Sermons tagged with Hope

Good morning. How you doing? A couple of things. My name's Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I love seeing everybody here for the second service. There's a lot of space at the first service, so feel free. And in case you're wondering, does God smile more when you come to the early service? He does. He's smiling a little bit now, but man, the grin on his face when you get up that much earlier is really something special. The Lord moves in that first service. The other thing I want to mention is this. I'm super excited about this. It may not be the case. You never know what's going to happen for the rest of the tournament. But for now, Jen, my wife, is beating all of us in the churchwide bracket challenge, which is a pretty big deal. If you know Scott Hunter, he's in dead last, and that's fun too. All right, we're in the eighth part of our series in John, and I really enjoy getting to move through the book of John with you. This morning, we arrive at what I think is a critical seminal teaching of Jesus in this book. And to help us think about it, I want us to go back to that first day of a class that we took in college, okay? If you didn't have the experience of doing that or you haven't had it yet, you're not missing much. It's overrated. But for those that had to do it, there's this common experience on the first day of class in college. And I'm talking about back before the internet was a thing, when us old people went to college. It's not often that I get to lump myself in with the old people, but this week I do. This was before we had the Internet. You didn't know what to expect in your class, right? And so you'd go on that first day. You're taking whatever it is you're taking, Philosophy 101 or English 101 or whatever it is, and you don't know what to expect. It's the great unknown. What's this professor going to be like? What are my assignments going to be? How do I achieve success in this class? We all bring a different set of goals to the class. I mean, some of y'all are nerds, and you wanted to get an A, and so you thought, like, what am I going to have to do? And I don't mean that really. I wish I would have cared more about getting good grades. But some of you guys really cared about your grades, and so you're thinking, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? I just want to know the work that I'm going to have to do. For me, my academic goals were literally just, what do I have to do so that my parents aren't furious at me at the end of the semester? They were helping out with college, so what do I have to do to keep the gravy train rolling? That's the amount of effort I'd like to give to right? And there are some of you, you got there and you flipped to the back and you look at the assignments and you went, I will never step foot in this class again, right? Because there's too much work there. That's what we did. You get to class. For those that don't have the experience, you get to class. The professor gives you the syllabus. You grab it. And then at the top of the syllabus, you always read this thing. It says that the successful student will be proficient in yada, yada, yada, right? Or the successful student will be proficient in these things. And so you're like, okay, well, this is the goal of the class. This is what it looks like to be successful in this class. Now I know this, but then what are you really interested in? You're really interested in the assignments. What am I going to have to do to achieve the success? And then in the syllabus, you'll remember he or she would have like the philosophy of the class and their philosophy of teaching and all the goals and all the different things. You went, yeah, I don't care about that. You flip to the back of it, and that's where they had the assignment load. And you wanted to see how many tests, how long is the paper going to have to be, right? What am I going to have to do in this class to pass? And that's when some of us went, I don't think I'm coming back to this place because it was just too much work. But we've had that experience. And to me, regardless of what kind of student you were, whether you're a straight A student or you're a slacker like me, you would go to that class with a set of goals. I want to accomplish this in the class. And then you would love the syllabus because that would bring, that would make the unknown known. It would tell you, this is what's expected of me here. This is how they're defining success, and these are the things that I have to do to be successful. And we like this mindset. We have this mindset about a lot of the things that we do. We all, all of us, if we're old enough, have jobs, or we've had a job before. You get to that job, and what do they do? They give you a job description, and at the top of the job description, it says, this is what this position is for. This position will do this and this and this and this. And then there's objectives underneath that. This is how those things are going to be accomplished. This employee will do this thing and this thing and this thing. We like having a very clearly defined version of success, and we like having clear steps to achieve that success, don't we? And we often apply this to our faith. In every Bible study that I've ever been in, I've been in church my whole life. I've been doing ministry for about 20, I went pro in my Christianity about 20 years ago. And in every Bible study that I've ever been in, and a lot of conversations with with my friends and a lot of different small groups, this idea gets presented. And it happened again a couple of weeks ago in the young person small group that my wife and I are leading now. One of the girls said, wouldn't it be nice if there was like a to-do list for our faith? If there were just some clearly defined parameters in the Bible so that we know what to do and when to do it. Wouldn't it be nice if we kind of had a syllabus or a job description for our faith? And this is a commonly expressed desire because the Bible can be very confusing and it can be very intimidating and there's a lot in there to learn. And there are some churches, and then Christianity in and of itself, there's some churches that think this way about an issue, this issue is terrible and it's wrong and you should never do it. And then there's churches over here who are like, no, that's actually pretty okay and we encourage it and we think that you should do it. And there's churches all over the spectrum and there's different ways to interpret the scripture. There's tons of different denominations. And sometimes it's really difficult to figure out, man, what is it that I'm supposed to do? And if you're a new believer or a non-believer, I think a very natural thing to think is, I'm considering this faith, what is it going to require of me? Or, I'm a Christian now, I'd like to be a good one, what does that mean? Is there a to-do list? Is there just something simple where I can know what to do? How is success defined? And how do I achieve that success? Which is why I think John 15 is such a great passage, because I think that Jesus gives us our course syllabus for Christianity. So a little bit different this morning is your notes on the back of the bulletin that you received, you have notes on the back of that. The back of that is actually a course syllabus for Christianity 101. So if you don't have the notes, I'd like you to slip up your hand and the ushers will try to get one to you. Is there anybody that needs one? Some of the ushers have some and they're going to go around making sure folks have those. This is Christianity 101, okay? This is your course syllabus for this morning. You'll notice on it, I am your professor, Professor Rector. I do that. I'm not going to get the chance to do that probably ever again in my life, except for when I pretend at church. So I'm your professor this morning. Class is in session. We're going to take a lot more notes than we normally do. I would encourage you to get out a pen. There's one more, a couple more over here. Just send the whole pile down. I encourage you to get out a pen and write along with me, okay? If you don't have any now, we're out. So you're just going to have to go old school and cheat with your neighbor, okay? You have to look on to theirs. I believe, one more, she's auctioning it off. She's auctioning it off. I believe that Jesus gives us our core syllabus for Christianity in John chapter 15. I'm going to read the first five verses, and then we're going to talk about why I think this is true. If you have a Bible, you can open to it. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But this is what Jesus says. He says, That's important. We're going to come back to that later. Verse 5, this is the clincher. All right, so this week we arrive at one of these great I am statements that Jesus makes. In the other Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have the parables. You're probably familiar with them. They're made-up stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. And in John, we don't have any of those parables. What we see is Jesus making these I am statements. I'm the bread of life. I'm the living water. I'm the way, the truth, and the life. I am the good shepherd. And now this week, he says, I am the vine, and you are the branches. And this is said to an agrarian society that understood what it was to grow grapes and try to make wine from these grapes. It was part of that culture. They were very familiar with this terminology, and that's what he's talking about. I am the vine, you are the branches, you're going to grow grapes. Connect to me and you will bear much fruit. And so in our terminology and way of thinking of it, it makes more sense to say that I am the tree trunk and you are the branches. But what he's saying is, I'm the source of life, I'm the source of joy, and you are attached to me. And when you abide in me, when you are attached to me and you remain attached to me, you will bear much fruit. All right, that's what he's saying in this verse. And so in verse 5, when he says, I am the vine, you are the branches, abide in me, and I in you, and you will bear much fruit, that really is a packed statement. There's a lot of questions that come out of that statement. For me, the first thing that I see is what does it mean to bear fruit, and why is he talking about that? And I think that that helps set us up for the goal of the course. So at the top of the syllabus you have the student will be proficient in these things. So if we're thinking about Christianity as a course, we're trying to figure out what it is we need to do, then what we need to know is that the course goal is that the successful student or Christian will show proficiency in bearing fruit. Okay, if you're a believer and you want to know if you're successful, if you're thinking about becoming a Christian and you want to know what's going to be expected of me. If you're a new believer and you want to go, okay, well now what do I have to do? The successful student or Christian, the person who is successful in Christianity will be proficient in bearing fruit. And I say that because this seems to be the goal of the passage. Jesus says, abide in me, get attached to me, remain attached to me, and you will bear fruit. Do this, follow my commandments, obey me, love me. Why? So that you can bear fruit. It seems to be that the point of the Christian life, the reason that Jesus leaves us here rather than taking us to heaven immediately upon salvation is so that we can bear fruit. So if you want to know what's the whole point of the Christian life, why are we here? Christianity 101, the successful student will show proficiency in bearing fruit. That's the point. So then you have to ask, okay, what does it mean to bear fruit? And those of you who are church people, you've heard this before, you know this passage. And if I were to ask you, hey, it says that if I'm attached, if I abide, that I will bear fruit. What does it mean to bear fruit? You would probably go, well, it means that you should, well, now hang on. Because it gets a little complicated, doesn't it? What does it mean? Some people would say that it means that we should bear the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We should become more like God in character and develop those traits in our life. To bear fruit means to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Other people would say, well, it means to bear the fruit of ministry. It means that in your life, you're leading people to Jesus, you're discipling people, bringing them closer to Jesus, that there is actually evidence of ministry and people what I think Jesus would say is that it's both. And I think that he says this in what we talked about last week in John chapter 13. If you weren't here last week, in John chapter 13, Jesus tells the disciples, I'm giving you a new commandment that you should love one another as I have loved you. That's the new commandment. That's what we're supposed to do. And then the question becomes, how do I do that? So last week is kind of, what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to love one another as Jesus loved us. And this week is, how do we do that? Well, we do that by abiding. And so what it means to bear fruit, I think, is this. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, not as we love ourselves, a higher standard, Jesus' love. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, it is impossible to do that without bearing the fruit of the Spirit in our life, right? How are you going to love other people as Jesus has loved you if we're not bearing love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control? How are we going to be able to do that if we're not becoming more like God in character? We can't. So part of it is to bear the fruit of the Spirit. But then the results of this love, if we love other people as Jesus loved them, when Jesus loved these people, what did they do? They drew more closely to him. And so when we love others as Jesus loved us, it's going to have this natural effect of drawing them into the Father, of drawing them towards Jesus. And so I think it's safe to define for the purposes of the course, again, in our syllabus, that bearing fruit will be defined as loving others towards Jesus. When we're looking at this and it says that we should bear much fruit, what does it mean to bear fruit? It means that we are proficient in loving others towards Jesus. Loving them in such a way that when they look at our impact in their life, they go, I am closer to Jesus because of them. To bear fruit simply is to look at the wake of our life and the people that we know in our life and have people who would point to us and say, I love Jesus more because of the way that they love me. I love Jesus more. I feel closer to Jesus because of their influence in my life. That is fruit. It's both a character, that has both a character aspect and a ministry aspect. But that's what it means to bear fruit, is to love people towards Jesus. So that's the goal for the course, right? That's what success looks like. The successful student will be proficient in bearing fruit or loving people towards Jesus. So now, how do we do that? And that's what this passage answers. And it gives us, I think, our assignments. And so the coursework, the objective, the first objective, our first assignment, the first thing we have to do is abide in Christ. Plain and simple. Abide in Christ. And if you're a church person, you've heard this before. You know this passage. This is a famous passage. You know how this goes. But I think it works pretty similarly. If I say, what does it mean to abide in Christ? I think sometimes we have a hard time explaining that or understanding that. And so I really wanted to dive into it this week so I could do a good job hopefully explaining it to you. And one of the things that I learned that I thought was most helpful was this idea. See, Jesus is talking to the disciples at the end of his life. We are in the middle of Passion Week in the chronology of the life of Christ. In a couple of days, he's going to be arrested and crucified and then raised from the dead, and we celebrate Easter, right, in the story of Jesus. So he's very near the end of his life. He's been moving through life with the disciples for three years now. He's been doing ministry with them. He's been ministering to them. He's been discipling them. He's been training them. He's been teaching them. He's been loving on them. He's been developing them. And so over these three years, there's this intimate relationship that has formed between them. And to me, it's very interesting that here at the end of his life, he calls the disciples to abide. Abide in me are his instructions to the disciples. But that's not what he said when he met the disciples. When he met the disciples and he called them to himself, what did he tell them to do? Follow me, right? So three years ago, it was follow me. Three years later, after spending all this time together, it's abide. And I love that there's a relational maturation to the calling of Jesus in this passage, where at the beginning he says, I want you to follow me. And when you follow someone, there's a distance there. I'm watching what you're doing and I'm trying to do those things. But when you abide, there's this relational aspect to it of knowing someone intimately, knowing them well. Let your heart beat with mine. Let what brings me joy bring you joy. Let what breaks my heart break your heart. Let my goals be your goals. There is this relational dynamic to abiding. The word there in the text literally means to get connected and remain connected like a branch is to a tree. So over these three years with Jesus, we see this relational component where we're supposed to know him intimately. I think if we want to make it our goal to abide in Christ, one of the very first things we have to do is find time in our day, every day, to spend time in word and spend time in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, if we want to know him intimately, if we want to pursue him, what do we need to do? We need to get up every day, spend time in God's word and spend time in his presence through prayer. We have to do that. That's an integral part of our life. And this is actually this idea, abide, we are to abide in Christ, is where we get this idea of having a personal relationship with our Savior. You guys have heard that before. Even if you're not a believer, you're here because someone drug you here. First of all, I'm so glad that you're here, and I'll try to go quickly for you. But second of all, you understand, and you've probably heard this term before, that we should have a personal relationship with Jesus. And sometimes we talk about how this separates us from other religions, that we're actually invited into a relationship with our Savior and with our God. But it's a very natural question to go, okay, I'm invited into a relationship with Jesus, but how do I have a relationship with this person or this entity that I don't interact with the same way as I do everyone else? I can't see him. I can't touch him. I can't see the look in his eye. I can't hear the cadence of his voice. How do I get to know somebody that I can't see or feel or touch? How do I have this intimate relationship with what feels like at times a distant God? That's a very fair question