Sermons tagged with Israel

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

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. I appreciate you being here on this October Sunday. This is the first Sunday where I'm really seeing a lot of sweaters and flannels, and it's just making me so, so very happy that it's cool weather finally. Nothing in my life requires the temperature to ever be above 70 degrees. So I'm very happy to be in the fall. We are wrapping up our series, as Kyle mentioned earlier, this Sunday called Transformed, where we're talking about God transforming us in different ways. This morning, we're going to be focused on transforming our love from conditional to unconditional love. How do we move from conditional love to being able to offer unconditional love, which is a lot more challenging than we might think at first. And in a way, the next series that we're doing is called The Songs We Sing, and it's one I told you about last week. I'm very excited about it because it's one that we've wanted to do for about two and a half years, I think. I've had it in the kitty. I've wanted to do it. We weren't sure the right time to deploy it, and we felt like this fall was the right time. This is what we want to do. And so it's really going to be a six-week series focused on worship. We're going to look at individual worship songs and where they come from in Scripture, imbue them with not more meaning, but the meaning that they had from the author that wrote them and see them in Scripture so that they can mean more to us and really move through a theology of worship learning why we do it. So I'm very excited for that series, and I hope it will be a very meaningful one in the life of Grace. This Sunday is almost like kind of part one of that. It's a transition between transformed and between the songs we sing because we just sang this song, Reckless Love, the reckless love of God. And that's where we're going to rest today. As we approach the idea, I wanted to share with you an idea about love that I encountered years ago, two, three years ago, and it stuck with me, and it's really, it's kind of transformed the way I think about love, and it definitely helps me as I counsel with couples who are going to get married as I do premarital counseling and all of those things, and you'll see why in a minute. But this idea that was presented to me about love is the concept that we all love with boundaries. We all offer our love with some boundaries around it. I'm going to love this person or this thing, but I'm going to love them within some parameters that I've set up. And if this person or thing ventures outside those parameters, I will no longer love you. I'm going to love this puppy until it goes to the bathroom on my bed. Then that is outside the parameters of love. I no longer love this puppy. That scarred me for my whole life, right? Maybe I wouldn't assume that all of you love me. I think some of you do. Maybe you feel kind thoughts towards me. I would hope that none of you exist in open hostility towards me, but maybe you have some affection for me as your pastor. But if I got up here next week and I told you how to vote next year, some of you would be like, that is outside my bounds of love. I no longer feel those feelings of affection towards you, right? There's plenty of things I could get up here and say that would be outside your boundaries of affection for me. There's things that could come up about stuff in the shadows that you would go, well, that's outside, that behavior is outside the bounds of love that I would have for a pastor, so I'm out. You see, we all love with boundaries. We all love with parameters. And this is just kind of as an aside, something that I always say to the couples that I'm doing premarital counseling with. It's important in our marriages to love with broad borders, big expansive boundaries, because the truth of marriage is people don't stay the same. When you get married, you're not just committing to loving that person that you're married, but you're committed to loving the version of them that unfolds 10 years down the road. When we walk the aisle, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we have children, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we get into our careers, when we start to learn ourselves a little bit more, new hobbies open up and those changes, new desires and passions open up and we evolve as people, or at least we should, and those changes. So even this notion in marriage of looking at your spouse and going, you're not who I married. Yeah, no kidding. This shouldn't be unless you married a real dud. So we love with broad borders and allow the person in our marriage to become whoever they need to become, whoever God designed them to be. And that's the love that we should offer to other people is borders that are broad and wide and generous and gracious where we allow God to work in the lives of these people and we don't set tight parameters of our love around the objects of our love. But you can also make an argument that we love with boundaries because these boundaries protect us. We love with these boundaries because life has taught us to love with boundaries. Because those boundaries protect us from hurt. When love goes unreciprocated, when you care a great deal for someone, and at no point in this for the rest of the day am I talking about a romantic love. I just want to be clear. I'm talking about phileo love, the brotherly love, an affectionate love. If we offer our love and affection to somebody over and over and over again and it goes unreciprocated, then eventually it's going to hurt too much to offer that love and we're going to stop. If we offer someone our love and trust and they betray us and they show us that they're not worthy of our love, enough times eventually it's going to hurt so much to offer it to them that we are going to stop. So we naturally develop these borders around the love that we offer to other people and to other things because after those things have hurt us enough or disappointed us enough, we withdraw our love because it hurts too much to extend it. I have a friend that I've had since high school. Really good buddy of mine. And it's probably four or five years ago now, it kind of came to light that his wife was an addict. She was addicted to pills. And it was profoundly impacting their marriage, obviously. And he, for years, had tried to love her in spite of, and eventually had to let other people in on the struggle that they carried together. And it led to her doing things that were not legal to acquire the things that she felt like she needed. And she became more and more distant from my friend. They together had three kids. She had a daughter from a previous relationship but was so close to my friend that she called him dad. So they ostensibly had four kids together and she was completely absent. And I watched him love her faithfully through that. I watched him think the best of her and hope the best of her. Continue to try to rehabilitate and rejuvenate her. And then the time came when she eventually broke down and she needed to go to rehab and rehab lasted several months for her. And I watched him hold together the pieces of his life, try to raise four kids that ran the gamut in age from elementary school to high school. I watched him try to hold everything together. He's an accountant. He had a really good job and his bosses knew what he was going through, but they had to pull him aside and be like, dude, we're not getting any productivity out of you. You can't do your job well right now. We need you to do better. And they worked with him and they worked with him and he felt the pressure and he felt bad. During the season of life, he and I would talk on the phone two and three times a week. And you could just see him spinning out of control and falling apart at the seams. And eventually his bosses came to him at work and they were like, we hate to do this, but you need to look for another job. Because if you stay here, we're going to have to fire you and we don't want