Sermons tagged with Pain

All right, guys. Good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and I'm so grateful that you've joined us on this October Sunday. I'm hopeful that we don't have to hear that noise again, but who knows? Who knows? Some of you may have noticed that I'm wearing Georgia Tech colors for no particular reason. I just thought I'd wear them today. But speaking of suffering, speaking of UNC football, today's message is about suffering, so it kind of works out, those of you who stayed up late to get your dreams crushed last night. This morning, we're talking about Great Is Thy Faithfulness. When we planned the series, I knew that I wanted to take at least one week and talk about a hymn. Because hymns are, if you ask me like what songs are you listening to, what Christian worship are you listening to, I have a playlist called Acoustic Hymns on Spotify, and I listen to that probably more than anything. I just like hymns, and so I knew that one of the sermons was going to be focused on a hymn, but I didn't know which one, and so I did what I often do when I don't know what to preach about or talk about. I ask Jen what she thinks. Jen's my wife. She's not just a lady that I ask questions to, and I asked her what I should do, and she immediately said, Great is Thy Faithfulness. We love Great is Thy Faithfulness. It's one of our favorite songs. Jen even walked down the aisle to that in our wedding. And so I dove into the song Great is Thy Faithfulness a few weeks ago to prepare for this morning. And what I was not expecting to find was that this is really a song about grief. It's a song to be sung in the midst of grief. And so this morning is necessarily about pain and suffering and struggle and grief. And we've all walked through those seasons. Some of y'all know our story well enough to know that 2019, early 2019 to the end of 2020, were some hard years for Jen and I. In early 2019, her dad John was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he fought the good fight for almost two years and died in the last days of 2020. And that was probably the first time that we moved through that kind of profound grief at loss. And it really shapes you when you walk that path. In a lot of ways, there's my life before we walked that and life after. And the perspectives are very different. And one of the things that I learned in that season of suffering and loss and grief was, and I know that this is, I'm just getting right to it. I know it. I know this is heavy. I know this is even grim, but it's just true. And this is the way that my mind works. Maybe that's why one of my favorite books in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. But as we were walking with John on his journey to eternity, it occurred to me somewhere in there that best case scenario in life, you walk with your parents into death. When you are born, the best possible outcome for that relationship with your parents is to accompany them as they transition into eternity. That's the best possible outcome. It's a path we all have to walk. In fact, if we don't walk that path, holding our parents' hands as they fade away, if we don't walk that path, it's because something more sad than that happened, right? They lost you. You were estranged. It was tragic and sudden when they passed. I know that's dark and I know that that's heavy, but I think it's a helpful reality to understand that when you are born, hopefully to loving parents, that the best case scenario for that relationship is for you to one day hold their hand as they pass into eternity. If you have walked that path, you know what an incredible honor it is. I was talking with somebody this week who lost their brother, and he was able to sit with him for the last two weeks while he faded. And I just said to him, it's a unique privilege in life to be invited into that sacred space, isn't it? And he said, yes, very much. So I would say, if you are walking that path, if you have walked it, when one day you find yourself walking it, I know that it is not much solace, but consider yourself blessed. It's a blessing from God to walk with a parent, to walk with a loved one in that way. We don't all have that opportunity. But if that's the best case scenario, what that means is life is going to be filled with strife. Life is going to be filled with grief. I make the comment sometimes that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy for their whole life. No one does. Something sad will happen. Grieving, suffering, loss is a ubiquitous part of the human experience. Just this last week, within the last week, I went to the funeral of a 40-year-old friend of mine who suddenly passed away. I told you guys about this last week. She has two kids, middle school and elementary school. It's tragic. On Wednesday, I drove to Asheboro and I did the funeral for a man that went to my church in Atlanta who moved up here. And I sat with his kids. He has kids are twins they're both 53 and I talked with his daughter very successful woman she was really struggling and I was talking to her and I just mentioned to her that she had walked through this before and I was sorry that but she knew this path because she had lost her mom and she said said, well, this one, she said, yeah, but this one feels different because I had my dad at that one and I don't have parents anymore. It's hard. I told you I was on the phone yesterday with somebody from our church who just lost their brother. As soon as I hung up that phone call, I called somebody else in our church whose dad just started in hospice care. There is a reality in this life of pain and suffering. And in light of the ubiquity of that human suffering, we can be grateful for a Bible that includes the book of Lamentations. In light of the ubiquity of human suffering and grief and tragedy and loss, we can be grateful for a Bible that includes the book of Lamentations. Now, the book of Lamentations is not a popular one, okay? If you have a Bible, if you were faithful and you brought your Bible this morning, I'm so glad that you did. If you don't have a Bible, you can get one in the seat back in front of you. Turn to Lamentations for me, and you'll be able to look at some of these things as we look at them here in a few minutes. It's five chapters, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations. If you get to Ezekiel, you've gone too far. If you can't find it after a few minutes, use your table of contents or hand it to the person next to you who's a better Christian. The book of Lamentations is a collection of five poems that are laments. And a lament is an expression of anguish or grief. It is an expression of deep sorrow. And Lamentations is not the only place where these laments make an appearance. I told you last week as we were talking about Psalms that there's several different categories of Psalms. And one of the categories is Psalms of Lamentations, Psalmsms of lament. We find poems of lament in Job. We find them in Isaiah. And so all through the Bible, we have these poems and these songs and these writings on laments, on deep anguish and deep grief. And I am grateful for a Bible that has those. I'm grateful for a Bible that does not hide from that part of the human experience. We do not serve a God that seeks to whitewash those things and push those off to the fringes and off to the side while we're happy and joyful over here. And in a lot of ways, I'll talk about towards the end, pain and grief and loss can sometimes seek to drive a wedge between us and God and push us further away from God. And so it would seem to his benefit to kind of cast aside, put pain in the shadows so that we don't acknowledge it. But God, in his goodness and in his wisdom and in his word, has chosen to bring pain front and center and show it to us over and over and over again and even show how the saints have responded to it. So we do not have to be afraid of pain or grief and we don't have to pretend like it doesn't exist. We don't have to whitewash it. And because God doesn't flinch about including pain and grief and the reality of suffering in his word, then we don't have to flinch about including it in our church. The church should not be a place where we take people who are grieving and who are hurting and who are suffering loss and put them to the side and ask them to quietly get over it until they can join our happy, joyful circle again. That's not how church works. That's not how the Bible works. That's not how God works. So that's not how we should work. It is okay and right and good to bring our pain and our grief into the middle of the fellowship and say, this is what I'm doing. This is what was happening to me. And this is how I'm suffering. We should do that. But I'm grateful for a God, for his word that does not hide from the reality of suffering and loss. Because everyone in here, everyone in here over the age of 30 has a place they can go. If I were to ask you what was your hardest time, you have a place where you can go. You have something that you encountered that was sad, that was hard, that challenged your faith. And maybe it was so profound that you even mark your life by it. There was me before that and me after that. And if you are one of the lucky few who says, you know, I really haven't known that season, I'm so happy for you. You will know it. You will. It's a reality of life. We will walk through times of profound suffering and grief. And the Bible doesn't flinch about that. And I have committed to you that I will preach about that reality just as often as it comes up in Scripture. Because shame on us if we perpetuate this idea of faith that tells us if we'll just pray hard enough and love hard enough and be faithful enough that we will dodge the raindrops of tragedy, that God will put a protective shield over the ones he loves the most who are the most faithful. That is not in the Bible. That is not in that situation too. And so God includes it in his scripture. And in doing that, I