to ask. And Jesus actually answers this. I was nervous about how to explain it. How do we abide in Christ? How do we have this personal relationship with him? How do we experience the connection that the disciples felt? And I was actually kind of nervous about explaining this to you until I got to read the passage and really study it. And what I found is that Jesus answers this question in verse 10. And so really this is the second part of, this is our second assignment, our second objective. We want to be successful in the class of Christianity. The first thing we do is we abide in Christ. The second thing we do is we abide by obeying. We abide by obeying. In verse 10, Jesus says this. He says, If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love. You want to know how to abide in Christ? Obey him. You want to bear fruit? You want to be a successful Christian? You want to do what you're supposed to do, what you were put on this earth to do? Then abide in Christ. You want to abide in Christ? Well, Jesus says, obey him. You want to abide in me? Obey me. That means all the things, right? That means that when Jesus says in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, that when someone hits us in the face that we need to turn the other cheek and not seek revenge, that we learn what that means and that we do that. That means that when someone asks us to go a mile and Jesus tells us to go an extra mile, we go an extra mile. When Jesus tells us that when someone asks for our fleece, we should give them our coat as well, we give them our coat. When Jesus tells us that we should be generous and that we should care for the poor, then we be generous and we care for the poor. When he tells us that, when he redefines and correctly defines the commandment on adultery, that it's not simply sleeping with another person's spouse, but it's looking at anyone with lust in your heart, then we define that as our definition of adultery. If we want to abide in Christ, then we walk in lockstep with his commands and we submit our life to his word. John 1 says that Jesus is the word of God, so we obey God's word, right? That's what we do. But here's the thing. Being obedient to the Bible, being obedient to Jesus's commandments, it's pretty challenging. It's pretty difficult. It takes a long time to get proficient at it. Some of us have a hard time with it all the time. And as I think about what it means to really obey God, I kind of think about it like I think about a golf swing. Back in 2013, I went to the Masters for the first time. Now, the Masters is a golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It's the greatest sporting event on the planet. If you don't agree with that, take it up with someone else. I'm not into frivolous conversations, okay? This is actually, I played golf a little bit when I was a kid. This is my Pawpaw Six Iron. He taught me how to play. I like to have pieces of him up here whenever I can. But I learned to play a little bit when I was a kid. But I left it to play other sports. I had ADD big time, I think. It was undiagnosed, but man, it was there. And so I liked to play soccer, and I walked away from golf a little bit. But in 2013, I went and I saw the Masters, and I thought, I've got to play this sport. This looks super fun. And so I grabbed a set of clubs, and I started going to the range as often as I could get there. A shameful amount of time. I neglected gym for golf. And so I started playing, right? And once you start playing golf, you start learning that the golf swing is pretty stinking complicated. It doesn't look complicated. You watch it on TV, it seems like a pretty simple thing. But man, if you've ever tried to hit that ball any distance, even just in the air, you know it is difficult, okay? And so I started learning to play golf and you start to learn, man, there's all these technical aspects to the golf swing. Now, some of y'all know the golf swing a lot better than I do. So please don't judge me too harshly. But you do the golf swing and you wanna square up to the ball. It's called a dress, okay? The's on the ground. You want to address it, so you want to make sure your club head is facing the right way behind it. You want your feet to be spread about shoulder width apart if you've got an iron in your hand. Not too far, because you'll look ridiculous like a sumo wrestler. So you just want it right there, right? And then you've got to grip the club. And there's actually a way to do this. They, like, tell you. I went and got golf lessons one time. And the first thing the guy said is, show me how you grip the club. And I'm like, you're weird. Just tell me how to swing the club. But apparently it's important. You have to interlock your fingers in the back. Or if you're fancy, you can cover over your fingers in the back. But you don't do it like this. That's what crazy people do, okay? You can't do that. You have to grab it like this. And this hand needs to be in a certain place. And did you know that your thumb has to go in the crease of your hand right there? It took me two years to learn that. I don't know why they didn't tell me that. But you have to put your thumb right there, and then you hold it. Your knuckle's got to be in a certain place. If you rotate your hand too far under, you're going to hook it. You don't want to do that. And if you do it too far this way, you're going to slice it. You don't want to do that. So it's got to be just right. And then they tell you, once you get the club, that you just want to hold it like a baby bird, okay? Like you just want it to be real gentle. I've got like this death grip on there, and people have told me, you're going to strangle that bird, man. You need to let it go. So you got to be gentle with it, you know? Just hold it like pillow soft, like you do a lot of dishes or something. And then you want to take it back. And when you take it back, you want to keep your left arm straight. And you want to keep your left wrist flat. I do this sometimes or this. You don't want to do that. You want to keep it flat, right, so that when you meet the ball, like it's flush. And so you come back. And when you come back, you want to bend your left leg, but not too much. You don't want to look like a crazy person. You got to do it a little bit. And then I had somebody one time on my backswing tell me, you want your back pocket to face the target. And I'm like, well, how do you, I don't know what that looks like. Like, I don't even, I'm not, maybe that dude was a gymnast. Like, I don't even know how to make that one work, man. And then you go and you do the thing and you follow through. And sometimes I'll follow through and people will say things that I don't understand. Like, I'll hit the ball and it didn't do what I wanted to because it never does. And people will go, oh, you double crossed that one. And I'm like, what are you talking, I don't know what that, I don't know what it means to double cross. Or sometimes people will tell me, your hands got a little fast on that one. And I'm just thinking to myself, like isn't that the point? Don't we want our hands to go fast in a golf swing? Like I'm thinking that slow hands is not good for golf. But it's super complicated, right? And so here's what we know about golf. When you're golfing with your buddies and somebody's struggling and you want to give them a little tip, I'm going to coach you. I'm terrible at golf. I have a 20-plus handicap, but I'm going to coach you. I'm going to give you the thing that's going to make you good at it. You can give somebody one tip to start thinking about one thing. Your backswing's a little fast. You want to slow that down, and it'll screw them up for the rest of the round. They won't be able to hit that because they'll be thinking about all the things. They won't be able to hit that for anything. So here's what they tell you in golf if you want to improve your swing. You get what's called a swing thought. When you're swinging the club, you get a swing thought. You get to think about one thing. Just do one thing. There's so many aspects to the swing. It's so technical and so complicated. You could think about 12 different things if you wanted to, but if you want to get better at it, you think about one thing. I played an entire round of golf focused on keeping my left heel on the ground when I would swing the club. The whole round, that's all I thought about all day. You get one swing thought. Because if you take more than that, you won't be able to keep up with it. It'll be a messy jumble in your head and you won't see success. But the way they teach you to get better at golf is you take one swing thought and you get better at that. You don't think about all the other things. You get better at the one thing, whatever's most urgent for you. And then once you get that down, you get that into muscle memory, then you do the next thing. That's how they teach you. And I think obedience works the same way. There's so many things to focus on. There's so many areas. We need to grow in our kindness. We need to grow in our generosity. We need to grow in our patience. We need to grow in our humility. We need to stop doing this one sin that's kicking our tail. We need to start doing this thing that God's been tugging on our heart about for a long time. There's so many different things we could do to try to obey God. But I want to submit to you that the way to really learn obedience is to just have one obedience thought. Just take the next thing. Just take the next step. I'm not saying that we don't worry about all the other things. When you're learning a golf swing, you don't forego everything else you've already worked on to work on the next thing. You keep those intact too, but then you work on the next thing. And I think our Christian life is much the same way. We should have, and we are wise to have, an obedience thought, a next step of obedience, a thing that we can do to begin to obey God a little bit better and a little bit better. And the beautiful thing about this is, I think all of us have a next step of obedience. Whether you've been walking with God for five days or for 50 years, there's always the next thing that you can work on. There's always the next thing that God would have you, the next step of obedience that he would have you take. If you were to go to a PGA event and talk to one of the guys who does it professionally and ask him, what are you working on with your swing? None of them would ever tell you, nothing, this is as good as it gets. They would always tell you that they're working on something. And this is how it is with our obedience to God. No matter how many years we've been walking, no matter how mature or immature we are, every one of us in the room has a next step of obedience that we can take. And if we're going to learn to obey God and follow Him and abide in Christ, then I think it boils down to simply taking our next step of obedience. So objective three, our third assignment in how we abide in Christ, is by praying, stepping, and trusting. We pray, we step, and we trust. Under that, I have a prayer for you where I'm encouraging you to pray, Father, show me my next step of obedience. And that's a prayer that I would encourage you to pray now and pray every day this week. Father, show me my next step of obedience. What would you have me do? So we pray about it. God, what's my next step? What do you have for me? What's the next thing you want me to do? Maybe it's to get more serious about church attendance. Maybe it's to get more serious about a small group. Maybe it's to get up every day and spend time in God's word. Maybe it's simply to consider Him, to read a book or do some research or have a conversation with somebody that would help us grow in our faith a little bit. Maybe it's to start the discipline of tithing or giving. Maybe it's to actually have the conversation that we've been having. Maybe you know exactly what it is because God's been pressing it on our hearts for weeks or months and we haven't listened. But we should pray that God would show us our next step of obedience that he would have us take. And then we trust. We step. We take the step. We obey him, and then we trust that it was the right thing, and we trust that life is going to be better on the other side of obedience. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about obedience, and we talked about this idea that sometimes the reason we're not obedient to God is because we believe that life is better on this side of obedience. And so to actually step into obedience requires a degree of trust that life is actually going to be better for us on the other side of obedience, that that's where we find God's grace and God's love. And so often obedience takes faith in God and the courage to actually take the step. But here's what happens when we do this. I love this. This is my favorite part about this teaching. When we take a step of obedience, however difficult it is, God impresses something on our hearts. I want you to do this. I want you to get up 30 minutes earlier and I want you to spend some time with me. I want you to actually give to this thing. I want you to actually have that conversation. It's a difficult step when he shows it to us. But if we'll take it, and when we take that step in our fear and what we're met with is God's grace and goodness, we'll see that we can actually trust him. And because we've had this experience of taking a step in faith and being met with God's goodness, it'll give us more courage to take the next step, won't it? And then the next step, and then the step after that. And then for our life, we are simply taking these steps of obedience as we grow closer to Jesus and abide in him. And then here's what happens as we take these steps of obedience. We abide in Christ. And Jesus says that when we abide in him, we will bear much fruit. And here's what I love about that. If you think about an apple tree, if you think about a branch attached to an apple tree, that tree decides when and what kind of fruit that branch is going to bear. That branch doesn't get to decide, you know what? I want to give us apples in the wintertime. I really like apple pie. I'm doing winter apples. That's what's happening this year. That's not how that works. The tree decides when that branch is going to bear fruit. The branch doesn't get to go, you know what, fellas? I'm really thinking pears. They're in. Turkey and brie, it's really good. That's what we're going to do. The tree doesn't get to decide, I'm tired of being in an orchard, I want to be in a mangrove. We're doing oranges this season. That doesn't happen. The tree decides when the branch will bear fruit and what kind of fruit it is. Look at this. When you abide in Christ, when you are connected and you stay connected and you're following him and you know him intimately, when you're connected to the tree, you will bear much fruit. And it's not up to you when and where you bear that fruit. It's not up to you what kind of fruit that is. It's not up to you when the season is when you bear it. The tree decides that. You remain connected to Christ, and Christ says, I'll decide when and where you bear fruit. I love the freedom of this. And my role, my heart is for grace. We've given our lives to build God's church here. So I want to see grace grow. I want to see the kingdom expand here. I want to see lives impacted. I want to hear the story about somebody coming, visiting with us over VBS or Summer Extreme, and their kid coming to faith who didn't know Jesus comes to know Jesus here. And then that kid goes home and tells their parents what they saw here. And then their parents come, and their parents get plugged into a small group, and they accept Christ. And then they grow in their faith by taking their next steps of obedience and then there are elders and there are leaders and they're leading their small group. I want to see that story. I want to see marriages rescued here and strengthened here. I want to see little kids that grow up here and then grow up to follow Christ so well and so closely and know him so good that they disciple us. I want some of the kids that are in there to preach up here one day and tell us what they've learned about God. I want to see all this stuff happen in our church, and I want to see you guys live healthy and vibrant lives in spiritual faith. I want to see that. Do you know how we bring that about? Do you know what my role is in bringing all those things about? Getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer and trying to take my next step of obedience, abiding in Christ. If I want to see that fruit at grace, if I want to see God do incredible things, you know what I need to do? Abide in Christ. Obey Him. He'll decide when and where we start bringing fruit. It's not about strategy. It's not about how good I preach. It's not about how good Steve does. It's not about marketing campaigns. It's not about follow-up. It's not about any of that stuff. It's about abiding in Christ, and Jesus will handle the rest. In your lives, you have kids you worry about and you pray for. You have ministries that you're involved in. You volunteer in different places. You have companies or groups of people around you that you want to influence and draw towards Jesus. You want to have a wake of people in your life who would say, I'm closer to Jesus because I knew that person. We want these things. You know how you get those things? Abide in Christ. Obey him. Get connected, stay connected. Take the next step of obedience. Pursue him daily. And guess what? He will decide when and where you bear fruit. But here's the promise. You will bear much fruit. Just simply abide in him. Pursue him. Obey him. Have the confidence and the faith to take the next step that he shows you, and you will abide abide in Christ and then the tree will decide when and where you bear fruit. There's a glorious freedom to this. And when we bear much fruit, you should know two things happen in this passage. Two things happen as a result of our bearing fruit. We are pruned and we are proven. We are pruned and we are proven. The second verse of this passage, Jesus says, when you bear much fruit, the Father will prune you so that you can bear more fruit. And make no mistake about it, that pruning hurts. That's the branches getting cut. That's when they lose a piece of themselves. I don't have time to delve into what pruning is like all the way this morning, but I know that for years and years, Jen and I prayed for a baby. We prayed to get pregnant, and it took a lot longer than we wanted it to take. We finally got pregnant, and then we miscarried. I've shared that with you guys before. That was four or five years ago. That was a super difficult thing. That's the hardest thing we've ever had to walk through as a couple. But I am convinced that that was a pruning period for us. Because how could I come lead a church? And how could Jen partner with me in this ministry if we didn't know grief? If we didn't know tragedy? If we didn't know what that was like? How could I teach about God's view of grief and how he's with us in our suffering unless I had experienced that? How could I empathize with someone who would shake their fist at God and say, why me, this isn't fair, unless I had walked through that in my life as well? I believe that part of the reason for that was a pruning to make us more effective in what God would