Sermons tagged with Conversation

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody, Alan, welcome back to the service. It's good to see you all. Did you shout getting some coffee? That was a great timing. That was the time. That was the spot. It's better than leaving right now. Yeah, you did great. No, you did great. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that so that in future services, I can make fun of you when you do stuff. And that will be great. This is the second part of our series called The Table. And we're focusing on Jesus's ministry and Luke around the table and how he uses meals purposefully and strategically in his life. And if you've spent time around me, if you've been here for any length of time, you know that one of the things I like to remind people of is the fact that I believe that God speaks to us in stereo. If we hear something from one isolated friend, they say one thing. If a sermon pricks our heart in a certain way, that's great to hear that one thing and try to respond to it correctly. But if we hear it from another friend and then from mom or dad or a husband or wife, and then we hear it from a sermon and then we hear it in a song and then just something, we're scrolling and we see it again, then I would argue that God is trying to get your attention and tell you something very specific. Because again, I believe he speaks in stereo, which is why I thought it was so interesting that I went to a pastor's conference this week in Orlando. And there's like 6,000 other pastors there. Some of the best communicators in the Christian world are there just kind of telling you their ideas and experiences. And it was a real refreshing time. I'll tell you more about that a little bit later in the sermon, but I thought it was really, really interesting that here I am, we're in the middle of this series called The Table. That wasn't my idea, it was Carly's idea, and then I get into it, and it's really, really great stuff. And then I go down to this conference, and what do all the speakers say? The speakers say the future of the Christian church in America is around the table. The future of evangelism in the United States is around the table. The future of discipleship, Christian maturity in our country is around the table. And we believe God is doing something and he is moving and he's moving around our tables. And so I'm sitting in the conference going, okay, I'm in. Like what you got? God, I'm listening. So for me, I do believe that God is speaking through this idea of the table. I shared with you a couple weeks ago, I do think God is doing something here. I do think he's moving here. Look how many of you showed up today. You're better Christians than the people who are cozy and warm watching online. I'm sorry, you know it. If you're home, like, you know that that's true. Thank you for coming here this morning. You really meant it. You really wanted some Jesus today, so we're going to try to take you right to him. But I believe that God is moving, and I believe that God is speaking. And if he's speaking to you about the sacred times around our tables and how we can use those and employ those and use those to push us and others closer to Jesus, then I would encourage you to lean in and listen today as well. This morning is called The Table for Relationship. We're looking at how Jesus uses the table for different purposes throughout his life. And this story we take from Luke chapter 7. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Luke chapter 7. If you didn't bring one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Luke chapter 7 has this great interchange between Jesus and a Pharisee named Simon. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were the lawyers and the senators and the pastors all rolled into one. And Jesus gets invited over to Simon's house, and he has this great discourse. And I'll get into it, and I'll read it. And when I read this passage, it's the second part that we're not going to cover today that always, to me, jumps out as the most resounding portion of this passage. But I'm actually saving that portion of the passage for our Good Friday service. So again, that Friday before Easter, we'll be here. I don't know the time yet, probably seven o'clock, but don't quote me on that. Just don't make other plans that night. Come to our Good Friday service, and we're going to cover the rest of this story there in a different way. But I want to focus on the front half of this story that we find in Luke chapter 7, verses 36 through 39. If you have a Bible, read along with me. If you don't, it should be on the screen. One of the Pharisees asked him, Jesus, to eat with him. And he went into the Pharisee's house and took his place at the table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at the table in the Pharisee's house, him saw this, he said to himself, if this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner. Okay, we'll leave the story there. It goes on, and Simon accuses Jesus of this. Why are you interacting with this woman? Jesus tells a little parable about a debtor being forgiven his debt, two debtors being forgiven their debt, and the larger debtor is the one that is more grateful. And Jesus says this great line, yes, he who is forgiven little loves little, but he who is forgiven much loves much. And it's this great instruction about how grateful we are for Jesus and who he is operates in direct correlation to the weight of our sin that we feel. And if we don't feel a great affection towards Jesus, then it's very likely that we walk around thinking we're a lot better off than we actually are, thinking we're somebody when we ain't. But again, we're going to focus on that with Good Friday service. For this, I think it's helpful and interesting to focus on something else in this story. And before I tell that, just so I know that we're all on the same page, I told you what a Pharisee was. Pharisee was the religious leader, senator, lawyers, all wrapped up into one of the day. They were the religious elite. This woman is from the city, and she is a sinner. So that should tell you what she did and what her profession was. It was the oldest profession in the world. If you still don't know what this woman did for a living, ask someone next to you and, you know, make fun of them if they ask you, and then tell them, okay? But that's who she she was and that's what she did. Women didn't have a lot of options back then. And so she comes in and she anoints his feet and she wipes away, she dumps alabaster ointment on his feet, perfume, and then she cries on his feet, she kisses them, and then she washes his feet with her hair. And I'm not going to get into it. Culturally, this was an okay thing. This was understood. Everybody kind of knew what she was doing. It wasn't nearly as weird and awkward as it would be now. If I come to your house and some lady just wanders in and just starts crying on my feet and dumping perfume on them and kissing them, I'm never coming to your house again, okay? That's super weird. I'm not just going to sit there and be like, well, this is biblical. I'm going to, I'm going to leave. And I'm going to swear to Jen, I do not know that lady. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. But in this context, it's fine. So what's interesting to me about this dinner invitation is why Jesus accepted it. Why did Jesus go? We see him, and we'll look at this next week when we look at the table for celebration. When he asked Levi, the tax collector, who later becomes Matthew and writes the gospel of Matthew, he asked him to be one of his disciples. And Levi says, come to my house, I'm going to throw a feast. And he throws a feast with all of his sinning tax collector friends who don't know Jesus. And then Jesus is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard for going to that party and for going to other parties like that. And Jesus' response is, a physician does not come for the well, but for the sick. I came to seek and save the lost. And so we see in Jesus this very high degree of interest in hanging out with people and being around people who we good church people would not typically associate with because they're gross and we're better than them, right? Spoiler alert, we're not, okay? You suck and they do too, and that's why we all need Jesus. So we know that Jesus accepts those dinner invitations, but this one's interesting to me because it's not from a sinner, quote unquote. It's not from the outcast of society. It's from the religious elite. It's from the people that seem to not need Jesus, who he doesn't seem too interested in carousing with, except he gets an invitation from Simon and Jesus accepts it. Now, why does he accept this invitation? Now, this is a guess for me, okay? I don't have a verse to hang on this. This is my guess based on what I know of Jesus and what I know of Scripture, this is my best guess. You guys know Jesus. You know Scripture as well. You're welcome to your best guess, and you're welcome to disagree with this. But it is a guess. Why did Jesus accept this invitation? Was it to be polite? Maybe. Was it just a commonly accepted practice? It could be. But I think that Jesus was also concerned about Simon's soul. I think that Jesus also wanted him to see the light. We see throughout the New Testament and the Gospels that Jesus is pretty hard on the Pharisees. He calls them a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs. He's pretty pointed with them. If he's going to be harsh with anybody, it's going to be the Pharisees and then a couple times the disciples. But in this scene, Jesus is actually amicable to them. He wants to go spend time with them because I believe that Jesus cares about the souls of the Pharisees as well. Not only because he says he cares about everybody, he says he loves everybody, but we see him go into Simon's house. We see him in John chapter 3 have a private, subtle, under-the-radar discussion so he doesn't get in trouble with Nicodemus, another Pharisee. We see Jesus in quiet moments act favorably towards them. Why? Because he cares about their souls too, and he wants them to know the truth. So I believe that Jesus took this dinner invitation, at least in part, to begin working towards the conversion of Simon, to evangelize him. And he knew that Simon's friends would be there, and he'd have an opportunity to begin to work towards their conversion as well. And I believe that Jesus in his wisdom knew that this woman was going to be there as well, and that would give him an opportunity to include her, to rope her in, to say in front of the religious elite, I love her too. She's all right with me too. And you should accept her at your table as well and quit separating things out and quit thinking that you're better than because you're not. Everyone's equal in the kingdom of God. I believe that he wanted to slowly chip away at their thought processes and chip away at her thought process and invite them in. So I believe that Jesus uses this meal for conversion and inclusion, understanding that both require relationships. I believe that Jesus was using this meal to begin to work towards the conversion of Simon and his friends and the inclusion of this woman and people like her into one table, realizing that both of those goals require relationships, require friendships. Jesus understands that for a man like Simon, entrenched in his ideology, since birth he has been poured into by other probably well-meaning rabbis and spiritual leaders who have simply misled him because they were misled. And it's really scary to think how generational teaching can lead to people reinforcing bad ideas on down the road until you as parents are teaching things to your kids because they were spouted to you by some ignorant Sunday school teacher when you were a little kid and you've never reconsidered them in your whole life. You see how this happens? And so this is what was happening with the Pharisees. It's not that they didn't love Jesus or it's not that they didn't like God and want to be in right standing with Him. It's that they were blind. They had been misled. And you don't break someone like Simon free from his ideology with one exchange in the town square, with one pithy remark or parable or saying. You break someone free like Simon from their ideology with conversations over time. You gradually open their eyes. If there's someone in your life who you love who does not know Jesus, we can take a page out of Jesus' playbook and engage in relationship with them and realize it's going to happen over time and over conversation and over consistency and over watching someone love them like they actually love them and love Jesus too. It takes relationship to see people come to faith. And Jesus also uses relationship for the inclusion of this woman. She is a woman one would assume. Maybe she didn't, but I don't think it's a bad guess to assume that she lived with a degree of shame. Maybe she didn't feel it all the time. Maybe when she was around other people who did what she did and other people who hired the kind of people that she was, maybe she didn't feel shame around them, but in general society, anytime she entered into a house like this, I bet she felt shame. I bet she felt unwanted and unwarranted. I bet she felt rightly excluded from genteel society. And what Jesus is doing here is going, no, no, no, no, she's good with me too. She's okay too. She's included here. When we first wrote this out, I was going to say the table for adoption or the table for inclusion and how we can use our table and we can use our friend groups to invite people into the space and say, they're good with me, they should be good with you too. And that's what Jesus was doing. He was providing her a cover for that relationship and for these people saying, we're all equal and we're all even. The challenge for this with her is that when you live your life in shame, it takes hearing that you're loved and accepted more than once for you to actually believe it, doesn't it? You know this is true in your life. Most of you in this room, if not all of you, have heard plenty of times God loves you, he forgives you, he desires you. We sang earlier, he runs after you. There's no mountain he won't climb up, shadow he won't light up coming after you. You know that intellectually to be true. You may even know that if you're a believer, you're an adopted son or daughter of the king, and he loves you as much as he can ever love you, no matter what you've done, no matter what you're going to do, he is passionately in love with you. And you may know that he approves of you and that he accepts you just the way that you are. But isn't the Christian life a slow, painful acceptance of that? Don't we have a tendency to say other people are loved and accepted, but God does not feel that way about me because I know better? Don't we heap shame and guilt on ourself and assume that we're unacceptable to God and others because of what we've done and assign His acceptance and His love to other people? Isn't it one thing to know intellectually that you're loved and forgiven and another thing to know in your heart and soul and actually live like you are? Doesn't that inclusion by Jesus take a long time for us to learn? So Jesus knows, if I want to convert Simon and his friends, and if I want this woman to know that she's truly included and loved, it's going to take time. It's going to take relationship. And Jesus sets a model of relationships in his life. I don't know if we think of it in those terms or if you've considered that before. But at these meals, we see him building relationship. When Zacchaeus is in the tree and Jesus walks by him, he says, hey, I'm coming to your house for lunch. Like, let's hang, man. Let's go. He develops relationships with his disciples. He develops relationships with the people around him. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were some of his best friends, and he went and retreated there. Those were his people. That's where he was safe and trusted, and they were safe and trusted as well. Relationships are important to Jesus, and I believe he lived a life modeling the importance of these relationships. And I believe that one of the reasons he did it is because Christianity requires relationships. Biblical Christianity requires of us biblical friendships and biblical relationships. The whole Bible is written not to individuals, but to communities, groups of people. Even the books of the Bible that are originally addressed to individuals, Philemon, Titus, Timothy, Acts, and Luke, which are addressed to blessed Theophilus, were intended to be shared as groups, in groups. Were intended for people to consume together. It's this unique perspective of Western philosophy and Christianity that has reduced Christianity and faith to our own personal salvation project, where the most important thing in faith is whether or not we're saved. And Jesus offers us so much bigger, robust gospel and love than whether or not we're going to heaven one day. He offers us a relationship with our creator God now that we can share with others on this outpost of eternity. Christianity was never, ever intended to be lived alone. As a matter of fact, if you've spent any time at Grace, hopefully you've heard me say there is no such thing as a Lone Ranger Christian. I would argue with you it is absolutely impossible to grow as close to Jesus as you can without other people in your life walking with you. That's why when we had a discussion as elders years ago around our current mission statement, connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people, there was some pushback. Some of the folks in the circle at the time felt like it should just be connecting people to Jesus. We should not elevate connecting people to people on that level. It's connecting people to Jesus. And it was kind of tough for them to get over connecting people to people. Like, that feels too simple. That feels too easy. And so we agreed that we would put it second. So there's a clear priority there, which who cares? But I was a real stickler about connecting people to people, and some of the other people in the circle were a stickler about that because I would contend that you cannot grow as close to Jesus as you possibly can without other people in your life who also love you and love Jesus. And so we are committed to connecting people to people to help you in that walk. And if you think that, if you have any hesitation about that being true, about closeness with God being possible without, all I need is my Bible and prayer and God and I'm good. Okay, well Adam had that. The first book of the Bible, second, third chapter, he had that. In chapter two, we see him. He has the perfect relationship with God, the exact relationship with God that God created us for, the exact relationship with God that we will finally one day experience in heaven. Adam walked that. He had that. He walked with God in the cool of the evening. They talked every day. Adam was the perfect man. He was intellectually superior. He was emotionally intelligent. He was utterly fulfilled. And he had a perfect relationship with the perfect God. And he lived on a perfect earth with no pain and no death and no struggling. And he didn't work. It's like living in a country club with just amazing fruit everywhere and pretty much walking through life like me, if you think about like the perfect man. And even in that perfection, he looked around after a period of time and he went to God and what did he say? I'm lonely. I'm lonely. I need, I need a companion. You cannot live out this life on your own. You cannot live the Christian life without relationships. To further that point and to show us how essential they are, I actually want to share with you something I heard this week. I've heard this before from this same guy, and I heard it again, and it was such a good reminder, and I feel bad for not having shared this with you before. But the Bible is full of one another's, isn't it? If you read it, we should be kind one to another, we should pray for one another, we should hold one another accountable. We should confront sin in one another. We should love one another. We should outdo one another in humility. We should bear one another's burdens. We should celebrate with one another. We should mourn and grieve with one another. There's a lot of one another commands in the Bible. And one another's are impossible outside of genuine, honest friendships. All those commands are impossible to obey outside of genuine and honest friendships. Now, there's some that are easier. Be kind one to another. We don't have to know people very well to be kind to them. We can be kind to people. But the better you know somebody, the more kind you can be. If I think about Cindy, our wonderful and lovely sound technician today, and I want to be kind to her. It's her birthday or something. Jen and I can buy her flowers. Buy her flowers and have a flower sent to her house, and oh, that's a nice gesture, whatever. But I know that Cindy loves the Duke Blue Devils. And if you don't, pipe down, nobody cares, okay? She loves them. And so if I made the flowers blue and white and sent them to her, that'd be a little bit extra kind, wouldn't it? Or you know what? I might find out that Cindy doesn't even like flowers. So knock it off with that stuff and send her donuts. I don't know. The better you know somebody, the kinder you can be. But there's some of these that really, unless you know somebody, unless you're friends with them, you can't obey these commands. Pray for one another, which seems simple enough, but you guys have been in a small group and you've been in those circles. Hey, does anybody have any prayer requests? Yeah, could you, my cousin's friend has a girlfriend who's, she might have COVID. Oh gosh, is she okay? I mean, it's just a head cold right now. She's probably okay, but let's pray for her. I'm like, I'm not, nope, I'm not gonna do that. And also, just so you know, sometimes Christians, you don't have to pray for everything. Somebody can tell you something and you can be like, okay, you don't have to like, I'm gonna ardently seek the Lord's throne over this. You can just let that one be. Or it's, you know, it's surfacy stuff. My wife is sick. My kids had a little bit of a cold. I got a trip coming up. Pray for traveling mercies. Sure. But when you're in a small group for a long time and trust begins to develop, the prayer requests get different, don't they? Pray for us. Our kids are struggling in school. They might have to repeat kindergarten. We just want wisdom there. We don't know the right thing to do. We just want to do the best thing for them. You start to get really real prayer requests. Hey, man, can you just pray for my marriage? We're not doing great. It's been a rough couple, two, three years. And I really don't know how this is going to go. Will you just pray for me that I can be a good husband? Sure. Hey, I lost my dad last year, and it has really done a number on my faith, and I don't really even know what I believe, and I'm having a hard time trusting God. And I don't even know if your prayer is going to work, but would you pray it anyways? When you're friends, you start to get real prayer requests. And you can really actually pray for each other in meaningful ways. And if you're close enough with them, when they tell you to pray for their cousin's friend who might have COVID, you can tell them to shove it and pray themselves. We can't start obeying these one another's until we're actually friends. If we're supposed to confront each other with sin, let me just tell you, for me personally, you do life how you want to do life. For me, if you want to sit me down and say, hey, Nate, I've noticed this destructive pattern in your life and I really don't think it's good for you, we better be friends or I'm out. I might sit there politely and say thank you. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to leave that conversation and I'm going to call a friend. I'm going to say, listen to what this person said. Is this true? But I'm not going to hear it from you if you're not my friend. We don't have a track record of going through life together. And listen, confronting sin and other people, the only way it can be done is with the foundation of relationship. When the Bible tells us to mourn with one another, to grieve with one another, to celebrate with one another, those are things that require a deep bedrock friendship and relationship there to be able to do that. We cannot be obedient to instructions about biblical Christianity without the power of relationships and friendships in our life. And I would even say this, just to push it a little bit further. When I hear about folks who are going through a rough patch, marriage is really, really hard. They've developed an addiction of some sort and they're fighting it. Their personal life is falling apart. Their professional life is falling apart. Whatever it is, when I hear about people whose lives are beginning to spin a little bit out of control, can I just tell you what I often find and what they often share with me? They say things like, you know, I really don't feel like I have many friends. I'm not sure if I have any friends at all. Let me tell you something. As your pastor, and if you're sitting in this room today, I'm your pastor at least for today. As your pastor, if you are doing life without friends, you're in trouble. If you are doing life without friends who share your values, if your closest friend is your spouse and you don't have any true friends outside of that, you're in trouble. And if your closest friend is your spouse and you don't have any true friends outside of that, you're in trouble. And if your closest friend is your spouse, and you don't have, I'm not saying your closest friend shouldn't be your spouse, I'm just saying you should have really good friendships outside of your marriage. If you don't, you're putting too much pressure on them, and they're putting too much pressure on you, and you're going to let each other down, and things aren't going to go good. Jesus designed us to walk in friendships. If you don't have them, the biggest encouragement I could give you is to pursue them. When I counsel with young couples doing premarital counseling, very often I'll do the marriage of people who don't live close to us. They don't live in Raleigh. They live in Fuquay or they live in Greensboro or they live wherever they live. But centrally, their family's around here. So they're choosing a venue in Raleigh. So they want a pastor that's local and close to the venues. They find me online and I agree to do their wedding. And when I talk to these people, I ask them, what's your plan for finding a church? And very often they'll say, you know, we don't have a church. We're looking for a church. What would you recommend? How can we find a good church? And I always tell them the same thing. Listen, find a church. And I mean this, you're gonna laugh, but I really do mean it. And I think this is actually what most of you have done. Find a church that has a tolerable pastor. They don't have to be great, okay? The sermons don't have to blow your doors off every week. You can download really good sermons every week. Find a pastor that doesn't drive you nuts and sit under that teaching. Find worship that's good. Here we have great worship and we're lucky. But find it that's good. But you know what you really need? Find a church where you can make friends. Find a church where you can make friends. And then everything else kind of fades away. You can go to the church with the best preaching and the best worship and the best programs. But if you don't have friends, you're never going to connect in the way that you need to. And that church isn't going to serve you how it should serve you. So when you choose a church, choose a church to build friendships, to do life together. With all of that being said, I want to bring us back to the power of the table and ask, what would happen if we viewed our meals as Jesus did? What would happen if those opportunities around the table, and I don't want to be unrealistic, not every day, not every meal, not every time we sit with somebody who's going to have a sacred element to it, but man, it happens far more often than we think it does. What would happen if we would understand that relationships and friendships are absolutely essential to my faith, and they're essential to the faith of others, and they're essential if I see someone I want to convert, if I see someone I want to move closer to Jesus, if I see someone I want to influence, then relationship is essential within that influence. What if we accepted that and began to use the meals in our life to further those things, to pursue those things? What would happen if when we had the opportunity to go out to eat after church with our friends, we had one or two intentional questions? We don't make the whole lunch and impromptu Bible study, but what if we had one or two intentional questions? What's God been teaching you for the last six months? Anything at all? What'd you get from Nate's sermon? What'd you think of that? That was terrible. Did you agree it was terrible? Yes, I agree it was terrible. And then have a great conversation. Did you love it when he made fun of Alan at the beginning? Yes, I loved that. Whatever it was. Point of fact, I told you I went to conference this week, and the idea for that, it came to me last fall, and I texted an old buddy of mine. We were on staff together at the church I worked at previously. He left and started his own church. He's been a senior pastor for, I think, about eight or nine years now. I'm in my seventh year of being a senior pastor, and so we talk multiple times over the course of the year, how are things going, and I was telling somebody before the service that when you're a senior pastor and you have the opportunity to talk with another senior pastor, the conversation's just different, right? Because we're smarter and more spiritual than all of you. So it's just, no, it's because we have the same job. Like if you're the national sales director of whatever, and you talk to another national sales director of whatever, and there's a lot of similarities there, then you're going to be able to just talk about things that other people don't understand and can't talk about. So the ability to relate is very, very high. And so I wanted to go and have some extended time to spend with another senior pastor and just talk about what it's like to do life in the way that we've chosen to do it. And what his church is almost the exact same size as our church. And so it's good one-to-one comparisons about how you're handling different things. And I wanted to go to this conference, but I was determined