Sermons tagged with Father

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. If you're watching online, thank you for joining us wherever you are and whatever you may be doing with your summer. This is Father's Day. So happy Father's Day to those to whom it applies. I am a dad myself, so I don't have to show any sensitivity about Father's Day. This is what I love about Father's Day is on Mother's Day, I saw on TikTok this week, which means it has to be true, on Mother's Day, that is the single highest call volume day of the year every year in the United States, because obviously people are calling their moms. That is not true of Father's Day. I saw that Father's Day is ranked 20th as far as like online traffic and phone calls and yada, yada, yada. And I saw a comedian say, I can't even think of 18 other holidays besides like Christmas and Mother's Day. And what I really love about Father's Day is on Mother's Day, we go out to eat, we celebrate mom, we fuss over her, we do all the things. And on Father's Day, all the dad wants is just leave me alone for a day. In some seasons of life, for a day, just leave me alone. If you want to silently snuggle with me while I watch the U.S. Open, fine. But don't tell me about your monsters today, okay? This is our day. So happy Father's Day for those to whom it applies and in all sincerity, if today for any reason is a was on the dad, I was on the phone with my dad this morning talking about Father's Day. He just mentioned to me that Moses is his favorite character in the Old Testament, and he's one of mine too. So it's going to be fun to continue to go through his life this summer. Last week, we looked at Moses in the burning bush. And I said, we're going to spend two weeks in this passage because the lessons in this passage are so profound that they're worth it. I honestly think I could spend six weeks in this passage, but I think I would bore a majority of you if I did that. I may risk boring you this morning with just two weeks, but last week we approached this passage with this, and so this is simply a reminder of how we approached last week. We are all meant to build God's kingdom. We are all meant to be kingdom builders. And I said this last week, I spent time on this last week, but I was talking to a friend who is a regular church attender who looked at the, this is in the lobby 15 minutes ago, who looked at all of the traits of grace across the glass doors on the top of it. And he goes, this looks different. What's different? Did something change here? And I said, yeah, in like September. And he's like, well, I mean, I didn't know. And he goes, what are these? I said, these are the traits of grace. And the apex trait is that we would be kingdom builders. So clearly I need to continue to repeat it so we all get it. But we are intended to build God's kingdom, not our own. And that is the conversation that's happening here where God is telling Moses, I want you to go build my kingdom in this way. This is the good work for which I created you. Now you go walk in it. And we talked last week about how we have, we looked at the five excuses of Moses that ended in, oh God, please choose someone else, which is a wonderful excuse that we all have as we seek to build God's kingdom. And as he presses on us, what we need to do to build his kingdom. But this morning, I want us to focus on one of the responses of God, where Moses asks God, what is your name? When I go, and I'll read the verses in a second, when I go, who should I say sent me? And to my recollection, I could be wrong about this, but in my recollection, I can only think of one other time where God the Father is asked a direct question and kind of his feet are held to the fire. Hey, I need to know the answer to this. Where all of humanity leans in and says, yes, God, what's the deal with this? There's instances in the gospel, because Jesus walked among us, where Pharisees or pastors by or disciples would press on Jesus and kind of demand answers from him. But we don't see this happen to God the Father, in my recollection, but one other time in scripture. And the only other time where I see God being questioned directly is in the book of Job. Now, I hesitate to bring this up this morning because I fear that I will create more questions than answers with this particular example, but I think it's worth pointing out. The book of Job, for those who don't know, a very quick synopsis. Job was the most righteous man on the earth. Satan asked God permission to mess with him, and God said, go ahead. He's not going to betray me. This is a loose paraphrase. And so things start happening to Job. He loses his family. He's wrecked with illness. It's so bad that his wife looks at him and offers the wonderful advice of curse God and die, which Jen tells me that all the time. Just twice though. It's just two times. No, but his wife offers this advice, curse God and die. His friends are offering him advice. Surely you're wrong. And he's not wrong. He's righteous and he is not sin. And he goes to God finally in Job chapter 38 after cycles. And if you've read Job, you know, after cycles of bad advice and back and forth. And he finally goes to God and he demands an answer of God. Hey, why am I suffering? And what he's asking is why are bad things happening to a good person? I, I demand an answer from you. And I had a professor in seminary that was to the whole class was on the book of Job. It was one of the best classes I ever took. And I think of Job as like theology 501. It's not 101, 201, 301, 401. It's graduate level theology. You have to develop, and this is why I hesitated to bring it up, a robust and appreciative and in-depth view of God before you can really appreciate the theology and lesson of Job. But I had a professor say that Job went to God to have a man-to-man conversation and found that he was one man short. So when Job goes to God and says, why are these things happening to me? You owe me an answer. God's response is, it's one of the best lines in the Bible. It's in Job chapter 38. You can look it up. Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Which is what I say to Lily when she argues with me. Right? Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? And you can see, you can feel it in the text. Job goes, whoops. I'm sorry. And so God starts to berate him. Where were you when I hung the earth where it goes? Where were you when I created the moon and stars? Where were you when I created the behemoth and the Leviathan? And I told the tides of the earth and the oceans that you will go this far and no further. And he starts to ask him questions. And Job says, and this is another great line, he says, I am sorry, Lord. I have spoken once. I will speak no further. And God's like, yeah, I'm not done. And he goes on for three chapters and it's the equivalent. It's, it's the conversational equivalent of that movie, uh, that came out years ago. I think it was in the nineties. This may be too old of a reference to use anymore in 2025, but a few good men when, when Tom Cruise is playing a a JAG lawyer, and is it Jack Nicholson or Nicholas? Nicholson? I always get it confused. Thank you, Jeffy. I always get it confused. Jack. We'll call him Jack. Jack Nicholson is a colonel, and he's being put on trial. And there's that great moment where he says, what do you want? And Tom Cruise, I want the truth. And Jack Nicholson screams back at him, you can't handle the truth. Right? This is what God is telling Job. It's an elaborate way of saying, until you can understand and answer the questions that I've asked you, you could not possibly understand my explanation for why I'm allowing these things to happen to you. So maybe just be quiet and trust that I am God. It's the only other time in scripture where I see God's feet being held to the fire and someone is demanding an answer. And God's answer is, yeah, I'm not telling you. Another profound time is in Jesus's life when his best friend, Mary of Beth Bethany shows up and says, why did you let this happen? And Jesus' response is, yeah, I'm just going to weep with you, but I'm not going to answer you. Similarly, in this passage, when Moses asks God, what is your name? We find God's response to be insufficient. Intuitively, it feels insufficient. But I want us to look deeper into this name of God and understand its all sufficiency. Because I think that this is probably, as far as building a theology and an understanding of who God is, one of the most, if not the most, important passage in all of Scripture, or at least the Old Testament. So let's look at these two verses in Exodus chapter 3, verses 13 and 14. And then we're going to spend the rest of the day talking about the profundity that is found within these words. Verse 13, Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they ask me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? He's holding his feet to the fire. God says to Moses, this is his answer. I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you. And at first glance, I think we hear that and we go, what are you, Dr. Seuss? This is how you're answering this question? What is your name? When I go to the elders and I tell them that I need to lead the people out of Egypt, I need to do it in your name. What is your name, God? It's the only place in scripture where God has asked his name. God has many names in scripture. We see most often in the Hebrew Elohim, but Elohim is a placeholder for God. It just means God or Lord in the Hebrew language, but that's how he's most often referred to. And we see other names of God that are given to him by us. I jotted down a few. We see El Roy. When Hagar says that he is the God who sees, he's called El Shaddai, which means all sufficient. He is called Jehovah Jireh, which means he is the God who provides. He's called Adonai, which means Lord and Master. Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals. And Jehovah Shalom, the God of peace. When I was growing up, my mom cross-stitched. Raise your hand. Anybody in here ever cross-stitched? Has anybody done that? David McWilliams. I'm expecting all women, David McWilliams, knocking it out of the park. Good job. Good job representing the dudes with cross-stitching. My mom does that. And in the church lobby, in the church where I grew up, she had cross-stitched this big list of more than a dozen names of the names of God. But these names were ascribed to him by us. God does not name himself, except in this passage, where he says, I am. You tell them I am has sent you. And before I get into kind of the points that I want to make this morning, I do want us to pause here in reverence of the holiness of that. And I do think it's important to revere this moment. So I'm not preaching to you or at you right now. I am sharing with you so that we might feel the weight of what is happening here. These words, I am, were so holy that the Hebrew scribes and rabbis refused to give that a word. They wrote initials. In English, it's translated Y-H-W-H, Yahweh. And we sing, who pulled me out of that grave? He did, he did, Yahweh, Yahweh. And we just sing it and we declare it. But they held that name so much more preciously than we do. I don't think, I tried to think of something that would be relevant in our culture for how they held it. And there's nothing because Americans are irreverent by nature. But this name was so holy that they dared not speak it. They would not say out loud Yahweh. That's why he's referred to as Elohim in the Old Testament. Because they dared not say the name Yahweh. It was unspeakable. And when they had to write it in scripture, they would pause. They would be transcribing scripture, copying it from one piece of paper to another, from one scroll to another. And when they got to Yahweh, where they would see that in the text, they would pause and get up and go ceremonially wash their hands and kneel and pray and then sit back down at their desk and write those four characters and then pause and pray again and then continue with their work. We have no parallel for that kind of reverence in our culture. But this is how the Hebrew people held God's name. This is how sacred this moment is. And I just wanted to say that to you so you would feel the weight of what's happening in this passage. Now, as we jump back and we kind of ask the question, how do we process that? How do we process I am? I am who I am. You tell them I am sent you. There's really two things I would point out here. There's certainly more to learn from this name. But I think this name is frustrating because it's insufficient. It feels dodgy. It feels like God is evading the question. And in some ways he is, but when we understand why, we'll be grateful for that. Because it's's wonderfully so but the first thing that I would that I would say about this name that we should learn and that we should know and that we should reflect on is that when God says I am what he means is this I am all that you need all the time I am all that you need all the time. I am all that you need all the time. In the ancient world, cultures developed pantheons of gods. And the context in which we find this, the Egyptians were the major power. They had a pantheon of gods. And next week, as we look at the 10 plagues, we're going to see how those 10 plagues were a direct assault on 10 of the gods of Egypt. There was, there's pantheons of God. If you studied North Norse mythology, there's