Sermons tagged with Love

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. It's so fun to watch myself for two minutes before I preach every week during this series. This is the third part in our series, Big Rocks, where we're talking about the large priorities in life. And this week, I want to talk about having a Jesus-centered home and a Jesus-centered family. So this, I will tell you up front, is family-centric. But it applies to having a Jesus-centered marriage. If you're a single person, there are principles here that we can absolutely apply to having a Jesus-centered life. But when I throw out that term, Jesus-centered home, I think a lot of us would go, yeah, we have one of those. Like our home is a Jesus-centered home. But I want to kind of challenge you up front on that by just making this simple point. A pro-Jesus home is not the same as a Jesus-centered home. A home that's pro-Jesus, if we would say, yeah, we got a Jesus-centered home, well, is it a pro-Jesus home or is it a Jesus-centered home? For instance, the Rector House, our home, is a Kyle Tolbert pro-home. We are pro-Kyle Tolbert. Thank you. Thank you for that. He's running sound today for me, so a little less pro-Kyle right now. But overall, the Rector Home is a pro-Kyle home. We like him. We hope things work out for Kyle. I bet most of the homes in this church are pro-Kyle homes. We want the best for the guy, right? We hope things work out for Kyle. We hope that he has good days. We're fans of what he does. We like DJ KT and Christmas Kyle and Easter Kyle and Summer Extreme Kyle. We like all the versions of Kyle, right? But it's not a Kyle-centered home. We don't pray every day that John and Lily will become more and more like Kyle as they age. We don't wake up going, what can we do? What can we implement in our home to get our children to be closer to Kyle, right? Like we don't do that stuff. We don't have WWKD bracelets, right? We don't have what would Kyle do, like anywhere in our home home. We're pro-Kyle home. We're not a Kyle centered home. I think a lot of us have pro-Jesus homes. We're foreign. We hope things work out for him. We want his will to be done. We might pray that sometimes. We support, in this house, we support Jesus. There's no more, I don't mean to step on any toes. If I do, I'm a little bit sorry, not a lot of it, sorry. There's no more pro-Jesus sign in a home than at Christmas time when you see the poster or the postcard or whatever it is of Santa kneeling at the cross. Like in this house, first Jesus, then Santa. Santa kneels to Jesus here. We are pro-Jesus, even during Christmas. Good job, right? We have pro-Jesus homes. Do we have Jesus-centered homes? Do we have Jesus-centered conversations? Do we wake up every day thinking, what can we do? What can we implement so that our children grow more closely to Jesus? What can I do to make Jesus the center of my life? What can we do to make Jesus the center of our marriage? What kinds of things can we implement to make sure that the relationships in this house, the things that happen in this home are things that revolve around Christ? And so to that end, I wanted to talk this morning about actually having a Jesus-centered home. And I'll tell you this up front, okay? As I was thinking about the sermon and the best way to approach it, and really, most of the time when I'm thinking about a sermon, I'm thinking, how can this be maximum helpful to the people who got up and showered and brushed their teeth and came today? Like, how can this be maximum helpful for you? And so as I thought about that, I really didn't think it was worth investing a ton of our time in this idea of having a Jesus-centered home. I didn't want to come in this morning and try to convince you to have a Jesus-centered home or leave with this compelling vision of what can happen when Jesus is the center of your home. Not because I don't think a compelling vision is worth having, but because I think you're probably already with me on that. Like you got up in the summertime and you came to church and your kids are over there or you're here or whatever it took you to get here, you're here. So I think I'm going to assume that a majority of us, I'm not saying that everyone in here is in on this hook, line, and sinker, but a majority of us in here, if I could talk to you and say, do you want to have a Jesus-centered home, you would say yes. So I'm going to assume that we came this morning, you didn't wake up thinking, boy, I really want a Jesus-centered home. But when I first started mentioning it, I'm going to assume that you're with me and that this is a thing that you'd like to pursue. This is something that you'd like to implement. So to that end, a couple things. First of all, my goal for you today, if you have someone to drive home with today, is to have a family meeting in the car. It's to schedule a family meeting in the car on your way home. If you have children, I want you guys, my goal is for you guys to schedule something with your children to talk about some things that you're going to do. I want mom and dad to talk about how can we make this a more Jesus-centered home. I want husbands and wives to look at this and go, okay, there's some things that we can implement. How do you want to, which of those seem practical? Which of these seem like something that we can actually do? So my goal is for you guys, to whom it's applicable, to have family meetings as a result of today to talk about how to implement some of these things. Also because of that, this is just a ridiculously practical sermon. I'm going to give you six suggestions of things that you can do to have a Jesus-centered home. Because again, I wanted it to be maximum helpful. I didn't want to bring you in, talk to you about having a Jesus-centered home, and then send you home with no practical ideas, just leave you to search Google and figure it out on your own. So this is the place where we're going to do that. Our guiding passage today is found in Deuteronomy chapter six. So if you have a Bible, it's the fifth book of the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter six is just a sideline. This doesn't mean anything. Deuteronomy, the word Deuteronomy literally means the law repeated. So Deuteronomy is like a synopsis of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Okay. So if you really want to know what's going on in those three books, Deuteronomy will kind of give you the highlights for better or for worse. And it finishes up the narrative of that portion of scripture. But in this portion of Deuteronomy, they had just received the law, and Moses is telling them how they are to teach it to their families, how they are to implement this as a culture. How are we going to learn this law, to breathe this law, to obey this law as a culture? Here's how we're going to do it. This is what he says. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. He's talking about the law. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your. When Moses is telling them, this is the law of God, this is our religion, this is our faith. Here's how we're going to implement this countrywide, nationwide. To us, it'd be nationwide. To them, it was peoplewide. The Hebrew people, this is how we're going to implement that law. You're going to teach it to your children. You're going to write it in your homes. You're going to keep it on your hands and on your head. To this day, if you go to Jerusalem, you go to the wailing wall, you will see some Orthodox Jews, some men who have it, literally, phylacteries, I think is what they're called, tied to their head and tied to their wrists with these elaborate leather bands in obedience to this. This is how they said that we are going to learn God's word and learn the law and learn our faith. And what's interesting to me is he does not say, diligently take your family to church, diligently go to synagogue, diligently go to the tent when we set it up and we have the sacrifices. No, no, no. And he doesn't say, listen to your pastor, listen to your priest. He doesn't say, make sure the kids get to youth group. What's he say? He puts it all on the parents. You teach it to your children. How's this faith going to go forward? You teach it to your kids. You teach it in your house. You teach it in your house. We'll teach it in our house. And the next generation will do the same thing. And somewhere along the lines, we kind of lost this a little bit. Where we bring our families to church and that's where they get their Jesus. But our families need to be learning Jesus from us, from the parents. So the other thing that I want to say about this as we apply it to our lives, this verse is talking about the law, the Ten Commandments, the law of God. However, the New Testament teaches us that Jesus perfected the law. Jesus himself said that he did not come to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it. Romans tells us that he perfected it. And so not in every case in the Old Testament, but in this particular case and others like it, I think it's fair to apply what God wanted his people to do with the law, to apply that to his New Testament people and say, this is what God wants people to do with his word and with his son. So teach our kids the word. Talk about it. Write it on our houses. Keep it in your head. Keep it in your hands. This is how we are to have a Jesus-centered home. This is how we are to be obedient to this command in Deuteronomy. I think the same impetus still sits on us to center our lives and our homes around Jesus and around God's word. So how can we do that? What are the practical ways to be obedient to Deuteronomy, to have not just a pro-Jesus home, but to have a Jesus-centered home? Well, the first thing is the most obvious one. It's where all of your heads went, so I just thought I would go ahead and get it out of the way and say it up front. Family devotions. Have family devotions. In your marriage, read something together. Talk about what you're reading in the Bible. Even if you're not reading the same thing, you're not on the same reading plan, you're doing different small groups, you're doing whatever, read it and talk about it together. But for those who still have children in the home, have family devotions. And I know that that feels intimidating. I don't even have my own devotions. How am I going to do a family devotion? This is a good way to learn them. And here's the thing. Your kids have never had a family devotion either. They don't know that it sucks. They don't know that you're not good at it. So just start. They're not going to know that you're not any good at it. And you'll get better. And you'll figure it out. And here's the thing that I bet most of the parents in this room don't know. Do you know that every week, one of Erin Winston, our children's pastor, one of her volunteers, every week, puts a piece of paper in your hand when you pick up your child that has prompts, that has devotional prompts on it for three to five days of the week. Age appropriate according to what they talked about in that room and in that room over there on the other side of the aquarium store. According to what they talked about, she puts a piece of paper in your hand with prompts that are age appropriate. They get more and more detailed as your child ages to help you have these conversations and have devotions in your home. She also last summer gave to all the families a devotional book and has a ton of resources for you. So a devotion is just a time where you sit down, you read usually just a verse of scripture, you reflect on it as a family, and you move on. So if we want to have a Jesus-centered home, one of the first things we can do is implement some regular family devotions in our house. You can do it. Moms, dads, step up to the plate. It'll be all right. You can do it. Married people, have your quiet times. Don't hold each other accountable. Don't pester each other about it. That doesn't work. I don't think that works in a marriage. If that works in your marriage, that's fine. I'm not advocating that, but every now and again, you should say, hey, what have you been reading? What have you been learning? That's a good conversation to have. The next thing that I would tell you to do to have a Jesus-centered home is to have public quiet times. Have public quiet times. And what I mean by that is quiet times that are visible to the rest of your family. I don't mean put on your cool jeans and go to Sola and read your Bible like a lonely hipster. I don't mean that. I mean, read your Bible in a place where your family can see you. I've told you guys this before. Growing up, I would come downstairs to go to school in the morning as a teenager, And every morning I would see my mom's Bible open to a different portion of scripture. And I would see a mug of coffee that was almost all the way gone every morning. And I knew that she was praying for me every day. And I knew that she was reading God's word every day. And I'm going to tell you something. When she told me the Bible says this, or I think God says this, or I think you need to do this, I gave her words more weight because I knew that she was reading her Bible. My dad traveled all the time, but when he would travel, he would take his Bible with him. I saw that in my parents. I knew that they knew their Bible. I have been meaning to, I read my Bible when I get into the office. That's my quiet space because we have two young children. But I'm going to try, you can hold me to this, I'm going to try to intentionally shift to sit in the chair that you can see. I can see the stairs so that when Lily wakes up, she'll see me there doing my devotions. Steve, our worship pastor, he gave me this idea, and it's a great one. He listens to scripture on his phone. He's got a great porch with a great view of some woods. He'll turn Scripture on on his phone on the Bible app and just let that read it to him. So you could do that on your way to work or whatever, but he'll sit there, have his cup of coffee, and let the Bible app read Scripture to him. And I thought it was such a great idea that me and John, my three-month-old, listened to Colossians four or five times through this week while I was feeding him in the mornings or whenever else. And while he's doing that, sometimes his son Grayson will come outside and he'll say, what are you listening to? And he's saying, First Thessalonians. And he's like, can I listen too? Yeah, sure. So then they talk about it. Have public quiet times. Let your spouse see you doing that. Let your kids see you doing that. Make it a part of the regular rhythm of your home. It's not a thing that needs to be hidden. Another very simple thing to do to make your home a Jesus-centered home is to write scripture on your wall. It's simple. It's easy. But it's important. Pick a verse. Pick a passage that characterizes your family. That really depicts. Maybe it's the fruit of the Spirit that you want to hang on the hallway. Not so that your children will have the fruit of the Spirit, but so that you'll be reminded to have the fruit of the Spirit with your children, right? Put the verses in visible places in your home so that they become a part of your family life. When I walk in the door every day, one of our favorite verses is on the wall right when you walk in from the garage door, and it's a phrase out of Psalm 1611. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, neither me nor Jen put that there so that we could walk in and go, ah, fullness of joy. We didn't think about that. We just put it there because it's small and it fits on that wall. That's why we put it there. But when I walk in and I see it, there are times when I see it and it reminds me. In God's presence, there's a fullness of joy. And I remember that my family is one of God's biggest blessings to me. And so the joy that he intends for me is found in this place. It grounds me. Jen may not say that that feels true to her, but it's true sometimes. She doesn't know what I would be like if I didn't read that verse. Put it on your wall. We have something that we're going to put on our wall. It's written out. It's a prayer from Paul that we've had. Her cousin wrote it out. I've got to get it framed, and that's going to sit in our living room wall and kind of be our family verse. If you go into all of the children's rooms, Erin has selected a verse that's appropriate for that season of life, and she's put it on the wall. If you walk back through the hallway into the kids' room back there, the one thing you see down the hallway is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. You see scripture everywhere. Put it in your home. Display it. Go into Hobby Lobby in Kirkland, those stores that are filled with what I call old lady clutter. There's tons of it there. Go look at the old lady clutter because some of it has scripture on it. Buy some pretty old lady clutter and then put it in your home. It's an easy, easy way to have things, to make, to follow this prescription from Deuteronomy that says write it on your walls. So legitimately do it. Find a verse, find a scripture, find a passage that's encouraging to you, find something that you want to implement with your kids and display that on your home and those verses will stick with them and they will stick with you. It's an easy, easy way to do it. Pray together. Number four is pray together often and about everything. Pray together often and about everything. Do we pray for our meals? Let's start there. Let's pray for our meals and let's do it in such a way that we're actually remembering who got us there and why we're there. Do we pray in the morning before we take them to school or camp or wherever it is they're going? Do we pray at night before they go to bed? Do you pray with your spouse? When your spouse is stressed, is your knee-jerk as a couple, let's go to Lord in prayer on this. Or is it the same, that stinks, and keep talking about whatever else. Listen, I'm not good at this either. But if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, I think one of the easiest things to do is to pray often and to pray about everything. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so got a bad diagnosis. Let's pray for them real quick. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so is pregnant. Let's pray that God, let's celebrate and then pray that God keeps this pregnancy safe. I'm stressed about this at work. I'm stressed about this for our kids at school. I'm unsure about this thing. Okay, well, let's stop and let's pray together. And to that end, I would just throw this out for you guys. Give your spouse permission to suggest that you pray. Give your spouse permission to grab the kid and pray about something. And here's why I'm saying that. Because if you exist in a relationship where there's never any prayer at all, and after hearing this sermon, your husband, the next time something comes up, reaches over and says, well, let's stop and let's pray about this. Your inclination is going to be to go, who the heck are you? What? It's weird. No. I'll pray about it later. Your inclination is going to be to look at them like they're a hypocrite. And it's going to be to say, you're only doing this because Nate said we should do it. Yeah. That's the reason. If it wasn't happening before today and it happens after today, then yeah, it's happening because I brought it up. All right? So let's just accept that up front and let's let prayer be brought into our marriages and into our homes. This refocuses us consistently and constantly on the Father. It refocuses us on his throne, on who he is and on who we are. It reminds you this is out of your hands anyways. There's nothing that you can do about this. It settles down control freaks and people who like to worry. If you do it with your children, doesn't it set this incredible pattern for them and their own life to go to the Lord in prayer all the time? To have this ongoing conversation with the Father? Doesn't it set them on a pace to be obedient to the instruction in Thessalonians when he tells us that we should pray without ceasing? To have a continual conversation with the Father. Let's implement prayer more in our homes. Let's give each other permission to work on this, to do this well together, to not look at each other like we're hypocrites when we suggest it. Let's start modeling that and bring our attention to God as spouses and then model bringing attention to God for our children. So that one day when they're grown up and they hear a sermon about incorporating prayer in the home, it doesn't feel like a weird, awkward thing for them. All right? We're already, we've lost. Okay, we're done. We failed, but they have a chance. Let's pray and teach it to them in that way as well. Number five, and I'm excited to get into this today. Know your role. I wanted to talk to you guys about gender roles in the house this morning. I'm just kidding around, I'm not doing that. Know your role. We're not talking about roles in the home. It's an easy way to say and to remember this idea. You are in your spouse's life. You are in your children's lives. You are in your family's lives. As a tool to be used by God to help them become the person that he created them to be. That's your role. Do you see why I reduced it to know your role? You're married to your husband because God is sanctifying him. God is changing him. God is working in him. God is developing his character and his spiritual maturity. And he is trying to learn to walk with God more and more every day. And the world is trying to get him to not do that. And you've been placed in that marriage by God to help him become the godly man that God wants him to be and created him to be. Husbands, you are in your marriages to help your wives become the most beautiful version of themselves, which is to say the most spiritually healthy version of themselves. You have been placed by God in that marriage to help them walk more closely with the Father than they ever have before. That's your primary role for your spouse, is to cultivate their spiritual life and their spiritual health and to see them flourish and become people who are passionately following Jesus. That's why God placed you in that marriage. It's not for you. It's not because you're a good decision maker or you're a bad decision maker or I'm not good at directions and she's good at directions, or we both like the same music, or any of that stuff, God placed you in that marriage first and foremost to be used as a tool by him to fashion your spouse into the person that God created them to be. To help them see more and more that they are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that they might walk in them. That's why he placed you in that marriage. And I think that sometimes we lose sight of that. I know I do. But when we think about our spouses, if we want to have a Jesus-centered marriage, our very first thought towards them ought to be, how can I help them grow into the person that God created them to be? The thing that we love most about them ought to be how much they love Jesus. It ought to be a heart for the Father. These should be regular things that happen in our marriages. And then the next step is our children. Know your role with your children. I'm going to say this to particularly parents with young kids. We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes we like her more than we did when she was three, sometimes less. The summer entering into kindergarten is a challenging one. And there are things that Lily needs to learn. But I need to be constantly aware of and reminded of. My goal in parenting is not to have a six-year-old who behaves herself so that I don't get embarrassed in public circles. My goal is to raise a daughter, excuse me, who fiercely loves Jesus and requires as little counseling as possible. That's my goal. My goal is to raise a son and a daughter who care about the people around them, who love Jesus better than I do, who are humble, kind, meek, gracious adults. That's my goal. And if we get so caught up in parenting our children as if the goal was for them to not embarrass us when there's people around, as if the goal was for them to not be inconvenient during this season, which goodness, that's a great goal. But if we'll parent them knowing that the goal is to release grown-ups into the wild who love Jesus fiercely, who we respect because of that. So when Lily does something that she shouldn't do, when she displays an attitude that she shouldn't display, as a loving, godly parent, it's my role and my job to find the good part of that attitude that she just displayed. Well, you're very defiant. This can be good because you're going to be willing to stand up for yourself when you need it. Try not to stand up for yourself right now. That's not needed here. But at some point, it will be. Our role as parents is to fashion our children into the people that God created them to be as well. And, you know what's funny? That's why they're in your life too. I was talking with a buddy of mine, Shane, over there outside, and he just made mention to me. He said, man, I tell you, I just can't pray for enough patience right now. These kids are driving me nuts. And I just made the joke like, yeah, I never pray for patience. Because when you pray for patience, God just puts things in your life that requires patience, right? So I pray that God, would you give me grace and the patience that you're teaching me and can it be enough yet? Like I never pray for more patience. I'm happy with the current amount that I have because to get more stinks. But in a very real way, those children are shaping his patience into being a more gracious version of Shane. And God is using them as tools. All of the family dynamics are there to bring us closer to God, closer to the Father, closer to Jesus. So let's know our role within those dynamics and see that as our goal to help the people in our families and in our lives become the version of themselves that God created them to be by helping them to walk more closely with Jesus. That's your primary role in your home. Finally, number six is have Jesus-centered conversations. Talk about them. This goes back to the devotions. What are you reading? What are you learning? How's your faith? What'd you think of the sermon? What's your favorite worship song? What do you think God's teaching you right now? How's so-and-so's faith doing? Have Jesus-centered conversations. I saw this in the Bible. I didn't know this. Did you know this? I didn't know that this passage linked to this passage. Did you know that those passages linked together? Have conversations about it. Talk to your children about Jesus. Just bring them up in conversation. Erin puts out, our children's pastor, again, she puts out parent cues. Just these short little one-sentence things, I think on Instagram, she can give you a bunch of them if you reach out to her. Just little prompts to have spiritual conversations. And here's the thing about having Jesus-centered conversations, okay? You've got to bring them up a lot to have a good one. If you have a kid, you know that having a good conversation with your child is a really life-giving thing. It's also a fleeting thing. It's hard to do. Hopefully, if you have older children, you're having better, longer conversations with them, and you're getting to a place where sometimes you have really meaningful conversations with them. But those are still fleeting. And you know that to get to a good conversation with your child, whether they're four years old or whether they're 20 years old, to find a good one, you've just got to have a lot of them. I can talk with Lily all day long. Give me a Saturday. We can talk all day long about this and that as she runs in and out and whatever it is. And then at the end of the night when I think she's about to go to sleep and I'm ready to go downstairs and do something else, she starts talking. I'm there. I'm present. I don't know when the conversation's going to hit, so I'm just here for them. Jen is far better at that than I am. It works the same with Jesus-filled conversations. You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your spouse? You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your children? Bring them up a lot. Talk about it a lot. Make Jesus feel like a regular figure in your home so that it's not foreign when we start talking about spiritual things. And then you know what? They'll know how to talk about spiritual things too. And really and truly, it's not really possible to have these Jesus-centered conversations if we aren't ourselves Jesus-centered. So if you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. If you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. That's as simple as it could possibly be. All of these things, one through six, you could put, you could implement all of them in your house. You could have family devotions, public quiet times, write scripture on the wall, pray together often and always. You can know your role in fashioning others, and you can have Jesus-centered conversations. But if you're not centered on Jesus in your own life, all that's going to feel fake. All of it's going to feel fabricated. All of it's going to feel like you're trying to push a rope up a hill, and you're just going to stop. You're not going to do it. These things have to pour out of you. Now, the good news is they work synergistically. It's impossible to do those six things and that not orient you more on Christ and him be more the center of your life. But you can't do these things if he's not. It's going to feel unnatural and you're going to quit. So if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, and I think we do because you're still looking at me, then we've got to have a Jesus-centered life. Jesus talks about this in John 15 when he says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about these six things. You abide in me. And if we're having a Jesus, if we have a Jesus-centered heart, he's going to spill out of it. We're going to talk about him all the time. We're going to want to read his word. We're going to get caught reading the Bible. We're going to want to go to him in prayer in every instance. If we have Jesus as the center of our life, then we're going to want to fashion other people in a way that he becomes the center of their life too. It would be like Psalm 1 when it talks about the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night and he is like a tree planted by streams of water and everything that he does he prospers. If we want to have Jesus-centered homes we have to have a Jesus life. And if we'll do that, these things will pour out of us naturally. So, I hope you'll do some of these things. I hope you'll have a family meeting. I hope that you'll allow non-hypocritical prayer into your life. Not be hard on each other. Let's be supportive of each other. Let's have family meetings. Let's do it today. Before we go to bed at night, let's talk about this or let's commit to a time where we're going to talk about this. And if it seems intimidating to do all of this stuff, pick two. Do them this week. See what your home feels like when you do that. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. We confess sometimes that we have pro-Jesus homes. Would you help us grow to a place where we have Jesus-centered homes? Would you fill our hearts so much with you that you are what spills out? God, give us the discipline and the determination to have devotions with our family. Give us the openness, the honesty, and the desire to have spiritual conversations with one another. Would you fill our hearts and our lives and our homes more and more and more, God, so that what happens here on Sunday is simply a small supplement to what's been going on every day in our lives and in our homes. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If you're here this morning and I haven't yet had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. So please say hello in the lobby after the service. If you're watching online, thanks for doing that. Particularly if you're on vacation, thanks for making us a part of your Sunday, even while you're away. This is the last sermon in our series, One Hit Wonders, where we have been pausing and looking at some verses and passages that we don't often get to stop at in a normal series or in our normal Bible study. Some of the lesser known verses and passages that we find in Scripture, a lot of them have been in the Minor Prophets, which is a whole section of the Old Testament that we don't often explore. But this morning is admittedly more of a greatest hit than a one-hit wonder. It's actually apropos with the last question of our little game, trivia game that we were playing there in the bumper video. Steve, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but I'm actually going to pull this one out of Psalms, which is that's the Beatles of the Bible. All the greatest hits there are in Psalms. And so the one that I'm pulling out this morning is one that we have framed and in our house. It's a very frameable verse. I would encourage you to do that. If you've never heard Psalm 1611 before, I think it's going to be one that you'll identify with and appreciate, and hopefully we can leave today thinking about in a different way, especially if you are aware of this verse. But Psalm 1611 simply says this. This is where we're going to focus this morning. David writes, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. That's a heck of a verse, isn't it? I mean, that's a really encouraging, life-giving verse. That's a great promise that David makes to us through the voice of God in Psalms. And as we walk through it, that first sentence, you make known to me the paths of life. Often in Psalms, David adopts kind of the motif of a shepherd, us as the sheep and God as our good shepherd. Psalm 23 is a very familiar Psalm where it says, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. So maintaining that illustration, you make known to me the paths of life is this picture of a shepherd leading his sheep to the good places, leading his sheep to where they can eat, to where they can drink, to where they can rest, to where they'll be protected. And so he's saying, and in the onset, you lead me to the life-giving paths, to fullness of life. You lead me, God, to the best possible places. And then he says, in your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, I don't know if you've ever thought about this. Not everyone here is a scientist. You may not be aware of this fact, but you can't get fuller than full, man. When you're full, that's it. This idea in sports that we give 110%, that's bupkis. You can't do it. It's 100%. That's it. When you're full, you're full. So what he's saying is in God's presence, you will experience maximum joy. It is impossible to find any other place in the known universe, any other scenario, any other situation. It is impossible to pursue any other relationship in which you will find more joy than in your relationship with God, than in the presence of the Father, there is fullness of joy. And then he says, and at the right hand of the Father are pleasures forevermore. And we learn in Romans and Hebrews that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us as our high priest. So what that is saying is, in Christ, if we obey John 15, when Jesus says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit, if we abide in Christ, if we pursue him, if we love him, if we chase him, if we know him, if we are intimate with him, then we will experience pleasures forevermore. That's some astounding promises, right? He's going to lead us to the best places possible in God's presence as we pursue him, as Steve and Lisa invited us into worship, as we go into worship, as we take ourselves like in Isaiah 6 into the throne room of God in prayer, in his presence, we will experience the fullness of joy. And then as we pursue Jesus and we go to his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. That's a pretty good promise, isn't it? Isn't that what we're all chasing anyways? Just better days and a happier existence? If we were to say for ourselves, what do you want in 20, 30 years? We'd say, I just want to be happy. If you have kids and you say, what do you want for your kids? One of the things I promise would be in your top five answers is, top three answers is, I just want them to be happy. This verse promises that. So I actually think that if we really believe that, if we really believe Psalm 1611, that our own selfishness would drive us to God. If we really believe this verse, that he's going to lead us to try to be generous or unselfish. We can do the most selfish thing possible, and that selfishness should, in theory, based on these promises, drive us straight to the throne of God. We should respond to this verse. Like I responded to the news in my mid-twenties that places like Fogo de Chão existed. Now, I don't know if you know what Fogo de Chão is, because we had one in Atlanta. That's where I'm from. We don't have one in Raleigh. It's a Churras, Korea. It's a Brazilian steakhouse. There's one over in Briar Creek, I think. I still need to get over there. But in a Brazilian steakhouse, let me just, let me just tell you what they do there. Okay. This is unbelievable. Some of y'all know. If you know me, you know, I love steak. I really do. I had steak the other night for the first time since John was born because I like to make it myself and it's a whole process and I was in heaven watching the recorded Open Championship. Anyways, I love steak. And they told me, and I was like 25, 26, you know there's this place called Fogo de Chão. And when you go there, there's a card next to your plate. And one side is red and one side is green. And when you put it on the green side, they just bring you steak until you flip it back to red. And I'm like, what now? And so I go to this place, right? And there's these men and they walk around with these skewers of perfectly cooked steak. And they bring it up to you. Your card is green. They go, would you like some, sir? Yes, I would. I'm glad that you came. And they start to slice the filet or the top sirloin or the skirt steak or the bottom sirloin or the lamb or whatever it is. Jen, we need to go to this place for lunch today. They just start shaving it until you tell them to stop. If you want a steak mountain on your plate, you can have a steak mountain. It's amazing. And I'm just telling you, if you leave there without the meat sweats, you're not a good American. It's a remarkable place. And so when they told me that this place existed, with all of my heart, all I thought is, I want to go to there. I want to go. I'll save my money. I will lie to people. I will disappear for three days so I can go to this place and experience phogo to chow. That's where I want to go. That's how we should respond to this verse. What? There's a place I can go and there is fullness of joy. There are pleasures forevermore. There's someone I can follow who will lead me to only the best places. That's a thing? I want to go to there. I'll disappear for three days. I'll sever relationships. I'll give up whatever I do. I'll save up whatever I gotta do. I want to go to there. That's how we should respond to this verse. If we believe that the Bible is the word of God and that what's in here is eternally true and good and right and worth staking our life on, if we really believe that this is God's word and that what he's telling us, what David is saying is true, then why don't we treat the kingdom of God like Jesus tells us to when he said the kingdom of God is like someone who finds a pearl in a field and they sell everything they have so they can buy that field and have that pearl. We would forsake everything for the kingdom of God and for the presence of God and to walk and abide with Jesus if we really believe this. But see, for me, I'm just talking about me. I'm not talking about you guys. For me, my actions don't bear out that I really believe this. If I really, truly believe that in the presence of God, I would find the fullness of joy, then I would betray everything that's not associated with that presence and chase after it as hard as I could. But I don't. And see, I'm preaching this because I've been a Christian about as far back as my memory goes. I've been around Christians for 40 years. I've talked to a lot of them. I have yet to meet a single Christian that when I ask them, how's your relationship with God going? How you doing? How's your spiritual health? I've never heard a single one of them say, I'm nailing it. I mean, I'm really good at this. I mean, about five, 10 years ago, I got to this place where I was just really walking with the Lord and now I'm just waiting on him to come down here and carry me up to heaven in a chariot without having to experience death. How can I help you? I've never met that person. Everyone I talk to has this profound sense of, I ought to be doing better by now. I know better than to do the things that I do. I thought I'd be closer with Jesus by now. I thought I'd be further along. I thought I'd be more spiritually mature and spiritually healthy. That's my experience of faith. There's this constant voice going, why aren't you better at this? And I think it's because we don't really believe that verse. We say we do. Do you believe the Bible? Yes. Every word? Yes. All of them. Okay, well, we don't seem to believe this one. So the interesting question becomes, why is that? Why do we have such a hard time trusting this verse in Psalms that says that in the presence of God, in the presence of Jesus, there are pleasures forevermore, which we all would agree we want. Then why doesn't our life look like we believe it? I think one of the big reasons is that we have an impoverished view of Jesus. We just have this impoverished view of who Jesus is. I've told you guys this before. I do premarital counseling with couples that are getting married. And one of the things I always ask them, so I won't belabor this because I really have told you guys this before, but the point that I'm making is important. I'll ask them on a scale of one to 10, place yourself on that scale of spiritual health. 