to use the conversations that we had with a purpose. And some of you may have seen that I put on social media, we went to, we were going to go golf, and I said, I'd rather go see the Star Wars section because I've never seen it. Nobody in my family cares about it. And so we went to see the Star Wars section, which was great. I don't know if it was $165 great. I was there for like 90 minutes, and I was like, cool, I'm going to go to the hotel. But it was really fun. I got us matching t-shirts because of course, you know. And we had a great time. But at the breakfast, when we wrapped up, we had gone to conference for two days. We went to Disney and had that experience and shared meals together and all this stuff. At breakfast on the last day on Friday morning, I asked him, what are your takeaways? And one of the things that we agreed upon, he said, this was not a frivolous trip. This was an absolutely spiritually encouraging trip. And I made the comment, I would argue that the most important things on this trip happened in line and at meals, not at the conference, not with what we learned. And he said, a thousand percent. And it was because at the beginning of the trip, we shared, we want this to be purposeful. We want to have important conversations. We want to talk about important things. So we talked about silly stuff, our mutual affection for Caitlin Collins on CNN. I mean, we both think that she does a great job as a news anchor. But then we also talked about family. And do you think your mom and your dad and your sister are part of your ministry? What are your responsibilities for them? What do you do with hosting? How do you plan series? How do you keep your spiritual life vibrant when church feels like it's dragging you down? We had good, meaningful conversations that helped both of us. So what would happen if we all did that? And the meals that we had around our table, we began to use intentionally. And we came in with one or two intentional questions just to check on the people that we were having meals with or just to help us become better friends with them. But what if we didn't see our time around the table? And I don't mean just meals. It can be any setting where we have an opportunity to talk with people and we don't have anywhere to go and nothing to do or be? In those settings, how can we use those more purposefully to build friendships, to build the relationships that are essential to biblical living? And then I would ask you, what relationships do we need to pursue so others might begin to pursue Jesus? Who do you have in your life that you can leverage your table to push towards Jesus, to convert or include? Who do you have in your life that you can encourage spiritually? And shame on me for not including this one, but what relationships do you have in your life that you can pursue to begin to push you towards Jesus? Who seems to have things figured out maybe a little bit better than you right now that you can invite around your table and just ask them questions. There's so much benefit from doing that. I issued last week the Dinner Table Challenge for the series and said between now and Easter, we're encouraging everyone here to have someone around your table from grace who's never been around your table before. And we're encouraging everyone to have someone around your table who's not from grace, who's never been around your table before. Point of clarity, someone asked me last week, is that the same meal or is it two separate meals? It's two separate meals. For me, I'm not really down with mixing universes. I don't like it when someone invites me over to their house and they've also invited over other people who I don't know. And I'm like, well, I've been ambushed. What is this? I just want to go back home. This is completely, I was not prepared for this. But listen, if you're down with that, if that's your deal, you like mixing universes and making people uncomfortable, sure, invite them both over and let's just see what happens. But I would encourage you, don't just invite the easy ones over. Be strategic. Who can you invite over and hopefully encourage them towards Christ? Who can you invite over and maybe learn from them? And when God places you in opportunities, in small groups and in meals and around tables and in friend groups, and as you have new acquaintances that you're allowed and enabled to pursue, how can we use those to push them and ourselves closer to Jesus? But what I want us to take away from today, if nothing else, is the Christian life is impossible to live without friendships. It's impossible to live without relationships. If you don't have them or you need stronger ones, the best place to begin to do that is around the table. So let's use those strategically as we move throughout the rest of our weeks leading up to Easter and prepare our hearts for celebrating Easter when it comes. Let's pray. Father, we love you and we thank you for the example that was set for us by your son. How he modeled for us sitting around tables with people and having conversations that needed to be had. Loving on people in surprising ways, encouraging people towards conversion in gentle ways. Father, I pray for people here who feel like right now in their life they're a little bit lonely and they're a little bit alone and they're not sure if they have the friendships that they need and that they want, would you bring them people in their life that they can pursue, that will pursue them, who love them and who love you? Would you build friendships in their life? Father, would you give us the courage to pursue those, to extend the invite, to make the offer, to reach out and bridge the gaps. And God, around those tables, would you bless the conversation? Would you build friendships that last for decades? Ones that encourage us towards you? And God, in these relationships, would we find more of you there? In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see everybody. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby immediately following the service. If you're watching online, especially if you're doing that habitually, we love that you are, and that is fantastic that you're following along. But I'm just going to tell you as a friend, you're missing the best part of the service. Because the best part of the service is when we all get to worship together. We're just putting up with me in between more songs is all we're doing here. Because that was really great. Thank you, band, for leading us into God's presence in that way. This is our big spring series. This is the series that we have been planning since the fall when we kind of sit around and try to plan in advance what we're going to do. And what we always want to do with the series in the spring as we come out of February, we move into March, is we kind of want to take at least six weeks and point our collective attention towards Easter to prepare our hearts and to prepare our minds for the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, for the victory of victories, for what I believe is the greatest holiday in our calendar. It's the greatest day of the year when we get to celebrate that we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. And so the point of the spring series is always to kind of drive us to Easter and to prepare our hearts as a body for that celebration. And so that's absolutely the point of what we're doing this spring as well through a series called The Table. And we've got a couple things I'm going to, we've got a challenge we're going to issue for you. We've got something for you to take home. I'm going to tell you what this is. But the other thing I just want to put on your radar screen is we're going to have a Good Friday service this year for the first time since I've been one of the pastors. Yes, thank you. That's great. Okay, so if you clapped, you have to come. That's part of the deal. You can't be like, oh, I got plans. No, I'm telling you right now. Good Friday service, and for those that don't know, I'm not making a joke here. I'm just being kind. It's the Friday right before Easter. So you can go ahead and mark that off in your calendar. We've got that written and ready to go. We've been thinking about that already, and so we are looking forward to that. And the whole purpose of that service is really and truly to take some time on the Friday of Jesus's crucifixion, that remembers Jesus's crucifixion, and really ask the Lord to prepare our hearts for Easter so that the impact and the weight of it can fully rest on us. And so I hope that you'll be a part of that. This Sunday is intended to be kind of a setup for the rest of the series. So this Sunday, we're just kind of looking at the broad brush of it, why we've landed here, why we are doing this series called The Table. One of my favorite parts about this series is that we have a lady, Carly Buchanan, who is our part-time graphics department, among other things, right? She sings sometimes. Right now, she's over there watching my son and his peers in the hallway. And she gives a lot to the church. This series is her idea. When we sat around pitching things, I had my own idea for what we should do for series. And then she mentioned this, and everybody just immediately latched on to it. And it's a great way for me to highlight to you that you have a really great staff that works for you, that serves your kids, that serves your students, that serves us here. They're really, really great folks who are fun to work with. And almost none of the good ideas that we do are mine. I'm just leeching off of their good ideas. And so she brought this to us and we immediately loved it. And I immediately recognized that this series would resonate with grace. And I should have known that something like this would resonate with grace back when I started here. It was April of 2017 was my first Sunday at grace. It was the Sunday before Easter. And so prior to that, I think somewhere in late February, early March, they offered me the job and I ignorantly accepted it. And then they flew me up one Sunday in the middle of March to introduce me to the church right here in this room. And I should have known that meals were going to be a big deal to grace people because I landed Saturday evening around dinner time. And at the time, the moderator of the board was a guy, a good buddy of mine named Burt Banks and his wife, Terry. Now Terry is one of the elders. And so it's nice to get the good banks on the elder board. Now they picked me up at the airport and we were planning to go out to dinner and they said, hey, is it okay? We made reservations for dinner. I said, that's great, I'm hungry. And they said, we've also invited some other folks from Grace to meet us there that they wanna have a chance to meet you. Is that all right? And I'm like, yeah, sure. I mean, I'm the new pastor. I need to want to meet the people that I'll be working with, going to church with, that kind of thing. So absolutely. So we headed straight from the airport, straight to Winston's, straight to this back room. There was three other couples there, plus the Banks's and myself. And we just sat down and we had a time. And we talked for, it must have been two, two and a half hours. They were peppering me with questions. I was peppering them with questions. We just wanted to get to know each other, and so we sat down over a meal, and we did it. And then a couple weeks later, we moved the family up here. We rented a house off of Teal Briar over in Northridge, and that first week that we were here, I will never forget it. It had to be at least five of the seven nights we were going to somebody's house for dinner. You guys were just, you were peppering us with dinner invites. And over that first month, we went to dinner at more people's houses than I could count because people just wanted to get to know the new pastor and we wanted to get to know the new people. And that's what we did is we got together over meals, right? And when you think about grace culture, who we are as a church, one of our biggest events of the year, Hootenanny in September, what do we do? Well, we sit outside and we eat. You know, grace is big night out. What do we do? We stand around tables. We talk and we drink. That's what we do. This is what we like. We are a communing church. This is who we are, which is why I think that Luke is going to become our new favorite gospel. As we dove into this series, Carly had the idea based on a book, and we're going to see a quote from that book here in a second, based on a book called A Meal with Jesus. And so that book is based out of the Gospel of Luke. And I began to do research for the series. I was listening to that book on Audible. I like to listen to books so I can do other stuff while I'm reading. And the book really is based in the Gospel of Luke. And what I began to learn about Luke is meals are incredibly prevalent in this particular gospel. For those that may not be able to recall right off the top of their head, there's four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what's called synoptic gospels where they kind of tell the story of Jesus from start to finish. They follow the same chronology. And then John kind of stands independently as its own gospel with its own style and makes its own points and things like that. And so Luke is one of the synoptic Gospels, which means a lot of the stories that it tells are very similar to Matthew and Mark, to the two preceding Gospels. But what we don't necessarily see, or what I've never learned before, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, because I've read Luke dozens of times in my life. I've led Bible studies through it. I've taken classes specifically on the book of Luke. Like, I should know this, and I just never did. And maybe you guys did, because you pay closer attention to Scripture than I do. But Luke is actually called, in in Scripture the hospitality gospel. I didn't know this, but in Luke, there are 10 different instances of Jesus sitting down to a meal with other people. Only three of those meals are recorded in the other gospels, which means in Luke, we have seven completely unique stories of Jesus sitting down to a meal with others. Meals are so prevalent in the book of Luke that the author of A Meal with Jesus, a guy, Tim Chester, said this, in Luke's gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal. That's how prevalent it is in the book of Luke. And so I just thought, frankly, what a grace series to focus on that, the power and the efficacy of meals. And then the author brings up this verse that, again, I had read plenty of times before, but I've never just considered it in an isolated way. It's never jumped off the page like it did to me this time. But if I were to say to you, complete this sentence, the Son of Man came to, how would you complete that sentence? The Son of Man came to what? For me, as I was listening to this and processing it, I would complete that sentence, the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. That's what I've always heard. That's what I understand. And that's what Jesus said, and he did. But in Luke, he also says this in chapter 7, verse 34, the Son of Man has come eating and drinking. And you say, look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors've carried myself in my arrival. The Son of Man has come eating and drinking. Now, I want to provide you some context so we understand what's going on there. Jesus is speaking to people from his hometown who have rejected him, who do not believe that he is a Messiah, who do not affirm his teachings. And they've kind of turned him away and said, he's a glutton and a drunkard. He can't be trusted because of who he's carousing with, because of how he behaves, because of what he's doing. And so Jesus says to them in the verses preceding, you guys, you had John the Baptist. He fasts. He lives in the wilderness in complete piety and austerity. He abstains from everything. He lives this very aesthetic, like this very minimalistic life, and you rejected him as the devil. Then the Son of Man comes eating and drinking, doing the exact opposite of that, and you reject me too. You guys got to pick a side. You have to pick a lane. That's the frustration that Jesus is expressing in this verse, and he gets accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because of the company that he's keeping. And so as we move through the series, we're going to see why Jesus chose to keep that company. But I also think it's powerful that Jesus does say this. Even out of context, I do think it's a powerful statement, the Son of Man comes eating and drinking. The Son of Man understands the power of a meal, of what happens around a table, of how memorable it can be. And we're going to continue to unpack that as we go through the series. But we know meals are powerful because we've experienced that too. I remember, I think it was 2008. It was the year, or maybe it was 2007, the year after Jen and I got married in 2006, we went to Rome with her family. And we went with her family, and then we went with another lady and her two adult sons. There was eight of us total, and we went to Rome. And when we went to Rome, we were there for seven or eight days. We got to see a lot of really cool stuff. We got to see the Parthenon and something called the wedding cake that the people in Rome really don't like very much. We got to see St. Peter's Basilica and St. Peter's Square. And I got to go on Christmas Day to the papal address. He came out and he addressed the throngs of people gathered in St. Peter's Square, and Pope Benedict gave me a plenary indulgence for 2008, which was great. 