Sermons tagged with Hospitality

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

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

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. If this is your first time here and you're wondering, do these people wear their pajamas every week? Yeah. Yeah, we do. You should see us in July. It looks crazy. No, we don't. Thanks for participating in Christmas Jammy Sunday. If you did, we said we were going to do a prize or we're going to acknowledge the most festive. And I really think there's only one way to skin this cat this week. Shane, will you do me a favor and stand up? There's about four families wearing those pajamas, which apparently were on sale at Target. So if you are wearing those pajamas today, if you would be so kind as to kind of collect your kids and maybe just hang out in this area after the service, then I'd love to take a group picture of just one big church family that wore the same pajamas today. So if you'll participate in that, that would be really, really great. Next week is our holiday hoot. If you spend any time at all around Grace, you know we like a good hoot nanny. If you don't know what a hoot nanny is, just stick around, you'll find out. Next week is just our church-wide Christmas party immediately following the service. We're just kind of asking everybody, just bring something to share, doesn't really matter what it is, and we'll have some tables set up. You can drop that off, and then after the service, we'll all hang out for just a little bit. We'll provide some stuff to drink, and we'll just have a church-wide Christmas party for as long as anybody wants to, although I know some people are going to be home before the one o'clock kickoff. I get that too. This week we are in part two of our series called Not Alone, where we are looking at the different ways that God reminds us of his presence through the Christmas season. Last week we talked about the silent generations between Malachi and Matthew, the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. And we talked about that Christmas is a reminder that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So when we feel forgotten, when we feel alone, when we feel like we've seen God move for others and he's not moving for me, we, like they, in between the two testaments, cling to Christmas and to the promises of God. This week, I wanted to start us out by just diving right into Scripture. It's an obscure verse from an obscure book of the Bible, Micah. If you think you can find it, you can go ahead and start turning there. I see some people who are ambitious and eager. Good for you for knowing where Micah is in your Bible. The rest of you, get it together, man. This is church. Come on, memorize the books. No, I'm just playing around. Micah is tucked away in the middle of the minor prophets towards the back part of the Old Testament. And we're just going to jump right in and I'm going to the verse, and then we'll talk about it. But it's from an obscure book, from an obscure prophet, kind of tucked away, which makes it really appropriate for this morning. So this is what Micah writes in chapterah is what we call a messianic prophecy. It's a prophecy about Jesus. What Micah is saying is that God has told him, and now he is communicating to the people, and he specifically addresses it to Bethlehem, which is Bethlehem, not ham, just so you know, Southerners, it's Bethlehem, okay? So he addresses it to Bethlehem, and he tells them, from you is going to come what we know of as Jesus. From you is going to come my son. He's going to come a king and sit on the throne. It's this messianic prophecy. And he gives it to Bethlehem specifically because Bethlehem is unknown and insignificant. It says in the prophecy that Bethlehem is too little to be included amongst the tribes of Judah, which means it's really small. I probably should have gone and done the research. What did it take in ancient Hebrew and ancient Israel to become actually a clan within a tribe of Judah or any other tribe. And I just didn't do the research because if I did, the result of the research would have been that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. So I'm just skipping that part and telling you that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. One of you is going to do the research this week and be like, you were way off. I'll have to issue an apology next week. But let's go with that, that Bethlehem was just this small, nondescript, unimportant, insignificant town. And God says in the Old Testament, I'm going to use you in big ways. You're going to be really important. You're going to have a part to play in this grand story of Christmas and my kingdom. And I bring that up and I start our sermon there this morning because really and truly, Christmas has always been about the unseen, hasn't it? Christmas, the story of Christmas, maybe more than any other story, brings to light this thread throughout Scripture of God choosing the unnoticed and the unknown, the unseen and the insignificant. And in Christmas, we see this theme woven throughout the story over and over again. He chooses Bethlehem, a nondescript town from a nondescript place that hasn't even risen to the part of having its own clan within the tribe of Judah. And he says, this is where my son, Jesus, is going to make his grand entrance into the world. He could have chosen Jerusalem. He could have chosen Rome if he wanted to, but he didn't. God chose Bethlehem, this unknown and insignificant town, off to the side, in between, on the way down to the Dead Sea from Jericho. And when you think about the rest of the Christmas story, that's very on brand. Who did God choose to be the mother of his son? Somebody rich? Somebody influential? Somebody that everybody would know and trust? Somebody with a lot of clout from an important family in the nation of Israel? No, he chose Mary, a girl who was probably in her early teen years, who had not yet gotten married, who was from a small, nondescript town called Nazareth. That in the New Testament, when somebody hears that the Savior is from Nazareth, their response is, has anything good ever come out of Nazareth? They talk about it like we talk about Mississippi. Nothing good comes from there. How could that be possible? It's a little nothing quarry. It's a rock quarry town. It's a workaday town. It's in the backwoods. It's in the country. Nobody of any renown comes from there. And yet God chooses Mary to bear his son. Not somebody known. Not somebody influential. Not somebody with status. Somebody with nothing. And then to have his son born, he directs Mary and Joseph to go down to Bethlehem. They tried to stay in Jerusalem. They tried to stay in the important place. There was no room there. So God makes a way for them to end up in Bethlehem in a manger. He doesn't bring him into a noble estate. He brings him into a manger. And I don't know what you think of when you think about a manger, because we hear that in the