Sermons tagged with Heritage

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..

Well, good morning, Grace. Good morning, those of you here in person. Good morning online. Thank you so much for participating online. Last week was a roaring success. We were blown away by how many of you brave souls showed up and braved the elements to be here. We were thrilled with how many folks watched online. And like I said last week, this is a new season in the life of Grace. We are going to exist this way for a long while where we meet either in our home or yours. So we are grateful for the opportunity to meet. We know that God has his hand on this place, and I have just really enjoyed this morning. I'm so grateful we have our music intern Dalton Hayes with us. This is wonderful. If quarantine brings him to us, the book of Kings in the Bible. And we understand that when it was originally written, it was one big long book that got divided in two for the sake of scroll length, and now it's 1 and 2 Kings. So that's where we are. This morning, we're going to start in 2 Kings chapter 22. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and open it. If you have one at home, go ahead and open it there. I'm going to try to highlight as much of the scripture and read it together as we can, but we're going to cover a lot of stuff. We're going to be, if you want to mark your Bibles already, we're going to be in 2 Kings 22, then we're going to jump to 2 Chronicles 34, then back to 2 Kings 23. So if you need to mark things, go ahead and do that. It's always great to interact with Scripture as we go through it. This morning we arrive at who I believe is one of the most unsung heroes in all of the Bible. It's a king named Josiah. We may have heard of Josiah before. We may have even heard a sermon on Josiah before, but I would be willing to bet that many of us here and many of us online have not heard of Josiah. Maybe we've heard of him, but we don't know what he did. We don't know what his role was. And as I went through and read the accounts of Josiah, both in Kings and in Chronicles, I realized, you know, there's really no way for me to preach about Josiah in the way that I normally do. If you've been paying attention to my sermons, which I realize is a big if, most of us come for the worship, but if you've been paying attention to my sermons, you'll know that I tend to try to drive to one point. I don't like to do the three and four point sermons. I like to drive to one point, mostly because I think it's difficult to remember more points than that. I think it's more engaging to just drive to one thing and take that home with us. But as I prepared this week, I realized, man, Josiah is too big of a topic to do that with, and what happens in his life and what's left from his example is too great to boil down to one thing. And when I grew up, I don't know about you guys that grew up in church, but when I grew up going to church, it was three and four points. I mean, the pastor took the passage, he read part of the passage, and then he made a point about the passage, and then he jumped back into the passage, right? It was just this old school way of preaching. So this morning, if you'll allow me with Josiah, I'm going to go a little old school, and I'm just going to throw things out to you as we go through a story. We'll drive to one main point, but there's going to be some other things along the way that if you're a note taker, you may want to write down. We encounter Josiah in 2 Kings chapter 22. And one of the first things we learn about him, which is pretty interesting, is that he was eight years old when he assumed the throne. He was eight years old when he became the king of Israel. He's the youngest king, I think, that Israel gets. And what's interesting about Josiah is if you read Kings and Chronicles, as soon as a king is introduced, the text will immediately say one of two things. The text will immediately either say, so-and-so was righteous and did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, or so-and-so was evil and did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. Or so and so was evil and did what was right in their own eyes. And there's a lot more kings that did what was right in their own eyes and did what was right in the sight of the Lord. But when we meet Josiah, we learn right away he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. He followed the God of his father, David. So it harkens all the way back to the second king of Israel, the greatest king of Israel, and said he embraced the faith that David had. And I think this is super interesting that he does this. Because his father, Ammon, and his grandfather, Manasseh, were evil. They were idol-worshiping, evil, greedy kings. He did not come from a heritage of faith. And yet at the age of eight, when he takes over the throne, he has a heart that follows our God. And it just makes me wonder, I was curious about this this week, who is the silent voice, the unseen voice in Josiah's life that was speaking Jesus into his ear? Who was the unseen voice in his life? Who was the one whispering? Who was the uncle? Who was the aunt? Who was the nanny? Who was the teacher? That every time they had time with this future king, they said, you know who the true God is? You know who really loves you? You know who really purposed you? You know who really created you? You know who got us free from Egyptian slavery? You know who sent the flood and then restored his creation? You know who that is, right? Who was the unseen voice in this young prince's life that turned his heart towards the Father? And it just makes me appreciate the role that unseen voices have in our lives. Teachers, you might have kids in your classroom that have no other voices pointing their hearts to Jesus. You might be the unseen voice in their life. Aunts and uncles, you might have nieces and nephews that you love and for reason, their parents' hearts don't track with your heart. You might be the unseen voice that points their little hearts towards Jesus. Keep speaking that truth into their life. Keep telling them about their God. Keep telling them about their Savior. We never know who these unseen voices are in our lives, and those of you that have influence, particularly with little ones and even with adults, you never know when you might be the unseen voice that turns their heart towards Jesus and impacts the rest of their life. I can't wait to meet the person who was in Josiah's ear saying, you know who the true God is. But at the age of eight, he takes over as the king, and he turns his heart towards God. And somewhere in there, we're going to find out, we're going to jump to Chronicles 34 and get the timing of it exactly right, because the timing to me is very interesting. But somewhere in there, he looks at everything that had built up in Israel over the years. Over the many different kings in Israel, they had erected different idols, different gods, and now there existed this clutter and clamor all over the nation that were monuments to other gods, to Baal and to Asherah and to anybody else that they may have worshipped, to the golden calves that we learned about last week. So much so that these images began to clutter the temple itself. Inside and outside the temple, the one place that was supposed to be the house of God and representative of God's presence with his children in Israel. Even that was cluttered with the presence of other idols. And so Josiah, like a madman, starts to clear away all of this clutter. And in the midst of doing that in the temple, they uncovered the book of the law. They uncovered the book of the law, which was the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, written by Moses. This was the closest thing in this time in history that they had to the Bible. This was their holy text. It's our same holy text, and they found it. And I want you to look at Josiah's reaction to finding the Bible, to finding the book of the law tucked away in the temple. We're going to pick it up in 2 Kings 22, verse 11. When the king, that's Josiah, heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes. So they found it, they brought it somewhere, and then they read it to him. He said, I want you to read it to me. So they read it to him. And when he heard it, he tore his clothes. And the king commanded a bunch of people. I'm not going to read all those names in verse 12 and embarrass myself. He commanded a bunch of people. And he said in 13, go inquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah concerning the words of this book that have been found. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us. So in the midst of this cleanup, somebody finds the book of the law dusty and covered up with other things in the temple. They get it. News travels back to Josiah that they found it. He says, bring it to me and read it to me. And as they read the book of the law to him, he tore his clothes, which is a symbol of anguish. We're going to get to what that means a little bit later, but it's a sign of anguish. It's a sign of repentance. It's a sign of pain. He tears his clothes and he laments at what their fathers did. He said that the wrath of the Lord is kindled against us because of the sins of our fathers. He's acknowledging that over the decades, over the generations, the men and the women who had leadership in the country, who were saddled with spiritual leadership, led them off course. And now they're so far off course that he weeps at the reality of where they are. I picture it like this. I picture the book of the law, the Bible, God's word that Josiah read that day. As he's looking at it as the king, I picture it's a map of the ocean. And Josiah is supposed to be anchored over here, and they have drifted so far away that the faith of the nation is not even recognizable to David and to Abraham and to Moses. And he realizes in that moment that they've drifted so far off course, carried by the current of culture, by the shifting winds of preference and of intellect and of education and of convenience. They drifted away from who they were supposed to be and where they were supposed to be. And in the face of the law, in the face of God's word, he realizes, my goodness, we are so far from who we should be. Our fathers allowed us to drift, and God is rightly angry with us for the type of faith that we perpetuate. And it makes me realize, as I read that, that if we want to hand our children a solid faith, it must be anchored in Scripture. If we want to hand our children a solid faith, it must be anchored in Scripture. And so that's applicable to parents, it's applicable to those who lead young people, but it's applicable for us as we age, as we think about the next generation of grace. One of the things I got to see when I got here is we just had a group of girls graduate from high school, and they are all part of grace, and they're all, well, they went off to colleges, and now they're back home because, you know, COVID is a thing. But they went off for a minute together in faith, and then, and I've seen a picture of them as little girls playing soccer together at events at grace. And then yesterday was my little girl's first soccer game. And it was super fun. Everyone was terrible at it. But there's four kids on the team, including Lily, who go to Grace. And we got to take a picture with all of them yesterday. And that's the next generation of kids that's going to move through this place. And for those of us that care about God's church and care about his kingdom and care about the generations moving through this place, not just the children, but the parents of those young children and those of you moving into empty nests and people who have been through that before, each generation that follows, if we want to, if we care about handing the generations that will follow us a solid faith, it must be anchored in Scripture. And this seems like an obvious point. And I'm sure that all of you and all of you would agree with me. Sure, yeah, it must be anchored in Scripture. But do we practically do this? I'm not trying to poke too hard here. But how many of our ideas about the things going on in our culture are really us following the dictates of culture and the currents of change and the currents of intellect and the currents of education and not about anchoring ourselves in Scripture? How many of our attitudes towards homosexuality have to do with what the prevailing thought in our culture is and not what the prevailing teaching in our Scripture is? How many of our thoughts about politics have to do with the prevailing winds of culture and not anchored in Scripture? How much of the morality that we would pass on to our kids, how we discipline and what we tell them is right and wrong, is anchored in how we feel about things, is anchored in and shifted by what culture tells us should be important to us and not what Scripture tells us should be important to us. How many of us, me included, are guilty of looking at the way that culture shifts, of feeling that shift beneath our feet, and then beginning to try to bend this around what our community is telling us, rather than remaining anchored in God's Word. If we want to hand our children