and for my disloyalty to God, but that he is also highly capable of meeting that out and has chosen not to, and instead has chosen to show me grace and mercy in the form of his son and watched him die for my betrayal to him. It is only then when we swim in those waters and acquaint ourselves with that reality that we can properly appreciate grace and mercy. But we're so quick to jump to grace and mercy. And we figuratively ask our parents, has it always been like this? Did you travel like this when you were a kid? Because we're spoiled. And so I think that fear is good because it refocuses us on our gratitude for grace and mercy. And it shows us how important those things are. Fear is good because fear reminds us of our place. It reminds us of our place. When we say the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and we say this is actually a good thing. Why? Because it reminds us of our place. Jen pointed this out to me this week. Do you understand that the original sin in the Garden of Eden was essentially choosing to not be afraid of God anymore? It was losing this fear of God. The story goes that the serpent whispered into the ear of Eve. There was one tree. There was only one rule. God said, do whatever you want. Just don't eat fruit off of this one tree. And the serpent appears to Eve and speaks into her ear and says, do you know that God actually doesn't want you to eat of that tree? Because if you do, you'll know the difference between good and evil and you'll be like him. He's just trying to hold you down. He doesn't want you to be like he is and So what happened in the language of what we're talking about this morning is he whispered in Eve's ear You don't have to be afraid of him You can do what you want You don't have to fear God you are like him and so the original sin Was have to fear God. You are like him. And so the original sin was refusing to fear God at the beginning of wisdom. Do you see that? And I love the way that the Bible starts out, and this is why I say that fear helps us keep our place. The very first sentence of the Bible, do you know what it is? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I'm firmly convinced that it does not begin that way just because that's where the story starts. I'm firmly convinced that the Bible begins that way because it sets up from the very first sentence, the essential relationship in all creation. I am the creator, you are the created. All sin in our life is when we do this and we put ourselves on level with our creator. Anytime we sin, anytime we do anything that displeases God, all we've done is we've said, yeah, you're the creator, but I think I'm equal to you. So I'm not going to follow your rules. I'm going to follow mine. Everything in life that is messed up begins with a fundamental disjointment of this relationship where he says he is the creator and we are the creation and we go, nope, I'm not scared of you. This was the original sin of Eve. When the serpent whispered in her ear, you don't have to be afraid of him anymore. You are like him. And so she lost the fear of the Lord. So the fear of God keeps us in our place. It reminds us that he is all-powerful creator, and we are subservient creation. When Job got upset with God in that book, and he confronts him in Job 38, God's response is, hey Job, you forgot your place. So when we have fear of God, when we read Exodus 19 and we allow that to take us back to our nine-year-old selves and tremble at the might of our God, it also reminds us to keep our place. Last good thing I'll say about fear and why God insists on it is that fear makes knowledge a privilege. It makes knowledge of God a privilege. We presume that we should know who God is. We presume that we have a right to him. We presume that he should share himself with us. But that is not the case. Do you understand the miracle of the condescension of God? Do you understand what that is? Here is a figure that for the first time in history, since the garden of Eden descends onto a mountain, it burns with smoke. It shakes violently. It makes everyone around him tremble. And thousands of years later, he condescends by sending his son and our frail form to be with us, to sit in the muck and the mire. The miracle of God's condescension to us, to be one of us, to live as us, to be tempted as us, to love as us, and then to die as us for us. We start with Christmas and we start with Easter, so we take it for granted. But put yourself in the shoes of the people surrounding that mountain and imagine that thousands of years later, this being that's shaking the foundations of the earth and is causing fear and everyone that I know is going to send his son in human form to live the life of a pauper, to love me perfectly, to die perfectly, and to pave a way for me to get to know that cloud, Testament Christian mindset that grew up thinking that they always vacation in suites. That grows up thinking that God could never possibly be upset with me. He loves me. I'm forgiven. I'm concerned for the spoiled Christians that don't take time to understand what it means to fear their God and how mighty and awesome he is. I'm concerned for the church as life chips away at our wonder and we're no longer scared of water slides because we can explain it all away. And I just thought it was worth it this morning to try my best. And I don't mean this in any disrespectful way. But to try my best to grab your face and make you look at the might and the wonder and the awe of your God. For once, before we skip to Easter and we skip to Christmas. Look how wonderful and terrifying and miraculous he is. And let's be grateful that he uses that for us, not against us. That he chooses to love us. That he chooses to save us, that he chooses to condescend to be a part of us. We cannot read Exodus and see God descend on Mount Sinai and not pause and acknowledge that we are spoiled spiritual brats that do not often enough reflect on the awe-inspiring wonder, might, and wrath of God. And so this morning, let us do that. And may we always see ourselves at the foot of the mountain. And in so doing, come to appreciate all the things we love about our Heavenly Father all the more. Because I think so often we skip to the things we love about our God and we forget this foundation of fear that is the very beginning of wisdom that deepens our appreciation for him. So may we this morning together sit at the base of the mountain and tremble. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for what you chose to do with the Israelites in descending upon Mount Sinai. God, I'm not sure why you chose to reveal yourself in that way. I'm not even sure we've handled it the way it needs to be handled this morning, but I know, God, it gives me pause. I know, Father, it makes me wonder at you. And I hope that just a little bit of that wonder was communicated. And I hope that we are moved by it. I hope that we will not be so inoculated by your love that we forget your wrath. God, give us a deep appreciation for that so that we may approach you with more gratitude. So that we might marvel at the fact that you love us, that you know us, that you care about us, and that you're proud of us. God, help us more and more to see ourselves at the foot of that mountain, marveling at who and what you are. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

All right, well, good morning, everybody. 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, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We're in the middle of a series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the gospel of Mark, looking at who Jesus is and what we know and learn and eventually come to love about him. This week, or when I sat down to write the sermon for this week, what I had scheduled was the kind of quintessential Mark sermon, which is what the gospel of Mark is known for almost more than anything else, which is to lead, you need to be the servant of all. And so I was going to talk about servant leadership and what that means. And we probably will do that one yet. But as I was looking for that passage, I came across another passage that I love. I think it's incredible. I actually think it's the most fantastical, awe-inspiring story in the life of Christ. And one of the most fantastic stories in the whole Bible. And we never really talk about it on Sunday morning, which is the transfiguration. So, if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Mark chapter 9. We're going to be looking at verses 2 through 10 today. The Transfiguration of Christ is, to me, one of the most remarkable stories in Scripture, and it's this picture of Jesus that we really don't get again until the book of Revelation. So, it's maybe the most remarkable story in the gospel outside of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. So as I was preparing, I came across this story and I reread it and I went, yeah, I want to talk about this because we hardly ever talk about the transfiguration. I can't remember ever hearing a sermon on the transfiguration of Christ. I've been taught about it in theology classes and maybe a Sunday school type setting, but I can't remember hearing a sermon on it. Doesn't mean I haven't. I just don't remember one. And you guys may not remember one either. I know I've never preached on it, but something dawned on me as I was reading it. And I went, yeah, I want to put that in front of grace, and I want us to have a chance to respond to that. So I'm going to read it so that we're all on the same page about what happened. Some of us might need a refresher. Some of us might not know what it is or what I'm talking about yet, and that's perfectly fine. So I'm going to read through, and then we're going to reflect on it just aling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses who were talking with Jesus. Okay, quick pause right there just so we understand what's happening. What's happening is what sounds like it's happening. Jesus says, hey, Peter, James, and John, come with me. I want to go somewhere. So they followed Jesus up a high mountain. And Peter, James, and John, just as an aside, are known as the inner circle of the disciples. So there was 12 disciples, but Peter, James, and John were the three that he was the closest with. James and John were brothers. Their nickname was the Sons of Thunder, which is just the coolest nickname in the Bible. So they go up to the top of the mountain with Jesus. Jesus is in blazing. He changes. He transfigures. His face starts to glow. He's dressed in blazing white, whiter than anyone could bleach. He starts to glow at the top of the mountain. And then Moses and Elijah appear next to him. Now, what's significant about that is Elijah is the only man to never experience death. God sent a fiery chariot down to scoop him up into heaven because he was so righteous he didn't want him to have to experience it. And Moses is the only man ever buried by God. He died on Mount Noab with no one around and God buried him himself and did the funeral himself. So these are the heroes of the Hebrew faith. And they're glowing like Christ is. All right? So that's what's happening on the top of this mountain. That's why I say it's a fantastic story. Then, pick it up in verse 5. Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. He did not know what to say. They were so frightened. Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the clouds. This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him. So now they're up there, these three fantastic figures, Jesus, Moses, and Elijah have descended back down from heaven, and they get to witness this. And then the cloud descends, and it's the voice of God. It's Father God now speaking. This is my son. I love him. Obey him. And that's significant because God came down in a cloud and appeared to Moses, and his face glowed so brightly that he had to cover it with a veil. So this is kind of a throwback to what God's done before. Now he's doing it for Jesus. And God appeared to Elijah in a mountain and spoke to him in a whisper. So he's done this to Moses and Elijah. Now he's doing it to Christ with the disciples near him. That's why it's a big moment. Suddenly, verse 8, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. They kept the matter to themselves, discussing what rising from the dead meant. Which that last one is just a little bit of a hint that they still didn't really understand who Jesus was and what he came to do because they didn't know what rising from the dead meant. They didn't know that he would have to do that. So that's the story. It's this remarkable moment in the life of Christ nestled in the middle of the Gospels. I find it to be completely fantastic and completely awe-inspiring. And when you read it, you kind of go, okay, well, what do I do with that? So you can talk about the theological implications of what's going on there, and that's fine. What's happening here is this is a picture of the end of days. This is an acknowledgement from God that Moses and Elijah, Elijah represents the prophets, Moses represents the law, and it's God saying that Jesus, he's got the Father saying that Jesus, God the Son, is fulfilling both the law and the prophets and is the conclusion of the lives and ministries of Moses and Elijah, that he is the right heir to those things. And now he's coming in to do things for all time. So that's the symbolism of what's happening there. And we can talk about that. But what I'd rather talk about is this. And this is a hard right turn, but you'll come with me. What I'd rather talk about is when I was a kid and the first time I saw Luke Skywalker. When I was a kid, I'm sure that there were other heroes that I was aware of before Luke Skywalker. Spider-Man and Batman and Superman, I'm sure. But there was something about when I was a kid and I saw Luke Skywalker for the first time. And I watched those Star Wars movies for the first time. And here's this hero. I'm completely in awe of him. I'm marveling at him. He's incredible. He defeats the Empire. I'm terrified of Darth Vader. There's never been a better villain in the history of villains in any sort of story creation ever. And Luke, I just remember being enamored with him. I just thought he was amazing. And I thought that the Star Wars movies were amazing and captivating and sweeping in a way that I had never experienced anything before in my life. And so when I read this story and I think about the way that Jesus appears and what he does and how fantastic it is, it conjures up within me those wisps and hints of what it felt like to be a kid and to worship a hero and to marvel at a hero, right? So when I read this, that's what I see here. And what occurred to me is that now when I think about the Transfiguration and what I saw that I wanted to put in front of grace Was that the Transfiguration? Reminds us that we were made to marvel at Christ We were made to marvel at Christ that childhoodination, that fragrance of adolescence, of how I felt when I saw Luke Skywalker on the screen, about how I felt about having big, bold heroes that I loved and I wanted to wear their shoes and their shirts and all that stuff. The way I felt when I saw those things, that's conjured up within me when I read the transfiguration and I see the depiction of my Jesus up on to marvel at Christ. And what I know that is true of us is that we all have this inclination in us to worship a hero. We all, at some point or another, had that childhood wonder where we marveled at someone else, where we made someone else the object of our affection and our worship, whether it was a fictional character or a real person, we all at different times in our life have looked and have glorified heroes that we see. And here's how I know this is true. There's many, many ways I know this is true, but here's one, and I thought this would be a fun exercise. I would like you to raise your hand if in your childhood bedroom you had a poster of an athlete or a celebrity or a superhero? Yeah. Jeffy, who was yours? It was Theismann, wasn't it? Yeah, it was Theismann. Tom, who was yours? Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan. Yeah, there you go. We all did. I had Michael Jordan. I don't know why. I was not a Green Bay Packers fan, and I never even cared about the guy. I think I got it for free, like a leftover at the book fair. So Sterling Sharp, Green Bay Packers, number 84. Great. There you go. Go Pack Go. We all had that when we were kids. Some of us, maybe you still do. I don't know. It's cool if you have a poster. And then we carry this into our culture, even in adulthood. We have celebrity worship. We worship celebrities. We have whole magazines that are published to tell us about the lives of the celebrities. And I don't understand them. There's a picture of like, look, Ashlyn Tolbert gets coffee just like I do. Like, great. I wonder how she takes it. Nobody cares. But we worship these celebrities. We put them on a pedestal. We see them. We marvel at them, and we wonder at them. And we also see this, and I've got to thread the needle here, but we see this in our political figures too, where one individual can often become the focal point of an entire party and the focal point of an ideology that says that is our hero and they are going to do what we need them to do to maintain our standards and the life that we want or to bring about the life that we want for our country. But we aggrandize our politicians and we engage in a little bit of hero worship from time to time. I'm not saying you do that with your vote, but I'm saying if we both think a little bit hard, we can see that happening where people make politicians their heroes. And it's because of this inclination that we have within us that drives us to worship heroes, that drives us to want to marvel at somebody or at something. And because of that, you may think that this idea of worshiping a hero is actually not a positive one. It's not something that we should do. That's something that we should grow out of. That's something that we leave in childhood, and in adulthood, we're more realistic about the expectations of our