Sermons tagged with Martyrs

The Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're catching up later in the week, we appreciate you following along. This is our third part in our series going through the book of Revelation. There's a lot of questions there, a lot of curiosity, a lot of mystery. And so I want to do the best that I can as we move through the series to help make Revelation more approachable and understandable for all of us, whether that means pulling back from the details and the weeds so that we can actually see the forest and get the point of this amazing book, or whether it means making it approachable so that we can actually understand what's happening throughout the book. Last week, my dad carried the weight for us. He did a phenomenal job. Many of you have said kind things to me about him, and I appreciate that. I was as surprised as the rest of us that he did such a good job. I was watching from the cabin that I was at going, huh, look at this. The dude's good at it. So that was really, really cool and a neat moment for us. So I appreciate you guys indulging that. And he did a good job talking about Revelation 4 and 5. And the point that he made was that God in chapter 4 is seated on the throne and that Jesus, the Lamb of God, is the one worthy to open the seals. That's what happens in 4 and 5. But there's a question that leads into the rest of the book of why is Jesus, as the Lamb of God, stepping forward to open a seal? What's the deal there? What's going on? And it's actually an important part in the narrative of Revelation, what's happening in 4 and 5. And basically, what's happening in 4 and 5 is that Jesus is stepping up to begin the tribulation period. This is when the tribulation begins. It's the official start of it. Now, some of you know that word tribulation. Others of you may not. Maybe we can define it. Maybe we kind of have a loose knowledge of what it is. But what Jesus is doing in Revelation 4 and 5 is he is beginning the tribulation period. And in Revelation chapters 6 through 17 describes this tribulation period. So the way that we're going to approach it as a church is for the next three weeks, we're going to talk about this together. This morning, we're going to define the tribulation. Next week, we're going to look at the events of the tribulation. And then the week after that, we're going to look at the signs in the tribulation. Because this is where it gets sticky. This is the tough part. Revelation 1 through 5, that's easy. We just did that. The last two sermons, Jesus comes back. Hooray. God establishes new heaven and new earth. Those are easy. These middle three, boy, they're tricky. They are tricky. This is where if you have questions, what does this mean? What happens? In what order? I'm genuinely interested in them. So this week or next week, as you're reading through Revelation, hopefully you're following along in the reading plan, or maybe there's been something rattling around for a long time. If there's something that you in particular want me to address and say, hey, this is how we understand this event, then let me know, email me. And I will absolutely, if I can't address it in the sermon, I'll figure out how to answer you personally. But I would love your questions because the thing is, if you're asking it, so are five other people, at least. So ask away and we'll kind of cobble this thing together over the next three weeks as we focus on this tribulation period. So this morning, I want to define the tribulation and what it is, and then ask, why is it necessary? So that's the first thing to think about. What is the tribulation and why is it necessary? Why does it have to happen? And the tribulation is quite simply, the most abrupt way to put it is, the tribulation is the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath and reclaiming what is rightfully his. The tribulation process is a seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. I will be up front with you and tell you, this sermon this week is the least excited to preach a sermon I have been in my life. Okay. I did not wake up going, yes, wrath of God. This is super fun in 2021. I'm actually getting on a plane this afternoon to go to Atlanta and just be around the stadium during the game in case they win tonight. And it is really hard for me to not focus on how excited I am for that and appropriately address the wrath of God in the service this morning. As we began the series, I knew that this was coming. And to me, it's the hardest part of Revelation. Not interpreting what's going to happen and trying to figure everything out, but for a 21st century audience, to actually, for us to wrap our head around the fact that our God is a wrathful God, that he is a just God. And so this morning, as I was preparing this week, I realized we can't really go on and discuss the events of the tribulation until we adequately understand the wrath of God that's seen in the tribulation. So when we ask, why is the tribulation necessary? Why is it necessary for God to pour out his wrath on his creation at the end of time? Well, the first answer that I would offer you is that God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. My dad did a great job last week of defining holiness in a way that I had never thought of before when he was talking about the angels around the throne and they're singing to God. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And what does that word holy mean? Well, he defined it as being the intersection of God's love and God's justice. That they are perfectly balanced in God. And we love God's love. We love God's love. But we don't talk a lot about God's justice. And the reality is that his person, his very essence, requires a balance of love and justice. And the further reality is we don't want a God creator sovereign over all of the universe who isn't just, who isn't capable of wrath. Our own sensibilities insist that our God would be just. Here's what I mean. The Braves are playing the Astros in the World Series. The whole country is a Braves fan right now because everybody hates the Astros, right? They are the patriots of baseball. Everyone hates them. Now, here's why everyone hates the Astros. For those of you who don't know baseball and may not be informed about this, back in 2017, the Astros had a great season and a great team, and they won the World Series. And they kind of came out of nowhere when they did it, and I think they may have won the next year or the year previous, I'm not sure, but two years around 2017, they won the World Series. And it was kind of fun, because they were kind of a cool team, and they were kind of fun to cheer for. But then it came out that they were cheating. Like, not cheating a little bit. They were cheating a lot of it. And that's how they won those two World Series. And then what happened was, what did baseball do? What did the commissioner do? Did the commissioner bring wrath and justice upon the Astros? No, he'd like find the owner and I think the coach got in trouble. But none of the players who actually cheated got punished. And so everyone hates the Astros because it wasn't fair. It's not right. They cheated, they got caught, and nothing happened to them. And our senses of justice cry out and say, that's not fair. To the extent that, and I was so proud of my hometown, when their best player came up to bat in game three of the World Series, first time he had to play in Atlanta, the whole stadium broke out with chants of cheater, cheater, cheater. I'm like, yes, this is great. Our sense of justice is offended when things are not fairly litigated. To think about it in a more applicable personal way. Parents, if somebody did something to genuinely harm your child in a way that requires you to be in court and to prosecute them. And they are absolutely guilty. How offended would you be if the judge did not display justice and said, you know what? That wasn't you. You didn't mean it. You're off the hook. No, we want a just judge in the same way we want a just God. His nature requires it. And our senses of fairness and justice demand it. The uncomfortable side of that justice is his wrath. And make no mistake, when you read the middle sections of the book of Revelation, it reads very much like the Old Testament prophets. Two times in the book of Revelation, the phrase, the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God is used. In Revelation 19, when Jesus comes back, it says that he is going to tread the press of the fury of the wrath of God, which tells us that God's wrath does not only exist, but it is furious. We are told at a different point that God will send an angel with a sickle to take a third of humanity like grapes and put them in a wine press and press them with his fury and his wrath. The wrath of God in Revelation is unavoidable. And to pretend like it's not there is dishonest and unfair. So we have to come to grips with this existence and learn how to accept that this is a part of the God that we worship. To do that, I think that we can listen to the voices of the martyrs in Revelation