Christmas story a lot. But I've had the opportunity to go over to Israel and to be in Bethlehem and to see what their mangers are, and they're basically caves. Bethlehem is rocky and hilly, and so on the side of a mountain, there's a little cave. They'll dig that out a little bit. They'll build a couple stables in there, and that's where they would rest. That's where the animals would be. So there's sheep and goats and maybe a donkey back there, and who knows what else, maybe a llama. I don't know. We got a Christmas llama. So a Christmas llama was in there on the sweater over there. Y'all should see it. It's great. It's got a little thing to hold water bottles. And that was the manger, just this little nondescript place where God says, this is where my son is going to come forth. And then God does a birth announcement. He has the angels go and they sing. And it was a little bit different than our birth announcements, right? We do birth announcements and he could have had Mary and Joseph hire a photographer, dress in their business casual wear, and then take off their shoes and get in their bed like they do every day, and then just have the light pouring through and post on Instagram like white people do. That's what we do when we have children. But instead, he had the angels sing. And to whom did they sing? The rich and the wealthy in Jerusalem? No, the poor and the unknown shepherds who meant nothing to anybody. That's where he announced the birth. There were some dignitaries that came, but they came from the east. That's all we know. They came from the east. And they showed up a long while later. Everything about the Christmas story is God choosing the unknown and the unseen to bring about his will. And I happen to think, I don't know if I even believe in the phrase, the spirit of Christmas, and I feel really cheesy saying this to grown adults, but if there is a spirit of Christmas, certainly it is wrapped up in noticing the unnoticed. Certainly it is wrapped up in bringing significance to those who feel insignificant. Certainly it is wrapped up in seeing the unseen. And Jesus lived his life this way. Jesus, the Son of God, born into this obscurity, lived his life noticing the unnoticed. He carried on that tradition and that ethic throughout his life. Think about the disciples that Jesus called. I don't have time to go into the cultural significance of what it was to be a disciple, but I can tell you, and you can take my word for it if you like, that to be a disciple, that was still like being in an Ivy League school. That was to really have accomplished something. Pretty much every little boy hoped to be a disciple. That's what the athletes were back then. They didn't have anything else to aspire to. That's what they aspired to. And so to be a disciple was a big deal. And so those who were in their adolescence, those who were in their late teens, like the disciples may have been when Jesus called them, and not actively following a rabbi, not actively being a disciple. And we need to understand that Jesus didn't have the only disciples in the New Testament. John the Baptist had disciples. Respected rabbis had disciples that they trained for ministry. And so to be going about your business after your education and not be a disciple of a rabbi was for the system to have told you, you're good. There's nothing left for you to pursue here. Learn a trade. We're going to train the more excellent ones. And so for Jesus to go and call his disciples the way that he did tells us that he chose people who had felt rejected. He chose people who had been told you're not gonna be good enough for this. And Jesus goes to Peter and says, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to James and John, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to the tax collector who sold out his people to make money. And he says, Levi, follow me. He goes to different people that are unknown and unnoticed that are cast aside. And he says, follow me. And I think it's really interesting because if I were trying to start a movement in the ancient world or any world, but in a small country like Israel, I would go to the affluent, right? I would go get the sons of the rich people. I would go find the sons of the ones who had the most influence and the most sway in the country. And I would try to, if I were Jesus, win them over to my cause and he saw them when they were unseen. And he noticed them when they were unnoticed, and he gave them significance when they felt insignificant. And then he modeled for them what it was to see the unseen throughout his ministry. We can think of miracle after miracle. He's walking through the pool at Bethesda, and he sees the man who's blind, who has no hope of getting into the pool before the other people do and earning the miracle. That was the myth around that pool at the time. And he goes up to him, and he heals him, and he makes it possible for him to see. I think of the woman who's caught in adultery in the act and drug through the streets to the feet of Jesus. He didn't have to have anything to do with this woman, but he chose to give her dignity. And he chose to give her respect. And he chose to defend her. And he chose to see her for who she was when everybody else just saw her for what she did. I think of Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well that Kyle preached on a few weeks back. This woman who is on her fifth husband, she's not respected in society. She's kind of ashamed of who she is. She goes to the well in the heat of the day so that no one would notice her, precisely to be unnoticed and unseen. And Jesus shows up and he sees her and he gives her living water and he speaks into her. He makes a habit throughout his whole ministry of noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen. Zacchaeus, the tax collector, who's rejected by everyone around him, climbs up in a tree just to get a glimpse of this savior. This famous person as he walks by and the crowds are gathered around him. And he looks up and he sees Zacchaeus, the last person anyone there wants to talk to. And he says, hey, I'm gonna come to your house for lunch, all right? I would love to know what Zacchaeus made, short notice for Jesus. At every turn in the life of Christ, you see Jesus living out this Christmas ethic of seeing the unseen, noticing the unnoticed, of giving significance to those who felt insignificant. And then he captures it for us, this ethic and this desire and this command for us to do the same thing towards the end of his life when he's speaking to the disciples in a story, in a parable, or in an example in Matthew chapter 25. We're going to put verse 40 on the screen, but I'm going to start reading in verse 35 when Jesus says this. Then the righteous will answer him saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you? And the king will answer them, truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me. This is the Christmas ethic. This is what's woven all throughout scripture. This is how