Sermons tagged with Goodness

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is the second part of our series called The Songs We Sing. Last week, we opened up and we did Graves in the Gardens. I gave you kind of a background of worship, and I started to, it's kind of trickled into me some good feedback that you guys are excited about this series, looking forward to it, looking forward to seeing what we've been singing in the Bible, what we will be singing in the Bible. And so I am thrilled to be going through this series with you because like I said, it's one that I've been wanting to do for a while. And last week when I got done preaching and we sang together, I was so encouraged at the voices being lifted up. And this morning we'll have the same opportunity. I'm going to preach about the song that we just sang because it's pulled straight out of Psalm chapter 8. And then we'll sing it again, knowing it better, having a better understanding of what it means in a full-throated, open-hearted way. And then we'll sing some other songs that are really special to us. And then we'll go into our week. So I'm feeling really good about this Sunday. And I just feel like it's worth saying sometimes that I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for my church. I'm so grateful for the love and the community that we experience here, for the handshakes and hugs and laughter and the lobby for the stories of the team coming back from Mexico I'm just grateful for y'all I'm grateful to be here and I'm excited to teach to you out of the book of Psalms this morning now to do a series focused on worship and to not have at least one morning out of the book of Psalms would be sacrilegious. It would be absolutely awful because Psalms is the hymn book of the Old Testament. It is the hymn book of the Hebrew people. It is intended to be sung. A vast majority of the Psalms are intended to be sung. And sometimes there's even instructions about it at the beginning of eight. You don't have to look there yet, but the very first thing it says is to the choir master, according to the Giddeth, nobody knows what that is, a Psalm of David, but they think it's a certain tune to which it's supposed to be sung. So David is even giving this to the choir master. I wrote this to praise our God. Let's sing it to this tune. Let's sing it together. A vast majority of the Psalms were written with the intention of God's body of believers singing them his words back to him, which I think is remarkable. And Psalms is a remarkable book. It sits in the dead center of our Bible. It's the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters. It's divided into five separate books within the book of Psalms. It has the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, which comes in at, I believe, 176 verses. It's a super long chapter of the Bible because it's a beautiful Hebrew poem. There's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, and each stanza, every line begins with that letter of the alphabet as the psalmist moves through. It's the one thing in the Bible that really makes me want to learn original Hebrew so I could hear that psalm read and sung in the original language in which it was intended because I've got a feeling that it is beautiful. I'll just wait until I get to heaven. I'm not actually going to do the work to learn Hebrew. That seems super hard. The seminary I chose, I chose it so I didn't have to learn original languages, so I'm not about to reverse course now, you know? But it's the longest book with the longest chapter, and it's filled with songs. And they're not all praise songs. They're divided up in different ways depending on who you ask and who's doing the dividing. You can find some people that divide them into five different types of Psalms, some as many as 20 and everything in between. But just a few examples of the types of Psalms that you can find in your Bible as you read through Psalms. And shame on me, I realize I haven't done a series in Psalms in the six and a half years I've been here. Shame on me for that. So I am promising you that coming up, we will do a series in Psalms at some point. But if you want to know some of the divisions of the book of Psalms, the different types that we have, there's Psalms of praise. Obviously, there's royal Psalms, Psalms of lament. And we're actually going to talk about those next week. I'm so grateful that our Bible has Psalms of lament, expressions of sadness and grief. There's what's called imprecatory psalms or psalms that are prayed and sung to seek vengeance over our enemies. David had a lot of reason to sing those. You probably don't. You probably don't have many enemies that you should sing imprecatory songs over, but they're in there. Psalms of enthronement and then psalms of pilgrimage. And I think these psalms of pilgrimage are really interesting. And I want to actually point you towards a book for my people who are readers. There's this book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is the pastor that faithfully translated the message to make scriptures a little bit more approachable for people who have never encountered them before. I read his biography last year, and I think it was an autobiography, a memoir, and it was one of the more moving books I've read in a long time. I was really, really touched by the heart of Eugene Peterson. And probably his most famous book is a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. And A Long Obedience in the Same Direction actually moves through what's called the Psalms of Ascent, this group of pilgrimage psalms And I've wanted to, that may be the Psalm series that we do. I'm either going to do it as a series as we walk through the book together, or I'm going to do it as like a Wednesday night course where those that want to come and we move through it together. But if you're a reader, I would highly encourage you to go grab or write down or put in your Goodreads, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But in the book of Psalms, we have all these different categories. We have all these different verses. And one of the things we see that I think is remarkable is that a majority of them are written by David. They're not all written by David. There's some authors that are just referred to as the sons of Asaph. And Asaph was, I believe, the choir master, the worship leader. And then these are his sons that he has passed this responsibility down to. And they've written their own Psalms in there. But one of the remarkable things about the book of Psalms is to see the heart of David just kind of filleted open on the table for you. And I love that God in his goodness includes the Psalms to offset the other stories of David. Because if you read the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, you can also see the stories in 1st Kings but more of details of the story are in 1st and 2nd Samuel and if you read the story of David you see this traditionally masculine macho guy who's fighting and killing and he kills Goliath and he fights lions and bears with his bare hands which you know who hasn't and then there's a song about him him. David has killed his tens of thousands. Saul has killed his thousands. It's just like, yeah, spear-throwing, meat-eating dude. And then you open Psalms, and here's a guy that's brokenhearted. Here's a guy that's highly emotional, highly vulnerable, who displays his tears and his lament and his repentance and his hopes and his fears and his deepest prayers for all of time to see. And the juxtaposition of Psalms and 1 and 2 Samuel kind of brings together this vision of what we can be as people and how multifaceted we can be. So I'm grateful that Psalms reads almost like a prayer journal of David at times. But to me, the most remarkable thing about the book of Psalms is that when we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. When we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. And you can sing the Psalms. Write this down if you want to, if you want something else to listen to. There's this, I don't know, I guess they're just a duet, a duo, I don't know the rules, a band, Shane and Shane. And they have an album called Psalms, where they have set the Psalms to music, and it's one of my favorites. I love it. I've loved it for years and years. You can go find it. It's on Spotify. It's on all the things. And you can sing the Psalms. I would highly recommend it. When we sing the Psalms, understand this, we are joining in to an ancient chorus of all the saints. I spoke last week about how when we worship, when we praise, when we sing out, that we join our brothers and sisters in Christ in unity. It unifies us according to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. When we sing together, it unifies us in this remarkable way. When we walk in Republican and Democrat, we walk in 80 and 20. We walk in stressed and not stressed, successful and not successful in a season of plenty and a season of need. And we lay all of those things down and we praise our God together and it unifies us. And I've just, I just got to tell you, I shared this with the band and the tech team before the service. But this is just a, just such a good picture of how it unifies us. if I don't say it I might die a little on the inside. So I'm just gonna have to Yesterday I was at the funeral for a friend of mine's wife 40 years old perfectly healthy Went on a girl's trip Heart heart attack, died in the bathroom. No other explanation. Incredibly sad thing. Two kids, sixth grader, third grader. So I drive down, I go to the funeral, and the husband's name, my buddy's name is Jeff. There's about 750 people in the room. And in between speakers, they put up a slideshow of Jodi and her family. And they started playing under that slideshow a song called Gratitude. We've sang it here a couple of times. It's going to be the last song that we sing this morning. They started playing Gratitude. And when that song started, Jeff, the husband who lost his wife a week ago, stood up and raised his hands in worship. And so, if you're at a funeral and the husband of the deceased woman stands up and raises his hands, you stand up and you raise your hands. So 750 people stand up and raise their hands to this song too. And then they spontaneously started singing it. And I'm six hours away from my church family, with my old church family, singing a song with myriad other church families, with our hands raised, choosing to praise in a moment of grief, and it just unifies you in a way that nothing else can. It was a remarkable moment. And when we sing it this morning, we join them and their praises to a God in spite of grief. We join Jeff in our prayers for him. We join the other congregations that sing that too. So when we sing the Psalms, we join into the ancient chorus of all the saints. Do you understand? When we sing in a few minutes, Psalm 8, back to God, we are singing it with David. We are singing it with the generations of David and Solomon and the faithful generations of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. We're singing it with Hezekiah and King Asa. We are singing it with the faithful generations, with the remnant that gets taken to Babylon. We are singing these psalms with Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. We are singing these psalms with the Maccabees who lit the menorah in Roman oppression. We are singing these psalms with the generations that cried out in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew We are singing these songs with Jesus himself and with the disciples And with the early churches that met in the basements in Rome when we sing the Psalms We are joining with the underground churches in China and in Lebanon and in Istanbul, singing God's songs back to him. One of my favorite quotes about the Psalms is by Charles Spurgeon, and I'll tell you why he deserves to be the one who writes this in a second. Also, I'm just going to compose myself. We've got a long way to go here. This is premature. I can't afford this. I only have one tissue. Jen's laughing at me the hardest, she knows. It's been an emotional weekend. Back off. All right. Spurgeon writes this, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. I love that. The book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. That when we sing Psalms, we are mounted on wings of eagles and we soar in the presence of God. Now let me tell you why Spurgeon has a right to write that sentence and should rightly be pointed out in any sermon on Psalms. If you don't know who Charles Haddon Spurgeon is, he was a preacher. He was loud. He had combed back hair and a beard and a belly, and he suffered from gout, and he liked to drink whiskey. So, just saying, he was called. He was and is called the Prince of Preachers. He holds the world record for preaching to the most people in one space at one time without a microphone and being heard. One time he was preaching in an auditorium. This is in the late 1800s in London. He was preaching in an auditorium, going through what he wanted to say, and some janitor in a hallway that he couldn't see bowed on his knees right there and accepted Jesus listening to Charles go through his sermon. It's an amazing story. The volume of work of Charles Spurgeon is unbelievable. The amount of books that he wrote. You can look up any of his sermons online, and they're long, wordy, lengthy sermons. And it was said of him that people would come from all over the world to hear him preach, and what they would say is, yeah, the sermon's great, but you need to listen to the man pray. He was known all over the world. He wrote tons of books. He ran a seminary out of his church. He wrote books for the seminarians that I have, that I refer to regularly, that still help me and my approach to pastoring and preaching and all the things. But his whole life, he worked on one book that became a three-volume set called The Treasury of David. It's a commentary on the book of Psalms. And he carried it with him wherever he went. He worked on it for decades. He would work on it for a bit. He'd put it back down, he'd pick it back up. You better believe that I've got the treasury of David in my office. And that every time I preach out of a psalm, that's the first place I go. If you're someone who appreciates materials like that, go get it. It's not like super expensive. Find it on Amazon with a cheesy cover. And he writes in the intro to his magnum opus, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. The book of Psalms is worthy of our study and it's worthy of our singing. And we ought to acknowledge when we're singing it back to God because when we do, we join into that ancient chorus of all the saints through all the decades. Now this morning, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 8. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to turn there. And I'm going to say this this morning. I don't try to get you to do a lot of stuff because I want it to matter when I ask you to do something. So I intentionally don't try to put pressure on you to do things. I just want you to be a good Christian adult and do what you want to do and do as the Spirit moves you. But I'm going to encourage us as a church to begin to bring our Bibles to church for Sunday mornings. Some of you like to read through apps. That's fine. Read your app. Bring it. Have your phone out. I'm giving you permission to have your phone out in church. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not scrolling something that you shouldn't be scrolling during a church service. And if you are someone who likes to read the Bible on your phone, that's fine to have it out. Just make sure that the screen is visible to the people next to you, okay? So that they can smack you if you're cheating and you're checking a score or something. But let's be people who bring our Bible to church. Because here's what I want for you. I want you to sit, and I want you to have your Bible open. And when something strikes you, I want you to be able to write a note. When you see a verse that you like, that you want to remember, I want you to be able to highlight it. I want your Bibles to serve you as kind of these spiritual journals where when you flip through them, you see where you've been. You know that God's spoken to you there before. When you go to different places, you have notes on the sides and you have dates and you have prayers so that as you flip through your Bible years from now, you see times when God was faithful. I can't tell you how many passages I have written beside them. What does this mean? God help me understand. And then I'll hear sermon on it, or I'll hear somebody teach about it. I'll read a book on it, and I'll turn to that passage, and I'll go, oh, I think I understand this now. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. I want to encourage you to bring your Bible to church. Open it up. Make notes about what I'm saying or what God is saying to you. And then let me just tell you this. If things get boring, as they often do, you can start flipping through your Bible like you're source checking me or you're just interested in something. And then you look double spiritual. The people in your row are going to be like, yo, they're cross-referencing Nate. That's, look at, look at them. That's super spiritual. So just bring it, man. We'll probably make you an elder if you start doing that stuff. And you're just doing it because you're bored. It's so many benefits. Let's start bringing our Bibles if we don't already. But right now, what I want you to do is grab the Bible. If you don't have one, grab the one in front of you and let's read Psalm 8 together. It's only nine verses and I thought it would be well worth it to spend some time reading it together this morning. Find Psalm 8. It says this. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Verse 9, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. What a wonderful, declarative psalm of praise. This is the psalm that we sing from. This is the psalm that when I'm done talking, we will sing from again. And as we look through it and we go through it together and see what it has to offer, I think there's such depth of wisdom and goodness here. I love the way that the psalm starts. Verse 1, if you look at it in your Bibles, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. What I love about this, and this is a point that Spurgeon made, not me. What I love about this is the inadequacy of that declaration. This is a psalm that is clearly meant to glorify the majesty of God, that is clearly meant to frame him up among the stars, that is clearly meant to swoop us up and to carry us away into a reverent awe of the majesty of God. This is a big deal psalm. This needs to resound through the generations. And so we would expect some honorifics to go along with the Lord's name, wouldn't we? We would expect some more adjectives to be there. How majestic and all of your grandeur and the worthiness of your ways and whatever else. We would expect it to be this grand entrance as we open this declaration about God. And yet it's not that. It's this humble, oh Lord, our Lord. That's the best David could muster. Oh Lord, our Lord. It feels so inadequate for the moment, but that's why it's so good. Because to start a majestic psalm that way, so humbly, is to confess without even having to say it out loud, my words are inadequate for your greatness, oh God. What else could David say but oh Lord, our Lord? What else is fitting? What honorifics should he put there that would adequately capture who our creator God is? There's nothing worthy enough of writing. So he just humbly puts, oh Lord, our Lord. And so when we sing those words in a few minutes, when we say, oh Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name, we are admitting in that song and in that declaration and with our voices and in our hearts that we are inadequate to adequately title God's glory and goodness. We are inadequate to adequately express and explain and capture who he is. And so we surrender to the simple, humble, oh Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name. It's such a good beginning of the psalm to start it with humility and with simplicity as we confess through our words and our spirits, our inadequacy to capture who our creator God is. Verse two, we're actually going to look at in a second. That becomes important when we start to think about how Jesus employed this psalm. But verse 3, I love, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. Psalm 8 proclaims that God has told the story of himself through his creation. The song that we are singing based out of Psalm 8 is called Tell the Story. And it talks about how creation tells the story of God and how we participate in that. When we look at creation, when we look at a sunset or a sunrise, when we're on a plane and we can look out and get that unique view of God's creation and his earth, when we hike and we see beautiful things, when we look into the heavens and we marvel at God, when we get away from the city and we can actually see the stars, when we do those things, the heavens are declaring the glory of God. They're preaching to us about the presence of God. The purpose of creation is to tell the story of the creator. And since you are his creation and you are the only one imbued with a voice and entrusted with a voice, then it is our responsibility to cry out to God in ways that the rest of creation cannot do. It is our responsibility to make sure that the rocks don't have to cry out to our God because we're going to do that because we are the part of his creation that was made to praise him. And so we do it loudly. We do it vigorously. We do it openheartedly. And I'm reminded in verse three, as it points to God's creation, kind of declaring who he is of Romans one, Paul writes about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the Lord has revealed himself in creation so that no man is without excuse. Through the millennia, men and women and children have looked at God's creation and marveled at the creator. The sun, the moon, and the stars tell the story of our God and who he is. And then we move into verses four and following what could be a little bit of a confusing portion. Because as I read it earlier, you may have picked up on the difference. If you were following along in an NIV, if you're using one of our Bibles this morning, then you're reading an N NIV maybe you pulled up an NIV on your app or that's what you carried in this morning but what you saw is in verse 4 when it says what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him your version says them so the ESV and some other versions say him and your version and some other versions say them. And so the question becomes, why is there a difference there? Why does that matter? Why is that important? Well, the Hebrew word there can be translated either way. And so some translations choose to say them because clearly some of these verses are referring to us, to humankind. I mean, when we read it, especially verse 4, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? That's not talking about Jesus. Who is Jesus that you would care about him, that you are mindful of him? Obviously, it's not talking about Jesus. It's us. Who are we that you would care about us? And to this point, just to bring this home, I do like that verse. I'm going to pause here. We're going to get back to him and them. But I like this thought, who am I that you would care for me? Why do I matter to you? I don't know if you've ever experienced someone singling you out in a way that made you feel special. You're like, why are you paying attention to me? Years ago, a few months before I moved to Raleigh, my pastor growing up died. He had had an aortic aneurysm, survived for a few years, developed an infection, and he passed away. He was very old, though. He was about 62, I think. He was too young. And his church had grown pretty significantly, and they had started other churches. So the people who were there were in the thousands. There was so many people who wanted to pay their respects for Pastor Buddy that they had to have a visitation the night before at the church. And the line was over an hour long to talk to the family. And when I got there, I hadn't been going to that church in years. I worked at another church. I grew up with, I grew up at that church and Buddy has three kids, Gabe, Joy, and Spring. Joy's my age. Gabe's a few years older than me. But Gabe and I, we were buddies growing up. We played Goldeneye together. He was my Goldeneye buddy. I don't know if that resonates with any of you. Like four of you, they're like, yes, Goldeneye buddies. But we weren't like super tight. And I really didn't expect to talk to anybody. I was just showing up because I have a lot of respect for Buddy and I love that family. And before I could get in line, I heard Gabe call my name. And I'm like, cool, I get to skip the line, which I love doing. And I go up to Gabe, and he hugs me, and he says, it's such a funny question. He goes, dude, what are you doing? Like, you got anything going on? I'm like, I'm at your dad's visitation, man. This is what I'm doing. You know, like, I didn't say that, but I said, no, I'm not busy. And he goes, come on. And so he leaves the line, and he takes me back to a hospitality room where there's Zaxby's. I'd love to say it was Chick-fil-A. It wasn't. There's Zaxby's. And he sits down, and he just wants to talk with me. And I just remember thinking, why are you talking with me of all these people why do i why am i the one that gets your time why are you treating me like this and in that case i really do think it was because i knew him when we remember growing up we we were at the church running around together we were the ones running around in in the service after it was over before there was thousands of people going there. And I guess nobody else kind of knew the family like I did. But the whole time I'm sitting there, I just felt such privilege of why in the world do you care about talking to me right now? And I feel like that's what the author of Psalms, David, is describing. God, why do you even notice us? Why are you calling me out in a crowd? Why do we matter to you? That should not be something that's lost on us, that God sees us, that he calls our name, and he says, hey, come here, let's talk. That's a remarkable thing. And so back to the he, him, and them. There are some verses that are very clearly talking about humankind, us. But there are some verses that are very clearly talking about Jesus. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You gave him dominion over the works of your hand. You have put all things under his feet. Clearly that's talking about Jesus. And so the question becomes in Psalm chapter 8, in verse 5, is the psalmist talking about us or Jesus? Yes. He's talking about both things. He's talking about both us and Christ. Again, because clearly there are some verses here that could not apply to Christ. Who is Christ that you should consider him? That doesn't really work out. He's part of the Trinity. So that has to be for us. But he has not put everything under our feet. He's put everything under Jesus' feet. So clearly that's for Jesus. And I'll tell you how I know that's for Jesus, because Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews also thought that it was for Jesus. If you turn to Hebrews, you'll see, I forget the chapter. I think maybe I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah, chapter 2. The author of Hebrews is comparing Jesus to the angels, saying that he's superior to the angels. To do that, he quotes Psalm 8 and uses it to point back to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 25 through 27, this is one of the times that you could flip and check me if you're bored and you'd look super spiritual. Paul is talking about Jesus and he's telling the people this is who Jesus is. He's the one that Psalm 8 was referring to. He's the Messiah that we are waiting on. The whole earth is in subjection to him. That is who we serve. And then Jesus himself uses this psalm to prove to a group of Pharisees that he's actually Jesus. He uses it to tick them off, which, you know, I'm a fan of. But this is what he says. Matthew 21 verses 15 and 16. I cheated. I had it marked. So I got there extra fast. Jesus says this, well, this isn't Jesus yet, but he'll talk soon. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. Now they're indignant because for, for someone to declare Hosanna to the Son of David is to declare them the Messiah. It is to declare them God incarnate. And they were not willing to accept that about Jesus. So the children acknowledged who Jesus was before the adults were willing to acknowledge it. They were indignant. Verse 16. And they said to him, Do you hear what these are saying? Like, you need to tell them to be quiet if you have any sense. And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read? Which is hilarious. Have you never read? That's like asking a Tennessee fan if they don't know that they got their tails kicked yesterday. Yes, of course they know that. Of course they do. Have you never read? It's ridiculous. Have you never read? Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise. It is a direct reference to Psalm chapter 8, where Jesus says, yeah, have you not read that Psalm? It's about me. So how can I be sure that Psalm 8 is about us and Jesus? Because Jesus told me. He uses it as a proof text to say, yeah, I am Hosanna, the son of David. And so what this means, what all this means, and I don't want you guys to miss this. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of our God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. That's what's packed into these nine verses. We declare the majesty of God. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We declare God is grand. God is big. God is huge. We declare it along with the churches down through the centuries. We declare glory unto God. We marvel at his wonder for us. Who are we that you should pick us out of a crowd, that you should call us, that you should talk to us, that you should care about us, that you should know us, that you would want my praise. Who am I that I matter to you, God? Why in the world did you send your son for me? So we marvel at God's love as we sing. And then, and then we declared glory for the risen Savior. We shine him in glory, understanding that Psalm 8 is also a messianic psalm that talks about Jesus and declares his glory and puts him in dominion and says the world is under his feet and we are in that world so we are subservient to him. So in this psalm, as we sing it and as we move through it, we declare the glory of God. We wonder at his love for us and we declare the glory of our risen Savior all in those nine verses. And if this all doesn't stir your soul to sing, I can't help but think I must be a terrible pastor. Because as I studied this, as I prepared this morning, as I thought through this, I couldn't wait to sing with you guys. If I were you, I would want me to shut up so I could start singing. That's what I would want right now. And so I'm going to do that right before I do. I just want to show you the words we're about to sing. And I want to show you the verses that they come from. So when we sing this song together, when we, in a few minutes, join the ancient chorus of believers who have been singing this song through the centuries. When we join the churches all over the world who have been singing this song and who might even sing this song or sing from the songs this morning. I want us to know what we're singing. So let's look. The first verse, the first words, O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name. That comes directly out of verse 1. Directly out of verse 1. We're singing that right back to God. And then the words right after that in the song are your glory on display. The works of your hands show us who you are. That's verses 2 and 3. Do you see? That's verses two and three when it says the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. We're singing those words back to God. That's where they're pulled from. On down we see verse three highlighted again where it says, O Lord, our Lord, you light up our world, the sun, moon, and stars. Declare who you are. Declare who you are. And then finally, we see verse 4, and O who am I, unworthy one, that you would give your only son? Who are you to care for me? Amazing love, how can it be? That's where directly out of verse 4, we wonder and marvel at the love that God has for us, that he would notice us and care about us. And then the whole psalm declares the glory of Jesus. Anytime we sing about Jesus, who am I that you would send your only son? That's Jesus. That's who we're singing about. And then we say and we declare, tell the story. As we sing, God use me to tell your story of creation. I would remind you, all of creation was made to tell the story of God and declare praise for him. We're the only part of that creation that was given a voice to praise him. So let's use it together as we close out in these songs together. I'm going to pray and then Aaron and the band's going to come and we're going to sing together. Father, you are worthy of our praise. You are worthy of our adoration. Our words and our praise and our declarations are insufficient for you. They are inadequate for you and who you are. We admit that, God, as we look to sing to you. Lord, would you fill our lungs with praise for you? Would you fill our hearts with your grace and your goodness and your love that we might pour it back out to you? Would what we experience as we sing now not simply be something that makes our Sunday morning better, but will it carry us on a wave of praise into our weeks and maybe wash back up on these shores next week ready to praise again. God, fill our hearts with praise. Fill our hearts with joy. And let us do now, God, what you created us to do, to sing your praises back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I'd love to do that after the service. Or you could just come to Discover Grace right after the service. We've got food for you and we've got space, so hang out with us there. Just for a little bit of clarity, Mikey, I don't know where you're sitting, but I lied to you in front of the whole church. This is not great. This is fine, I would call it. This is what I'm about to tell you is average. This is an average sermon for me. So let's adjust expectations to whatever you think my average is. If you think my average is good, then I got good news for you. You're going to like it. If you think it's not so good, then, you know, good luck in finding another church. And I mean it. I hope they serve you better than I can. This morning we are in the letters of John, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. We've been moving through the books of the New Testament. This summer and next summer we're doing a series called 27 where we go through the 27 books of the New Testament. But sometimes we are grouping them together because the letters of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John really all three have the same message. And 2nd John and 3rd John are one chapter. So it'd be tough to give you an overview of that one chapter. It's better to just group them together because the message that they preach, the message that they proclaim, is very similar all the way throughout. Now, John, the disciple, wrote these letters. He wrote them probably towards the end of his ministry. It's the same John that wrote the Gospel of John, in which he describes himself the disciple whom Jesus loved We've talked many times about John's unique relationship with Jesus. They were uniquely close They sat next to each other at dinner. Jesus told John some things that he didn't share with the other disciples There was a relational closeness there that I'm not sure Jesus or John experienced anywhere else in their life. And then John also wrote the book of Revelation that we're going to get to next summer. And then towards the end of his ministry, he wrote these three letters. And John is also super significant in church history because we believe that he probably kind of replaced Peter as the leader of the church after Peter passed away. Then John was a leader of the church. And then he discipled some guys named Ignatius and Polycarp, and they like took the church after John did. So he's kind of the link between the last of the biblical figures to lead the church. And then guys that we learn about in history books, not in the Bible. So these are significant letters that they fall at the end of his ministry and reveal to us what he thinks is most important to share with the people. And unlike some of the letters like Thessalonians that's written specifically to the church in Thessalonica, these letters are written to all the churches, to take one, to read it to the congregation, and then to get it to the next church down the road so they can read it there the next week. So these are just general advice, advisory letters to the church. And in 1, 2, and 3 John, we see this theme, this instruction, this singular idea come up multiple times. When we decided to do this series going through the books of the New Testament, I knew when we planned the series what I was going to preach when we got to the epistles of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. Because they proclaim one loud message the whole time. I knew what I was going to be preaching. To me, now maybe somebody else has preached an overview on these three, and they pulled a different theme out, and I don't want to be critical of that, but as I read it, when I look at these letters, there's one theme to talk about that if we don't talk about that, we're doing a disservice to these letters from John. And I went through, and I read the theme. I know what it is. And so I read the letters in preparation for the sermon. And I counted 12 times in seven chapters that John says basically the exact same thing. It's the most reiterative book in the Bible that I know of, besides maybe Proverbs. Just the same idea over and over and over again. He keeps bringing your attention back to this one singular principle. And it's captured in a lot of passages, but I'm going to look at 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6. It's kind of the seminal passage that captures this idea that shows up 11 and the other 11 ones that I counted off for myself is simply this idea. If you love God, your actions will prove it. If you love God, your life will bear that out. So clearly, I'm talking to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a a Christian then you get to kind of watch from the outside and see what you might want to get yourself into or what you might be considering but this isn't for you this is for the believers in the room and if you're a believer you've said at some point that you love God and what John says is that's great if that's true then your actions will bear it out we will it. And what's great is all of these letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, are like a commentary or a blow-up of this teaching that Jesus offers to the disciples that's only recorded in the Gospel of John. In John chapter 15, when Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. He says, to abide in me, you keep my commandments, and my commandments are that you would love. So then at the end of his life, John is reflecting back onto that singular teaching of Jesus. If you abide in me, you'll bear much fruit. How do you abide in me? You obey me. What does it mean to obey me? You obey my commandments. What's my commandment? That you would love one another. So then 12 different times in his swan songs to the church, he reiterates this idea. If you love me, if you love God, your actions will bear that out. And when you think about that, it makes a lot of sense because that's true of every relationship, right? Like I have a wife named Jen. She's wonderful. And if I told her every morning when we woke up, sweetheart, I love you so much. You're the best. Text her in the middle of the day, just thinking about you. I love you. Before we go to bed at night, hey, you're the best. I love you. That's great. But if my actions don't bear that out during the day, if I'm an unholy, impatient jerk to her, if I'm a terrible father to her children, if I give her crud about the house being dirty when I get home, when she's had a way more hectic day than I have, if I refuse to be helpful around the house, if I nitpick her and just make these little demands, if I just take the service that she offers the family for granted and I never express how much I appreciate it, if I don't cut the grass, if I'm lazy around the house, if I just don't do any of the stuff that a halfway decent husband is supposed to do, eventually she's going to stop believing it when I tell her that I love her, isn't she? If Aaron Winston, our wonderful children's pastor, says she loves the kids and she loves their families, but she doesn't bother to learn their names when they show up, eventually y'all are going to stop believing her when she says that she loves them. It's one thing to say it, but John says, put your money where your mouth is. If you say that you love God, then act like it. Then do the things that communicate love to him. If I want Jen to know that I love her, then I need to learn her and do the things that I know communicate love for her. I need to show up randomly in the middle of the day with a Chick-fil-A Coke because she didn't sleep well last night. When I do that, she knows that I love her. Jen needs to laugh at my jokes. That's all I need from her. That's all I require. Touch me sometimes. Just give me a pat on the back. You're great. And then when I make a joke like laugh and I know as long as she laughs at my joke the world is right everything's okay that's all we need but we learn to love in the language that people receive love and God says you know what I want you to do you know the important thing if you say that you love me you know how you show me you obey me you submit to submit to me. You trust me. You keep my commandments. So really the question becomes, why is obedience the thing that God asks of us to prove our love to him? And it's not that we have to prove our love to him, but why is that the proof of our love to him? I think it's for this reason. Obedience admits that God is the expert and we trust that expertise. Obedience admits that God is the expert on life, on humanity, on love, on the human condition, on the universe, and that we trust in that expertise. I'll tell you what got me thinking about that in this way. Sometime last year, some of the kind folks in the church started gently encouraging me that, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could have a cross somewhere on the stage. And so I thought through it, and I thought maybe there's a chance we can inlay one in this center panel. And we've got a lot of talented woodworkers at the church, and none of them were available. But Greg Taylor has tools. So I called Greg, and I asked if he would be interested in this. Some of y'all are picking up on that. I asked if he could help with this. And he said, yeah. He got excited about it, and we started kind of talking about what we could possibly do. He kind of sketched some stuff out and told me what he was thinking. And as he was telling me what he was thinking, I honestly thought, like, I don't think it's going to look good. I don't think, I don't, I don't think that's the way that we should go. It's not really, I don't see it like you see it. So that doesn't sound like a good idea to me. But I also know this, that knowing just a little bit more than most folks about the Bible does not make me a good interior designer. So you know what I did? I shut up. And I was like, all right, Master Woodworker, I don't see your plan. But you do, and you seem excited about it, so go ahead. And then he did that. And I came in here and I saw it. And I thought, I sure am glad I shut up, because that looks phenomenal. looks phenomenal thank you Greg the whole church got better because of that often in my role I have to trust the advice of others who have an expertise that I don't last summer when we were going through the purchase of the land we own four acres off of Litchford Road we'll find out more about what's gonna go there on the 10th of December, two weeks from today. Oh, December, I said? We're going to delay it even more. It's going to be so fun. It's going to keep you guys waiting. Yeah, thanks. Two weeks from now, September the 10th. I'm so focused on that sermon that what I want to say in that sermon kept me up all night last night. I couldn't go to sleep because I was thinking about that. And then I woke up and I was like, I kind of came to this morning. I was like, that's not even what I'm preaching this morning. I have to focus on this. I'm thinking about that a lot. But as we were going to buy the land last year, there was a team of people that were kind of informing us, informing the elders, informing me on the decisions that we should make. And they were spearheaded by one of the great partners of our church, a guy named Scott Hurst. Scott Hurst is a lifelong corporate real estate guy. And so he would call me and he would say, hey, what do you think we should do about this? Do you think we should make this kind of offer? Do you think we should do this or that or whatever? And I would always