Sermons tagged with Relationships

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Real quick, before I just dive in, I believe next week we're going to Mexico. Is this correct? Yeah? Raise your hand if you're going. Pipe down, Howard. All right. Good, good. We got a crew that goes. You need to cheer for something. It's not going to be UNC right now. I'll tell you that. Sorry. Sorry. That was not fair. That was uncalled for. I repent in dust and ashes, Howard. But this is something I failed to do. They're going. They've been going for years. It's a good core group of people every year. A couple new people go. But while they're here and while we can do it, let's just pause in the service and pray for them and their team as they prepare to go that God will do some incredible things in and through them as they go. So pray with me for our Mexico team, and then we will get started. Father, thank you for impressing upon the people of grace, the very heart of grace, your heart for others. Thank you for this Mexico trip. Thank you for what it means to us and the relationships that we've built there. Thank you for the people who are going for the first time and for the 20th time. I pray that your hand of protection would be on them. I pray that meaningful relationships would be developed and cultivated. I pray that your love would be felt both by the folks we're going to see, but also by the folks who are going, and that they would mutually minister to one another, and that it would be a good trip with great stories. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen. Speaking of praying for people as we dive into what I think is part five of our Gentle and Lowly series, something that happens almost every Sunday morning that most of you have no idea about is something that humbles me tremendously. Most every Sunday morning, there's a group of elders and resting elders. And resting elders is someone who served as an elder before, and they're not an elder now, they're a resting elder. They get together in my office at about 935, 940. Now, they didn't do it this morning, and all of you who normally do it are here, so I don't know what gifts. Maybe you just didn't care about this particular service. But almost every Sunday, not by my request, they get together in my office, and they pray for the church, and they pray for me. And being a pastor is a tremendously humbling experience in some ways because it is with great regularity that I look out on the faces that I see on Sundays or interact with you in the lobbies. The lobby, we don't have more than one. And just feel tremendously humbled that you guys choose grace, that you guys choose to listen to me. I don't take that for granted, and I don't take for granted the men and the women who gather in my office, each of whom I respect deeply, and they pray for me, and they pray for the church. And another thing that happens on Sunday morning that you probably don't know about is Aaron Gibson, Gibby, and I get here early. I get here usually beforehand, but we both get here early. And one of the things we do before we engage in our morning is we sit down in my office and we just say, what are you bringing in here this week? What do you got? What's going on in your life? What other things are you thinking about besides what job God has for you to do this morning of preaching or leading worship? Because I don't know if you know this about your pastors, but you guys have had the Sunday mornings where you're coming in here with your hair on fire. You and your spouse had a bad day yesterday. You're upset with each other. Things aren't good right now. Your kids are driving you nuts. I walked in the door this morning and there was a mom walking her children out to go next door. And I saw her and she's usually a pretty chipper person. And I said, hey, how you doing? And she goes, I'm here. It was one of those mornings. We've had those mornings where you're yelling at the kids, you're stressed out, work is hard, there's stresses in life that are impacting you, and you come in on two wheels and then you sit down and then you get a moment of quiet. Well, I have news for you. I don't know if you know this about your pastors, but we're people too. And we have mornings like that. We have Sundays like that. And I love knowing that my friend Aaron is going to pray for me and I can tell him anything that's going on in my life and, and he will pray for it. And I love him knowing that he can have whatever's going on in his life and I'm going to pray for him. And some days we'll look at each other and I'll go and one of us will go, I don't have it. And the other person will go, well, I'm feeling it. I got you. Let's go. And the spirit is great. He always shows up. He always gives us the strength when we don't have it. But I love knowing that I have him to intercess for me. And I love knowing that we have people who gather to pray for grace because it reminds me that it's not all on me. It's not all on me to preach a great sermon, to be a good leader, to do all the things. I have people who care about this place wrapped around me and gathered around us that are lifting us up too. And I know that many of you pray for me and for the service and for the church. I got a text this morning from my dad, hey, praying for you. And I can't tell you how much it lifts you up to know that you're being prayed for. And I say all that because you also have someone praying for you. We see this person in Hebrews 7, verse 25, where the author writes, Therefore he, being Jesus, is able to save completely, or to the uttermost, those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them. Hebrews tells us that Jesus still has a job. And his job is to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercede for you. And the way that the author of Gentle and Lowly explains this, I think, is a beautiful way to understand it. Jesus is quite literally praying for you at all times. We have this misnomer of an idea that Jesus did his work. He came and he lived a perfect life and he died a perfect death and he hung on the cross for you and for me. And now he's just sitting in heaven, biding his time until act two, when in Revelation 19, he comes crashing out of the clouds and is coming to wreck shop and make all the wrong things right and sad things untrue. It'll be the greatest day in history. We have this misnomer, I think, sometimes without really cognitively being aware of it, that Jesus did the work then, and he's going to do the work later, and right now he's just chilling out. Certainly not blessing Falcons football. I'll tell you that's what he's not doing. But he's just hanging out in heaven. Not true. Hebrews tells us. He's an intercessor for us. He's actively praying for you. And I don't know how to explain in his divinity, his ability to pray for you and to pray for me and to pray for him and to pray for her at the same time in the same way. But that's what Jesus does. He prays for you constantly. He intercedes for you constantly. He's lifting you up constantly. And Jesus' intercession reminds us that it isn't all on us. Knowing that Jesus is praying for you should remind you in the same way when I'm reminded people are praying for me that it's not all on me. Jesus is praying for you. It's not all on you. Your marriage is not all on you. Your job is not all on you. Your parenthood is not all on you. Your friendships, your stability, your health are not all on you. Your success or failure is not all on you. Your moral goodness, your sanctification process, becoming more like Christ in character, is not all on you. Your moral goodness, your sanctification process, becoming more like Christ in character, is not all on you because we have Jesus interceding for us on our behalf, literally praying to God for you. And time, if he's your constant intercessor, that Jesus prays for you when you don't have the strength or the inclination to pray for yourself? Last week, we talked about Jesus is gentle with sinners. He's gentle with those who sin ignorantly and he's gentle with those who sin on purpose, the wanderers. Do you know that in your season of wandering, and maybe you're in one right now, And maybe you haven't prayed for yourself in a long time. Maybe you haven't prayed for your kids in a long time. Maybe it's been a minute since you prayed for your spouse. Maybe you've been floating for a while, not really spiritually engaged. Or maybe I was talking to a friend this week who told me that he was just dry. I want to want Jesus. I just don't right now. And I don't know what to do. Maybe you're in a season of dryness. Maybe it's simply been a minute since you prayed for the people and the things in your life, including yourself. And maybe when I say that and you go, oh, shoot. Yeah. Maybe it hits you right between the eyes. Maybe you can relate to it in part. But I think our reaction to that, to our attention being arrested to that truth, man, it has been a minute since I prayed for my spouse. It has been a minute since I prayed for myself. It has been a minute since I prayed for my kids. Do you know who's never stopped praying for those things on your behalf? Jesus. Even in your wandering, even when you're far off, do you know who's praying on your behalf that you would come back to the Father? Jesus is. Do you know who is your strength when you don't have it? Who says your prayers when you don't say them? Jesus does. And his prayers, I'm so grateful for the prayers of the elders and the resting elders. And sometimes I sit in and I listen to them. And I love hearing people pray who've walked with God for a lifetime. I love hearing people who have a generation or two on me pray. I love to listen to that. Sometimes they invite me to pray. I'm like, I don't want to. I just really prefer to listen to y'all pray. I want to hear how you talk to God. And I covet those prayers because they pray better than me, right? But do you know how much better than them Jesus prays? And he's praying that for you, over you. And it brings us to this principle that I think is foundational to Christianity. It's a quote from the book. Dane puts it like this. It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity that we are declared right with God, not once we begin to get our act together, I'm going to read it again. We have this mindset sometimes about pursuing the Savior, about our spiritual health and journey, that we kind of need to get our act together before we can really go to the Father, before I can really go to small group, before I can really start to consistently go to church, before I can really engage in any sort of service. I really have to get my act together. I have to clean myself up before I can go to Jesus, because if I go like this, I'm not going to be good enough for him. So I have to make myself a little bit better so that I feel better about going to Jesus. It's this silly idea. We treat it. We treat sometimes going to Jesus like I do going to the doctor. Now, listen, I'm going to say some things here. And what I don't want is 30 moms momming me after the service about my need to go to the doctor. So please don't make me regret this. Okay. I'm 44. I'm, I'm getting old. And those of you who are older than me and you think, Oh, that's not old. I mean, what are you calling me? I'm not calling you anything. I'm just telling you I'm old. Okay. Matter of fact, this week, um, I met with our architect, which by the way, there's going to be an email coming out this week that's going to share about the progress that we're making towards getting this building built around the corner. I know that there hasn't been a lot of information coming out, but there has been a lot of work being done trying to get some certainty around what we can share. And so that's going to come out this week and then hopefully more news after that. But I saw our architect this week, and I hadn't seen him in about two years. And the first thing he said to me walking down the hall, I said, hey, Jim. And he goes, hey, you got a few more grays in that beard, don't you? Thanks, buddy. Good to see you. This dude's like 75, whatever. I just want to be like, Jim, you're just blanket old. Like, I'm getting there. You just, anyways. I'm getting old is my point. And I know that at 44, I need to go to the doctor. I didn't have, you're not going to believe this, some of you will. I did not have a primary care physician until I was 39 years old because I had to go for the gout, right? I had to go for that. But after I had Dr. Mann until I was 18 years old. And then after that, nothing. I went to urgent care like twice to get a Z-Pak for a cold. No doctors for me. I'm not doing annual checkups. I hate going to the doctor, but I'm getting old and I know that I need to go. But here's my thought and here's why I haven't gone. If I can just lose a little bit more weight and do a little bit more exercise, then I'm going to have a better blood pressure and all my levels are going to be good and I'm going to get a clean bill of health and that's what I want. So if I can just get myself ready a little bit, get my act together, then I can go to the doctor. I don't have anything to worry about right now. If I go to the doctor, he's just going to be like, you're fat and sedentary. And I'm going to be like, yeah, I know actually not anymore. Cause I've lost a lot of weight since last year, but that's why I