believe that poems of lament imbue human suffering with a sacred dignity. I believe that these poems of lament, that finding deep anguish and grief in scripture, imbues our suffering that we walk through with a sort of sacred dignity. And I don't really know how best to explain it except to say that I'm fond of reminding myself and reminding you guys when I can that we all stand on shoulders. You are who you are, for better or worse, because of the shoulders you stand on. Because of your mom and your dad and your grandparents. Because of the people who were around you when you were being formed, because of the successes or failures that came before you. You stand on those shoulders. I've reminded us as a church, we stand on spiritual shoulders. We do not, as Grace Raleigh, float out in the ether untethered to church history. No, we are a part of church history. We are carrying the torch for our generation, but we are standing on shoulders that go back thousands of years. We stand on shoulders of faith. And in suffering, I think it's important to acknowledge through scripture that we stand on suffering shoulders as well. The generations who have come before us, they know suffering. They know hardship. And the reality of it is, whether we like to admit it or not, we're the lucky ones. Our generations experience far less suffering than their generations. It was not lost on me, and even in other countries. It wasn't lost on me last week as I was at the funeral for Jodi, that we're in a room, there's 750 people in there because this tragic thing happened. This mom died. And 750 people stopped their Saturday and went to a room and celebrated her life and worshiped God together. While on the other side of the globe, there's Palestinian and Jewish moms dying who are not getting services. They don't have time to stop and bring 750 people in and celebrate that life. Life just marches on. And so, comparatively speaking, we are the lucky ones. But just like getting to walk with your parents in their final hours doesn't make those final hours not sad, acknowledging that we are comparatively lucky doesn't make our hurt hurt less, which is why I think the song Great Is Thy Faithfulness can be one of hope. It can be a profound anthem for us during pain. But to understand Great Is Thy Faithfulness, we've really got to understand the book of Lamentations. So you've got it there open in front of you, and I don't expect you to look at this right now, but it's five chapters. Chapters one and two and three and four are acrostic poems. They're all 22 verses. Each verse starts with a different Hebrew letter, obviously in the Hebrew, not in the English that we are looking at or whatever language you read your Bible in. And then chapter three is a little bit different formulaically than the others. But all five chapters are poems and all five chapters are poems of grief and suffering and strife. If you've ever tried to read through Lamentations, I did, sat down, read it cover to cover before I started to write the sermon on it. It's a hard book to read. It is not a hopeful book. It is not, besides what I'm going to show you, besides this one little nook right in the middle, it is not a faith-filled book. It is a book of despair. And so I wanted to acquaint you with kind of the sense of the book of Leviticus so we can understand the deep anguish that the author is talking about. It's attributed to Jeremiah historically, but recent scholarship calls that into question. But we're going to say Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. Look with me at chapter 2, verses 11 and 12. These are hard verses, but I want you to see the kind of pain that he's talking about here. as they faint like a wounded man in the streets of the city as their life is poured out on their mother's bosom. I cannot think of anything more profoundly sad than that. That a mom clutching her small child as that child's life is poured out on her chest. And I do not think that was a figurative verse, because the book of Lamentations is written in a response and reaction to the downfall of Jerusalem being conquered by the Babylonians and the Jewish people being carried off into slavery. The book of Lamentations is written while the smoke rises from the ashes of Jerusalem in the background and slavery awaits in the foreground. So please understand that to the Jewish mind, to this person, to Jeremiah, and to those who would read it, the anguish they are expressing is because of actual grief that they are seeing. Women and children dying in the streets is what they are seeing as the city is conquered. But it's not just that that they are grieving. This also is a grieving of a loss of a promise from God because God promised to care for his people and God promised to look out for them. He promised to protect them. And more than anything, he promised them that land, the land that they were on. And then God allows a foreign army to come in to destroy his city, the crown jewel of Israel, to lay waste Jerusalem and the temple and take his children that are claimants of his promise and march them into slavery in a land where they don't belong. Back pretty close to where Abraham came from originally. So when they are marching, it is not just the sights that they have seen that have broken their hearts. It's not just the ones that they have loved and lost that have broken their hearts. It's not just the future that they face that's breaking their heart, but it's also the thought, the reality to them that their God had failed them. Their God had broken his promise. Either he was unfaithful or he was weak. But their hopes had been dashed. It's with that that Jeremiah writes these laments. This verse in particular struck me about women and children in the streets as their city was destroyed around them. I wrote this sermon in the days following the original Hamas attacks a couple of weeks ago. And I didn't have to imagine what it would look like to see what Jeremiah was writing about. Because all I had to do was turn on my TV. And you see horrific pain, horrific violence, and horrific evil. I watched a dad celebrate when he found out that his eight-year-old daughter was dead rather than captured because being captured was worse than being killed. That's sad. And my heart breaks for not just the Jewish people who have lost their lives, but for all the Israelis. It's multicultural that have suffered needlessly for this. And my heart breaks for the Palestinians who are caught in the middle of a war that they did not choose to wage. And I don't know the answers there. I don't know the right thing to do. The only thing I know to do is to pray for them. Don't turn our eyes from it and pretend like it's not happening. To be grateful that we don't live in a place where we have to suffer in that way. I've thought over and over and over again what I would do with my young family if I was unlucky enough to be born in Palestine. How do you protect them? And the thought that really struck me as I was reflecting on that and reading these verses is that there truly is nothing new under the sun. Jeremiah wrote these words 2,500 years ago. And here we are right back in the same place. Women and children are dying in the streets of Israel. The suffering until Jesus comes back is unavoidable. And then you flip to the end of Lamentations. The very last verses. This is the time to finish on a high note and encourage God's people. Isn't it, Jeremiah? Not to him. He finishes it this way. I sure do like the sound of pages turning in here. That's good. Verse 21 and 22. Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and you remain exceedingly angry with us. The end. That's the book. It ends with a dot, dot, dot. God, please restore us. Please take us back. Please make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Please, God. Unless you're just going to forget us. That's it. There's no resolution there. Which is why I think that these verses in chapter 3 are remarkably powerful verses. These verses are the only hopeful, optimistic verses in the whole book of Lamentations, and we find them in the dead center. And if you know your hymns, these verses are going to sound really familiar. Look with me at chapter 3 and listen to these words. Verse 21. I love the way he starts this verse off with that phrase, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. This I call to mind, but therefore I have hope. In the midst of all the suffering he's written, he's seen the ashes of Jerusalem are fading behind him as he's led into slavery. He has seen the very worst of human suffering. He has finished the book with uncertainty, but in the middle of it, almost like a nail being driven into a wall with a curtain, just letting it drape there, holding up the last tendrils of faith is this declaration of hope in the middle of it. But this I bring to mind and it gives me hope. Great is your faithfulness. Your mercies are new every morning. You provide for me and I believe in you and I hope in you, God, because I know that you are good. Despite everything that I've seen, despite everything that's happened, despite all the questions that I cannot answer, I know that you are good. And see, I always thought that Great is Thy Faithfulness was a jubilant song. It was to be sung in seasons of plenty. It was to be sung when we realize we're blessed. Great is your faithfulness, O God, my Father. All I've needed, your hand has provided. I have all that I need. Morning by morning, new mercies I see. I thought it was a song to be sung in the midst of plenty. But it's actually a song to be declared in the midst of grief. Which is interesting to me that Jen chose it. We're not too far off. As the song to walk down the aisle, maybe she knew something that I didn't about the years ahead. But make no mistake about it, and I love this. Great is thy faithfulness is an anthem of defiance. You understand? The song, great is thy faithfulness, is an anthem of defiance. And here's what I mean by