Sermons tagged with Majesty

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Jordan, it is interesting to me that you think profundity is what's required to get up on the stage when they parade me out here every week, falling woefully short of the bar. This is the third part in our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at times in Scripture where we see a blow-up or a blow-out or people with with just big overwhelming emotions because that is so much a part of our life. That is something that we experience just as we go through life. Sometimes our emotions are too big for us and they're overwhelming. And so this morning I wanted to take a look at big emotions in our prayers and what happens and how does God respond when big emotions creep into our prayers, when our prayers really become cries. And to do that, I want us to think about prayer together. It's really, when you consider it, one of the more interesting passages in the Bible, one of the more interesting interchanges that Jesus has with his disciples. They're following him around. They're watching him do ministry. And at one point, they look at Jesus and they say, hey, Jesus, will you teach us to pray? Now, this is a really interesting question coming from the disciples. And many of you have probably considered this before. The disciples knew how to pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed their whole life. They had gone to synagogue every week, maybe daily at different points in their life. I don't know. They had seen a ton of people pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed many prayers before, but there was something different, so different about the prayers of Jesus that they had to stop him and say, can you teach us to pray like you pray? Because that's different than how we pray. And Jesus responds by sharing with them the Lord's prayer. You guys probably all know it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so in that, Jesus gives the model of prayer to the disciples and to us in perpetuity. And if you break that down, I've always been taught prayer and I've taught prayer this way in church, in youth group, in camps, in different places, in men's groups, small group, when we talk about prayer, something that's always been really helpful for me is the acronym ACTS. And you guys have probably heard this before. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. So the way that Jesus opens up the prayer. When we pray, the first thing we should do is adore God. God, you're great. God, you're good. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. God, you are wonderful for this. God, you blow me away for that. And when we do this, it really puts us in the right posture for prayer, you know? It really reminds us who we're talking to. I had a Bible teacher in high school who was also my soccer coach, who was also my administrator because I went to a small school. And when he would pray in class, he would say, okay, everyone, let's pray, bow your heads. And we would bow our heads to pray, and he would wait 20 or 30 seconds. And so finally, I asked one day, Mr. Dawson, what are you doing? Like, that's awkward. Why do you make us just sit there in silence? What are you waiting on? Because it's almost like, does he want us to pray? Like, should we? And he told me what he was doing. He said he was taking his mind, whenever he would pause before prayer, to Isaiah chapter 6, where the throne room of God is described. And it says that God is on his throne, and the train of his robe is filling the temple with glory. And there's these six-winged angels flying around him saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And it's just so overwhelming that he cowers in a corner. And Mr. Dawson said that when, he said, when I pray, I like to take myself there to put myself in proper posture before God to remind myself when I pray, where am I going? I'm going to the throne room of God, the King of the universe, and I'm addressing the creator of the universe. That's a serious, somber thing. That's a place for humility. That's a place for penitence. This is why when we teach our children to pray, we teach them to bow their heads and close their eyes. It's a sign of reverence. It's a sign of respect for knowing who we're talking to and where we're going. It's why I encourage you as much as you can to kneel when you pray. Because it's hard to put yourself in the posture of kneeling and not feel humble, at least a little bit. And so Jesus says we should start with adoration. We should adore God. We should praise him. And then we should go to confession. What are the things, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How have we trespassed against God? What attitudes do we bring into this day and into this prayer? What sins do we carry with us that yet remain unconfessed before the Father? What do we need to confess to God before him? And then we move into this time of thanksgiving, praising Him. God, thank you for your goodness in my life. Thank you for my family. Thank you for a church that I love. Thank you for the rain. Thank you for the day, whatever it is. It's John's second birthday today. Thank you for a great two-year-old son and for friends watching him in the nursery right now. Thank you for all of those things. We praise God for things. And then, suffocation. Then we ask for what we need. And you guys know, and you've heard this, that the tendency when we pray is to skip act and go straight to S. Skip all the other stuff and just go, dear God, I really need blank. I really need you to show up here. I really need this to work out. I'm really worried about this. It's all the I need, I need, I need. And there's a place for that in prayer. But the way that Jesus teaches us prayer, it follows this pattern of first putting ourself in the proper place and then confessing our sins, which remind us of the humility we should carry into the throne room. And then thanksgiving, let's acknowledge all the blessings God's given us in our lives before we ask him for more, and then in that proper mindset, say what we need to say. That's kind of the proper way to pray. But sometimes we pray when our emotions are too big for propriety. Sometimes we pray prayers that become cries. And the emotions that we bring into that moment are too big for acts. I've shared with you guys before that the first time Jen and I got pregnant, we miscarried. And I'm not in the business of doing comparative pain for miscarriages and who has the right to the most sorrow. But for us, the pain was particularly acute because we had been praying for a child for years. For years. We had struggled mightily. Our moms and grandmas were praying for babies. We had the church around us at the time praying that we could have a baby. We knew that's what we wanted to do. On my mama's deathbed, a few years before we got pregnant, the very last thing she did for me was direct someone to the top of her closet to get a stuffed animal that she made to give to my child when we had them. She went ahead and made it, and I think my sister finished it up for her so that we would have that to give to our first child. So when we got pregnant, we were elated. And then we went to the checkup for eight weeks, and the baby wasn't there. I don't know how long it took me to pray after that. But the first time I did pray, it wasn't Acts. The first time I prayed, it didn't look very much like our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It looked a lot more like God. What in the world? What the heck? I would say different words if I weren't on this stage and there weren't children in the audience. That's how I felt, and that's how I prayed. What are you doing? Because we, and we're not entitled to this. None of what I'm about to say really matters, but to us it did. Jen's a school teacher. She loves kids. She's teaching in a Christian school, leading people towards you. We still have relationships with some of the kids that she taught in those days. I was a school teacher. I taught high school Bible. And then I worked at a church. We had made good choices. We were good Christian people. We had checked all the boxes. We had done all the things. And there was people who were living lives way more rebellious than us who were just tripping accidentally into family. And then we get pregnant and then you take it? No, I'm not praying acts. I'm not following the pattern for this one. There are some prayers that we pray that become cries. When we hear of the terminal diagnosis and we go to the Father and we say, really? This one? Him? Her? Why not me in your jacked up economy? Why them? There's a girl in our community. She's a young woman in our community. Just last week or two. She battled cancer for five years and came to it a week or two ago. Beautiful family, young kids. I don't know when that husband is going to pray again. When he does, those prayers will be cries. We've all prayed prayers like that. Where we're walking through what feels to us like the dark night of the soul and we don't have time or patience for propriety. We just go to our God and we are raw and we are real and we cry out, what in the world? How is this right? How does this make sense? As parents that send their kids to school in that private school in Nashville, what do those prayers sound like when they start to pray again? We've all prayed those prayers that are so big and so raw and so emotional that they become cries. And so I think it's worth it to look and see how God handles these prayers in Scripture. Because we get to see some. God in His goodness left them for us in His inspired Word. And so what I want to encourage you with today is, I know that we've all prayed those prayers. If you've never prayed those prayers, I'm so happy for you. I hope you never do, but I think you will. And what I want us to know as we look into the scripture this morning is that God is not offended by our prayers that become cries. I don't think God in his goodness and in his grace and in his mercy is offended when I look at him after the deepest pain that I've felt up to that point in my life and I go, what in the world? That's not fair. That's not right. That doesn't make sense. I don't think God gets offended by those things. I don't think he's so small that our broken hearts offend our God. And I actually think that there's grace and space for those prayers because we see them in the Bible. We actually see Jesus pray one of these prayers, a prayer that is so raw and so real and so emotional that it becomes a cry. This prayer is recorded in all four Gospels. We're going to look at the account in the Gospel of Luke chapter 22. Beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, speaking of Jesus. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, this scene, many of you know it, Jesus has just left the Last Supper with the disciples. He's instituted communion. He's told them, my body is going to be broken for you. My blood is going to be spilled for you. He knows what is going to happen. He knows when he gets done praying, he's going to be arrested. And he knows that when he's arrested, he's going to be tried. And after he's tried, he's going to be flogged and beaten, and he's going to be hung on a cross and left there to die and then face death and hell. He knows that. And so he brings the disciples with him, and he says, remain here while I pray. And he goes off a distance, one would assume, so that they couldn't hear him. And it is interesting that they all ended up hearing him, because there's nothing in the text to indicate that Jesus subtly knelt and clasped his hands and said, my Father who is in heaven. No, these prayers from Jesus that we see, in Luke it says he knelt. In another gospel it says that he fell with his face to the ground. And the disciples are a stone's throw away and they can hear him clearly. And then he gets so intense in his praying that sweat begins to mix with his blood, which we know is something that can actually happen in moments of incredibly intense stress in our lives. So the prayer that Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane was not, Dear God, if there's any other way, would you please point me in that? It wasn't that. It was Jesus on his face prostrate, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please, is there any other way? Is there anything else I can do? I do not want to bear this. I do not want to be on the cross and hear you and see you turn your back on me. I do not want to say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I do not want the crown of thorns in my head. I do not want the nails in my wrist. I do not want to do this, Father. Is there any other way? Please, please take this cup from me. That's a prayer becoming a cry. That's Jesus sidestepping propriety and crying out to his heavenly father. And in there, he finds what we should find when we pray like this. No matter how deep, no matter how raw, yet not my will but your will be done. Please give me the strength to accept your will. So I know that God isn't offended by those prayers because his son prays one to him in full view and vision of the disciples. And then he tells us about it in all four gospels. And that made me wonder, where else in the Bible do we have prayers that are raw and real and emotional? Where else in the Bible do we have prayers that have become cries? And of course, I went to Psalms. And I just started reading them and flipping through and finding them, these things where people are just raw. I am weary unto death. I want to die. Take my life. And I put them in your notes, Psalm 142 and Psalm 13 and Psalm 77. I think of Hannah's prayer in the temple when she's praying so earnestly and fervently for a child that Eli the priest thinks she's drunk. I think of the book of Lamentations, which is a whole book of tough, raw prayers. And I was going to kind of bounce around between those prayers, but then I was reminded of another psalm that's really dear to my heart, Psalm 88. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to turn there. I encountered Psalm 88 when I took a trip to Israel several years ago. One of the things most groups do when you go to Israel is when you're in Jerusalem, you go to Caiaphas' house. Caiaphas is the high priest that had Jesus arrested, had him tried, and had him murdered. And in the basement of Caiaphas' house is this makeshift small dungeon. And a portion of the dungeon is a cylindrical room that they would tie ropes under the shoulders of the prisoner and lower them into this pitch black, dark room. Now there's stairs that lead down, but in Caiaphas' day, in Jesus' day, that was not the case. They lower you in and they pull you up when they're ready for you. And most people believe that this is where Jesus spent the night after he got arrested, waiting on his trial before Pilate the next day. And when you go to Jerusalem, you can go down into that cell. And our guide pointed us to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 was written by the sons of Korah, we're told. But it's also believed by scholars to be a prophetic messianic psalm. And many scholars believe that this is meant to be the prayer that Jesus prays after he's arrested. If it's not the prayer that he prays after he's arrested, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew the psalms, this could very well be a psalm that came to mind that he quoted. But when I picture Jesus arrested and alone and reading, crying these things out, it brings fresh meaning to it for me. And when we listen to it and read it, I think you'll be taken aback by how very real it is. So I'm going to read a good portion of it. Beginning in verse 11. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? And then verse 13, They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That's a real prayer. That's not a prayer you pray in church in front of other people. That's not how we teach our kids to pray. We see accusations in this prayer. You have caused my friends and my loved ones to shun me. It is your wrath that beats against me and waves and covers me. The person crying out to God in this psalm feels the darkness closing in in such a way that they don't know if they will see the light again. My companions have become darkness, he ends with. And that's it. I am grateful to God for choosing to include in his Bible and his inspired word prayers that are that raw and that are that real. Prayers that show us that when our emotions are too big for propriety, that our God can meet us in those places and hear us. He appreciates those prayers so much so that he recorded them and fought for them and protected them down through the centuries so that we could see them too. So when we pray them, it's okay. When we need to cry out to God, we can. He's not offended by those prayers. He hears those prayers. He welcomes those prayers. And here's what else happens when we cry out to God, when our prayers become cries, when we lose all sense of propriety and we're just trying to figure it out. Here's what else happens when it's literally the dark night of our soul and the darkness is closing in around us and our life is falling apart and our children are making decisions that we don't understand and our husband is making decisions that we don't understand and everything that we thought was going to happen, this future that we had projected is not going to happen. This person that I love is not in my life anymore and I see reminders of them all the time and I don't know how I'm going to put one foot in front of the other. I don't know how I'm going to do it. When we pray those prayers, this is what happens. If we look back at Luke 22, there's a verse that I skipped. Verse 43. In the middle of his praying, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him. In the middle of Jesus crying out, Father, please don't make me do this. Please let there be another way. God says, son, you're going to have to walk that path. But he doesn't make him do it on his own. He sends an angel to strengthen Jesus in the dark night of his soul. And I can't help but believe that God will send angels to strengthen you too. When you pray those prayers, I think God sends his angels to strengthen you as well. And I don't know what those angels look like. Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's someone's presence. Maybe it's a text or a phone call or an email. I know in our family it's cardinals. Maybe it's a southern thing, I'm not sure. But we believe that when a cardinal shows up in your view, that that's a lost loved one who's just stopping by to say hello. Just to check in on you. And so sometimes God sends cardinals just when we need them. Another big one in our family is Mallard Ducks. You know that we lost my father-in-law a couple years ago. And Mallard Ducks were really special to him. And I can't tell you all the cool places where we've just kind of looked and there's a duck there that doesn't belong there. And it's just God kind of reminding us that he loves us, that he sees our pain, that he walks with us in that pain. Maybe, for some of us, God's using this morning to strengthen you, to buoy you. I hope so. Maybe this is just what you need. My hope for all of you is that you never need this sermon and you never have to pray those prayers. But my suspicion is you have a better chance of dodging raindrops on the way back to your car in a downpour than you do of living a life without tragedy. And so I think all of us, at some point, need this sermon and this reminder that when our emotions are too big for propriety, God can hear those prayers too. And in the hearing, in those moments, he sends his angels one way or another to strengthen us. I just got done reading a book. It's actually Beth Moore's biography. I would highly recommend it. One of the best books I've read in a couple years. And in it, she was talking to someone who faced incredible tragedy. And she asked her, how is it that you have kept going through these years? And she said, God opens my eyes every morning. I have no other explanation than that. There are nights that I went to sleep and I did not want to wake up and God opens my eyes. And so I get up that day and for us today I use the breath that's in my lungs and I praise him and I go. We will all in different times and seasons and for different reasons and in different ways walk through dark nights of the soul. But when we do, we can cry out to God. And when we cry out to God, He will hear us. And when He hears us, He will send His angels to strengthen us. I'll finish with this verse from Isaiah, and then I'll pray, because it's one of my favorites. We're taught in Isaiah that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and that he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. You're big, you're good, and you're gracious, and we are broken. We need you so much, and we have no right, we have no right to pound our desk and shake our fist and demand answers from you. We have no right to do that, and yet in your goodness, from time to time, you allow it, and you hug us, and you weep with us. I lift up the people today who might have recently prayed prayers like these, and I just ask that you would strengthen them, that they would feel your presence, they would feel your goodness, they would feel your love, they would be strengthened by you. Father, buoy us and tether us to you. God, we also thank you that Jesus did drink of that cup, that he did die for us, that he did conquer death and sin and hell for us so that we don't have to. And God, we look forward to a day when we understand things just a little bit better. But in the meantime, may your presence and your love be ever enough. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

The Pretty epic, huh? I mean, looky there. The sermon is half as good as the video. Y'all are going to leave here with your hair on fire. This is great. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. So thanks for being here. I thank you for watching online or catching up during the week if that's what you're doing. This is clearly the start of our series in the book of Revelation. I have been studying and prepping for this as far back as the summer because Joseph was a fun series. I loved doing Joseph. I love narrative series where we're just telling stories and seeing what we can learn from the story. The prep time on a Joseph sermon is about two and a half or three hours. The prep time on the Revelation sermon is 10 times that for each one. So you got to start those early. But because I've been doing so much studying, I'm very happy to tell you guys that I have all the answers for you. I'm going to tell you very clearly what happens in the book of Revelation. You can't ask me a question that I won't be certain about. And this is going to be a very productive time for the church. So I'm very much looking forward to it. Revelation, for some of us, has a lot of baggage. For some of us, it doesn't have very much at all. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s. And when you grew up in a Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s, Revelation was a big deal. I don't know if you guys realize that or what your church contexts are, but there was a season in church life when having strong opinions about the tribulation and the rapture was just a part of church. I actually talked to a church one time in a former life. I was a teacher at a private high school, and one of the churches was a small country Baptist church. And they said, hey, we're looking for a pastor if you know anybody. And I said, okay, well, you know, I'll keep my eyes out. And they said, but we're only going to hire people if they believe in a pre-trib rapture. That's a non-negotiable for us. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I'm like, oh, you mean that? Like, that's really important to you. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. Well, are you not pre-trib rapture? Because if you're not, I don't want you teaching my daughter Bible. I'm like, rapture is not coming up. All right. We're not covering that in 10th grade Bible. Don't worry about it. I wonder how many of you though have had, like, when I say pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, 1260 days, the four beasts, the man, the eagle, the lion, the ox, the 144,000 Jewish males from the tribes. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You've heard those things before. Okay. And then I won't ask the rest of us, how many of you are like, I got no clue, man. Like, no idea on this. You don't have to raise your hand. But yeah, so like, how do we approach like that wide of a swath of information and knowledge about this book? Because there's some of us that have been a part of really in-depth Bible studies and there's some of us who we've avoided it all together. So in thinking about how to approach the book of Revelation for these next seven weeks, I really thought it was worth noting the tendencies that we kind of tend towards as we approach the book of Revelation. Because again, some of us are very experienced with it, and some of us have never opened it because it's scary or intimidating or whatever. So as we begin, I kind of wanted to begin the series with this thought as we think about how do we approach the book of Revelation. I would contend that most people either overcomplicate or oversimplify Revelation. Most people in their approach to it have a tendency to either overcomplicate it or vastly oversimplify the book. And what I mean is we can overcomplicate it so that we miss the forest for the trees. We can overcomplicate it so much and drill down on things so much and ask so many questions about it. When is the rapture actually going to happen? Because of this verse, I think it's going to happen in the middle of the tribulation. When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? Are people, can you still get saved during the tribulation? What are the four creatures and the beasts and the angels and which angels have which wings and what do they represent and what's going on with the dragon trying to eat the baby and all these different things? what is the mark of the beast? Is it the vaccine? What is all that stuff, right? And so we can kind of drill down and the answer is no, stinking no, that's not the thing. The vaccine is not the mark of the beast. Anyways, we can get so concerned in drilling down on these details that we kind of miss the message of the book. And the thing about all those details that we'll talk about in a little bit and throughout the series is many of them are really not knowable. So to try to figure out what is the creature that comes out of the abyss that has a tail like a scorpion and stings you and it ails you for five months? Is that an attack helicopter or is that a scorpion? I don't know. And you don't either. And there's no way to know. So let's stop worrying about it, right? So we can overcomplicate it and get so mired in the details of the book that we miss the message. But we can also oversimplify it. I had somebody in my men's Tuesday morning Bible study who he's involved in a study in Revelation right now with another small group. He's cheating on me with another small group and it's hurtful. But he said, we were talking about Revelation and he waved his hand and he goes, Jesus wins. That's all you need to know. And listen, that's true. And this is a man who clearly he cares about Revelation and I don't mean to disparage him, but in that moment of just going, meh, Jesus wins, I would tend more towards that camp in my own interpretative approach of it, but that's not enough either. What happens when we overcomplicate or oversimplify the book of Revelation is that both approaches cheapen the message of the book. Both of those approaches really end up cheapening the message of the book in general. If we get so caught up with the details that it matters to us deeply who the 144,000 are and we search through the Bible to try to piece that one together, and we miss the overarching message of the book because of it, then we cheapen the message of the book. If we just dismiss it and say, listen, Jesus wins, that's all you need to know, then we cheapen the message of the book as well because there's a reason that Revelation exists. There's a reason that God called John up to heaven and gave him a vision of what's going to happen at the end of time. There's a reason he told him to write it down. There's a reason that people have died for the preservation of Scripture over the centuries. There's a reason that this book was canonized, was put in the Bible as part of every Bible that's ever been printed. There's a reason that God ends His revelation to us with this book. There's reasons for that, and so it's worth studying. And I would contend that the book of Revelation matters very much to God. And I would actually base it on the way that he starts the book. This is John writing it. Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. Listen to this. This verse, particularly the third verse, tells us that revelation is important to God. This book is important to God. And it says, blessed are those who read aloud, because this was a letter. It was written to the churches. And so there wasn't a bunch of copies. Gutenberg hadn't showed up yet. So there was just one letter and one person would read it aloud. So it's basically blessed are those who read it, blessed are those who study it, blessed are those who invest time in it. So God says that we will be blessed by doing this. And, you know, I was talking to Erin Winston, our great children's pastor, I think a year and a half or two years ago when we were talking about series ideas. And she just mentioned to me that she can't remember Grace having ever done a series in Revelation. And I thought, well, goodness, our church needs to know about this. Our church needs to know this book. We need to kind of demystify it and walk through it and see what we can learn from it. And we wanted to do it for a long time, but then the pandemic hit and this didn't feel like what I wanted to do strictly over video, right? I wanted this to be in person because some of the stuff that we have to talk about in the book is hard. That's not this week, but it's coming. And so I thought that it would be worth it to do this series together. And it'd be worth it to not overcomplicate things, to try to train ourselves to focus on the message of portions of it, rather than get mired in the details, but also get into it enough that we feel like we can understand it. So as we approach Revelation, we do need to do some background work to really understand why it was written. It was written by John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. He was in exile on the island of Patmos about 90 AD is what we think, is when we think it was written. So about 60 years after the death of Christ. He's the last living disciple. All the other disciples have died a martyr's death. He is the last stalwart of the disciples and the bastion of the early church. John really lived a remarkable life. And so God calls him up to heaven and shows him a vision and he writes it down and that becomes Revelation. And what we need to understand is that Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. To be a Christian at this point in history is to take your life into your hands. To be a Christian is to put yourself and your family at risk. It's to go into the catacombs, into underground graveyards, to have your Easter worship service because you cannot be seen in public doing this because you will be killed. It's to know friends and loved ones who have been dipped in tar and used as live torches to light the path into Rome. It's to watch your friends and loved ones get taken and thrown into the gladiator arena with animals that rip them apart. It is a tough time to be a Christian. And so John wrote this letter to them from God to give them hope, to encourage them, to help them hang in there, to help them see a path to a better day. And so when reading Revelation, we can never separate our understanding of it from how the original audience would have understood it. We can never make it mean something that it wouldn't have meant to them. But that also means that it's right and good for us to approach it, mining it for hope. That's the best reason to approach Revelation. It's not necessarily to know what's going to happen at the end of times with great detail, but to cling to the hope that the book offers us throughout it. This is why I love Revelation. If you've heard me preach any messages for any time at all, you've heard me say things like there's coming a day when Jesus is gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. You've heard me talk about Revelation 18 and 19 where he comes down with righteous and true tattooed on his thigh. He comes back not as the Lamb of God, but now as the Lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop. You've heard me talk about that because I take great solace in that in my personal faith. You've heard me talk about Revelation 21 when God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping and crying in pain anymore. You've heard me talk about that because it's in Revelation and it's hopeful and it's what we cling to. So when we read it, our top priority, our first priority ought to be to mine it for hope and to let it encourage us in our faith. That's far more important than some of the other details. And it's important enough to dig in and to see how it might offer us hope the same way it did the early church. As we seek to understand and interpret the book of Revelation, a couple rules of thumb for us as we walk through it together. The first is, it's not completely linear, but sometimes it is. It's not completely linear, but sometimes it's linear. And when I say linear, what I mean is just event after event from start to finish. The gospels are linear. The gospel of Mark starts at the beginning and moves through the story of Jesus to a crucifixion and then ascension. That's linear. It's just, it's all happening on the same timetable, right? Well, Revelation's not like that. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it moves through and it moves, this event happens, and then the very next thing he talks about is the event that follows the one that he just described. But sometimes he jumps. He says, I turn and I saw. And I'll show you in a second what I'm talking about. He says, then I turned and I saw, and it's something else is going on. And the thing that he's talking about over here happened before the thing he just got done talking about. Or it happens years after the thing he just got done talking about. And then in the next chapter over, he's going to talk about the stuff that happens in the middle. And then the next chapter over, he's going to talk about stuff that happened before that. So sometimes it's linear. Sometimes it's not. So you just have to know as you're reading it that he's not presenting us from chapter 1 to chapter 22 all the things in order. Another thing you should know is that it's not completely literal, but sometimes it is. It's not completely literal all the time. Sometimes it's figurative. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes the words that you're reading are actually going to happen. They're descriptive of a thing that really will take place. Sometimes you're reading it and it's figurative language to describe to you in the best way that John can what it will be like. Or because God is intentionally using powerful imagery, it's a picture of other events that have already happened. So as we're reading it and as we're studying through it, and there's a reading plan that will be, it would be on the, is it on the table this morning, Kyle? Okay. It's there and it'll be online as well beginning tomorrow morning. I hope that you'll read through Revelation with us. I hope that you'll be talking about it in your small groups together. But as you read and study, we need to be asking ourselves as we look at the text, is this literal or figurative? Is this linear? Is this happening in order? Or have I jumped back or to a different place? We'll need to know this as we read. Now, some examples of where it's figurative and nonlinear or literal and linear are easy to find. So I'm going to read a passage from Revelation chapter 12. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to my words as I read. This is a famous scene in the book of Revelation. Just listen. I don't know what diadems are. I think maybe crowns. Cool. Let's just go on to the next thing, right? What's going on there? Well, what's happening there is that John is neither being literal, nor is he being linear. Most scholars agree, and it's not certain, so I don't say it with certainty, but most scholars agree, believe it or not, that this is a picture of Christmas. What if I preached that this December 25th, right? What if I made that the Christmas message? Boy, that would be something. Most scholars believe it's a picture of Christmas. It's figurative. It's powerful imagery that God is using to drive home a point. And that in this depiction, the woman very likely represents Israel. The baby is Jesus. The red dragon is Satan. And Satan is trying to thwart Jesus, thwart the efforts of God. But God rescues Jesus back up to his throne, which means God's throne and Jesus' throne. And then Israel is nourished in the wilderness, which could be a reference to their exile in Egypt as slaves, or it could be a reference to the flight of Mary to the wilderness once Jesus is born and they have to go to Egypt for a couple years because Herod is trying to find and kill baby Jesus. The tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the heaven down onto earth, that's a reference to the fact that when Lucifer was kicked out of heaven and became Satan, that he took a third of the demons with him. So this isn't linear because it's Christmas. This happened 90 years before John even wrote it. And certainly not in order with the other things going on in the book. And it's not even linear within its own depiction because it's talking about fleeing to the wilderness and it's talking about the demons falling from heaven, which happened thousands of years before any of this stuff and the rest of the story was ever happening. And then the 1260 days at the end of it is a reference to half of the tribulation period that Revelation divides in half often in months or in days. So it's literally, as far as the time frame is concerned, it's covering thousands of years in a paragraph. It's got a ton going on there. And it didn't literally happen. It's figurative imagery. So that's neither literal nor linear. But sometimes Revelation is those things. Listen to Revelation 21. At the end of the book, John is given a vision. He's carried to another place where Jerusalem begins to descend. A new Jerusalem begins to descend out of the sky. God is setting it Its length the same as its width. And measured the city with his rod. 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall. 144 cubits by human measurement. Which is also an angel's measurement. Which is nice to know. If you're measuring in cubits. You're measuring as the angels do. So well done. The wall was built of jasper while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, then sapphire, a gate, emerald, onyx, chameleon, chrysolite, beryl, and he goes on and on. And then he says, and the 12 gates were 12 pearls, each of the end of the book. It happens at the end of the story. It happens at the end of time. We can read that, see where it's happening in the book, and know that that's how it's going to happen in time. And it's literal. That's not figurative speech about the specific jewels that are going to be the foundation of the wall or the way that the city is going to look or the size of the city. That's a literal interpretation. So again, as we read, we need to ask, is what's happening here, is it literal or is it figurative? Is it linear? Is it happening in the order in which it's presented? Or in its proper context, should it go in another place? When I was explaining this to Jen this week, she was asking how I was going to approach it, and I was kind of walking her through portions of the sermon. And Jen, she's my wife, for those of you who don't know her, not just a lady I talk to sermons about, but that would be cool. I have one of those. When I told her what I was going to do and how it sometimes is literal, sometimes linear, and sometimes it's not, she said, yeah, but, and she's asked the question that you guys all should have by now. She goes, yeah, but how do you know? How do you know when it's supposed to be one and not the other? Well, that's the tricky part. And the only possible answer to it is you have to work hard. How do I know when it's literal and when it's figured if you have to study? Listen, some books of the Bible are really easy to understand. Proverbs. You don't need to study Proverbs. Just read Proverbs. And it says that we should consider the ant and work even when we don't have to. There's no mystery going on there. That's pretty simple. When it says whatever you do, get wisdom, that's simple. Revelation, not simple. If you want to understand it, it takes hard work. It takes discussion. You have to read a lot of sources. You have to listen to a lot of people. There's no easy path to understanding Revelation. I can't stand up here in seven weeks and explain it to you in a way that will make sense and get everything right. I just can't do it. And people who claim that they can are dumb. They're just being intellectually dishonest. Which is why I think it's important for me to kind of share this idea with you, not just for this series, but as you encounter Revelation as you move throughout the rest of your life, which is simply when it comes to Revelation, be cynical of certainty. When it comes to the book of Revelation, when it comes to who you're listening to and what you're reading and how you're talking about it and how people are presenting ideas to you in whatever form you would consume them, we are wise when it comes to Revelation to be cynical of certainty. Now there are some things in the book of Revelation that we ought to be certain about. Jesus is there. He's in heaven. God is sitting on his throne. He's surrounded by angels. There's going to be a new heaven and a new earth. Satan's going to be dealt with. People are going to be judged. We're going to be called up there. Like there's things that we can be certain about, but there's other things you simply can't be certain about. And for someone to present you information in a way where they are certain, where they don't even acknowledge that there's other theologians, there's myriad other views of this particular passage or this particular idea, and they don't even acknowledge that those exist, well now, I don't know if I believe you about anything. I was listening to a pastor that I really like a lot. He's been one of my go-to guys for years. And his church did a series in Revelation last year. And I thought, oh, well, shoot, I'm just going to listen to his and then steal it. That'll really cut down on the prep time here. This is going to be great. But as I listened, he got to a portion, I think it's in chapter four, where there's these four creatures, these four beasts that are really mysterious. And one is like