didn't go last year. Cause I was trying to lose the weight. Now that I lost the weight, I should probably go. But he's, he, he's just going to say you're sedentary and out of shape. Like you need to do things. And I know that I need to do things. So my thought is, let me just do the things and then I'll get a good bill of health, right? And I think we treat Jesus like I treat the doctor. I just need to take care of some stuff and then I will go to him. Then I'll be ready. Then I'll be acceptable to him. Now here's the difference. I can actually get myself in better shape and get a better doctor's report when I go. That is possible. It is not possible to clean yourself up to make you adequate for Jesus to get a good bill of health from him. The only way to go to Jesus is to finally put down your sword and admit that you can't get yourself in good enough shape to go see him. We have to fall helplessly into his arms and say, Jesus, I know that I'm not enough. We sing that song. I'm broken, but I'm not forsaken. I am who you say I am. Jesus says we're a child of God. He says he loves us. He says, as Aaron pointed out, that he calls us and he purposes us and he knows who we are and he knows where our shortcomings are and he intercedes for those things. We are who he says we are. But we will never get ourselves there by trying, by white knuckling and being try-hards. We have to fall into the beautiful, glorious, comforting intercession of Christ. So, Christians, those of us that would seek to pursue righteousness need to know that our pursuit of righteousness begins and ends with our pursuit of Jesus. Our pursuit of righteousness begins and ends with our pursuit of Jesus. Our pursuit of righteousness begins and ends with our pursuit of Jesus, of joining in with him in that intercessory prayer, of agreeing with him what he must be praying over us and over our families and over our children and over our careers and over our friendships and over our relationships and over our marriages. If we want our marriage to be better, it begins and ends with our pursuit of Christ. If we want to be better grandparents, if we want to be better parents, if we're realizing, oh my goodness, I haven't prayed for my kids in a long time. I haven't prayed for my spouse in a long time. Where do you think the impetus to pray for others comes from? It comes from a pursuit of Jesus so that he is filling you up so that your cup now spills out on those around you. I love that verse. I remind you of it often. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. It's like Jesus is so full of grace that it spills out of him and onto us. And if we are there for it, if we are there to receive it, if we will pursue him, if we will be in relationship with him, our cup will be filled to overflowing and we will pour that grace out ourselves on others. And so what I would say to you gently and a non-accusatory way, because it certainly applies to me too, if it's been a minute since you've prayed for yourself, since you've prayed for your children, since you've prayed for your spouse, since you've prayed for your friends, if it's been a minute since you intercessed on someone else's behalf, perhaps it's because you have not been pursuing Jesus consistently either, and so your cup is not full. If we want to be the kind of people who reflect Jesus's intercession for us and pray for others in our life that we love very much and pray for things that matter a lot to us. If we want to be people of prayer, the impetus to pray begins and ends with our pursuit of Christ. So if we're dry there in our prayer life, my suspicion is that we are dry here in our pursuit of Christ. And then maybe we're just trying to lower our blood pressure just a little bit more before we go to him. Our pursuit of righteousness, of all things good in life, begins and ends with our pursuit of Christ and leaning into his intercession. But this morning, I've coupled two things together because Jesus does not just intercede for us. First John chapter two, verse one tells us of another role of Christ that I think is all the more encouraging. John writes this, my dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He says, I write this to you so that you don't sin. But if you do, we have in Jesus advocacy. If you do sin, Jesus is at the right hand of the Father, not simply interceding for you, but he is advocating for you in the places where you do sin. And when I say he's advocating for you, there are times in my house when I have to advocate for John because Jen is just mean to him and I have to defend him. John is four and a half. He's four and a half, right? Sure. He's four. I don't know if we've gotten to half yet. Half years matter a lot under 10. But he's all boy, man. He just like, if he doesn't run around enough, he just kind of gets, like have you ever seen a dog get the zoomies and just buzz around a room? Which is another reason why they're dumb. John gets this energy coursing through his veins where he just has to scream. This is not something that we experience with Lily. Lily, when she was four, sit down and color for like an hour and let mommy and daddy talk. John, no chance. No chance. That kid is annoying. He is there all the time. And we love him. He's hilarious. But he just has this energy. And one of the things that he loves to do is show you how hard he hits. And he's been told, just hit daddy. You can hit daddy whenever you want. Do not hit your sister. Do not hit your mom. Just hit me, whatever you want. And so he'll come up, and I can see it in his face. I know that he's just about to get me. And he just, I kind of, you know, I kind of turn and just kind of let him get the leg and he just will roar and beat on my leg for like 30 seconds. Stick around. He'll probably do it after the service today when he sees me. But sometimes he and Lily get to horsing around and Lily's playing with them and they're having fun and they're laughing and giggling. then that just boy rage will come up and he'll just start wailing on her. And then she gets mad and she'll cry or she'll cry out and she'll play act like it hurt and then you have to put up with that and like whatever. Watch you stub your toe harder than that. But it's all a big deal. And before she can react, because he's about to get walloped, you know, he's about to get taken out. Before she can react, I'll have to jump in and I intercede for John. I advocate for him. And I say, Lily, he's four. He's not trying to hurt you. He's not trying to be mean. He's playing. This is how he plays. This is how boys play. So don't be mad at him. Be nice to him and just know that he doesn't understand what he's doing. And then I have to pull John aside and say, this is why we don't hit the girls. We hit daddy. When you feel that, you hit me. Okay, Daddy. And then he hits me. But I have to advocate for him. Hey, Lily, he doesn't know what he's doing. Let's calm down the anger. This is what Jesus does for us in our sin. And I think that that's remarkable because it is in our sin when he advocates. It is when we mess up that he somehow doubles down on this intercession and is in the ear of God saying, hey, I've covered him. I've covered her. They're good. They're righteous. They're lovely. They're your children. They don't know what they're doing. There's that famous advocacy when he's hanging on the cross, when he looks at the Roman soldiers and he says, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. This is a picture of the advocacy of Christ. And the thing that I love, and I would just make this point real quick. So the way that we think about it is intercession is proactive and advocacy is reactive. Intercession is proactive. It's always happening. He's always praying to the Father on your behalf. It's ongoing. Advocacy is reactive. Advocacy happens when you sin. It doesn't happen when you're healthy. It doesn't happen when you're righteous. It doesn't happen when you're walking the right path and you're doing the right things and your cup is overflowing and you're giving grace out to everybody around you and you're praying for everybody around you and you're following Jesus' intercessory model for the people in your life. That's not when he advocates. He advocates when you're low. He advocates when you mess up. The mornings that you wake up and you feel like a failure and you don't want to look anybody in the eye and you don't want to look in the mirror. Those are the mornings when Jesus is fighting for you the hardest. Those are the mornings when he advocates for you most. I write this so that you do not sin. But if you do, you have an advocate in Jesus. Someone who is in the ear of the Father advocating for you, Father, forgive them. They're your child. We love them. And I thought about this this week, too. And maybe some of you have gone there in your head. Why is it that I need an intercessor and an advocate between me and God the Father? Is God the Father so disposed towards wrath towards me that I need Jesus there to be running interference the way that I get in between Lily and John when John's taking things too far? Is God so predisposed towards justice and wrath and anger that he needs Jesus to talk him off the ledge when he watches us do the thing again? And this is where the Bible gets really tricky and understanding the person of God gets really tricky because it's difficult to understand. God can't fully explain himself to us. God can't fully explain himself to us any more than I can explain literature to John. I just got done. This is going to, I almost decided not to share this because it sounds like I'm bragging, but I just got done reading a book. Okay. Like a whole book. I read East of Eden by John Steinbeck. And I love reading the classics. I love reading books that have been in circulation for more than 50 years, because if they, if they are, there's a reason. And the thing I love reading books that have been in circulation for more than 50 years because if they are, there's a reason. And the thing I love about old literature, about books that are 50, 200 years old, whatever, is the incredible insights the authors have into the human psyche. The incredible things that they have to say in those books. The commentary on humanity that's so nuanced where it will sometimes articulate thoughts that I've been loosely aware of for a decade and then here in a paragraph it's lucid and detailed and cogent and helpful. And it articulates things in a way that I would have never done on my own. It teaches me. If you guys were to ask me what was East of Eden about, I could give you probably a longer answer than you actually wanted, so I would not advise that. But if John asked me what it was about, how much would I have to dumb down the plot? How much would I have to simplify it for him to get even an iota of an idea of what that 650-page book was about? That's been in circulation for 75 years. Right? John can no more understand literature. And trust me, my understanding of it is incredibly rudimentary. I regret that either I didn't take English literature in college or I didn't pay attention. I can't remember which one it was. But I've never sat in a classroom with a professor telling me how to plumb the depths of literature. How to really, what was happening in the author's life and what the point was and what the critics say and how deep you can go. I have a very rudimentary understanding of it. It's just kind of, I read it and what I think is what I think. How much less so can John understand literature at the age of four. The gap of understanding between me and my son is infinitesimally small compared to the gap of understanding between us and God. So sometimes God is left to explain himself to us Neanderthals, and he's limited by what he can do and say and express. And so the more I thought about this question and the way that God is choosing to express it through Scripture, depicting Jesus as an intercessor and an advocate, I do not believe the point of that is to remind us that God is predisposed towards wrath against us. I do not think that the point of it is to point towards the Father and his character at all. Rather, I think it's simply to get across to us the very heart of Jesus towards you and the heart of your Savior, of your gentle and lowly Savior on whom we are focusing this fall. his heart is predisposed towards love and grace and mercy, so much so that he never ceases to intercede for you and pray for you on your behalf, so much so that when you are at your lowest, he doubles down and advocates for you. I do not think that those two truths are placed in Scripture to depict to us what must be the character of the Father and leave us to determine that. I think they are left in Scripture so that we would know the heart of Jesus towards us. So, what do we do in light of his intercession and advocacy? We pursue Jesus. First and foremost. The beginning and end of our pursuit of righteousness is our pursuit of Jesus Christ. What do we do in light of this wonderful Savior whose job is not done, who still works every day praying at the right hand of the father for you and at your lowest advocates for you. What do we do in light of that? Well, first of all, we mimic it as his followers. So we intercede for others. And if we're not interceding for others, maybe we should start interceding for ourselves so that we might be filled up with grace and then