Sermons tagged with Joy

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here for part six of our series in John. We've been in John for a while and we'll continue to be in John until the week after Easter. I'm really excited about this series. I hope I've been encouraging you guys to grab a reading plan on the information table as you leave. There's only two tables out there. One of them has coffee on them and the other one doesn't. So I trust you to figure out which is which. And on that table, there is the reading plan so that you can be reading along through the gospel of John with us. Because I've been saying the whole time, it's not good to only get my perspective on John and on Jesus through John. You need to put your own head and your own heart and your own emotions into it so that you can process Jesus on your own and then supplement it with this and what you're talking about, hopefully, in your small groups. We've been going through John because John was, for all intents and purposes, one of Jesus' closest friends and offers us a unique perspective of Jesus. This week, we arrive at my favorite verse in the Bible. Now, some of you have already gotten on to me this morning because you say I have a lot of favorite verses. Because like every other week, I'll put in the grace find. This is one of my favorite passages. I'm super excited. And now I'm starting to get a hard time. Like all of the passages are my favorite passages. But shame on you for being mad at your pastor for loving the Bible. I expect more of you, Grace. But no, that's my bad. I'm the boy who cried favorite. But this really is my favorite. I love this verse. It's hanging up in my house. I believe that when we understand this verse, when we choose to believe it, it really changes everything. And this is one that I weave into just about every sermon that I do. I love this passage. To understand this verse, I want to come at it from a different angle and share with you a conversation that my wife Jen and I had last week. Last week, we were talking about something, and she lovingly and fairly pointed out that maybe there's a chance that I have a little bit of an authority issue. It's possible that I don't care for authority or being told what to do. There's a chance of that. And I push back on that a little bit. I say, I don't have an issue with authority. I just have an issue with unreasonable and dumb authority. I mean, that seems fair. If you're telling me to do something that doesn't make sense, I'm not going to do that thing. If your authority was given to you by something that I don't recognize, like, say, putting a stop sign in a shopping center parking lot, I don't recognize that authority. I'm not going to stop. I don't care. That's on you, Kroger, right? That's not my authority. So I don't have a problem with authority. I just have a problem with unreasonable authority, right? And there's plenty of examples of this, but I think back to Snotnose High School, Nate, in Mrs. Parks' ninth grade algebra class. Now, Mrs. Parks is a wonderful lady. She's incredibly sweet. She still teaches high school math at Killian Hill Christian School in Lilburn, Georgia, where I went. It was a small private school. I graduated with 26 other people. I don't like to brag a lot, but I did graduate 24th in my class, so higher than most of you probably. That's actually true. My parents' greatest frustration in life is my academic career, but joke's on them. I'm living the dream. Who cares? She taught me in high school all four years. She teaches everybody all four years, and I can remember a conversation in ninth grade that went something like this. It's not exactly how it went, but it went a lot like this. I took a test, and in that test, there's some simple algebra problems. Like, I don't know, X plus three equals five. And I just write down on my paper, two. X equals two, that's pretty easy. You know, any more brain busters? And so then I hand in my test. I get it back, and she's taking points off that question. So she says, if anybody has any questions, you can come talk to me at my desk. And I'm like, I got a question for you, buddy. I need to see this. So I go up to Mrs. Parks. I'm like, hey, I don't understand. I got this question right, but you took points off of my test. What gives? And she said, well, you didn't show your work. I need you to show the steps. And I'm like, why? I got the question right. I don't need the steps. Your steps are for dummies. I don't need them. And she says, well, I need you to show your steps because in future tests, if you get a question wrong, but you do the work right, I can give you partial credit. And then all my immature 15-year-old bluster, I said, well, I tell you what, how about I just write down the right answer and you give me full credit? What do you think about that? And she kind of did the thing that you guys are doing right now, like, oh my gosh, what's the matter with this kid? And she did it. She was gracious and she was like, all right, that's how you want to do this thing. And when I did it right in my head, she gave me full credit. The problem was geometry. Geometry, I can no longer do it in my head. And all of us, some of us are good at math, but there always comes a point in which we can no longer do it in our head. We have to follow the steps. And I didn't know how to do the steps because I had rejected them and thought that they were dumb, and I didn't follow them. And so I ended up failing geometry because I didn't know how to do the steps. Turns out she was right, and guess what? I was wrong. I have plenty of stories like that in my life where an authority has said something, and I said, I'm not going to do it your way. I'm going to do it the other way, like the stop sign in my neighborhood. Or like I've gotten counsel for something from somebody who probably knew more about that thing than I did, but I said, you know what? I'm going to trust my wisdom more on this one than your wisdom. I'm going to do my own thing. And there are some of you here who can totally identify with me. When I say, I don't really care for authority to be told what to do, you're like, me neither, buddy. And there are some of you who just judged me, and that's fine. I can handle that. Some of you who are a lot like my wife, Jen, my sweet wife, Jen, who, she follows authority, there's security in rules and structure and that's fine. And you tell me what to do and I'll do it. And some of you are absolutely like that and you're hugely uncomfortable operating outside of authority. But what I want us to see is that I, the problem that I have is the problem that we all have, because at some point in your life, even those of you who love and respect authority and appreciate the structure that it brings you and feel safe within that structure, all of us at some point have broken the rules and rejected authority. All of us. If you haven't, then you're sinless and you should be the pastor of the church. I'd be excited to learn from you. We've all, at some point or another, rejected authority, gone our own way, done what we thought we needed to do. We've all, at some point, said, your rules don't make the most sense right here. I'm not going to do those rules. Or your counsel, the advice that you're giving me is a counsel that I reject. I don't care for it. Even though you probably know more about it than I do, I'm going to reject that counsel and do what I think is best in this situation. And I want us to see that when we do that, that implicit in our rejection of authority or counsel is an admission that we think we know better. You see, we've all done this. We've all rejected authority in our life at different times for different reasons. And we've all rejected counsel in our life at different times for different reasons. And that's all well and good because sometimes all authority shouldn't be followed. But when we do that, when we reject authority or counsel, there is an admission in that that we believe our way is better, right? To take it to the next level. A lot of times when that authority is a moral authority, when that counsel is moral counsel, a lot of times when we reject moral authority or moral counsel, we do it in favor of a pursuit of our own happiness. We believe that we're experiencing a happy, joyful life and that the thing that we want to pursue is actually outside of that authority that is being levied over us. And so we push off the authority that would have us act in a certain way in favor of pursuing our own happiness because we don't believe that submission to that authority will bring about our happiness. I said it like this. We reject authority when we do not believe submission will lead to happiness. You see this? When you're a kid, your parents tell you to do something and and you reject that authority, because we're not going to have more fun if I follow that authority. This is actually going to lead to greater happiness if I reject that authority and do what I want. I think back to when I was about 17 years old. My dad, mom and dad said, forget it with the curfew. Just tell us if you're going to be home that night, and let us know when you get wherever you're going. But no curfew. You do what you like. But here's the thing. My dad always said this. Nothing good happens after midnight. Son, go do what you want. But listen, nothing good happens after midnight. And I thought, that is a stupid idea. All the best things happen after midnight, right? All the fun stuff happens after midnight. That's when you get the best stories, right? So he says you need to, yeah, she knows. What are you doing over there, five-year-old? That's great. That's right, baby. He says you need to stay, you need to be in, you need to be safe, you need to make wise choices. And I think that's not going to lead to my happiness. That's not going to lead to fun. I'm going to choose this over here. And so I reject, I believe that submission to that authority will prevent me from being happy. And so I'm going to pursue it over here in rebellion of that authority, right? And here's the thing. Those two ideas that to reject authority or counsel is to say implicitly that we believe that we know better, and to reject moral authority and moral counsel is to say that I don't believe my happiness can be pursued in submission to that, so I believe that my happiness is best pursued in rebellion to that authority. It's through this grid that all of us, in one way or another, view God. You see? If you think about it from a non-Christian's perspective, and if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, I am thrilled that you're here. I'm thrilled that you're dipping your toe in the water to see if we're actually a bunch of weirdies or if maybe we're kind of like you and just trying to figure out life. I appreciate the fact that you're here and that you're exploring. That's wonderful. But for those of us who know people who aren't believers, or if perhaps you are not a believer, I think one of the things we could agree upon is, if you live in the South, first of all, you've been exposed to the gospel. You've heard about the Bible. You've heard about Jesus. You've probably sat in a church service. There's not many people wandering around our culture who haven't at least been presented the story of Jesus, right? And so it's been an active decision to keep Jesus at arm's length. And people do this for different reasons. But a lot of the reasons can be boiled down to a simple rejection of authority. I'm not interested in submitting to that authority in my life right now. Because people who are not believers tend to believe that to become a Christian means I'm going to have to stop doing some things that I really enjoy doing and I'm going to have to start doing some stuff that I really don't want to do. Right? If we think about ourselves and our journey and coming to a place where we submitted to God and said, yeah, I'll live my life under the authority of God's word. If we think of some of the people we know who may be on the fence about it, I would be willing to bet that a big contention that they have is to be a Christian, to live under the authority of God's word means to stop doing some things that bring me joy and to start doing some things that I don't think will bring me joy. So what we see is they're choosing their pursuit of their own happiness over what God's happiness will be for them, right? They think they know a better way than God does, and so no thanks. But here's the thing, even as believers, we continue to do this. We have these pockets of exceptions that we make for ourselves in our life. If you're here this morning and you're a believer, then most of you would say that you live your life under the authority of this word, that if God's word says something, that you try to acquiesce to that, you try to live in submission to it. And yeah, we mess up from time to time. Nobody's perfect, but I do try to live my life under the authority of God. But here's the thing, even as believers, we all have pockets and we all have places where we don't really submit to God's word. We're over here, we're submitted to God's authority and we're pursuing his happiness and the good life that he has for us here. But over here, what we believe is I'm going to hold on to these sins and these things because I really do believe that my happiness will be found here more than it will be found with God. And so we hang on to these things. An easy example of this is the biblical admonishment that we should confess our sins to one another. Scripture teaches over and over again in the Old Testament and in the New Testament that we should confess our sins to loving brothers and sisters, that we should take the dark things that are in our life and shed light on them. Because when we put them in the light and we allow God's people, God's children who love us and who love Jesus to see what's happening in the dark recesses of our life and of our heart that to do that sheds light on a sin and will destroy that sin and break that foothold that is in our life. We know this to be true. If you've been a Christian for any time, you've heard that teaching. But here's the thing. Most Christians I know are really bad at that. When's the last time, I'm being honest, those of you who have been walking with the Lord for a long time, when's the last time you had an egregious sin in your life that was eating your lunch and that you sat down and endured the shame and told somebody who loved you and who loved Jesus, hey man, this is kicking my tail? When's the last time you did that? When's the last time someone did that to you? When was the last time someone called you to coffee or called you on the phone and said, hey, I just need your help with this. This is going on in my life and I don't want it to be a part of my life anymore. For most of us, that hasn't happened in a long time because even though God's word teaches it, we don't like to do it. Why don't we like to do it? Because to do that would cause shame. There would be potential ramifications in our marriages, in our finances, in our standing, perhaps in our careers. It would cost us a lot to have to confess the thing that's going on in our life that we don't want to admit to. And so what we do is, instead of submitting to God's authority and confessing that to somebody who loves us, who can help walk us through it, is we convince ourselves that I'm going to handle this on my own. I tell you what, God, I have a better way. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to get over this sin on my own, and then I'll never need to confess it to anyone. No one will ever need to know about this part of my life and my heart. And then I'll move past it, and it'll just be a thing that used to exist. Sound familiar? And we know that God's word says that we need to confess, but we go, no, I have a better way. If I do that, that will make me unhappy. I will lose things that are sources of joy, so I'm going to pursue my happiness here. We all do this with God. And it's to this mindset, to those of us who may not be believers who hold Christ at arm's length because we believe that to follow him would cost us a quality of life that we're not willing to give up, or those of us who are following Jesus but we hold him at arm's length in certain areas of our life because we don't want to give up that portion of our life because we don't think that it will really make us happier if we follow him. We think that we're living the best life possible now because we trust our judgment more than we trust his. It's to that mindset that Jesus speaks in John chapter 10. In John chapter 10, if you have a Bible, you can open there. He uses another one of these great I am statements, these big statements that he says throughout the gospel of John that makes it unique from the other gospels. The other gospels, we have parables. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have parables, stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. We don't have any of those in John. In John, we have I am statements. A couple weeks ago, Kyle preached about him being the living, he says, I am the living water. Last week, we looked at him saying he is the bread of life. This week, he says he is the good shepherd. And the picture here with the good shepherd, and Jesus often paints himself as the good shepherd, is that he is the shepherd of the flock. The flock is us, his church, his children. And the idea with sheep is they're pretty helpless without their shepherd. They're not going to find their way to food. They're not going to find their way to water. They're not going to find their way to flourishing without their shepherd guiding them. They're going to be totally defenseless against predators without their shepherd there to protect them. And so Jesus sets himself up as our shepherd who is there to guide us, to lead us into good water, to lead us into good pastures, and to protect us. And in this verse, he talks about being the gate for the sheep. In town, when you're a shepherd in town, when you're at your house or your farm or whatever it is, there's like a big structure. There's wood and a structure and a swinging gate and hinges and the whole deal, and he can lock the sheep in there and everybody's good. But out on the hillside in the country, a little bit away from the town where the sheep might be grazing, if you need to stay overnight, the shepherd has to make kind of a makeshift pen. He has to set up rocks and sticks and things like that to keep the sheep hemmed in. And then because he doesn't carry a gate with hinges in his pocket, he's got to make a gate. And so what the shepherd will do out in the hillside is he will sleep in front of the opening of the gate, of the pen, and serve as the physical personification of the gate so that nothing can get to his sheep unless it comes through him. And then he talks about this idea of a thief that might try to get into the gate in any other way by jumping in or coming into the pen by any way that isn't him. Okay? And so that's kind of the context for this verse that has become my favorite verse. John 10, 10, Jesus says this, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly. The thief is Satan. He is the enemy. We're going to talk about him in a second. But Jesus says, listen, to a room full of people who we at different points in our life for different reasons have all rejected the authority of Jesus in our life at one time or another. To a room full of people who have all at different points chosen our own version of happiness and our own judgment over his to pursue what we think is going to be the best life possible for us. To a room full of people who have done that, Jesus says, I am the gate. I am the good shepherd. And if it comes into your life through me, then the promise is you will have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say have it to the full. The original language, the word there means to have a super abundance of a thing. Jesus tells you, those of us who doubt his authority, who choose our own version of happiness over his version of happiness, he tells us, I promise you that standard is working to bring about the greatest possible happiness and joy and fulfillment for you. If it's counsel from my word or from someone who loves me and loves my word and they're speaking this into your life, I promise you that counsel, even if it's counterintuitive, will be working to bring about for you the greatest possible life that you can have in this life and the next. Jesus promises us that anything that comes from him is working to bring about your greatest happiness. And then he says, but the thief, which is anything that gets to you that isn't through me, is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And we understand that that thief is Satan. And we don't talk a lot about Satan here. We don't talk a lot about the devil. And actually, it's such a big part of the scripture. He's addressed so much that I really do believe at some point or another, we're gonna do a whole series on the devil. I'll wear a double-breasted suit every Sunday and a handkerchief and I'll dab my forehead a lot and yell at you, okay? It'd be great. We need to address him. He's a big part of Scripture, but for the purposes of this morning, what we need to know is Satan is real, he is effective, and he is against you. And Jesus says, anything that gets into your life that is not from me is from him. And it is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And many of us know that this is true experient the thief can derail our life, can steal our life from us, there's easy examples of this. We immediately think of the egregious sins, right? We think of maybe an addiction. Maybe there was somebody who had a surgery, the surgery of the recovery of which required some pain medication. And so they began to take that medication and they liked the way that made them feel. There was more of it than they needed, and we fast forward two, three years down the road, and they've developed an addiction, and that's how Satan steals our lives. I have a dear, dear friend whose wife developed one of these, and it has wrecked their life. He has had portions of his life stolen from him from a sin that isn't even his. We've seen this work in our lives and in the lives of others, right? Sometimes it's a secret sin. It's an affair or an issue or a private thing that we have going on that we won't confess, that we won't let other people know about. And Proverbs tells us that we can't hold hot coals against our chest and not be burned. And sometimes, eventually, that secret sin will fester up and manifest itself and do damage in our life that is irreparable, and Satan will have successfully stolen that portion of our life from us from some egregious secret thing or from some addiction. But for most of us, that is not how Satan is going to steal our life. The Bible says he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking who he may devour. And for some of us, that's how he picks us off. But for many of us, most of us, I think Satan's most pernicious tactic is to simply distract us, to keep us focused on all sorts of things as we go through life that aren't from God, that ultimately don't matter. I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with people in their 50s and 60s who have poured their life into their career and been very successful into that career, in that career, only to find that they don't have the relationship with their children or their spouse that they would really like because Satan distracted them for so many years and they poured their life into a thing that ultimately doesn't matter very much. We pour ourselves into hobbies that don't matter. We get really good at a thing that has no eternal value And most of that is a masking mechanism because we're not happy with what our home life looks like. And what we really need to do is work on that. But it's easier to be distracted by these other shiny things that are going off in our life. And so we pursue those. We pursue the house that we want. We pursue the family that we want. We pursue all these things that at the end of the day might not matter very much, but Satan has successfully distracted us with things going on in our world and in our culture that don't matter for eternity, and he steals your life from you. Some of you walked in here today, and you are in the middle of having your life stolen. And for you, I hope if nothing else happens as a result of this this morning, that you will recognize that that's taking place. And you'll put your foot on the ground and you'll say, no more. I'm not going to allow my life to be stolen from me in this way. But what I want us to trust is that if it comes from Jesus, even if it's counterintuitive, that it is working to bring about our greatest happiness. There's plenty of examples of how this works. I think of marriage, right? Most of us in the room are married, and if you're married, what do you want? You want your marriage to be vibrant and happy and fulfilling and loving and filled with joy. That's what you want. The problem is not very many of us or not most of us would use those words to describe our marriages because marriage is hard, and to get to that place, it takes a lot of work, and sometimes it's easier to just fulfill the needs of marriage outside of that marriage because that takes a lot less work, right? Sometimes when we're not having our needs met within a marriage, we go outside the marriage to another person or a thing or a hobby or a group of people or some sort of masking activity from what we're lacking in our home. And what Scripture teaches us is that our greatest happiness is found in our marriage. If you are married right now, I'm not talking about in the past, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad. If you are married right now, I can tell you it is God's will that you would be happy and flourishing in that marriage. It is God's will that you would remain married. I know that to be the case. And so what God really wants us to do, even though sometimes when marriage gets hard, it looks like it would be easier to just go outside the marriage and have our needs met in different ways and keep everything intact. The better thing to do, the harder thing to do, is to lean harder into our marriage and do the hard work that it takes to bring vibrancy there because that is the path through which our greatest happiness and fulfillment will be found. That's what Jesus promises. Another easy one is the confession. When we don't confess, we don't do it because we're afraid of the shame that it's going to bring us. And so we try to work on this thing privately, and it never gets any better. And we never experience the grace of other people loving us without judgment and without shame and seeking to build us up. And so we never obey God and confess our sins to one another, and that thing festers. Instead, if we would just do the difficult thing and shed light on the dark places, we would watch the love of God and the grace of God through His children rush into our life and heal us of this thing that's been eating our lunch forever. Right? Example after example of things that seem counterintuitive, if we follow the authority of Christ, it can't possibly make me happy. It can't possibly make me happy to give away a minimum of 10% of my money. That does not seem very smart. But God promises us that if we do that, if we'll be generous people, that we will experience life as conduits of his generosity and experience the joy that comes from that. Jesus promises us in John 10.10 that even when it doesn't make any sense, if it gets into your life from him, then it is working to bring about the greatest life you could possibly imagine.10? Do you believe John 10.10? Do you believe that Jesus is telling the truth? Do you believe that Jesus cares deeply about your joy and your happiness and the quality of your life now? And do you believe if he does care about that, that he alone knows how to bring about your greatest joy? Do you believe that? Because if you do, if you believe it, then our whole life changes. There's never a reason to sin again. There's never a reason to throw off his authority again, because we know that we trust that God is working to bring about our happiness. When we get to those crossroads in life, where it would be far easier to just do the easy thing, the simple thing, to do the thing that is a rejection of God's authority, or it would be difficult to choose God's authority. When we get to those crossroads, if we believe John 10.10, it will be easier to choose Jesus' authority than our own because we know we can trust him with our happiness and with our joy. If we believe John 10.10, here's the thing, there's no reason to ever sin again when we really think that it's true. And when we really think that we can trust it, it changes everything. So here's how we want to finish. I would love for you to think through, where is God trying to bring me joy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? What lies am I believing in pursuing happiness outside of God's will that will never make me happy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? And what would it look like if I actually chose submission to God, glad and happy obedience, and pursued the happiness that he promises me through everything that enters into my life through him as it works to bring about our greatest joy and the greatest life possible, a super abundance of the thing. This week, as you go throughout your days and you hit those crossroads where you realize it's a choice between my authority and my version of good and Jesus' authority and his version of good, whose will you choose? And really, the question as you leave this morning is, who do you trust with your life and with your happiness? Yourself or Jesus? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your son who loved us so well, who was so patient with us, who was so gracious with us, who is our good shepherd, who always leads us to the good places. God, I pray that we would trust him with our lives, that we would trust him in submission to you, that we wouldn't be, frankly, so arrogant as to choose our own way, but that we would submit to the founder and perfecter of our faith, to the author of the universe, that we would trust that you have our best interest at heart and you know exactly how to bring that about. Father, let us trust you more. Let us choose your judgment and your authority over our own. Let us believe what your son says in John 10.10. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, sweet. Good morning, everyone. Everyone doing well? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Woo! Yeah, baby! All right. Sweet. Hey, I'm always for being applauded. I've already lost my notes. This is how this is going to go this morning. I'm all for getting applauded before I even have to do anything. So thank you guys so much for that. But as Nate said, I'm Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace. I'm so excited to get to speak to you guys this morning. I'm especially excited, honestly, because I have actually, probably about a month after we decided to do the book of John, I actually did a passage out of John with our students. We did John 4 and our students, and I had read it and kind of studied it a little bit, and something hit me in a different way than I'd ever been hit by this story before. And this is a story I think that many of us know. I know I've heard it tons of times, and it's incredible in itself, but I had realized something a little bit different that I said, you know what? After getting to know our students, I think this would really go well with them. And so I went through it, and it went well. I think that they really enjoyed it, and I really felt like the Lord had placed on my heart, Kyle, I have a bigger audience for you to tell this to as well. And as I realized, I was like, hey, we're doing a John series. I guess this is my moment. And so, you know, it's a pretty big story, and I was like, well, I don't know if Nate's going to let me do something that's that good, you know. But I went to Nate. I was like, Nate, what do you think about this? And he was like, well, you know, let's look at our times. Let's look at the schedule, blah, blah, blah. I didn't know. I didn't know what the schedule was looking like. I kind of had forgotten. I mean, I knew it was first weekend of March, but you know, I didn't know. And so we looked, and wouldn't you know that on the fourth week of John, I'd be able to talk about John 4. And I think that's incredible. And I think that there's something to be said about that. And I don't say that to say, get ready for me to knock your socks off. Get ready for the best sermon you've ever heard. I mean, are those things true? Yeah. No, they're not true. And if you're expecting that, then I'm sorry that it's going to be kind of a bummer. But what I will tell you is that clearly, that the Lord has clearly ordained the ability for me to be able to speak this to you this morning. And so for that, I would say, maybe he has something for you this morning. And so I would ask that you'd open up your ears and open up your hearts to maybe what the Lord has for you this morning. And I'm going to do my best to get out of his way and just let him take over. So anyways, let's jump on in. We're going to be in John 4. I'm going to kind of, we'll talk about it some. I'll read a little bit, you know, the classic one too. And so we're going to be in John 4, and basically at this time, Jesus and his disciples, they've been traveling. They're going from Judea to Galilee, and they stop in this town called Sakaar that's within Samaria. They stop there basically, you know, because they've been walking a long way. Like, I don't like to walk from here to Chipotle with Steve, and that's like right down the road, and I have shoes. So I don't even imagine where they were at, so I'd be stopping a lot. But anyways, they're stopped here, and the disciples go off to try to find some food for them as Jesus goes to the well to get some water. So as he goes, this woman comes up. It says around noontime or the sixth hour, both mean the same thing, that this woman comes and he says, woman, could you give me a drink? And that's where I want to pick up. I want to read her response real quick. Her response in verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? And I think to stop real quick, I want, I think it's very important to understand why she's asking that question. The reason in the cultural background and the cultural significance of that is the fact that Jews and Samaritan did not mix. They didn't mingle. They hated each other. It was an NC State fan and an UNC fan talking to each other. It just didn't happen. There was no love lost between the two people. And so this was a big deal that Jesus had crossed that cultural boundary to talk to this woman. In the same token, as she says, a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman, that not only that, but we know that in this time and in this culture, there was this hierarchy between men and women, that men were considered better, they were considered greater. And in the same respects, in this culture, men and women just didn't randomly, a guy would not go up and just talk to a girl in public, especially one that he didn't know. It just was not considered right. And in the same token, as we go a little bit more in depth into something that we know here, is that when it says that this was at noon when this woman approached, that what this is saying and what in this culture, as they would know and as Jesus would know, that the reason why this woman is coming at noon in the middle of the day when it's completely hot and she's completely alone and by herself, what we know about that, and we know that to mean that probably even within Sychar, even within her own people and in her own community, she was in exile. That she was an outcast. That she was somebody who was probably shamed and looked down on, that she was less than or considered unclean. And we realize, and as we get into this, that this is the truth and that she had basically these public sins. And so because of that, instead of going with the rest of the women early in the morning where it wasn't too hot, where they could get their water and come back and start working and doing their chores, doing the stuff that they had to do for the day, that this woman had to wait until everyone else was gone because she was so shamed. And so, hey, you cannot be here with the rest of the people. You have to come by yourself. You have to go in the heat of the day where, I mean, just to be real, probably not great. It was probably the worst. And not only that, but even just to consider the fact that she had to walk there every day by those people who had shamed her and who hated her. And so we know those three things. And the reason why I think those are important is because Jesus is about to talk about some incredible things. Jesus could give the message he gives this woman in a sermon, and it would do incredibly well. It's awesome. There's so much truth in this. There's so much awesome, great stuff in the love of Christ that he shares in this passage. But instead, he goes up to one woman. He walks past every boundary that has been placed culturally for her. And he says, you know what? I'm talking to you. I'm expressing my love to you because you need to hear it. And I think that that's incredible. And what I think that that shows us is that Jesus' love is boundless, and it's for everyone. It's not just for people who are Jews. It's not just for people who are men or who work in the church, who are in the church. It's for everyone. And I think that that's incredible. And so I want to pick back up, and we're going to start back in 10. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you holy water or living water. Sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. I would have given you living water. And she doesn't know who he is. She wasn't able to read the first three books of John before having this conversation. She didn't get to hear these great messages that Nate has posted online from the last three weeks. She doesn't know who this is. So she's like, okay, that sounds great, but you don't have anything to get the water, and the well is deep, my man. And so I just think that's funny, and I think that you should too. But in 11, it says, sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Ah, we've already read that. Sorry. We're going into, yeah what this living water is, it's this well that will spring up into eternal life, that it's this eternal well, this eternal spring where you never have to go back to the well again because you're forever satisfied, your soul is satisfied. And we understand what he means is God's love and the grace that's shown through Christ to us on this earth. We understand that he is pointing to, I'm going to die in a couple years and I'm going to for you, and then I'm going to be raised to life. And in the same way, if you'll come to me, you can experience this as well. This is incredible. It's awesome stuff. It's him saying, dude, look at this grace. This is offered to you, but she still doesn't get it. Instead, her reply, she said, the woman said to him, sir, give me this water that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. And I love that. She doesn't get it, but what she does get is I don't want to have to come back to this well and come back to the memory every day of the fact that I am completely isolated and completely alone. I don't have to walk past people trying my best to not make eye contact because I know they're looking down their noses at me. And this is not the main point of my message, but grace, may we never be that person. May we never be a place that people do not want to come back to because they're afraid of what people will think of them for a mistake that they've made, for a past that they have, for somebody who's sitting next to you right now that undoubtedly may mess up in their life. That we're always a place where you can come and you can experience the love of Christ with open arms coming in, and I don't care what you did yesterday because you're here today and I love you for that. May we be that type of church. Let's keep going. He told her, go, call your husband and come back. I have no husband, she replied. Jesus said to her, you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you have five husbands and you've had five husbands and the man you are now with is not your husband. What you have said is quite true. Now, remember this moment because it seems random. It seems weird. It's always been weird for me. I've never really fully understood it, but I just said, you know what? This is a great passage, but this is what we're going to come back to. This is the meat of the passage, but I want to continue because I think it's imperative that we fully understand what Jesus is saying and who he is in this passage, and then we'll come back and see what that means. So let's just keep reading. I don't know if you have. Bibles need bigger print. You know what I'm saying? All right. Sir, the woman said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. And so basically what she's trying to deflect, trying to get, you know, like, okay, let's talk about worship for a bit. I can tell that you're a prophet. And so Jesus responds, and it's a little wordy, it's a little hard to understand, but basically what Jesus says is, let me tell you, first of all, the God that us Jews, the God that we worship is the one true God that Jews worship in truth because this God is the God. He is the only one true rightful God. But let me also tell you that a time is coming and a time has now come where not only is this the God of the Jews, but this is the God of all people, that this God created every person and loves every person. So a time is coming that not only will the Jews be able to worship in truth, but all people, Jew or Samaritan, will be able to worship in spirit and in truth. That when I die for you, that you have the ability to have the Holy Spirit inside of you, the same well that we've talked about that continues to come in, that you never have to go back. You're always forever satisfied. You have this eternal value and this eternal soul satisfaction. He says, this is going to be for all people, not just for Jews, but for Samaritans, for you as well. And so she responds and she says, basically she says, sir, I know that a Messiah is coming. I've heard that a Messiah named Christ is coming and that he's going to explain all of this to us. And Jesus says, I, the one you are speaking to, am he. This Messiah that you've heard about, that is coming to save all people, it's me. And I'm here to tell you that you're definitely right. And that I, as the Messiah, am here to love you. Not just to love people, but to love you. And how incredible is that? And how incredible is that truth? And if we just ended it there, it's like, oh my gosh, this is phenomenal. And like, how awesome is it that God is a God who loves everyone? And as I've read this in the past, I'm like, it's so great that not only does God love me, but God loves people who've sinned in drastic ways, people who are completely isolated, somebody who's dealt with adultery and seems like to continue to fall under adultery and probably other sins as well, as this passage alludes to. And I love that until I think, why was it in this passage? Why did he, she just asked for holy water, and then he changes the subject and says, come bring your husband. And so it's like, why, that's random, and that's weird. Why did you say that? And then the next question is, okay, so you did know that she didn't have a husband. You did know that she's had five husbands and that she's with her sixth man. You did know all of this. So then it just seems like she's putting the, that he's putting this lady on blast. Like he's just straight up calling this lady out and being kind of rude. And I hear that and I see that. And it also just doesn't make sense. Why are you doing it? But then as I, as I realized is there's no reason why this would be in here if it didn't completely connect with the rest of it. And what I think is that instead of him simply talking about her sin is that he is trying to get to the heart behind her sin. And when you get to the heart behind sin and when you start to think about it that way, it gets a little bit scarier for us. Because we, I don't, most people in this room have not been married five times and are on their sixth lover or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what the word is for that. Sorry, I said lover. But what I do think is that we all have hearts that are seeking out other things besides God. And what I do know is that what that means is we have sinful hearts. And so what I think is he's pointing at this and he's saying, you have been searching for value and worth and identity in men instead of in me. And so because of that, you're continuing to have to go back to this well, because it's never going to be enough. And so like I said, I know that we don't always have these stories. Like for me, like to give you a little background behind me, since I know I don't know all of you quite as well, and I haven't known all of you guys for such a long time, I think the best way to give you a little background behind me is to tell you a little bit about high school Kyle. High school Kyle was killing it with the braces game, aka had braces, like all of high school, which is great. Like, that's the time you want to have braces is high school. Like, you know, let the least amount of judgmental people around, you know, obviously. But no, I think the easiest way to really tell you is to kind of tell you what senior superlative I got. And yeah, I know, I know. Hold your plot. Like, I know I got a senior superlative. You guys are like, wow, this is a girl. I know, I get it. But chill, you know, I'm just a normal person just like you guys. But I, the senior superlative, so like, for those of you who don't know, or maybe you like forgot for whatever reason, but there's like, you know, most athletic, and there's like, most likely to succeed, most likely to be president, smartest. Like, I'm sure like if at Connor's school was like biggest sweetheart, he would, he had that unlocked, because he is the sweetest of hearts. Shout out to Connor. Everyone go meet him because he's great. But I didn't get any of those ones that were mentioned. I got most involved. And most of you know, it's like, oh, cool. That's great. That's whatever. Like, when you think about what most involved is, it's basically a participation medal of the superlative game. Like, literally, it's the participation trophy of superlative. It's like, Kyle, we know you worked so hard in school, and you did really well, but there's just people who did better. And we know you worked so hard in sports, and you played a lot of sports, but there were just people who were more athletic. And we know that you were, like, vice president of your class, you were in a lot of leadership roles or whatever, but, like, you're not going to be, you're not most likely to be president in this scenario. Like, you know, like, but you tried so hard, and so we have to give you something, and so here's this. And so it's really sweet, and I don't know, maybe my mom asked them if they would make that just to be sweet to me because she felt bad. But that's what I got, and we laugh and we joke about it, but at the same time, like, I did wear that with a lot of pride. I think it adequately described who I was and who I am, that I'm somebody who is very focused on succeeding. And I want to work as hard as I can to do the very best that I can in every scenario. You know, I wanted to make 100 on every single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be, like, nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh, my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the next one. But then if I didn't make 100, if I made a 98 on the test, I was devastated and it was the end of my day. And I think some of us can relate to that. Some of us can relate to the fact that we so seek out success and the success is where we're driven. It's where our worth and our value comes from, and we don't quite reach it, then we feel like we've completely failed. And it takes, it like just messes with our hearts in the same way I wanted to be the guy who was known as somebody who worked really hard. I wanted coaches to be able to talk about, man, that guy's work ethic is incredible. Or to tell the players, if you had the work ethic, that if everyone had the work ethic