Sermons tagged with Depression

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here with us this morning, especially on a holiday weekend. I always joke around about you being a better Christian if you're here on a holiday weekend, and while I do believe that is true, I also think that it's just really nice and impressive when it is a holiday weekend and you choose to make church a part of that. So that's touching for me and I think good for you on that. And good for you if you're watching online and making it a point to be with us in spirit this Sunday as well. We did it. We made it to the end of the summer. This is the last in our series for this summer called 27. We'll pick it back up next summer when we jump into Paul's letters and finish in Revelation. So this is the last one that we're going to do. We're focused on the book of Jude this morning. And as if you guys needed more evidence that my wife, Jen, is a better Christian than me, when she asked what the sermon was on this week or which one I was going to be writing for this week, I said, Jude. And she goes, what are you going to do it on? And I'm like, I don't know. It's Jude. Like, I don't know the last time I read Jude. And she was like, well, I love this verse. You should do it on this one. And I'm like, of course she knows a random verse from Jude. So that was humbling. And you'd be better off if she were your pastor. But you have to settle for me this morning until she can be convinced otherwise. When I sat down to study Jude, I saw very quickly that it was kind of a microcosm of the entire Bible, of one of the dynamics happening all through Scripture and in the way that we understand scripture. So I'm starting us off here. Jude is a perfect depiction of both the depth and approachability of the Bible. Jude is this kind of microcosm and a picture of both the depth and the approachability of the Bible. Jude in verses 5 through 19, that's 15 verses. I know that's 15 verses because I counted on my fingers to make sure that I would not be wrong when I said 15 verses. In those 15 verses, there are 18 references to other scriptures, to Old Testament scriptures, and even apocryphal writings. Within just those 15 verses in Jude, 18 references to Old Testament scriptures and apocryphal writings. Some of the quotes are from the book of Enoch. For many of you in the room this morning, you didn't even know that was a book. You didn't even know the book of Enoch exists. It's an apocryphal literature. You'll find it, I think, in the Catholic Bible, but you don't find it in the Protestant Bible. But in Jude, there's references to the book of Enoch. There's, again, 18 references and 15 verses. And so if you're looking at Jude and you're trying to understand Jude, which by the way, Jude is probably short for Judah, which was a brother, a half-brother of Jesus. So if you're trying to understand his letter to the churches, how could you possibly understand Jude without understanding those 18 references? And scholars believe that the audience that he wrote this letter to, the churches in Asia Minor, they were people of a Jewish background and had grown up with a Jewish faith. They understood these references. It was like when I would refer to you and I would say, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. You know that, John 3.16. Most of you can fill in the rest of that. These references to them were that ubiquitous and that identifiable. And so as I'm studying Jude, again, I think to myself, how in the world could we seek to understand this book if we don't have any bearing for the 18 references found in the middle part of it that make it come to life and make it understandable. And this, I feel, is a depiction, too, of the depth of Scripture. I'm 42 years old. I've spent almost my entire life studying Scripture. I grew up in a Christian home. My dad was a deacon. He was important and fancy. I went to church every time the doors were open. And this was back in the day, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. I went to the church so often that my pastor felt totally comfortable calling me out in the middle of Sunday night service and telling me to quit talking. And then I would get in big trouble. I got spankings, is what I got. I would get struck with objects when I got home for that offense. Back when we raised kids right, you know. That's right. That's right, Jeffy. Let's let it all hang out here on Labor Day Sunday. Who cares? Beat your kids, Jeff just said. Don't do that. Don't do that. Totally off the rails. Jeff, this is your fault. Shut up, Jeff. But I grew up in church. I did Awanas. I memorized all the verses. I don't know if you guys did that when you were kids, but I memorized verses every week. I memorized them for the test, and then I promptly forgot them because I was eating candy right after that and then playing games. But some of them stick because sometimes I'll start to quote a verse, and it'll be in the King's English, and I'm like, oh, that's from Awana. That's from KJV back in the day, right? I went to Christian private school. I went to Christian high school. I've had a Bible class. I went to Bible college and studied theology. I got a master's degree in more theology. I've studied the Bible my whole life. Now, not as hard as I should have all the time, or maybe ever, I don't know. Not as consistently as I would like to all the time, but far and away, for the balance of 42 years, I've studied God's Word. And I'd be the first to tell you, there are myriad 42-year-olds who know way more about this than I do. But I can also say that I've devoted a life to studying it. And here's what I know. I'm embarrassed by how little I know. I'm humbled by how much more there is in this. I feel like God's word is an ocean and I've waded into it up to my waist and been like, yeah, okay. I think I get the gist. You can spend your whole life plumbing the depths of these pages and you will never get to the bottom. You will never stop learning from it. It will never return null and void. It will never not have more layers. You will never not see more connections, and there's so much of the Bible that's really impossible to fully understand without a grasp of the rest of the Bible. You can never understand the book of Galatians if you don't understand the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. You just can't do it. It's why, it's one of the reasons I say as often as I can, it's one of the reasons that one of the traits of grace is that we are people of devotion. It's why I say that the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. Because the bottom of this is unfindable. The depths of this are unknowable. And some of you have spent your life studying it too. And you know I'm right. Your heads are nodding the most because you've done it. And it always leaves you wanting more. So there is a degree to which approaching the Bible feels a little bit like approaching Jude. You could read Jude on your own with no background and with no study, and you probably wouldn't recognize but a couple of the references, if any, in verses 5 through 19. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know that you're not getting the depths of it. And sometimes I think people get intimidated by the Bible and how deep it is and how much there is to learn because I know good and well. Not all of you grew up being exposed to scripture every day. Some of us, when I say, and you're good believers, you love Jesus, you love the word, but when I say turn to Galatians, you're like, I don't know yet where that is. I want to know, I just don't know yet. And you go to small groups and there's other in the small group, and they're not professional Christians. They don't get paid to be a Christian like I do. That's all being a pastor is, is I just went pro with my Christianity. I'm still doing the same things that you guys should all be doing. I just get paid for it. I don't know if that's right, but I do. And you're sitting there in your Bible study with the other amateur Christians, and somebody knows way more than you. Right? They just know the Bible. We have them in every small group. And maybe you think to yourself, gosh, I don't know how I will ever understand that much. It just, it can feel intimidating. But that's also why I think it's beautiful that Jude depicts the approachability of Scripture as well. Because sure, the Bible is complicated. It's challenging. It's difficult to understand. It's unmasterable. And yet, some of the messages that come from it are so simple as to make it immediately approachable. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the whole gospel. That's all of Romans compacted into a sentence or two. Right? Jesus says this new commandment I give you, go and love one another as I have loved you. That's it. That's all the law and the prophets compacted into this one commandment. I don't really understand the rest of the Bible, but I believe in Jesus and I can go love people in his name. Okay. Then you get it. And so in Jude, again, we have this depiction of the depth of scripture, but also the approachability. Because even if you don't get the references from verses 5 to 19, there's a simple message in Jude that we can all understand. Sorry, I had to crunch the ice without you guys hearing. And that's what I want to look at now, is this simple message in Jude, and we're going to spend the rest of our time on it. What is this message that Judah, the half-brother of Jesus, wanted to give us, and why did he write this short little note and it get tacked into the end of the Bible as the penultimate book? Well, I think we see the beginning of this purpose in verse 3. This is the simple message of Jude. This is why he wrote the book. And even if we have no context, we can pretty much understand what this means. In verse 3, Jude says this, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. So here's why he wrote the book of Jude. He says that he had been eager to write to them concerning their common salvation. And so a lot of scholars believe that Jude was trying to write a letter that looked more like Romans or Hebrews, something long and formal where it kind of outlined this faith that they would share. And that's what he was eager to do, and that's what he was working on. But another matter began to press, and he thought it was so important that he put that large work on hold so he could write this short note to them. And what he wants them to do is, I wanted to talk to you about our common faith. I wanted to lay out all the things that we believe to give you some clarity. I don't have time for that now, so I'm just writing to you to urge you to contend for the faith. Why? Well, because in verses 5 through 19, what we learn is that there's false teachers. The early church, they didn't have an agreed upon Bible, an agreed upon book, agreed upon doctrines. They didn't have denominations in theology. They just had their faith and understanding in Jesus, which means that the populace in the church was very easily deceived, very easily misdirected in the wrong ways. And so the churches had false teachers that were entering into them, gaining clout, proclaiming that they knew the teachings of Jesus. And yet the morality of those teachers did not line up with the words that they were teaching. They were teaching a kind of hedonism that's clearly out of step with scripture and with God's will for his people. And so Jude was writing the churches to say, hey, you can't listen to those guys. They're trying to steer you in the wrong direction. They're wrong. You need to contend for the faith. And what's really interesting is I was thinking about it, at least this is interesting to me, is when in churches, especially in the South, you use phrases like we need to contend for the faith. That usually means go out and fight a culture war against the waves of culture that are trying to bash down and beat down the truth of Scripture. But that's nowhere in here with Jude. It's contend for the faith. Where? Well, it looks like, based on what he says, within yourself. Contend for your own faith. Fight for your true and sincere faith. Because God doesn't need culture warriors going out there fighting for the faith. Contend for it in your own heart and then guess what? You're abiding in Christ and you'll produce much fruit. Contend for it here and you will be who you need to be as we operate in culture. So I believe that Jude is telling us to contend for our faith. And the simple message of Jude then is to contend for the faith with your whole life. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And we're going to read the verses that make me think this is true here in a second. And really this is kind of a launching pad into what I'm going to preach about next week when we do our big reveal Sunday. Next week, we're going to show the plans for the new building. If it's your first Sunday with us, then you have no idea what we're talking about. But we have four acres over off of Litchford Road, and we're looking to build there. And so we're going to share the plans with the church next week. And I'm very, very excited to do that. And the message that I'm going to preach is basically this. We have to contend for the gospel with our whole life. Contending for the gospel, contending for your faith, takes everything you got, and you can't let up. And that is the simple message of Jude. It's interesting to me. Sometimes, I don't know if you guys get to see this from your perspective, but from my perspective, as I just kind of, we map out series and what we're going to teach and what we're going to cover. There's so often that God has woven things together and woven themes in week in and week out to kind of prepare our hearts for things that are coming and help our hearts respond to things that have happened. And I see him weaving things together as we approach next week as well. But I believe that's the simple message of Jude. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And I believe it because of what he says at the end. So he says, contend for the faith. Here's why. Here are the threats. Verses 5 through 19. And then he says, if you're going to contend for that faith in yourself, here's how you do it. But you, beloved, verse 20, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life and have mercy on those who doubt. So Jude says, contend for the faith. Here's what's threatening your faith. Here's what you need to protect yourself against. And then he ends with, and here's how you do it. And he gives us four things that we can do to contend for our faith. Now, here's the thing. If you're here on a holiday weekend, you didn't accidentally come to church. All right. Labor day Sunday is typically not the Sunday when non-church people decide, you know what I'm going to do on a holiday weekend? I'm going to try church. That's not normally how that goes. If you're here, chances are you are probably a church person. If you're here, if you're listening, chances are your faith matters to you or you're visiting people that drug you to church. Either way. But I'd be willing to bet that your faith matters to you. I'd be willing to bet that you are a people who want to contend for your faith. That when Jude says this, if we are believers, we lean forward and we go, yes, how? So I'm going to give you four ways that we contend for our faith directly out of scripture. But here's what I would say to you. I don't think that any of us, and maybe you will, and if you do, that's wonderful. But I don't think that any of us are going to take all four of these things, keep them in our heads and work on all four of these things this week. So here's what I'm going to ask you and challenge you to do. Pick one, one of the four things that I'm about to mention that we can do to contend for our faith. My hope and my prayer is that one of them will resonate with you, that one of them will move you, that you will lock into one of these as you move into your week. And between now and the 10th, you will turn the dial on this in your life in such a way that you are responding to the simple message in Jude and beginning to contend for the faith with your whole life. So like I said, there's four things that Jude tells us to do to contend for the faith. And the first one that we see right there at the very beginning is to strengthen your faith. When I contend for your faith, you need to strengthen your faith. This is an interesting idea to me. How do we strengthen our faith? I don't think our faith is too much different than like a muscle or a muscle group. I've joked before, and I do think it's true, that I've probably had more first days in the gym than just about anybody in history. I've had a lot of first days. Some of those first days were also my last days, and I just didn't know it yet. But I've had a lot of first days in the gym. And one of the things I like to do when I go to the gym is I like to do squats. Big muscle group. I like to do squats. I think it's important. I don't know anything about anything, but I see people in better shape than me. They do squats and like that seems smart. So I do squats, right? And I don't know how much longer my knees are going to hold out and let me like do this. I don't know how many more of those I have in me because I'm aging more like a light beer than a fine wine, but that's how it goes for me. And one of the things I notice when I go back to the gym on the first day, especially if my last day was the last day after like a lot of days and I was actually kind of like in good shape, when I put the weights on the rack and I go to do what I think is going to be a warm-up set. Okay, for those of you who don't work out a lot like me, a warm-up set is when you do a little bit less weight just to get the muscles going and then you put on the actual weight and then you do the exercise. So there's been a couple of times on my first day where I've put the weight on, you know, just like 375, 400 pounds, and I'm just doing a warm-up set. And I go down and I'm like, yeah, this ain't no warm-up set, man. I only got about four of these in me. This is the real deal. This is the real set that I'm doing right here. Because my muscles have atrophied. Because I haven't done that in a couple of, they go into atrophy and they shrink and they get weaker if we don't continue to use them. I think our faith works the same way. If we're not using our faith, living a life that requires faith, then the faith that we have, I believe, can begin to atrophy so that it's not even as strong as it once was. So Jude tells us to strengthen our faith, acknowledging that this requires a regular use of our faith. And I did not come here this morning with the intent of convicting you or making anyone feel bad, but I do just want to ask the question, when is the last time that your life required faith? When is the last time you took a step of obedience, knowing that if God doesn't come through and deliver, this is not going to go well? If we're not taking those steps, if we're not living a life of faith, then our faith is going into atrophy, and it's not being strengthened. It's being weakened. I thought back to 2015, December of 2015, Jen and I were pregnant with Lily and we were, uh, we were not wealthy people. I was an associate pastor at a church. She was a part-time office manager. Uh, we did not have a ton of money, but because Lily was due in January, we had about $5,000 set aside for medical expenses and all that stuff. That's what we figured would work and cover it. And at the beginning of December, her car, her 4Runner, started to make weird noises, and so we took it to our guy who goes to the church, a guy named Kelly. And Kelly called me one day, and after I took the car in, he said, hey, man, how you doing? I said, I'm pretty good. How you doing? I said, hey, Kelly, how are you doing? And his first words were, better than you. And I went, oh, geez, what's going on, man? And he goes, we have to replace the engine. And I said, ugh, this is terrible. How much does that cost? He said, $5,000. Which apparently is super cheap for an engine now, but back then it was not. He says, $5,000. And I'm like, well, you got to do what you have to do, I guess. So make it happen. And there goes our new baby cushion. And we're just looking at each other like, great, what do we do? And that same week, a little bit prior to that revelation, we had committed to giving a certain amount of money to the Christmas offering that year. We had talked about it, prayed about it, and there was an amount that God had laid on our heart to give. And so I went back to Jen and I'm like, I don't think we can afford to give that anymore. We just lost all of our cushions. Certainly God would understand that. But the more we talked about it, and mostly Jen thought this, I was against it. The more we talked about it, the more we thought, no, God put that on both of our hearts. He did it knowing that we would have to pay for an engine. And we should be faithful to that. We should walk in obedience. Okay. So we did. We gave the amount that we had agreed to give. The very Sunday that we gave that amount, some random person walked up to me in the lobby and just said, hey, just want to say thank you. You and your family have been such a blessing to us. And they handed me a Christmas card. And then the Christmas card was a check for the amount of money that we had given to the church that morning. And it was like God was winking at us going, I'm going to take care of you. All right, don't worry about it. Now, do you not think that my faith got stronger after that? When I took this step of faith and obedience, God, I feel like this is a thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do it. And then I watch him come through for us. That strengthened my faith. My faith got stronger. We made a decision that required God to come through in an incredible way. And he did. And so for many of us, I think it's very possible, particularly in our affluence and in our abilities to live lives that do not require faith. And so maybe what you need to take this morning is this little nudge from God to make that decision that requires some faith. To step out in obedience and trust him to come through. That's the first thing Jude tells us to do. Strengthen our faith. The next thing he tells us to do is to pray in the Spirit. I love this. Pray in the Spirit. He doesn't just say to pray. He says to pray in the Spirit. Now, why does he say to pray in the Spirit? And what does it mean to pray in the Spirit? We get an insight into this in Romans chapter 8. It's so funny to me that God laid Romans 8.28 on Aaron's heart for worship. And now just this morning I added in Romans 8.26 for the sermon because there's just so much good truth there. And God often speaks in stereo. But in Romans 8.26 it says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. Meaning the Holy Spirit hears what comes out of our mouths and then communicates to God what we really need because we are spiritual babies and we don't really know how to pray for what we actually need. I don't think it's too dissimilar from when my two and a half year old son, John, says he needs a passy. I need a passy. I want a passy. He wants a passy, but what he really means is, I'm tired. What he really means is, I want to snuggle, which, come on, I got plenty of that. He can do that whenever he wants. What it really means is, I just feel a little bit off kilter and I want to be centered and I need some peace. That's what it means. We're praying to God for passes and the Holy Spirit's like, here's what they really need. And so to me, I think if we learn to pray in the Spirit, it's praying with an awareness that the Spirit is going to translate this to God anyway. So how do I change my prayer? How do I have an awareness within my prayer to pray according to what the Spirit will ask for, to pray according to what the Spirit will translate? How do I pray according to the desires of the Spirit and the very heart of God? To begin to put that filter on our prayers. Before we just blurt out what we need and what we want and what we're hopeful for, to put on the lens of, I'm praying in the Spirit, I'm praying through the Spirit, The Spirit is going to translate this to God. What is it that he's going to translate? I think this is why Jesus teaches us to pray by starting off praying for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We need to put on this mindset when we pray of Holy Spirit, how would you have me pray for this? Which begins, I think, with praying for things that actually concern the Father. This is appropriate at the beginning of football season. I'm not entirely sure God is very interested in the outcome of football games. I could be jaded because I prayed fervently at the beginning of the Falcons Super Bowl a few years back. And he let me down, which means that he does not care about football at all, because certainly he would have come through for my Falcons if he did. It always makes me laugh at the end of a football game when the athletes and the coach want to give glory to Jesus for this victory. Because I just think like, man, you really lucked out playing that whole team of atheists over there so that God could very clearly pick a side. He had to have been against that football team. And if God really did care about football, how does LSU ever win? Like they're Cajun rednecks. It's the worst combination. And yet they're good. So God doesn't care. It's silly, but often we pray about things and God in heaven just has grace and patience for us. I wonder what the translation is when we pray that a certain team would win. I wonder if the translation is, this one's faith is weak, God. I'm working on it. And it's funny there, but there's other ways in which it applies and it matters. One of the things I've learned over the years and the way that I pray for people who are sick and maybe dying is when I have opportunities to go and pray for families over seemingly terminally ill loved ones. If the family asks me to pray for healing, I will because I think that's an honoring thing to do. So sure, I'll pray for healing. But when I pray privately for that family, I almost never pray for healing. I always pray, Father, help this family see and accept your will. Help them to be comforted by it. And help what they're about to walk through to conspire to make their faith in you stronger, not weaker. God, please don't let this path that they're walking shake their faith to a point where they question it. Would you make everything that's about to happen, whether you heal or whether you take, would you let everything conspire to make this faith stronger in this family? I could be wrong, but I think that's a more reflective prayer of what concerns the Holy Spirit. And I think if we can teach ourselves to pray in accordance with the will of the Spirit, we better acquaint ourselves with the heart of the Father. And we see a lot more answered prayer when we do it that way. So pray in the spirit to contend for your faith. The next thing we do is we walk in God's love. We walk in God's love. Now this is what we talked about last week. How do we walk in God's love? And it's actually in the verse, it actually says, keep yourselves in the love of God. So I probably, I should have said, keep yourself in God's love. How do we do that? That was last week's sermon. That's how God's weaving things together. That was first and second and third John. How do we walk in God's love? How do we walk in love for God? We obey him. Because when we obey God, we admit his expertise and that we trust in it. When we obey God, it proves that we trust him. Right? Obedience proves trust. So how do we walk in God's love? We walk in obedience to God. And some of us may have carried in the same sin and the same weight and the same thing that's entangling us. Last week when we preached a sermon on, hey, if you love God, obey him. Where are we being disobedient? Where do we need to walk in obedience? And maybe we brought that exact same disobedience into this sermon this week, into this place this week, and God is still after us. Hey, when are you going to hand that over to me and walk in obedience there? And so maybe this week is just a reminder for you that God really does care. He really does want you to let that go. And he really does want you to walk in obedience. And that's how we need to respond this morning. The last one I love, and I love that it seems to just be tacked on there, but it's such an important concept as we contend for the faith. Have mercy on doubters. There's not too many other places in Scripture where we're given instruction on how to handle doubt and doubters, but it's really interesting