Sermons tagged with Rest

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

Good morning. Grace, I would just like to point out that I'm the guy who fixed the sound. Let's pray and go home. I think we can leave on that one. Actually, and I fixed it by doing absolutely nothing. That's what happens a lot of times, right? Like you go try to fix somebody, somebody asks a question, and you just act like you do something. It's like, thanks, man. You know so much about everything. Hey, I'm so glad that you are here and you decided to join us this morning if you're new. My name is Aaron. Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you for choosing to come to church instead of asking your wife if you could stay home and watch the U.S. Open. Jesus does love you more for that. I'm just kidding. He doesn't. I know some of you. Hey, we are in the third week of a series called Idols. And just to kind of set us up, kind of get us moving in the direction we're heading this morning. So you've got like the US Open, right? Very prestigious event, great golfers and all that. Then there's another event that's really close to it. It's the Grace Raleigh Golf Tournament. It's same prestige, same level of competition, same caliber of players and we had it back April, but nobody signed up. So what we did instead, we actually, there was like 16 people who signed up to be a part of it. So we quickly veered away from like tournament and we said, okay, so what we're going to do instead is just give whoever wants to play a reason to take Monday off and go play golf and hang out with one another, right? And so I just want to be very open and honest. I am, I'm not a good golfer, okay? And because of that, like, I don't typically sign up to be a part of stuff like that because I don't need you to see and remind me that I'm not a good golfer. Like, I'm learning. I love to play. I play often. I'm just not playing well. So I typically avoid stuff like that. But I look through the list. I look through the roster, and I was like, okay, I may not be the worst one there. I was. I was the worst one there. Absolutely. And I can tell you, there's proof that I was the worst one there. So what happens is as soon as you pull up, we were at Zebulon Country Club. If you've ever played there, you'll know what I'm talking about. You pull into the parking lot, and immediately atop of a conversation is the ninth hole, right? Because as you go to park, like some people will remind you and like warn you, hey, listen, you see that? There's a tee box right there. Like it's really close. The green is really close to the parking lot. It's really close to the clubhouse. And you don't want to park there because some idiot's going to hit the ball too far. It hit a car. You don't let it be your car, right? And so immediately what happens is you, okay, yeah, let me move. Like I'm going to go somewhere else. then we went. We played the eight holes, and I played terribly. Like there's all this added pressure, which is dumb. I'm not a good golfer. Everyone knows I'm not a good golfer. Why do I feel like I have to play like a good golfer? That's another reason. If you play golf and not well, why do you get so mad that you're not playing? What do you expect to happen? So we go through the entire eight holes or we go through eight holes. Then we get up to nine and then you start thinking about the parking lot again. Right? Well, I start thinking about the parking lot again. When I went up to the tee box, what was going through my mind was not, hey, there's a sand trap just in front of the green. Make sure, play the left side. I don't think, hey, you know what? I want to hit this in the back of the green and make it spin. I don't even know how to make the ball spin. I don't know if it does spin when I hit it. I have no clue. So that's not what going through my mind is. I line up to hit the ball. What I start thinking about is, don't be the idiot who hits a car. Like, don't be that guy. And I take my backswing, and I come through, and man, y'all, I blade it. Like, it's just, I hit it, and it just rockets towards the parking lot. Not just towards the parking lot, towards the Mercedes flipping bins, okay? Now, was anybody here? Did anybody go? Dude, either of you drive a Mercedes. Because if you do, this was going to have a very different ending. Like, it went past the Mercedes. There was this banged-up truck. I hit that thing. But no, so as you can figure out by now, like it went straight. I'm telling you, like everything got real. It was movie type slow motion. You know what I mean? Like I could see which way the blades of grass were going. There was a groundskeeper. He was in the sand. He just watched it. Uh-oh. It just looked. And then I'm telling y'all, like it was the loudest bang I've ever heard in my life. It sounded like this dude's ex-wife was really, really mad, found a sledgehammer in his car, and went to work. It was so loud, and everything in me just sank. I was like, oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. For one, the first thought was, my wife is never going to let me play golf again. I just played an $80,000 round of golf at a mediocre golf course. What kind of, I'm the idiot that everyone's thinking about. And then my second thought was, I have people with me. Like they all saw that I'm the idiot who hit the car on the other side of the green at Zebulon Country Club, right? And so I turn around, I'm like, well, maybe,, there's this idea of, okay, I'm one of their pastors. Which I am, by the way, if you didn't know that up to this point. But I'm one of their pastors. Maybe I'll turn around and there'll be some grace and some kindness. Here's what I. That's what the heck I turned around to. That was just that exact noise. No, I'm telling you. There's a guy. I'm not going to. We share the same first name, Carly Buchanan. It's his husband. You don't need to know the rest of it. But I turn around, and here's what I see. Like, he's laughing so flipping hard. Like, he can't even control his shoulders. I'm like, are you, you're a jerk face. And then I said, okay, well, there's still two others. And I look and there's another guy swinging a golf club. Just, oh, let me act like I don't see anything. But still there's a single shoulder. He's not as big. I'm like, are you kidding? There's one other guy. And I look over to him and his face is like this because I'm on his team. And he's like, we can't use that ball. I gotta, I gotta show up now and do something really good. Right. And I'm like,, my, this is the worst day ever. Okay, so immediately I start going into damage control. How do I make sure nobody else finds out? And about that time, the little golf club swinging guy, he yells out to people on another hole. He hit the Mercedes. I'm like, are you kidding me? Listen, I'm not joking about this. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we were at the AJ event. I think it was two weeks. Anyway, it was a couple weeks later. Somebody came up to me who wasn't even at the golf course and said, hey, I heard about the ninth hole. Dude didn't even go to our church. I'm like, are you kidding me? And the entire time I'm thinking, everybody knows I'm the idiot who hit the car. Not just a car. It was a Mercedes. And, like, everything that was the reason that I don't go get involved in stuff like this. Now, we did go. We went and we really looked over the car pretty well, make sure there was no dings or anything like that. And there was at some point the guys that were there with me, they tried to start consoling, except for the one jerk face whose shoulders are going like that. Like everybody was like, hey, don't, Aaron, it's all right, buddy. Like it happens. They certainly have to take a little bit of accountability. Like when you park there, like you knew there was going to be an idiot. You didn't know you were going to be the idiot, but like you knew there was a possibility. So they started to give some comfort, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, like there was just this overwhelming overwhelming sense of not good enough, and everybody knows it now. Like, there was this overwhelming sense of everyone sees that I don't belong here. I don't belong at this tournament. I don't belong being here. Like, there's nothing about it. And fortunately, these guys came, they consoled, and then I do just want to say, like, I piped the next drive, right? Like, it looked really, really, so much so that the greenskeeper who watched it go like this, he was like, that wasn't the same guy who hit the bins, was it? I was like, shut up, dude. So, but there was this sense and this need, this overwhelming awareness where I was different. I didn't belong in that place. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt the not good enoughness? Have you ever felt like your weakness, your insecurity, all the things that you're worried about? Everybody kind of sees. And maybe it's just not a weakness, but maybe it's just a difference that someone else doesn't approve of. Maybe you feel it when mom-in-law or dad-in-law or mom or dad come to the house, and suddenly they start looking at everything, and you know there's going to be some criticisms. You know where they're going to say, hey, you should really do this different. You know they're going to say, you're not raising your kids right. I didn't let you do that. You've got to do this differently. Maybe it's in co-working world, right, or with your boss, or maybe it's whenever you go with a group of moms, and all the moms seem like they have houses that kids don't live in, right? Like it just, there's this overwhelming sense and awareness of different. Don't belong. Not good enough. And there's this pressure that in order for you to accept me and to like me, to approve of me, I have to become who it is that you want me to be. Not good enough. It's a powerful motivator. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. I have. And that's what we're talking about today. We started a couple weeks ago a new series, as Aaron was saying a little earlier, called Idols. And essentially what an idol is, an idol is anything that we elevate to a position of authority in our life. It could be anything at all. But I love what St. Augustine says about it. He says that the matter, the challenge, the problem, the difficulty with living the holy lives that we want to live is a matter of disordered love. It's loving things out of their appropriate order. That's not just a Christian thing. That's a human thing, right? Well, whatever's at the top of your list, whether it's a person, whether it's a thing, that's what's going to call the shots in your life. That's idolatry. Whatever is at the top of the list is going to determine the steps that you take because we shape our lives around pleasing that person or attaining that thing. And Nate talked with us last week. I don't know why I pointed over there. He's not over there. Nate talked with us last week about power and how when power becomes something that becomes the ultimate thing, it just rattles everything and how it destroys relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out online. Go and listen to that. Today, we're talking about approval. And I know the thought, I know the argument. You may have even had someone who leaned over to you and said, I really don't care what people think about me. Yes, you do. Because you wouldn't have said that if you didn't want us to think you were cool for saying it, right? Approval is not a bad thing. And approval, I wouldn't even say is a desire so much as it is a need. A need for approval comes from an awareness of self. A need