have us do. I'm not saying that's the reason for all of our pain, but I'm saying that's the reason for some of it. God prunes us. That's why I hate the health and wealth gospel. We're not promised prosperity and a tragic free life. We're promised that if God prunes us, it's so that we will be more effective and bear more fruit, which is the whole point. And then, in that bearing fruit, we are proven. Every Christian ever has wondered, am I really saved? Did I do it right? Did I say the right prayer? Do I really have faith? If I were to die today, do I really know I'm going to go to heaven? You know what proves your faith? Fruit. Jesus says in this passage, you will bear much fruit, and so prove that you are my disciples. You want to not doubt your salvation? Look at the wake of your life and see if there is fruit there. When we bear fruit, two things happen. We are pruned and we are proven. And then as a result of all of this, all of these things, this idea of taking steps of obedience and finding God to meet us there in trust, of abiding in him and just focusing on him and not worrying about the end of the passage, verse 11. He says, these things I have spoken to you. So this lesson, what I've just taught you about the vine and the branches, these things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. All of these things, knowing Jesus, abiding in him, obeying him, bearing fruit, being pruned and being proven, all of these things conspire to fill you with joy. Because in simply abiding in Christ, we are relieved of the pressure of productivity. We are relieved from the pressure of results because it's not our responsibility to bring about the fruit. We just follow Jesus. We are relieved of the sense of hopelessness that sometimes comes from pain because we know that it's serving a purpose to prune us and make us more effective at bearing fruit for God's kingdom. And we are relieved of the worry and the anxiety of, am I actually saved? Am I actually going to persevere? Because the proof is in the fruit that we have borne. God relieves us of all of those things and frees us up to simply follow him, to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer, and to say, Father, what's the step of obedience you would have me take today? And when we do that, we experience the fullness, not of our joy, of his joy. So that's my prayer for you. That you would go from this place and that you would abide in Christ and experience the fullness of Jesus' joy. And my challenge to you is that you would pray now and every day this week, Father, what step of obedience would you have me take today? Father, please show me my next step of obedience. And I believe that by doing that and taking the step that he reveals to you, that we will abide in Christ and that by abiding in Christ, his word will be true and we will bear much fruit. And that by bearing much fruit, we will experience the fullness of the joy of Jesus. I'm going to pray for you. And as I pray, I want to encourage you right now to go ahead and begin asking God, what's my next step of obedience? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for this morning. We thank you for your word, how clear it is. We thank you that your son boiled things down for us to this place where we can understand it. I pray that we would simply abide in you, God. Create a fire in each of our hearts to know you, to abide in you, to walk with you, to obey you. Give us the strength to pray the prayer, to ask what our next step is. Give us the courage and the faith to take the step. Give us the clarity to see it. Give us the gratitude for your grace that meets us there. God, whether it's a big step or a small one, I pray that we would take it. I pray that this would be a church full of people who are abiding in you and with you. And God, we can't wait to see the fruit that you bring about here in our lives and in this place. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

Good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for being here. This is the seventh part in our series going through the book of John. We're going to continue this series through the week after Easter. So I'm thrilled to see all of you here. Hopefully, as I've been encouraging you every week, you've been reading along with us. I think it's hugely important for you guys to be reading the Gospel of John on your own as you process it and we go through it as a church so that my perspective isn't the only perspective that you're getting on this book. That's why it's such a bummer that I realized yesterday I forgot to update the reading plan and the one that we have out there is not current. So I'm real sorry about that. I had a wedding to do yesterday and then basketball, so I didn't get a chance to do the reading plan. But we'll have that done for you tomorrow. We'll get it out online and we'll have a physical copy for you next week when you get here. If you are following along in the reading plan, just read the next two chapters. We've been going at two chapters a week and you'll be good, okay? But as we've been going through this week, I had a sermon planned out of John 11, looking at the story of Lazarus and the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept, John 11, 35. And I had been looking forward to that sermon. But as I got done last week and looked at the chapters that we had to cover this week, there's a portion, there's something happening in John chapter 13 that I just, I didn't feel right about doing a series in John where we don't cover this. There's been a ton that we've skipped over in the book of John. We didn't even stop on the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16. We haven't talked about that, which again is why we should be going through this on our own. But I just didn't feel like it was right to go through a series in John without focusing on what Jesus says in John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's a seat back in front of you. And then later when I read the passage, it will be up on the screen. And I think we have it in your bulletin. There's really no reason, unless you're illiterate, to not read John chapter 13, 34, and 35 with us, okay? So in this verse, Jesus gives a summation of all of his teaching for the disciples. He's left with just the 11 faithful disciples that are with him, and we'll get to this in a minute, but he's giving them a summation of everything that he's ever taught them. And I find summaries like that to be the most helpful teaching or the most helpful advice, right? We know that good advice summarizes all the other advice and makes it a little bit more memorable. I think something that we can all relate to is many of us in this room have had kids. And we know that when you're about to have a kid, this is the time when you are receiving the most unsolicited advice you have ever received in your life. The only other thing I've ever experienced like it was when I was about to become a pastor. I had been named the senior pastor, and so I had kind of a month to get my affairs in order and then get up here and take over, at the time, Grace Community Church. And so everybody was giving me advice on how to be a senior pastor, including my atheistic uncle, who hadn't been in a church in like 35 or 40 years. I'm literally, I'm golfing with the guy. It's the last time I'm going to hang out with Uncle Dick. And he's in the fairway practicing, and then he like steps off the ball and he goes, Nathan, you know, I've been thinking about you becoming a pastor. And I'm like, what in the world is going on here? He goes, I just had something I wanted to tell you. And I'm thinking like, just like everybody else, come on, let's go. You haven't been in church in 40 years. Let's see what you got. It was okay advice, but I just thought it was hilarious that an atheist cared about advising me on being a senior pastor, right? And when you're a parent, you get all this parenting advice. It doesn't matter if they've had kids before. It just matters that they've read a book or seen something on Facebook. They will tell you what they saw. And sometimes this advice is even contradictory in nature, right? You got the camp over here saying you should use cloth diapers. And I'm like, you're crazy. And then you got this camp saying you should use regular disposable diapers. I'm like, these are my people, right? You got the camp that says when you get home, you do not let that child sleep in the bed with you. You put them in their room on night one or they are going to develop dependency issues. And you're like, holy crud, that sounds really hard. And then you have other people that are like, you let that child sleep in your bed until they are eight if they need to. They are your precious angel, you know? And Jen's reading books the whole time. Jen's my wife, not just some lady who reads books for me. So she's reading books the whole time. And she's getting all this advice. And it's contrary. This book says this thing, and this book says this thing. You're like, well, which person knows more about this? Who knows? Can I speak to their adult children to see if this worked out? You just don't know, and you're getting so much all the time. But one guy, this was super helpful, Kyle Hale, the worship pastor at the church that I was at at the time, I was on staff with him. He came up to me one day. He had three boys under five. So he had earned his dad's stripes, right? And he comes up to me and he goes, hey man, listen, a lot of people telling you a lot of stuff. And I'm like, yep, and here comes your thing. And he goes, listen, just for the first three months, just keep the kid healthy and stay sane. Whatever you have to do. Don't worry about what you're going to do to them. You're not going to do any permanent damage. Just keep the child healthy and stay sane. Try not to yell at Jen. That's it. Just do that. And I thought, this is good advice. I can do this. I don't know about all the other stuff. I don't know about the five S's and all the things, but I can do this. I can just try to take care of them, and I can try to not yell at Jen. This is good. This is actually how I still parent. Just make sure she's good and try not to get mad at Jen. That was good advice. It was a summation of all the other advice, right? It was memorable and easy and executable. And this is what Jesus does for the disciples in John chapter 13. Here's what's happening in John 13. I actually, I feel a little bit badly about the way that we've done this series in that we haven't done a lot to follow the chronology of Jesus through his ministry and through his life. We've dropped in on snippets of what he's taught and things that he did, but we haven't done a good job of following the chronology of Jesus. So here's what's happening in John chapter 13. Jesus has moved through his life. About the age of 30, he goes public with his ministry and begins calling disciples to him. And then they do ministry together through Israel. Israel is a relatively small country. It's really a small country by any measure. And so all over Israel, they're doing ministry and they're following Jesus around and he's teaching them how to do what he does. He's preparing them to hand them the keys to the kingdom. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but why didn't Jesus just come to earth, live perfectly, become an adult, and die for our sins? Why did he dabble for three years with this public ministry? Why was it essential for him to do this in order to die on the cross for our sins? And I think the answer is Jesus knew he was going to have to leave behind his kingdom in the form of the church. And he knew he was going to have to entrust that to people. And so he wanted to invest three years of his life into some young men so that he can hand the church off to them as passing them the keys to the kingdom. So I'm convinced that he spent an extra three years here on planet Earth with us for the main purpose of training the disciples to get them to a place where they were ready to take over his kingdom called the church and propel it into the future, which they absolutely did, or you guys wouldn't be sitting here in a different continent 2,000 years later, right? So that's what Jesus is doing with the disciples. So about age 30, he goes public, he calls the disciples to them, he trains them for three years, and then at the age of 33, he's crucified. And that week leading into the crucifixion is called Holy Week. And we're in the period of Lent that's leading up to Holy Week now. So Palm Sunday, which this year we're going to celebrate on April the 14th, is the day that Jesus goes into Jerusalem. It's called the triumphal entry. He enters as a king. But this sets in motion a series of events that by Friday has him crucified. We call that Good Friday. And then Easter is when he resurrects on Sunday. So he is in the middle of Holy Week here. It is the end of his life. He's sitting around one night with the disciples. If you were here the first week, we know, you know, that Jesus has just looked at Judas who had betrayed him and said, the thing that you are about to do, go and do it quickly. So Judas has left. He's at the end of his ministry with the 11 faithful disciples who he will hand the keys to the kingdom to and entrust them with the church. And he looks at them and he says, I have a new commandment for you, which is an interesting thing. Because the Bible says that Jesus had that all authority on heaven and on earth had been given to him. He had come down from heaven as God. He was God in the flesh. He could have added all the rules that he wanted to. He could have been given out commandments left and right. He could have done anything that he wanted. He could have made any rules that he wanted. And he waits three years to do it. And right before, like a couple of days before he's going to go be arrested and die for us, he says, oh, by the way, I have a new commandment for you, in verse 33, he calls them little children. Come to me, little children. Jesus doesn't play the little children card a lot. That's like maximum God card, right? Because they're peers. He's a dude, they're dudes. But in this one, he says, little children, listen to me. So this is like, hey, pay attention. Jesus is playing the God card here. He doesn't do this a lot. What's he about to teach? He says, I have a new commandment for you. So we should be leaning in. This is the one rule that Jesus makes. He could have made any rule his whole life. He's made one, and it's going to be this, and it's going to be a summation of all his teachings. So Christians, church, we should lean into this. If you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, you should be very interested in this new commandment that sums up everything that Jesus ever taught and did and said. Non-believers, if you're here and you're considering faith, you should be very interested in this because in this one commandment is the whole of the faith that you are considering. This is a hugely important, crucial passage. And this is what Jesus says to them that night before he prepares to go to heaven. He says this in verse 34. He leans in and he says, little children, disciples, church, for the rest of time, I'm going to give you, I have a new commandment for you. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. This is how the whole world will identify you from this moment on. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. Now, if you've been paying attention in the book of John, you should have some questions. How is this a summation of everything that Jesus teaches, and how is it different than things that he's taught in the past? Because at the beginning of the Gospels, in the beginning of Matthew, and at different places in John, he tells us that we are to, what, love our neighbor as ourselves, right? We know this commandment. This isn't new. This doesn't feel different. We know that we're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. In fact, it was commonly known then. Then there's a story where Jesus is talking to a lawyer, a young man who's been studying the law, which incidentally is the Bible, and he asked the lawyer, what do you think are the greatest commandments? And the lawyer says, love your God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind, amen, and love your neighbor as yourself. This was a commonly accepted teaching. So how is this different than this commonly accepted teaching? There's another theme that runs through John of what Jesus teaches. Over and over again, he continues to come back to this idea that it's our job to believe in him. We looked a couple weeks ago when people asked him, what do we do to inherit eternal life? How do we labor for eternity? He says, believe in the one that the Father has sent. When he prays, after he resurrects Lazarus, Lazarus is a friend of his who dies. Jesus shows up at the grave. He brings him back to life, and he prays, and he says, Father, I knew you were going to do this. I did this so that they would believe that I am who I say I am, so that they would believe in the one that you have sent. So over and over, we see this theme in John that Jesus admonishes us to believe in him as the Son of God. And if we see those themes, it's already commonly accepted practice and commonly accepted teaching that we should love our neighbor as ourself, and we know that we should love God as well, and that it's our job to believe in God. How is this a summation of those things that Jesus has taught us? Well, we start when we understand this. When you look at the command to love your neighbor as yourself, do you understand that you are the standard of love in that scenario? That when the admonishment, when the instruction is, love your neighbor like you love yourself. And to love somebody for all intents and purposes is simply to want what's best for them and to act in a way that would bring that about. We love somebody, so we want what's best for them, and we act in a way that would bring that about in their life. That's what we do. And so when we love somebody as we love ourselves, then we are the standard of love in their life. So however we love ourselves is how we ought to love other people. And that's a problem because we are imperfect and we love ourselves imperfectly. There have been seasons of my life where I did not do a good job at loving myself. And if I were to love you like I love myself, then I would probably owe you an apology, right? There are seasons of your life where you love yourself imperfectly. You're not taking care of yourself very well. You're not making the best decisions for yourself. You're not bringing about the best things in your life. And so if you started to love other people like you loved yourself, if we're honest, that's a pretty low bar. When we say that we should love our neighbor as we love ourself, that sets the bar at us. And you'll notice that Jesus says this at the beginning of his ministry, before the disciples have watched him relentlessly love everyone around him. But at the end of his ministry, when they've watched him for three years, graciously and patiently and givingly and sacrificially love everyone around him all the time, Jesus raises the bar on this command. And he says, it's no longer good enough for you to love other people as you love yourself. No, no, you need to love them as I have loved you. You need to go and love