a faith that matters, it must be anchored in God's Word. And how can we anchor our faith in God's word if we are not students of it? Listen, I try the best I can to teach the Bible every week. It's my deep conviction that that's my responsibility, to teach you God's word, to enliven it, to make it so that you want to go home and read it on your own. But I will tell you this readily. If I'm the only Bible you're getting every week, it's going to be a shallow faith. If this is it, and then you just go from here, and you don't encounter God's word again, and we're not getting up and we're not reading it, we're not pouring over it, we're not learning it for ourselves, and we're not going back and going, what did he preach? Does that even make sense? If we're not doing that and this is all you're getting of Bible, of God's word, that's not enough. That's a paltry diet. We want to hand our children a faith that matters. It's got to be anchored in God's word. When I anchor our faith in God's Word, we have to be loving students of God's Word. But I thought that this was also interesting about Josiah. As I was studying him and I was looking at his life, some of the pieces weren't coming together all the way for me. So I flipped over to the Chronicles account of him. So if you want to flip to 2 Chronicles 34, you can. Really quickly, this is a good place for an aside. If you care about things like this, this is just kind of, here, Steve, I'm going to step this way, so get ready to move the camera. This is just an aside, okay? All right, good. Kings and Chronicles share the same stories. Kings shares the same block of time as Chronicles does. And so you may wonder, why did the Bible include two editions of the same stories with the same characters? Well, here's why. Kings was written during a time of slavery. The conclusion of both countries is that they were carried off to Assyria and Babylon as slaves. And there are generations of Hebrews being born into slavery, and their dads and their granddads are telling them, hey, you're the chosen people of God the Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You are his chosen people. He has a special plan for you. He has land promised to you. And they're looking around going, you sure? Because I'm a slave right now. Really, it feels like that God's kind of impotent. There's a generation of people angry at God for not keeping his promises. And so Kings is written to break the hearts of a hard-hearted people and help them see it is your father's fault that you're here in the first place. It's a book of conviction. Chronicles was written to what's called the post-exilic community. Kings was written to the exilic community, the ones in slavery, but eventually they all wandered back. So if that's interesting to you, there's that. All right, I'm going to jump back into the sermon proper. So in Chronicles chapter 34, we have the account of Josiah. And I want to highlight two verses here for you. The first one is verse 3. It says this, and I thought it was interesting. Okay. If you're tracking along, he's 16 years old. For some reason at 16, he decides that he is going to pursue the religion of his father, David. That's when his heart is turned. That's when God captures his heart. And that's when he begins to pursue that faith. Four years after the internal changes begin, he begins to purge the nation of all the idols that are there. And then this happens in verse 8. Now in the 18th year of his reign, so this is now, he's 26, this is 10 years after. When he had cleansed the land and the house, he sent. Okay. I stopped there at he sent because that's where we pick up the story in Kings. The rest of that is when in his 18th year, he sent those people to the temple. They cleared out the temple. They uncovered the book of the law. And then we pick up the story in Kings. But what's so interesting to me is this. When he was 16 years old, his heart was turned towards the Lord. He began clearly to work on himself and his own understanding. As a result of his own understanding, he began to clear out the idols that existed. As a result of clearing out the idols that existed, he uncovered the word of the Lord. Do you understand? It was 10 years between a heart conviction and a deep life-changing encounter with the Lord. It was 10 years between his discovery of faith and a place where he went, oh my gosh, and tore his clothes and repented and realized what he had been doing. He waited 10 years on the voice of the Lord. Some of us get frustrated and spiritually discouraged if we have to wait one week and we don't feel the voice of the Lord. Some of us say, you know what? I'm going to do quiet times now. That's going to be a thing. I heard what Nate just said about being dedicated to Scripture. I should really do that. One of these days, I promise you I'm going to do this. I'm going to preach a sermon, and I'm going to come up here, and I'm going to say, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor. You should read your Bibles more. Let's pray. And that's going to be enough. That's going to be enough where all of us are going to go home and be like, yeah, that's actually a fair point. And so maybe you've decided to do that. And you go home. It's day one. You get up. You make your coffee. You sit down. You read it. Your wife says, what did you learn? You're like, stuff. Something. Josiah seems okay. All right, and the next day, what'd you learn? The next day, what'd you learn? I don't know, reading the Bible seems silly. We can't wait on the Lord three days. Josiah waited on him 10 years with all these obstacles in the way. I think another thing we can learn from the life of Josiah is to find God, remove the obstacles. To find God, move towards him. Some of us just sit passively waiting, God, why won't you speak to me? Why won't you talk to me? Why don't I seem to feel your presence and hear your voice like so-and-so does? Maybe it's because of all the junk that we have in our life, all the idols that have accumulated all over the country and even in the very temple that are covering up the book of the law. Maybe, just maybe, we should take some steps towards God. And this isn't how it works for everybody. Sometimes we take a step towards God and he comes in and he meets us right where we are. I've heard of miraculous conversions of somebody who was an alcoholic on Friday and on Saturday they weren't because they met Jesus. And that's amazing. But that's not everybody's story. Sometimes it's 10 years of pursuit before we finally go, oh, hang in there. Persevere. Pursue the Father. This is even true in the New Testament. Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, and it's this miraculous story of the sinning son being met by the saving Father. But it wasn't until he started moving towards the Father that the Father met him. While he was still a long way off, the Father went to meet him, but when he was in that foreign country, he began to move towards the Father. If we want to pursue God, move towards him, remove idols, instead of passively wondering why we can't hear from him. I think it's worth it. But then we see, if we look back to 2 Kings chapter 23, we see the conclusion of the story of Josiah. And this is the thing that I'm most excited about. If you look at 2 Kings 23, after being convicted, after removing the idols, after finding the book of the law, and now after tearing his clothes and being fearful of the wrath of God because of the sins of the father, because of the shifting faith that they were handed, he goes on a rampage in chapter 23. It's a detailed chronicle of just everything that he removes from the country. Thing after thing after thing after thing, clutter after clutter after clutter. He strips it all down until all that's left are the things of God. And then he caps it off this way. And I think it's incredibly appropriate. I had to read this story three different times before I saw the magnitude of why it finishes here, but I think it's such a huge deal. He cleanses all of these things, and then he reinst of the moving towards, after all of the conviction, he reinstituted Passover. And I think that this is so important. The Passover hadn't been celebrated like this since the time of the judges. The kings had mucked it up so badly that this was an unrecognizable ceremony for them. But you might remember if you were here last fall, we looked at the festivals of the Hebrew people and the one that points to Jesus more than any other festival is the Passover. It's a reminder of the 10th plague in Egypt when God sent the angel of death over the nation of Egypt and he said, unless you have the blood of a spotless lamb over your doorpost, then I'm gonna take the life of your firstborn son. And in that plague, God, through the blood of the lamb, he protected his children. He took them away from slavery into freedom because of the blood of the lamb. And the whole thing is a picture of salvation. They didn't realize it, but they thought they were looking back on a time that they were saved. And Passover, every time they celebrated it, was really looking forward to a coming Messiah. You understand that? And so how he kept off his repentance is to focus on Christ. That is why I think that Josiah is a picture of repentance. We hear this word a lot in church, to repent of sin and what that means. And I talked about it before, so I won't belabor it today. But if you ever need to know what repentance actually looks like, because repentance is to be moving in one direction, stop what you're doing and move in the opposite direction. So they're moving towards deeper idolatry. He stops and he doesn't just say, we're not gonna worship those idols anymore, but he knocks away all the clutter as he pursues God and he finishes his repentance. He stops, and he doesn't just say, we're not going to worship those idols anymore, but he knocks away all the clutter as he pursues God, and he finishes his repentance. He stops his repentance. His repentance lands in a place where he's focused on Jesus. You see? This is proper repentance. Sometimes we stop short, and we forget where our focus belongs. Last week we looked at Jehu. We talked about how Jehu started all the cleansing process, but he didn't go the full measure. He wasn't the picture of repentance. Josiah is a picture of repentance, and he stops all of that by finishing, by reinstituting a ceremony that focused his eyes on Christ. Incidentally, all the clutter and all the movement and all the stuff that we need to do to find God works by focusing our eyes on Christ anyways. I was reminded as I thought about this and what proper repentance really is of Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And this is what Josiah did. He's surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, all the kings that came before him, all the people of Israel, all of heaven looking down on his reign saying, what will you do? And he began to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangled all the idols that would obedient to verse 2 in that chapter, which is this. How? How do we do this? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We can't throw off those idols ourselves. We can't do a good enough job of that on our own. We can't live perfectly enough to satisfy God, but Christ has already done that for us. So the proper end of repentance is to say, God, I'm giving you everything here, but my eyes are focused on Jesus. Josiah took the repentance. He took the obedience of the people. He focused them back on the Father, and he capped it off with Passover and focusing their eyes on Christ, which is why we continue. That's our version of Easter. When we celebrate Easter, what are we doing? We're looking back on the sacrifice that saved us, and we are anticipating a future with that Jesus. Josiah's life, 2 Kings chapter 22 and 23 and 2 Chronicles chapter 34, are a living, breathing picture of what happens in Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, of throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race that is set before us by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. That's who King Josiah was. That's an example we're following. And I hope that we will learn from him this morning and carry forward just some of those as we go through our weeks this week. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. God, we are grateful for your conviction when it is both gentle and when it's more forceful. Father, we are grateful for your word. Make grace students of it. Give us a heart for it. Help us to love it. Give us a deeper understanding of it than we've ever had. Jesus, focus our eyes on you. Let us trust in you to remove the obstacles. Let us trust in you to draw us near the Father. Make us a church that has our eyes focused on you. God, thank you for your servant, Josiah, and the examples that we learn from him. I pray that in little ways this week, you would make us all a little bit more like him and help us focus a little bit more on you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. All right. Thank you guys for coming in person this week. Thank you for watching online this week. We will see you in whatever capacity next week. Have a great week.