Jesus lives his life. And this is what he leaves us with as we are tasked with seeing the unseen and noticing the unnoticed and loving the unlovable. And Jesus himself tells us, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. And so as we sit here in the middle of festive Christmas season, I can't help but think what better way to honor the arrival of Jesus than to continue in his example. What better way as individuals, as families, to celebrate Christmas season than to honor the example of Christmas, to honor the example of Christ, and to be intentional about noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen, about doing for the least of these. What better way at Christmas than to do for others, right? And I think that when we think about this, when we think about this idea of doing unto others what we would have them do unto us, when we think of this idea of doing for the least of these, and in that way we're actually serving Jesus. And this is a concept that almost everybody in here knows and has heard. And I think that when we think of that concept, doing for the least of these, we tend to think of people who are down and out. We tend to think of people who do not live in our blessing. Who do not live necessarily in our financial status. We tend to think of people who are poor. I think that we tend to think of soup kitchens. Or the homeless. Or maybe that tent community that's right around the corner. And our minds say, what can we do for them? The least of these. I think that's who we think of when we think of the least of these. Or we think we can walk out and we can grab a card off of the angel tree. And these are some people who are in need. And I want them to feel seen and significant. And so we get that. And we participate. And Jen and I, we've participated. And those things are good. And they should be done, and those are the least of these, and we should love them, and we should see them, and the church should be first in line to go love on those people, all the people that come to mind when we think of, quote unquote, the least of these. As a matter of fact, just as an aside, parents in the room still have kids at home. And I have to be careful here because I'm perfectly happy to share with you the things I'm terrible at. I'm perfectly happy to tell you what I'm bad at and to run myself down because we're all bad at something. I don't really have a lot of insecurities around that. Everybody stinks, so get on board. I never want to run down my kids, right? But I think that this issue is so ubiquitous that I'm really not running her down. All I'm doing is saying that Lily is seven. One of the things that we're starting to notice in Lily is this entitlement for Christmas, right? What she wants for Christmas. She starts working on her Christmas list in like May. She'll just tell us what it is. Like it's just gonna arrive. And you with young kids like yours do this too, I'm pretty sure. They all do it. They all go through it. And we start as parents to think like what can we do for the entitlement of our kids? How can we kind of show them so that they can be more grateful? And then we all toy around with that idea, don't we? Like, this is the year. I'm not getting them anything. Then they're going to learn. They need to learn some gratitude. But you don't because you're chicken. You're totally chicken. You're not going to do it and scar them for life. They're going to be in therapy because of it. But I do think that a good way to chisel away at some of the entitlement of our kids is to expose them to the least of these. I remember going down and serving in downtown Atlanta around Christmas season, I believe with my dad, but I know with folks from my church. So just as an aside, those of us with kids still at the house, it's probably not a bad idea to take a field trip this year somewhere and go help in a way that exposes them to another portion of life that they may not see in the circles that they run in. So I do think that when Jesus talks about the least of these, he does mean those people, people who are in different socioeconomic categories than us, people who have less than us, people who need in different ways than we do. But I also believe that the unseen are in and around our lives every day. The unnoticed, the unseen, the people who feel insignificant, I think they're on your row. I think they work in your cluster at the office. I think they're on the Zoom calls and in your neighborhoods. I think those people are everywhere. And I think that we should ask God for eyes to see them and hearts to hurt for them and wills to do for them. I think of my mother-in-law, Terry. Many of you know that part of the story of our family is that now two Christmases ago, December 29th, we lost Jen's dad to cancer. And Jen's dad was highly involved in the church. John and Terry went to church every week. Jen's dad was really, really close with his pastor. The pastor is a good family friend of theirs. And so the church was a big part of John and Terry's life. And because of that, it was really difficult after John passed for Terry to want to go again because it was such a painful, difficult thing. The idea of going to church just made her want to cry because she'd have to do it without John, and she wasn't sure if she would be strong enough to do it. And so a few months go by from essentially January to Easter, and Terry decides, I need to go to church. I need to go to church. Those are my people. I need to go. And so she gets up on Easter, drags herself out of bed, gets herself ready, and she drives there. And she's terrified. She's terrified because she's going to be sitting alone. She can't even bring herself to go to the side of the church that they normally sit on. She goes to the opposite side. And she knows that people are going to see her. She knows she's going to be sitting by herself. And she can already feel the pity in the stairs as she sits down as she's going through this. And she hates all of it. And she's scared of all of it. But she knows she needs to go. So as she's sitting down, a good friend of theirs sees her and says, hey, gives her a hug, tells her he's glad to see her. And he wasn't going to be sitting in that service, but he knew some people who were. And so he introduced this couple over here to Terry, and Terry and this couple had met before. They weren't friends, but they had talked. They were friendly. And they got to talking to Terry. And that couple invited Terry to sit with them at Easter. And as soon as they did, all the tension left Terry. She was good. She was comfortable. She was safe. And she felt seen. And she felt loved. But she was also going to get up from there, and she was going to go home to an empty house with no Easter celebration. And at the end of the service, the couple looked at her, and they said, hey, we're going to go to lunch. Would you like to come with us? And so she went to lunch with this sweet couple, and they talked for hours. And as soon as Terry got done having