10 is just zealot on fire for God, Elijah in the Old Testament, John the Baptist, just going and doing everything for Jesus, just totally on fire zealot. And then one is just very, very far from God. And I'll ask them, where are you in your spiritual health? And without fail, people will answer four to six, okay? Because no one wants to say, well, I'm currently doing great. And no one's going to admit to being a two. So everybody says four to six, okay? And then I'll say, and this is the important part, all right, that's great. In five years, where would you like to be? And it's really a vehicle, the numbers don't matter, it's a vehicle to talk about what steps can we take to grow in our spiritual health. That's what it's there for, to help us get into that discussion. But what's interesting to me is when I ask people, and where do you want to be in five years without fail? Eight. I've had one person in 11 years of premarital counseling say 10. One person. Everybody else, eight. I don't want to be like, I don't want to be crazy zealot. I don't want to be that person. Just make me an eight. That'd be great. And what they probably really mean is seven, but they're telling the pastor, so let's bump it up. And I can't help but think that that's probably due at least in part to the fact that they probably don't think that walking with Jesus is that big of a deal. They probably aren't that enraptured with Jesus. I probably just don't think he's as big of a deal as he is. Whatever picture we have in our head of what it would be like to be a 10 isn't that attractive. It's just not that great. We're not that compelled by it, so we don't pursue it. Why don't we say 10? Because we don't want to be. Because whatever's at 10 is not really something that we would enjoy. Because I think we have this small view of who Jesus is. Because for some reason or another, we've never just fallen in love with scriptures and made it a habit to get up and read it every day and see Jesus on these pages and read the gospels and walk through his life and see how he forgave and see how he was generous and see how he loved and see how he sacrificed and fallen in love with him. We haven't allowed the sin and the weight that so easily entangles in Hebrews. We haven't allowed that to fall to the wayside to a degree that we can begin to experience our savior. We haven't engaged in worship in such a way that we turn our heart to God and let him fill it up with his joy. We haven't stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus, God, condescended, came down from heaven, became one of us, walked with us in our filth, was patient and gracious with us, marched to the cross, died there on the cross for us, even though he knew that we would crud on it with our own life and with our own actions and with our own hypocrisy and sits at the right hand of the Father despite all of that and intercedes for us. We don't sit in the weight of that reality and allow the gratitude and the grandeur of his forgiveness and grace to wash over us. And it allows us to create this impoverished view of Jesus that isn't really all that compelling. And I think one of the reasons we keep our view of Jesus small is the second reason why we struggle sometimes, I think, to believe Psalm 1611, which is that we like making mud pies. We like making mud pies. C.S. Lewis was an author in England prior to and through World War II, and one of the greatest authors of all time. And he described sin in this way. This is a very gross, loose paraphrase. But he described sin like this. He said, it's as if we are children and our parents want to take us on the most amazing holiday. For us in America, it'd be a vacation. Our parents want to take us on the most amazing vacation, but we content ourselves sitting in the backyard making mud pies. We'll sit in the backyard playing with mud because we don't believe that anything could possibly be better than this, and our parents have the most amazing vacation on the planet planned for us, and we're totally disinterested in it. That's how he describes sin. That God has the fullness of joy. He has pleasures forevermore. He leads us to the paths of life. He has something better for us that he's trying to draw us to and we content ourselves with making mud pies in our backyard because we just don't believe there could be anything better. This is actually a trick of the enemy. This is a lie of Satan. You understand that, right? Think of it this way. One of Satan's best lies is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure. One of the enemy's greatest tactics is to trick us into sacrificing long-term joy on the altar of short-term pleasure, on what we can have right now. Isn't this why most of us fail at diets? Not me, but you fail at diets. Because I want to be in good shape. I want to exercise and have the sweat show up here before it shows up here. I want that very much. But I also want a steak right now. I also want Cinnabon. I also want a Chick-fil-A, number one. And I want the sweet tea and I want it to be large. We also want those things. And so we sacrifice long-term things on the altar of the immediate. And this is a trick that Satan plays on us, where God offers us the fullness of joy in this process. God is thinking long-term. He's promising us things years down the road, and we sacrifice those things on what we want right now. Marriage is probably the easiest example of this, where God makes it very clear in Scripture, in Genesis, and then repeated again in Mark, that for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh. And what God has put together, let no man separate. It is God's will for your life. When you are born, it is his will and hope that you would meet one person, that you would marry them, that you would become one flesh, and that you would experience the fullness of joy that comes from being in this lifelong giving relationship. Now, I'm not trying to diminish people who have walked through divorce or are currently divorced or whatever and diminish you as being outside of God's will. I believe that divorce happens because we're broken people and that there is redemption after that. But if we want to talk about what God wants for us, he wants a husband and wife to be united in one flesh and he wants them to walk down the years and the decades following him and knowing him and raising children together and walking through things together and experiencing the depth of love that can only come through that level of commitment sustained through the decades. That's what he wants for us. There's joy and happiness there. Just last night, I'm going to embarrass Jen here, I'm sorry, but just last night, Jen and I, we've got an 11-week-old and we've got a five-and-a-half-year-old, and sometimes, just sometimes, only me, this is not true of Jen, but sometimes I don't like either of them. I just want to sit. Yesterday may or may not have been one of those times. But we had a plan. That last night, we had a plan. We're going to get the kids to bed, and we're going to go get Chinese, and we're going to bring it back. There's this knee Asian kitchen that's really, really good. And we went, and we got the stuff. And I bring it back, and we set it out on the console table and we sit down on the floor and we eat Chinese and we watch Hometown with Ben and Aaron who are charming. If you're not watching Hometown, I mean, you're missing out. They're great folks. And we watched that and we laughed together and we ate together and we talked about how good the food was and then afterwards we laughed at Instagram videos and then both of us couldn't stop commenting on how great it was to have that night and how much we loved each other. Give me that. Give me that love after 15 years, all day long over our honeymoon in St. Lucia. When we were 25 years old, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon and we thought it was great and it was the best and we're so in love and it was wonderful. Man, that's nothing compared to what we experienced last night. Give me Chinese on the floor hiding from our children and our dog over a week in St. Lucia because the love 15 years in and what we've walked through and what we experienced and what we know about each other and the ways that our love has changed over the years is so much richer than it was 15 years ago. Now, I can't wait to experience what some of you guys have experienced being 10 and 20 years beyond where we are and the fullness of love that comes there. That's what God wants for us. He wants us to experience that fullness, but there's a process and it takes time. And Satan, Satan would will to steal that joy from us by tempting us to just fade in our marriage and not put in the work that we need by tempting us to just be selfish. And today I know I should help with the kids. I know I should do these things. I know I should love. I know we should go to counseling. I know that we need to work on this marriage, but today it's hard and I don't want to. So we sacrifice future joy on the altar of the immediate. Or even worse, he begins to tempt us to look outside our marriage and that would be fun and that would be entertaining for a season and that would be a type of joy and pleasure that we don't get to experience. And so we do and we sacrifice what could be long-term joy on the altar of immediate pleasure. It's true in our quiet times. I've said dozens of times from this stage, there's no more important habit in our life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And we know this. And we know that through doing that, we will find Jesus, we will be drawn to him, we will be caught up in him, that life will be better, that our attitude will be better, that our spiritual health will be better. We know it's good for us. Most of the whole room would agree with me that that would be an excellent practice in our lives, and yet for many of us, we don't have it. Why? Because it's easier to hit the snooze button. It's easier to flick through Twitter. It's easier to turn on SportsCenter or to get to work early or to just sit in the quiet or to read a book. There's so many different things that we could do besides dive into God's Word. And so once again, we sacrifice the joy that waits for us in the presence of God on the altar of the immediate, doing what we want. This is one of the greatest tricks of Satan, just to trick Christians into wasting their days and pursuing temporary pleasures instead of long-term joy. I came across a quote this week, and I that it was timely from some pastor that I didn't recognize and he just simply said, all of Satan's promises are for the right now. Promises without process are lies. God promises us the future. Satan promises us today. And we so very easily choose today. But really, I think in a room full, for the most part, of believers, the reason, probably the predominant reason, we struggle to believe Psalm 1611, is if we're being honest, I think we're afraid to be on fire. I think we're afraid to be a 10. I think we're afraid to be zealots. We're afraid to be on fire for Jesus. We don't want to be that person. We don't want to have to give up everything and move to Malawi and teach and write the Bible in another language. We don't want to have to do that. We don't want to have to sell all the things that we've acquired. We don't want to have to give up the pleasures that we enjoy. I know for me, the thing that makes me scared to be a zealot, and listen, I'm speaking to me more than you right now. The thing that makes me scared is I just don't want to be weird. I want people to like me. I like having friends. So I think we're scared to be on fire. And after being around church people my whole life, I'm convinced that this is true. And when I say this, just know I'm saying this to me, okay? I'm saying this to me. I am convicted by this. I am stepping on my own toes. If this doesn't apply to you, great. If it does, welcome into my conviction. But I'm saying it to me. I'm convinced that we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground that appears spiritually healthy while still leaving us the Lord of our own lives. I'm convinced that a vast majority of Christians are afraid to be on fire, and so what we do is we carve out for ourselves a moderate middle ground of spirituality that makes us appear spiritually healthy while still giving us space to hang on to some of the things that bring us joy and pleasure and therefore still being the lords of our own lives. I'm going to go to church. I'm going to go to Bible study. I'm going to say the things. I'm going to have the right friends. I'm going to reorient my life. I'm going to look different now than I did years ago. And now I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing okay. I'm not a 10, but I'm like a seven. And this is a pretty comfortable place for me. Maybe I'm the only one that does that. But we carve out this moderate middle ground. I'm not John the Baptist. Okay. I'm not one of the disciples, but I'm not one of the bad ones either. I'm good. Could I be doing better? Sure. Everybody could be doing better. Could I be doing worse? A lot worse. You should have known me five years ago. And so we carve out this middle ground. Well, we're not on fire. We're not totally cold and turned off to the Lord. We're just like a seven. And we're good with it. When we do that, the Bible has something to say about it. About specifically that. In Revelation chapter three, Jesus has written letters to seven churches in Revelation two and three. And in chapter three, he says, you're pretty good. You do a lot of good things to this particular church. But then in 3.16, he says this, but you are lukewarm. And because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. That word spit there is better translated as vomit or spew. That's what Jesus thinks of the middle ground that we carve out for ourselves. Well, we're comfortable and happy and sure, I could give more, I could do more, I could grow more, I could sacrifice more, but that's scary, I don't want to do it. I'm doing pretty good here as a seven. God, if you'll just kind of leave me alone and worry about some of those threes, I'll be happy to invite them to my house. I'll be good. And Jesus says, couldn't be less interested in that. To me, Nate, I couldn't be less interested in your moderate middle ground of spirituality here. He calls us to be on fire. He calls us to be zealots. And if you're in this conviction with me, of this middle ground that we carve out for ourselves, I would invite you into this question. What is it that you're afraid of? If you light your hair on fire for Jesus and go burn the world down, what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that worries you about getting up every day and reading God's word? What is it that worries you about inviting Jesus into every moment of your life? What is it that worries you about being a zealot? Is it that you'll have to give up something that brings you pleasure? God has more pleasure waiting for you if you'll just trust him, if you'll just drop your mud pies and go with him on vacation, what are we scared of? Is there some pleasure or friend group or thing that you like to do that you're worried, well, if I really sell out, then I can't engage in that anymore. So what? God's got something better. Well, I'm worried that, this is me, I'm worried that I'm going to be weird. People won't like me, that I won't be relatable. Who cares? Jesus didn't call me to be relatable. He called me to be passionate about him. And I bet the joy that I'll find there and the relationships that are there and the magnanimity of the love that's found there will do just fine with the weirdness. What are we afraid of that God's not going to give us back? What kind of pleasures are we embracing in our middle ground that we don't want to let go because I don't want to go too far? Why? Are you afraid he's going to ask you to sell everything and move to Ghana? He's probably not. If all American Christians moved to Ghana at once, that would be inconvenient. He's probably not going to do that. But even if he did, you'll find pleasures forevermore and fullness of joy in Ghana, so go to Ghana, man. What are we scared of? I think we're scared of being zealots. And so maybe what we need to do is understand what that means. I don't think that being a zealot is selling everything and becoming a weirdo and moving out into the wilderness like John the Baptist and wearing camel skins and eating locusts. I think that being a zealot means inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. Into every conversation. Inviting him in. How would you have me handle this? How can I reflect you here? Into every quiet, peaceful moment. Into every still morning. Into every late night. Into every dinner conversation. Into every relationship, into every work interaction, inviting him into every email, into every prayer. I think being a zealot looks like simply inviting Jesus into every moment of your life. What harm can come if we do that? What possible thing could we give up that's worth anything at all if we simply start by inviting Jesus into every moment of our life? If we do that, you know what we'll find? That our view of him begins to enlargen. That the lies of Satan become less convincing. That the fear of being on fire becomes a lot less fearful. So let's do that, Grace. Let's collectively light our hair on fire and light the world on fire for Jesus. Let's collectively be zealots. Let's collectively trust that this verse is true. And let's collectively ask ourselves the tough question, what am I hanging on to that's preventing me from pursuing God? That's preventing me from pursuing Jesus, from abiding in his presence and creating a larger view of him in my life. And then let's ask ourselves if it's worth it. I know that for me this week, as I've sat in this verse, I've developed a more deep conviction than ever that I want to trust this verse. I want to believe it. I want to live it out. I want to go be a zealot. And I want the church to come with me. Let's pray. Father, we love you. I'll be the first to admit, God, sometimes I just, all the time, I love you the best way I know how. It's an imperfect, insufficient, hypocritical, broken love. But God, we love you. We're grateful for Jesus. We really are. We know that sometimes it doesn't seem like that. We know that we demand a lot of your forgiveness. God, we are grateful for it. Lord, I know that I have been afraid to give up some of the things that I think are actually bringing me joy when all they're doing is keeping me from you. So I pray that you would give me the strength to walk away from those things and the strength of faith and hope to trust that you're going to bring me to these paths of life, to the best places possible. God, would you give us the strength this morning to put down our mud pies and trust that where you're taking us is exponentially better than anything we could ever cook up for ourselves. I pray that we would grow in our view of Jesus and be so enamored with him that we would just sprint towards him with all of our might. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