Well, good morning, Grace. It's so good to get to be with you in this way again. You know, I was thinking, typically in the summer, attendance and engagement in church, particularly in Grace, will fall off a little bit because we're all over the place. We're going to the beach, we're going on vacation, we're visiting people, and that's great. We love that we have the opportunity to do those things, but watching sermons this way and having church this way is actually kind of a nice thing as we get into the teeth of the summer that we can all come together from wherever we are. I know that by the time we are previewing this or premiering this, Jen and I are going to be at the beach watching it. So it's fun that we can all kind of scatter but still participate together as we come back for this moment. Last week, we took a break from our series in Acts, and we addressed the issues of racial inequality and racial injustice that we believe are still existent and pervasive in our culture. I can't imagine that you're watching this sermon and participating along with us at Grace and somehow missed that one last week, but in case you did, I would appreciate it if you would watch that. It was a special thing for me to share and a direction that I felt compelled to go. This week, however, we jump back into our series going through the book of Acts together called Still the Church. And the idea is kind of twofold. It's to help us understand where we came from. It's to help us understand that these are our roots, that we stand on the shoulders of this church, that these are our origins or our genesis, that the book of Acts depicts for us and details for us in a beautifully written letter by Luke. The activities and the behaviors and the events of the early church. I kind of picture a baby deer learning to walk as we watch the machinations of the church in Acts and we see it come to fruition and become the institution that we know it as today. But also as we go through Acts, we become familiar with that story and we see our roots and our heritage as people, members of the church, the body of Christ, children of God. So we're reminded that that's our heritage, but we are also extracting from it practices and principles and philosophies that still apply today. And we're saying that the church that we see in Acts is still the church that we should emulate now. What this church looks like is what grace looks like or should look like. And so when we started, we kind of have moved through the narrative. This is one of the narrative books in the New Testament. And it starts just so we can kind of orient ourself in the story today. Jesus goes to heaven. He leaves behind the disciples. He says, wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit and then go and share the gospel in all the corners of the world. That's your job. Go and build the church. That's what he leaves them there to do. So they go into this upper room and they wait for the gift of the Spirit. While they're waiting in this upper room, thousands of people in Jerusalem are clamoring around to see what they're going to say and what they're going to do and what's going to happen next in this great movement. And they receive the gift of the Spirit like flaming tongues on the day of Pentecost. And they go out on the balcony and they preach. They preach the gospel. They tell the story of who Jesus is and who he was. And the people hear it and they're moved and they say, we want in, what do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. And we talked about that repentance being the fundamental repentance of the church. That before we can become a Christian, that the very first thing we must do is repent of whatever we thought Jesus was and accept that he was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is. That's the repentance on which the entire church is built on. And then after that, we saw that after that repentance, 3,000 were added to the church. The church is now a mega church. It's's booming in Jerusalem. It's this movement. And then in Acts 2, verses 42 through 47, we have the quintessential passage that describes the early church. And we spent two weeks in that passage pulling out what we refer to as early church distinctives. What are the things that characterized the church then that should characterize our church now? After that in the story, as Luke, the author of Acts, shares, Peter and John are called into the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin is the religious ruling body of Israel. They're called in and they have to give an account for what they're doing. This movement is getting traction and they're put on trial for it. And at the conclusion of that trial, we see one of my favorite bits of advice in the Bible. This is a freebie. I can't go through Acts without bringing this up. I wanted to do a whole sermon on it, but it just didn't work out. But it's this advice from Gamaliel, one of the rabbis, one of the Pharisees, who is speaking to the Sanhedrin as they're trying to decide what to do about this movement. Do we quell it? Do we stamp it out? Or do we let it breathe? And Gamaliel says, if this is for man, then it will fade. But if it is from God, then there's nothing we can do to stop it anyways. And so they relent, and they watch, and they see this movement of the church begin to take off. And soon it's not just the disciples who are teaching, but it's others around them who are hearing and learning and who are being moved and who have the gift to teach. And so they're going out and they're doing that. And one of the people who's going out and teaching is a man named Stephen. It says that Stephen was teaching around the synagogue of the freedmen, which was a group of Hellenistic Jews. The synagogue of the freedmen, we assume, were former Roman slaves who had been freed. They were likely Greek-speaking Jews and not Hebrew-speaking Jews. And so they got together in their own synagogue and they met there, the synagogue of the freedmen. And apparently Stephen was working some signs and wonders that were having an impact on them. When we see Stephen in Acts chapter six, he's doing these things, he's performing signs and wonders, legitimate miracles that are drawing people into his ministry. And we assume based on their reaction that he's drawing people away from the synagogue of the freedmen. And so some of the leaders within that synagogue, we assume, it just says people in the synagogue, but we assume that they were the leaders, begin to get offended. They begin to get upset. They begin to get resentful of Stephen and his witness and his ministry and the power and efficacy of what he's doing. So they, we think, a lot of scholars think that they probably had a formal debate, a dressed debate where people came and attended and they argued back and forth with each other. But we know whether it was formal or informal that they debated and that the power of his words and his wisdom blew them away, that there was nothing they could do to touch Stephen. Everything they threw at him that he had an answer for. Everything he said they could not refute. He was leading this new church in this new way towards Christ away from what they were teaching at the synagogue of the freedmen. And when they couldn't defeat him in debate, they decided that what they would do is just levy false charges against him. That they would drum people up, that they would stir people up. Basically, what they did is they went to the Sanhedrin and they went and they told the principal. They told the teachers what they did. They were having a quarrel. They were having a spat with Stephen. They couldn't win. Stephen always got the better of them. And so they took their ball and they went home. They went, well, we're gonna go tattle on you. And so they went to the religious establishment and they told on Stephen. If you have a Bible with you this morning or wherever you're watching this, you can turn to Acts chapter 6. That's where we pick the story up. Acts chapter 6, I'm going to start reading in verse 12 and go all the way through 7-1. This is what the people from the synagogue and the scribes, and they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council. And they set up false witness who said, This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law. For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us. And gazing at him, all who sat in the council saw that his face was like that of an angel. And the high priest said, are these things so? So his enemies, the people who opposed him, can't beat him in debate. They can't put down his movement or the movement that he's shepherding and participating in. And so they drum up these false charges and they stir up the people and they go and they throw him in front of the Sanhedrin, in front of the ruling body. And they levy these claims against them that are so funny and I think easy for us to understand. I think one of the big issues going on in our culture right now is the lack of nuance in our discourse. We don't know what news sources to trust. We don't know what tweets to trust. We don't know what Facebook posts to trust because what we do inevitably is the opposing side puts out a message or shares a thing or there's a speech or there's a statement or there's an action or an event. And then what the opposite side will do is pull the different things out that will fire up the base of their side and say, hey, this side said these things. When it's not an accurate picture of everything that they said, it's the worst possible picture of these little things that they said. And this is exactly what the synagogue of the freedmen is doing to Stephen. They're not giving the whole picture of what he's been teaching to the Sanhedrin. They're pulling out these little things that they know will be most offensive to them and accusing him of those things. They're saying he's claiming that Jesus of Nazareth came to overthrow the laws and the customs of Moses. Now that's an audacious claim because the laws and the customs of Moses, that's our Old Testament. That's what they refer to as the law and the prophets. That's their law. That's their Bible. That's everything that they know and cling to. And so for them to accuse Stephen of teaching that Jesus came to overthrow those things and to change them, that's a bombastic claim. That's salacious. That's a difficult thing to defend if it's true. And then to say that he intends to tear down the temple. That is the most holy place in Israel. That is the seat of power. It represents the very presence of God. It is the center of Hebrew worship. And to say that Jesus intends to tear that down, it's a big deal. And they get fired up too. The Sanhedrin hear this, they're upset, they're fired up, and they look at Stephen and they say, is this true? Is that really what you're teaching? Now listen, Stephen knows what's at stake with his answer. Stephen knows that if he navigates this poorly, he's going to die. And he knows that it's not an easy death. He knows that if he navigates this poorly, that they are going to kill him and they're going to kill him by stoning him. And just so we're all clear on what stoning is, they tie your hands around your back and push you off a cliff and drop big rocks on you until you die. It is death by blunt force trauma. Stephen knows that if he navigates this poorly, that that's what's waiting on him. When they ask him, what do you say, Stephen? He knows that if he answers poorly, he's going to pay with his life. And so I wonder, at this moment, if we put ourselves there in Stephen's place, how would we respond? What would we expect of Stephen? I wonder how I would respond. I think that I would expect Stephen, and I'm pretty sure I would want to calm everybody down. It's happening in a whirlwind. Emotions are there. They've misrepresented my story. I would want to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, hey, let's just take it easy. Let's just take a beat. Let's talk about this. And if you're Stephen, you can correct how they've been misled. You can say, yeah, Jesus is going to change the way that we adhere to some of the laws of Moses, but he said himself that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. He's the fulfillment of those customs. Yes, Jesus did say that he's going to tear down the temple, but in a way that he makes the need for it obsolete because the temple is the very presence of God. And now in this New Testament, in this new way, since the righteous one has died for us, we have the Holy Spirit in our hearts and we are now the new temples of God. That temple is good and we should respect it and it is wonderful, but it's no longer needed. If I were Stephen, I would want to show the Sanhedrin, listen, we're on the same team. We follow the same God. The things I'm preaching are a continuation of the things that you believe and have taught. I would want for them desperately to see that all I was doing is teaching a continuation of what they've always believed. And I would want them to see that Jesus was actually the fulfillment of all the things that they hold dear. I would want to throw the temple of the freedmen under the bus and say, they're just mad because they're losing people. They're just mad because they can't beat me. They're just upset. This is just sour grapes. Let's just calm down. And if that wouldn't work, because maybe the Sanhedrin would be resistant to that defense anyways, maybe that would be blasphemous, I can make a pretty good argument. If I'm in his spot, and I've got this