Sermons tagged with Jesus

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, my name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. I've got a couple of things for you before I just dive into the sermon. The first thing is that Kyle, who did our announcements, is engaged, man. Yeah. That's right. And she's pretty okay. He's getting older. This is right. No, in all honesty, I can't say much, Kyle. I can't say much. I'm so excited for you. I was sitting over here trying to think about what to say. And I just started like tearing up as I thought about all the things because you guys are perfect. So I'm excited and the church is too. The other thing, let's move away from that quickly so that I can actually preach a sermon. The other thing that I want you to know, and I wanted to say it during this part of the service, not during the announcements, because I actually want you to know about it if you're catching up throughout the week or if you're listening on a walk or whatever it is. I want the whole church to know about this and be prayerful in this. At the end of this year, 2020, what is it, two? Goodness. At the end of 2022, we're going to have three spots available on the elder board. So we're going to spend the rest of this year nominating and naming up to three new elders. And I feel like this is a really big deal because we only have eight elders, including me, max. And so we have an opportunity, or in addition to me, I'm the ninth, Max. And so to put three people on the elder board is a big deal. It impacts the culture of the church. It impacts the culture of the board. And I happen to feel that the people who go on the board are of the utmost importance because I'm trying to constantly remind the elders, this is not Nate's church. It's Nate and Jen's church as much as it's your church, as much as we are partners here and we care about the things that happen here. But this is not my church to lead. This is the elders' church to lead on behalf of the partners of grace. I have been asked to steward grace, but under the direction and leadership of the elders. And the elders, again, represent the wishes of the partners. And I would argue that there is no single portion of grace that has a greater impact on the health, integrity, and character and fitness of the church than to have a board that is healthy and fit and integral. So it's important who goes on that board. So if you are a partner, you're invited over the next month to submit people to be considered to be an elder. The process is we take a month to submit names. We take two months for our nominating committee to kind of talk to those folks and vet those names. And then we take a month for the elders to discuss the people that get there. And then we present them to the partners for a partnership vote. I'll say up front, I don't nominate anybody. I try the best I can to stay out of the process and just receive the people that are nominated by all of you guys. And then we discuss all of that. But I don't want to get too deep into the weeds. I just want you as partners to prayerfully consider who you might nominate to be an elder if you feel led to do that. If you look at the Grace Vine this week, there's a link there. If you scroll down, this announcement is in there. There's a link where you can go to the elder page and there's an online form. We have some forms that you can fill out in person if that's your preference. We just don't have them yet this morning because I oopsied this week and forgot to do that. But we'll have them next week on the information table. So please prayerfully consider that. Now for this week as I get into the sermon finally, sorry for such a long preamble, we're talking about repentance. We've been moving through Lent and kind of pulling different Lenten themes out each week through the devotionals and through the sermons. As I've said each week, I hope that you're being ministered to by those devotionals. I've really, really enjoyed reading through those every week and love all the voices speaking into grace. This week we focus on repentance. And as I got into studying repentance, I was taken aback, honestly, by how often repentance shows up in Scripture. It's all over the Old Testament, this call to repent, to throw off our sinful ways and to move towards God. It's all over the New Testament. All through the Gospels, Jesus calls us to repentance again and again. All of Paul's letters call us to repentance. A lot of the general letters call us to repentance. The end of the Bible, Revelation calls us to repentance. We're called to repentance throughout the whole of Scripture. And as I read that, and as I saw that, and as I studied it, I honestly, I'm not saying this to make a joke. I'm not saying this to make light of anything. I genuinely felt a prick of conviction that I have been your pastor now for five years. Next Sunday is five years, and I have not preached on this. It is to your detriment that I have not. No, it doesn't mean that we haven't talked about the idea of repentance in the service, but I have not slowed down and focused our collective gaze onto this issue that comes up over and over and over again in scripture, and I do sincerely apologize to you for that. I believe I have shortchanged you in not discussing this. And if it is not a part of our regular Christian life, then we have shortchanged ourselves in how we are applying the Scripture. So this morning, I want us to sink in and talk about this principle, this act of repentance. To do that, it's important that we're all on the same page and that we understand what it is. Because repentance can be one of these churchy words like sanctification that we say sometimes and we hear church people say, but if we asked you to say what it was, you would feel very uncomfortable about that. Now, half of you in the room probably know a good definition that I would agree with, which by the way, if I would agree with it, that makes it good. Sorry that that snuck in there. That sounds arrogant. But you would probably have a good definition. But half of us maybe not. So for the sake of the sermon and for the sake of the conversation this morning, we're going to define repentance this way. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. The word literally means to turn 180 degrees. So the idea of repenting is I'm moving this way. I'm committing this sin. I'm suffering from this addiction. I have this habit. I say these words. I hate this person. I'm moving towards sin and I realize it's sin and I stop. But I don't just stop moving towards that sin. I turn and I move back towards Jesus. So there's an action in repentance. Repentance is not a mindset. It's not a place of sorrow that we reach, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. It requires action of us to actually move away from what we are doing and back towards the Father because, I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but it is impossible to be actively sinning and not also actively drifting away from God. If there are things in our life that ought not be there, if there are things in our life that God would tell us, hey, I don't want that to be a part of your life, then that's sin. And to keep it in our life is to actively and intentionally choose to move away from God. And so when we repent, we acknowledge that that is sin, and we stop it, and we move back towards God. So that's the definition of repentance. As I studied this, I also thought it would be worth kind of detailing, and this is my thought, okay? This is me. You guys are adults. If you're Christians, you have the Holy Spirit. You read the scripture. You decide what it means to you. But for me, I actually see in scripture two different kinds of repentance. I see in scripture kind of a call for what I'm thinking of as initial repentance and then a call for ongoing repentance. So in scripture, I see these calls to initial repentance and ongoing repentance. And I'm going to tell you what I mean. We see a picture of initial repentance in Acts chapter two. In Acts chapter two, Jesus has died. He's come back to life. He's appeared to the disciples. He's ascended up into heaven. He's told them to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, the Holy spirit. And they don't really know what that means. And Jesus told them, just sit in this room and wait until the Holy Spirit comes, and then you'll know what to do. And they're like, all right. So they just sit around in this room and they wait. And they wait, and they wait. And then one day, at what we call Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues. And they go out on the porch and they begin to preach the gospel. And everybody who's there hears the gospel in their own language, in their own tongue. And it's important that we note that the people who are there are presumably the same people who days earlier insisted that Pilate crucify Jesus and kill him on the cross. It's the same crowd, right? And so what is Peter preaching to them? He's preaching to them this message of, hey, you know that guy that you killed? That was Jesus. That was the son of God. That was the Messiah who came to take away the sins of the world. That was the one that Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel had been prophesying about for all those years. All those scriptures that you learned growing up, he was the fulfillment of those things and you killed him. So, whoops. And then their response is, oh no, you're right. What do we do? How do we fix this? How can we be in with God? What we would think of, probably, as being saved. How can my relationship be repaired with God? And Peter answers them this way in chapter 2, verse 38. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is an invitation to what I'm thinking of as initial repentance. And before I go on to explain that as an aside, I'm so glad that this morning the Lord laid on my heart a passage that speaks about baptism because we have Easter coming up. And I think at Easter we're going to have the opportunity to baptize at least two folks. And the whole service really is going to be wrapped around those things because baptism is a picture of Easter. You understand? It depicts the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus. It's a reminder of that. It is the oldest of church traditions, and the early church would only baptize on Easter. So if you are one that the Lord has been pricking your heart towards baptism lately, would you please reach out to me? And let's make this Easter one of the most special ones that you've ever had in your life by moving you through the rite of baptism. But Peter calls them to repent and be baptized. And I think an interesting question is, repent of what? Perfectly repent of all your sins? If you need to be right before Jesus, then you need to perfectly repent of all your sins and be baptized and move forward? Well, certainly that can't be the case because no one can repent of their sins perfectly. It occurred to me this, this is true, not even Jesus can perfectly repent of sins because you have to sin first to perfectly repent. Jesus does not know repentance. So literally no one has ever repented perfectly of their sins. So this can't be the instruction of Peter. I think, and again, this is me thinking, that this initial repentance, that what Peter is calling them to repent of is repent of who you thought that Jesus was that you crucified. That guy that you killed, repent of who you thought he was and believe that he was who he said he was. Repent of thinking that he was a teacher or a prophet or an insurrectionist or just some guy or just a carpenter. Repent of those things and believe that he was who he says he was, who is the divine son of God incarnate who came to live a perfect life to die on the cross for you and for me to gain our citizenship in heaven, to secure us a seat at the table for the marriage supper of the lamb for all of eternity. And so I would invite you this morning, if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian. You have an invitation to the exact same initial repentance that the people in Acts got called to. And I would invite you this morning, if the Spirit so moves in you, that you would repent of whoever you thought Jesus was when you came in here. A historical figure, a humble teacher, a prophet on par with Muhammad or Confucius or Buddha. Repent of who you thought he was and accept that he is who he says he is, the divine Son of God who died on the cross for you and for me to secure your seat in all of eternity and to rectify your relationship with your Creator God. That's who Jesus is. And if you didn't believe that walking in here, you're invited into the initial repentance of walking away from who you thought Jesus was and walking towards who we now believe him to be. That's the initial repentance. But I think after that repentance, that's the moment when our salvation begins. The Bible teaches salvation as a process. So when you're saved, are you saved? Are you secured? Are you going to heaven? Yes, but your process is also ongoing. It reaches its completion in our glorification as we enter into heaven. So yes, that begins the process. But then as we enter into this process of salvation and sanctification that is secured for us, that is guaranteed for us, that we will experience in glory, God continues to call us to ongoing repentance as a portion of our Christian life. And he calls us to repentance in verses like this. I'm gonna read it again. Ed did a great job of reading it as we started, but in Romans chapter 2, do you suppose, oh man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness them that God has enough grace to cover over all of your sins. And no, that doesn't mean that you should just go on sinning so that God's grace may abound. That means that you need to realize his grace as kindness and understand that his kindness and his goodness and his grace and his overwhelming patience with you is designed by God and bestowed upon you by God to lead you into a position and a posture of repentance over and over and over again. God's kindness leads us into repentance. We need to be people of ongoing repentance because we are people of ongoing sin. Because we are people that no matter how far we go, there will always be things in our life and in our heart that don't belong there. John Owen, one of my favorite authors, writes about sin that the only way to win the battle against sin is to die fighting it. Otherwise, we just