This morning we really want to acquaint you with the ministries that we partner with. We want everybody to know a little bit more about what goes on behind the scenes kind of of grace because you've probably heard me say plenty of times that 10% of everything that's given goes to ministries operating outside the walls of grace. We actually have a missions committee full of people who have a heart for missions, a heart for seeing others come to know Jesus, and want to use the resources that we have to see that brought about. And their job is to find ministry partners for us to pair up with who are accomplishing the mission of God out in the world. And then they take the money that we give and we support these ministries in various ways. And it occurred to me, it's actually, we're doing this because Sarah Prince emailed me, or maybe a Facebook message. I forget how we communicate. Hey, we'll be in town. We'd love to share if we got the opportunity. And I thought, gosh, I think the church needs to know about all of the people that we partner with and what they do. And so we're going to highlight Jen Taylor. You're going to hear her story and what she does over at Refugee Hope. And then we're going to talk with the princes as well. But this is an opportunity. This is kind of a getting to know you. Let's learn who are we supporting, what are they doing, and how can we get involved, how can we pray. And so without further ado, this is Jen Taylor. She's with Refugee Hope Partners, which I think is, are you guys located outside of Raleigh as well? So we have families that have moved outside of Raleigh that we remain connected to, but our main location where we start all of our relationships with our refugee friends is actually five minutes down the street right behind the Falls of the Neuse Chick-fil-A. There's an apartment complex right there. Cool. So we're going to dive into that, but before we do, there's some folks here, even though you've been here for like your whole life, who might not know you. So tell us about your background at Grace. You grew up here. Your parents dragged you here all the time. So how was it growing up at Grace and all that stuff? Tell us about that, how long you've been involved here. Yeah, so I've been involved at Grace probably since the start of Grace. I grew up here in the youth group. I actually had Casey and Sarah as youth leaders back in the day. Like they're not getting enough attention. Exactly. But my parents were super involved. I even did, if any of y'all are back that far enough, the handbell choir. I was a part of that. Yo, we had one of those? We need to dial that back up. But yeah, so just grew up here. Had a family here. Y'all are family. And so I went away for a few years, but once I moved back to Raleigh about three years ago, it was just natural to plug right back into Grace Family and right back into the ministry here. So that's great. I'm now going to refer to you as the handbell chair. You're in charge of getting that rolling. So tell us just a broad view about Refugee Hope Partners and what they do, and then we'll kind of talk about what you do with them, and you can tell us about some of the families that you work with and things like that. So what is Refugee Hope Partners? Yes. So Refugee Hope Partners is a nonprofit right here in Raleigh. We work with over 700 different refugees from over 40, well, right under 40 different countries from around the world. Refugees come from these countries after being in refugee camps. They sign in with the UN and get placed by the U.S. government right here in North Raleigh. So they move into these apartment complex, specifically Cedar Point Apartments where we're located, and we help that transition. As refugees come in, they don't have the language that they need. They don't know the systems that are in place in America. They don't know how to read. So paperwork is a huge issue to get past. So we are there not just loving our refugee neighbors but really trying to help in everyday life build confidence, engage the community and really equip them so that they can become sustainable right here in the U.S. So we have tons of different programs that we do that through but some of them are medical, some are ESL, some are homework help. So we do tutoring for all of our kids. We have like 350 kids that we work with. So it gets to be a little bit crazy, but it's a whole lot of fun, and we do a lot of ministry. We have Bible study as well, and we share the gospel throughout. You said, I think, 40 countries are represented. What are the predominant ones? I'm sure that there's a majority there. So what are the top two or three? So we do have a very large group that comes from kind of Central Africa, the Congo, a lot of Swahili speakers. And then we also have a large group of Karenni refugees from Myanmar and Burma. That conflict is still going on. So they are 25 years deep in a refugee camp before they come here. And then we also have a lot of Middle Eastern countries represented. So a big group from Afghanistan has come recently. So we have a lot of Farsi speakers that come in as well. And as you love on them and help them and kind of help to pave a way to assimilate, I would suppose is the right word. How are you also able to point them towards Jesus? And with coming from so many different places, there's so many different faiths represented there. And I would imagine that encountering each faith has its own sets of issues and things that make it helpful and things that don't. So how do you, what do you guys do programmatically and relationally to point the refugees towards Jesus and to let them know that you're doing this because Jesus loves them and you do too. Yeah. I think the biggest thing that we do is we just love them. Jesus loved us first so that we can love them, and we love our refugee neighbors in so many ways. We are there during crises. Whenever those happen, we are right there, feet on the ground, loving them in the midst of it. And even in our programs, we don't shy away from the fact that we are a Christian organization and that we are here to love them no matter what they believe or where they come from or what their background is. That we have Bible studies that are geared towards all different groups of people. We have, even in our ESL programs, at least around Easter and Christmas, we tell the whole gospel story right there. And many of those people that are in our ESL programs come from Muslim world, Muslim background, and they're getting to hear the story of who Jesus is and how he loves us right there in our programs. That's wonderful. And what is your role now? How did you get hooked up with them? Did you start a volunteer? Was there an internship process? Or did you find them and go, that's a position that I think I might enjoy and so apply for it? And then what you started as, how has that morphed over the time that you've been with them? How long have you been with them? About three years. Okay, yeah. So when I started, I actually moved back to Raleigh and didn't know exactly what to do next. And I knew I wanted to work with refugees. So I went to talk to the executive director about volunteering. Where'd you go to school? I went to Chapel Hill. And got a degree in? Global Studies. She's using the degree, Pop. Okay, so I'm sorry. I just wanted to, so you saw that, you thought it could work, and carry on. Yeah, and I sat down for coffee, and within that coffee chat, the director said, well, we have a position for you. And so I got a job right after thinking I was going to volunteer. So it was definitely the Lord being like, you need to be here. I started out part-time doing more of the ESL program and then switched into program staff, which means that I do everything on staff. And then from there have moved into the volunteer coordinator. So I actually connect everybody that wants to volunteer. I'm the first person you see. I walk you through the whole process and all of our programs and what we do and get you connected in the programs that we have. What kind of volunteer opportunities are available? If you have 350 kids to tutor, I'd imagine you need some of those. Emil is great at high-level math, so bring him in for all your advanced students. But besides that, Zach, don't laugh so hard. That's mean, man. There's tutoring needs, I'm sure, maybe even some ESL needs, but what else? What other kind of volunteer spots are there? Yeah, so you can plug in anywhere. We have a medical ministry that helps drive families to doctor's appointments. So if you can drive a car, you can volunteer with us. We have a bridge mentorship program that literally pairs volunteers with a high school student and helps them move into those next steps of what do I do after graduation? What is my career? What could that look like? We have ESL for adults. We have a preschool, like a preschool for our three and four year olds. We have childcare during the ESL times. Anything that you would like to do, we have it and we would love to get you plugged in. And it really is any schedule as well. We run programs that are on a weekly basis, so you can plug in and really get to know people on a weekly basis. But then we also have programs that are come as you can. Show up once a month, show up once a year, that's okay. We'd love to have you be a part of our programs and really get to know the community and the refugees there. So as you think about, well, I guess I would ask you this too. I think this is relevant of every organization. What were your specific unique challenges during COVID? Because I can imagine in an apartment complex with refugees, folks who are not yet fully assimilated, that that had its own unique set of challenges. What was the biggest challenge during the heart of the pandemic? And now what are you guys thinking about as we move out of it? Definitely at the very beginning, the biggest challenge was just feeding our families and making sure that those that were unemployed were able to pay rent. That was a huge thing at the beginning of COVID and all that happened, and we were right there. Grace was with us actually donating on a weekly basis groceries for some of our families. And then as we transitioned into online school, that was a giant mess for us. I bet it was. Even just Wi-Fi and tablets, right? Even just Wi-Fi and tablets. So we were the main access for schools to help kids get computers, get internet, get connected to their teachers. We had different classrooms running all year long of if you can't get internet working or something's wrong, you come to us and we'll actually have school right there. So every morning we would be trying to sign in five different students at once to one teacher and say, no, they're here, they're attending, I promise. So just getting through that process was a big challenge. Thankfully, they're in person now and we don't have to worry about that anymore. I can't imagine what a challenge that was. I'm curious, in ministry, in my experience, you have stories or experiences that sometimes will anchor you in what you're doing. They encourage you. They kind of God-breathed into those moments, into those families, into those relationships. You see someone come to Christ. You see a family strengthened, or you see some prayers answered in a big way. And those stories kind of, they anchor you in the not so easy times. And I'm sure that you have a couple of those. So as you look back on your three years with Refugee Hope, tell us a story or two of someone that you saw come to Christ, of a family that you saw strengthened, of some prayers that you saw answered. What are your kind of anchor stories? Well, like I said, I started out in ESL. And while I was there, one of the ESL moms who comes from, she grew up in Pakistan and Afghanistan, kind of switching over those borders. That sounds like an easy background. Goodness gracious. So she and her family have moved here, and they got really connected to our ESL volunteers. And one volunteer in particular was able to share the gospel with her to the point that they do a Bible study on a weekly basis even still. And her family has moved not only from being able to speak English. She actually wants to become a nurse and wants to go back to college and get a degree. And then her family was able to, through the years of learning how to save, learning how to speak English, learning to get better jobs and fill out applications, they actually just bought a house six months ago in Nightdale and are now living on their own, sustainable, and still bring their kids back every week, at least twice a week, for violin class that we have running and to be a part of ESL and encourage the other families and moms to be a part of it. Gosh, does anyone else feel terrible about their life right now? Holy smokes, that's unbelievable. And here's what's really cool about what Jen just did. She told a story about something that someone else did. You don't think that she's had those conversations too? And she just took the spotlight that we put on her and she was like, well, this volunteer one time did this thing. That's really, really cool. As we finish up our time with you, what are we hoping for next at Refugee Hope? And what can we as individuals, not Grace as a church, but what can we as individuals do to be a part of whatever the next season of life is at Refugee Hope? Yeah, so right now we're getting, gearing up to go back to school. So one of the big things that Grace is already going to be a part of is our back-to-school drive and sale. We're actually going to equip our 350 students with all that they need for school. And so Grace can be a part of just helping supply some of the supplies, and that information will be soon to come of exactly what we are asking for. But then just prayer. Our ministry is growing continually, and we're looking at strategically how we can grow and love on our refugee neighbors, not only at Cedar Point, but all around Raleigh. So it's moving. The Lord is moving in this place, and it's really cool to see. That's awesome. I also just kind of feel compelled to say, I don't know to whom this might apply, but if you're in a position where you need workers that folks like this may be able to fill, I would imagine that you could reach out to Jen, and she could hook you up with some pretty good folks. So to whomever that might apply, I think that would be something good to keep in mind for Grace. Thank you so much for coming and sharing with us. She will be in the lobby immediately following the service, so you guys can bombard her there and we can find out more ways to get involved. And we're going to end the service with talking about a volunteer team. So if you're hearing about, like, well, Grace is involved in school supplies, and you're going to see a video here in a minute from Fox Roads, something that we did for them at Christmas, and you're like, I want to do that stuff when that's happening, you'll be able to. So we'll get to that in a minute. But before I let you go, I just want to pray for you as a church. Let's pray for her and everything that's going on at Refugee Hope. Father, gosh, we are just so encouraged by the work that you're doing just down the street from us. God, I can't imagine what it is to be a refugee. I can't imagine what it is to grow up on the border of Pakistan. I can't imagine some of the things that these people have walked through. And yet you've brought them here and they have people with them who love them. And God, we pray that they would continue to see your love in Jen and the folks that she works with and the folks who volunteer over there. Lord, if any of us are compelled to be a part of what you're doing there, I pray that you wouldn't let go of us, that your Holy Spirit would just tenaciously get after us as we get more involved in what you're doing over there and get front row seats to watch you work in the lives of these people. We pray that you would bless Jen. I know that it is fun to share success stories and it is fun to talk about what's next, but God, I also know that it is hard. And so I pray that you would be with her in those times and in those moments as well. We thank you for her, for her humble example and witness and ask that you would just encourage her and give her many, many more stories of folks who came to know you through what they're doing over there. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. who haven't been at Grace for as long and don't know who the princes are and why we get excited. So now they get to share with us and everybody can be excited together, which is great. So tell us, where'd you grow up? How'd you get to Grace? When did you realize you were in love with each other and you needed to move to Africa because this is just what God wanted you to do. So go. There's a lot of steps in one question. So I think like I was part of the, I would call it the St. Grace crowd. So Chris Sasser sort of lured me into youth ministry as a high school student. And then I felt a call to youth ministry very as like a teenager. And so he sort of nurtured that. And I interned a couple summers, and then basically we sort of always dreamed of conspiring so that once I would graduate, I would come on staff. You and Chris would... Chris and I would... Yeah, we conspired together, and that worked out. And so I used to sit between he and Karin and sort of mediate their marriage and relationship up in the old loft. In the aughts. In the early years of Grace, Chris Sasser was the student pastor here. And they were going and blowing. I mean, they were doing some really cool things. So he was doing high school, she was doing middle school, and I sat in between. And it was a dangerous place. But it was an amazing experience. But yeah, I mean, Sarah had interned as a college student as well. And then as she was at Seminary at Duke, we were also conspiring to figure out how to get her on staff. So as you're on staff, there's an attractive intern, and you're now conspiring. No, no, no, no. I brought the intern. Okay, all right. So basically we met at Fun in the Sun, the camp we used to take kids to. And she was from Lakeland, Florida, and they had a lot of pretty girls at her church. so I spent a lot of time talking to the girls at her church. You made your way over to the Lakeland crowd. Yeah. So then we moved back to Raleigh and I started working at Grace and she started seminary. I think what was a mutual attraction was we both just loved kids. We both loved ministry. I mean, we met where we were both interns, you know, loving on kids. And so that's always been a part of our life is that we just love loving on people together. We love having people in our home. And we lived, you know, five minutes from here and literally would always just have people in our home, a lot of kids, a lot of adults. And, I mean, we're just so grateful for this place. I became a pastor here. I was ordained here. We grew up a lot here. And I feel like, again, this name lives up to its name. I received so much grace in this place as we just kind of clumsily figured out what it looked like to be pastors and to love people and to be newly married. As some of these now adults can attest to on mission trips. We had some marital strife over, you know, pranks and Chris Latta. And so, yeah, we just... He was usually the center. Just strife specifically over Chris. Yeah. Usually he's in the center. Yeah, specifically. But we grew up here. It's not just your own marriage. You got other people's too now. For sure. 100%. Yeah. So we're grateful. I mean, just to sit here and to look out at so many old faces and so many new faces, it brings us so much joy. And we're just so grateful that you guys loved us while we were young. And now that we're old, that you love us from afar, it's such an incredible thing. We're the same age, I think, and we are old. What year did you guys get married? 