for approval comes from this awareness of that I'm not perfect. And so what we need in these moments is if you are a Christian, you became a Christian because you were aware that you fell short and you needed Jesus. The sense of approval. It's not a desire, it's a need, but maybe you are a person who generally walks through life with an understanding that none of us are perfect. None of us have everything together. Like we all have things that we're working on. And so the opinion and ideas of others generally don't bother you. Here's what I would ask you to consider. and here's what I would argue. There is someone in your world whose voice influences the things that you do. There is someone in your world that what they think about the decisions that you make influences the decisions that you make. Approval's not a bad thing. It just makes a crummy God. Because here's what happens. The danger with approval, the idol of approval creates a fear of rejection that places our identity and worth in the people around us. The idol of approval, when approval gets to the top of the list, when it becomes the ultimate thing that we have to have, we have to have it from the people around us, we have to have it from the person, whatever it may be, it shapes who you become. And what we avoid is this fear of rejection. All of the idols are connected to your identity. All the idols that we'll talk about in this series, they determine who you become. Approval is the only idol that places your identity in the hands of the people you seek to be approved by. You know this. In order to be approved by someone, you have to either become or show them something they would approve. And what happens is when approval becomes ultimate, your sense of value and worth is determined by the acceptance of the people around you. And it creates this internal tug of war. You see an example of this in John. Jesus is pretty far into his ministry at this point. He's at kind of rock star status. Like everyone who knows who he is. Some people like him, some people don't. There's some people who do believe in him. There's some people who don't believe in our life. It creates this internal tug of war. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want to do. In order for people to accept, approve, like, love, respect, I have to do this. And when approval's at the top of the list, it's always going to win. Your value, your worth, your identity is going to be in the hands of the people around you. And let's think about that for a second. What version of right and wrong do you choose today? We live in a world full of opinions. Everyone has an idea about the way you should or should not raise your kids. Everyone has an idea about what is right and what is wrong. And it's also people don't see the action that you do in light of who you are. They determine who you are based off of the action that you do. We see it with political affiliations, political views, religious views. You don't believe this. You are this. You see it with, again, like the way you raise your kids, the way you discipline your kids. You see it with whether you shop at Target or Walmart. I get that one a little bit. Like, don't go to Walmart. Like, there's nothing good that happens at that place. But like, we see these things in our life and people determine who we are based off of who we do. And when approval becomes our idol, it creates this exhausting desire to please. It creates this exhausting pursuit of a fragile approval that can be taken away at a moment's notice. Because when you gain someone's approval, in order to be approved by one is to be disapproved by the other. It's a dangerous place to be. It's a dangerous thing. And so the thing that we really need to take away from when we idolize approval, we ask people to fill a need that only God can satisfy. And so this exhausting race, this pull back and forth, this constant trying to, okay, I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this to this over here. Like we, it's exhausting. And you're always going to be left feeling less than because it highlights the differences and typically what we would assume as weaknesses where we've dropped the ball. It brings those to the surface. Because people, and again, let me reiterate, I want to make sure that you're not hearing the wrong thing in this. Approval, it's not bad. It just can never serve you the way that we're asking it to. Because we start looking at broken people to fill this need that we were designed to have filled by God. And so approval from people just creates this fragile pursuit of never good enoughness, never quite arrived yet. The best person that I've seen, the best story throughout scripture that I've seen to kind of illustrate the difference of a life defined by the fear of rejection and a life defined and transformed by the approval of Jesus is with the Samaritan woman. Let me read for you just a second, then we'll talk about it a little bit. This is in John chapter 4. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. We're going to put it on the big digital Bible in the sky, too, so you're more than welcome to read that one. But in John 4, starting in verse, I'm going to start in 4, but it from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. Verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews did not associate with Samaritans. If you've been in or around church very much, you've probably heard this story. Even if you haven't been around, you may have heard reference to it. But in case you aren't familiar with some of the implications of the details that John gave, right? So the fact that it says she went to the well at noon says a lot about the life that this lady was living and the life that she was avoiding. So going to gather water was a common practice from the women in that day, but they would typically go one to two times a day, but it would always be in the morning or just before sunset because it's a cooler portion of the day, right? So, but not just was it practically better to go at those times, but it was also a time and an opportunity for community. Like there was a lot of ridiculous restrictions on women in that day and the way that they could function in public and especially around men and things of that sort. So whenever they would gather at the well, it was an opportunity for them to just be. Like they could hang out. They could hang out in their community. They could have conversations. They could talk about whatever it is they needed to talk about. They were just free to be there. And the fact that this lady, when at noon, shows us she was intentionally trying to avoid the people from her own town. Like she went at a time when she wasn't expecting anyone else to be there. And not only that, there's a lot of scholars and a lot of theologians point to that there was a lot of springs of water, a lot of wells closer to her village that she could have went to. So not only did she go at a time when she was expecting not to see someone, just in case, I'm going to go to a place further off. Like we don't know if, we don't know for certain if it was an idol of approval that she was dealing with. But what we do have a very good indicator of is she was avoiding rejection. She was avoiding the fingers. She was avoiding the conversations. Because what we find out a little later in the story is the life that she's living, some of the mistakes that she's made, some of the things that she's done would have been frowned upon by her community. And so what we can see in her life is that she is being shaped by an avoidance of rejection, which is a good indicator that there's a lack of approval in her world. I struggle with this. I struggle with the idol of approval much more than I'm proud of. Like, it rears its head up often. Like, I just need people to like me, partially because I'm so awesome, but also because the, like, no, there's just this, it's just something that pops up. Like, all of the idols do. I think they were all susceptible at different times. But this is the one that seems to pop up with me more often than not. And I was having a conversation with a couple of, actually three different people. So y'all are the fourth person I've ever told. Don't tell anybody else. An analogy that I used is with every interaction, every person, there's a brick wall. There's an imaginary brick wall. And the less bricks that are on that wall is an opportunity for me to come over. It's you accepting me, you bringing me in, you respecting me, you thinking whatever it is that I need you to think of me. It's I need you to love me, I need you to welcome me, I need you to do whatever. The less bricks that are there, the closer that I get to being fully brought in by someone. But the more bricks that are there is just the opposite, right? The more bricks that are there, it's more of a reason for you to not accept me. It's more of a reason for you not to like me. And so what I had told these people in this analogy was it feels like at times every conversation, every interaction, it doesn't matter if it's at like a rehearsal, it doesn't matter if we're hanging out and passing and going to grab lunch, if I'm passing you and barely talking to you in Walmart, in certain seasons of my life, it feels like every conversation I'm carrying a brick. I'm either putting a brick onto the wall and giving you a reason to not take me, to not like me, to not love me, to not accept me, or I'm taking a brick off of the wall. It's an exhausting pursuit. You're constantly carrying this weight of being whatever people need you to be, whatever people want you to be, oftentimes at the sacrifice of your own personal convictions, your own personal beliefs, your own ideas of who you want to be. We've all stood on the other side of a decision of regret. Like, why did I do that? For me, in my life, most of those decisions have been on the other side of, I've got to either remove a brick or I've got to put one up. That's an indicator for me. I didn't realize it until like I was writing this sermon this week, that whenever I feel that weight, whenever these moments start to happen in my life, when I feel like I'm either removing or putting a brick on, it's an indicator that approval is being elevated in my life. Not just simply because there's a need for it, but I'm looking to people for validation. I'm looking to people to affirm that I'm someone. I'm looking for people to help me realize that I am who I need to be and that I'm okay being who I am. I'm looking for people. That's an indicator. I don't know what it would be for you. Maybe that resonates with you. But some other indicators that approval has gotten really high on our list, is moving up the list in terms of desires, is when the one criticism speaks so much louder than 100 compliments. Like, you've got something, you've done something, you believe something, something happened, and there's so many people who are telling you, love that, you killed it, but there's one person, and that voice keeps you awake at night. When the idea of one person not liking you, being disappointed in you, thinking you messed up or that you let down, like it just rattles you to the core. Another indicator would be a lack of confidence, not just in you, but a lack of confidence in decisions that you have made or are making. And so what happens is we seek constant reassurance. I need validation. I need you to affirm that I'm doing the right thing. And honestly, in those seasons when approval is way up there, you can't make a decision without getting input from other people. These are indicators that we're seeking approval from a broken people. We're seeking