lunch with this couple, she called her girls. She told them all about this couple that loved her so well, that made her feel seen and made her feel important. I don't know who that couple is, but I know that they rescued Easter for my mother-in-law. I know that they made church a safe place for my mother-in-law. I know that their act of just simple hospitality and inclusion. Let her know God sees you. God loves you. God cares about you. He's going to take care of you. And even you can extrapolate that out to this path theory that you have to walk is difficult, but I'm going to send you little angels along the way. And I can't tell you the difference that it made for her to be seen that day, to be loved that day, and to be noticed that day. And you have those people in your life too. You have people who this year, their life changed tremendously. A diagnosis, a loss, a divorce. And you know that they're facing an uncertain holiday season, or maybe it's certainly going to be very difficult. You have them in your life. You have people in your life who are hurting, who are lonely, who are struggling with mental illness or newfound depression. You have folks in your life who have been praying for something and they don't have it yet. You have people in your life who on their social media feeds, there's less and less pictures of them with their spouse. And you see less and less of them at church. And you can read between those tea leaves. And we know that a phone call would probably be really good. We know that a lunch would probably be really timely. I could make a longer list, but we all have those people. We all have the people in our lives right now who are unseen and unnoticed and hurting. What better way to honor Jesus at Christmas than to make sure those people know that they are seen? Than to make sure those people know that their God loves them, that their God sees them. So why don't we do that? I was talking to Jen about it this week, and she made the point, and I think it's a great one, that we all think it, but it only matters if we actually do it. We all think about the nice things to do, don't we? We see them, we know we should call them, but it only matters if we actually do it. We can't be like me and Kyle. Kyle, our student pastor, we joke around a lot, but neither me nor Kyle really love pranks. We just love the idea of pranks. And so very often, with some degree of regularity, like at least weekly, somebody will do something and the other one of us will be like, dude, I was going to when you left, I was gonna do this to you. I thought to do this. Wouldn't that have been funny? And then we laugh at it. Yes, that would have been funny. Like a couple weeks ago, staff was going to Gonza for lunch because we take about three and a half hour lunch every day. So we're going to Gonza for lunch and we were supposed to leave at a certain time, and I just, to be an idiot, because I'm like this, I just walked out of my office. My door had been shut all day. I hadn't talked to anybody all day. I was writing a sermon, and then I just, I left, and I walked out the door, and as I opened the door, I said, later, losers, and I got in my car, and I drove to Gonsa's, knowing that they would have to drive together, right? So then they all arrive at Gonsa's a few minutes after me, and Kyle comes up to me, sure enough, and he's like, dude, I really thought it would have been funny to convince everybody not to come to lunch with you and just leave you here by yourself. And I was like, I know. I was actually pretty worried that's what you guys were going to do. And then we laughed about it, but we don't actually ever do anything to each other. We just joke about how it would have been, right? We can't do this when it comes to loving people who need it so much. What if that couple, months later, the next time Terry went to church was like, Terry, listen to this. We thought about inviting you to sit with us, but, you know, we just didn't do it. And then we thought, we should invite her to lunch, right? This is her first Sunday back. It's Easter. I don't know if she has any plans. Let's just invite her. But, you know, Terry, we just, we had stuff going on, so we decided not to do it. It doesn't work the same way, does it? We all think the things. We need to do it. I was talking to a dear friend of mine yesterday, who when I think of people who see the unseen and notice the unnoticed, I think of her. And I was talking to her about the sermon. And I made the comment to her, I bet the more you do it, the more you see. And the more you see, the more you want to do. And she said, yeah. And I thought about it more. And it really is true that when we become those agents, God's hands and feet, God's hugs, God's presence, God's attention, God's smiles for the people who need it so desperately. We really do meet Jesus there. We really do find our Savior there in those moments. We really do get a glimpse of what it's like to love like he loves. So that when Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do it for me, it's not hyperbole. It's just true. And so my simple encouragement for you this week is to go do it. Let me just challenge you to think of one person, one family, one neighbor, one coworker, one person sitting on your row right now who might feel unnoticed or unseen, who might be hurting. And allow God to use you. And maybe you get to be the angel that rescues Christmas for them this year. Maybe God allows you to participate in his good and perfect will in that way. Maybe you'll be the one that other family members that you don't even know will be telling stories about to their friends two and three and five years from now because of a simple act of love this December. And I'll be the first to admit I'm the king of thinking about things I should do. I'm just letting them float off and not do them. So when I say do it, like actually do it, I'm talking to me more than anybody. But what could happen in our little community? What stories could come out? What ways could God be seen if just everybody in this room decides, you know what, when I go to school, when I go to work, when I get home, I'm going to make it a point to ask for eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to feel. And I'm going to love somebody that needs to be loved. I'm going to notice somebody that needs to be noticed. I'm going to see somebody who doesn't feel seen. What could God do with that in just this room right here? Let's find out. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. Thank you for always seeing us when we feel unseen. Thank you for always loving us when we feel unlovable. And God, thank you for the opportunity to participate in your word and in your will. I pray that you would give us eyes to see the people around us who need your love. And that you would give us the will and the courage to express that to them. Let us this week, Father, write the email, make the phone call, extend the invitation, buy the gift, reconcile. Give us your heart for the unnoticed and for the unseen so that when we go and love them, we might find you there. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