tell him, Scott, I don't know. Your vote is my vote. Whatever you think we should do is what I think we should do. I have no right to usurp your expertise and insert myself and think I know what to do as we evaluate whether or not to purchase land. I'm just trusting in your wisdom. In the same way, we had a group of people that we put together from the finance committee, from the elders, and one of the bankers that we have at the church. And we put together, I don't know if they're the finest financial minds in the church, but they were the most available at this time. So we put them in a room and we said, how much do we need to raise so that when we build the building, we're borrowing a responsible amount? And they gave me an amount. And as soon as they gave me the amount, I said, that sounds great. That's fine. Zero pushback. No questions. Let's go. Because I trust in the expertise of those people. So I'm happy to submit to what they think. Now, how ridiculously absurd would it be of me to hear the advice of those people and slough it off? To hear Greg say, hey, this is what I think we should do with the cross. And for me to be like, listen, Greg, I know you spent a lifetime in your basement, in your shop, working on projects. And I couldn't do what you've done in a whole lifetime. But I was a trim carpenter for six months when I was 25 years old. And I know a thing or two. And I'm just going to tell you, I don't like your vision, man. You need to rethink that. What if I looked at Scott Hurst when he gave me some advice on something? And I said, you know what? I didn't take a course on corporate real estate and sales deals when I was in seminary, but that was in the class right next door. And I picked up on some stuff. And I think I know a little bit better. What if I push back on the team of people that we asked to advise us on how much we need to raise? What if I push back and I said, that's not, that's a bad idea. That's not doable. I would be dumb. I'm not saying that I'm not. I'm just saying that would be proof. That'd be what you would need. I would be incredibly prideful and incredibly obstinate and incredibly short-sighted and incredibly myopic if I just threw off the advice of the experts in my life and just chose my own way. I was like, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to do this. Because I know how to read the Bible and run my mouth for 30 minutes, I'm the smartest and we're going to do what I say. No, it's dumb. It's silly. It's short-sighted and prideful to throw off that sort of wisdom. And yet, you guys see where I'm going with this? God is the author of the universe. Jesus is the founder and perfecter of your faith. God knew your very soul before he knit you in your mother's womb. He knows the hairs on your head. He knows the number. He knew the good work that he created you to walk in before he ever created you. To say that God knows you better than you know yourself is a vast understatement. He doesn't just know you. He knows the depth of you and all the possibilities of you and all the inclinations of you and all the future pathways of you. He knows all the things that bring you joy. He knows all the things that fill you up. Not only you, but everyone around you. For all of history, he designed all of this. He is the author of life. He is omniscient, meaning he is all-knowing. He is omnipresent, meaning he is everywhere. He can see every possible outcome of every possible scenario, and he can play that out better than any computer we could ever touch. He has all the algorithms. He can figure it out. We can't see past this minute, and he can see every outcome for all eternity, and he's told us some things about how we should live our lives, things that we should do and things that we shouldn't do, things that we should pursue and things that we should cut off, things that are good for us and things that will damage our soul. The author of the universe who sees into the infinite has told you those things and yet we choose to trust in our own wisdom and not his. In different ways and in different seasons and at different times. We throw off the wisdom of the infinite for the blindness of the broken. We have access. Through his word. Through his presence. Through his spirit. Through prayer. Through others. Who call Jesus their savior. We have access to him. To the divine. To the infinitely wise. And he makes it very clear what he wants us to do with our lives. He makes it very clear how we are supposed to love and how we are supposed to serve, how we are supposed to outdo one another with humility. How we are supposed to avoid certain things and embrace certain things. And in the face of that infinite wisdom that only wants what's best for us, we continue to choose the blindness of the broken. The pleasures of today sacrificing the joy of tomorrow. And I don't know where you are in your obedience to God. When I say things like, you know, there's ways in which we're all being disobedient, I don't know what comes to your mind. For some of us, we flash right away. We know the areas where we're allowing sin and the things that so easily entangle to prohibit us from running our race. When I say, what's an area of your life where you're just not being fully obedient to God, you know right away. And that's good. Others of us, because we've been at this a while, have probably settled into this place where we've begun to settle for good enough, where we worked really hard, we've done pretty well, things in life are going pretty good, we've got our spiritual disciplines, we've got our regimens, and we don't do them all the time, but we do them most of the time. And when I compare myself to the other people around me, I seem to be doing pretty well. And I know that there's more work that I could do, but it's hard. So I'm going to stop. And we settle into this kind of middle-of-the-road faith where we're just comfortable. And God, through his word and through his prayer and through worship, beckons us to more. He calls us into deeper obedience. He calls us to walk with him in stride. He calls us to abide in him. He offers this much more full life that's waiting for us on the other side of obedience, and yet we just choose to throw off the wisdom of the infinite that God knows what's best for us in favor of the blindness of the broken. No, I know what's best for myself. Do you understand that when we sin, that's what we do? We throw off God's wisdom and we choose our own wisdom? No, no, no, I know that you are the author of the universe. I know that you kind of wrote this thing and you know all the things there are to know, but for this one, I'm right. Listen, if you think I'm dumb, if I were to ignore the advice of Scott and corporate real estate, what does that make us all when we ignore God's expertise in our own life and we choose our own? It seems really silly to be disobedient when we put it that way, doesn't it? What must it feel like to God when we regularly and habitually refuse His expertise and choose our own? Is there anything, is there anything in life more infuriating than when you're talking with someone and you know you're right about a thing and they will not give it to you? They insist that you are wrong and that they are right and you don't know what universe they're from because you're right and you know you're right. And if you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This happened sometime last year and I don't remember the particular word. But Lily, my daughter, she was six at the time. And I think I've shared a little bit of this before. And again, I'm making up this conversation. I remember the gist of it, but I don't remember the word and the actual things that were said. But this is pretty much how the conversation went. She pointed to a word. It was mañana, the Spanish word for tomorrow. I think that's right, right? That means tomorrow. Yeah? You're Spanish adjacent. You should know. His wife speaks Spanish. And I said, she pointed to the word. She said, how do you say this, Daddy? And I said, you say that mañana. And she goes, I don't think that's right. And I'm like, based on what? Based on what expertise do you think I'm wrong? Like, I'm open. Maybe you know something I don't. And she goes, well, that's not, that's not how my, how my teacher at school says to say it. She's taking Spanish at school. She says, that's not how the Spanish teacher says to say it. And I said, how'd the Spanish teacher say that you should say it? And she says, banana. And I'm like, excuse me, banana? That's what you're going to enter the chat with? And I just kind of look at her. I said, I said, baby, that's not right. And she goes, yes, it is, dad. That's what my Spanish teacher said. I said, I do not believe that that's what your Spanish teacher taught you. Because if it is, there's going to be a really strongly worded email. Not that I'm passionate about Spanish education, but that's ridiculous. I'm going to write an email about that. And we're going back and forth. And I'm literally like, I'm even pulling out reason like, Lily, you have taken two months of Spanish. You're largely illiterate in English at this point in your life. I promise you, I know that it's mañana. Do you see that? That's an ñ. That means ñ, mañana. That's what that means. That's why it's there. And it didn't matter to her. Like, Lily, I took Spanish three times in high school. I only made it through. I took Spanish two twice. But I did take it three times, technically. I've been to Spanish-speaking countries. I've been exposed to that. If you drop me in the middle of Costa Rica, I could get home. There would be hand motions and things, but I could get back. Like, I know that's manana. And it was so infuriating because it didn't matter what I said. She was right, and I was wrong, and I literally had to finish the discussion about manana manana with agree to disagree. We have two different opinions about this. I was so mad. How infuriating is it? When you know the right thing to do, you know the right answer. And the person you're talking to is like, man, that's not right. And yet, as I was talking to our student pastor, Kyle, about this this week, he pointed it out and I thought it was a great point. Our God experiences so very little of that frustration. In those moments, when we're obstinate and we are insisting to him that it's pronounced manana, I do not believe that our God experiences frustration like we experience frustration. I do not believe he is angered by that like we are angered by that. In those moments of our profound obstinance, I believe that God is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I believe he is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I think of it like this. Some of you have walked this path. My children are not old enough to have walked this path, but I've watched other people walk it. And you know the pain of being a parent with adult children and watching those children choose a path that leads to pain. You've watched those children make choices and you can see the end of that road. You know how that's going to end. You know their life is going to be shattered because of it. You know their heart is going to break because of it. You know that they are going to shipwreck themselves with the choices they are making and you are impotent to stop them. And all you can do is sit back and hope that the crash isn't so bad. And hope that when they're ready to pick up the pieces, they ask you to help. Some of my older parents in the room know the pain of watching an adult child collide towards catastrophe knowing there is nothing that you can do. And I think that this is what our Father in Heaven experiences every day. Watching us just careen out of control, spiraling towards a collision or a blow-up or a shipwreck, knowing that what's there is going to end and hurt for us, hoping that when we get there, we allow him to help us pick up the pieces. I do not think our God experiences anger and frustration with us when we're disobedient the way that we understand those emotions. I think he experiences hurt because he knows he has something better for us. Do you ever think about why God asks us to do things? He tells us, he makes it very clear in scripture that we're not to lust, that we're to avoid sexual immorality. Are we to do that just because God wants us to live puritanical lives that aren't as exciting and interesting as those who don't put themselves under the standards of the Bible? Is that what God wants is just his children to be more puritanical and less indulgent than other people, and so let's just keep a lid on that. No. God knows that if you are married, that every time you look at someone who's not your spouse and you desire them in a way that you don't desire your spouse, that you cheapen your spouse and you make the relationship worse. Every time you look at someone outside your marriage and you compare them to who you are married to and you want things that they seem to have that your spouse doesn't seem to have, then you cheapen your spouse and you weaken your marriage. Every time. And God knows this. So he doesn't tell us not to lust because he wants us to be Puritans. That's a happy accident of avoiding lust. But the point is, it's only when we never do that, it only deepens our devotion to our spouse. It only deepens our attraction to our spouse. It only heightens our desire for them. And then in living within this happy, fulfilling marriage where you two are mutually desired, guess what you experience? Maximum happiness and joy in a happy marriage, which is what we all want. God says, he tells us in Psalms, David writes this. In his presence there is fullness of joy, his right hand is our pleasures forevermore. It's the idea that if we pursue him, if we obey him, then the best things are waiting for us there. Why does he tell you not to be greedy? Because he doesn't want you to have nice things? Because he wants you to live the life of a pauper? No, because he knows that if you're greedy, that those things that you want are going to own you. That you're going to live a life serving stuff and image. And it'll throw off your priorities and you won't be the spouse that you're supposed to be and you won't be the parent that you're supposed to be and you won't be the member of God's church and kingdom that you're supposed to be. Because you spend your life pursuing and hanging on to stuff. And there's no joy to be found there. If you think about anything in the Bible that God tells you to do, anything in the Bible that requires your obedience, and you ask yourself, and listen, I'll give you a hint. I always preach this. Whenever there is an instruction from God in the Bible, and I have to present it to you, hey, guys, we need to not be prideful. Hey, guys, we need to not lust. Hey, the Bible tells us that we need to pursue humility. Like, whatever it is, I'm always thinking in the back of my head, why? Why is it important for God that we would do those things? Why would he instruct his children in those things? And the conclusion, it looks a lot of different ways and a lot of different sermons, but this is the basic formula. He tells us to do something, A, because when we do it, we love other people and him better. Bottom line. When we don't lust, we're loving God and others better. When we're not prideful, we love God and others better. When we're not greedy, we love God and others better. When we show humility, we love God and others better. When we offer hospitality, we love God and others better. That's always the first answer. And then ancillary to that, the benefit of that, that should push our selfish souls directly to it, is that also it's what's best for us. Also, there is the greatest joy found in obedience. There is the greatest joy in the fullest life found in following the good shepherd. God asks us to be obedient. He puts things in front of us, not for his weird pleasure, not because he wants us to feel bad, not to browbeat us and make us puritanical, but because by walking in obedience to God, we love him and others better, and we find the greatest joy possible. So he urges his children to obey him. That's why I love this verse in John 10.10. It hangs over my desk. I think in this verse is the fundamental question for all of Christendom. Jesus in John 10 is referring to himself as the good shepherd, and he says he lays at the gate of the pen to protect us, and then he says this, the thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say, have it to the full. And I love that verse. I love that thought, that point. Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the full. And so it's no mistake. It's no exaggeration to say that Jesus wants the best life possible for you. That's not health and wealth, praying that. I'm not telling you if you follow him, you're going to be rich and no one in your family is ever going to get sick. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is in Jesus the promise is, if you follow your good shepherd and go where he leads you, and don't wander into your own fields trying to find your own sustenance, but if you trust him and you follow him and his wisdom, he will lead you to the best pastures, and in those pastures, you will find fullness of life, life to the full, life abundant. Meaning, there is no greater life waiting for you outside of God's commands. Which brings us to the fundamental question of Christianity. Jesus says, he's the good shepherd. Do you believe him? Jesus says, he will take you to the best pastures. Do you believe him? Jesus says, if you just put your head down and follow him, if you just abide in him, that you will find a fullness of joy there that you can find nowhere else. Do you believe him? He beckons with that teaching the simple question, hey, hey, hey, do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust Jesus? And John, at the end of his life, as he distills all the teaching of a lifetime to this singular point, hey, do you trust Jesus? Do you say that you love him? Do you say that you know him? Well then, obey him, because obedience proves trust. I don't know what areas of your life you would look at and say that they're out of sync with God. I don't know where you would find your disobedience. But whenever there's an area of our life that's not submitted to God and his wisdom, what we are saying with our actions is, I'm the expert here. I don't need you. I do not trust you to be the good shepherd. I will be my own shepherd and I will find my own pastures. Thanks very much. So that's the question that I would leave you with. When Jesus says that he's the good shepherd, when God says that he cares for us, when we're told that he's going to lead us into green pastures, when we're told that in his presence there is fullness of joy, in his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. Do you believe that? If you do, then obey him. And if you need to pray while I'm praying, if you need to pray while we're singing, and offer some areas of your life over to God where you've been walking in disobedience, declare that now before you walk out those doors that you will offer those over to him and you will walk in obedience and trust him to be the good shepherd. Prove to God with your obedience to his commands that you love him and you trust him. And what you'll find there is the best life possible. Let's pray. Father, I always say that we love you. And we do. I know that we do. And God, we believe. But sometimes we need you to help our unbelief. God, I know that this room is full of people who love you, who want to love you more, who want to know you better. But we have so many things clinging on to our souls, entangling us, keeping us from running our races. So we simply pray this morning, God, that you would help us see them. What are the things holding us back? What are the pockets of disobedience that we've clung to and allowed and fostered and nurtured over the years that we need to expose and let go? God, if there are things pressing on our hearts and our souls right now, would you not let us leave this place until we agree to submit those things to you? To walk in obedience in those areas once and for all. Lord, we love you. We pray that our actions this week would bear that out. That we would love you and others well. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. As I said earlier, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I will be speaking this week. Like I said, last week we did a silent sermon, and I've got largely good feedback from that, some really encouraging things. I've had some people who have been honest and said, hey, you know, it wasn't for me. And then I've got another section of people who said that was a pretty clever way to take a Sunday off. But let's not do that anymore. So I appreciate your honesty. I'm going to try my best to get through this sermon. I'm going to give you all the voice I got left for today. So Jen is in luck because I'm not going to be able to say a thing when I get done with this. But let's go. This is part five of our series called Powerful Prayers, where we're just looking at different prayers throughout Scripture and asking, what can we learn from these prayers? And the one that we're looking at this morning is one that is very near and dear to my heart. It's the one that when I went to Jen and I said, hey, I'm doing a series on powerful prayers, which prayer would you point me to? Because she's my number one sermon consultant, and she said the prayer of Hannah. She pointed me to this one because this one means a lot to us. The prayer of Hannah is found in 1 Samuel chapter 1. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's one in the seat back in front of you if you don't. But Hannah was married to a guy named Elkanah, and she wanted to have children and could not. She wanted desperately to have a child, to experience motherhood, and couldn't. She just couldn't conceive. And that's near and dear to our heart because part of mine and Jen's story is that for about six or seven years, we desperately wanted children. And the Lord, it just didn't work out. We couldn't get pregnant. We couldn't have one. And so we walked through that pain. And so to this day, when I encounter a couple that really desperately wants to experience parenthood and they can't, it's just not happening for them yet, my heart breaks for them. I immediately start praying for them. I immediately follow up for them, sometimes in borderline inappropriate and invasive ways. How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? It burdens me so much because I know the private pain of struggling to have children. I know what it is to go into lunch meetings, to go into one-on-ones, knowing they're going to ask me about it. They're going to ask me why we can't have kids yet, and I'm going to have to give them some canned answer, and it's the last thing in the world I want to talk about. Like, I know that pain. And so Hannah's pain resonates with me in her prayers in 1 Samuel. We don't hear all the words of her prayer in the first chapter, and then she sings a song of praise in the second chapter, but we're going to focus on what she was praying about and how it was processed, how it was interpreted by the priest, Eli, when she prayed it. So it's helpful if we think of what we're about to read. These are Hannah's earnest prayers for a child, but I think all of us have things in our life at different times that we want to. Sometimes it's for a child. And I know a couple of couples in the room and maybe some watching online who have prayed and prayed and prayed and they're sitting in the middle of blessing. We've got a couple of folks who I prayed for and they're pregnant and they're finally pregnant and God is good and that's wonderful. And now we're praying like crazy that they get to hold that healthy baby in the appropriate amount of weeks. Not too many, because mom's going to get tired of it, and not too few, because that's not good, but that they hold that healthy baby in the appropriate amount of weeks. We're praying hard for that. But I also know there's other things that we ardently pray for. Healing of loved ones. When we hear the C word, cancer, we hit our knees and we pray, right? We pray for, I know of another family in the church that their schedule is just untenable because the husband's job is just takes them away too much and he desperately needs another job. And so we're praying for that, that God will open up something there. I love that last song that we ended with, you make a way when there was no way. And you've done it before, we believe you'll do it again. And so we pray those prayers and we trust them to God. And I know that in this room, there's situations that are just driving you insane. I know another family that's dealing with aging parents and mom has no resources. The grandma has no resources. They have no more bandwidth. It seems like it's an impossible situation. What are we going to do? Well, we're going to have to pray about it. And so it's helpful for us when we look at the story of Hannah, if we think about the things in our own life that we genuinely want, that we deeply want, that we deeply need, that we're petitioning God for. God, will you please make a way? Will you please give? Will you please do? That's the mindset we need to be in as we encounter the prayers of Hannah. So in 1 Samuel 1, Hannah goes to the temple and she begins to pray fervently and ardently that God would bless her with a child. And while she's praying, the priest, Eli, notices her and accuses her of being drunk because her lips are moving, but there's no words coming out, and she looks like a crazy person. So he goes up to her, and he's like, hey, you got to get out of here. Like, go home. Go home, you worthless woman. You can't be here in the church. And it sounds harsh of Eli to do this, but I'm telling you from experience as a pastor, you got to keep your head on a swivel sometimes. One Wednesday night during rehearsal for our band, this was three, four years ago, pre-COVID, and I checked this with Jeffy, the guy who was singing. I call him Jeffy. His name's Jeff. I also call him SB. You can ask me what that means later. But Jeff was here this night, so he verified this this morning. Several years ago during rehearsal on a Wednesday night, a gentleman that had been kind of visiting the church, who's not coming anymore, you'll see why, came in and asked if this was an open rehearsal. And our worship pastor at the time was like, sure. So dude sat down. It was very clear that that guy got an early start on his evening, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And so he just starts barking out like suggestions to the band. You should do this song this way. They're like, what in the world? And so finally they had to say like, hey man, this is now a closed rehearsal. We're sorry. You got to go. And he went right outside to the bushes and began his purification process. And then he went on his merry way. So you got to, I don't blame Eli, right? You got to keep your head on a swivel. Sometimes it happens. So he goes to Hannah and he's like, hey, you're drunk. You need to get out of here. And this is Hannah's response in 1 Samuel 1, verse 15. So she goes up to the temple. She's praying ardently for a child. So ardently that the priest misinterprets her passion for drunkenness and confronts her. And I love that she says, she says, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm praying out of utter anxiety and vexation. I'm pouring it out unto the Lord. I don't know what else to do. It's this earnest and honest prayer. And Eli's response is wonderful. Eli's response is, may God bless your prayers because she's praying out of this honest spirit. And so the first thing we learn and see, I think, from Hannah's prayer and this experience in the temple is that God desires our honest prayers. He desires our honest prayers. He wants us to tell him what we're thinking and what we're feeling. He doesn't ask for us to hold back our anxiety and frustration and vexation. He welcomes our honest prayers. I know that this is true because I've seen honest prayers over the years that are cried out of just this honest place where we strip down all of the intricacies that we put up when we go to God in prayer and we just cry out earnestly to him. There's a story in my family. There's a story in my family. I think it's my great aunt or my great, great aunt. I don't know. It's one of those stories that's like, maybe it's like a 30% shot that it's true, but it's been passed down. And so I'm going to tell you, because for all I know, this happened. So there's some great aunt that I had in Southern Georgia or Southern Mississippi. That's where my family is from, which is why I'm so smart. And she was a church lady, man. She was a church lady through and through. She was there every time the doors were open. She told her neighbors about Jesus all the time. She loved God, and she was fiery and whatever. And she was a widow, and she didn't have very much money, and her roof was in shambles. It's leaking. It's clearly visible. She needs a new roof. She can't come close to affording one. And one day in frustration, she walks out into the front yard and she says loud enough for everybody to hear, God, all of my neighbors know that I'm your daughter. And if this is how you want them to see you taking care of your family, then so be it. But I wouldn't think you'd like my roof the way it is. And she walks back in the house. That was her prayer. Then I'm not kidding you. The next day, two dudes show up at the front door. Hey man, we're just here in the neighborhood. We're new roofers in the area. And we think that your house would really make a great kind of model home. So we'd love to redo your roof for free if that's okay with you. The very next day, it's as if God went, okay, Aunt So-and-so, you make a great point. Here you go. God desires our honest prayers. He desires our earnest prayers. And it's so funny when we pray. Sometimes, have you ever heard those people who when they pray, they start to use a vocabulary unknown to any of their friends outside of their prayers? These and thous and henceforth and Father God this and Father God that. And you're like, I never hear you say that outside of praying. We take on like this different language when we pray. We