chapter 6 to begin not only to understand that God's justice requires wrath and that we want a just God, but also to begin to understand the source of this wrath. It's helpful to listen to the voice of the martyrs in Revelation 6. This to me is one of the more poignant moments in all of scripture, and I'll tell you why in a second. Revelation chapter 6 verses 9 through 11. So there's this poignant scene in heaven. As Jesus begins to open the seals, and if you don't understand what the seals are, that's all right. We're going to talk about those next week. The rest of Revelation is scheduled out through seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. And we're going to talk about that progression next week. But for this one, as this seal was opened, then there's martyrs under the throne at the altar of God. And these martyrs are men and women who have died for their faith. They were killed because they professed a faith in God. And they cry out, how much longer are you going to wait before you avenge us, God? We were killed for you. You saw the people from heaven. You know who murdered us. When are you going to punish the people who are harming your children? And this voice, the voice of the martyrs, echoes. And it echoes particularly with the original audience. Because I told you in week one that the people who received this letter endured great persecution. The generations of the church that immediately followed this time around 90, 95 AD endured tremendous persecution. To be a Christian, to proclaim and claim the gospel of faith in Jesus was to put your life at risk, was to put your family at risk. So the people reading this letter and receiving it, they cried out with the martyrs too. Yeah, God, win. How much longer? And here's how much longer before you avenge. You saw them take our dad. You saw them kill our mom. You saw them take my wife. When are you going to make that okay? And if we pay attention, what we see is that we cry out with the martyrs as well. We also cry out with the martyrs. Paul talks about this in Romans when he says in Romans chapter 8 that all of creation groans for the return of our king. When we have that sense that this isn't right, most of you know that part of mine and Jen's story is that at the end of last year, her dad lost a two-year battle to pancreatic cancer. Her dad was the best man I ever knew. And I will always be sad that Lily doesn't get to experience the glow of his love in her life. I will always be sad that his grandson will only get to meet him in eternity. And so we cry out, God, he loved you. He served you. He loves his grandkids. He cried when we told him that we were pregnant because he knew we wouldn't meet that one. How is this okay with you? And that's just ours. You guys have it too. Where you cry out with the martyrs. God, you could have done something and you didn't. When are you going to fix it? When are you going to make this okay? How are you going to make this right? And it's not an insistent thing. It's not a precocious thing. We don't walk into the throne room of God and demand. We sit at the altar and we humbly wonder and plea like, God, how much longer are you going to watch this? And we need to realize that that voice has been echoing throughout the centuries, not just for the things that we endure that seem unfair or seem like God could have prevented it and he didn't, but for all the things going on over the course of history. God sat in heaven and he watched the Holocaust. And the voice of the martyr says, God, how much longer? He sat in heaven and he watches the slave trade. That still exists. And we think, how much longer, God? He's seen the atrocities of people claiming his name in the Crusades. Evil meted out over an entire continent, falsely claiming him. How much longer, God? So at the beginning, when I define the tribulation as God pouring out his earned wrath, that's what I mean. He's been waiting. He is angered by the evil things that happen. He is angered and hurt by school shootings. He is angered that our sin has broken down the world in such a way that we lose people too early from disease. He's angered by that. He's hurt by that, that Satan has been loosed into his perfect creation and the people who listen to his voice, including us, have perverted it and made it something that it is not. He's angered by that. He's angered by us when we trample on his gospel and we presume upon his grace and we act like our actions have no consequences because we're so used to hearing about the love of God that we forget about the wrath of God. And it angers him. God says that vengeance is his, and he will take it. He's simply waiting. And when the martyrs ask him, how much longer are you going to wait to do, as I always say, to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue? When will that happen, God? His response is, rest a little while longer because there's still more to be added to your numbers. It's not time yet, but it's coming. And so we see in listening to the voice of the martyrs and in seeing the response of God that part of the necessity of God's wrath and his tribulation is that God's wrath is actually working to draw people to him. His wrath is working to wake people up and to draw them into his eternity. If there are still martyrs who have yet to be added to the number in Revelation chapter six, then what it means is there are people in the tribulation period actively sharing their faith so that more people might know Jesus, so that more people might spend eternity in heaven. If you flip the page to the next chapter, what you see is a mass of humanity being ushered into heaven. And John leans over to the angel next to him and he goes, who are they? And he says, those are all the people who have accepted Christ who are coming out of the tribulation. God is using his wrath as a tool to wake people up and draw them near to him. And if that sounds like a contradiction, then let's think of it this way. In our house, we try to be calm. I try, best I can, not to raise my voice. Except at Jen. Boy, howdy. I really get after Jen. I'm just messing around. I try not to raise my voice. Now, sometimes, Lily, she's five. She's very much like me. And so, I can't help it. But most of the time, I'm pretty calm with her. And the reason I try not to raise my voice is, first of all, I want to set that model for her. But second, I want it to matter when I do. We raise our voice all the time. Eventually, I mean, you can see these kids. They're in the store. Their mom's yelling at them. They couldn't care less. Because mom yells at them all the time. So I want it to matter when I raise my voice. Because when I raise my voice to Lily, sometimes I do it because it's the only thing left that's going to get her attention. Right, parents? I tell her to stop. Don't do that. Put that down. We're not going to talk about that. I try to be as calm as I can. But sometimes I have to get stern with her. And when I get stern with her, I'm doing it to get her attention. Because what I'm saying matters. The same is true of God. Sometimes God has to get stern with his children because he's been trying to get our attention in other ways and we're not listening. So sometimes God gets forceful with us because you parents know if you pick your moments there, you can really get your kids' attention simply by being more stern with them. So God also knows, and we see it in the Old Testament, that sometimes to get the attention of His people, He raises His voice. He does not do it to intimidate or scare us, although that should be our reaction. He does it to draw us near to him, to get our attention. He does it because his biggest priority in all of creation is that you and I would spend eternity with him. That's why Paul writes that even though we endure pain for a little while, he considers it nothing compared to the glory that he's going to experience in eternity. It's nothing. It doesn't matter. So is God, and Jesus tells us, listen, if your eye's causing you to sin, gouge it out. It's better to enter into heaven with one eye than it is to have both eyes and not be in eternity with God. So sometimes God uses his wrath and his stern voice to get our attention because his priority is that we would spend eternity with him. This may be why Solomon writes in Proverbs chapter 9 that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Many of you have probably heard this verse before. And when I was growing up and we would come across this verse, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we were kind of told that fear there is an awe, it's a respect. It's not being afraid of our Heavenly Father because our Heavenly Father is good. It's being in awe of Him, and that's the beginning of wisdom. No, no, no. It's being fall on your face, terrified of the Father. It's actual fear. On the holiday that we celebrate fear, this is actual fear. Being fearful of our almighty God creator in heaven. Being scared of what he can do to us if he were to so choose. Being actually fearful of him. Reading through the wrath of God that will be poured