2002. Wow. Okay. And then when did you go to Africa? So, yeah, basically I think the thing is that Grace nurtured this heart for mission because we were taking students on all these mission trips. And that was our excuse for not doing it ourselves is that we were taking Jen and we were taking Colleen. And so that's cool. We've done our part. And unfortunately, God was continuing to stir that. So she went to Uganda in 2007 with some girls who had been sort of involved with Grace. I somehow let my wife and three college girls go to northern Uganda by themselves. It's very irresponsible. I don't feel like you had a lot of choice. I don't choice. He did not. Also true. And so that was kind of a make or break moment. Either this is going to die down or this is going to get worse. And it got worse. And then she basically said, I'm going to stop working at church. And, you know, so she went to Jeff Hancock, the pastor at the time, and said, look, I'm going to stop and we need to go do something. And he had heard about this organization in Cape Town. So, hey, why don't you try them? And so the church was just unbelievably gracious to us to not only, you know, let her quit, but also just to, I mean, I took a three-month leave of absence, and they just supported that and said, cool, we'll hire someone to replace you to help the thing keep going, and go do it, go explore, and go sort of figure out what God is doing. And so it was just incredibly gracious. And so in that period of time, working with Living Hope and meeting a guy named Michael and him just sort of answering that prayer that we were having of, okay, if God, you want us to be here, what would we ever do? And so that's sort of where Ubuntu was birthed in us and then came back and told people. And I think people there advised us, you need to tell people there. You can't decide here. You must decide. You must really hear from God there. And so as we told people, everyone said, well, we hate the idea that you're going to leave, but this sounds like exactly what you should be doing. Knowing you, this is what you should do. So it was very affirming and, yeah, pushed us out the door. And what year was that? So we left in 2009, October of 2009. Okay. And my understanding is, correct me if I'm wrong, you went over there with Living Hope. And Living Hope is an organization that was founded by a pastor in Cape Town, South Africa, and initially was doing a majority of its work in the HIV community because it was, for a while, the highest case per capita in the world. And so that's where it started, and then other programs got built out of that, and now it's this whole big thing. And so you guys originally went over there partnering with them, and then at some point or another transitioned to Ubuntu. Yeah, like our 2008 time was all with them. And then in 2009, we kind of went back saying, I'm going to do, I'm going to start this Ubuntu thing eventually, and she's going to work with Living Hope and with the Methodist Church and, and, and. That's always and, and, and. Always and. Yeah, right. There's lots of ands. Yeah. I mean, I think there's been a, there's been a couple paths. I mean, Ubuntu is a path which Casey can obviously really share about what that is and even what that word means. But us as a family, we studied missionaries. I studied at Duke race and reconciliation and justice things. And we thought, let's try it out really doing this. And so we went to Cape Town the first time, lived in a cute apartment and did all the sightseeing. When we moved there, we actually moved into an impoverished community. So their apartheid has been lifted for about 20 years, but everyone is still kind of stuck in whatever community they were forcefully removed to. So in way deep in Cape Town, very south, there's a community called Ocean View, and it's mixed race people. It's colored. That's a PC term there. And so we had done work there. We'd made friends there, and we just thought, we want to try this. We actually want to live among people and try to be friends and try to be neighbors with the people that we serve. And people were like, you can't do this. People are crying. No, it's a death sentence. And we just were very stubborn. And we just wanted to give it a try. Also was serving at a Methodist church in the community. So we moved into the pastor's house. And that's really where our ministry manifesto, as I call it, was born because we showed up. I mean, someone literally, when we left, made a cake with South Africa on it. They were like, you're going to South Africa, save Africa. And we were like, okay, a little bit, we will. I mean, you just, you get this kind of hype. And so we show up in Ocean View and no one cared and no one talked to us and they were suspicious and they didn't need whatever we were selling. And so we sat alone in our house for a while and started to open the Bible and just say, okay, Jesus, this didn't happen to you. You know, when Jesus went from town to town, he had throngs of people following him, coming to his feet, touching the hem of his garment. So what are we doing wrong, Jesus? And I found myself in John 4 specifically, and it's really the woman at the well. And she doesn't want to know a religious guy, and yet at the end opens up her entire life and her soul, and then goes back to her town and converts everyone. And it's just because Jesus came to this place, and this is our ministry manifesto, look, listen, love. You know, we go to save and to conquer and to, you know, rescue all the orphans, but God really, in Jesus, showed us you just show up and you look. What's around? Who's there? What's not there? What are people feeling? You listen. You get people to open up, share their stories, share their lives, and then, if God allows, you love them. And so because God humbled us, slowly we started to make friends. Slowly people started opening up their lives to us. Slowly people started letting us in. And it's changed our lives, that humbling experience of not having the answer, of not knowing the way, of not being the saviors, and just people slowly allowing us in has changed our lives, and now these people, 11 years later, are our friends. They're our family. We do a lot of life together, and one story, I was actually thinking about while we were sitting. So Bernadette is a woman we met the first time in Living Hope. She worked for Living Hope. We did HIV support groups together. We'd go into communities. She had these groups of people, all HIV people. She was supporting them, loving them. I would just tag along. We come back. Her son, Robin, comes to the academy, becomes a part of the academy. And while he's still in high school, they're in the front yard, basically, and someone next to him is shot dead. Robin is there with a friend. The friend is shot dead by a gangster. Bernadette calls, crying, weeping, for months. Obviously a lot of grief. Robin as well. So we walk a lot of life together through this trauma, through a lot of stuff. Eventually Robin graduates from Ubuntu after he comes here to America. Now he's in Portland. He is at school. Where is he at school? Corbin University. But just recently before I came here, I was having my own crisis, struggling with how to love people, what to do, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like I can't do this anymore. Who do I call? I call Bernadette. I show up at the Ubuntu house. She now works at the Ubuntu house. She's our cook. Bernadette, I need you. I show up. I'm crying. Help me. Guide me. What do I do? She sorts me out, and she says, I tell everyone, I have this white friend, and she's my white sister, and she lives in Ocean View. She said, but Sarah, you need to be colored now, and you need to toughen up. And she prayed for me. And that's our life. Our life is not about us saving anyone. It's about neighbors. It's about friends. It's about a lot of stories that are intertwined and us finding God sometimes more than we feel like we're even helping them. Sure, sure. I like to be colored and toughen up. That's great. Casey, can you tell us about all things Ubuntu? Just how did it start? How did it germinate? What has it become? What energizes you the most now that you're 10 years in? Yeah. So Ubuntu is really, it's born out of a desire to deal with fatherlessness. So 60% of kids in South Africa grow up without a father in the home, which is a very frightening statistic because it leads to then all of the other issues that come with it, gangsterism and drug abuse and alcoholism and massive unemployment, and it keeps going. And really, Michael, it's not really my idea. Michael Jenkins had the dream and the idea, and he saw a sucker who had all the background he needed to make it happen, and I took the bait, and so we did it. But really, we work with a small group of kids who, sort of elite footballers or soccer players. And we really try to walk from really almost nine, but they enter the academy around grade six. So kind of 11 years old through the end of high school. And it's really about now we run our own school. So we register with the Department of Education. And so you go through the normal South African kind of educational system. We train four or five, six times a week. We have amazing coaches. We have a residence for about 30 of the boys who live further in town to get there every day or who live locally in their home situation. It's just not going to help them be successful. So there's about 30 kids who live in the residence. And then, yeah, and then we just spend a lot of time on their character, leadership, and spiritual formation. How do we help them become the man that will, you know, be different than what the men are in our country currently? How do we help them raise a different heart for their own community, their own family, and the nation wider? And so, yeah, in February, it was kind of like our 10th anniversary of our first training sessions. We had big celebrations. And I think what's amazing now is watching, we have this sort of first generation of graduates, of guys who finished and the things that they're doing. So in August, we'll have 17 kids now studying in the United States. One of them is here. Yeah, you got one here with you, right? So Tarek is here. So if you want to bombard Tarek to get the real stories about Casey, you can. So, I mean, poor Tarek from the age of 12, even beyond up until last year, so until he was about 20, had like one coach. He got stuck with the same guy all the way through that process, and he loves me deeply still. Is that true, Tarek? Do you love him deeply? Okay, all right. So it's amazing to not watch those guys. There's about 10 playing professionally. We have our first Olympian. So if you watch the Tokyo Olympics, hopefully Luke Fleers will play and hopefully play well. So he actually brought Tariq to trials because we had seen Luke first. But, I mean, it's been amazing. But what's really amazing is to see the two guys who are training to be teachers and Josh, who's now a policeman, and the impact that they will have. But I'm also so excited because I know that we, after 10 years of bumping around and making lots of mistakes, are infinitely better at what we do now. We have a much, much stronger team. We have all these amazing teachers and house staff and coaches that are around it. Where in those first couple years, it was like me and Mike stumbling around, wondering when the adults were going to show up and help us run this thing. And tell you what to do. Yeah. And we're like, ah. I'm wondering that here, actually, in my role. We heard. Yep. So we have this amazing team. And what's been really great is now Sarah is actually a full-time Ubuntu staff person and on the leadership team. Can you believe it? That took a long time to lure in. We're going to get to Sarah in a second. I want to hear everything that you've done because it's been a lot of different things. The last year really showed us the need to really focus on formation. We were doing it, but it was sort of on the edges of everything we did. And I think, obviously, that is her heart and what makes sense. I know that that's going to drive the next 10 years to be even more amazing and that the graduates will be even more amazing young men than we have already produced. When you say formation, you're talking about spiritual formation, spiritual health? Spiritual leadership, character formation. And what are you guys doing now to key into that specifically? So we have some programs for all of that. So spiritually, it looks like a lot of different things. A lot of it's relational. It's work that our teachers and our coaches and our staff do, especially at our residence, through relationships, just inviting them to be in a relationship with God, modeling that. We have a Bible study that our very own Casey leads at the house once a week, which is incredible and really cool. And then we have other programs that we're really excited to launch. You know, it's been kind of just a few programs spiritually. We want to get even better about that. Leadership is also something that we're really starting to do. We don't want just to expect them to be leaders, but teach them what does it mean to be a leader and that every one of them is a leader. And then character formation is actually a program that we do once a week. They have an hour that they do it. And they're learning to really know who they are and live with integrity and live with excellence. These things have to be taught, especially because of all the trauma and bad habits that some of them have faced. They really have to actually be taught these things. And so it's really exciting to now look at who we want the Ubuntu 30-year-old man to be and then intentionally and strategically create a pathway to that place. It's really exciting. That is really, really cool. And now briefly, as we are out of time, I am interested in the chronicle of all the different positions and things that you've done in your now decade in South Africa. So run us through it. And then now, I believe you just finished a book, yes? And now you're on staff with Casey. So what have you done? A lot of different things. I'll say most, a lot of pastoral stuff, really. I learned in South Africa that even if no one thinks you're a pastor, even if no one gives you a title or, you know, a cool cloak or whatever a pastor is supposed to have. We're supposed to get cloaks? Yeah, I had one. I had one back in the day here, but it's just who you are. And so, you know, people in Oceanview call me Pastor Sarah, and I don't pastor a church anymore. And I'm so thankful. I'm so honored that they call me that. So we were at the Methodist Church for a while. We've been at different churches, but we're now at a local church. We actually want our kids to now just be involved in a youth group and have that kind of stuff. So I've done a lot of things, a lot of stuff in the community, in the high schools, in the different kind of organizations of Ocean View. My book is actually about our journey with special needs because, as many of you know, our son Keller, who's now was one was diagnosed with autism mild autism and so we walked this unexpected journey where literally we googled autism after we got the diagnosis from the doctor to getting totally integrated in ocean view with the schools we got a team of therapists and experts and this really extraordinary thing happened where people just came into our house daily and changed all of our lives, most all my son. So he lost his diagnosis when he was five. And it's a miracle, but it's a miracle of community. It's a miracle of people coming into all of our lives. And it's a miracle of God saying that Keller is fearfully and wonderfully made, autism or not autism, and watching that come out. And so I finished the first draft. We're hoping to launch it next summer. It needs a lot of work. But it's really also my story of an unlikely mother, very unlikely. I didn't even know if I wanted kids. And now here I am, the mother of a special needs son. And so it's been a journey. You've got your daughters here. Are you happy that you have her? So happy. We thought she was going to be a boy. We were certain God loved us and it was going to be a boy, and now we have this incredible daughter who loves Jesus, loves acting, singing, dancing, is a leader, is kind, is this incredible person. So I don't know how he did it, but I feel like it's made me more than it's made them. And so I really want to share that story of what God has done in my life and how I found a real God in the midst of real trial. And now I'm the mother of Ubuntu. I never would have wanted to be Tarek's mom. And Tarek and I had a deep and real, even last night. There's fireworks and bourbon flowing last night, and Tarek and I are in having this deep conversation because I'm the mom. And that's what I do. And I am so humbled to be the mother of Ubuntu. Again, never would have expected it, but it's my best job I've ever had. It's the one that brings me the most joy. Best boss I've ever had. He really is. That's great. That's great. I wonder if he feels the same about his employee. Okay, Princess, thank you so much for sharing a little bit of your story. I have one more thing. Okay, let's pray. No, I'm just messing around. I just want to, I think, like, affirm and honor Grace, because, you know, like, hearing Jen share and Colleen on the video and, you know, Suzanne's work with Anastomari and stuff, it's a reflection of who Grace is. And so, you know, Suzanne and I came through the youth ministry and Beth and Bill Gentile tried to, like, ruin us at young, young ages, and they didn't. But all of that practice we then got serving people because of grace, it shaped our hearts. And now seeing kids you invested in, like Jen and Colleen, doing a really amazing work. I know that those seeds were planted by amazing parents, but we got to throw a lot of water on it for a period of time and really do something. And their reflection of that and their response to that is exactly the picture I want for Tarek and Vazumzi and Luke, that they would, through that, somehow, our feeble efforts, water something in them that when they finish, that they would change and transform South Africa. And it's a silly kind of vision we have, but I really believe it's possible. And I believe it's possible because I've seen it now in kids that I got to water the seed and that they were doing it. So today is such a perfect picture and it's such an encouraging picture for me that it really is possible that for seven feeble years of really only having one or two days a week with someone, I got to water something. And now I get, I mean, they're stuck with us all day, every day. So what does that mean I can, you know, our staff can do? And so it's such an amazing picture. But I want to honor what you've done over years and years as a church to do that. Thank you. And I would echo that and just say we really have a very strong group of folks on the missions committee who care deeply about this and are kind of the stewards of this culture that Grace has fostered through the years. And it's one of my favorite things about our church. You guys are having an event tonight here. We are. We're having an event at 7. And we're just going to share some more stories. Vazumzi Plamana, who was here actually two years ago sharing, he is now at NC State. And he actually couldn't be here because he's at his church today, and so he'll be here tonight. And so we're so excited to just share a little bit more about what God's doing. And we wanted to say thank you. Look, Listen, Love is the organization that Grace started to launch out missionaries. And so when you support Acts of Grace, sorry, Look, Listen, Love is manifesto. Acts of Grace, thank you. And that's the way that you support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing. Ubuntu is its own 501c3, but Acts of Grace just keeps us there and allows us as a family to keep doing what God has called us to do there. So we'll share more about that tonight, and we're so thankful. Wonderful. Thank you. And they'll stick around, too, to chat with after the service. Let me pray for y'all, and then we're going to suffer through Alan Morgan together, and then we'll eat some tacos. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for all that you're doing in South Africa, in Ocean View, and in the ways that you are using the princes and also drawing them more near to you. God, I pray that their walk with you, that their exuberance to follow you, that their joy that they find in you would be contagious as they move in and out of circles and relationships in what they're doing in South Africa. God, we pray for Sarah in her new role, that she would thrive there. It certainly seems as though all the experiences that you've given her over the years have prepared her for this in really incredible ways. And we lift up Casey as he continues to plug away at this thing that he's done now for a long time. I pray that you would give him new and fresh excitement and motivation and that he would wake up tomorrow as excited about Ubuntu as ever. And God, we thank you for bringing them here safely, for them being able to share their story. And we pray that you would write many, many more good stories through what they're doing down there and that you would just draw these young men and these folks in the community to your son Christ through what they're doing. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If I didn't know any better, it would seem like your senior pastor guilted you into attendance this morning. This is great. Thanks for being here. I hope we keep it rolling. We are resuming our series today called One Hit Wonders, where we're looking at different passages in the Bible that we don't often get to stop at or pause at or focus on. And this morning, we're going to be in a passage at the end of Habakkuk. We'll be right back. Habakkuk. Very few people know where it is. You're probably going to have to get your table of contents involved. There's no shame in that. It's one of the minor prophets towards the end of the Old Testament. So join us in Habakkuk. What we're going to find there, I think, is a passage that is tucked away and little known, but it really brings to me a lot of hope and a lot of faith, sometimes when we need it the most. But as we approach that passage, I'm reminded of these rites of manhood that I would hear of as a kid growing up. You hear about these different tribes across the globe that have different tests for children to become adults. They throw you into the wilderness for a few days, and if you come back with like 10 beaver pelts, then now you are a man. There was the Maasai tribe I was reading about this week out in Africa. They don't do this anymore because it's illegal, but for generations, what they would do is on your 10th birthday as a little boy, they would send you into the savanna with a spear, and you had to kill a lion and bring back proof of this kill, which is an insane test for a little boy. But in the Messiah's defense, if a 10-year-old can do that, dude's a man, okay? I believe them. That's a legitimate test. But you've heard about these rites of passage and these tests of manhood or adulthood before, right? And I actually think, I bring that up because I think that there is a test for our faith in the Bible. I think that there is actually a test that all believers at some point in their life must go through, must experience, and must come out the other side as proven and mature. And I'm arguing this morning that we find that test in the end of Habakkuk chapter 3 and verses 17 through 19. So read them with me, and then we're going to talk about why I think this really is suchber verse. This is a difficult thing to be able to say. So I'm going to contend with you this morning that being able to authentically claim this passage is the mark of mature faith. Being able to authentically claim this passage, Habakkuk 3, 17 through 19, to be able to say this out loud to one of your friends, to be able to say this out loud to God himself, To me, to be able to authentically claim this verse, claim this passage, to say it out loud and to mean it, is the test of a sincere and a mature and authentic faith. And if we look at the verse and the context in which it comes, I think you'll see why I think this. Because the picture that Habakkuk is painting here follows three chapters of devastation. Three chapters of the nation of Israel being laid low. Three chapters of the consequences of their action resulting in poverty and death and famine. Three chapters of hopelessness. And so here at the end, he's saying, even in light of all of that, in light of all the devastation that we just experienced, in light of where I find myself now, and listen to this, even though the fig tree will no longer produce and the olive crop fails and there are no herds in the fields, what he's saying is, even though the present looks bleak and the future looks bleaker, even though today stinks and tomorrow looks worse, I don't find any good reason to hope in a good and bright and hopeful future, even though that's true, yet I will choose to find my joy in the Lord and find my strength in him. Do you see the power of that statement? And for many of us, we know what it is to feel like the present stinks and the future doesn't look much better. We know what it is to look around and think to ourselves, though the fig tree does not blossom, though the olive is not going to produce a crop, though the things that I relied upon are no longer there. We've walked through those moments, right? And I'm not talking about small disappointments. I'm not talking about little fissures in our life that upset our otherwise peaceful existence. I'm talking about the hardest of times. I'm talking about my dear friends in the church who they have some good friends who are in their early 30s, I would presume, and have young children, and she has been battling cancer for months, if not years, and has recently found out that her body is so riddled with it that she will not survive this. That's today stinks and tomorrow's not looking good either. That's hard. That's what Habakkuk's talking about. I've mentioned before my friend Carla Gerlach who lost her husband at the age of 30, my college roommate to a widow-maker heart attack with three children under the age of five. That's sitting in the middle of a present that stinks and looking towards a future that doesn't feel very hopeful. We know what it is to walk through these difficult times. That's raising a child and then watching them make decisions that hurt us so much and not knowing what to do. That's experiencing a parent with dementia or with a difficulty that has now been imposed upon you and you have to love them and carry them through it. I've seen that happen over and over again in our congregation as some of us age and take on the role of caretaker of our parents, that's a difficult spot. That's in the middle. What Habakkuk is talking about is how we feel in the middle of a divorce, in the middle of finding out about infidelity, in the middle of getting the call about the difficult diagnosis, in the middle of the difficult relational thing that we don't know if we're going to see through it. It's how we feel in the days and months after we lose our job or after someone hurts us deeply. That's what Habakkuk is talking about. And so what he's really saying in this passage, to put it in our language, is that even when God disappoints me, I will choose to find my joy and strength in him. Even when my God disappoints me, I will choose to find my joy and strength in him. I debated on that word disappoints because you could say, even though I'm disillusioned by, you could say even though I'm confused by, even though I'm let down by, even though I don't understand my God right now, I will choose to find my joy and strength in him. And where the rubber meets the road on that is when as a believer, you know that God is good and you know that he is sovereign and you know that he is loving and you know that he is all powerful and you know that he could have stopped this thing if he wanted to, but he didn't and you don't know why. You know that it's in his power to cure that cancer. You know that it's in his power to prevent that heart attack. You know that it's in his power to heal this person, to mend that relationship, to see this thing through. You know he can do it and he didn't. And you're left with, but why, God? Why didn't you do that? It's a feeling we feel whenever there's another shooting. God, you could have stopped this, and you didn't. Why didn't you? It's a feeling that Mary felt when Jesus let her brother Lazarus die. And she wept and she said, why didn't you get here sooner? And in that moment, when we're disillusioned by our God, when we don't understand why he let this happen, and there's no words that anybody can say that can comfort us, to choose in that moment to say, God, I don't understand you, but I trust you. God, I don't understand you, but I find my joy in you. And God, I don't understand why you let this happen, but I'm going to lean on your strength to get me through the season of disillusionment and confusion and disappointment. To be able to do that, to be able to choose that despite the confusion and disappointment that we're walking through, to me that is the test that produces a mature and authentic faith. To me, when you've been forced into making that choice, is when your faith becomes sincere and mature and authentic. And listen, there's some middle ground there. I've talked to people walking through this season. There's some middle ground there. There's some people who will say, yeah, life stinks and it's really hard right now. And God, I don't know if I trust you and you could have fixed this and you didn't and I don't know why. And they, even though they love God, they trust God, they still follow God and believe God, they are not yet prepared to say, and I will find my joy and my strength in him. They're not there yet. There's a middle ground where you don't understand what God has allowed, where you know you trust who he is, but you're not yet ready to fully embrace the reality of it. You're not yet ready to fully say, even though I find my joy in you, I rejoice in you, and I find my strength in you, and I know that you will make me walk in high places. There's a middle ground there. And if you are in that place, that middle ground, between God, how could you let this happen, and not quite ready to say, I want to rejoice in you again, this sermon is specifically for you. And the reality is we all face these tests. We, all of us, if you are a Christian, at some point or another, is to be disappointed or disillusioned by God and to feel that he has let you down. It's to go through this test. And the Bible is very clear. It's very open with us. We should see it, right? This shouldn't be a surprise to us. The Bible is honest with us that this test is coming. I could share with you myriad verses, but I've gotten just three here for us to consider this morning. In Proverbs, Solomon writes, He speaks of this test that's coming. The fire burns the gold and the purity rises to the top and there's something to this in the way that the Lord tests us as well. Peter writes famously, 1 Peter 1, verses 6 and 7, He says, on the vine, that today looks bad and tomorrow looks worse. And even though that happens, I will rejoice in the revelation of my Savior, Jesus Christ. I will look forward to the day when he returns and he makes the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. I will cling to that, even though I don't understand God, even though he doesn't make sense to me, even though I would do it differently if I were God. I will choose to trust that in eternity I will understand him, That if I ever possess the capacity to understand what God's doing and why he allows things to happen in this way, I'll sit back and I'll go, you're right. You were good. And I love you. He allows these tests to produce in us a perseverance that will result in glory and honor, praise and the glory and honor of the revelation of Jesus Christ. And then Peter writes at the end of that same book, 1 Peter 4, verse 12, I kind of like this one a lot. Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. Don't be surprised when we walk through the test. Don't be surprised when life is hard. Don't be surprised when there's a season and you look around and you go, God, where are you? When you relate to the Psalms where David writes, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? Where are you, God? I cry out to you, and I do not see you. Don't be surprised when those trials come, and we look around, and we say, this isn't right. This isn't fair. God, you could have done something about this. He says, don't be surprised as if this is something unexpected. The reality is the test happens. And I want you to know this too about the test. Our father doesn't delight in testing his children. He simply knows that a fallen world will test us. Our God in heaven, our good father in heaven is not up in heaven looking at your faith going, hmm, they seem to be doing pretty well. How can I tighten the screws to see if they really mean it? What can I do to make them to kind of poke and prod them and see if they really mean this or if they're going to fade away? He's not up in the heaven tightening the screws. He doesn't take delight in watching you squirm. That's not what he's doing. He simply knows that in a fallen world, his children will be tested. And he weeps with us. And he offers us his presence. And he offers us his hope. And we're told that those who hope in the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and not be faint. We're told things over and over again. We're told that God is our refuge and our strength. We're told that we can trust him, that he is our ever-present help in times of trouble. We're told that he is close to the brokenhearted, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. We're told blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. We're told over and over again throughout Scripture that God is close to us in our brokenness, that when we are in the middle of this test is when God is closest to us if we will only be able to feel him, if we'll only have the ears to hear him and the eyes to see him and the heart to know him. We're told that the test comes. And it doesn't come because our God delights in testing us and watching things be hard. The test is coming because this world has fallen. Because in a fallen world, people get cancer. In a fallen world, sin begats abuse, begats divorce, begats pain, begats generational scars. In a fallen world, people die too soon. In a fallen world, people get addicted. In a fallen world, we have to watch our parents become people who no longer know us. And those things will test our faith. Those things will make us look at God and say, couldn't you have done something about this? Because of that, I think it's important for us to think, I actually think it's important for us to remember the story of John the Baptist who had this very moment. John the Baptist was this great prophet. He was the last of the great prophets. And he was the one to announce Jesus as the Messiah who was to come. He was the one to introduce Jesus to the people of Israel. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. And subsequent to that, John the Baptist is arrested. He's being held in prison by Herod, and he is going to die. And he sends one of his disciples to Jesus. And he asks Jesus, are you the coming one? Are you the coming one or should we hope for another? And we have no reason to know this, but this is a reference to Isaiah 35, which is a messianic prophecy, a prophecy about the Messiah that is to come. And he calls in that, in Isaiah 35, Jesus is referred to as the coming one or the one who is to come. And it says that when he arrives, that the blind will see, that the deaf will hear, and that the lame will walk, and that the prisoners will be set free. John the Baptist is a prisoner. And he sends a messenger to Jesus to say, hey, are you the guy? Because your word promises that when the guy shows up, I'll be let out of prison. Or should I hope for another? And Jesus tells that disciple to go back to John and say, go and tell John that the blind do see and the deaf do hear and the lame do walk and the prisoners will be set free, but you won't be set free, John. And then Jesus says, blessed are those who don't fall away on account of me. Blessed are those who have expectations of me that I don't meet. Blessed are those who are confused by my actions and my choices, and still choose to trust that I am sovereign and that I am good and that I love you. John the Baptist walked through this very test. All saints walk through this very test. Because of that, I think it's important for us to think of our faith as a clay pot. Think of the faith that you have as a clay pot. If you grab clay and throw it on the pottery wheel and start to form it, you can make it into a thing. I don't know anything about pottery. I've seen it in enough movies and TV shows that I feel like that's what you do, right? You slam it down and you press the pedal and it spins and you can make it into a thing. You can make it into a bowl or a pot or a vase, right? And if you just take the wet clay and you form it into a shape, it's there and it's real and it exists and it's not not clay. It's not not pottery. And you could probably even hold stuff in it if you wanted to. It could probably even serve a purpose. But that piece of pottery is not finished until it goes into the kiln and it comes back out of the fire. That pottery is not hardened. It's not mature. It's not ready to serve its purpose. It's not ready for use. It's not trustworthy until it comes out of the kiln formed and fashioned and fired. And after a couple decades now of being in ministry and being in church my whole life and watching people's faith and watching how it grows and how it fades and how sometimes it seems to go away and sometimes it seems to come back and then sometimes it seems to move into maturity. I am certain of this. Our faith isn't as mature as it could be until we walk through that fire. Our faith is most trustworthy when it's put into the kiln and it comes out the other side hardened and authentic and mature. Our faith, to me, isn't yet mature, isn't yet strengthened, isn't yet completely trustworthy until we've been put in the fire and we've been forced to choose God when sometimes it doesn't make sense to choose Him. And say, but even so, in the words of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we trust that God will protect us from this fire, but even if he doesn't, we will declare his name. Please understand that the test is not, the fire is not the circumstances that we find ourselves in because those will come and go. To me, I firmly believe that the fire is that moment, it's that season when we question, can I really trust this God? It feels like he let me down. Can I really trust him? Can I choose? When faith isn't easy, when faith doesn't come naturally, when faith isn't fun, when faith is a choice, will I then choose God? When it doesn't make any sense to me, will I trust his wisdom over my own? Will I trust that in eternity, when I can look my Savior in the eye, that I will understand the way that he ordered his creation? I really do think that that's the test of genuine faith. And there's something to that fire, too. And that picture of gold being purified through it. You know, the reality is, as hard as it is to hear, the fire burns off the impurities, right? And so what we find usually when we go into these crucibles and we go into these tests, and the real test is not the circumstances around us, but having to choose God in spite of our confusion. The real test is choosing Him anyways. And allowing some of our impurities to be burnt off. Acknowledging I've been carrying expectations from God for a long time that he never gave me. I've lived, and I know that this is hard, but I've watched it happen. I've lived in myopic faith where my assumption is that by my actions I can control him. And God, I've been good, so you should order the universe to not harm me. That person was so good. They were such a good man. They were such a good woman. They went too early. God, how can you let that happen? That assumes that God pres think the fire forces us to see that maybe we've built a myopic faith. Maybe he's opening our hearts to a grander vision of eternity in his kingdom. Maybe we open ourselves up to God, what did I bring into this test that doesn't belong here? So that when we emerge from the other side, we can authentically claim Habakkuk 3, 17 through 19. This is why James writes in the first chapter of his book, Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you endure trials of any kind. For we know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance, and perseverance, when it takes its full form, will leave you perfect and complete, not middle space. When you find yourself in the fire, take heart in knowing that your Father is shaping you into a saint who can claim Habakkuk 3, 17 through 19. If you find yourself in that sacred middle ground and that land between God, you've disappointed me. I believe in you. I want to. I want faith, but I can't yet find my joy in you. If you find yourself there in that fire, take heart. You are in the midst of your test. And when you grab onto God and you choose faith, you will come out the other side persevering. You will be perfect and complete, not lacking anything. You will have a fire-tested faith that was hardened through experience, and you will be able to use your faith as a blessing and beacon to others. To this day, the people whose faith I respect most are the people who have walked through this fire and chosen God anyways and now use that to help walk other people through their test. So if you've been through the test, if you've been forced to make that choice, forced to choose faith, you know how formative that is. You know how solidifying that is of your faith. You know that that season of life, no matter how difficult it was, if you have a sincere faith now, is one that you look back to and flag as the time when I really moved into maturity. You know that that instance, that season of life, anchors your faith now and now so that when things happen around you, they are not near as difficult to deal with. Those of you who have not yet walked through that fire, you will. And when you do, remember those words of Peter. Don't be surprised by this. We all walk through this. Choose God. Choose to find your joy and strengthen him. And for those of you in that middle ground right now, who know God and trust him, but are not yet in your heart at a place where you feel like you can worship him, where you can find your joy in him. God has grace for that. God doesn't rush that. God loves you and is closest to you as you walk through it. My hope and prayer is that we will be heartened by that, that we will be encouraged by that, and that we will be a faithful of people who have chosen God and have mature, authentic walks with him that will stand the test of time, that will be perfect and complete, not lacking anything. Let's pray. God, you're good. Even when we don't understand how you're good, you are. Even when we can't see a hopeful future, God, we know that you do. Lord, I pray specifically this morning that you would be with those who are in the fire. I pray that they would feel your comfort, that they would feel your presence, that they would feel your peace, that they would feel your love. God, fill us with your spirit so much so that even though we don't understand how or why, God, that we would still trust in you. Give us the strength of faith to find our joy and strength in you. Be the one who strengthens us even as we walk through the fire. It's in your son's name we ask all these things. Amen.