begin to proactively pray for others out of the overflow of our hearts. We advocate for people. We see the best in them. We hope the best in them. And we speak the best of them. But we can never do any of that if we don't pursue Jesus. So what I want to leave you with this morning is, how can you leave here and pursue Christ? What can you do? What step can you take? I say often, I haven't said it often enough lately, that the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. So if it's been a minute since you had a quiet time, start tomorrow. If you don't know where to start, these are in the lobby of the information table. This is a daily devotional guide that I wrote up last year. It just gives you a practical approach. I want to have a quiet time. What do I do? If that's a question you have, pick this up. I wrote this to answer that question. It's not as long as East of Eden. You can get it done today. If you don't even know what version of the Bible you want to read, I get that question sometimes too. I wrote a translation guide so that you'll understand the options that are out there. I do not advocate for one over another. I just put in front of you, this is how you can understand translations. So maybe there's one out there that would work better for you. But those are out there. So the first thing if we're going to pursue Jesus is we read his word and we pray. In a minute, we're going to have a chance to sing again, right? Yeah. We're going to have a chance to sing again. Call out to Jesus. Praise him. Rest easy in his intercession. Be present with him in that moment. Engage in your small group. Engage in church. Come ready to hear from God. And here's a big one. Invest in spiritually nourishing friendships. Lean into the people in your life that encourage you spiritually. And maybe for some of us, take a step back from the people in our life that don't. Lean into the ones that refresh you and give you life and make you more desirous of Jesus when you're with them. I don't know what you can do to begin to pursue Jesus today. But as I'm praying, I hope that he'll put something on your heart and I hope that all of us will move with obedience towards him as we go from here. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful for the way that you've chosen to depict your son. We don't imagine, God, that you are angry with us, that you're disposed to wrath. But, God, we are grateful that your son prays for us, that he advocates for us. God, I know that there are those in this room that even right now need that intercession desperately and are reflectively grateful for what's already been taking place. As he pleads to you on our behalf. God, those of us who have been brought low by poor decisions we've made. God, thank you that your son advocates for us in those moments. That he doubles down on the intercession and he raises us up in front of you. Help us be people who mimic those things, who pray for the people around us and who think the best and speak the best of the people who even may have wronged us. And God, as we go from this place, we pray that you would develop in us a hunger and thirst for you and for yourself. So much so that we would overflow with your fullness of grace upon grace. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

All right, man, that's got to, that may be the grooviest song I've ever walked up to stage to, so pretty excited about that. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, and if you receive like our email communication, our Grace Vine, then you came, then you woke up this morning anticipating to see Nate preaching from stage and talking about marriage. And guess what? So did I. I woke up to a phone call this morning that Nate was sick and that he wasn't going to be able to come in and preach this morning. And so here I am. And I know that Ashlyn and I are probably like 98% towards solving marriage because we've officially hit two years as of a few days ago. Yeah, I didn't do that, but you know what? I'll take the applause. I'm feeling nervous up here and your applause is soothing me, so thank you. But while we're close to solving it, let's give it about six more months and then I'll do my marriage sermon for you guys. But no, so Nate at some point is going to serve you well by hopefully getting to preach a sermon on a prayer for marriage. But this morning, instead, I'm going to let you guys get a peek behind the curtain as to some stuff we've been doing in youth group on Sunday nights. So for those of you who don't know, on Sunday nights is when our sixth through 12th graders meet. We all come, we meet in here, we get rid of a lot of these chairs because they're in the way of fun. And we set up games, we set up all this different stuff. And then ultimately, we always have some sort of message and some sort of small groups and whatnot. And the last few times we have been meeting, we have been discussing and reading and going through this one simple verse in Deuteronomy 6, 5. So there's not going to be any slides. So like, that's kind of your like wink, wink. If you want to grab your Bible and read along, this is probably your time to do it. Because I'm going to pause here and I'm going to be any slides. So like, that's kind of your like wink wink. If you want to grab your Bible and read along, this is probably your time to do it. Um, because I'm going to pause here and I'm going to pick up on asking, and you don't have to tell me verbally because that would just be too wild, but with a, with a nice head nod or a nice head shake as anyone in here set up or, or, or did anyone have new year's resolutions this year? I've actually apparently heard that three people for sure in this room had New Year's resolutions, as Haley just told me. So I'm very glad to hear that. But I've got, all right, I got to see some heads moving. Yay? Nay? We've got some people who did. I am the king of setting New Year's resolutions. And I would not say I'm the king of New Year's resolutions, because that probably means actually doing the things that you set. And I'm not good at that. But boy, do I love thinking that I'm going to do things in the new year. This year, I went classic. I went very cliche. I didn't want to, you know, get too interesting or get too whatever. And I was like, you know what? It's probably time I got in shape. I wear big enough clothes to where people still go, nice, you look nice. No, you don't need to. It's like, trust me, you'll never see me with a shirt off, but if you did, you'd be like, ah, that's a bummer. And even getting in shape, you're still not going to see with my shirt off, but at least it wouldn't be false. But I was locked in in December. You know, we're going to see our families. We traveled in a week's time, about 29 hours on the road. And through that time, I'm like thinking through what I'm going to do when we get back. You know, I'm going to eat all of this bad food and do like nothing that's helpful or useful or important to my life and my being while I'm at my family's house because it's Christmas and Christmas doesn't count as we all know. But once I get back, like I'm doing stuff, hey, what can I cut out? What is something easy that I could get better? I could eat a little bit healthier here. Or what are some workouts that I would do that would really benefit what I'm looking for? I did research. I've got the Nike Training Club app and you can can highlight, and you can find different workout programs, or I bookmarked workouts. Oh, this one's perfect for me. It's like, I don't know any of this stuff, but I'm acting like I'm an expert when I'm scrolling through that app. But I'm figuring out, I'm planning it out, I'm locked in. And honestly, as I'm driving, and I'm like, man, my back hurts, that's probably a core thing. All I'm thinking of is like, this is going to be wonderful when I'm finally here. I'm locked in, I'm ready. I know the stuff. I've done the research. I'm excited about it. I have all of this will. My heart is ready to be healthy. And yet, as I told my students last Sunday when we were talking about some of this stuff, the most I've done is one night, I think Saturday night, because I had been thinking about this message, I decided to lay on the floor and do some sit-ups while we watched TV. So I'm like 10 sit-ups in to a new year, which is less than what I had planned, which is less than what I had been ready to do. And ultimately, as I thought about that, and as I began to think more about New Year's resolutions and why I'm simply the king of starting them as opposed to continuing them, what I recognized and what I realized is I am so good at having the heart that is ready to do the thing. I am so good at having a will of doing a thing and setting my heart on what I want to do and what I want to value in the person that I want to be, but I have a much more difficult time at marrying that heart and that will with action. I have two, a left and a right hand, so handshakes like this don't look right, but that's a handshake. What's in my head, what's in my heart, often stays there. Especially when it comes to resolutions, when it comes to setting and walking out goals, when it comes to doing those things. And I wonder if any of y'all have felt the same way. Speaking of what Haley mentioned, there's people in this room that have the New Year's resolution of joining a small group. What I know for sure is that those people know the importance of joining a small group. They know why it's valuable. They know why it builds and grows their faith. They know why building relationships with friends inside of a small group is deeply beneficial to them and to their hearts and to their lives. But as long as that's all that happens, as long as it's only what's in your heart, then it's incomplete, right? Because then you're still just sitting there on a Tuesday night when all of your peers are meeting together and growing together. And it's the same with anything that we do and with all of those things. And so now I'd like to come back to what I think we learn and what I think we begin to understand in our faith if we want to marry and we want to couple our heart and our action. And that is in Deuteronomy 6, 5. So some of you guys open with me and we can read it together. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with everything inside of you. I understand that. I understand what it takes to do that. I get to know Christ. I come to church every week and I get to learn about this God that loves me so deeply and so uniquely. And I get to learn about Jesus, God's son, this savior who God sent down to live a perfect life and yet die so that I can experience an eternal life with God in heaven through salvation, simply through faith. Love the Lord your God with all of your heart. That is easy and understanding and tangible. I can tangibly understand, okay, how do I go about that? What does it look like to love God with my inside? Well, it looks like going after and pursuing God. Sitting in church and learning more about him. Waking up and reading scripture and spending time in prayer. Sitting in small groups and listening to how the Lord works and how the Lord moves and allowing our hearts to be shaped and molded and changed and transformed in the goodness and in the love of God. But as we move forwards, the point of these verses is not simply to internally love God, but it's to love God with all that we are. I learned some Hebrew as I was reading through some of this, and so guess what? We're all learning some Hebrew this morning. The word soul here is actually translated to this word called nefesh in Hebrew. And nefesh, while it's translated in our Bibles as soul, the nefesh more has to do with the soul of who we are as a physical presence in this world. Who we are and the people that we are as we are living in our lives. And when we understand that, and then when we translate might to being with everything and with all that we have, the goal and the purpose of this is not simply to love God internally, inside of our hearts, worshiping him and loving him, being like, God is the best, I've got this down. The goal and the point of this is to recognize and to realize when we put these three words together, love God with all of our hearts, our souls, and our might, is to say that every part of your life should be dedicated to loving God. So yes, do all of the things to where you can continue to fall in love and be transformed internally in your heart by this God that loves you, created you, and wants a relationship with you every single day, but at the same time, just like me trying to do a New Year's resolution, if you're simply starting internally, then this call is incomplete in your life. And so then the question becomes, okay, well, what does it look like to love God with our physical selves? Does it look like, oh, well, I guess like if my body needs to love God better, maybe I should like raise my hands during worship, which, hey, you know, try it maybe. But I love that Jesus actually gives us this perfect and beautiful definition and explanation in Matthew 25. And so if you want to read with me, because we're going to like, it's going to be a few verses. So here's what I'm going to do. Normally what I do with students is I say, first one to find it, yell out the page number. Well, guess what? I'm the first one to find it. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to yell out this page number and it is page number 984. If you have one of the Bibles in the back of the seat in front of you, we are going to be reading verses. We're going to start in 31 and I'm going to just read this story. So if you guys are committed, I am going to read for a chunk. Sometimes that can get boring. And so let's all just like lock eyes and go, you know what? I'm not going to be bored because this is God's word and it's probably good. So we're going to lock in and we're just going to do it. So if you will read or listen along with me, please. He will put the those on his right, I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me. Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in or needing clothes and clothed you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you? The king will reply, I will tell you the truth. Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me. How do we love God in our lives? We do so by loving his people. How do we serve God with our physical presence? We serve the people that are in and amongst us within our lives. One of my favorite stories in all of the Bible is the story of King Josiah. So much so that if Ashlyn and I ever have a kid, I've asked that we could name our son King Josiah. I haven't decided if I want to do like King Josiah and then still give a middle name or if I just wanted to be King Josiah Talbert, which would be sick, which Ashlyn said no. So maybe if you guys are moved enough, if you could just have a couple words with her this morning, that would be great. Thank you. But I love the story of King Josiah because Josiah became the king in a weird and difficult and troubling time for a few different reasons. Let me go ahead and give you the background. This is how King Josiah's story starts out in 2 Kings as I turn and make sure I found it. In 2 Kings 22, I'm just going to read 1 and 3. Don't worry about finding it. I'll just listen along. Josiah was eight years old when he became king. Awesome. Genuinely, I would have thought you'd at least have to be 10 to be a good king, but he ended up doing it at eight. And he reigned in Jerusalem 31 years. Here's his description. Here is how he is described before his story is even told. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left. Josiah's descriptor as a king is that he did what was right in the eyes of God, and he followed after the footsteps of the one chosen king, David, that God had placed in front of him. Josiah took over a kingdom in Jerusalem, a group of people who had been set into this place to be God's chosen people, to be a people that would experience the love of God, who would get to have their hearts truly transformed by God. And through that, that as a part of the covenant that God made with his people in Israel, in Jerusalem, that his people would not only love him, serve him, and whatever, but that they would go and that they would bless the entire world. Their call was to know God, was to love God, and was to bring God and to bring goodness about the world through God. This was not a covenant or a call that Josiah had ever heard about. Because Josiah took over rule of a nation that was completely walking in opposition to God. What we learn actually in this story is it was a nation that was actually moving forward into exile. That soon enough after Josiah's reign, that Judah was going to be taken over by another nation and the people within that, but within Jerusalem were going to be taken into exile. Why? Because they had fallen short of their covenant. For generation after generation, they had walked farther and farther from God. And that is where Josiah took over. And about 18 years into his reign, he came into contact with a high priest. He encountered a high priest, and this high priest basically brought him, Josiah, for the first time in Josiah's life, the law or the word of God. And through Josiah being able to interact with this word of God, he was able to learn who God was. And as he was able to learn who God was, he was completely transformed. Truly burdened by the fact that he had lived such a life that would be walking anywhere except towards God because he realized for the fullness of the love and the goodness that was offered by God and his heart was completely changed. This child, I mean, even still at 18 plus eight, you do the math, he was 26 at this time. This young guy with all of the power in his, with all of the power you could ever ask for was forever changed and his heart was forever marked by the fact that he had encountered this God who loved him. And upon that encounter, and upon learning about this, and upon having God change and mold and shape his heart to becoming a new person, changed everything he did and everything he valued. And so, as he turned back around, the rest of his reign as king was a reign that was marked by, I'm going to continue to lead and I'm going to continue to serve my people the best that I can. But what I recognize now is while I'm doing that, the only way I can do that well and the only way I can truly love and serve my people rightly is if I do so for God, in God, and through God. He rebuilt the temple so that his people would have a place that they could go and encounter God. He got rid of all of these false idols so these people wouldn't have these temptations in front of them to walk and to go and serve other gods. He made the word of God readily available and made the word of God a foundational piece of these people who lived there. What Josiah did is when God got a hold of his heart and transformed his heart, he realized that that would be incomplete unless he turned that love around and he showed it and he gave it to his people. Josiah offered the love and the goodness of God to his kingdom because he knew that a heart for God is not enough. But a heart for God only takes full effect when I turn that around and I share that with my kingdom. And guess what? I know that none of you are kings. You're kings in like the cool sense. Like I think you're all kings and queens. You're awesome. You know, great. But all of us have kingdoms. All of us have a kingdom that we are living and, as Nate often says, that we are building. You have a family at home. You have people that you interact with on the way to work, inside of work. You have sports or you have kids that are at sports and you're standing around with parents. There are kingdoms that all of us have in our lives. And if we want to truly live out this Deuteronomy 6, if we want to truly love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and might, then that means that as we are taking steps forwards and growing in our love of God, then at every step, we should be taking steps forwards just along with it of loving the people that are in our lives. Because guess what? God placed them in front of you for a reason. There's this old hymn that I think is beautiful that I love. It's called Christ Has No Body But Yours. We're called to love people out of the love of God, certainly to make our faith whole and to make our faith what God describes and how it's described in Deuteronomy and throughout scripture. But we're called to do the same because guess what? Christ isn't here. Christ hasn't been here for 2,000 years. God takes up residence inside of his believers, inside of the people whose hearts he has gotten a hold of. And through us and through our hearts, Christ has a body now. And through our hands, our feet, our actions, our lives, our words, we share the love of God that we have experienced so that these people can experience the same. There are people in your lives and in your worlds that will not know God the same way if we don't bring it to them, if we don't tell them about him, if we don't show him his love, who he is and what he's done. And so as we normally wrap up in students, I always send to small groups. And when I send to small groups, I normally want to have a couple things, a couple tangible things that I can grab onto. And it's normally, hey, you know what, this week, let's do this. So if you're willing, since I've decided that this morning, I'm letting you guys into what a youth group would look like, I'd like to do something similar. And I'm going to give you guys the same call. So if you find somebody who looks like a student, ask them how they did it. They might can give you some help. But what I asked them to do and to think about was this. If we're trying to marry the heart with the action, then to really love people this way requires us not simply to do it because we're supposed to, but to do it because our hearts are truly for these people. So maybe you have someone in your world right now that you can think of this week. Someone who you know in some way you could serve well or you could love well. You could love or serve uniquely to your relationship with that person. Maybe it's a group of people. Maybe it's a small office and this is the people. So, write that person down. Write that group down. And here's what I want us to commit to. Not simply going, you know what, when I get to work, I'm going to be really nice to those people. But when I wake up in the morning, before I ever interact with these people, I am committed to praying for them. Praying that God would mold and shape our hearts to having a deep burden and a deep love for these people, that I can love them in a way that is going to glorify the God that is sending me to love them. And in and through that, as you interact with them, being prayerfully aware of what the Lord would have you be in their life. When I translate these Matthew verses, feeding the hungry, taking care of the sick, what I translate it as is this. Everyone has different needs, and everyone needs love in a certain way. So my call for everyone in here is this week, whether it be one person, two people, a few people, can you be the people that loves these people well? Can you be the people that serves them? And can you couple this heart that you have for our God that loves us so deeply with the actions of letting these other people know just how deep that love is through how we love them. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. I pray that we never grow tired and weary in growing closer to you and diving deeper into your love. But God, I just pray that it never stops there, but that you give us a heart for your people. You give us eyes to be able to see where we can serve and where we can love in any possible way that would glorify you. Lord, allow us to be prayerfully aware of the people in our lives and how we could show you to them. We love you so much. We are so thankful that you let us come and be here to rest and to worship in your love. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Michelle Maskin. to be one of the pastors here. And sorry about that. This is the second part or the third part of our series called Ascent, where we're focusing on the 15 Psalms, Psalm 120 to Psalm 134 in the book of Psalms that are meant to be used as your family takes its pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And so these particular 15 Psalms in a book with 150 Psalms are really important and central to life growing up in Israel. And so we thought it would be good to take some time and focus on them for us and see what we can learn from these Psalms of Ascent as we journey towards God ourselves. Last week I talked about repentance. Mikey, those are all online. You can listen to those whenever you'd like. I talked about repentance and how that's always, repentance is always the first step in a journey towards God. This week, I'm looking at Psalm 126 that Michelle just read for us very well about joy. And I picked this because I think I'm the perfect person to give a sermon on joy, right? Like if you guys were out to dinner with some friends who didn't go to Grace and they said, describe, give me three words that you think best describe your pastor. 