out on creation and going, that sounds terrible. And God goes, yeah, because here's the thing. As we go through Revelation and we see God's wrath meted out on creation, please understand, the only people who experience God's wrath are the ones who don't believe in it. The only people who experience the wrath of God are the ones who have said, please God, or the ones who have not said, please God, spare me. At any point, if we look to God and we say, God, you're God and I'm not, and I trust you, please spare me your wrath. He does. The only ones left to experience the wrath at the end of the tribulation, I am convinced, are those who have chosen obstinately to refuse to submit to God in faith. And so he pours out his wrath. And he pours out his wrath because God in his goodness sent his son to rescue us up to heaven to spend eternity with him. And we obstinately, some of us choose to not believe in the son that he sent. Instead, we spit on it. Instead, we don't believe it. Instead, we pass it off like a fairy tale. And one day, every knee will bow before our God in heaven. And the only ones who will experience God's wrath are the ones that have to be forced to bow. And it is not, to me, until we understand that, that we can begin to appreciate God's love for us. This is why wisdom begins in, oh no, God created the universe and I'm terrified of him. And God says, good, but guess what? I created it so that you could spend eternity with me and I love you. And all you have to do to be spared from that wrath is ask me. As I sank into this topic for this week, I began to reflect on the wrath of God. It actually occurred to me, something that I've long understood, but something that fits very well into this sermon and this idea right now, which is it is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. It is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. And I think it's actually good for us to take a Sunday and confront the fact that our God is just and his justice necessitates wrath. And for us to exist and tremble and for us to hear it said, yeah, we want to be as nice as possible to everyone, but one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. And you do not want to be made to bow against your will. We submit to God now and we spend eternity with him later. And I think it's good for us to sink into that reality because we talk a lot about the love of God and we should. We talk about our good, good father and we should and we talk about his grace and we talk about his forgiveness and we talk about his mercy and we should. Those things are good and trust me, I like preaching about those things way more. But I think that sometimes we talk so much about God's love for us that we forget he has every right to smite us. All the times that we've trampled on the gospel. All the times that I've presumed upon God's grace, knowing he would forgive me. All the times I've cheapened the blood of Christ on the cross with my action and my attitude and my obstinance. We were in here on Tuesday morning for Bible study and I was sitting right here and over there was a roach. And I noticed it and Shane noticed it, but it was a roach. And we're like, whatever, I didn't care. It was like 620. Live it up, roach. But when Britt Vinson, who was dressed up like a cowboy that day, noticed it. You like that, Kyle? Okay. All right, pal. There you go. I love Kyle. When Britt Vinson in his cowboy boots saw the roach, he got up. That was the end of that roach. We live our lives as if God can't do that to us. We live our lives as if that's not a daily reality. And we live our lives as if it would somehow be unfair if he did. When it's not. The most fair and just thing for him to do is to take us. Is to die for our sin. That is the most just thing. But because his incredible love balances his incredible justice, he sent his son so he doesn't have to smite us, and we walk around acting like that's not a reality when it is. And so it's good for a Sunday for us to sink into the wrath of God and to appreciate it. Because I wonder about me and maybe about you if we feel stagnant in our walk with the Lord. If we heard Steve talk about being on fire for Jesus and it's been a while since we have experienced that. If we give mental assent to the fact that God loves us, but we are not warmed by it daily and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the grace of his love for us, maybe it's in part because we haven't sat and thought for a minute in a long time about the wrath that his love is balancing out. About what he's sparing us from. About what it means for him to have every right to claim us and choose in his goodness not to. So my hope and my prayer this week has been that by focusing on God's wrath, it would actually inexplicably draw us closer to him and help us more deeply appreciate the love that he lavishes upon us and the things that John writes, like from his fullness he has bestowed upon us grace upon grace. I hope we can appreciate those sentiments a little more deeply today and feel God's love a little more closely today by reflecting on his tremendous wrath as well. Let's pray. God, thank you for your justice. Thank you for your terrible and furious wrath. We know that we would not want a God that was not capable of those things, whose character didn't require them. Father, I pray that if anyone can hear my voice, whether it's today or in the future, who doesn't know you, who has not bowed their knee, I pray that they would cry out to you today. That they would claim Jesus as their Savior and you as their Father. That they would simply ask to be spared of your wrath, which you are so anxious to do. God, would we be brought more close to you? And God, would we walk more fearfully of you? To give us a greater depth of appreciation of your love for us. It's in your son's name we pray. 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.

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

Amen. Good morning, Grace. Good morning online. Thank you, Steve. That was wonderful. It's good to see everybody. We've got some new folks venturing in this week, Braving the Elements. My name is Nate, for those of you that I haven't gotten to meet yet or for those watching online. This is the last part in our series called A Time of Kings. And as we think about questions like that, I really believe that there's one loud message that should come from the book of Kings. And I want us to see that this morning. And as I think about Kings, and remember I call it a book because originally it was written as one big long book. So as I think about the book of Kings, I really have realized as we've studied it together that this is a tragic book. This book is really sad. It's really sad because of the hope with which it starts and the devastation with which it ends. If you think back to the very beginning of the book of Kings, if you have a Bible at home, you can flip it there. If you have a Bible with you, you can look at 2 Kings 25. That's where we're going land today, and then we're going to jump to, I think, Samuel, and then Revelation, and John. So, you know, we'll be all over the place this morning. But if you think about the way that Kings begins, it's like the climax of hope. David is the king. You'll remember in the very first week of this series, if you've been watching along or listening along, that David is the king, that the nation of Israel clamored for a king, and Samuel the prophet said, you don't need one, God is your king. And they said, we really want a king. We think that a king is going to bring about all the promises that God made to us, because they are God's chosen people. They live in an awareness of the promises that they have received, that the land of Canaan, that Israel is going to be theirs, that they're going to have a multitude of descendants, and that one of their descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And so they cling to these promises. And they don't see them coming to fruition in the time of judges. It was a dark time in the nation of Israel. And they said, you know what? If we have a king, that person can lead us into prominence and be God's chosen person. And so they elected Saul. He made the most sense. He was head and shoulders above everybody else. He was really good looking. When you looked at him, you thought, that guy should be king. If you need a good picture of who Saul was, he looked a lot like me. But that didn't work out. And David is God's chosen man to be king, and he was a great king. He established Israel into international prominence. He, in him, was this man who walked closely with God, who wrote the Psalms, who led well, who conquered enemies, who won victories, and certainly this king is the king that's going to lead us in the prominence that we have been promised. And David asks the father, can I build your temple? I want to build your home. He goes to God and he says, I want to build your home where your presence can reside with us. Because all the way back in the desert, when Moses was in charge, 450 years prior, God gave him instructions