successful ministry going on over here, people are being added to the church day by day, people are believing me, I'm working signs and wonders, and we see this movement happening now that's spreading out of Jerusalem, and I'm a vital part of that, I can totally see the validity of the thought process of just thinking to yourself, I'm going to say whatever I have to say to survive this day. I'm going to just do whatever it is I have to do to live through this. Whatever they want to hear from me, whatever I have to admit, whatever I have to confess, I'm just going to get through today. I'm going to tell them what they need to hear, and then I'm going to continue on with this ministry because it's valuable ministry. And honestly, if that's what Stephen did, I'm not sure that I would judge him. I would understand it. He's doing good things. Shouldn't he want to preserve those things and not die right here on the spot? That's what I would expect of Stephen. That's what I would do. But for the rest of chapter seven, we see Stephen's response. He goes on for a long time, 53 verses. And Stephen's response is not what I would expect. If you look at chapter seven of Acts, it is the best summation of Genesis and Exodus that exists. It is an incredibly succinct summary of the events that unfolded that led to the nation of Israel. If you're unfamiliar with that portion of Scripture, if you've never read through Genesis or Exodus, I would highly encourage you to read the cliff notes that we find in Acts chapter seven. It's a very good read. And so in the midst of these false accusations, in the midst of the stress, in the midst of the urgency, in the midst of the anger and the Sanhedrin, pressing upon Stephen and saying, hey, is this true? Are you really teaching this? Stephen, knowing that he was facing death, tells them their own story. He tells them a story that they all know. And he starts with their father Abraham, the one from whom all Jews have descended. And then he moves through Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. And then he fast-forwards the 400 years to Moses. And he talks about different events in Moses' life where he murdered the Egyptians and he has to flee to the wilderness. And he comes back 40 years later after being moved by the burning bush, compelled by God in the burning bush. And he frees the people and they move through the wilderness and he installs the law and they get to the banks of the Jordan River and Moses passes away and Joshua leads them across and they move into the promised land where they all now, Stephen and the Sanhedrin and the synagogue of the freed men and all the people watching where they all now sit. And he tells them a story that they already know. He tells them their story. And it's a story that they could all tell. Every one of the men sitting there judging Stephen, assessing the situation, they know the story. They know their Bible. They can all tell it. And so it makes you think that Stephen's building the case to do exactly what I said I would do, to say, hey, we're on the same team. Listen, I know all your history. I share it. I'm with you. And you feel like as he's saying it that he's going to end up making the point of we're all on the same team. Listen to this clarity. But he finishes telling the story and he punctuates it like this. It's unbelievable to me the confidence and the boldness that he has in this moment. Stephen finishes telling the story and then he says these things, beginning in verse 51. Yo, he stuck his face in the wood chipper, man. He just put it right in there. He tells the story. He brings everyone along. He shows that he has an understanding and a grasp of the scriptures like they do. And then he calls them uncircumcised of heart and eyes, which flares up the whole room. Because you have to remember in this context, circumcision was a sign of the covenant. If you were a Jewish circumcised male, then you were saved. You were in. You and God were good. That was the sign that your parents had committed you to the same God that was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the rest of their forefathers. It was the visible sign that you are in, that you are what we would refer to as a Christian or saved, that you and God are good. And Stephen says, no, forget it with your circumcision. You're uncircumcised in the heart and of the eyes. You're uncircumcised where it matters. You think you're saved. You lean on this tradition that you have, but that's not it at all because you don't mean any of the things that you teach. You've missed the point. You've gotten it wrong. You're not even a Christian. You're not even a believer. You don't even preach. You don't even live out the stuff that you preach. He's calling them hypocrites and false teachers. And then he associates them with the people who killed the prophets. The very prophets that they uphold, the very prophets that they teach, they consider the prophets their fathers. And Stephen says, no, no, no, no, no. You're not descendant from the prophets. You're descendant from the ones who killed the prophets. And then he goes to the last prophet, John the Baptist. You even killed him when he came and was preparing the way for the righteous one, for Jesus. And when he showed up, when God finally sent his son, the promised Messiah that you're supposed to have been looking for, you know what you did? You murdered him. He says, you've received the word of God from angels and you did not uphold it. Stephen, with boldness and audacity and faith, blasts the Sanhedrin. He spoke truth defiantly and righteously to power. And they respond exactly how you think they would. They rush him, they yell. It says that some of them covered their ears, a bunch of drama queens the Sanhedrin were, and they run at Stephen and they seize him and they carry him outside the city and they stone him. They bind up his arms, they bind up his legs, they drop him off of a smaller cliff so he's incapacitated and then they drop big rocks on him until he dies. And it says that in that moment Stephen looked up and he saw the Son of God at the right hand of the Father and that he prayed for them because they didn't understand what they were doing. I've read this story a few times in preparation for this week. And every time I read it, I've had to just kind of put my Bible down and sit there for a minute and marvel at the boldness of Stephen. Marvel at how brave he was. And note that what Stephen did in that moment was Stephen chose the consequences of action over the comfort of inaction. He chose the consequences of action. He knew that what he was going to do, he was inviting it. He stuck his chin out. He said, let's go. I know what's going to happen, but you need to know the truth. He invited it in. He chose action and invited the consequences of those actions rather than sit in comfort and inactivity. He could have placated. He could have lived to fight another day. He could have chosen comfort. But he stepped away from comfort and into fear. And it is a profound story. I'm honestly tempted to just leave it here because that's in some ways what Luke does. He just tells the story, sits it in the middle of the narrative. We don't come back to Stephen. I'm not entirely sure why he shared it with us, except to let us be moved by the boldness of Stephen, except to allow us to be inspired by the faith of someone who was facing certain brutal death. And part of me wonders why he did it. Why didn't he try to convince the Sanhedrin that he was right? Why didn't he try to convert the Sanhedrin? Why wasn't he more gentle with them? And I think that the answer is because when Stephen said those things, when he called them uncircumcised of heart and he said that their fathers were the ones that killed the prophets, that they murdered the Son of God, that they received the Word of God and that they did not hold it up. When he says those things, he's looking at the leaders, but he's not talking to them. I think he's talking to all the people who can hear him. I think he wants to inspire all the listeners, all the other young pastors who are watching him to see how he's going to handle this moment, all the people that he preached about the goodness of God to that are watching him to see how he's going to handle this moment. He's not talking to the Sanhedrin. He's talking to everyone around him. He's talking to the crowds because they needed to hear the truth. I think he knew that the truth was going to land on deaf ears when the Sanhedrin heard it, but he also knew that what they need, that what the crowds need, because it matters, is to hear the truth. And the truth to the crowd is that your leaders have let you down. They are false teachers, and Jesus was not. And so he chose boldness for their sakes. And I think all of this presses a question upon us. What is worth our boldness? What's worth our boldness? What in life is worth choosing the consequences of action over the comfort of inaction? What in life is worth stepping into that fear of the unknown, of giving up our comfort and our safety and security and saying, no, this is actually a place I'm willing to plant my flag and I will not be pushed off of this. Hopefully we all have things in our life that push us to boldness. Hopefully we all have things in our life where the comfort of inactivity is just simply no longer attractive enough to not choose the consequences of action. But as I thought about this question, we have different answers. But one answer that we can and should share in common is that if it matters to God, it is worthy of our boldness. If it matters to God, it's worthy of our boldness. If God says, hey, this matters to me, then it should matter to us. If God says this matters to me, then we should be willing to run from the comfort of inactivity towards the consequences of action. That's why last week I felt like I had no choice but to be bold. I would have much rather preferred to just stay comfortable. Not risk ruffling feathers, not risk being divisive in a church that I love so much. But I meant what I said when I said that oppression and injustice matters to God, that it breaks his heart, and it should break our heart too. So we step forward as a church in boldness, choosing the consequences of action. What matters to God is worth our boldness. And what matters to God more than anything else is the souls of men. What matters to God is that people would become his children. So your neighbor, the one that you've been getting closer to in quarantine, the one that you've had more conversations with in the last three months than you have in however many years you've lived there prior? Jesus died for that person. He was so bold that he faced death for them. They matter to God. They're worth your boldness. Have the uncomfortable conversation. I know it feels weird to start talking to people about faith. I know it feels weird to ask them what they believe. I know it's uncouth. I know it's uncomfortable. I know we have to leave the comfort of inactivity to do that. I know that we have to choose some consequences that might scare us, but I'm telling you, be inspired by Stephen. It's worth it. Be bold for the sake of your neighbor. Be bold for the sake of your children. Fight for them. Don't let things slide. Impress upon them the good news and the love of God. Be bold for the sake of your Christian brothers and sisters. Do you know somebody who might be sliding into sin? Do you know somebody who might be making choices that are leading them on a path that doesn't have a good ending? Do you know somebody who's dropped their guard a little bit? And you're seeing some things begin to leak out of their life that aren't good, God loves them. God wants that person near to them. They're worth your boldness. Have the conversation. Invite them to coffee. Invite them to the back porch. Talk to them. They're worth your boldness. Your marriage is worth your boldness. Your marriage matters very much to God. God designed marriage to be a picture, to be a manifestation that people should be able to look at and say, that's the way that God loves the church. And that's the way that Jesus loves us. That's why our marriage should be a picture of the gospel. And if it's sliding, and if it's unhealthy, if it's rocky, if it's murky, if it just feels distant, be bold for your marriage. Say the hard thing, have the hard conversation, Choose the consequence of action. And be bold for your marriage. The things that matter to God are worthy of our boldness. Listen, I mean this. Write the book. Start the ministry. Have the conversation. Send the email. Say the prayer. Open yourself up. Let us be inspired by the boldness of Stephen who in the face of certain death told the defiant and righteous truth. And let us, like Stephen, in the places where it matters most and the things that matter to God, choose consistently the consequences of action over the comfort of inaction. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We thank you so much for your servant, Stephen, and for his story here. Thank you for moving Luke to share it with us so that we could see it and revisit it and marvel at his sacrifice. Thank you for his boldness, for wiring him in such a way that he did not lilt or fade away from that moment, but that he leaned into it. Give us a little bit of that fire, God. Give us the strength to lean into things. Give us the faith to know when we ought to do it. Give us the courage to face consequences of necessary action. Make us a church full of Stevens. In Jesus' name, amen.