to do that. His life was hard. And then in the middle of this, as she's gotten out of rehab and has started to go to different meetings throughout the week. What I felt was inevitable, unearthed as true, she was unfaithful to him as well with somebody in the rehab group. And even in the face of that reality, my friend continued to love her, continued to hope for her and for them and for their best future. And it was hard to watch. And I began to just gently tell him, it may be time to move away. It may be time to move on for your sake and for the sake of the kids. The language I didn't have was, she's ventured outside of any boundaries that should be required of you. And it may be time to admit that she's never coming back in. And he still couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. Still determined to love her. And one day we were on the phone and he said, man, it feels like I'm just throwing myself against a brick wall. And I get up and I dust myself off and I don't know what to do. And I said, dude, not to make it about me, but he decided it was time to make that decision. And so they separated and eventually divorced. And if you fast forward now, now he's living in the Brady Bunch. He married a lady. I think she has three kids. They have seven kids in this house. And it's nuts, but he's happy and she loves him well. And the whole experience actually brought him back to God. But there are times in life when those boundaries are necessary because they protect us. We offer very little boundless love. I can really only think of two situations where we approach offering limitless love to someone or something. The first is to our children. Most parents have incredibly generous borders around the love for their children, and this is a good model for how God loves us. The other place where we seem to have boundless borders around our love is in our sports fandom. We just, NC State fans, you know this. You know this well. Every year, every year, maybe they'll be good. Maybe they won't disappoint me. Maybe they'll take a step forward. And then they just slam into the brick wall of mediocrity. And what do you do? You get yourself up. You dust yourself off. The next year is going to be different. And here's what's awful. Here's what you do is you impart that on your children masochistically. These people that you love boundlessly, now you parade them to the game with you so it becomes a part of their soul. And now they're Wolfpack fans too. Great. They get to endure a life of pain. And I know this masochism well because Lily's a Georgia Tech fan. And I know that we had a big victory last night. Whoop-dee-doo. Guess what? We're still bad at football, and we're going to be bad at football for decades. We offer very little boundless love in our life. And because we are used to offering our love with boundaries, and we are used to receiving love with boundaries, we understand that when someone shows us affection and love and care, that there's some parameter, there's a fence that we need to stay inside of. We get that concept. Because we give and receive love with boundaries, we assume that God has boundaries too. We assume that there must be some parameters around the love that God offers to me because every other experience of love in my life carries those parameters and I know that I need to stay within them or offer within them, and so God must love me in that same way. And the thing that happens that I've seen being a Christian for as far back as I can remember is that when you're in, when you're in the church, when you've been a long-time Christian, you hear about the boundless and the reckless love of God, and you're like, yes, amen. That's absolutely true. To the sinner out there who's disappointing God with every word, thought, and action that they have, who's so far from God, they come to know him, and they get the good news, the good news of the gospel. Hey, God loves you boundlessly. He loves you recklessly. He loves you with no parameters at all. Just be swept up into that love and ushered into heaven. We love that message. That's a good message. That's the Christian message. That's the miracle of the gospel. The problem is that once we receive that love and feel that love, we move into the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ in character, and we start to disappoint God, and we start to let him down down and we start to return to some of the sins that we employed previously and we slide into and out of fervency, into and out of spiritual attendedness, into and out of faithful pursuit of him. There are times when we run our race well. There are times when we take a breather and we walk and there are times when we just sit down and consider whether or not we want to continue the race at all. And we assume, Christians, that we have ventured outside the parameters of God's love. And the love that he once had for me, he still has, but not as much because I've tainted it. Because I should know better. Because I know what I'm going to go do. I know what I'm planning to go do. I know that if you put me in this situation with this group of people, what I am capable of doing. I know my private heart conditions. I know my prejudices and my biases, and I am not going to be letting those go anytime soon. So God must be disappointed in me. I think that's how most Christians go through their life. To put it more pointedly, if you were God, would you still love you? If you were God in heaven, would you still love you? Let's make you God and me you. And you offered for me the thing that you valued the most in all of your existence, your only son. You sent him and you watched him die for my sake. And I saw that gift and I saw your love and I saw your sacrifice and I saw his suffering, the same suffering that you watched and I I said, thanks for that. And I put it in my back pocket. And then for the rest of my days, I lived as if that weren't true. I lived outside of gratitude for it. I did whatever I wanted. You said, I'm doing this for you. Let me be the Lord of my life and I'll give you the best life possible. And I said, I'm going to accept your eternal life. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, save it for a rainy day. And I I'm actually gonna choose my version of a good life because I think I know what it is better than yours. Yours seems lame and boring. Mine is super awesome and fun. So I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And every now and again, I'm gonna lean towards Jesus. I'm gonna make it look to everyone around me like I've got my act together and I'm doing the right things and I read my Bible and I pray and I make wise choices. But you and I both know that I'm really not living under your lordship at all. But at the end of my life, when it comes time, I'm gonna pull out that card and be like, so I get in, right? Would you still love me? If that was my attitude towards your gift? There's a reason that most of us feel like God is disappointed in us. There's a reason why when I ask a question like, if God still loves you, if you were God, would you still love you? And it's because we've been programmed to assume that God's love works the same way ours does. That there's parameters, there's borders, that there's a limit. But thank God that this human God, this God that loves like a person, is not the God at all that's described in Scripture. Thank God that the God in Scripture is described as offering a love that is utterly impossible for us and unknown to us outside of knowing him. And I'm going to read some scriptures and go through and show you this never-ending reckless love of God from scripture. But as I do that, the temptation, I believe, for us Christians in the room is to say, I know that. Yeah, I know God loves me no matter what. I get it. He loves me no matter what. He loves me recklessly. He loves me to the end of the earth. He removes my sins as far as the east is from the west. Some of you can probably guess the verses that I'm going to use. I know God loves me. Yeah. Listen. You know God loves you here. But when's the