2008 was the best year of my life. Thank you, Pope Benedict. But the thing that I remember the most from Rome, and I think everybody who went on that trip would agree, is the Christmas Day meal that we had. Somebody in our party got a tip from one of their friends that this is the place you need to go in Rome for a good meal. And we're like, all right, let's go. I had no idea where we were going, what we were doing. So we're walking to this address. We end up on some completely nondescript street in Rome. Gray cobblestones, and it looked like residential. It wasn't rough residential, it was just residential, like row homes or townhomes or something like that, just kind of all together, and we didn't know where to go or what to do. And we're just kind of standing around, looking at the map, like did we come to the right address, what's going on? And then out of this door to my left burst an Italian chef from Central Casting. I'm telling you, he was short, he was rotund, he was thinning on top, but he had his hair knocked back. He was yelling Italian things. He was like a volcano of Italian joy, right? Like just, I'm not going to try to make any Italian noises because A, I think I would sound stupid. And B, I think that might be somehow racist in 2023. I don't know. I don't want to get in any trouble. But he was saying a bunch of Italian things very loudly and very joyfully. And he just comes bolting right up to me and he grabs my hand. He grabs my wrist. He didn't even grab my hand. He wanted me to not be able to resist at all. And he grabs my wrist and he yanks me into the building. He just starts pulling me towards the restaurant. And I'm looking at the other seven, like, don't leave me behind. Like, you got to come too. And he's just spouting off things and making motions. And he pulls me into what I think is going to be a house. And we walk in, and it's a restaurant, and there's tables, and there's people eating. And he just continues to be an Italian volcano of joy. And then we just plunge right into the kitchen. And I'm like, what's going on here? And again, it's like from a movie. There's stainless steel and steam and fire and chopping and Italian words. And I'm like, this is all happening too fast. And then he bursts out of the kitchen into this private dining room, and he points at the table gleefully. We all get around it. And then he grabs my mother-in-law and kisses her square on the lips and sits us down. And nobody was mad. We were a little offended. He didn't kiss the rest of us. Like it was just, he just sat us down. And as soon as he sat us down, somebody else comes out of the kitchen with whatever the first course was, probably prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella and whatever. And they set it down, and he says his stuff, and he asks what kind of wine we want. He's got a great wine pairing, and nobody else there drank wine. And I'm sitting there. It's my first year in marriage. I'm with a teetotaling family, and quietly I'm like, well, this is stupid. I mean, can I get a little bit of wine? But no, no deal. But they kept just bringing the food, right? The first course is done. He comes and he joyfully sweeps it away. Someone comes out of the kitchen with the next course. And this must have happened seven or eight times. I don't know what we had. I don't know what we ate. I know it was the best meal I've ever had in my life. I know that I will never forget it. When you ask me what's the best meal you've ever had, I will always say that meal in Rome. That's what I remember more than anything. And one of the things that sticks out to me is his joy in hospitality and that infectious joy that spread around the table. And that that's a memory as a family that no one can ever touch, that you can never take away. There was power in that afternoon. And the Italians do it right. When you have a meal over there, you're not going anywhere for like three hours. And you better plan for a nap afterwards. He just keeps bringing stuff. And it was so good and so wonderful and clearly so memorable. And you guys know that meals are powerful too. That's why they occupy such an important space in our culture. When someone gets married, biggest day of their life so far, what do we do? Immediately following someone's wedding ceremony, we go eat together. What do we do the night before someone's wedding ceremony? We have a meal with our closest friends so that we can talk more intimately than when we have to invite all the acquaintances and pay for their meals at the big one the next day. When we have a funeral, what do we do at a funeral? While the family is at the graveside service, someone who loves them is back at their house collecting meals from everybody else so that when the family gets there, they can sit down and they eat. When someone comes over to the house, what's the first thing you say if you're a decent human at all? What can I get you? You hungry? You thirsty? When someone comes in town to visit, what do we do? What are we going to eat? What do you guys want? See, whether we realize it or not, meals hold a sacred place in all of our lives. They're special. They're important. The table is an image that all of us know, that all of us share, that all of us gather around. And those moments around those tables are sacred. And Jesus knew this too. And it's why I think on bright display in the Gospel of Luke is Jesus' commitment to sitting down and having meals with people. But he's not simply eating and drinking. That's not all he came to do. As a matter of fact, that's not even at all what he came to do. He came to eat and drink with people because around the table, conversations happen. Stories are shared. Laughter is exchanged. If it's a really good meal, really good meal. We'll tear up together. We'll learn something about the people we're sitting with. It forces us in the busyness of our lives to stop and focus on what we're doing and who we're with. And Jesus understood the power of a meal. And so over the course of this series, as we prepare for Easter, we're going to look at how Jesus uses his meals in the Gospel of Luke. We're going to look at what he uses the table for. Because Jesus used meals as ministry. He uses the table to symbolize provision. He uses the table to include those who feel ostracized. He uses the table to try to convert those who may be lost and wondering. He uses the table to build community. He uses the table near his death to symbolize what he's about to do. He uses the table to help us always remember what he did. And then most powerfully, I think, he uses the table as a shadow of the reality that is to come in eternity when we are promised in Revelation 18 and 19 that we will sit down one day at the greatest banquet of all time, the marriage supper of the Lamb, where we celebrate the bride of Christ, the church being swept up into heaven to exist with God in perfect peace for all eternity. The marriage supper of the Lamb and the truth of it and the existence of it and the hope for it is the hope to which we all cling. And every meal we have is a shadow of what is to come in heaven. And that's what we're going to talk about on Easter. But what we're going to see as we move through this series is Jesus using meals as ministry. And it's going to cause us to ask, kind of that prompt that we left in the video, it's going to cause us to ask, what would happen if we began to think about our meals the way Jesus did? What would happen if we began to look at lunch and dinner, I mean, not breakfast, like nobody does anything for breakfast, okay, so we don't have to worry about that. But what would happen if we looked at lunch and dinner as opportunities for ministry? To bridge gaps with people. To build relationships with people. Even just to solidify things within our own family and have good spiritual conversations. What would happen if just for this season, for these six weeks, we allowed ourselves to think about our meals the way that Jesus thought about his meals. To that end, we have some things to help you do that as we move through this series. The first is this. This is a booklet of conversation prompts, and you can fold it and it sets up like a triangle, like one of those calendars. And so these are all sitting on the information table out there. And what we're encouraging everyone to do, one per family, please, because we didn't print out enough for all you guys to be greedy. What we're encouraging you to do, if it makes sense at all in your universe, and I know that for some this is not going to make sense, and I don't mean to exclude anyone, and I'm sorry about that, but if it makes sense in your family, grab one of these. Every week, there's a couple of verses that tie in with the sermon that you or your kids can read at the beginning of the week so everybody has the right context what we're talking about. And then every day is just a different conversational prompt. It's just one. It's not a list of small group questions. It's very low bar, very attainable. It's just one conversational prompt that has to do with the sermon from that week. It's an opportunity for you guys as families to use your meals with some purpose, to have meaningful, important conversations around your table. And so I would encourage you to take this, set it up, put it on your kitchen table for this Lenten period for the next six weeks or so. Carly did a great job. It's going to fit in with your decor, Okay, it's going to look nice. Don't worry about that. Just go and put it on your table. And then every time you have a meal at that table, I know that it's not realistic to assume that five or six nights a week, we're all going to sit as families around a table. Maybe you do, and that's wonderful. But I know that a lot of us struggle for that. So if you miss days, don't beat yourself up about it. Nobody cares. But when you're sitting at that table as a family, grab it, flip to the day, and ask the prompt, and make everyone around the table answer. Sometimes this won't go anywhere. It'll be two minutes of awkward, and your kids will be mad at you, and then you'll move on to other things. That's okay. But maybe two or three times it'll spark a really important conversation in your house. And if it does, isn't it worth it being awkward a couple of nights? So I think we've got an opportunity to begin to use our dinner tables as families to have some meaningful conversations as we move through this series together. So I would really encourage you to take one of these. The other thing we want you to do in the next six weeks leading up to Easter is what I'm calling the dinner table challenge. Here's the challenge. We would love for you, if you're a grace person, if you feel comfortable doing this, if you're new here this morning, you're like, bro, I did not sign up for this. Okay, I understand. You're adults. Do this if you want. But here's the challenge, okay? Sometime over the next six weeks, we would love for you to invite someone to your table from grace who's never been around your table before. That's simple. Now, you're going to start giving out invites to people who have never been over to your house before. And they're going to go, are you inviting us over because of the challenge? And then you go, yeah, but like, you know, do you like hamburgers? Let's go. Nobody cares. Let's just zoom right through that and have people over to the house from grace that we've never had over before. And I bet we'll start making new friends and new connections. And I bet different parts of the church will start getting connected with other parts of the church, and I bet this can be a very positive thing. The second part of the challenge is have someone around your table who's not from grace, who's never been around your table before. And I know that this is going to look different for different folks. If the idea of having someone around your table is terrifying because you're an awful cook or you're a hoarder and you don't want them to see your shame, like whatever it is, go out to dinner with some people. Make some reservations and go and talk with some folks from grace that you've never done that with, with some folks not from grace that you've never done that with. But I do think, and we're going to talk more about this next week, I do think that there is a power and an efficacy to having people over to the house, to preparing the meal, to going through those things to show hospitality. But however that makes the most sense in your context, that's the dinner table challenge here in the next six weeks. Have someone around your table from grace who's never been there. Have someone around your table not from grace who's never been there. And I'm just telling you, I really think God's going to do some cool stuff with that if we'll walk in it. I really think God is going to spark some good conversations. I really think he's going to make some good connections. And this isn't at all the reason why I'm doing this, but I think it's going to bring some people to grace. And if it doesn't bring them to grace, but it brings them to a church, great. Great. You guys know me. I'm not trying to get more people. We don't have enough room