pantheons of gods and Viking lore. There's pantheons of gods to the, to the, to the Celtics. There's pantheons of gods to the Greeks and to the Romans, every major society, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas, they've all had these pantheons of gods. And the Jewish tradition is the first one to come out and say, no, no, no, we have one God. And he is all that we need. He is Jehovah Jireh. He is all sufficient. He is all the things. And so when God says, I am, he says, I am all that you need all of the time. I am all sufficient. I am El Roy. I am the God who sees. But you are not going to call me El Roy and suspect that I am only the God who sees because I am also El Shaddai and I am all sufficient. But I'm not just going to limit myself to El Shaddai because I am also Adonai, your Lord and master, and you need to follow me. But I'm not just going to call myself that because I'm also Jehovah Rapha and I heal. And you should pray to me in times that you need. But I'm not just Jehovah Rapha or just Adonai, the Lord and Master. I am also Jehovah Shalom, the God of peace. And I give that to you when you need it. I am all that you need all of the time. And this is wonderful. This is wonderful because we don't need the same God in every situation. We need certain things at certain times. And while I'm here, just let me step aside and say this. We also, for my Catholic brothers and sisters, don't need a patron saint of healing. We don't need a patron saint of fertility. We don't need an additional saint to advocate to our God because our God says, I am. I am. You can pray to me. And what I find wonderful about this is sometimes what we need from God is for him to pick us up. Sometimes we are on the map. And we need the God who heals and encourages. And we need him to lift us up. And we need him to breathe life into us. And we need him to help us see hope and joy again. And we need a God to build us up. But sometimes we need a God to tear us down. Sometimes we're killing it. And we get a little full of ourselves. And we think we're somebody. And we need God to bring us down. We need God to send us to the desert for 40 years to humble us, to prepare us for the work. We need the God that sent David into the wilderness for 20 years to humble him before he could lead. We need the God that sent Paul into the wilderness for seven years to humble him before he could preach. And then other time, Moses needs the God to pick him up and to encourage him and to say, I will supply you with all that you need. Sometimes we need God to bring us low. We need the God of humility. Sometimes we need the God of encouragement. Sometimes we need the God who heals. Sometimes we need the God who hurts for our own sake. Sometimes we need the God of wisdom so that we might speak wise words into a moment. And sometimes we need the God of wisdom so that we might shut up and not say dumb words in the moment. God is all that we need all of the time. And here's what I like about this answer. There's this old Seinfeld bit. And, you know, just for the record, I love Seinfeld. He's the best. It's a running joke in my friend group that I may as well be Larry David's spirit animal. There's a lot of similarities there in our views on life. You take that for what it's worth. But there's this old bit where Seinfeld talks about getting on a plane and how the plane will come over the intercom. And he's like, yeah, passengers, this is Gary. This is your captain speaking. We're going to go up to about, we're going to take off in another 15, 20 minutes here. We're going to go up to 30,000 feet. We expect to cruise all the way to New York City. There's a little pocket of clouds and thunderstorms over West Virginia, so we're probably going to just go around that. And then we expect a smooth landing when we get there. And Seinfeld's like, yeah, whatever. I'm going to get on the plane. You take off. You land in New York. I don't need to know all the details. I don't care what you're going to do. Fly directly through the storm. It doesn't matter. Just land me in New York in an hour. That's what I need from you. I don't need to understand all the things. And this passage to me is God going, what, do you want me to explain it all to you? Do you really want Gary, your pilot to be telling you over the intercom, the, the, the, the nitty gritty of what's going to happen through life? Just sit down, get on the plane, buckle your seatbelt. I'll bring you some peanuts in a minute. And then we're going to land in New York when we're supposed to. All right. I am, I got this, whatever you need, I am your God. And so what we see is that what we think of as an insufficient answer in its insufficiency is all sufficient in its lack of clarity is perfectly clear in In what we would perceive as a lack of meaning and an incomplete answer, upon further reflection, what we find is it's fully complete. Because he says, I am. I am all that you need all of the time. And here's the other thing that we see in this answer. And I've made this point before. I made it in FAQs when we talked about doubts. But I think it's such an important point that we need to reflect on it as much as we can. The other thing that this answer means, beyond I am all that you need all the time, is this. I will not be confined to your boxes. You will not name me. I will not limit myself to El Shaddai, to El Roy, to Jehovah Rapha, to Jehovah Nisi. I will not limit myself. Jordan spoke very eloquently about Emmanuel God with us. But that is not all I will be. I will be more than that. I will be all sufficient. And you and I will not be limited to your boxes. And I love this idea. That we are constantly trying to understand God and limit him. We're constantly trying to put him in boxes. And God says, when we hold his feet to the fire, in one instance in Job, when it's like, hey, what's the deal? Why are you letting this happen to me? God says, you can't handle the truth. All right. So just worship me as sovereign God and trust me to get you where you need to go. And in the second case where his feet are at, are held to the fire, he says, yeah, I'm not good. What's your name? And God said, I'm not going to give you that, man. I'm not going to tell you that. I'm not going to let you name me. I'm not going to let you confine me with a title. Because I can't be reduced to a name. And if I give you that, you'll try to put handles on me and confine me to what that is. And that's not who I want to be. And what's remarkable to me is how little Christians acknowledge this. God never intended to be fully understood. Do you know that? God never intended to be fully understood. If you sit down and you read the Bible cover to cover, when I know many of you have, you'll take away a lot of things from that experience. But one of the things a thoughtful reader will take away from that experience is, goodness, it doesn't really seem like God's that interested in being completely understood by us. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about it, but he had all the chances in the world. He wrote the Bible. He could have made it more clear than this. What are we doing with Esther, man? What's that about? He could have made it more clear. He could have made it a systematic theology. In my seminary and in my training, I took a class called, I think it was two or three systematic theologies where there was this very thick book where the author and all of his wisdom and all of his learning tried to write down all of the things about God. This is how we understand who God is. And these are the boxes and this is how they go. And this is how things relate. And when this happens, this is why. And when this happens, this is why. And it's a book intended to give you a full and robust and workable and applicable theology of God. And the reason that you don't understand why things happen is because you haven't read systematic theology. But I have, and I understand, and now I'm the pastor, and I'm going to explain God to you in this perfectly systematic way that holds up in all the seasons of life. Isn't that dumb? Now listen, that's an easy joke. The men and women who write those are very learned and very thoughtful and would probably agree with my sentiment that it is an adequate effort. So I'm not trying to deride those books. I'm just saying it's tilting at windmills to try to write them. God, do you ever think about this? God waited thousands of years to give us the rules. He gives the law to Moses. We'll talk about that in a couple of weeks. He could have given the rules to Adam. All right, Adam, here's the one rule. Don't eat the fruit on that tree. Oh, you did it. Well, shoot. Well, here are the rules. He didn't do that. He could have given the rules to Noah. He destroys the whole world with the flood. Noah and Hamshim and Japheth are left and their wives. And he could have said, okay, you guys kind of screwed it up that last time. So for the reboot, here are the rules. No. Could have given them to Enoch, who was so righteous that he lived and then he was with God. Could have given them to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. He didn't. He waited thousands of years and he gave them to Moses. If God's goal was to be perfectly understood, wouldn't he have done that sooner? Wouldn't Jesus have spoken in more clarity than intentionally speaking in riddles to thin the herd? Didn't God have every opportunity to present himself to us in a perfectly systematic way that fits inside a book so we can understand him all the time? Yeah. He had every opportunity to do that, but he didn't. So either God's dumb or we're silly for thinking that we can understand him and reduce him to our intellect. And so when God says, you tell them I am sent you, he is saying, yes, I am all that you need for all of the things. But he's also saying, no chance, buddy. I'm not telling you what my name is. I'm not going to let you reduce me to that because you can't possibly understand me. And despite that message being replete throughout scripture, we skip over that and we continue to pursue our systematic theologies to try to understand him. We're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just for David. Yeah, yeah, that's just for them. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Let me try to understand God. And we can't. And we try really hard to understand God. We try so hard to understand God and what he's done that we have this organization called CERN in France and Switzerland. And it is one of, if not the greatest scientific achievements in our generation. That's right. If you're over 60, I just lumped you into my generation. Okay. So we're all one generation today. It's one of the greatest achievements we've ever seen. It's, it's a Hadron collider that's under the ground on the border of France and Switzerland. It's 27 kilometers long and it has magnets inside of it that are colder than space. I don't know how that works. I just read it on their website. Okay. I'm not making this up. Colder than space. I would assume they mean like the cold parts of space and not like next to the sun. That'd be really easy. And what they do is they speed particles around this cylinder, around this tube, under the ground, and they slam them into each other. And the whole point of it is to try to figure out what happened at creation. They are literally simulating the Big Bang. And they're learning all that they can about the way that particles, and I don't know the right words, protons, neurons, whatever. I didn't pay attention in chemistry. My science teacher in high school was a retired Vietnam vet named Mr. Owens. And if you just sat with your test long enough and went to him and said, I don't understand number 10, he'd go, here you go, baby. And he'd write down the answer. You go, thank you. And then you go back to your seat. And then you just wait a few minutes. Mr. Owens, I don't understand number 11. And you think I'm kidding. There was a constant line of three or four dudes. It was always dudes in line to talk to Mr. Owens about the test. And he'd fill it out for you. You go, okay, thank you. And then you'd get an A. So I don't know the words for the things. I think electrons are involved. But they would slam together. And then they would the reaction. And they do it over and over and over again. And they've learned so many things. But do you know that at the height of human achievement, trying to understand the nature of the universe and what God created and how he created it in our terms, that's not what they say they would be doing. Some of them might be believers. I really don't know, but they've created more questions than answers. They've gone in with a theory, a standard theory, and they've tried to disprove it and they can't, but they don't understand why they can't. They're watching particular particles behave and they assume certain things about those particles. And then their experiments reveal to them that the things that they have assumed are not right, but they cannot explain the behavior of those particles. And so the more they dig into God's universe, the more questions they have about how it works, the less clarity that is brought about. Now, they're better questions. They're learned questions. They're more important questions. And here's what I would say, too, just a careful caveat. I've sat in rooms before where a Christian pastor was deriding atheistic