to me that Jude, as he's listing these other things that we would all agree with and expect to be there, walk in God's love, strengthen your faith, pray in the Spirit. Sure, we know that. We hear that kind of stuff every week and all the time. But then after that, just as importantly, have mercy on the doubters. And I love that this is in here because can I just tell you a secret about faith? If you are a thinking person, if you are an observant and thinking Christian, then doubts in your faith are unavoidable and absolutely necessary. They are essential and unavoidable parts of faith to run into places where you are experiencing doubt. And if you have never experienced doubt, you either have the strongest faith of anyone I've met, or you, I would gently say, have not really deeply considered your faith and what it means. Doubts, wondering if all this is true anyways, are an unavoidable and completely essential part of our faith. Why do I say that? Because I know personally from experience that the faith you find on the other side of doubt is more rich and more full and more vibrant than the previous version of your faith could have ever imagined being. I walked through a profound season of doubt in my early 20s as I was finishing up Bible college and doing ministries. And then I walked through another profound season of doubt during COVID in the summer of 2020 while I was pastoring. It felt like reassembling a plane in midair. So I know that doubts in our faith are unavoidable and absolutely essential. And I know that when we do the hard work to learn and to actually answer the questions, not let the questions drive us away. I don't understand this, so I'm done with faith, but I don't understand this, so I'm gonna dig in harder. I'm gonna look from new sources. I'm gonna look new places. I'm going to ask more people. And when we find the answers that actually satisfy the doubt, what happens is we emerge with this firm foundation and this vibrant faith that's more rich and more generous than what we could have ever imagined. And what we find on the other side of doubt is that we actually love God more because he gets bigger and more mysterious and we find out we can trust him. Doubts are good, but we shouldn't stop at doubt. We should work through them and talk through them. The problem in churches with doubt is that often doubts are met with condemnation and not mercy. I shared with you guys weeks ago, and we all know that this is happening, that over the last 12 years or 20 years, 40 million people have left the church or something like that. We know the church in America is shrinking. We are now very familiar with this term deconstructing, which refers to someone who grew up evangelical Christian, who grew up with faith and as an adult walked away from it. We're familiar with that. Why is this's going on in our culture it's something that i think about a lot but one of the big reasons it's happening is because doubts in our churches tend to be met with condemnation and not mercy because our pastors and our leaders are not obedient to jude's instruction to have mercy on doubters And when people raise their hand and they go, hey, what about, or how come, or I don't understand, but how could this be true if this is also true? When people express doubts, sometimes they're met with dismissals. Sometimes they're met with condemnation. When I grew up, you felt like this person with a weak faith if you had any doubts. If you didn't understand. That the people who were in charge, the spiritual leaders, the pastors and the deacons and the elders and all those people, they were the people with the fewest doubts. They were the people with no chinks in their armor. They were the people who had all the answers and understood it the best. And so having doubts made you weak. And I think we need to have a church where having and expressing doubts actually shows some strength because you're trying to fight through those rather than bury your head in the sand. And you have a desire to enrich your faith by working through those and finding answers. So if we're going to be obedient to Jude, we need to have mercy on the doubters, understanding it's a necessary process in faith to move through those and find answers. This means, parents, we create that environment in our homes where our children are allowed to doubt, and they are allowed to ask questions, and they are allowed to wonder, and they are allowed to learn other information that causes them to question things about their faith. And they are allowed to move through that in mature ways that are helpful for them, believing that on the other side of that doubt lies a rock-solid faith. So we give them mercy when they have questions. We create environments in our homes where we can have spiritual conversations, and they don't have to agree with mom and dad about everything. And then maybe most of all, for some of us, we have mercy on ourselves. And we allow ourselves to express those doubts. We allow ourselves to express that uncertainty. We give ourselves some grace and start to seek out answers. Not being afraid of the doubt, but knowing that pushing through it and seeking answers in the doubt is going to lead to a faith that we don't have right now, but we desperately want. So we have mercy on the doubters. That's the simple message of Jude. That's how we contend for the faith. The simple message of Jude is to contend for the faith with yourself, with your whole life, with everything you got. How do we do that? We pray in the Spirit. We walk in God's love. We strengthen our faith. And we have grace and mercy on those who doubt. And we walk through this together. I don't know which one of those resonates with you. But if any of them do, I pray that you'll take it from here and you'll leave and you'll work on that this week. And contend for your faith with your whole life in accordance with the message of Jude. Let's pray. Father, you love us. We know that you do. We feel it and we see it. It's all around us all the time. God, if anybody doubts today that you love them, I pray that they would see evidence of that sometime before their head hits the pillow tonight. Lord, we thank you for the simple message of Jude and ask that we would be people who would contend for our faith, that we would contend with our whole lives and our whole heart. Lord, if we have lived lives that don't require faith, would you help us take steps of faith and watch you come through? Lord, if we need to learn to pray more in the spirit and according to your will, would you make us aware that your spirit is with us as we pray? Make us sensitive to praying according to your will. God, if there are areas of our life we know are not in accordance with your word, that we know we are walking in disobedience, would you help us to walk in obedience and therefore walk in your love? Father, if we are experiencing doubts, would you help us be brave in those? To have mercy on ourselves. And to seek out the conversations that we need to seek out. To help us arrive at a stronger, richer, more vibrant faith. Help us contend for the faith that you've given us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. We've been moving through a series called Big Emotions. This is part six of the series. And within this series, as we kind of planned it, I realized that we needed to have a morning like this morning where we talk about some of the heavier, harder emotions that we can experience in life. In the past just few months, I had a lunch with a young man who was and is a recovering alcoholic, and actually today is his one-year sober anniversary, so we're excited for him today. Yeah, he's not here. That's okay. He didn't hear how much you didn't, how tepid that was. If he were here, I would have. But we're thrilled about that. And he shared with me as I talked with him about a story that part of what led him down that path is dealing with a depression. This creeping sense that he wasn't going to be who everyone expected him to be and who he was. And it was this feeling of not mattering anymore, of not living up to things that sent him into a depression that caused him to seek out some help for that from chemicals. In the past couple months, I've talked with two different dads in our community whose daughters are struggling mightily with depression. You could even call it a crippling depression. And one of them even shared with me that he's learned through her struggle that that's what he's always dealt with. He just never had the words to put around what he was feeling, or it's entirely possible because men are stupid, that he just didn't allow himself to admit that he was sad because we're too manly for that. I've sat with people in the wake of great loss. Sat with a family, and I won't detail the struggles, but they just kind of, life just keeps running them ashore, man. Life just keeps beating them up. I get texts from them, and I'm like, God, you've got to be kidding me with what they're having to walk through, and I'm certain. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that some of them are staving off bouts of depression and anxiety and deep grief and deep sadness. In my own family, on both my side and Jen's side, Jen's my wife, on both my side and Jen's side, we have depression in our family. We're walking through it. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes it's more extreme than other cases, but it touches us and it touches our lives too. And I know that each of us deals with or loves someone who deals with depression, grief, melancholy, sadness from time to time, these seasons in life that just feel dark and heavy. And I also know that many more of us deal with feelings of insignificance, like we don't matter. I know firsthand that being, because of walking through it with my wife, that being a stay-at-home mom can make you feel very small. It can make your world feel very inconsequential, that all you are is the nursemaid for a toddler or a shuttle service for your kids or whatever it might be. Being a parent can sometimes make your world feel very small. As you age, sometimes your world can start to feel smaller and smaller and the things you do less and less significant. And some of us have gone from seasons of mattering a great deal to mattering not very much. Some of us have gone from having great identities that we are proud of to these small identities that we kind of wander in and aren't used to yet. And so I know that in our family of faith, in our congregation, in this room, and the people watching online, the people who will hear this later, all of us have dealt with personally or love someone dearly who struggles with bouts of depression, with grief, with sadness, with loss, or even insignificance. And so I thought it was absolutely appropriate to take a Sunday while we talk about big emotions and talk about these. And I thought it would be really helpful for us as we identify with that sadness, with that grief, with that inadequacy, to look at someone in the Bible who also dealt with that and to see how God meets him in this place. So we're going to look at just a part of the story of a prophet named Elijah. Now, many of you were not here years ago when I did a whole series in the summer on Elijah, or if you were here, you were probably at the beach and didn't hear it. So some of this stuff will be reviewed, but maybe not much. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of the life of the prophet of Elijah, but he is one of God's, as Aaron said in the announcements, one of God's great servants. Elijah was so great. In fact, I'm not sure I need to tell you anything else about his life, but at the end of his life, as he was aging and the end was near, he's walking with his disciple, Elisha, and on the west bank of the Jordan River and Elijah decides that he needs to go to the eastern bank of the Jordan River and so he just parts the waters and walks across it like this miracle of convenience. Like the ark stopped the Jordan River so that God himself could move into the promised land with his people and then Moses parted the waters so that God's people could escape from the Pharaoh. And Elijah parted the water so that his sandals wouldn't get wet. That's just okay. He just puts his cloak in the water, parts it, walks through, come on, Elisha, and then they go through. And when they get on the other side, a chariot descends down out of heaven. An angelic chariot comes down and scoops Elijah up and takes him to heaven. Dude was so righteous, he caught an Uber ride to the pearly gates because God didn't want him to experience death. We see Elijah again in the New Testament at the Mount of Transfiguration when he appears along with Moses to Jesus to strengthen him and encourage him. He's a major figure in the Old Testament and a hero of the faith. And when I say it's difficult for anyone to get closer to God than Elijah was, I mean it literally because all of us in here are very likely going to experience death. He did not have to. And yet, in his life, we see pretty convincing evidence that at least in this season, Elijah was low. He struggled mightily with depression and insignificance. And so I think it's worth looking at this part of his story and seeing how God responds there. The part of the story that I'm going to present to you is somewhere, I would guess, about 45 to 50 days of his life. So I'm not even sure you could call it a season. It was just a time of his life when he was low. We don't know if there were other times or not. One would assume that there were. But here we get just a snippet or a snapshot of Elijah's, what I believe to be, depression, at least in this season. We're going to be looking, and not yet, but if you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1 Kings chapter 19. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Unless you're watching from home, I don't know what's in your seat backs. But in 1 Kings chapter 18 is the big showdown, the big thing that Elijah's famous for, the showdown with the prophets of Baal. And I don't have time to give the full treatment to the story. I wish I did because it's a fantastic story and you should really read it. But the predominant religion at this time was worshiping this God named Baal. The king was Ahab, the queen was Jezebel. They were evil and they supported this idol worship. The followers of God were pressed into the margins and the fringes. And Elijah was by all accounts, essentially the chief priest for God at the time and the head prophet. And so he goes to Mount Carmel and he has this showdown with the prophets of Baal. There's 450 prophets of Baal. And they make this deal that they're each going to build an altar. And whichever God from heaven itself lights the altars on fire first, that's the best God. And the other one has to take his ball and go home. And so they start this competition. And Elijah, I just have to point out, he says one of the best lines in the Bible. He is a sarcastic jerk, which breathed life into me from God himself. And Baal is not responding and lighting the altar on fire. And he's making fun of them. Maybe you should yell louder, yada, yada. And at. And at one point, he's like, maybe he can't hear you because he's in his heavenly bathroom taking a Tuesdays. Maybe that's what's going on, which is phenomenal. It's the kind of stuff you get here at Grace Riley. And after they give up, Elijah prays this humble prayer. God, it's time. God sends fire from heaven, lights the altar on fire, and Elijah has all 450 prophets arrested and put to death. After this, the beginning of chapter 19, Elijah's praying. There had been a drought for three years in Israel, and God told Elijah that the drought's going to be over. Get ready for rain. And then swept Elijah with the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God sweeps Elijah to Jerusalem. So he beats Ahab's chariot back to Jerusalem. When Ahab, the king, gets to Jerusalem, he goes to Jezebel, the queen, and he tells Jezebel all that Elijah has done. She responds by sending a messenger to Elijah that says, everything that you did to my prophets, I'm going to do to you, and it's going to be worse. I'm going to kill you. And this is interesting because a couple chapters later in 2 Kings chapter 1, she tries to send soldiers to kill Elijah. And Elijah says, I'm a man of God, and if you try to arrest me, then he's going to send fire and kill you. And then they do, and then he does. Three times. Dude has nothing to be scared of. He has the protection of God on his head. He has the hand of God on him. But when the messenger reaches Elijah this time and says, Jezebel's wants to kill him. And in fear, he flees a day into the wilderness. He gets done with that day and he sits down and he prays a prayer that I hope none of us have prayed, but I bet some of us have. God, it would be better if I were dead. Please take my life. I'm done. I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give. I'm exhausted. I did this great miracle in your name, won a great victory, and it's like it doesn't matter. She's going to kill me. Do you understand that he was despaired to his point of death? He was despairing for his life. Do you understand that he went to sleep under that broom tree, that he closed his eyes praying, God, please don't let me wake up? You understand that when Elijah's eyes were opened that he was disappointed? I don't know if you have ever gone to sleep and before you went to sleep, you prayed, God, please don't let me wake up on this side of eternity. But I bet some of you have. I bet we know people who have felt what Elijah felt. God, I'm going to sleep and I don't want to wake up. This world has nothing left for me. I don't want to be here. No one cares about me. I don't matter. This needs to be over. It would be better off if I were in eternity than here any longer. Please don't let me wake up when I go to sleep, God. Elijah is despairing unto death. And is at, by all estimations, a very low point. But God wakes him up. He wakes him up with an angel who feeds him, gives him food. I love that that's God's response to the dark night of the soul. Like a loving divine grandma. Here, just eat a little something. You'll feel better after some cookies. Elijah goes back to sleep. The angel wakes him up again. Says, you're going to need this for your journey. You're going to Mount Horeb. So he eats and he travels 40 days to Mount Horeb. And God tells him when he gets there, go up into this cave. I'm going to talk to you there. And when he gets up to the cave, God speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing? And Elijah says, my part. I've served you well. I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And they've killed all my friends. They've killed all my companions. I, even I, only am left. There is no one left in Israel like me. I am totally alone, God. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. I have no love. I have no camaraderie. I'm alone and I'm destitute and nobody cares about me anymore, God. This time when I go to sleep, can I please just not wake up? I'm done. This is an articulation of the lowest of lows in his life. I, even I only, am left. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. It's just me, and I'm tired. And God says, I'm going to speak to you again. And it's this remarkable passage where Elijah is sitting in the cave on the side of this mountain. And the text tells us that there's this great earthquake and the ground shakes and the stones tremble and the trees shake. And you think surely that God's voice is in the earthquake, but he's not in the earthquake. And then God sends this fire by the mouth of the cave that consumes everything in its path, and you think, surely God is in the fire, and he's not in the fire. And he sends a mighty wind that shakes and vibrates and stirs and scares, and you think, surely God is in the wind, and he's not in the wind. And then scripture says there's a gentle whisper and God is in the whisper. And Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and God says, what are you doing, Elijah? And Elijah gives the exact same response in verses 14, in verse 14 that he did in verse 10. I've been very jealous for you. I've served you well. And I've put all my friends to the sword, and I, even I only, am left. And God hears him. And he says, I want you to go do something for me. I want you to go appoint this man and this man kings of their different areas. I've still got stuff for you to do. Go make them kings. And when you do, here's what's going to happen. Now go. And on his way to go do that, he comes across a man plowing in his field named Elisha. And he grabs Elisha and he says, I'm going to essentially make you my disciple. Come and follow me. I'm going to teach you to be a prophet like I'm a prophet. And Elisha goes and tells his parents that he's leaving and he leaves and he goes with Elijah. And he spends the rest of his life following Elijah. And when Elijah goes up into heaven on the chariot, his cloak wafts back down to Elisha, and Elisha receives a double portion of the Holy Spirit that Elijah had, and outperforms Elijah in miracles and in all the other things, has a greater ministry than Elijah did. And it can be argued that Elisha is probably the greater impact than defeating the prophets of Baal, that Elisha may have been Elijah's greatest work. But without question, in this 45 to 50 day period, we see one of the great servants of God at a low point in his life. We see him despair unto death. We see him go to sleep and not want to wake up. We see him express solitude and isolation, feeling completely alone and wanting to die. We see him despairing. What we see, I think, at least for this season, is a depression. And if you look at what he says, and if we think about what we've experienced when we've been low, then what we understand is that depression silently screams, you don't matter. Depression silently screams at you that you don't matter, that nothing you do matters. Look at what Elijah says the first time. I'm the only one left. I did everything you wanted me to do. Now they're going to kill me, and I'd rather just die I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give God. My best days are behind me. I have no bigger miracles to work. I've done everything I can do. All that's left is waiting for death. Please just go ahead and take me. And it occurs to me as I reflect on Elijah voicing in that way that he felt like he no longer mattered. That one of the great strengths of grace is having a generationally diverse congregation. I love that about our church. And what I'm about to say is in no way a joke. This is not a time for stupid jokes. I'm not doing that. It occurs to me that a large portion of us, a large portion of you, you've reached the end of your career, the last portions of your career. You've ended your career and you're in retirement. You've raised your kids. Maybe you've even helped raise your grandkids. In your mind, you've shifted. I've seen the shift in men and women that I love. From wanting to build a name for yourself to thinking about what kind of name you're leaving behind. You've shifted from establishment to legacy. And you've accepted that you are in the twilight of your life. And I think it would be very easy to become convinced in that season that your best days are behind you, that you've done the great work that you're going to do. You've climbed the biggest mountain that you're going to climb. You've defeated more prophets then than you ever will in the future. I think it would be very difficult to have lived a life where in one setting you were important. Your voice mattered. People came to you for your opinion. They paid a fair amount of money for your time to a place where people don't come as much anymore and they don't ask as much anymore and your voice isn't as weighty as it used to be and you become convinced that my best days are behind me and if we're not careful, we can slip into, as Elijah did, just kind of waiting for the last day to get here because I have nothing left to give. And so I think in that way, even if we're not people who are depressed, we can hear that message of the world and that message of depression creeping into our hearts. Hey, you don't matter. Your best days are behind you. Or we can feel insignificant for other reasons. Our role in life right now reduces us. We have a thankless job and a somewhat thankless marriage with thankless kids, and we just feel small, and no one tells us that we're good enough, and no one tells us that they respect us, and no one tells us that they're grateful for us. We can move through seasons of life where we just feel like we're going through the motions, and we feel so insignificant and small. I know firsthand that when I preach sermons about God having a purpose for us, God having a use for us, when I quote one of my favorite verses, Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. And I encourage you guys, identify your good works and walk in them. I know that there's a large portion of you that hear that and go, yes, that's good. I have no idea what my good works are. I have no idea how God gifted me. God's gifted other people to do other things, but he has not gifted me in any significant way. So the best thing I can do is just keep my head down and be nice because I don't really matter that much in God's kingdom. That's what Elijah was saying. I, even I only, am left. I don't matter. There's nothing around me that's important. And I talked with some friends of mine who deal with depression more than I do. Candidly, this is not something that I'm given to struggle with. I have other struggles, and I'm pretty transparent with you about those. For this one, I had to outsource a lot of it. So this idea that depression silently screams at us that we don't matter, that's not my idea. That came from someone who walks it. And then I called someone else who probably deals with depression in a little bit more profound way, and I said, hey, does this check out with you? If I say that depression insists that we don't matter, does that resonate? And he said, yeah, but it's worse than that. He says, my depression tells me that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters, let alone me. And so if you've ever sat in that place, or you've loved someone who sits in that place, when we start to listen to the voices that tell us that we don't matter, I think God's response to Elijah when he was giving into those voices should breathe some fresh air into our lungs. And here's what God does to Elijah. We go back through the story. Here's what we see him doing. God strengthens, whispers to, sends, and encourages Elijah. And I think all of those things are important. He strengthens Elijah. He whispers to Elijah. He sends Elijah. And then he finally encourages Elijah. He strengthens him. He literally wakes him up and gives him food. You're going to need this for your journey. He literally wakes him up again and gives him some food. You're going to need this for your journey. Eat up. He strengthens him. He gives him enough to get through the day. Whatever you need to get through today, God gives that to you to sustain you. That's the daily bread. That's the manna. That's the daily sustenance of God showing up and sustaining you for today. I shared with you a few weeks back that I was reading the Beth Moore biography, and she encountered her mother-in-law had walked through a tremendous trial, and she said, how do you do it? How did you giving me strength for that day. I'm reminded of this famous passage in Isaiah Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint. God will sustain us if we trust him to do it. He will strengthen us in the darkest of days when it's so dark and so heavy and so cloudy that we can't see a glimmer of light or a glimmer of hope. God, if we have within us one ounce that is willing to reach out to God and ask him for that day, he will sustain you that day. He will whisper to you. I love that we have a God that speaks to us in the whisper. In the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways, God shows up with his presence. A few weeks ago in men's Bible study, one of the guys shared his story. He's a little bit older now, late 50s, early 60s, than he was when this happened. But at some point in his life, I'm not sure when, but he lost his wife. Lost his wife to breast cancer. I can't imagine the pain of losing a spouse or a child. Losing a parent is hard. But I bet losing a spouse or a child is harder. I used to work at a school years ago and there was this woman named Emmeline McKinnon who founded the school. Wonderful lady, everybody loved her. A few years ago, she passed away from cancer, and her