give up. So we are meant to be people who are a people of repentance in an ongoing way. And I think one of the reasons that we don't talk about this as much, and one of the reasons that we get confused about repentance is because we kind of equivocate it with some other Bible terms. We equivocate it with conviction and with confession, I think. That we kind of lump all those together and we make them all mean the same thing. I'm convicted about this sin. I've confessed this sin to God. I'm repenting of this sin. And I think sometimes we equivocate those things and make them mean the same thing, but they are all a part of the same ongoing process of repentance, but they are very different things. So conviction is feeling badly about your sin. Confession is agreeing with God that what it is is sin, and repentance is to actually do something about that sin. Conviction is that prick from the Holy Spirit that we get. Hey, that doesn't belong in your life. Hey, God doesn't want you doing that. Hey, It's really unbecoming to talk to people in that way. Maybe you should think about doing something about this anger issue. Maybe the way you treat your wife, maybe the way you take your husband for granted, maybe that's not holy. Maybe this pattern or practice or habit in your life is not something that pleases God. That's the prick of the Holy Spirit. That's the beginning of conviction. That's where repentance starts. But then from conviction, we're called to confession, where we confess our sin before God, which basically means to agree with God that it is sin, to agree with God that the thing that we're doing that we now feel guilty about is actually sin and is something that doesn't belong in our life. That's confession. And the good news is that 1 John 1, 9 teaches us that if we confess our sins, that God is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So again, I'm not talking about repentance as we earn our salvation. Our salvation is secured. The process begins at that confession, and then we begin to move towards glory as God works to sanctify us, and we work in ongoing repentance. But the idea of repenting requires us to actually do something about it. To illustrate this, I'm going to share this thing about me, and I don't want to share it, all right? This is the very first example that I thought of when I thought of this sermon, and I needed a good example to illustrate this point. And I went to Jen, and I was like, here's what I got so far. I don't want to share it, but I can't think of anything better. And she's like, yeah, think of something better. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I snore like bad. I snore a lot. And I do want to tell you this because A, it's embarrassing, and B, some of you love me and you want me to not experience any displeasure in my life. And so you have advice for me. You have a device or you have an uncle or you have a husband and this worked for them and you're going to want to tell me about it. Okay, but I just, I'm not in a place in my life where I'm ready to receive that. So if you could just respect my privacy during this time, that would be great. But I snore. And when I snore, it makes it hard for Jen to sleep. And when it's hard for her to sleep, it's hard for me to sleep. And I feel bad about it. When we go on family trips, like my sleeping accommodations are sometimes annoying because I snore. And it's a real issue. And every now and again, we'll come to this place where she's like, you should really, like our life and marriage would be better if you would take care of this. And I say, you're right. I agree with you. I've been pricked by you, the Holy Spirit, of my conviction. I confess, I agree with you that it is wrong. It does not need to be a part of my life. And I am sorry that it has gone this far. And then what do I do? Nothing. I go to sleep and I snore. Do I get the devices? Do I like eat well and run and try to get in better shape so I don't snore as much? No, I don't do anything. I agree, I'm pierced with conviction. I confess and agree this is wrong, but I don't do anything. I don't actually take any steps. And listen, if your process ends with confession, then you're just sorry. If your process of conviction ends with confession, then you're just sorry. Do I mean that in the double entendre way of you're sorry that you did this and you're sorry as a human? Yeah, yes I do. I do mean that, let's be very clear. Because you're stopping short of repentance. You're stopping short of action. Sorries don't mean anything. Sorries mean I'm ready to start the path of repentance. Falling on our face before God, you're right, I'm convicted. This doesn't need to be in my life. Give me the courage to get rid of it. That's great. But that's the starting line, man. What are you going to do after that? What are you going to actually do about it? What actual steps are you going to take to make sure that this sin cannot exist and cannot grow in your life? And the other thing is, if we stop at sorry, eventually our hearts get seared. You can't sit in sorry year after year after year and still mean it. Once you sit in sorry long enough, and you who have had crippling and debilitating and ongoing sin throughout your life, you know that I'm telling you the truth. Once you say you're sorry enough times, you stop meaning it and you can't bring yourself to say it because you know that it's as empty as your intentions. And that thing that used to prick you is scarred over now. And that's seared. And we don't experience the conviction that the Holy Spirit has for us. Because we've learned how to mute his voice out of our life by stopping at sorry. When we stop at sorry, we just see our own consciences, and we short-circuit the repentance process. So we have to actually do something. And I work very hard to preach here that it is not human effort that God is looking for. It is the power of the Holy Spirit in us. It is not human effort. It is focusing our eyes on Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. I preached a sermon in Colossians in February talking about if we want to put on the new self, what do we do? How do we overcome the old self? Will we focus on Christ? And all that is true, but when it comes to repentance, the rubber meets the road and you got to do stuff, man. So think of it this way. The Holy Spirit empowers, but we act. The Holy Spirit empowers us for repentance. Before you knew Jesus, repenting was impossible. The only thing you could possibly repent of was who you thought Jesus was and then move in faith and the Holy Spirit breathed life into you and now it's possible to repent of all the other things in your life. That's what Romans is talking about when it says that we are no longer a slave to sin. Now we have the option to repent. So the Holy Spirit empowers us to repent, but it is us that must take the action. It is us that must produce the activity of repentance. If that's true, then what does it mean to repent? What does it mean to actually repent of a sin? And this is the part, honestly, that I'm most excited to talk to you about. So if you've tuned me out because my word salads have just gotten confusing up until this point, then pay attention now because this is important. How do we actually repent? By taking steps to make it as darn near impossible as we possibly can to not allow that sin to on-go in our life. How do we repent? By taking actual action steps to remove temptation and distraction from our life that will cause us to commit that sin again. Not just white-knuckle discipline of, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, but to figure out why you do that, to figure out when you do that, to figure out what triggers you to do that, and to remove those things strategically from your life. If your issue is looking at things on your phone that you shouldn't look at, saying another prayer and saying another I'm sorry and doubling down on how much you mean it isn't going to do anything, and you and I both know it. So invite some accountability into your life. Have a scary conversation with someone who will meet you with grace, I promise. Take action steps to reduce your screen time on that phone. Let someone else put a passcode on your phone so you can't get to the apps that tempt you. Do whatever it is you have to do, but take the steps so that that can't tempt you anymore. If you struggle with anger or anxiety to a point where it cripples you and it begins to be harmful to the people around you, if you struggle with those things, go to counseling. Don't just pray, God, please make me a happier person. Make me a more patient person. Please don't let me be angry. God's gonna answer your prayer by going, great, here's a wonderful counselor to help you figure out why you're angry all the time. Go to counseling. If your marriage is rocky, yeah, start praying with your husband or your wife. But also pray that God would find you a good marriage counselor so that you can work those things out. If we want to move away from a bad marriage, we have to move towards a good one. If we want to move away from anger, we have to move towards peace. Take the steps that are necessary to get that sin out of your life once and for all. If it's an addiction that hounds you, shed some light on the dark corners of your life. Tell people about your addiction. Ask them for their help. Get the things out of the house that you're addicted to and refuse to bring them back into the house until you know you can handle them responsibly. Take the steps that you need to take to move away from the sin that is in your life that is entangling you and causing you not to live the life that God wants for you, not to be the person that God created you to be and is experiencing this stunted Christian life here that God does not want for you because we keep the sin in our life. Get rid of it, man. Take the steps. Do what it takes. Don't just be sorry. I don't care if you're sorry. And sometimes, eventually, according to Isaiah chapter 1, God doesn't care if you're sorry either. Do something. Let's take some steps and move away from the sin that hounds us. When we do this, when we repent, if it's true that sin pushes us further away from God, then when we repent, we are choosing a pursuit of his presence. We are choosing to be obedient to what Peter writes as he reiterates Leviticus, be holy as God is holy. We are choosing to pursue holiness and we are pursuing the very presence of God. To repent is to move away from sin and to pursue the presence of God. And my Bible in Psalm 16 tells me that in God's presence, there are pleasures forevermore. the full so that when I pursue the things of Jesus and when I pursue holiness and when I move away from the things that have been dragging me down for years, that I'm actually going to begin to experience the life that God always wanted for me. The rewards of repentance are intuitive. What would it be like to finally walk without guilt for that thing? What would it be like to finally be the person that everybody else around you thinks you are but that you know you're not? What would it be like to finally live a life free of this sin? That's the reward of repentance. The reward of repentance is the presence of God. And here's the thing that dawned on me this week. Repentance affords us the opportunity to begin to experience the fruits of our salvation here and now. Here's what I mean. Salvation is a process. Salvation is not completed until we are glorified in heaven forever. You are secured. I'm not preaching against that, but the salvation process goes on throughout the rest of your life. And in heaven, one day you will be glorified in your new body and you will experience the presence of God. And if we repent, and if that repentance takes us closer to the presence of God, then you have a very real opportunity to begin to bring heaven down into this place to experience flashes and moments of what heaven will be like here in this place when we walk in the goodness and the gifts that God gives us. When I sit with my family and we're all smiling and we're all happy and Jen and I can't believe the blessings that we are experiencing on this sunny day on the floor of our living room, I've got to believe that that's just a taste of what heaven is like. And when we repent and we move into God's presence and into the good things that he gives us in our life and away from the things that would seek to thwart these good things in our life, I have to believe that we are experiencing the presence of God and the pleasure of God and just a small fraction of the eternity that awaits us when our salvation is complete. So when we repent, it affords us the opportunity to begin to experience some of the fruits of our final salvation here and now. I want you to see desperately because it can be a scary thing to repent. If I take the steps I need to take to be serious about this thing in my life, I'm going to be ashamed. Some people are going to think differently than me. I'm going to give up some freedom that I don't want to give up. I'm going to have some accountability that I don't really want to have. And so there's some things about repentance initially that could bum us out. But I've experienced this in my own life and I know that it's true. Greater joy awaits us on the other side of genuine repentance. I don't know what else to tell you, man. On the other side of genuine repentance is a joy that's so much greater than whatever it is that's dragging you down. So I pray that grace will be full of people of repentance. Will be full of people that the Holy Spirit convicts. That we move to a place where we say, yes, this stuff does not belong in my life. Will be full of people who confess and say, yes, God, you're right, I'm sorry. But full of people who don't stop at sorry, but allow the Holy Spirit to empower you to actually move away from things. My prayer as I got up to preach was that God would soften even the hardest of hearts, and that those of us who have soft hearts, that God would cradle those two and usher them into a gentle repentance. Because there is so much greater joy found walking away from sin and towards our God. Maybe that's why we're taught in Romans that it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. Because he knows what waits for us there. Let's pray. Father, Father, I pray that we would be people of repentance. Give us eyes to see the things in our life that don't belong there. Give us ears to hear your spirit as he convicts us. Give us tenderness in our heart as we confess. And God, empower us through your spirit to move towards you, to leave behind the things that drag us down and to move towards you who gives us life. God, give us the courage, the conviction, the desire to repent, to name the things or the thing that doesn't need to be in our life right now and offer it up to you. And ask you for the power to move away from it and give us the courage to take the steps that you lay out before us. That we would not be people who simply stop at sorry. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, This morning's reading is from Philipp earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. All right. Thank you, Alex. Do you guys, just before we get started, have you guys ever experienced spending the better part of two weeks, really just most of all of your time of the last two weeks, to prepare a sermon on fasting, and then the person who's supposed to be singing decides she's going to say something that is far more elegant and far more beautiful than anything that you have to say about fasting? I don't know if you guys have experienced that, but I am currently resting within that experience, right, as we speak. But no, for those who don't know me, my name is Kyle. I'd love to meet you if I don't know you, so please come up and say hello. I'm the student pastor here at Grace, and as always, I am just so thankful for the opportunity to be able to just share a little bit of my heart for the Lord with you guys this morning. Last week, we began in our Holy Pause series, a series that we are going through through the entirety of Lent. Last Sunday, Nate basically gave an introduction to, hey, here's the background of Lent. Here's what Lent is. Here is why it's important. And here is why, Nate, we as a church feel like it can be important and it can be beneficial for us as a church to walk through Lent together, to give up something, to fast of something, to spend some time in devotionals written by the grace body together. And he did a great job. He did an awesome job. And so for the next few weeks, leading all the way up into Easter, we are going to be looking at a different spiritual discipline. And we're going to be just talking about and focusing on how might that spiritual discipline allow us and our hearts to be more connected to the heart of Christ. And so this morning, I have the joy of being able to talk to you guys about fasting. And so naturally, I'd like to begin by telling you guys my history with coffee. So for a long time, I've been around a lot of people who really like, who really love coffee. They drink it all the time. I think it's disgusting. I did think it's disgusting. Let me go ahead and say that because honestly, I'm not a big acquired taste guy. I don't know. Some people are great about like, oh, I should probably do this. I should probably drink this. I should probably eat this. It's healthy, whatever. So I'm just going to do it. That's not really me. You know, if I don't like something, I'm not really trying to eat it. I'm not really trying to drink it. And so, you know, I tried coffee and I was like, cool, there's dirt in this water. That's awesome. You know, like, and it's great. And then you also, you deal with like, for any of you guys, for every, all of us don't like something. And all of us have been promised by someone who does like that something, hey, I promise you, when you try this one, it'll be better. And I don't think I've heard that any more than I've heard it with everybody and their coffee. It's like, hey, guess what? Every other coffee in the entire land is garbage except for this cup right here. So why don't you go ahead and give this a try? I was like, okay, cool. It's still dirt and water. Like, as you guys can see, I prefer my water without dirt. But what made coffee a little different is because I was like, man, it smells so good. You know, like with vegetables, it's like vegetables smell as gross as they taste. You know, they smell gross, they taste gross. There's no reason to consume vegetables, which is not true. I'm actually coming around on those, so you guys should be proud of me. Like, no need to applaud, but I mean, I'm eating some vegetables now at the ripe age of 28. But for coffee, it just smells so good, man. And like, when I would go to my grandparents' house and my granddad would make coffee or my brother would make coffee in the morning, I'm like, gosh, that smells so good. Like I know it tastes like garbage, but man, it just seems really nice to be able to make some coffee in the morning and then just sip along with it. And as we all know, it's fun drinking hot drinks with friends, you know? And not only that, but there's only a number of times that you can go to a cool coffee shop and everyone's ordering their fancy black coffees, and then you order your fancy brown hot chocolates that you don't feel a little bit embarrassed. And so at about 26, I decided I'm going to try to give coffee a shot. And honestly, those are goofy, funny reasons. But the real reason is because I realized that my health needed it. Because if I had a long car trip, if I woke up early in the morning and I need to get energized and get going for the day, or if there was a time where I needed to stay up late or whatever, I mean, from high school on, what I turned to was Mountain Dew. I mean, just absolutely pounding Mountain Dews so that I could stay awake for whatever I needed to do. Like, if you look at the marketing data for Mountain Dew, Kyle needing to stay awake always increased heavily the sales of Mountain Dew. There was like this innate sense of me, I need to keep them in business because I have to wake up right now. And honestly, as you guys know, Mountain Dew is straight up poison. Not only is it disgusting, but it is poison and it is terrible for you. And so at some point I looked in the mirror and I said, Kyle, it's time to get off the Mountain Dews, brother. And so I decided to turn to coffee as a healthier alternative. So I drank it a little bit, and as you acquire tastes, as you start eating or drinking something more, you start enjoying it a little bit better. You start liking it a little bit more. And so that was happening. I would go on a trip, a long trip, and I'd maybe get a couple cups of coffee. And I wasn't drinking it real fast. I didn't love it, but it was what it was. And so obviously my family was elated. They all love coffee and I always just roasted them about it. And now they are allowing me to roast coffee. Because for Christmas, because they were so excited, they got me a Keurig thing, coffee maker. And so I was like, well, you know what? If they're going to make me this, then why don't I just start drinking it? Like, you know, I was kind of just drinking it when I needed it because it's like helps me stay up, gives me some good caffeine, all of that stuff. But maybe if I start drinking it more often, then like these other people who really do actually really like coffee, enjoy the taste, all that stuff, maybe, just maybe, I'll feel the same way. So I started making it more on my own. Well, fast forward into quarantine. And in quarantine, I don't know, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a big rules guy. If you give me a rule, I'm just going to say, okay, I'm going to follow it. So like early quarantine was like, hey, you should not leave your front door. Like you should not go outside at all, if humanly possible. Like there was a time where it was, like, banned to walk on sidewalks. Like, it was insane, you know? And so, being a single guy who lives in an apartment alone, I was just not doing very many things. I mean, I was, like, you know, we would do our streams, and I would FaceTime the kids or whatever, but mostly I'm, like, watching TVs, and I'm playing TVs. I'm watching TV. I'm, like, watching TVs. I'm watching TV. I'm playing Xbox, all that stuff. But there is literally nothing to do except for those two to three times a day where I was like, you know what I could do? I could make some coffee right now. And so for all of you who know Keurigs, you know, you walk over and you got to turn it on because you got to heat up that water. So you got to turn it on first. And as you're heating it up, sometimes you have to add water. That was like a joyous occasion when I got to even add the water to it. So you'd add the water, you'd heat it up, and then it would just drizzle down. And all this whole process, getting it into the cup, takes like five minutes. And then you got to blow it. And that was another thing I got to do. Blowing the coffee because it's too hot, you know. And then for about five more minutes, it's still too hot to like just chug down. So you drink it, you know, you sip it or whatever, and that was 10 to 15 minutes where I felt like I was actually doing a thing, and it was joyous, but all that to say that as I started doing that, I started really liking coffee a lot. I enjoyed it a lot more. I started drinking a lot more. As stuff started opening up, as we came back into the office, I got a membership over at Panera to where I could get free. And so I'd stop by, I'd grab a free coffee, head over here, maybe get iced coffee for lunch, whatever it was. And it was like, great, this is awesome. I'm finally at the place where it's like, ah, it's not just something I have to do because I need it. It's like, I don't even need this anymore. Like, I don't really feel the caffeine doing much. It just tastes good. So I like doing it. Well, fast forward again to a few months ago when I was set to preach on a Sunday. And on Monday, I had an ear infection. And it didn't feel great. So I went to the doctor, got an antibiotic. Next morning, take the antibiotic, head over to Panera, get like a scone and a coffee and do that stuff. About an hour later, I started feeling super sick. I felt terrible. My stomach felt awful. I didn't know what was going on. I was like, is this COVID? You know, like first the ear infection, now I have COVID. This is awful. And I went home. And as I went home, I'm like, well, I do at least feel a little hungry. And so I start eating. And as I start eating, I start feeling better. So all you guys now are now, all you parents are now nodding. You're like, yeah, you just need to eat more when you take antibiotics, dummy. And that was it. Literally the only thing that made me sick was the antibiotic. But as any of you know, if you get sick around something that you eat or something that you drink, you're not really excited to eat or drink that thing the next day. And so on Wednesday, after I had just survived two ailments, on Wednesday, I do not at all want scones. I don't want any coffee. I had no taste for coffee anymore, which had become foreign to me to not have a taste for. And I go about half the day, and ailment number three comes as my head starts pounding. Like it hurts so bad. My eyes are just like, like it just, I don't want, I don't want my eyes to be open. It just, all of it. And I'm just like, am I dying? You know, like I just, because it's now three times where I have no idea what's going on. It's the third different type of sick I was or whatever until I finally realized, as all of you veteran coffee savants know, is my body had grown so accustomed to having that coffee that when it didn't have it and when that caffeine intake didn't come, my head was pounding because my body was trying to let me know, Kyle, we need this. And it was the first time where I'm like, oh, my coffee intake has not been healthy. Something that I thought was like good, and I thought was actually a healthy alternative, and therefore I was doing something smart and right, had turned into something that I was completely abusing. Something that literally was giving my body a negative, painful reaction if I went a day without it. And the crazy thing was, I had no idea. I just thought I liked coffee, so I was drinking it. But until that first day that I didn't have a coffee that morning, I had no idea the hold that it had over me and the hold that it had over my body. And if you'll permit me, I'm going to pause there. I'm not going to finish that point because I want to backtrack a little bit, and I want to talk a little bit more about Lent. Wednesday is when Lent started. If you guys have joined us in our devotionals, you know that. If you've joined us by deciding that you want to fast of something and replace that with focusing on and loving Jesus more and growing closer to Him, then you know that Lent started Wednesday. Here's my trivia question for you. Do you know what that Wednesday is called, the first Wednesday of Lent? Ash Wednesday, yes. Points to everyone who said that. Congrats. I saw all of you, so I've made a mental note of everyone who has points now. It's called Ash Wednesday. I'm not going to take the time to talk to you about all of the history of Ash Wednesday and to tell you all about the service of Ash Wednesday, but I would say if you've never been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, it's worth it. Check it out next year. Obviously, it is come and gone at this point, but check it out next year because it is really interesting and it's a cool service to be a part of. But Ash Wednesday partly derives its name from the words of God in Genesis when he says, from dust you came and to dust you shall return. If you've been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, you've heard that repeated over and over. And if you've ever seen someone who's been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, you've probably seen them with a cross drawn with ashes on their forehead. And when that cross is drawn on their forehead, they say, from dust you came, and to dust you shall return. The point of an Ash Wednesday service, and the point of Ash Wednesday is this. It's to remind us of our humanity and to remind us of our mortality. That just as one day we're here, one day we'll be gone. That one day our bodies will return once again to Ash just as they came. One day the things that we have, everything that we've built up in this life, the good things, the bad things, the neutral things, all of the things one day will pass away and they will return to dust. And as that reminder is set in, we kick off a 40-day fast. And that 40-day fast, as we talked about last week, and as Nate talked about, and as Carter read about, comes from the 40-day fast that we find in Matthew 4, from Jesus. Before Jesus sets off on