for all your friends anyways, and I'm not going to two services until the fall. Because Aaron Winston would quit. Just today, he would quit. But man, what if you invite somebody from your neighborhood who hasn't prioritized Jesus in a while, but because they interact with you, because they interact with your family, because you express friendship and hospitality to them, they decide that they want to re-engage with their Savior. Isn't that great? And who cares what church they go to after that? So that's the dinner table challenge. That's what we want you to do, and we want you to grab one of these and use that for the next six weeks. This is also probably a good time to mention something that I've been thinking about for a long while. I guess it was maybe the summer where Carly came to me and she said, hey, can I change the logo? And I'm like, what's wrong with the logo? That's grace, you know? It's fancy. And she's like, what? I don't like it. And then I looked at it. I don't know if you guys can see this. I'll show it to you afterwards if you can't. Yeah, but it looks better here, all right? Jeez. It is on the screen, and that is helpful. So you see it on the screen, and here it's all silver. So when it's one color, it looks like a helmet for Mickey Mouse. That's what it looks like. It looks like we stand for Sir Mickey Duke of Raleigh. And here it's in silver, so it's really pronounced. And once you see that, you just, you can't not see it. And here's the thing about the logo is like, what does it mean? Nothing, nothing. Well, there's hexagons. Yep. What do those mean? We don't know. There's a cross. We know what the cross means, and that's good. Pro-cross. But it doesn't really have any significance to it. And so the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I mean, yeah, sure. If there's something better that you can come up with, let's try it. And so with that kind of on the back burner, I also had this other thought about grace. And I think that we can marry the two and the logo. I don't have a logo to unveil for you this morning. I'm not like building to that, so don't get excited. We're working on it, all right? I just realized the anticipation I was building. No, that's not, mm-mm. I don't have anything yet. I can hand-draw you one. But there's a lot of different ways to think about a church. And after walking with you guys for almost seven years, I think I really know how we think about the church and how I think about the church. In Christendom, in church world, you can come across churches that kind of present themselves as almost this weight room, like this machismo, I'm going to just man up and be a good Christian and be a warrior for Jesus. And whether you're a woman or a man, you need to man up and you need to be tough for Jesus. And okay, in some contexts, that's effective and useful for the kingdom, and that's great. But that's not me, and that's not us. I grew up hearing this analogy to help us think about church, that church isn't a cruise ship, it's a battleship, right? Church isn't just this good time gang where you just have the best time possible and you just cruise along trying to have fun and get through life and just enjoying things. It's a battleship where we fight the enemy and we attack and we move forward and we're on mission and we press. And that has a lot of stuff that resonates with me. The problem is, when you think of the church as a battleship, we often get confused about who the enemy is, and we start to shoot at people that we don't have any business shooting at. So I don't really love thinking about the church as a battleship. So as I think about the church, and I think particularly about grace, I think grace is a banquet table, and everyone is invited. I think of grace as just this big party where we're celebrating our Savior, where we sit around a table every week, and we gather to share about our Savior. Where we sit around a table every week and we gather to share about our weeks and to hear what Jesus is doing and where he's taking us. I think about grace as this banquet table where everyone is welcome. If you want to bring your friends, bring them. If we fill up this room too much, I'll just walk around the room going to people who I know who have been going here for a long time and say, go stay in the lobby. Somebody needs your seat. We're fine with that. Everyone is invited to this table. There is not a head to this table. It's round. We're all equals. We're all together just trying to cling to the hope of the promises that we see in Scripture, knowing that one day we will sit around the great banquet table. Grace is a table where if you're sad, you can come here and you can grieve and you can mourn. Grace is a table if you're joyful, you can come here and celebrate and not allow that joy to terminate and the experience that's making you joyful, but turn in reflection to the God who is the author of that joy and share it with the people who love you most and best. Grace is a place for weary pilgrims to come and rest, for wanderers to settle. Grace is a table where the wounded can come and they can heal, where the weary can come and they can rest. It is a place where people who feel lonely, who need community, can come and find it. It is a place for those of us who have community to turn and offer that to other people who need it as well. Grace is a place where everyone is invited to come and celebrate in the majesty of our Savior. It is a place to come where we are loved and we allow ourselves to love others. And we do that in celebration of the God who loves us most and first and best. And so I think this series is most appropriate for who we are and for how God has shaped our faith, for how God has brought us to understand what it means to live the Christian life. And so more and more, I want us to see grace as a table that we bring everybody around to be refreshed and revived, then go back out. And I want us, as we go back out, to think of our meals more purposefully for the next six weeks and ask ourselves the question, how can we use our meals as Jesus did? And as we come back over now five more weeks, we're going to look at how Jesus used meals for ministry every one of those weeks. It'll culminate in that Good Friday service, and then hopefully we'll have the best Easter that we've ever had. But now I'm going to pray, and Aaron of the band is going to come up, and I don't know if we'll have lyrics for it or not, but if we don't, it's no big deal. Just listen for them. And they're going to sing over us a song that I think is thematic, not just for this series, but for Grace as well, and I'm excited for you guys to learn it and experience it. Let's pray. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for the gospel of Luke and all the truth that we find in it. Lord, thank you for opening my eyes to the way that your son used meals in that book in his life. I pray that we would use them in the same way, that we would see meals as sacred spaces, that we would invite others into those, that you would use those of us with gifts of hospitality, with gifts of conversation, that you would break some of us out of our shells and help us to make the connections that honestly our souls need so desperately. God, I pray over this series and what's happening at Grace. I feel like I can see you moving powerfully here, and so I pray that you would continue to do that and that nothing that we would do would get in the way of what you want to do. May we be sensitive to your guiding, sensitive to the Spirit in this season. Even as we consider who to invite, God, that you would move us in the direction of the connections that you want us to make. Lord, use this series in a powerful way, not for the sake of grace, but for the sake of the families and the individuals that comprise this place. We thank you for giving us a table here that we can all gather around. We pray that we would always be grateful to you for that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We find ourselves at the end of a series called Known For where we're examining this idea of reputation. What are we known for as individuals? What are our families known for? Last week we talked about what our church is known for, and this week we want to talk about what our faith is known for. And this is a sermon for me that really means a whole lot to me. It's really very important. This is a message that when we set up this series and when I started writing the sermons each week, in the back of my head I wasn't really writing the other sermons. I was thinking about this one and what I felt compelled to say and what I felt needed to be said. When I go to write a sermon, I write down, I just sit down and I just write all of my thoughts that I have until there's one that seems good and then I go with that one, which sometimes doesn't take very much time at all. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but I wrote down more stuff for this sermon than I've ever written down for almost any of them, because the reputation of God's church matters very much to me. I love the church. I love this outpost of an eternal kingdom that we get to participate in with our lives. We are, we're told, the ambassadors of Christ to a lost and watching world. And so it is our job to carry that flag well. It is our job to be highly regarded in our culture and in the public square. And how God's children are perceived and how his kingdom on earth, the church, is perceived ought to matter very much to a believer. And so for me as a pastor who's dedicated his life to the church, who loves the church very much, it matters very much how we are perceived. And if we were to ask ourselves, how is Christianity in the American church perceived by our culture, the answer is not great. The answer is that for my lifetime, and for most of your lifetimes, we have been on a slow decline. Where the percentage of people over 60 who attend church and claim a faith has gotten lower and lower, and that's the highest percentage of our population that attends and prioritizes churches until you get down to people under 25 years old, and it's as low as 18% of people that claim of faith and attend church on any sort of regular basis. We are on a slow slide towards a post-Christian culture where the church has lost its position of prominence in our country. And the hard part is it's our fault. It's not them. People leaving church, rejecting church, are people who grew up in it. So what are we doing to make a bad name for our Savior? It's really the question that faces us, and it's an important one. To answer it, if you'll humor me, I would like to do a brief overview of all of Christian history. Also, I'm not kidding. So in the new church, after Jesus died, I almost wore, I used to teach Christian high school, and to make myself feel like more of a teacher, Jen remembers this, I bought a houndstooth blazer, and I wanted to wear it for you, but that thing don't fit, man. That would have been flapping open all day. That would have been bad news. So I couldn't do it, so I went with coral. Some people have called it salmon. I don't know which it is. But here we go. Humor me on this. I will try to move as quickly as possible. And I promise you, I'm getting to a point with this. And another reason I'm sharing this with you is because I'm assuming that most of us in this room are Christians, but that the vast majority of us didn't go to seminary and probably haven't taken a personal interest in exhaustive church history. And a lot of this might be new information for you, and I think it can be very helpful information to you. So the church began, obviously, in Jerusalem at the death of Christ. And then we see Pentecost and Acts. The disciples are the leaders of the church. Saul is converted to Paul and commissioned to plant churches throughout Asia Minor. He does this over four missionary journeys. And we see Christianity begin to flourish in the ancient world under the umbrella of the Roman Empire. Because Christianity claimed that there was a Lord who wasn't the emperor, it was reviled as a rebellious and revolutionary religion. And it was persecuted and attempted to be stamped out at every turn, sometimes really bad under Nero, sometimes a little lighter, but it was consistently persecuted in the early centuries of the church. Incidentally, the church always, always flourishes when it's persecuted and always messes things up when it's in power. We'll see that. So the church begins to flourish and grow and grow in prominence and God is blessing it. And in the midst of this flourishing in 313 AD, an emperor named Constantine decided to legalize Christianity. Many of you probably know that. What you may not know is that he did not legalize Christianity because he was a convert and was favorable towards it. All the evidence points to him continuing in the pagan faith that he claimed before he legalized Christianity. He simply legalized it to ingratiate himself to elements of his empire and political leaders and figures that were close to him whose power he needed so that it would be easier to be the emperor. He married the Christian faith for political expediency while feigning a faith that he didn't really have for the sake of his own political career and efficacy. And I would just like to say that I'm very grateful that only happened in 313 and definitely does not happen in the United States for any reason. So Christianity moves into this place of cultural power and primacy. And in the midst of this, eventually, while Christianity, and it's the Catholic Church, but I'm not picking on the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church was the only church until about 1050 when we had the Great Schism and that born Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. So in that time, what we see is the crumble and the fall of the Roman Empire. And all of Europe is basically made up of Frankish and Germanic clans and tribes and nation states. The only transnational power in this time is the Catholic Church. And so the Pope, most pointed, Pope Gregory, becomes kingmaker. He decides who's going to be king of what tribe. He decides who's going to get promoted. And the Catholic Church decides what all these tribes have to believe and what they're going to think favorably of and what they're not. And so this is really historically the very height of power for the Christian church is the pope as kingmaker, as the most powerful force on the planet, single most powerful person on the planet. And out of this place of great power comes our worst and most egregious sins in history. Comes the Spanish Inquisition, where inquisitors are commissioned to go to towns and suss out the heretics and kill people who claim a Christian faith, they just don't articulate it like all the nuanced ways the Catholic Church insisted that they should, and so they kill them. This is when we started indulgences. Indulgences are some of the greatest evil to me in the history of the church. The church had this doctrine of purgatory, where you were taught that even if you're saved, even if you're going to heaven when you die, that since you've sinned here on earth to differing degrees, you have to pay penance in purgatory. Basically, we got to burn all the bad stuff off of you in purgatory before you can go to heaven. That was the idea. But there was this great system that they invented that's called indulgences. And