Sermons tagged with Obedience

All right, well, like I said, good morning. It's good to be here, and I'm excited that you're here on this October Sunday. We've got a team down in Mexico now. We're gonna have a chance to catch up with them a little bit. Connor's gonna tell us a little bit more about what they're doing after the service, but I'm excited about that team. I'm gonna fly down there and join them on Tuesday of this week. But right now, we're gonna focus on the sixth part of our series called Feast. We did it. We made it. We've gone through the other five festivals in the Old Testament. We've arrived at the final one. This one is called the Feast of Weeks, or it's also known as Pentecost. It's the end of the first fruits celebration. Now, the trick here is you're thinking to yourself, why in the world do I care about the Feast of Weeks? This is the first time I've ever shown up for a sermon at a church, and they said, good news, everyone, we're talking about the Feast of Weeks from the Old Testament. So here's the thing. I think that if we learn what's happening here in the Feast of Weeks, if we learn what they're celebrating, then it can impact our life right away. It can impact the way that we understand that God loves us. It can impact the way we go about our days, and it can impact the way that we understand the Bible. If you've spent any time at Grace, you've heard me say that one of the most, not one of the most, the most important habit that anyone can ever develop is to spend time every day in God's Word and to spend time in prayer. The most important habit we can ever develop, eating well, exercising, being mindful, sleeping well, reading, whatever it is, any other habit, I would put this up against that one and say, this is the best one that any person could ever adopt is to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. So if we're going to do that, it's incumbent upon us to understand the Bible. And what we're talking about today, I think, breathes fresh and essential life into our understanding of scriptures. And if we get it, will unlock for us a lot of the meaning of the New Testament. I would argue that the New Testament is not possible to be understood without the principles that we're talking about today. That's why I think the Feast of Weeks is so very important. Now, the Feast of Weeks, we see in Deuteronomy that it originally commemorated, it was a time to remember being in bondage or being in captivity. Over time, they looked at the timing of it and it became a celebration of something else because the Feast of Weeks is locked into the other spring festivals. The other spring festivals, for those who don't know, just so we catch up, is first Passover, and then that's on the Sabbath Friday, and then it starts on Friday night, and then that Sunday is the Feast of First Fruits. There's a timing thing there. It's two, three days after, and then you count 50 days from that period, from that time, and you arrive at the last holiday in the spring calendar, the Feast of Weeks, known as Pentecost. It's 50 days and counting. Penta means 50, and so in the Old Testament, it was known as Pentecost. Now, some of you know your Bible well enough that you're jumping to Pentecost in the New Testament. You know what that is, and Acts, we're not there yet. We'll get there. You're smart. But we're not there yet, okay? This is where we are. And what they realized after some years is that there wasn't a significant event that happened to be timed up perfectly with the Feast of Weeks and Pentecost. And that was the receiving of the law. And so traditionally, the Feast of Weeks has celebrated the reception of the law. You've got notes there in front of you. We handed those out. Obviously, we're not going to put those up this week. We didn't need one more thing to try to not mess up. But I'm going to say enough things that you can fill in your notes if you need to. So Feast of Weeks celebrates the reception of the law. And that timeline that you have at the top of your notes is really important. Now, why was it such a big deal to receive the law? Why did the Jewish people celebrate this every year? Well, one rabbi said that the law is so essential that it's what makes Jews Jewish, that following the law is what makes Jews Jewish. In it, it's their essence. It's who they are. Tradition says that the law was given in all 70 known languages, but the Jewish people were the only people that decided to take on the mantle of the law and begin to try to follow it. So first, the law gave them their identity. That's why it's a big deal. Another reason it's a big deal, I don't know if you guys have ever thought about this. I spend time with the Bible and try to think about stuff like this because I kind of get paid to do it. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer in God before the law, before the scripture, before the Bible? To just be in Egypt and to know that there is a God. I'm pretty sure there's a God. He seems to be pretty tight with Moses. When Moses says stuff that usually comes from God, he encountered a bush one time. And so now he's telling us what to do. And I feel like that's authoritative. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer before the law, before the Bible, before websites had statements of faith, right? Like if you're new to Grace or if you've checked out a church recently, one of the first things other church people do before they go to a church is they go to the website and then they click on statement of faith and they go, do these people agree with most of the things that I think, right? So that when they go to church, they kind of know what they're stepping into. Can you imagine just visiting someplace blindly? Can you imagine going to a church and the pastor's preaching and he doesn't have the Bible? There's no authority. There's nothing to check him on. I'm just telling you what I think is a good idea, what I heard from this guru in the mountains this one time, and now I'm telling you that this is the gospel truth. Can you imagine how murky and how confusing and how difficult that might be to try to follow and please a God that you know exists, but you're not sure how? I think it would feel like I felt at my old job, Greystone Church, one time. When I was at Greystone, I was the small groups pastor, and I was in charge of student ministry. I was in no way talented at graphic design or content creation. Yet, that's what I got assigned to do this one time. My boss, the lead pastor, Jonathan, he came to me and said, Nate, I want you to design a booklet that has all the information that somebody would need to know about Greystone Church. I want you to just put it together, do pictures, summaries, do a picture of Sunday morning worship, tell them what that's about, give them the mission of the church, student ministry, children's ministry. I want you to put this together and make it look nice. We're going to put it on the information table, and then when somebody new visits the church, we'll just be able to hand it to them, and they can know everything need to know about Greystone. And I'm like, all right, great. You got the right man for the job. I'm gonna knock this out of the park. So for the next two weeks, I actually worked and I tried hard at this. And I had my friend come in and they took pictures and I assembled the document. I figured out how to make it the right size, how to make it like a square, I think, is the shape that I went with. And there was pictures, and there was captions, and there was someone dynamically leading worship, and then a paragraph underneath about what worship means to us, and a verse to go along with it, and then the preaching, and then the small groups, and why we do that, and here's our vision for small groups. And it was excellent. And then I had to go print it out. And I realized, I don't know, I don't know if you guys have ever encountered this. I don't know how to make the printer do the thing I need it to do. Like, I don't know. I need it to print out in a square book that's folded. That's what I need. And what it's giving me is eight and a half by 11 that's not folded and not square. I don't know what to do. So we did like 200 of these things all day on the Saturday before because I didn't want to mess it up. It was due Sunday morning. I didn't want to let anybody down. And so I fear failure. That is my main driver. So like if you'll do this, it'd be great. I'll never do it. But if you don't do this, you will fail. I will stay up 48 hours to get it done. So I'm hand stapling each one of these things. I'm measuring them out and hand cutting to eight and a half by 11 and the borders around the whole thing and then folding them myself, like nice and neat. I get it done. I array them on the information table. Look at what Nate did. And then we get there Sunday morning, very proud of what I've just done. And Jonathan gets there. And I go, hey, dude, I finished these. Did you see them? And he takes a look at it. He's like, oh, yeah, that's good. Good job, man. Thanks. And he sets that down. About five minutes later, I look over, and the volunteers that day have been instructed to just sweep those into the trash can. Just throw them all away. These are garbage. And listen, you think that's mean. That was the right choice. Those things were terrible. They were, I knew as I was cutting them, I can't believe this. This looks like an eighth grade art project with someone with no talent. Like this is awful. And I knew it was awful. And really, I was grateful because in the decision to throw those away, he saved me the shame that was going to come from everyone discovering that, oh, isn't that sweet that Nate did these? Like, I didn't need that in my life. So it sounds mean, but he actually did me a favor, right? And then he put Kyle on it. Like three weeks later, there's this, not that Kyle. Kyle's not good at that stuff. Another guy named Kyle who is good at that stuff. Kyle's the student pastor here. He used to work with me at Greystone. But we had a worship pastor there named Kyle, and he was good at that stuff. He put it all together, and it was this nice glossy color pamphlet that unfolded and had minimal words and maximum pictures and looked way better. And Jonathan was like, great job, Kyle. And I think they still have that sitting over there, okay? Here's the thing. I didn't have the direction or the competence to do what I needed to do. I was groping in the dark to try to do a good job at this assignment, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't know what he had in mind and I was ill-equipped to get it done. I did not have the talent to make it happen. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the law. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the Bible. Just this loose idea that we're supposed to obey him, we're supposed to love. I think we should probably love our neighbors. I think we should probably not steal things. This all seems good. But then in the nuances of the day-to-day, how do I please this God? I am ill-equipped and the mission is undefined. I don't know. And so the law brings clarity to a place that was unclear. The law says, okay, you want to be right with me? You want to know what it takes to please me? Here are the rules. There's 10 of them. The law communicates. Now, this is not what God communicated, but this is what they heard. And over time, this is what the law came to communicate. And this is actually in your notes if you want to write it down. The law came to communicate, if you obey me, I will love you. You want some clarity? You want to know what you need to do to please the God that talks to Moses? You want to know what you need to do day in and day out? Then here's the law. Here's what you need to do. If you do this, I will love you. And then the Jewish tradition, the rabbis, what they would do is the law is here. The line is here. Do not cross this line. So what they would do to make extra sure that they never crossed the line and faltered in the law is that they would draw their own line back here. And then somebody else would go, oh, that's not far enough. And then they would keep backing up and keep backing up and keep backing up so that they would stay away from this. And so God continued to add more laws like the fine print undergirding the other laws, like honor your father and mother. Here's the 38 laws that will help you do that. Honor the Sabbath. Here's the 150 laws about the Sabbath. And so over the course of history and in the book of Leviticus, we have over 630 laws that they accrued, and they lived according to the law. And so they celebrated this each year when they celebrated the Feast of Weeks at the conclusion of Pentecost, 50 days after the Feast of Firstfruits, because it gave them clarity. It gave them their heritage. It made Jews Jewish. It showed that God loved them and was communicating with them, and it gave them a clear path to be right with their Creator. The problem with the law is really twofold. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders frustration. Legalism. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders legalism. It engenders legalism because now our spirituality is defined by how well we follow the rules. Some of us have been in environments like this. I can remember growing up in the 90s in evangelical world in high school. For me, I don't know how it was in your high schools, but for me in the context that I grew up in Atlanta, if you're in high school and you don't do things you shouldn't do with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't cuss, and you don't drink, and you don't smoke weed, you don't do those four things, and you do go to church, you're an excellent human. You're the best possible version of Christianity. That was it. And if you did one of those things, then you're kind of okay, but you probably can't be a leader in your youth group. You probably wouldn't be an elder or a deacon one day in your church. That was the rules. I grew up in that legalism. If you don't cuss, you don't do inappropriate things with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't do drugs and you don't drink, then you are a phenomenal Christian. Never mind that you have all these bad habits going on in private. Never mind that you're pompous and you're filled up because you think you're better than everybody who does those things. Never mind all that. That's what the law does. It engenders legalism. And gray area. And then we start asking questions like, is it a sin if I do this? I know that this is wrong, but can I get away with this? Right? More dangerously, it engenders frustration and I think exhaustion. Because the law says, if you want to be right with me, here are the rules. Here's what you have to do. And so you set yourself about doing that, and you fail, usually within a couple of hours. You feel bad about your failure. You go to God in sorrow. You perform a sacrifice. You're forgiven. You're good with God again because the law has made that provision, and now you start over. And you try really hard this time. I'm really gonna honor God. I'm really gonna have the right attitude. I'm really not gonna do that thing. I'm not gonna mess up anymore. And then you mess up. You feel bad. You perform a sacrifice. You start over. Try hard, fail, start over. Try hard, fail, start over. It's the whole cycle of the Old Testament. And we've seen this in our life. We've seen this in our life. And what happens eventually when you try hard and you fail, eventually instead of starting over, you just quit. Instead of starting over, you just go, I'll never be able to do it. I can never be who God wants me to be. I can never be right with him. I can never follow the law well enough. I can never follow all the rules right enough. I can never be the person that I see in my church. I can't be those people. So I'm out. I'm done. And we walk away. I think this is what happens with a lot of kids who grow up in church and then they fall away in college. We know this story. it's very prevalent. It happened with a lot of us. A big part of that is we grew up in some version of faith where we were legalistic and we were told that God accepts us based on our behavior. And then we get off and we have a little bit of freedom and honestly, we're tired of trying. So we just stop. We know this frustration. And if we don't, if we still think one day I can be good enough, one day I can still, it's possible for me to behave in such a way that I will honor God with my behavior day in and day out. I would introduce you to what I call the torment of motives. There's this actually philosophical question. It's been, I mean, the debate's been going on for centuries. Is it possible to do anything that is truly good? Some of you guys may have thought about this before. And basically it states that there's no truly unselfish act. That when you do something good, and you're nice to somebody, you hold the door for someone, and you go, that's a good act, that's positive. And you go, yeah, that's great, why'd you do that? Well, I just want to be courteous. Why do you want to be courteous? Keep asking those questions, you know what you'll get to? I want other people to like me. That's selfish. You didn't hold that door for them, you did it for you. That's tough. There's actually a Friends episode about this. Joey and Phoebe debate this, like through the course of the show. If you don't know Friends, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna give you the context for Friends, but if you do, great. There's two people on a TV show and they're debating back and forth. And finally, Phoebe feels like she thinks of the one thing, the one altruistic act that she can do that's truly good. And so she goes to the park, and she lets a bee sting her. She said, look, I did it. This caused me pain. I got nothing out of this. It was good. And Joey says, well, the bee died, man. That's murder. Even if we think we're good, even if we have a good behavior week, if you get down to the heart of the matter and what motivated that behavior, that's still nasty. It's still muddy. It's still selfish. It's still self-centered. And so when the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, what we find out is that that leads to frustration and it leads to legalism and we end up exhausted. And it's in the middle of that exhaustion. That's not just for us, but the Hebrew people too. They lived that generation after generation. It's in the middle of that exhaustion that the second Pentecost shows up. Second Pentecost we find in Acts chapters one and two. What's going on here is that Jesus has come and he's lived his life. He's died on the cross. And then he ascends into heaven. The disciples gather in an upper room. And then they receive second Pentecost in the book of Acts. It's the you're supposed to do it when you get the gift. So they're just sitting there. The Holy Spirit appears in the form of flaming tongues. They go out on the balcony of this upper room and begin to preach. And gathered all around them are the citizenry of Jerusalem as other people from the surrounding areas in all kinds of languages and all different tongues. And they begin to speak. And these people hear the gospel in their language because they're still in Jerusalem. Because what just happened is 50 days ago, we murdered a guy named Jesus of Nazareth. We put him on the cross and we crucified him. But when he died, the sky turned black and the veil tore in two and some pretty seismic things happened. And then three days later, he wasn't in his tomb anymore. And we got to know what in the world is going on with this Jesus guy and what in the world is happening with these disciples. What did we just do? And so at Pentecost, Peter goes out and he tells them what they did. He said, that man that you crucified, that was the Messiah. And he shows how all the scriptures pointed to Jesus and prepared them for Jesus. And even the festivals prepared them for Jesus. And he helps them see what we've been seeing for the past six weeks. Everything points to Jesus. God's been prepping us for the Messiah. And he was the one and you killed him. And they go, what do we do? You're right. We believe you. What do we do? Peter says at the end of chapter two, repent and be baptized. Repent. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. You thought he was just a man. You thought he was just a teacher. You thought he was just a prophet, and because of that, you killed him. But he is the son of the living God. So repent of who you thought he was. Admit that he is Lord. Put your faith in him and be baptized. And it says that day that 3,000 were added to their number. Do you know what that is? That's the birth of the church. That's where we came from. It worked. We're on another continent 2,000 years later. It's pretty good. I've been on the southern tip of Africa in Cape Town in Masapumaleli, standing outside of a church, looking up at the clouds, listening to them praise God in a language that I don't understand and going, God, your plan worked. Pentecost worked. While I was there, there was a team there from Australia, from the other end of the globe. It worked. That's the birth of the church. And then we get the seminal passage in chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that defines the early church. They gathered in their homes. Two days later, first fruits, Sunday. Then you count 50 days, and it's Pentecost, the receiving of the law. The Holy Spirit speaks, and he gives them the law. After Jesus dies and goes to heaven, on the day of first fruits, they count 50 days later, and what happens? Second Pentecost. You see? Passover. Jesus was celebrating Passover with the disciples. He's arrested and crucified. That's Friday. Two days later on Sunday, he raises from the dead. That's Easter. That's the feast of first fruits. He goes to God. He offers himself as the first fruits of the rest of the harvest that's about to come, that he's just one with his death and his resurrection. He counts 50 days. 50 days later, the disciples are holed up. They're supposed to be celebrating the feast of weeks, but they don't know what to do. They're waiting for a gift. The Holy Spirit speaks to them in the form, comes to them in the form of tongues, and they present the gospel instead of the law. Thousands of years ago, the law was delivered. The Holy Spirit spoke on the day of Pentecost and he delivered to them the law. And the law engenders frustration and exhaustion and legalism. And in the middle of that frustration and exhaustion, God delivers Jesus and it follows the same timeline. And on the feast of weeks at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks again, except this time he speaks with the gospel. And if the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, then the gospel says, I love you, obey me. Totally different. The gospel says, I love you. I don't care what you do. I don't care what you're going to do. I don't care if you don't have your quiet time for the next 50 days. I don't care if you have it for the next 50 days. I love you. There's nothing that you can do to make me love you more. I don't care if you tithe 50% of your income in 2020. I will not love you more at the end of that year than if you tithe nothing. I don't care if you join eight small groups or if you join no small groups. I love you the same. You can go have the best week possible this week and be walking with the Lord and check all the boxes and do all the things you're supposed to do. And guess what? When you get to the end of this week, God will not love you any more than he does right this second because it's impossible because he loves you as much as he possibly can right now. And if you do nothing this week, if your life spirals out of control and all the things in the shadow are thrust into the light and you're a wreck, God will love you just as much at the end of this week as he did at the beginning. The gospel says, I love you. Obey me. I love you. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to perform. I'll clean you up. I'll get you right. Obey me. Do you know what else this does? This purifies our motives. Because now I'm obeying out of the sense of God loves me so much, I'm blown away by his love. I can't believe that he loves me in this way. I just want to go do what he asked me to do. I want other people to know this love. Can I tell you where I see this show up in my life? It's very few places, if I'm honest. But I see this show up in my sermons. When I'm not in a good spot, which is more regularly than you know, I'm not joking. It just is. There's all kinds of mixed motives laced into when I preach. I want you to think I'm good at it. I want you to tell your friends. I want my friends from back home to listen and miss me. I want it to be good. I want all the same ego crud wrapped up in what I do that some of you do. Some of you are pure of heart and you can't relate to this in any way. Jen, my wife Jen's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never done that in my life. But when I'm not totally healthy, my prep is laced with the desire to do good. But when I am healthy, when I'm overwhelmed by how much the Lord loves me in spite of myself, I care less about doing good. When it's really pure, there is this thing in the Bible that you guys have got to know. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to tell you. And I don't care if you think it's good or not. I don't care if I think it's good. I just want you to know this. Those are the good ones. I want to live my life like that. I want you to live your life like that. When someone says, why'd you do that thing? Why'd you give those people that money? Why'd you wait? Why didn't you yell at that person? Why don't you fight more with your children? What's going on? I want your sincere answer to be, God loves me, so I love them. How pure would our lives be? We wouldn't have to try to obey anymore. We would never ask the question, is this sin? Never. We would just walk in this reality that God loves us. Then we don't have to do anything. Do you know the whole point of the law was to get us to a place where we realized our need for that? That's what Paul says in Romans 8. Romans 8 starts out and he says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Okay, so that means that there's no blame. Everybody who's in Christ Jesus, everybody who has faith is right with God. They don't need to perform anymore or try anymore. They're good. He said, for God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. Which means that the law, the point of the law was trying to show us how to be pure and earn our way into heaven. But because we are human, we can't do that. The law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. So God sent his son in the likeness of sin and in flesh, who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Jesus met the standards for the law so that you didn't have to. He broke the cycle of frustration and exhaustion so that you didn't have to. And he freed you up to walk in this freedom of simply being overwhelmed by the fact that God loves you and then loving other people. That's why he says this new command I give you. All 630 laws, this new command I give you. Just go love people as I loved you. Love others as I have loved you, is what Jesus says. That's the whole point of Second Pentecost. And here's the problem with this. We have a constant, nagging drift to the First Pentecost. We are a people of the Second Pentecost. We are a people who are not judged by how we act. We're judged by where we place our faith. We are a people who are not encumbered with required obedience. We get to obey out of love. We are a people of the second Pentecost. The problem is we're more comfortable with the first Pentecost. We're more comfortable drifting back towards law. And this is the tension in the entire Old Testament. I said this tension would help you understand your Bible better. This is the tension, excuse me, in the entire New Testament is the desire for the Hebrew people to go back to being first Pentecost people, to go back to following the law rather than living under grace. All of Acts is about the tension of, wait, wait, wait, wait, we know we have Jesus, but how many of the rules do we have to follow? Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Corinthians, the book of Hebrews, laced throughout all those books is a desire of the audience to go back and be first Pentecost people when the writers of the Bible are trying to go, no, no, no, forget about that. You're second Pentecost people. Walk in love. Walk in forgiveness. Walk in acceptance. Do that. We're people of the second Pentecost, not the first. God doesn't say to us, obey me and I love you. He says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I sent my son for you. Now walk in obedience. We're people of the second Pentecost. And God didn't lay these over one another by mistake. Let's try to walk this week and not forget that. Let's try to do some pure things this week. And when we do the good that we do, and someone were to say, hey, why'd you do that? Let's let the sincere answer be, because God loves me. Let's pray. Father, we love you too. We are not worthy of it. We do not deserve it. We cannot earn it. God, I pray that we would be overwhelmed by it. Thank you for making us people of the second Pentecost. Thank you for seeing us in our frustration and telling us that your yoke is easy and that your burden is light. May we please live in light of the fact that we are loved by you, no matter what. And because of that, go and love other people for you. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. Before I jump into the sermon, I wanted to pray for a couple of our Grace partners. Most of us don't know this, but there's a couple that are in their 30s named Matthew and Brianna Brown, and they have been in the process of adoption for probably the better part of a year, I would say, if not longer than that. And they actually flew to Columbia in South America this morning to pick up three teenagers that they're adopting from Columbia, which is amazing. This is our primary way to grow at Grace, is to just go get children and then bring them here. So we're very grateful for that. But really and truly, I want to first of all just celebrate their faithfulness to do that and God's goodness in granting them these children. And then also just pray for them as they're there and as they come back and we surround them as a church family. So stop and pray with me and then I'll jump right into the sermon. Father, we are so grateful for you and the way that you love us. We are grateful that you have adopted us into your family, that you give us this picture. God, thank you so much for what you've placed on the heart of Matthew and Brianna. We pray that you would calm their nerves, that you would give them wisdom as they meet their new children, that you would give those children wisdom and grace as they meet their new parents. God, we can't imagine all the thoughts and feelings and emotions swirling around, but we know that this is a family that you have built and constructed with your will. And so we just ask for your blessing on them. We ask for a safe, good, beneficial trip. We ask for good assimilation as they arrive in the States. And God, we ask for special insight as a church, for ways to love them and show those kids that they are welcome here and they are a part of our family. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen. One of my favorite things about the Bible is that it's not just 66 individual books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament. It's not just a string of 66 individual books that exist independently from one another, like a history book or something, but rather the Bible is a tapestry of stories woven to present to us one big overarching story. And one of my favorite parts about that tapestry and learning more about it as a pastor is to look at the things in the Old Testament that are pictures or signposts that point us to the New Testament and more specifically point us to Jesus. If you spent any time in church, you know of some of these signposts and perhaps the most popular one, the one that's the most well-known, that we're most aware of, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, or this is your first time in a church in a long time, or maybe ever, you would probably recognize the term Passover. It's still a holiday that the Jewish faith celebrates. It's still something that we acknowledge on a regular basis as believers. And to me, it's one of the more clear signposts or pictures in the Old Testament that points to an event in the New Testament that points very clearly to Jesus. And Passover is the fourth feast that we're looking at in our series as we go through all the feasts and festivals that were in the Old Testament calendar that God prescribed in the book of Leviticus, chapter 23. This is the fourth one. We've got two more to go. And for this morning, I did want us to kind of catch up on Passover and know what it is, but then I want us to ask a really important question about Passover and what brought it about. So just so we're on the same page and we understand what Passover is, it's actually the tenth plague that God inflicted on the Egyptian people. The situation is God's people, his chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, have existed in the nation of Egypt as slaves for 400 years. It's all that they know. It's generation after generation. They are a people. They are a people of slaves. And so in Exodus chapter 3, God grabs one of the guys that he's chosen to use, a guy named Moses, and he appears to him in a burning bush. And he says, Moses, I want you to go to Egypt and I want you to free my people. Which is a pretty tall order, because he would lead a nation of slaves against the most powerful nation in the world. Egypt was the worldwide superpower at the time, so it felt like a pretty hopeless errand. But he says, I want you to go free my people. To help you do that, I'm going to inflict plagues on the Egyptians. Moses didn't know that at the time, but over time it became apparent that that was God's plan. And so Moses goes to Pharaoh and he says, you need to let God's people go. And Pharaoh says, you're ridiculous. I don't think so. This is a loose paraphrase of a conversation in Exodus. And then God starts to inflict the plagues on the Egyptian people. The waters turn to blood. There's a swarm of locusts. There's gnats. The day has turned to night. The livestock dies. There's boils. There's other plagues that are inflicted on the Egyptian people to soften Pharaoh's heart. And a couple of times he says, you guys got to get out of here. We're tired of these plagues. And then he changes his mind. He says, nope, you got to stay here. Just kidding, you can't go. So they keep them as slaves. The tenth plague becomes known as the Passover. This was the one that finally softened Pharaoh enough to get him to let the people of Israel go. And Passover, what God told Moses to do is to go to Pharaoh and tell Pharaoh, tonight the angel of death is going to pass over all the nation of Egypt. And that angel is going to claim the firstborn of every family, even of the livestock. And God tells Moses that if you want protection from this angel that's going to come as the final plague, that what you need to do is you need to go find a lamb. Sacrifice the lamb and then take the blood of the lamb and paint it on your doorposts, on the top and on the sides. And when the angel passes over Egypt, if that blood is on your doorframe of your house, then he will pass over you and the death that was supposed to happen in your house will not occur because I will accept the death of the lamb that died in their place. And so that's what happens that night. The angel of death passes over the nation of Egypt and the families that didn't have the blood on their doorframe lost their firstborn. And it said that the cry in Egypt that night was great. And the next morning, in his sorrow at losing his own son, Pharaoh tells Moses, get out of here. Go. And Moses gets all the people. They take some gold and some jewelry from their Egyptian slave masters, and they go out into the desert, and they begin to search for the promised land. And that's the story of God's rescue of his people out of slavery. He does it through the series of the ten plagues capped off by what's called now the Passover because the angel of death was passing over Egypt and would pass over your home if you had the blood of the lamb on your doorpost. And it's a very clear picture of Jesus in the New Testament. Very clear picture. When Jesus arrives on the scene, he's introduced by a man named John the Baptist. And John the Baptist, when he sees Jesus of Nazareth walking towards him, says, Behold, the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. Jesus was the spotless Lamb. And just like in the Old Testament, the lamb died so that your home didn't have to experience death. In the New Testament, the lamb dies so that we don't have to experience death. In the Old Testament, the lamb dies at Passover so that God says, there's no penalty required here. You guys are right with me. Just like that in the New Testament, Jesus dies, the Lamb of God, and God looks at that death and he says, that's good. There's no penalty required here because the Lamb has died on your behalf. It is a one-to-one picture that points us to the miracle of Jesus in the New Testament. The Lamb makes us right with God in the Old Testament, and then the Lamb makes us right with God in the New Testament. Passover is a picture of salvation. And now most of you here, this was really my challenge this week, you're church people. You know what Passover is. You could have just done this part so far. And so I thought, I wonder, what are the important questions to ask around Passover that can help us now as we reflect on that festival? And the question occurred to me, what was it that brought about the Passover? What was it that the people of Israel did that got God, enacted God, spurred God, was a catalytic event for God to