a lion, one is like an ox, one is like an eagle, and one is like a man. And there's this incredible description of them. And the same four creatures are described in Ezekiel, in an Old Testament book of prophecy, with stunning accuracy and similarity to the four creatures in Revelation. There's very little doubt that both authors, that both John and Ezekiel saw the same four creatures. Now, what are they? And what do they represent? I don't know. But the pastor that I really liked when I was listening to him, he said, well, the ox represents this, the lion this, the eagle this, the man this. Does it not? And then he moved on. And he said it as if he was certain of it. And he said it as if there was no other possible explanation than the one that he just shared. When the reality is we only see them in Ezekiel. We only see them in Revelation. Very little explanation is offered about them in either place. So to presume that we know who they are, what they are, what they represent, and why they exist is not fair. It's not intellectually honest. The most intellectually honest thing to say about them is, they're pretty cool. That's it. They matter a lot to God. They're going to be neat when we see them. They're probably going to be scary. It's going to be awesome. What do they represent? I don't know and neither do you. And don't act like you do. We can make educated guesses. There's plenty of room for that. But we ought to be cynical of certainty as we move through this. And I'm saying that, hopefully, not for your benefit in this series, because hopefully I don't get up here and start teaching you things with certainty that I don't understand. Hopefully I'll teach them honestly and present the sides that exist and are merited. But I say that to you as you move throughout your lives and as you encounter other Revelation studies. Be cynical of certainty. So that's how we want to approach the book. I told you that we would mine Revelation for hope. And there's an incredible space to do that in the first chapter of Revelation. And that's where I want us to focus as we finish up the sermon today. I will also say this for those who know your Bibles well. Chapters 2 and 3 in Revelation are the seven letters to the seven churches. They are wonderful letters. They're hugely important. They're incredibly informative for us, not just of the ancient church, but what our modern churches ought to look like. They're a hugely impactful portion of the book of Revelation. They are so important and so impactful that we're going to skip them. Because I'm not going to reduce them to a week and preach them to you like that. So we're going to skip them. I'm going to set them aside. At some point in the future, we're going to come back and we're going to do a seven-part series as we move through those letters together. But if you know your Bible well, and next week we just open up and we get to chapter four, and you're thinking, why didn't we do the seven letters to the seven churches? That's why, because they're too important to reduce to a week. And Revelation would get too boring to expand to 14 weeks. All right, so we're going to do those later. But as we look at chapter one and we begin to move through the story, I wanted to bring us to what I believe is maybe one of the most poignant moments in all of Scripture. And we find it towards the end of the first chapter. We're going to start reading in verse 12. This is John writing. He says, And these are the words of Jesus now, which will always show up in red during the series. and I have the keys of death and Hades. I get chills every time I read this. John is swept up into heaven. He's told, you're gonna see some stuff, write it down. And he looks and there's someone who is white like snow, who is shining in brilliance, who has a voice like raging waters. And he sees him and he's so terrified that he falls on his feet. He falls at his feet. He collapses in fear. And we learn from those words in red that it's Jesus. And Jesus places his hand on John's shoulder, presumably. And he says, Behold, I am the first and the last. I have died and yet I live. Other translations say the Alpha and the Omega. And I have the keys to death and Hades. I've conquered them. Which is a remarkable moment. But it's more remarkable when we reflect on who John was and what John did. Do you understand that John calls himself in his own gospel the disciple whom Jesus loved? You should probably be pretty certain of your standing before Christ if you want to go around touting that nickname. This John is the John that was the disciple whom Jesus loved that may have been, some scholars think, as young as 10 years old when he was following Jesus. He was so close with Jesus. They were such intimate friends that at the Last Supper, Jesus was close enough to John that he was able to whisper in John's ear that Judas was going to betray him before anybody else did. He was able to communicate with John that closely at the Last Supper because John was, of course, next to Jesus because he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. When Jesus was hanging on the cross dying, when he's watching his savior and friend die, Jesus looks at John and Jesus only said a few things on the cross because you had to push up on the nails to do it. And he looks at John and he says, will you care for my mother? John, this is your mother, Mary, now. That's quite the commission. Can you imagine Jesus himself putting the care of his aging mother in your hands? And if you yourself knew that the end was near and that someone needed to care for your aging mother, who would you choose? Your most intimate and trusted of friends. And John went on from that moment and he cared for Mary. He went on from that moment and he led the church and the council. He saw them through this conversion of Gentiles, this difficult period in the book of Acts. He preached the gospel. He spread the word about his friend. And this whole time, he was promised by Jesus. You see it in the gospels when he tells the disciples, where I'm about to go, you can't go. And they said, we want to come with you. He goes, you don't understand. Jesus is telling them, I'm going to die and I'm going to ascend into heaven and you can't come with me. but where I'm going to go, I'm going to prepare a place for you and it's going to be great and you'll be with me there one day. Do you understand that John, he clung to that hope. He trusted his friend Jesus. He trusted his Savior and he spent the rest of his life caring for the mother of Christ. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message of Christ. He spent the rest of his life building the kingdom of Christ. But John eventually ended up as the head of the church in Ephesus, and there he discipled a man named Polycarp and Erasmus, who were the early church fathers that we begin now the church history that leads down to us. John is the linchpin in this. He watched all 11 of his friends, all 11 of the disciples die a martyr's death. And now he's an old man on the island of Patmos writing the last thing that he's going to write. And he's missed his friend Jesus. And he's looked forward to seeing his Savior again. And he spent every day living for his Savior. Every day building the kingdom for his Savior. Every day pointing people towards his Savior. And when he gets to heaven, he sees a figure that he doesn't recognize and he falls to his knees. And out of that figure comes the voice of his Savior, Jesus. Out of that figure comes the assurance that John has waited for and longed for his entire life. Out of that figure rushes the peace that only Jesus brings. He gets his reunion moment. He gets his welcome home. And it tells us that meeting Jesus is the best promise in the whole book. Meeting Jesus face to face, hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, feeling his embrace, that is the best promise in the whole book, man. There's other stuff that happens. We get to be with God. We get to spend eternity. There's going to be loved ones there. It's going to be perfect. There's no more weeping or crying or pain anymore. We're going to experience all of that. It's going to be an incredibly peaceful, joyful existence. But none of it, none of it is better than seeing Jesus in person. None of it is better than your welcome home moment. When he hugs you and he says, I've prepared a place for you. And he invites you to the marriage supper of the Lamb. I was thinking about it this week. What it would be like to finally meet my Savior. And how I would probably feel compelled to say I was sorry. And how he would probably just say, don't worry about it. I've covered over all those sorries. And how we would be compelled to say, I'm sorry, Jesus, I should have done more. And he would say, that's okay. I did enough. I did it for you. And I've thought about that moment when the burdens of hope and faith don't have to be carried anymore. When we can cast those things aside because our Savior is looking us in the eye. After all the stresses and all the struggles and all the triumph and all the worry and all the anxiety and anything else that we might experience, the loss and the pain and the sufferings and the joy, whatever it is, after all of it, we as weary travelers will end our spiritual pilgrimage in heaven at the face of Christ and he will say, welcome home. And maybe he'll even say, well done, good and faithful servant. But that's the best promise of the book. That if we believe in Jesus too, that one day we will see our Savior face to face and we can rest. And if you love Jesus, and that's not the part of heaven you're most excited about, I don't know what to do for you. I hope this series can change that. But more than anything else, as we move through this book, that's what we cling to. That Jesus is there waiting for us. And we'll get that reunion moment too. Where we get to meet our Savior face to face. Now, before I close, I never do this because if I tell you guys that I won't be here for a particular weekend, then what I've found is you don't come, which is mean. That's just mean to whoever is preaching that's not me. But I'm going to tell you this time that I'm not going to be here next weekend. I've got a bunch of my buddies I've talked about before. A bunch of us turned 40 this week, so there's going to be seven of us in a cabin in North Georgia making questionable decisions. We planned this back in the spring before I knew that this would be week two of Revelation, which is a week I'd rather not miss. So when I was thinking about who should I get to preach it, Kyle's great, Doug Bergeson's great, we've got plenty of folks here who would do a fantastic job with it. But there's one person who I know that knows more about the book of Revelation than anybody else I know. I'm not saying he knows the most about the book of Revelation, just more than anybody else that I know, and that's my dad. So dad's going to come next week and he's going to preach Revelation 4 and 5. And you'll get to see half of the equation of where all of this came from. To give you a literal picture of how deeply he loves this book, I wanted to take you to Israel with us. Dad and I had the opportunity to go to Israel, maybe about 2013. And we did the tour. We're up in Galilee. We were there for a whole week or eight days or something like that. And we get down to Jerusalem and we're in the Garden of Gethsemane. And from the Garden of Gethsemane, which is where Jesus prayed the night that he was arrested and then crucified, you can actually see the walls of Jerusalem, and you can see the Temple Mount. And so this is what you see from the Garden of Gethsemane. And you can see in kind of the bottom right-hand corner of the portion of the wall is a gate. That's the eastern gate. And when we were just walking along and we saw that, my dad said, that's the eastern gate. And I said, oh, cool. And then I looked at him and he was crying. And I said, dad, why are you crying, man? It's a gate. And he says, that's the gate that Jesus is going to walk through when he returns. And it moved him. And he doesn't get moved to tears very often. But he was moved by that. Because one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to walk through that gate. And he knows it. And he believes it. And he knows his Bible. And he knows it so well and he believes it so much that it moved him to tears. So I couldn't think of anyone better to come and teach us a portion of the book of Revelation next week. So I hope you'll come. I hope you'll be kind to him. I hope he tells you some stories about me that make you laugh and like me a little bit less. And just you're thinking, oh, he must be an experienced teacher and have done this before for Nate to be asking him to do this here. No, he's an accountant. He's taught Sunday school a bunch of times, and I think it's going to be really, really great. So I hope that you'll give him a warm welcome when he's here next week and know that I'll be beaming from ear to ear watching him online with my buddies. So with that, let's pray, and then I've got an announcement for you guys, and we'll worship some more. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us. God, thank you for this book of Revelation. I pray that we would see clear and simple messages coming out of it. God, I pray that you would give us wisdom as we move through it. Give me wisdom as I teach it. Wisdom that I have no business having. Maybe just a special blessing for these next few weeks. God, I pray that we would always find the hope in it. That we would always see the justice in it, that we would always see the good news that we can cling to, God. Be with us as we go through the series. I pray that it will enliven our hearts to you. I pray that it will increase our passion and desire for you. And I pray that it will give hope to folks who might need it really badly right now. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace. Before I jump into the sermon this morning, I did just want to make note of the fact that this morning and today actually is July 4th. And so that's exciting and that's super awesome. Thank you to everyone who has decided to join us on July 4th. And for everyone who's online, we're thankful that you're watching us online on your holiday. But as we think about July 4th, and as we think about these patriotic holidays that we come to, and as we talk about them within the church, it is normally within the realm of just being incredibly thankful to live in a place where we are free to gather together like this and worship God how we want and however we are able to do so. And so this morning I just wanted to make note of that, but then this weekend as I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about that we celebrate that freedom, one, because it's a freedom, but because that is not a freedom everywhere. There are Christians around the world who live in places where they are not free to worship in this way. They are living out their faith. They are meeting with other Christians. They are taking the gospel to places that is illegal to do so. And so as we celebrate our thankfulness and our praise for this freedom that we have, let us be mindful of those people as well, that those people who live there are those people who have left the freedom of America as missionaries to go and take the gospel to places where those freedoms do not exist. And so will you real quick just bow with me as we pray for both of those things. God, thank you for allowing us to live in a place where we are able to freely worship you, freely just learn more about you and grow closer to you. God, we realize that on days like today, it's just the perfect time to celebrate the fact that we get to celebrate you. And God, we also realize that this isn't the case for everyone. And so we also pray for those Christians worldwide, whether they be people who are native to countries where it is illegal to have and to spread the gospel, where it's illegal to worship you, or whether it be our American missionaries who have left their cushy freedoms to be able to take the gospel to places where it's not free. And so God, today, allow our joys to be sweeter as we celebrate you, as we celebrate our ability to celebrate you, and allow us to continue to be mindful of those who don't have those freedoms. We love you so much. Amen. So when I was coming towards the end of my college days, I basically, my last semester of college, I knew for sure that I was going to start working at Greystone Church as the student pastor. Many of you know Greystone is where our pastor, Pastor Nate, where he used to work. And so that's how we got connected. I got to work underneath him there at Greystone. Well, also, I found out at my second semester of my senior year of college that I had torn my ACL and my meniscus in such a way that it was going to have to require a full repair for both. Basically, I had hurt my knee at one point, like two years prior to that. I had gotten an MRI. He said he didn't see anything conclusive. He didn't see anything that was conclusive. And so I took that to mean, all right, let's go tear it now. And so for the next two years, I just played sports until I went back, got an MRI, and the list of things wrong with my knee were longer than the list of things I have to tell you this morning. But with that being the case, not only did I have ACL and meniscus surgery, but with a repair of both of those things, not a shaving, but a repair, it takes like months and months up to like over a year to be able to do any of the fun, athletic, exciting things that I wanted to be able to do, right? Not only that, but with a full meniscus repair, I don't, I mean, like some of you might be like, that's not actually right. I'm just telling you what I think that I remember. But, like, it was like, I wasn't allowed to put weight on my left leg for an entire month, or at least a few weeks. I think it was a month. But like, think about how hard that is. I mean, like, for those of you who've never seen me before, you're already watching me. It's like, this is not a guy who sits. And so like, that was incredibly difficult for me. And then even after that month, I had lost all of the little muscle that I had to where any rehab and any weight was literally all I could do was put some weight onto my leg. And so for a guy who all I wanted to do was just play sports and play basketball and play Ultimate Frisbee and all that stuff, that was really difficult. And so I got that surgery right before I started at Greystone. And so through that time, I'm on crutches. And even when I'm getting off of crutches, I'm just like walking. And so I have all of, I have all of these students who play basketball and I wanted to play basketball with them. We have like Greystone. I know none of you guys have ever been there, but like there's this incredible outdoor basketball facility at our church, which is also like, I lived in the backyard of our church. I had 24 seven access to basketball that I couldn't play because of this knee injury. And so because of those facts, what I decided was when I came back, I was going to have the very best possible basketball shoes that were on the market. It's just the decision was made. I was like, I have to figure out something that I can control that has to do with basketball that actually doesn't get me hurt or injured again. And so I started to stream, and we've all been here. We've all been in this exact place where we just start really deep diving into basketball shoe performance review YouTube. We all know it. The performance, there's just, truly, I know I kid, but this is a very real thing that there are like this group of YouTubers that people that put videos online, basically as basketball shoes release, they get these shoes and they give you all of the specs. They give you all of the, this is the stack height and this is the fit and this is what the shoe is made of. And you know, all of those things that no one cares about, but that are true, I guess. They're saying like the specs of the shoe. But then what they also do is they tell you how they actually operate, what they're best for. Are they best for inside or outside? How do they cut? How do they feel? How do they measure up? All this stuff. All of these things that say, hey, not only is this what these shoes are on paper, but on feet, this is what they look like. And so I began to get a little overwhelmed because there's a lot of these people. They're all saying things. And a lot of them in their performance reviews are saying very different things. These people will be like, I love this shoe. It's great, whatever. And these other people are like, no, I do not love this shoe. It's terrible. It's an awful shoe. Never buy it. You should burn it if you did buy it, which not a good idea. But with that came me having to then do even more of a YouTube deep dive into this because it was no longer about the shoes anymore, and I had to figure out who to trust. Well, by doing that, what I had to figure out is who are these dudes? And so as I start going deeper and deeper into this, I start seeing some videos and some footage of some of these guys playing basketball. And so there's these guys who are awesome. They're super good at basketball. I'm like, these guys are great. You know, they're cutting, they're jumping, they're doing all the things that you want to do when you're testing out a shoe. I'm seeing other videos of dudes who look like they have never played basketball in their entire life, where they're just kind of like, you know, like doing this. And then if they catch the ball, they're shooting it, but they're not doing anything. And then even still, there are literally YouTubers who are giving performance reviews who do not play basketball, who do not wear the shoes, who did not do the performance aspect of the shoes. Instead, they are getting paid because they're YouTubers by these companies to say, hey, this is the shoe you need. This is how it performs. This is how it works. They might be saying things that are right. They might be saying like, hey, this is what the specs are, but they are doing so not because it's something that they've actually put the time and effort into, not because they're actually walking the walk. They're just talking the talk because it benefits them to get paid and to get to do it, even though they literally are not playing basketball. They are not ever using the shoes. And I know that this is a super random and specific example, but we all know the examples like this, right? Like we know and some of us know about the couple times that very famous people have tweeted about these new phones that they absolutely love and that everyone should buy. And then at the bottom of their tweet, it gives the little update that says tweeted from an iPhone, where it's like, oh yes, so you don't use this phone that you're telling us to buy in this ad now. But, you know, we have it. You know, you have the people who say like, hey, this five-minute workout, this five-minute-a-day workout absolutely changed my life. It is absolutely life-changing. Or this diet is life-changing. And I look the way that I look like a bodybuilder because I work out five minutes a day like this. You know, we hear those and we know those and we're like, okay, we know that maybe this is good, and maybe you're not necessarily lying, but you're telling us that something is good and great and life-changing when you're not doing it or when you're not using it in your own lives. Basically, they are people who are talking the talk without walking the walk. They come off as experts, but their life says something completely different than what they're saying in their mouths. This is what we enter into as we jump into Jude. This week we're going to be in Jude. As Nate has chosen a lot of different books of the Bible that are very hard to find in the Bible, I decided to be a good guy and to be your friend and to give you one that's very easy to find in your Bible. So if you want to open in your Bible, Jude is one chapter, so it's short, but is the second to last book in the Bible. So if you find Revelation, just go backwards until you find Jude. If you find Revelation 1, and it's the next page, over. But Jude is this guy who wrote a letter to these certain people. We're going to actually get into who he is, to what he wrote about in a second. But if you guys will go ahead and open, and we will actually jump in, and we will start reading, starting in Jude 1. It says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Before we continue, that already kind of tells us who Jude is. He is somebody who is a Christian. This is post Jesus dying and being resurrected. This is during a time where people have given their selves to Christ, given their hearts to Christ. And so as Jude refers to himself, he is a servant of Jesus Christ. And not only that, but he is a brother of James. Now, what makes this interesting is I know that we're all like, oh yeah, we know James is in the Bible. But what makes this interesting is that James is a brother of Jesus. And so what this means intrinsically is that Jude or Judah is one of Jesus's brothers, which makes it a little bit weird and a little bit interesting that he calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. But we're going to get back to why that's interesting in just a second. So let's move on. We're going to keep going through one and then two. To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. So who is he writing to? He is writing to these Christians. We don't have an exact area or exact place or an exact church that he is writing to, but what we know is these are people who love the Lord and who have given their hearts over to Jesus and given their hearts over to the gospel. And then we have a bit of a shift. As it goes, and if you're looking in scripture, you'll see that it's actually marked judgment on false teachers. And so we jump into for a second, he starts off by saying, Christians, you people who have given your hearts to Jesus, I wanted to write to you in celebration. I wanted to write to you to say what an amazing and incredible thing this gospel is. What an amazing thing that God has looked down on us and looked down on our imperfections and our failures and said, I want that person in my family. And so I will send my son so he can live a perfect life and die as a sacrifice so I can make them a part of my eternal family. What an unbelievable gospel that is. And I wanted to just be able to celebrate with you. I wanted to write a message of celebration and excitement. I wanted to just be able to love on Jesus. But it has come to my attention that there are these people within your community and there are these people within your church that are taking that gospel that we hold so dearly and they are perverting it and they are denying this Jesus who lived, who loved, and who served and then who died for us. How are they doing so? Not with their speech. They are people who are teaching, and as they talk, and as you hear them on a Sunday morning at church, or as you hear them and what they're saying, there's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but their lives are filled with ungodliness. Their lives are filled with them leaning in to unrepentant sin, leading into this selfish desire and ambition that they have. And by that, they are perverting the gospel. They are saying, Jesus, we understand that you made your sacrifice. And instead of allowing that to say, now I want to live a life that is marked by you and your spirit and your truth. Instead, I'm going to let that allow me to do whatever I want, whenever I want. And so as he writes this, he writes this to say, be wary of these people. Be wary of what they are able to do, of the strength that they can have and what they are able to do. And for that reason, contend for the faith. Contend for this faith that you have, that I have, that is in your heart, or else it is going to cause division, and it is going to cause strife. For the next 10 verses, he goes on to talk about different examples in biblical history where this has happened. He talks about the people being brought out of Egypt, the Israelites being brought out of Egypt, and they were barred from entering the promised land because as they were being cared for by God and as they were being led by Moses, these people had given themselves over to their personal passions and what they personally wanted and their personal convictions and seeking after their own ability to control their circumstances. They started turning to other things. They started turning to sin. They started turning to other gods because of fear, because of anxiety, because of worry, because of a lack of control that they had in their circumstances. They talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think a lot of us have heard of them. They literally reached judgment and condemnation as nations