approval from people who can never feel that need. This is what's happening in the world of the Samaritan woman. She's living a life avoiding the whispers, avoiding the reminders that she's not good enough, avoiding the reminders of the mistakes that she's made, and then she talks to Jesus. And this conversation changes everything in her world. Now, so something to understand, you saw that she was surprised that Jesus even approached her and talked to her. So remember, she's trying to avoid people. She's trying to avoid the people of her town. So she's going even further than what she needed to. And as she approaches Jesus, she's certainly thinking, okay, today's not the day that I'm gonna get a break from it. Because in this conversation, in this man, like with the man and woman, there was so many reasons why she would feel rejected by him. As she approached and as she got closer, as she saw that not just is he a man, but he's a Jew, as she got closer, she realized, oh man, there's religious tensions here that go back thousands of years. There's racial tensions there. There's cultural tensions that say men are not allowed to talk to women in public. Most husbands didn't even talk to their wives in public, much less a single man talking to a single woman in public. It just didn't happen. And as she got closer and closer and closer to the well, what had to start resonating with her a little bit more is, okay, today is going to be another day, just like the rest. But that's not what happened. Jesus talked to her. He broke cultural and religious norms, and he treated her like a person. Treated her not like she just had something, that he wanted something from her, but she had value in her world. And then there's a funny part of the conversation where they're talking about the water, and he's like, Jesus tells her, hey, so the water I've got, like, you won't ever be thirsty again. She's like, you ain't even got a bucket, man. Like, you asked me for water. How you got water? Like, what are you talking about? And then this happens in verse 14. Maybe not 14, 15. Actually, I'm going to go to 13. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst. This is quite true. So she goes and approaches and has this conversation, and then comes the question, right? Jesus brings up this very thing that has shaped her life. Jesus brings up what is likely the very thing that is causing her to feel rejected by the people in her town and need to be approved. It's the very thing that's made her feel not good enough. And Jesus, you had to bring that up? Like, you can't really, like, Jesus knows everything everything. He knows everything. Like he just told her. So you have to kind of ask this question. Like Jesus, why did you have to bring this up? I really don't think it was because he wanted to remind her. See, you're not quite perfect, are you? See, here's this thing in your life. You got to get this worked out. You got to fix it. She didn't need reminding of that. I think that Jesus brought up the question because he wanted to let her know, you don't have to do that here. You don't have to pretend with me. You don't have to feel the weight of your failures. You don't have to feel like you are the sum total of your mistakes. You don't have to feel like you have to be someone else in order to be accepted, approved, and loved by me. For the first time in probably a very long time. This lady who has been rejected time and time again comes to a conversation with someone who knows everything and welcomes her in. And suddenly there's a rest. I don't have to chase. I don't have to be. I can just be. I don't have to conform to what your idea of good and bad is. I can just rest in the approval of Jesus. And it changes her life forever. You can come on up here. It changes her life forever. What's incredible is you read throughout the rest of the story, there's a boldness and confidence after finding this approval that she runs back to the town. She runs, she leaves her water jug. She runs back to town, back to the place where she has faced rejection over and over again, back to the place where she's reminded you're not good enough, back to the place that people have told her and made her feel like you don't belong here. You're not one of us. You aren't good enough. We'll never approve of you until you fix everything. She's a boldness and a confidence that takes her back to that place and resting in the approval of Jesus, she becomes the person these people need in their life. She has influence on her community. She has influence in the people's lives around her. Resting. Listen to me. This is just an aside. I said I wasn't going to say it, but I want to. And so here we are. The people in your life that you feel like you have to measure up for, the people in your life who rely on you and depend on you, the people in your life who need something from you, what they need from you is to be the person that Jesus is asking you to be. Jesus is not going to lead you to be a poor wife, a poor husband. This lady, this, the first evangelist, I think she, she was, she was the first person to hear, hey, wait, you're the Messiah? And she went back to her, and she had influence in the lives of people who wanted nothing to do with her. When the voice of Jesus became the voice that she rested in, when the voice of Jesus became the voice that she found her approval, she found her identity, she found her life in, it changed her world. She realized that she didn't have to be all things to all people. There were certainly still people there, still people in her community that didn't respect, that didn't like. They may have still whispered. There were certainly people in her community who still didn't listen to what she had to say. But the beautiful part about it is after she found rest in the approval of Jesus, she didn't need them to anymore. They were no longer shaping who she became. Whose voice are you listening to? In certain seasons of your life, whose voice are you listening to? Do you know what Jesus thinks about you? Like, do you know what God thinks about you right now, knowing you fully? Ephesians 2.10 is one of my favorite verses. It's the Apostle Paul. He says that you are God's masterpiece chosen in Christ Jesus to do the good works that he prepared for you ahead of time. He says you are God's masterpiece. There's some versions that say worksmanship, craftsmanship, but the Greek word that Paul used there is poe. Let me look at it. I want to make sure I say it right. Well, I'm going to read it. Those are the right letters. I'm going to say it wrong. Poema. He says, you are God's poema. It's where we get our word poem from. Do you know what God thinks about you? You are his poetry. You are God's poem. His work of art that before time began, he loved. You do all of the things that you do, but do it from an awareness that you have of God who looks at you as his work of art. Let's pray. God, thank you so much. Thank you for the love, the life, the grace that you offer. God, there's going to be seasons, some of us more often than others, when the need and desire for approval begins to become our focus, when image management becomes the thing that we work on the most because we need people to let us in. God, what I ask you to do is just with the softness and gentleness of your Holy Spirit, remind us. Remind us who we are in you. Remind us of the life, the freedom, and the rest that we found in you as our Savior. And let us live our life, God, from a position of approval from God instead of seeking the approval of man. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

All right. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. First things first, to my Wolfpack friends, no jokes this morning. Well done. That was a fun run. You guys should have enjoyed that. I hope you had fun. I'm sorry it ended with an 8'11 buzzsaw yesterday, but that was a good run, lots of fun. I tried, just so you know, I pulled out, I have one shirt that's Wolfpack colors, a black and red flannel. I pulled it out this morning, and I'm fat, so I had to switch it out to the big boy shirt, but I was with you in spirit, I promise. Also, before I jump into the sermon, I don't normally do this, but there's something coming up I want to tell you about, and I want to tell you about it because of what's been going on, excuse me, kind of behind the scenes in discussions with our missions committee and on our elder board. So you probably heard Aaron say a few minutes ago something that we say regularly, which is 10% of everything that's given goes to ministries happening outside the walls of grace. It's our conviction to be generous as we ask you to be generous. And so the missions committee, which predates me, that was here before I got here, is the group of people from the church with a heart and experience in missions who determines where that 10% goes. They determine who we partner with. So we have three local partners and three international partners, and they're the ones that make sure that we're partnering with the right people in the right ways. And one of the things that they've been talking about, and one of the things that the elder board has been talking about, and so as two separate bodies, we've been talking about this together, is how can we get the partners of grace, you guys, more involved with our ministry partners beyond just passively giving and seeing 10% of that go to ministries outside the walls of grace. And so we've been actively looking for opportunities for our partners, church partners, to get involved with our ministry partners outside the walls. And so we've got that opportunity coming up next Sunday. Addis Jamari is one of our ministry partners that we support. They're doing wonderful work with families and orphans in Ethiopia. The thing that's near and dear to my heart is poverty is so pressing there that when a young family or a young mother has a child, she's very often faced with the decision of, do we give this baby up for adoption because we can't afford it, or do we lose our home or lose something else? Do we keep this baby because we're not sure that we can feed it? Which, to my knowledge, no one in faced that choice that's an excruciating decision and so by supporting them we're able to provide those mothers the resources they need to to keep their babies at home and not have to give them up for adoption which is a huge huge deal so to that end as we seek to continue to support at a story there's a trip this summer some of the teens are going and beyond the teens we have three adults from our church who are also going and so there's a fundraiser for that trip and it's a trip this summer. Some of the teens are going. And beyond the teens, we have three adults from our church who are also going. And so there's a fundraiser for that trip, and it's a way to get involved. There's a barbecue next Sunday. Wes, where is the barbecue? It's at Falls River Slim Club. That's right. Okay, so Falls River, the Greenway Club over at Falls River. There's a barbecue. You can go there. You can get some food. You can take it home, watch the Masters. You can also contribute food to that, and you can just show up and volunteer. It'll probably be a good place to hang out. There's more information about that in the Grace Vine, and you can talk to Wes after. He's one of our elders, and he happens to be married to the lady running the joint, so he knows more answers than I do. So I just wanted you guys to be aware of that as an opportunity for us to begin to partner with our ministry partners. Now, as Mike alluded to, this morning we are starting a new series called The Treasury of Isaiah. I am particularly excited about this series because I think this series was Jen's idea. Jen's my wife. I think it was her idea back in the fall when I was asking her what we should talk about, and she said you should do some stuff out of Isaiah. And that's tough because Isaiah is 66 books. It's a book of prophecy in the Old Testament. It's got all the themes of prophecy in it, and it's 66 books long. And if I tried to preach through the book of Isaiah, you guys would probably find another church, and I would probably find a new job. So I don't think that's what we can do. But there's so many wonderful, rich texts in this book that what this series gives us an opportunity to do is to dive into those and begin to learn them and see them and appreciate what they are because we don't often spend time in Isaiah on a Sunday morning. So we're going to do that for the next seven weeks. Now next week, I'm going to work to give you an overview of the role of a prophet and prophecy and what it is. And we'll look at a big sweeping view of the messianic prophecies in Isaiah, the prophecies about Jesus. But before I can even do that, I have to jump into this text in Isaiah chapter 1. If you have a Bible, and I hope you do, I hope you're bringing your Bibles, I hope you're marking them up. This is a mark-up passage. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. In Isaiah chapter 1, we have these nine verses in Isaiah 10 through 18. And I know that I say that things are my favorite, but this is, and I mean this without equivocation, my favorite passage in Isaiah. In Isaiah. Okay? Maybe in the Bible, but definitely Isaiah. And I'm not even interested in approaching the rest of the book before we talk about this because I love the deep conviction of this passage. This passage kicks you right in the teeth. If you didn't come for that this morning, I'm sorry a little bit. But we see God speaking to his people in this passage about as harshly as you see him speak. And I'm the kind of person that needs you to do that to me or I'm not going to listen. So I love this passage. I love the conviction of it. I love the challenge of it. I love the relief of it. And in this passage, we find the very nature of the gospel. So my hope and prayer is that this passage can become for some of you what it has been for me for so many years. This is a hugely important passage. For just the slightest bit of context before I start to read it, this book is written to God's people, to the Hebrew people, to the Israelites. It is written to them at a time when they are spiraling morally away from God, when they have lost their way. And the role of the prophet Isaiah is to convict God's people. And that will become a very clear goal of his as we read this text. But God's chosen people, they have every reason to be following God. They know are they to me, says the Lord. I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and of fattened animals. I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of your blood? Listen. your worthless assemblies, your new moon feasts and your appointed festivals. Listen, I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Yo, God is big mad at his people. He's incredibly angry at his people. You can tell it with the way he starts off because he says, hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom, you people of Gomorrah. Listen, Sodom and Gomorrah to the ancient Hebrew mind were synonymous with evil. Those cities represented what evil was. It would be like calling a conservative Southern Baptist the mayor of Las Vegas. All right. It's it's when they think of that place, they think of sin and evil and debauchery. And they think of themselves as a shining people city on the hill. We are the chosen people of God. And guys go, no, no, no, no, no. Listen, listen, you sinners. Listen, you evildoers. You've lost your way. And then he goes down and he details for them. Here's what's interesting. He's not mad at them for the traditional sins that we would think of God being angry about. He doesn't say you're debaucherous, you're gluttonous, you're filled with lust, you're sleeping around, you're selfish, you're greedy, you're hoarding, you're oppressing the poor, you're mean and unkind to one another. He doesn't say those things. He actually gets onto them for doing things that he's asked them to do. Did you catch that? Look. He says, God, you asked us to give these sacrifices. The blood of bulls and lambs and goats, they mean nothing to me. God, you asked us to do that, he says, I detest them. They are a burden to me. It wears me out to have to deal with you when you show up on Easter. These are harsh words from God. And the question worth asking, if God is this angry with his people, then why does God hate the very actions he's prescribed? They were told to do those things. There's a whole book, the book of Leviticus, that details in painstaking detail exactly what they're supposed to do. If you've ever tried to read through the Bible in a year, two-thirds of you stopped in Leviticus. And it was because the book of Leviticus is laying out all of these things. When do we offer incense? When do we offer prayers? When do we offer sacrifices? What kind? When? Bulls and lambs and goats. When do we do that? When are the calling of convocation? New moons, new Sabbath, all the festivals? How do we do those? That's all in Leviticus. God has given them in detailed instruction exactly what he wants them to do. And now here in the book of Isaiah, he is raining down fire on them for doing those things. So why is it that God hates the very actions that he's prescribed? Because what God wants is the heart behind those actions, not the letter of the law and the actions themselves. We are told by David that God can despise sacrifices, but a fearful and contrite heart he will not despise. That God requires mercy and brokenheartedness, not sacrifice. God is interested in the heart behind the actions and the motives behind the obedience. He wants to see day in and day out that they actually love him and care for him, not just when they show up at church and go through the motions. I think of it like this, how the people of Israel were acting and what God was frustrated about. When I was in college, I think Jen and I started dating when we were, I was 20. So somewhere around the age of 20, 21. We're dating. And I had not really been in a serious relationship before this. I had been in relationships, but they weren't serious. And I didn't really know how to be in a relationship. I'm still not positive that I do. I think it involves vacuuming. And so we're dating. She knew how to be in a relationship. And she looked at me one day and she said, I can tell something's wrong and I'm kind of probing. And eventually she just says, I just don't feel very special to you. And I said, oh, I'm sorry. You are. So I don't really know how I handled that conversation. But we parted ways. She went back to her dorm, and I went back to my dorm. I lived in an on-campus house named Beulah. She lived in a small women's dorm named Troy Damron, and they were kind of reasonably close to one another. I went back, and I thought, gosh, my girlfriend doesn't feel special to me. I need to figure something out here. So I came up with a plan. I went to Walmart, and I bought a king-size bed sheet. And this is not going where you think it's going. This is a Christian college. So I got a king-size bed sheet, and I lay it out on the living room floor. And my roommates are watching me do this, and I trace out in big block letters, Jen, you are very special to me. Love, Nate. I draw it out, and then I get the Crayola markers, and I'm coloring it in. I went through a whole pack. I was up to like 2 or 2.30 a.m. This is painstaking work here that I do, and then I sneak over to her dorm. We still have the sheet somewhere. I know that we own it. It's somewhere. I went over to her dorm and I tack it to the pillars on her front porch. So it's facing the front door. So everyone who comes out that door, the seven or eight girls that live there, they will see that clearly Jen is special to Nate and she will know beyond a shadow of a doubt what she means to me now. Let me tell you something. That did not get the response I thought it would. It turns out that what Jen wanted was for me, through the little things of day-to-day life, to indicate to her that I cared about her, that she was special to me. What she didn't want was a big, dumb, grand gesture with block letters that would provide sermon illustrations for decades to come. What they were offering God is the block letters. You are special to me, God. Happy? And God says, no, absolutely not. And what they were guilty of doing, and this is why God is coming down on them so hard, is they were going through the motions. They were going through the motions of their faith. They were doing the bare minimum required of them to be seen as in the faith. We're still good. I'm doing my sacrifices, God. I'm coming to the special assemblies. You know, can't make it every week, but Christmas and Easter, I'm your guy. And they were just going through whatever they decided was the bare minimum of what their faith required of them to prove to God and whoever else that they were in. And it's interesting to me that in the corporate world, we now actually have a term for this. It's a new term that we've been blessed with by the Gen Zers called silent quitting, where people who have corporate jobs understand that HR, God bless them, can sometimes make it really difficult to fire your butt when you deserve it. And they realize that they have some job security, not going anywhere, so they make a conscious decision to put in the minimal amount of effort possible that will still allow them to keep their job and collect a paycheck, while fairly clearly communicating to everyone around them, I couldn't care less about this job. Just in it for the check. Doesn't mean anything to me. Now, I know that's a harsh way of depicting that, and I do actually see some positives to it, but I'm not making a joke. I think work-life balance got ridiculous, and the next generation is course-correcting for us a little bit. It's just going to be wonky. Anyway, sorry, that's social commentary. What God is telling the Israelites is, you're silent quitting on me. You're putting in the least amount of effort possible to still appear as if you're a people of faith. But you don't really care about me and what I've asked you to do and where your heart should be. And if you are at all like me, in my old Bible, I had a note next to these verses that said, Dear God, please don't ever get this angry with me. I never want to give God a reason to be this frustrated with me. That he says to me that when you bow your head to pray for me, to pray to me, I will not listen to you. When you come to church, you are trampling my courts. When you get up on Sunday and you put on your church finest and you show up at church, it is a burden to me. I am weary of your hypocrisy when you show up and pretend like you love me. And I want to write, God, please never be this angry with grace. And if you're like me, you're wondering, when and how do I go through the motions? When and how in my faith have I simply been giving God lip service? When and how have I silently quit on my faith? When the things I'm doing are just to be seen, are just to be considered in. I thought about enumerating the ways we can go through the motions. But I really think the more interesting thing to bring up when we consider how we might do this is to think about two things. I know for me, if I want to be honest about examining my