that Kyle had, then we'd be a better team. Or I wanted parents and I wanted teachers to say, this is a great kid. This is a kid who loves the Lord. This is a leader. This is someone who I want my son or my daughter to grow up to have a faith like Kyle. And I say these things to say that these are not bad things. And I think so many things in our life are not bad things. But when I recognize where he's calling this woman out, it was the same with me. I sought so heavily to find my value and to find my worth and to even rest my identity into things outside of Christ, into being seen as a good person, into being lifted up. I can remember at Greystone, the last church I was at, I would be so excited to preach God's word. I would be so excited to get to talk to our students and I had something for them. I knew that the Lord was ready to speak through me to do that and I'd get done and I'd I'd feel great about it, and I'd leave, and I'd be super bummed out at home because not enough people said it was good. I didn't realize, and what I finally realized is this tweet by my man Timothy Keller. He's an older man. He's actually not a pastor anymore because he's retired. Incredible preacher, incredible writer, incredible tweeter. So the big three as far as I'm concerned for being a pastor. But he actually tweeted this week, and I was like, how incredible that he did this, and this is perfect. He said, sin is not simply doing bad things. It is also putting good things in the place of God. I realized, and it hit me pretty hard, that there are so many things in my life that I seek after. There's so many things that I try to find worth and value in, and it never is enough. I love the way that David Foster Wallace puts it. He's got a two-part last name, so you know he's smart. I may start doing my middle and my last name. So Kyle Jordan Talbert said this. So if you quote me, say that, because then people will listen to you. beauty and sexual allure, you will always feel guilty. If you worship power, you will always feel weak and afraid. Worship your intellect, and you will always view yourself as stupid and a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And let me tell you guys that anything you worship outside of God will end up eating you alive. And what is the issue with these things? What is the problem? Why is it? Why can't I find value in these? Because they're earned. Because you have to work as hard as you can to earn them. And anything that you earn, you are always on the verge of also being able to lose them. And there's always someone else. There's always somebody else who doesn't like you. There's always someone who doesn't laugh at your joke. There's always someone who doesn't approve. There's always someone better. There's always someone more successful. There's always more money to be made. When we focus on our success, when we focus on anything else besides God, then we're left coming up short. One scholar says, and I love this, he says, we seek to find our identities horizontally on earth when we have been hardwired to find them vertically in God's love. We've been created to be able to, we've been created to have a relationship with God, our Father. And that is where true eternal value and significance and satisfaction come from. We need to, we need something to change what our heart loves and what it rests in and what it fixes itself on the most. Jesus says he's the only object of worship that won't abuse you because you don't earn his love, his grace, and his favor unlike every other object of worship. And because the point of the gospel and the point of Christ's sacrifice is that the love and the grace that is given to us is given to us as a gift, as free. And so therefore, it is ours. We can't lose it. It's a perfect love and it is a perfect sacrifice that we only receive. And therefore, we're not at risk of losing it. I love, I wrote this one, so whatever. Maybe it's not good. I just kind like, I'm no longer those things. I'm no longer Carl and Suzanne's son. I'm no longer Jay's brother. I'm no longer Connor's coolest friend. I'm Kyle, child of God. And that's in your thing, but I don't want you to write Kyle. You can if you want. That's nice. I want you to write your name because I want you to realize that that is who you are. That's your identity. That's how Christ sees you. That's how the Lord sees you. It's his child. When the creator of the universe would send his son simply for a chance to have a relationship with you, there's not much more value and there's not much more worth you could ever feel than that. And it's a love that keeps coming and it keeps welling up all the way to eternal life. So what does that look like? What does that look like practically? Because it's a cool point. It's an awesome thing. But as my students know, I don't care at all that you understood my message. Like, if you understood my message and you talked about it and then you don't apply it, then who cares? It didn't mean anything. So what does it look like? And I think a very awesome, very cool example is Trevor Lawrence, who was the freshman quarterback at Clemson who won the national championship this year for football. He said he was in a press conference and they basically asked him about his nerves during the game. Ask Asked him like, you know, like, I don't know the exact question, but his response, I love his response. He says, no matter how big the situation is, I know it's not going to define me. It doesn't matter what other people think or say about me because I know what Christ says about me. My identity is in Christ. My value and my worth comes from what Christ says about me. And that was written in stone a long time ago. And so I don't have to spend all of my time worrying about what other people are going to say about me or what other people are thinking or if I am a great quarterback or if I choked or if I'm the best. I'm not worried about that because that's secure. And so does it mean that the Lord took away football because he gave up football in his heart to God? No. The dude won a national championship this year. But can you imagine how much more fun it was for him to play the game that he loves on the biggest stage, not worried about what everyone else thought of him, not trying to find his worth and his value based on the way that he played in that football game? What if that was the way you guys were at work? What if that's the way that we were in our relationships, in our family? What if we weren't solely concerned with having to find our value and having to find our worth by what people thought of us? And instead, we could simply just enjoy it. Enjoy life. Go through life with joy. Going through life knowing that our value and our worth and our souls are completely satisfied. I think it goes even further, honestly. I mean, like, the way that this passage ends, I absolutely love. Like, this woman who was completely isolated from her society and probably was shown, like, a true picture of love, maybe for the first time in her life. I bet her life was a pretty rough one. And so what happens when she finally realizes this? What happens when she finally understands who this man is and the love that he's offering her? She sprints down to Sicar and she starts yelling, you guys have to hear about this person. I think it could be the Messiah. I think it could be this person that we've heard about. He literally told me everything I had done in my life. You have to come find, you have to come see this person, hear from this person yourself. When Christ changes our hearts, when our value is in him, we care far less about what the culture would have us do, what our culture would have us do. We care a lot less about how other people see success. We care a lot less about how other people think we should parent, how other people think we should be as a friend, about what we should be concerned about, what we couldn't. This woman was completely isolated. She wasn't allowed to interact with any of these people. But when you realize and when you fully allow your heart to understand, realize, and be overwhelmed by the love of Christ, there's no way that it doesn't change the way that you live, the things that you talk about. And can I tell you that in such a cynical and fallen world, someone who's completely joyful, you can tell it on them. Someone who has a worth and has value that doesn't go away based on their current circumstance, people see it. And so they heard that and they saw this woman. I think they probably cared less about the words that she said and more just the fact that something incredible just happened to this woman who I probably haven't made eye contact with in years because she's been trying to avoid it because she doesn't want to be seen with shame. I think they cared less about what she said. I think they cared more about the fact that she was so changed in her heart that she would go out in total love and look like a completely different person in her everyday life. May we be those people. May we experience this living water. May we experience having value that is eternal, complete soul satisfaction. And may it change who we are. May it change what we look like. And may it be like the end of this passage where these people, when they saw this woman, they had to go see for themselves. Jesus made a pit stop into a three-day stop because these people wanted to hear what he had to say because they saw what he had done for this girl. May we have people in our lives who have to come see what's going on here, have to go see what's going on in this person's heart, because man, there's just something different about it. Let's pray. God, thank you for your love. God, thank you for your son, for his sacrifice. God, thank you for the fact that you literally show and offer your love to every single one of us, regardless of our past, regardless of our present, that God, if we would come to you, you offer love. And God, allow us to realize that this love is the only thing in this life that we need. And so instead of worrying so much about our current lives and what's going on in our future and what our past was, God, that we're simply able to rest in the peace of your love and the assurance that that brings us. Man, God, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sending your son to die for me for some reason. Thank you that you see me as a child of God, as a child of you. And God, I do just want to take a second to say thank you for whoever wrote this next song because man, they did a good job. We love you. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate, and I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for coming out on this holiday weekend. You guys didn't get the memo that you're supposed to be at, like, cabins or something, so you came here instead. And this is great. If you want to know how to excite a pastor, this is it, man. There's also space at the first service, if you'd like. It's good to see all of you here. This is the second part of our series in John. Last week, we opened up, and instead of just diving right into the text, I spent a week giving you some context for what's happening in the book of John and for why we are choosing as a church to focus on the book of John for this many weeks. We're going to carry this through the week after Easter. So we're going to camp out in this for a while. And so my whole goal last week was to get you excited enough about the book of John to go and to read it on your own. So we have a reading plan that we've developed. It's on the information table that you can get on your way out. I hope that if you were here last week, you grabbed one of those, or maybe you looked online and found that. If you don't have one, they're there this week. We are really encouraging you to read along with us as we go through John. One of the huge reasons to do this, if you think about this, this is a dangerous thing. If you come every week and you listen to the sermons and this is the picture that you get of John, but you never read it on your own, then I have bad news for you. You are only getting my perspective of your Jesus through John, and that's not good for you, okay? You are mostly smarter than me. Some of you are not, but most of you are smarter than me, and you need to process this on your own, okay? So that's what we're all going to do is dive into John together. This week, we open up the text, and we start the first 18 verses of the book of John, which are a sweeping narrative of the grandeur of Christ and who he is, why he came, how he's going to do it, and what that means to us. So those are the things that we're going to discuss today. This passage, John 1, 1 through 18, has been called by theologians one of the greatest adventures of religious thought ever achieved. It's a grand passage, and I'm nervous, if I'm honest, about not doing it the appropriate justice because of all that it is and all that it means to us. If you wanted to just do one sermon from the book of John, to just read one portion of the book of John and say, what is the message in John? This is the portion that you should read. John chapter 1, 1 through 18. As you read through it and it tells us about who the person of Jesus is, what he came to do, how he came to do it, and what it means to us. If you only hear one message from the whole series, I would say that this is probably the most important one because this message and this passage encapsulates all that it is that John wants to address for us. To help us understand this passage and what's going on here and why John approaches it the way that he does, I want to tell you about a trip that I had earlier this year. Earlier this year in January, my wife Jen and I took our daughter Lily to Disney World, okay? And this is the racket that Disney World has going on. We took her because if you take somebody before they're three, then their ticket is free and you get to save money. This is a great deal, right? Except my parents went, they took us. And so there's four adults paying for everything to go down there and the trip and then everything inside the park. And the money that I had set aside to pay for things in the park, I get to the end of the day, the first day, and Jen goes, how much money do we have left in our budget? I said, none, no money. We have no money left in our budget. We're not doing anything tomorrow. Like that's it, you know? But listen, we saved 200 bucks, right? Because we went early, a bunch of dummies. Disney's genius, man. So we go down there and I actually, I rehearsed the sermons before I subject you to them. And this one was always running long and I figured out it was because I was so excited about the Disney trip that I was telling you guys, I was going to tell you guys like all these details that you didn't need to know. So ask me afterwards, I'll be thrilled to talk with you about Disney. But the thing that I do want you to know is before we went, we did the best we could to give Lily some context for the trip, right? She's almost three years old. She's liked Mickey and Minnie her, her, literally her entire life. When she was a baby, she would watch them and like somehow they would bring her peace. And I'd be like, this is voodoo, man. Walt Disney, like I'm already spending money and And I will be for the next 18 years. But she loves it. So she was excited to go. Mickey and Minnie are going to be there. I get to see them. Tigger and Pooh are going to be there. It's great. So we're talking to her about those things. We're also showing her videos. Like there's YouTube videos of the rides down there, the Dumbo ride and the teacups and the different things to give her some context for what's going to happen to try to help her understand why we're excited. We did a little countdown in the kitchen. Every day she would cut like a ring off and she would count. And this is many days till we go see Mickey. And so the whole deal, we did the best we could to kind of get her ready for what we're going to experience. And so we go down there and she does phenomenal. She's loving it. She's smiling on the first day. I actually took her on a legit roller coaster. It was probably one of the few mistakes I've made as a parent so far. And I put her on the roller coaster by telling her that