get more austere and serious when we pray. Now, we do need to approach the throne with a degree of respect, and I'm not advocating prayers like my great aunt prayed. I don't think that's really the design there. But we can go to God with honesty. We can go to God and we can tell him, I'm frustrated with you. I'm frustrated with you, God. I did when we were struggling to get pregnant. I would go to him and I would say, there's so many people who seem to be just getting pregnant on accident. Students that I taught that are dummies. And I know that that kid is going to struggle and end up in therapy, God, and you know it too. Why won't you bless us with kids? What's the deal? Like, I would go to him and be honest, and you can do that with God, because it's not like he doesn't know. It's not like he doesn't know that you're frustrated with him. It's not as if he doesn't know that you're doubting sometimes that these words are even reaching his ears. It's not like God doesn't know what we're doing, that we're living these duplicitous lives of sometimes I'm holy church guy and other times I'm just this shadowy version of myself that I don't like and don't identify with. It's not like God doesn't know that when we pray. It's not as if he doesn't know that when we sin. As a matter of fact, when we go to God and we try to put on this veneer and we try to act like we're full of faith when we're not, or that we're full of confidence when we're not, or that we're at total peace when we're really losing our minds, when we go to God dishonestly in word and in attitude and in emotion, I think we resemble the Cheetos kid from the commercial a few years back. It's one of my favorite commercials of all time. This dad's in a living room, right? There's a lot of white furniture and there's Cheeto dust all over everything. There's a bag of Cheetos there, Cheeto dust all over everything. And he's sitting there just kind of looking around going, good gravy, what in the world? And then his kids run through. And the last one that runs through is a redheaded kid, because of course it was a redheaded kid. And they're wearing, the redheaded kid is wearing all white, right? Cheeto dust just exploded all over this kid, all over his fingertips, wiped all over his shirt, yada, yada, yada. And his dad goes, hey, and catches him by the arm. And he goes, you know anything about this? And the kid goes, no, and then runs off, right? It's great. When we go to God and we try to be what we're not, we try to act more together than we are. We try to act less concerned or more faithful or more confident or less sinful than we are. We're the Cheetos kid. God's going, you know you can just tell me the truth, right? It's not like you're going to surprise me. I know every thought that you've ever had. I know you better than you. You can just tell me the truth. So I love the model of prayer from Hannah of going to the temple and praying out of her emotions. God, I want this. And what's so wonderful about her prayer is that Hannah was clearly a holy person. She was a spiritual person. And if you don't think of yourself as holy, the Bible defines you as holy once you become a Christian. If you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, then you're a believer. And God says, and the scripture says that when God looks at you, he sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ, that you are holy. So as a Christian, when you offer prayers, those prayers are holy prayers offered by a holy person. Hannah was a holy person, praying spiritually motivated good prayers, aligning with the heart of God that she would experience the blessing of parenthood so she could raise that child according to God's standards. And she was asking for a thing. And in this story, God grants her a son. The son's name is Samuel. Samuel goes on to be the last judge and the first high priest in a long time of Israel. He was David's priest. Incredibly influential in the Old Testament. And what I also love about this prayer of Hannah is that once she learns that she's pregnant, she goes back to the temple and she worships. And it's such a good model for us. Because I wonder about us in our prayer life, when do you pray the most? Is it when you need the most or is it when you're the most grateful? What activates you into prayer more than anything else? Is it that you're overwhelmed with God's goodness and you just have to pour out praise to him? Or is it, I need, I need, I need, I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared, I want, I want, I want. And so the model of Hannah is a good time to ask this question, do we go to God in want and in celebration? It's good, it's good to go to God in need. We've got to do that. But once he answers that prayer, once he relieves that stress, once he relieves those tensions, do we go back to him in gratitude? I would encourage you to track those things because it can be a special thing when you do. As I was looking at this prayer this week, I have some notes in my Bible. Underneath the highlighted prayer of Hannah for a child, it was highlighted because Jen and I had been praying that prayer for a long time, for seven years. And we found out that we were pregnant the first time on October 15th, 2014. And I wrote out to the side, God is good, next to that date. But on December the 8th, we found out that we miscarried that child. At the time, that was the hardest thing we'd ever walked through. But here's the thing, and I'll talk more about this later. When we lost that first child, whose name was going to be Samuel, God was still good. God was still good. I'll talk more about that in a second. Then I've got another date, May 12th, 2015, a couple days after Mother's Day. And it just says again, we're pregnant. That was Lily. And then another one. January 15th, 2016. She's yours, God. Thank you for Lily and Grace. When we pray for things that we ardently desire, it is right and good and helpful, not only just the right thing to do, but helpful for our faith to mark those times so that we go back and we can sing songs like what we just sung in earnesty. I've seen you move, and I know you'll do it again. And I've told you guys this before. When we put John and Lily down for bed, we sing. The last song we always sing is God is so good. God is so good, he's so good to me. There's a lot of variations to that. I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm going to because I'm a child. Whenever we're having Asian that night, whether it's Japanese or Chinese or whatever, I always sing the verse of God loves miso. He loves miso because I think of miso soup. And I'm like, God likes Asian food too, to celebrate the Asian food we had that night. Because I'm a moron. I'm a moron. But the last stanza that I always finish with, no matter what, before I put each kid down to remind myself of God's goodness, is he answers prayer. He answers prayer. He answers prayer. When God answers prayers in our life, we need to come back and mark those so that they can be reminders and harbingers for our faith. Because the other side of this that's not so fun to preach about, but we've all encountered, is this reality. Sometimes God says no to earnest prayers born out of godly desire and prayed by holy people. Sometimes the thing we pray for, and it's not a bad thing. It's not a selfish thing. It's not a give me the promotion so I can get the boat thing, which is a fine prayer if you want to pray for the boat. I don't care if you have a boat or not. I'm just saying that's a little bit different prayer than I'd love to experience parenthood, okay? When you're praying for holy things, that our children would come to know Christ, that he would heal the cancer, that this disease would go away, that this situation would be alleviated, that this untenable part of my life would be healed, that whatever it is, sometimes we go to God and we pray those things earnestly, and then the answer's no. And it sucks. I remember when I was teaching school, this would be in 2010, there's a kid in my class named Alex who I was really close with. I loved him a lot. His dad was Ron and Ron had cancer. And Ron had had cancer since 2008, Alex's sophomore year. And Alex, even though he was a senior, had two little brothers in like first grade and third grade. And Ron was dying. And we prayed for Ron a lot. And I remember one day at the school, I think it was after practice, we had Ron come in, because Ron used to set up a chair and watch football practice. We had Ron come into my classroom, and men there from different denominations but involved in the school gathered around Ron. And one Pentecostal brother even brought some oil. I had never seen prayer oil before, but I thought, you know, it can't hurt. I mean, it can't be bad for the prayer. Let's do it. And we lay our hands on Ron, and holy people prayed earnest prayers with holy motivations. And Ron died. And God said no. And it was really hard to look at Alex and be his chaplain and try to see his faith through that time. It was really hard to understand why God would choose to say no when there's two young kids still at the house. We prayed hard for God to heal my father-in-law two years ago. And he could have. He could have. He didn't. That'll do a number on your faith. You've heard no too. You've got the bad news too. You've prayed earnest, fervent, ardent, wholly motivated prayers, and God said no. And it left you feeling confused and bewildered and probably betrayed by God. So we can't bring up, pray earnest prayers, and you'll move mountains without going, yeah, but what do we do when he doesn't? I think the best answer for this is found in the prayers of John the Baptist. Now, I'm being presumptuous in assuming that John prayed about this. Nowhere in scripture, I'm just telling you honestly, okay, hear me. Nowhere in Scripture are we told directly that John the Baptist prayed about this particular situation. But I think it's safe to assume that he did. Because John was a man of prayer, this was a dire situation. John had been arrested by King Herod. He was in the king's dungeon, and he knew he was going to die. But John knew of a prophecy in Isaiah 35 that says, And John knows that Jesus is the Messiah. He's the coming one. He's the one that they were talking about in Isaiah 35. And I'm a prisoner, so I should be set free. But here I sit. And so he sends some representatives to Jesus to ask him, are you the guy or did I mess this up? Let's look in Matthew. We'll pick up the story in chapter 11. Chapter 11, verse 2. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk. Lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me. Other translations say, blessed is the one who does not fall away on my account. What's he telling John? He says, go tell John all the things in that prophecy are happening. Deaf people here. People are being raised from the dead. Blind people see. And prisoners are being set free. But you're not going to be one of them, John. And then, that all-important line, blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Which is Jesus' little tip to John. Keep the faith. I'm the one. I'm just not going to do what you think I'm going to do here. I'm just going to let you down a little bit here. And I think that this story is so vitally important to the Christian faith. Because what Jesus is saying here to echo, to reverberate through all the centuries is, Christians, there will come a time when I disappoint you because I don't do the thing that you think I'm going to do. Do you hear me? If you're a believer, you will reach a point in your faith when you are disappointed in Jesus, when you are let down by God, when he doesn't do a thing. It's within his power to heal my dad, and he didn't do it. You're going to reach that point, and you're going to be ticked, and you're going to be confused, and faith is going to be hard. And what does Jesus say to us in that moment? Blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. I'm gonna disappoint you because I'm not gonna do what you expect. And if you can keep the faith, you are blessed. So what do we do when God's answer is no to our earnest prayers? We cling to him. We cling to Jesus. We do what Peter did. I love this story. I should have put it in your notes. Jesus was teaching the crowds one day, and in the cryptic way that Jesus teaches, he thinned the crowd. And he said, I'm telling you the truth. Unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And the people who had been following him was like, all right, that's weird, man. We're been pretty cool with the miracles, but we're, we'll see you. They left him because that is weird. They know what he's talking about. We know he's talking about communion because we're smarter than they are. But they didn't know. That's not true. They didn't know about communion yet. So then he goes to the disciples and he says, are you guys going to leave me too? And Peter's response is, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? Isn't that great? If I ever get a tattoo, that's what I'm going to get. You're Jesus. Where am I going to go? There's so much in that. I don't understand what you just said, man. That was weird that you want people to eat you. I don't get it. I'm totally confused. I have no idea what you're doing. I have no idea where you want us to go, but I know you're Jesus. I know you're the Messiah. I know that. I'm just here. I'm in. Wherever we're going. Wherever you want to go, I'm in. It's just weird, man, and I don't get it. When our prayers aren't answered the way we want them to be answered, it's entirely okay to pray, you're Jesus, and I'm in. But I don't get it, man. I don't know what you're doing. That's an okay prayer. That might be the most honest needed prayer that you've ever prayed. Jesus, I know you're Jesus. And I know you died for me. And I know you've promised me a future. And I know you could have done something that you didn't do. And I don't understand it, but where else am I going to go? Because you're Jesus. When he doesn't move the mountain, we cling to the promises. Because here's the reality of it. We pray prayers in this life. Jesus answers prayers in eternity. One way of looking at it is that when we prayed for John to be healed, for my father-in-law to be healed from his cancer, he wasn't because he died. But the other way to look at that is to say he was because he lives in heaven for eternity. And his life is markedly better than ours right now. And I can't help but think, Jen and I talk about this all the time, it creates such sadness for her family that their dad, their patriarch, isn't with them anymore. But I can't help but think that when we get into eternity and we realize what a blip on the radar screen our life is compared to all of time, that the fact that he left early won't matter one little bit once they're with them in heaven for all of eternity. I can't help but think, as callous as that sounds sounds that it just won't matter as much. I think that's why Paul refers to hardships as though you struggle for a little while, though you endure this light momentary affliction. Oh, you mean like decades of cancer, like that light and momentary affliction? Oh, you