last time you felt God's love here? We know intellectually he loves us. Do we walk filled with the love of God through our days and offering that freely and graciously to others? Do we live out that verse from his goodness? We have all received grace upon grace. The initial grace is God's And from his fullness, we receive that and we spill it out onto others. Do you walk through your days knowing here, deep in your soul, that God loves you and it's the only love that you ever need and you can stop chasing it in other places because he is all sufficient for you? Do you walk in a heart knowledge of God's relentless love of you? I don't. I know I don't. Because every now and again I do. And when I do, those days are different. When I walk with a soul knowledge that I am loved by the creator God, that he finds no fault in me because of his son, I'm a better husband, I'll tell you that. I'm a more patient father. I'm a more gracious friend. I'm a more diligent pastor. I'm a much more patient driver. Do you go through your days with some sort of mental assent that yes, there's a God and he loves me? Or do you go through your days feeling it beat in your chest and in your soul that God loves you deeply and there's nothing you can ever do to change that? So as I go through these verses, don't be the pious Christian that gives intellectual assent to what I'm going to say, but let God's love rest on your soul this morning. That you might know and accept and walk in the fact that you are loved deeply by your creator. This is what he says in Jeremiah 31.3. I've just got a list of passages here that I want you to hear this morning. The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Now he's speaking here in Jeremiah to God's people, to the Israelites, but we know that if we are Christians, if we profess a faith in Christ, then we are God's people too. And so this verse, and God's love applies to us, he loves us in an everlasting way. And so he remains faithful to us. Nehemiah says, back in the desert when you freed us from slavery and we were wandering around for those 40 years, we trampled on you. We rejected you. You gave us manna every day and we didn't care. You gave us laws and we didn't want them. You gave us provision and we didn't care for it. We wanted to actually go back to Egypt and worship their gods. We stubbed our, I don't know the right phrase. We snubbed our nose at you. Is that a thing? We refused your help. And by all rights, you should have rejected us. But you didn't. Because you're slow to anger and you're abounding in steadfast love and mercy. And he did not forsake them. And then John writes at the end of his life, 1 John chapter 4. Your notes have 9 through 11, but the first three words are from verse 8. God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. I mentioned the sacrifice of Christ earlier. That is the picture of love. That is love literally becoming flesh and suffering for us, with us, to bring us with him into eternal not suffering. And he leads off this section, John does, by saying God is love. He is the personification of love. You cannot think of pure love and be thinking not of God. Any person who's ever existed without a knowledge of God, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, when they think of love, when they feel love, they are thinking of God, they are feeling God, even if they don't realize it because God is love. He is found in that emotion. He is found in that desire and in that affection. God claims to be love itself. And if that's true, then I would like for you to allow me the license to reword Paul's famous poem on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If we replace the word love, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, does not boast. If we replace that with God, because God is love, then it reads like this and resonates with me. God is patient. God is kind. He does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. He does not dishonor others. God is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails. That's the love that your God offers to you. He loves you with an everlasting love. And because of that, he is steadfast in his faithfulness to you, even when you are unfaithful to him. He always persists. He always hopes in you. He never fails you. He keeps no record of your wrongs. We sing that song right before the sermon, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. And it's funny to me, when that song first came out, there was debate in theological circles because theological circles like to have stupid debates to justify their existence. And there was a school of thought that the recklessness there was that shouldn't be in a worship song. We shouldn't attribute that to God. That's a negative thing. That means he's foolhardy. It's some sort of error that he's making in loving us. And I always thought that was absurd. God's love is reckless because he loves with no regard for himself. God's love for you is reckless because he's the only entity in eternity that can love with a boundless love with no parameters to protect himself. God will slam against the wall of your apathy over and over and over again for your entire life and get himself up and dust himself off and heal himself up and chase after you again. And eventually, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to Kool-Aid man through that brick wall of yours. He's going to get you. But in the meantime, he's going to keep coming. And our sin and our obstinance and our apathy can keep holding him at bay, but he's not going to stop following you. He's not going to stop pursuing you. He's not going to stop chasing you. You're not going to hurt him enough that he has to withdraw and retract and say, I just can't do it. It hurts too much to continue to love her. He's just going to keep coming because that's the love of God. I've gotten into this habit recently that I would honestly highly recommend for my Bible readers. When it's time for my reading time in the morning, I've started trying to figure out what's the thing I'm feeling or thinking about the most right now. And then I read the book of the Bible that I feel like most aligns with that. If the book's short enough, I just read the whole thing. And so this morning, knowing that I was preaching about this, I sat down to read Hosea. Some of my scholars in the room know that that's what the whole book of Hosea is about. An overview of the book of Hosea is there's a prophet, I bet you can guess his name, and he is told by God to go marry a lady of the night named Gomer, which could there be a more tempting name for a lady of the night than Gomer? God says, I want you to go marry her. I want you to make her an honest woman. Go pay the bride price, and I want you to marry her. And your marriage to her is to be a picture, is to be a picture of my marriage to Israel that has gone and been unfaithful to me and cheated on me with other gods and with other priorities and yet I'm still choosing them. So you're gonna go marry her as a picture for how I love you. They got married, They had three kids. After they had three kids, she left and she went back to her old ways. Because I think when you're in a lifestyle like that or others like that, that it's difficult to always fully depart from them. She went back to her old ways. And God said, Hosea, go pay her bride price and marry her again. And he did it. And then she left him again and he went and got her again. And the whole book is a picture of God's love for Israel, God's love for you and me. So I sat down to reread it this morning and I didn't even get through, I didn't even get it past the second chapter because in the second chapter we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids, yeah, it's the first chapter. Because in the second chapter, we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids. Yeah, it's the first chapter. She has the kids and God, whenever she gets pregnant, God tells Hosea what to name the child. And I don't remember the actual names. One is just real. I don't remember the rest. But the first