say, now is when I want to enact my grand plan of rescue? Really what I want to ask is, what was their role in their rescue? What part did they have to play? What did they do? If we were to ask the question today, we would say, what's our role in our salvation? What do I have to do to be saved? We've all asked this question before. Before you were a believer, or now if you're not yet a believer, you would wonder, what do I need to do to be saved? What's required of me? What's my role in my rescue? Some of us wonder if we did it right, if we prayed the prayer right, or if we really meant it, or if we really obey enough. We don't really know if we did everything right, and we wonder still, what's my role in my rescue? What's my role in my salvation? What's our role in our rescue? What do I need to do to be saved? What's my role in my salvation? It's all the same question. And I remember when I was 17 years old, I was at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge. I've mentioned it before. And the camp director was a man named Greg Boone. And he asked the same question, but he just asked it this way. He came out and he asked all the students. There's about 300 kids at the camp that year. And he asked us, what do you have to do to be right with God? What do I have to do to be right with God? And it's one of these questions that somebody asks it and you know that you don't know the answer and that to give an answer, you're just going to get made fun of. Like my dad loves these kinds of questions. My dad asked me one time, son, and I was, I mean, I graduated from seminary. I had reason to believe that I could answer this question. He looks at me and he goes, son, what's the Bible about? And I'm like, geez, I don't know. I mean, I feel like it's about God. Like, that feels like a good answer. And he goes, no, it's about missions. Great, great dad, whatever. You're ridiculous. He's going to listen to this. I still, dad, I still think you're ridiculous. So it's one of those questions. He says, what can we do to be right with God? And we all know that we're not going to get it right, but there are those of us for whom the glory of the correct answer is too irresistible, right? If I get this right, if I somehow unlock the code and I'm the one that's correct, then I will get all the esteem of all of my peers and everyone here is going to know I'm the smartest one. So we have to try. A lot of kids had the sense to not try, but some kids did try. And I don't remember how exactly it went, but I do remember it well enough to know that it went something like this. Someone would raise their hand and offer an answer, and they would say, well, you have to pray a prayer. And Greg would say, well, that's fine. Is it possible to pray a prayer that you don't mean? Is it possible to just say words that aren't sincere? A person would sit back down defeated. Yeah, it is. It's not prayer. There's no magic words to make ourselves right. We know that. Somebody else would say, well, you have to be committed. And I remember thinking like, that sounds pretty good. That's convincing. You have to be committed. And Greg says, okay, how committed do you have to be? They're like, like all the way committed? And they go, yeah, and sat back down because they knew they weren't all the way committed. They were a terrible Christian. And then somebody else says, you have to obey. You have to submit yourself to God and be humble and obey. And I remember thinking, oh, shoot. They might have it on this one. And to us, I think that that would make sense. If you were to ask us, what do we have to do to be right with God? What's our role in our rescue? We might say obey, especially in an Old Testament context. Those of us who know our Bible know that in the Old Testament, your spirituality, in some ways, it was very easy for it to drift towards measuring your spirituality on your ability to follow the rules. In the Old Testament, God gives the Ten Commandments. He gives the laws, 600 and something laws. It's like 630. There's 300 and something thou shouts and 200 and something thou shalt nots. And if you follow those and you do it just right, then God will love you and he'll approve of you and he'll bless you and he'll give you all the things that you ever wanted because you were obedient. And that feels right. It kind of makes sense. I obey God, I follow his rules, I honor him, I'll appease him, and then he'll like me and he'll give me all the things that I need. That's probably our role in our salvation, to obey. The problem with that answer, if we look at it for Passover, what was their role in their rescue? It couldn't have been obedience because the law didn't exist. Moses has yet to bring the Ten Commandments down the mountain. They have yet to write the book of Leviticus with all the 600 laws. They don't have any clear laws to follow. They did turn around and paint the blood on the doorframe, but that was just for that one plague. That wasn't what enacted their whole rescue. So the answer in the Old Testament really couldn't have been obedience. And listen, we know in our own lives, experientially, that obedience is not how we bridge the gap between us and God. Come on, church people. We've tried that, haven't we? Haven't you tried? Isn't it exhausting to try to obey your way to God's approval? If I have just the right attitude and I don't lash out at people and I can control my anger and the terrible thoughts that I think I just mutter under my breath and I don't give voice to them, or if I can ever become super, super nice and just never think those thoughts at all, if I'll watch my language, if I'll give to the church like I'm supposed to, if I'll serve where I'm supposed to, if I'll suffer the way that I should suffer and I don't have the fun that they have and I won't laugh at the jokes that they do and I won't watch the shows that they do and I will be very, very disciplined and we'll just white knuckle our lives to God's approval. Isn't that exhausting? Doesn't that wear you out? And haven't you found that at every effort to obey our way into God's favor is futile? And what's more sinister than that is we always fail. We inevitably fail. Do you understand that in the Old Testament, God gave us the rules to show us that we can't follow them so that we would conclude that we have a need for him? And so when we think that we can obey our way towards God's approval, and we try really hard to do all the things, to dot all the I's and cross all the T's and be the person that God wants us to be, and we fail, we assume that we don't have his approval. That our Father's in heaven looking down at us disappointed. And I think that if you get nothing else today, especially if you're someone who's been a believer for a long time, if you don't hear anything else I say, maybe this morning can be the time when you finally, finally, finally let go of the idea of winning God's approval and admiration through obedience. We cannot perform our way into God's favor. And can I confess something to you? I'm 38 years old. I really do believe that I came to know the Lord at the age of four. And that I've been rescued for 34 years. I still cannot figure out how to quit trying to win God's approval through my behavior and through what I do and through how I perform. I still can't figure out how to just know that God loves me and to exist outside of this performance-based economy. Who knows, maybe if I preach hard enough today, I'll finally get it too. So if you haven't figured it out yet, you've got at least me as company. But it's not obedience. That's not the answer. That's not our role in our rescue, obeying our way to God's favor. And so it was at this point in the night that I thought, I think I've got it. I think I'm ready. I'm ready to crack the code. So I speak up and I said, Greg, you've got to love God. You've got to love him. And I felt like I was on good biblical standing for this because Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. How about them apples, Greg? So he says that's a good answer. How much do you have to love God? Like what percentage? Like 100? He goes, yeah. Do you love God 100%? No. And I sat back down. And all 300 heads turned to me aghast. How could you not love God 100%? And I just remember thinking, you shut up, you hypocrites. Like, you don't either. You're judging me. That's not loving. So it was a... But that wasn't the answer either. And that night, after everyone finally gave up, Greg offers us the answer, and he says, nothing. There's nothing you can do. But as I reflect on Scripture and what my life has taught me and a passage that I see in Exodus chapter 2, I don't think that's the answer either. I don't think it's nothing. I think that they did something, and I think we see the something that they did in Exodus chapter 2, verses 23 through 25. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Exodus is the second book of the Bible. And at the end of this chapter, it kind of bridges the gap. Before this, the author of Exodus is setting up what's going on, just what's happening in the culture. And basically what he's told us is there's people, the Hebrew people are slaves. They've been slaves for 400 years, but there's this boy named Moses who was born and he was adopted into Pharaoh's home and he grew up learning to lead. But then God put him in the desert for 40 years because he murdered some people and he needed to be prepared for the leadership. And then God is about to call him in chapter three. But right before God calls Moses to rescue his people for his part in rescuing his people. We see what the people did that I think is because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew. These people were slaves. They had been for 400 years. Can you imagine what it would have been like to be a civilization of slaves? To look your children in the eye when you have them and know that their life is not going to be any better than your miserable life. To know as fathers and mothers, there's nothing I can do to bring about a change for you. To feel that impotent and powerless. Can you imagine how anonymous the people of Israel must have felt? There's no nations around them that are going to swoop in and overthrow Egypt and free them. That's not on the geopolitical agenda. No one's going to pick a fight with Egypt. Most nations probably don't even know that they're there. They're totally unseen and totally unknown. They're completely impotent and helpless. And I think based on the beginning of this passage, it says, during those many days, the king of Egypt died. I think that they were hoping, this Pharaoh stinks. He treats us really poorly. Maybe if we can hold out long enough, he'll die and the next one will be nicer. But the Bible tells us that the next one was worse. And I happen to believe that this is when they gave up their last strand of hope. And in this hopelessness, in this isolation, in this feeling of impotence, the people of Israel cry out to God. They groaned in their slavery. And I think that there's a quality to this cry. I think there's essential qualities to this cry. I think that this was an earnest, admissive cry. Earnest in the idea that God, this is broken. This is not supposed to work like this. We're your people and life shouldn't feel like this. This is not how it's supposed to go, God. You didn't design it this way. Life feels broken. And I think that we felt that before too. God, this is not how this is supposed to go. This feels broken. This doesn't feel right. God, I'm not happy. God, we are miserable. God, we are hopeless. So there's this earnest, honest cry that this is broken. And then there's this admission, and we can't fix it ourselves. The next Pharaoh isn't going to fix it. Some other country's not going to come in and fix it. We're not going to rise up in rebellion and overtake and overthrow. We don't have any options, God. We cannot fix this. We are totally and completely reliant on your favor and your mercy. God, help us. It's an earnest admission. God, this is broken, and we are impotent to fix it. And when they let out this earnest cry of admission, what does God do? I love these three words. It says he remembers them, he saw them, and he knew. God doesn't forget things. It's not as though when they cried out that God was in heaven preoccupied with dealing with something with the angels and went, oh my goodness, man, 400 years goes by so quick. I am so sorry that I left you guys in Egypt. He doesn't forget. It's a way to say that this is when God acknowledged them. He saw and he knew. He didn't just then see. That's not a present tense. It had always seen and he had always known. And that know there is an intimate know. It's an intimate word. It's a word of empathy. Not only did he know what they were going through, but he had personally felt what they were going through. And it tells me that our God never forgets us. He doesn't forget that we exist and we are never at any point unseen, no matter how isolated we feel, no matter how hopeless we might feel, he sees us and he knows. That's why he's called El Roy, the God who sees. Do you know the power of being seen? Of being known? Have you ever been walking through something in your life that was incredibly difficult and had someone come alongside you and say, hey, I've been through that before. I know it's tough. Let me tell you what I learned from that experience. You know how life-giving that is? Have you felt the power of being seen and known? So when they cry out, this earnest, admissive cry, it says, God remembered them, he saw them, and he knew them. And then, the very next chapter, he calls Moses and enacts his grand plan of rescue. But if you were to ask me, for the people of Israel, what was their role in their rescue? I would tell you it was to come to a place where they let out an earnest, admissive cry to God. God, this is broken, and we can't fix it. So for you, what's your role in your rescue? What's your role in your salvation? If you're here this morning and you don't know Jesus, what do I do to be saved? You let out an earnest and admissive cry to the Father, Father, this is broken and I'm impotent to fix it. Father, life was not supposed to feel this way. I have all the things that I want. I have the job that I want. I have the house that I want. I have the family that I want. I have the toys that I want. And I still feel empty. I still don't like the quiet. I still don't like the silence. I'm still uncomfortable with my own thoughts. I'm still not at peace. Father, I need you because I thought that this was going to make me happy and it hasn't. Father, I have all the kids that I want and I'm still not happy. Father, I have everything in my life that I want and it's still not doing it. God, I had that and I lost it and then I reached for this other thing and I thought that that would be the thing that made me feel okay, that made me feel at peace, that made me feel happy and it's not. It's just another lurch at empty. God, I need you because this is broken and I don't know how to fix it. That's what salvation is. What's our role in our rescue to salvation? It's an earnest cry to the Father. What's our role and our rescue from sin? Many of us here, we're believers. We know we're believers. We don't doubt that, but man, there is just sin in our life that we cannot kick. We have things that are growing in the shadows that we are terrified are going to tear us down. We have attitudes that we can't get over. We don't like the way we act when we're angry, but we still have a temper. What's our role in our rescue for sin? It's the same thing. To make an earnest cry to God, God, I'm broken. I don't know how to fix myself. I've tried everything I know how to try to get better at this, to not sin in this way anymore, to not let you down. I've tried everything that I possibly can, and I don't know what else to do. And I think God says, good, because I love you anyways, whether you do this or not. And I'm ready to rescue you if you'll make space for me. What do we do? What's our role in victory over sin? It's an earnest cry to the Father, God, this is broken and I am impotent to fix it. It's the same for spiritual success. What do we do to raise kids who love the Lord? What do we do to have a healthy, vibrant marriage so that when people look at it, they go, man, that is a picture of how Jesus loves his church, which is what the Bible tells us our marriage is supposed to be. How do we live up to that picture? How do we obey Paul and live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? How do we obey the author of Hebrews and run the race that is set before us by throwing off every sin and weight that so easily entangles? How do we do all of that that feels so impossible? We cry out to the Lord, God, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix it. I need you. I think that this is the cry for salvation. And I think it is the cry for a believer every day. Every day that you wake up and this isn't what we say to the Lord, Lord, I'm broken today and I need you today and I'm impotent to execute your will today. Every day we wake up and we think that we're going to step into it and do it ourselves, that our role and our rescue is our performance, we're going to hurt that day. So this morning, I want to invite you to the same thing that I believe Passover invites us to, to make an earnest cry to the Father. Maybe for the first time if we don't know him. Father, I'm broken and I'm impotent to fix myself. I need your rescue. I'm going to pray and then the band is going to come. They're going to lead us in one more song. And I want you, as we sing together, make that your cry to the Father. In this song, we'll sing the lyrics, Our Hearts Cry Out. Let's honor Passover today and make a collective cry to the Father. God, we need you. We're broken without you. And it says in Exodus that when his people cried out to him that God saw them. And as we cry out in a few minutes, I want you to know that the God who saw all of his children still sees his child. Let's cry out to him together. Let's pray. God, you are good. You are a good father. Even for those of us who didn't have good dads, you are a good father. God, if there's anything in us that's still holding on to a pride of success or of performance or of being good enough, help us to let that go. Help us be like your children in Israel who cry out to you earnestly and admissively that we are broken and that we need you. God, we feel your rescue rushing into impossible situations even today. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. But thanks for being here on this September Sunday. I'm excited to be back in the fall in two services and to be in our new series called Feast. What's going on here is that God, using Moses, carrying the Israelites out of Egypt. They were a nation of slaves. The Israelites are God's chosen people. They're living in the desert. And we see this in the first five books of the Bible. And the books of Leviticus and Numbers really kind of give us the details of God's effort to help Moses kind of construct a civilization or a society. If you think about it historically, it's about 500,000 people coming out of slavery. It's all they've ever known. Now they're an independent nation or group of people, and they're trying to figure things out. So God gives them laws and the Ten Commandments. He gives them religion. They assign a priestly class, the Levites, to set up the tabernacle and put expectations and provision around how these people are supposed to interact with their God. They install a government. Moses names elders and everybody looks out for their tribes and it works kind of like that. And one of the things that God does for this new society is he gives them six festivals or six holidays, and he says, every year I want you to celebrate these six events. And last week we talked about this idea that really what a holiday does is it stops us in the midst of our year, in the midst of our crazy life, as everything just kind of gets going and blowing and we focus on all these other things. What a holiday does is it stops us and it narrows our focus in on things that are important to us. And so to me, it's really interesting to look at the six holidays that God installed in the Old Testament for his chosen people and ask ourselves, what is it in these holidays that God wants us to remember? What is it that he wants us to celebrate? What was it that he wanted his chosen people to stop and slow down and focus on for a little while? And so as we approach the holiday this week, last week was Feast of Trumpets. It kicks off the Jewish New Year, and I had a good time. We kicked the service off with a shofar. I thought it was a really fun service. I really went home last week going, man, this fall is going to be really, really great, really, really fun. As we approach this week and the festival that God had, I wanted to go back a couple of weeks to a podcast that I was listening to. There's a guy that does podcasts. I think it's called Armchair Expert, a guy named Dax Shepard. He's an atheist. He's not a believer. It is not a church-friendly podcast. I'm not like, go listen to this and you'll be spiritually enriched. But what he does is he talks to other people and he has these actual meaningful, vulnerable, deep conversations. And I've found in my life that conversations like that, where you can just really get down to things that matter and learn about people and be honest and vulnerable with people, those kinds of conversations really kind of give me life. I like those. And so I like listening to his podcast. And he had a guy on named Danny McBride, I think. He's an actor, comedian, whatever. And they're talking, and they were talking about growing up being forced to go to church. Danny grew up in the South, I think maybe even in North Carolina. And he was forced to go to church, but he never wanted to. And so as soon as he was old enough, he quit going. And he really doesn't claim to have much of a faith now. Dax grew up, sometimes his grandparents would make him go, but he is a devout atheist now. He's very open about his atheism. But they got to talking about going to church when they were young. And then one of them made the comment when they were old enough to not have to go anymore. I think it was Dax. He was like, you know, I kind of missed it. I liked having to do something, being made to do something that I didn't want to do. And Danny said, yeah, you know what? I found that I kind of missed it too. I wonder why that is. And Dax said this thing that I thought was incredibly interesting coming from an atheist. He said, I think that there is a human need to repent, a need to make ourselves right with our Creator. There's an author named C.S. Lewis who was around in the early 1900s, World War II. He was an English professor at Oxford and was an atheist as well. But he made this intellectual journey from atheism to theism to eventually Christianity. And he wrote a book that chronicles that journey called Mere Christianity. It's a Christian classic. If you've never read it, it's absolutely worth the time. The language is a little bit tough. It's hard to understand. Sometimes you're going to have to reread passages. If you're like me, you're going to have to really reread them a lot. But eventually when you understand it, man, it is one of the best books I think ever written. And in his argument for God and explaining how he arrived at a belief in the Christian God, the first thing he does is talk about, lay out some proofs for God for himself. Not trying to convince you, and I'm not going to go through those proofs this morning, but he starts making the case for why he came to the conclusion that there has to be a God. And then after he concludes that there has to be a God, he makes a reasoned argument that he has to be a perfect God. And then he says this, and it stuck with me. I've always thought it was so interesting. He said, and since there's a God, and since he is perfect, we have no choice but to conclude that he is offended by us, that he's angry with us, because we're not perfect. And we know intrinsically that there's a God who created us and that we have displeased him in the way that we've acted because we haven't lived up to his standards. And I just think that these two different thought processes by people who were or are atheists coming to the conclusion that, you know what, and they wouldn't say it like this, but I say it like this, written on the human heart is a longing to be made right with our creator God. I think it exists in each one of us. I think if you're here this morning and you're not even a believer, somebody drug you here or you're kicking the tires, I think that you might even agree with me that there is something that wants us to be right with God, right with the universe. If you're a believer, you know this feeling very well. And it's for this need, it's to address this feeling, this thing that was written on us, this need to repent that God placed on the calendar the holiest of holidays that we now know as Yom Kippur. And that's what we're going to look at this morning. Now, Yom Kippur is what it's called in the Hebrew culture. And those words together, Yom means day and Kippur means atonement. So it's become known as the day of atonement. But Kippur can also be translated as covering, the day of covering. And so it's the day on the calendar that God provides for his people so that you can be sure, so that the Hebrew people, the Israelite people can be sure that they are right before their God. It addresses this intrinsic need within us to repent and know that we are right before our creator God. And so it's on this day that all of the sins of the priesthood, of the high priest, and of the Hebrew people are atoned for in a ceremony that we're gonna go through that occurs at the temple in Jerusalem. It's the day of atonement or the day of covering. It's the provision that God makes so that his people can be right before him. And to me, it's a remarkable day. Most of you have probably heard of it before. Most of you who pay attention to cultural things probably know that it's a Jewish holiday and it's the holiest, it's the highest of the holidays. It's celebrated so reverently that every 50 years, the day of atonement becomes a year of Jubilee. And on the 50th year, on that year of Jubilee, all debts are canceled and all land is given back to the family. It's a really important holiday in the Hebrew calendar. And on this day, everybody went to the temple. So to help us as I kind of walk us through what happened at Yom Kippur, we have to kind of have a working knowledge of the temple. So I actually found this picture that I wanted to show you. This is the temple. If you go to Jerusalem right now, in the city is a museum that I've been able to go to. And in the middle of that museum is a replica that's probably about as big as this room of ancient Israel at the time of Solomon and immediately following. And in the middle of the city is the temple complex. And this is the temple complex. And so what you see here, I just kind of want to walk us through there for a couple of things. That big building in the middle, the tallest part of it, that is the holy place and the holy of holies. We're going to talk about it in a second, but that building was basically divided in two by a curtain. The front portion of it was the holy place. The only people allowed in the holy place were Jewish priests. And then the other side of that is the holy of holies. The only person allowed there is the high priest. And then outside of that through the door, you see the inner courtyard. The only people allowed there are Jewish males. And then outside of that building and more of the space is the outer courtyard. Only Jewish people are allowed in the outer courtyard. And then this roofed area to the left of the screen, that's where the Sanhedrin met. That was like their senate. That's where the government met. All the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Zealots, their representatives would meet there and decide on things. So that's kind of, when I talk about the temple for the rest of the morning, this is what I'm talking about. And it's important for us to know that on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, the focus of all of God's people was on the temple. On the Day of Atonement, on this day, on the holiest of holidays, the focus of all of Israel, of all of God's people scattered wherever they were, was on the temple. And so what they would do is they would come from all over the country. And having been there, it's not super far. You can get there in a couple of days if you're walking from the top of the country to Jerusalem in the center or from southern Israel to Jerusalem. So everybody has the chance to come and gather in the holy city at the temple, the holy place where the presence of God is. The presence of God was said to be in the holy of holies. And so on this holiday, the highest of days, all of Israel would gather and clamor into Jerusalem. And then on the Day of Atonement, as many people as could fit into that temple complex would fit into that temple complex and wait for the priest to perform the ceremonies and the rites and the duties that went along with Yom Kippur. And the priest was also a focal point of this day. And as I learned this stuff, I'm going to walk you through kind of what that day looked like. I was fascinated by all of these things. I hope that it doesn't bore you, but for me, I'm kind of a history nerd, so as I was reading this stuff, I really, really ate it up. But the priest would come out. First of all, he would start to fast the day before. Everybody would fast the day of. Every good Hebrew would fast the day of Yom Kippur, but the priest would fast a day early, and then he would stay up all night. Members of the Sanhedrin were assigned to watch him and make sure he didn't fall asleep, because he was likely an older guy, and our population of people who are the age of what the high priest would have been know that it's kind of hard to stay awake during one of my sermons. So I can't imagine staying awake all night. So the Sanhedrin would kind of watch him and poke him and make sure he didn't fall asleep. And then after that, they would hand it off to the priestly elders and they would make sure that he would stay awake. And then very early in the morning, the ceremony would start and he would go into the temple, I would assume surrounded by thousands of people, and he was wearing his traditional priestly robes, which were laced with gold as is detailed in the book of Leviticus. And he would go behind a curtain to like a bath and he would ceremonially bathe himself, which I'm guessing wasn't awkward for them. They would have been like, yeah, I mean, he's just taking a bath. For us, that's weird. But for them, he would take a bath behind the curtain and it was fine. And then when he was done, he would put on white priestly garments specifically for Yom Kippur, for the Day of Atonement. And he would begin to perform the ceremonies and the rituals of the day. And the first one was he would go to the altar in that outer courtyard in front of the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, and he would take a bull. And he would place his hands on the head of the bull, and he would repeat this prayer of repentance because this bull was dying for the priest and for his family. This was his personal atonement and the atonement for the rest of the priesthood for all of the sins that had been committed in that year. And so he would atone for his sins, and his sins were symbolically transferred from him to the head of the bull, and that bull would die in his place and in the place of his family. It's a sacrificial system. And then the blood of the bull would drip into a bowl, and he would hold that, and that would be prepared for something in a second. Then, in this really kind of interesting ceremony, there would be two goats that were brought to the high priest. And he would take one goat, they would draw lots, which was their way of playing paper, rock, scissors. And he would decide which goat got designated as for the Lord and which goat got designated as the scapegoat. And the one that was designated for the Lord, they put a white cord around its neck. And the one that was designated as the scapegoat, they put a red cord around its neck. And then after doing that, the priest would then say a prayer. And in this prayer, the name of Jehovah was elicited. And I think it happened like eight times throughout the day. And every time the priest would say the name of Jehovah God, the entire assembly would fall on their face and worship God. And then stand back up and he would continue. to God, and then you would walk through this curtain. And this curtain I always heard about growing up separates the Holy of Holies from the holy place. And I always heard in Christian school and in Bible college that if you put a team of oxen on either side of that curtain and they pulled against one another, that they would not be able to tear that curtain. It was an impenetrable layer. And in the Holy of Holies was the Ark of the Covenant. It was a box that you weren't allowed to touch. Inside this box was the stone tablets that God gave Moses the law on and the staff of Moses. On top of this box were two golden angels. And it's thought that their wings were pointed out and their heads were bowed and that their wings were touching each other at the tips. And where they touched would create what was called the mercy seat. And it said that the very presence of God rested on that mercy seat. And there was only one person alive allowed to go in there, and that was the high priest. Because it was the very presence, the holy presence of God. And if you went in there and were impure, anything about you was imperfect and not worthy of God's presence, then you would fall dead in an instant. They were so worried about this. This was so sobering and such a concern that in the white priestly garments of the high priest, they wove bells into the hymns so that when he would move, you could hear him moving. And before he went into the Holy of Holies, they would tie a rope around his ankle so that if the bells stopped, they'd just start pulling. That's how serious it was. Can you imagine being guy number two? And they had to pull him out and be like, well, you've got to put on that robe now. That would be really scary. But that was the seriousness and the sobriety that surrounded going into the Holy of Holies. And it's only the priests that even saw the high priest enter. The Jewish males are outside. Maybe if they have a certain vantage point, they can peek in and see. But the other, the people, the throngs up on the walls and on the roofs, they can't even see him going into the Holy of Holies. And that's where the presence of God rested. And when he got in there, he would take the blood of the bull and he would sprinkle it on the mercy seat and he would sprinkle it on the curtain and he would say a prayer and that was for his family and then he would step out. And when he stepped out, he went and he took the goat that was designated as for the, and he sacrificed that goat. And this was the beginning of the atonement of the sins of the people of Israel. He would take the blood of the goat, he would pray a prayer, he would read a scripture, people would fall on their face and worship God, and then he would go back into the Holy of Holies, and he would sprinkle the blood of the goat on the mercy seat and on the curtain, and this was the atonement for the people. Then he would step back out and he would take the scapegoat. And there was a designated priest in a particular causeway of the temple. And he would send the scapegoat to that priest. And that priest would then walk that goat out of the city limits into the wilderness, traditionally 10 to 12 miles. I don't know how long this took, but I do know that if I were an ancient Hebrew person, that waiting for the goat to get to the place would be my least favorite part of Yom Kippur. I'm not a man of a lot of patience, and that's 12 miles away with an old priest. I would get pretty bummed out about that. All along the way, there was 10 stations, 10 booths where they would eat and drink and then move on. And once the scapegoat got far enough away, the priest would then sacrifice that goat. And then he would camp there overnight and not come back into the city until the morning. And it said that that scapegoat is the goat that died for the sins of the people of Israel. And it would cover over the sins of Israel. That's where we get the kippur, the covering. It would serve as the covering of the sins of Israel so that when God looked at the people of Israel, he didn't see their sin. He saw the covering. And this particular death was for sins of omission because all of these people, listen, if you're at Yom Kippur, if you've got prime seats and you're watching this, you probably have been going to temple every week and you've been doing your sacrifices every week and you've been making sure that you and God are good throughout the year. But this particular sacrifice were for the sins of omission of the people of Israel throughout the year. And we can relate to this. Those things that you didn't know were wrong until later, that thing that you've been doing for years, and then you find out like, oh my goodness, I shouldn't do that. That's not really pleasing to the Lord. I guess I should stop. Sorry, 2012. Like we know those things, or maybe those little like attitudes that show up, the little flecks of racism that we find in ourselves. And we go, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I used to think that way. These things where we've displeased the Lord and we don't even realize that we have. That's what the Day of Atonement was for, was to say, hey, everything is covered. Everything is taken care of. Once the goat had been sacrificed, there was a series of flags that would be waved by centuries all the way back to Jerusalem. And then once the word got back to the high priest, he would burn the remaining parts of the bulls and the goat that were