95% of you in the top three would have joyful somewhere. I'm pretty sure of it, right? There's giggles because I think that there are some misconceptions around joy and what it is. I think sometimes we can think of somebody who's joyful, and it just means that they're exuberant. It just means that they're bubbly and they're happy all the time. But we don't realize that that could be masking a deep anxiety that they're trying to counter with and they're not actually a deeply joyful person. And so I was talking with Jen about this idea, about, Jen is my wife if y'all don't know us, about joy and what it is and how we define it. And I actually saw a clip that helped me think of it a little bit. It was just a quick clip of Jerry Seinfeld on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. And I showed it to Jen and I showed it to Aaron Winston and to Carly. And it's of Seinfeld and he's talking about vacations and complaining about stuff like he always does. And he goes, but at one point he looks at Jimmy and he goes, I'm very happy. I'm a happy guy. I'm very, I hate everything. And that makes me happy. I'm, I'm perfectly happy hating everything all the time. And I told them like, I feel so seen. This makes, I love this. I'm a very happy guy. I love, and then he goes, he goes, but I do like to complain about things, and that's something I do enjoy. And I was like, yes, this is my guy. So I think joy comes in all shapes and sizes, and I was asking Jen, when you think of someone who's joyful, what do you think? And she actually said Jimmy Fallon, and because he's bubbly and exuberant and yada, yada, yada. And I said, I don't know. I don't think, that's not what I think of. And she said, what do you think of? And I know he's going to hate me for saying this, and I'm very sorry. But I think of Ron Torrance when I think of someone joyful. And if you don't know Ron yet, you will. If you come back three times, he will know your name. I promise you he will. He's got some more years under his belt than me. But whenever I talk to Ron, whether it's during the week or on a Sunday morning, I always leave that conversation a little bit happier and a little bit more encouraged than I was when I entered that conversation. And he exudes for me the type of joy that we want to think about this morning. So as we seek to think about it, understand it, learn about it, we should probably together define it. The problem with defining joy in a sermon on joy is that our definition needs to come from the Bible. It shouldn't come from me. However, when I search the scriptures for a clear definition of joy, the Bible is quiet on that. It's not quiet about the topic of joy, but it is silent on giving us a direct explanation of what it is and how we can best understand it. So instead it just talks about it and it brings it up and it points us to it and it says that God desires it from us and it says that God seeks to make us joyful and shows us the benefits of joy, but it doesn't define it. And so we are left to define it on our own. So I'm going to offer you my best definition of joy. And if you don't agree with me or you think it's somehow incomplete, that's okay. You add your own stuff too. The important part is that we have a common understanding of the foundations of it. So here's how we're going to define joy this morning. Joy is a state of happiness fueled by gratitude. Joy is a state of happiness fueled by gratitude. So it's not a fleeting moment of happiness. This is important. I thought about words like foundational and unimpeachable, but those seem too cumbersome in a clear definition that I wanted you guys to kind of remember a little bit. So it's a state of happiness. It's not an experience of happiness. It's not a brush with happiness or a feeling of happiness. It's a state that we exist in, just kind of this simmering happiness, positivity, joy. And it is fueled, and this is important,'s fueled by gratitude. Joy is always fueled by gratitude. It has to be. When you think about it, when you think about the things that make you joyful, you're thinking of things for which you are grateful. And this psalm maps it out for us very clearly. It shows us, they model for us how we arrive at joy. Those first two verses, I don't know if you paid attention to them when they were being read, but this is what they said. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion. So there was a time in the past when they were not doing well, where the people were not doing well, where they were living, they were living in poverty, they were living in oppression, and they were scattered. And then God restored their fortunes. He built the nation back up. And now there are joyful people with songs in their hearts. And the other nations around them looked onto them and said, wow, they are really blessed. And so this joy that they're experiencing comes out of abundance. Joy is always the product of abundance. If we want to talk about the joy that we experience from God, it is always the product of abundance. Think about a time in your life in which you've been exceedingly joyful. Think about some of the happiest moments of your life. Think about a season where you were just deeply content and you look back and you go, man, that may be the sweetest season of my life. I don't think of seasons for me as much as I think of moments. I know that for me, anytime I have my arms around both of my kids voluntarily, and we're not wrestling on the bed, anytime I sit there with that long enough, I start to tear up. Because we'll be watching, I'll be watching football and sometimes I'll want to come watch it with me, which really makes me tear up because that's just great. This is the perfect, the absolute perfect two minutes right here. Because I'm watching my favorite thing and I'm hugging my favorite people. And sometimes we're watching TV and one of them will climb up on my lap and then the other one will want to do that too. And I just completely tune out. I check out of whatever's on the television and just kind of sit there. And I just feel so much joy. Why do I feel that? Because I'm existing in this abundance right now. Right? I remember, this is so cheesy, but it's true. Jen plays the piano a little bit, not a lot of it. And don't get any ideas, she'll never ever play it for you, ever. You will never hear her play the piano. But she plays it, and sometimes she'll play the old hymns like Great is Thy Faithfulness, and those are my favorite. And whenever she plays the piano, I always tell her, that's my favorite sound in the world. I love you filling the house with the sound of this piano because I know it brings her peace and joy and I love it too. And I think it was last Christmas. In the lead up to last Christmas, Jen was at the piano and I was standing next to her and she was playing Oh Holy Night. And then she and I just started singing Oh Holy Night. That's my favorite Christmas song. It's my favorite song, just in general. And Lily knew some of the words, so she started singing it too. And it was this moment of abundance. And then here's what I did that makes me a crazy softie, is I spun it forward. Because I think that the house that we're in now, Lord willing, and the creek Don't Rise, is the one that we're going to be in for a long time. And so I think our kids are going to come home from college to this house. And I would anticipate, if God grants it and is good to us in this way, that they might one day bring grandkids into this house, and we might get to celebrate holidays in this house. And our piano is in the dining room. And so I just, for whatever reason, I let myself start to imagine 15, 20 years down the road when the family's coming in and Jen and whatever her weird mama, Mimi nickname is, is playing piano. And the whole family's singing along. And I just started to, like, I started getting emotional. I started to tear up. And Jen's like, what's the matter with you? I was like, I really don't want to tell you because I'm going to sound like a loon. But when we think about the moments of joy in our life and the pockets of joy in our life, I think we can conclude that the joy is always produced by abundance. It's always in moments and in times when we realize we have these amazing blessings in our lives. And it reminds me of a verse that I like to remind you guys of often, one that we have on our wall in the house, John 1 16, where it says, but from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God, from all of his goodness, he bubbles over grace and goodness, and it spills down onto us, and we are happy recipients of this grace and goodness. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From his fullness, we have all been blessed in ways in which we don't deserve. I love Tom Sartorius, one of our elders and greeters. If you ask him, hey, Tom, how you doing? I guarantee you, better not deserve every time. That's kind of an acknowledgement of this. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And so one of the things I would just stop and point out to you is if you're not experiencing joy, if you don't think of yourself as a joyful person, if you don't think of yourself as existing in a state of happiness that is fueled by gratitude, maybe what's happening is we're running short on fuel. And it's not because we don't have enough. It's because we don't notice what we do have. We're like my son John when he goes to the store. Whenever John goes to the store, the Dollar Tree or whatever it is, if he sees animals, little plastic animals in a bin, in a bag, on their own, if he sees animals, he wants the animals. He has to have them. He loves animals, and he wants them. Now this, I've been complimentary of Jen. Jen is a sucker. I never buy that kid animals. 100% of the time, they go to the store. He comes back with another gorilla, and I'm like, what are we doing here? Because he loses his mind if he can't get the animals, and it's easier at the Dollar Tree just to spend $1.25. Go he'd go, here, kid, shut up. Here's a monkey. Now let's keep going. So she does it to keep the peace. I get it. But he's so concerned with this animal that he wants that he forgets that we have literally a whole bookshelf full, like in cubbies, filled with plastic animals that will never see the light of day again until we throw them away. Ever. If any of you just had kids, because we've got a lot of you right now, if you need animals, we got you. I think so often in life, we can move through life like John moves through the Dollar General. And we have a house full of blessings. But we just want the one that we don't have. And I think that if we would just stop and spend some time being grateful for the abundance that we see in our lives, that we would by, be a more joyful people. And so I think in many cases, we might not be experiencing joy because we're just not looking around at the abundance that does exist in our life. And so that's where we should start. And if we're not experiencing joy, we probably want it, right? We probably all want to live a joyful life. I know that this is true because if you ask anybody from any walk of life, no matter their religion, I can at least speak to Western culture, what is your top hope for yourself? And more interestingly, what's your biggest goal for your children? What do you want your children to experience? What do you want you to experience? What do you pray about for your children to experience? Somewhere in the top three, unlike your answer about me being joyful, this is actually legitimate, sometime in the top three, you're going to say happiness. What do you want for your children? I want them to be happy. I want them to be content. What do you want for your future? I want to be happy. I want to be content. The whole world defaults to a pursuit of joy. Every commercial you see tells you, if you buy this product, you will experience a more joyful life. If you vote for this candidate, usually the way it goes is you will experience a less joyful life. Right? We are drugged up. We are counseled up. We are self-helped up. Every facet of our society tells us to pursue this happiness. And here it is sitting right in the Bible where we get this psalm of joy. And we need to realize that joy is fueled by abundance. Joy is given to us by abundance, fueled by gratitude for that abundance. But we ought to be asking the question by now, if I'm not experiencing joy, how do I get it? If it's a little bit more than just looking around at my life and seeing what's there, how do I pursue this joy? How do I pursue this happiness that God offers? I think that there's a great answer for this that Eugene Peterson offers himself. He says in the chapter on joy, he says, joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. I want you to do this with me. Think of the most joyful person you know or the most joyful people you know. Think of who would come to mind in your life when you're asked that question. People who seem to exist in a state of happiness that's fueled by gratitude. Once you have them in your mind, let me make two bets about this person. The first thing I bet is true about them is that they have said they have sacrificially served others with their lives they are people who have spent their lives serving others I bet you they are people who have spent their lives getting involved in what God is doing and going where Jesus is growing I bet you the most joyful people that you know whoever it is you're thinking of I bet you that they have a long track record of getting involved where God is involved, of serving Christ and pursuing him and living their life for him. And I would bet that they have personally sacrificed. They've allowed some pain and some pain points to come into their life so that they could serve Christ well, so that they could serve others well. I bet you the most joyful person you know is also a servant of Jesus who sacrifices for others. See, we think that the road to joy, this is what the world would have us believe, that the road to joy is paved in pleasures. That if we just go from pleasure to pleasure, from experience to experience, from good time to good time, from enjoyable thing to enjoyable thing, if we can just stack together enough fun, enough pleasure, enough relaxation, enough good times, enough luxury, enough things, then eventually we'll arrive at joy. And the path to joy is not paved in pleasure, it's paved in sacrifice. Joy is the verified, repeatable experience of those who are involved in the work that the Lord is doing. So for one, that joyful person you're thinking of, I bet that they are a servant of Christ. The other thing I would bet about them is that their life has not been void of tragedy. I'd be willing to bet whoever you're thinking of has walked through some dark days. I'd be willing to bet that whoever you're thinking of has reasons, good reasons in their life to