This is our summer series called One Hit Wonders. And I have an explanation for what the series is and why we're doing it. But really, the most honest, transparent thing to say is this is really just a vehicle so that we can stop and highlight some of the passages that we don't pay attention to as much sometimes. That's really what it is. To pull these passages out of the Bible that maybe in a normal sermon series we wouldn't normally hit. This morning we're going to be in the book of Micah, which if you have never looked for the book of Micah in your Bible before, now is probably a good time to start, okay, because it's a hard one to find. So you're going to need a few minutes before I get there. So if you have a Bible, open to Micah chapter 6. If you don't know where it is, I was trying to think of helpful ways to tell you that, and there are none, okay? It's just like most of the way through the Old Testament, probably use your table of contents if you need to, and good luck. But we wanted to, for the next six or seven weeks, take some time to highlight some of the passages that we just don't get to talk about in church as often. And so this morning, like I said, we're going to be in Micah chapter 6. As we approach Micah chapter 6, I wanted to tell you about a friend of mine. This is a friend of mine who grew up in North Georgia. I'm just going to grab a name out of the air. We'll call him Alan. Alan grew up in North Georgia. In his late teens, early 20s, I'm unsure of the exact timing, small town, he's driving around one night and doing something he shouldn't do, speeding or whatever. I forget the details of the story. But the fuzz gets after him, right? The law catches him and the blue lights come on. And here they come after Alan. And Alan thinks, maybe I can outrun these guys. Maybe I can duck away and not get in trouble because my parents are going to be mad. I think the story goes, pulls into a driveway and thinks he's hiding out. The officer pulls up behind him. He knows good and well who it is. The officer knows good and well who's driving this car because, again, it's a small town in North Georgia. He gets out of the car and he pulls his pants up likey police officers did, you know. And he looks at him and he says, son, you done boogered up. Which I just love that phrase. That's just such a good southern phrase. Son, you done boogered up. And you know it. Like you know you're in trouble. You messed up. You know you messed up. And now you know that there's going to be consequences. And I bring that up because I think we've all felt like that. Oh, man, I done boogered up. I think that we know people who have messed up. We have people that we probably could have said that to in our lives. And I think the tendency there, when we mess up real bad, is to try to figure out what can we do to make it right. I think of a husband who's messed up in some significant way. He's just been drifting away from the family for a while. He did one big dumb thing. He's not paying attention to the kids. He's a grump whenever he comes home. He's selfish in the way that he spends his time. Something, some way that a husband can mess up and we're all capable of messing up. Wives are not. Wives are great and we just need to try to get on board with them. But husbands mess up and when we mess up, I've been in so many conversations with guys after they've messed up and they think to themselves, what can I do to make it right? What can I do? I've boogered up. What can I do so that my wife knows I love her? Should I give her a day at the spa? Like a girl's trip? This is really bad. Do I buy her a new car? Like a hundred roses spread throughout the house? Like is this what I do? Do I buy her jewelry, like something big and nice? Like, what's the grand gesture that I can do that when she is the recipient of it, she will go, oh, he loves me. Everything's good. You're forgiven. That's what we're looking for, right, is that grand gesture. But here's the thing. Here's the thing about marriage when we really mess it up. And when the husband comes to me and he says, what can I do? What can I buy her? What can I give her? What big extravagant thing can I do for her? I always say like, dude, she doesn't want a day at the spa. She wants you to do the dishes. She doesn't want a hundred roses. She wants you to cut the grass without complaining about it. She doesn't want a big grand gesture. She wants you to get up with the kids when you don't have to. She wants you to offer to do bedtime and bath time. She wants you to clean the kitchen. She wants you to do these small, consistent behaviors that spring from a sincere love. And you know what she wants? She wants you to be a good husband, man. You don't get to act however you want for a month and then spend a bunch of money at the end of the month and be like, see, we're good. Grand gestures are never in a real relationship. In a relationship where we genuinely love one another, where the other person matters to us, grand gestures are almost never the thing that communicates the love that we feel for them. And the truth of marriage and the truth of relationships is that when we mess up, what we really need to do to make it right is just small, consistent, simple behaviors over time that flow out of a sincere love. Show them. Don't tell them that you love them. Don't tell them. Don't make some big promise, some big commitment. I promise I'm going to get up every day and I'm going to do this and I'm going to come home and I'm going to do this. Don't do that stuff. Just start doing it, right? And I'll just throw in this little tip. I don't like to give tips for my marriage because I don't like to set myself up like I'm some sort of good husband here, But this one I think I've learned. If you'll be consistent with these little things over time and do the dishes and get up with the kids and show on a daily basis that you love her, the pressure's kind of off for the big grand gestures. You don't have to do those as much. Now, if you can do both of them, I would imagine that's really firing on all cylinders. I have not experienced that. I try to invest in the little things, you know. But the grand gestures aren't really needed as much. And you know what's interesting to me is that that's how we as people work. Just give me the consistent things. Just show me that you actually love me. Just be a good husband. Just be a good friend. Just be a good wife. Just be a good son or a daughter. That's what we need. And what's interesting to me is that God is no different. If we think about our relationship with God, to be a Christian for any amount of time is to come to the conclusion that we've done boogered up. We've messed it up. I've disappointed God. I ought to know better by now, and I'm still doing this. I didn't even know I was capable of becoming this version of myself, and now look at me, I feel shameful. To be a believer is to come to a conclusion at some point or another that we have let God down, that we have messed up. And I've talked with people. I've felt these emotions. What can I do to show God that I love him? I get on my knees, I'll pray, I'll commit. I used to work at a summer camp, man. And the summer camp, I got to the point just callously and skeptically. At the end of the week, we would do a campfire, right? And there's a campfire and we sing songs and we've been pumping these kids, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus all week. And it's good. And the things that happen at camp are wonderful are wonderful and life changing and I trace a significant event in my spiritual formation back to the first time I went to a particular camp. So I think that they're incredibly effective in the lives, in our spiritual lives. But these campfire moments where these kids come forward and they make these big grand promises. I'm going to go home and I'm going to break up with my boyfriend and I'm never going to talk to them again. I'm going to make a bunch of new friends and I'm never going to do this. You're just kind of sitting there as a counselor and you go, I made that promise. You're going to fail. You're not going to do that. But it's our tendency to want to try to find these promises to make to God, to make this big grand gesture. God, what do you want from me? What can I give you? What do you ask of me? I want to show you that I love you. And this is actually the same place that the ancient Hebrew people found themselves. When we get to the book of Micah, I'm not going to give you all the background to the book of Micah for the sake of time and your interest level. But what I will say is that God's people, the Hebrew people, the Israelites, were far from him. They had been wandering from him. They had thrown off his rules. They had thrown off his reign and his sovereignty, and they had begun to live by their own rules. And because of that, they were suffering in their sin. And by the end of Micah chapter 6, these prophets would try to shake them and get their attention. And by the end of Micah, they had gotten, Micah had successfully gotten their attention and they were ready to repent. They're ready to come back to God. And so they go to God and they say, what do you want from us? We've messed up. We've done, boogered up. What do you want from us? And that's kind of, that's the questions that we see in verses six and seven. So I want to read those to you first. We be right with God. They realize they've messed up. They want to fix it. God, what do you want from us? What can we do? Can I offer you oil of a thousand rivers? Do you want a hundred calves that are a year old? Do you want my firstborn, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Now they're getting into hyperbole. Whatever you want, God, I'll give you. Whatever grand gesture, whatever I need to do, whatever promise. You want all my money? You want me to stroke a check for everything in my bank account? I'll do it, God. Just tell me that you love me and that we're good. This is the place of desperation that they've reached. And it's a place, again, as believers, that I believe that we are familiar with. God, I've messed up. I've become someone that I didn't know I could become. What should I do now? How do I make this up to you? What do you want from me? Whatever you want, I will do. And I love God's response in verse 8. You know how you can make it right with me? You know what you need to do so that we can be good? I'll tell you. Verse 8, he has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. I'll read it again because it's worth it. He has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. I love this passage because it distills down so much the complication of scripture. You know what God wants from you? You know what he wants you to do? He wants you to seek justice. He wants you to love kindness. He wants you to walk humbly with him. Really, at the end of the day, God wants what we want when someone has messed up with us. He wants us to just simply show him that we actually mean it, that we actually love him. He doesn't look for a big grand gesture. God asks for simple behaviors born out of sincere love. And if I had the notes to do over again, I would put the word consistent in there. So if you're a note taker, put that in there for me so I feel better about things. God asks for simple, consistent behaviors that are born out of a sincere love. If we want our wives to forgive us and to know that we mean it, be better husbands. You want God to forgive you and know that you mean it, be better children. He doesn't need the oil from a thousand rivers. He's got all the oil he could want. He doesn't need your bank account. He's got a big one. He doesn't need your time and your energy and your talent. He created everybody, and he can use a donkey to speak to people. He does not need me. You want to show God that you love him. You want to know what God wants from you. It's simple, consistent behaviors born out of a sincere love. And I really love the simplicity of this truth. I love how resonant this is and what it does for us in our thinking about our spiritual life because I think it's entirely possible for someone to be new to the faith and be intimidated by it. This is a thick book. It's a complicated book. It's hard to know everything in here. I would bet if you're a student of the Word, if you listen to sermons regularly, I very much hope that you regularly encounter things that you did not know before, that you had not heard before. I think it's part of the Christian experience for there to be a spiritual question that we can't answer because we don't know the Bible well enough, or to learn something about Scripture and see it be incongruent with another part of Scripture and not know how to harmonize those things. And so I think that Scripture itself can be intimidating. I think that the idea of living a Christian life can be intimidating. The idea of being spiritually healthy can be intimidating and it can be big and it can be confusing. And sometimes it's hard to know where to begin. And for those of us that feel like that, kind of mystified by the whole Christian life and all the learning from us that it requires, this verse is incredibly helpful because it takes everything that we're trying to piece together and distills it down into the simplest form. Listen, just seek justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God. Just do those things and the rest of it will help make sense. Seniors, as you go into your own lives and you make your own decisions for what you want your faith to be and how you want to live that out. You will have any number of messages coming from the world about what it should look like and how it should be shaped and what you should believe and what you should think is right and who you should affirm and who you should do all these things for. Listen, if your faith seeks justice and loves mercy and walks humbly with God, you're on the right track. For the rest of us confused about our faith sometimes, intimidated by what it means to be a Christian and not really sure, is this a sin? Is that a sin? Is this right? Is that wrong? How do I do this? What do I do there? Do this first. Seek justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. I think the opposite is true too, the way that this simplifies things. Some of us have been walking with God for a long time. Some of us know the Bible very well. And some of us have the tendency and the mindset to kind of get entrenched in the details, to get mired in the details and in the dogma and how it all pieces together in a good systematic theology. And we like to deep dive into books and parse out individual words and sentences and tenses and understand what does this mean in context and this and how does it relate to this. And we can fire off all those things and do those studies. And listen to me, those studies are valuable. They're good. They're profitable. They're beneficial. They build us up. They're helpful. It's good to understand the Bible on a granular level like that. But if that's the only place that we live, is on that granular level, if that's the only place we go and we get mired in the details, sometimes we forget about the themes of the Bible and the whole purpose of the Bible. And this verse kind of helps to pull us up out of that and help us give a 30,000 foot view of the Bible and go, I need to seek justice. I need to love mercy. I need to walk humbly with my God. And it helps to pull us down. If our heads are in the clouds and we're confused, it helps to bring us down and center us. So this verse is a wonderful, settling verse. We love it so much that we have it displayed in our home to remind us consistently that these are the things that we need to champion in our house. Because they're so vital, because Micah in this book, in his message to the Israelites and then in turn to us, highlights these things as vital practices, seeking justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with God. I believe it's worth our time to think about this morning what it means to actually do those things. What does it mean to seek justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with God? And so as I thought about justice, and some translations, mine says that you should do justice. Other translations say that you should seek justice. And so as I thought about it, I thought of this idea. I don't think that what he's telling us to do is to seek justice for ourselves. I don't think that we should do justice for ourselves. I don't think that we're to seek out our own justice. And justice is someone getting what they deserve. Whether it be a warranted punishment for a sin committed or whether it be a right wrong. Someone's been treated unfairly and we're trying to right that wrong. And I think more often than not, the type of justice that we're supposed to seek for other people is not punitive justice. We shouldn't be trying to punish them, but we should be trying to restore people who have been mistreated. And this idea of seeking justice, again, is not for us. I don't think the message of seeking justice for yourself is really congruent with the gospel message. Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile, that we're to reciprocate evil with kindness. So I don't think it's really congruent in the gospel message that we should in 2021 be running around concerned about our own justice. I think the heart of God is that we would seek justice for others. And so here's the thing about justice. And this is for me, okay? This is something I thought of this week. So try it on with skepticism. This is not gospel truth. I didn't get this from some smart pastor or theologian. I made it up, okay? So you try that on for whatever it's worth. If it fits in your life, good. If not, it doesn't hurt my feelings. But here's what I think about justice, particularly as we seek it for other people. Justice always flows downhill. If we're going to seek justice for others, we can really only seek it for those that don't have the voice or influence or power that we do. We don't seek justice for people who have a greater voice or influence than us. If Jeff Bezos is wrongfully imprisoned, he doesn't need your help. He doesn't collectively need our help. He's good. We can't get him any resources or voice or influence or power that he doesn't have access to. He's fine. But we have a girl here named Jen Taylor who's involved in a ministry called Refugee Hope. There's a whole community of refugees that live behind the Falls Village Shopping Center over there on Falls in the News. And on July 11th, we're going to actually have a whole Sunday dedicated to highlighting our ministry partners, and we're going to get to talk to her, and I'm really excited about that. But those people who live in those apartments, they don't have the voice and the influence that Grace does. If we want to seek justice, we seek it for people like them. A really easy application of this, because you might think, I don't have voice. I don't have influence. How do I seek justice for other people? An easy way to do this is when a kid's getting bullied. Right? We're on the cul-de-sac or we're at the park or we just happen to notice and we see some older kids picking on a younger kid. Nothing riles me up more than watching a kid get bullied. I used to be a teacher and there was a kid getting bullied in my class and I sent him to the office to get something I didn't need and I laid into the girls that were making fun of him and they cried and I felt better. Maybe someone needed to seek justice on me after that moment. But we can insert ourselves there. That kid's not getting treated fairly. I want to let them know that that's not okay to do. This community of people isn't getting what they deserve. I want to be an advocate to get them what they deserve. I have a friend who started a ministry. He became aware of a trailer park community that was 85% Mexican immigrant. And the children were English speakers and the parents were not. And it was really hard for them to make their way in society. And so they got involved simply by bringing a turkey for Thanksgiving one year. And that developed into a multi-state ministry called Path Project, where they go and they partner with these people and they get adults in there to teach the adults English as a second language. They teach them to go into the schools and be advocates for their children so that they can seek justice on their own behalf. And that's what godly justice looks like, is using our voice to bring about fairness for someone who doesn't have the voice or the influence that we do. That's seeking justice. And I say that because if we're growing in our walks with God, if our hearts are beginning to beat more like his, then we will be people who regularly seek justice for those who don't have the voice that we do. And I think it's important for us to point that out in church because