other people as you've seen me love them. And when that's the commandment, do you understand that Jesus is now the bar on that love? Before we set the standard, go love others as you love yourself. That's our standard. And he says, no, no, no. I want you to raise it to my standard. Go and love other people as I have loved you. He says this to the disciples who have watched him over the years. Bring sight back to the blind. Make people who can't walk be able to walk again. Love on people who are found in the middle of sin. Restore people who the world would condemn. Argue with the Pharisees. Teach the multitudes. Perform countless miracles. Sit patiently with them. They've watched all of this. And Jesus says, as you have seen me love on you and minister to you, I want you to love one another that way. He sets the bar at himself, not us. But the question then becomes, if I am to love other people as Jesus loved me, how is it that Jesus loves me? And how does that fulfill the instruction that we should believe in Jesus and love God? How can this possibly be a summation of everything that he's taught? And to answer that question, we need to look at the way that Jesus loves. Now, I'm going to give you kind of three categories or ways that Jesus loves us. I would encourage you in your small groups this week as you discuss this, you guys can probably think of more ways or more categories of ways that Jesus loves us. But here are my three this morning. There are three ways, main ways, I think that Jesus loves us. I think Jesus loves us sacrificially, he loves us restoratively, and he loves us recklessly. Sacrificially, restoratively, and recklessly, I think, are ways that Jesus loves us. Sacrificially is obvious, right? If you were to ask anybody, believer, non-believer, anybody who has a cursory knowledge of Scripture at all, how does Jesus love us? One of the answers would be sacrificially. He died for us, so he sacrificed, he gave of himself for us. But it's not just that he died on the cross for us. That's the biggest of sacrifices. But we see him time and again in the gospels give of his time and give of his energy and give of his attention and give of his patience. We see him constantly choosing other people over himself. He even chose homelessness. He has foxes have holds and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. He just wandered around loving on other people, not being concerned with himself. So if we're going to love like Jesus, we need to love sacrificially, which means that we need to give of our time and our effort and our energy and our resources in his name and for him. And this happens a lot. We have people over there who are watching kids so that young families can sit in here and go to church in peace. And some of these families just need to sleep right now. I'm not even mad at them for not paying attention because they just need rest because it's hard to be a parent sometimes, right? So we have people who are giving of their time on a Sunday morning and loving on them so that they can be in here. We have people who are teaching the kids in there, loving on them, giving of their time. We have servants all over the church who are loving well through sacrificing. I see that happening a lot in Grace. Once a month, we do this incredible thing when we go to Pender County that was impacted by the floods. And Florence came in, the hurricane came in, there was floods, and we're good, and everything's settled, everybody's got power. Except out there, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of homes that have been impacted by the floods that are unlivable. Insurance can't help them out, and these people have no options. And so Grace actually sends a team of people down once a month to go and help restore these people and restore their lives and fix their homes. And so the men and women who do that on a monthly basis are going and loving sacrificially. They are giving up a Saturday to be down there, which is a big deal, particularly in NCAA tournament time, to give up these Saturdays. Incidentally, the trip this month got canceled and got moved to this upcoming Saturday. So if that's a way you'd like to love sacrificially, you can sign up for that online or indicate it on your communication card, and that's fine. And so there are all these ways to go out and to love others outside of our homes and to kind of step into the lives of others and love sacrificially, show up for the food drive and love the people, the kids who might not be able to eat over spring break. That's good. But to me, the surest test to know if we're really loving others sacrificially is whether or not we're doing that in our home. It's easy to go out in fits and starts and to kind of drop in and make an appearance and love here and then retreat back to those who know us best and be selfish and need our space and our time and our TV and all the stuff, right? That's easy to do. It's easy to step out and love for a couple of hours and then step back into our shell. I learned this lesson when I was in high school. I was 17 or 18 years old and I had just gone off to summer camp, right? A place called Look Up Lodge in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. And it made a huge impact on me. I had grown up in the church, grown up, I think, as a Christian. But this was the time, this was the week where I really, really got it. Something switched for me, and I understood Christianity in a way that I never had. And so I'm on fire for Jesus, right? I'm like the classic mountaintop experience kid coming back from camp. Like I am, I am so fired up. I'm ready to charge hell with a water pistol. And it doesn't have to be one of those pump kinds. It can just be like the single action. Like I'm still in, bring it on Satan. I'm coming for you. Like I am ready. And I'm, my hair is on fire for Jesus Jesus. I come back and I'm telling my parents who raised me in the church and who love God and who love me, are super involved with the church. I'm telling them all the things that I'm going to do. I've made all these commitments. I'm going to do all the things. I'm going to start all the Bible studies. I'm going to lead all the things. I'm going to teach the little kids. You've never seen a Christian like me, Dad. I'm going to change the world. Dad says, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom. I'm like, man, you really cut the legs out from under a guy. And at the time, I thought he was kind of a jerk for saying that. Maybe he still is. But the point that he made is right. That's great. That's wonderful that you've had this mountaintop experience. That's wonderful that you love Jesus. Be nice to your mom and love your sister. It's easy to run out and fake it and sacrifice for others. It's hardest with the people that we know best. That's why we're meanest to the people that we love the most. That's why we have the shortest fuse with them. That's why we sometimes fail to offer the grace to others, the grace inside our home that we offer outside our home. If we want to love sacrificially, then it looks like, for me, this is something that I struggle with, when I come home sometimes, I know we make jokes about pastors and our job, and it is stressful looking at Facebook and golfing a lot, but there are times when I do come home and I am stressed. I've had a lot of meetings and a lot of things, and we've made decisions, and I've had to work hard, and the last thing in the world I want to do is sit on a chair that is too small for me and make Play-Doh donuts. I don't want to do that. I want to sit on a couch that is too big for me and eat donuts. That's what I want to do. But if I love Lily and I love Jen, then I'll come home and I'll sit down and I'll play. And I'll give Jen the space she needs to do the things she needs to do because she hasn't had that space all day and I'll engage with my daughter. If we love our family, we'll come home and we'll sacrifice for them. If we love the people around us, then we will consider their needs before they have to consider their own. I think sacrificial love shows up first in the people that we know best. Jesus also loves us restoratively. He seeks to restore us. There are so many examples of this. A couple weeks ago, Kyle did a great job preaching about the woman at the well, who at that time had had five husbands and was living with the sixth man who she was not yet married to, which by any account throughout all of history is generally referred to as scandalous, right? And Jesus doesn't bring it up. He just mentioned it as if it's true, but he doesn't seek to condemn her about it. He's far more concerned about restoring her and letting her know about who he is and the promises that he makes and her need for him. In the book of John, there's a story that some versions include where there's a woman who's brought to him in adultery in the city streets. And the Pharisees, the religious leaders say, should we stone her? And he has this impossible question to answer. And he does this thing where he makes everybody, he convinces everybody to go away by riding in the dirt. And once everyone is gone, he looks at the woman and he says, is there anyone left to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord. And he says, and neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. He's not there to condemn her. He's not there to convince her, hey, you know adultery is wrong and you really shouldn't do it. You know that the thing that you were doing was shameful and that I don't like it. And that when you do that, you trample on my love. Like I'm here to die for you because you do stuff like that. Could you maybe knock it off? He doesn't say that. He says, neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. We've extended this series a week so that I can preach to you about the restoration of Peter after he messes up. Peter messes up big time. And Jesus comes to him and he has every right to get onto him and condemn him and he doesn't. He simply restores him. What we see in the ministry of Jesus over and over and over again is that he is far more concerned with restoring you than condemning you. And in the church, when we look at other people, it gets so easy to identify that as sin. Is that person sinning? Is that person doing something that's wrong? Look at what they're doing in their life. Doesn't that count as sin? And Jesus says, yeah, maybe, but how about we love them first? He doesn't let them off the hook. He says, go and sin no more. Go and don't do this thing anymore. But first, he says, neither do I condemn you. He's always, always, always more interested in restoring than condemning, in restoration than condemnation. And if we are going to love other people like Jesus loves us, then when we approach others, we should always be primarily concerned with their restoration to spiritual health, not condemning them and defining what they're doing. We restore people. We do not condemn. That's the Lord's job. And Jesus loves us recklessly. Now, I like this one because we're going to sing a song after the sermon called Reckless Love. I think it's called Reckless Love. I never know song titles. It should be called Reckless Love. And it's about the reckless love of God. And it was a popular song in Christian circles. But we had some debates and some discussions about it as a staff because part of the concern was that it was erroneous to call God's love reckless because reckless kind of infers that there's mistakes made, that it's just like reckless abandon, that there might be some mess up or some error to his love or some misjudgments within his love, but it's good and it's fine and we like God's love and so that's okay. So that maybe it was almost theologically inaccurate. But after we talked about it some more, we decided to go ahead and sing the song. And I'll confess to you that the first time I ever even looked at the lyrics of the song was when we were singing it on Sunday morning because I'm really bad about keeping current with worship songs. We do a playlist on Spotify with the songs that Grace Raleigh does, and that's my worship. That's what I listen to. And if it's not on there, I don't listen to it. So I had not heard this song before. And as we're going through it on Sunday and I'm looking at the lyrics and it talks about how he leaves the 99 and he comes after us and he always chases us and he always pursues us and there's no wall that he won't kick down and there's no mountain that he won't climb to come after us. What I realize about the recklessness of God is that it's talking about this emotional recklessness where he has no regard for how much we hurt him. He is always going to pursue us. That's the recklessness of God. It doesn't matter how many times someone rejects him. It doesn't matter how many times someone makes him a promise and says, God, I'm never going to do the thing again. And then they turn around and they do the thing. It doesn't matter how many times we betray God or we walk away from him or we break his heart or we break his rules or we hurt his spirit, he is always going to forgive us and he is always going to pursue us. It doesn't matter how many times he extends a hand to us and we knock the hand away and we say, I'm not interested. He is still going to extend the hand again. He recklessly pursues us. This is the picture that he lays out in the Old Testament when he has a prophet named Hosea marry a prostitute named Gomer. He says, I want you to go and I want you to take Gomer as your wife. She doesn't deserve you. I want you to go marry her anyway. So Hosea, in obedience, does it, marries her. Inevitably, she cheats on him, goes back to her old life, and God speaks to Hosea again and he says, go back and get her and marry her again, regardless of the toll that it takes on you. That's the reckless love of God. Because there is something very human and very natural to this idea that once our heart has been broken, once someone's turned us down enough times, once someone has disappointed us enough times, once someone has required our forgiveness more than a few times, there's a very natural human thing to do to recoil and to withdraw our love from them and to not pursue them as hard and to not go after them as hard because it's hurt us so many times in the past. And so we recoil out of this sense of self-protection and we build up walls and we don't let other people in because we've been hurt so many times, and we've been damaged so many times that we don't want to experience that again, so we learn to protect ourselves from the possibility of other people hurting us. And God's reckless love says, I don't care how many times you hurt me, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna pursue you. That's the recklessness of God. And if we want to love like Jesus, then we love recklessly. This is how Jesus is able to tell Peter how many times to forgive people, right? Peter goes to Jesus and he says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone when they wronged me? When someone wrongs me, when they disappoint me, when they let me down, when they break my heart, when I thought I could count on them and they show me that I can't and it really, really hurts, how many times should I forgive them? Up to seven times seven. As many times as it takes, you forgive them until they do it right. You forgive them as many times as you have to. You recklessly pursue them with your love. That's what it means to love like Jesus loved. We love sacrificially, we love restoratively, and we love recklessly. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about how to love in that way, what becomes very apparent is we are not able to do that. We are not able in and of ourselves to love in those ways, to love perfectly sacrificially, to always empathize and love with restoration in mind. We are not able to love recklessly. We do not possess the ability to do that. And this is how it fulfills Jesus' teaching that we ought also to believe in him. Because what we understand is it is impossible to love others like Jesus loved us without Jesus's possession of and power in our hearts. You see, unless we believe in Jesus and he has taken up residency in our heart and has possession of our heart and his power is working in our hearts to change our ways and our desires to his and our ability to love to His. Unless He's doing that, unless we've loved God enough to believe Him and place our faith in Christ, there is no possible way we can be obedient to the command to love one another as Christ has loved us. So in this, we come full circle in seeing that it is really a summation of everything that Jesus has taught. It raises the bar on the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself. It fulfills the commandment to love God and fulfills the commandment to believe in the one that he has sent because it's impossible to do it without believing in Jesus. And in that way, it's a summation of everything that Jesus ever taught. Simply go and love. Andy Stanley says it this way. He's a pastor in Atlanta. He says, when you don't know what to say or do, just love others as God through Christ loves you. That's what we do. We love other people sacrificially. We love them restoratively. We love them recklessly. And then Jesus says, this is how the world will know that you are my disciples. This is how I want the world to look at you and know that you belong to me. This is what I want to be your defining and distinguishing characteristic. This should be the way the world identifies you to look at the way you love one another and you love others. That's what I want to define you. And this is something that I think the church gets messed up sometimes. He does not say that the world will know that you are my disciples by what you stand against, by how you define sin, by who you choose to condemn, by what you stand up and rally against in Washington. That's not how we are going to be defined. We're not going to be defined and identified by the world by our good doctrine or dogma or theology. We aren't made known to the world by winning a Bible knowledge trivia contest. We're not made known. The world will not know that we are his disciples by how well we know this book. Now, all of that flows out of our love for him, but it is not our definitive thing. It is not our distinguishing characteristic. Our distinguishing characteristic is who and how well we love. That's what Jesus wants to define us. All the other things are important, but if we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we believe. If we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we're against. If we fail to love others first, then nobody cares how well we serve. We are first to love others sacrificially, distortively, and recklessly. And this is how we will be defined. This is how the world will know that we are his disciples. What would it look like for you to be known in that way? What would it look like for the people around you to say whatever it is they want to say about you, but at the end of the day, that person loves people well? What would it look like to love people so different and in a way that was so other that when people saw you doing it, they were drawn to your God because there must be something else going on here. Nobody could possibly love others that well. Nobody could possibly sacrifice that much. Nobody could possibly mean it. You know how when you meet