because they were so enthralled, they were so invested into themselves and what personally drove them and anything that they wanted and anything made them feel good was okay and was right regardless of what the Lord said about it and they reached condemnation and death. He talks about that from as far back as Enoch, an eighth descendant of Adam, so a long time ago, all the way up to disciples of Jesus Christ, there had been people to say, look out for people. There will be people who rise up in this ungodliness and they will use, they might say the right things, but you can tell and they are marked by their ungodliness in their lives. They are marked by the fact that their lives look completely different than the gospel that they are speaking and the gospel that they are preaching. They're basically the shoe guys. They're the shoe guys who say, hey, I know all of these things. I know all the right things, but they're only talking the talk. When it comes to walking the walk, they were doing anything but. They liked the gospel and they wanted to use the gospel, but they wanted to use it for their own selfish gain and their own selfish ability to do whatever they wanted to do because they'd been saved by grace. And as I talk about these things, I think all of us in our minds probably have people in our minds and in our lives or that we know of whether like, you know, in our actual lives or that we know through social media or that we know through the news of these people like that, that they talk a big game, but their life is so far from anything that they're preaching and that they're speaking. We all know those people. We know what it means and we know what it looks like to have a false teacher in our faith. And so when I talk about this, I think most of us are probably like, yes, amen. We need to contend against those people. Yes, amen. These people bring strife, and we need to watch out, and we need to be wary of them. And all of those things are so true, and there certainly is a full sermon that can be preached on what to look for, and the ways to avoid, and the ways to contend for these things and for these people. But what really stood out to me is how he continues after he talks about these people. Because after he talks about these people, he turns back to talking directly to the Christians, to the people who are living their lives in faith and in the gospel. And he offers up and says, persevere in your faith. You need to continue to persevere in your faith, growing closer to God, growing closer to who he is. And I believe that not only is that so you can be wary and so you contend for your faith, but what I believe is that he realizes, what I realize as I read this scripture, is that these people that were marked by ungodliness, these people that he is writing against, have really fallen short in just some very small, unique ways that all of us are at danger of falling short. That these people's entire lives are marked by ungodliness. They are that way for reasons that they have fallen short that I believe that we fall short every day. And what I realized is as I was like, gosh, these people are the worst. We need to watch out for these people. I realized that it's a lot easier to point our fingers at the ungodliness in other people than it is for us to recognize the areas of our life and our faith where we fall short. It's a lot easier for me to roast these basketball guys than it is for me to, or than it was for me to admit back in middle school when I got really into skateboarding, but I was a huge wimp, and so I didn't actually want to skateboard, so I just got the clothes, and then people would call me poser, and I was like, and I was devastated by it, but then I had to realize, you know, I had to come, I had to realize, they're right, I'm a poser. I talked a good talk, I knew all the stuff, I wore the cool clothes, I had some sick brown etnies, but I wasn't walking the walk. And by walking the walk, I meant rolling the roll. But how often is that true, right? How often do we hear these things and hear these people who are marked by ungodliness and in our minds we immediately go to the people that we know that are marked by ungodliness instead of our minds going to the parts of our life that are marked with ungodliness, the parts of our life that are separating us and that are holding back to a full life marked by the gospel. See, I think that the root of these people's sins were simple. I think for one, they wanted to keep seeking after and striving after their own selfish ambitions. They knew that God was who God was, but they had these things that they liked in their life and they weren't willing to give them up. And even that is rooted even deeper in the fact that I think that they just wanted to have lives that were separate from their spiritual lives. They had their regular, they had their personal life, their weekday life, and then they had their spiritual life. That on Sunday, yes, let's celebrate the gospel. Let's celebrate God and let's worship because he's awesome. I get to spend Sunday celebrating my spiritual life in God so that for the rest of the week, I am able to live my life that is not my spiritual life, my regular or my normal life. And I think the third thing they did is they just misunderstood the gospel. When they heard that Jesus died for their sins, when they heard that there is grace offered because Jesus was a perfect sacrifice, that they just misunderstood what that meant. They felt like the people, like in Romans 6, Paul asks, does that mean that we sin so we can make much of grace? No. That means we lean into godliness, we lean into holiness, we pursue getting rid of the sin in our lives so that we can have the best possible relationship we can with Jesus. But they didn't understand that. They thought, if I'm saved and I'm redeemed, then why do I have to change anything about my life? They didn't get it. They'd forgotten what it says in John 14, what Jesus says when he says that if you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, you will obey my teachings. Don't we all have those things? Don't we all have those sins that are in our lives, those sins that are in our hearts that we just don't want to give up, that we just want to be separate from our faith, separate from our spiritual life? Don't we all have those times where we say, okay, like, that was a great time of church or that was a great time of Bible study, now time to get back to my real or my regular life? Don't we separate the two at times? Don't we have sins and time commitments and ambitions and worries and plans and comforts and the like that we just hesitate wanting to give up to God because they make us feel comfortable or because we like them? And so the question becomes, how do we make sure that we don't fall so far down like these ungodly people? How do we persevere in our faith? How can we grow in our faith to where we can do our best to grow closer to God, to where we can make our hearts more and more like him every day, giving up those personal ambitions for these godly ambitions and these godly calls. Well, he talks about it. He writes about it. In verses 20 through 23, he says, What do we do? We lean into God. What do we do? We lean into our relationship and into our faith with God, ever more trying to build it up however and wherever we can. We read scripture so that we can better understand his heart. We pray, we pray so that we can give up those things and ask for God to mold and mend and to shape our hearts into what he loves and what he believes and what his call for us is. It means leaning into each other and building up each other and ever more encouraging each other and asking for encouragement from the people that are around us. As he says, going back to verse 2, he says, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied in you. While I read that as a blessing, I also read that as a way to persevere in the faith is by leaning in to mercy and peace and love, the type of which we only know because of the gospel and because of who God and Jesus is. What is our ultimate goal? Our ultimate goal is that our identity is the same identity as Jude's. For that, we go back to Jude 1 where he says, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Why did he walk around here to tell us that he was the brother of Jesus? He mentioned Jesus. He talks about his relation to Jesus. Why doesn't he just say Jude, a brother of Jesus? Why instead does he say Jude, a servant of Christ, also a brother of James, which actually does connect me and I am a brother of Jesus. Well, the best way that I've heard it said is this way by William Barclay, who wrote a commentary on Jude. And he says, part of it's gonna be on the screen, but we'll get to it in a second. The only title of honor which Jude would allow himself was the servant of Jesus Christ. That is to say, Jude regarded himself as having only one purpose and one distinction in life, to be forever at the disposal of Jesus for service in his cause. And then this part's on the screen. The greatest glory which any Christian can attain is to be one of use to Jesus Christ. The ultimate goal of our life, the ultimate goal as we persevere in our faith is that we are simply and utterly used by Christ and loved and found in his love. We are marked by Jesus, not only in our teaching, not only in our theology, not only in what we believe, but by the fact that he governs our hearts, he governs our actions, and his call is what we do. And how does that grow? It grows through growing closer to him. It grows through knowing him, through spending time with him, through building up our love in him and who he is. What the teachers failed to understand, what these people that he writes about failed to understand is that when we give our hearts to Jesus, it means we are giving our lives to Jesus. That giving our lives to Jesus means that we are trying our best to pursue holiness, pursue blamelessness, to rid ourselves of these sins, to rid ourselves of the things that separate us between us and Jesus, not so we gain salvation, not so we can earn God's love, but because salvation has been freely given to us, we turn around and we love God. We turn around and we love Jesus. We seek his calling. We live out his calling. We get rid of what separates us and we lean into him with the ultimate mission that my identity, my marker is Kyle, servant of Jesus. Connor, servant of Jesus. Doug, a servant of Jesus. So when you look at your life, what are those things that are standing in your way? Whether it be sin or your time or your comfort, whatever it may be, what is standing in the way of you fully being able to call yourself and refer to yourself as a servant to Christ? What do you have that's making a disconnect between your regular life and your spiritual life? And this morning I say, why not lean into him today? Why not trust him today to say, I am willing to give this up to you, God, because I understand the promise that comes on the other side. Because here's this, God wants your all. And he wants your all not so he can just take away the things that you love, but so that he can give you fullness of joy and utter, like, just overwhelming joy and awe and love that comes literally and only through being found in him. So will you pray with me? Lord, thank you for your gospel. Thank you for sending your son to die for us in our place. God, that you offer us grace and you offer us salvation. God, I pray that we don't, that we never pervert that. God, I pray that we never spit in the face of Jesus by making his sacrifices less than what they are. Let us daily press on towards you. And through that, God, let us daily grow closer and closer to you. Let our hearts grow closer and closer to being like yours, growing in our sainthood, growing in our holiness, one step at a time. And God, we thank you that not only do you offer us an eternal home in your kingdom, but you offer us a seat in your kingdom that we get to experience today, right now, because of your salvation. We love you. Amen. So I know this feels a little bit different because I'm still up here after I prayed. One of the beautiful things that writers do sometimes in the Bible is they write doxologies. Doxologies are basically just words of worship. And one of the cool things about them is that they're often found at the end of theology. They write about, hey, these are these things that are true, or these are ways that God is awesome, or in this, contend for these things and persevere in your faith because it can get hard. But within that, let us stop. And in light of these things that I'm talking about, I have to stop now, and I have to finish this letter, not with a period, but saying, now it's time to worship. It's similar, and I don't know if you guys know this, but it's normally why we sing another song on Sunday morning after the message, because it is a response to truth in worship. And so, if you will, I would love for you to stand with me, and on your sheets or on the, you don't have to read out loud with me, but let's just read this, because I love his beautiful words. I love his beautiful doxology saying, hey, all of these things have happened, all of these things are true, but let us not forget the joy for which we fight for these things To the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.