it was a small train and that she was going to like it. And so then I sit her there and I have to brace her little head because it's just flapping around with the G-forces. And we get done and I'm thinking she's going to scream and cry, but we got done. And I said, Lily, did you like it? She says, uh-uh. I said, why not? And she says, it was too fast, Daddy. And I was like, well, I'm pretty happy this is a response, and not just screaming. So she did phenomenal. At about three o'clock in the afternoon, we realized, gosh, you know what? We're making such good time here that we could get everything accomplished at the Magic Kingdom in day one if we pushed it, and then we could go see someplace different the next day. And so we started talking about what do we want to do? Do we want to call it? Do we want to push? What's going on? And we decided, you know what? Let's just take it easy. Let's just let her experience this. Not push her too hard. Let's not push us too hard. We're old now. I don't want to go till eight o'clock at night anymore. And so let's just go back and rest our feet. Let's let Lily rest. And then we'll come back the next day, right? And then we'll take it easy. We'll finish up the other thing. She can repeat some things and we'll just relax and just enjoy Lily enjoying the park. And that's what we decided to do. And it was a good decision. And one of the happy accidents of that decision was we got to see the joy of anticipation with Lily because she gets back that night and she starts to talk and she's telling us about her favorite rides and she loved Small World and she loved Dumbo and she loved Aladdin and she was like, these things are my favorite and I love doing this and I love doing that. And then she woke up the next day and she's super excited about what we get to do. She can't wait to go to the park and she can't wait to ride Small World. And we're like, we got a fast pass for that, so you're in luck. So it was really cool. We got the unexpected gift of anticipation for Lily. And because of that, we get to have pictures like this. This is us on the Aladdin ride. We're not even riding it yet. She's just excited that she's about to ride it. And I'm excited that she's excited. It was this great, genuine moment, right? Because she knew what was going to happen and she was really looking forward to it. Without anticipation or context, day two Lily doesn't happen. So we've got day one Lily with no context for what's about to happen to her. Just kind of some base excitement, but not really unsure what's going to happen. And then we have day two Lily who is super pumped because she knows what's up, right? Okay. As we approach John, and that's good. As we approach John, we have day one Lily and we have day two Lily. We have a group of people who really are not sure what's going on. They have a general excitement about the idea of Jesus, but they don't know who he is. And then we've got day two, Lily, which is a group of people that are really keyed up and ready for who the Messiah is and what he came to do. And so day two, Lily, the people who knew what was going on is the Jewish community to whom John was writing. John wrote to the Jewish community and the Greek community. And to the Jewish community, when you tell them in the first century AD, hey, the Messiah is here, they instantly know what that means. They know because they have a knowledge of the Old Testament. They have been for thousands of years now, generation after generation, looking forward to the coming Messiah. Every generation waits to see, is the Messiah going to be coming now? Is he going to come in our lifetime? They know the prophecies that he's going to be Emmanuel, God with us, that he will be King of Kings, Lord of Lords, that he will sit on the throne of David, that he will come from the city of David. They know all the stuff. And so when you go to a Jewish person in first century AD and you say, hey, the Messiah is here, they're day two, Lily, man. They're fired up. They know exactly what's going on. But the Greeks, they're day one, Lily. You go to them and you say, hey, good news, guys, the Messiah is here. And they're like, that's great. What's that? They have no context. They've not been expecting a Messiah. They don't know who Jesus is or what makes him a big deal. And because John wants them to understand how big of a deal it is that the Messiah arrives, he starts his gospel off in a different way than the other three gospels. See, I went back and I looked at the other three gospels, and when I looked at how Jesus was introduced, what I picked up on was the fact that in the other gospels, Jesus is presented as the Messiah. But in John's gospel, he's presented as God. The other gospels present Jesus as the Messiah. They just start off and they just say, hey, here's the genealogies. This is Jesus. He's here. He's our Messiah, and let's go. But John's gospel doesn't start off like that. John presents Jesus first as God and doesn't talk about him as the Messiah until verse 14, which we're going to get to. So this morning, we're going to move through this passage, look at who Jesus is, why he came, how he intends to accomplish the mission that he came for, and what that means for us. And so to define who Jesus is, rather than starting out with Jesus as the Messiah, John starts out like this in some of the most profound verses and impactful verses in Scripture. This is just packed with stuff. He writes this. John 1 starts out this way. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him, not anything made that was made. In the beginning was the word. So right away, the word is capitalized. It's a capital W in the Bible. So he is giving, he is personifying that word. He is saying this is representative of an entity, of a person that I'm going to tell you about. So his introduction of Jesus is the word. In the beginning, before time began at creation, there was this entity that I'm now calling the word, and it was with God, and it was God. So right away, what he tells us is the person that I'm about to tell you about was not created by God and therefore subservient to him. No, he was God and is not subservient to God the Father, but is on equal footing with him. He introduces the Trinity or the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Spoiler alert, because we don't talk about the Holy Spirit enough and because Jesus does in the Gospel of John, after this series, we're going to spend some weeks on the Holy Spirit and who he is, which should be a really comfortable series for a lot of former Presbyterians. I'm super excited about it. But he introduces Jesus like this. He says, he is the word. He was at creation. And the Jewish mind goes back to the account in Genesis, to creation. And when you look at the creation account, how did God create the earth? What did he do? He spoke. The word, his word, the word of God is the mechanism through which he wrought all of creation. Do you understand that? Jesus is the activation and the power of the Creator God in bringing about the formation of creation. It says, let there be light, and there was light. Let there be animals, and there's animals. Let there be trees, and there was trees. And it is God's Word that activates all of creation and brings about all of creation. So John is placing Jesus back in the creation narrative for both the Jew and the Greek to say, in the beginning, there was this entity, and without this entity, nothing was made. And he is the mechanism through which everything was made. So he says right away, the person that I'm going to tell you about and the rest of this Bible is divine. And he is as divine as God the Father ever was. He was not created by and therefore subservient to. He is God. He was there from the beginning. And it's important to note that when John says this and he tells us who this Jesus is that he's going to tell us about, that he is telling us who Jesus is just as much as he is telling us who he isn't. He is telling us who Jesus is just as much as he is telling us who he isn't. We see later in the gospels, Jesus asks this question of his disciples. He says, who do you say that I am? He says, some people say that I'm a prophet. Others say that I'm a teacher. Through history, we've seen people label Jesus as a moral representative, a moral guide of some sort. And Peter says, you are Christ, the Son of God. And Jesus says, yes, and on this faith, I will build my church. Okay? On this rock, I will build my church. Those questions about who Jesus is have regurgitated and rung through all of history. Those have always existed about who is this person, Jesus of Nazareth, that existed. And we've seen different cultures and even different religions and different offshoots of even Christianity explain Jesus as he was a prophet, minimize him to a prophet or minimize him to he was a good teacher or he was a good moral representative. And so we've seen efforts throughout history to reduce Jesus to less than God by calling him a prophet or a teacher so we can accept his teachings, but we don't have to accept his divinity. And John right away says, no, that's not going to work. Which by the way, Jesus, this person that we are worshiping as God, did claim to actually be God. So you can't call a dude who is lying about being God a good moral guy or a nice teacher, right? He either is or he isn't. There's no in-between. And John takes this in-between away from us right away. He says, he is divine. He was not created by and subservient to. He cannot be reduced to prophet. He cannot be reduced to teacher. He cannot be reduced to moral guide. He is divine. That's the person I'm going to tell you about. And then he moves into this next series where he talks about John. John the Baptist is coming. Next week, I'm going to preach all about John the Baptist. I'm really excited to do that because John the Baptist is one of my favorite figures in the Bible because Jesus says of John the Baptist that he is one of the greatest people, not one of, he is the greatest man ever born of a woman, which means that Jesus thought John the Baptist was the greatest man to ever live. So this week, I'd love for you to be thinking about why in the world did Jesus say that about John the Baptist? Because that's the question we're going to come back next week and answer. So I'm not going to focus on those verses this week. We're going to get to those next week. After those verses, he's told us the who. I'm going to tell you about a person who is divine, let there be no doubt about it, and this is what he's come to do. This is his mission. This is why he's here. And we can sum up his mission in verses four and five. This is what he came to do. It says, in this person that I'm talking about, in him was life. And the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it. And he goes down for several verses all the way up through to verse 16, through verse 15. And he talks about the light and what it means and what it came to do. And what we find out is that Jesus shines light in the darkness, that the darkness will not overcome it, that he is the light of the world. And that if we place our faith in this light, if we believe in him and what he came to do and who he claims to be, then we will be children of God and we are a part of God's kingdom. And this is what Jesus came to do, to be a light in the world and to claim his children back into God's family. That's what he came to do. And this theme, this idea of light runs through the book of John. So I'm not going to belabor it this morning because we're going to come back to it as we go through the series, but there is a theme of light throughout the book of John. If you read it and you pay attention, what you'll see is a bunch of different instances where the disciples go to Jesus and they go, hey, this thing is happening. Why is this happening? Shouldn't we do this? And Jesus' response is, no, in the daylight or in the day or in the light, this is how we behave because it will not always be light, but right now it is because I am here. So it's this theme that runs through John. And last week I pointed out to you that when Judas Iscariot, the disciple that betrayed Christ, does the thing that he does, that there's this ominous sentence in the text that says, and it was night because the daylight has changed. So this theme of day and night and light and darkness moves through the gospel of John. And so he's introducing that theme here, that Jesus is the light of the world. But what I want us to understand this morning is that Jesus came to shed light in the dark places and that the darkness will not overcome it. And what does that mean for us? Well, I think that the light that Jesus sheds is twofold. First, he sheds light on who we are and our ingrained need for him. He sheds light on you and your sin in your life. Before we know Jesus, we have this loose understanding that if there is a God, that he's probably not very happy with me for some of the decisions that I've made in my life. And then when we see the light of Jesus next to us, and we read through the gospel, and we see who he is, and we compare ourselves to his standards, what we realize in the light of Jesus, in the face of his light, is that we fall woefully short of the standards that Jesus establishes for us, that we can never be as good as he is, and he sheds light on the sin in our life. I even had somebody this week in my men's Bible study make the comment that, man, I'm really learning that even the good things that I do as I suss them out and figure out the motives that push me to those places, those are gross and selfish motives that really negate the good things that I'm doing. And I'm like, good news for you, that's Jesus's life shining in your light, showing you your desperate need for him. And the good news for us is that it's twofold. It doesn't stop at just illuminating our need for him in light of our sin, but then also illuminates his grace to us in the face of our sin. That's the twofold light of Christ. To illuminate for us our need for him because of our sin, and then to show us his grace in light of our sin. And that if we trust in that grace, we can be a part of his kingdom and rescued to heaven for all of eternity. That's the promise there by Jesus being the light. So that's why he came. That's what he came to do, to be the light of the world, to illuminate for you your need for Christ, and then to illuminate the grace that he offers in light of your need. Then we get to verse 14. In verse 14, we see the personification of Jesus. This is when we're introduced to Jesus. This is when John has gotten everyone up to speed. Now everyone is day two lily. Now everyone is ready to meet this person who has existed for all of creation, who is divine, who is the activator of creation, who is the light of the world and is coming now to shed light on us and on his grace. Now everyone has the proper context to really understand and be grateful for what happens in verse 14. This is the how. How was Jesus going to accomplish what he said he was going to accomplish? Verse 14. And the word became flesh. That's a big stinking deal. And the word, capital W, word. The person that I've been talking to you about, the divine one who has a heavenly form, has condescended to become one of us. What he's talking about here is the condescension of Christ. He's talking about the condescension of Christ. The Word became flesh. And we often have a problem with that word, condescension. We don't like to be condescended to. We're told not to condescend to others. But make no doubt about it, Jesus gave up His heavenly form to take on our form. The Word became flesh. See, only God in the history of gods and any other story and any other narrative in the history of mankind to condescend and give up his heavenly form to us. I didn't do this in the first service, but I just, I want you to see this. Revelation chapter 18 and 19. Let me tell you who Jesus is. This is Jesus. This is heavenly Jesus. In the Gospels, we see this meek and mild person who has taken on the infirmities and the frailties of humanity. He is the Lamb of God. But in Revelation 19, we see the Lion of Judah. John writes this in Revelation 19, Oh man, that's Jesus. That's heavenly Jesus. That's the