somebody who's super nice and super gracious and they're very kind to everyone, you think to yourself, they're faking it. You think to yourself, what do they look like when they're down? What if you never were? What if you weren't faking it? Because that love was fueled by Jesus and you loved everybody just as hard as he did. What if this was the distinguishing and defining characteristics of our homes? What if when someone entered into your home and spent some time with you and your family, when they left and they got in the car and whatever else they said about your home, I really like her napkins or those curtains or that's what cozy farmhouse looks like and that's what I want to do. Like whatever else they said about your home, the one thing that they took away was, man, those people love each other well. Man, I felt loved in that house. What if your kids growing up in your house, the one thing they'll say about mom and dad is, listen, they did some crazy stuff and there's some crazy, I got to knock off of me here in adulthood, but man, they love me well. And when I brought friends over, they loved them too. What if that's what was said about your house? That they showed the love of Christ there? What if that's what's said about the church? That when people come to Grace Raleigh, they walk away, and whatever else they experienced here, sermon was okay, music was great, announcements were outstanding. Whatever else they experienced here, they walk away and they go, those people love well. Those people loved me. And I'll brag on you a little bit because I don't think we're too terribly bad at this. Last week we had a guy here, we're getting our website redone. He's our web developer, a guy named Hugh. And Hugh is here. I invited him to just see the church and kind of learn more about us. And so he came in, and he came in after the first service, stayed in the lobby, came to the second service, and then I talked to him afterwards. And I just said, hey, you know, thanks for coming, whatever. And he said, dude, I love this place. I said, really? He says, yeah, these are the friendliest people I've ever met in my life. And he wasn't kidding. He said, they were so nice. He lives on the other side of Cary, like 40 minutes away. He said, if I lived closer, my family would start coming here next week. This place is incredible. So good on you if you were a part of that. I think this is one of the things we do well, but I think we can do it better. What if we were a church where no matter what other people experienced, they walked away and they said, those are some of the friendliest people I've ever met. What if that were everyone's experience? What if when you brought a visitor here, you brought friends or family here, they walked away and they said, that place loves well. It starts in the individual, it goes into the home, and then it comes here. And if we could be a church that loves other people well, that's what we become known for, that's the kind of church I want to be a part of. And you're here, I know, because that's the kind of church you want to be a part of too. But it begins with us. It begins with us pursuing Jesus and asking him and praying, help me to love other people as you have loved me. And what I love about this teaching is Jesus knows he's about to leave the disciples on earth. He's been a physical presence there. He has been the representative of the Godhead there. But he is about to leave and they're going to be the ones who carry the torch. And what better way as the torchbearers of Christ to represent him to the rest of the world than to go and be the embodiment of love to them as Jesus was. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We love you imperfectly. We love you inconsistently. We love you often half-heartedly. Often, God, we love you forgetfully. God, please continue to work in our hearts to draw us near you that we may love you more. And that out of that love, we might love other people more. Give us the grace and the patience to love sacrificially, God. Give us the sympathy and empathy and insight to love restoratively and give us the strength and the faith to love recklessly. God, may we, may our homes, may this place be known and identified for how well we offer your love to others. It's in your son's name I pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am the pastor here. I know a lot of you guys are wondering, did Nate do that voiceover? Yeah, I did. I did, actually. I worked really hard on that and my accent. But I am so excited about this series, about the book of John, about spending. We're going to spend 13 weeks in the gospel of John, and I really couldn't be more elated to do it. And I will tell you a couple things. First off, the whole point of this morning, like Kyle alluded to in the announcements, is to get you excited about John, to help you understand why this is such a big deal, why this is such a big book, why it's important enough to stop and spend 13 weeks in. I really haven't been excited for a series, this excited for a series, in a really long time. Part of the reason I'm excited is because I feel like we've been waiting to do this as a church. I've been waiting to do this as your pastor. I told you guys last week, if you were here, that when I came in April of 2017, that I looked back through all of the series that had happened at the church to see where you guys had been and what you guys had been learning about to make sure that I wouldn't be repetitive moving forward and to see if there was any gaps that I felt like I needed to teach. And what I saw was that we spent a lot of time in the Gospels. The Gospels are the books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus' life. It's the first four books in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And so you had spent a lot of time there, and you'd spend a lot of time in a book called Acts that kind of tells the story of the early church. It's a fun book. It's a storytelling book. It's the only one in the New Testament. And so it's a good book to be in. But I felt like there was so much more that we needed to study and know about the scripture. So we spent time in the Old Testament focusing on characters like David, and then the names of God, and then how the Old Testament points to Jesus. And so we've done that for a long time, and now it's time as a church to dive into Jesus, to dive into the story of his life, to acquaint ourselves corporately with our Savior, with someone who loves us and who died for us. And I'm really elated to do this. But I will also say this, and I'll remind you of this here at the end of the service. As I sat down to prep for the series and outline it, one of the things I realized is there is no way I can teach everything that I want to teach from the book of John. There is no way that I can do justice to the book of John. When I was growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, who I adore and respect immensely, he passed away a couple of years ago, but I consider myself lucky to grow up under his teaching. And my passion for scripture, I think, was ignited a lot by him. He spent four years going through the book of John, every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, until his elders finally sat him down and were like, dude, we need some Proverbs or something. You've got to switch it up. So if he could do that, I couldn't do four years, but I could do more than 13 weeks. I sat down to outline the series, and I just started by opening the Bible and just writing down everything that I saw. I was like, oh, I got to teach about that. Oh, yeah, that can be a sermon. Oh, yeah, they need to know about this. And I got through the first two chapters, and it was already like an 18-week series. So this really, if I'm being honest, isn't us going through the book of John. It's really Nate's 13 favorite things in the book of John. So to really get all of it, you're going to have to work along with us, okay? And we're going to get to that at the end. But I just want to say that as a preface to the series. As we preface the series this week and we launch into what does God say to us through this book, I want to answer some fundamental questions about why we're even doing this. I think one of the fundamental questions that we should answer is, why should we study a gospel? What is interesting to us about the gospels? Why were they written? Why did these books matter in some ways, in a different way than all the rest of Scripture? And so that's the first question we're going to answer. And I think John gives us that answer, at least the beginnings of an answer, in the 20th chapter of his book. The Gospel of John is 21 chapters long. And at the end of the second to last chapter, he throws in this statement, verse 31. And he says, I have written these things that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. So he says, I've written all of this down, my experiences with Jesus down for this reason, so that you, you being whoever reads this ever, may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. So he wrote this so that you believe that Jesus was who he says he was. He wants you, he wrote this down so that you would know that Jesus is real and Jesus was who he says he was. And I don't know if you ever thought about it this way, and this is why we need to study a gospel and why Jesus matters so much to us. Do you understand that Jesus is the hinge on which all of history swings? He's the fulcrum on which all of history rests, that he matters more. He stands alone in history as the single most influential figure to ever be on the planet. Do you understand that? Do you understand that all of history and all of faith really boils down to two questions? These are the only questions that matter. Was Jesus real, and was he telling us the truth? That's all that matters. Was Jesus real? Did a guy named Jesus of Nazareth actually walk the planet 2,000 years ago? And if he existed, was that guy telling us the truth about himself? Because what he claims is that he is the incarnate son of the creator God who came to reconcile our relationship back to that God and that all reconciliation that we know as salvation flows through him because of what he did while he was on this earth, because he died and resurrected and defeated death and sin, and we'll see that later. Because of all of that, we can have a faith that we place in God if he's real, because that's what he claimed. So we have to answer those two questions. Was Jesus real, and was he telling us the truth? And I would say to you this morning, if you were here and you're not a believer, if you were here and you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, maybe there's someone close to you who kind of encourages you to come to church and so you come to do the nice thing. First of all, good for you for doing the nice thing. But if you're considering faith, dipping your toe into the waters of faith, unsure about faith, I would tell you that the very first thing you need to figure out is the answer to those questions. When I do my research, when I look at history, based on all the evidence, did Jesus, did he really exist? And then, do I believe that he was telling us the truth? Because if the answers to those questions are no, I don't think he existed. I don't think he was telling us the truth. Then nothing else matters, right? Nothing else matters. The Old Testament doesn't matter. What we understand about God doesn't matter. Nothing else in all of Christendom and the way that we understand the world and our worldview and the way that we understand faith, none of that matters if Jesus wasn't real and he wasn't telling us the truth. But if he was real and he is telling us the truth, that changes everything. Because that man during his life is recorded as affirming the first 39 books of the Bible that we call the Old Testament, that he called the Talmud. He affirms those, the law and the prophets, as scripture, as God breathed. He had the same 39 books that we have today by the time he was on earth. They were assembled around 250 BC and the people in Jerusalem said, yep, this is the holy text. And so Jesus affirms the holy text. So if Jesus is real and he is who he says he was, then he said he himself believed that the Old Testament was God breathed and was the word of God. So we can believe it too. If he's real and he is who he says he was, then he actually died and he was actually resurrected and he actually went to heaven. And the church that he leaves us in Acts is actually true and that was really the kingdom that he came to start that goes through the rest of history. It's the kingdom that we sit in now. If Jesus is real, then all of history before him looked forward to anticipating a Messiah, and all of history after him looks back to him as the Messiah and looks forward to his return, if he's real. So Jesus really is the hinge of all of history. We have to figure out what we think of him. We have to understand whether or not we can believe him. I think those questions are the most fundamental and the most important questions for anyone to answer in their life. If you've never answered them for yourself, it is worth the effort to do it. I promise. Get those answers for yourself. Because in Jesus, what we see is these essential qualities that we absolutely have to have. They're revealed in the Gospels, and it's why we study the Gospels. What I want you guys to understand is Jesus is the divine exemplar. He is the divine exemplar of our faith. An exemplar is just a fancy word for the best possible perfect model. And we see both of these things in the gospel. If you really want a fancy theological term, it's called the hypostatic union, that he is 100% God and 100% man. And we will never really understand how that all works out. But both elements are necessary and both elements are displayed in Scripture. And we need him to be divine, because without his divinity, we do not have the faith that he gave us. Okay? Without his divinity, there is no faith. Right? We understand that? And then, if we don't get his example, if he doesn't live for 33 years, three of which are really highly recorded, if we don't see the gospel stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then we never get his example, and we need his example because without it, we have no perfect model for the faith that he founded. He is the exemplar, and that's essential for us as well. Without Jesus, we get other pictures of the faith. We get Paul, who may have struggled with arrogance. We get Moses, who may have struggled with anger. We get Esther, who had her own struggles. We get Ruth, who had her own struggles. We get them throughout Scripture, but they're all imperfect models. Jesus is the perfect model of your faith. So because he is the hinge of history, because he's the most influential person to ever live, we should really, really, really want to know everything we can about him on a more personal level than that. Jesus is your Savior. If you're a believer, he's your Savior. He is the one person to whom everyone else looks. He is the one person on whom all of Scripture is focused, whether it's looking forward to him or looking back to him or anticipating him again. Understanding Jesus is fundamental to your faith. That's why the prayer of Paul for all of his churches is that you would know Jesus along with the saints in the breadth and the depth and the fullness of the knowledge of Christ. It's why he prays it over and over again, and he praises the churches throughout the ancient world for their knowledge of Jesus, because it all boils down to how well we know Jesus. Jesus says in John 15, and we're going to spend a whole week on this, that if we abide in him, that he will abide in us, and that we will bear much fruit. And all of life boils down to focusing on Jesus. The author of Hebrews tells us to run our race, to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles us. And how do we do that? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If you are a believer, there is no element of your faith that is more important or fundamental to you than understanding the person of Jesus and getting to know him in a very real way. And there is no better way to do that than the Gospels. If you are considering the faith, and you wouldn't say yet that you're a believer, the best thing to consider in the faith is who was the person of Jesus. It's essential to us that we study him and that we know him. I heard somebody say one time, a scholar once said, you couldn't possibly claim to be a Christian who knows Jesus if you don't read all four Gospels a minimum of once a year. I'm not espousing that as true. I would never say someone is not a Christian who doesn't know Jesus. That seems pretty inflammatory. But the attitude behind it is, if we believe, we have got to dig into these things and get to know the person of Christ. So, because we see that studying the gospel is so essential, something that we have to do, we should want to do, the question becomes, well, why John? There's four options there. They all do a great job of it. So why do we choose John? Why have I chosen John for us to go through? Well, I believe that John has a unique relationship with Jesus. He has a unique relationship with our Savior. And I think that because there's clues dropped all throughout his gospel that show us that this is true. First of all, one of the things I would point to is Jesus in his life had about 100 to 120 people kind of following him around wherever he went. Sometimes we don't know that or we forget about that. We think about the 12 disciples that were with him all the time, but really there was others around him, 100 to 120, that followed him all over the place. Actually, in Acts, when Judas has to get replaced, one of the requirements to be the replacement disciple, which ends up being a guy named Matthias, is he had to have been here from the very beginning. So there's people for all three years of his ministry that followed him around that were just never mentioned. Those are people of great faith. Then there was the 12 disciples, the 12 that he called, and we know the 12 disciples. But then there was an inner circle of three disciples, the only disciples that he gave nicknames to, Peter, James, and John. When Jesus met Peter, his name was Simon, but he renamed him Cephas or Cephas, which means rocky, which is translated Peter. So Jesus named some dude Rocky because he just kind of had an attitude that was like ready, fire, aim, right? And so Jesus was like, you're Rocky. Then he gives James and John the coolest nickname in all the Bible. They were brothers, and their dad was named Zebedee. And so they were called the sons of Zebedee, but his nickname for them was the sons of thunder. Come on, man. That's awesome. I want to be a son of thunder. I'm just Nate. That's lame. But they get the best nickname in the Bible. They're in the inner circle. They have access to Jesus that even the other disciples who see him every day do not have. Little things like, and it's not a little thing, it's actually a huge thing. And some of you know the story and some of you don't, and that's okay. But at the end of Jesus's life, he's about to be arrested and he goes to pray this incredible prayer in what's called the Garden of Gethsemane. And he leaves the disciples and he grabs three of them and he says, will you guys come pray