about setting up a tabernacle that could move with them. That's where they put the Ark of the Covenant. That's where they had the Holy of Holies. That's where the presence of God rested among his people. And it was time to build God a permanent home. And David said, let me do this. And God says, I can't let you do that. There's too much blood on your hands, but I'm going to make you a promise. And we're going to look at that promise in a minute. He said, among those promises, your son is going to build my house. And so the book of Kings picks up with the end of the incredible reign of David that has launched Israel into international importance. This high watermark in the kingdom. And then he has assembled all the goods and materials so that as soon as his son Solomon takes over, he can build the temple. And he does. And much of the beginning of Kings is dedicated to the dedication and construction of this temple. And there's a beautiful prayer that Solomon prays for the people then and for you and I. It's really wonderful. You should go read it. It's this high watermark in the history of Israel. It's the culmination of 450 years of hope. And you have to think, man, look at us. These kings are bringing about the desired results. They're pushing us into prominence and they're bringing about the promises of God. This king thing is really working out. Hope is high. Then Solomon's son is terrible. They descend into civil war, and the northern tribes never get a good king. The southern tribe gets some that they get to hope in. And in the northern tribes, when it looks like hope is lost and they have evil kings like Ahab, they're putting their hope in kings, and it's not going to be Ahab. He's not going to bring about the future that God desires for us. But God does bring some strong prophets into the reign of Ahab. He brings Elijah, who wins the victory on Mount Carmel, against the 450 prophets of Baal. And you read that and you go, okay, now, now God's promises are going to come true. Now we're going to have the king that we are waiting for that's going to set everything right. It seems like the tide has turned and the hearts of God's people are going to be turned towards him, but they're not. And then God sends Elisha to secede Elijah, and he does twice the miracles that Elijah does. And it's this glimmer of hope that maybe the hearts of God's people will be turned to him, but they're not. And then God sends sporadically these good kings, Hezekiah, who defeated the armies of Sennacherib through prayer, by taking the threatening letter and laying it down before the Lord in the temple and saying, God, please protect your people. And God does because of Hezekiah's faithfulness. And you think, maybe this is a good king. Now, as you're reading the narrative and you're following along and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news, this is when there's going to be good news. And by the end of his life, he's no good anymore. We wait for some generations and Josiah, this glimmer of hope that we talked about last week, comes along. And he eradicates all of the idols and he turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord. But God says, you know, it's too late. My people are already turned away from me. I'm going to take the kingdom from you in four kings. And sure enough, he does. Jehoahaz and Jehoakim and Jehoachin and then Zedekiah and then it's done. Four generations. And the very end of Kings, this book that began with so much hope, a king is going to come and he's going to set everything right and the world for God's people is going to look exactly as God intended it to look. The book of Kings ends like this in chapter 25. I'm going to read you a summary of what's happening in verse 8. This is pretty much what they're looking at. That's the scene as we finish this hopeful book. We watch king after king come in. Maybe he's the one. Maybe the prophet's the one. Maybe the tide is going to turn. And we're waiting for the hero. We're waiting for the uptick. We're waiting for the climax. There's going to be a resolution to this. And at the end of the story, King Nebuchadnezzar sends in his army. They burn down God's temple, Solomon's temple that he built. They burn it down. They burn down the palace. They burn down the homes of all the prominent people in Jerusalem. And they tear down the walls. It's left in shambles. It is an ash heap of a city, and they take all the richest and wealthiest and most capable with them, only leaving behind the most impoverished and the most destitute. That's the picture of God's chosen people at the end of the book of Kings. It's utter devastation. It's utter and complete devastation. And you're reading this book and you're waiting for someone to come along. You expect to turn the page and then it's like, but then this happened and it's not. It's just somebody else telling the story, telling the same stories in Chronicles. There's no page turn here. You're expecting the hero to come. You're expecting the king to come, the right one to come along and restore everything, and it doesn't happen. As I'm studying in my office this week, I'm going, man, this really stinks that the book of Kings ends this way. Really find another story to just talk about and maybe we'll just let them discover this on their own, their own leisure. But it dawned on me that the devastation in Kings is very purposeful. This is really the point of the book. It's meant to end this way when we place our hope in earthly kings. The devastation is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. The devastation in kings is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. They kept waiting on an earthly leader. They kept waiting on someone to come and sit on the physical throne and usher them into prominence and make them a great nation, and it just wasn't going to happen, and God was letting them slowly, painfully realize the thing you're hoping in to fix your lives is not the thing that's going to do it. Boy, that's a whole sermon in and of itself, isn't there? How many slow, painful lessons have we learned putting our hope in the wrong thing? But it's meant to show his people an earthly king will never be enough. And if you're paying attention to the Old Testament, if you're paying attention to the things that God is saying to his people, even in the time of kings, when their hope is placed in an earthly king, if you're listening to what he's saying to his people, you will hear that he is telling them you are looking for the wrong kind of king. I referred earlier to 2 Samuel 7. This is where God made David a promise. It's referred to as the Davidic covenant. It's where he doubles down, he triples down, he reminds the people of his promise to them. And he promises that he's going to send a king to sit on David's throne. And these are the words of God. Look at what he says in verse 14. He says, So he's talking about Jesus here. He's going to be a son for me. He is going to pay a penalty for you. And then when he does that, he's going to sit on the throne forever. This is kingdom language. This is king language in the middle of the time of kings that they're not listening to. And then God sends prophet after prophet that we have in the major and the minor prophets in the rest of the Old Testament to tell them of their coming king, of the coming Messiah, most pointedly in the book of Isaiah. When Isaiah tells God's people, Isaiah is a prophet during the reign of Hezekiah, one of the good kings during this time. And he says that God is going to send someone and that by his stripes we will be healed and that he will be Emmanuel, God with us, and that he will be the King of kings and the Lord of lords. What God is trying to communicate to them that they can't seem to capture is that what they really need is a divine king. What they need is Jesus. What they're waiting on is the Messiah. They continue to look to an earthly king to make their problems right, to make things go away, to confirm and restore the promises of God. And what God is trying to tell them all along, through his promise to David, through the voice of his prophets, is, hey guys, you're looking for the wrong king. You're not paying attention to the right things. You don't need another earthly king. You need a divine king. You need Jesus. And this language isn't just in the Old Testament. We see king language throughout the Bible. You'll remember, if you were here in the spring of 2019, we went through the book of John for I think 12 or 14 weeks. And one of the themes we see is the people of Israel when they meet Jesus continually clamoring to make him king. He had to disappear from their midst so that they wouldn't start a revolution too early. He had to heal people and say, but don't tell anybody because he didn't want word to get out that the Messiah was here. He didn't want to foment revolution. This is why he did his ministry in the far-flung corners of northern Israel rather than coming down south to the capital of Jerusalem until later in his life because he knew that it would set into motion a series of events