sacrificed earlier. He would read three scriptures and say eight benedictions. He would invoke the name of the Lord and the crowd, the thousands of people would worship along with him each time. And when he was finally done, after a whole day's worth of ceremony late in the afternoon, he would ceremonially bathe one more time and put his personal clothes back on. And tradition says that he would go home and have a feast with his family to celebrate surviving that day because it was a stressful time for his family. And I do think it's interesting that after the high priest performs all of these duties on a somber holiday, the first thing he does is he goes home and he has a feast. So even on a holiday that's dedicated to fasting, there's still a feast to cap it off at the end. And so as I learned about these things this week and this process and this ceremony, I just began to think, man, what would it have been like to have been in the ancient Hebrew world? And watch this. What would it have been like to grow up with this tradition? What would it have been like to bend one of the throngs of people in the temple watching or listening or waiting and seeing the reaction of everybody else? At a time with no internet, at a time without published books, at a time where the only way you learn is through rote memorization, whatever the previous generation tells you, that's what you retain, and then you teach it to the ones who follow you. And for thousands of years, that's how it worked. What would it have been like to take in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as an ancient Hebrew person? What would it have been like to just be surrounded, to be from the countryside of Galilee and to come in and be surrounded by all these people? To have grown up and have your grandpa or your grandma explain to you every year, Grandpa, we know the bull, like we get it, we know what it means. What would it have been like when you came of age and it was your responsibility to explain it to the younger generation and keep them along? To have grown up seeing this every year, to watch the same high priest perform the same rites every year. What would it have been like to have fallen on your face? Really picture it and worship at the name of the Lord every time. How totally separate and other must the high priest would have been? Don't think about it from the perspective of the Sanhedrin looking down from their VIP seats or from the other priests who would watch the high priest and think that might be me one day and kind of peek out of the holy place and watch his back as he performed in front of the crowds. But what would it have been like to be in the crowds, to be separated and other, to even be a Hebrew woman and not even be allowed in the part where you can see the priest and all you can do is listen. How distant would the priest have felt to you? I know over the years I've gone to different Christian conferences and in Christian world there's these celebrity pastors that write books and do podcasts and have thousands of downloads and tens of thousands of people that go to their church and they feel like little celebrities and you them down there on the stage, and you're like, oh, that's so-and-so, that's so neat. I'm really glad that I'm here, and that's as close as I'll ever get to them. And I imagine that at the best, that that's how the high priest felt, is so different and so other and so separated from you. What would it have felt like to know that he was going into the Holy of Holies on your behalf? To know that in the Holy of Holies was the presence of God, and we're so fearful of the presence of God that the holiest man among us, the most righteous among us, the high priest, is fearful that he might die. He's barely qualified to walk through that curtain. I know that I could never walk through that curtain. What kind of mystery surrounded the holy of holies? What kind of separation must they have felt from the high priest who was arguing to God on their behalf, who was interceding for them, who served as their intermediary? What kind of separation must they have felt from God? What kind of fear must have surrounded what they interpreted as the presence of God? Can you get yourself into the mystery and the wonder and the pageantry of Yom Kippur and what it must have been like to take that in as an ancient Hebrew person and pass that down from generation to generation? And I ask that because I wonder what it would have felt like to be one of these people at the time of Jesus. And to be a devout Jew, to celebrate Yom Kippur every year, it's the highest, the holiest of holidays. And the temple, the focus of all God's people is on the temple, and that's where the presence of God rests, and that's where his people work, his representatives, the priests work and intercede for us and serve as intermediaries for us. What must it have been like to be sitting there and to be a devout Jew and to watch this man who claims to be the Son of God die on the cross, and the moment he dies, you can look across the valley there from the eastern side and see into the Holy of Holies and watch that veil tear from top to bottom. Which is what the Gospels tell us happened when Jesus died. That veil was torn in two. How earth-shattering must that have been for a Hebrew people who grew up believing, rightly so, that the presence of God was on the other side of that veil. Something that was different and other and we're fearful of it and we're separated from it. How earth shattering would it have been for that veil to tear as the Son of God dies on a cross. What I want us to see is that Jesus' death on the cross was the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. Jesus' death on the cross, our God sending His Son to die for us, who lived a perfect life, who died a perfect death on the cross as our eternal sacrifice, is the final atonement. They needed this atonement every year. They needed the high priest to go through it all every year. They needed all the pomp and circumstance and pageantry and majesty and mystery every year to make sure that they were right with God. And then Jesus dies on the cross outside the city as a final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. And what I want us to see here is, I said that for all of history up to the point of the death of Christ that the focus of Israel had been towards the temple. Did you know that even all the synagogues built in Israel are built so that they are facing Jerusalem, facing the temple? And that all the synagogues throughout the world and whatever other nation that exists, they are built facing Israel, facing Jerusalem, facing the temple. All of the Hebrew world, their focus is on what happens at the temple. But at the death of Jesus, at the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur, there is a seismic shift in focus. There is a seismic shift in the focus of God's people because the focus of God's people no longer needs to be on the temple and what happens there. There's actually several shifts in focus and I want to walk us through them very quickly. Maybe the most significant one is there is a shift in focus from the temple to the cross. All of Israel, all of God's people, all of those who would declare faith and believe in God the Father are to shift their focus from what happens at the temple to what happens on the cross. And the cross becomes our focus. That's why we don't place any priority on the temple. That's why we don't have to go there because of what happened on the cross. That's why our church doesn't face Israel. It faces the parking lot. Because the focus is on the cross. So we shift our focus, God's people, from the temple to the cross. We shift our focus from an annual sacrifice to an eternal sacrifice. The book of Hebrews tells us that in this ceremony, in Yom Kippur, that all of the sacrifices are shadows that are cast by Jesus on history. That the bull represents Jesus and the goats represent Jesus. And particularly the scapegoat that was led outside the city into the wilderness to die for the sins of the people. Jesus, thousands of years later, was led outside the city on a hillside in the wilderness to be crucified for all the sins of the people. He is the scapegoat. He is the goat that is for the Lord. He is the bull. Jesus is the perfect sacrifice. And so our focus shifts from annual temporary sacrifices to eternal ones, we're told in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews also tells us that Jesus is now our high priest. And so we switch our focus from a human priest to a holy one. We had a human priest who was fallible, who had ego to deal with, who had all the sins that we have to deal with, to a holy priest who is divine, who intercedes for us. And what I think is amazing about this priest is he's not other. He's not distant and far. He holds us and he weeps with us. And the Bible says he stands at the door and knocks and waits to come into our life. He dies for us. He serves us. He washes our feet. He walks amongst our poor. The high priest that we have doesn't sit and wait for us to come to him at a temple. Surrounded by all the other priests in the pomp and circumstance, he comes to us and he beckons that we come to him. And he offers us an intimate relationship. Not only that, but he advocates to the Father on our behalf. No longer is there this wall of separation between us and God, where the only way to approach the presence of God is to go to the priests, his intermediaries, other people who are our peers. You guys get to bypass me entirely and go right to God, which is good for you because I've got my own issues to deal with. We go right to Jesus and he advocates to the Father on behalf of us. So our focus shifts from a human priest to a holy one. Maybe most interesting to me is our focus shifts from covering to cleansing. Do you realize that in the Old Testament, all the language used to talk about us no longer being guilty of our sin is covering language, that the blood of the sacrifice covers over our sin. It makes us outwardly appear righteous as God looks at us. Even as we go back to the very first sin, the sin in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. What is God's response to that sin? What does he do? He takes animal skins and he fashions them and he covers over their shame. He doesn't cleanse them. He covers it. But in the New Testament, there's a shift in language. He cleanses. He removes it from us. Because when it's just covered, it's still there. We're still sinful. If you get up on a Saturday and you go out and you work all day and you sweat in the yard and you're gross and you come in and you take off your yard clothes and you don't shower and you put on your nice going out clothes, you'll look nice, but you stink. When our sin is covered over, we are acceptable to God, but we are still sinful. And the miracle of Jesus on the cross is that he cleanses us. This is what Hebrews says. This is why the author writes this. Chapters 9 and 10 of Hebrews are really a statement on Yom Kippur. And what they're saying, what the author is saying is that whole deal was a big shadow cast by Jesus on history. It was a road sign pointing to our need for Christ. And what Hebrews 9 and 10 tells us is that Jesus is the sacrifice. He is the high priest. He is, like I said earlier, the final atonement and the perfection of Yom The Bible tells us that he removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. We are clean and invited to walk with the Lord. And finally, and I love this one, our focus shifts from separate to intimate. Again, take yourself back to the place where you were the Hebrew person and you're watching all of this take place and you see the very holy priest, very pompous and pious, and I'm sure he was a righteous man, but he must have felt just very separate and other. You could never even approach him. And then he would walk into a holy place and then a holy of holies and you're three layers removed from the presence of God. And it's only once a year that you go into God's presence. And it's a fearful thing and an awe-inspiring thing. And then in an instant, the veil tears. And when that veil is torn, the separation that was felt between the people and God goes away. And the very presence of God rushes out of the Holy of Holies and into the lives of those of us who would believe. And Jesus becomes our high priest who begs for intimacy with us, who wants to know you. This presence of God that feels different and other and fearful and unapproachable, now we're told he knows the very numbers of hairs on our head. We're told that he weeps with us. We're told that he touches us when we are sick. And I don't think we have an adequate appreciation for what it must have felt like to feel so removed from God and his people to immediately transition into this intimacy that we're invited in so that this God that we would die if we went into his presence undeservedly because Jesus' blood now cleanses us. Romans tells us that we call that same God Abba, Father, Daddy, or Papa. The kind of intimacy that we are invited into. And so as I looked at Yom Kippur and just kind of reflected on what it means, it became very clear to me that what Yom Kippur really is, what we're really celebrating, what God is really doing here, Yom Kippur is God's ruthless and relentless effort to remove all the barriers that exist between He and us. You see? In the Old Testament world, there was priests that existed between us and God. There was sins that existed between us and God. There was sins of omission that we didn't even know about that existed between us and God. And Yom Kippur is when he gets everybody together and he says, look, look, everyone, I am putting things in place so that there is nothing between me and my people. I'm putting things in place so that you know that I want to be with you, so there is nothing that can separate us. There are no barriers between us now. And then when he sends Jesus, who is the perfection of Yom Kippur, he removes all of the barriers and his presence rushes into the lives of those who would believe. And Yom Kippur is God's relentless and ruthless effort to remove all barriers between you and him. He wants nothing to exist between you. And knowing that we are impotent to remove those barriers ourselves, he installed a celebration once a year to tell us, hey, there's nothing between me and you. There are no barriers. There's nothing keeping you from my presence. You are welcome here. And then by sending his son the perfection of Yom Kippur, he says eternally once and for all, you are invited into my presence, so much so that I am preparing a place for you in my very presence for all eternity. And as I thought about the spirit of Yom Kippur and this God who ruthlessly removes every barrier between he and I, what I realized is I am impotent to remove the barriers that are placed between me and God, but I am very capable of putting them there. And as I reflected on myself, it occurs to me that any barriers that exist between me and God are ones that I put there. They're man-made. I built them myself. Sometimes with doubt, because I walked through that. Often with faithlessness and inconsistency. The feelings of guilt that he's ridden me of that I still cling to. Because I can't understand how he could still love me. Oftentimes it's my sin that puts a layer, puts another veil between me and God. And then I got to thinking about you as your pastor and would submit to you. If you feel like there are barriers between you and God, things preventing you from being as close with him as you would like and he would like? I think it's very likely we put those there ourselves. I think based on the heart of God, I see in Yom Kippur that any barriers that exist between us and God are ones that we built. Because he removes all the ones he can. So maybe we have doubt. But we haven't asked God to remove that. So here's what I want to do. In a few minutes, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, the band is going to be playing through a song. And I want to invite you while they play to just stay in your seat and be quiet and pray and reflect. And invite you to pray a prayer for yourself that I've been praying this week. And ask God, are there any barriers between you and I? Ask for the faith and the courage to see those. And then if he's gracious enough to point them out to you, maybe you know them right now, maybe they're blaring in the back of your mind, then pray that God would give you the courage to take the steps of faith to remove them. And so, as we pray together, I want you to have this opportunity to ask God, God, are there any barriers between me and you? Have I hung any veils in my life that need to be torn down? And give him permission to do that. Give him permission to bring down those barriers. Maybe you came today and you don't know Jesus. Maybe you wouldn't call yourself a believer. And so the barrier between you and God is faith. If you're here today and you want to become a believer, you want to accept this atonement, you want to be made right with your creator, that human desire to repent and be made right resonates with you. Then maybe today is the day that you become a child of God. To be a Christian, all you do is admit that I've sinned. I've acted in ways that have displeased my creator. And my sin has placed a barrier between God and I. And because of that, I need the death of Jesus on the cross to atone for me. It's not just cover over my sins, but cleanse them. You pray and you tell that to God. And then you say, from this point forward, I'm no longer the Lord of my life. I'm no longer the decision maker in my life. God is. And I'll do my best to do what he says. Many of us in here have been Christians for a long time, but over the years, we've allowed barriers to develop between us and God, and we don't have the intimacy with him that we want. Take a few minutes and have the courage to allow God to point those out, and have the faith to ask Him to remove those, whether they be doubt, bitterness, or sin, or habits. And on the day that the church looks at Yom Kippur, God's visible effort to remove barriers between he and I and restore the intimacy that we both long for. Take a minute and approach God for that intimacy as well. I'm gonna pray and then you guys sit and pray. And when Steve thinks it's the right time, we'll all stand and we'll finish singing together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are floored and humbled that you have so intentionally removed all the barriers between us and you. God, we thank you for the day of atonement for Yom Kippur and all that it represents, for all the symbolism there. I ask that we would be touched by it, that we would be moved by it. God, I ask that for those of us who came in this morning with a veil that we hung ourselves, with a barrier that we built ourselves between you and us, God, give us the faith to see it and the courage to ask you to remove it. It's in your son's name we pray.