name of the first child meant not my people. And he said, you're going to name your child not my people because Israel, not Judah, Israel has betrayed me. Israel has talked and acted and walked and thought as if they don't want to be my children, as if they don't care to be my people, so now they no longer will be my people. So you will name your first child as assigned to Israel, not my people. You will name your second child as assigned to Israel, not my God, because in word and thought and action, they have betrayed me as their God. They no longer want me as their God, so I'm going to grant them their wish. You name your second child, not my God. The third child, I want you to name no mercy, because through their words and through the thoughts and through their deeds, they do not want my mercy anymore. So name the child no mercy, for I will not show them mercy. And as you read it, you think, this makes sense. I know this love. I understand this judgment. I get this reciprocity. I offered myself to you. I made you my people. You acted as if you didn't want to be my people. Eventually, you're not. I made myself your God. You acted like you wanted other gods to worship Baal or whatever else. So eventually, I'm not your God. I offered you mercy. You said, no thanks, we don't need your mercy. Fine, I'm not going to offer you my mercy. And then you read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is this long poem. And in it, he details the unfaithfulness of his bride, Israel. And then all the things that he was doing behind the scenes to provide for her, care for her, love for her, that she didn't realize. And then ultimately, she still spat on him and who he was. But even after that, chapter two ends with this verse. It just sat me down right there in my seat. It just blew me back. Even after that, after Israel does nothing, they have not apologized. They have not looked at the example of Hosea and been like, oh no, what do we do? They are not repentant. They are not sorry. They have not come back to God at all. And in the midst of that, God says this, and I will have mercy on no mercy. And I will say to not my people, you are my people. And he shall say, you are my God. Even after not repenting, even after continuing to stomp on the love of God, continuing to betray it in word and in thought and in action, and reject it in word and thought and action, God says to those people, I am your God, you are my people, and I will show you mercy. And he says that to us. His love is overwhelming and never-ending and reckless. And he pursues you. And I don't want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because here's what happens when you feel it and you walk as if you're loved by God. God's reckless love creates a protective sanctuary from which we are able to offer boundless love as well. How do we transform, transition from offering conditional love to unconditional love? By walking in the deep heart knowledge of the boundless love that Creator God has for us. When you can walk with it here, you can offer it everywhere. Reject me as many times as you like, brother. Creator God loves me. I don't need yours anyways. Say whatever you want to say about me. Betray my trust as many times as you need to before I wear you down and before you accept this love too because God loves me. I don't really need yours. I'm loving you for you. If we want to be transformed from offering human conditional love with boundaries to offering divine, holy, Jesus-enabled and Holy Spirit-inspired love to others, then what we must do is walk in a deep knowledge of the reckless love that God offers to us. I hope you'll go from this place and do that. Let's pray. God, every time I pray, personally or corporately, I pray that I or we love you. And we do. You know that we do. We're just not good at it. So God, would you make us better? And God, would the only effort that we make towards loving you and others more, would the only effort that we make towards that be? To attempt to live in a knowledge that we are loved recklessly and endlessly by you. Would that reality transform our lives, our hearts, how we love, how we live? God, we thank you for your son, the personification of your love, the embodiment of your love, and how he was poured out for us. God, I pray that we would leave this room more certain that you love us, feeling more deeply what your love means than we did when we came in here today. Help us receive and offer your reckless love, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' 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.

The Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. Can you guys hear me? Is it coming through? Okay, good. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I'm the senior pastor here, so thanks for being here. If you're watching online, thank you for doing that or catching up during the week. We're grateful for that as well. If you are watching online, you probably cannot tell that this room is full, so that feels pretty good, which means I can only draw one of two conclusions. Either as a people, we are starting to feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit closer to post-pandemic life. Fall activities are coming to a close, and we feel more comfortable gathering together. And so maybe culture is coming back to life in general, which is great. Or you guys just really love tribulation and wrath sermons. I think it's the latter. And so we've got a lot more of that coming, baby. I'm rethinking January. We're really going to drill in on God's wrath and terrible things that we see in the Old Testament too. I'm very excited for it. Clearly you guys are as well. To that, I'm just kidding. to that end, this is a series in Revelation. It is a little bit of a different series than what we normally do. I mean, normally we go through stories and books in the Bible and things like that, but focusing on the content in Revelation is a challenge for us, but we felt as a church, having never gone through it, that it was appropriate to stop and to study the book of Revelation. And one of the reasons we do this is because the book opens up with this idea of blessed are you for studying this book. So it's worth it to move through it as a church. And I feel compelled this morning to make this delineation for your edification and expectations of what's going to happen this morning in this sermon. I don't know if you've ever thought of the difference between preaching and teaching. Many of you would have no reason whatsoever to ever try to define that in your own personal life. I am compelled to do that often. And so to me, the difference between teaching and preaching is that teaching informs and preaching inspires. So when I preach, my goal is life change, that we would open up the scriptures, that we would encounter God's goodness there, that we would be turned towards a desire for him and for our Savior and for the Spirit, and that we would leave changed. Convicted, challenged, encouraged, inspired, whatever it is, we would leave changed. Well, teaching is different. Teaching, the goal is to inform. I want you to know more about this thing than you did before you came this morning. So this week, just to be clear, is teaching, okay? Last week, I had the whiteboard up here. That was teaching. We walked through the events of the tribulation. Some folks told me it felt like a college classroom, which is generous. I would have said upper middle school classroom, but I'll take it. I'll take college classroom. Maybe it's a reflection of you guys. But anyways, take it easy. I was just, I was talking specifically about Alan Morgan, not anybody else. Last week was teaching. It was to inform you. I got a lot of good feedback on that. This week is teaching. It's on the figures that we see in the tribulation. My goal is that you would simply understand it better. So I would say if this is your first sermon experience at Grace, they're not all like this. It's not that I'm not proud of this. I just want you to know that this is a different experience than what we normally