what they said is you're probably going to burn for that for a little while in between this life and the next. But the more money you give to the church, God actually deposits that to your spiritual account, and you burn less. So this is just keep giving. And then they would tell you we're very sad that your mother just died died and we know you're grieving, but also she's on fire. So the more money you give, the quicker you can put out that flame. And there's this phrase, I'll never forget it. There was a guy who was the right hand of the Pope. I forget what his name was, but he used to go through small towns in Europe to collect money for indulgences. And he would ring the metal coffer and and he would say, for every coin in the coffer rings a soul from purgatory springs. And it is an egregious evil on a poor, illiterate populace. But it also paid for the Vatican City, so... And then the worst of our sins, the Crusades. Raping and pillaging our way across Europe for a holy war in the name of Jesus to try to conquer Jerusalem from the Muslims for what reasons I do not understand. Telling these young men who are again illiterate and uneducated that if they die in this holy war that they will go straight to heaven and skip purgatory altogether. At our time of greatest power, we committed our greatest sins. In the midst of these sins, towards the end of the 1400s, there was a guy named Ulrich Zwingli. He started to ask some questions. He was followed by John Calvin and then ultimately by a guy named Martin Luther, who we probably know, and you may have heard the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Church door, where he says, hey, this church seems corrupt. I've got some questions. And out of their questions and in the corruption that they saw began the Great Reformation. And so that's when the Protestant church sprung off of the Catholic church. And in that Reformation, that was very necessary. And in asking those questions that did need to be asked, and in holding the powerful accountable, we see a spiritual flourishing again, where we have the Scottish Reformation and the English Reformation and the Swedish Reformation. And all of this was born out of Germany. So there's large reform going on in the German church. And so across Christendom, things start to get better, and churches start to be filled with more grace, and things get less corrupt. And so we kind of start to pick ourselves up again. Except what happens in the midst of this flourishing and this spiritual awakening? Well, Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin decide that what they need to do is establish a Christian nation state in Geneva where it's going to be this perfect society where all we do is follow God's laws. And if you don't follow God's laws, you're not allowed to live there. And what they do, they killed heretics. John Calvin had one of his closest friends burned alive. He pleaded with the authorities that it could be just beheaded, so it would be a quicker death. But they said, no, we've got to burn him alive for his heresies. He was a believer. John Calvin killed other Christians. Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and was responsible for the death of thousands of Jews, and he would go around commissioning people to kill Baptists. If you would baptize somebody, Martin Luther didn't agree with that, and so he'd just have you killed for your heresy. So at the height of their power, what did they do? They used it to try to get people to behave the way they thought they should behave, and they tanked it. And so Europe, in response to the Reformation and the behavior of the Christians of the Reformation, in response to the behaviors of the Christians from the Catholic Church, wholeheartedly began to reject religion and move away from it. And the church in Europe goes into atrophy. About this time, some people seeking religious freedom from the oppression of Europe come to Jamestown, and they start the American experiment. The American experiment, we found this country on Christian principles, and the church occupies this place of importance in our country. And then the 1700s, we have figures like Jonathan Edwards who led the Great Awakening. And Christianity begins to flourish again in good and wonderful ways, in ways that led to missionary journeys across the world, that led to the church in China and many churches in South Africa or in South America and Central America. There was a good movement of the Spirit that poured out of this great awakening. And then eventually, the church and Christianity moved into this place again of cultural prominence and primacy for all of our lives who are in this room. Christianity has occupied this position of cultural primacy and power where we have a lot of sway in the country in which we live. And I want us to see these historic ebbs and flows because I want us to understand that in the scope of history, and this is very important, that for Christians, cultural primacy always produces corruption, hypocrisy, and abuse. Always. Without fail. In the span of history. And you can take cultural primacy and you can just make that power to make it a little easier. In the span of history, when you put Christians in power as a group over a country or a people, that power always, without fail, produces hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. Always. Now, why is that the case? Well, I think it's largely because when we achieve that power, we start to take our eye off the ball. And we forget the kingdom and we forget what got us there and we just start to focus on maintaining power. Very, very often, almost without fail, what Christians do with that power is we try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. And when they won't, we punish them. And when it's real bad, we kill them. And I just wonder if in your experience in our American culture, if you could pick out some examples of where Christianity in its place of power in our country produced hypocrisy and corruption and abuse. I'm not going to list any because I'm pretty close to the line already, but I'm pretty sure you can think of them. Those instances of corruption and abuse of power where we leverage everything we can to try to make people who don't believe like us behave like us. How do they make us look in the public square? How do those advance the kingdom we live for? So, if that historic cycle is accurate, how do we make sure we're not a part of it? How can grace make sure that we are not participants in this terrible historical cycle of being persecuted, rising to power in a position of prominence, using that power in ways that are inappropriate, that produce corruption and abuse and hypocrisy, and then watching Christianity fall from prominence. Because let's be honest about where we sit in history. We are on the downside. We have existed in prominence in this country, and now we are on the downside, where based on the statistics I told you at the beginning, where the younger you get in this country, the less likely you are to go to church. We are on the tail end of our cultural dominance. So in this moment in history, as we sit as a church, as you sit as Christians, what do we do? How do we act? How do we respond? What do we admit to and own? And how do we try to chart a path moving forward as Christians within a culture that is beginning to reject us because of the way that we have behaved? Not because of them. What do we do? Well, this will be the least controversial thing I say this morning. We focus on Jesus. And we ask how Jesus engaged with culture. What did he do when he came? Because he entered into a time and place that had its moral bankruptcy, that was rife with oppression, that saw more tragedy than we see, that saw more blatant corruption than what we see. He entered into a world with myriad cultural ills. And when he entered into that world, what did he do about the damaged culture that he saw? Well, how did Jesus interact with culture? He ignored it. He ignored it. He just almost acted as if it weren't there and it didn't matter. I've got some examples of this that I will share with you. The first is in Luke chapter 5, verses 29 through 32. This is when he's calling the disciples at the beginning of his ministry. There's a disciple named Levi that we also know as Matthew. And Levi was a tax collector. And tax collectors in ancient Israel were persona non grata. They were no good because a tax collector is someone who had turned tail on his own people and now worked for the oppressive Roman government and took your money and then a cut of that and then gave the other money to the Roman government. So he was by accounts, a traitor. This was a job that you took and you said, I'm going to be morally bankrupt, but I'm doing it for the money and it's going to be fine. He was that guy. And Jesus, not caring about any of that, calls him to be a disciple. And this is Levi's response to that call. And Levi made him a great feast in his house. And there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples saying, why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered them, those who are well have no You can't be, we don't do that. Our type, we are religiously proper. We don't interact with their type. We don't go to their house and have feasts where there's food and beverages. And Jesus says, yeah, but I do because that's who I came for. I actually came to spend time with them. I'm not really that concerned with your cultural norms. I'm going to go love on them because they're the ones who need my love the most. So I'll see you later. Another instance, in the book of John at the beginning, we see Jesus talking to the woman at the well, and maybe we forget sometimes that the woman at the well was a Samaritan. And the Samaritans to the Hebrew were an ethnic cultural mutt. They were unacceptable. And there was wildly accepted and agreed upon racism amongst the Hebrew people that the Samaritans are the worst. It is right and good to hate them. They have intermingled with other countries and other religions. They are not like us. We are better than them. We should disdain them. It is okay. It is rampant, agreed upon racism by God's people, a lot like the late 1860s in the United States. And Jesus, supposed to avoid Samaria, just walks right through it, goes to the well in the middle of the day, encounters a woman who's basically known for her life of what we would think of as sin and impropriety, and has a conversation with her. Part of the conversation goes like this, John chapter 4, verse 9, the Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? The Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. And Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. So he goes to the Samaritan, and she says, Why are you talking to me? You're not supposed to be talking to me. Culturally, this is not allowed. And Jesus says, yeah, I don't care. I'm actually here for you. You're who I came for. I love you. And if you'll ask me the right question, I'll love you forever. I'll offer you living water. Touched by his love, the Samaritan goes back to her village, tells everyone who she's met, brings them all back out to Jesus, and they all convert. And he reaches a Samaritan village that would have culturally never been reached by a Jewish person because of the norms that he was expected to uphold. Another interesting time we see the Samaritans show up in Scripture is when this rich young guy comes up to Jesus in the public square, and he says, I know that the Bible says that I'm supposed to love my neighbor, but can you tell me who is my neighbor? And Jesus tells them a parable of a priest and then a Levite who walks past a dying man on a road to Jericho, And then he says there was a Samaritan that came up. And the Samaritan healed him. Or paid for him and cared for him. Covered his bills at the hotel. Made sure he was squared away. And then he looks at the rich young guy and he says, and who was his neighbor? That is not dissimilar at all from Jesus showing up in Birmingham, Alabama in 1958 and talking with a group of white churchgoers and them asking him, who is our neighbor? And Jesus tells a parable where a black man is the hero and the moral exemplar over the pastor and the doctor that's respected in town. It's noteworthy to me that though this rampant racism was present in his culture, he did not seek a large audience to decry it, nor did he tacitly approve of it. He just called it out in instances where it made sense. Not really caring who was around and what they thought and what the culture expected of him at the time. We see Jesus greatly concerned with the behavior of others, but first he was concerned with loving others. The adulterous woman that's brought to his feet. Caught in the act of adultery. Asked in front of Pharisees if she should be stoned. And Jesus says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And then I am convinced began to write the names of ladies in the sand. And all those guys went, oh, okay, see you later. And so he shows her great grace, but does he in that grace approve of the behavior? No. He looks at her and he says, your sins are forgiven. Now go and sin no more. There's another example that I have here that we'll just go through really quickly. Luke 5, 12, there is a leper that came to him. While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. And when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and begged him, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I will be clean. I will be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him. This is a big deal because if you've got leprosy in the ancient world, it was because of a sin that you or your family committed and you deserved it and you deserved the death that you were going to die. So they isolated them into communes where no one of any righteous standing would go. Because it was culturally incorrect to do so. And Jesus didn't care. He went and he healed the lepers. When I look at Jesus' life and I understand that he existed in a culture that had its ills, and I think about what he came to accomplish. Listen, if Jesus wanted to, have you ever thought about this? If Jesus wanted to, he could have come and established a nation state. He had the horses to do it. He could have overthrown the Roman Empire. He could have sat on the throne of David. He could have made Israel the moral exemplar for the whole world. He could have established a nation state and made people behave the right way within that nation state if that's what he really wanted to do. He could have done what Zwingli and Calvin and Luther tried to do. He could have done what the Catholic Church tried to do. He could have done what we in America sometimes tried to do, but he doesn't do that. He establishes a church, an eternal outpost of an eternal kingdom and a temporal world. And he didn't get all caught up in the culture wars of his day. Because Jesus fought kingdom wars, not culture wars. Jesus came to fight for a kingdom, not win over a culture. And he died on the cross to lay the cornerstone, to lay the foundation of that kingdom. And in a little bit, we're going to have communion and we're going to celebrate the establishment of this kingdom in which we get to participate. But if we want to encounter our culture like Jesus does, and if we want to care about the reputation of our faith within our culture, then I would contend