his journey and on his time on earth where he is ministering and he's healing and he's loving and he's serving, he spends 40 days fasting in a desert. And after those days, Satan comes to him. And when he does, he tempts him. He tempts him three times. And the first one is he basically says, Jesus, I know you're hungry, and I know that you can turn that rock right there to bread. So why not go ahead and do so? You're super hungry. Just do it. The fast doesn't, it's not that important. It's not that meaningful. And Jesus's response, I think, is within the same vein as the response of Ash Wednesday, the response of God to the people of, dust you came and to dust you will return. And in Matthew 4, he says, man does not live on bread alone, but by every word spoken from the Father, from God. And I believe that those two reminders are coupled to remind us, one, not only that one day we will be gone, not only one day we will return to dust, but to remind us that while we're here, what ultimately is the most important and the most beneficial thing that we can intake is the word of God. And as we transition, obviously Jesus says this, but then Jesus, we know, goes on. He lives a life and he goes on and he takes the cross for us. And when he does so, what that means is now we, our souls, our hearts, get to rest upon the knowledge and the truth that Jesus did this for us, that we are freely able to experience a relationship with our Creator and our Father because He died and was raised to life for us. And so through Lent, we take time. We fast, we give something up. With the whole and sole purpose and mission of setting our hearts a little bit better on the Father, setting our hearts on the things above, taking to heart the reminder that Jesus gives when he talks to Satan by saying, hey, as much as our bodies need food, that much more our souls need the word of God. But as Paul writes, as a lot of us know and a lot of us see, and as Paul writes, this is something that's gone on forever. There are a lot of people alive. There are a lot of people around that have missed this truth, have missed this goodness of God, have missed this good news of Jesus as our Savior, because they're ignorant of the fact that it's offered to them. And they're so, as he taught, I'll just read it. As Alex read out of Philippians 3, the first half of what he read is talking about, and he refers to these people as enemies of the cross. It literally brings him to tears to talk about that these enemies of the cross are people whose stomachs are their gods and also whose minds and hearts are consumed by earthly things. There are people around that have not been able to experience the truth and the joy of the realization that we have this Jesus Christ who came to live and to die for us. And if they live their lives ignorant of this fact, if they live their lives not being able to recognize and understand and come to know this Savior for themselves, then they end up being an enemy of the cross. And while I don't read that and I don't want to talk about that scripture to say, hey, all of you guys who are Christians, if you ever allow yourself to care more about earthly things than about heavenly things, it means you're an enemy of the cross. That, I don't think, is the point, because if our hearts belong to God, then our hearts belong to God. But I do think that if we allow distractions to enter in, if the worldly becomes our ultimate, if it becomes everything that is in front of us, everything that surrounds us, what I do think happens is we hold God and we hold Christ at arm's length. As God and as Christ is trying to bring us into their embrace, trying to rain down the blessing and the joy of who they are in a relationship with them, we become so consumed by the things of this world. Our belly becomes our gods, our minds and our hearts are set to the earthly things, and we hold God's promises, and we hold the Word of God at arm's length. And so the goal of fasting is to shift that. To paraphrase Brad Gwynn's devotional from Wednesday of the Grace devotional, he talks about fasting as basically we have these things, these things that get in our way, these things that distract us from the goodness and the glory of God, we find and we take hold of those things and we replace them with the presence of Jesus, submitting to him and letting him sustain us. And I know that fasting seems and is maybe a bit of a big step to take, you know, like, hey, like, if there are distractions, if there are things that are around me that are distracting me, then I'm just gonna, you know, switch it up. I'm just gonna, like, you know, just let God take over that. But why I would argue that fasting might be the best and ultimate way that we are able to eliminate distractions and things getting in the way of us and God is because I don't really think that we understand the way that distractions take us away from God. I don't think we really understand the full scope and the full grasp that these things, these things of the world, these distractions that are all around us, the full grasp that they have on our lives. As an example, I would say most of us would probably say that at times we allow our phones to be a bit of a distraction. We pull them out. It's very easy to scroll, to continue to be on them, all that stuff. And when we do so, ultimately, we're saying, hey, Lord, I don't, like right now, I just want this to be my time. But I would contend that most of you aren't making that choice in your head. I would say that for the most part, you're not like, man, you know what, God? You're not worth my time right now because I got to check Instagram again. I don't think we're making those decisions. I don't think we're trying to be maniacal about like, God, you're not getting this amount of time. You're not getting this ride home because there's a podcast to listen to. I don't think any of us are making those decisions, but those decisions get made for us because they're so readily available and because we're so used to them. The author David Matthews says it this way. He says, That's about the best quote I'm going to read today, so I'm going to read it again. I had no idea it was a negative. I had no idea I was addicted to it. I had no idea that my body literally needed it or else it was going to go haywire and really turn on me while I'm trying to write a sermon. I had no idea of any of those things until I took a day and I didn't drink it. In the same way. Look at the distractions of our life. I bet a lot of you guys gave something up for Lent. I bet if you gave up your phone, you probably grabbed your phone a lot of times and was like, oh. Or if you gave up social media, you grabbed your phone and looked and couldn't find the Instagram app a lot of times. I actually last week decided to fast from food, to take a day with no food. Honestly, I don't know if I could tell you that I've done it before. I hate to admit, but it is what it is. And I don't know about you guys, but in my life, I never allow myself to experience hunger. I mean, if I'm at home, I'm eating. I've got snacks in between if I need. When I'm here, when I'm at church, I'll eat breakfast and then I get to church, I'm like, I could eat something. Julie's got Fig Newton stocked. I can have a Figgy Newton literally whenever I want a Figgy Newton. And so one, we love Julie for that. Shout out to Julie for being the realist MVP for always having Fig Newtons for me. But I say all that to say that literally, like, I just, I have built a life that never allows my body to need food, never allows my body to actually hunger for food, because I just scratch it before it gets there. And so when I fasted, you can imagine that my body was not thrilled. I was really hungry. My stomach hurt. My chest hurt. My body got like actual achy, actually achy. And I was astounded as I thought about because I was fasting after doing a lot of research. And so luckily I was kind of aware of what I should be looking for, and I was astounded at the thought that we're called to hunger for the Lord in that way. When we are called to hunger and to yearn for God, it is a literal hunger, a literal yearning for God. In the Beatitudes, it says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. It is a literal hunger, a literal life support thirst for God. I don't think I even knew what that felt like until I took time to fast from food. If we're honest, outside of food, I would say there's a thousand other things that we could fast from as well that would give us similar experiences. So I would say that food is far from the only thing that we turn to that distracts us from God's glory. As Pastor John Piper says about fasting, he says, fasting reveals not only food's mastery over us, but also televisions, computers, phones, or whatever else we submit to again and again to conceal the weakness of our hunger for God. Every single thing that conceals the weakness for our hunger for God. That's the point of Lent. To find that one big thing, to find those 10 small things, to get rid of them, to replace them, to realize the hold that they have on our body and to somehow shift our mindset and to shift the way that we live of like, instead of every time I grab my phone, it's every time I look here and say, God, I'm just going to pray for this person now. I gave up social media for Lent. I gave up social media and I kind of just gave up, I told my small group, like excess. There's, I would say, zero seconds in a day that I'm not like intaking. In the morning, I wake up, I play Wordle very well. And then post-Wordle, I scroll Instagram, I scroll Twitter, I do all that stuff. And then as I finally get up after I've laid in my bed for an hour looking at my phone, I go and I make breakfast. And when I make breakfast, like, I can't just be making breakfast until I have the TV on, because obviously. I make my breakfast and I eat it while I'm still watching TV, then I get in the car and I turn on a podcast. And then for the rest of the day, it's all of that. If I'm sitting, I'm working, every single time I take a quick second, like if my hands move away from my computer or something, then boom, boom, got it. Got to go to the bathroom, got to grab my phone. Like literally like, I know we've all done it before. I know we've all gone to the bathroom and then go, oh, and then run back. It's like, hey, I promise you it's not like a physical necessity to have your phone. Like you can still go to the bathroom without it, which I guess I promised you. I don't even remember the last time I tried. But every second of every day is consumption for me. And almost none of that consumption is being consumed by Christ. And if you're like me, there's a lot of those things. And then I have the audacity at the end of the day as I take stock of the day or those times where I get a little bit mindful of what's going on. And I have the audacity to say, well, I didn't spend much time with Jesus today, but I was pretty busy. I think we all have that. And not that we're always lying to ourselves. There are days where we are so busy. But fasting allows us to realize that there are a lot of natural reactions that we have. Natural times that we turn to so many other things that make the shield around us to where we hold God's promises and we hold God's truths and we hold the joys of Christ at arm's length because we're so invested into these small little things. And these trivial distractions have just become so a part of our day we don't even realize them. Until we take some time where we don't deal with them. Until we take time where we cut them off and we begin to turn our affections to God instead. John Piper continues and he says, fasting remedies by intensifying the earnestness of our prayer and saying with our whole bodies what prayer says with our heart, I long to be satisfied in God alone. So through fasting and through that prayer, that intense prayer that follows with our whole hearts and our whole bodies, we allow Jesus to rightly adjust our priorities. And as Katie Davis reminds us in Thursday's devotional from Matthew 6.33, we're reminded to seek first God's kingdom, seek first God's righteousness, and then we allow him to fill in all the details. And we allow him to faithfully provide for us, just as he always has. As the Lord becomes more and more part of our days, as our fasting continues through Lent, and the Lord becomes ever and ever present in our days. As our hearts experience his glory and his goodness more and more, our hearts begin to grow closer to and to resemble his. We're better able to worship. We're better, excuse me, we're better able to find rest in him. and our hearts are more tuned to see and to sing his grace. That's not it. Because as Gary Green reminds us in Friday's Lent devotional, that as Isaiah 58 talks about, which I'm just going to step away for a second. Gary Green's devotional was awesome. He talks about a set number of verses within Isaiah 58. If you didn't take the time to read all of Isaiah 58, I don't think that there's anything better written about fasting than Isaiah 58. So one, thank you, Gary, for letting me realize how awesome that is. Two, that's your homework assignment. Go home and read all of Isaiah 58. Let me come back over here. In Isaiah 58, as Gary reminds us, our hearts begin to reflect Christ not only inwardly, but outwardly. Our natural posture becomes one of love and of service for the people around us, and especially, especially those that are in need. The orphans, the widows, the sick, the homeless, the oppressed. The people who live, the people whose lives are in hunger of the luxuries, are in hunger of the needs, that we are taking a small amount of time to give up. The last time I got to preach, I was asked to simply answer the question, why should our lives be consumed by Christ? And the answer that we arrived at is because Christ's life is consumed with us. Not only in the past where he literally lived a life, lived a perfect life, took on the cross, and died so that we could have a relationship with him, and so that we don't have to settle for dust we shall return as our ending, but we now have a soul that is able to enter into a perfect eternity. Not only did Christ provide that for us in the past, but he is now living, sitting on the right hand of God as our high priest. And he's praying for us. And his whole goal, every second of every day, is to draw us closer and closer into the love of God and to bring us further and further into this perfect redemption that he offers us. And when we fast, we get to experience that just a little bit more. And I don't know if I know any other better reason than that. So will you bow with me as we pray. Lord, fasting is weird. It's a little bit foreign. It takes on many meanings. It takes on many definitions. But Lord, ultimately, fasting allows us to rid ourselves of distractions, to see and understand need a little bit better, and to allow us to witness you a little bit more. Lord, I just pray that anyone who has embarked on fasting through Lent, Lord, that you bring them strength and you allow them to see your goodness just as you have promised that you would. For those who are pondering, Lord, I pray that you would work in their hearts and maybe offer them too. And Lord, if anyone in here says, you know what, I want to take it to the next step. I want to try a food fast. Just to experience a little bit more of you. And Lord, I pray that you give them the strength to do that. Lord, we are so thankful for your goodness, always and forever. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now now, be still, and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. I'm reading from Matthew chapter 4, verses 1 through 4. Then Jesus was led by is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We are starting our new series this morning called Lent, A Holy Pause, and I have been very excited for this Sunday and for this series. Excited since about this time last year. So excited that this week on Tuesday, Jen and Lily and I fly to Disney World to spend a few days down there. We're very excited about that. And some folks in the church know that that's what we're doing. And so this morning I've gotten a lot of like, are you excited? And I'm like, yeah, I'm so excited. And they're like, yeah, Disney World is going to be great. I'm like, oh, I'm talking about today. Like, I'm excited for this series. I'm excited to launch this out today. And I don't know how you guys work, but when I have something that's big on the horizon, it's kind of all I think about and focus on. And then I get on the other side and the dust clears and I'm like, okay, now what's next? So this afternoon, I'll be excited about Disney. But right now, I'm excited about this series. And I would tell you that this series really started, the idea of it started last year at Lent. Last year at Lent in a staff meeting as the Sunday before Ash Wednesday was approaching, which is the beginning of Lent, we said in a staff meeting, hey, we should observe Lent this year. We should try to like, let's challenge the church to fast and do that this year. And I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. That's something that we haven't done at least since I've been here. So that's a good idea. Let's do that. And they're like, well, it needs to happen quick. So Nate, let's make a video. I'm like, all right. So we made plans for me to show up the next day and do a video that we were going to email out and challenge the church to fast because like Wednesday was the next day and we had to start. And I showed up that day and when on video days, I shower and I do my hair and I shave. So I have to look good for them. On non-video or meeting days, I just wear sweats and like a hat, you know, like it's very professional over there on a random Tuesday. And so I showed up not dressed for a video. And at the time, our worship pastor, Steve, was like, what are you doing? And I said, we're not doing a video today. He said, okay, why? And I was like, I don't want to do this half measured. I don't want to do it quick. If we're going to observe Lent as a church, I want us to mean it. And so we started thinking through how we wanted to approach this series. And so what I get to share with you this morning, and I guess this is why I'm so excited to do it, is really the result of a year's worth of reflection and prayer and learning and discussion. And I feel like I get to kind of introduce that and share that with you this morning. I would say this too about what I'm going to share with you this morning. This morning really technically is not a sermon, okay? In a sermon, I think you open up the Bible, you read it, you talk about what it says. The point of a sermon is for us to open up Scripture and let it speak to us. And so this morning, I don't have any verses. I will refer back to the ones that Carter just read for us, but this is really more of a message from me to my church. And I'm thinking of it as we approach the series almost like an epilogue to set it up so that we understand what it is that we're doing and why we're observing Lent in this way and what our hopes are for it as we move through the series. You're probably also wondering why I have random things up here with me. This is a stack of Bibles. This makes coffee. This is the coolest thing that you'll ever see in your life. This is an ashtray boot lamp because of course it is. This lamp down here still works. This is a boot and then this is a horse and it's my favorite thing that I own. Incidentally, it's Jen's least favorite thing that I own. But I have these things in my office. And I have them in my office because they're from portions of my family. And they all mean something to me. This stack of Bibles I've referenced before, this is my papa's Bible. And this is my dad's Bible from the 70s. And this is my Bible from high school and college. And I have a preaching Bible. It's in my office right now. But these sit just above my computer screen every day. And every time I look at these Bibles, I'm reminded of the spiritual heritage that came before me. I'm reminded that part of my papa's story was that he was not a believer, was that his daughter, my mom, accepted Christ at the age of eight and drug her parents to church, and they became believers because of the ministry at that church to children. And my papa is a guy who was very imperfect, Typical 60s dude in the South. Racist, probably abusive, and all those things. But God reached him and changed him. So by the time I got to know him, he was one of the most gentle, charismatic spirits I have ever met, to know Don was to love him. But God got a hold of him as an adult and changed him. And then my dad grew up in a broken home. The only reason that my dad knew that he was really loved by a man in his life is because his granddad stepped into the void and loved him and made him feel loved and appreciated. This is my great-grandfather's. This belonged to the man that made my dad feel loved. And so, yeah, it's awesome because it's a lamp and an ashtray with a boot, for sure. I would have it if it didn't belong to him. But because it does and did, it makes it all the more special. And it's important to me to see these things. This is my mama's coffee maker. This is what she used to make coffee in growing up. And in the waning years of her life, I would go over every other Monday to her house. There were Mama Mondays. I had special mugs made. And we would just talk for an hour, hour and a half, two hours. And she, I've spoken about her before. You know, she was never out front, never outspoken, always just loving quietly, but lived a life of tremendous import and impact because of the way she quietly served God. And there are other things too. There's a lamp that my late father-in-law built for me, that if I went to the store looking for lamps, I would not choose this one, but he made it for me, so it's in my office, and it's the first thing I turn on every Sunday morning. I have something cross-stitched, an old gospel hymn about fathers and sons that my dad got from my mom when he became a dad for me, and he gave that to me with tears in his eyes when we had John. That's in my office. And I keep all of these things in my office because they remind me the shoulders that I stand on. That's in my office. And I keep all of these things in my office because they remind me the shoulders that I stand on. They remind me that I didn't just float into grace out of a vacuum, that I come from somewhere. And that a lot of the reason that I know scripture, a lot of the reason why I can prepare a sermon in the length of time that I prepare a sermon is not because I'm not studying scripture and learning new things, but it's because I've been learning scripture my whole life. Why have I been learning scripture my whole life? Well, because he got saved when he was an adult and he committed himself to it. And then his great grandfather loved him and kept him in church and he committed himself to it, and he taught me the Bible, and then I stayed locked in in high school and college and learned those things. I'm here because I stand on shoulders, and we all stand on shoulders. We have previous generations that poured into us, and we're better off for it. And we're foolish and ignorant and prideful if we can't acknowledge that some of the comforts and successes that we have in our life, the blessings that we have in our life, we have because we stand on shoulders. Because we are tethered to previous generations. And I bring this up because it's not just true of me personally and you personally, but it's true of church. Grace Raleigh stands on shoulders. We come from a rich, deep spiritual heritage that goes all the way back to millennia, to 33 AD. And you could argue even before that, that as a church in 2022, any church, we must acknowledge and recognize that there are relics all around us. There are family heirlooms all around us that remind us that we stand on shoulders too. And see, I think this is important for us as Grace Raleigh to think about because we're an independent church. We're non-denominational. And I think that there are great benefits to that in our congregation, in our partnership. We have Catholics and Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Christian Missionary Alliance and Pentecostals and Church of God and people who are very far from God and have absolutely no spiritual heritage whatsoever. And then this is it. And we're just all here in a melting pot of backgrounds. And it's really wonderful and diverse, and I think that that's a positive thing for us. It's also positive to me that no one who doesn't sit in our fellowship every week can tell us what to do. There's not some office in Rocky Mount that can dictate to us who we can hire and where we can go. There's no one who can tell us what we can and cannot believe who does not sit amongst us each week. And I think that is tremendously valuable and I'm happy about that. But I think that one of the potential downsides of being an independent church is that we can sometimes float along week to week, month to month, year to year, untethered to the traditions that came before us and forgetful of the shoulders that we stand on. Neglectful of the traditions and the heritage and the writing and the theology and the hymns and the blessings and the liturgies and the prayers that served the church for generations before Grace Raleigh ever showed up, for millennia before we ever showed up. And that when we do this, we make a great mistake to just rely on our wisdom and our new things and our fresh perspectives without relying on the wisdom that has been passed down to us through the centuries by forgetting the shoulders that we stand on and never reaching back to look at where we came from and consider how to implement and acknowledge that in our worship. And churches actually commit this sin a lot. I've seen plenty of times over my life and my church career, churches that make the mistake of throwing out the old in favor of the new. In church world, young families are the sweet spot, man. That's what you want. If your church is growing in young families, then your church is growing. If your church isn't growing in young families, then it is slowly dying. That's just how it goes. And so what churches do to reach young families and to feel vibrant and to feel like they're growing is they tailor things to the sensibilities of young families. They tailor the worship to what the younger generation wants. The sermons are about topics that apply to the younger generation. The sanctuary is set up in a way that will apply, that will appeal to the newest generation. And sometimes in all of that change and in the forgetting of the old, a brave, a brave older person from a previous generation will raise their hand and say, can we just maybe like do a hymn? Can we, can we decorate in this way? Can we put this up? Can we, I would love to hear sermons out of this. I would love to hear sermons about this. Do we have to, every year, do we have to do a parenting sermon? Like I'm done with that season of my life, right? And so usually I've seen that older generation will be met with something to the effect of, it's not about you anymore. It's about reaching them. So tithe, pray, lead, but also pipe down. Because we're not here for you. We're reaching young generations and that's what you need to be excited about. And I've seen it happen over and over again. And I think it's a great sin of the church. I think it's incredibly foolish for a young pastor, for young leadership to take a church and to set the older generation off to the side and say, we need your finances, we need your support, but we really don't value your wisdom and we definitely don't value your preferences. So if you could just kind of pipe down, we're going to move on. And we end up sacrificing the wisdom of the old on the enthusiasm of the new. And we forget about the generations that came before us. And it's just a constant, what's the next song? What's the cool way to do a sermon? What kind of stupid lights do we need to make it feel more awesome in here? And we just keep moving down the road of what's most relevant, and we forget about the generations that came before us. And God forbid that grace ever become a place where we don't value the wisdom of the generations who have preceded us. If you are of a generation that has preceded me, and you feel disregarded in this space, and you feel like we don't listen to to you or that you are not important to us, I hope that you will please tell me that. Because the last thing I want to do is get involved in that pattern of sacrificing the wisdom of the old in sake of reaching the new. Because here's the other thing. If you listen to the generations that came before you, you're going to reach anybody with a heart. You're going to reach anybody that Jesus is trying to reach. You'll be more effective in ministry