with me? And John's one of those disciples. Throughout the entire crucifixion process, John is present there. He had access to Jesus that nobody else had. We'll see an intimate moment between he and Jesus at a meal here in a minute. John was so comfortable with Jesus that his mom felt total comfort in asking Jesus for special favors for her boy. They were walking into Jerusalem the last week of Jesus's life to begin Holy Week. In Christendom, we understand Holy Week kind of sets in motion the gears that bring about crucifixion and resurrection, and then we celebrate Easter. And so they're walking into the city. Jesus has been being welcomed as a king. One of the things you'll see in the gospel as we go through it is nobody, my contention is, nobody understood who Jesus was or what he came to do. Nobody really understood Jesus except for two people, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. I don't think anybody else got it until after he came back to life. They expect Jesus to walk into Jerusalem. All the prophecies are that he's going to be a king. So they expect him to walk into Jerusalem, sit on the throne of David, overthrow Roman rule, and make Israel awesome again and this world's superpower, and Jesus is going to be the king of the world. And so walking into Jerusalem, John's mom is behind Jesus tugging on his tunic going, hey, when you take over the planet, can John be like your vice president? Moms, man, forever. They're all the same. Moms are the best. That's why we have a day for you guys. Fathers have a day for you guys because we felt bad about dads, but moms, they deserve their day, right? Because they've always done that. That's how comfortable she was. She felt like she could ask for that from Jesus. John actually records that he was the first disciple to the tomb. After Jesus dies and is resurrected, John records that Mary Magdalene was the first one to the tomb, but then she goes back to the disciples and she goes, hey, there's nobody there. And so two of the disciples take off running, John and Peter, right? Two of the very close ones. And John makes sure to record in his gospel 60 years after it happened because he's a dude. We started running together, but after a while, the one that Jesus loved left behind Peter and got ahead of him. So he's like, hey, just so we know, for all of history, I won, all right? Like I got there first and had enough time to review the tomb and fold some stuff up before Peter ever gets there. He was the first one to the empty tomb. He was so close to Jesus that when Jesus was hanging on the cross and said very little because of the excruciating pain that it required to speak, he looked at John. And John was the lone disciple around. He looked at John, who was standing next to Mary, his mother. And he says, Mary, behold your son. John, behold your mother. And what he's saying is, John, take care of my mom for me. Especially in that society where old women had no way to make a wage and they were entirely reliant on their families to care for them, this was a huge responsibility. And he looks at John, of all the people that he's met in his life, of all the people that he knows, he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. Makes him the executor of his will. Remarkably close. And then we have this moment in John chapter 13 that I think impacted John for the rest of his life. It gives us a picture of the relationship that Jesus had with him. In John chapter 13, what's happening is the disciples are reclining at the table. And when the Bible says reclining at the table, for us, it really just means like drooping in your seat, probably with your legs crossed and just kind of slouched down like you own the joint. Okay, that's what it looks like when I recline at the table. But when they reclined at the table, it literally meant that they were kind of laying down on their side with their elbow out and eating off the table like this, kind of in a pinwheel situation, like chest to back. Not totally spooning, but closer than you'd want to be, okay? And that's how they're reclining at the table. And in this meal, it's before Holy Week, before things are set in motion, he looks at the disciples and he says, one of you is going to betray me. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be a disciple in that moment. To go, what? Who? Who would betray you? But he says, one of you is going to betray me. And Peter, of course, because he's Peter, wants to know immediately. I love Peter so much. I relate to him so much. He wants to know immediately, but he knows he can't just brutishly ask in front of everyone. So he hits up John, like in elementary school. Hey, John, figure it out. He says, hey, John, ask Jesus who it is. Who's it going to be? Because he knows that John has Jesus' ear. It's a tip of the cap to the relationship that Peter knows they share. And John leans presumably back to Jesus. And he says, who's going to betray you? And Jesus says, it's the one that I give this morsel to. And he takes the bread and he dips it and he hands it to Judas. And John knows. And he's the only one that knows. Because Jesus trusted him with that secret. And then I'll say it now because we're not going to get to it later because there's just so much. But this incredible moment happens. He gives it to Judas. And when he gives it to Judas, it says that Satan swept into him. So now Jesus is eye to eye with Satan. And he looks at him and he says, what you're about to do, do it quickly. Incredibly intense sentence. And if we're reading too fast, we don't get it. What you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then it says, and then it was night. And the whole tone of the book in Jesus' life changes. Because before then it had been light. It's an incredible moment there. And right after that moment, Jesus offers a profound teaching to only the disciples who remain, to only the faithful ones who will now carry his kingdom forward because Judas has been exposed and he's now gone. It says the disciples didn't know what he was talking about. They thought when he said, go and do it quickly, and they thought maybe he's going to get some money for a meal or something like that. They didn't know, but John knew. And so John was really paying attention to what happened. And then Jesus gives them, the faithful disciples, this teaching. And he says to them in John 13, and you can just listen. He says, little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me. And just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, where I'm going, you cannot come because he's going to death. They don't understand this yet, but that's what he's telling them. He says this, It's the whole commandment. It's the new commandment. It even supersedes the commandment to love God and to love others. It's the new one. Love one another. Love, love, love. It's the final commandment that Jesus gives. It's the only new commandment that he gives. And it touched John so much that at the end of his life when he was writing the other epistles, John, first, second, and third John that we have at the end of the New Testament, you know that 1st John, if you open it up and you read it, it is a commentary on these two verses, on that one teaching, love one another. That is how the world will know that you are my disciples, love one another. If you go in your Bible and you open up 1st John, it is a commentary, it is an exposition of what Jesus teaches right here that stuck with him so profoundly that he writes about it as an old man wanting everybody to understand what Jesus was teaching in that moment that mattered so much to him. If you open up 1 John and you read it, what does it say over and over again? If you say that you love Jesus but you hate your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. If you do love Jesus, then you will love your brother. And if you love your brother, then you must love Jesus. It's an entire exposition on this moment. And then there's this other moment that I really love in Revelation. John goes on from here. He goes on. He takes care of Jesus' mom. And all the disciples we see in Acts, a lot stay central to Jerusalem. Some disperse and begin to preach the gospel in other places. But John, we learn, is the only disciple that did not die a martyr's death. All the other disciples were put to death for their faith. But John was allowed by God to live for many, many years into maybe his 70s or 80s. A lot of people believe that John was maybe the youngest disciple. Some put him as young as potentially 10 years old when Jesus called him. A lot of scholars believe that the disciples were high school boys and college freshmen when Jesus called them. Can you imagine that? Leaving the keys of the kingdom to them? Yikes. I don't know that that's true, but a lot of scholars believe that that's true. And that means that John has a lot of time between when Jesus passes to remember back. And he's got a lot of years of ministry and a lot of preaching and a lot of writing and a lot of influencing. And he discipled early church leaders like Polycarp and set in motion the vehicle of the church. He was like the first real church father. And at the end of his life, he's on exile. He's in exile on the island of Patmos, somewhere around 93 AD, 60 years now after Jesus has passed. And all of these years, he's preached about his Jesus. He's taught other people about his Jesus. He's taught them about his best friend and his hero and this man that he loved so much that he has devoted his entire life for. And now he's in exile, remembering and writing and looking forward to when he finally gets to meet his Savior again. And the Holy Spirit comes to him in this season and sweeps him up and takes him to heaven. And he says, here, I want you to write down the things that you see. And that book becomes Revelation. And at the beginning of Revelation, we have this incredible glimpse of the relationship between John and Jesus, where they are reunited. And I'm going to read. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen. John is in heaven, and he's seeing all of these visions. And then he sees this man that scares the fire out of him. And this like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like flames of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze refined in a furnace. And his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars. From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword. And his face was like the sun, shining in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. He didn't know yet that it was Jesus. And he falls on his feet, terrified, because he's never seen the heavenly reunited with his Jesus. He knows that it's Jesus' hand on his shoulder and that it's Jesus' voice speaking to him. And the one that he had lived his life in memory of and devoted to and longed to be reunited with was there, and he finally meets him in his heavenly form. And it's this man, with those unique perspectives, that writes us the gospel of John. We study John because it gives us a unique perspective of Jesus. How could it not? You know, in John's gospel, he never refers to himself as John. He refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. And some scholars argue that this is evidence that he didn't actually write the book himself, that somebody wrote it for him, because what an arrogant thing to call yourself the disciple whom Jesus loved. But man, as I read that and I think about the relationship that John had with Jesus, I don't think it's an arrogant thing at all. I think that John, in his old age, he's 50 or 60 years removed from Jesus. He's in his 70s. He's in the twilight of his life, particularly with life expectancy back then. He was an old man reflecting back on his early years. And as he wrote this, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. And I think that he uses that not because he was proud of himself or somehow arrogant. I think he was astounded that he was the one that Jesus chose to love and reveal himself to in that way. I think as he thought back that he was touched and humbled, I can't believe that Jesus trusted me with the secret of Judas. I think he was touched and humbled. I can't believe that my Savior, that my hero asked me to care for his mom. I can't believe that he swept me up and spoke to me in Revelation. I can't believe that all the other disciples have passed, and for some reason he's allowed me to shepherd the early church, his kingdom, his building into the next age of leaders. I can't believe that my life has included these amazing privileges. I cannot believe I'm the disciple that Jesus has chosen to love. And so he calls himself that. And that's the man that offers us a perspective of his Jesus. By the time he wrote this, all the other gospels had been written, and they had begun to circulate in the churches. So we have every reason to believe that John had actually read the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And those are called synoptic gospels, and they're different than John's gospel. They're synoptic because they tell the same story with the same chronology from beginning to end. And so what John is able to do is read those and go, okay, here's what you need to know about my Jesus. Here's what you need to know about my best friend. He is a man in his old age who loves Jesus, who knows him maybe better than anyone has ever known him, writing down a book that you may believe that Jesus was who he says he was, telling you, you know what? If you want to know Jesus, then here's what you really need to know. Look at these things. That's why his book is unique. That's why the other books include parables, pithy sayings that are memorable teachings of Jesus, and John doesn't include any of those. In John, we get these big sweeping monologues. We get these real long teachings from Jesus. In the other books, we have the long teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, but John doesn't share the Sermon on the Mount because it's already been taken care of. Instead, he shares with you these big, long conversations like the one that he has with Nicodemus in chapter 3, the Pharisee that comes to see him at night because he's ashamed and embarrassed that he might actually believe in this Jesus guy. So Jesus has a conversation with him that John records. We get stories that we don't get in the other Gospels, like when Jesus' closest friend in the world, Lazarus, dies and Jesus goes to raise him from the dead and comfort his sisters in the city of Bethany. And we get this verse, John 11, 35, the shortest one in the Bible that says, Jesus wept, that answers for us for all time. How does Jesus respond in our tragedy? Well, he comes and he weeps with us. We know that because John tells us so. We get in John these I am statements. There's no parables there, and there's not as much figurative language, but he says, I am again and again. I am the bread of life. I am the living water. I am the good shepherd. Over and over again, we see these things. We get the miracle at Cana, where Jesus' first public miracle is to keep the party going. You guys do with that whatever you want to, but it's in there. We get one of my favorite chapters in the Bible, John 17. It's called the High Priestly Prayer. Right before Jesus dies, he prays for them, and he prays for the church. And get this, 2,000 years ago, he prayed for you. And it's recorded in John 17. We have all these things in his gospel that we don't get in the others. And the others are not unimportant. They're incredibly important. And we can't get a holistic picture of Jesus outside of those gospels. But John is an old man in his old age reflecting back on the person that he's loved the most in his entire life saying, here's what you need to know about my Jesus. Here's what you need to know about my friend and my hero. Unique and it stands alone. And it's an amazing book. And it's worthy of our consideration. And like I said, the whole point of this morning is to get you to a place where you go, I want to know what John says about Jesus. Wherever you are, if you're dipping your toes in the water of faith, start with John and see what he says about the person you're considering. If you call yourself a Christian, then read John and look at what he says about his Savior that you love so much and learn about him. And like I said at the beginning, this is not a series working through John. I'm going to skip around and share stories and it's going to be good. I really, really hope. But if you want to get the most you can out of this series and you have got to do the work on your own on a daily basis. So I made a reading plan for us for John. There's one, they're in the lobby, they're on the information table. The one thing I want you to do from this sermon is leave and grab one of those. There's gonna be one online, they're gonna be in a couple of different places. I've even, I want you so badly to read the book of John with us that uniquely I've included a catch-up day, okay? Every Saturday it just says, catch up, man. I know you missed one, I did too. Let's catch up. Do it. Use the YouVersion app. If you don't know what that is, Google it. Use that app, and you can listen to it in your car, okay? If reading is hard for you or you're lazy like me, just listen to it in your car, man. Listen to it on your jog. But it's two chapters a week. It's easy. The whole goal for you leaving today is to be excited enough about the book of John and what God's servant John has to say about his Jesus that you're willing to dig into it on your own. And then together as a church, we're going to learn more about who our Jesus is. And my prayer for you is that you will know him, Jesus, more deeply and more intimately than you ever have by the time we get on the other side of Easter this year. I hope that you'll do that with us. Let me pray, and then we're going to take communion together. Father, we love you. We are so grateful. We're so grateful for the book of John. I thank you for inspiring him to write down what he did. Thank you for giving him the perspective that would allow him to remember the things that he remembered. God, thank you even for preserving it through all of history, through the years and through the wars and through all of the torrent of the times, God, that you brought this book down to us. Thank you for the diligent scribes that recorded it, that protected it, that gave their lives for it, that we might learn from it. God, I pray that you would reveal yourself to us in this book in incredible ways, that we would see the tenderness of your son, that we would see your heart revealed as it's poured out in the form of him, that we would come to value the spirit that he's left us behind, and more than anything, that we would come to know you in an intimate way through this series and through this study. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. In just a minute, we're going to take communion together, but as we do, this is probably the appropriate place to acknowledge that earlier this week, a young boy, 17-year-old, named Leighton Holidayiday passed away overnight in the early mornings of Wednesday. A lot of us know the family and know his dad, Craig Holliday, was the founding pastor of Grace. And so the community grieves, and Grace in particular grieves with the holidays with Craig and Rhett and his brother Cody. And so this afternoon there's going to be a funeral at NRCA at 3 o'clock. Everyone's invited, and the family would appreciate your attendance and your prayers and your support. And I mention it now because we're about to do communion, and today is a tragic day. It's been a tragic week. One of the most sad things in life is to bury a child. And so today, there's nothing that makes today not sad. But here's the thing. Because of communion, because of what it represents, today isn't just sad. It is tragic. But because of Jesus, it's not just tragic. Because Jesus defeated death and holds the keys to hell and Hades, this day is not just tragic. It can also be hopeful. And that's an amazing thing. So when we take communion today, we remember the death of Christ that united us with our creator. But what we also remember is that this was the moment that Jesus defeated death and took the sting out of days like today and made them not just tragic, but also made them hopeful, which is a remarkable thing. As the disciples were reclined around the table the night that Jesus was arrested, he took the bread and he broke it and he says, this is my body that was broken for you. Every time you eat of this, do it in remembrance of me. And then he took the wine and he poured it out and he says, this is my blood that was poured out for you. Every time you drink it, do it in remembrance of me. So I'm going to pray and we're going to take communion. And as we do, as we always do, we reflect on how grateful we are that Jesus, through this breaking of his body and through the spilling of his blood, reunites us with him. But today we also are grateful for the fact that through this act he defeated death and Hades and that days like today aren't just tragic. They can be hopeful too. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for sacrificing him for us. We thank you that he rose again and defeated death and hell. We thank you that he has taken the sting out of sin and says to death, where are your shackles? That it has been defeated. God, we are so grateful that you've saved us from ourselves, from our own foolishness at times, that from our own choices, God, you reunite us with you and we are so grateful for that. God, we are also grateful that you take the sting out of tragedy and that you promise a future that is delivered by Jesus. Thank you for communion and everything that it means. In Jesus' name, amen.