very simply that we need to love as Jesus did. And that we need to concern ourselves with the things that concern Jesus. And that we ought not think that it is our job to fight culture wars to try to convince people who don't believe what we believe to behave how we behave. But instead, we build God's kingdom. And we build it the way that Jesus did. He fought for his kingdom one opportunity, conversation, and person at a time. That's what he did. When I say opportunity, sometimes Jesus had ministry opportunities or opportunities to love where he fed 5,000 or he gave a sermon, like the Sermon on the Mount, to thousands of people. And so not every interaction that Jesus had was isolated to the individual, but what my point is, we all have opportunities to minister. We all have opportunities to love. God gives us all a chance to show his love to our neighbor and to people within our culture. And when he does, we should seize it. And so Jesus fought for his kingdom, one opportunity, one conversation, and one person at a time. Very simply, Jesus loved. He didn't seek a bully pulpit in the Sanhedrin and try to convince all the Pharisees that they needed to go to Samaria and do ministry. He just went to Samaria and he did ministry. He didn't argue for time in the synagogue and try to convince them that they should care deeply about the lepers. He just went and loved on the lepers. He didn't enter into a debate in the public square about the validity of racism against the Samaritans. He just set them up as a hero and a parable to make a very clear point to the few people who were around him. It's not as though Jesus doesn't care about bad behavior. He just knows that the right behavior is never going to follow the wrong beliefs. And so as Christians, the most important thing we can do is fight for God's kingdom, which as we defined it in the fall, was to strengthen and add to the souls who are following Jesus. So what can grace do in our culture to make sure that we are not a part of the terrible historical cycle of abusing power and producing corruption and abuse and hypocrisy. I think that we can examine long and hard the culture wars that we feel like we need to fight as Christians. And start wondering what it might look like to fight kingdom wars like Jesus did instead. To fight for individuals and their souls, not principles. We can carefully and prayerfully consider the value of trying to get people who don't believe like us to behave like us. And we can ask, when we do find ourselves in a situation where we can legislate them to behave like we do, does that push them closer to or further away from our Savior? And if it's further away from our Jesus, did we really win anything? Or have we just perpetuated the historical cycle? So Grace, let's be a church that fights for God's kingdom. Let's fight for it one person at a time, one conversation at a time, one opportunity at a time. And if we do that, you know what I think we'll see? In this little outpost of God's eternal kingdom? Revival. Revival in our hearts. Revival in our neighbors. Revival in our friends. Let's pray for that. Father, we love you. We are sorry for making your good name look bad. We are sorry for the times that we, as individuals, have carried your banner poorly. We are sorry for the times that we have been a part of churches that have carried your banner poorly. God, we know that grace has not always displayed you perfectly in our communities, and we know that we will fail you again, but God that we would see it and that we would care and that we would try and that we would be like your son and try to win people to your kingdom one person at a time. God let us see and be very afraid of the potential damage that can be done when we are put in positions of power. Let us hold it well and honorably. Let us honor you in our interactions. And let our biggest priority, God, for everyone that we encounter be that they would know you, that they would love you, and in turn, eventually, they would begin to love others as you love them. Be with us in our small groups this week as we discuss this. Be with us as we drive and we think and we pray and we reflect. And God, for what it's worth, we really want this church to be a place that you're proud of. Would you give us the courage to be that? In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, once again, good morning. It's good to see everybody. This morning in the sermon, my goal really, more than to get you to feel or to convict you or to challenge you or encourage you, is simply to get you to think. So the goal this morning is that we leave here thinking, and I would tip the cap a little bit and say, in depth about our faith and the reasons behind our faith. And so I would begin with this question. You have it there in your notes in front of you. Why are you a Christian? Now, I understand that there are some people in the room who you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian. You're here because you're exploring or you're considering or you're curious. And to that end, I am so grateful that you trust this place to help you on your path to answer some of those questions. That really, really is very honoring and humbling. And we hope that we hold that well. If you ever want to talk about beliefs that you may or may not have or things that you're considering in a nonjudgmental way, I would love to do that with you. I promise I'm open to whatever your thoughts are. If you are a Christian, however, I would ask, why is that the case? If we could sit down and have coffee together or beer, whatever you prefer, not wine though, that's gross. If we could sit down and we could talk to each other and I could say, why is it that you're a believer? What's the reason for your faith? How would you answer me? I feel like that answer is very, very important for reasons that we're going to explore as we get into the text. And my goal is for you to leave here considering that and hopefully to arrive at an answer to that question that feels substantive, that feels good. And I want to tell you why I feel like that question is such an important one. It's important for many reasons, not the least of which is that it comes up in 1 Peter chapter 4. Peter writes about this question. He poses it to the people who received the letter. And I know that we took a break this last week, and then we missed, or two weeks ago for Mother's Day, and then we missed last week, and so now we jump in the middle of the letters to Peter, and we might have forgotten the context and some of the things going on. So, so that we're all on the same page, and we can appreciate the importance of Peter weaving this into his letter, I wanted to just remind us that Peter was the disciple that I feel like I can relate to. He was the ready, fire, aim disciple, right? He was the one that would always speak first and think later about the things that he just said. He was always sticking his foot in his mouth. He was always the one that was going out first. He was the one jumping in the water. He was the one who would answer Jesus's hard questions. And sometimes he was right. And sometimes he was, he was spectacularly right. And he was honored for that. And other times he was spectacularly wrong and he felt shame for that. And I can relate to Peter a lot. And his letter gives me hope that even dummies like me might be able to grow up one day and be remotely wise. And so in Peter's old age, in his measured, weathered wisdom, he writes two letters to the churches in Asia Minor, which we know pretty much is modern day Turkey, with the intent of them being circulated around the churches. And these are churches that have people in them who are not of a Jewish background, but largely of a Gentile background, meaning they are first-generation believers. They are just coming into this faith. And to them, he writes the same encouragement, the same question that I posed to you just a few minutes ago, why is it that you are a Christian? He phrases it in a different way, but it leads to the same question. This is what he writes in 1 Peter 3. Sorry, I misspoke earlier. Verses 14 through 16. So Peter encourages the early church in the first century, be prepared with an answer when anyone asks for the reason of the hope that you cling to. Now, what is the hope that they cling to? Where does their hope rest? Well, their hope rests in the same place that our hope rests, and our hope rests in the promises of Christ. The hope that we have as Christians, what we hope for in the future, rests in the promises and in the actions and in the victories of Jesus. The hope that we have as Christians is the same hope that they had as Christians, that Jesus really did live, that he really did die on a cross in Jerusalem, that he really was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and that Easter really is true, that he really did raise himself from the dead after three days, and in doing so, conquered sin and death for the rest of time. And then as he went back up into heaven, before he did, he made promises. He made promises that he was going to prepare a place for us. He made promises that he was going to return again to retrieve his bride, the church, to retrieve his brothers and sisters, the children of God the Father. He made promises to us that he's going to come back and get us. That one day, and I say this a lot, he made promises to us that one day all the wrong things would be made right and the sad things would be untrue. Those are the promises that we cling to, the promises of Jesus. Just this week, I was on the phone with a lady who had just lost her dad moments earlier. And she was crying, and it was hard. And those are, it's this really weird juxtaposition, my favorite and least favorite conversations that I have in my role, because what an honor it is to be there as people endure that sort of pain, and to be the one that they call to talk to. I never carry that lightly. But the hope that she clings to is because her father was a believer and professed a faith, and she's a believer and professes a faith, that when she said goodbye to her dad, it wasn't goodbye forever. It was goodbye for now. That's the hope that we cling to because Jesus promised us that. The hope we cling to is one day we'll be at the marriage supper of the Lamb, that one day we'll be in heaven in eternity, that we will see our Jesus face to face. That's the hope that we cling to. It's the same hope that the early church clung to. That's where we are similar to the audience that Peter wrote to in the first century. Here's where we're dissimilar, but in some ways kind of close still. In the first century, everyone was a first generation believer. Maybe, maybe, maybe there was a second generation believer, meaning they were the first ones in their family to come to faith. There could have been some children in the services where this were read whose parents were believers and they were therefore believers. But I could say with almost certainty, there were no adults receiving this letter the first time it was read in the very first edition, maybe a couple hundred years later, but there was no adults receiving this freshly whose parents were believers and who bestowed it upon them. That is highly, highly unlikely. So we have a bunch of first generation believers. And we have a bunch of first generation believers in a culture and in a context where this Christian religion seems like some weird fringe cultish thing. Why would you be a part of that? Why would you do that? Why would you be one of those crazy people where you have to eat the flesh of the Savior? That's so freaking weird. Why would you want to have anything to do with it? To be a Christian in the first century was to choose to be ostracized and to be put on the fringes of society. And so when you would declare publicly that you were a Christian, it was pretty normal to be met with, why? What for? And Peter tells them, when they ask you why, be prepared with an answer. Be ready. Have a why. Another way of thinking about that why is it that you are a believer is to say, what is your why? So Peter says, know what your why is. Know how to respond when people ask why you have faith. And then he says this, and this is so, so important. He says, yet do it with gentleness and respect. Do it with gentleness and respect. This is not the point of the sermon, okay? But I guess I'm getting to the age where I just feel like it's all right to climb on top of my soapbox every now and again when a chord struck with me. Christians in the public forum, on social media, commenting on Facebook, posting on Twitter, maybe on Instagram, I don't know. When you talk with your friends, when you get beers with the fellows, when you talk with the ladies, whatever it is, if our speech is not marked in contentious situations with gentleness and respect, then we dishonor the Savior that gave us the opportunity to use those words. If our speech in the public forum with people who disagree with us, not just about faith, but about anything, especially politics. If our speech isn't marked with respect and with gentleness, then our speech, no matter what our words are, is not Christian. It must be marked with gentleness and respect. That is the mark of the believer, and that is what will have our words heard. And I think the admonition of Peter here to be prepared with an answer for why you believe what you believe and gentleness and respect is every bit as applicable now in our lives and in our public forums. Our speech, when we answer why we think what we think, why we believe what we believe, because listen, the question doesn't always come up, why do you believe what you believe? Why do you believe, people aren't gonna come up to you and go, why do you cling to the hope that you have in Jesus? That's not how that question comes in. It's why do you believe this about this? Why did you vote this way about this thing? Why do you go to church on Sunday? Why do you prioritize this in your family? You tithe? What for? That's crazy. That's how those questions look in real life. And when we answer those questions, they go back to why, because we have a faith. Why do we have a faith? Well, that's your why. And then it's incumbent upon us to offer those answers with gentleness and respect. Now, here's the difference in our context now in the 21st century and the first century. In the first century, Christianity was this fringe religion that nobody had ever heard of. And if you believed in it, you were probably cultish and crazy. But now, particularly in the Southern United States, which Raleigh like barely counts. I'm from Georgia. Raleigh's kind of Southern. It's not super Southern. We still got some work to do. But in the Southern United States, that's not the case at all. Christianity isn't a fringe religion, it's the religion. It's the assumed one. Everybody knows who Jesus is. Everybody knows what church is. Everybody knows why it exists. Everybody's heard the story of Jesus. If you went man on the street interview, if you just went to Triangle or to Crabtree and just started grabbing people and saying, hey, what do you think about Jesus? You would be hard pressed to find somebody who would go, who? Do you mean Jesus? They would all know who you were talking about to a man and to a woman. If you were to say to them, do you go to church? If they said no and you said why, they'd have a reason. In our context, it's