do. In Revelation, we've been spending three weeks in the tribulation. The tribulation is in chapter 6 through 17 or 18, depending. And there's really no way to go through and just do chapters like 6 through 10, and then 11 through 14, and then whatever. There's no way to group them together. So what we did is the first week we talked about God's wrath. What is the tribulation and why is it necessary? Because in the book of Revelation, we see God, the tribulation we defined is pouring God's seven-year process of pouring out his earned wrath and reclaiming what is rightfully his creation. So we talked about the necessity of God's wrath. Last week, we talked about the events of the tribulation, the seven-year period that comprises it, and everything that happens, and the seals, and the trumpets, and the bowls, and all the events that happen. And I kind of mapped them out on the whiteboard, and you guys responded favorably to that, and I really appreciate that. It was very encouraging this week. But also in the tribulation, in those chapters, 6 through 17, we see a lot of mysterious figures. We see beasts and dragons and groups of people and two witnesses and a woman in Babylon. We see all of these different figures, and it's not readily apparent all the time. There's only one that's specifically spelled out as to what it is, and that's the dragon, and we'll get there today. But the rest of them are really pretty mysterious figures, and this is where we start to encounter things like the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast and all of that stuff. So this morning is devoted to just tackling these figures. There's six of them that we're going to look at this morning. We're going to go through them one by one. I'm going to say, here it is. This is where we find it in Scripture, and this is what we think that it could be or represent. So this is teaching this morning. And then we are going to wrap up with a spiritual point, but to get us ready for next week, when we start preaching again. Next week, I'll just say it this way. I feel incredibly intimidated by next week. Because next week basically needs to be the best sermon of my life to do adequate justice to what happens in the text next week. It is unbelievable and moving and I might yell through it, I might blubber through it, I'm not sure, but next week's got to be the best sermon of my life to even come remotely close to doing justice to the crescendo of time that happens next week. But to get there, we've got to understand everything happening in the tribulation. And part of that is the figures in the tribulation because we're going to see some of those come to life next week. With that preamble, let's begin to work our way through chapter 6 through 17 and look at the different figures that show up there and simply ask, what are they? What do they represent? What do we know about them? I would say a couple of things. First, I'm going to present to you one or two thoughts about each of them. I am not going to present to you all the views that exist of them. And as I said in week one, when it comes to revelation, be cynical of certainty. So everything I'm saying, I'm holding with an open hand. If I get to heaven and find out I'm wrong, I'm pretty comfortable with that. And I don't want anybody saying it's gospel truth, whatever I say this morning, because these are all guesses and hearsay. You're all smart adults, so we can deal in that realm. Most of you are smart adults, so we can deal in that realm. So the first figure that we see early on that we have not yet discussed, but we've mentioned and alluded to, is the 144,000. So if you have notes, you can write that down. The notes are simply a list of these things. Underneath each figure is some text that's listed. Those are the main places or the main place where we see this figure, or in this case, this group of people. Please know that that's not an exhaustive list of all the places where we encounter that figure. It's just the main place, specifically the dragon. I think I've listed, yeah, chapter 12, verses 1 through 17 for the dragon. That's three down. The dragon shows up throughout the book, okay? That's just the main place where the dragon is described. So just a little disclaimer. The 144,000, I am going to read a description for the rest of the figures. There's no good synopsis verses for the 144,000, but here's what we know about them, okay? The 144,000 are comprised of 12,000 Jewish virgin males from each tribe in Israel. And those are listed out in chapter seven in the first reference that I gave you. And there's really nothing else there that we're told. There's 144,000 Jewish males that for some reason God has sectioned off for himself to worship him in a particular way. They show up again in chapter 14, which is why I'm mentioning them, because they show up twice. If it was only the one time, I just would have kind of skirted past it because I don't have much conclusive to say about them. But because they show up twice, it feels important enough for us to at least say, why is that there? The second time they show up, we learn a lot more about them in chapter 14. In chapter 14, we learn that they are around God. They follow the lamb wherever he goes. They are being taught a song by the angels that only they can understand. No one else, we're told, can learn this song. And it's interesting that they are virgins and it says that they are blameless. They're sinless. They have been kept spotless by God for the purpose of following the Lamb wherever he goes. Now, what are they? Who are they? What do they represent? How do Jewish males know if they get into the 144,000? We really don't know that stuff at all. There's been a lot of guesses over the years. Some conservative Christian theologians have attempted to explain the 144,000 as a figurative number that's representative of all people who will ever be saved. There's a big Christian camp that kind of holds that opinion of the 144,000, that it's a figurative number, that the 12 times 12 times 12, 12 times, that is some sort of figure of perfection. The 144,000 really just means multitude. And so really it's a figurative way of saying all the people who will ever be saved in all of history are grouped together like this. The problem with that viewpoint is there is zero, absolutely zero indication in the text that that's the case. What's going on there is conservative Christians got upset that they weren't included in the 144,000 because they're not Jewish male virgins. And they're like, well, then it must mean this because then I'm in. We're just finding a way to shoehorn ourselves into God's blessing, which we've been doing for all of history. This is another instance of it. That probably doesn't hold a lot of water. There are other offshoot religions like Jehovah's Witnesses that have staked their claim in being the 144,000. That likewise holds very little merit, it would seem. The most reasonable view to me, to me, is that there's literally in heaven 12,000 Jewish virgin males from the different 12 tribes of Israel that total in number 144,000 that for some reason God has sectioned off for himself in eternity. And the real reason I bring this up is to make this point. It would seem, based on this, and based on much of Revelation, as kind of a counterbalance to the rest of the New Testament, it would seem that in the book of Revelation, we see coming out of it, particularly in God's treatment of this 144,000, that the physical nation of Israel and the actual genetic descendants of Abraham, God's chosen people, it would seem in Revelation, still matter to him greatly. That God still has a soft spot for Israel. That God still has a soft spot for his chosen people. As we read through the New Testament, it's easy to move away from that, particularly when we get to Romans and we read some of the Pauline writings where it indicates that if you have faith, then you are a spiritual descendant of Abraham and you are God's child, which is good for us because we want to be in that chosen number. We want to receive God's blessing in that way. But what Revelation shows us as kind of a counterbalance to the Pauline teachings is the nation of Israel, at the end of the day, remains important to God. I'm not going to pretend to tell you why or how or what that means, but it's my opinion that God does actually care about the physical nation of Israel. There's a lot of stuff going on in Jerusalem in Revelation. I think he cares about Israel. And I think he cares about the Hebrew people. And I think that's one of the things we can pull out of the inclusion of the 144,000 twice in the book of Revelation, second time being taught a song that only they can know. And if I'm right about that, it has implications for some of the other figures as well. So just kind of set that thought to the side, and we're going to circle back to it when we start talking about the beasts. The next figure that we see, there's actually two of them, are the two witnesses. We see them in Revelation chapter 11. They show up in the back half of the tribulation. You'll remember last week, if you were here, that the tribulation lasts seven years. And the first three and a half years, maybe, probably, is the seals being opened in heaven. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, the voice of the martyrs, the great earthquake, and then the silence in heaven as God's wrath is ushered in. And so those are pre-wrath in the first three and a half years. And then I argued last week that there seems a reasonable chance, based on Revelation 7, that the rapture could happen in the middle of the tribulation prior to God's wrath. And so we think that for the back half of the tribulation, the last three and a half years, that God has already raptured Christians up to heaven. This is why the two witnesses are important. So I'm going to read you a brief description about them and then we're going to talk about who the two witnesses are and what they do. I'm looking in verse three if you have a Bible and you want to follow along. It says this, and I will grant authority to my two witnesses and they will proph for 1260 days, clothed in sackcloth. 1260 days is three and a half years. So it's the back half of the tribulation. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. So the text goes on. They show up, these two witnesses show up in Jerusalem, in the back half of the tribulation, to prophesy and to share the gospel. So what this tells us is God, even though he's pouring out his wrath on what we believe based on some of the passages that we looked at last week, are an obstinate people who are refusing to ask for mercy from God. God sends two witnesses in his goodness to proclaim his good news, to tell people to turn to God, to remind them that they can be saved from this wrath if they would only turn themselves to God in humble submission. And so God, even in the back half of the tribulation, remains interested in bringing people into heaven, into the place that Christ has prepared for them, into his eternal glory, into their eternal glory. God still wants to do that. And I think that's worth pointing out. Now these witnesses, they share and they prophesy, and it says that they're given the power to shut up the sky, that they can stop it from raining, and that no one can kill them. They're impossible to kill, and if you kill them, you will be killed in the same way that they are killed. And because they go around sharing the gospel, and because they keep pressing on it, and we're going to get to this point in a second where we understand this character and why it matters, the beast gets ticked at them sharing the gospel, and the beast war against them and they end up killing the two witnesses. They kill them in front of the whole world, it says, in the middle of the streets of Jerusalem. So I'm imagining this being on CNN and BBC and things like that. Or just the internet. Maybe it'll be on YouTube. Who knows? I just thought of trying to explain YouTube to the Apostle John. That would be a fun exercise. So they die, but they lay dead in the street for three and a half days because their followers won't allow anyone to approach the bodies. After they've laid there for three and a half days, God miraculously resurrects them. They walk again in front of the whole earth, and then God sweeps them back up into heaven. So their role is to come down, share the gospel, be one final sign from God of his love and his goodness, and then they're swept up back into heaven. Now, a lot of people like to ask, who are the two witnesses? And it's good that you're asking because I know for sure who they are with no doubt whatsoever. Some people, most people argue that the witnesses are Moses and Elijah. This is based primarily on the scene of the transfiguration in the Gospels, where Jesus goes up on top of a mountain, he's transfigured into his heavenly appearance, he's glowing bright as the sun, and Moses and Elijah are there, and they're talking. And just as an aside, Peter says the most Peter thing in the history of Peter, when he leans, you can find the story in the gospel where he leans forward and he goes, it's a good thing I'm here. I can make you guys some tents. You can hang out for a little while. What kind of audacity do you have to have to see Jesus the Messiah turn into his heavenly form? Bright as the sun, you can't look directly at him. By the way, Moses and Elijah are there, brought back down from heaven to have the special conference with Jesus for them to chat. How could every urge in your body not be to simply shut up and try to not be noticed? And Peter decides to go, you know, fellas, you're lucky I'm here. Shut up, Peter. What's the matter with you? Just soak it in, man. Anyways. So a lot of people think it's Moses and Elijah based on the transfiguration and because of their prominence in the Old Testament. Some people think it's Enoch and Elijah because Enoch, along with Elijah, are the only two people to never experience death, to be so righteous that God sweeps them up into heaven. And so maybe he was preserving them for this moment. Not very many people think that. I think that because who cares if I'm wrong about it? What's the difference? So I'm an Enoch guy. My dad is a Moses guy, and we will argue about it until we get to heaven. But the other thing is, it could be none of those people. It could be two women. We don't know. We don't know. It could be people that we've never met. So those are the guesses, and those are the roles of the two witnesses to prophesy, to point people to God, even in the midst of his wrath. Those are the good guys, the figures that we see in the tribulation, the 144,000 and the two witnesses. So now we get to the bad guys. The bad guys make up this term, and you may want to write this down. The next three, you might want to draw brackets and bracket them together and title them in your notes as the unholy trinity. That's kind of what they're known in eschatological and theological circles, the unholy trinity. And I'll tell you why in a little bit. The first one we see is the dragon. The dragon shows up in Revelation chapter 12. I read this passage in week one as an example for another point that I was making, but just to refresh our memory, this is the description of the dragon. Verse three, and another sign appeared in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and on his head sevenabor it here. The simple answer is it's a picture of Christmas. And doesn't that get you into the spirit? The dragon is the only figure where we are told very specifically what he is. Further on in the chapter, I believe in verse 9, John just goes and states right out that the dragon is Satan or the devil. So we know that whenever the dragon is mentioned in the book of Revelation, it means Satan. And his tail sweeping the stars out of the sky is again a picture of him bringing a third of the angels out of heaven with him when he was expelled and they became demons. In the, sorry, I've got a cold. I've been tested. It's not COVID, promise you. It's just a cold. Anyway. In the unholy trinity, the dragon takes the place of God