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Somebody's near those lights in the back. Can we hit them? Thanks, David. Both of them. There we go. I want to be able to see everybody, even Jim Adams in the back. Welcome to Grace. It's good to have you here. I'm so excited to be kicking off the fall. I really, as a pastor and just as a person who's no longer in school, hate the summertime. It is too hot. Nothing in my life calls for the temperature to be over 70 degrees. I really like football, and I really like two services, and I really like when small groups start. So I'm so excited to be launching into this new series. As a clerical note, as we begin here today, those of you that got the bulletin when you came in and you are my note takers and you like to fill in the blanks, I have bad news for you. I'm not going to use those today, okay? I'm going to use them kind of. There's going to be enough in the sermon that you can fill in the blanks if you really want to, but I went back to Alan running the computer and I said, we're just going to put the verse on the screen when I get to it. Other than that, don't worry about the notes because they're just going to mess me up this morning. Okay. So anyways, I just wanted you to know that. Don't get frustrated when you're like, I don't know what to write down. You're not gonna. It's going to be a big fun mystery. I want to take you to our staff meetings. We have staff meetings now every Tuesday, every Tuesday, full-time staff. So that's me and then Steve. Yeah, the one with the curly hair that comes up here sometimes. Steve, our worship pastor. Kyle, our excited student pastor. I'm a little worried that the stage is now too wide for him. It's got too much space up here. And then Aaron, our wonderful children's pastor. And then sometimes some of our part-time staff will join us for lunch and stick around for a meeting. So that's what we do every Tuesday. And so we go out to lunch and then we come back and we sit down in a room over there and we talk about whatever it is we need to talk about. And I don't know how your staff meetings go. I'm sure that you are all on staff or have been on staff in different places. You have meetings that everyone loves. And I don't know how well you guys stay focused, but I know for us, all of our meetings go at least 33% longer than they need to because all four of us are very prone to chasing rabbits. It can very easily go something like this. If you could please silence your cell phones, that would be super. I'm just messing around. I just always wanted to say that. We'll sit down in a meeting and we'll be like, okay, we got to plan the Hootenanny. Hootenanny's coming up. We got to plan it. Let's talk about it. What do we want to do here? And then I'll say like, what kind of food should we serve? And maybe Aaron will say, well, how about just hot dogs? Those are easy. Let's try hot dogs. And then Steve will go, oh, man, I was downtown, and I had the best hot dogs at Crazy 8's. They were so good. You guys have got to try this restaurant. And then Aaron will be like, yeah, Harris and I love that restaurant. That's the best. And then I'll hear about Harris, and I'll get excited and be like, hey, how's Harris doing? Is he doing okay? Has he been able to get out and golf lately? I know that dude likes golfing. And then Kyle will be like, yo, me and Harris just went frisbee golfing like yesterday. It was great. And I'll go, get out of here. Where did you go? And he'll say, we went to such and such park. And then Steve will go, Grayson loves that park. And then Aaron will say, I do too. And then I'll go, let's all get together and hang out at the park. What do we need to bring? Hot dogs? And then eventually somebody goes, hey, hey, hey, hootenanny. We've got to focus. And we go, oh, yeah, okay. And then we go. I mean, am I lying? That's totally how it goes. And we've got to stop. We get to wandering off. We get caught up in everything else, and then we have to refocus on what's important. And I bring that up because I think that that happens in life, right? I think that in life we all choose our priorities and our things that are important to us. If I were to ask any of you, what are the three most important things in your life, for most of the people in the room, even if you're lying because I'm the pastor, you would say, well, my faith and my family and then like job or friendships or whatever else comes next. We'd all say those things to one degree or another. But then as we get into life, sometimes that gets skewed a little bit because life just gets crazy. I was talking to somebody last week who said that they learned while all three of their daughters were in middle school, high school time, they got a new car, and they learned very quickly that the mom was putting 1,000 miles a week on her car just getting all the kids to all the different places that they needed to be. That's busy, man. That's hectic. We volunteer for stuff. We overextend. We fill our calendar so that we feel like we're doing something and we don't have any time in the margins. We got to go to meetings that we don't care about. A lot of us live our life out of a sense of ought. Someone asks us to do something and when we feel like since they asked me, I should say yes. And then we wake up in the morning resenting that thing that we have to do, but we go and we do it anyways because this is what good people do. And we just go on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that sometimes our years get away from us. And this is why holidays are great. Because holidays force us to slow down and focus on this thing that we've designated as important. Right? This is how Mother's Day works. We go through the year, and I don't know who gave it to us, Hallmark maybe, I can't back that up with paperwork, but we're grateful to them. We go through the year, and if we have a good mom, we take her for granted sometimes. We forget to tell her that she's awesome. We forget to thank her for all the things that she does. We forget to call her when we should. And we just kind of go through the year doing that. And then May comes and everybody goes, hey, hey, Mother's Day. All right. Say you're grateful. Oh, yes, thank you. And then we do the flowers and the hugs and we go eat at the restaurant with the bad service, right? That's what we do. It's the same for our anniversary. If you're married, you go through the year. And often, I mean, it never happens in my marriage with Jim, but I've heard that other people take one another for granted and they just go through the year kind of forgetting and then your anniversary comes up and you go, oh, that's right. And for that day, you focus on what's important. And I think that this is what holidays do for us. I think holidays orient us on what really matters. Holidays remind us to focus on what's actually important. This is why I think God instilled some holidays in the calendar in the Old Testament. This is an aside. I couldn't move through the sermon without saying this because it's something I've been thinking about with the rhythm of life. We're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the six festivals or holidays or feasts that God installed into the calendar of his people that we see in Leviticus chapter 16. We're going to look at those six holidays and figure out what they mean for us and what we're celebrating now as we remember them. And I've loved diving into them. I've learned more, more quickly than I have in a long time because this represented a big gap in my biblical knowledge. And so one of our great partners gave me a stack of books that I've just been reading through for every holiday. It's been so enriching. But one of the things I've been thinking about is if holidays serve to reorient us on what's important, to take our focus off all the stuff and focus us in on what really matters. And this is the rhythm that God has installed so that every now and again, at a certain rhythm over the course of the year, before we get too far off the mark, God goes, hey, and he focuses us. Then isn't this what happens on Sundays? As he installed the rhythm of church, we go through our weeks, and before we can get too far away, God brings us back into church and focuses us on him and says, hey, don't forget about me, I'm important. And isn't that what's great about the rhythm of waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer? I've said a bunch of times that you can develop no more important habit in your life than to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. And if nothing else happens, if this sermon this morning is a dud and you leave here, you're like, I didn't get anything out of that. I wouldn't blame you. If you get up and you read the Bible in that particular week, you kind of go, gosh, I just didn't get anything out of this. I just didn't see anything today. Isn't it good that if nothing else happened, there's this rhythm in your life of bringing your focus back to God every day through prayer and through scripture reading and every week through church and then every so often through the holidays that he instills. I think there's something to a rhythm of life that reorients us on what's important. But we're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the festivals that God installed in the Hebrew calendar. We're going to do this with a little bit of an awareness of why God did this and when he started these in history. So just so we're all on the same page, the Hebrew nation really looks at the people of Israel, God's chosen people, they really look back at Abraham as their founding father, as their forefather. For Christianity, he's kind of the forefather or the founding father of the faith. For the unindoctrinated, he would be like our George Washington, okay? Like he was the guy. And so way back in Genesis 12, God made Abram, at the time he wasn't yet Abraham, some promises. Three promises of land of people and of blessing. I'm going to give you the land that we know as modern day Israel. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. That's going to be the Hebrew people, the Jewish people. There's going to be a bunch of them. And then one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth, is the promise. So in Genesis 12, God makes these promises to Abraham, and through those promises, he becomes the forefather, the founding father of the Jewish faith and of our faith, if you're a believer. Then from him, he had some sons, and a couple generations later, there's Joseph. Joseph is a guy who ends up down in Egypt. All of Abraham's family moved down to live with Joseph. The Bible fast forwards 400 years between the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus, the first and second books of the Bible. And then we have Moses sitting there in Egypt. They are a people who are enslaved by Egypt and God tasks Moses in Exodus 3 and 4, the burning bush, with leading his people out of slavery. So Moses leads the people out of slavery. They're in the desert. They're wandering around, and it's this fascinating time. It's fascinating biblically, but just historically, if you like to think about things like this. Here's this nation of people, maybe about 500,000 strong, between three and 500,000 strong, that are living as nomads in the desert. And they have to now figure out life. They have to figure out laws. They have to figure out a religion. They have to figure out a civil structure. And so Moses installs a government and God gives them laws. This is the Ten Commandments that he carries down from the mountain. They start meeting. They set up a tabernacle, and they have a whole group of people called the Levites, or the priests, who are in charge of setting up the tabernacle and performing all the ceremonies necessary at the tabernacle to relate to the God that's meeting them. They start to form this little society, this little civilization. And as part of the civilization, God says, I want you to have six holidays that you observe every year. And so for the next six weeks, we're going to look at those six holidays. Because what these holidays do is they teach us and they show us that our God is a God of remembrance and he's a God of celebration. Our God is a God of remembrance and he is a God of celebration. He wants us at each of these holidays to remember something that he's done, to look back at something that he's done. He wants us to celebrate something that he's done. And I kind of like pointing that part of God's character out to people. I think sometimes we get the idea that church needs to be somber and sober and serious and that I should be wearing a suit and that we should put on our best for God and that it needs to be just high church of the utmost all the time, when really God designed fun. He initiated fun. He gave you the ability to smile. He likes laughter. He likes hearing your laughter. He likes watching us laugh together and enjoy one another, which is why in a couple of weeks when we have the Hootenanny, there's going to be a bunch of silly stuff and a bunch of funny stuff around that. We're going to have competitions in the service, and if you win one, you're going to get a fanny pack, and it's going to be the Hootenanny fanny. And you get to wear it to the Hootenanny so that everybody sees how awesome you are for the rest of the day. You're going to be the king or the queen of the hootenanny. It's going to be great. And we'll laugh and we'll giggle and we'll share stories and we'll talk about fantasy football. I'm going to win the league this year at the church. Worst to first, it's going to be an incredible story. And listen, God celebrates that. God ordains that. When we have the moments in here where we cry and we're brought low, those are holy moments. But when we have the moments where we celebrate and we're brought high, those are holy moments too because God initiated those. He is a God of remembrance and of celebration and we'll see these in the festivals. So this week we want to look at the first festival that God orders in Leviticus chapter 16. It's called the Feast of Trumpets, and it's initiated by the sounding of a trumpet, which is why we had Brandon come up and play the shofar at the beginning of the service. If you didn't get to see that because maybe you rolled in a little bit late, then you have to stay for the beginning of the next service. It's just a must. So he sounded the trumpet, and it initiated the service, and that's what they would do for the beginning of the next service. It's just, it's a must. So he sounded the trumpet and it initiated the service. And that's what they would do for the Feast of Trumpets is they would sound it and it would initiate and bring in the Jewish New Year is what it was a celebration of. Oddly enough, I don't know how it works out. Okay, I don't ask questions like this. Their New Year began in the seventh month of the year. It was a month called Tishri. It mirrored a large portion of September and the beginning of October. So according to the calendar, we're observing it and looking at it at exactly the right time. And I think that that's really cool because to me, this first full service, I mean, we had Labor Day, we did Grace Serves, and it was amazing. But this first full service in September, to me, initiates the new year at Grace, the new ministry year. And that may sound funny to you, but for me, the rhythms of the year kind of work like this. In September, everything's back, right? Small groups are back, people are back from vacation, and the church is full again, and people are consistent again, and schedules are a little bit more regular. And so September is a big month at Grace. And so we push hard in September. We get ready for it, and we push, push, push, and we go, go, go. And really, we push really hard until Christmas. And Christmas is a big celebration. And then we kind of take a deep breath, and we get ready because January is a huge month too. We gear up for January, then we push really hard to Easter and then through Mother's Day and then after Mother's Day, schedules kind of start to get irregular again. People go on vacation and we know that. That's perfectly fine. And then over the summer, we kind of take a deep breath and then we gear up for September again. So that's kind of the rhythm of church. And so to me, this Feast of Trumpets mirrors our new year as well. Their new year mirrors our new year. And so I thought it was a good place to start as we dive into these feasts. And they sound the trumpet because it was symbolic of a lot of things in Hebrew culture. The trumpet, the shofar, the ram's horn. And we have a small one, but you guys have probably seen those big, long, loud ones that would just fill the area with sound. You've probably seen those. Trumpets meant something to a Jewish person. There's the ram's horn, but then there was also a silver trumpet that was sometimes sounded. And the silver trumpet was emblematic or symbolic of the redemption that God buys for us, the way that he makes a way for us to be right with him. You would sound a shofar as a battle cry. You would sound it so that people would prepare for an announcement. It was sounded around the walls of Jericho. To me, one of the coolest things, because there's a parallel in our New Testament, is it would be sounded to call the workers in from the harvest. So it's time for synagogue or it's time for temple. One of the priests would go out and he would sound the shofar and all the people working out in the field would hear the sound far off and know to come in because it was time to gather for assembly. And I think that's really cool because in Thessalonians and in Corinthians, we're told that one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to claim his children to himself. And if you're here and you're alive, then you are a worker in the field. You are active. You should be about actively bringing other people along with you to heaven. We all have work to do. That's one of the reasons why at Grace we have partners. We don't have members because we kind of believe that members tend to consume and that partners tend to contribute. And we believe that we are an entity that is about getting something done. So we're looking for people to partner with us. We are laborers in the field and workers for the harvest. And one day Jesus is going to return and he's going to call us home. And do you know what we're going to hear when he does that? The sound of a trumpet. I would bet everything I have that it's a shofar. What a beautiful parallel there is from the Old Testament to the New Testament promises. But I think the most profound symbolism that we see in the Feast of Trumpets is that the horn that was blown is symbolic of the ram that was caught in the thicket in Genesis 22. I told you that Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people and that God promised him that through you, you're going to have a ton of descendants. This was an issue because Abraham and his wife Sarah had not yet had any children. And so very late in life, I think Abraham was 99, if I remember my Bible correctly, they had a son named Isaac. And a few years into Isaac's life, God says, I'd like you to offer