than if you just cater a dog and pony show to the sensibilities that are the freshest and the newest. So my hope here at Grace is that we would not do that. The way that I phrased that this morning is let not the enthusiasm for the new cause us to forget the wisdom of the old. And I think in the way that we form a service, in the way that we worship, in the way that we approach even designing a Sunday morning, that we have done that. I'm guilty of that. And I realized that slowly over the course of the year. That for centuries, there were whole liturgies and some of you come from backgrounds with more liturgical services where you stand and you read. If the word of God is being read, then you stand and you read it together where the service will end with a prayer or a benediction, or there'll be a portion of the catechism that's read at different parts. And it ties us back to the shoulders that we stand on in the generations that came before us. And there's good, rich, deep wisdom that we find there. And we haven't really incorporated that in what we do. And in doing so, we've just kind of floated along untethered to the generations that came before us, which is really a shame because in grace, as I enumerated a little while ago, we have so many different rich traditions that have so much to offer in our space and in our worship that we simply disregard for the way that we are comfortable, for the way that we've always done it, or for whatever my sensibilities might be as we construct a worship service. And we disregard the centuries of church history and the rich faith and tradition and hymns and prayers and blessings that they have left for us. And I believe that there's something beautiful in these traditions. And I want to be intentional as well as the staff and the elders as we move forward. I want to be more intentional about reaching back, about including those blessings. I want to get us to a place, I'm not going to do it this morning, okay? We're going to ease into this as a church together, but I want to get us to a place where we're willing and look forward to standing and reading something together, standing and reading scripture together, or a short blessing together, or something like that. I want it to be more a part of our worship because when we do that, it tethers us to the shoulders that we stand on and it reminds us that we are not independent, that we do not exist in a vacuum, that the blessing and that the things that we have now are because of where we come from and we ought to acknowledge that and we find a depth and a richness there that I believe will bless our souls. So because we desire to embrace and acknowledge our rich spiritual heritage, we are observing Lent. Because we want to tether ourselves to those who came before us, because we want to acknowledge that we sit on deep wells of wisdom, we are going to very intentionally observe Lent as a church. And we're going to do this for reasons that I'm going to talk about in a second, but also because of the way that it does tether us. Lent, how many of you, let me pause and just ask this, how many of you grew up in a tradition that observed Lent and you have regularly observed Lent in your life? Okay. That's not me. That's not me. Baptists don't think we need to observe anything except for baptisms and tithing. So we didn't observe Lent. And it's always been kind of mysterious for me. So even in the last year, I wanted to wrap my head around, okay, if we're going to observe this in a serious way, let me understand it a little bit. So for some of you, this will be a refresher. For some of you, it's new information. But when basically put or defined, Lent is a 40-day fast designed to focus our hearts on Jesus and prepare them for the miracle of Easter. That's what Lent is. It's a 40-day fast designed to focus our hearts on Jesus and to prepare them for the miracle of Easter. That's why this series is subtitled as A Holy Pause. Because especially now, as the world opens back up and our schedules begin to be filled up again, we're as busy as ever. We're going and we're going and we're going. And many of us, some of us have the luxury to get up and sip a coffee and sit down and have a nice, easy morning. But most of us are shot out of our bed like a cannon because we have things that are screaming for our attention. And we just, we go and we go and we go, and then we fall down exhausted at the end of the day. And then we get up and we go and we go and we go. And we're busy and we're busy and we're busy. And it's good for us as humans because we were designed to do it, to just stop and pause and breathe and reflect. Similarly, as a church, we can get harried and hurried, so focused on the pandemic and should we or should we not wear masks and what are the decisions that we need to make about that and we've got a worship pastor to hire and what are we going to do this ministry and that ministry? And we're planning this thing and we're moving and we're doing this. And we've got this objective coming up and how our finance is doing. And have we found a building yet? And there's all kinds of things that consume those who are in church during the week. And it's as good for us as well as a church to just stop and pause and focus our hearts on Christ and ask the Spirit to move in our individual and collective hearts as we prepare for Easter. So a big part of this series is inviting you into a space where we just pause and we worship and we listen and we pray and we fast. And it tethers us to these previous generations because Lent first shows up at about 300 AD. It's the first time it was written about by the church fathers and intentionally followed. No doubt it was happening before that as well. It just got actualized around 300 AD. And they chose a 40-day fast because they wanted to model it after Jesus' 40-day fast in the desert before he began his earthly ministry. That's why we had Carter read that particular passage, because the 40-day fast from Lent is modeled after Jesus's 40-day fast, which incidentally, for those of you that care about these kinds of things, the number 40 is incredibly significant in Scripture. I learned, somebody even texted me yesterday, and I did not know this, three separate times in Moses's life, he fasted for 40 days, either in preparation to something or in response to something. We know that the flood, the rains lasted for 40 days and 40 nights. We know that the Jews wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. We know all of these things. And then Jesus fasted for 40 days as he was tempted in the wilderness. So I can't pretend to know what 40 means. I just know it's a significant biblical number. And so when the early church saints chose a length of the fast, they chose 40 days. They realized that it's pretty untenable to fast for 40 days for most mortals. So they started making these weird rules. You can eat fish on this day and Friday, like have a goat if you want. I don't know all the different meat rules, but there's different ones, right? And then they said, you know, we need to, we can't do this all the time. This is getting old. We need to be able to take a break. We need to be able to break fast. So first, some traditions picked two days, and it made Lent last eight weeks. And they're like, that's too long. Let's do it shorter than that. So let's just take one day and make it last six weeks. So Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is this Wednesday, March the 2nd, and it ends on Easter. And technically, you're allowed to break your fast, whatever you're fasting from, on Sundays. Although some church fathers say, essentially, suck it up. All right, don't do that. That's cheating. But that's up to you to decide, depending on what it is you give up, if anything. But that's why it's a 40-day fast that lasts six weeks, if you're trying to do the math in your head. You get to take Sundays off. But that's what we're going to do as a church. And everyone's going to be invited as we do this. Everyone's going to be invited and challenged to fast from something. And I'm not going to talk about fasting too much because the whole sermon is about fasting next week. So I'll simply say this, that the purpose of a fast is to abstain from something in your life that you use and desire regularly so that when you are abstaining from it and something is triggered and you know that, oh, I wish I could have that thing, you take your desire for that thing and you turn it to Christ. It's a pause where you stop and you go, let me take this desire and turn that desire to my Savior and ask the Holy Spirit to speak to me and work with me during this season. It is an intentional foregoing of something. And if we fast and we just grit our teeth and bear through it and we just think about how much we want food and just don't eat food and we get to the end of the day and be like, eh, I won, that's not really the point. The point is to take the desire of food and let it turn your eyes on Jesus. That's the point, okay? But it doesn't have to be food. It could be wine or bourbon or social media or TV or screens or whatever it is. But I would invite you to consider fasting from something. I would also invite you, if you didn't already, to grab the devotional booklet that we have out in the lobby. I'm really excited about those because we began to ask people to write on certain topics back in the fall, and we have compiled them, and they're available to you for free. Carly over here has done them at great effort and really, really put in a lot of time, worked a lot of overtime to get those things done. The people at the printers know her by name. And we are very grateful to her, and we're grateful to those who wrote. But it begins, you can grab one now. The intention is to begin it this Wednesday, and then there's a devotion every weekday all the way up to Easter. And the way that the series works is each week there's a topic. This upcoming week is fasting. And so every week as we look at the topic that's associated with Lent, we're asking the question, how does this point me to Jesus? How does fasting point me to Jesus? The next week is stillness. So we say, how does stillness point me to Christ? How does forgiveness, how does generosity, how does sin and forgiveness point me to Jesus? And so that's the question we'll come back and answer every week. And so the devotionals are written so that you'll read about that topic as we prepare our hearts for that Sunday. And what I really love is it's over 30 different folks from the church who have written these things. So it's not just my voice. It's not just the staff's voice. But it's the collective voice of the collective wisdom of the church that gets to speak into everybody every day. So I hope that you'll take one of those devotionals and that you'll follow through with it as we move through the season. And I would really invite you to take the next two days and prayerfully consider whether or not you want to do this. Ecclesiastes tells us that it's better to not even make a vow to God in the first place than to make one and then break it. So I would encourage you, don't walk out of a service with an incredibly compelling message and decide, yeah, I'm definitely going to do this thing, and then get into week two and peter out and nothing ever happens. But prayerfully consider if this is something you want to commit yourself to. Prayerfully consider if it is what you might fast from. And then share that with somebody. Maybe it's the person who knows your next step of obedience. And prayerfully consider reading the devotion every day and partaking in the same wisdom that the rest of the church partners are taking in that day. And let's be mutually encouraged by that. I would challenge you to consider participating in Lent this year for those reasons. And I will also say this. For this series in particular, and I honestly hope that this happens more and more, but for this series in particular, I would love it if we could decentralize the sermon. In church life, as you kind of go through the rhythms of church, the sermon is really kind of the main attraction of the Sunday morning. It's kind of the worship can be really good and the sermon's really bad and we'll say it was okay. But really, it's kind of sometimes all about the sermon. And I don't love that at all. I never do. I think that gives these words too much weight. And frankly, it gives me too much weight. I've got plenty, as it is. We need to decentralize the sermon and not look to it to encourage us spiritually as much as all the other elements around us. So for this series in particular, I hope and I pray and have been fervently praying that Jesus moves in your heart, that he does something in your heart, that this is a time of spiritual renewal for us as individuals and for us as a church, and that it happens by simply slowing down and pausing and inviting Jesus into our life and into our thoughts and into our habits for this six-week period leading into Easter so that when we get to Easter, it might be one of the more worshipful, holy, wonderful Easters that we've ever experienced. And I'm talking about sermons in this context because let's let our daily devotional move the needle on our spiritual health. Let's look to that to inspire and enliven us. Let's come expectant of good worship, which it really was this morning as we sung full-throated and mostly maskless. It was really a great and joyful sound in here. But let's come expectant, expecting to be moved by worship. Let's expect God to move in the daily habit of having our devotion. Let's expect God to move in the uncomfortable discipline of fasting, and let's allow the sermon to simply be a supplement to those things, but not the thing that moves us. Let's let God's Spirit move in us through all the other myriad ways that he is trying to speak to us and get our attention as we move through this series together. And let us as a church invite Jesus to speak to us as we turn our attention to him daily. Let us consider how he might move us, how he might grow us, how he might call us back to him. And let us expect that as we move through this season as a church that it will be a profound time of spiritual renewal and restoration for us. And let's look forward to moving out of this season and celebrating a wonderful and holy Easter together as we give God the next six weeks to prepare our hearts for that. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to sing a song, and then as an added element at the end, we're going to have the chair of our board, Brad Gwynn, he's going to come up and share a closing prayer for us as we go into the Lenten season. So let me pray. Father, you are good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for loving grace. Thank you for blessing this place. Lord, we turn our hearts to you collectively and expectantly, eagerly asking you to speak, eagerly asking you to move, eagerly asking you to heal what is broken and what is hurt. Inspire us, God, to serve you, to love you, to be moved by you, to hear from you. God, I just pray that these next six weeks as a church, seven weeks as a church, are just some of the most special in memory. Not because of what's said or what's done, but just simply because of how you move. We invite you into this space to do that, to draw us near to you. We invite you into our hearts to draw us near to you. And God, I just ask that you would do amazing, unexpected things in our hearts and in our lives as we observe Lent like so many of your faithful bodies and churches that came before us. It's in your son's name we pray all these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. That was great, Kirk and the band. It was really good. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So if I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. And sincerely, thank you for being here on this cold holiday weekend. It's really great to look out and see faces, ones I hope will be smiling and not yawning here shortly. If you're wondering why is Nate limping around and on a stool, well, to much of your glee, I have gout again. So I know the worst part of gout, which is very painful, is not the pain. I can limp around for a couple of days and really not fuss about it very much. It's you. It's the jackals here, the hyenas that circle my pain-ridden corpse as I have to admit things like this. But that's what's going on. And I'm only telling you now because I'm referring to him as Uncle G. Uncle G's come for a visit. He's going to show up later in the story this morning. So it's important that you have this preface right now. We are in the fourth part of our series in Colossians, where we've moved through the book of Colossians together. And admittedly, it's portions of the book of Colossians. We've not moved through the whole thing. We've just kind of moved through and selected the things that seem to me most relevant to grace. And I've really enjoyed being able to do this in ways that were unexpected. I've really enjoyed this series. And so what we've been through so far is to look at this church in Colossae and acknowledge that they were a church that existed with some pressure. They were doing a good job. They were loving God well. They loved one another well. And in that way, I felt like they were similar to grace, but they're also similar to grace in the pressures that they were facing from within and from without. In the culture in which they sat, there were pressures for them to skew legalistic in their practices and in their theology. And then there was pressures for them to skew liberal in their practices and in their theology. So Paul's goal is to write them and encourage them to stay true to the true faith. And so how does he do that? Well, he does that in the opening chapter and for us week one by painting a soaring picture of Christ and who he is and focusing us on him. And then he lets us know that we are actually our brother's keeper, that the spiritual health of the people around us who we love and care about is your responsibility as one of God's children. And so we carry that together to try to bring everyone to spiritual maturity. And then last week, we talked about this idea of living as a new creation, as focusing on Christ, daily letting His love and His grace and His mercy and His compassion wash over us and so put to death in us the things that would have us behave as our old self or the bad, less healthy versions of ourself. And so this week he finishes up the letter with what's commonly referred to as the household codes. And they show up a couple different places in Pauline epistles or in Paul's writing. Okay. And so we're going to be looking at those this morning and I'm going to start start to read the passage. And immediately you're going to think to yourself, oh boy, this is a sticky one for 2022. What's he going to do? I'll tell you. But let's read together and then we will look at the meaning of the passage together. I'm picking it up in Colossians chapter 3 verse verse 18, and I'll read through the very beginning of Colossians chapter 4. Read with me, if you will. Paul writes this, For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. All right, there's a lot there and a lot of dynamics covered there. The dynamic covered between husband and wife, between father and children, and then between master and slave. And some versions have the word bond servant put there. And really that's an attempt of the editors of that particular translation to soften the original text and say, no, no, no, it didn't mean slave, it meant bond servant. And that's intellectually, okay? So as believers, we should encounter what it says in Scripture and deal with it with honesty without trying to artificially soften it. So the word there is slave, which is problematic, and we're going to refer to that in a second. But as we read this passage, and as you hear it, my anticipation is that you would expect me now to break that down. What does it mean? Wives, submit to your husbands. What you going to do, sucker? That one's pretty sticky, right? In 2022. And then we read the rest ones, and then there's the problematic things for Christians about provisions for masters and slaves and the whole deal. So what are we going to do with that? Well, the answer is we're not going to talk about that. All right. I'm going to talk about something else. Now, why am I going to talk about something else? Well, two reasons. The first one is the one that you're assuming right now, because I don't want to. I don't want to do that. That's too much work and too much effort and too much thought and too much parsing out all the words. And honestly, I don't think it's what Grace needs to hear most right now. So we're not going to camp out on gender roles in the home, okay? We're just not going to do that. Second, I think that there's a bigger theme here to these verses that is super important to us, that is very relevant to us, and that is worth camping out on. Before I just jump to that, though, I will say this to fight back just total cowardice on my part about the first verse, wives submit to your husbands, gender roles in the home, things like that. I will tell you two things, and only these two things, and I will not offer much explanation. If you want more, talk to me about it. Email me. I've never once turned down a lunch opportunity, especially if you're buying. I've never once done that. I always respond to emails. So if you want to talk more about this and these themes, I'm open for that. That's just not where I want to camp out this morning. But since we're there, I will say these two things. I will say it is my personal understanding and belief based on not just this scripture, but myriad passages, that in the structure of marriage, God has chosen to give men the tie-breaking vote. But it is also my belief based on other passages, particularly Ephesians 5, where men are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it. That men are to sacrifice everything we have for the sake of our wives, and therefore, though we have the tie-breaking vote, it is our holy responsibility to use it as little as possible so that when it is used, it can be trusted. Okay. The other thing that I will say about that on kind of the opposite end of the spectrum is we cannot just pluck that verse, wives submit to your husbands, out of context and understand it at face value. We have to put it in the context in which it rests. And the context in which it rests is in the following verses, there's a lot more provisions about how slaves are to behave and how masters are to behave towards slave than there is about family codes. So if we're going to contextualize and culturalize the instructions about masters and slaves, then we can't just do it to one part of the passage. So the whole passage is best understood with the nuance of the culture going on around it and with some good academic study, not simply plucked out of context. We cannot understand verse 18 in a way that we would not use to understand the passages that follow. That's what I'll say about those two things, or about that thing, those two things. Now, to the bigger point. There is something going on in this text that I think applies to all of us right now and is a far more relevant sermon than just how do we parse out these particular things. And to get to that point, we do need to understand the cultural context in which these things rest. These are, again, household codes, where Paul is saying, in light of the gospel, in light of Jesus and who he is, in light of the provisions that I'm giving you, in light of putting on a new self and how do we live this Christian life, how are we to organize our lives? And what we need to understand is these codes that he gives out here in these verses, these instructions, and the ones that we find in other Pauline writings, like Ephesians, are given in a Roman context. These cities are Roman cities with a Roman heritage. And those cities and those cultures are incredibly patriarchal. They are man-centered. The man of the house, the father, the patriarch of the family, is a king of his little fiefdom. Now, they're little pathetic kingdoms. I mean, there's nothing to be proud of, but he is the king. The wife is the property. She is subservient to him. Everything is built around him. Everything focuses on him. Everything exists under his direction with no question and with no questioned authority. The wife is someone that is there for use or not use, for purpose or no purpose, and she can be cast aside just as quickly as she is added into the family. The marriage covenant is a marriage contract, and he can terminate it whenever he wants. She can terminate it never. Children are accessories to the marriage. They are future heirs. They are not little people. They do not have rights. The rights that they have exist under the authority of the father, and they have no more rights than he wants to give them. Slaves, likewise, have no rights. They exist under the rule of the man of the house. They exist under the rule of the master. They have no one to appeal to. They have no other authority. He literally is the king of his small kingdom. That's the way that the Roman culture and society was set up. As an aside, can you imagine the abuse and misogyny that went on in that culture, where a man is in charge with unquestioned authority of all of the people in his life. Thank God we have figured out how terrible of an idea that is. My heart breaks for the women and children that were in that culture. And all of that makes Paul's writings incredibly radical in the time that they were received. He says, husbands, treat your, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. More on top of that, in Ephesians, he says, love your wives as Christ loved the church, laying himself down for them, giving himself up for them, which is totally radical to the Roman view of wife as accessory. It's a completely different train of thought. I can't be harsh with them. I have to consider them. I have to be nice to them. I have to listen to them. Yes, man, it's called being a human. You have to do all those things. And then it says, do not provoke your children to anger, which is not something that a Roman father would ever consider. He doesn't care if he makes his kids angry. He doesn't care if they don't like him. He doesn't have to. They're just there as accessories to the marriage. And one day there'll be heirs. And one day maybe they can contribute to the wealth of the home. But right now I don't have to care about them, Which, having a nine-month-old, I understand that mentality sometimes. John likes to play a really fun game of, hey, I'm going to kind of cry all day, and you just figure out how to make me stop doing it. Fun. Let's go, buddy. But children were accessories to marriage. They had no rights. And then slaves, I don't need to explain to you how much they could be mistreated. We know the crimes over the centuries. And so for Paul to come in here and say, hey, masters of the house, you treat your slaves, paraphrase, treat them however you want, but God's watching you. And however you treat them is how he's going to treat you. However you judge them is how he's going to judge you. The mercy that you apply to them is the mercy that he will apply to you, which again is radically different than what's happening in the rest of Roman culture. So Paul is telling the church in Colossae, if you want to be believers in light of Jesus and the fact that he is now in your life, your family needs to look radically different than the families that are around you. And bigger than that, he's telling them this. He's telling them that right now, your family life, your life is centered on the man. It's centered on the father. It's centered on the husband. It's centered on the master. He needs to be decentralized, and Christ needs to become the central figure and tenant in your home around which everything revolves. And he's primarily addressing the man here because the rest of them are under no auspices that they are the focus of the home. They don't need to reorient how they expect others to treat them. They need to reorient where they put the father of the home and put Jesus in the center of that. So what's going on here is radically different than everything in the Roman home. And this is the larger theme, I believe, of the household codes that we find in Colossians and in Ephesians, which is to say this, that Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. That's the point, I think, of this passage, the larger point that is more applicable and important for us to consider this morning, that when we become believers, Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. So to these cultures, to these families that were entrenched in this patriarchic, unhealthy culture in ancient Rome, Paul says your life needs to look completely different. You need to completely reorient your family and