the Father. So the unholy trinity is meant to mimic the holy trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. So in the unholy trinity, the dragon is God the Father. He is the one that imbues the beast with power. He is the one that gives the message to the false prophet that we're gonna talk about here in a little bit. He is the one kind of directing the show, so to speak, in this point in history, and the one kind of pulling all the strings. So the rest are doing the will of the dragon in the same way that God the Son and God the Spirit do the will of God the Father. So that's kind of how they work together. And we don't need much explanation of Satan. I think we're pretty clear on what his role is. His role is to take as many people away from God as he possibly can. He's fighting to hurt God in every way possible. The next figure that we see is the beast from the sea. The beast from the sea. This beast comes out of the sea in chapter 13. I'll read you a brief description of him like a leopard and head like a lion and all that stuff. I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine. Anybody who says different isn't being truthful. So whatever. With that description, it's an impressive beast is the thing to take away from that. What's important is that it's imbued with the authority of the dragon and given the right to rule. So the beast is often referred to as the antichrist. So that's something that we've all heard before. If you watched horror movies and didn't read the Bible growing up, you still heard the term Antichrist at some point or another. And we have been looking for the Antichrist, wondering who the Antichrist is going to be. This is a thing that we concern ourselves with. I think every president that's ever in my lifetime has been accused of being that. And then there's historical figures like Hitler and sometimes the Pope gets lumped in with this of being the Antichrist. The reality is the Antichrist has not made an appearance yet. And it's going to be a lot more powerful when it does than anything we've tried to name it over the years. The other thing I would tell you is this. The word, term, title, Antichrist is not in the book of Revelation. At no point does John say this is the Antichrist. We get the idea of the Antichrist from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John when the same guy who wrote Revelation is writing letters to the church and he's warning them about the Antichrist and Antichrists, plural. So not only is there a the Antichrist, but there are other Antichrists. Any Antichrist is someone who tries to take on a messianic persona and trick other people into believing that he is somehow or she is somehow the Messiah and they should follow him or her. For those with a long enough memory, before Waco, Texas was a home goods store, it was the place where you thought of David Koresh. He was an antichrist, but not the antichrist. So because of what John wrote, we look for the antichrist, and many see him in Revelation and go, the beast, this has got to be the antichrist, and it very likely is. It's just important to me to point out to you that at no place does Revelation claim that, okay? But we're gonna treat him as if he is. The role of the Antichrist is to trick the world into thinking he's the Christ, is to trick the world into thinking he is the Messiah. So we think of the Antichrist as being evil, but it's important to know that when he shows up, he's going to seem inherently good. Particularly in the midst of a tribulation, he's probably going to be promising health and wealth to people and protection to people. And we know that the Antichrist sets up his own kingdom and sets up his own religion. He is the king of the kingdom. He is the focal point of the religion. And the whole world is to gather around and worship him. And he institutes this policy where you can be particularly effective with the Jewish audience, which we learned based on the 144,000, God still cares about deeply. If you've ever heard me preach through the Gospels, if you've been in a Bible study with me working through the Gospels, one of the things that I like to point out, because it helps us understand our Gospels so much better, is that no one around Jesus really understood who he was and what he came to do. Everyone's expectation of Jesus when the Messiah came was that he would be a physical king and sit on a literal throne, that he would be the most powerful physical ruler in the world. He would establish a worldwide empire and the whole world would worship him as a God while he did it. King, emperor, deity. That's their expectation of Christ. Now we get to the end of time and the Antichrist comes to impersonate and to deceive and what does he do? He meets the expectations that everyone has ever had of Jesus. By uniting the whole world under one empire, sitting on that throne, being the emperor and the deity that is the focal point of all the worship of the world. Okay? Which, sadly, is going to be particularly effective with the Jewish community. In 2012 or 13, I went to Israel. And one of the things I got to do is on the night of the Sabbath, on Friday night, I went to the Wailing Wall. It's the wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It's a holy place. And there was all these men dressed in traditional Jewish garb with the phylacteries and things on their forehead and the whole deal. And they're praying and they're wailing and they're rocking and they're singing and they're praying to God. And it broke my heart because God sent Jesus for them. And they don't yet believe in Jesus. They're still waiting for a Messiah to come and sit on the throne and be the emperor of the world on a focal point. They are primed and ready for the deception of Satan at the end of time. For the deception of the beast. Satan is very intentionally digging at God the best he can as he deploys his strategy to tear people away from God. So that is the Antichrist. In the unholy trinity, he's clearly taking the role of the son, right? But there's one more in the unholy trinity. That's the beast from the earth that's talked about later in the chapter. His brief description is this. Chapter 11. Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast whose mortal wound was healed. We're not going to get into the mortal wound thing, but we see that the role of the beast from the earth is to point people towards the beast of the sea. That's why he's often called the false prophet. So there's the Antichrist and the false prophet that have been prophesied about, and most people believe that these beasts fulfill those roles and round out the unholy trinity. And we see him as being the spirit. The spirit points us to Jesus. The spirit speaks to us in personal ways and directs us to Jesus and shows us what we ought to do. And so the false prophet, the beast from the earth, directs people towards the beast and towards the authority of the beast and acts as an evangelist for the beast, okay? And again, we don't see false prophet. We don't see unholy trinity show up in the Revelation text. We just use those terms to help us understand who they probably are, okay? So that's the unholy trinity. And those are the ones, those are the beasts that when they get tired of watching the two witnesses win souls to heaven, that go and attack them and kill them. These are the beasts that in, I think it's the sixth seal or the fifth bowl of wrath, God darkens their kingdom. He darkens the kingdom of which the first beast, the Antichrist, sits on the throne. These are the beasts, along with the dragon, that assemble the armies of Gog and Magog at Armageddon for the final battle, for the final scene in history. They're the ones that God curses when he sends a huge earthquake and breaks Jerusalem into three parts. This dragon and these beasts are the ones that are thrown into the pit and locked up for a thousand years for the millennial reign of Christ, which we'll talk about in two weeks. And then come back out and are loosed and are allowed to tempt the world for a short time before Jesus finally