defiance. Because when you've walked through grief and pain and hurt, you know something to be true. Those things have whispered in your ears. When you are hurting, when you are suffering, when your life is marked by sorrow, that pain whispers in your ear. The same thing it was whispering to the ears of the Hebrew people as they marched away from the ashes of Jerusalem. That pain will whisper in your ear, your God is not big enough. Your God has forgotten you. Your faith has failed you. Your faith is not serving you. Your God is too weak. He's too apathetic. Or your faith is weak. or this is your fault, that pain and grief will begin to drive a wedge between you and God. It will whisper things when you're trying to fall asleep that your faith has failed you and your God has failed you. And if you let it linger long enough, it will work to convince you to walk away from your God. And when you go to the place you went when I talked about your darkest hour, we both know we heard those voices then. We both know we hear them sometimes now. We know people who have let those voices win and have walked away from faith because the pain was too great. So it is those voices that this anthem is defying. Jeremiah was hearing those voices as he wrote Lamentations, and yet in the middle of it, nail in the wall, he hangs his hope. Great is your faithfulness, he declares it, despite everything going on, despite the fact that, God, you could have stopped that and you didn't. God, you made us a promise and it feels broken. Lord, I don't understand how these things can be happening to these people. It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem fair. How can you possibly watch the news and see what's happening in Israel and not be moved? How can you possibly watch the news and see what happened in Maine this week and not be moved and not wonder and not ask those questions that we all ask in the midst of pain. God, why are you letting this happen? And I don't understand. And I can't explain why. And I don't know what to tell my kids. And my faith feels weak. But in the midst of that dismay, I choose to sing with Jeremiah and all the saints, great is your faithfulness. God, I don't understand this, but I know you're good. Great is your faithfulness. God, I don't have enough to get through today, but I know you're going to give me the strength. I love that line, strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, even in the darkest of times. So from now on, for the rest of your life, when you hear the song, great is thy faithfulness, I want your mind to rush to Lamentations chapter three. I want you to see it holding up the tendril of hope and faith and our creator and uncertain times and things we don't understand. It's an actual choice to choose faith in those moments and declare to God, I don't understand it, but great is your faithfulness. And it's an anthem of defiance because when we choose to sing it in the midst of pain, we are telling those voices of pain and grief and fear. Not today. You will not rob me of my faith today. This pain will not take my faith from me. And it will not take it from me because I know who my Jesus is. And I love him I trust him and I know he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And I don't see how, and I don't see why, and I don't know when, but one day he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And so today this pain will not take my faith from me because great is his faithfulness. And I will declare it even when I don't feel it. So in a minute, we're going to sing. And when we do, let this be an anthem. If you're walking through pain right now, sing it. Defy it. Declare it. When you hear it in the future, sing it as an anthem that my faith will not be shaken by the circumstances that I'm walking through. But I know that for me, for the rest of my life, whenever I hear great is thy faithfulness, I will remember it as an anthem of defiance that in the midst of the greatest suffering and the greatest trials, we stand up and we choose to sing, God, I don't understand, but I know you are good and great is your faithfulness. Let's pray. Father, your faithfulness is steadfast. You have never broken a promise. You have never not done what you said you were going to do. There's so much that we don't understand, God. There's so much in life at times that seeks to rob our faith from us. And so, God, we pray that you would give us strength for today. Continue to give us hope for tomorrow. That we would declare this as an anthem against the evil one who would seek to tear down our faith. Lord, if there are those here who are listening, who don't feel like your faithfulness is really great right now. Would you give them the strength to sing? Would you give them the strength to declare? Would you give them the strength to defy today? God, we thank you for being good. Thank you for loving us. We thank you for being faithful to us. Help us see it more and more. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

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

Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Good for you for being here today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. Do we have anybody here who particularly cares who wins, feels very stridently about the Eagles or the Chiefs? No one's willing to admit. Okay. All right. I saw one fist up indicating neither team, but go your team, Kay. I will be cheering for them tonight on your behalf. This is literally, in my opinion, the worst weather possible. It's almost freezing and it's raining, but it's not cold enough to actually have anything fun happen, so we just trudged through it together, and here you are. Thanks for being here. This morning, we are appropriately talking, based on the weather, appropriately talking about mourning and grief and sadness. As we go through our series, The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the Beatitudes that come at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus's first recorded public address. And he opens up that address, that sermon, with a list of nine blessings in the book of Matthew. You find them in chapter five, and then the following sermon in five, six, and seven. And when he opens up with these blessings, he's speaking exactly to where the Israeli people are at the time. And he says, if this is you, then you're blessed. And so last week we opened up the series and we talked about that word blessed. And it's important that we define that and understand what it means to be built, to be blessed by God. And what it means very simply is to be fully satisfied, is to have all that you need, to be lacking for nothing, which when you think about it is a pretty profound definition of blessing. Because we can be in all different stages and all different instances in life, in all different situations, we can have plenty, we can have a little, we can be hurting, we can be exuberant, and in that moment we have all that we need, God says we are blessed. So this morning we look at one of the blessings, and it's probably the blessing that I find to be the most counterintuitive. It's when Jesus says this in Matthew chapter 5 verse 4 very simply, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. When this blessing is recounted in Luke, it says blessed are those who weep for they will laugh. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. And I don't know what you think of when you think of mourning, people who mourn. And maybe my perspective as a pastor is a little bit different than others. I don't know. I don't have another perspective. But there's things in life that we are sad about that cause us to grieve, right? The loss of a relationship when you're in middle school or high school. The person you like doesn't like you back. That's devastating. This causes us great mourning and teenage angst. We know about this. The loss of a job, the loss of an opportunity to get a promotion. Something bad happens to your kid and you mourn that. There's a little bit of sadness. There's different degrees of sadness and mourning. But what I think Jesus is talking about here, where my mind goes, what I think is implied in the Luke version of it, blessed are those who weep, what I think of is this deep, soul-aching sadness that there really are no words for. If you've lived life long enough, you have walked through a grief like that. Or you've walked with others or seen others as they walk through a grief so deep and so profound that words fail you. What do you say to parents whose eight-year-old had an adverse reaction to a prescription drug that they were given for a simple illness and it causes them to die and you have to do their funeral, what do you say to those parents? What do you say to people who are young who lose their parents way too early in a profoundly sad way. What do you say? What do you say to people who sit in the midst of the wreckage of their marriage? Sometimes because of decisions they did not make, and now they are grieving not just their marriage, but the future they had always envisioned for them and their kids. What do you say in the midst of that grief? What do you say to the wife with three kids under five who just lost her husband? What do you say when your friends have miscarried for the third time. When I think of mourning, grief, sadness, that's what I think of. Those times in life when the sadness is so profound, the ache is so present, that words fail you. And it would feel altogether stupid to hug them and say everything's going to be okay. Because it just doesn't seem sufficient. What do we say in those moments? Well, here's what Jesus said. That you're blessed if you're there. Because you will be comforted. Now, all those situations I just listed out for you are situations that I've been in. Situations I've seen. Situations I've walked with other people through. And it never occurred to me in those moments, nor will it occur to me in the future moments, to say to them, you know