one that's going to come one day and make all the sad things untrue and all the wrong things right and exact justice on those that did not honor God in their life. That's Jesus. And what I want you to understand is when John says the word became flesh, that this is the form that he's giving up to take on our form, to come and live with us, to come and be one of us, to condescend and understand our frailties and be faced with the temptations that we are faced with. And this is essential. His condescension and his taking on of flesh is essential to our understanding of salvation because unless he does that, unless he comes down and he takes on human form, he cannot rescue and reconcile us back to God. Because to qualify for a perfect sacrifice that would cover over our sins, he has to live a faultless life. He has to come down and he has to face the same temptations that we do. He has to face the same infirmities that we do. That's why the Bible tells us that if you are faced with a temptation, that you need to know that you cannot be faced with something that Jesus has never been faced with. And because he faced that temptation down for you, you now do not have to succumb to that temptation. You understand? That anything that tempts you in your life, anything that would rally against you in your life, anything that would seek to overtake you and pull you away from God in your life, that that is not too great for Jesus to overcome because he has already overcome it, because the word became flesh and he condescended to us and he gave up that heavenly form for a time to come down here and face that temptation for you so that when you faced it later, you could lean on him and know that you could be victorious. He comes and in John 11, he weeps with us in our tragedy and in our pain. He ministers to us and he prays for us. And he trains the disciples to lead his church, his kingdom, and he hands the keys of the kingdom off to them as he ascends into heaven. And his ministry on earth is the reason that we sit here over 2,000 years later and have the opportunity to learn from one of the disciples that he trained. We need the incarnation of Christ so that he could be the sacrifice for us, so that he could not only, through his example, illuminate our need for him, but through his sacrifice, illuminate his grace to our need. Do you see? We have to have the personification of Jesus in human form. We have to have his incarnation. The word has to become flesh or the whole thing falls apart. So, he gave up his heavenly form. He gave up sitting at the right hand of the Father. He is crucified on the cross where he says, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which means my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because for the first time in eternity, he was separated from God the Father for you. And then he says, tetelestai, it is finished. The debt is paid in full. I have accomplished what I came to accomplish. And then he passes on. We have to have the personal incarnation of Jesus for our salvation to work, for our faith to exist. It's absolutely essential. So in the beginning was the Word. That's who he is. He is God. He is as much God as anything has ever been God. He came to shed a light on your need for him and his grace in face of that need. And then he condescended to human form to take on your frailties and your infirmities so that he might die for you and make a path. And then one day he's coming back as this heavenly Jesus to rectify everything. That's who he is. That's why he came. That's how he's going to do it. And then John doesn't finish there. If he finished there, that's enough. If he just stops there and he just says, there's a God in heaven that I'm calling the word and he's going to illuminate, he's going to shed light in the dark places and the darkness will not overcome it. And he took on human form to deliver you back to heaven. If that's all we learn about him, that's enough. But John doesn't stop there. He leads into this great verse in verse 16. It's becoming one of my favorite verses in all of scripture. He writes this, and this is what it means to you. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. That word fullness there, if you look it up in the Greek, I'm not going to quote you the Greek word because it's obnoxious when pastors do that. I'm not smarter than you. I just have Google. What it means there is from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. That word fullness means the sum total of all that God is. The sum total of all that God is. From his fullness, from the sum of all that God is, from everything that we've learned in the sweeping narrative of God, that he is divine, that he is the mode and the medium of creation, that he has wrought the creation through himself. Without him, nothing exists. He is as much God as anything has ever been God. He is the light of the world. He condescended to take on frailty for us that he might save us. And from this fullness of an understanding of exactly who this Messiah is that I am about to tell you about from the next 21 chapters, from this fullness, from the sum of all of God is, we have all received grace upon grace. And then he goes back in 17 and 18, he says, until Jesus came, everybody had to follow the law. Everybody was subjected to the law of Moses. You had to follow these rules or you didn't get in. And now that Jesus is here, what we see is that we can't follow the rules. We'll never be able to do it right. And in light of our failings, we see his grace. So we have grace upon grace. There was grace provided and what the law did for us in the Old Testament and then covered over that grace is a larger grace of our salvation where now it's not a performance-based salvation. it's just a faith-based salvation. And we look at these truths of Jesus and we go, I believe you. I think you're telling me the truth. And he says, good, then I offer you grace and I claim you to be my child. And that word grace there is an important word. The easiest understanding of grace is to get something that you don't deserve. Grace is when we receive something that we haven't earned. Mercy is when we don't get something that we do deserve, but grace is when we get something that we do not deserve. And so what we're seeing here, when we think of this grace that we receive from Jesus, our mind probably goes first to our salvation. I don't deserve my salvation. I've done nothing to earn it. I've done nothing to deserve for Jesus to condescend, for the Word to become flesh and take on my frailty so that I might know Him. I don't deserve that. He didn't have to do that for me. He did that because He loved me. That's grace, and we acknowledge that as grace. But this doesn't say just grace. It says grace upon grace. And what I want you to see this morning is that from the fullness of God, from all that Jesus is, we don't just receive salvation, although that would be enough. But I want you to see that every good and perfect thing in your life that God has given you is grace, is something that you have that you do not deserve, that you have not earned. Everything in your life that brings you joy is God's grace in your life for however long it brought you joy. All those things are God's grace. Do you understand? As I think back through my life, I remember some moments that stick out. I can remember being up at the altar for my wedding day and watching the back doors open and the sun illuminate Jen in her white dress and knowing that that was the woman I was going to marry and walk through life with. And I began to cry right away because I still couldn't believe it. That moment is God's grace. Years later, I can remember learning that we were pregnant and going to the doctor and hearing the heartbeat of Lily. That moment is God's grace. I can remember having Lily and Lily laying on Jen's chest and me hugging her and looking at this woman who's now the mother of my child. That moment is God's grace. When we get those moments, they are God's grace in our life and you have them too. And what you need to understand is your own wisdom and your own goodness didn't bring those about, those treasures that we have, those moments of joy. When we have good enough friends that we can sit around and laugh and be vulnerable and real and be comfortable and be ourselves, that's God's grace to us. We have church that we enjoy. That's God's grace. We have small group that we enjoy. That's God's grace. And we have children. That's God's grace. All the goodness that we have in our life is a result of the fullness of God acting in you to bring about grace. Things that you have that are good that we did not earn or did not bring about because of ourselves. Those are God's grace. And so my hope is that this morning as you leave, you will walk in gratitude for God's grace. That you will understand that it's the fullness of God. It's all that He is. Everything that He was. Everything that He came to do and how He came to do it. That this full understanding of God rots for you the good things in your life that you did not earn and probably do not deserve, and that those things are God's grace to you, and from his fullness we have received grace upon grace. And even those of us who are walking through the hardest of times know that God still offers grace even through those things. And from His fullness, we have all, all of us, not some of us, not the chosen ones, not the believers, all of us received grace upon grace, gift upon gift, joy upon joy, goodness upon goodness. My hope is that you will walk in gratitude for God's grace in your life as you marvel at the fullness of Him that brings that about for you. Let's pray. Father, we love You and we are amazed by you. We marvel at you. That you would allow your son to give up his heavenly form to come down here to save us, to be one of us, to model for us, to carry our griefs and our infirmities and our temptations, God. That you would allow him to die for us so that we might know you. God, I pray that there would be this progressive revelation, these just waves of understanding that kind of hit us, God, as we go through our weeks of just all the goodness that you have allowed us in our life. that we would turn in gratitude for you for this grace upon grace that you offer us. God, we are so grateful for you. I pray for the people who are in this room right now that you would be in their stresses and in their concerns and in their heartbreak and in whatever is going on in their life and that all of those things would serve to draw us more nearly to you, Father. It's in your son's name I pray these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.

Thank y'all for being here. It's so good to see you. I'm actually the pastor here. They let me do it, which is silly. But my name is Nate, and it's good to see all of you. And again, thanks for being here as we start out January in 2019 together. We have launched the new year with the series Lessons from the Gym. And that started in 2017, that whole year. For whatever reason, I had an uncommon burst of discipline, and I spent more time in the gym that year than I ever had before. And while I was there, just some things occurred to me. I observed some things and learned some things, and I began to see a lot of similarities between going to the gym and trying to get physically healthy and coming to church and trying to get spiritually healthy. And so I just kind of kept track of these things. And as we approached the new year, we knew that some people would be making some resolutions to get physically healthy. I mean, I had my first day back in the gym already this year. It went really well. I was throwing up tons of weight. And then some of us have some resolutions to get spiritually healthy. And we want to meet those and foster those as well. And so as we start the year together, I thought I would share with you some of the things I learned or thought about while I was doing that. Last week, I shared with you my experience in going for the first time and how that could be intimidating when you go to the gym for the first time and you don't know what to do. You feel like kind of an imposter and everyone's kind of looking at you and they're going to figure you out, right? And then it occurred to me that, oh my goodness, this must be what it feels like to go to a church for the first time. It's got to feel uneasy. It's got to be a little bit unnerving, even for those of us with more confidence, which has to be just a little bit intimidating for us to do that. And so I thought, man, what are five things I would love to be able to say to people on their first visit with us at Grace? And what are five things that I want us as a church to be saying to other people through our words and our actions as they come to Grace? And so I would say this, I never do this. I never tell you like, hey, go back and listen to the sermon because that's self-aggrandizing and gross. But for this one, I do think it's important because last week I shared five things that we would love to tell people on their first visit at Grace. And so if you're new to Grace, I would encourage you to go find that online or on the podcast and give it a listen. This week I want to tell you about a meeting that I had with a nutritionist at the gym. As I started to exercise, one of the things I learned is that exercise is good. It makes you healthy. It's very helpful. But if you really want to change the way you look, meaning my goals was for when I sweat, for my sweat to show up on my chest before my belly. That was my only physical fitness goal. But to start changing that, I didn't need to get in the gym. I needed to eat right. And I realized that diet is really more impactful than exercise. So then I started thinking about like, well, how can I diet, right? How can I eat right? Because there's a lot of fad diets out there and they seem unmanageable and unwieldy. And I'm not going to be able to like do those in perpetuity, right? Like I heard somebody say like you have to eat the rainbow every day and that feels like a real hassle. I don't want to do that. I know some people who are on Whole30, which really should be called Whole Hassle. It's so annoying even to be friends with these people when you go out to eat. You may as well just hand a note to the server when you walk in going, I'm really sorry, I'm going to be a hassle for you today. That's not sustainable, right? Because you have to know all these things about food and how to eat. You can do that for 30 days. You can't do that for forever. And so I wanted to learn how to eat right moving forward, something that would be manageable. And so I found a lady who was a nutritionist at the gym and I set an appointment and I went to meet with her. And I was fascinated with what she had to say about nutrition and all the different ways it works and the way that like different bodies respond to different. And I had no idea that it was that detailed. And I quickly became overwhelmed and a little disinterested because I thought, I'm not going to do any of this. So instead, I noticed that her job in trying to help people get physically healthy is a lot like my job in trying to help people get spiritually healthy. And so I began to ask her questions about that. She kept trying to go back to nutrition. I'm like, yeah, that's great. I'll eat some eggs. But let's talk about this, right? And I noticed that she has people come in. She gets to know them, what makes them tick. She comes up with a plan to move them towards health. And then they provide accountability around those people to help them become healthy, and that's really what I do. And from her vantage point, she's seen a lot of people come into the gym wanting to get healthy, and she's seen success stories, and she's seen others that flamed out, and she was telling me the importance of, if you're going to do it, and you're going to do it right, then you really do need a trainer because we hold you accountable. It would be good to have a group of friends or a group of buddies to kind of work out with you or at least see at the gym to hold you accountable there. It would be good if you would do that. Her nutrition and program, she said, was great because you keep a log and she holds you accountable