Isaac to me. And so Abraham, in obedience, gets up and takes the physical manifestation of the promises of God to this land, to this region of Moriah, up onto a hill, and he prepares to sacrifice him. And right at the moment where Abraham was going to strike down Isaac, he hears a voice that says, Abraham, Abraham, do not touch the boy. And there's a ram caught in the thicket. And the voice tells him, go and get the ram and let that die in Isaac's place. And so he goes and he gets it and he kills the ram and the ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. And it's the picture of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament that says and acknowledges that when we sin, and sin is any time we put our authority in our life over God's authority in our life. God says, I think that you should do this thing, and we go, no, I don't think so. I think I need to do this thing. That's sin. Whatever it is, it's when we elevate our judgment over God's in our life. And when we do that, we're separated from God. And that separation requires a death. And so God in his sovereignty in the Old Testament installed the sacrificial system so that essentially that ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. It's a picture of what's called a substitutionary atonement. And the really cool part of this is, this is what the Hebrew people would remember. So on the Feast of Trumpets, the trumpet is blown. It stands for all these things, but it most pointedly stands for the ram caught in the thicket in Genesis chapter 22. And so God told them, I want you to remember the promise that I made to Abraham, your forefather, and then remember how I kept it in the form of a ram. And now here you are today at the time in the land of Israel with the promises of God kept. And so what the Feast of Trumpets is really is a time for us to celebrate and remember the promises that God has kept to us and anticipate the promises that God has made to us. And so for a Christian, as we look at this festival, what we understand is that it points directly to Jesus. Do you know what the picture in Genesis 22, when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mount, do you know what that's a picture of? It's a picture of the crucifixion of Christ. Do you understand that all of Israel looked forward? They would celebrate the Feast of Trumpets every year. They would celebrate, next week we're going to look at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. They would look at that and how there was an atoning work done for them. And they would anticipate one day God's going to send a Messiah, his son, a messianic figure, and he will be the atonement for us all. He will be the ram for us all. And so it was a remembrance of the promise that God made to Abraham and a looking forward to the fulfillment of that promise. And as believers now in 2019, we look back and we see how God kept his promise to Abraham and his people by providing Jesus. That the sacrifice of Jesus to that point is the apex and the perfection of history. That all of history before Jesus looked forward to him coming. That the feast of trumpets was a yearly reminder that we anticipate the coming of Jesus. And then after that, we anticipate this perfect utopia that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth where his children live in peace, and that Jesus brings that about. And as New Testament believers, we see that the ram is really a picture of Jesus. And so the shofar that is sounded at the Feast of Trumpets to us is not a reminder of the ram. It's a thing that points to Jesus. And it's our job to remember on a day like this the promises that God made to us and kept so that we can gleefully anticipate the ones that he will keep. To me, the Feast of Trumpets is a big ceremony that's existed for thousands of years to point us to what I believe is the most hopeful passage in all of Scripture. If you were to talk to an ancient Hebrew person on the day of the Feast of Trumpets, they would tell you that one of the promises they were anticipating, the main promise they were anticipating was being in eternity with God one day. It was a utopia that God is going to create with a new heaven and a new earth. And if you were to talk to a Christian and say, what are you hoping in? We would tell you, ultimately, we are hoping in an eternity spent with God. And in Revelation chapter 21, one through four, we see this eternity kind of synopsized in four verses. John writes this. The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. If you are a believer, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then that is the hope that you cling to. When life doesn't make sense, when things get hard, when days are dark, that is the hope that we cling to. And we cling to that hope because Romans tells us that our hope will not be put to shame. We cling to that hope because we remember the other promises that God has kept. And if he's kept those promises, then I know he'll keep that promise. If he's been faithful to his church through Jesus and his death, then I know that he'll be faithful to his church through Jesus and his return. I know that I'll hear a trumpet again one day and I know that he's gonna call me into this promise in Revelation where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be made untrue. And all the things that you don't understand in this life will make sense. And so on the Feast of Trumpets, we reflect on the promises that God has kept. And we eagerly anticipate the ones that he will fulfill. We do that as a body of believers, as the church Big C Church. We do that as Grace, Little C Church. It would be right and good to reflect on where the church has been and how God has been faithful to us through the years and anticipate what we believe his promises are about our church as we move forward. And I think most importantly this morning, it's a time for us as individuals to reflect on the promises that God has kept in our life and be hopeful about the things that he will bring about in our life. Some of us are walking through hard times. For some of us, our anxiety level when we walked in here is up to here. We're struggling with depression. We're struggling with anxiety. We're struggling with sleepless nights. We're struggling with indecision or pain or hardship or grief. And if we're not struggling now, we know enough about life to know that those days come, that there's dark days too. And the Feast of Trumpets slows us down in the midst of our anxiety and focuses us and says, hey, do you remember all the things that God has done for you so far? He will see you through the next thing. And so I think it's right and good today for all of us, no matter where we are, no matter how we felt when we walked in the room, to remember the ways that God has come through for us in the past and know that he will come through for us in the future. I've shared with you guys before that the most difficult season of my life was our miscarriage. We struggled for a long time to get pregnant. We finally did, and then we learned that we had lost the baby. Those are the darkest months of my life. That shook my faith the most. That made me the most angry with God. Those days were the most difficult ones to pray. Those were hard. And I remember those moments. But now I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lily. And she's the fulfillment of things. She's the promise of God. She's my physical manifestation of his goodness that he will come through for me. And every now and again, I get to put her to bed. Most nights not because Jen is her favorite and she makes that very clear. She will tell me, Mommy is my favorite. I do not like you today. Okay. Same as our friends. But when I do get to put her to bed, we do the whole routine. And then finally we lay down and I'm laying there next to her and I sing her some songs. And the last song that I always sing is God is so good. God is so good. He's so good. He's so good to me. And she doesn't know it. She thinks I'm just singing. But she's the goodness. And the last stanza, there's a bunch of different ways you can sing that song, but the last stanza that I always sing when I put her to bed at night is God answers prayer. He answers prayer. He's so good to us. He answers prayer in your life too. You have the manifestations of God's goodness in your life too. And the Feast of Trumpets, even in the hardest of times, focuses us on the promises that God has kept for us in the past and gives us hope even when we don't see how, even when we can't piece together why, that God will fulfill those promises in the future, that he will see us through again. So today, that's what we celebrate. I'd like you to pray with me, and then we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, we love you. You are so good to us. You do answer prayer. God, you've seen us through so many seasons of our lives. You've come through in so many ways. Father, I pray specifically for those who came in with heavy hearts this morning for whatever reason. That you would focus them in on the things that you've done for them in the past so that they might have a little hope that the future is bright too. God, thank you for all the manifestations of the goodness in our life. I pray that we would take a minute today and realize those before we get out of here, before we run out and let life pick up again and forget what we should be focused on. I pray that we would each take just a minute and be grateful for your goodness in our life and the way that you've come through for us in the past. God, be with our brothers and sisters, our family members who are hurting. Pray that you would heal them. Pray that you would give them your peace. And we thank you that you are a God of celebration and that you are a God of remembrance, Lord. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, my name is Nate. They let me be the lead pastor here. If I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. We are finishing up our summer series called Obscure Heroes. I'm really excited about that. Yesterday, I got home from doing a wedding and then on my TV, there was football and it's less than 70 degrees when I woke up this morning and church is full and schedules are normal and small groups are starting, and all the things in life that I love are happening. Fall is the best, and summer is the worst, and this is the last Sunday of summer. Praise Jesus. And so next week, we do the Grace Serves, and then two services we launch into a series that I'm particularly excited about. It was not my idea. Somebody at the church gave it to me. One of our great partners suggested it. We're going to look at the six festivals that God installed into the Hebrew calendar in the Old Testament to see and remind ourselves that God is a God of remembering. He's a God of celebration. He's a God of commemoration. And all of that is worth learning about and celebrating. We're going to have a really fun, worshipful fall. We're going to have the Hootenanny, second annual one. Get your fanny to the Hootenanny. It's going to be the line there. That's going to be on September 22nd, along with some baptism. So I'm really, really excited about what we have coming up for you in the months of September and October. I think they're going to be huge months for Grace. But this morning, we want to finish up Obscure Heroes. I'm so grateful to Kyle for speaking for me last week, just so that you guys know that was planned for a long time because one of the things that I think is super important as a pastor is that you guys, as the church, get to hear other voices. And don't just hear me beating the same drum and playing the same notes every week. I would get tired of me. I know that you guys probably are already. So we want to have other voices and other perspectives speak into the spiritual life and have some spiritual authority here at Grace. So inviting other people up here to give the sermon is always going to be a part of who we are and part of how we do ministry, just so that doesn't surprise you guys as we move forward. But this week, I get to finish up our summer series. We've been looking at obscure heroes, characters in the Bible, people that we see in Scripture that we may not be familiar with, that we may not have heard of before, people who are a little bit less prominent, whose stories we may not know, and kind of asking the question, God, why are they in the Bible? Why do we hear this story? What can I learn from their story and their example that I can apply to my life? And I've enjoyed doing this series with you. This week, we're going to look at what I believe to be is a collection of the most obscure heroes in the Bible. We don't even get their names. They come at the end of Hebrews chapter 11, one of my favorite passages tucked into the most beautifully written book in the New Testament. If you're not familiar with Hebrews, it's a letter. It's towards the end of the Bible. There's this many pages in front of it and this many pages behind it. So it's towards the end, right? And it's a letter. We don't know who wrote it. We used to think that Paul wrote it, but increasingly we don't think that's the case. Basically, the thinking goes, it's too good for Paul to have written. So we don't think that he wrote it, but it's this incredibly beautifully written book. It has this incredibly high view of Christ as the Messiah, as the priest once and for all, as the sacrifice once and for all. And towards the end of it, in chapter 11, the author breaks into this discourse on faith. And he opens up the chapter and he defines faith and says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, it's the belief in things unseen. And then he chronicles all of these heroes, these heavy hitters of our faith, if you're a believer, of our shared faith, and shows us what they did by faith. And to a lot of folks in the church world and theological circles, Hebrews chapter 11 is actually known as the hall of faith. It chronicles a lot of the heavy hitters in the Old Testament. And he concludes it with this idea in Hebrews 12 that we're surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, and so we should run our race too. But as he goes through the book, he highlights the different people. He starts at the very beginning. He starts with Abel, and he says, by faith, Abel offered the sacrifice that God asked for. He gets to Abraham. He says, by faith, Abraham moved from a place called Ur to a place called Canaan because God told him to. Some of us know the story in Genesis 22. By faith, Abraham offered Isaac when he was asked to. By faith, Joseph served Potiphar and Pharaoh. By faith, Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea and brought down the Ten Commandments. By faith, Joshua crossed the Jordan River and conquered Jericho. And then one of our obscure heroes, by faith, Rahab protected the spies and helped the armies of Israel. And so he chronicles all these heroes that we've heard of before. And as he gets to the end of that, the author's kind of made his point. And he says, should I keep going? Should I keep listing off names? And then he offers us some of the judges. Do I need to tell you about the faith of Gideon and of Samson and of Jephthah and of Barak? Do I need to enumerate what they've done as well? And then he starts talking about the prophets and some of the things that they've suffered. And then at the end of the chapter, he doesn't even refer to groups of people anymore. He doesn't even refer to people with titles. He's no longer using names. He just starts telling brief snippets of dozens, if not hundreds of people's stories. And I've always been fascinated by this passage. I think I came across it sometime in high school when I was beginning to read the Bible on my own. And I've always thought about the end of Hebrews 11. Man, who are these people? Because look at what he says about them. It looks like it's on your bulletin. It looks like a typo, like they printed the wrong verses. How could he possibly be preaching from these? But this is what it says. We'll just kind of pick them up mid-thought in verse 35. They wandered around destitute. They gave up their life. They were martyrs. They gave up probably well-being, maybe careers, maybe families for the sake of what we would call the gospel, for the sake of their faith. By faith, they took these steps of obedience that led them down these paths. And what we see, and these are people whose stories are incredible. Probably, if you could know them detail by detail and line by line, on par with any of the heavy hitters that precede them in the chapter, on par with what Moses did or what Abraham did or what Joseph did or what David did, on par with any of that. But there's just too many to enumerate, too many to note. It makes me wonder about all the stories of the people in the Old Testament that we don't even get to hear. And I've always wondered about these stories, about these people. Who were they? Where were they from? How did they come into faith? What did it look like for them? And what we see at the end of this passage, the beginning of chapter 12, when the author wrote the book, there weren't any chapters there. We added those in later. And so it's a continual flow of thought. And he says, therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us, is how chapter 12 begins. And that's the point of the whole chapter 11, is to tell us by faith we should run our race too. But he says, because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and he only lists off like 10, 15 people by name, but then a stadium fills the rest of heaven. And it makes me realize, we know the heavy hitters, we know the all-stars of the faith, but do you realize that heaven is populated with obscure heroes? Heaven is populated with obscure heroes. If you're a believer in whatever heaven looks like when we get there one day, we're not going to just walk through seeing all the heroes of the Old Testament that we recognize. It's populated with these obscure heroes, with people that are mentioned in verses 35 through 38 that are wandering around whose names are not mentioned in this book, who just had the simple faith and simple obedience and whose stories we don't ever get to know. And whenever I see this passage or read through it, I always think, man, what are the stories out there of faith happening on other continents or at other times or in our inner cities or just down the road that we'll never hear and we'll never know on this side of eternity? What are all the stories waiting on us of these faithful people who are these obscure heroes that we find out about when we get to heaven? Because I've always wondered that, what are all the things going on in God's kingdom that I don't know about? I was fascinated and felt privileged to meet somebody that I consider an obscure hero that none of us have probably heard about before in Honduras. About 10 years ago, I was with a school. I was a chaplain at the school and they had a mission trip that they took to Honduras, and so I went with them. And I met a man there that I will never