and victoriously throws them in the lake of fire for all of eternity. These are those beasts, okay? So those are those figures from Revelation. There's one more figure left to talk about. Her name is the least comfortable to say out loud, but she's the whore of Babylon or the great prostitute. We see her in chapter 17. We're told about who she is, and we're told in chapter 18 the author delights in her demise, like in a song. I'm going to dive into some research on that so I can adequately sum it up for you next week because it transitions into Jesus showing up in chapter 19, which is the best part. But this figure in chapter 17, known as the whore of Babylon, I will argue to you, renders Revelation chapter 17 as the most mysterious, unknowable chapter in the whole Bible. I don't think there's any way to know who she is and what's going on there. What we know for sure is that she represents a city. We don't know what city. People over the years have tried over and over again to guess. In the text, there's some indications that it could be Rome. That seems to be the strongest indication in the text because it's noted in chapter 17 that she is, oh, here's her description. I'm sorry, I almost forgot. And then I'll was written a name of mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and earth's abominations. Another quick point to make here, it says at the beginning that she is arrayed in purple and scarlet. If you dig into the Greek there, those color words can also be translated electric blue and silver. So Panthers fans, just be careful. You never know if you're wearing evil, evil colors. I'm just looking out for you guys, you know? For those that don't know, I'm from Atlanta and I hate the Panthers and I just made that up. That's not remotely true, okay? It's very clear in the text that she's representative of a city. It's hard to know which city. There's indications that it could be Rome because it says that she is drunk off the blood of the martyrs of Christ. And at the time of the writing, Rome had essentially declared a holy war on the followers of Jesus and was martyring them left and right. So that matches up. And then there's a mention that she sits on seven hills. And if you've ever been to Rome or studied Rome, you know that Rome is defined in its geography by seven hills. And so there's some lining up there. And it's very easy to say, well, that's got to be Rome. The problem with that is that would mean that whatever happens in Revelation has to take place when Rome is the most powerful city in the world, which was true at the time of the writing, but is no longer true. So if you want to say it's definitely Rome, you have to either commit yourself to compressing the timeline of Revelation to a degree that all of it's already happened, and then we have to figure out what the implications are with that interpretive style. Or you have to think that maybe Rome is going to be thrust into the forefront at some point later on in the future. Maybe that's where the beast decides to sit and brings it back to prominence as he leads his world empire. But when you get there, you're just guessing, man. It may as well be Tupelo, Mississippi for the guesses that you're making because you have no idea what's going to happen in the future. Which renders this chapter and understanding exactly who she is or what city she represents impossible and is the most mysterious chapter in the Bible will very likely only be known within the generation that it happens or in eternity for most of us. What we can know is she, the city that she is, embodies all the sin and all the willful rejection and all the flippant dismissals of Christ and his blood and God and his goodness throughout history. We could think of it like we would culturally think of Vegas. Just a city that thumbs its nose at Christian sensibilities, thumbs its nose at the idea that a God could exist who would actually care about what we do and honoring him with our bodies and our morals and just pursues hedonism and throws everything and greed and throws everything else to the wind. The whore of Babylon is the personification of reckless, unfettered, selfishness, evil, greed, and what we would call sinning for all of history. It is the embodiment of rebellion from God is how we understand her. So those are the figures of the tribulation. I would end with this thought as we try to wrap all that up and prepare ourselves for next week. Deception has always been and will always be Satan's strategy. Deception has always been and will always be Satan's strategy. The whole purpose of the unholy trinity is to trick a generation of people into believing that they are the Godhead, that the beast, that the Antichrist is the Messiah, that you are good and right and wonderful to put your faith in him and follow him. And in doing so, deceive people away from God and hurt God the Father's heart as he watches his creation march away from him being deceived, believing that they are doing good. That's the insidious part of it. It's not that these people are choosing to worship Satan because you stink God, we love Satan. They think they're worshiping God. They think they're following the Messiah. It's a deception of Satan and it's evil. And it's important for us to realize that now because deception will be then, was in the past, and is right now, the language that Satan speaks. It is the way that he pulls you away from your creator. And it's worth simply asking as we wrap up, what lies are we believing that are pulling us away from our God? There's any number that we could place there. Some of us believe the lie that politics are the way to fix our culture. Some of us believe the lie that if we just get the next thing, we'll be happy. Some of us believe the lie that if that thing wouldn't have happened in the past, that we could be happy right now. Some of us believe the lie that we're the main character of the story of the world. Not me, other people. It has never not been a profitable exercise for me in my spiritual life to not sit and contemplate. If Satan is the author of lies, he's the father of deception, and his efforts to pull people away from God are going to culminate in the greatest deception, what lies am I believing now that I need God to free me from? If you want a spiritual exercise from this teaching this morning, that would be the place that I would lean into. And if it makes you angry that Satan has been lying to people for all of history and has been hurting and harming you with his lies, if you see your children believing the lies of Satan and it hurts you to watch them walk in those lies. Guess who else is upset? God. And next week, we'll see him send his son to a wrecked shop and make someone pay for those lies. And it's pretty great. Let me pray for us. We'll go throughout our weeks. Father, we thank you for the book of Revelation. We thank you for being so clear with us in ways of what to expect, what's going to happen, how things are going to go. God, I pray that we would have a better understanding of this book and the things that occur in it now than we did weeks prior. Lord, my words that have been unclear or clumsy or poorly or irresponsibly chosen, I just pray that they would be forgotten or forgiven. The things that are right and good and true, let us lean into those and hold tight to those. Let our study of this book enliven our hearts towards you and help us want to know you and understand you more. God, I pray for all of these folks as they go throughout the week. I pray for the folks listening as they go throughout their week. May you show up, God. Would they see you? Would you be present to them? For those who need encouragement this week, I pray that you would breathe that into their life in a way that only you can so that there's little doubt that you love them and care about them. Thank you for loving and caring about us. Thank you for loving and caring for this church. Thank you for all that you're doing here and all that you're allowing us to do through your spirit. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.