household life around Jesus and not around the Father, not around the man. It's got to look radically different. And I actually, in those notes, I said Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives. And I don't know why I did this. I intentionally softened it a little bit when I turned in the notes on Thursday. But in thinking about it over the weekend, it's not invites, it's insists. Jesus demands that we would radically reshape our lives around him. And it's so much so that I would say that our lives after Jesus need to look a lot different than our lives before Jesus. Our lives with Jesus as Lord of our lives by necessity will look a lot different than our lives without Jesus as the Lord of our lives. And if those two versions of ourselves and our lives and our priorities look pretty similar, there's probably a problem going on there. And the problem is this. I think we often attempt to fit Jesus into our lives rather than reshaping our lives around him. We often attempt to find ways to kind of shove Jesus into our life in this predetermined shape in a way that he will fit. And we're more interested in making Jesus fit into our life than we are about reshaping our life so that Jesus takes it over. There's kind of two illustrations I would use here. The first is pretty simple, but maybe it's the one we need this morning, so I'm just going to leave it in. But it's as if we become a Christian and when we become a Christian, Jesus is going to move into our house and he's going to now live with us. He's now a part of our life. And so a lot of us probably have a guest room. And when we realize that Jesus is going to be moving in with us, we're like, well, I got to update this thing. The thread count is too low for Jesus. So we go and we get the finest Egyptian, we get 800 or more thread count for Jesus is what he needs. And we get all the best things and we make sure that there's a good charger. We don't give him the one that's chewed on or frayed. We give him the nice charger for the nightstand. And we buy, maybe we buy a new small TV and we put it over there and we hook it up to an Apple TV and the whole thing and we go ahead and we cover his Apple TV subscription because it's Jesus and he probably wants to watch Ted Lasso. And so we kind of set up everything for him, right? And we're ready. And then Jesus moves in. And he says, look at this guy, this is a nice guest room. And we're like, well, yeah, I mean, you're moving in. So we wanted to make sure it was up to your standards. And he's like, well, no, I mean, I'm taking the master. That's your room. I think some of us just prepare a nice guest room for Jesus, and then everything else stays the same. Another way to think about this, that I actually wanted to do a visual aid illustration of, and so I need to beg your forgiveness and your imagination, because I'm going to invite you to imagine this illustration with me, since I'm not able to do it. And here's why I'm asking you for your forgiveness. I was not able to do it because I had to go get some materials and prepare it, and I had a couple afternoons where I probably could have, and I just didn't. I'll do it this weekend. And then over the weekend, you know, we had a kid get sick, and some unexpected things happened, and my old buddy Uncle G came to visit, and it's not really a time to be walking around stores, and I just didn't have time to do the things that I needed to do. So I failed you as a pastor. I did not budget my time wisely, and I sit up here illustrationless. So if you'll accept that tepid apology, then I will invite you to use your imagination, because here's what I wanted to do, okay? Here's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go get like a big block of like modeling foam, if that's even a thing that exists, and get a square one, and then have a board with a big hole cut out of it, and say the foam block represents Jesus, and the board with the hole in it represents us. That's our life. And what happens is we take Jesus, the square, and we try to fit it into the circle, and it doesn't work out. And so we're faced with a choice. I can reshape Jesus according to who I think he ought to be and to what my life already is and just kind of shove it in there and make it work, or I can change my life. And what most of us do, all of us in different ways, choose to do is we choose to reshape Christ according to who we already are and just assume that he probably is too. And we remake Christ in our image and then we make him fit the life that we've already chosen to live. And there's a bunch of examples of how we do this. I'm just going to give you a couple this morning. When I was thinking about how is it that we do this, what are practical ways that we kind of reshape Jesus in our own image to make him fit into our existing life, the very first thing that occurred to me, as touchy as it is, is politics. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans, and everything in the middle. I don't know if libertarians in the middle or if it's like over here on the other side of Republicans. I don't know where that belongs, but all of the parties. I have known people who just assume that because this is my political affiliation, certainly Jesus agrees with me. Certainly because this is the most important moral value for me, it's also the most important moral value for Jesus. And sure, my party doesn't champion some of the causes the way that it talks about in Scripture, but we cover the important ones the exact same way that Jesus wants to. And so I know that my political party is the right political party. And further, the other political party, those people are not even Christians. They think they are. They're stupid. And if they went to my church, my pastor would tell them. No, I would not. I would not. I'd tell them in person, but not corporately like this. And it's funny to chuckle at, but what's really disappointing to me, and I've seen it more and more, if we don't think that this is true, is the fact that I have seen a lot more Christians change their faith than change their politics. I have seen a lot more Christians who are, they are clinging to their political party, they are clinging to their social justice paradigm, to the way that they think about cultural issues and the way that they think about political issues and then be met with places where it seems to clash with their faith and one of them has to give way way, and it's not their politics. It's not their faith, rather. They choose their politics. I've seen a lot more Christians adjust their view of who they think Jesus is according to what their certain politics should be. And I've seen very few believers, just being honest, I've seen very few believers who change their politics in light of the Jesus that they learn about. And I think that that's a big problem. Another way we do this is with our time, right? We become Christians and we see that Jesus makes certain demands of our time. Jesus says, I'd like to meet with you every morning. I'd like to meet with you every day. I'd like to meet with you in prayer. I'd like you to study me. I'd like you to get to know me. I'd like to spend some time with you. And our response is, listen, Jesus, I do too. I want to spend time with you. You seem great. But I'm sleepy, okay? So I'm not going to set that alarm. Jesus, listen, I want to spend time with you too. But it's the playoffs, all right? So I'm going to be up late. Jesus, I know that I need to prioritize church. I get it, and I'm going to. But it's football season, and I'm going to be tailgating. You know what happens at tailgates. So I'll see you during basketball season, Jesus. And he says, hey, I'd like to spend this time with you. I'd like to do these things. I'd like you to reprioritize your life. And we're like, I will, but not right now because there's other things that I'm doing. I'd love for you to connect with people in small group who can encourage you and push you towards me. Jesus, I'm gonna, but right now I'm just kind of tired. And so even though we know that he places certain demands on our time, we just decide we can't give those right now. Sometimes we reshape Jesus by hanging on to just blatant sin in our life and just excusing it away and being like, listen, I need a Jesus who accepts me as I am. I just need someone who just takes me in as I am. And listen, Jesus does love you as you are. But he also tells the adulterous woman, after he loves her as she is, to go and sin no more. He balances grace and truth. But some of us just hang on to sins that we have in our life, figuring it's not that big of a deal, and Jesus couldn't possibly mind. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm drinking too much. I know I'm drinking. It's not healthy. I'm starting to hide it from people. This is not very good. But Jesus has bigger fish to fry, so I'm just going to hold on to this one. Yeah, maybe I regularly look at stuff I don't need to look at, but it's better than actually cheating. So I'll just hold on to this one for a little while. Maybe, and this one's personal, maybe I drive like a jerk. Maybe it's possible that I bought a nondescript Honda Accord that does not have the church sticker on the back of it so that I can continue to drive however I want and not make anyone think poorly of the church that I lead. Maybe I sometimes can drive in such a way that the pastor of a church ought not drive, but certainly Jesus has bigger fish to fry than that. And so I just hang on to it like a dummy, like it's okay to just weave through traffic with my six-year-old in the car. He says, Daddy, you drive fast. Like, yeah, no, I like driving fast. But we have these things that we just allow in our life as if Jesus doesn't call us to repentance. And I know that last week we talked about let's just focus on Christ and that will kill the nature in us that wants to sin. And that's very true. But on the same hand, we are called to repentance, to walk away from the sin that Jesus shows us in our life. And so very often we handle it casually and we just allow it in our life as we just move on. And Jesus says it has no place there. And we're like, well, this has a place in my life or you don't. So come on and make some space for it. Another easy example I think of is our sexual standards. Scripture's, I think, pretty clear. Sexual activity outside the bonds of marriage is classified by Scripture as sexual immorality. And Scripture teaches against sexual immorality. But we go, yeah, I mean, I got loud and clear. Makes total sense. Jesus, I get it. But it's 2022. Come on. We don't really still mean that, do we. And for each one of these examples, as we talk about shaping Jesus to fit our politics, just trim off a corner of the block and to fit our standards on sexuality and trim off a corner of the block, and to fit into our schedule, and for his goals to fit in with our goals, and for his priorities with my life to fit in with my priorities of my life, and just trim off portions of Christ until he became a rounded circle that was able to fit into our pre-existing life. And I think that this is what so many of us, including me, do to Christ. As we look at the rough edges, we look at the things that don't fit into how we've already organized our life and our priorities, and we say, certainly you don't mean that, and certainly you understand it can't fit. And so we change our Jesus rather than changing ourselves. When what we need to do, and I was gonna have another fresh square and another fresh board with a square hole in it, is not change who Jesus is, but fundamentally change who we are. Fundamentally reshape our lives for the standards of Christ. Not clinging to the things that we used to cling to, not prioritizing the things that we used to prioritize, but opening up our life to Jesus and saying, Jesus, what's in here that doesn't fit? Show me the parts of my life where I need to make space for you, but Lord, please don't let me insist that you reshape yourself for me to have the audacity to say, well, now I'm willing to include you in my life. And so that's the question I wanted to invite you to this morning. What is it that we have in our life that we refuse to reshape? What are the things that we are clinging to? Political thought? Sexual purity? Blatant sin in our life? Our time? Our goals? Our talents? What is it that we're claiming to where we're kind of keeping Jesus in the guest bedroom? We're kind of saying, you just stay over there. When you fit into my life, I'm gonna let you come in. When you don't, I'm gonna expect you to change. What are the places in our life where we're asking Jesus to change who he is instead of being willing to allow him to change who we are? That's what I'd like us to prayerfully consider as I close here in a second. Is to say, Jesus, where are you not fitting? And how can I change to accommodate you and quit insisting that you accommodate me? As I read through this radical reshaping of the Christian family in a Roman context, I can't help but think that the most important thing for us to draw out of this passage is our very human tendency to reshape Christ in our own image and our refusal to be reshaped in his. So this morning, let us open ourselves up in prayer to where we might need to reshape our lives around who we know Jesus to be. And let us further pray that as we pursue Jesus and know him more and learn more about him and he becomes more real to us, that different aspects of him are opened up to us that then demand that we make more space for him. And let us be generous and quick in making that space. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this morning. We thank you, God, for grace, for all that you're doing here, for what I think is a palpable sense of enthusiasm and energy as we move forward and maybe, maybe finally begin to think about what a post-pandemic world looks like and what grace might look like in that world. God, thank you for Colossians and all the truth that's found in it. I pray that we would be people who are focused on you, who radically reprioritize our life around you, God. We give you permission to reshape us in your image and we repent of trying to reshape you into ours. Give us courage and honesty and integrity this week as we examine our lives and ask where we need to make space for you. And God, when we do that, I pray that we would be met with your grace and with your peace and with your joy. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.