husband, in his grief, took his own life too, a few days later. And to anyone with a heart, when they hear that story, I think they say, I get that. They loved each other for 60 years. How do you keep opening up your eyes after that? So understand it. I empathize with it. And I don't condemn it. And my friend was walking through that grief. Did not have kids. No one was relying on him. He was in the depths of sadness. And so he made the decision that he was going to go to heaven to be with her because he didn't want to be here. He went and acquired whatever it was he needed to acquire to put together a cocktail so that when he drank it, he would be in heaven with his wife. He went home, put it in the blender, started to mix it up. As the blender was going, the phone rang. So he stops it. He answers the phone. The person on the other end says, hey, is this so-and-so? He says, yeah, who's this? And he says, well, I'm Dr. So-and-so. I was your wife's optometrist. And my buddy said, I haven't heard from you in years. How you doing? And he said, I'm doing good. I just wanted to call you and tell you how special your wife was and how sorry I am for your loss. And my buddy said, well, thanks. I appreciate that. He said, how are you doing with it? And he lied, and he said, I'm doing fine. The way you're supposed to lie in polite society. And the doctor said, hey, I don't know if you're a religious man, but I am. And I feel like I need to tell you that God has been really pressing on me to call you. He's been doing it for a couple of weeks, and I'm sorry, I'm the worst. I've been putting it off. Every time he presses on me to call you, I kind of have something else pressing, and I think, yep, I need to do that, and I set it aside, and I mean to do it later. He said, but about five minutes ago, I felt the press again. And I was in the middle of doing paperwork, and I tried to put it off, but God would not let me put it off. He would not relent, and I just really felt like I needed to call you. So how are you doing? And my buddy really told him how he was doing and what he was up to that day. And they cried together and prayed together. And my buddy dumped it down the drain. Lived to remarry, to love nieces and nephews, and to sit in that circle and tell us that story. God whispered to him that day. So not only will God whisper to you, but sometimes he'll use you to whisper as well. When he's prompting you to do it. Do it. And then, God doesn't just whisper to Elijah. He sends him. And I love the matter-of-factness of God sending him. Because it's like, Elijah, listen, I can see that you're clearly bummed out, but I've got some things I need to do. There's some guys who need to be named king. They don't have kings right now. They need to be anointed. So I need you to get back to work. Go appoint these kings. He sends them. He says, I'm not done with you yet. I know you feel like you're done because you finished this thing with the prophets of Baal, and now there's nothing left to do. There's stuff to do, Elijah, and I need you to get to it. And I was actually talking with my dad this week. I wouldn't call it arguing. We weren't arguing. We were just kind of going back and forth, as we are wont to do, about what the greatest work was in Elijah's life. Was it the prophets of Baal? Or was it the training and developing of Elisha and leaving him behind as a legacy? Which one was bigger? And in the middle of the discussion, I said, Dad, this is really a stupid conversation. Which usually he's the one that gets to do that. So I was happy to be the one that got to do it this time. This is a really stupid conversation. And I just pointed out to him, the size of our works don't matter nearly as much as the faithfulness of our works. Who cares if the miracle with Baal was the bigger deal than anointing a king or naming a successor or raising someone's son from the dead? Who cares what the bigger miracle was, the size of the work, the grandeur of the work, the import of the work? Who cares if that's bigger than what's left? For those of us who maybe our best years are behind us, maybe the biggest thing we've done is behind us. Maybe the most important thing you think you'll do from a human perspective is already in your past and not as big of things are waiting on you in your future. I think that's silly. God could care less about the size of our work. Like God's impressed with the size of any work. What matters is our faithfulness within the works that he gives us for as many years as he gives us. Here's how I know it's true. I know that you guys would support me in this. Right now, there's probably about 200 people here this Sunday morning. If next week you snapped your fingers and you made grace 2,000 people? Would my work next week in preaching be any more impactful, any more great, any more important to God? Would I somehow be more spiritual next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am this week preaching to 200? Would I somehow be more faithful or more loved next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am faithful or loved in preaching to you today? No! It's stupid. The size of our work is irrelevant. It's our faithfulness within what he gives us. What lies ahead of you is not insignificant if God has placed it there. What's significant is your faithfulness as you are obedient to that. And after he sends Elijah, he encourages him. He peels back the curtain a little bit. And he says, hey, I know you think you're the last one here. There's 7,000 more just like you. I've kept them for myself. They have not been the need of bail. You're not alone. You have companions. You have friends. And I see you. And I'm not expecting you to carry all this weight. Now go do what I've asked you to do. What we see in the story of Elijah. If depression says, you don't matter, and if Elijah's expressing, God, I don't matter, and I am alone, then what God says in the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the encouraging from a megaphone is, Elijah, you matter, you matter, you matter, you matter. I see you. I know you. I love you. What you're doing is important. And what he says to us and what he says to you and what I hope you hear is that you matter. Look, the love of God drowns out other voices and gently reminds you of how much you matter. The love of God and the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the purposing and in the encouraging remind you in these subtle ways, I know life is hard. You matter. I know you feel insignificant. You matter. I know the world is trying to convince you that you don't matter, but I'm telling you that you do. Sorry, it's been an emotional week for me. One of the people I reached out to shared with me that he'll walk through really dark depression for months and sometimes a year at a time. And as I was walking through with him what I wanted to share, I admitted my own feelings of inadequacy to even address what it's like to actually be deeply depressed. Because I know that there's some depression that words don't touch. It just doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I pray. It doesn't matter how I encourage. There's just some depression that you walk through that's so dark and so difficult that words don't touch it and arrest you from it. And so I said, in your greatest times of trial, what helped you? And as I even admit the own inadequacy of my words to you, what can I say to help you? And he said, let me write you an email because I'm better with my thoughts like that. And he responded with some very helpful things, but one thing he said was so profound that I thought I wanted to share it with you this morning. He wrote me this. Solitude and isolation are freedom. They're the ability to define you as you wish because there's no consequence to any decision you can make. If you decide to surrender, there's no consequence. Your story ends and nobody else is there to see. Nobody else is there to care. Nobody else is there to respond. The profundity of that struck me as I read it in my office. That when you are deeply depressed and you are convinced that it doesn't matter and that you don't matter, that you are all alone and no one sees you. That you're isolated. In your solitude. But then that is freedom because you can do whatever you want and no one's going to care. And I thought, my gosh. That's a low place. But then he said, but it's because of, and this is a paraphrase, we have a conversation preceding this to help me understand that what he meant in our language is that because of the cross, because I know Jesus died for me, because I know God made promises to me. Because I know I matter enough to God for him to send his son. He said this, because it means, because of the cross, it means that there is no way not to be seen. There is no situation in which you are finally, truly, absolutely alone. You understand the cross stands eternally reminding you of how much you matter, that in the depths of not mattering, in the depths of despair, in the depths of I'm not important and I don't matter to anyone and no one sees me and no one cares about me and it might just be better if I weren't here, that even in the depths of that, that God sent his son to die for you, to claim you back to him. And before you say, no, he did that for other people. No, no, he did that for you. If you're the only person on this earth, he still would have sent his son to die for you, to reclaim you to the heaven that he created for you. And if we will cling to the cross, to the glimmer of light that shines through the millennia, we can take hope and solace in the fact that there's going to be a day where depression doesn't exist and where the darkness goes away and every day is bright and filled with joy. And I might not get to experience those here today, right now, but I will one day. And if I cling to that cross, God's promised that I matter, that there will be days where this will let up, where I will see joy, where I will live in the fullness of life, but even if it doesn't come, there's an eternity where I'll see that every day. We sang a few minutes ago that you're fighting a battle that I've already won. I'm fighting a battle that you've already won. This is the battle, and it was won on the cross. So let God strengthen you today. Let him whisper to you today. And hear me say that you matter to your God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. We thank you for loving us. Lord, I lift up those that feel sad or depressed or insignificant or unwanted or unwarranted. God, it is my fervent prayer that they would be strengthened today. That they would get enough from today to keep clinging to you. God, for those we love who live in a cloud of darkness from time to time, we pray that you would use us to help them brighten it. God, we pray for the days ahead that you promised through your son, that you won through his death on the cross. Where in your presence we finally at long last experience fullness of joy. God, I pray for my brothers and sisters who are sad and who are downtrodden and ask that you would pick them up, that they would know today that you love them, that you care for them, that more than anything, they matter deeply to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Jordan, it is interesting to me that you think profundity is what's required to get up on the stage when they parade me out here every week, falling woefully short of the bar. This is the third part in our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at times in Scripture where we see a blow-up or a blow-out or people with with just big overwhelming emotions because that is so much a part of our life. That is something that we experience just as we go through life. Sometimes our emotions are too big for us and they're overwhelming. And so this morning I wanted to take a look at big emotions in our prayers and what happens and how does God respond when big emotions creep into our prayers, when our prayers really become cries. And to do that, I want us to think about prayer together. It's really, when you consider it, one of the more interesting passages in the Bible, one of the more interesting interchanges that Jesus has with his disciples. They're following him around. They're watching him do ministry. And at one point, they look at Jesus and they say, hey, Jesus, will you teach us to pray? Now, this is a really interesting question coming from the disciples. And many of you have probably considered this before. The disciples knew how to pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed their whole life. They had gone to synagogue every week, maybe daily at different points in their life. I don't know. They had seen a ton of people pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed many prayers before, but there was something different, so different about the prayers of Jesus that they had to stop him and say, can you teach us to pray like you pray? Because that's different than how we pray. And Jesus responds by sharing with them the Lord's prayer. You guys probably all know it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so in that, Jesus gives the model of prayer to the disciples and to us in perpetuity. And if you break that down, I've always been taught prayer and I've taught prayer this way in church, in youth group, in camps, in different places, in men's groups, small group, when we talk about prayer, something that's always been really helpful for me is the acronym ACTS. And you guys have probably heard this before. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. So the way that Jesus opens up the prayer. When we pray, the first thing we should do is adore God. God, you're great. God, you're good. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. God, you are wonderful for this. God, you blow me away for that. And when we do this, it really puts us in the right posture for prayer, you know? It really reminds us who we're talking to. I had a Bible teacher in high school who was also my soccer coach, who was also my administrator because I went to a small school. And when he would pray in class, he would say, okay, everyone, let's pray, bow your heads. And we would bow our heads to pray, and he would wait 20 or 30 seconds. And so finally, I asked one day, Mr. Dawson, what are you doing? Like, that's awkward. Why do you make us just sit there in silence? What are you waiting on? Because it's almost like, does he want us to pray? Like, should we? And he told me what he was doing. He said he was taking his mind, whenever he would pause before prayer, to Isaiah chapter 6, where the throne room of God is described. And it says that God is on his throne, and the train of his robe is filling the temple with glory. And there's these six-winged angels flying around him saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And it's just so overwhelming that he cowers in a corner. And Mr. Dawson said that when, he said, when I pray, I like to take myself there to put myself in proper posture before God to remind myself when I pray, where am I going? I'm going to the throne room of God, the King of the universe, and I'm addressing the creator of the universe. That's a serious, somber thing. That's a place for humility. That's a place for penitence. This is why when we teach our children to pray, we teach them to bow their heads and close their eyes. It's a sign of reverence. It's a sign of respect for knowing who we're talking to and where we're going. It's why I encourage you as much as you can to kneel when you pray. Because it's hard to put yourself in the posture of kneeling and not feel humble, at least a little bit. And so Jesus says we should start with adoration. We should adore God. We should praise him. And then we should go to confession. What are the things, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How have we trespassed against God? What attitudes do we bring into this day and into this prayer? What sins do we carry with us that yet remain unconfessed before the Father? What do we need to confess to God before him? And then we move into this time of thanksgiving, praising Him. God, thank you for your goodness in my life. Thank you for my family. Thank you for a church that I love. Thank you for the rain. Thank you for the day, whatever it is. It's John's second birthday today. Thank you for a great two-year-old son and for friends watching him in the nursery right now. Thank you for all of those things. We praise God for things. And then, suffocation. Then we ask for what we need. And you guys know, and you've heard this, that the tendency when we pray is to skip act and go straight to S. Skip all the other stuff and just go, dear God, I really need blank. I really need you to show up here. I really need this to work out. I'm really worried about this. It's all the I need, I need, I need. And there's a place for that in prayer. But the way that Jesus teaches us prayer, it follows this pattern of first putting ourself in the proper place and then confessing our sins, which remind us of the humility we should carry into the throne room. And then thanksgiving, let's acknowledge all the blessings God's given us in our lives before we ask him for more, and then in that proper mindset, say what we need to say. That's kind of the proper way to pray. But sometimes we pray when our emotions are too big for propriety. Sometimes we pray prayers that become cries. And the emotions that we bring into that moment are too big for acts. I've shared with you guys before that the first time Jen and I got pregnant, we miscarried. And I'm not in the business of doing comparative pain for miscarriages and who has the right to the most sorrow. But for us, the pain was particularly acute because we had been praying for a child for years. For years. We had struggled mightily. Our moms and grandmas were praying for babies. We had the church around us at the time praying that we could have a baby. We knew that's what we wanted to do. On my mama's deathbed, a few years before we got pregnant, the very last thing she did for me was direct someone to the top of her closet to get a stuffed animal that she made to give to my child when we had them. She went ahead and made it, and I think my sister finished it up for her so that we would have that to give to our first child. So when we got pregnant, we were elated. And then we went to the checkup for eight weeks, and the baby wasn't there. I don't know how long it took me to pray after that. But the first time I did pray, it wasn't Acts. The first time I prayed, it didn't look very much like our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It looked a lot more like God. What in the world? What the heck? I would say different words if I weren't on this stage and there weren't children in the audience. That's how I felt, and that's how I prayed. What are you doing? Because we, and we're not entitled to this. None of what I'm about to say really matters, but to us it did. Jen's a school teacher. She loves kids. She's teaching in a Christian school, leading people towards you. We still have relationships with some of the kids that she taught in those days. I was a school teacher. I taught high school Bible. And then I worked at a church. We had made good choices. We were good Christian people. We had checked all the boxes. We had done all the things. And there was people who were living lives way more rebellious than us who were just tripping accidentally into family. And then we get pregnant and then you take it? No, I'm not praying acts. I'm not following the pattern for this one. There are some prayers that we pray that become cries. When we hear of the terminal diagnosis and we go to the Father and we say, really? This one? Him? Her? Why not me in your jacked up economy? Why them? There's a girl in our community. She's a young woman in our community. Just last week or two. She battled cancer for five years and came to it a week or two ago. Beautiful family, young kids. I don't know when that husband is going to pray again. When he does, those prayers will be cries. We've all prayed prayers like that. Where we're walking through what feels to us like the dark night of the soul and we don't have time or patience for propriety. We just go to our God and we are raw and we are real and we cry out, what in the world? How is this right? How does this make sense? As parents that send their kids to school in that private school in Nashville, what do those prayers sound like when they start to pray again? We've all prayed those prayers that are so big and so raw and so emotional that they become cries. And so I think it's worth it to look and see how God handles these prayers in Scripture. Because we get to see some. God in His goodness left them for us in His inspired Word. And so what I want to encourage you with today is, I know that we've all prayed those prayers. If you've never prayed those prayers, I'm so happy for you. I hope you never do, but I think you will. And what I want us to know as we look into the scripture this morning is that God is not offended by our prayers that become cries. I don't think God in his goodness and in his grace and in his mercy is offended when I look at him after the deepest pain that I've felt up to that point in my life and I go, what in the world? That's not fair. That's not right. That doesn't make sense. I don't think God gets offended by those things. I don't think he's so small that our broken hearts offend our God. And I actually think that there's grace and space for those prayers because we see them in the Bible. We actually see Jesus pray one of these prayers, a prayer that is so raw and so real and so emotional that it becomes a cry. This prayer is recorded in all four Gospels. We're going to look at the account in the Gospel of Luke chapter 22. Beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, speaking of Jesus. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, this scene, many of you know it, Jesus has just left the Last Supper with the disciples. He's instituted communion. He's told them, my body is going to be broken for you. My blood is going to be spilled for you. He knows what is going to happen. He knows when he gets done praying, he's going to be arrested. And he knows that when he's arrested, he's going to be tried. And after he's tried, he's going to be flogged and beaten, and he's going to be hung on a cross and left there to die and then face death and hell. He knows that. And so he brings the disciples with him, and he says, remain here while I pray. And he goes off a distance, one would assume, so that they couldn't hear him. And it is interesting that they all ended up hearing him, because there's nothing in the text to indicate that Jesus subtly knelt and clasped his hands and said, my Father who is in heaven. No, these prayers from Jesus that we see, in Luke it says he knelt. In another gospel it says that he fell with his face to the ground. And the disciples are a stone's throw away and they can hear him clearly. And then he gets so intense in his praying that sweat begins to mix with his blood, which we know is something that can actually happen in moments of incredibly intense stress in our lives. So the prayer that Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane was not, Dear God, if there's any other way, would you please point me in that? It wasn't that. It was Jesus on his face prostrate, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please, is there any other way? Is there anything else I can do? I do not want to bear this. I do not want to be on the cross and hear you and see you turn your back on me. I do not want to say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I do not want the crown of thorns in my head. I do not want the nails in my wrist. I do not want to do this, Father. Is there any other way? Please, please take this cup from me. That's a prayer becoming a cry. That's Jesus sidestepping propriety and crying out to his heavenly father. And in there, he finds what we should find when we pray like this. No matter how deep, no matter how raw, yet not my will but your will be done. Please give me the strength to accept your will. So I know that God isn't offended by those prayers because his son prays one to him in full view and vision of the disciples. And then he tells us about it in all four gospels. And that made me wonder, where else in the Bible do we have prayers that are raw and real and emotional? Where else in the Bible do we have prayers that have become cries? And of course, I went to Psalms. And I just started reading them and flipping through and finding them, these things where people are just raw. I am weary unto death. I want to die. Take my life. And I put them in your notes, Psalm 142 and Psalm 13 and Psalm 77. I think of Hannah's prayer in the temple when she's praying so earnestly and fervently for a child that Eli the priest thinks she's drunk. I think of the book of Lamentations, which is a whole book of tough, raw prayers. And I was going to kind of bounce around between those prayers, but then I was reminded of another psalm that's really dear to my heart, Psalm 88. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to turn there. I encountered Psalm 88 when I took a trip to Israel several years ago. One of the things most groups do when you go to Israel is when you're in Jerusalem, you go to Caiaphas' house. Caiaphas is the high priest that had Jesus arrested, had him tried, and had him murdered. And in the basement of Caiaphas' house is this makeshift small dungeon. And a portion of the dungeon is a cylindrical room that they would tie ropes under the shoulders of the prisoner and lower them into this pitch black, dark room. Now there's stairs that lead down, but in Caiaphas' day, in Jesus' day, that was not the case. They lower you in and they pull you up when they're ready for you. And most people believe that this is where Jesus spent the night after he got arrested, waiting on his trial before Pilate the next day. And when you go to Jerusalem, you can go down into that cell. And our guide pointed us to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 was written by the sons of Korah, we're told. But it's also believed by scholars to be a prophetic messianic psalm. And many scholars believe that this is meant to be the prayer that Jesus prays after he's arrested. If it's not the prayer that he prays after he's arrested, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew the psalms, this could very well be a psalm that came to mind that he quoted. But when I picture Jesus arrested and alone and reading, crying these things out, it brings fresh meaning to it for me. And when we listen to it and read it, I think you'll be taken aback by how very real it is. So I'm going to read a good portion of it. Beginning in verse 11. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? And then verse 13, They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That's a real prayer. That's not a prayer you pray in church in front of other people. That's not how we teach our kids to pray. We see accusations in this prayer. You have caused my friends and my loved ones to shun me. It is your wrath that beats against me and waves and covers me. The person crying out to God in this psalm feels the darkness closing in in such a way that they don't know if they will see the light again. My companions have become darkness, he ends with. And that's it. I am grateful to God for choosing to include in his Bible and his inspired word prayers that are that raw and that are that real. Prayers that show us that when our emotions are too big for propriety, that our God can meet us in those places and hear us. He appreciates those prayers so much so that he recorded them and fought for them and protected them down through the centuries so that we could see them too. So when we pray them, it's okay. When we need to cry out to God, we can. He's not offended by those prayers. He hears those prayers. He welcomes those prayers. And here's what else happens when we cry out to God, when our prayers become cries, when we lose all sense of propriety and we're just trying to figure it out. Here's what else happens when it's literally the dark night of our soul and the darkness is closing in around us and our life is falling apart and our children are making decisions that we don't understand and our husband is making decisions that we don't understand and everything that we thought was going to happen, this future that we had projected is not going to happen. This person that I love is not in my life anymore and I see reminders of them all the time and I don't know how I'm going to put one foot in front of the other. I don't know how I'm going to do it. When we pray those prayers, this is what happens. If we look back at Luke 22, there's a verse that I skipped. Verse 43. In the middle of his praying, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him. In the middle of Jesus crying out, Father, please don't make me do this. Please let there be another way. God says, son, you're going to have to walk that path. But he doesn't make him do it on his own. He sends an angel to strengthen Jesus in the dark night of his soul. And I can't help but believe that God will send angels to strengthen you too. When you pray those prayers, I think God sends his angels to strengthen you as well. And I don't know what those angels look like. Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's someone's presence. Maybe it's a text or a phone call or an email. I know in our family it's cardinals. Maybe it's a southern thing, I'm not sure. But we believe that when a cardinal shows up in your view, that that's a lost loved one who's just stopping by to say hello. Just to check in on you. And so sometimes God sends cardinals just when we need them. Another big one in our family is Mallard Ducks. You know that we lost my father-in-law a couple years ago. And Mallard Ducks were really special to him. And I can't tell you all the cool places where we've just kind of looked and there's a duck there that doesn't belong there. And it's just God kind of reminding us that he loves us, that he sees our pain, that he walks with us in that pain. Maybe, for some of us, God's using this morning to strengthen you, to buoy you. I hope so. Maybe this is just what you need. My hope for all of you is that you never need this sermon and you never have to pray those prayers. But my suspicion is you have a better chance of dodging raindrops on the way back to your car in a downpour than you do of living a life without tragedy. And so I think all of us, at some point, need this sermon and this reminder that when our emotions are too big for propriety, God can hear those prayers too. And in the hearing, in those moments, he sends his angels one way or another to strengthen us. I just got done reading a book. It's actually Beth Moore's biography. I would highly recommend it. One of the best books I've read in a couple years. And in it, she was talking to someone who faced incredible tragedy. And she asked her, how is it that you have kept going through these years? And she said, God opens my eyes every morning. I have no other explanation than that. There are nights that I went to sleep and I did not want to wake up and God opens my eyes. And so I get up that day and for us today I use the breath that's in my lungs and I praise him and I go. We will all in different times and seasons and for different reasons and in different ways walk through dark nights of the soul. But when we do, we can cry out to God. And when we cry out to God, He will hear us. And when He hears us, He will send His angels to strengthen us. I'll finish with this verse from Isaiah, and then I'll pray, because it's one of my favorites. We're taught in Isaiah that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and that he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. You're big, you're good, and you're gracious, and we are broken. We need you so much, and we have no right, we have no right to pound our desk and shake our fist and demand answers from you. We have no right to do that, and yet in your goodness, from time to time, you allow it, and you hug us, and you weep with us. I lift up the people today who might have recently prayed prayers like these, and I just ask that you would strengthen them, that they would feel your presence, they would feel your goodness, they would feel your love, they would be strengthened by you. Father, buoy us and tether us to you. God, we also thank you that Jesus did drink of that cup, that he did die for us, that he did conquer death and sin and hell for us so that we don't have to. And God, we look forward to a day when we understand things just a little bit better. But in the meantime, may your presence and your love be ever enough. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, my name is Nate, and I say I get to be the pastor here, although that's less convincing since I just said I don't want to preach to you guys. I still like to be the pastor. I just want to sit in the service, too, you know? And if I haven't gotten to meet you, I really would love to do that in the lobby afterwards if that's something that you would like to do as well. We are in the last part of our series called The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the blessings that come at the beginning of Jesus' first recorded public address, the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. That's where we've been looking at the blessings. But it's also recorded in Luke chapter 6, so you can find it there as well. As we've looked at the blessings, we've looked at three of them. Last week, Doug looked at poor in spirit, did a phenomenal job. Thank you once again, Doug. I told Doug after the service last week, and I would say publicly, that I think the church is so very blessed when we can just kind of give him this little idea or verse or thought. I think one time I allowed him like a part of one sentence, please preach on just this part of one sentence. And he takes that into his laboratory for like six months and just thinks on it and then just says, here you go. And we all just kind of walk away going, I think I should listen to that three or four more times, but we're so blessed by that. So thank you. This week, I want to look at the final blessing that we have selected. And when I say we, I mean me. There's nine blessings, and I picked three of them to talk about. Doug picked the other one. And as I chose them, one of the ones that I wanted to talk about as we moved through this series was this one found in Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. And it simply says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, which is quite the blessing for this one. The others, you know, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that they will be, their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, that will be filled, they will inherit the earth. But this one, God literally says, if you are a peacemaker, I will adopt you as my child. That's the blessing that flows from being someone who seeks to make peace. And for most of us, this is not the first time we've encountered this blessing or beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. And so when we think of it, we probably think of peacemakers. What I think about peacemakers, I had an experience a week, 10 days ago, where I met a buddy of mine in the afternoon just to chit-chat and catch up, just kind of like you do sometimes. And we got to talking, and he asked me about a mutual acquaintance of ours and how my relationship was with him. And I said, well, it's not super good. There's really still kind of a lot of hurt and anger there, so I wouldn't say that we're actually talking very much. And he said, well, why is that? Why is that bad? And for eight to ten minutes, I kind of enumerated my sob story of why I'm angry at this person, why I'm holding a grudge against this person, and why I'm not really too keen on cleaning that up. We don't really run in the same circles. We don't really run into each other. So it's not something that's in my face all the time. And I'm perfectly happy just floating through life, never forgiving them, never talking to them, just making them anathema to me and just moving on down the road. And I enumerated to him all the reasons why I'm justified in this hurt. And he responded with, you're right, that makes sense. And I would be angry too. You know you need to talk to him and forgive him, right? Just like flippantly, as if he hadn't heard the methodical case I laid out for 10 minutes so that he would know, yes, God does tell us to forgive, but surely this, Nate, is the exception. You were so deeply wronged. You do not have to forgive this person. He said, you know you have to forgive him, right? And I was like, eh, I mean, I think we're good. And he was like, no, you're not. You know you need to talk to him. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to. And he goes, okay, but you should. He's really stubborn, and he's not very smart. So this was really annoying. And I finally looked at him and I said, yeah, I know, you're right. I do. I don't want to, but I'll pray that I want to and that I can. And that was two weeks ago. I've thought about that person and that conversation every day since. And choosing a sermon on being a peacemaker doesn't help with the conviction that you have in your life that you've not made peace. I don't hold a lot of grudges, but apparently when I do, I hold them pretty tight. And so I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I don't know if it's going to help you guys. I'll just preach to myself. None of y'all hold grudges or mad at anybody. But I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I'm going to need this. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll be freshly convicted as I go through it. And it is. But as I approached the topic and began to read up on it, began to think through it, it actually came out in my studies that that sort of peacemaking, person to person, is not really what Jesus was talking about when he said, blessed are the peacemakers. See, to Jesus, a true peacemaker is one who reconciles someone with their God. So a peacemaker is someone who seeks to reconcile someone else with their creator God, which is different than horizontal peacemaking. A peacemaker is one who makes peace vertically between a person and their God. And so I kind of came into the week loaded for bear on why peacemaking is so important, why it matters so much, why we need to pursue it, and even the active part of peacemaking, how making peace isn't just staying quiet and simmering with anger and never saying anything to someone else to kind of not disturb the peace, but sometimes making peace looks like the exact opposite of peace for the sake of peace, right? Sometimes making peace looks like getting involved in World War II for the sake of making peace. And so sometimes in our lives and in our relationship, we can't just sit back. We can't just idly stand by and try to keep the waters calm where there's tension simmering underneath it. We need to actively pursue peace with difficult, challenging conversations. And I was ready to preach this because that's something I don't mind doing. And I felt like I was preaching from a strong suit. And it turns out I'm not. It's funny how God works because that's not really what this sermon is about. It's about the fact that making peace in the eyes of Jesus, first and foremost, means reconciling people to their God. And so really, as much as my buddy was a peacemaker that day, and really ultimately pushed me closer to my God in reconciliation with others, a true peacemaker is more like my friend who's a pastor. I have a friend who is a pastor and his gift, he's got this gift of evangelism. He shares Jesus all the time everywhere he goes. He's one of those guys when you go out to eat with him and the waiter or the waitress brings the food to the table, he'll say, hey, we're about to pray. Is there anything going on in your life we can pray about? And if you're like me, that makes you just a little tense. It's a little bit uncomfortable, but I can't tell you how many times out of that simple question people have broken down, people have shared things, people have wanted to talk. He'll stay after the meal and lead them to Christ right there in the restaurant. He likes to golf. He'll go golfing and he'll witness to his caddy for 18 holes when he goes on trips. And by the end, he's posting a selfie next to his caddy who just accepted Christ. And like, if you're next to him on an airplane and you don't know Jesus, you're at least going to fake like you do before the end of that flight. He is going to share his faith with you. He is going to share it all the time, and he is constantly, constantly helping people reconcile themselves with their creator. That's what a peacemaker does. A peacemaker helps someone see there is a creator God of the universe who really loves us, as we just sang, and pursues us and comes after us when we are the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter. He chases after us. He waits for us eagerly. He desires us. And we were made, Garden of Eden, perfect creation, perfect relationship. God walked with them in the cool of the evening. God designed you to be in relationship with him. It's the only reason you exist. It's the only reason he wanted to create you is so he could share himself with you. The problem is when we sin, and the easiest way to understand sin is when we assume authority in our life. When God is here and we are here and we go, gosh, I don't like this arrangement. I'm going to start making my own decisions regardless of what God wants me to do. Those decisions are sin. And that sin wrecks our relationship with God. And we cannot be reconciled to him. There is nothing we can do to reconcile our relationship with our creator God. And God in his goodness, because he loves us, sent his son to die for us and create a path of reconciliation back to him so that all we need to do to be reconciled to our creator God is open up our eyes to the fact that he created us, that he loves us, that our sin has distorted our relationship, but that he sent his son to die for us so that that relationship might be restored. And that's what heaven is. It's to exist in eternity in a perfect relationship with God. When we think about heaven, we probably think about the pearly gates and the golden streets and seeing our loved ones and the marriage supper of the lamb and all the things that heaven is going to be. But what heaven really is, the real draw, is to exist in right relationship with our God for all of eternity, exactly as we were intended to do that. And so a peacemaker is someone who opens up the eyes of others that they might be reconciled with their God. Do you understand that the teachers who are in that room right there teaching the fourth and fifth graders and who are on the other side of the aquarium supply store