What up? I'm Nate. Thanks for being here. I get to be the pastor here and they let me do the sermons and stuff, so it's good to get to see you if I haven't gotten to meet you already. In case you're wondering, cookout and baggy clothes is the key to this body. So, I mean, you guys can have it too. It's really easy. This is the last part of our series called Lessons from the Gym pursuing and prioritizing our spiritual health. And one of the things that we've been saying is implicit in your attendance in church is that to some degree or another, you care about your spiritual health. Maybe a little bit, we may be dipping our toe in the water. It may be a big, huge deal, a life-changing moment, and you're really taking it seriously. But all of us, to varying degrees, say by being here that we care about our spiritual health. And so we've been walking through that for the month of January. I've been really excited about the series because if I'm honest, I had some trepidation going into it. I wasn't sure if we should do it. For different reasons, I was insecure about it. But you guys have been really nice and kind, and the feedback has been good. And my prayer throughout this has been that we would be, that 2019 would be a year for all of us of marked spiritual growth and maturity, that we would finish the year closer to Jesus than we were when we entered the year. So we've been talking about that pursuit, and I hope that you guys are committed to your spiritual health. I want to talk this morning about a principle in Scripture that I think is one of the most forgotten, underrated, undertaught, undernoticed principles in the Bible and really highlight that today and talk about the ramifications that has for us as we seek to become people who are more spiritually healthy and walking with Jesus. To do that, I want to go back to a place where I was at several years ago at my previous church called Greystone Church outside of Atlanta. I was going to Greystone and they ended up hiring me as the student pastor. And so when I took over, I had a group of small group leaders that worked with the students that were volunteers from the church. One of the guys was a guy named Toby. Toby was a, he was a regular dude, couple kids, job, the whole deal. And Toby's story that he shared with me was he, earlier in his life, I mean, as an adult, but years prior, he was an alcoholic. And that's what he dealt with. That was his cross to bear. And he was very far from Jesus. He never accepted Jesus as his Savior. And then one day, God got a hold of his heart in this incredible way, and he comes to know Jesus as his Savior. He becomes a Christian. He lets God in, and he gives his life over to that. And on the day that he accepted Christ as his Savior, moving forward, he said he has never had another sip of alcohol in his whole life. He goes from walking one way, being an alcoholic, kind of a slave to that, that's a big part of his life, and then the very next day after accepting Christ as his Savior, no more alcohol in his life ever. Now listen, the point of this illustration is not to tell you that alcohol is evil and that you should never have a sip of it. The point of it is, in Toby's life, his conviction was that he shouldn't because it was unwise of him. And God cured him of his alcoholism just like that. And if you guys have been around church for any amount of time, and a lot of you guys are church people, you've seen and heard stories like this, right? Where somebody had an addiction to a substance or some other thing. Somebody was just a big jerk, or they were greedy, or they were selfish, or they were myopic in their thinking, or whatever it was that tended towards unhealth, that was them. And then they got saved. They accepted Jesus as their Savior, and God changed their heart in a 180-degree turn. The very next day, they're totally different people. They were never that person before. We've seen stories like that, or they were never the person that they were before. Again, you guys know this, right? And then we look in Scripture, and we see sometimes indicators that this is kind of the norm. This morning, I want us to look at kind of the life arc of a guy named Paul. Paul was probably the most influential Christian to ever live. He wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. And in the book of Romans, which is the most theologically detailed book in the New Testament, maybe even in the Bible, he's outlining for us what we call the doctrine of salvation, or really why we believe what we believe about how a person gets saved is the word that we use. And when he's outlining that, he gets to the part in Romans 5 and 6 where he starts talking about accepting Jesus and what it means when we become a Christian. And in Romans 6, he says that when you become a Christian, that the old person is gone, the old version of you, the things that you used to do, the things that you used to be interested in, the pursuits that you used to have, that person is dead. He has been put to death with Christ. He or she has been put to death with Christ. And now you walk as this new creation in Jesus. So the version of you that used to be, what Paul says, a slave to sin. You have no choice but to sin. And when we talk about sin, what we understand is a church word that we use a lot of times, but sin simply is living as though God's standards for your life don't matter. That's what sin is. And so when we live a life of sin, we are far from God. We are separated from him. We are a slave to sin. We have no option but to do things that displease Him. And then, the moment we become saved, says Paul, we are a new creature. We can walk in freedom. We're not a slave to that anymore. The problem with stories like Toby's and the ones that you know in your life and passages like that that seem to indicate that this spiritual change and transformation is this instantaneous, momentary thing where we're going one way one minute and then the next minute, because of Jesus, we're walking in the other direction and we're not the same person anymore. The problem with that and hearing stories like that is that they end up, for most of us, being more discouraging than they are encouraging. And they're scourging in the same way that I was discouraged at the gym. I told you that I started taking my physical health seriously. At the end of 2016, I was 204 pounds. I wish I had a picture of Super Chubby Nate. You guys would really love it. But I was 204 pounds, which for me, I graduated college at 155, man, like soaking wet. So I've always been a beanpole. So that was pretty big for me. And I started going, man, like I can't even, like when I just stand still, I have two chins and that's not good. So I got to do something about this. I'm going to have to tuck it. It's just there. So I was like actually taking pictures, like trying to stick my face out, you know, so that way, anyways, it was bad. And I thought, how about instead of taking pictures like a weirdo, you just get healthy. So I started to pursue health. And I would get in the gym and I would work out. I'd really rep it out good, you know, like whatever it was. I felt really tired. I was really sweaty. And I'd get down into the locker room, changing for the shower or whatever it was. And I'm looking in the mirror, you know, there's mirrors all over the place in these stupid locker rooms, and I'm kind of doing like the subtle flex, like, you know, is there anything there? Like give it a little, like squeezing the pecs. Y'all quit looking at me like you never do the subtle flex. You bunch of liars. You all do the subtle flex. So I'm looking at it, trying to figure out, is there anything different about me? And it was depressing because the answer was no. It took a long time. It probably took about three months before I was able to look in the mirror and go, okay, I'm starting to notice some differences. It probably took about five or six months before anybody in my life looked at me and said, you know, you look a little healthier. You look a little skinnier. Are you losing weight? It took a long time to start seeing the after picture that I wanted to see. It probably took about 10 or 11 months for me to get to the place where I said, okay, I think I'm pretty happy with the way I feel and the way that I look. It took a long time. And it was a bummer to realize, getting into the gym, that just because I go to the gym and just because I'm now trying to eat right and I'm watching my calories and I'm watching my sugar and all that other stuff and I'm doing the exercises, just because I'm doing that does not mean that I'm going to get instantly healthy. Just because I have a good week doesn't mean I'm going to see results. And what began to dawn on me is, man, getting healthy takes a long time. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? You spend your years doing whatever it is you're doing to get to the place of unhealth that drives you to the place to pursue physical health, and you've been eating whatever you want, you've been doing whatever you want, you haven't maintained a discipline of exercise, and it's going to take a long time to shed those years of unhealth, right? And I realize, man, everybody who's walking around who's healthier than me, like they've made a long-term commitment to this. It's not a result of just one good week or one good month, but they are really staying the course to get physically healthy. And what occurred to me is it's the same with our spiritual health. It takes a long time to get spiritually healthy. It's the same deal. If you're walking through life acting as though God's standards for your life don't matter, and so you're walking in unhealth, and you're allowing things to come into your life, whatever it is to come into your life, to come into your head, to come into your heart, to come into your person, and then you just allow those things to sit there and generate within you whatever they generate, and you perpetuate in this unhealth. When you decide to pursue spiritual health, doesn't it make sense that it would take a long time to shed those layers of unhealth? And what we need to realize this morning is it's great to make a decision to commit yourself to spiritual health. It's great to make a decision to follow Jesus. It's great to get on your knees at somewhere in the month of January and say, Jesus, I want you. I want more of you. I want to grow nearer to you this year. It is great to do those things, but it is not one decision or one action or one prayer or one commitment that turns our life 180 degrees and suddenly we begin to walk in health. It takes a long time. That's why I think that this principle in Scripture is so very important and can be so very encouraging for those of us who are longing for spiritual help, but it seems to be taking longer than what we want. I talked to you about Paul. Paul's the most influential Christian to ever live, and Paul has probably the most radical conversion story in the Bible. Somebody who was not a believer and then became a believer. Paul was a guy named Saul who, after the death of Jesus, was actively killing Christians who professed a faith in the guy that had just died and come back to life. He was actively persecuting Christians. And he went to the leaders in Jerusalem and he said, I'd like to go to Damascus. There's been an outcropping of Christianity there. I want to go squelch it. Let me go arrest and kill people. And they said, yeah, go ahead. So he is literally on the road to Damascus, on his way to go kill Christians. And Jesus appears to him. And he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And he gets his attention and he blinds him for three days. And in that moment, God changes Saul's name to Paul and he becomes a believer. And God even goes to another guy named Ananias and he says about Paul, he is my chosen instrument to reach the rest of the world with the good news of me. He is going to build my church in the rest of the world outside of Jerusalem. He's a big deal. And you would expect that a person, the same man who experienced that radical conversion, to go from on his way to killing Christians to now a believer who wrote Romans 6, who explains to us that when we accept Christ, that the old version of us is dead and the new person of us, new version of us now walks in freedom and is no longer a slave to sin. You would expect that that person, if there's ever been 180 degree turn, that it would be him. Except in the book of Galatians, he gives us this little detail about his life that I think is incredibly interesting. He's writing to the church in Galatia and he's kind of giving them his resume. Here's why I can say the things to you that I'm saying. And one of the things he says is this. He says, when I got converted, I went to the Arabian wilderness for three years and isolated myself. You hear me? This guy who was converted radically, who had all the religious training in the world when he was a guy named Saul, who God got a hold of and turned him towards him and said, you're going to be my instrument to reach the rest of the world. Before he went and did any ministry, before he was spiritually healthy, he went and isolated himself in the Arabian desert for three years while God did the work on his heart and on his soul and on his ego and on his mindset and on his values and on his conscience that he needed done before he was healthy enough to go and to minister to others. Do you realize that? It took the most influential Christian who's ever lived three years to go from a place of unhealth to health. And it's not just Paul. We see this in the Old Testament. Moses, a hero of the faith, the founder of the nation of Israel, the author of the first five books of the Bible called the Torah, the guy who carried the Ten Commandments down the mountain and gave them to the people who instituted the law. He grew up in Pharaoh's house, being exposed to training that no other Hebrew had ever been exposed to, being trained to be a leader and learning how to get people to follow him. He got training that nobody ever did because God was preparing him for what he wanted him to do later in life. But before God allowed him to do the thing that he put him on the earth to do, God sent him to Midian to be a shepherd in the desert for 40 years in the wilderness. 40 years in the wilderness. Where God worked on him and worked on his heart and ironed out his arrogance and ironed out his ego and instilled him with the spirit of altruism so that when he began the work, he was ready for it. David, the greatest king Israel has ever seen, the king on whose throne Jesus is going to sit when he returns. As a young boy, maybe 10, maybe 12, maybe 13, was anointed the king of Israel. And Samuel said, you're going to be the next king of Israel. Do you know that between anointment and appointment, there was maybe 15 or 20 years that went by before that was actually fulfilled. And in the meantime, between being anointed king and actually being appointed king to what God wanted him to do, he wandered around the wilderness trying to not get murdered by the other king. Where God worked on his heart and his ego and his humility and his conscience and his values to prepare him for what he needed him to do. This principle of the wilderness runs throughout Scripture, and we often forget about it, or we don't notice it. But I think it's incredibly important to point out, as many of us in the room say, in 2019, I want to prioritize my spiritual health. Because what we need to understand, if we're going to prioritize our spiritual health, is that it's going to take a long time. It's going to take a long time. It's not one decision. It's not one commitment. It's not one prayer. It's a daily decision. It's a daily prayer. It's a daily renewal. And it takes a long time to work out our hearts and get them to a place where God wants them to be so that we can walk in harmony with him. It takes a long time. So those of you who are seeing other people and seeing this instantaneous change and go, why isn't that happening to me? It's not happening to you because that's not natural, and that's not founded. And even Toby would tell you, yeah, sure, it changed my desire for alcohol, but God still had a ton of work to do in my heart. It takes a long time to get to a place of spiritual health. It takes long commitment and daily decisions for weeks and months and years to get to a place where we're healthy. And it takes so very long and is so very arduous because as God is working in us, what we need to realize is he's working in us because we need our consciences repaired, our values reoriented, and our hearts restored. You understand that? It takes so very long to get spiritually healthy because we desperately need our consciences repaired, our values reoriented, and our hearts restored to what they are meant to be. The Bible has a lot to say about this idea of our consciences being seared, is the word that it normally talks about. Being seared so that something that's supposed to make us feel bad when we do it, we do it so often and so regularly that that part of our heart or that part of our conscience is numb and we no longer even acknowledge that anymore. We don't even experience the pains of guilt when we do that thing that we always do anymore because we're so accustomed to doing it. And so God has to peel back layers of scar tissue on our consciences to reorient them and recalibrate them towards him. An easy example of this, I don't mean to be crass, it's just a really easy example. I was in a small group at my old church and I wasn't on staff yet. So people actually told you the truth. Once you become a pastor and you're on staff, nobody tells the truth anymore. It's all like the nice pastor sheen. I would really love to go golfing with someone who would just let some anger go, man. That would be really fun for me. But everybody always acts so nice. And so in this small group where people were actually telling the truth and it was refreshing, we broke up. It was a couples group, and we broke up men and women. And so the dudes were just sitting around talking. And the topic came up of the stuff that you look at, usually on the internet, that you probably shouldn't, well, not probably, that you shouldn't look at, right? And one of the guys said, and he at the time was professing to be a believer. I'm sure he was. I have no idea. He spoke up and he goes, you know, I don't really see a problem with it. And we all kind of go like, that's an interesting take. All right. What's up? And he goes, well, I mean, as long as you're looking and not touching, what's the harm? And listen, I'm not pure as a driven snow by any means, but I kind of thought instantly like, oh my goodness, well, that's not what Jesus says in Matthew. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says, if you look at somebody with lust in your heart, then you've committed adultery with that person. So you're not allowed to do that, buddy. But his conscience was so seared from something that seemed so normalized to him that the very act of doing that didn't cause any pangs of guilt in him at all. Now, the rest of his story is he hung around small group long enough. God began to get a hold of him. He actually became a small group leader and then discipled other people and sent them out as small group leaders in the church. So God used him in really cool ways. But one of the things that I'll always remember is when we first decide to move towards spiritual health, there are so many things that we carry a seared conscience towards that God has to open our eyes and begin to peel back the scar tissue of the things that we've been doing in our life for years and years. And it makes me wonder, with this many people in the room, as we decide, hopefully, collectively, to pursue spiritual health, and maybe many of us have been wandering, many of us maybe have been living as though God's standards for our life didn't really matter. Maybe we've been in a spiritual rut and not really taking things very seriously for a while. Wherever we are, I wonder what sort of scar tissue we bring into this room on our consciences right now. I wonder how much work there is to be done in us so that we feel the pangs of guilt for the things that displease God that have just become so normalized to us that we don't even feel them anymore. So God has to do some work in our hearts and in our consciences to repair them. He has to reorient our values. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but we value basically what's around us. And we get our values from the people that we're closest to. And so most of us default to getting our values from the culture and the world that we live in. And our culture tells us things like the kind of car I drive is super important, which I've clearly rejected with my Nissan Leaf. It tells us that the job that we have is really important. It tells us that we should make as much money as the rest. I don't need to make more money than everybody. I just need to make more money than the guys I grew up with or the girls I grew up with. It tells us that our spouses are important for reasons that they're not important, that status is important for reasons that it's not important. It encourages us to go after power or influence with the opposite sex or to chase money or to prioritize all these things that are values imparted on us by the world that we really weren't designed to pursue. And when we decide to pursue spiritual health and we begin to take seriously the teachings of the Bible and we begin to run our life through the grid of what scripture teaches, what we very quickly find is the values of God and his kingdom are very different than the values of the world. And it takes some work to reorient our hearts and our values in line with things that God values. To quit valuing what our job is so much and start valuing the relationships we have there and the opportunity to minister. To quit thinking about how much money we can get for ourselves and how we can be good stewards of the resources that God allows us to have, to use our job and our influence philanthropically, to use our gifts and our abilities to build up God's kingdom and not our own kingdom, to begin to value other people and their friendship and to see them as people who desperately need Jesus as opposed to people who are simply in our way. It takes a long time to recalibrate those values. Years and months of God working on our heart and ironing out the selfishness and ironing out the ego so that we can be the people that he created us to be. And finally, he has to restore our hearts. I don't know if you've thought about this, but your heart was created to beat in harmony with your creator. It was created to exist in peace with the one that created you. And we've said earlier in a service that every lurch at happiness that we've ever had is really our heart trying to find that harmony with the one that created it. But the problem is when we walk through life without caring about the standards that our creator gives us, without much thought towards our spiritual health, and we allow things into our life that don't need to be there, not because they're bad, even though they might be, but more importantly because they're unhealthy for us, it beats up our heart. It damages our heart, and it begins to beat for things that it doesn't need, and it begins, it lurches to find its happiness in things that will never give it happiness, and we walk away with damage, and we walk away with scar tissue on our hearts because we've been trying to fill it and be in harmony with things that it wasn't designed to be in harmony with. Isaiah in the Old Testament describes it like this. Isaiah was a prophet. He wrote the longest book of prophecy in the Old Testament. And he describes the nation of Israel. The nation of Israel was a nation that collectively had been wandering away from God, not pursuing them, living however they wanted to live as though his standards didn't matter. And wander away from him, that that is the condition of our heart when we come back to Jesus. It is wounded from top to bottom. It needs to be bound up. It needs to be healed. God needs to reorient and restore our heart to what he intended it to be so that it beats with him. And that takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. And it doesn't happen because of a prayer. And it doesn't happen because of a spiritual high. It takes a daily, long-term commitment to allowing God to do the work in us that he needs to do to bring us to a place of spiritual health. The good news about this is when we do it for long enough, when we allow God to work in us for long enough, that things and disciplines begin to feel more natural and that the things we want begin to actually change. And we do see our values begin to actually change and our desires begin to actually change. I liken it to the change that happened in me physically when I was trying to eat better, right? And I was actually doing good and avoiding sugars and eating the stuff that I needed to eat. At first, I was bummed out about it, but then I would have like a cheat day, right? Like I've been doing pretty good. It's been 36 hours since I had anything that I wasn't supposed to have. I deserve a little treat, right? So maybe I'd get a sweet tea instead of a water. And I'd drink the sweet tea, and after not having sugar for like a month, it was gross, right? If you've ever experienced this, you take a sip of that sweet tea and go, oh gosh, how did I used to handle this? This is ridiculous. I couldn't handle it. It was too sweet. I had to switch to half and half. Good news, I'm back on full sweet tea, okay? I just want you guys to know that. Yeah, I know. I know. I got my body back in shape. You take it down, buddy. Or I would allow myself a cheat day. I love baked goods, right? So I would be a sucker. Somebody would bring some donuts, a Bible study or something like that and be like, I'm going to have one of those later in private in my shame, but I'm going to have one. And I would start to eat one and it was just too sweet and I couldn't finish it. And my cravings had literally changed. And I used to be like the fast food king. Like I have fast food way more often than I'm willing to admit to you. And so like I loved a big greasy burger and the whole deal. And so maybe I'd have a cheat day. Maybe I would say, okay, that was a good sermon. I'm going to go get myself a nice big cookout, whatever it is. And so I'd go home and I'd eat it, and I would feel gross, like I needed a nap, like it just didn't sit well on me. And my cravings changed, right? And when I started working out, it was hard to get up in the morning. I didn't want to. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to lose that time. Like when I'd get to the gym, I'd kind of look around defeated and be like, I don't want to do any of this crap. But I would make myself do it. But eventually, you do it enough, and your body wants it. And I would go a day or two without working out, and I'd be like, man, I've got to run or something. Like I just need to like sprint around. This is crazy. I need to exercise. Like my body craved it. And so over time, those things change and it becomes more normalized. But here's the thing that I learned. If you add in enough cheat days, if often enough, more regularly than not, you allow yourself that sweet tea again, you know what happens? You get back on the full deal, baby. Eventually, your body goes back to the same place that it was before. If you allow yourself to eat enough burgers when you've been trying to avoid big, greasy foods, eventually your system can handle it again. And you go right back to the place you were before. If you lose your discipline once you're healthy, it doesn't take much to get right back to where you were before. So I'm going to show you something as an example of this, and I'm being vulnerable here, okay? I believe in vulnerability and authenticity. I think it's what makes church so good sometimes. So I'm going to trust you with this. You can make fun of me for this picture today, and then not again, all right? So that's the deal. But I'm going to show you the opposite of a before and after picture. Okay. Or how it's not supposed to look. I'm going to show a picture up here in a second. And the picture on the left is me healthy. And the picture on the right is me like now. Okay. So look, here's what happens when you lose your, when you lose your standard. See me on the left, like that's like November of 2017. That's when I was like at my most healthy. There's some looseness to the t-shirt there, particularly in the gut area. And then to the right there is me like three weeks ago. All right. That's what happens when you fall back into old patterns is you make butter pants Nate there. Okay. Okay. Please take that now. What I've learned is not only does it take a long time to get to a place of health, but if you lose the discipline that got you to that place, you very quickly fall back into who you were. This is the same spiritually. Many of us have spiritually yo-yoed, haven't we? We get to a place of spiritual health. We allow God, we stick to it enough, long enough to allow the Lord to actually get us to a place where we feel like we're walking with him and then something happens in our life. Typically life starts going well and we quit relying on him so much and we just kind of start walking through life. We get back into our ruts. We allow ourselves the cheat days. We don't maintain the vigilance and the discipline over our character and what we allow into our life. And before we know it, we look exactly like we did before we were healthy. This danger and this truth is exactly why I think Paul seems to be so fanatical about perseverance. As we look at the life arc of Paul, we see a man who was converted and who took three years to get spiritually healthy. And then you look at the letters that he writes in the New Testament to all the churches. There's a couple things in there that you pull out that you go, man, these are themes. These are big deals to Paul. And one of them is this idea of perseverance. He is constantly, constantly encouraging everyone around him to persevere in the faith, to hang in there, to maintain the level of discipline, not only that got you to a place of health, but understand that that level of discipline sustains you as you move through life. It prohibits you from yo-yoing spiritually. We've got to hang in there and continue to make faithful decisions. He encourages this corporately and individually. When he writes his letter to the church in Thessalonica, he praises them at the beginning of the letter. He says, I've heard about you and I want to praise you. Why? For your goodness and your faithfulness and your love and your numbers and your growth and your ministry? No. He says, you want to be a good pastor? Here's my advice to you. They're wonderful letters. And throughout these letters, do you know what he encourages Timothy to do over and over again? To endure in the faith, to persevere, to continue to make faithful decisions, to not fall away from the discipline that got him there, to stand strong. And then as Paul finishes the letters to Timothy and nears the end of his life, he shares this incredible verse about perseverance. These two, actually. They're in 2 Timothy 4, verses 6 and 7 thing to be able to say. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. In my Bible, I have a little note next to it. I don't know when I wrote it, but it says, oh, to say this. Would there be a better thing to say at the end of your life than to be able with a clean conscience to say, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I've kept the faith. And so as we consider pursuing spiritual health, hopefully we've been challenged over the series that this is what we want to do. My prayer for you all month, I repeat it every week, has been that you would be closer to Jesus when you finish the year than when you started, that 2019 would be a year of marked spiritual health for you. As we hopefully commit to that in light of this need not only to allow God the time to work in our hearts to reorient them towards him because of that principle of the wilderness and how long it takes to get spiritually healthy. As we allow God that time and we daily choose to commit ourselves to him to get us to a place of spiritual health and then also continue to choose as we commit to that health in an ongoing way, I wanted to finish the series with this simple question or challenge. At the end of 2019, will you be able to say that you finished your race? At the end of this year, if somebody looks at you in the lobby, we come and we have our Christmas Eve services and we blow them out and they're fun and they're really great, and someone looks at you in the lobby, someone who knows you and loves you well and cares about you, and they look you in the eye and they say, did you finish your race this year? You made a commitment in January. You made a commitment to God. You prayed and you committed and you meant it. Did you run your race? What will you be able to say? How do you want to answer that question? To remind you of that commitment, if you've made it, I've put one of these, we've put one of these in each of your seats. It's just a little wristband. It's a cheesy thing, but I think it makes the point. If you're committed to running your race this year, if you're committed to 2019 being a year of marked spiritual health and growth for you, if you're committed to the daily decision and you understand the principle of the wilderness that this is going to take a long time and you're committed to the daily decision of pursuing spiritual health and allowing God to do the work in you to restore your heart and you're committed to maintaining the discipline once you begin to see the results that you're looking for, then I want you to take this home. If you don't want it, you don't need it, it's no big deal, but if you want it, if you're committed to running your race, I want you to take this with you. And I want you to put it somewhere where you'll see it. Maybe not every day, you don't have to prominently display a white wristband, that would be super weird. But put it in the center console of your car. Put it in your catch-all where you drop off your keys when you get to the house. Put it on your nightstand. Put it in a desk drawer that you see at work. Put it next to where you brush your teeth. Wherever you might see it, wherever you might see it frequently enough to remind you so that when you see it, it is a reminder to go, I'm running my race this year. I'm committed this year. I'm making the decisions that I need to make to allow God to work in me this year. I'm going to finish the race. If someone asks me in December if I finished, I'm going to tell them that I did. What could this year be like for you if you committed and you ran? What could this year be like for you? What could God do in your heart and in your life and through you if you would commit to following him this year? What could God do at Grace if we all did this? If at the end of the year we got to be a church where if someone could come ask us, did Grace run their race this year? What if we got to say yes? What amazing things could we see God do here? I can't wait. Because I think there's going to be a lot of y'all running with me. And so I say let's go. And let's be committed to finishing our race this year. Let's pray. Father, we love you so very much. We're so grateful to you for the way that you've loved us, the way that you've looked out for us. God, I pray that you would call on our hearts even now. I pray that those who are far from you, that you would begin to break down those walls and let your goodness like like a fetter, bind their wandering hearts to you as you have with me so many times. I pray that we would be spiritually healthy, that we would allow you the time to do the work in our hearts to orient us towards you, and that when we finish this year, that we would be able to say with a clean conscience, yeah, I ran my race. Show us what happens in a church when a group of people decide to do that, Father. Give us the strength and the courage and the perseverance and the friends and the people that we need in our life to maintain the commitments that we've made this month. It's in your son's name we ask all these things. Amen.