that he could not reverse because they were clamoring to make him king. They were clamoring so badly to make him king that at the end of his life when he was on trial with Pilate, the Roman governor, Pilate, he was accused by the people who were trying to kill him of being someone who was leading a revolution, who claimed to be the king of the Jews. And he's trying to overthrow Roman rule. And Pilate, you should care about this deeply. And so Pilate asked him, they say you're a king. Is that what you? And Jesus says, yeah, but not of this. You can have this. This is too small for me. I don't want this kingdom. I have a kingdom, but it's not here. If it were here, my angels would come and defend me, but they're not, because my kingdom is eternal. My kingdom is divine. My kingdom is universal. And with his death, he bought our citizenship into that kingdom. And then, as the narrative of the Bible continues to press forward, and we continue to wait for our king, along with the children of Israel, when is our king going to return and set things right? When is he going to restore things to the way that he intended them to be? And we fast forward to the book of Revelation, where we see more king language. In Revelation chapter 6, we have the cries of the martyrs. It's are the exact cries of the hearts of the saints in 2 Kings 25. And God's chosen people are in the middle of total devastation. Their hearts cry out, God, when will you make this right? How are you letting this happen? Why are you letting King Nebuchadnezzar do this? This is evil, God. This is not your plan. This is not your promise. Why is it going this way? Why are you allowing this devastation? It's the same cry that was in the hearts of the martyrs in Revelation 6. God, how long will you let this happen before you avenge what they've done to us? How long will you watch devastation occur in your creation? It's the same thing. It's the same cry of the hearts of the people who had to witness the terror of slavery, who had to endure the persecution of Nero, or the persecution that continues to happen in closed-off countries to this day. It's the same devastation that cries out to God in our own lives when we have a diagnosis or we have a loss or we exist in the rubble of a relationship. And we say, God, this doesn't feel right. How much longer will you let this happen? We need our king to make it right. And in Revelation 19, we get it. It's the most hopeful chapter in all the Bible when we see the king that we've always wanted, that we've always hoped for, that the nation of Israel longed for without realizing it. I love this passage. I always get emotional when I read this passage. Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. This is the appearance of Christ as king as we finish the Bible. The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True. and fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That's Jesus. And when he comes to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, when he comes to fix the devastation, when he comes to restore his creation and claim his throne, he is no longer coming as the Lamb of God. He is coming as the Lion of Judah. And he's going to answer those cries of our heart. And he's going to respond to the devastation. And he's going to speak right to the hearts of the people in Israel, watching their loved ones be carried away as slaves. As the palace burns and the walls lay in rubble, he is going to speak directly to their hearts as he establishes his divine eternal kingdom. And so what I want us to see as we think about the book of Kings and the lessons that we learn from it is that the entire book is meant to end in devastation and allow that devastation to point God's people for their need for Jesus so that they can see that Jesus is the hope of God's people in the midst of devastation. Kings ends that way on purpose. It's not a mistake by God. It's not like God was watching history and go, well, that didn't work out as expected. I was really hoping one of these kings would be the guy. He knew that it would end bad. He told Samuel when they were clamoring for a king, he says, you give them one, but it's not going to end well. And it didn't. He knew this was going to happen, but he let it happen so that his people would see their need for a divine king, and that devastation would point them to Christ. Jesus was their hope in the midst of devastation. And in the same way, our lesson from Kings is that Jesus is our hope in the midst of our devastation too. When things aren't going right, when we identify with the martyrs crying out to God, how much longer are you going to let this happen? You've made me some promises, God. You've said that everything I pray will be yes in your name. You said that if I ask for things that you will give them to me. You've said in Romans 28 that one day everything's going to work out for the good of those who love you and are called according to your purpose. When's that coming, God? Because this stinks. That frustration and devastation is meant to point you to Christ and remind you that we all collectively are waiting for Revelation 19. We all collectively are waiting for the return of our King who will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, who will sit on the throne of David forever, who will restore his creation to exactly what it is meant to restore, who will bring about the reality of Revelation 20 where it says God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things. All the things that caused devastation, all the things that caused us to cry out with the martyrs, those things have passed away because Jesus has won a victory over them. And for all of eternity, we exist in a perfect kingdom with our perfect king. Kings is designed to help us anticipate that future and cling to that hope. And when we experience devastation in our own life, that is there to point us to our need for Jesus. Sometimes it's a simple devastation of our souls. We come to the end of ourselves, and we realize that our way is not working. We realize that there is something about this life that is making me unhappy. There is something that is missing. There is something that I need. That devastation is designed to point us to our need for Christ. If you're here this morning or you're watching online and you're experiencing that devastation of your soul, you need Jesus. You don't need another earthly king. You don't need another earthly fix. You don't need to read another book or a new regimen of discipline. You need Jesus. The devastation of our relationships points us to our need for Jesus. When people disappoint us, it points us to a person who won't. When we lose someone that we love so much and we cry out and we say, God, this isn't fair. Why'd you take them? It was too early. Our King has died for us and conquered that death to assure us that we will see that person again one day. So we turn our eyes with hope to Revelation 19 when faithful and true comes out of the sky. When Jesus comes as the Lion of Judah to restore his kingdom and restore order to the way that it should be. And the devastation of finances and the devastation of just life events and the devastation of disappointment, big and little. Little disappointments are meant to turn our eyes to Jesus and say, yeah, this place isn't perfect. We need you to come make it perfect, God. We usher in, we pray for your return. Come soon, Lord Jesus. Big devastation, huge things from which we don't know if we will recover are intentionally designed to point our eyes towards Christ and say, yes, Jesus, this stinks. We are waiting for you. We are yearning for you. We are inviting you in. Come soon, Lord Jesus. The devastation in Kings is intentionally left in the Bible and is allowed intentionally to occur so that it will forever point God's people to Jesus in the midst of their devastation. If we remember nothing else from the book of Kings, remember that the whole book is designed to point us there. And remember that if you are experiencing some form of devastation or disappointment or disillusionment in your life, that the point of that, just like the point of it happening in Kings, is that you would point your eyes towards Christ and eagerly anticipate the return of your King, who is going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We are grateful for you. Jesus, we need you. Come soon to get us. God, you have watched from your throne all kinds of devastation. You have watched all sorts of divisiveness and violence. You have watched evil. And you are as fed up with it as we are. God, now in our time, it's hard to turn on the news or pick up your phone and not see something that disappoints us, something that breaks our heart, something that seems evil. God, you see it too. We need our king. Would you send him soon to rescue us? And God, while we wait, would you set our eyes on him? Would you set our gaze on you? Would you fill us with your spirit and give us the peace of hope? May we be a people who continually turn our eyes towards you. It's in our king's name that we pray. Amen.