what, I know you're hurting right now, but you are blessed because God's coming for you. And yet, this is what Jesus says to a grief-stricken people, to dads who can't afford to feed their children, to a society in which the average age of death and infant mortality rate were respectively incredibly low and incredibly high. They knew pain and sorrow and grief. And Jesus says to them, you're blessed for you will be comforted. How is it that Jesus can say that to those people? How is it that Jesus can say that to us in the midst of our grief and our pain? And how is it that mourning can be a blessing? That in our mourning, we can see that we actually have all that we need. I think one thing that is helpful for me, it might not be helpful for everyone, but one thing that is helpful for me based on the Luke iteration of the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount, there are blessings and then there are woes. There are woes to counterbalance those blessings. So when Luke records it, he remembers that Jesus says, blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh. And then later when he gets to the woes, he says, woe to those who laugh, for they shall weep and mourn. And so he introduces kind of this cyclical nature of life. There will be seasons of mourning and there will be seasons of laughter. There will be seasons of celebration. There will be seasons of sadness. And so what we see in life, what we see in Ecclesiastes, what we see in the biblical text over and over and over again, and what we know experientially is that morning is as natural as morning. Morning in life is as natural as morning in the day. What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that 18 hours from now, if Jesus doesn't come back and stop it, morning's coming, right? I don't know if I did the math right. I'm just throwing out 18 hours. You might disagree. I don't know when sun rises tomorrow, but technically speaking, if we don't have any more UFOs invading our country, Lord knows what's going on there. As long as Jesus doesn't come back, in 18 hours, it'll be morning. It's coming. There's nothing we can do about it. Whether we can see it or not, like today, whether we want it or not, unless Jesus stops time or returns and breaks the cycle, morning is coming. And in life, until Jesus returns, until he breaks in and breaks the cycle, mourning is coming. So when we mourn, when we hurt, when life is hard, we ought not be surprised by that. We ought to just think, it's my turn. This is inevitable. Everyone mourns. And I think it's really important to point this out. It's one of the large reasons. I had nine blessings to choose from. I chose this one, and it's one of the big reasons I chose to spend the morning highlighting mourning and the fact that it is cyclical and inevitable and will happen. Because as long as I am your pastor, I will do whatever I can from this small stage to beat back the idea that once we sign up for God's agenda, that he gives us a get out of grief free card. There is this pernicious idea in Christian history that when I begin to follow God, everything else is going to go okay for me. I'm going to close the sale and I'm going to avoid the big hurts and I'm going to avoid the big things and the raindrops of grief will miss my head and my family's heads. And yeah, sure, I mean, I'm going to have to go through some sadness at some times, but it's not going to be too bad. He'll never give me more than I can handle. The Bible has nothing to say about that. Nowhere does Scripture indicate that following God is a get-out-of-grief-free card for his children. And it's an incredibly damaging thing to teach otherwise. Because what happens is we find ourselves in the midst of mourning and we think, my God has betrayed me and let me down. Because he's allowing me to hurt this much. And what right and good theology says is, no, no, no. God never promised that those things wouldn't happen to you. But he does make a lot of promises to us in the midst of that morning. One of my favorite ones, it's one that I mention in funerals when I do them. It's one that buoys me that I am reminded of. There's a passage in Isaiah that says, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we hurt the most, God is closest to us. When we are crushed in spirit, when we are weeping, when we are mourning, when it's that soul ache is when God himself sees us most and clings to us hardest. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic, and maybe it's because we're in the season where we have young kids. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic of how a young kid, when they hurt, runs to mama or runs to daddy, right? How the only thing they want in the world is the shelter of their parents. Jen was able this week to see this play out in real time. Lily was involved in a spelling bee, and it was an off-campus spelling bee. So Lily, or Jen had to take her to another school. Jen is my wife, by the way. Lily's my daughter. They're not just two random people I talk about. So Jen was taking Lily to the spelling bee, and they get there. And the way that this thing was set up is they gather all the kids together, and they take them into the classrooms, and the parents sit in the gym. And they just silently watch these double doors. And it's grades one through eight. And as it's your kid's turn, you don't know what's happening in the classroom. As it's your kid's turn, they spell and you know, they get it right and they stay in the classroom or they miss it and they have to do the walk of shame in front of all the parents. They come trickling through the double doors, dejected, and everyone knows you're not very smart. And then here they come. And so the parents are just sitting there staring at the doors. I'm, I'm at the house hanging out with John, who is my son. And, and just, I can't get enough. I'm just texting Jen nonstop. I'm on, I'm on the edge over here. I can't take it. What's going on? What's going on? Who's coming out? She's giving me live updates. Oh, but someone like someone's been defeated from our little school. Uh, the, the, this little boy, this little girl, they've come out. They said, Lily's hanging in there. It's round 15. She's fighting hard. I'm like, go, Lily, you know. But as these kids come out one by one, they come through the door. And what do they do? They're scanning the room for their parents. And they run to mama, and they hug mama. And the first kids who get out, they're fine, you know. They didn't have high expectations for the day. They're good. Let's hit the road, mom. Maybe there's a Shake Shack down here. But the kids who lasted longer, man, they were in it, right? It gets stressful in that room, first grade for two and a half hours spelling words. They start to hope. Lily wore her gold shoes that morning. She thought she was going to win. And so gradually they start to come out. When they hug mama, they're crying, they're hurting. They're releasing the stress of the day, the disappointment, maybe a little embarrassment. And the only one in the world who can comfort them is their parent, right? They're hurting. They're mourning. And sure enough, Lily comes out of there. She looks around for Jen, runs to her. They cry together. Lily cries because she's disappointed. Jen cries because she's a mom. And she sees that she has a different perspective on the pain than Lily does. She has a different perspective on the disappointment that Lily does. And she cries mostly because she just hurts for Lily. And after a minute or two, classmates start to gather around, and everyone gives their condolences, and then one little girl tells Lily very happily, they have cake pops here. And then suddenly, the spelling bee fades, and we're cake pops and grilled cheese at Zaxby's, and the world is right. But this is what we do when we hurt. We come through the gym doors and we scan the horizon for our Heavenly Father. We're drawn to Him. And He's drawn to us. And He sees us in those moments. And then, in those moments, when we need him, when we need his arms to wrap around us, when our soul aches, and we will never be too big, and we will never be too tough, and we will never be too manly, or whatever other stupid adjective we could put there to need our heavenly father to wrap his arms around us. We will never be beyond that. And when we hurt the most, He offers Himself the most. He comforts those who are crushed in spirit. He is close to the brokenhearted. And when He is close to us, do you know what He does? John 11, 35, He weeps with us. He holds us and he weeps too because his perspective on our pain is a little different. Because he knows that we don't really understand what it is we're walking through, but he sees it for what it is. And he holds us and he comforts us. This is what Jesus does in John 11, 35 that I mentioned. His best friend Mary has lost her brother Lazarus who's very close to him too. And she weeps to Jesus, why'd you let this happen? And he doesn't answer her, he just weeps with her. I will never get over the idea that there is an all-powerful, divine being who spoke the vast universe into existence, who knows who I am, and he knows the hairs on my head, and when I weep and when I hurt, he weeps with me. He is that intimately involved in our lives. Whether it's a small hurt or a big one. He's there. And what I find interesting about the way that God comforts us is that so often if you say, well, how does God wrap his arms around me? I think so often he does that through his other children, right? So often God comforts us by sending his children to be the ones who are the vehicles of that comfort, to wrap their arms around you, and maybe to say everything's going to be okay, and maybe just to say, I know it seems like everything isn't going to be okay, and I don't know what to tell you, but I'm here and I love you. And I'm pretty sure God loves you too. And let's just let that be enough right now. So often when we hurt and it says that