The Yo, good to see everybody. Thank you again for being here. This is the sixth part in our series going through the book of Revelation. I have really very much enjoyed going through Revelation with you all. And honestly, you guys have been more enthusiastic about it than I expected because Revelation can be a slog. It can be tough. We just took three weeks working through the tribulation, talking about the wrath of God and all the mechanics of the tribulation best we can. And to me, that feels tedious, but you guys have been incredibly supportive and incredibly kind. And it seemed like y'all have enjoyed going through this with me. As folks have asked me, how is Revelation being received? I say, it seems universally good. However, no one's going to tell me it's bad. No one's going to email me and be like, just so you know, really are looking forward to when this series is over and we can talk about something else. So that might be out there. And if that's you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for hanging with us. But for those of you who have enjoyed this, thanks so much for the encouragement because it's been really, really neat to get to go through it with you guys as a church. This morning, we arrive at Christ's return, the return of Christ. And I said last week that this needs to be the best sermon that I've ever preached in my life, to do adequate justice to the grandiosity of what's happening in Revelation 19. This will not be the best sermon of my life. I just wish that it could be, okay? So let's temper our expectations now. This is a B minus, all right? But in this sermon, we arrive at Jesus' return, at kind of the culmination of God's wrath, the final nail in the coffin. I said we've been walking through the tribulation. We've kind of looked at it through three different lenses. We looked at it in the first week to understand the wrath of God that's poured out in the tribulation, and we defined it. We defined it that week when we looked at Revelation 4 and 5, and Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, qualified to open up the seals and begin to open up God's wrath on his creation. We said he's beginning the seven-year process of tribulation. Now, what is tribulation? Well, we define that as the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on his creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. And this week, he reclaims it. This week, he does the last part of the tribulation. Then we looked at kind of the flow of it, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, and then we looked at the figures of it, and we'll talk a little bit more about the beast, the Antichrist, today. But where we're at in the narrative of Revelation is we're at the end of the Tribulation. God has poured out his wrath. We've had this great battle. There's been a great earthquake. God has sent darkness onto the kingdom of the Antichrist. And then he sends his son to finish up the work. He sends his son to answer the voice of the martyrs that cries out in Revelation chapter 6, the fifth seal. The voice of the martyrs below the throne of God that say, how much longer, God, before you avenge our death? You know who killed us. You see us suffering as your children. How much longer will you let this keep going? And we talked about in that week how we cry out with the martyrs, that every time something in our life happens that seems difficult or hard to understand or seems unfair, every time there's a school shooting, God, how much longer are you going to let this go on? Every time we lose someone too soon, God, how much longer will you let this world be broken? Every time we see something that we can't understand, we cry out with the martyrs and we say, God, how much longer, oh Lord, will you put up with this? And when he begins to open up the seals and begin the process of tribulation, he says, no more. And when he sends his son Christ, when we see Jesus in Revelation 19, that is God putting the final nail in the coffin of evil and saying, now I will make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Now I will rectify things. Now I will restore creation. Now I will answer the groanings that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 8 when we are told that all of creation groans for the return of the king. When we're told that we yearn inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters to experience eternity in the marriage supper of the lamb, we wait for this. We long for this. This is the hope that persists in our faith and keeps us anchored to our savior because we believe that revelation 19 is going to happen one day, that he's going to come get us, and that when he comes back, you guys have heard me say this before, he's not coming back as the Lamb of God. He comes back as the Lion of Judah. And we see this description in Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. So if you have a Bible, you can read along with me. I love this description of my Jesus. Every time I read it, whether it's out loud or just in private, I get chills. I love this picture of him. And I don't know, I don't know if everybody can relate to this. This may just be silly. This may just be me being a dummy, and that's fine. I'm familiar with this territory. It's not unfamiliar. But when I read this passage about my Jesus, that part of me as a little kid that loved to see the hero win in movies, that teenage boy that loved to watch Braveheart win, that loved Gladiator and seeing Russell Crowe's character stick it to him, that little boy that loves Star Wars, that loves to see the hero win against evil, against all odds, that part of us, and I'm sharing that with you because I think that God lays that in us intentionally. I think we love the hero because the hero is a shadow of this reality that Jesus becomes. We grow up learning to love when the day is saved and when the hero makes an appearance because God wove that, I think, into our hearts to appreciate the appearance of his son when that hero returns and appears once and for all. So it's with that preamble that we'll read the description as Jesus comes back to reclaim his creation. This is the description of him that John records. Chapter 19, verse 11. And behold, a white horse. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Gosh. That's Jesus, man. That's Jesus. That's our Savior. When we think of Jesus, when we pray to him, when we sing to him, when we think about him, when we think about being reunited with him in heaven, I believe that it's our tendency to think about the gospel of Jesus, to think about the crucified Christ. And I don't think that's anybody's fault. We have four gospels. We spend time there all the time. I revisit a gospel every spring with you guys. We focus on Jesus at Easter. We focus on Jesus at Christmas. And we see the teachings from Jesus come out of the gospel. And so it's right and good to think about our Jesus as the crucified Christ. It's right and good to think about our Jesus as gentle and lowly. We're actually reading a book, as the staff right now, called Gentle and Lowly, and what it tells us, and I did not know this, but that the only time that Jesus is ever asked to describe himself in scripture, or rather the only time that he actually does it, he describes himself as gentle and lowly. And I think that when we think about Jesus, we think about a humble Nazarene from the country. And that's fine and that's well and good. But that's Jesus in human form. Revelation 19, that's Jesus. You understand? That's who's waiting on us. That's who's coming to get us. That warrior king written on his robe and on his thigh, king of kings and Lord of lords as a callback to Isaiah so that we know exactly who it is. And when you read through this passage, it's unbelievable to me how rich it is with allusions to other parts of scripture so that there is no doubt about it that this is Jesus coming from the very beginning. It says that he was called faithful and true, capitalized. This is a deity. This is Jesus coming. And then it says that only he knows his name, which is, that's Exodus chapter three and four, when God refuses to share his name. That's a throwback to that. And then he says that he was called the word of God, which John is referencing his own writings at beginning of John, the gospel, when he says that the word was with God in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God through him, all things were made without him, nothing was made. And then at the end, king of kings and Lord of lords. John, in this description of Jesus is weaving together all of the scripture to point us to our savior. This is the Jesus, the one who has fire coming out of his eyes and a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. The one who rules with the rod of iron, who has the armies of heaven arrayed in linen, following down as he thunders down to conquer the beast and the dragon and the antichrist. That's the one that sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. That's the one that rules for all of eternity. That's the one that we pray to. And that's the one who's coming to get you. So I want to at least take some time this morning to encourage you. When you sing to Jesus, when you pray to him, when you think of him, when you anticipate meeting him, anticipate the conquering Christ. Anticipate this Jesus. Anticipate the warrior king coming down to settle the score. Anticipate the lion of Judah coming down to wreck shop. To once and for all sweep evil off the face of the planet. And when you do that, when you focus on the conquering Christ, to me, it really caused me to think about this a lot this week, that the conquering Christ renders the crucified Christ all the more miraculous. The conquering Christ, Christ conquering renders Christ crucified all the more miraculous. Because this description in Revelation 19 with a robe dipped in blood and a sword coming out of his mouth and a rod of iron that he rules a nation with, he's gonna tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God with all of heaven's armies arrayed behind him, thundering down to wreck shop. That Jesus hung on the cross for you. That Jesus walked away from all of that, condescended to take on our form, walked with us for 33 years, nurtured disciples to birth a church that would become his true kingdom that he's coming back to rescue so that you and I can sit in here 2,000 years later. He did all that, meek and mild. And when he describes himself as gentle and lowly, yeah, you're not kidding, man. Because look who he is in earth and look who he could be this whole time. This description, this guy, this God, this warrior king, he hung on the cross for you. Not just some sage from the hills of Israel. God condescended for you. He chose to hang on the cross. So I love that moment with Pilate. He's like, are you really a king? And he's like, don't worry about it, Pilate. If I wanted to, this whole place would be smashed. At any moment in Jesus' life, he could have called down these armies and just crushed anybody who opposed him. Caiaphas, the high priest, is sitting there thinking he's got Jesus right where he wants him, and Jesus is just thinking, you have no idea who I am. He dies, he's separated from God. Satan thinks he's got Jesus right where he wants him. Jesus says, you have no idea who I am. Christ conquering, to me, renders Christ crucified as all the more miraculous. And when I think about my Jesus, this is who I think about. He comes to get us and to take us back up to heaven and to start off eternity. And when he comes to get us, he takes us back, we're told, to what's called the marriage supper of the Lamb. He's defeated the beast. He's defeated the Antichrist. He locks them up. It begins the thousand-year reign. We're going to talk about that next week. There's an encore of evil, and then Jesus once and for all throws them in the lake of fire, and that's it. But he comes down. He captures the beast. The armies conquer. He takes his children, he wipes evil off the face of the earth, he purifies his bride, and then we have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And I feel bad for how I'm covering the marriage supper of the Lamb in this series. Because I'm not gonna do it justice. I'm not gonna adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this series. Because I'm not going to do it justice. I'm not going to adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this way of false humility, like, oh yeah, I'm really not doing that good of a job with it. Like, no, I'm not. We just don't have enough time to sink in to everything that's here and even all the symbolism in the marriage supper of the Lamb. But a simple way of thinking about it is the marriage supper of the lamb is the greatest celebration feast of all time. It is the greatest celebration feast that ever was and ever will be. And this should hit home with us. Because what do we do? What do we do when we want to celebrate? I got a little bit of good news last week. Such good news that I went straight to the butcher's market. I bought myself a big old ribeye and I had that for dinner when the kids went to bed. I had myself my own personal private celebration feast. When your team wins, what do you do? You have a feast. When something good in life happens, when you graduate, you have a feast. When people come into town, what do you do? You have a feast. What are we going to do this week? We're going to get together with friends and family. We're going to reflect on the blessings that God has given us, and we're going to have a feast. This is what we do to celebrate. When your kid gets married, and you celebrate kind of transitioning into that season of life. This one has passed. We've formed a new family. What do you do? You get all your friends together and you have a feast. This is what God is doing. It's the