important to understand that if people in our culture are not Christians, they have a reason for that. As we seek to share our faith, as we seek to invite people to church, as we seek to build God's kingdom in Raleigh, in the South, we need to understand that when we engage in spiritual conversations with other people, they know who Jesus is. They know what the church is. And if they don't come to church and if they have rejected Christ, they have a reason for that. It's not that no one has ever told them. I would be shocked to find somebody who grew up in this area or who grew up in the general vicinity, who hasn't come over from another country without a Christian context, but to find someone who's from here and ask them, why is it that you don't have a faith? And for them to have never heard the story of Jesus dying on the cross before. They've heard it, which means if we know people in our life, when we encounter people in our life who are not yet believers, they have a reason for it. And often the reason is that God's children gave them a bad impression of their father. Often the reason that people are not believers is because God's children gave them a bad impression of their father. And this can happen really in two ways. It can happen in the way that you're thinking of, where someone's a hypocrite. You know, we see the pastor who preaches God's good news every Sunday, and then they have a moral failure, and they're off, and they're living some different life. Or somebody says, you know, hey, you come to my church with me on Sunday, and then during the week, they're every bit the hellier than you are, and you're like, your life looks no different than mine. How am I supposed to believe in your God? So there's hypocrisy that can often give people a bad impression of the Father, to be sure. But then it's also the church that does this sometimes. It's also the way the church talks to itself and to other people without gentleness and respect that turns people off. I think of my aunt who grew up in a very conservative Southern Baptist church where Christianity was reduced to moralism and legalism and following the rules. And we obeyed God because he's wrathful and he's sitting in heaven and he wants to get you. And in adulthood, she walked away from the faith. She rejected the version of the God that was taught there, and she should have because that's not the God that we serve. But to her, and this broke my heart when I heard her say it, early in ministry, I knew that she wasn't a believer, and so I wanted to have an honest talk with her about it. And I asked her in all sincerity, when you hear the name Jesus, what do you think? And she said, hatred. And I thought, oh my goodness, that's pretty strong. Why hatred? And she said, because that name has only ever been used to make me feel bad about who I am. It has only ever been used to heap guilt on my head. And I don't want to have anything to do with that name. God forbid anyone ever have that experience at Grace. God forbid it. And so sometimes God's children give people a bad impression of their father, not because of their hypocrisy, but because of their wrong beliefs, because of their wrong why, because of the way they carry out their faith that is in no way taught in scripture. And so we need to be prepared with our why. We need to be ready to encounter things like that when we have these conversations. And listen, we never know when these conversations are going to happen. We never have any idea when somebody in our circles, when someone who works for us or with us or one of our neighbors or somebody at the ball field will just kind of lob this question over to us. Why do you go to church? Why don't you guys do this? We invite y'all to these parties. Why don't you come to them? Why did you change those plans? Why do you do this thing? The question comes in a lot of different formats, but we need to have ears to hear it when it happens. And like I said, we never know when it's going to happen. Years ago, I had joined a men's tennis team. And I'm sitting there, my very first match. We had practice on, I don't know, Wednesdays, and then we had a match on Saturday. And so I'd gone to practice, and I'm sitting at the match, and I think I was done with my match, and I was just trying to support the team and watch the rest of the guys and eat the stale donuts and drink some Gatorade or whatever it was. And I'm just watching the match. And some dude sits next to me. His name is Brent. And Brent and I get to talking and I asked what he did and he told me and he asked what I did. And I said, well, I'm, you know, I'm one of the pastors at the church down the road. And he goes, oh, you're a pastor. I go, yeah. And he goes, all right, so tell me something. And I'm like, ah, here we go. Okay. What do you, what do you want to know, man? I said, sure, what's up? He goes, all the trains are getting off at the same station, right? Like, everybody believes something, but it's all the same. We're all climbing the same mountain, you know what I'm saying? Which is universalism. Universalism is the belief that at the end of the day, all roads, all religious roads, all spiritual paths lead to God. Even agnostics and atheists who don't believe in God or who believe in a God that doesn't care about them will one day find their way into eternal harmony with or without Jesus. And so he's asking me, you're a pastor, but like, everybody's right, right? And I'm like, yo, you just jumped in the deep end, didn't you? We couldn't start with like an easy one. Like, do we have to go to church every Sunday? Like, that's easy. Yes, of course you do. Otherwise God condemns you forever. That's not true. That's not true. Church should be vitally important to you, but anyway. You just jumped right in the deep end, didn't you, pal? I just want to know. But luckily, I had thought about that a lot. I considered it and been in conversations about it. And I had an answer worth sharing. And so I shared it. And I guess he found the answer valuable enough that he asked a lot more questions. And I spent a lot of evenings in Brent's backyard having a beer with him, answering his questions. And then his wife, Susan, was always off to the side. She would kind of know what we were talking about, but she would do her own thing. And then eventually she started to come to talk to us too until we get a year down the road. And I'm asked at that church to lead a Sunday night service that was totally independent of the Monday morning service. And so it needed its whole crew of volunteers. And Brent and Susan were the ones who volunteered to be in charge of set up and tear down for the service, to put the chairs where they needed to go and put the curtains around the chairs so it felt smaller and more intimate. Within a year's time, God used those conversations to bring them into the fold, to help them find a faith and to get them serving in the church and doing something that they would not have done a year earlier when he sat down and said, so all the trains get off at the same station, right? You never know when those conversations are going to happen. You never know when you're going to have the chance to have them. And if you're sitting here now and you're thinking, I never have those conversations. They never happened to me. Then pray that God would give you ears to hear and eyes to see. Because either one of two things is true. Either you only hang out with Christians and you need to go make some pagan friends. And I say pagan, I'm just messing around. You need to go make some friends who are really great people who don't share the faith that you have. You make some friends with them and it'll come up. Or if you have pagan friends, you're not paying attention because I promise you they've asked you some of these questions. I promise you they've opened the door for spiritual conversation for you to be able to enter it and say, with all gentleness and respect, here's why I believe what I believe. And these conversations, when we get to have them, they ripple for eternity. They have eternal impact when we get to have these conversations. There needs to be a switch that flips in your head where you go, oh, okay, Holy Spirit, all right, all right, I'm done. I'm not just casually talking anymore. I really want to be sensitive to you and what you might have me say. These conversations, when people begin to ask you, hey, why is it that you believe what you believe? And what they're really asking in our culture, as I alluded to earlier, everybody has a reason for not being a Christian if they're not. What they're really saying is, why do you still go? Why are you hanging in there? Your God lets you get cancer. Why do you still have faith in him? Your God let you endure these things. Why do you still put up with him? Church does this and this and this and it's terrible. Why do you still go to one? If you can be prepared with an answer to those questions that's substantive and good and compelling, then God can use those answers to compel them right to Jesus. He can use those answers to compel them towards the Holy Spirit, to allow the Holy Spirit to get into their life and into their heart, to do the work, to draw them into the Father. Being prepared with an answer to these questions when people ask about your faith can literally compel them into eternity if we will be humble and respectful and gentle and thoughtful as we explain to people why we have the faith that we have. But here's the other thing it does for us when we understand our why. Your why not only compels them, but it also guards you. I try to say this as often as I can so that when it happens to you, you will not be surprised, but to be a Christian is to sometimes be dismayed with Christianity. To be a Christian is to sometimes be brought to a place where you're like, why do I even believe this? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? To be a Christian is to experience God not doing something that you thought he would do, not protecting you or a family member from something that you thought he would protect you from. To be a Christian is to sit in a disappointment that you felt like God didn't come through and he did not keep his promises to you. It's to sit in the remains of kind of a broken faith and have to choose to put things back together. Or it's to be promised things in scripture to be told that it's going to be like this to be a Christian and it just doesn't feel that way as you can't seem to get any traction living the life that God wants you to live. There will be times in your Christian faith and in your Christian walk where you come to a place where you go, gosh, I'm not even really sure why I believe in this. This is really hard. Maybe I should just be done with it. This is the whole deconstruction era in our lifetime, right? I saw somebody say, a pastor recently, Tim Keller, he said, let's be honest. It may be possible that Christianity has never had a worse name than it does right now. And so when you are a Christian in the midst of a culture where our church does not have a good name, sometimes it gets challenging to cling to that faith that is derided by so many and questioned by so many. And when that questioning comes for your faith, it's going to be important to you to have an answer of why. I'm reminded of the parable that Jesus told at the end of the Sermon on the Mount about the house built on rock versus the house built on sand. He says, the foolish man builds his house on the sand, and when the rains come and the winds blow, the sand melts underneath it and the house crashes into the ocean, but the wise man builds his house on the rock, and when the rains come and the winds blow, his house stands firm. If we think about the foundation of our faith so it can weather the storms of life, certainly our why is one of the cornerstones, yes? And sometimes when the winds come and the rains blow, I've seen believers who might not have had a good why allow it to be washed away, and so their faith is with it. And so I would challenge you this morning with what is your why? Why is it that you believe what you believe? Why is it that you make the choices that you do to build your life around faith? When it comes up, what will your answer be? You don't need to be prepared to answer every question. You don't need to go home and do a deep dive into universalist theology so that you have a good answer for that. But you need to have a why that's sufficient for you. I know that for me, what I have found, this is just personal, is that the most solid whys are built first on undeniable experiences of God showing up in your life. When I think, why is it that I believe what I believe, the first place my mind goes is because it's the times when I go, well, because I saw God come through here. I saw God speak to me here. I saw God move in this thing there. I saw God, I saw God, I saw God. And so there's enough events in my life that I can point to and say, I can't deny that God exists. I can't deny God's existence because I saw him show up in myriad ways throughout my life. And then on top of that, we build the academic things. We build our understanding and our trust for scripture and our understanding and our trust of doctrine and theology and all of those things. But God shows up for us first and lets us know that he exists. And then we learn on top of that. So I would encourage you today. I told you my goal is to get you to think. If you ride home from church with someone, ask that someone, what's your why? Why do you believe what you believe? And poke them a little bit. Because they might say, well, I believe that the Bible is true. Okay. Why do you believe the Bible is true? I believe that God is real. Okay. Why do you believe that God is real? I believe that Jesus existed. All right. Why do you believe that Jesus existed? Let's sharpen one another and help prepare one another to be ready with an answer that we can share in all gentleness and humility because my prayer for you is that you will find yourself in some of these conversations and that when you do, you will remember that those conversations ripple for eternity. And it is my hope that you will be prepared with an answer and raring to go when someone opens this door in your life to have these conversations. So as you go home today, what is your why? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for who you are, for all that you've done. We thank you for the hope that you give us in your son. We know you bind all that hope together, God. We know that hope rests in you as well. We thank you for the spirit that convicts and leads us to that hope. Father, if there's anyone here who does not know you, I pray they would. If there's anyone here with questions, may they be bold enough to ask them. God, if there are any of us with questions about our faith, may we be courageous and diligent enough to seek out those answers. God, I pray that each of us, within the sound of my voice in this room and whoever listens to this later on, would be prepared with the reason why we cling to you. We'll be happy and eager to share with others why we cling to the hope that we find in you and why that hope brings us so much encouragement in uncertain times. God, would you give each of us the courage to seek it out and help us discover and solidify why we believe what we believe. Strengthen our faith in you, God. In Jesus' name, amen.