God is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. How does he do that? By sending his children, his hands and his feet into our lives to comfort us. And what's so amazing about this comfort when they offer it is that the best comfort, and you know it if you've been through it, the best comfort when our soul aches only comes from people who have walked that path too. Many of you know that part of our story is that in 2019, Jen's dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he fought that battle hard until the end of 2020. And it was in early December of 2020 that we were about to have a service and I got a call just before the service. Jen's uncle was down there with her dad in Athens and outside of Atlanta. And he called me and he said, hey, it's time. You need to get the family down here. And I said, okay. Did the service. Went home. Jen was packing up the kids, getting things ready. And in our scramble to get out of town, there was a knock on the front door. And it was her friend Lisa. She had heard that it was time to go. And she came over. And she knocked on the door and she hugged Jen. And I don't know exactly what she said, but it was not much. But she essentially just said, I'm so very sorry. And they hugged and they cried. And Lisa left and we went to Georgia. Now what makes that hug and those words so profound from Lisa is that she had just walked through that with her own mother. So when she looked Jen in the eye and she said, I am so very sorry. She knew exactly the path that Jen had walked for those previous two years. The ups and downs and the good phone calls and the bad phone calls and the hoping and the praying and the staying up at night. She knew all that. She knew how terrible that was. And she knew how terrible the next few weeks were going to be and what we were going to see and witness and walk through. She knew that. And all of that went into, I'm so very sorry. And those words brought Jen better comfort than the dozens, if not hundreds of people, including me, all along the process who had hugged her tearfully and said, I'm so very sorry. Because if you haven't walked that path, that's great. I'm glad that you're sorry. I know you are. I appreciate that. I received that. But you don't know. So when someone who has walked that path of grief, who's been through that divorce, who's been through that dejection or disappointment, who has experienced that loss, can look you in the eye and say, I'm so very sorry. It carries a different weight. And so it occurs to me that one of the things that makes us blessed when we mourn is because when we get to the other side of that mourning and we are comforted and we have all that we need and we move through it and our heart and our soul heal in whatever way they can, that we will also get to be the hands and feet of Jesus as God himself comforts his hurting children down the road. So you could almost say, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted and comfort. That in the midst of your mourning, it is cold solace. But the reality is for the rest of your life, you will be able to offer empathy and tears that will mean more to people because of the path you've walked than any other empathy and tears they might get. The hardest thing I've ever walked through from a mourning perspective is our miscarriage. The first time we got pregnant, the time before Lily, we miscarried. And before that, as a pastor, and I'm also just ridiculously pragmatic and stupid sometimes, as a pastor, when I would hear that couples had miscarried, my honest, dumb thought was, oh, well, that's too bad. They'll have another one. Which is just mind-numbing, but I was also in my 20s. I just hadn't experienced enough life to know that that's not what a miscarriage means. It's the loss of a dream. It's the loss of hope fulfilled. It's incredibly devastating to walk through that. Particularly if you've tried really, really hard to get pregnant. Particularly if it's not your first one. And in some ways I'm glad that we have walked through that because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it has made me a better pastor for couples who are walking through that as well. And I would never again cheapen that grief by trying to move past it and look ahead. But I can hug them and look them in the eye and know their pain and say, I'm so sorry. And so in that small way, through our grief, God allows Jen and I to be blessings to others when the time comes. And so part of the blessing of mourning is knowing that in this cycle of weeping and laughing, when other people enter into a mourning phase, we can walk with them and be used by God to bring them comfort. And here's what's really interesting about the comfort that he brings us when we are hurting. When he brings a person along, when a song shows up in an unexpected place, when we are scrolling and we just happen to see something that touches us, whatever it might be, whatever that temporal comfort is that he gives us, that temporal comfort is intended to point us to our eternal comfort. This comfort that God offers us as we hurt is temporary. It's a salve. It's a balm. It's a band-aid. It helps our scarred souls, but it does not fully heal us. It is a temporal comfort intended to point us to and remind us of the eternal comfort that we cling to. As I was preparing this sermon, I sat down with Jen and I just said, listen, you've been through profound grief and I feel like I have not. What do I say? What do I talk about? I actually pitched a couple of ideas. I said, here's what I was thinking about saying. And she looked at me and she was like, those are not helpful to me. All right, cool. Well, then what should I say? And she shared this verse with me and told me that this is something that sustained her and continues to sustain her. And I think that there is tremendous power to this idea. And honestly, she said, it's that Hebrews verse that talks about hope being our anchor. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good verse. Googling off to the side. Which verse is this? It's one that had not stuck out to me before, but it is now one that I will never forget. But it says this in Hebrews chapter 6 I want us to hold on to is this idea that this hope anchors us. It anchors us. And one of the things that she kind of pointed out to me is that that cycle of mourning, that cycle of weeping and laughing, of mourning and celebration, of times of plenty and times of little, That's inevitable. Those things are artificial. Life ebbs and flows around us. But the thing that keeps her anchored, that keeps her steady, that keeps her pointed at God is the hope that she clings to. Whether life would seek to buoy you in exuberance or drown you in sorrow. There is an anchor that holds us there in the middle, and that anchor is our hope in Jesus. That's what our hope is placed in. The anchor is the hope, and the hope is placed in Jesus. In Jesus doing what? In Jesus doing what he says he's going to do. I say all the time that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And the way that I always say it, and it's particularly applicable this morning, is that he's going to come back one day and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In the midst of our mourning, and for that matter, in the midst of our celebrations, the comfort that we have in each scenario reminds us of the eternal comfort that Jesus has promised us. That one day he's coming back. And one day he's going to break the cycle. There's not going to be any more weeping and laughing. There's only going to be laughing. What God's promise is and what our hope is, is that one morning there will be no more mourning. There will be a day that breaks at some point in the future. We don't know when and we don't know how long we have to wait, but there will be a day that breaks. And when that day breaks, the only mourning that's left is the next day. There will be no more mourning with the children of God. And one of the great solaces we have is that if our grief is related to loss, the loss of a loved one, if they know Jesus, they are experiencing that mourning already. And so in the midst of the ebbs and flows of life, when our soul aches, we can hold on to that anchor of hope that reminds us of who Jesus is and what he came to do. That reminds us that Jesus promises us in Revelation 19 that he's gonna come back and on his thigh is gonna be written righteous and true and he's gonna conquer death and sin once and for all and there will be no more mourning. Revelation 21, I love to remind you of it. There is coming a day where 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, the things that bring you grief, the things that scar your soul, the things that make your heart ache, that make you wonder if you can go another day. Those things will never happen again because they will have passed away. That is the promise of Jesus and that is the hope that anchors our souls as we go through the ebbs and flows of life. And as Christians, that is our greatest hope. That is our greatest encouragement. That is what we cling to. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes that I share every Easter. I believe it's Pope John Paul II who says, we do not give way to despair for we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. Because Jesus died and rose again on the third day and conquered sin and death and promises us a day, promises us a morning where there will be no more mourning, we believe that he will come again and do what he says he's going to do. And so what we can say for sure, when we find ourselves in the depths of despair, when we find our friends drowning in sorrow, is that we can whisper into their ear, hang on, cling to the hope that one day things like this will not happen anymore and that one day you will be healed and that one day, because of the hope that Jesus gives us, you will be reunited, you will be restored, you will be made right. So how is it that Jesus can say, blessed are those who mourn? Because he knew what he was going to do. And he knew that one day he would take away all of that mourning and make sure that for eternity we exist in joy and laughter. And so we cling to that hope in Christ. Let's pray. Father, I just pray for those right now who hurt. Those of us who are walking through a season of mourning and hurt and grief. I pray that they would feel your presence. That they would feel your love. That they would feel your comfort, that your church would serve them well. God, I pray for those who are in seasons of joy and celebration. Would we honor you well in those? Would we use those seasons to comfort others when we can? Thank you for the hope that you give us in Jesus. God, if there's anyone here today who doesn't know you, who hasn't yet professed a belief in your son, who hasn't yet claimed that future that you promised, I pray that they would. Even right now as we pray and sing and finish up, stir our souls and our hearts to you. Bring comfort to those who need it. Give the rest of us eyes to see that need. And give us the strength as we need it to cling to that anchor of hope. That one day you're going to come get us. And you're going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. As I said earlier, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I will be speaking this week. Like I said, last week we did a silent sermon, and I've got largely good feedback from that, some really encouraging things. I've had some people who have been honest and said, hey, you know, it wasn't for me. And then I've got another section of people who said that was a pretty clever way to take a Sunday off. But let's not do that anymore. So I appreciate your honesty. I'm going to try my best to get through this sermon. I'm going to give you all the voice I got left for today. So Jen is in luck because I'm not going to be able to say a thing when I get done with this. But let's go. This is part five of our series called Powerful Prayers, where we're just looking at different prayers throughout Scripture and asking, what can we learn from these prayers? And the one that we're looking at this morning is one that is very near and dear to my heart. It's the one that when I went to Jen and I said, hey, I'm doing a series on powerful prayers, which prayer would you point me to? Because she's my number one sermon consultant, and she said the prayer of Hannah. She pointed me to this one because this one means a lot to us. The prayer of Hannah is found in 1 Samuel chapter 1. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's one in the seat back in front of you if you don't. But Hannah was married to a guy named Elkanah, and she wanted to have children and could not. She wanted desperately to have a child, to experience motherhood, and couldn't. She just couldn't conceive. And that's near and dear to our heart because part of mine and Jen's story is that for about six or seven years, we desperately wanted children. And the Lord, it just didn't work out. We couldn't get pregnant. We couldn't have one. And so we walked through that pain. And so to this day, when I encounter a couple that really desperately wants to experience parenthood and they can't, it's just not happening for them yet, my heart breaks for them. I immediately start praying for them. I immediately follow up for them, sometimes in borderline inappropriate and invasive ways. How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? It burdens me so much because I know the private pain of struggling to have children. I know what it is to go into lunch meetings, to go into one-on-ones, knowing they're going to ask me about it. They're going to ask me why we can't have kids yet, and I'm going to have to give them some canned answer, and it's the last thing in the world I want to talk about. Like, I know that pain. And so Hannah's pain resonates with me in her prayers in 1 Samuel. We don't hear all the words of her prayer in the first chapter, and then she sings a song of praise in the second chapter, but we're going to focus on what she was praying about and how it was processed, how it was interpreted by the priest, Eli, when she prayed it. So it's helpful if we think of what we're about to read. These are Hannah's earnest prayers for a child, but I think all of us have things in our life at different times that we want to. Sometimes it's for a child. And I know a couple of couples in the room and maybe some watching online who have prayed and prayed and prayed and they're sitting in the middle of blessing. We've got a couple of folks who I prayed for and they're pregnant and they're finally pregnant and God is good and that's wonderful. And now we're praying like crazy that they get to hold that healthy baby in the appropriate amount of weeks. Not too many, because mom's going to get tired of it, and not too few, because that's not good, but that they hold that healthy baby in the appropriate amount of weeks. We're praying hard for that. But I also know there's other things that we ardently pray for. Healing of loved ones. When we hear the C word, cancer, we hit our knees and we pray, right? We pray for, I know of another family in the church that their schedule is just untenable because the husband's job is just takes them away too much and he desperately needs another job. And so we're praying for that, that God will open up something there. I love that last song that we ended with, you make a way when there was no way. And you've done it before, we believe you'll do it again. And so we pray those prayers and we trust them to God. And I know that in this room, there's situations that are just driving you insane. I know another family that's dealing with aging parents and mom has no resources. The grandma has no resources. They have no more bandwidth. It seems like it's an impossible situation. What are we going to do? Well, we're going to have to pray about it. And so it's helpful for us when we look at the story of Hannah, if we think about the things in our own life that we genuinely want, that we deeply want, that we deeply need, that we're petitioning God for. God, will you please make a way? Will you please give? Will you please do? That's the mindset we need to be in as we encounter the prayers of Hannah. So in 1 Samuel 1, Hannah goes to the temple and she begins to pray fervently and ardently that God would bless her with a child. And while she's praying, the priest, Eli, notices her and accuses her of being drunk because her lips are moving, but there's no words coming out, and she looks like a crazy person. So he goes up to her, and he's like, hey, you got to get out of here. Like, go home. Go home, you worthless woman. You can't be here in the church. And it sounds harsh of Eli to do this, but I'm telling you from experience as a pastor, you got to keep your head on a swivel sometimes. One Wednesday night during rehearsal for our band, this was three, four years ago, pre-COVID, and I checked this with Jeffy, the guy who was singing. I call him Jeffy. His name's Jeff. I also call him SB. You can ask me what that means later. But Jeff was here this night, so he verified this this morning. Several years ago during rehearsal on a Wednesday night, a gentleman that had been kind of visiting the church, who's not coming anymore, you'll see why, came in and asked if this was an open rehearsal. And our worship pastor at the time was like, sure. So dude sat down. It was very clear that that guy got an early start on his evening, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And so he just starts barking out like suggestions to the band. You should do this song this way. They're like, what in the world? And so finally they had to say like, hey man, this is now a closed rehearsal. We're sorry. You got to go. And he went right outside to the bushes and began his purification process. And then he went on his merry way. So you got to, I don't blame Eli, right? You got to keep your head on a swivel. Sometimes it happens. So he goes to Hannah and he's like, hey, you're drunk. You need to get out of here. And this is Hannah's response in 1 Samuel 1, verse 15. So she goes up to the temple. She's praying ardently for a child. So ardently that the priest misinterprets her passion for drunkenness and confronts her. And I love that she says, she says, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm praying out of utter anxiety and vexation. I'm pouring it out unto the Lord. I don't know what else to do. It's this earnest and honest prayer. And Eli's response is wonderful. Eli's response is, may God bless your prayers because she's praying out of this honest spirit. And so the first thing we learn and see, I think, from Hannah's prayer and this experience in the temple is that God desires our honest prayers. He desires our honest prayers. He wants us to tell him what we're thinking and what we're feeling. He doesn't ask for us to hold back our anxiety and frustration and vexation. He welcomes our honest prayers. I know that this is true because I've seen honest prayers over the years that are cried out of just this honest place where we strip down all of the intricacies that we put up when we go to God in prayer and we just cry out earnestly to him. There's a story in my family. There's a story in my family. I think it's my great aunt or my great, great aunt. I don't know. It's one of those stories that's like, maybe it's like a 30% shot that it's true, but it's been passed down. And so I'm going to tell you, because for all I know, this happened. So there's some great aunt that I had in Southern Georgia or Southern Mississippi. That's where my family is from, which is why I'm so smart. And she was a church lady, man. She was a church lady through and through. She was there every time the doors were open. She told her neighbors about Jesus all the time. She loved God, and she was fiery and whatever. And she was a widow, and she didn't have very much money, and her roof was in