mean like being an orphan, that light and momentary affliction, you jerk? Yeah, that one. Because when we get to eternity, God answers all of our prayers. One day, God will grant all of our prayers. This is the hope that we cling to in Jesus. That's why I always say that what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God and he came to earth. He sits on the throne at the right hand of the father. We believe that he did what he said he did. He said that he died and he rose again on the third day. And we believe that he's going to do what he said he's going to do, which is to come back one day and make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and to answer our prayers in eternity. So when he doesn't move the mountain and when the answer is no, and when we've prayed earnestly and honestly and we've poured our guts out to the Father. And he still says not right now. And we don't get it. We're sitting there like Peter going, you're Jesus, I don't understand what you're doing and I'm pretty mad at you right now, but where else am I gonna go? The promise of Christianity and of our faith is that those prayers will be answered in eternity. And that one day there is issued a forever yes and amen. And we cling to that day. And we cling to that hope. That even though, God, I don't understand why you would let this family walk through that, why you would let Alex lose his father, why you would say no to this earnest prayer request from this wonderful couple who desperately wants children. Even though, God, I don't understand your timing or why you're making them wait or why you've said no, even though I don't understand, I cling to you and I know that you're good and I know that if I knew everything that you knew that I would understand this decision exactly. And so we cling to him and we cling to his goodness. And we remember that God is good all the time. I've talked with people recently who were waiting on results of tests. Pregnancy tests, tests for cancer, body scans, whatever it was. And it comes back with good news, all clear. Or we're pregnant and it's healthy or whatever it is. And what immediately follows is God is good. Yes, God is good. But if he doesn't cure it, and if you're still barren, and if you don't get it, God's still good. And that's the promise and reality that we cling to even when nothing around us makes sense. Is knowing that one day, whether in this life or the next, it will. Because God is faithful and God keeps his promises. Let's pray. Father, we don't deserve you. We don't deserve your goodness and your grace and yet you shower it upon us. We thank you so much for who you are, for what you do, for how you love us. Lord, let us be people who pray honestly and openly and trust you with our emotions and trust you with our words. Let us be people of gratitude who come back to you in celebration when you grant us the thing that our heart longed for. But God, in the middle of a no, in the middle of a mountain that's not moving, walls that are not falling down, paths that are not being made, would you give us the faith to cling to you, to trust you, to know that one day everything will be yes and amen? For those walking through that right now, God, who have heard the no or who sit in the desperation and in the stress of the what if. God, would you just strengthen their faith today? Let them cling and hold tightly just a little bit longer as you minister to their broken spirit. It's in your son's name we ask all these things. Amen.

Thank you. Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that. We have a wonderful apparatus for that to happen after the service today at the Hootenanny, so we hope that everyone will stop by for that. Before I jump into the sermon, I just felt compelled to say this as we sing that last song. I run to the Father, I fall into grace, I'm done with the hiding, and I run again and again and again. I run to the Father. And it was just, it occurred to me that this weekend I had the opportunity to go out and see a good friend of mine. Lives a couple hours away. And I've just, I'm tired, you know. I mean, it's just life. It's nothing in particular. I have two young children and I'm a pastor. And sometimes you just get busy and I was tired and I just needed some time to kind of refresh. And so Jen saw that, and she sent me, and I went. And he's a good friend, and he loves Jesus, and he loves me, and my soul is refreshed for going. And it occurred to me as we sing that song, Run to the Father, that sometimes that means running to his people that he's put in your life so that he can use them to refresh you. So if that helps you in your week, if you feel tired, if you want to run to the Father, if you're done with the hiding, sometimes that's why he puts his children in your life so that you can run to them and he can refresh you through them. So just throwing that out there if that encourages any of you. This week, we're in part two of our series, The Traits of Grace. And I told you guys last week that these five things that we're going through starting last week are the defining characteristics of who we are as grace. So if you've been going to grace for years, these should sound very familiar to you. These should be an articulation of things that you already value, of things that you're already passionate about, of characteristics that you already see displayed in the church and in the partners of the church. And I told you last week that the elders were so animated by this and the staff was so excited by these things that we are going to make these a regular part of the church. We're going to bring these back all the time and make sure that our series are hitting on them and that we have them displayed in the lobby of the new space that we're going to be building and all of those things. So I've been excited to go through this with you guys. That's intense. You're not missing it. Whoever that is is not missing calls. I'll tell you that. You are reachable. You're on top of it. So these are articulations of who we already are. They're not a new direction for us. So if you're a longtime Grace partner, these should feel very familiar and affirming and give you the direction to run in as a partner. If you're newer to Grace, then you've picked the perfect time to start coming to Grace so that you can learn exactly what we're all about and decide if that's what you're about as well. So this week, we arrive at our second characteristic that I'll get to in a few minutes. And this characteristic is really based on something that I sensed in my interview process with the church back in 2017. And it's something that people pick up on all the time about Grace and Grace folks. One of my favorite things to do in my job is I get to go out and grab lunch or a beer or a coffee or whatever with people who are newer to the church. I get to know them. I get to know their story. I get to ask, how'd you end up at Grace? What brought you here? And all of those things. And it's a really, truly fun part of my job. So I would say if you're new to grace and this is your place, you're going here and we haven't gotten a chance to have a face-to-face yet and hang out, I would love to do that if you would reach out to me. Because sometimes I don't know how to reach out to you. So if you want to reach out to me and do that, I would love to do that. But without fail, in those conversations, when I hear their story and I say, so what brought you to grace? Like, how'd you find us? And then why are you staying? What keeps you here? Without fail, one of the answers that I hear literally almost every time is, Grace is just real. Grace is authentic. They're just real people there. Nobody's putting on airs. Nobody's walking around the church like they're holier than everyone else, right? Because you're not. Like, we're just a real authentic place. We're a real authentic group of people. And I think that works out really well for us because that's like the buzzword right now, right? That's what everybody wants to be. Everybody wants to be real. Everybody wants to be authentic. Everybody wants to be trustworthy and transparent and all the things because we live in a society where we've seen everybody debunked and everybody's messed up and everybody's got secrets and everybody's got something to be ashamed of. And so we don't believe any more than anybody's holier than thou. And at Grace, we don't either. We believe that we're all messed up. And people notice that. And they like that. And they say, yeah, it just feels real. It feels honest. It feels authentic. And then what they'll usually say to me, and I know this feels like me patting my own back. I'm really not. What they'll usually say to me is, you know, you're real as a pastor, like you're authentic in who you are, and that's trickled down to the church that you lead. And I'll always correct them and say, no, no, no, like I am real as a pastor. And what that means to me is I will never, ever, ever speak down to you. I will never be the pastor that says, I've figured out spiritual life and how to be holy, and I'm here to help you get on my level. I will never, ever do that. I'll do that for you, but I will never do that for others. I will never speak down to us as a congregation. I will always speak to, I will always share in conviction when it's time for that. I always share an insight when it's time for that. And nobody here will do that either. But I always tell them, it's not me that made grace authentic. It's not me that made grace gracious. When I was in my interview process, I specifically looked for a church where I could be the same person I was Wednesday and Friday night as I am on Sunday morning. I did not want to have to be any different or pretend that I was anything different. I did not want to be at a church where there's pressure put on the pastor to be the moral exemplar, the most spiritual, right-walking person in the room. I didn't want that because I knew I couldn't be that. And Grace hired that intentionally. I went to a church that was already real. I didn't create a culture of authenticity here. I was attracted to the culture of authenticity that already existed. Which, by the way, there's a couple people walking around with some gray Grace Riley shirts on. Those are the OG shirts. All right, that's the first Hootenanny shirt. So those are the people who were authentic to me when I got here, and all I've done is participate in a culture of authenticity and acceptance and grace that already existed. So the real question becomes this morning, because as we were putting up our traits on the whiteboard as a staff, and we were brainstorming, what are the traits of grace. One of the first things that went up there is authentic, real. That's who we are. We don't put on airs. And so I wasn't just going to say that authenticity was a trait of grace because that felt insufficient, right? That feels cheap to just write that down. Yeah, everybody writes that down. I was more interested in what's the secret sauce there? What was it about the people of grace long before I got here and half the people in the room got here that made this place a place that's authentic and humble and real? Really, the question we're asking this morning is, what is the source of grace's grace, right? What is the source of grace's grace? What makes us loving and accepting of all the people who come in? What makes us feel like nobody thinks we're better than anybody else? And as I thought about that, I started writing things down. And I wrote down this little stanza. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's a poem. Maybe it's a benediction. It's something that I think I might bring up over like repeatedly and read to us again. And it's in your notes. If you have notes today, if you're watching online, you can download those at the bottom of our live page and they might still be attached to the Gracevine. I don't know what we do. But you should have access to those. And on your notes is this paragraph or whatever it is, this benediction that I wrote out. But if you were to ask me, what is the source of Grace's grace? I would say it's this. At Grace, we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed because of the Spirit, and all of this is grace. All of those things are God's grace and goodness in our life. We understand, each one of us, when we walk in this room, we have an acute awareness that we are guilty of breaking harmony with the Father. We are guilty of making wrong choices. We are guilty of sin. We are broken. We are broken humans. And we are deeply flawed. Every one of us that I know at Grace walks around with an acute awareness that we do not have it all together. There's not a single person in here who I think would claim to have it all together. We know that we don't. We know that we're screw-ups. And here's the thing. If you're new to Grace, I just want to go ahead and relieve you of this tension so you don't feel like you have to put on airs either. We know you're a screw-up too, okay? We know that you got stuff that you don't want anybody in this room to know about. We know that. If it's not now, it's in the past. We know that. We all have that. We're all broken. We've all failed. We're all deeply flawed. That's part of life. That's part of humanity. It's part of who we are. And yet, what we know is that we are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. That we are guilty and yet forgiven. That we are broken, but we are restored. Because our good Father did that for us. Because he sent his Son to wipe those things away. We are blemished and yet we are righteous and clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And we know that all the goodness in us is because of the Father. Because when I look at grace, I see a lot of good. I see a lot of good people and good faces. I see a lot of people that I have watched be servants over the years. I see a lot of kindness and a lot of grace. I see a lot of love. When people who I know visit on Sunday morning, they say, man, you really have a loving congregation. I said, yeah, we do. We have sweet people. I see a lot of goodness here. But I know that you know that you're only good because the Father has made you so. You're not good because you did it yourself. You're not good because you're somehow better. You don't serve well and love well and offer grace because you're somehow superior to other people. No, you're good because God made you good. You're good because God imparted on you goodness. You're good because you know and you understand as a partner of grace that your righteous deeds are as filthy rags without Christ. That there is nothing good in you until you meet God. And so though there is goodness here, and though there is sweetness here, and though there is mature belief here, none of us are under the impression that that is for any reason than because God the Father loves us and makes us so. You know, grace, that you are righteous because of the Son. You know that when God looks at you, if you believe that, if you're a Christian, which is to 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. You know that if you believe that, that you are now clothed in