greatest celebration feast of all time. In the days of old when kings would conquer and they would come back from conquering another king, what did they do? They feasted. And Jesus is bringing us back to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Why is it called the marriage supper of the Lamb? Because Jesus is getting married. Who's he marrying? Us. The church. His bride. We see throughout Scripture that the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. We see in Ephesians that God purifies his bride. He prepares us. We are made pure for Jesus so that we might marry him in eternity. I don't know how all that works out. It's a word play, but we are made pure by our savior. How are we made pure? By the crucified Christ hanging on the cross. He died for us. He covered over you in righteousness, made you good, purified you, prepared you for this very moment, for the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the church and Christ are united for all of eternity and perfect bliss. And so it's right and good to have a feast to celebrate the marriage. And this feast, man, it's going to be a good feast. The ones that you've lost, they're going to be there. I don't know for certain. I can't find it in Scripture. But I'm pretty sure they're going to serve catfish at this feast. Because my papa is going to be there. He loves catfish. And I know he's got some waiting on me. Your loved ones are going to be there too. Your dads are going to be there. And your moms. And the children that you never got to meet because you lost them too early, they're going to be there. All the saints who have come before us, all the saints that you've loved, they're going to be there. And listen to this. They're going to be the best versions of themselves. They're not going to be sick. They're not going to be unhealthy. They're not going to be unwell. They're going to be the perfect versions of themselves. They're not going to have all the brokenness that hurts us sometimes. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your dad, who you loved, but man, that guy had a temper. In heaven, he doesn't have a temper anymore. He's just love. He's just all the best parts of him. The people who we love, who made it sometimes hard to love them. Jesus has prepared those brides too. Their brokenness is wiped away. And they love you with purity. And you're made perfect too. All the crap in your life, all the stuff that you wish wasn't true of you, all the things that you hope nobody finds out, all the brokenness that spills out of you and hurts the people around you when you don't want to hurt them and you hate that side of yourself, that side's gone at the marriage supper of the Lamb. You're made perfect there. You're made your ideal self there. You're made your eternal self there. And you can love other people finally with the purity that God loves you with. We see the best versions of the folks we love. I am convinced of this. We finally walk in the best versions of ourself and don't have to wonder what it would be like to not have to walk through life as a selfish, egotistical jerk. That one's just for me. I don't know what your thing is. That feast is going to be remarkable. And everybody's going to be there. And Jesus is coming to take you to that. And I think that's pretty great. And as I thought about these things this week, the triumphant return of Christ and the marriage supper of the Lamb and all that it represents and what Jesus really won with that victory. What does it mean for us? Yes, evil is smited. Evil is gone and all the wrong things are made right and all the sad things are made untrue. All that is very true and God wins once and for all and that part of us that loves a hero gets to see the actual hero come storming out of the clouds. He wins those things for us. We see our God claim victory and that's great. But there's something else that occurred to me too. I was prepared. I knew this was going to happen. We're not even to the hard part yet. Jeez, old Pete. Something else occurred to me as I kind of asked the question, what has Jesus won? And what are we celebrating at the marriage supper? And I was reminded of this idea that I have long carried with me, but I've not heard too many other people talking about it. I've actually never heard a pastor talk about this. It doesn't make it a unique idea. It's just one that I've not heard other people mention. And maybe it's because pastors aren't supposed to say things like this and the other ones know better and yours doesn't. But I've long carried with me this idea that faith and hope are burdens. Faith and hope are hard. We celebrate faith and hope in our belief system. We're told that the greatest of all these things is faith, hope, and love. We celebrate faith and hope. We want those. We name our children faith and hope. They are good things. But I, in my life, in my most honest moments, experience them often as a burden, as something to be carried, as something to be chosen. Because faith is a belief in things that you can't see. Faith is what we choose when facts fall short of certainty. Do you understand? There's things that we can know about the universe and about our God and about scripture and about the claims and about life. There's things that can be scientifically proven and broken down and rendered as factual. And then there's what we choose to put our faith in. Then there's certainty. And when facts fall short of certainty, we fill that gap with faith. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're an atheist, there's no way to be totally certain of what you think's going on in the universe. So when we reach the end of facts and we have to arrive at certainty, we fill that gap with faith. So faith is a choice. We choose it. We exercise it. We learn it. We let God speak into it. We let him strengthen it over the course of our life. The longer you walk with God, hopefully the stronger your faith gets, but it gets stronger because it's been tried and it's been tested and it's been a burden that you've chosen to continue to carry. Hope is a burden. Hope is a belief that one day something can be true that I want to be true. Hope, to even have hope, is an admission that right now things are not the way that I want them to be. Right now things are less than ideal. Right now things are not what I want, but I hope, I believe that one day the things that I want can be brought about. Hope is an admission of a shortfall. People who are not yet parents and desperately want to be hope that one day this can be true of us. We, as believers, we read scripture, we hear the stories of Jesus coming down out of heaven, and we hope in that day. We place our faith in that day. We believe that there's going to be a marriage supper. We place our hope in that. We place our hope and our faith in the idea that our prayers are working, that they get to God, that they are powerful and effective and they're not just bouncing off the ceiling. But sometimes, life makes hope heavy. Sometimes