My name is Nate. It's good to see you. Thanks for being here on this August Sunday. I hope that you've had a good summer as they're winding down. We're winding down our summer series as well called Obscure Heroes. And if this is your first exposure to it, the idea is we kind of know the heavy hitters in the Bible, right? We know some of the main characters. We know the Davids and the Moseses and the Abrahams and the Pauls the John's and Peter. We know those folks. But tucked away in the Bible. Sir, if you could please find your seat. I just always want to do that. Tucked away in the Bible are these folks that we just see for a chapter or two. We just get little snippets or little glimpses into the lives of these folks, but the examples that they leave through their stories are profound. And we wanted to take some time in the summer and focus in on some of these stories. So this morning, we're looking at the story of a woman named Rahab. Rahab, when we meet her, we meet her in Joshua chapter 2. Now, Rahab lived in a city called Jericho. To understand why that's important, what we have to realize is that the people of Israel, God's chosen nation, have come out of Egypt. They've come out of slavery. They've lived in the desert for 40 years, and now they're about to cross over the Jordan River. They're on the east side of this river. They're about to cross over the river and go on a conquest to conquer what we know as the modern day nation, land of Israel. To them, it was the land of Canaan. And Joshua was going to lead his armies over the river and then through the nation to sweep through and take over all the cities for themselves per God's orders. And like good war planners do, they had to go get some intel. So Joshua finds two spies and he sends them into Jericho to go see what they could see and come back and they would come up with a strategy on how to attack this city. So when the spies go into Jericho, they end up in the house of a woman named Rahab. Now Rahab was a prostitute. And I like to think that these men were there not because they were of a weak moral fiber, but because it made sense for people coming in and out of town to spend the night at her house, because this was something that was done a lot. So this would kind of throw people off the scent. It makes sense for some transient businessmen to come in, spend the night there, and then leave the next day without raising too many eyebrows. So I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. But when we meet Rahab in Joshua chapter 2, one of the first things we learn about her is that she was a prostitute. She was used to this kind of thing. But the men come in and somehow or another, the king of Jericho, the authorities in Jericho, get word that there are some spies in their city. And so they start trying to find them. And then they hear that they're probably in Rahab's house. But Rahab, who has every reason to hand them over to the king, she doesn't need this stress in her life. She doesn't need this drama. I don't know what her life looked like at the time, but I'm sure it had plenty enough drama that she didn't need to be hiding spies from the government. It would have been way easier for her to just let the king in and say they're right there and go get them. But that's not what she does. She actually, we see, she goes up to them. They're sleeping on the roof. And we see in Joshua 2, verse 8, that this is Rahab's response when she encounters God. Before the men lay down, she came up to them on the roof. Verse 9, and she said to the men, I know the Lord has given you the land and that the fear of you has fallen upon us and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you. And she goes on. She goes on and she's talking about their fear and she makes a deal. She says, so here's the deal. I'm going to hide you. I'm going to protect you. I'll lie to the king for you. I'll give you an escape route. But I need to know that when your armies come through Jericho and conquer us, that you're going to protect me and my family. I'll make a deal with you. And I love this response from Rahab because what we'll see as we move through her story is that Rahab's response to God was faithful obedience. Rahab's response to God was faithful obedience. Think about it. This is a woman that's presumably grown up in Jericho. We don't know what their religion was, but it was what we would refer to as a pagan religion. She didn't worship the God that we worship. She didn't worship the Hebrew God. This was a land and a time when each civilization and each culture had their own gods, and they would always vie for power with each other. That's why the 10 plagues in Egypt was actually a strategic affront to 10 different gods of Egypt to show the nation of Egypt that the Hebrew God is more powerful than your God. And so if you had any national pride at all, if you had any cultural pride, you would always say that your God was stronger than the other gods. Except when she encounters the Hebrew God and hears of the stories of the Hebrew God and what they're doing and what he's doing for Joshua in his army, she responds in fear. And then that fear produces obedience because she had a choice. She can hand over the spies and do what's easy for her, or she can protect them and take that on. And she chose in faithful obedience to protect them. And I call this obedience to God. And here's what I think is super interesting about this step of obedience that Rahab took. Would we call her a Christian? No. Was she a believer? Was she in? Was she a Hebrew? Was she practicing? Was she following the law and performing the sacrifices and going to temple? Did she know the Torah, the first five books of the Bible? Did she know even who Moses was? Did she know the story of Abraham or Noah? Did she know any of this stuff or any of the things around the religion that she was being obedient to? No. She just knew that God was coming and she wanted to be on the right side of things. So she took the step of obedience that was in front of her, and she helped the spies. I love that response from Rahab. So she tells the spies, I'm going to hide you. I'm going to lower you out of my window because she had, her house was actually in the city walls of Jericho. She says, from your window, then we promise that we will protect you and anybody who is in this house. They say, okay, deal. So she lets him down. Sure enough, King knocks on her door. She gives him the old that away. You know, they went over there and lies to him, which is an interesting thing to know because God counts this to her as righteousness. So sometimes lying is okay. Just so we're clear, there's a hierarchy of things that we're supposed to do to love others. And in this situation, she was supposed to love on the spies and obey God by deceiving the king. So this absolutism of morality doesn't really work sometimes. It's just a useless aside for you. But she lets him down the window. They get away. She sends the king in another direction, and everybody's safe. And then a little while later, we have the famous Battle of Jericho, where God's strategy from on high was to march around the city seven times, which seems, first of all, ineffective, and second of all, tiring. But I've actually gotten the chance to be at Jericho and see the size of it and actually look down in a dig and see the excavation and the layers of the walls. And towards the bottom, there's this one black layer of soot from the walls being burnt down this one time, which is super interesting. And the whole size of Jericho is maybe the size of the parking lot that's across the street. So walking around it seven times in a day isn't unfeasible. It's not like a triumph of the human spirit or anything. So that's what they did. And on the seventh time, the walls fell down, the armies of Joshua swept into Jericho, took over the city, but because the cord was hanging from Rahab's window, they protected her and her family and grafted her into the nation in a way that you'll see in a minute. And I think that Rahab's faith is remarkable. One of the reasons I think it's remarkable, and I don't know how much time you've spent thinking about this, probably not much. I tried to really think through it this week. And I have to make some guesses here, but I think that you'll give me the license and the liberty to make these guesses? What was Rahab's life like? What happened in her life that she ended up as a prostitute? Women in that day, and it goes without saying that it's totally wrong, but women in that day had very little value outside of being a wife. They could not have a profession. They had no opportunity to make money. And so to be on your own as a woman is to have very few options. And so she took the only option that was in front of her. And so what it tells me is she either experienced loss or rejection or both in her life. Maybe she had a husband and he passed and so now she had to fend for herself. Maybe she wanted to be married and she couldn't. Women in that culture very much wanted to be married. They had no way to provide for themselves. They needed to get married. And so it's safe to say that almost every woman in that culture had this innate desire to find a husband. And for whatever reason, she finds herself without one, either through loss or rejection. I wonder what kind of number that would have done on the psyche, on the self-image, on the hope of this woman. More than that, she's a prostitute in ancient Jericho. What was that like? There's no justice system there. If there was, it was nothing like ours. It was a place where might made right. It was a patriarchy. I don't know what she had to do to avoid abuse from some. I don't know what she had to do to gain the protection that she was afforded. I don't know the kinds of awful things that she saw that if we closed our eyes, we would still be seeing. I don't know what that woman's life was like, but I guarantee you it's harder than mine. I guarantee you she saw and experienced things that you can't unsee. I wonder what it would be like for Rahab to sit in the office of a therapist or a counselor. I wonder what layers would have to begin to get peeled back from her about trust that she lost early, about feeling worthless, about feeling shame over who she was. I wonder what it was like when Rahab was being honest to look in the mirror. I think that Rahab was a broken woman. And in that brokenness, when confronted with God, without understanding all the ramifications about it, she chose obedience. And for that, it's amazing, for that, this foreign woman who had the worst job that churches think you could have, she is put in the Bible dozens of times. God shares her story throughout the Old Testament. She's mentioned again and again. And she shows up two places that I know of in the New Testament. And in the New Testament, she shows up in one of the most famous chapters in the Bible, Hebrews chapter 11. We're going to finish the series with looking at Hebrews chapter 11. Some people call it the hall of faith. The book of Hebrews is easily the most beautifully written book in the New Testament. We don't know who the author was, but it's so eloquent and good that we go, that probably is not Paul because we've read a lot of his books. It has the highest view of Christ, of Christology in the New Testament. It really holds him up as the high priest and the sacrifice and the Messiah once and for all. It's a beautiful book and absolutely worth delving into. And in chapter 11, the author wants to make the point of how important faith is, how impactful faith can be. And so the author goes through the heroes of the Old Testament and says, you know, by faith Noah built the ark, and by faith Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac, and by faith Noah or Moses led them through the desert. And he goes on and on and on until he gets to Rahab, who by faith protected the spies in Jericho. And here this foreign broken prostitute is laid right next to these Jewish men who are heroes of the faith. And God says, the things that they did to me are the same. The things that they did to me have the same faith, have the same obedience, have the same heart. And she's held up as a hero of the faith alongside with these men who made the choices that they made. And God says they're equal because she responded to God with faithful obedience. That's remarkable to me. It's remarkable to me because do you know how concerned God is with the Jewish lineage in the Old Testament? He tells them over and over and over again, do not intermarry. When you move into this nation, do not take wives or husbands from the surrounding cultures. And he even punishes them for doing it sometimes. He'll ostracize them for doing it, but yet here in Rahab, he's grafted in someone into his people, into his family, who is a foreign woman of ill repute. And it goes to show us that God was never concerned with protecting the genetics of his people. He was always concerned with protecting the faith. He doesn't care about what our makeup is or what we look like or how we were born. He cares about our faith as we respond to him. And so because Rahab responded with faith, he grafts her into his family. But to me, as I researched this, I knew that Rahab was in Hebrews chapter 11, so I turned to that and I read through that and kind of let that soak in. But I also know that she shows up in one of the most boring chapters in the Bible, Matthew chapter 1. Matthew chapter 1 is the begats. It's so-and-so had so-and-so had so-and-so had so-and-so had so-and-so all the way down. It's a whole chapter. It's really fun to read it out loud and see how good you do at pronouncing the names. It's fun if you're like a huge Bible nerd like me. It's like a great time. Let's sit around with our friends and pronounce Bible names. But you can go through that, and it's just super boring, man. It's hard to read. Like if that one shows up on your quiet time that day, you're going to fold it up and be like, God, I got nothing. I'm so sorry. There's actually a great sermon there, and I want to do it one day, but I have to get my ego out of the way because I really want to say that I've done a sermon out of Matthew chapter 1. But there's really a great sermon there. One day I'll share it with you. But Rahab shows up there too. And we can put it up on the screen. This is where she shows up. I thought it was remarkable as I read this. It says that she married a man named Salmon, and together they had a son named Boaz. And Boaz with Ruth had a son named