shambles. It's leaking. It's clearly visible. She needs a new roof. She can't come close to affording one. And one day in frustration, she walks out into the front yard and she says loud enough for everybody to hear, God, all of my neighbors know that I'm your daughter. And if this is how you want them to see you taking care of your family, then so be it. But I wouldn't think you'd like my roof the way it is. And she walks back in the house. That was her prayer. Then I'm not kidding you. The next day, two dudes show up at the front door. Hey man, we're just here in the neighborhood. We're new roofers in the area. And we think that your house would really make a great kind of model home. So we'd love to redo your roof for free if that's okay with you. The very next day, it's as if God went, okay, Aunt So-and-so, you make a great point. Here you go. God desires our honest prayers. He desires our earnest prayers. And it's so funny when we pray. Sometimes, have you ever heard those people who when they pray, they start to use a vocabulary unknown to any of their friends outside of their prayers? These and thous and henceforth and Father God this and Father God that. And you're like, I never hear you say that outside of praying. We take on like this different language when we pray. We get more austere and serious when we pray. Now, we do need to approach the throne with a degree of respect, and I'm not advocating prayers like my great aunt prayed. I don't think that's really the design there. But we can go to God with honesty. We can go to God and we can tell him, I'm frustrated with you. I'm frustrated with you, God. I did when we were struggling to get pregnant. I would go to him and I would say, there's so many people who seem to be just getting pregnant on accident. Students that I taught that are dummies. And I know that that kid is going to struggle and end up in therapy, God, and you know it too. Why won't you bless us with kids? What's the deal? Like, I would go to him and be honest, and you can do that with God, because it's not like he doesn't know. It's not like he doesn't know that you're frustrated with him. It's not as if he doesn't know that you're doubting sometimes that these words are even reaching his ears. It's not like God doesn't know what we're doing, that we're living these duplicitous lives of sometimes I'm holy church guy and other times I'm just this shadowy version of myself that I don't like and don't identify with. It's not like God doesn't know that when we pray. It's not as if he doesn't know that when we sin. As a matter of fact, when we go to God and we try to put on this veneer and we try to act like we're full of faith when we're not, or that we're full of confidence when we're not, or that we're at total peace when we're really losing our minds, when we go to God dishonestly in word and in attitude and in emotion, I think we resemble the Cheetos kid from the commercial a few years back. It's one of my favorite commercials of all time. This dad's in a living room, right? There's a lot of white furniture and there's Cheeto dust all over everything. There's a bag of Cheetos there, Cheeto dust all over everything. And he's sitting there just kind of looking around going, good gravy, what in the world? And then his kids run through. And the last one that runs through is a redheaded kid, because of course it was a redheaded kid. And they're wearing, the redheaded kid is wearing all white, right? Cheeto dust just exploded all over this kid, all over his fingertips, wiped all over his shirt, yada, yada, yada. And his dad goes, hey, and catches him by the arm. And he goes, you know anything about this? And the kid goes, no, and then runs off, right? It's great. When we go to God and we try to be what we're not, we try to act more together than we are. We try to act less concerned or more faithful or more confident or less sinful than we are. We're the Cheetos kid. God's going, you know you can just tell me the truth, right? It's not like you're going to surprise me. I know every thought that you've ever had. I know you better than you. You can just tell me the truth. So I love the model of prayer from Hannah of going to the temple and praying out of her emotions. God, I want this. And what's so wonderful about her prayer is that Hannah was clearly a holy person. She was a spiritual person. And if you don't think of yourself as holy, the Bible defines you as holy once you become a Christian. If you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, then you're a believer. And God says, and the scripture says that when God looks at you, he sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ, that you are holy. So as a Christian, when you offer prayers, those prayers are holy prayers offered by a holy person. Hannah was a holy person, praying spiritually motivated good prayers, aligning with the heart of God that she would experience the blessing of parenthood so she could raise that child according to God's standards. And she was asking for a thing. And in this story, God grants her a son. The son's name is Samuel. Samuel goes on to be the last judge and the first high priest in a long time of Israel. He was David's priest. Incredibly influential in the Old Testament. And what I also love about this prayer of Hannah is that once she learns that she's pregnant, she goes back to the temple and she worships. And it's such a good model for us. Because I wonder about us in our prayer life, when do you pray the most? Is it when you need the most or is it when you're the most grateful? What activates you into prayer more than anything else? Is it that you're overwhelmed with God's goodness and you just have to pour out praise to him? Or is it, I need, I need, I need, I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared, I want, I want, I want. And so the model of Hannah is a good time to ask this question, do we go to God in want and in celebration? It's good, it's good to go to God in need. We've got to do that. But once he answers that prayer, once he relieves that stress, once he relieves those tensions, do we go back to him in gratitude? I would encourage you to track those things because it can be a special thing when you do. As I was looking at this prayer this week, I have some notes in my Bible. Underneath the highlighted prayer of Hannah for a child, it was highlighted because Jen and I had been praying that prayer for a long time, for seven years. And we found out that we were pregnant the first time on October 15th, 2014. And I wrote out to the side, God is good, next to that date. But on December the 8th, we found out that we miscarried that child. At the time, that was the hardest thing we'd ever walked through. But here's the thing, and I'll talk more about this later. When we lost that first child, whose name was going to be Samuel, God was still good. God was still good. I'll talk more about that in a second. Then I've got another date, May 12th, 2015, a couple days after Mother's Day. And it just says again, we're pregnant. That was Lily. And then another one. January 15th, 2016. She's yours, God. Thank you for Lily and Grace. When we pray for things that we ardently desire, it is right and good and helpful, not only just the right thing to do, but helpful for our faith to mark those times so that we go back and we can sing songs like what we just sung in earnesty. I've seen you move, and I know you'll do it again. And I've told you guys this before. When we put John and Lily down for bed, we sing. The last song we always sing is God is so good. God is so good, he's so good to me. There's a lot of variations to that. I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm going to because I'm a child. Whenever we're having Asian that night, whether it's Japanese or Chinese or whatever, I always sing the verse of God loves miso. He loves miso because I think of miso soup. And I'm like, God likes Asian food too, to celebrate the Asian food we had that night. Because I'm a moron. I'm a moron. But the last stanza that I always finish with, no matter what, before I put each kid down to remind myself of God's goodness, is he answers prayer. He answers prayer. He answers prayer. When God answers prayers in our life, we need to come back and mark those so that they can be reminders and harbingers for our faith. Because the other side of this that's not so fun to preach about, but we've all encountered, is this reality. Sometimes God says no to earnest prayers born out of godly desire and prayed by holy people. Sometimes the thing we pray for, and it's not a bad thing. It's not a selfish thing. It's not a give me the promotion so I can get the boat thing, which is a fine prayer if you want to pray for the boat. I don't care if you have a boat or not. I'm just saying that's a little bit different prayer than I'd love to experience parenthood, okay? When you're praying for holy things, that our children would come to know Christ, that he would heal the cancer, that this disease would go away, that this situation would be alleviated, that this untenable part of my life would be healed, that whatever it is, sometimes we go to God and we pray those things earnestly, and then the answer's no. And it sucks. I remember when I was teaching school, this would be in 2010, there's a kid in my class named Alex who I was really close with. I loved him a lot. His dad was Ron and Ron had cancer. And Ron had had cancer since 2008, Alex's sophomore year. And Alex, even though he was a senior, had two little brothers in like first grade and third grade. And Ron was dying. And we prayed for Ron a lot. And I remember one day at the school, I think it was after practice, we had Ron come in, because Ron used to set up a chair and watch football practice. We had Ron come into my classroom, and men there from different denominations but involved in the school gathered around Ron. And one Pentecostal brother even brought some oil. I had never seen prayer oil before, but I