life, about when I'm going through the motions of my faith, when I'm giving God the actions but not my heart, is to think through what motivates me when I do spiritual things. When I get up in the morning early to read my Bible? Am I getting up to read it so that I can check a box and say I've been spiritual today? Or am I getting up to read it because I just want to know the heart of God more? Because I'm curious about the scripture and I want to dive in in a fresh way. Do I get up to read it so that my Bible can be on my desk and my daughter can come down the stairs and see it there and I get the good dad award for today? Or am I doing it because I want to pursue the very heart of God? When I listen to worship music in the morning with Lily in the car, am I doing it so that she thinks daddy listens to worship music in the morning? Or am I doing it because that's what sets my heart right for my day? When we go to Bible study, we attend small group. Am I doing that because I want the people around me to think that I'm spiritual and I'm the kind of person who reads my Bible and attends small group? Or am I doing it because I want to be spiritually nourished by my community of faith? When you come to church, are you doing it because you're supposed to and there's somebody that you want to see and you want to keep up appearances? Or are you doing it, are you getting out of the car with the thought, God, speak to my heart and move me closer to you today? When you perform spiritual actions, prayer for a service, prayer before a meal, leading a small group, attending a small group, showing up and partnering and serving with something in the community, what is motivating that service? Is it the way that service will make you appear? Is it how it positions you in the eyes of others? Or is it because you can't help but serve your God? Let me tell you. When we do spiritual things for the way it makes us look to other people, we are going through the motions, and our hypocrisy is burdensome and wearying to God. The other thing that we think about to assess if we're going through the motions. Can I say with authenticity that I'm the same person on Friday night that I am on Sunday morning? Is there one version of me that everyone in my life sees? And you see it on Sunday morning. You see it on Monday afternoon. You see it when my kids are driving me nuts. You see it on Friday night and I've got some freedom and I can cut loose. You see it on Saturday at the tailgate. Am I the same person everywhere I go? Or do I put on different faces for different people to appear in different ways at different times? Because if we are not the same person in all of the pockets and circles of our life, then somewhere we're going through the motions. Either we're faking being like the world, and we don't really mean it, or we're faking being godly, and we don't really mean that. And normally, people who are walking with Jesus and zealous about him don't bother faking it for the world. What motivates your spiritual actions? How consistent is your character with the people that you see? Are there different versions of you? Because if there are, you might be going through the motions too. And this temptation to go through the motions of our faith without meaning it with sincerity, without being properly motivated, is a trap into which the historical church has fallen in over and over again. There is not a single person here who's been a Christian for more than three days who has not at some point gone through the motions. You may be sitting right now in deep conviction, thinking, Father, I've been going through the motions for years. And if you are feeling that, good. I'm not going to disavow you of that. Sit in it. It's helpful. And we should be asking, if all of those things are simply going through the motions, then what things does God want from me? What does he want me to do? What actions does he require of us that can begin to shift our heart towards him and prove to him that we're in this for him? What does God actually want from us? I'm glad you asked because Isaiah answers that question. In verses 16 and 17, he says this, wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. What does God actually want me to do? If he doesn't want me to go to church and pretend, if he doesn't want me to just do sacrifices and tithe and go to small group, what does he actually want me to do? I'll tell you what he wants you to do. He wants you to stop doing evil. Learn to do right. Defend the cause of the oppressed. Seek justice. Defend the widow and the orphan. Care for those who can't care for themselves. That's what he wants his Christians to do. That's what he wants his children to do. He wants you to go do the things you can't fake. Go do the stuff you have to really mean. And listen, this verse 16 and 17, this resolution, stop going through the motions. Stop faking your faith. Stop being insincere and burdening me with your hypocrisy. Go and do what I actually want you to do. And what is it that he actually wants us to do? It's to defend the cause of the fatherless and plead the case of the widow. It's to pursue justice and correct oppression. And I don't know of sitting with a group of men Friday morning talking about this topic and I became so frustrated with how I was taught my faith because I don't know where we decoupled justice and defending the cause of the fatherless and the widow and caring for those who can't care for themselves. I don't know where we decoupled that from the message of the gospel, but somewhere along the way in our churches, we made it optional and it's not. James tells us at the end of the Bible, true religion that is pure and undefiled before the Lord is to do this, is to take care of the widows and the orphans. Why is it widows and orphans? Because in the ancient world, those two were down and out. If you're an orphan, they did not have orphanages that you could go to that would feed you and care for you until you were 18 and send you to college. You begged in the street until you died. If you were a widow, your husband had died, and you did not have children to care for you and bring you into their home, you begged until you died. There's no social safety net. So when God says care for the orphan and the widow, does he mean specifically them? Yes, and he still does. But what he really means is those who can't care for themselves. That's why in the laws in the Old Testament over and over again, we see this principle of gleaning. When you're plowing your fields, leave the corners of them unharvested so that the sojourner, the alien, the homeless, the oppressed, the marginalized, the widow and the orphan can eat off of your field. That's theirs and it actually belongs to them. And if you harvest all of your field, then you're actually stealing from the oppressed and participating in the oppression. I'm not going to belabor this point too much because we may have a whole series about this coming up. But whenever we see the heart of God revealed, it is always for those who have less than us. When you see the idea of giving in the New Testament, it is almost always associated with giving to the poor. When you see Jesus handle the poor, he says, whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me. When Jesus begins his ministry, he goes to the poor, blessed the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. You see him caring for the oppressed. So if we want to do the things that God really wants us to do, then we have to, in a non-nebulous, very specific way, get involved with caring for those who can't care for themselves. Go to the Ades Jumari thing next week. Dip your toe in it. See what it's like. Start to talk to people in your community and find out how you can be a part of that. This is not a theoretical, metaphoric instruction. This is a literal instruction. That if we are guilty of going through the motions and the thing that God wants us to do is to care for those who can't care for themselves. So let's get active about that. Now here's the thing that I love about this passage. Because you might be thinking to yourself, why is this one your favorite? This is a little rough. Here's why. Because it doesn't end in verse 17. In verses 10 through 15 we have this tremendous conviction. You're going through the motions and your hypocrisy is burdensome to me. I'm weary of you. And then in 16 and 17, we have this very high challenge. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Stop being dumb. Learn to be good. Go and do it. What do I want you to do? I want you to care for the poor. Go care for the poor. Go. But then we get verse 18. And verse 18 is the best. And verse 18 kind of, to me, feels like this. Sometimes in my home, my daughter Lily and I can clash. We're very similar. And that means that sometimes our words get sharp. And sometimes there's a little battle of will about whose words are going to be louder. And I win those. But sometimes I wish I hadn't. And whenever we clash, whenever she's gotten in trouble and she feels bad, I always go find her or she'll come to me and I'll pull her alongside of me and I'll hug her and I'll kiss her little head and I'll say, I love you. I'm proud of you. It's going to be okay. You're going to do better. I'm going to do better. Because I don't want it to end with the conviction and the challenge. I want to call her alongside and I want to comfort her. And when I read verse 18, to me it has the tone of God coming alongside us, putting his arm around us, and telling us it's going to be okay. Here's what he says in verse 18. Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. I love that verse because we experience the conviction of 10 15. And the challenge of 16 to 17 to go make it right. But then in 18, God sidles up next to us, puts his arm around us, comforts us and says, but hey, this isn't all on you. You've messed up, sure. But though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. How does he do that? Through shedding the blood of his own son that's prophesied about later in this book. So that when God looks at you, he doesn't see all the times you've walked through the motions. He doesn't see all the times you've failed to help the poor. He doesn't see all of your shortcomings and misgivings. And he is not burdened by you or weary of you. He sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ and he is happy to pull you up alongside him and put his arm around you. So really, this is the reason why I love this passage. Because Isaiah 1, 10 through 18 is the gospel. It is the gospel. Do you see this? See, I think a big problem with the American church is that we start the gospel message at verse 18. We start the gospel message at verse 18. We begin it right there. Hey, guess what? Jesus died on the cross for you, so you're not accountable for your sins. Hooray. Just accept him and walk with him. And I think that's the reason why we have people going through the motions in their faith. Because all they need to know is, what's the minimum amount I have to do to stay right with God for that salvation to count for me? What are all the things I can do over here that I'll be forgiven for eventually? What's the minimum amount of the things that I need to believe so that I'm in and God loves me and that salvation accounts for me? And what do I have to do? What's the get in the door price for this salvation? Because we started the gospel at verse 18. But when we do that, we cheapen the power of the gospel. The power of the gospel operates in direct proportion of our realization of our need for it. The power of the gospel resonates more deeply with you the more deeply your own sin resonates with you. The more deeply your own shortcomings resonate with you. And that's why we experience the relief of verse 18 because we have the conviction of 10 through 15. Oh my goodness, God is so angry. And then we have the challenge of 16 and 17. Go and start doing right, but God, that's so hard. And then we have the relief of verse 18. And so what I want us to do now is I'm going to read all nine verses in the tone and inflection in which I think they're intended. And we're going to collectively feel the relief of verse 18 when we get there. And you in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. When you come to appear before me, who asks this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing me meaningless offerings. Your incense is detestable to me. New moon Sabbaths and convocations, I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your new moon feast and your appointed festivals, I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong. Learn to do right. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless. Plead the case of the widow. Come now, let us settle the matter, says the Lord. Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. Though they are like crimson, I will make them like wool. That's the power of the gospel. The power of the gospel is to feel deeply the conviction in 10 through 15. And if you're here this morning, I've prayed that you would feel the necessary conviction. If you have been going through the motions, in part or in whole, it's not news to God. Confess it to him. If you're challenged by 16 and 17, and you think honestly about your life, and you go, gosh, I don't know what I'm doing for the poor and the oppressed. I don't know what I'm doing to correct injustice. Then let that conviction determine you to find ways to get involved in that. And then, and then, once we've sat in the conviction and we've sat in the challenge, then sit in the comfort of verse 18 and the gift of the gospel and allow that gratitude from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. Allow that grace that has been poured out from you from his fullness that it's not all on you to go do all the right things, but that God is already working in and through you and you are forgiven for the times when you've fallen short. Let the gratitude of that motivate the right behaviors and let the things that look like going through the motions be an outpouring of the faith that you've expressed through helping the poor and seeking justice for the oppressed. But we will never do those things if we do not allow God to bring us to a place of tremendous gratitude and comfort of the words of the gospel and the promise that we can reason together and though our sins are like scarlet, he will make them as white as snow. So I'm going to pray. And as I pray, if you need to pray to God on your own, do that. If you need to confess to God that you've been going through the motions of your faith, confess it. If you need to confess to God, I'm not doing anything for justice or oppression, confess it and ask that he would show you what to do. And if you are not overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the gospel and him covering over your shortcomings, ask God to fill you with gratitude. And if you are filled with gratitude, express that to him. As I pray, you pray, and then we'll have a chance to sing together. Father, thank you for your servant Isaiah. Thank you for the power of your words through him. God, we know that at different times and in different ways, our hypocr forget the conviction, but that we will allow the power of your word to rest on us. Father, I pray for myself and openly confess I go through the motions all the time. But Lord, I pray that you would imbue my actions with a sincerity filled with gratitude. I pray that for the people here as well. God, give us the courage to be convicted and to confess. Show us ways to get involved with what matters most to you. And Lord, would we leave here with just a deep gratitude for your sending your son to cover over our sins. And though they are like scarlet, you will make them white as snow. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. You guys have not gotten the memo. Church attendance spikes in January and February and then begins to dip in March. There's too many of you here. I hope this is a problem we continue to have. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I've really enjoyed getting to spend the last four weeks in the Upper Room Discourse, the final statements of Jesus to his disciples the night that he was arrested and crucified. And so we are calling this series His Final Thoughts because these are the last things he shares with just the intimate group of disciples. And we find this discourse in John, the back half of chapter 13, all the way through chapter 17, where we get this beautiful prayer of Christ called the High Priestly Prayer. I'm excited to be focused on that for two weeks here in another few weeks. But like Mike, our double-duty coffee guy and announcer guy this morning told us, we spent last week in the concept of abiding in Christ and why it's so important. And last week I said that the invitation to abide in Christ is a gift of simplicity amidst a world of confusion and chaos. That we're all asking ourselves these major questions. Am I making the right decision? And am I being a good fill in the blank, whatever you are. And that when we abide in Christ, the promise there is that Jesus will say yes, that we will do what we are supposed to do and that we will be what we are supposed to be when we simply focus on abiding in Christ. And we left off with this question of that's great, but life is still confusing and chaotic. Life is still very busy. I still have to do carpool. I still have to make the meetings. I still have to make the calls. I still have to do the things. I still have to live a life. So how do I abide in Christ, short of going to a monastery, in my life now? How do I abide? And so that's what we're tackling this week. So this week's sermon, really, if I'm being honest, is more of a seminar. This is intended to be practical and to be applicable to your life. So I would tell you up front that I do not expect everybody in the room to do all the things that I'm saying. Some of us aren't ready for them yet. Some of us have already started doing those things. Some of them it's not new. So I don't expect everything I say and suggest this morning to go, oh my gosh, that's so great. I've never thought about that. But my hope and my prayer is that there can be two or three things that you hear that will change your life because you begin to instill them into your life and it changes the course of your life. So that's my goal for you, that you'd pick up just a handful of things this morning that you can begin to apply in your life right away. As we answer this question together, how do I abide in Christ just day in and day out? How do I walk with the Lord? So to remind us of what we're talking about, I just wanted to start off by reading the passage. It's not going to be on the screen. And we're having some gremlins on the screen this morning. So if all of a sudden it just goes out, don't worry about it. Just keep following along. The only song we have left is How Great Thou Art. Most of you know it. So we'll be all right. If you have a Bible, open to John chapter 15. Read with me verses 4 and 5. This is where we are last week and this week. Jesus is speaking. Remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. And we talked last week about how some translators choose the word remain and some choose the word abide. I memorized this passage or got acquainted with this passage with an abide translation, so that's why I say abide. But the concept is the exact same. So here's what I want to do. As we ask the question, how do we day-to-day abide in Christ? What I want to do is I want to give you three guiding principles for abiding in Christ, and then we want to look at how we can apply those guiding principles to the different areas of our life, to our work or our school, to our home, to our friendships, and then to our alone time. So that's where we're going to go this morning. First of the three guiding principles to how can I daily abide in Christ is simply anchor your day in Christ. If you want to abide in Christ, anchor your day in Christ. If you have been here, if you have come to more than four services, you have heard me say at some point 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. It's what I consider a keystone habit. There are some habits that are so fundamental that they begat other habits. This is one of those for us, especially for believers. We need to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer for myriad reasons. But if you're a parent, how are you going to teach your children the scriptures if you don't know them? If there's a verse in the Bible that says, I will hide God's word in my heart that I might not sin against you, how are we going to do that if we don't study the Bible on our own? How are we ever going to become acquainted with God's word in such a way that we can teach it and instruct it and know it and it nourishes us if the only bit of God's word are what we're getting from church every Sunday. It just won't work. This Sunday, I just read you two verses that I read you last Sunday. I'm going to read you one more verse in Philippians. That's the verse eight. Aaron read six, or where did you start? Four. Four through seven. And then I'm going to do eight. All right? So that's five verses or four verses, however the math works there. And then two more right now. That's it. That's all you're getting this week if you're not reading the Bible on your own. So we've got to read the Bible on our own. Similarly, we've got to pray on our own. We have to pursue the presence of God. We have to find a spot, get on our knees, and pray. I think posture is important in prayer. I'm not saying you have to do it. I'm just saying it helps me when I pray. And, you know, I know that some people say I'm not a morning person. I like to do my quiet time later in the day. That's fine. Do it whenever you want to do it. But for me, I anchor my day in it. I've got to start out that way. Find a place, find a habit that works for you and anchor your day in Christ by having a quiet time. If you don't know how to have a quiet time, if you're in a rut, if you need some suggestions, if you just like some more information, I've done a couple of things. I wrote a daily devotion guide. It's on the information table out there. We have two tables. We have a coffee table and an information table. You guys can piece it together where it is. This is just a guide on how much do I read, where do I read, when I pray, what do I pray about, how do I pray. And there's some resources in there. So if you're in a rut, there's some suggestions of some places that you can go and know how to have a quiet time. So I made that for you guys if you need it. And then there's also one of these, a Bible translation guide. There's a bunch of different translations of the Bible. A lot of times I get asked which one's right for me, which one should I be reading? And this is the answer, okay? This kind of tells you there's three major approaches to how translations are done, and I detail those, and that might help you as you decide which one you want to use in your daily study. But the first guiding principle is to anchor our day in Christ. We have to start with a quiet time if we're going to hope to be walking with Christ through the day. The second one is to practice the presence