Good morning, my name is Nate. They let me be the lead pastor here. If I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. We are finishing up our summer series called Obscure Heroes. I'm really excited about that. Yesterday, I got home from doing a wedding and then on my TV, there was football and it's less than 70 degrees when I woke up this morning and church is full and schedules are normal and small groups are starting, and all the things in life that I love are happening. Fall is the best, and summer is the worst, and this is the last Sunday of summer. Praise Jesus. And so next week, we do the Grace Serves, and then two services we launch into a series that I'm particularly excited about. It was not my idea. Somebody at the church gave it to me. One of our great partners suggested it. We're going to look at the six festivals that God installed into the Hebrew calendar in the Old Testament to see and remind ourselves that God is a God of remembering. He's a God of celebration. He's a God of commemoration. And all of that is worth learning about and celebrating. We're going to have a really fun, worshipful fall. We're going to have the Hootenanny, second annual one. Get your fanny to the Hootenanny. It's going to be the line there. That's going to be on September 22nd, along with some baptism. So I'm really, really excited about what we have coming up for you in the months of September and October. I think they're going to be huge months for Grace. But this morning, we want to finish up Obscure Heroes. I'm so grateful to Kyle for speaking for me last week, just so that you guys know that was planned for a long time because one of the things that I think is super important as a pastor is that you guys, as the church, get to hear other voices. And don't just hear me beating the same drum and playing the same notes every week. I would get tired of me. I know that you guys probably are already. So we want to have other voices and other perspectives speak into the spiritual life and have some spiritual authority here at Grace. So inviting other people up here to give the sermon is always going to be a part of who we are and part of how we do ministry, just so that doesn't surprise you guys as we move forward. But this week, I get to finish up our summer series. We've been looking at obscure heroes, characters in the Bible, people that we see in Scripture that we may not be familiar with, that we may not have heard of before, people who are a little bit less prominent, whose stories we may not know, and kind of asking the question, God, why are they in the Bible? Why do we hear this story? What can I learn from their story and their example that I can apply to my life? And I've enjoyed doing this series with you. This week, we're going to look at what I believe to be is a collection of the most obscure heroes in the Bible. We don't even get their names. They come at the end of Hebrews chapter 11, one of my favorite passages tucked into the most beautifully written book in the New Testament. If you're not familiar with Hebrews, it's a letter. It's towards the end of the Bible. There's this many pages in front of it and this many pages behind it. So it's towards the end, right? And it's a letter. We don't know who wrote it. We used to think that Paul wrote it, but increasingly we don't think that's the case. Basically, the thinking goes, it's too good for Paul to have written. So we don't think that he wrote it, but it's this incredibly beautifully written book. It has this incredibly high view of Christ as the Messiah, as the priest once and for all, as the sacrifice once and for all. And towards the end of it, in chapter 11, the author breaks into this discourse on faith. And he opens up the chapter and he defines faith and says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, it's the belief in things unseen. And then he chronicles all of these heroes, these heavy hitters of our faith, if you're a believer, of our shared faith, and shows us what they did by faith. And to a lot of folks in the church world and theological circles, Hebrews chapter 11 is actually known as the hall of faith. It chronicles a lot of the heavy hitters in the Old Testament. And he concludes it with this idea in Hebrews 12 that we're surrounded by this great cloud of witnesses, and so we should run our race too. But as he goes through the book, he highlights the different people. He starts at the very beginning. He starts with Abel, and he says, by faith, Abel offered the sacrifice that God asked for. He gets to Abraham. He says, by faith, Abraham moved from a place called Ur to a place called Canaan because God told him to. Some of us know the story in Genesis 22. By faith, Abraham offered Isaac when he was asked to. By faith, Joseph served Potiphar and Pharaoh. By faith, Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea and brought down the Ten Commandments. By faith, Joshua crossed the Jordan River and conquered Jericho. And then one of our obscure heroes, by faith, Rahab protected the spies and helped the armies of Israel. And so he chronicles all these heroes that we've heard of before. And as he gets to the end of that, the author's kind of made his point. And he says, should I keep going? Should I keep listing off names? And then he offers us some of the judges. Do I need to tell you about the faith of Gideon and of Samson and of Jephthah and of Barak? Do I need to enumerate what they've done as well? And then he starts talking about the prophets and some of the things that they've suffered. And then at the end of the chapter, he doesn't even refer to groups of people anymore. He doesn't even refer to people with titles. He's no longer using names. He just starts telling brief snippets of dozens, if not hundreds of people's stories. And I've always been fascinated by this passage. I think I came across it sometime in high school when I was beginning to read the Bible on my own. And I've always thought about the end of Hebrews 11. Man, who are these people? Because look at what he says about them. It looks like it's on your bulletin. It looks like a typo, like they printed the wrong verses. How could he possibly be preaching from these? But this is what it says. We'll just kind of pick them up mid-thought in verse 35. They wandered around destitute. They gave up their life. They were martyrs. They gave up probably well-being, maybe careers, maybe families for the sake of what we would call the gospel, for the sake of their faith. By faith, they took these steps of obedience that led them down these paths. And what we see, and these are people whose stories are incredible. Probably, if you could know them detail by detail and line by line, on par with any of the heavy hitters that precede them in the chapter, on par with what Moses did or what Abraham did or what Joseph did or what David did, on par with any of that. But there's just too many to enumerate, too many to note. It makes me wonder about all the stories of the people in the Old Testament that we don't even get to hear. And I've always wondered about these stories, about these people. Who were they? Where were they from? How did they come into faith? What did it look like for them? And what we see at the end of this passage, the beginning of chapter 12, when the author wrote the book, there weren't any chapters there. We added those in later. And so it's a continual flow of thought. And he says, therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us, is how chapter 12 begins. And that's the point of the whole chapter 11, is to tell us by faith we should run our race too. But he says, because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and he only lists off like 10, 15 people by name, but then a stadium fills the rest of heaven. And it makes me realize, we know the heavy hitters, we know the all-stars of the faith, but do you realize that heaven is populated with obscure heroes? Heaven is populated with obscure heroes. If you're a believer in whatever heaven looks like when we get there one day, we're not going to just walk through seeing all the heroes of the Old Testament that we recognize. It's populated with these obscure heroes, with people that are mentioned in verses 35 through 38 that are wandering around whose names are not mentioned in this book, who just had the simple faith and simple obedience and whose stories we don't ever get to know. And whenever I see this passage or read through it, I always think, man, what are the stories out there of faith happening on other continents or at other times or in our inner cities or just down the road that we'll never hear and we'll never know on this side of eternity? What are all the stories waiting on us of these faithful people who are these obscure heroes that we find out about when we get to heaven? Because I've always wondered that, what are all the things going on in God's kingdom that I don't know about? I was fascinated and felt privileged to meet somebody that I consider an obscure hero that none of us have probably heard about before in Honduras. About 10 years ago, I was with a school. I was a chaplain at the school and they had a mission trip that they took to Honduras, and so I went with them. And I met a man there that I will never forget. To me, he's a hero. A guy named Israel Gonzalez. This is a picture of Israel and I. This is the last time I got to hang out with him. That's like eight years ago, okay? That's baby Nate. This is