for what you eat and all those kinds of things. And a question occurred to me that I thought had some application at the church. I said, how many people do you see come in? Because when you're at the gym and you're a trainer, January, right, you see us all come in. All the people with our holiday weight on us, like we come in and they see us and they kind of know whether or not we're going to be successful or not. And so I said, how many people do you see come into the gym with the goal of getting physically healthy, but they're doing it alone? They don't have any accountability. They're not hooked up with a trainer. They're not doing the nutrition program. They're just on their own through their own personal discipline. They're just trying to get themselves healthy. How many people do you see successfully do that by themselves? And she very quickly said, less than 5%. Less than 5%. That's nearly impossible. And I thought, oh, how interesting. Because if you think about segments of our culture that are disciplined, people who go to the gym are disciplined, right? And so if you wanted to isolate a segment of our culture that does exhibit discipline that's maybe even above and beyond the mean, you would go to the gym. And what I thought was interesting was even amongst people who are by nature disciplined and have taught themselves self-discipline over the years, less than 5% of them are able to accomplish physical health without other people around them. You cannot get physically healthy alone. And to me, everything in my brain went off as I think about church, because I know that it's entirely true that just like you can't get physically healthy alone, you don't stand a chance of getting spiritually healthy alone. You cannot do that. She said less than 5% of people come in and achieve physical health by themselves. I would say nobody comes into church, regardless of their resolve and their background, void of other people in their life who love them and love Jesus, and moves to a place of long-lasting spiritual health. Nobody does that. You can come to Jesus on your own. You can come to Jesus in the privacy of your own heart, in the privacy of your own home. You can do that on your own. You can get connected with Jesus by yourself. That's absolutely possible. You hear a sermon that compels you. You have a conversation with a friend. You have a big life event. There can be something that just between you and God, you accept Christ and you're connected now to the Father through Jesus. You can do that on your own, but you cannot sustain that growth and flourish in your spiritual health on your own. There is no such thing as a Lone Ranger Christian. I have been doing ministry now, vocationally, for nearly 20 years, which is, I feel old. But when I was 19, I went pro, right? They started paying me to be a Christian, which is, that's all ministry is. It's not a big deal. But at 19, I got involved with Young Life, started doing youth ministry, kept doing youth ministry, started doing some other stuff, got involved in a church. I oversaw small groups for a church of nearly 2,000 people and kind of watched the spiritual maturation process within the several hundred folks that were in those and have just been around church world for a long time. And like the trainer at the gym, I've seen a lot of people come in and out of the church. I've seen a lot of people come into the church with gusto. Something's happened in their life. They really want to pursue spiritual health. They want to prioritize their walk with the Lord. They want to prioritize. They want to get some things out of their life that they've been wanting to get rid of for a long time. They want some things in their life that they feel like they've been missing for a long time. I've seen this happen a lot. And sometimes you watch people, it just takes off. Something clicks and they move towards spiritual health and it's a really cool story. And other times you watch them flame out. And maybe that's part of your story. You go back to church with gusto. We've seen this happen. If you've been a church person for any length of time, you've seen other people do this. And maybe we've done it too. We recommit. We make a commitment. I'm going to get spiritually healthy. I'm going to do this. This is going to be important to me. And so we prioritize our walk with the Lord. But then the spiritual things in our life, church, small group, whatever matters most to us, I don't want to set up Sunday morning like it's the number one indicator of spiritual health. It's not. But our commitment to those things tends to fall away, right? At some point or another, it's going to trickle down. No matter how much energy and effort we have and commitment we have going into it, eventually our enthusiasm wanes. And I've seen people come in and they meet with me and they're on fire and they want to get plugged in and they do all the things, but then like attendance and engagement starts to kind of fall off, right? For a couple of months, I don't see them as often. And then after those couple of months, I just don't see them at all. It just falls off. And as I've watched this process over the years, one of the things I've learned is this, that the number one, and I believe this with my whole heart, the number one indicator of your future spiritual health is the community of people that you have in your life. The number one indicator of whether or not you're going to be walking with the Lord in three years and five years and 10 years is who you have in your life right now that is connected to Jesus and connected to you. It's who you have in your life who loves you and who loves Jesus. You show me a person, and not that anybody ever does this, this is a ridiculous hypothetical conversation, but if you showed me a person and you said, this is Kyle, how do you think he's going to be doing spiritually in five years? The very first question I would ask is, who are his friends? Who does he have around him? Who does she have around her that loves her and loves Jesus? To me, that is the number one indicator, more than whether or not we're getting up and reading our Bible and praying, more than what their church attendance is. No, no, no, no. Who do they have in their life that loves them and loves Jesus? It is the number one indicator of future spiritual health. I believe that community is vitally important. And I believe so strongly that you can't be a Lone Ranger Christian that I think it should be prioritized in church above and beyond almost everything else. And this isn't just my idea. This is not something I've learned over observation in ministry. This is a very biblical idea. If you look at Jesus, the Son of God comes down to earth, lives in Nazareth and the area of Galilee and northern Israel for 30 years, and then at the age of 30, he starts his ministry. And if you're a Bible person and you've read the Gospels, the first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, they all tell the story of Jesus' life. If you've ever opened those up and you've read them and paid attention to them, when Jesus starts his ministry, when he goes public, what's the very first thing he does? He calls the disciples to himself. Does he go, okay, I'm starting, and then just go out and start preaching and talking to people? No. He goes and he gets community around him. We actually see evidence in Jesus's life that he had some very best friends that lived in a town east of Jerusalem called Bethany. And that those were his people. And that those are who he loves. And when he called the disciples, he didn't just call one or two or three, he called 12. And when you watch Jesus interacting throughout his ministry, he's interacting with groups on a group level. You very rarely see Jesus having a one-on-one conversation with somebody. He's always teaching corporately. He's always keeping people around him. Jesus was one who believed in the power of community. Paul, the most influential Christian to ever live, he wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. He was a man, his name was Saul, until God got a hold of him, changed it to Paul, and said he is the chosen instrument to reach the rest of the world. And what he did to reach the rest of the world is he went on three, maybe four, depending on what you think of the last one, missionary journeys where he went around planting churches in cities like Thessalonica and Corinth and Philippi and Ephesus and Galatia and Rome. And then he would write letters back to those churches which have become our New Testament. And when he would go on those missionary journeys, the most influential Christian to ever live, did he go alone because he was so close to God that he didn't need anybody else? No. He had with him what we refer to now as the traveling seminary. Younger men and women that he was training for ministry, that he was pouring into, that he was leaving at certain places. Did you know that there's books in the Bible, 1 and 2 Timothy, that Paul writes to a young pastor because he left Timothy, who was in his traveling seminary, in Ephesus to continue the work there. He discipled him relationally. Even Paul surrounded himself with community. If you read his books, what you'll pay attention to and you'll notice is that friendship mattered a lot to him. The book of Romans, the entire last chapter, Romans 16, is almost entirely greetings and salutations to people who were in Rome to whom he was close. These relationships mattered a lot to Paul. If you look at the book of Acts, where the early church starts, Acts chapter 2, Jesus has lived his life. He's died on the cross. He's come back to life. And then he gave the disciples some instructions. You guys lead the church now. You guys make it go. I'm going to heaven. I'll see you when you get there. And they get together in this upper room and they go, what do we do? And the rest of them go, I don't know, what do we do? And they waited for the Holy Spirit. the Holy Spirit showed up and told them what to do. And so they went out on their balcony and they began to preach to the thousands of people in Jerusalem who were gathered around the disciples to see what do we do next. And when they heard the message of the gospel, when they heard who Jesus was and why he was here, they said, I want in. And the church immediately grew to thousands. Two or three thousand people right there in Jerusalem. That was the birth of the church that we are now a part of today. And in Acts 2, chapter 42 through 47, or chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, we have the seminal passage on what the early church looked like. Like, if you care about church at all and you want to know, like, are we doing this right? The biggest indicator is to go back to Acts chapter 2 and look at the characteristics of the early church that are listed out in those verses. And we're not going to turn there today because I don't have time to do it, but I'll tell you that the characteristics there are they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the breaking of bread, to eating meals together in their homes. It says they gathered in their homes daily. It says that they pooled their resources and shared them together and gave them to whoever needed them as those needs came up. And then it says that the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. You know what characterized the early church? Community and connection. It's that important. It's not just important in the New Testament, it's important in the Old Testament. In the days of ancient wisdom, Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, wrote the book of Proverbs. And in Proverbs chapter 10, he says, the companion of the wise will become wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. My dad used to say, show me your friends, I'll show you your future. It's absolutely true. And then in Ecclesiastes, Solomon writes this. I love the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes has the guts to just be dead level honest with you and tell you the truth. The rest of the Bible tells you the truth, but this one just who love you and love Jesus and are helping foster that commitment. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon says, the more the merrier. The more people you have around you in your life who love you and love Jesus, the better chance you have of maintaining and growing and flourishing in a spiritual health. I believe that this is so important, this concept of connection and community, that if you were to ask me what the most important part of my job is, that's what I would say. Which is interesting because when I took this job, that's not what I thought it was. If someone were to come to you and ask you, hey, who's your pastor? You would say, well, it's a guy named Nate. We're kind of going through a rough patch right now. But then if they were to ask you, what is his job? You would probably say, well, he preaches. We prop him up there on Sunday morning, and he runs his mouth, and then we go home, and that's how it goes. His job is to preach. And when I took the job, I felt like my job was to preach. But the more I've thought about it, I've realized that's not the biggest thing that I do. The biggest thing I do is to create systems and processes that funnel you into connection that matters. The biggest thing I do is get fanatical about connecting you with people once you come here. The biggest thing I can do is activate those of you who are grace people, who are grace partners, to use and leverage your community and your connections to graft others into the family of God so that they have the community that you have and are plugged in in such a way that we propel them towards spiritual health. The most important thing I do is to help us be fanatical about getting other people connected to people who love Jesus and who love them. It is the difference maker in future spiritual health, and it is vitally, vitally important. It's a huge deal. And if you hear that and you think, gosh, man, I hear you. We do have to get people connected, but you should preach, man. We got to learn the Bible. There's other things that are super important. I agree with you. Because of that, I want to ask you to do a little exercise with me, okay? I'm being serious now. You can get a pen. You can get your bulletin. You write this thing down. Or if you're like me and you're going to ignore my instructions anyway, just think about it for a second. Here's what I'd like you to do. If you've spent any time in church, if you're not a church person, this is your first time in church, this is going to be a hard exercise for you. You just chill out for just a second. But if you're a church person, I want you to do this for me. I want you to take 30 seconds and write down the five most influential sermons you've ever heard in your life. The five sermons that you've heard in your life that have impacted you in such a way that's moved you to a place of spiritual sustained health. The ones that you look back on and you go, that one was good. That one really changed me and impacted me. Five most influential sermons in Go. Y'all can't even remember two of mine. All right. Time out on that. If you're really doing it, you can continue it later. It is an interesting exercise. Now I want you to do this. Same piece of paper, same thought process. Make a list in 30 seconds of the five most influential people in your life who have impacted you spiritually and pushed you more towards Jesus. That's an easier list, isn't it? It's a much easier list. And when the pastor asks you to write down influential sermons, you think, oh, shoot, I've got to come up with something here. No, you don't. Here's what I know. Can I just tell you this? Can I just be honest with you? You guys don't remember what I say. I know that. You guys don't remember my sermons. Maybe. I've been here almost two years. Maybe one, maybe two. You don't remember my sermons. And that's okay. You're not supposed to. I've worked the hardest I can to give you something on Sunday morning that's worth showing up to. I don't expect you to remember it on Wednesday. I just hope that there's something over the course of time that we learn about Scripture, that we learn about our God, that we learn