of Christ. If we want to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ. I'm stealing this phrasing from a 17th century French monk named Brother Lawrence. I don't know what his actual name was, but when he went to the monastery, he took on the name Brother Lawrence. It's called The Practice of the Presence of God. It is the single best book on prayer I've ever read. I believe for some of you, the thing you're supposed to get from the sermon this morning is to go read The Practice of the Presence of God. You can write that down on your bulletin or type it out on your phone, and then you don't have to listen anymore. As a matter of fact, if you want to leave to just make some space for other people, you can do that. Go get the book and read. It's a phenomenal book, Practice the Presence of God. But one of the things I pulled from that is this idea of being constantly with Christ, just knowing that wherever I go, I'm taking Him with me. And so it taught me this little phrase that sometimes I'm spiritual enough to remember, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, if you're a Christian, he tells us in the upper room discourse that he gives us the spirit. We have his spirit with us. Everywhere we go, I am with Christ, Christ is with me. As I go into a meeting at work, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. As I go into my office, as we go into traffic, as we go into the store, as we interact with the slow person behind the cash register, I am with Christ. Christ is with me. Everywhere we go, this should be our mantra. This should be what we repeat to ourselves. We take it into and out. We take him with us into and out of every situation. On the golf course, I am with Christ. At work, I am with Christ. At home, I am with Christ. Practicing the presence of Jesus. A story that kind of brings this home for me that I heard years ago. I heard it one time and I've never forgotten it. And I think I may have told it to you guys before, but indulge me. This is not a true story. This did not actually happen. If it did actually happen, it would be super weird. So it's a fable, all right, but it makes a good point. So there's this church, and there's this one guy in the church who's known just to be a phenomenal prayer. He has a remarkable prayer life. He's incredibly disciplined. He's the guy they always call on for the public prayers. Prayers are beautiful. And he's just this monkish spiritual figure in the church. Everyone respects him. Darn it. Chris Lott is a buddy of mine. He's sitting right here. He's looking at me, and I just edited about four jokes at his expense, and then I lost my train of thought because you had some sort of dumb grin on your face because you knew. Because you knew it. You knew I was thinking that, didn't you? Yeah, that's right. All right, well, let's get back on track, buddy. I don't even know what I was talking about. Oh, the story. The story. This godly guy, the story. Well, sorry. Then the lights were shining off your head. I got distracted again. So some guys from the church said, we want to hear his prayer life. We want to hear. He's such a great prayer. I bet his prayer at the end of the day is phenomenal. I want to hear his prayer at the end of the day. I want to know what his conversation is with God when he closes out his day and goes to bed. And so they decide what they're going to do, and this is how we know it's not true, is they hide in his closet. We're going to hide in his closet. We're going to wait for him to go to bed. So they're in there. They're doing whatever you do when you're hiding in somebody's closet. And then he comes in. It's nighttime. It's 930. It's time to tuck in. And so he does his routine. He brushes his teeth. He does whatever he does. And then they're expecting he's going to kneel next to the bed. He's going to pray. But he doesn't kneel. It's weird. He just gets in. And they're like, okay, I didn't think laying down prayer. But maybe he's trying to prostrate himself like Christ did in the garden. Maybe that's what he's doing. He's going to pray that way. And he gets in, and he pulls up the covers, and he rolls over, and all they do is hear him say, goodnight Jesus. And that was it. Which makes a phenomenal point about an active, everyday, constant prayer life, and obedience to Paul's instructions in Thessalonians, pray without ceasing. So if we are going to abide in Christ, we have to practice the presence of Christ and bring him with us everywhere we go and talk to him constantly. Now, I know some people are actually pretty good at this. Some people are actually pretty good at doing what I just call like kind of sniper shot prayers throughout the day. Just kind of one-offs of God help me here, God help me here, God help me here. And that's great. And then other people are good at the basing foundational prayer where we pray about all the things in the morning. And some people are good at both, and that's really great. But if you are good at one and not the other, then maybe turn the dial on the other and let's see that prayer life start to escalate. But that's practicing the presence of Christ. The third guiding principle, and I think this one's so important, especially now, is consume what draws you to Christ. Consume what draws you to Christ. And I use that word consume very intentionally because I believe we have got to be, if we consider ourselves, if we consider whoever's alive one generation, we have got to be the most consumptive generation of humans that have ever walked the planet. We have to be. We are all day, every day. And the younger you get, the worse it is. All day, every day, taking things in, consuming things, conversation, media, TV, phone, all the time, radio, podcasts, all the time. It's just piped into it. The world has a funnel into our brain, just shoving information in there all the time. I mean, if you think about it, almost, I'm 42, I'll be 43 here in a little bit. So almost 30 years ago, I was sitting in the DMV getting my driver's license. And the DMV has made zero innovations in 30 years. And it's still just as satanic as it was then. It's terrible. It's the worst place on earth. And when you go there, because they have engineered it to make you hate it, it's slow. It takes forever. And when I was waiting two hours to go back a car up into some cones, I, you know what I did for those two hours of the DMV? Nothing. You just sat there and you stared at the wall and you counted bricks and you wondered why it was taking so long, and you thought about your life. You contemplated all the decisions that had led you there. If you wanted something to do at the DMV, you took a book. You took a Sudoku thing or something. I don't think they had invented Sudoku in 1997. But you know what you do now? When you have 30 seconds of dead time, you have 30 seconds of something not entertaining you, don't raise your hand. How many of you at traffic lights grab your phone? He's like, I don't know what to do anymore. And you just grab it because you need something to look at, something to inform you, something that you consume. We are the most consumptive generation of people who have ever existed. We have no dead space in our life. So just as an aside, we should seek silence and stillness sometimes so that the Lord can speak to us. But living in the reality of how consumptive we are, when you do consume things, we need a filter. Is this pushing me closer to Jesus or is it pulling me away from him? Is this inspiring me and increasing my desire for Christ or is it decreasing my desire for Christ? The things that we have that take up our attention every day, we ought to at least assess whether or not they are inflaming us and impassioning us towards Jesus or whether they are blunting and muting that passion so that it fades away. We should at least be aware of that. And I'm not advocating that I think it's possible to just pipe spiritual things into ourselves at all times. But I am certain that all of us have some room to grow there. This is the reason why last year I took social media off my phone. Because I just got tired of the time that I was wasting on it and what I was consuming. There's only so many falling videos you can watch in a row before you feel like this can't be edifying twitter just made me angry now i will admit i have tick tock and i need to take that off my phone because it's too often that i'm not doing anything and then now all of a sudden i'm watching dumb videos we need to at least know what we're consuming what are we filling our brains with when we get in the car, when we go on a run, when we sit down at our office, when we have some alone time, when we're doing yard work? What are we consuming? And is what I'm consuming pushing me towards Christ or pulling me away from Christ? So those are the three guiding principles. Anchor your day in Christ, practice the presence of Christ, and then consume what draws you to Christ. If you apply those three things in your life, you will be abiding in Christ. Now, how do we practically do this? I want to look at work, I want to look at home, I want to look at fun, and I want to look at alone. So, at work, how do we practice these principles? Well, one thing that I do, it's the easiest for me in my schedule, is the very first thing I do when I get into the office most days is I pull out my Bible and I read, and then I kneel and I pray. I'm actually lately been thinking I need to switch up that habit, and I'm just saying this for the parents in the room. I have vivid memories in middle school and high school of coming downstairs every morning, and my mom's Bible would be open on the table next to her chair, and there'd be a coffee mug, usually with some lipstick on it. And there was evidence there that she had been spending time in the Word. And that gave me respect for her when she started instructing me on spiritual things. And I don't know what you think it would be like to be my parent, but it wasn't easy. I'll tell you that. But seeing the evidence. Of her dedication to Christ. Gave me respect. And I listened. And so now I've got a daughter. Who's starting to notice things. And I'm going to try to shift. My quiet times back to my office. At home. So that when she gets up. She can see it too. because I have that memory. So parents, if you've got kids growing up in the house, what do you want them to see? Can they see your devotional habits? But for some of us, maybe it makes more sense to have it at work. A very easy way to anchor our day in Christ at work and to practice the presence of Christ at work is to pray before everything. We park. Pray before you get out of the car. Father, remind me that you're with me. Remind me that I'm representing you. Be with me as I go. If you're working from home, when you do whatever you do to tell yourself, now I'm locked in and I'm working, before you do that, pray, Father, be with me today. Carry Christ with you into meetings. Before you go into meetings, pray over the meeting. Before you do the call, pray over the call. Before you write the report, pray over the report. Before you do anything in your work, pray over it. Give it to God. Acknowledge that he is with me and I am with him. And let me just speak especially to the people in the room who lead other people, to the people in the room with direct reports, bosses. It is, I realized it this week, I had not articulated it before, but it's a big goal of mine because we do have, I think, an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. If you're a leader and you call grace home, it is my fervent prayer that the people who work for you would say that their life is better