life makes hope heavy. When you lose someone too early and your Bible teaches you that your God could have done something about it and you have to be confronted with the fact that he just simply didn't. In that season, you choose hope. And in that season, it's heavy. And sometimes, when life gets hard, and when faith and hope become burdens, and they become heavy, we see people put them down and walk away from them and say, I can't carry this faith anymore. I don't know how to believe in a God that would let that happen, so I'm gonna set down this faith. I don't know how I can still cling to hope when I've been disappointed in these ways, so I'm going to set down this hope. Sometimes faith and hope get heavy, and they get hard to carry. When you grow up in church, being taught a simple faith, and then you become an adult adult and there are things that happen in your world that just don't align with what you were taught when you were a kid and you have to learn how to find this new faith. You have to cling to it and you have to hope and you have to choose hope and you have to find ways to make what you were taught and what you're experiencing mesh and you have to find a whole new way to understand scripture and understand God and to understand how he speaks to you. In those moments, faith can get hard and hope can get heavy and we have to choose them. And I am convinced that the Christian life is simply a series of the decision to choose faith and to choose hope in Christ over and over and over again until we make it to the finish line. My prayer as I prayed before I preached this morning was that if there is anybody in here that's carrying heavy hope that it would get lightened just a little bit today. That we would have the strength and the faith to continue to carry it for a little bit longer. Just get down the road just a little bit further. Because sometimes faith and hope get heavy. And I hate that we don't talk about that as much because we should. And if that's true, if I'm right that they can be burdens, then one of the best things that Jesus wins when he comes sweeping out of the sky is on this day, he lays to rest faith and hope forever. And he says, here, you don't need these anymore. You don't need faith and hope anymore. Maybe that's why Paul writes in Romans 8, he says, for in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. When Jesus shows up, we don't need hope anymore. When he shows up, we don't need faith anymore. There's no more gap between facts and certainty. There's just Jesus. There's no more hoping for one day. There's just Jesus. One day has arrived. Do you understand that when Jesus sweeps down out of the sky, that he lays to rest for us for all eternity, faith and hope. And he says, you can set them down, weary traveler. You're here now. Let's feast. And I think that's a remarkable blessing. Because to be a Christian is to believe that one day these things will be true. To be a Christian is to believe that one day God will set all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. One of my favorite songs in the world is this song called Farther Along. Farther Along, I like the version from a guy named Josh Gerrels, and it opens up. And he says, I wonder why the good man dies and the bad man thrives and Jesus cries because he loves them both. And the chorus is, farther along, we'll know all about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. And it's just this acknowledgement, I think, that faith and hope are hard. Faith and hope are hard, but one day, I won't need those anymore. I can lay that and everything else down at the feet of my Savior. And on that day, when Jesus comes back, there are no more one days. On this day, Revelation 19, marriage supper of the Lamb, on that day, there are no more one days. It is one day for all eternity. There's no more wondering, there's no more hoping, there's no more struggling, there's no more pain. Because on that day, he puts an end to waiting on one day. And I kind of wonder now if that's why Paul didn't say what he said in Corinthians. When he gets to the end of talking about all the spiritual gifts and he says, but now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these, Paul says, is love. And I've always read and accepted that teaching, and it's made sense to me. Love binds. Love is the very nature of God. Love is what unites us together. It makes sense to me that love would be greater than faith and hope. But now I wonder, in light of what I've thought through this week, if maybe love isn't the greatest because when Jesus comes back and lays faith and hope to rest, that love is the only thing that exists for all of eternity. Maybe love is the greatest because it's the only thing left after Revelation 19. And we live in an eternity of perfect love that God designed us for, finally. As I was thinking through this sermon this week, I was pacing in the lobby. And as I was out there, just kind of walking back and forth, thinking through these things, asking myself the question, what has Christ won for us? I noticed on the information table, a bracelet, like a little ringlet. And I picked it up and I saw an inscription there. And I thought, oh, what is this? God, are you talking to me? Let? Speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm working on the sermon. There's a bracelet here. You've got to be working in this. So I reach over, and on the bracelet, it just says, it is well with my soul. Also, if that's your bracelet, it's right out there. It just said, it is well with my soul. And I thought, oh, I love that song. But that's not really helpful. Okay, God's not speaking. And I just kept pacing. And I got done and I kind of had a fully formed idea. And sometimes on Tuesdays when I get a fully formed idea, I get a little bit excited about the sermon and I'll go and I'll tell Kyle because Kyle's always up for a conversation. I said, Kyle, I got it. Listen, I told him about this idea of faith and hope being burdens and that Jesus is going to put those to rest for us. And Kyle started to get a little teary eyed. And he said, he said, that just reminds me of my favorite song, my favorite line from my favorite song. And he quoted me these lines from it as well. And I was like, oh my gosh, God is speaking. I'm just dumb. I always say God speaks in stereo. And Kyle quoted these lines. And he started crying. And I got misty, and I knew that this is what we were supposed to share, and I knew that we were supposed to end the service today with it as well. Because in these lines, we see the author of this song admitting what we've just talked about today. The faith and hope are burdens, and so it is well with my soul. We often sing this song in a response to grief as an admission that I am going to choose faith and hope even though it's heavy today. Now let's sing it looking forward to the day we can lay those things to rest and Jesus has won the final victory and forever we will say it is well with my soul. Stand and let's sing together.