Well, it's good to see everybody here. It's good to see or thank you for joining us online. I don't know why, but I feel compelled to share this with the church. Every week, I thank folks for joining us online, and I think that this is actually pretty fun. So, I think it was Christmas Eve. It was either December 23rd or 24th. I got an email from a woman in Chicago named Heidi. Good morning, Heidi. Thank you for watching. And she said, I've been wanting to write this email for a long time. It's about time that I tell you that you're my pastor. She said that somehow or another, she found us online in the summer during quarantine and started watching sermons and watching worship and things like that, and told me that this had been her church for a long time. She is a partner of Grace. She lives in Chicago. She watches online every week. We are now multi-state, so no big deal. Yeah. So thanks, Heidi. If we could all long-distance high-five you from a safe social distance, we would, but we're glad that you're a part of the family. This morning, we are starting our new series called Greater. It is a study through the book of Hebrews, and it will surprise you to know that I am particularly excited about this series. I love the book of Hebrews. I have an adoration for this book that I've always wanted to cover it, and it just hasn't worked into the rhythm of our series, and now here we sit, and I'm so excited to do it. I've been planning this one since the fall, even in how we would approach it. And in Hebrews, what we find, and we'll talk about this more, but what we find in Hebrews is this soaring picture of Christ. What we see there in the book is this high view of Jesus, where the author goes through a very carefully crafted argument and presentation to share with us exactly who Jesus is and exactly why he's worthy of our dedication. And he does this through the lens of really four big comparisons. He compares Jesus first to angels and then to Moses and the law, and then he compares Jesus to priests, and then he compares Jesus to sacrifices. And his conclusion in each of these comparisons is, this is why Jesus is greater. And so we're going to move through those comparisons. And then we're going to take two extra weeks to pull out two big themes, one big theme in the book of Hebrews, and then we're going to end in what is one of my favorite passages that I circle back to, both in the way that I pastor and in my private life all the time. So I'm really thrilled to get into this series with you. And as I approached the series and did the requisite research that, you know, half-decent pastors are supposed to do before they just get up here and wing it, as I dove into the research, it became apparent to me that there was really kind of two ways to approach this series and this book. And they're this. We could choose to mine Hebrews for application for ourselves, or we could make it our goal to understand the book of Hebrews. We could make it our goal to simply mine applications from the book, to open up the book and read it. Or we can make it our goal to understand the book of Hebrews, to be inspired by the book of Hebrews, to really let it move us and shape us and articulate our view of Christ. And hopefully, hopefully, and this is where we'll spend our time today, it will leave us with this soaring majestic picture of who Jesus is and who we serve. And it's okay to mine scripture for meaning sometimes. It's okay just to, when you mine it for application, what you do is you just, you grab a verse, you pull it out, we read it together, we look for application to us, something that can help us in the moment, we apply that and we go on. And we really don't have a working knowledge of the book of Hebrews, but we are inspired to move closer to God and he's exalted and that's all right. But sometimes it's worth it to do the work to understand what we're doing. And to do that work, you've got to understand the context and the background of this letter. You have to know who it was written to. You have to know the best you can the intention of the author when they wrote it. We've got to understand some cultural things going on around the recipients of this letter if we're going to begin to appreciate the message of this letter. And so I think it's worth it for us to take a morning and dive into understanding the background to this book and the thrust and intention of this book so that we can appreciate it as we move through it together. My hope is that you wouldn't just hear it from me on Sunday mornings. My hope is that maybe you'll talk about it in your small groups. My hope is that you'll read along with us. If you've been a part of Grace for any time at all, you've heard me about a year and a half ago, and I preached on reading the Bible, and I kind of issued a challenge. I said, you know, it should be a rite of passage for every Christian to have read the Bible cover to cover. If you've been a Christian for any amount of time, I know that feels intimidating. I know some of you are like, oh gosh, I could never do that. But listen, I'm just telling you, set it as a goal to work towards. And if you've already done it, do it again. It should be a rite of passage. I met a guy for drinks this week and we were talking and he was talking about how he makes his steak and I was talking about how I make my steak. And we said, what was the deal? And listen, my dad's going to watch this and whatever. But I said, what was the deal with our dads growing up that thought you made a steak by just throwing it on a grill and charring it and then slapping some A1 sauce on it? Like, steaks in the 80s were terrible. I don't know what was wrong with people and why we didn't take more pride in how we make steaks. But he said, man, making a good steak, that's like part of your man card, right? Like, you need this. That's something every man should be able to do. And it's true. I see some young fellows over here. Learn to make steaks, boys. It's going to serve you your whole life. It's the same with reading through the whole Bible. It should be a requisite for every believer that this is something that we have done. And so he responded to that challenge, and he emailed me, and he said, Nate, it's been, I was trying to read it through in a year, but it got to the point where I realized I was just doing it to check a box and not to really understand what was there. So I slowed myself down intentionally, but it's been about a year and a half, and I've read all the way through it, and it's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. So I would encourage you to begin a practice, to take back up the practice of reading Scripture every day and praying every day. We have a reading plan online, graceralee.org slash live. If you're watching online on our webpage, it's just down at the bottom of that page. It's a reading plan through the book of Hebrews. I would encourage all of you to be reading along with us as we pace it through the series. But we're going to this morning, as we approach this book, make sure that we understand the context and background of what's going on here. And so the first thing that's important to know is who it's written to. This book is written, the recipients of this letter were Hellenistic Jews under persecution. The recipients of this letter, this book is a letter, just like a lot of the New Testament, it's a letter, and it is written to Hellenistic Jews who are enduring persecution. Now, that may be the first time some of you guys have encountered that phrase, Hellenistic Jews, or maybe you're in a Bible study where somebody who was fancy used that term, and you just nodded your head like, yes, the Hellenistic Jews, and you had no idea who they were. Well, I'm going to help you out, okay? Hellenistic Jews are simply Jewish people who live in a Greek context. So it's basically, at this time, it's Jewish people who weren't from Israel. Okay, they were born in the surroundings. It's called the diaspora or the diaspora, the cities surrounding Jerusalem. There's Jewish communities in these cities or surrounding Israel. So as far over as Rome and even over towards Iraq, there's different cities. And inside those cities, they were all Greek-speaking cities because of the preponderance of the Roman Empire, and these Jews grew up in these Greek-speaking cities. So they're already a little bit out of place. They have their own religion. They are practicing Jews. We call that faith Judaism. That's them, okay? So it's just Jews outside of Israel, and they were believers. And so it's the case for most of these Jews that they grew up as practicing Jews. They grew up practicing the faith that is detailed for us in the Old Testament. And then right after the death of Christ, were compelled to believe in him and have now transitioned to becoming Christian Jews. We call them now in our culture Messianic Jews, but that's what they were. The only ones who didn't have this experience were maybe some of the younger bucks in the different tribes and in the different groups who were actually born into a family of Christian Jews. But for the most part, these are people who have all had a conversion experience in their life from Judaism to Christianity. They're also under intense persecution from within and from without. Now, I'm going to tell you why I'm saying that in a second, but they were under intense persecution. In the first century AD, in the years immediately following Christ, the Roman Empire was particularly hostile to this new faith. They were violently opposed to it. We've heard the terrible stories of Christians getting thrown into the arena and lions eating them. There was one emperor that used to tar Christians and use them as torches to light the path into Rome. Nero persecuted them heavily. They were a heavily persecuted church. In fact, the author of Hebrews gives us some insight into what it was like to be a believer at this time and even addresses some of the persecution that they were receiving from the Roman Empire. He writes this in chapter 11. He says, mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering about in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth. This was their experience. That first sentence, it says that they were flogged, they were beaten and tortured, and then they refused release because they wanted their torturers to just kill me now so I can go to heaven. They were stoned. In that culture, when you got stoned, what it meant is they tied your arms behind your back and pushed you off a cliff and dropped big rocks on you until you died. That was getting stoned. They were sawn in two. Did you catch that part? That's what it was to be a believer then. To publicly profess a faith in Christ was to invite that violence on yourself and your family. To do what I'm doing this morning is to invite this kind of violence on yourself. To do what you're doing this morning, to attend a gathering where we're going to preach and honor and worship Jesus, and by gathering, implied in your attendance is your approval of the message that I'm giving you, you now are at risk for persecution. I have a tremendous, that word doesn't even really cut it, admiration for the Christians in this time. Because if you ask me, Nate, would you continue to preach the gospel? Would you still have your job if this is what was at stake to have your job? If you might be tortured like this, would you continue to preach the gospel? And I could play you the tough guy card and say, yeah, bring it on. This is my calling. He is my Jesus. If I need to die for him, I will. And I don't even know if that's true. It's probably not. I would probably cower like a sissy. I would probably run away and hide. But then you start to threaten Jen and Lily if I do this? No. No, I'm not doing that. But they did. That's what it took to be a believer. That was just the persecution from without, from the Romans, from the Greeks that surrounded them. But they were persecuted from within as well because they've converted away from their Jewish community. So now the people that they grew up around, to the eyes of their family, they have betrayed their faith. To the eyes of their childhood friends, they have betrayed their heritage. And now they're ostracized within their own community. They have a hard time getting jobs. No one's going to come to their shop. No one's going to want to hire them. They have just their Christian brothers and sisters. So please understand that in this time, to choose to be a believer was to invite violence on you and your family, and it was to choose ostracization from your culture and choose a life of poverty and loneliness. That's what it took to be a believer. It's worth noting, and you can Google this, this is a tracked fact, that the church thrives the most when it is under the most persecution. Within a couple hundred years, Christ was, he was the center of the Roman Empire. Constantine ushered him in, made it legal, made it the predominant religion, and over half of all Romans worldwide claimed to be Christians within a few hundred years of this. It's amazing how the gospel exploded out of this environment. Under the most intense persecution, the church always does the best. Why? Because the barrier of entry is so high. There's no room for casual Christians in this time. If you're kind of on the fence, if you're not really like on fire for Jesus, if you don't have this thing that burns within you to love him and to obey God, then you're not going to church. The church actually historically does the worst. Grapples for power, becomes hypocritical, gets infiltrated by people who don't really believe, lets the doctrine wander in their heart for Jesus, wane when it's in positions of cultural prominence and the barrier of entry is incredibly low. That's when we begin to invite corruption and ego and everything that's so far from the Spirit of God. One of the things that we fight in the American church is that the bar of entry is so low that you can come to church for decades completely casual in your faith. I wonder what would happen to our churches if we began to be persecuted like this. We've heard cries over the last couple of years that the church is being persecuted. No, it's not. That's dumb. We're not being persecuted. And if we were, we'd shrink. I don't know if you guys would have a pastor. I don't know how many folks we'd have coming in if we were under this kind of persecution. But they were. And their faith was strong. This is the audience that the author addresses. This is the audience that he's writing to, this beleaguered and shrinking church. And I say the author because the reality is that no one knows who wrote the book of Hebrews. No one knows who wrote Hebrews. The early church, the very early church began to attribute it to Paul, but as early as 135 AD, we see record of those pastors and leaders beginning to question that. Because basically, if Paul wrote the book of Hebrews, then for just this letter, the Holy Spirit inspired him to write 400% better and more eloquently than he had in any of his previous writings. So it's probably not the case. Most scholars today no longer believe that Paul wrote the book of Hebrews. Whoever it was, was very likely a Hellenistic Jew, which is important because it gives them an intense knowledge of the inner workings of the Jewish faith because you cannot begin to understand this book unless you have an intimate knowledge of the Jewish faith. Unless you know the practices and the beliefs and what they hold dear and what they hold sacred, then this book really doesn't hit you like it should. It's a very