forget. To me, he's a hero. A guy named Israel Gonzalez. This is a picture of Israel and I. This is the last time I got to hang out with him. That's like eight years ago, okay? That's baby Nate. This is what you guys are doing to me. I don't know if you realize that. Every time you text me past 5 p.m., I get another gray hair. But that's me. That's me in Israel, and we're in a house on a mountainside somewhere in a village doing some of the ministry that I'm about to tell you about. But Israel is one of the greatest people I've ever met in my life. I go down to Honduras and I get introduced to Israel and I start to learn his story. He grew up in Nicaragua. He was trained as an engineer, but at some point or another, and he married a woman named Floripe, who was a practicing medical doctor. Very successful family, but at one point or another, God laid it on his heart that he needed to be a pastor. So he said, okay. So he started a church. And eventually the church got to be too much responsibility. So he had to quit his job and focus full time on the church. And one of the things that the church did early on, they were based in a city called Saguarapeque in the middle of Honduras. And Saguarapeque is just in central Honduras. It's surrounded by mountains, and in those mountains are different villages. And when I say villages, I'm not talking about like a quaint village term. I'm not trying to minimize what it really was. I'm not talking like Nightdale and Rollsville here. I'm talking they were villages, just hovels, houses that were built out of cinder blocks, some that were just poles in the ground with canvas wrapped around them. Just groups of people who had lived there for generations and probably still will. Honduras is one of the poorest countries in our hemisphere. It's one of the most dangerous countries, most politically volatile countries in our hemisphere. But what Israel would do to spread the gospel, to spread the good news of Jesus, is he would go into these villages that surrounded Swagwatapeki. And he would need to build goodwill because he would want to tell them about Jesus, but you can't just show up and start telling them about Jesus because these villages are Catholic. And I don't have any problem in the world with Catholicism or a Catholic background, but this was a version of Catholicism in Honduras that was incredibly legalistic. That was very much, you are saved based on what you do and how you behave. You earn your way into heaven. And I have a big problem with any time we tell anybody that they have to earn their way into heaven, because that's not the Bible. They didn't know the grace of Jesus that says, you can't earn your way into heaven anyways, man. Just accept Christ. They didn't know that. They had not heard the beauty of the gospel, and he wanted to present them with the beauty and the mystery and the good news of the gospel, but he had to earn a little good faith with the community members before he could do that. So he would go in and he would throw parties. He would take people from his church, and they would go and they would cook hot dogs for the kids and they would do face painting and they would have games and they would give away little gifts. And then some churches from the states would find out about it. Not too many, mind you. He's only associated with probably five or six churches stateside. And start sending teams down there with little gift bags to give to the kids at these parties. And then Israel would always be off in the corner. He would either be talking and playing with the children, or he'd be off in the corner talking with some of the people who were like the village elders. And then when he would go into homes, they're still cooking on wood-burning stoves. So in these very poor villages in the hillsides of Sugatapaki, Honduras, these people are cooking on wood-burning stoves, and because of that, lung disease was rampant. And he looked at that, and he went, it doesn't have to be this way. And with his engineering background, he designed, invented a stove that can be built in these homes that reduces smoke inhalation by 90%. And we know it reduces it by 90% because some of the teams carried the designs back to Duke and the University of Indiana and said, will you look at these and see if these are legit? And they are. 90% reduced smoke inhalation. Vastly increases the quality of life. So he goes to the village elders and he can build these for $100 a pop. He says, hey, I've got enough to build two stoves. Who would you like to have them? And they start with the oldest women and then work their way down. And so while the party's going on, him and a team are over here building a stove. And after building this goodwill and meeting their needs, the village elders come to him and they say, hey, we don't just want your church to have to come visit us. Can you send us a pastor to start a church and we'll rally around him? So Israel thought, okay. So he began to disciple young men in his church and train them to be pastors. And when a village would ask for a church, he would send these young men out to go be their pastors. Do you know that Israel has founded 14 churches out of his church from young men that he's risen up and sent out. He's installed hundreds of stoves. He's done this with virtually no support from the United States. He doesn't have a big moneymaker here. He just does it. They just figure it out. And he does it faithfully. Do you know that Floripe used to, when they would go into the villages, his wife, these people need medical care. So she would treat them. But there was never enough time in a day to treat everybody that they were going to see. So eventually, God made it possible for them to build a permanent medical facility, a clinic that people come to every day. Get dental care, get medical care, take your kids in to get shots. Minor surgeries happen there. And this is the life that they lead. And now here's the thing, and here's why I marvel at Israel. You might not know this because not all y'all are plugged into this or care, nor should you. But there's like a thing, and it might be gross, I don't really know where I'm at with it, to be honest with you, like Christian celebrity. Once you start a church, and that church grows, you get invited to conferences, you get to speak, you write a book, you do a podcast, and everybody starts to know who you are, and then you get more campuses, and then you do a video video projection and you teach at those campuses too. And now I'm a robot pastor everywhere, right? And bigger grows my kingdom. And I don't know, it would be so hard to protect your ego against what that does to you, but it happens in Christian circles. And these people who build churches, who have 14 churches and a medical clinic that their wife runs, we know about them. They're famous. They show up on preachers and sneakers on Instagram. Like we know about them. But not Israel. Because he's working away in Honduras. And he's one of these obscure heroes. That when we get to heaven, we're going to go. I want to meet the Israels. These people who are serving God in obscurity that most of the world will never, ever know about. I marvel at those stories. And you may be thinking, Nate, that's neat, man. Love 35 to 38. It's people at the end of the chapter. They populate heaven. That's wonderful. That's not gonna be me, man. Probably not gonna be so on and to for my faith. Praise God for that. I'm probably not gonna go to Honduras and like start a clinic. So I don't know what you want me to do here. How are these people, these heroes of the faith, these obscure heroes that did stuff and can't even be named, how is Israel, how are they like us? These people that populate heaven, how can we relate to them? And I was thinking about that this week. And as I was looking at it and working through it, one of the things I realized is, what do these heroes all have in common? They all took simple steps of obedience. What do all these people have in common? As you read through chapter 11 and you look at these heavy hitters of our faith, what do they have in common? The people at the end whose names we don't know, what do they have in common? When I tell you the story of Israel and the things that he's done with his life, what do they all have in common? They all took simple steps of obedience. Simple steps of faithful obedience. None of the people in chapter 11 woke up and said, I want to be great. I want to be a great Christian. We have this terrible thing that we do where we think that the better Christian I am, the more known I'll become for my Christianity. Like pastors are the apex of the faith or something. And that's gross. I don't have any marketable skills, so God placed me here, okay? Like it's not a big deal to be a pastor. We think that Christianity should be lived out publicly and that the better you are at it, the more people notice you. And that's just not true. It's just taking a simple step of faith. Abraham didn't wake up and say, God, I want to be great. I want to be written in your Bible and remembered for thousands of years. He wasn't thinking any of that. God said, I want you to move. And he said, okay. Yes, Lord. And he took that step. He said, I want you to offer me your son. Yes, Lord. And he took that step. He didn't have visions of grandeur. In fact, the one person in chapter 11 who did have visions of grandeur, Moses, he grew up in Pharaoh's house. He thought he was really going to be something. You know what God did to him? He sent him to the desert for 40 years until he got rid of those visions. He humbled him. And then out of a burning bush one day, he said, hey, you ready to take that step? And five times Moses said, no, I don't think so. You got the wrong guy. Until God said, Moses, take it. And he took the step of obedience. We've looked at Rahab. We know that she didn't think she was going to be great. She was a prostitute in Jericho. She didn't have high hopes for being a champion of the faith. She just took the step that God put in front of her. Are you going to protect these spies or not? All these people, all they did, and all Israel, if Israel could be with us here today, what he would tell you he did is just simply what God asked him to do. You understand that the kingdom of heaven is built by simple people taking simple steps of obedience. The kingdom of heaven is not built publicly. The Christian life is not lived out publicly. The Christian life is not lived out to applause and everyone noticing you and going, that's so great and you're so godly. That's not how it works. And I'm saying this because I think so many of us here have been living out a quiet and humble faith day in and day out, taking little steps of obedience, being loyal to your God and being loyal to your beliefs. And sometimes in those things we feel forgotten. Sometimes in those things we feel cast aside because people aren't looking at us and giving us credit for who we are and how we're obeying. And I want you to know that based on Hebrews chapter 11 and these people that are listed here, I think that God sees us. I think that God sees you and that the kingdom of heaven is built on your shoulders. The kingdom of heaven is built on the Stephen ministers who just get up and quietly go sit with people who are grieving and they don't say anything. They just listen and they show up. Those are wholly heroic moments. And you might think, man, being obedient doesn't make you heroic, but I would disagree. It might not make you heroic to everyone, but it makes you heroic to someone. I have some friends. They grew up, each of them separately, without great examples in the house of what it meant to have a good godly marriage. They didn't see examples from all of their parents about what it meant to be a wonderful parent. So when they grew up, they had layers of things that they acquired in those homes, and then they looked at each other and they said, let's put our messes together and make a bigger one. So they got married, not knowing how to do any of that because they never had a good example of it. So now they're flying blind trying to figure that out. And they weren't people of faith. I don't know how you navigate that. And then they said, you know what we should do? This is a mess. Let's have kids. Say it too. And then they're trying to figure out how to be parents to those kids. And somewhere along the way, Jesus gets a hold of them. And they started taking these little steps of obedience. They say, you know what we need to do for our family? We need to prioritize church. And even though they're busy and even though they're tired, even though weekends is the only time they have to rest, they prioritize church and so they show up. And even though they're busy and they're tired and they're coming in on two wheels, they prioritize small group. And even though there's a cost to it, they prioritize things that help them be better parents and help their kids be better kids. And I've watched them slowly develop into this household of faith. And I look at that and I go, man, that's heroic. To take those steps when you don't have to, because they're the right thing to do. When you're flying blind, but you're determined to figure it out. So you just take the next step of faith in front of you, and you do it quietly, and no one sees it, but you just do it because you want your kids to have something different than what you had. Listen, we might not ever know about that, this side of heaven, but they're heroes to those kids. My dad grew up without a dad, and he's not a perfect dad to me, but he's a good one. And I'll never know what it is to not have a dad who's not proud of me. You want to tell me that's not heroic? That simple step of faith that he took? The kingdom of heaven is built on people taking obscure steps of faith, taking obscure steps of obedience that we may never see on this side of eternity. It's built in there, holding the crying baby just a little bit longer so that mama can actually hear the sermon and participate in the worship this week. Or maybe just tune out and be sane for a minute. The kingdom of heaven is built by people that we have in this church. I think of Ginger Reith. Some of y'all are not Ginger Reith. I'm sorry, although she's lovely. Ginger Gentry. Just kidding. Ginger Reith is the worst. Let's put that on video. Ginger Gentry. She leads our prayer ministry. And you may have never met her or heard of her. But every week, if you put a prayer request on the card, it goes to staff and elders, but it also goes to Ms. Ginger. And Ms. Ginger lives alone now. And she sits in her house and she puts those things out and she prays for those. And she makes sure that you get a card and she makes sure that people know about it. I had somebody last week come up to me and they're like, man, that Ginger, like she works, man. I said, what do you mean? And he goes, I've been praying for something for months. And so finally I put it in. It hasn't worked out until finally I put it on the connection card so Ms. Ginger could pray for it. And it happened this week. I'm like, yeah, you don't mess around with Ginger, man. And nobody would ever know about that, about the hours that she spends in prayer. I'll tell you some other heroes we have around here. It's about time I publicly embarrassed them anyways. I don't know if y'all know Harris, Winston, or Howard Sauls. If you don't, you're not missing much. But they're married to our children's ministers. And I marvel at them, and I have since I got here. Because let me tell you something about them. Next time we all do something together, on the 22nd, we're going to have the hootenanny. It's going to be great. Look around. While everybody's having fun and talking and laughing, think of what's the cruddiest job that I could be doing right now? What's the thing that nobody here wants to be doing? You figure that out and then you look and one of them's gonna be doing it because they're servants. And we might not otherwise ever notice that or care. Let me tell you something. The kingdom of God is built on those steps of obedience. The Christian life is lived out by just day after day choosing to be obedient to God. Jesus tells us, if you love God, you'll obey me. He makes it as simple as every day taking the next step of obedience. We don't have to have a plan. We don't have to know what the goal is. We don't have to see the whole story arc. All we have to know is, what's my next step of obedience? And so as we finish up the series and we reflect on the heroes that we've learned from for the past eight weeks, I want to put that question in front of you. What's your next step of obedience? What simple heroic act has God placed in front of you? And don't discredit it and don't say, oh, that's not heroic or oh, that's not a big deal. Yes, it is. Whatever that step is, it's a big deal. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe it's to make a public profession of a private decision. Maybe God has impressed that upon you, and next month we're going to have a service. If that's you, write that on your card or reach out to me somehow. Let's talk about that. Maybe your next step is to get rid of that thing in your life that doesn't need to be there. To shed some light on some dark places and take that step. Don't tell me that's not heroic. That's hard. Maybe your next step is to have the conversation. It's to volunteer for the thing. Maybe your next step is getting home and putting down your phone and engaging with family. Maybe it's finally developing the discipline of spending time in God's word and time in prayer every day. Some of you know what your next step is, and you're thinking right now, dang it, I didn't want to come today. Sorry, sucker. Now you're here. I don't know what your next step is, but I know that the kingdom of God is built by you taking that simple step that no one may ever see but him. And that heaven is populated with obscure heroes like we have here at Grace, like you probably are. So I'm just hoping that we can commit as we move into the fall, that we can commit to taking those next steps together. Let's pray. Father, we sure do love you. Really and truly, God, thank you for making faith so simple. Sometimes we make it complicated. Sometimes we make it harder than it has to be. And God, a lot of times we want to know more than we need to. Give us the faith to take the next step. God, if there's someone here and they don't know you today, would they would just, I pray that they would just prioritize finding out. We all have roadblocks. We all have things, God. Maybe their next step is simply digging into those and figuring out what's there and why they're hesitant. Give them the courage to do that. Give us all, Father, the strength and the courage to take the next step. Give us the vision to see it. May we be like the people that were written about in Hebrews. May we be like the people that we'll find out about in heaven. I pray that you would fill grace with these obscure heroes of the faith who quietly build your kingdom for your glory. And it's in your son's name we pray. Amen.