heroes, that we place on our heroes. We look up to them, but we don't worship them. We don't marvel at them. And this culture that we can create where we engage in hero worship is actually not a healthy one. So maybe we don't even agree with, we were created to marvel at Christ. We were created to worship the hero that is Christ. Maybe we find that premise fundamentally problematic because we've seen the downside of hero worship. But to that, I would suggest this, that all perversion is misplaced desire. All perversion in life, whenever we see that, all it is is a result of misplaced desire. We were all created with the desire for our spouse. We were all created with a desire for someone else physically. We all have that. And so God in his goodness gives us spouses that become the correct vessels of that desire. They're the ones that if you're, if you're a married man, your wife is to be the receiver of that desire. She is the vessel to hold that. She's where you put that. And it becomes perversion when we put it anywhere else besides the gift that God has given us and our spouse, right? We can have a desire for food. We can have a desire and appetite for good Right? to you with this inclination towards hero worship is when we put it in an athlete or a politician or a fictional character or anything else that's not Jesus, all we're doing is perverting a natural inclination to marvel at a hero, something that we all carry. And so this morning, what I want to suggest to you is to just consider the fact that you were made to marvel at a hero. You were made to worship a hero. You were made to hear stories like the transfiguration about your Jesus and go, whoa. You were made to read Revelation and hear Jesus go, I am the Alpha and the Omega and I hold the keys to death and Hades and go, whew, that's great. That's a natural inclination that God gave you so that you would turn that in praise and marvel to him. And so I just want, you probably haven't thought about that in a minute, but I want to reacquaint you with that possibility that God created you to actually marvel at him and to worship him. And so that inclination is a good one. The problem is we've misplaced it so many times that we don't trust it anymore. And this is why the older you are, I think the harder it is to marvel at Christ. The older you are, the harder it is to be awed at something, to wonder at something. Because with every passing year, with every year that goes by, the older we get, the more we've seen our heroes fall. The more they've let us down. The more the people that we place on the pedestal and that we want to be like, we learn they're human too. And we learn that the fictional characters are fake. And that Luke Skywalker doesn't exist. And what hero worship does when it's misplaced, when it's not, when Christ isn't the vessel for that worship, and we make people or things or places the vessels for that worship, what happens is they lead to disappointment and disillusionment. I'm disappointed and I don't understand. And then we retract and we bring that instinct back into ourselves. And instead of expressing it in its proper way, we repress it and we displace it and we say that's not appropriate for adults I'm a 55 year old man I don't need a hero yes you do yes you do and you were given an inclination by your Creator to marvel at and worship that hero and the Transfiguration shows him in this full display that reminds us that he's the savior of the universe and that that is true and that is right and that that is good. But I think the older we get, the harder it is to allow ourselves to worship a hero. But I want to try to encourage you to think about maybe it's because you've repressed a good natural inclination because life has taught you so, not because that's not a good thing to do. So we need to get over that challenge to marveling at Christ. There's one more challenge that I want to mention that I think we can butt up against when we are trying to marvel at Christ and worship our hero. And that is committing the mistake of Peter. Now, I don't know if you caught it. And I don't want you to look down yet because it'll ruin the setup. I don't know if you caught what Peter's first words were when he got up there at the transfiguration. But this is, to me, the most hilarious, stupidest thing that's said in the whole Bible. I can't get over how obnoxiously, mind-numbingly dumb what Peter said was. Okay? Let's just make sure we understand where we're at. Peter, the disciple of Christ, the Messiah, the incarnate God, is following him up a mountain. As he follows, the only person who's ever been 100% man and 100% God, as he follows the Savior of the universe who holds the keys to death and Hades up the mountain. That figure begins to glow in bright white and take on his heavenly form. And Peter begins to get a glimpse of what he condescended from to take on flesh. He begins to get to see that. And he looks around, and there's only three humans in the world that get into this circle, that get into this meeting, into this place, that have this experience. And then after Jesus starts to glow, one guy who never died is just back on a mountain again. And another guy that God did the funeral for that represents the biggest hero in his religion is sitting right there. And they just start talking, it says. They start chatting it up. Peter is in the middle of that. And this is Peter's response. I think it's hilarious. Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Jesus, listen, I know you guys are talking just real quick. Just want to mention, you're lucky I'm here. Would you like us to build you tents? It is a patently absurd thing to say. It is completely tone deaf and not self-aware at all. It would be like if I were somehow golfing with George W. Bush. And on the ninth fairway, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln just show up. And they start talking. And I went in, I was like, hey, what's up? Hey, George, do you guys have any questions for me? Like, it's the stupidest thing ever. Shut up, Peter. Shut up and marvel at your Jesus. But here's the mistake of Peter. Oh, this is one more thing that I think is funny. Parenthetically, verse 6 says, he did not know what to say. They were so frightened. So Mark, this is why it's funny. Mark is kind of Peter's right-hand man. He's kind of writing this on behalf of Peter, right? Mark wasn't a disciple. Peter was. And so Peter's telling him these stories. The transfiguration is in other gospels. And Peter's stupid comments in other gospels. This is the only one that says, hey, could you just put in there real quick? We were told we were really scared. We didn't know what to say. It's funny to me. But here's the mistake of Peter, and this is what we do. We tend to make it about ourselves and not our Savior. When Jesus shows up in our life, when he does amazing things, when we have a moment to sit back and marvel at our Savior, so often in those moments we make it about ourselves instead of shutting up and worshiping our hero, instead of being quiet and sitting down and marveling. What Peter should have done is fallen on his knees and worshiped his Savior and thanked his God that he was able to be here in this moment. But he missed it because he made it about himself. What he should have done is looked at James and John and go, are you seeing this? Holy smokes. But instead he made it about himself. Instead he said, okay, he immediately went to, what am I supposed to do with this? And there are times in my life when Jesus has shown up in an absolutely profound way. And what I do is I make it about myself. I make it about, okay, how am I going to take this and get over the next thing that I need to get over? How am I going to use this to move through? So often as a pastor, I go, okay, how do I teach this? How do I share this? I'm already starting to do it. On Saturday, I'm going to fly to Istanbul, and I have the incredible privilege of getting to work with a guy named Rusin and help train. I'm just going to be in the room with a group of Iranian pastors that lead illegal churches in Iran. And I'm going to sit in the room with that kind of faith. And I'm going to listen to Ru teach them and I'm going to watch them interact. I'm going to listen to the questions that they ask. And I can already feel my mind going to, how can I help in that room? How can I add value? How can I encourage them? What sermons should I bring back to share with grace? And you know what I probably need to do? Shut up and marvel at Christ and listen and be humbled by what he's doing in these places. There are times in our lives when Jesus shows up in an unexpectedly profound way, maybe through the birth of a child, through a miraculous healing, through times of great joy and times of great grief. And so often in those moments, because we don't know what else to do with ourselves, we miss it. And we make it about ourselves and not our Savior. When what we should be doing is shutting up and marveling at our Jesus and worshiping our hero. So as I was going through this and thinking through it and writing it, I realized that what I wanted to do this morning, rather than continue to preach to you through word, is I wanted to worship with you in communion and worship with you in song. So we're going to take communion together. And we're going to do that because what I want to do for the rest of our time together this morning is just stop and be still and marvel at our Jesus. I want us to stop and be still and worship our Savior. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take communion. So elders, you all can come up and get ready to serve that. And when we take communion, I'm not even going to pray to end the sermon because this is part of the sermon. Because as I was writing it, I went to Gibson. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to set you up. You finish the sermon in song. We will preach it in worship through communion and through song. And so as we take communion, I want to leave you with this thought of where we should focus as we seek to marvel at Jesus. He loves you. He died for you. He advocates for you. He waits for you. He loves you. He loves you enough to leave that form and condescend to take on human form. He loves you enough to die for you. He loves you enough to sit at the right hand of the Father and advocate for you as your high priest, and he loves you enough to wait for you where he's preparing a place. I don't know how Jesus has shown up in your life. I don't know what your moments are that you don't want to miss, but I would like to encourage you to take the next 10 to 15 minutes and marvel at your Savior. Look at the cross. Think about his love for you. Reflect on how he's shown up and what your gratitude is. But let's stop and shut up and worship our hero. So when we take communion, we do it because Jesus started this tradition before his death. When he took the bread that was on the Passover table the night that he was arrested and he broke it and he said, this is my body that was broken for you. Every time you do this, do this in remembrance of me. A way to phrase it this morning is every time you do this, marvel at me. Be awed by me. Wonder at me. Worship me. He's our hero, the savior of the universe. Then he took the wine and he poured it and he said, this is my blood that spilled out for you. Every time you do this, do this in remembrance of me. So instead of me praying, what I'm going to invite you to do is to go ahead and stand. And I'd like to encourage you as you go through, you go out the sides and back up the middle. If you're not comfortable taking communion, just walk right past the elders. You don't have to do that this morning. But if you are comfortable taking it, take the bread and dip it in the grape juice and cup that in your hand and go back to your seat and sit down and you pray yourself and you allow God to prepare your heart to marvel at him. And let's finish the service worshiping him in communion and worshiping him in song. Go ahead.

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.