about our Savior, that moves us closer to Him, that they can impact us for that day, for that week, but we just push the needle every week. We just push the flywheel every week. There's not one single sermon that moves us in that direction, but do you know what impacts us? People. Over the course of my ministry here, if God blesses me with decades here, you know what will be most impactful to you is the times that I am able to show up at the hospital, the times that we're able to sit around a table together, the times that we served on committees together, the times that we were in small group together. You know what's going to impact you at grace more than my sermons is the friends that you have here that push you towards Jesus. That when you begin to fall away a little bit, they reach out and they grab you and they go, hey, why don't you come back? That when your marriage starts to struggle a little bit, they put their arm around you and they go, hey, is everything okay? That's going to impact you. The people in your life are going to impact you so much more than what happens here on Sunday mornings. And I understand that. Which is why I believe that the most important thing I can do for you is to connect you in community. The other reason I believe this, if we're just being honest, thinking about church moving into the 2020s, which is super close now, which is nuts. And I know you guys probably haven't thought about this. I think a lot more about church than most folks. Do you realize that the only part left of church that you can't download is friends? You ever thought about that? The only part left of church that you can't download is your friends. Listen, I work hard on these sermons. You guys say, most weeks I work hard on them. Sometimes I wing it. You guys say nice things about the sermons. But this is not false humility here. There are world-class speakers and preachers who their sermons are uploaded every week. You can listen to me on Sunday and go listen to six better ones every day of the week. There's better sermons and better preachers out there. That doesn't hurt my feelings. It's just true. And if you're coming to church for the sermons, you can download those. If you're coming to the church for the music, which by the way, time out, wasn't that freaking great this morning? Gosh, that was so good. I'm so proud of the way, the job that Steve has done and the way that they sounded. And it's just, I really like that. And I love singing Reckless Love. But you can get in your car and sing it with the person who wrote it, who got paid to record it, who is really good. You can download worship songs. You've got Spotify. You can dial up anyone you want. You can have a big, long worship session in your car or in your office or in your kitchen, wherever you want it. You can download that. You know what you can't download? Your buddies. People who love you and love Jesus. And so I believe that the churches who emphasize community most are the ones that are going to be healthiest and best as we move into the future. The ones who emphasize community and connection are the ones that are going to actually be healthy because we're paying attention to what matters in the lives of others. And so my goal for you is that you come in here and you get connected with other people. That's what I think about. And can I tell you that that's the reason I chose Grace? That's the reason I came to Grace was because of the tremendous sense of community that we have here. In December of 2016, I had an interview set up with the search team from Grace. It was a Skype interview. It was going to be two hours. And so I woke up that day, I think it was December the 8th, and I began to do research about the church because when they asked me, why is it that you want to work here? I'm not going to go, I don't know, what's on your website? Like I was going to have a good answer for them, right? Which by the way, if you're interviewing for jobs, like you should do that, like research for the company. They appreciate that. So I was just learning because I didn't want to look dumb. And can I just be honest with you? Some of you guys know this story. Others of you don't. So I'm sorry about this. The more I learned about grace in December of 2016, the less I wanted to be here. Because that church at that time was not going well. It was kind of leaking like a sieve. And I thought, I don't think that this is, I got a job I like, comfortable in, I have a family. I'm not moving six hours for that. So I actually opened up my computer to write the email to cancel the interview. But then I thought, time out, big time. You're not so important that you should cancel interviews. Just take it and practice. You need it. So I took the interview. And they asked me all the questions and whatever it was. And then at the end, they said, well, do you have any questions for us? And I thought, yeah, I mean, I don't really care. I said, let's just let it fly. I was interested in this. And I said, you guys, you guys have not been doing well. You've been shrinking for several years. And that church has been through a lot of strife. What are you still doing there? And they said, we're here because we love each other. We're here for the community. We're here because our kids grew up here and this place matters to us. And we're here because of our connection with others. And when they said that, I thought, that's where I want to be. That's what I want to be a part of. A church that values community like that. Because I so strongly believe in it. And as I've come here, I've seen that that is what's most important to Grace. I've watched you guys as we've come and we've grown over the last 18 months. As people come in who maybe haven't been in a while, there hasn't been even a hint of, oh, you're back now. It has only been open-armed welcomes. It has only been warm receptions. And I hope that as you've come back to Grace that you've experienced that same warmth as well. If you haven't, I'm sorry that we have failed you, but I think that's what characterizes Grace. I think it's what we do, and it's what we do best. Which is why, as I came here, and I thought about what are we going to look like in the future? What's going to characterize us? Because we're in Raleigh. There's hundreds if not thousands of churches. All of you guys, this place could fold. All of you guys could be in another church next week, okay? And I know that. So it's important to me to figure out what makes us us. What makes us Grace Raleigh? God has different churches that he's positioning throughout the city to build his kingdom here. What's our niche? What do we need to lean into so that we most wisely invest our resources and our time? And I'm convinced it's community. It's our ability to graft other people in and get them connected. Because of that, in the fall of last year, I began to look at our mission statement. And our mission statement was a good one. Loving Jesus, loving our neighbor, and living faithfully. We said it here every Sunday. It's a good mission statement. And for those of you who are unindoctrinated, the mission statement of a church isn't a huge deal, except that it really serves as kind of the marching orders for a church. The mission statement, what you say it is, has two purposes. It's descriptive to outsiders. As they look at the church from the outside in, what does that church do there? It's descriptive to them. It's prescriptive to insiders. It prescribes for us what we need to do. Our mission is to love Jesus and to love our neighbor and to live faithfully. That's what we're going to do. That's what's going to be expected of me if I go there. And that's a good mission. But this thing I had in the back of my head was the idea that that's a good mission, but that's not graces. That's not personalized to grace. That doesn't make grace unique. That doesn't capture who we are and what we most deeply care about. And to me, the belief in community and commitment to one another, connecting with one another as we connect to Jesus, is what's most important to us. It's what is vitally important to us. It's the reason I came here is because I felt like we were on the same page with that. And so at the beginning of the year, I proposed a new mission statement to the elders, and we had a really great, I would call it a healthy give and take discussion about it. And it was a worthwhile investment of time because by the end of it, we were all on the same page and of one accord. And we came up with a mission statement that I don't believe at all changes the direction of grace. I think it captures what we already do and makes our future more clear. So now, beginning in 2019, the mission statement at Grace Raleigh is connecting people to Jesus, connecting people to people. That's what we do. It's who we are. This doesn't change our direction. It just makes it more clear because we're already passionate about doing this. Because I think you know without ever saying it or thinking through it that the best indicator towards someone's spiritual health is whether or not they're connected to other people who love Jesus and love them. And so when someone walks through the doors at Grace Raleigh, our very first goal for them is that they would get connected to Jesus. But what we understand about the power of community and the difficulty of life is that no one grows closer to him by themselves. And so the very next thing that we have to get, we've got to be fanatical about is getting them connected with community. The shorthand of this is connecting people. Grace Raleigh, connecting people. That's what we do. Who do we connect them to? Well, first we connect them to Jesus and then we deepen that relationship by connecting them to other people who love Jesus and who love them. I hope that fires you up. I hope that you like that. I am excited about that. I've had people ask me a lot over the past several months, what do you think is the future of the church? How big do you think we're going to be? How big would you like to see us become? Where do you think we're going to go from now? What are we going to look like in five years? And to all those questions, I always go, I don't know. That's a lot of pressure, man. I just have to preach. I don't know. And to be honest with you, I don't really care. I don't really care how big we get. That's not really important to me. What's important to me is how healthy we are. What's important to me is how good of a job we do at what I believe church exists for. And the entire time I've been here, whenever anybody would ask and they say, what's your goal for the church? My goal is that on Sunday morning, when somebody walks through those doors, we acknowledge that God has entrusted us with that soul and we are a good steward of that soul. Whether it's for the first time or the thousandth, we need to be good stewards of the souls that God entrusts to us when they walk through those doors. And I believe that the best way to do that is to teach the Bible, connect them to Jesus, and to get them as quickly as we can connected with other people who love them and love Jesus so that we can sustain this desire for spiritual health in their life. We have to do it. I don't want to see people coming in here and fading away. That breaks my heart. So we have to fight for these connections. And the challenge at Grace is to take a sense of community that for years has protected us and sustained us and been inwardly focused by necessity and now begin to turn that out and graft other people into the family that God is growing here. That's what we need to do. Because of all of this, we have small groups. Small groups are the best way to get connected with people at Grace. If you are thinking right now, man, I don't know if I'm connected, I really need to be, then this is the next step for you. I would encourage you to do an inventory and think about your friends. Who are the top five people I talk to most often? Do they love you and love Jesus? Because if they love you, that's great, but if they don't love Jesus, that doesn't do you much good. If they love Jesus and not you, that's not very helpful either. We need both those things. Do you have that? Some of us need to lean into that more. Some of us need to rekindle some old friendships and say, hey, I really need you in my life a little bit more. Don't say it like that. Think of a cooler way to say it, but that's what you need to do. Some of us, you're coming in from other circles of life, and your circles of friends, they might not go to church right now, and that's great. I'm not telling you at all to disconnect from those friends, but what I am telling you is you need some connections in church. You need some connections of people who love you and love Jesus. And so I would encourage you, if you're not a part of a small group, to fill out that piece of paper that's in the seat that you're sitting in. That's an easy informational thing. You just write your name, write the way that you want me to get in touch with you, and then you put when you're available and what you think you might be looking for, and I'll give you a call or shoot you an email. We don't do sign up for a small group anymore like you pick from a catalog. I like to play matchmaker, and as long as I can, I'm going to do that every semester and just spend the time with the individuals and figure out what's going on in your life, what are your needs, what's the general sense I get from you, and how can I best place you in a group of people who are like you, where you're going to feel comfortable and get connected. So my encouragement to you is, if you're not connected, fill that out. And when we're done, in a minute we're going to take communion, then we're going to sing a song, and we're going to be dismissed. And as we're dismissed, at the end of the aisles, the doors, is either going to be an usher or a little table with a basket in it. Just put that sheet in the basket. Those are going to be put on my desk this afternoon, and I'll follow up with you this week and try to get you connected. As an aside, if you're here and you're in your 20s, there's a lot of you here. So many that I'm taking a break from my young family small group, my wife and I are, and we're going to help give some energy to the 20-something small group this semester. So if you're in your 20s and you'd like to get connected here, please indicate that on that white piece of paper and I'll be in touch with you this week. I'm particularly excited about that this semester. But whoever you are, whatever your walk of life is, we have a way to get you connected here and I hope that you will be. And I'm so excited as we move forward that this mission statement is going to characterize us. Because being committed to that, I think and I hope that we're going to to come to a place where we have to choose between do we grow more or do we try to stay smaller because if we grow too big, we can't do this. I wanna make that choice and I wanna choose health. I don't care what we look like. I hope that I get to be here for decades and I don't care what we look like at the end of that but I do, as far as size, but I do hope that we're healthy. That would be success. And I think by staying committed to this, we have a really good shot at that. And I'm going to pray, and then we get to partake in communion. Father, we love you. We're so grateful for you. We're so grateful for the way that you reach into our lives, that you love us recklessly with no regard for yourself, how you pursue us. Lord, we are so grateful for the connections in our life that move us closer to you. We are grateful for the friendships that have sustained us in this place. I pray that you would use those friendships in amazing ways moving forward. God, as people come to grace, may this be a place where they get connected quickly, where they experience community and your love quickly. And may that community serve to move us closer to you. If there's anyone here who's experiencing any trepidation about just taking that first step towards connection, I pray that you would give them the courage to do at least that today. We thank you for who you are and all the ways you love us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.