because you're in it, because you care about them and you lead them well. So if you're a leader and you're about to have a conversation with a team member, especially if that conversation is hard or potentially negative or has some conflict or it's critical, please pray before that meeting. Pray before they come into your office. Pray before you pick up the phone. Pray and ask for the Spirit to be with you in that conversation. Practice the presence of Christ in your workplace. How do we practice the presence of Christ in our home? Well, I think it's very similar. One thing, right off the bat, is mom, dad, when you're out and you're working and you're coming home, right? And you know, you know what it is. You're going to open that door. There's going to be a whirlwind of noise. Everything is going to need, everybody is going to need everything from you all at once, right away. You know that routine. Stop and pray. I have a friend who says he, when his daughters were young, he used to pull off the side of the road about a mile short of the house. And he would stop and decompress and take off career hat and put on dad hat and pray that God would be with him before he walked in. And once he felt like he was in the right space, he pulled in the driveway. He was present for his children. He was present for his wife. Stop and bring Jesus with you and that peace into the house. Wake up every day. Spend time in God's word and time in prayer there at your home. Ask yourself, and I think this is a conversation that everybody in the church should have. If you live alone, then you consider it on your own. If you live with other people, talk with them, talk with your spouse. And really ask the question, do we have a Christ-centered home? How often is the name Jesus mentioned here? If we have children still living with us, how often do we talk about faith with them? Did they hear us as adults talking about Jesus? One of my favorite things that I see in my house and that I can brag on because she's not here right now is every morning before Lily and I walk out the door to go to school, I take her to school. I don't still attend. Before we go, Jen grabs Lily and she says, let me pray for you, baby. And she prays. And do you know how non-spiritual I am? Sometimes we're running late. And I'm looking at her going like, yo, the Holy Spirit needs to move you to pray faster. I'm wearing sweatpants. I don't want to walk in that school if they're late. I'm so bad. Every morning, she grabs that little girl, she hugs her, and she prays for her. What a gift to kids to do that. Every night, we do a little devotional with the kids before they, in their beds before they go to bed. We sing them songs. I sing them hym truly the center of your home? And if he's not, how can we make it that way? So that when I'm at home, I'm abiding in Christ. How do we abide in Christ with our friends? Listen, I love friends. Friends are super important to me. I love having a good time with friends. I love messing around with friends. It's great. I think friendships are a gift from God. But how do we abide in Christ in those friendships? And listen, this can be tricky because not all of us, not all of our friends are Christian friends. And that's a good thing because I believe that the most effective form of evangelism is friendship. So we should all have friends in our life who don't know Jesus. We should. But we should also have friends in our life that push us towards Jesus. I learned very young, my dad used to say all the time, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's so true. Proverbs says that. It says if you spend your time in the counsel of the wise, you will become wise. If you spend your time in the council of morons, you will become a moron. It's a loose paraphrase. I explain that in the translation guide out there. And we know that research shows that you become the five people you spend the most time around. We know that. So if we are going to abide in Christ, then we're going to need our friends' help. And if we're going to need our friend's help, then we need friends who are abiding in Christ and who push us in our walk with Christ. And here's what can happen sometimes with friends, even Christian friends, is they'll become, and this is what I call them, they'll become yuck-yuck clubs where you just get together and you don't talk about anything that matters. We're just laughing and swapping stories and making fun of people and telling jokes. And everyone's just laughing and giggling the whole time. And listen, I love yuck yuck clubs. I'm the charter member of several of them. They're fantastic. Or other times people get together and all it is is one big juicy gossesh. And if you don't know what that is because you're not as cool as me, they just gossip a lot about other people. They just get together and eventually it's just going to degenerate into, did you hear what so-and-so did? I was disappointed in so-and-so for this. And we just start throwing names around and talking about other people and it's not productive and it's not good and it's not wise. So listen, what I would say to you is this, if your friends never talk about things that matter, change the conversation or get new friends. If the people you spend the most time with never talk about things that matter, have the courage to change the conversation, to introduce new topics, to actually ask them how their marriage and how their spiritual life is going. Have the courage to change the topic. Have the courage to ask a real question amidst the laughter. Have the courage to cut off the gossip and redirect to another place, or, I'm being honest, get new friends. If you look through your landscape of friends and you see that you don't really have anyone there who spiritually encourages you on a regular basis, then truly, maybe your thing this morning is to begin to pray that God would reveal to you some more friends, some new friends that you can grow with. And while we're here, don't forget what I talked about in January when I talked about the importance of community in the middle of the prayer where it says, along with all the saints, and we talked about this idea of sacred spaces. The one or two or three people we have in our life where we can be completely open and completely honest and completely vulnerable. If we want to abide in Christ, we're going to need those spaces. But I do want to encourage you this morning to consider your friendships. Do you carry Jesus into those as well? Do you find them spiritually encouraging? Are they neutral? Do they push you away? We need spaces where we can go for that. And then lastly, how do we abide in Christ when we're alone? This one's a tricky one. I've been told for a long time that your character is who you are when no one is around. And I think when we're alone, this idea of what we consume becomes incredibly important. When you're alone, and I don't know what alone is for you. For me, alone is the family can be upstairs and I can be in the kitchen with earbuds in. I may as well be alone. I'm listening to a book or a podcast or something or when I'm working in the yard. When you have time to yourself, no one else has any input into you, what are you doing? When you go on your runs or your rides or your hikes or your walks, if you're listening to something, what are you listening to? If you're thinking about something, what are you thinking about? When you're in the car, how do you use that time? You're by yourself, how do you use that time? What do you listen to? What do you think about? When do you pray? When it's the end of the day and the house is quiet and you have your own space, and we all need that, what do you consume? What do you watch? What do you play? What do you listen to? What do you read? In the morning, when you wake up, no one else is around. What does your mind go to? What is it that you want to consume? What is it that you should consume? This is where it's really, really important to know what pushes you towards Christ and what pulls you away from Christ. And this is why I'm careful to throw down standards. You should watch these kinds of shows. You should not watch these kinds of shows. These kinds of books. These kinds of books. Whatever it is. Because it's different for everybody. But what I want to encourage in you is this sense. This filter in your heart. That you allow to be triggered with, this isn't really edifying. I don't really think this is what I need to be consuming. And turn it off, or put it down, or go to sleep, or go on a walk. But we need to be thoughtful and not just consume things by default. So if we want to abide in Christ, remember, we anchor our day in Christ. We practice the presence of Christ. We consume what draws us to Christ. We think about how to apply those principles in our work life, in our home life, in our private life, and in our friend life. And then I would simply say this as we wrap up. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. No one can be 100% on 100% of the time. I've had seasons where I've been radical about this, where I just kind of look at my life and I realize I'm watching junk shows that I don't need to be watching. I'm reading books that aren't bad, but they don't really help me in any way. They don't help me get better. They're not pushing me towards Jesus. Maybe I haven't been having my quiet times like I should. I've stopped. My podcasts are all news. There's nothing spiritually encouraging there. I'm just not consuming anything that's helping me. And I go, oh my gosh. And I do a whole reset. And I just, and I'm just, I'm reading, I'm reading a book, I'm listening to a book, both are spiritually edifying, I'm having good conversations with my friends, I'm reading the Bible every day, I'm praying like I'm supposed to, and all the dead spaces is just spiritual, spiritual, spiritual. And maybe it's just me, I can't go that long doing that. Eventually, I want to know what Dan Levitard thought of the Super Bowl. Like eventually, I just get curious about other stuff. And there absolutely, there absolutely needs to be space for dead time. To just exist. To just rest. And that's fine. We all need that space. But use that space to rejuvenate you so that you're ready to begin pursuing Jesus again when you wake up, again when you get done with work, again when you get done with this. No one can be 100% on with this 100% of the time, but we all have big steps to take. So I hope this morning you've identified at least one or two that you can begin to apply in your life right now and that your day tomorrow will change. And I hope that you will ask, particularly if you have a spouse, is Christ the center of our home? How do we turn that dial a little bit more? How do we make him the center of our home? So I hope that you'll start doing a couple things this week. I'd love to hear stories about what you guys started and how that's worked for you. But I'm going to pray, and then're going to come up and we're going to do one more song together. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this great congregation of folks that love each other so well that I love so much. God, I just pray that if we heard things today that made us go, oh gosh, yeah, I need to do that. God, would you help us do it? Would you help us install some of these practices? It's fine that we know about them, God. But help us not be like the person who looks at himself in the mirror and then forgets what he looks like, hears your word and doesn't obey it. But help us to be the people who obey and to do. And God, would you help us to abide in you? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.