thought, you know, it can't hurt. I mean, it can't be bad for the prayer. Let's do it. And we lay our hands on Ron, and holy people prayed earnest prayers with holy motivations. And Ron died. And God said no. And it was really hard to look at Alex and be his chaplain and try to see his faith through that time. It was really hard to understand why God would choose to say no when there's two young kids still at the house. We prayed hard for God to heal my father-in-law two years ago. And he could have. He could have. He didn't. That'll do a number on your faith. You've heard no too. You've got the bad news too. You've prayed earnest, fervent, ardent, wholly motivated prayers, and God said no. And it left you feeling confused and bewildered and probably betrayed by God. So we can't bring up, pray earnest prayers, and you'll move mountains without going, yeah, but what do we do when he doesn't? I think the best answer for this is found in the prayers of John the Baptist. Now, I'm being presumptuous in assuming that John prayed about this. Nowhere in scripture, I'm just telling you honestly, okay, hear me. Nowhere in Scripture are we told directly that John the Baptist prayed about this particular situation. But I think it's safe to assume that he did. Because John was a man of prayer, this was a dire situation. John had been arrested by King Herod. He was in the king's dungeon, and he knew he was going to die. But John knew of a prophecy in Isaiah 35 that says, And John knows that Jesus is the Messiah. He's the coming one. He's the one that they were talking about in Isaiah 35. And I'm a prisoner, so I should be set free. But here I sit. And so he sends some representatives to Jesus to ask him, are you the guy or did I mess this up? Let's look in Matthew. We'll pick up the story in chapter 11. Chapter 11, verse 2. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk. Lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me. Other translations say, blessed is the one who does not fall away on my account. What's he telling John? He says, go tell John all the things in that prophecy are happening. Deaf people here. People are being raised from the dead. Blind people see. And prisoners are being set free. But you're not going to be one of them, John. And then, that all-important line, blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Which is Jesus' little tip to John. Keep the faith. I'm the one. I'm just not going to do what you think I'm going to do here. I'm just going to let you down a little bit here. And I think that this story is so vitally important to the Christian faith. Because what Jesus is saying here to echo, to reverberate through all the centuries is, Christians, there will come a time when I disappoint you because I don't do the thing that you think I'm going to do. Do you hear me? If you're a believer, you will reach a point in your faith when you are disappointed in Jesus, when you are let down by God, when he doesn't do a thing. It's within his power to heal my dad, and he didn't do it. You're going to reach that point, and you're going to be ticked, and you're going to be confused, and faith is going to be hard. And what does Jesus say to us in that moment? Blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. I'm gonna disappoint you because I'm not gonna do what you expect. And if you can keep the faith, you are blessed. So what do we do when God's answer is no to our earnest prayers? We cling to him. We cling to Jesus. We do what Peter did. I love this story. I should have put it in your notes. Jesus was teaching the crowds one day, and in the cryptic way that Jesus teaches, he thinned the crowd. And he said, I'm telling you the truth. Unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And the people who had been following him was like, all right, that's weird, man. We're been pretty cool with the miracles, but we're, we'll see you. They left him because that is weird. They know what he's talking about. We know he's talking about communion because we're smarter than they are. But they didn't know. That's not true. They didn't know about communion yet. So then he goes to the disciples and he says, are you guys going to leave me too? And Peter's response is, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? Isn't that great? If I ever get a tattoo, that's what I'm going to get. You're Jesus. Where am I going to go? There's so much in that. I don't understand what you just said, man. That was weird that you want people to eat you. I don't get it. I'm totally confused. I have no idea what you're doing. I have no idea where you want us to go, but I know you're Jesus. I know you're the Messiah. I know that. I'm just here. I'm in. Wherever we're going. Wherever you want to go, I'm in. It's just weird, man, and I don't get it. When our prayers aren't answered the way we want them to be answered, it's entirely okay to pray, you're Jesus, and I'm in. But I don't get it, man. I don't know what you're doing. That's an okay prayer. That might be the most honest needed prayer that you've ever prayed. Jesus, I know you're Jesus. And I know you died for me. And I know you've promised me a future. And I know you could have done something that you didn't do. And I don't understand it, but where else am I going to go? Because you're Jesus. When he doesn't move the mountain, we cling to the promises. Because here's the reality of it. We pray prayers in this life. Jesus answers prayers in eternity. One way of looking at it is that when we prayed for John to be healed, for my father-in-law to be healed from his cancer, he wasn't because he died. But the other way to look at that is to say he was because he lives in heaven for eternity. And his life is markedly better than ours right now. And I can't help but think, Jen and I talk about this all the time, it creates such sadness for her family that their dad, their patriarch, isn't with them anymore. But I can't help but think that when we get into eternity and we realize what a blip on the radar screen our life is compared to all of time, that the fact that he left early won't matter one little bit once they're with them in heaven for all of eternity. I can't help but think, as callous as that sounds sounds that it just won't matter as much. I think that's why Paul refers to hardships as though you struggle for a little while, though you endure this light momentary affliction. Oh, you mean like decades of cancer, like that light and momentary affliction? Oh, you mean like being an orphan, that light and momentary affliction, you jerk? Yeah, that one. Because when we get to eternity, God answers all of our prayers. One day, God will grant all of our prayers. This is the hope that we cling to in Jesus. That's why I always say that what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God and he came to earth. He sits on the throne at the right hand of the father. We believe that he did what he said he did. He said that he died and he rose again on the third day. And we believe that he's going to do what he said he's going to do, which is to come back one day and make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and to answer our prayers in eternity. So when he doesn't move the mountain and when the answer is no, and when we've prayed earnestly and honestly and we've poured our guts out to the Father. And he still says not right now. And we don't get it. We're sitting there like Peter going, you're Jesus, I don't understand what you're doing and I'm pretty mad at you right now, but where else am I gonna go? The promise of Christianity and of our faith is that those prayers will be answered in eternity. And that one day there is issued a forever yes and amen. And we cling to that day. And we cling to that hope. That even though, God, I don't understand why you would let this family walk through that, why you would let Alex lose his father, why you would say no to this earnest prayer request from this wonderful couple who desperately wants children. Even though, God, I don't understand your timing or why you're making them wait or why you've said no, even though I don't understand, I cling to you and I know that you're good and I know that if I knew everything that you knew that I would understand this decision exactly. And so we cling to him and we cling to his goodness. And we remember that God is good all the time. I've talked with people recently who were waiting on results of tests. Pregnancy tests, tests for cancer, body scans, whatever it was. And it comes back with good news, all clear. Or we're pregnant and it's healthy or whatever it is. And what immediately follows is God is good. Yes, God is good. But if he doesn't cure it, and if you're still barren, and if you don't get it, God's still good. And that's the promise and reality that we cling to even when nothing around us makes sense. Is knowing that one day, whether in this life or the next, it will. Because God is faithful and God keeps his promises. Let's pray. Father, we don't deserve you. We don't deserve your goodness and your grace and yet you shower it upon us. We thank you so much for who you are, for what you do, for how you love us. Lord, let us be people who pray honestly and openly and trust you with our emotions and trust you with our words. Let us be people of gratitude who come back to you in celebration when you grant us the thing that our heart longed for. But God, in the middle of a no, in the middle of a mountain that's not moving, walls that are not falling down, paths that are not being made, would you give us the faith to cling to you, to trust you, to know that one day everything will be yes and amen? For those walking through that right now, God, who have heard the no or who sit in the desperation and in the stress of the what if. God, would you just strengthen their faith today? Let them cling and hold tightly just a little bit longer as you minister to their broken spirit. It's in your son's name we ask all these things. Amen.