maybe not be joyful all the time, and yet their joy persists. We do not get to joy by pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. That's not the pathway there. The pathway is through Christ. And when we pursue Christ and what he has for us, what we find is that he produces an abundance of joy in us that cannot be touched. I think of it this way. So we do not pursue joy. We said, how do we pursue joy? How do we pursue this abundance that God offers us? We don't. We don't pursue joy. We pursue Christ. We don't pursue joy. We pursue Jesus. This falls in line with this other verse I like to mention that I have on the wall of my office that I think is really applicable here. John 10 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I've come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says, do you know that I want you to have the best life possible? Do you know that I want you to, to, to, to experience an abundance of joy? Do you know that I want you to experience the overflow of the Father and His goodness? Do you know that I want you to have the best life possible? And I love this verse because if we just decide to trust it, we'll never mess up again. Anytime in our life we mess up, we sin, we develop a bad habit, we make a bad decision, we behave poorly in a situation, we allow something into our life that we know we shouldn't allow into our life, but we keep it there. All we're doing is saying, Jesus, I don't trust you to bring about the best life for me. I'm going to figure this one out on my own. But Jesus tells us, the path to joy is through me. The path to happiness that we want for ourselves and for our children that all of society seeks after every day in every way. The path there is through Jesus. So we do not pursue joy. We pursue Christ. And when we pursue Christ and he blesses us with an abundant life, and we have to be careful about this because I am not talking about financial abundance. I'm talking about the kind of abundance that actually makes you joyful. I'm talking about blessings. I'm talking about your kid coming up to you and giving you a hug when you didn't expect it. I'm talking about a wealth of relationships and friendships that you have in your life that when you think about it, you're just so grateful for. I'm talking about the years of marriage when you've been married 25, 30, 40 years and you look at this person that, gosh, we haven't always gotten along and sometimes I don't know that I would choose you every day, but man, we love each other deeply for what we've walked through. That type of richness. That type of abundance. That's what Jesus offers us. So when we pursue Christ, we can proclaim with the Israelites like they do in Psalm 126, verse 3. I love this proclamation. The Lord has done great things for us. We are filled with joy. The Lord has done great things for us. We are filled with joy. And Eugene Peterson's the message. He translates it. We are a nation of joyful people. We are a joyful nation. And so if we can look around at the abundance that we have in our life and allow that to fuel gratitude within us, then that will fuel joy. And if we can pursue Christ, then by that pursuit of Christ, the byproduct is joy. So the first two things I would say to you today, if you're not experiencing joy in your life, check those two things. How's your gratitude doing? How grateful are you for the abundance that you have in your life? And then how's your pursuit of Christ coming along? Are you devoting your life to him and serving him? Are you getting involved in the things that God is involved in? If you'll do those two things, I promise you God will move you in this inexplicable way towards joy, and you will be able to proclaim with the Israelites that we are a people of joy. Now, here's what I also know about joy. There are some who are in this room, who are listening online, who will listen, who are absolutely not feeling like they're in a season of abundance right now. As a matter of fact, they're feeling like they're in a season of scarcity. And the reality of life is that sometimes life is hard. And sometimes the days are dark. And sometimes it's heavy. And so I know that for some of you, as you listen to me go on and on about joy, you're like, yeah, dude, this ain't for me because that's not what I'm feeling right now. If I had to try to preach this sermon to my wife in the wake of the loss of her father without this last part, she would have scoffed at the whole thing and swept it aside, and I wouldn't blame you if that's what you wanted to do so far. But sometimes life can be heavy, and if that's your season, I understand. This week was a little bit of a heavy week for Jen and I, just in the things that were happening in the lives of the people around us, not in our lives. But in a 24-hour period, we got news that a mama who we had been praying for since she started trying to get pregnant, there were struggles there, and so we joined with them and we prayed with them and we were elated when they were pregnant. We'd been praying the whole time. She went into labor. We were very excited, but a C-section had to get involved. And it was frantic there for a minute a minute and it was scary and I spent some uneasy moments with her mama and daddy in the waiting room of the hospital who were concerned about their baby that was heavy everyone's happy and healthy there then the next morning we learned that a really good friend of ours, someone that we hold dear, was going to need to be hospitalized for psychological issues that have not been experienced before by this individual. It's a scary thing. There's a heavy load on her family. And then just a few minutes after getting off that phone call, we found out that another friend of ours was separated from her husband because her husband let his family down. And she doesn't really know how to walk through this. And then that day, I'm on the phone with my buddy who's in marriage counseling with his wife and they were asked hey his name's Dan it doesn't matter you don't know Dan do you think you could find a path to love for Beth and he said yeah I think I do I think there's a version of her that I really love and I'd like. And she said, Beth, do you think that there's a path to love for Dan? For you to love Dan? And she goes, no. I think that ship sailed years ago. They have four kids. He might be thinking about divorce. She might leave him. Sometimes we have seasons like that. Sometimes we have heavy seasons of pain. And when somebody gets up and starts talking to us over and over again about joy, we're like, yeah, man, not for me. I'm not buying that this morning. So if that's your season, or you know somebody in that season, this psalm actually addresses that. It finishes with this in mind, that we don't all just look around at hyperabundance all the time. Sometimes life is hard. So this is how we pursue joy in moments when we don't think we're having it at all because life is heavy. Verse four, restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev. Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them. I don't know if you picked it up, because I didn't. I just saw it as kind of flowery language and imagery. But Eugene Peterson points out in the chapter this idea that the pain and the sorrow that we're experiencing, the heaviness and the worry that we have, those are seeds. Those are seeds of future joy. And what we're supposed to do, what they pray here in this psalm is, God, when I'm experiencing pain, when I'm experiencing hurt, I'm going to hand my pain over to you. I'm going to trust you with it. I'm going to give you my suffering and my despair and my pain, and I'm going to trust you with it. And I know that one day, eventually, if I trust you with it and I walk towards you, that you will reap for me a great harvest of joy from this seed of pain. And I think it's a beautiful idea that even at our darkest and even at our lowest and even when life is the most difficult, we can take the pain that we're experiencing, we can see it as a seed of future joy that we hand God and say, I don't know how you're going to turn this into joy, but I'm going to trust you to do it here. And we walk as faithful pilgrims on our journey waiting for God to bring about joy. It reminds me of what I do find helpful to say to people who are experiencing great tragedy. The best advice I ever received on how to talk to people who are going through incredible pain was from my pastor growing up. And his advice was, Nathan, don't say anything stupid. Okay? Thank you. What's stupid? Stupid are the empty words that don't really help. Stupid is when we miscarried our first child and somebody meaning well said, I guess God needed another angel. That's dumb. That's not helpful. So we'd be very careful about what we say in those moments. But one thing that I do think is helpful is when someone's hurting very much and they say, this sucks. I don't see how I'll be happy again. I don't see how I'm going to get through this. This hurts so much. I hate this. The one thing I found helpful to say there is to say, yeah, today stinks. Today's the worst. And you're allowed to hurt. And however you respond to this hurt is the right way to respond. No one can tell you what to do here, but here's what I also know. Not every day will feel like today. Not every day will hurt as bad as today. I know right now you can't see a light at the end of the tunnel. You're not even sure if light's going to be there, but one day you'll wake up and you'll see light. And one day you'll wake up and you'll be closer to it. And one day you'll wake up and you'll be in the light again. So let today be what today needs to be. And just know that not every day will be like this one. I think it's the same idea from Psalm 126. You think of your pain and your suffering as seeds of joy to be planted with God and allow him to reap a harvest of joy. So our job in pain and in trial, if we're here today and we're just feeling low, and it's not because we don't have abundance, it's not because we haven't been pursuing crisis because something really cruddy is going on and it's heavy on me and I'm having a hard time finding joy from here. Here's what you do. So your seeds of pain with God and wait expectantly for him to reap a harvest of joy. If you're hurting, sow that seed of pain with God and wait expectantly for him to reap for you a harvest of joy. So this morning, we're talking about a thing that everybody wants. Everybody that you meet, everybody that you see just wants what this is offering. They just want joy. They just want happiness. That's what everybody wants. And so in this psalm, we learn about it. We see about it. We learn how to get it. So here's my encouragement to you. If you are not in a season of pain right now, if life is pretty easy, pretty good, you're in good steady flow, nothing really bad's happening, but you wouldn't call yourself a joyful person, you're not in a state of happiness that's fueled by gratitude, two things for you. Check your gratitude dial. How's that doing? Check your Jesus dial. How much am I pursuing him? And if those are both turned way down, then it's no wonder that you're not experiencing exuberant joy. If you are in pain, plant the seeds of that pain with God and walk daily expecting that one day he will turn that sorrow into wonderful, exuberant joy because we serve a faithful God and he wants that abundant life for you. So my prayer for you is that you would be a joyful people and that together grace can say the Lord has done great things for us and we are filled with joy. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you want us to experience joy. We thank you that you desire for us to live in abundance that's been poured out by you. God, I pray that you would give us an unshakable, unimpeachable joy out of a sense of gratitude for what you've done for us. God, give us eyes to see the blessings that maybe we miss. Give us ears to hear the good news that maybe sometimes we tune out. And God, for those of us who are hurting, those of us who are in pain, for those around us who hurt, I pray that they would hand that pain over to you, trusting that you would produce from that an unmeasurable joy. And God, I pray that we would be such a joyful people that those that we encounter would mark us for it, would sense it from us, and that through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you simply by the joy that we exude. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Morning, everyone. My name is Tom Sartorius. I'm one of the elders and partners here at Grace, and this morning's reading is from Psalm 120. I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues. What will he do to you, Tom. You may have noticed Tom using a church Bible for that. We do not require elders to own their own Bibles, but we're hopeful that Tom will be able to acquire one in the coming months. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, this morning is the second part of our series called Ascent. Last week, Erin Winston, our children's pastor and pastor extraordinaire, opened the series up for us. And she kind of explained a little bit what it was, why we're doing it, where it's from. But as she was doing that, there was a little bit of sound issues. It was really nobody's fault, but no one was paying attention. No one heard what she said. So just to reorient us in this series, it is, this is one that's been a long time coming. I've kind of shared with you guys before. Sometimes we'll have series that we know we want to do. We know they'll be good for the church. We know we want to expose you guys to that thought process or information, but it just, it sometimes takes two, three, four years to work it into the calendar just right. And so we're all excited to finally be able to do this series. It is based on the Psalms of Ascent, which are Psalms 120 to 134. And what I didn't even know, I knew offhand that these existed, but I didn't really learn about them entirely until I read a book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson called Along Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a phenomenal book. If you get nothing else from this series, I hope you'll write down the name of that book and that you'll read it. It's a movement through all 15 of the Psalms of Ascent with some commentary before and after, and it will serve you. I just tell you, it will serve you better in your spiritual journey to read that than to listen to me preach about it for the next several weeks. I hope that I can do it justice, and I hope that it can focus our attention on the right things, but Eugene Peterson, to me, he's one of my favorite Christians that's ever lived. I think back in 2021, maybe, I read his autobiography just called Pastor about his story as a life in his life being a pastor, and it's one of the most personally impactful books I've ever read. So I'm really excited to expose you guys to what is probably his greatest work, a long obedience in the same direction. And these Psalms of Ascent are called the Psalms of Ascent because typically when you're going to Jerusalem, you're ascending, you're going up a mountain. No matter where you're coming from, Jerusalem's highly elevated compared to the rest of the country of Israel, give or take. And so usually when you're ascending, you're ascending to Jerusalem. So these are psalms that families were supposed to go through as they approached the city on pilgrimage. There's also a specific place in Jerusalem, the Temple stairs, I believe, where you were to pause when you arrived. You were to pause on the first step and sing this first psalm and pray over it as a family. Take the second step, do the second psalm. There's 15 psalms and 15 steps that aligned in this way. And overarching this entire series is this idea of pilgrimage, of a long obedience in the same direction, of the perseverance required by the Christian life, an acknowledgement that the Christian life is not simply a decision one day to accept Christ as our Savior and allow God to be the Lord of our life, but it is a daily decision that we renew. The Christian life is a long, steady obedience in the same direction. And so that idea serves as an umbrella over everything we talk about, that this implication that the Christian life is long and it is difficult, and we are pilgrims on a journey. This morning, we take the first step of that journey. The first psalm is Psalm 120, and that is a psalm of repentance. And when I think about repentance, I kind of think about it like this. Have you ever been in a space, your office, kids' room, kids' playroom, your kitchen, wherever it is, and you just look around and there's so much junk everywhere, you go, I can't live like this. This is disgusting. I have to clean this before I can do another thing. Have you ever had that impulse? If you have never had that impulse, you should clean your home this afternoon. Some of us would freak out. Some of you have that impulse so much that you will secretly clean your sister's house or your mom's house. You'll secretly go behind people and just clean at their place because you just want it to be nice for them. It's funny. I wrote this sermon a couple of weeks ago, but Jen took the kids. Lily's on fall break. Lily's my eight-year-old daughter. So she took Lily and John down to Jen's sister's house so the kids could play together and go to zoos and all the things that little kids do. And so I've been home alone since Thursday. And when I got up this morning, took a shower, went downstairs, got my Bible, got my notes, and went to go through the sermon. I go through the sermon on Sunday mornings just to make sure I'm familiar with it. And I went to go through the sermon. I'm standing in the kitchen, and I was like, I can't live like this. I can't do this. It just had four days of bachelor junk sitting around, you know? And I was like, I got to whirlwind clean this thing. So after I was able to clean the living room and the kitchen, I was able to get to work. But I don't know if you can relate to that, but I think most of us can. This idea where you just look around and you go, this is a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it right away before I can take another step. This, to me, is the heart of the beginning of repentance. Now, repentance gives a bad rap. We don't like to think about repentance. That one's hard. That's when we have to be hard on ourselves. We have to make better choices. We have to change things. Repentance is tough, and it might be uncomfortable to bring it up, but it's absolutely essential, and I hope that after this morning, that many of us can think about it perhaps in a different way and even seek to make it a habit. But along the lines of repentance being the first part of it, just kind of being disgusted with what's going on as we look around our life, Eugene Peterson says it like this, a person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. So a person before knowing Jesus has to look around at their life and be so disgusted with the way things are going, with the current state of affairs, with what's happening on their inside life and in their outside life. And be so disgusted with it that they go how we do in a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it. That moment has to come, has to precipitate genuine repentance. So he says, and I think as a Christian, because most of us in the room are Christians, as a Christian, we can think about it this way. We have to be so disgusted with the areas of our life that we have not yet relinquished to God. Because we've given our lives to God, right? But we've all got these little pockets where we know God probably doesn't want this habit in our life. He probably doesn't want this attitude. He probably doesn't want this pattern. He probably doesn't want this in my life. But I'm a Christian, and I'm good, and I'm pretty squared away. So I'm just going to keep this. This is under the lordship of God. Yes, this is my Christian life. This is my personal life. It's under the lordship of me. I'm going to continue to run things here. And Eugene says, until we get disgusted with how this feels, we will never convert it over to the Lordship of God in our life and take a step towards the Christian path. So one of the objects this morning is to help us think about our sin and look at the things that we have in our life in certain ways that make us miserable and make us disgusted and cause us to wake up in the morning going, who am I? Or cause us to finish an argument with our spouse and think, what was that all about? Or after we lose our mind on our kids, we go, what in the world, where did that come from? Or after we just go through a day thinking everyone's annoying or everyone's a moron or everyone's an idiot, and then we get home and we're like, is this really, do I want to be this angry? In those moments, we should reflect and become upset at the mess around us that our sin is making. David did it like this in the Psalm. Tom just read it for us. It starts off doing exactly this. I call on the Lord in And I think that's great. It's a great way to start off repentance. Last week, Aaron preached about, when I struggle, where does my help come from? Does it come from the mountains? Does it come from the altars on the mountains that serve me in different ways, that allow escapes and outs in different ways? And the psalmist says, no, lift your eyes up to God. Your help comes from God, creator of heaven and earth. So this repentance starts out in the exact right way. He looks to God in his distress. It's the song we just sang, God, I need you. We look to God in our distress. Run to the Father, fall into grace. So in his distress, he looks to God, which is the right way to start in repentance. Very first thing, I can't do this. I'm not going to white knuckle my way out of this sin or out of this attitude or out of this way of life. I need your help, God. And then he laments his sin. He laments his lying lips and his hypocrisy. He laments who he is and who he has become because of where he is and who he's surrounded himself with. He reaches a place of disgust with his sin, and so he cries out to God in his distress. And as I wrote this sermon, it occurred to me that for this to make sense, we can't just exist in the hypothetical and talk about vague sins that we deal with, you deal with, David dealt with, I dealt with, you know, whatever. We would need a specific example, and that example could only come from me. So I'm going to share with you more about my personal life than I want to. Don't get nervous. It's not any bad. Because I think we need to actually walk through a sin together to help us get this idea. Somebody did this for me, and it's what helped me understand the idea. So a couple, two, three months ago, Jen and I were finishing up the day, and Jen's my wife, and we got in a little spat, just a little normal marriage tiff, you know, not a huge deal. And we don't really do a lot of those. We're not fighters. Fighting with Jen's like kicking a puppy. So you can't really do anything there. You just feel terrible and shut up. You're right. I'm sorry. So we don't do a lot of anger and frustration in the house. We really don't. But we were frustrated with each other this night. And I honestly don't remember what it was about or what brought it on. I think it was probably just our typical disagreement, which is she's annoyed at me with something and I'm annoyed at her for having the audacity to be annoyed with me. And so then we butt heads. And towards the end of the conversation, I hit her with this one. This is a classic marriage argument. I don't know if you've used it before. I would not recommend if you don't mean it. But I hit it with, you know, lately I haven't even felt like you've liked me very much, which is kind of the emotional jujitsu of, do you see how all this is your fault? Because you haven't been being kind to me. You haven't been being the wife that I deserve. How do you expect me to do the things you want me to do when you don't even like me? It didn't land and we went to bed. And that whole night I was tossing and turning because I realized that the whole disagreement, I was reflecting on the last couple weeks, months of my life. And I realized that the whole disagreement was my fault because of some bad patterns in my life. And I knew that I needed to confess. I knew that I needed to apologize. And so I couldn't sleep. I'm just waiting for her to wake up so I can pounce on her with apologies and love, right? I just, I need this to be right, and I need her to know that I know it's my fault. And so I get up, I make us coffee. That's the peace offering, coffee on the nightstand. And when she wakes up, I said, hey, listen, I'm super sorry. She said, okay, tell me more. I said, the argument that we had last night was 100% my fault. She goes, what makes you think that? And I said, I just realized that all I've wanted from anyone in my life for the past couple of months is just to leave me alone. I've just been living selfishly. I just feel pulled in every direction. And all I want from anyone all the time is just leave me alone. And I said, that's a really cruddy way to be a father. It's a really cruddy way to be a husband. And by the way, I'm really sorry. It takes some special kind of chutzpah to accuse you of not liking me when I've been acting wholly unlikable for the last two months. My bad. And she laughed, and she said, I'm glad you know. And then we were good. We were good. But that tossing and turning all night, being concerned with the disagreement, wanting to get to the bottom of what was going on and motivating there. That was the process that the Holy Spirit used to bring me to a point of disgust with myself. Because what a terrible thing it is to go through life, especially as a father, a husband, and a pastor, and all you want is for people to leave you alone? Dude, you've made some bad choices. You have misaligned your life with what you need to do if that's really what you want is to be left alone. And so that's not an option. So I had to come to a place of disgust where it shook me so much that I could actually stop and let the Holy Spirit help me see where I had been selfish and confess that to my wife. So first I had to confess it to God at four in the morning and then I had to confess it to at seven in the morning. Because I got to this place of disgust where I looked at my life and I said, I can't live like this anymore. I have to clean it up. Right? But if we're going to truly repent of a sin, after we confess, we have to consider. Once we confess our sin, yes, this is in me. Yes, this is wrong. Yes, I have this habit, this pattern, this attitude. Yes, I've been making exceptions for myself