good argument for why it's important for Christians to also study the Old Testament. It's a very important argument for why it's worthwhile to spend five weeks in the book of Ecclesiastes or four weeks in the book of Ecclesiastes, why we go back to Elijah, why we study the festivals in the Old Testament for a series. We need to do it so we can understand our New Testament better. And so the author was likely a Hellenistic Jew who had a good working knowledge of these things. They were very likely someone who was referred to as a second generation Christian, meaning they didn't receive the gospel from Jesus himself. They would have interacted with Jesus at some point in their life if their book is included in the canon, but they received their faith from somebody else. Somebody told them about Jesus. So it's actually one of the first products of witnessing and evangelism, which is pretty cool. And we don't know who wrote it. There's different theories out there. Some people say Priscilla, which I think is a pretty cool option. Others say Barnabas, which I think is just thrown in there because his name happens to be in the Bible. And so we say Barnabas, but there's really no compelling evidence to suggest Barnabas. Another one is Clement of Rome. And then I would put my money on Apollos when I can't wait to get to heaven and for Jesus to tell me that I am wrong and that my dad is right. I can't get my dad off of believing that Paul wrote the book of Hebrews. He will die in his ignorance one day and then in eternity it will be Apollos. But we don't know who wrote it. We don't know who wrote it. And if we read it, what we find is that there is a sweeping, soaring view of Christ. It's the best picture of Jesus, of the majesty of Jesus that we find in the whole Bible. The only thing I think that even compares is a little bit maybe John 1 and then some pictures of Jesus in Revelation, but Hebrews on the whole paints such an incredible picture of Jesus. And it's interesting to me that it paints this picture of Jesus because you would think, as you read it, and I have for years, that the reason for writing this book is to give the early church a solid picture of who Jesus is. Because we've talked about this a little bit before in here, that in these early years, before the Old Testament was done and in every church and everybody had access to it, the New Testament rather, there was some murkiness around Jesus and what to believe about him and exactly who he was. And so it would make sense that he wrote this letter, that the author wrote this letter to the Hebrew people in the diaspora to give them a more accurate view of who Jesus is. And it's true that that was in part his point. He did that. He does write to give an accurate view of who Jesus is, but that is just something that is serving the greater intention, which is this. The author's intent is to compel a persecuted church to remain true to their calling and persevere in their faith. He doesn't write just to give them a good picture of Jesus. He writes to compel a persecuted, beleaguered, shrinking church to remain true to their calling and to persevere in their faith. The church was shrinking. There were people who were looking around at what was happening to their friends and loved ones and going, I don't want that for me or my family. And so they would shrink back. Maybe they shrunk back and embraced Christ privately. Maybe they devoted themselves to him in secret and not in public. That would be very easy for us to do if we were faced with these choices. But they were falling away in numbers because of the violence that was being enacted on them. And their Jewish teachers, their old rabbis, and their families were continuing to make arguments against this Jesus and for the old way, for the old faith. And so they're being tempted not only to escape violence, but also tempted by being welcomed back into families and embracing an old faith. And they're receiving these arguments against this Jesus guy. And so the author of Hebrews writes to compel them, to compel the Jewish audience, no, no, no, no, no, please understand. This faith that they're trying to get you to come back to, this Judaism that they're trying to lull you back into, you need to understand that Jesus is the right and good fulfillment of all the things that you were taught when you were growing up. You need to understand that it's not a different religion, it's a continuation of the same one, that Jesus is the fulfillment of all the things you were taught growing up. Let me show you how. And then he makes those comparisons. And then for those tempted to fall away from persecution, he just exonerates Christ and continues to hold him up. It's actually pretty amazing to me how he chooses to start this letter in an effort to compel them to stay true and to stand firm. If you were tasked with writing that message, understanding what those people were going through at the time, I wonder how you would start your letter. I wonder what you would lead with. I wonder how you would form it. I'm not sure how you would. I'm not sure how I would do it. But he begins by painting one of the most sweeping pictures of Jesus I think I have ever read. And it feels different than the rest of the New Testament. The only statement I can think of that kind of compares is the way that John opens his gospel. I think it was last spring or spring before last, we went through the gospel of John. So you might remember that the gospel of John opens up like this. He says in John 1, in the beginning was the word. The word was with God and the word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. It's this assertion right out of the gates that Jesus is God. He is king of the universe. He is part of creation. Without him, nothing was made. Through him, all things were made. He is the very word of God. It is this really bold assertion at the beginning of John's letter, but yet it, to me, pales in comparison to how the author of Hebrews opens up his letter. Listen to these words with me 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 purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels, Man, I love that passage. Every time I read it, I get the chills. Every time I read it, I just kind of want to put my Bible down and let it kind of wash over me. When I sat down to begin to prepare for this week, as is my habit, I open up the Bible on Sunday afternoon or Monday and read the passage that I'm going to preach on and go ahead and get my brain kind of working on it a little bit. And when I read it this time, I just sat it down on my desk and looked out the window at the sky for a little while. I love this picture of Christ. And I think that one of the things that we do when we think of Jesus that does him a huge disservice is we think of Jesus like this. This is, I think, the image that we usually think of when we think of Jesus. This white dude with well-conditioned brunette hair and a well-trimmed beard and blue, compassionate eyes who was just meek and mild. Looks like he was just kind to everybody. That guy, by the way, was incapable. The way that that goofy guy looks, he's pretty incapable of fashioning a whip and clearing out a whole temple. But, you know, whatever. That's usually how we think of Jesus. Or we think of him maybe as beaten and bloodied on the cross for us. But we don't think of him as the author of Hebrews describes him. We don't think of him in those grand terms. And I love that sentence in the third verse. I love it so much. It says, 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. He's the radiance of the glory of God? He's the exact imprint of His nature? I wanted to do some work this week to help you better understand what that meant. To come up with a metaphor or a way to explain what it means to be the exact imprint of the nature of God. To be the radiance of his glory. What is that like? How can we wrap our brains around that? And so to try to unpack that a little bit more, I started opening up the commentaries and read what people smarter than me wrote about it. And they wrote pages on these sentences. And I get into one of them and there is, he writes five pages alone on just verse three. And there's like this comparison chart of parallels with words that are used in other places in the Bible and cross references and dissecting out the Greek words and the tenses and the participles. And it's just all these pages of systematizing this great sentence. And man, it was gross. I hated it. I shut my commentary. I put it on the shelf and I thought, why do people read these dumb things sometimes? It was gross. This is maybe the most well-written book in Scripture. The author said what he meant. And he doesn't need my help explaining it to you. And it wasn't meant to be systematized like that either. We shouldn't write four pages on it to try to understand all the nuances of it. We should just let it wash over us. And so when he writes that Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, that may not be something that our minds can fully wrap themselves around. That may not be something that our mind adequately comprehends, but I've decided that that's okay because our soul does. Our soul feels the weight of that glory. Our soul knows that that's our Savior, that that's our Jesus, that our Jesus gave up the radiance of that glory for a little while to come, and it says there in verse 3, to make purifications for our sins, to come die on a cross and cover over us. And then he went back to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, where he sustains the universe with the power of his words. The only thing close we get to that version of Jesus is in Revelation 19 when he comes crashing down out of heaven on a white horse with fire coming out of his eyes and righteous and true tattooed on his thigh and he's coming back to wreck shop. It's the only thing close we get to that picture of Jesus that the author paints in Hebrews. And I think that we need to start thinking about Jesus more like that than like the Burnett ski instructor that we put in all of our pictures. And it's interesting to me, the centrality of Christ in Hebrews. It's interesting to me that this is what he chooses to hang his hat on as he tries to compel the church to stay together, to hold the line, to persevere. He doesn't have this, he doesn't guilt them into it. He doesn't try to win them over with this starting off with these sound arguments. He doesn't start off by threatening them. He just shows them Christ right out of the gates with who this Jesus is. He is the radiance of the glory of God that he holds up the universe with the power of his words. He is the imprint of his nature. He starts with Jesus. How does he compel and inspire a shrinking and fatiguing church to come back to faith? By showing them who Christ was. By painting for them the best picture of Christ that may have ever been painted. And it speaks to me a little bit about folks in our life. If we want people who we know and love to come to know Jesus, then maybe we should simply show them who he is. If we have people, neighbors, family members, friends, coworkers, and we want them to know Jesus too, maybe we should simply show them who Jesus is. That's what the author of Hebrews does. Maybe we should show them in our words and in our action and in our spirits the majesty of our Savior. Maybe we should compel them with the picture of Christ that our life paints so that they're as compelled to follow Jesus as these Hebrews were. And it begs the question, how, and this is me included, this is a very intentional we here. How can we compel people with a picture of Jesus if our picture of him is so very impoverished? How can we compel others with the majesty of our Savior if we aren't swept up with him as well? How can we compel others with the majesty of Jesus if we're not reading through the Gospels every year? How can we compel others with the majesty of Christ if we don't know it ourselves, if we don't pursue it ourselves, if we aren't enlarged and fulfilled by Jesus ourselves? If we only think of him as the meek and mild teacher that broke bread and handed it out to people, and we don't think about him as the radiance of the glory of God. And I don't mean to demean the person that Jesus was. I'm just saying that that's a limited view of who he now is. He came and he did what he came to do. He purified your sins. And then he went back to be who he is. And we forget about that Jesus. How will people ever see him in our lives, in our words, in our actions, in our thoughts, in our spirit, if we aren't swept up with who Jesus is too. So that's my prayer for you. It's my prayer for me. That as we go through this series, as we look at the book that paints a soaring picture of who Jesus is. That we, like the Hebrews, would be compelled by this letter. My prayer for you is that your view of Jesus is enlarged this spring. My prayer for you is that by the time we get to Easter and we talk about him as the greatest sacrifice, that your heart is soaring knowing that that is your Savior and that that is your Jesus. My prayer for grace is that the book of Hebrews would work in us to so enlarge in our view of Christ and our desire for him that we will be different for having gone through this book. And I've got more points to make in the sermon, but I don't want to make them. I just want to finish there. Let's make that our prayer for ourselves. That like Hebrews, like the author intended, we would allow this portrayal of Christ to so enlarge and enliven our hearts that the people around us would see him in us and that they would be compelled to look towards him as well. Will you pray for that with me? Heavenly Father, thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. Thank you for what he did. Thank you for the purification of our sins, Jesus. Jesus, we repent of our paltry view of you, of our limited view of who you are and what you did and what you're doing. Father, if there are Christians wandering from you who for different reasons entirely, but much like the Hebrews, are tempted to fall away from you, are fatiguing in their faith, would you use this exploration of this book to draw them near to you? Would we be compelled by the picture that is painted of Christ on these pages? And Lord, would you give me the words and the wisdom to do justice to such a great letter? Enlarge in our hearts towards you. Change us forever. And it's in Jesus's name that we pray. Amen.