Obed, and Obed had a son named Jesse,. There's a whole lot going on there. Now, I'm going to make some guesses about Rahab if you'll give me the chance to do this. Rahab married a man named Salmon. Maybe the Jews pronounced it Salmon, but I can't bring myself to do it. She married a man named Salmon. Salmon was from the line of Abraham. Salmon took great pride in his forefathers. He had to have. The whole line of Abraham did. It would have been a huge deal for him to marry a foreign woman who used to be a prostitute. So my guess about Rahab is, after taking that initial step of obedience when she encountered God, is that once she got grafted into the Hebrew culture and the Hebrew faith, and she began to look around, and she began to step into synagogue where she would find community, and she began to adopt the values of the people around her, that she continued to respond to God and his word, and that she grafted herself into the faith, and that she continued to take steps of obedience. I doubt very seriously that after the battle of Jericho, Rahab ever returned to her previous profession. I think God got a hold of her and moved in that way. Can I tell you the main reason I believe that? There's this old saying, I don't know if you guys have heard it before, but you can't fake good kids. When there's a group of brothers and sisters coming out of a house and they're spiritually strong and they love God and they have good character and they're great folks, you have to, whether you like them or not, give credit to their parents. You have to look at their parents and go, I don't know what they were doing, but it was good. You can't fake good kids. Now, sometimes kids can come out of messes and become really great humans, but that's not typically how that story goes. Usually, if you have a great kid, you can find some great parents. Rahab and Salmon had a great kid. Their kid was a guy named Boaz. Boaz stands out in the Old Testament as an example of what the Messiah is going to look like. You understand this? There's a girl named Ruth. She was a Moabite woman who had no options and no hope. She wasn't very different than, I guess it was her grandmother Rahab. Or was it mother-in-law? Is that how that works? I don't know. I should have planned this part of the sermon. She wasn't very much different than her. And she comes in. She's hopeless, she's a beggar, taking what she can at the corners of fields. Boaz says, we need to protect her, nobody lay a hand on her. And then going to look like when he gets here in the New Testament. And that's Rahab's kid. And I don't think that he comes from that home with those values if Rahab doesn't continue to respond to God in faithful obedience. And Ruth and Boaz have Obed, who has Jesse, who has David. Because of her faithful obedience, God didn't just pluck her out of the life that she was living and give her a new life. He didn't just put her on the pages of Hebrews thousands of years later to be displayed for all of time with an equivalency to all the other people of faith who had preceded her. He wrote her into the genetics of his son and used her to bring about two pictures of his son in David and in Boaz. God had an incredible story written for Rahab. And so as I look at her story, and I think about this woman in Jericho who must have felt hopeless and broken, and what God saw in her, and why we even get to see the story of Rahab in the Bible. What I see is that God made beauty out of her brokenness. God made beauty out of her brokenness. I picture Rahab as this vase or a bowl or a vessel that's just been shattered on the ground. I wanted to bring in like a clay pot and shatter it, but that would have been dangerous for like Holly and other people around me. So I had no way to do that. But that's how I picture Rahab, just broken and shattered on the floor. Irrevocably damaged. And in different ways trying to grab pieces of her life and put them back together in a way that feels whole, in a way that feels healthy, in a way that can at least look from the outside in like it's beautiful. I imagine her trying to assemble the pieces of her own life, and I think many of us can relate to this. I think many of us are broken. Listen, if we're being honest, we all are. We're all broken. And I don't mean that in some dramatic way. Some of us are walking through really difficult things. Some of us have walked through incredibly difficult things, and it doesn't feel like our life is ever going to be the same. Some of us can relate to the brokenness of Rahab, just sitting amidst your life feeling like it is in shatters. Some of us remember that and have pieced things back together. Some of us, maybe we're not broken into a thousand pieces, but it's a couple. We all struggle with value. We all struggle with feeling good enough. We all struggle with unselfishly loving others. We are all, in our own ways, broken. And so as I thought about Rahab and her brokenness, and us and ours, I wanted to find a picture of something beautiful being made from something that's broken. So I did what any good pastor does and I googled things. And I found the perfect picture. I want to show you guys this bowl. That bowl is an example of the Japanese art of kintsugi. That's how you know I Googled it. I don't know what that is, man. I just started learning about this this week. That's an example of the Japanese art of kintsugi. And what kintsugi is, is to take something that's broken and fashion it back together in a way that is beautiful. And what they would normally do, what you normally try to do when your bowl was broken is you try to piece it back together so that nobody would ever know it was broken, so that when you used it as a dinner party, people wouldn't know that you had dropped it on the floor once and no one would ever know that it had been broken before. But Kintsugi says, no, we're not going to do that. We're actually going to make the brokenness beautiful. We're going to fill the cracks with gold. And we're not going to try to hide the past from anybody. And in doing this, it actually becomes more beautiful than it was before. And I think that this is a picture of what God does with us. God took Rahab, this broken prostitute from Jericho, and wrote her into his family story. So that when we look at her story now, when we look through Matthew now, when we look at those names, married to Salmon and then had Boaz and Obed and Jesse and David and on down all the way to Jesus, we see the bowl. We see the thing that God pieced back together. We see the brokenness and all of its beauty. And God doesn't attempt to hide it. He doesn't say that there was a woman of faith from Jericho. He tells us who she was. He doesn't attempt to hide her faults. He makes them beautiful. And I want us to know this morning that if you feel broken, whether it's completely shattered or just missing a couple pieces, if you've been scrambling to kind of try to fix your life and put it back together in a way that makes sense, in a way that feels whole, in a way that feels beautiful, in a way that gives you meaning, I want you to know that God is doing that for you. And that you don't have to hide those cracks. And you don't have to pretend like you were never broken. And you don't have to pretend like you were always right. Because God is making something beautiful out of you. And all we have to do is respond with faithful obedience. Now some of you might not believe me. Some of you might think I've heard stuff like this before. I've got too much sin. I've got too much stuff. God's not going to use me. He's not writing me into his family tree. He doesn't have any big grand plans for me. I guarantee you, if you went to Rahab a month before those spies hit out at her house, and you said, hey, Rahab, you want to know something cool? The Hebrew God that you're scared of, he's going to use you. He's going to set you up for all of history on par with all the heroes who have preceded you. He's going to write you into his family tree. And he is making beauty out of your brokenness. She would have told you you were crazy. She would have sat right where you are, thinking right what you're thinking. Not me. Not possible. That's silly. Here's what I want you to know. When God looked at Rahab, he didn't see what she was. He saw what he was going to make her into. When God looked at Rahab, he didn't see what she was. He didn't see a broken prostitute in Jericho living a hopeless life. He saw the great, great grandmother of King David. He saw the mom that he was going to entrust to raise Boaz. He saw somebody that he was going to write into his own son's family tree. When God looked at Rahab, he did not see what she saw. He saw what he was going to create. And I want you to know that God looks at you with those same eyes. And all Rahab did was respond with the next step of obedience. She didn't understand all the things. She didn't get all the religion. She didn't know where it was going to go. She didn't understand the Bible. She couldn't quote to you verses. She didn't even know what theology was. She wasn't even a Christian. She just took the first step of obedience. And God began to craft beauty out of her brokenness. And I want you to know this morning that God wants to make something beautiful out of you. Not just in the way that he removed Rahab from her life immediately, but as he wrote a beautiful story about her for generations to come. God has beauty that he's creating you into. You have no idea who your children will come in contact with. You have no idea what kind of grandchildren they're going to have. But God sees them already. And he's fashioning you into that beauty. And all we have to do is to continue, like Rahab, to respond with faithful obedience. And I believe that God will make beauty out of our brokenness as well. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for the story of Rahab. Thank you for including people like that in your Bible. God, we love to learn about David and Moses and these men who were leaders. But God, sometimes that feels so far away from us. We thank you for regular people that you used in extraordinary ways. Father, if we are broken, I just pray that we would trust you to restore us and to make beauty out of that. Father, I pray that we, me, maybe most of all, would see what you see when we look at ourselves. We thank you that you don't see us now as we are, but you see us as what you want to make us into. And I just pray for us that you would give us the courage and the faith to take the next step of obedience as you make beauty out of the things in our life that are broken. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

My name is Nate. I'm the lead pastor here. Thanks for being here on this Sunday, the last Sunday in our series called Best Practices. The idea behind this series is that I believe that there are some habits or some practices, some disciplines that we can develop in our life that are really the best disciplines or the best practices that anybody can develop ever. That if we'll develop these, if we will make these a part of our life, they will make us better wives and better mothers, better husbands and better fathers, better children, better employees and employers, better friends and better neighbors. They will make us better people. More importantly than that, if we will instill these disciplines in our life, we will know God better. We will know him more deeply. We will experience the joy and the peace that we believe God offers. So here's what I'm doing as we move through this together. I'm assuming that if you're here in June, that you care at least a little bit about your relationship with God, okay? I don't you know this in church parlance, in the church business, or whatever you want to call it, but summertime is not like high visitor attendance time. Summertime is people who mean it come to church. So if you're here, I'm assuming that you do care to some degree or another about your relationship with God. If you're here because you are checking it out and you're not sure yet and you wouldn't even say yet that I do have a relationship with God, then I hope that this is a way for you to just assess some things and analyze some things and kind of look at and get a peek at Christianity. But as we've been going through the series, we looked at some practices that are really best for us, like reading the Bible on a regular basis. We kind of looked at how to do that and what keeps us from doing that and how we can make that a part of our life. We looked at worship in the second week. Last week, we looked at prayer and this idea of reducing ourselves to the need to pray. Don't wait for life to do that to us, but go ahead and every day admit that there's things that we need God for and spend time in prayer. And in that way, we can move further to being obedient to that command to pray without ceasing, which is a really challenging instruction in Thessalonians. This morning, what I want to do is kind of clean up the series and mention a couple best practices, a couple spiritual disciplines that maybe are a little bit less heralded, a little bit less known, a little bit more forgotten. These all probably deserve their own week, but I'm excited about our next series. I wanted to get to it. This one's a tight four-week series, so we're going to kind of hit three different things this week. So my hope for you is maybe all three of these things are great for you and you can instill all of them. Maybe you're already doing one or two, but I hope that everybody today can take home something that they want to begin to instill in their life or a discipline that they want to renew in their life. So that's my goal for you. So as we look at these three practices that we're going to cover today, one of the less heralded spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines that I wanted to talk about is the practice of giving, the practice of being generous, the practice of giving of our finances. Now, as I say that, if you're thinking along with me, okay, if you're anything like me, then your thought process might go something like this, okay? We're doing a sermon on spiritual disciplines. First thing out of the gate is that I need to give to the church. It's pretty self-serving, dude. Like, you're going to get up there, you're going to tell me these are things God really wants me to do, and then the very first one is, bam, you should give to the church. Okay, listen, I don't blame you for thinking that. I would be thinking that if I were you, but