in this way. I confess my sin. After that, we must consider the consequences of our sin. David says it this way, Psalm 123-4. I don't know what burning coals of a broom brush are, but I don't want them. I'd like to not find out experientially. He says, he stops and he considers. What will happen if I continue in this pattern? What will happen if I continue to be surrounded by lying tongues and deceitful lips and I continue to have lying tongues and deceitful lips? Well, what will happen in this instance is that God is going to allow warriors to come in and punish us on his behalf. The consequences of this sin are grave. And so it's good for me to sit and face those consequences and look at the reality that my sin could bring about. For me, in different times and ages and places throughout the church, the threat of divine punishment has served the church well to get us to make better decisions in our life. But for me, that's never worked super great. For me, I have to think about the actual literal results of my sin if it goes unchecked. And so to consider your sin is to think through the impact that it's having on the people around you. So in that season of selfishness in my life, which was just a season. I've only been selfish about two or three months out of my life. Everywhere else is super giving. So how about in that heightened activity of selfishness in my life in that particular season? I did the exercise the next day in the office. I sat down, I had my quiet time, and I made myself go through the exercise of how can this sin hurt the people around me? And the first thing that was brought to mind was Lily, my eight-year-old daughter. And I immediately just felt terrible because I've noticed this with other people's kids before I had kids. And now that I have kids, I see that it's absolutely true. When there's a little kid, three is like the height of cute. Three is super cute. One, two, three, it's all great. Four is pretty great. Five, all right, most of the time. But eventually, somewhere around five, six years old, it's like, all right, you're just an annoying little kid now. You've transitioned. You've got a goofy-looking smile. You do dumb stuff. You're always saying, look at me, when you do some regular thing that every kid in the world can do. Like, look at me, dad. Yeah, I mean, you jumped. That's really great. You know, like, every kid gets to this annoying phase until they're cool again. Like, they're, I don't know, 23. And part of what was requiring energy from me was to engage with Lily, to laugh at her jokes, to watch her dance, to give her the attention that she wants from her dad. But my selfishness, and this is hard to say, my selfishness was penalizing her for being eight. Not bad, not unreasonable, not demanding, not selfish. My own junk, as her dad, was penalizing my daughter for simply being eight. What does it communicate to her if I'm annoyed with her at every turn? It teaches her that she's fundamentally annoying. What an awful thing for a father to do to a daughter. It taught John similar lessons. When I didn't want to do trucks or have the dinosaurs fight again, or listen, I'm so bad at engaging in imaginative play. You be the dad. Oh, jeez, I am the dad, and he doesn't want to play. But by not doing those things, what I teach him is I don't want to be with him. I don't want to indulge him. I don't want to. I just want, I'm going to be selfish, and I'm going to do my thing. You do your thing, John. I distance myself from him. And then worse than that, the way that it hurts Jen is because she sees me annoyed with the load and the burden of the family, because she's sweet and because she's selfless, she takes on more of it. She tries to protect me by protecting me from the kids, and she takes on a bigger burden in the home. And that engenders in her resentment for always having to pick up my slack because I'm always in a grumpy mood because I always want to be left alone. It's completely unacceptable. And then you think about how it makes the staff feel at church when my door is constantly closed and I never want to talk to anybody and I go quick into meetings and out of meetings and I'm not available because I just want to be left alone. The ripples of this are terrible for a husband and a father and a pastor. But it's an important step in the process of repentance to think through the consequences of your sin if it goes unchecked. The question, after we realize our sin, after we've come to a place of disgust and we've said, I've got to clean this up, as we begin to clean, the question we should all learn to ask about our sin, we need to do the mental exercise to help with the disgust. The question we should learn to ask is, who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? Who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? I don't know what your sin is. I genuinely hope by now that you've been thinking along with me. That when I talked about the idea of confessing sins, that maybe you started to go through your mind and what the wake of your last few weeks have looked like or months. And I hope that you started to kind of go, I wonder what I need to confess. I wonder where my messes are. I wonder where the pockets of my life are that I haven't surrendered to the Lordship of God and I'm still ruling the roost there. And maybe those are the things that are actually making me miserable or anxious or whatever sometimes. I hope that you've begun to do that exercise. And I hope that as I was walking through the consequences of my sin with the people that I love the most, that you were starting to spin forward and think about the consequences of your sin with the people you love the most. Maybe it's selfishness like me. Maybe there's a secret habit or addiction that you're fostering. Maybe there's an attitude that you're maintaining. I'll tell you this, if you can't think of one, if you're sitting there going, gosh, I don't know what I need to confess or repent of, this is tricky. Well, then yours is pride. So that's easy to figure out. And if you still don't know what it is, ask your wife. She knows. She'll tell you. Ask your sister. Ask your best friend. Hey, I need to think about confession and repentance, but I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. I promise you they do. They'll help you out. But I hope that you've been doing that math and thinking along with me. But even as we confess and consider our sin, that's still not repentance. Repentance requires this last step. After we confess and consider, we must commence. After we confess our sin, we consider its consequences. We must commence. We must step. We must move. David are going to be if the sin goes unchecked. And he chooses to commence and take a step and go, I can't be here anymore. I have to move. I have to move away from what the world offers and towards what God offers. This whole Psalm follows the prescription that Eugene Peterson laid out at the beginning when he said that we have to be thoroughly disgusted with things the way they are before we can take a step towards God. It is not lost on me that in this sacred portion of the solemn book of Psalms, in these songs of ascent that were written by David for every generation of worshiper that would ever follow him to go through them every year in their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That a Jewish person would know these Psalms as well as a lifelong Christian knows the Christmas story out of Luke 2. And the angels appeared over the shepherds giving watch of the flock by night. It's all very familiar stuff for us. To the Jewish person, these Psalms of Ascent were just as familiar. You heard them every year. You heard your granddad give them, and then you heard your dad give them, and then you gave them. They were part of their life. An absolutely crucial spiritual linchpin in the life of a Hebrew in ancient Israel. And it is not lost on me that something of that great of import was started intentionally with repentance. He could have picked any topic. He could have started anywhere he wanted. He could have talked about the greatness of God. He could have talked about our need for God. He could have talked about the glory of God. He could have talked about loving our family. He could have talked about joy. He could have talked about all these things, but he starts with repentance. And I think it's so important because the first step of every journey towards God is always repentance. The first step of every journey towards God is always, always, always genuine repentance. To confess, to consider, and then to commence, to move. The most clear example of repentance in the Bible that I see is found in the book of Acts in chapter 2. Jesus has died. He rose again on Easter. He spent 40 days ministering to the people in and around Jerusalem, specifically the disciples. He ascended up into heaven. And then he told the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to come. And they waited for 40 more days. And then at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came. And when the Holy Spirit came, Peter goes out on the balcony and he preaches to thousands of people in and around the Jerusalem area. And these are the same people who were a part of the mobs 80 days ago who crucified Christ. And he goes out there and he tells them who that Jesus was that they crucified. And they said, we believe. What do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. The very first step he asks them to take in their Christian journey is to repent. And it's to repent. This is a fundamental repentance of all Christianity, I believe. What are they to repent of? I believe that specifically what they needed to repent of in this instance is repent of who you thought Jesus was before I told you the truth about him. That's the fundamental repentance of Christianity. And if you're here today and you're not a Christian because you came with a spouse or you're just checking it out or you're considering or whatever. If you are going to become a believer, the Bible urges you to make this fundamental repentance of Christianity, which is whoever I thought Jesus was before I came in here today, I now agree with who he says he is. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God who came to take away the sins of the world. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross to make a path for us to heaven and reclaim creation. And he's coming back again to get us. Revelation 19, crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh to rescue creation back to its maker. That's what it is to be a Christian. And so the fundamental repentance of Christianity is to repent, move away from, confess, consider, and commence away from who we thought Jesus was and move towards who he is. And in this way, all repentance is saying some version of no to the lies of the world and what it offers and to our little kingdoms and fiefdoms in our own lives. And moving towards, as we confess that sin, we consider the consequences and then we commence our movement towards God in this pilgrimage of a long obedience in the same direction. Confession is fundamentally, or repentance is fundamentally a rejection of the world and an acceptance of God. And you know, in September, September 10th, I opened up a series called The Traits of Grace. And I said, this sermon is going to be, I think, the most important sermon I've delivered in several years at Grace. And I rolled out for you discipleship pathways. And I encouraged us to be step takers, people who take our next step of obedience, kind of like being on a pilgrimage. I said that everybody has in front of them a step of obedience that they need to take. And I want to encourage you to take yours. And I challenged us on September 10th. Listen, the most important thing we can do over the next few years is not build a building, is not grow the church, is to allow God to grow us in our depth spiritually. I challenged you to begin to take your spiritual growth personally, to begin to prioritize it, to begin to prioritize personal holiness. And now here we are at the onset of another series. And God has brought this theme back around of repentance and confession and a beginning of a move towards him. So I'm inviting you as we move through this series together, as we reflect on the one that we just had and what it asks of us, on this journey towards God with grace. And if you want to do that, if you want to take your spiritual health seriously, then that journey begins with the step of repentance. So what I'm going to do, instead of closing us out in prayer, is I'm going to let Aaron continue to pray. And I'm going to invite you to respond to what you've just heard in a time of your own prayer. If you're not sure what to confess, if you're not sure where to start, ask that God would open your eyes and let you see. Where are the attitudes and actions and habits in my life that don't need to be there that are actually causing me misery that I might not recognize? Ask God to make you disgusted with the pockets of sin in your life. And then in prayer, consider how that sin could hurt the people that you love the most if it goes unchecked. And then in prayer, if you feel so led, begin to take steps towards God in that area. And let's have a time of repentance together this morning as we take our first step on this journey towards God in the Psalms of Ascent.