what you guys are doing to me. I don't know if you realize that. Every time you text me past 5 p.m., I get another gray hair. But that's me. That's me in Israel, and we're in a house on a mountainside somewhere in a village doing some of the ministry that I'm about to tell you about. But Israel is one of the greatest people I've ever met in my life. I go down to Honduras and I get introduced to Israel and I start to learn his story. He grew up in Nicaragua. He was trained as an engineer, but at some point or another, and he married a woman named Floripe, who was a practicing medical doctor. Very successful family, but at one point or another, God laid it on his heart that he needed to be a pastor. So he said, okay. So he started a church. And eventually the church got to be too much responsibility. So he had to quit his job and focus full time on the church. And one of the things that the church did early on, they were based in a city called Saguarapeque in the middle of Honduras. And Saguarapeque is just in central Honduras. It's surrounded by mountains, and in those mountains are different villages. And when I say villages, I'm not talking about like a quaint village term. I'm not trying to minimize what it really was. I'm not talking like Nightdale and Rollsville here. I'm talking they were villages, just hovels, houses that were built out of cinder blocks, some that were just poles in the ground with canvas wrapped around them. Just groups of people who had lived there for generations and probably still will. Honduras is one of the poorest countries in our hemisphere. It's one of the most dangerous countries, most politically volatile countries in our hemisphere. But what Israel would do to spread the gospel, to spread the good news of Jesus, is he would go into these villages that surrounded Swagwatapeki. And he would need to build goodwill because he would want to tell them about Jesus, but you can't just show up and start telling them about Jesus because these villages are Catholic. And I don't have any problem in the world with Catholicism or a Catholic background, but this was a version of Catholicism in Honduras that was incredibly legalistic. That was very much, you are saved based on what you do and how you behave. You earn your way into heaven. And I have a big problem with any time we tell anybody that they have to earn their way into heaven, because that's not the Bible. They didn't know the grace of Jesus that says, you can't earn your way into heaven anyways, man. Just accept Christ. They didn't know that. They had not heard the beauty of the gospel, and he wanted to present them with the beauty and the mystery and the good news of the gospel, but he had to earn a little good faith with the community members before he could do that. So he would go in and he would throw parties. He would take people from his church, and they would go and they would cook hot dogs for the kids and they would do face painting and they would have games and they would give away little gifts. And then some churches from the states would find out about it. Not too many, mind you. He's only associated with probably five or six churches stateside. And start sending teams down there with little gift bags to give to the kids at these parties. And then Israel would always be off in the corner. He would either be talking and playing with the children, or he'd be off in the corner talking with some of the people who were like the village elders. And then when he would go into homes, they're still cooking on wood-burning stoves. So in these very poor villages in the hillsides of Sugatapaki, Honduras, these people are cooking on wood-burning stoves, and because of that, lung disease was rampant. And he looked at that, and he went, it doesn't have to be this way. And with his engineering background, he designed, invented a stove that can be built in these homes that reduces smoke inhalation by 90%. And we know it reduces it by 90% because some of the teams carried the designs back to Duke and the University of Indiana and said, will you look at these and see if these are legit? And they are. 90% reduced smoke inhalation. Vastly increases the quality of life. So he goes to the village elders and he can build these for $100 a pop. He says, hey, I've got enough to build two stoves. Who would you like to have them? And they start with the oldest women and then work their way down. And so while the party's going on, him and a team are over here building a stove. And after building this goodwill and meeting their needs, the village elders come to him and they say, hey, we don't just want your church to have to come visit us. Can you send us a pastor to start a church and we'll rally around him? So Israel thought, okay. So he began to disciple young men in his church and train them to be pastors. And when a village would ask for a church, he would send these young men out to go be their pastors. Do you know that Israel has founded 14 churches out of his church from young men that he's risen up and sent out. He's installed hundreds of stoves. He's done this with virtually no support from the United States. He doesn't have a big moneymaker here. He just does it. They just figure it out. And he does it faithfully. Do you know that Floripe used to, when they would go into the villages, his wife, these people need medical care. So she would treat them. But there was never enough time in a day to treat everybody that they were going to see. So eventually, God made it possible for them to build a permanent medical facility, a clinic that people come to every day. Get dental care, get medical care, take your kids in to get shots. Minor surgeries happen there. And this is the life that they lead. And now here's the thing, and here's why I marvel at Israel. You might not know this because not all y'all are plugged into this or care, nor should you. But there's like a thing, and it might be gross, I don't really know where I'm at with it, to be honest with you, like Christian celebrity. Once you start a church, and that church grows, you get invited to conferences, you get to speak, you write a book, you do a podcast, and everybody starts to know who you are, and then you get more campuses, and then you do a video video projection and you teach at those campuses too. And now I'm a robot pastor everywhere, right? And bigger grows my kingdom. And I don't know, it would be so hard to protect your ego against what that does to you, but it happens in Christian circles. And these people who build churches, who have 14 churches and a medical clinic that their wife runs, we know about them. They're famous. They show up on preachers and sneakers on Instagram. Like we know about them. But not Israel. Because he's working away in Honduras. And he's one of these obscure heroes. That when we get to heaven, we're going to go. I want to meet the Israels. These people who are serving God in obscurity that most of the world will never, ever know about. I marvel at those stories. And you may be thinking, Nate, that's neat, man. Love 35 to 38. It's people at the end of the chapter. They populate heaven. That's wonderful. That's not gonna be me, man. Probably not gonna be so on and to for my faith. Praise God for that. I'm probably not gonna go to Honduras and like start a clinic. So I don't know what you want me to do here. How are these people, these heroes of the faith, these obscure heroes that did stuff and can't even be named, how is Israel, how are they like us? These people that populate heaven, how can we relate to them? And I was thinking about that this week. And as I was looking at it and working through it, one of the things I realized is, what do these heroes all have in common? They all took simple steps of obedience. What do all these people have in common? As you read through chapter 11 and you look at these heavy hitters of our faith, what do they have in common? The people at the end whose names we don't know, what do they have in common? When I tell you the story of Israel and the things that he's done with his life, what do they all have in common? They all took simple steps of obedience. Simple steps of faithful obedience. None of the people in chapter 11 woke up and said, I want to be great. I want to be a great Christian. We have this terrible thing that we do where we think that the better Christian I am, the more known I'll become for my Christianity. Like pastors are the apex of the faith or something. And that's gross. I don't have any marketable skills, so God placed me here, okay? Like it's not a big deal to be a pastor. We think that Christianity should be lived out publicly and that the better you are at it, the more people notice you. And that's just not true. It's just taking a simple step of faith. Abraham didn't wake up and say, God, I want to be great. I want to be written in your Bible and remembered for thousands of years. He wasn't thinking any of that. God said, I want you to move. And he said, okay. Yes, Lord. And he took that step. He said, I want you to offer me your son. Yes, Lord. And he took that step. He didn't have visions of grandeur. In fact, the one person in chapter 11 who did have visions of grandeur, Moses, he grew up in Pharaoh's house. He thought he was really going to be something. You know what God did to him? He sent him to the desert for 40 years until he got rid of those visions. He humbled him. And then out of a burning bush one day, he said, hey, you