a couple of things to clarify. First of all, when I talk about giving, it's only the second time I've talked about it since I became the pastor here two and a half years ago. But every time I do talk about it, I want to be sure that we cover this thing biblically. And I want to make some points. There's some ways that we talk about giving that just aren't true. The New Testament, which it doesn't mean the Old Testament isn't valuable, but the New Testament is our authority as we look for ways to live our life. The New Testament doesn't tell us to give 10%, and it doesn't tell us that we have to give to the local church. So when I say that we should give, that we should instill the spiritual discipline of giving, I'm not telling you that you should give 10% of your income to grace. That's not what I'm telling you. So in that way, it's not self-serving. What I'm telling you is the New Testament says that we should be a people who are generous, that we should be a people who give. Jesus talks about giving in such a way that he assumes that you will do it when you give. So it's to happen, when you give, give in such a way that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. We see a story about a widow that gave out of her poverty, and Jesus says that's a better, that's a bigger gift, a more meaningful gift than the wealthy person who gives out of their wealth, because her gift required faith, right? We see these instructions about giving, and we know that to give is a good thing. We know that that's something that the Bible talks about. But again, we're to give to God, give to things that are building God's kingdom. So it doesn't necessarily mean the local church. Paul does talk about this idea that if somebody is ministering to you and you're benefiting from that, that we should make it possible for them to continue to do that, that we should support them. But that's as close as we come to me being able to leverage the Bible to say that you have to give your money to grace. So that's really not what I'm talking about. Now, if grace is doing things that you believe in, that you want to support, then support it. Like Mikey, the guy that did the announcements, which is so well, I mean, he knocked those out of the park. When Mikey did those announcements, he told you guys that we were in Mexico right now, that we had two, that we had a team of students down in Mexico and that we're building two homes. I'll just tell you, those homes are $6,000 a piece. The missions committee that we have here, in their generosity, said, we want to go ahead and pay for you guys to build two houses so that two families who live on a dollar a day or less can have a home that they so desperately need just across the border in Mexico. They were able to do that because 10% of everything that's given to Grace goes to ministries happening outside the walls of grace. So if you've ever given, then you are a part of that. If you'd like to be a part of that moving forward, then you can give and you will be. Or if you'd like to be a part of other things moving forward, give to Addis Jamari, a great ministry going on in Ethiopia where they are cutting off sex trafficking at the front. They're nipping it in the bud before it even starts. They take girls that age out of an orphanage and they put them in a home and they disciple them and they teach them skills because there's a very high likelihood that they would end up in some sort of trafficking industry if they did not. And now they're going to the families that have to put up kids for adoption because they simply can't afford the children that they're having, and they're giving them training and investing money in them so that on the front end, those kids don't even have to go to an orphanage. So be a part of something like that. Be a part of faith ministry where our kids are now building homes for families that desperately need them. The instruction in the New Testament is that we should give and that we should be generous, that we should be conduits of God's generosity. And you may think, how is this a spiritual discipline? I know that that's something that we're supposed to do. I get it that that's instructed in the New Testament, but how are we supposed to do that? Why is that a spiritual discipline? And I would just submit that maybe we don't think about giving as a spiritual discipline because we've heard it taught poorly, or we've thought about it in incorrect ways. I've sat in services and listened to sermons before where people talk about giving as if it's some sort of investment scheme. They'll quote a verse in Micah, and they'll say, if you bring your tithe into the storehouse, then God's going to bless you and fill your barns. And it's almost this idea that if you'll give to the church, God's going to give you even more money. That's dumb. That's not how that works. Charitable giving isn't some sort of divine investment scheme, okay, where God just makes you rich because you give to other people. That's how jerks take advantage of ignorant people. That's how that works. So that's not true. It's not some investment scheme. Will you get blessed when you give? Absolutely. Is it going to be by more money in your account? Probably not. So that's not how that works. The other thing is we get guilted into it, right? God's done so much for you, the least you could do is give a little bit for him. And then it feels like this thing that we have to do out of obligation when really that's not what giving is. The reason I think that giving is a spiritual discipline is because giving builds your faith while we participate in God's goodness. Giving builds our faith while we participate in the goodness of God. I'll tell you why I think this. This was, and I have to preface this story. Jen is against me sharing this story because in this story, we stumbled into some obedience. I feel obligated to remind you that I'm an egotistical jerk and that I don't always do good things. But in this story, I'm going to do something good, okay? But now I feel like everything's balanced and that we're fine. About four years ago, I guess it was, it was December. Lily was due in January. Our only child was due in January. And we had managed to save up some money to have the kid and take the hit of Jen not being in work. Jen worked part-time. I worked at a church. I was a student pastor, a small groups pastor. And believe it or not, I did not make a ton of money. So for us to have money set aside was a big deal. We had about $5,000 set aside. And I'll just be transparent with you. we had not had that much money set aside in our marriage ever. So we were pretty thrilled that we had this amount set aside to be able to have Lillian be responsible for us to miss because she worked part-time as an office manager and she wasn't going to get those hours and we're going to have medical bills and you know how it goes. So we're feeling good about that. Well, then in late November, her car stopped working. So I had it towed to a guy that went to the church, a guy named Kelly McCart. And Kelly was looking at the car. He calls me one day. I was on the golf course. I mean, it's hard. We didn't have any money. By the way, I was golfing during work hours. I was on the golf course. He calls me. I said, hey, dude, how you doing? He says, I'm doing better than you will be. And I went, oh, no. I said, what's up? He goes, it's the engine. I said, ugh. He said, it needs to be replaced. And I'm like, what do I do? Do you think I should do it, or do you think I should just trash it and buy a new car? He goes, I think you should replace it. It's a good car. It's a Toyota 4Runner. I said, all right, how much is it going to cost? He said, $5,000. Son of a gun. So I had to go home, and I think I waited a day or two to tell Jen. You know, like, how's the car? Eh, it's fine. You know, I didn't, I just didn't, she's a very pregnant lady and I didn't want her to have to deal with the stress that I was dealing with. Because it's like, my goodness, how, how are we going to pay our bills in January? Like, how are we even going to make it? I don't want to do the humiliating thing of going to my parents and be like, we're, we're screw ups. Can you please give us money? Like, I didn't want to do that. So I was just really stressed. In the midst of this, it was time to give the Christmas offering at the church that we went to. Jen and I had prayed about it, and we had conferred, and we had each agreed that we, that year, wanted to give $500. But then this thing happened, and now we don't have any money. But it's time for the Christmas offering to happen. And I prayed about it, and I just kind of felt, you know, if I can trust him with $500 when we feel secure about our finances, then I ought to be able to trust him when I don't. And I feel like this is what God has asked us to do. So we said, all right, we'll do it. And we gave the $500. Two days later, friends of ours from the church, our age, not like grandparents or something, peers come up to us, come up to me after a service, and they said, hey, we don't know why, but the Lord just kind of put you on our heart this week. So we just wanted to say Merry Christmas, and they handed me an envelope. I take the envelope home, and inside is a check for $500. Yo. So I kind of start crying a little bit. I show it to Jen. And to me, that was God's way of saying, I'm going to take care of you. I have 1,000 sheep on 1,000 hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I have a thousand sheep on a thousand hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I wish I could chronicle for you the ways that God showed up in January and February so that we didn't have any need. The way that he just took care of all the things that we were concerned about. I think because we were able to stumble into obedience in that situation. But the reason I'm sharing that story is because do you not think that after we decided to give that money and then saw God deliver us in that way, do you not think that built my faith a little bit? Do you not think that helped me trust God even more? And then the cool part is the family that did it, a family called, named the Calders, they had no idea what was going on in our life. And then after they gave it, I shared with them our story. Do you not think that built their faith a little bit? Of them just sitting there going, I feel a prompting that we should try to take care of Jen and Nate. You don't think that built their faith to do that? I think that when we give, we create opportunities for God to show up and show us that he's going to take care of us. When we give, we create opportunities to be on the other end of stories like that, to know that what we gave was used for something far better than whatever we were going to spend it on to begin with. And when we do that, not only does it build our faith, but it allows us to experience the goodness of God as we are conduits of his generosity. That's why I think that giving is a spiritual discipline. Because I think it's something that builds our faith. So if that's not a part of your life, I know, I know that's a tough thing. That's a hard thing. Just practically, it's a hard thing. And there's questions around giving. Do I give 10%? I think that's the tithe. Listen, the New Testament doesn't really tell you a percentage. I think 10% is a good baseline. But I would tell you to just try to get into the habit of regularly giving anything to any ministry that's building God's kingdom. And let God show up. Let that build your faith. Get some experience in participating in the goodness of God in that way. If that's not a part of your life and you want to know God and you want to follow these steps and you want to instill these practices in your life, just find a way that feels right to you. Pray about it. Father, what would you have me do? And give in that way and watch God show up. So that's the first thing that I would encourage you in today is the practice of giving. The second thing is the practice, and you guys are going to be like, what in the world is he talking about? The practice of content consumption. The practice of content consumption. Here's the idea. I'm not going to spend long on this. I don't think I need to make a whole bunch of flowery points around it. I think that you guys can understand this, okay? There's a verse that I love in Philippians. It's one of my favorite verses. It's in chapter 4, Philippians 4, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Now that's a challenging voice. That's a challenging verse. If you think about the things that you allow into your life, the things that you watch, the things that... This steps on my toes, too. The things that you're not even sensitive to on Netflix anymore. Right? The shows that you watch. You're like, but that show has all that stuff in it. Yeah, it doesn't really bother me. Should it? Think about the stuff that you allow into your life. And if it's obedient to this, whatsoever things are just, pure, lovely, commendable, honorable, excellent, there's anything worthy of praise or praiseworthy. Think about these things. How good are we doing at that? And so I just kind of think, if this is something that I want to do, if I want my mind focused on things that are obedient to Philippians 4.8, that are praiseworthy and honorable, and all of those things, that's what I want. How do I do that? How do I organize my life around those things? I think part of it is the content that we consume. And I would ask you, for in your life, besides Sunday morning, besides whatever comes out of my mouth on Sundays, which, that's a low bar, what spiritually nourishing things are you getting in your life? What else is spiritually nourishing you? Outside of random conversations you might have with your friends that you do find encouraging or conversations that you might have with your spouse that you find encouraging, what is in your life that is there to spiritually nourish you, to build you up spiritually? For years and years and years, for centuries, the only option has been to read. And if you're not a reader, if you don't like doing that, which I totally understand, then it's really difficult to consume any spiritual content during the week that's spiritually nourishing in any way, because reading was the option. If you are a reader, I would encourage you, make books that are spiritually encouraging a regular part of your discipline. In my personal quiet time, when I'm really doing it well, when I'm really walking in consistency, I'll read the