the righteousness of Christ. And so when God looks at us, he sees his children, that he can't wait to welcome into heaven and sit at his banquet table for the marriage supper of the Lamb. He can't wait for that. And he looks at you and he sees righteousness, but it's not because you've white-knuckled your way into God's favor. It's because Jesus simply loves you, and Jesus died for you. And so we know at grace, yes, we are righteous. It had nothing to do with me. And so when other people come to grace, you can be righteous too, and it doesn't have to have anything to do with you. At grace, I know people who are wise. We have wisdom here. I'm very grateful for it. As we went through the process of buying the land, I was so relieved, and you ought to be too, that I had nothing to do with those decisions. We had professionals in the room who were seeing us through that, who were very kind to me and kept asking along the way, Nate, we think we ought to do this. Are you okay with this? Why are you asking me? All right, your vote is my vote. I don't know. I'm not going to tell you no. I'm going to do what you think we should do. We had wisdom in the room. When we meet as elders, there's wisdom there. When I interact with the staff, they have wisdom there in their ministries. When I interact with you, I see wisdom. But we know that we're not wise on our own accord. We're wise as a result of the Holy Spirit working in our life. We're wise as a result of the Holy Spirit sanctifying us and drawing us near to Him and drawing us near to Christ and imparting that wisdom and giving us those experiences that we need so that we can lead the church well. We know that if there is any wisdom here, it is not us or our own attributes. It is the Spirit working in us and through us that makes us wise. So we know that we are guilty and we know that we are fallen and we know that we are broken and yet restored. And we know that anything good in us is from God the Father and anything righteous in us is from God the Son and anything wise in us is from God the Spirit. And we walk in that humility. And all of that is grace. Grace is simply getting something that you do not deserve. So all of those things, the restoration and the forgiveness and the wisdom and the goodness and the righteousness are things that we do not deserve. But God lavishes on to us because he loves us. I am reminded of John 1 16, one of my favorite verses that says, from his goodness, we have all received grace upon grace. And it's just this picture, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. It's just this full, this picture of God being full of love and full of grace and full of goodness and full of mercy. And that spills out onto his children and it fills us up. And then as grace, as a church, we are filled up and we pour out that grace and that goodness and that love on the people around us. That's what gives grace its grace is the fullness of God and being gleeful recipients of the grace that he freely offers. And here's the thing, being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. Did you follow that? Being a gleeful recipient of freely given grace allows us to gleefully give the grace we freely get. This is what I think of when I think of the personality of grace almost more than anything else. We know who we are. We know we're not big deals. We know we're all just bundles of insecurities trying to make our way through life and find Jesus as we do it. We know that. We know that God pours his grace onto us. We are gleeful recipients of that grace, and as such, we happily and gleefully give it out to whoever we come in contact with. This is why the second trait of grace is that we are conduits of grace. Last week, we said we are kingdom builders. This week, we are conduits of grace. And I really do think that's the perfect word, conduit. It turns out in our little logos here, it's difficult to illustrate. So that's the cross. We just kind of, we punted collectively on that one, but the rest of them are great. We are conduits of grace. A conduit is something that is attached to a source and transfers what's in that source to another source. If you look it up, it can be a person or an organization that serves as a pathway for the attributes of another entity to another entity. And that's what we are. We stay plugged into the source. We are gleeful recipients of God's grace and goodness. And we pour that out on the people around us and the people who walk through these doors and the communities in which we exist and the circles that we walk in. We pour out God's grace and goodness onto others. That's what we do. That's our job. That's why we are conduits of grace. It doesn't stop with us. It flows into others. That's why it's poured into us to begin with. Jesus actually talks about this. In the verses that Caroline read so well earlier in the service, John 15, beginning unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. With grace, we abide in Christ. We stay connected to Jesus. Think of the branch, of a branch on an apple tree. As long as that branch is connected to the trunk, every season, whenever apple season is, I don't know, every season that it's apple season, that branch is going to produce fruit. Every season that it's not connected to the trunk, it's not going to produce fruit. That's just how it goes. When it's connected to the tree, it cannot help but produce fruit. Likewise, Christians, when we are connected to Jesus, when we are abiding in him, when we are walking with him, when we are connected to Jesus, we cannot help but bear fruit. So there's a couple ideas that we should talk about there. First, what does it mean to bear fruit? I had somebody ask me this week, is that the fruit of the Spirit that we find in Galatians? And I think that's just two separate passages using fruit, but it's not necessarily the same fruit. In Galatians, it's talking about the personal fruit of our character that we bear and the people that we become when we walk with Jesus. But in John 15, I think what he's saying is it's ministerial fruit. It's growth. It's pouring into others. It's seeing other people grow closer to Jesus as a result of our influence in their life. The language that we would put around it at Grace is, abide in me and I in you, and you will build much of my kingdom. That's what it means. It means producing that fruit. And I love how these traits do tie in together. And so when we abide in Christ, we walk with Christ, we pour that love, that grace, that goodness, that philanthropy out on other people and other organizations, and they flourish too. And that is the fruit that we bear. And so you also ask, what does it mean to abide in Christ? How do I do that? We're going to talk about that next week when I talk about being people of devotion. And if you heard me say that, and in your church Christian brain, you went, oh, devotion, yeah, got it. I know that sermon. Then I would just say to you, you're exactly who I'm preaching to next week. So come, and I might light your face on fire. That's what next week's going to be. I'm just telling you right now, I'm going to get after you next week, okay? So come on. And I don't do that a lot, but as I was preparing it this week, I thought, yeah, I think this is time. So I'm just giving you the heads up. Maybe next week is the time for waffles and pancakes. I don't know. At the house watching online. Anyways. Yeah, he's getting worked up. I'm going to turn this down. But when we abide in Christ, we remain attached to the trunk. We remain connected to him. We pour his grace and love out onto others. We cannot help but do it. An easy way to think about that, I got the perfect illustration this week as I was hanging out with the family. We were in our bonus room upstairs that we use as a playroom, and Jen had recently vacuumed the playroom, and because of that, the cord was laying on the ground in the middle of the room. Because Jen does this thing where she vacuums. I don't think she's wound a cord in her entire life. That's my job. Her job, vacuum. My job, put up the cord. So I had not done, in your defense, I had not done my job yet. I hadn't done what I was responsible for, and that's on me. So we're sitting there playing, and Lily's kind of like on the floor, and she reaches and she touches the cord of the vacuum and kind of jerks back. And I go, what's wrong, baby? And she goes, well, I didn't want to get electrified instead of electrocuted, which is great. We have a thing. I don't know if this is probably terrible parenting. When our kids say words incorrectly, we don't tell them. We just love it. We just, for years, anything that happened before today, whether it was three years ago or yesterday was last day in our house. And we, I know, I know, I know we miss those days. So we're not going to correct it. She didn't want to get electrified. And I said, oh baby, you don't, you don't have to worry about that. See that cord's not plugged in. It doesn't have any power. There's no juice in that. That cord is limp and useless and dead. And as I was explaining to her why she didn't have anything to fear, I was like, oh, this is great. This is perfect for Sunday because that's what it looks like to abide in Christ and not. That's what it looks like to be connected to Christ and not. That cord can sit there as a conduit of the electricity that's going to run the appliance. But until it's plugged into the source, it's not doing anything. Nothing's happening there. It's got to be plugged into the source for it to be effective in what it needs to do. Similarly, if we just get an extension cord and plug it into the source and it's not connected to anything on the other end, nothing happens. It's a glad recipient of the power coming from the source. It's a glad recipient of grace, but it is not yet a conduit because it hasn't transferred the contents anywhere else. It just sits there. And I think a lot of us sometimes, if I'm being honest, can fall into the habit of simply being extension cords. We're plugged in. We're doing our church thing, but we're not pouring out to anybody. We're not connected to any people on the other side of that producing fruit there. And so I think as a believer, and more pointedly as a partner of grace, we think of ourselves as conduits plugged into the source and plugged into the people so that we can be a glad conduit of grace that is freely given that we transfer to others, of love that is freely given that is transferred to others, of goodness and of mercy that is freely given to us that we can transfer on to others. Which is why we say this all the time around here. It's why we do everything we do. It's our mission statement. The five traits are basically an unpacking of this. What we say every week at Grace is that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. We are conduits. We stay plugged into Christ and we pour, we let his grace and goodness and love and mercy flow through us and we pour it into the lives of the people that we are connected to. And when you come to grace, we want to connect you to others so that they can be a part of that and you can be a part of that. This is really the beautiful simplicity of the Christian life, this idea of abiding in Christ, of being conduits and remaining plugged in. Because when you really pay attention to the Christian faith, which can seem intimidating if you're new. I have somebody in my men's Bible study who grew up Catholic. And I would never presume that this is true of all people who grew up Catholic, but he said for him and his experience with Catholicism, he'd had no encounter, very little encounters with the Bible. And so this is all new to him, and he feels like he's playing catch-up in his 60s. It can be very intimidating to try to learn Christianity mid-flight. And God knows this, and he makes it simple for us. He says, hey, listen, you want to know what I want you to do? Just abide in me. You know what my job is as a pastor? It's not necessarily to tell you all the details of all the things. It's to push you there. It's to push you to the cross. Every week to push you to Jesus. That is our singular, I don't know if you know this, that's our singular goal for a Sunday morning service. You know how we determine if it was good or not? Were they pushed a little bit closer to Jesus when they left than they were when they got here? Do we push them a little bit closer to God? Did we encourage them towards the Father? Was worship sweet and ushered them into the presence of the Father in such a way that made them feel a closeness with Him that maybe they hadn't felt in their week just yet? Was the sermon something that was good or convicting or encouraging or enlightening in some way that pushes us closer to Jesus? All we're trying to do is move the needle a little bit every week that you would get closer to Jesus, that you would abide in him more, that you would be plugged into him more, that you would sense his grace and his mercy and his goodness and your love and your life just a little bit more. So that in that growing and in that closeness, you would offer those things to others. And as I thought about the fact that we are a church that is authentic, we are real people here. It occurred to me that this really is a spiritual thing. Because if you were to, in your mind right now, think of the person in your life who you picture as the most spiritual person you know, one or two people, whoever that is, the person in your life that's closer to God than anybody else you know, I would bet you my paycheck that that person is one of the most gracious people you know. I would bet you my paycheck that whoever you're thinking of is one of the kindest, the gentlest, most gracious, accepting, loving people that you know. Because I think the more we receive Jesus' goodness and forgiveness and affection in our life, the easier it is to pour that out onto other people. So grace, we are conduits of grace. And to finish up, I would remind you of why, and then we'll pray. We are conduits of God's grace because we understand. We are guilty, yet forgiven. We are broken, yet restored. We are deeply flawed, yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. We are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. And we acknowledge that anything good here is you. We acknowledge that anything righteous here is you. Anything wise here is you. Father, may you create in each of us an increasing desire to be plugged into your son, to abide in him, to walk with him, that we might bear fruit, that we might be conduits of the goodness and grace that we receive from him and pour it out onto others. Would you create in us and in this church an attractive, appealing Christianity? One that I dare say is different than the one portrayed in culture. A Christianity that is not condemned but one that welcomes. Would you create in us a faith and a devotion to you that others want when they see it? That when others come into and out of our lives, they see our good works and so then glorify our Father who is in heaven. Make us your conduits as we go throughout our lives and our days and our weeks. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.