ready to take that step? And five times Moses said, no, I don't think so. You got the wrong guy. Until God said, Moses, take it. And he took the step of obedience. We've looked at Rahab. We know that she didn't think she was going to be great. She was a prostitute in Jericho. She didn't have high hopes for being a champion of the faith. She just took the step that God put in front of her. Are you going to protect these spies or not? All these people, all they did, and all Israel, if Israel could be with us here today, what he would tell you he did is just simply what God asked him to do. You understand that the kingdom of heaven is built by simple people taking simple steps of obedience. The kingdom of heaven is not built publicly. The Christian life is not lived out publicly. The Christian life is not lived out to applause and everyone noticing you and going, that's so great and you're so godly. That's not how it works. And I'm saying this because I think so many of us here have been living out a quiet and humble faith day in and day out, taking little steps of obedience, being loyal to your God and being loyal to your beliefs. And sometimes in those things we feel forgotten. Sometimes in those things we feel cast aside because people aren't looking at us and giving us credit for who we are and how we're obeying. And I want you to know that based on Hebrews chapter 11 and these people that are listed here, I think that God sees us. I think that God sees you and that the kingdom of heaven is built on your shoulders. The kingdom of heaven is built on the Stephen ministers who just get up and quietly go sit with people who are grieving and they don't say anything. They just listen and they show up. Those are wholly heroic moments. And you might think, man, being obedient doesn't make you heroic, but I would disagree. It might not make you heroic to everyone, but it makes you heroic to someone. I have some friends. They grew up, each of them separately, without great examples in the house of what it meant to have a good godly marriage. They didn't see examples from all of their parents about what it meant to be a wonderful parent. So when they grew up, they had layers of things that they acquired in those homes, and then they looked at each other and they said, let's put our messes together and make a bigger one. So they got married, not knowing how to do any of that because they never had a good example of it. So now they're flying blind trying to figure that out. And they weren't people of faith. I don't know how you navigate that. And then they said, you know what we should do? This is a mess. Let's have kids. Say it too. And then they're trying to figure out how to be parents to those kids. And somewhere along the way, Jesus gets a hold of them. And they started taking these little steps of obedience. They say, you know what we need to do for our family? We need to prioritize church. And even though they're busy and even though they're tired, even though weekends is the only time they have to rest, they prioritize church and so they show up. And even though they're busy and they're tired and they're coming in on two wheels, they prioritize small group. And even though there's a cost to it, they prioritize things that help them be better parents and help their kids be better kids. And I've watched them slowly develop into this household of faith. And I look at that and I go, man, that's heroic. To take those steps when you don't have to, because they're the right thing to do. When you're flying blind, but you're determined to figure it out. So you just take the next step of faith in front of you, and you do it quietly, and no one sees it, but you just do it because you want your kids to have something different than what you had. Listen, we might not ever know about that, this side of heaven, but they're heroes to those kids. My dad grew up without a dad, and he's not a perfect dad to me, but he's a good one. And I'll never know what it is to not have a dad who's not proud of me. You want to tell me that's not heroic? That simple step of faith that he took? The kingdom of heaven is built on people taking obscure steps of faith, taking obscure steps of obedience that we may never see on this side of eternity. It's built in there, holding the crying baby just a little bit longer so that mama can actually hear the sermon and participate in the worship this week. Or maybe just tune out and be sane for a minute. The kingdom of heaven is built by people that we have in this church. I think of Ginger Reith. Some of y'all are not Ginger Reith. I'm sorry, although she's lovely. Ginger Gentry. Just kidding. Ginger Reith is the worst. Let's put that on video. Ginger Gentry. She leads our prayer ministry. And you may have never met her or heard of her. But every week, if you put a prayer request on the card, it goes to staff and elders, but it also goes to Ms. Ginger. And Ms. Ginger lives alone now. And she sits in her house and she puts those things out and she prays for those. And she makes sure that you get a card and she makes sure that people know about it. I had somebody last week come up to me and they're like, man, that Ginger, like she works, man. I said, what do you mean? And he goes, I've been praying for something for months. And so finally I put it in. It hasn't worked out until finally I put it on the connection card so Ms. Ginger could pray for it. And it happened this week. I'm like, yeah, you don't mess around with Ginger, man. And nobody would ever know about that, about the hours that she spends in prayer. I'll tell you some other heroes we have around here. It's about time I publicly embarrassed them anyways. I don't know if y'all know Harris, Winston, or Howard Sauls. If you don't, you're not missing much. But they're married to our children's ministers. And I marvel at them, and I have since I got here. Because let me tell you something about them. Next time we all do something together, on the 22nd, we're going to have the hootenanny. It's going to be great. Look around. While everybody's having fun and talking and laughing, think of what's the cruddiest job that I could be doing right now? What's the thing that nobody here wants to be doing? You figure that out and then you look and one of them's gonna be doing it because they're servants. And we might not otherwise ever notice that or care. Let me tell you something. The kingdom of God is built on those steps of obedience. The Christian life is lived out by just day after day choosing to be obedient to God. Jesus tells us, if you love God, you'll obey me. He makes it as simple as every day taking the next step of obedience. We don't have to have a plan. We don't have to know what the goal is. We don't have to see the whole story arc. All we have to know is, what's my next step of obedience? And so as we finish up the series and we reflect on the heroes that we've learned from for the past eight weeks, I want to put that question in front of you. What's your next step of obedience? What simple heroic act has God placed in front of you? And don't discredit it and don't say, oh, that's not heroic or oh, that's not a big deal. Yes, it is. Whatever that step is, it's a big deal. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe it's to make a public profession of a private decision. Maybe God has impressed that upon you, and next month we're going to have a service. If that's you, write that on your card or reach out to me somehow. Let's talk about that. Maybe your next step is to get rid of that thing in your life that doesn't need to be there. To shed some light on some dark places and take that step. Don't tell me that's not heroic. That's hard. Maybe your next step is to have the conversation. It's to volunteer for the thing. Maybe your next step is getting home and putting down your phone and engaging with family. Maybe it's finally developing the discipline of spending time in God's word and time in prayer every day. Some of you know what your next step is, and you're thinking right now, dang it, I didn't want to come today. Sorry, sucker. Now you're here. I don't know what your next step is, but I know that the kingdom of God is built by you taking that simple step that no one may ever see but him. And that heaven is populated with obscure heroes like we have here at Grace, like you probably are. So I'm just hoping that we can commit as we move into the fall, that we can commit to taking those next steps together. Let's pray. Father, we sure do love you. Really and truly, God, thank you for making faith so simple. Sometimes we make it complicated. Sometimes we make it harder than it has to be. And God, a lot of times we want to know more than we need to. Give us the faith to take the next step. God, if there's someone here and they don't know you today, would they would just, I pray that they would just prioritize finding out. We all have roadblocks. We all have things, God. Maybe their next step is simply digging into those and figuring out what's there and why they're hesitant. Give them the courage to do that. Give us all, Father, the strength and the courage to take the next step. Give us the vision to see it. May we be like the people that were written about in Hebrews. May we be like the people that we'll find out about in heaven. I pray that you would fill grace with these obscure heroes of the faith who quietly build your kingdom for your glory. And it's in your son's name we pray. Amen.