scientists. They don't know what we know. They're not as smart as we are. That's dumb. They are. They're smarter than me. They have more degrees than me. They're very learned. They're paying attention to everything. I'm not questioning their intelligence at all. All I'm pointing out is at the apex of human understanding, as we seek to understand God and who he is, we just develop more questions than answers. And here's what I know for sure, that they't know because they can simulate what happens milliseconds after the big bang, milliseconds after creation. But if you say, okay, so those particles slammed into each other and then universe happened. Yes. Great. Where did the particles come from? We don't know. What activated them in such a way that they would collide with each other? We don't know. Does this point to a God? We don't know. Einstein himself, as he studied the fabric of the universe, concluded there must be some intelligence orchestrating the things happening behind us. We try and we try and we try to understand our God. And he told us in Exodus, stop, you can't. We can know our God. We can know his character. We can know that we can trust him. We can know that he loves us. We can trust that he created us. There are things about our God that are revealed to us. There are things about him and about his character that he does choose to share with us. And we can take comfort and solace and courage and faith in those things. But what we cannot do is seek to fully understand him. Because at the burning bush, when Moses holds his feet to the fire and he says, what is your name? God says, no, I am. I'm all that you need and you will not not understand me. And you will not confine me to your intellect. I am too big for that. And so, when we encounter God, and we look at the name Yahweh, and we hold it with the reverence that it deserves. We should respond to God with awe-filled wonder. The same way that Moses did. The same way that the saints of the Old Testament do. The same way that Paul does when he's confronted on the Damascus Road. We should, as believers, respond to God first with awe-filled wonder. This is why Proverbs tells us that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Because until we respond to God as he intended us to respond at the revelation of his name being I am, we cannot hope to understand the rest of scripture and appreciate it and him for what he is. And in all actuality, we should be thanking God for answering Moses' question in that way. Because it feels like an insufficient answer, but upon further thought, it reveals his all-sufficiency. It feels like he's shortchanging us, that he's being dodgy and that he's being mysterious, but what he's doing, he's doing us a favor. Because we can say, thank you, God, for being the God who heals. Thank you, God, for being the God who humbles. Thank you, God, for being the God that lifts up. Thank you, God, for being the God that is sufficient, that brings peace, that brings everything that I need. Thank you for being the God who provides. Thank you, God, for being the God who sees. And thank you, God, for loving us enough for not allowing us to limit you to the boxes we'd like to put you in. Thank you, God, for being so wild and so wonderful and so awe-inspiring that you're too big for a name. So the right response to Moses in the burning bush is to be filled with awestruck wonder and to say, thank you, God, for how big you are and for apparently how much you love me. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for in telling us your name, not telling us. We thank you that you are. That you are who you are and you always will be who you are. Thank you for the solace and the comfort and the peace that we find in that. God, we thank you that there are ways to understand you, that there are ways to know you, that there are ways to become familiar with you. But God, we also thank you for being so wild and so wonderful that you will not fit in our boxes. Thank you for being a God that's bigger than we understand. Thank you for who you are and how you've loved us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We're in the middle of a series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the gospel of Mark, looking at who Jesus is and what we know and learn and eventually come to love about him. This week, or when I sat down to write the sermon for this week, what I had scheduled was the kind of quintessential Mark sermon, which is what the gospel of Mark is known for almost more than anything else, which is to lead, you need to be the servant of all. And so I was going to talk about servant leadership and what that means. And we probably will do that one yet. But as I was looking for that passage, I came across another passage that I love. I think it's incredible. I actually think it's the most fantastical, awe-inspiring story in the life of Christ. And one of the most fantastic stories in the whole Bible. And we never really talk about it on Sunday morning, which is the transfiguration. So, if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Mark chapter 9. We're going to be looking at verses 2 through 10 today. The Transfiguration of Christ is, to me, one of the most remarkable stories in Scripture, and it's this picture of Jesus that we really don't get again until the book of Revelation. So, it's maybe the most remarkable story in the gospel outside of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. So as I was preparing, I came across this story and I reread it and I went, yeah, I want to talk about this because we hardly ever talk about the transfiguration. I can't remember ever hearing a sermon on the transfiguration of Christ. I've been taught about it in theology classes and maybe a Sunday school type setting, but I can't remember hearing a sermon on it. Doesn't mean I haven't. I just don't remember one. And you guys may not remember one either. I know I've never preached on it, but something dawned on me as I was reading it. And I went, yeah, I want to put that in front of grace, and I want us to have a chance to respond to that. So I'm going to read it so that we're all on the same page about what happened. Some of us might need a refresher. Some of us might not know what it is or what I'm talking about yet, and that's perfectly fine. So I'm going to read through, and then we're going to reflect on it just aling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses who were talking with Jesus. Okay, quick pause right there just so we understand what's happening. What's happening is what sounds like it's happening. Jesus says, hey, Peter, James, and John, come with me. I want to go somewhere. So they followed Jesus up a high mountain. And