down the dark hallway. Teaching our kindergarten through third graders. And the teachers all down this hall who are loving on our children. Do you understand they're making peace? But slowly by slowly, brick by brick, seemingly innocuous lesson plan by lesson plan, they're helping our children make peace with their God. Do you understand that our teachers are peacemakers? Do you understand that the people who come on Sunday nights and volunteer to be small group leaders for our students, who make awkward small talk with seventh graders so you don't have to. Are slowly by slowly, bit by bit, helping open the eyes of those students to their creator God who loves them and sent his son for them. That bit by bit, those small group leaders are helping those students be reconciled to their God. Do you understand that small group leaders who open up their home and their schedules and facilitate those conversations are peacemakers who are reconciling others to their God? Do you understand that when in a small group setting you share something from your journey, something from what God has shown you that can help somebody else, that in that small way, way in that moment that you too are being a peacemaker? That really we are being peacemakers anytime we help someone take a step towards God. Anytime we help someone reconcile themselves back to their creator, when we help someone make vertical peace, we are being peacemakers. And so Jesus says, blessed are those who help others make peace with me. Blessed are those who help others see themselves as I see them and see me as they should see me. And so in this way, not only is it volunteering in the children's and the students' and small groups and conversations, but it's also being willing to have those difficult conversations. It's also my friend who said, you know you need to forgive that person. And it's not because they were trying to help me make peace with that person. It's because helping me make peace with that person will help me make peace with my God. You're a peacemaker when you sit down with a friend who you love and you care about and you say, hey man, I don't want to be in this conversation right now any more than you want to be in it. But I've noticed this habit or this hang up or this addiction or this sin that's in your life and it's not helping you. It's hurting you. And I love you. And I want to see what you look like on the other side of this sin. That's making peace. When as a spouse, you look at your husband or your wife, and you say, hey, you're acting this way, you're doing this thing, you're developing this habit, you're developing this hang-up, and it needs to end where this does. When you put your foot down and you say no more, you're making peace. You're pushing them towards their creator. And in those moments when it's really difficult to make peace and yet we pursue it anyways. Vertical peace. Jesus says we are blessed because we're helping people to be reconciled to their creator God. And it occurred to me as I thought through what true peacemaking was that Jesus is the great peacemaker. He offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. Jesus himself is the great peacemaker, and he offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. I'll tell you what I mean, but he's the great peacemaker as he hangs on the cross, reconciling us back to our creator God. He did not have to do that. His relationship with his God was fine. His relationship with his father was fine, but he did it for me and you. So as he hangs on the cross, he is the great peacemaker, creating the great path of reconciliation and providing us with the great and perfect peace. And it makes me wonder, how could we ever seek to be at peace with ourselves if we are not first at peace with our creator? And as I thought about this concept, and I thought about the great peace that Jesus offers, it occurs to me that I should mention this. I'm going to move over here. I'm going to be in this portion of the stage, because this is not the sermon proper, okay? This is not what I'm driving at, but I do want to tell you this. So allow me a parenthetical portion of the sermon, okay? We live in a culture that is increasingly aware of mental health issues, anxiety and depression in particular. And it's not like these issues didn't exist before. We just didn't have words for them or labels for them. We didn't really understand them or know what to do with them. We just called it being sad or being discouraged or worrying too much. I was actually talking with a guy this week who has a daughter in college who's struggling pretty big with anxiety and depression right now. And he mentioned to me that as she's going to counseling, they're doing all the right things, and they're being really diligent about it. And she's been sharing with him some of the stuff that she's been learning in counseling, some of the symptoms and some of the things and some of the stuff that she sees manifesting in her life. And he's realized, oh my goodness, I've walked with that my whole life too. I shouldn't have a name for it. I just thought I was sad. So we live in a culture with an increasing awareness of these things. And I want to be really careful because I would not for a second try to be one of those pastors who says we pray away the depression. If you're worried, you just don't trust God enough. If you're depressed, you're just not experiencing the joy of Jesus and you need to pursue him harder and pray and sing more. Could be part of it. But probably that there's a legitimate chemical imbalance that needs counseling and that needs some drugs maybe even for a short time. And so I do not for a second want to say that we pray the depression and the anxiety away all the time as a first measure. There are some things that require actual treatment. I don't want to be ignorant about that. However, if it's true that God created us, if it's true that he fashioned your soul to crave him, if it's true that we, along with all creation in Romans 8, cry out for the return of the king, that creation groans for the return of God, for him to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, if we claw for Eden and the perfection that he created, if it's true that there's a creator God and that creator God made you and he made you to crave him and to need him and to only find satisfaction through knowing him and being reconciled to him, how could we possibly seek our own peace without being at peace with our creator? It's not the whole measure for mental illness, but it's got to be one of them, doesn't it? It's got to be a part of it, doesn't it? So I would simply say if you were one who struggles in that way, man, we want you to get all the counseling. We want you to get, if you need prescriptions, we want you to do those. We want you to be diligent about those things. But there's not enough therapy or prescriptions in the world to reconcile you to your creator. And there's not enough treatment in the world to give you the peace that he offers first. And even if that's not what you deal with, even if that's not your struggle, I would still ask you, how can you possibly be at peace with yourself and at peace with those around you if your soul is out of harmony with your creator God? So for many of us, the first peace we need to be making is with ourselves. For many of us this morning, and here at the end we're going to take communion, we're going to have an opportunity to do this. If you get nothing else from this but to leave here with the desire to be reconciled with your creator, this morning is a win. If there's sin in your life that's keeping you from having a good relationship with him, fix it. If you're like me and there's a relationship in your life, if there's a grudge that you're holding, if there's forgiveness that you need to extend and it's prohibiting you from having a perfectly peaceful relationship with your God, then fix it. If there's a habit that you're missing, a discipline that you lack, if there's a desire that you don't have, pray to God earnestly that he would speak into those things, that he would give you that desire, that he would give you that discipline, that he would supply you with that habit so that you might pursue him. But let's leave here determined and hopeful that we can be reconciled with our creator. God, let us first make peace with ourselves and in that way be peacemakers. But it does, to me, come full circles to reconciliation with others because how could we possibly be at peace with others if we are not at peace with our creator. If there is someone in your life that you're angry with, if there's someone that's angry with you, if there's someone that you're frustrated with. If there's a relationship that isn't right. No matter what the dynamic is there. They wronged you years ago. You can't let go of it. You wronged them and you've got too much pride to go to them. There's a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that's causing you to lack peace with a brother or a sister, instead of sitting back and expecting them to act, can I just encourage you to seek peace with your creator, God? Can I encourage you, instead of focusing on that broken relationship, can you focus on this one? And as God repairs this one, look what would happen. How could you possibly be at peace with our creator and not desire peace with others? Why do you think God has reminded me of this broken relationship I have every day for 14 days and he will not let it go? There's other things I'd like to think about. There's other stuff. I mean, listen, I've got plenty to be convicted about, but that's the thing right now, and it's not going anywhere. Why do you think that happens? Because my soul longs to be at peace with Creator God, and this horizontal relationship is messing up this vertical one, and so I need to go fix it to be back in right relationship with my creator. Those of you who have broken relationships in your life, someone that you haven't forgiven, someone that you haven't spoken to for years, someone that has something against you or you have it against them, how could you possibly be at peace with your creator and not seek peace with them? Not seek to be reconciled with them. So when we do this, and this is, I think, the really cool part, when we are peacemakers, when we first make peace with our God and ourselves, and then we make peace with others, we seek reconciled relationships, we encourage others to reconcile their relationships. When we make true peace, we are imitators of Jesus. When we make true peace with ourselves and with others, we are imitators of Jesus in the way that he is the great peacemaker, that he made the great path to reconciliation with our creator God. When we do that, we are imitators of Christ as we make peace with ourselves and others. And this is why the blessing is so profound. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. They will be called the daughters, the children of God. Because we are imitators of Christ. Of course. Of course when we make peace with our creator God, we acknowledge that we have broken our relationship and that he sent his son to reconcile that relationship and we claim the death on the cross as our reconciliation. Of course we are called sons of God. That's the promise throughout the whole scripture. It means we're believers and he claims us. And of course as we seek to reconcile other people with their God and they come to know God in a profound way and they become believers and they become sons and daughters of God. Of course we are imitating Christ and then called sons of God. Of course that's why this is the blessing. Maybe this is why scripture prioritizes peace so profoundly. Paul writes in Romans, as far as it depends on you, seek peace. As far as it relies on you, make peace. No matter what, Paul ends all of his letters with grace and peace to you. And I've always wondered why Paul made such a big deal out of peace. Because he wasn't talking about this peace. He's talking about this peace. Maybe this is why Jesus prays the high priestly prayer, John chapter 17, his longest recorded prayer. You know what he prays for? He prays for unity. Here and there. Peace. It had never occurred to me before how all of these themes are woven throughout Scripture. This use of the word peace that we see over and over again, God's encouragement through the different authors to pursue peace, to be people of peace, to lead quiet and peaceful lives. Jesus opening up the Beatitudes with blessed by the peacemakers. It had never occurred to me why peace was throughout all scripture. Because peace means this peace. Reconciling with our creator God. And so my prayer for you this morning as we worshiped, this week as I prepared, is that you will seek peace with your creator. You will acknowledge he is the creator God who loves you. Your sin has distorted that relationship and broken it irreconcilably. Accept that Jesus died for you and created a path of reconciliation. Pursue that peace. And in your pursuit of that peace, look around you and help others pursue that peace as well. And in doing so, we are imitators of Jesus. And God will call us his children. Let's pray. Lord, I know there are plenty of us here, me included, who do not feel at peace with you, would you help us? Would you wrestle with us? Would you remind us of this lack of peace and the gentle way that you do it over and over again until we pursue it. Father, if there are people here who have never made peace with you, whose souls have never found rest in you, who have wandered from one thing to the next trying to find the peace and the satisfaction that only you offer. Would this morning be the morning that they rest easy in you and reconcile themselves, claim the reconciliation that you offer, and make peace with their creator, God, finally. Father, for those of us who need to make peace with others, would you give us the courage and the strength to do that? For those of us who need to pursue peace with you through eliminating things that are in our life, would you give us the courage to do that? If we need to pursue peace with you by adding things to our life, would you give us the desire and the discipline to do that? God, this morning, we simply pray for peace with you and with our brothers and sisters around us. Let us be peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.