Bible. I'll let that push me into a time of prayer. And then when I'm done praying, I'll read a spiritually formative book until Lily wakes up. That's kind of how it goes. So if you're a reader, then choose books that nourish you spiritually. But if you're not, I just want to, on a practical level, let you know that there are some really great options out there for you. And I want to talk to you about this idea of harnessing the dead spaces in our schedules because we're all very busy. But there's these things called podcasts that you should really listen to. They're phenomenal. If you don't know what podcasts are, ask someone around you after the service. We will give you a one-day moratorium of not making fun of you or even calling you names for that. Just ask somebody around you, what's a podcast? How do I find them? How do I assess them on my phone. All of you have phones and you can get podcasts on all of them, okay? These podcasts are great because all of the sudden I can listen to sermons from all over the world. I can listen to people have discussions about things that are spiritually formative from all over the world. I can listen to all kinds of people. Do you understand that for centuries and centuries and centuries, the only spiritually building, nourishing thing that people got was whatever their pastor said on Sunday. And that's a bummer. Now you have access to the best pastors in the world who are preaching every week and you can listen to their sermons every week. So I want to encourage you to look for the dead spaces in your schedule. If you have a commute over 10 minutes, use that to listen to something that's spiritually formative. If you go on a walk with your dog, put in some headphones, listen to something that nourishes you spiritually. When you're at the gym, can we just all agree that almost everybody in this room is old enough to no longer need pump-up music? Nothing that you're doing requires you to be pumped up, okay? Nothing. Nobody in this room, I'm looking at you right now, nobody in this room, except for maybe Mikey, is lifting any amount of weight that requires you to be jacked. So just listen to something. Listen to something that's helpful. Listen to something that informs you, that nourishes you, that encourages you, that's spiritually formative. I have a buddy, he goes to the church, I'll tell on him. He's not here this week, and we'll see if he mentions anything to me because he listened to the sermon. But Shane Smith, and he has Smith, he has to drive to Durham every day for work, and he started listening to sermons on his drives. That dude texts me questions a couple times a week. He's asking me stuff. He's wanting to understand Scripture. He's saying, hey, I heard this taught to me. What do you think of this? He is chewing on it. He's considering it. He shows up to my 6 a.m. Bible study. I have watched his life change over the past several months. And one of the biggest things is because he takes time in his day, he looks at that drive not as a burden but as an opportunity to consume some content that's going to nourish him spiritually. And it's changed him and his family. Look for those opportunities in your life and find things that we can listen to. On your bulletin there, I emailed some people in the church who I know listen to podcasts, and I compiled some there for you. So there's recommendations there if you need some. The other thing I would say on this point is there's an app called Audible. And that you can subscribe for like 14 bucks a month and download books. You get one book a month and then they read it to you. You can listen to it. So if you're not a reader, but you're jealous of all the people you know who do read and seem to have things to contribute at parties and at like Bible study and stuff, and you'd like to be one of those people, you can game the system and have somebody else read it to you while you cut the grass. That's really great. So you can subscribe to Audible and you can get these books going in your headphones. So I just want to impress upon you this idea of consuming content that can help you. I think it's a discipline that we should all have and be careful with. The last one I want to talk about today is the practice of fasting. The practice of fasting. Now, fasting's an interesting thing. Fasting shows up in the Bible a lot. And fasting, if you spend any time around church, is something that we've heard of. If you grew up in a Catholic environment or an environment that observed Lent, then you know the idea of fasting for 40 days from certain things. And so we all kind of understand what fasting is. But as I thought about it this week, to put it in front of you, there's a couple things that I thought were interesting. First of all, we can fast for a bunch of different reasons. In 1 Samuel, we see David fast because he's mourning. He's lost his son. He's mourning the loss of his son. And so he fasts and he's brokenhearted before the Lord. We also see David fast in repentance. He's done something that he very much regrets. He made a moral misstep. He sinned before the Lord. And as a form of repentance, he pursues God by fasting. And maybe that's what some of us need to do. Maybe some of us have something in our life that's just eating our lunch that we'd love to not be a part of our life, but it just persists and it just pervades and it's just always there. Have we ever fasted over it and said, God, please take this from me? There's this really interesting passage in the New Testament in Matthew where Jesus says that this type of demon is only cast out through fasting and prayer. Like it somehow intensifies our prayer. We can fast when we're seeking guidance. In Acts chapter 13, it says that the church was getting together, and after a season of prayer and fasting, that they set aside Paul and Barnabas to go on their missionary journeys. We can, when we don't know what to do, when we don't know what's next, we can set aside some time to fast and pursue God in that. But I think maybe the most interesting thing that I saw about fasting is that Jesus just assumes that you do it. See, I think that when we hear fasting, there's a part of us that goes, okay, that's for like, that's for the ninja Christians, right? That's for the Navy SEAL Christians. Like, I'm just regular, just getting by, trying to not do dumb stuff Christian. That's for like super intense, big time Christian. Okay. Do you know in the New Testament, there's no delineation. There's no stages of Christians. You don't get to be like a white belt while that dude's a black belt. You don't get to do that. We're all on the same path moving towards the same goal of walking with God and being disciples of God. And part of that path is this assumption by Jesus that we would fast. Because he tells us in Matthew, he says, when you fast, don't do it like the religious hypocrites do it. Don't walk around with a sunken in face and all sad and be like, what's wrong with you? Be like, I'm fasting because I'm super spiritual. Don't do that. Splash water on your face. Fake it. Try to sneak it by people. Don't let anybody know what you're doing. But the interesting thing to me is this assumption by Jesus that it's a part of your life. And I know that for me, I'm not speaking for you. I'm sure that I'm behind the bell curve on this and you guys are all way ahead of me. But for me, until recent years, that was not a regular part of my life. I still, I fast with the elders from time to time, and I'm still bad at it. Honestly, half the time I fast with the elders, I have to email them the day before and be like, guys, I'm so sorry. I made a lunch appointment tomorrow, and I'm definitely going to eat tacos. So I kind of ruin that for us. It's true. The elders are nodding their heads at me right now, like, yeah, we know. And they're secretly grateful for it, so don't let them talk bad about me after this. They like it when I do that. But it's not really a part of our lives. We don't do it as a regular thing. I bet most of us in here can't remember the last time we did it. But see, Jesus assumes that we fast. And he doesn't assume that it's for, the super intense believers. It's for all of us. And the more I looked into it and thought about what it meant and what it was and why would Jesus assume that we did this, the more apparent it became that it's this picture of something. There's a book by a girl named Margaret Feinberg. I think that's her last name. Is that her last name? Yeah. And it's called Taste and See. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, told me about it, and I started reading it. It's really good. It's gotten me firing on a bunch of different things. I'm really considering doing a whole series on food. I feel like I'm an expert on this. I could bring a lot to the table. See what I did there? Yeah. Okay, I feel like I could do a lot with that, and I want to expound more on this later. But fundamental to this book is this idea that God could have created us any way he wanted to. He could have had us nourish ourselves any way he wanted to. We could have gotten our energy from the sun. We could have worked on photosynthesis like plants. He didn't have to make people who had to eat. He didn't have to make people who had to eat so often, but he did. And it's interesting to think that maybe he did that as a constant daily reminder of our spiritual need for him. As a constant daily reminder that our appetite for food, our body's appetite for food should be the same as our spirit's appetite for God. And in that way, fasting is a physical reminder of a spiritual need. The more I started thinking about this, the more I realized that food is a picture. Every time we sit down at a table and we eat because we need it, that's a physical picture of what our spiritual body needs. And so when we fast, it's an acute reminder of that. It's an intense reminder of that. It forces us to focus on this picture that exists with us every day of our life. And every time we feel the hunger pangs in a fast, that's why some people say, well, you can fast from different things. You can fast from alcohol, or you can fast from social media, or I'm going to put down my phone, or I'm not going to do this, or I'm not going to do that. I'm going to fast from TV. And those are fine. But there's nothing quite like fasting from food. Because it's a physical reminder of a spiritual need. And as we feel those pangs of hunger, gosh, I wish I could eat right now. That's a reminder. This is how your spirit longs for God. I've even gotten to the habit of, on the occasion when I'm actually good at fasting, I'll get a little headachy. And it's really tempting because I still have a lot to do in my day. I'm usually still about to go to an elder meeting. I have other things that I have to accomplish. I'm trying to get a sermon done, whatever it is. And it's tempting to eat something because I've got to stave off this headache because I can't really do my job if I'm not feeling well. So I need to take care of myself. And I'll start to go down that road. But it's a reminder. The way that your body begins to ache because you haven't had food is the way that your spiritual body begins to ache when you're not locked into God. We don't feel it as acutely, and we don't feel it as immediately. And I think that's why God gives us this physical reminder all the time. When we don't eat, we know it. And when food is good, and the meal is good, and we're around other people, and we're around our friends, it's one of the best experiences in life. And I just think it's this one-for-one picture of our need for God. So fasting serves as an acute reminder of our spiritual need. And if nothing else, it brings to the forefront of our mind our spiritual need for God. And so if fasting isn't a regular part of your life, I would encourage you to try it. Try it and let that drive you into prayer. Try it and let that take you into a place where you admit and acknowledge your spiritual need for God. I had a friend who, he's got three boys. This is the worship pastor I used to work with in another church. For all three boys, the week they were born, he fasted for a week and prayed for them. Because those were his boys, and he wants them to grow up to be godly men, and so he pursued the Lord after them. If you've got a big decision coming up and you don't know what to do, have you fasted about it? If there's a sin in your life that's just kicking your tail and you'd love to be done with it, have you fasted about it? If you'd like to get into these spiritual disciplines more but can't seem to find that in yourself, have you fasted about that? I want to encourage you to consider the spiritual discipline of fasting. Now, as we wrap up the series, to me, there's this key question, the answer to which dictates all of our actions after being asked the question. So as we wrap up the series in light of all of these practices, the practice of reading scripture, the practice of worshiping God, the practice of prayer, of giving, of consuming the right content, of fasting, all these different things that we can instill in our life so that we could pursue God better, I think that there is a key question. And when I say key question, what I mean is the answer to this question really determines all of your actions after you answer it. And I get this idea from a book that Jen and I have recently been given. A lot of you know that cancer has become part of our reality and our family in 2019. And so when that became a part of our reality, people started giving us different things and somebody gave us a book. It's called Chris Beats Cancer. And at the beginning of this book, there's a question. And the question is, do you want to live? And it may seem like a simple enough question, but it's really profound in how you answer it. Do you want to live? Because what's about to follow in that book, what he's about to tell you to do, is for most people a radical change in your lifestyle and your diet and your habits. So he sets it up with, do you want to live? The implication is, if the answer is yes, then you'll be willing to do whatever it takes to live. If the answer is no, that's a different conversation. And for those battling that disease, that's a more tricky question than you would think. So I think it's this key question. Do you want to live? If you do, then you will do whatever it takes to accomplish that. And I think that there's a key question for us as we consider our relationship with God, and it's this. Do you want to know God? Do