I grew up in church. I grew up in church in the South. I know what institutional religion looks like. And I have watched over and over again people in the church choose to use their voice to try to convince victims that they're not victims instead of trying to help the victims that are being hurt. If we're growing in our heart with God, we will be far more interested in helping victims than we are in trying to convince them and others that they're not actually victims. And if they'll just suck it up, if they'll just take ownership, if they'll just do what I did, then they'll be okay. That's not what the heart of God says. And I don't want to be a part of a church that is more interested in trying to convince others that they're not actually suffering than they are in actually doing something about the suffering. So we need to be a church that seeks justice, that leverages our voice and influence to help people who don't have the voice and influence that we do. As we seek justice, we're also told to love kindness. And I don't have any great insight to you on what kindness is. You're grown-ups. I think you'd get it. If you don't know what kindness is, just go talk to my wife. She's really nice. She'll tell you. We know what it is to be kind. But what I wanted to think about as we think about this idea of kindness is that kindness is most helpful, it is most effective where it is least warranted. Kindness is most effective where it is least warranted, right? We know this. It's really easy to be nice to someone who's nice to you. Again, my wife, Jen, she just drips kindness. And I have watched people in my life who I know are not kind people, and they are just butter in her hands. They just respond with kindness to her because that's how she acts towards everyone. It's really easy to be kind to someone when they're kind to you. But what about being kind to people that we don't have anything to gain from? Right? We've heard this before. You can tell someone's character by how they treat somebody they have nothing to gain from. What about when I don't need anything from you? I don't need you to like me. I don't need your money. I don't need your support. I don't need you to play my kid in the game. I don't need you to give my kid a good grade. I don't need this sale to go through. I don't need anything you have to offer me. There is nothing. You are literally bankrupt in my economy. You have nothing that I need. And yet we'd be kind to that person anyways. What about when someone is unkind to us and we feel like they don't deserve our kindness? Isn't that when kindness is most effective? When someone's been unkind to you, when everyone around you is telling you, yeah, you can be a jerk back to them, you need to put them in their place, and we choose to respond with measured kindness anyways, isn't that a more effective kindness? And when we are kind in these incredibly effective ways, I'll tell you, it makes an impact. When I was six or seven years old, I went with my church at the time, Grace Fellowship Church, to my first overnight summer camp, Word of Life Camp down in Florida. And I was newer to the church and young, and most of the kids on the trip were a little bit older than me. And so I was pretty intimidated by the whole deal, right? And so it's the classic scary moment of getting breakfast on the first morning and looking at the cafeteria and going, I don't have any friends here. I don't know what I'm going to do. You know, that terrifying moment of where in the world am I going to sit and how's this going to go? And so I just find a seat, sit down in the middle of the table somewhere. And I'll never forget the pastor's wife, a woman named Jody Hoffman. She comes and she sits down across from me. Which, as soon as she did that, I felt more important. I felt valued. I felt seen. I felt like this breakfast was going to be okay. Because here's the pastor's wife sitting down with me. And I remember at the time, even at six or seven years old, having the wherewithal to acknowledge this as kindness. She's not sitting here because she wants to. She's sitting here because she knows I'm alone and I'm scared and she wants to be kind to me. And now she's going to make conversation with me even though she doesn't know how to do that. And listen, that in and of itself is a remarkable act of kindness. I'm the pastor. I love your children. I want my hugs when they get here, and I want my high fives when they get here. I don't want to have breakfast with them. I don't want to do that. She sat down and she had breakfast with me. Not only that, I was so nervous about this breakfast and not messing it up, that somehow or another when I reached for something, I knocked over my milk. I knocked over my milk directly into her tray of French toast. I felt terrible. I'm scrambling. I'm apologizing. I'm near teary-eyed. I'm so, so sorry. I'll get you some more French toast. And she calms me down. She puts her hand on the table. She says, Nathan, it's okay. Calm down. It's all right. It's all right. I said, no, I'm so sorry to ruin your breakfast. And she said, I actually, I like milk on my French toast. And I'm like, you do? Yeah. Sometimes at the house I do this when there's no one else around. I like to, I like eating my French toast like this. Really? She goes, yeah, look. She takes a bite of it. That woman sat there and ate milky French toast for a whole breakfast so some dumb six-year-old wouldn't feel bad about himself. That's remarkable kindness. It's remarkable kindness. And listen, I promise you this. Here's what I promise. She doesn't remember that. I haven't talked to Jodi in years, but if I could talk to her this morning and say, do you remember the time at Word of Life that I dumped milk on your French toast and you ate it anyways? I promise you she had no recollection of that. That was probably the third milky French toast she ate that week, okay? She's just that kind of person. She's that kind of nice. It meant nothing to her than just being kind in the moment. But here we are 35 years later and I remember it and it stands out as this mark of kindness that someone treated me with. That kindness when it's least warranted is most effective. Maybe there's someone at your work who's not being kind to you. Maybe your boss is running your rag and maybe there's a co-worker who's not treating you with the respect that you deserve. Maybe you're kind of getting run over there and it's getting frustrated and you want to stand up for yourself, but you keep being kind because of your witness and because that's how you're wired. And let me tell you something, even if that person isn't responding to your kindness the way you wish they would, the people around you see it and they're going to tell your story for years. We have an opportunity to be kind to people that we get nothing from. They're going to remember that for years. My father-in-law, you know I like to brag on him. He lived in a community where they had a joint landscaping service. People who would come around and cut the grass. It was part of their HOA. It was part of the deal. He doesn't have to pay them anything. He doesn't owe them anything. He can't get any more or less service out of them without going through this big contract or whatever. He's got nothing to gain from being nice to these guys, yet every time they came, he would have a cooler full of drinks and fruit to refresh them on the summer days. They knew when they got to his house. You don't think they remember that house? Do they remember the people who worked there? When we have opportunities to show unwarranted kindness, it is incredibly effective. And lastly, God tells us that we should walk humbly with him. We're to walk humbly with our God. And so I was thinking through, how do I explain this humility? How do we walk humbly with our God? And the only conclusion that I could reach is that the deeper you go, the more humble you become. The deeper you go with God, the more you walk with him, the more you know him, the more your heart beats like his, the more humble of a person you become in your faith. I actually think of it like this. A few years ago, reading a book, I came across like this, a bell curve. And the idea of the bell curve was the ignorance of expertise, and I thought it absolutely applied to what we're doing. So we created this for you today to kind of take a look at. I think that this is how we get to humility. I think at the beginning of our Christian walk, we have this ignorance of beginning, right? We're just starting off. We don't know the whole Bible. All I know is that I'm a sinner in need of God and Jesus' sacrifice, and I'm putting my faith in that, and I'm going to kind of trust the people around me to show me the way. I love these people. I love the church people who are in the ignorance of beginning. There's no pretension. They're willing to ask any question. These are the people that always ask the good questions in Bible study. I love having these people in Bible study. Those people in the middle, arrogance and familiarity, they're bummers in Bible study. I don't want them anywhere near my Bible study. They know all the answers. They know everything. They're really, really smart. They can answer all your questions for you. But the ones at the beginning, man, they got the great questions. And they're not arrogant at all because they don't think they know any more than anybody else. Then what happens is we start to learn a little something. Start to piece some things together. We come to church often enough. We've got our Bible kind of scratched up and marked up. And then eventually we get to this arrogance of familiarity where we know enough to start being able to answer questions. People are coming to us asking us questions. What does the Bible say about this? What do you think about this? We start to teach it to others. And we start to be pretty confident in this theological system that we've built up, that this is going to have all the answers for life, and I've got the answer if you'll just come to me and ask me. This is where I lived in my 20s and most of my 30s. I hope that I'm on the other side of that now. I hope I'm not an arrogant jerk about my spirituality. Maybe I am, and this is exhibit A, but I hope not. And I think people get stuck there. People get stuck there because they quit learning and growing because Christianity for them is an intellectual exercise of how much of this can I understand and how much of this can I explain to other people and how many answers can I know and am I going to be the one in my circle of friends that people come to for advice? This becomes a place where Christians get stuck. We get caught up with theology and knowing the Bible and this intellectual knowledge never becomes a heart knowledge that we actually live out. And let me tell you something, that place, the arrogance, familiarity, that's a dangerous place. I'm very tempted to go off on denominations and things going on in our church and in our culture. The American church right now precisely because of this, because of people and leadership who have never moved past the arrogance of familiarity. It really gets us in trouble. But I just happen to believe that the more you know of God, the deeper you go, the more about his character that you learn, the more sincerely and honestly you read the Bible and let it rip you open and respond to that, the more humbly we approach God and spiritual things that we eventually arrive at this place of the humility of expertise. And the humility of expertise, we know how much we don't know. So we're not arrogant about the peace that we do. And the humility of expertise, we remember who we were when we had the arrogance of familiarity. We remember how we were teaching other people that you ought not do these things. How we were raising our kids telling them you shouldn't be like this. You shouldn't have that attitude. You shouldn't do this thing. Knowing good and darn well that we did those things. And the arrogance of familiarity to get to the expertise of humility. We know that we've walked through a season where we were the biggest hypocrites around. We're coming to church acting like we've got everything together. We're teaching a Bible study, telling everybody this is what the Bible means, this is what we have to do. And we know good and well that we're not living it out in our own private life. We know good and well that we've become a person that we can't identify anymore. That we've slipped so far into sin that we didn't even know we were capable of that. And yet, in our arrogance and in our hypocrisy, God continued to bless us. He continued to use us. He continued to forgive us. He continued to restore us. He continued to be there every time we cried out for him and said, God, this is the last time I'm going to need you. I'm not going to do this again. And he loved you and he rushed in recklessly with his grace, even though he knew you weren't going to keep that promise either. We've received that love enough times that we've moved into this place of humility because we know who we were and we know who God forgave. And how could we possibly judge other people? How could we possibly think that we're more than somebody else or that we're better than somebody else or that we know more than them because we've seen God forgive us? We know what we walked through. How could we not want to offer that forgiveness and understanding and empathy to others? Really and truly, I don't think we ever get to the humility of expertise if we don't begin to practice seeking justice and loving kindness. I think the way that we get stuck there is just to be satisfied with knowing the things that we know and never learning anything else. Knowing the things that we know and not feeling encumbered with expressing the other sides of ourselves. I have watched people over the years get their heads full of Bible knowledge and it turned them into more of a jerk. Because now I'm right and I don't need you. It's incredibly sad to me when that happens. And I would say to you this, if practicing your faith doesn't cause you to trend towards Micah 6.8, then you need to rethink how your faith is practiced. If as you grow, as you go to church, as you go to small group, as you learn more about the Bible, as you grow in your faith, if it does not trend towards seeking justice and loving to show kindness and walking in humility with God because you know who you are and where you've come from and you want to offer that same love to other people, if it doesn't trend in that direction, you need a new faith, man. This is a hard one for me, okay? It's a hard one for me. I don't know if you guys have pieced this together yet. I do not love kindness. That does not come naturally from me, okay? Any kindness I show is a direct result of the Spirit's hard and arduous work in my heart. But if our faith doesn't grow us and move us into a place where we want to seek justice for others, where we want to leverage our voice for those that have a smaller one, where we love showing kindness more than we love reciprocity, then we need a new faith. And if over time as we grow with God, we don't walk humbly with him because we know who we are and what we've been forgiven of and we want to offer that to others, if we don't walk in that, then we're not growing how we should and we should change how our faith is practiced. You know, right now, as we come out of COVID and things start to feel normal again, right? There's a lot of talk in church world about what does churches look like? And what everybody knows, what every pastor in America knows is essentially we've got to rebuild the church. Okay. February of 2020, for those of you who are around, was like one of the all-time highs of grace. We had record attendance for years prior to going back to years prior to that record attendance. People, you guys were enthusiastic. We had people coming out of our ears. It was super fun. We finished up a building campaign. I don't even know if you guys know that we're still doing that. We're still in the middle of a building campaign. It ends February coming up. I'm going to highlight it in the fall as we kind of make the push for the home stretch, but it's entirely possible for you to have been coming to this church for like a year and this be news to you. It's just kind of been quietly going in the background with faithful folks and it's been amazing. But we're in the middle of doing that. We were really, really humming. And then COVID hit. And within a couple months, I realized very quickly, oh, we're not going to see February numbers again for a while. Might not ever. And that's all right, too. But we're going to have to rebuild this church. We have to rebuild volunteer teams. All of our volunteer teams need new people. All of them. All of them. Most importantly, children and AV. Greg and Laura Taylor, I think we have to pay them to keep them on retainer now. They volunteer so much. We need volunteers across the board. We're going to have to rebuild the church. And as we look to rebuild the church, you know, I pay attention to pastor things, to conferences. I watch videos of guys teaching about growth strategy and yada, yada, yada. And there's all these strategies out there. There's all these things. You develop a goal, and then the goal gives you a vision, and then the vision gives you a strategy. Your strategy gives you tactics, and the tactics give you results. Gross. Gross. Get it away from me. I don't like any of that garbage. Because here's what I think. You give me a church that lives this out. You give me a church that seeks justice and loves showing kindness and walks humbly with God, you can keep your tactics. You're never going to hear me get up here and be like, if you'll just invite one person, and that person invites two people. I hate that stuff. Share your faith. Talk to your friends. Seek justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. If we have a church full of people who do that, we're going to need a bigger building. And listen to me, I mean this with absolute authenticity. More than I've ever meant it. I don't give a rip about growing this church. I don't care about being in charge of a church that's growing and has more people coming. That's not the point at all. The point is to care for the people that God sends us, to be good stewards of the souls that walk through that door that call grace home. And we're not going to be good stewards of them if we've got some stupid strategy to get their butt in the seat and then nothing to take care of their soul after that. I don't care. But if we'll seek justice and we'll love kindness and walk humbly with our God, we'll be ready to care for the people that he sends us. That's what matters to me. If we'll live out this verse, God's going to do cool things with grace because you've been faithful to him. What can happen in this church if we embody that verse? What can happen in your life if you embody that verse? What kind of stories will people be telling from you 35 years from now if you'll simply do these things? What kind of richness and joy and peace can you experience if we'll simply follow God's advice and distill our faith down to these simple practices? I want us to be people who seek justice, understanding that it flows downhill, and use our voice not to convince people they aren't victims, but to help them in their pain. I want us to love kindness so much that we show it when it's least warranted. And I want us to be people who have the grace and honesty to walk humbly with God and empathetically with others. And if we do that, I think God's going to do amazing things in our lives and the life of our church. Let's pray. Father, you are overwhelmingly good to us. You love us recklessly and unconditionally. You forgive us again and again and again. You restore us in the middle of our arrogance. You seek us in the midst of our ignorance. God, I pray that you would draw us into the humility that comes from walking with you, From praying to you. From talking to you. God, I pray for these seniors as they leave their homes and they go to become the people that you designed them and created them to be. Would they be people who whatever else happens to them would seek justice and love, mercy, and walk humbly with you as they learn and try on and exercise their new faiths? Father, for the rest of us, would we be a church, really and truly God, who just does those things? Would we be a church who just seeks you out and then seeks to show your love to other people? Would we be a church that's just characterized by simple, consistent behaviors that spring out of a sincere love for you? We just ask that you would give us a deeper love. Even as we finish and sing here this morning, enlarging our hearts to you and what you're doing in our lives. It's in your son's name we ask all of these things. Amen.