Peter, James, and John, just as an aside, are known as the inner circle of the disciples. So there was 12 disciples, but Peter, James, and John were the three that he was the closest with. James and John were brothers. Their nickname was the Sons of Thunder, which is just the coolest nickname in the Bible. So they go up to the top of the mountain with Jesus. Jesus is in blazing. He changes. He transfigures. His face starts to glow. He's dressed in blazing white, whiter than anyone could bleach. He starts to glow at the top of the mountain. And then Moses and Elijah appear next to him. Now, what's significant about that is Elijah is the only man to never experience death. God sent a fiery chariot down to scoop him up into heaven because he was so righteous he didn't want him to have to experience it. And Moses is the only man ever buried by God. He died on Mount Noab with no one around and God buried him himself and did the funeral himself. So these are the heroes of the Hebrew faith. And they're glowing like Christ is. All right? So that's what's happening on the top of this mountain. That's why I say it's a fantastic story. Then, pick it up in verse 5. Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. He did not know what to say. They were so frightened. Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the clouds. This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him. So now they're up there, these three fantastic figures, Jesus, Moses, and Elijah have descended back down from heaven, and they get to witness this. And then the cloud descends, and it's the voice of God. It's Father God now speaking. This is my son. I love him. Obey him. And that's significant because God came down in a cloud and appeared to Moses, and his face glowed so brightly that he had to cover it with a veil. So this is kind of a throwback to what God's done before. Now he's doing it for Jesus. And God appeared to Elijah in a mountain and spoke to him in a whisper. So he's done this to Moses and Elijah. Now he's doing it to Christ with the disciples near him. That's why it's a big moment. Suddenly, verse 8, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. They kept the matter to themselves, discussing what rising from the dead meant. Which that last one is just a little bit of a hint that they still didn't really understand who Jesus was and what he came to do because they didn't know what rising from the dead meant. They didn't know that he would have to do that. So that's the story. It's this remarkable moment in the life of Christ nestled in the middle of the Gospels. I find it to be completely fantastic and completely awe-inspiring. And when you read it, you kind of go, okay, well, what do I do with that? So you can talk about the theological implications of what's going on there, and that's fine. What's happening here is this is a picture of the end of days. This is an acknowledgement from God that Moses and Elijah, Elijah represents the prophets, Moses represents the law, and it's God saying that Jesus, he's got the Father saying that Jesus, God the Son, is fulfilling both the law and the prophets and is the conclusion of the lives and ministries of Moses and Elijah, that he is the right heir to those things. And now he's coming in to do things for all time. So that's the symbolism of what's happening there. And we can talk about that. But what I'd rather talk about is this. And this is a hard right turn, but you'll come with me. What I'd rather talk about is when I was a kid and the first time I saw Luke Skywalker. When I was a kid, I'm sure that there were other heroes that I was aware of before Luke Skywalker. Spider-Man and Batman and Superman, I'm sure. But there was something about when I was a kid and I saw Luke Skywalker for the first time. And I watched those Star Wars movies for the first time. And here's this hero. I'm completely in awe of him. I'm marveling at him. He's incredible. He defeats the Empire. I'm terrified of Darth Vader. There's never been a better villain in the history of villains in any sort of story creation ever. And Luke, I just remember being enamored with him. I just thought he was amazing. And I thought that the Star Wars movies were amazing and captivating and sweeping in a way that I had never experienced anything before in my life. And so when I read this story and I think about the way that Jesus appears and what he does and how fantastic it is, it conjures up within me those wisps and hints of what it felt like to be a kid and to worship a hero and to marvel at a hero, right? So when I read this, that's what I see here. And what occurred to me is that now when I think about the Transfiguration and what I saw that I wanted to put in front of grace Was that the Transfiguration? Reminds us that we were made to marvel at Christ We were made to marvel at Christ that childhoodination, that fragrance of adolescence, of how I felt when I saw Luke Skywalker on the screen, about how I felt about having big, bold heroes that I loved and I wanted to wear their shoes and their shirts and all that stuff. The way I felt when I saw those things, that's conjured up within me when I read the transfiguration and I see the depiction of my Jesus up on to marvel at Christ. And what I know that is true of us is that we all have this inclination in us to worship a hero. We all, at some point or another, had that childhood wonder where we marveled at someone else, where we made someone else the object of our affection and our worship, whether it was a fictional character or a real person, we all at different times in our life have looked and have glorified heroes that we see. And here's how I know this is true. There's many, many ways I know this is true, but here's one, and I thought this would be a fun exercise. I would like you to raise your hand if in your childhood bedroom you had a poster of an athlete or a celebrity or a superhero? Yeah. Jeffy, who was yours? It was Theismann, wasn't it? Yeah, it was Theismann. Tom, who was yours? Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan. Yeah, there you go. We all did. I had Michael Jordan. I don't know why. I was not a Green Bay Packers fan, and I never even cared about the guy. I think I got it for free, like a leftover at the book fair. So Sterling Sharp, Green Bay Packers, number 84. Great. There you go. Go Pack Go. We all had that when we were kids. Some of us, maybe you still do. I don't know. It's cool if you have a poster. And then we carry this into our culture, even in adulthood. We have celebrity worship. We worship celebrities. We have whole magazines that are published to tell us about the lives of the celebrities. And I don't understand them. There's a picture of like, look, Ashlyn Tolbert gets coffee just like I do. Like, great. I wonder how she takes it. Nobody cares. But we worship these celebrities. We put them on a pedestal. We see them. We marvel at them, and we wonder at them. And we also see this, and I've got to thread the needle here, but we see this in our political figures too, where one individual can often become the focal point of an entire party and the focal point of an ideology that says that is our hero and they are going to do what we need them to do to maintain our standards and the life that we want or to bring about the life that we want for our country. But we aggrandize our politicians and we engage in a little bit of hero worship from time to time. I'm not saying you do that with your vote, but I'm saying if we both think a little bit hard, we can see that happening where people make politicians their heroes. And it's because of this inclination that we have within us that drives us to worship heroes, that drives us to want to marvel at somebody or at something. And because of that, you may think that this idea of worshiping a hero is actually not a positive one. It's not something that we should do. That's something that we should grow out of. That's something that we leave in childhood, and in adulthood, we're more realistic about the expectations of our heroes, that we place on our heroes. We look up to them, but we don't worship them. We don't marvel at them. And this culture that we can create where we engage in hero worship is actually not a healthy one. So maybe we don't even agree with, we were created to marvel at Christ. We were created to worship the hero that is Christ. Maybe we find that premise fundamentally problematic because we've seen the downside of hero worship. But to that, I would suggest this, that all perversion is misplaced desire. All perversion in life, whenever we see that, all it is is a result of misplaced desire. We were all created with the desire for our spouse. We were all created with a desire for someone else physically. We all have that. And so God in his goodness gives us spouses that become the correct vessels of that desire. They're the ones that if you're, if you're a married man, your wife is to be the receiver of that desire. She is the vessel to hold that. She's where you put that. And it becomes perversion when we put it anywhere else besides the gift that God has given us and our spouse, right? We can have a desire for food. We can have a desire and appetite for good Right? to you with this inclination towards hero worship is when we put it in an athlete or a politician or a fictional character or anything else that's not Jesus, all we're doing is perverting a natural inclination to marvel at a hero, something that we all carry. And so this morning, what I want to suggest to you is to just consider the fact that you were made to marvel at a hero. You were made to worship a hero. You were made to hear stories like the transfiguration about your Jesus and go, whoa. You were made to read Revelation and hear Jesus go, I am the Alpha and the Omega and I hold the keys to death and Hades and go, whew, that's great. That's a natural inclination that God gave you so that you would turn that in praise and marvel to him. And so I just want, you probably haven't thought about that in a minute, but I want to reacquaint you with that possibility that God created you to actually marvel at him and to worship him. And so that inclination is a good one. The problem is we've misplaced it so many times that we don't trust it anymore. And this is why the older you are, I think the harder it is to marvel at Christ. The older you are, the harder it is to be awed at something, to wonder at something. Because with every passing year, with every year that goes by, the older we get, the more we've seen our heroes fall. The more they've let us down. The more the people that we place on the pedestal and that we want to be like, we learn they're human too. And we learn that the fictional characters are fake. And that Luke Skywalker doesn't exist. And what hero worship does when it's misplaced, when it's not, when Christ isn't the vessel for that worship, and we make people or things or places the vessels for that worship, what happens is they lead to disappointment and disillusionment. I'm disappointed and I don't understand. And then we retract and we bring that instinct back into ourselves. And instead of expressing it in its proper way, we repress it and we displace it and we say that's not appropriate for adults I'm a 55 year old man I don't need a hero yes you do yes you do and you were given an inclination by your Creator to marvel at and worship that hero and the Transfiguration shows him in this full display that reminds us that he's the savior of the universe and that that is true and that is right and that that is good. But I think the older we get, the harder it is to allow ourselves to worship a hero. But I want to try to encourage you to think about maybe it's because you've repressed a good natural inclination because life has taught you so, not because that's not a good thing to do. So we need to get over that challenge to marveling at Christ. There's one more challenge that I want to mention that I think we can butt up against when we are trying to marvel at Christ and worship our hero. And that is committing the mistake of Peter. Now, I don't know if you caught it. And I don't want you to look down yet because it'll ruin the setup. I don't know if you caught what Peter's first words were when he got up there at the transfiguration. But this is, to me, the most hilarious, stupidest thing that's said in the whole Bible. I can't get over how obnoxiously, mind-numbingly dumb what Peter said was. Okay? Let's just make sure we understand where we're at. Peter, the disciple of Christ, the Messiah, the incarnate God, is following him up a mountain. As he follows, the only person who's ever been 100% man and 100% God, as he follows the Savior of the universe who holds the keys to death and Hades up the mountain. That figure begins to glow in bright white and take on his heavenly form. And Peter begins to get a glimpse of what he condescended from to take on flesh. He begins to get to see that. And he looks around, and there's only three humans in the world that get into this circle, that get into this meeting, into this place, that have this experience. And then after Jesus starts to glow, one guy who never died is just back on a mountain again. And another guy that God did the funeral for that represents the biggest hero in his religion is sitting right there. And they just start talking, it says. They start chatting it up. Peter is in the middle of that. And this is Peter's response. I think it's hilarious. Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Jesus, listen, I know you guys are talking just real quick. Just want to mention, you're lucky I'm here. Would you like us to build you tents? It is a patently absurd thing to say. It is completely tone deaf and not self-aware at all. It would be like if I were somehow golfing with George W. Bush. And on the ninth fairway, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln just show up. And they start talking. And I went in, I was like, hey, what's up? Hey, George, do you guys have any questions for me? Like, it's the stupidest thing ever. Shut up, Peter. Shut up and marvel at your Jesus. But here's the mistake of Peter. Oh, this is one more thing that I think is funny. Parenthetically, verse 6 says, he did not know what to say. They were so frightened. So Mark, this is why it's funny. Mark is kind of Peter's right-hand man. He's kind of writing this on behalf of Peter, right? Mark wasn't a disciple. Peter was. And so Peter's telling him these stories. The transfiguration is in other gospels. And Peter's stupid comments in other gospels. This is the only one that says, hey, could you just put in there real quick? We were told we were really scared. We didn't know what to say. It's funny to me. But here's the mistake of Peter, and this is what we do. We tend to make it about ourselves and not our Savior. When Jesus shows up in our life, when he does amazing things, when we have a moment to sit back and marvel at our Savior, so often in those moments we make it about ourselves instead of shutting up and worshiping our hero, instead of being quiet and sitting down and marveling. What Peter should have done is fallen on his knees and worshiped his Savior and thanked his God that he was able to be here in this moment. But he missed it because he made it about himself. What he should have done is looked at James and John and go, are you seeing this? Holy smokes. But instead he made it about himself. Instead he said, okay, he immediately went to, what am I supposed to do with this? And there are times in my life when Jesus has shown up in an absolutely profound way. And what I do is I make it about myself. I make it about, okay, how am I going to take this and get over the next thing that I need to get over? How am I going to use this to move through? So often as a pastor, I go, okay, how do I teach this? How do I share this? I'm already starting to do it. On Saturday, I'm going to fly to Istanbul, and I have the incredible privilege of getting to work with a guy named Rusin and help train. I'm just going to be in the room with a group of Iranian pastors that lead illegal churches in Iran. And I'm going to sit in the room with that kind of faith. And I'm going to listen to Ru teach them and I'm going to watch them interact. I'm going to listen to the questions that they ask. And I can already feel my mind going to, how can I help in that room? How can I add value? How can I encourage them? What sermons should I bring back to share with grace? And you know what I probably need to do? Shut up and marvel at Christ and listen and be humbled by what he's doing in these places. There are times in our lives when Jesus shows up in an unexpectedly profound way, maybe through the birth of a child, through a miraculous healing, through times of great joy and times of great grief. And so often in those moments, because we don't know what else to do with ourselves, we miss it. And we make it about ourselves and not our Savior. When what we should be doing is shutting up and marveling at our Jesus and worshiping our hero. So as I was going through this and thinking through it and writing it, I realized that what I wanted to do this morning, rather than continue to preach to you through word, is I wanted to worship with you in communion and worship with you in song. So we're going to take communion together. And we're going to do that because what I want to do for the rest of our time together this morning is just stop and be still and marvel at our Jesus. I want us to stop and be still and worship our Savior. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take communion. So elders, you all can come up and get ready to serve that. And when we take communion, I'm not even going to pray to end the sermon because this is part of the sermon. Because as I was writing it, I went to Gibson. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to set you up. You finish the sermon in song. We will preach it in worship through communion and through song. And so as we take communion, I want to leave you with this thought of where we should focus as we seek to marvel at Jesus. He loves you. He died for you. He advocates for you. He waits for you. He loves you. He loves you enough to leave that form and condescend to take on human form. He loves you enough to die for you. He loves you enough to sit at the right hand of the Father and advocate for you as your high priest, and he loves you enough to wait for you where he's preparing a place. I don't know how Jesus has shown up in your life. I don't know what your moments are that you don't want to miss, but I would like to encourage you to take the next 10 to 15 minutes and marvel at your Savior. Look at the cross. Think about his love for you. Reflect on how he's shown up and what your gratitude is. But let's stop and shut up and worship our hero. So when we take communion, we do it because Jesus started this tradition before his death. When he took the bread that was on the Passover table the night that he was arrested and he broke it and he said, this is my body that was broken for you. Every time you do this, do this in remembrance of me. A way to phrase it this morning is every time you do this, marvel at me. Be awed by me. Wonder at me. Worship me. He's our hero, the savior of the universe. Then he took the wine and he poured it and he said, this is my blood that spilled out for you. Every time you do this, do this in remembrance of me. So instead of me praying, what I'm going to invite you to do is to go ahead and stand. And I'd like to encourage you as you go through, you go out the sides and back up the middle. If you're not comfortable taking communion, just walk right past the elders. You don't have to do that this morning. But if you are comfortable taking it, take the bread and dip it in the grape juice and cup that in your hand and go back to your seat and sit down and you pray yourself and you allow God to prepare your heart to marvel at him. And let's finish the service worshiping him in communion and worshiping him in song. Go ahead.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.