Sermons tagged with Peter

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. We are in the second part of our series called 27, where we're going to be this summer and next summer going through the 27 books of the New Testament and kind of giving you an overview of each book with the goal of kind of raising the biblical literacy of the church, making us more aware of and comfortable with the Bible, and kind of knowing what each of the books are about. And hopefully this series serves to drive you into God's Word. This week we arrive at the Gospel of Mark. Last week we looked at the Gospel of Matthew. And in the next two weeks we'll look at Luke and John. So we're kind of doing a sub-series here in June of the Gospels. As I was thinking about the Gospel of Mark and the message of Mark, I was reminded of a story that I heard a while back. I think I actually heard Andy Stanley talking about this. Andy Stanley is a pastor out of Atlanta. A lot of you know who he is. If you don't know who he is, you're probably not a very good Christian, but we're happy you're here. But he's a pastor out of Atlanta, really great. I really love a lot of the stuff that he does. And I think I heard him tell this story, but I also went online and it's been written about a couple different times in a couple different ways. But in January of 2013, then President Obama, he had just been reelected, and he invited Andy Stanley to come give a sermon the morning of his inauguration at St. John's Episcopal Church. And in this room was going to be, of course, Barack and Michelle and their family, but cabinet members, his staff members, very high-level people, easily. This is the most powerful room in the world. And Andy Stanley is invited to give a sermon to the most powerful person in the world. And it makes me wonder, when I first heard this story, my immediate thought is, oh my gosh, what are you talking about? What do you preach to that room? What do you preach to someone who's about to take the oath of office for the President of the United States. And I wonder what you would say if you had 20 minutes before the next president takes office, regardless of your political affiliations. I couldn't care less what they are. Just stick with me on this. Don't be the guy that's listening to this part of the sermon being like, I'd tell you what I'd tell him. No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't, all right? Shut up. What would you actually want to say to try to be maximum helpful and inspirational to the leader of the free world? It makes me so nervous to think about that and what I would say. But here's what Andy Stanley said, and it's stuck with me ever since. He asked this of President Obama. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He's saying this to the man who is and will continue to be the most powerful person on the planet. And to a very powerful room, Andy Stanley says, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He speaks right to where they are, and he answers it with this. You leverage your power for the benefit of the other people in the room. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in this space? You leverage that power and that authority and that influence for the benefit of the people around you, not for yourself. That is a great message to the President of the United States. I don't know what the passage was. I looked hard to try to figure it, to try to find it, to try to find the actual sermon, because all that is, all that you can find if you Google it is a bunch of really conservative Christian online magazines who are upset that he called President Obama the pastor-in-chief during the sermon. Everybody got all worked up about that. So there's tons of articles that he had the audacity to say that, which who cares? And you can't find the actual sermon text. I wish I could find the sermon text because I'm certain, I'm certain that Andy preached this out of the Gospel of Mark. I'm certain that he did. Because I bring up that story. What do you do when you're the most powerful person in the room? You use your power and your influence for the benefit of the people around you. And he looked at President Obama and he said, you are in a very big room. My hope and prayer for you is that you will leverage everything that you have to make it better for the people around you. I wish every government official could listen to this sermon the day they took office. And I'm certain that the sermon came from the Gospel of Mark because that distilled down is the message of the Gospel of Mark, is to be a humble servant. Last week, I told you that Matthew was written to the Jewish community and depicts Jesus as a king. This week in Mark, Mark was written to the Romans to depict Jesus as a servant. Mark was written to a Roman audience and depicts Jesus as a servant. Mark was written by a guy named John Mark. You may recognize him if you're familiar with the book of Acts. After the first missionary journey, Paul parted ways with him and Barnabas, and then eventually John Mark got back in Paul's good graces and was with the disciples during this time. He was also very close with Peter, and his gospel is really a collection of the stories that Peter told John Mark. So this is almost the gospel according to Peter, but John Mark happened to be the one that wrote it down. It's a very urgent gospel. It's a very quick gospel. If you've never read a gospel before, I would tell you to start with Mark. It's very action-packed. It just goes from one thing to the next, and it's a very succinct gospel, and it was the first gospel written. And again, it was written to the Romans because the Romans were very prevalent in that day and age. And it was written to portray Jesus as a servant. And it's interesting that each of the Gospels is written to a different audience. Matthew is written to the Jews, Mark to the Romans, Luke to the Greeks, and John to the whole world. And in each case, Jesus is depicted in such a way that it's very clear that the author's intent is to kind of arrest your attention and make you look at this Jesus figure. So when you're a Jewish person and Jesus is depicted as the king, that's what you expect him to be. So you're listening, you're all in. When you're a Greek person and Jesus is depicted as a man, as a human, you're all wrapped up in humanity and humanity being the apex of creation. And so you're paying attention. When you're reading the Gospel of John and it presents this man as a god, you're leaning in. That's interesting to me. And so to a Roman person, getting a message about this all-powerful creator god who takes on human form and is the most powerful person, literally, who has ever lived, it would arrest your attention to note that he was a servant. Now, why is it so powerful to depict Jesus as a servant to the Roman audience? Well, to a Roman, the whole point of having power was not to have to serve anyone else. To the Roman mind, the whole point of accumulating wealth and influence and power and authority was to put yourself in a situation where you didn't have to serve anyone else. You had someone serving you. To grow were very comfortable with servanthood. They did not have the sensibilities that we had. If you were a rich person, you had some servants. How you treated them was up to you. And to be a servant was to be the lowest of the low. It was better to be poor and have your own hut to live in, but no one telling you what to do every day than it was to be the servant in the home of a rich person where you just lived at their beck and call. Or beck and call, I don't know. So to the Roman mind, they would never ever have expected Jesus to be depicted as a servant because that was the lowest of the low. And to them, as you accumulated power and authority, you accumulated servants. The whole reason for having more power was so that you had to do less things for yourself. And you know, even though in the United States, we certainly don't have a servant or slavery culture, but we do think of authority and power in a lot of the same ways. We do think that to grow in authority and to grow in power and influence means that you have more people around you to do more things for you. We start to develop this idea that certain tasks are beneath us. I don't have to do that anymore. Remember, I saw one of the guys on Shark Tank, one of the sharks in the NBC hit show, Shark Tank. If you haven't heard of it, I'm not going to explain it to you. But they're billionaires, and one of them makes a comment that he doesn't wear a watch. And they were like, why don't you wear a watch? He goes, I don't need to. Whenever I get somewhere, I'm on time. And you're like, oh, oh, you're a jerk. As people accrue power and authority and influence in certain circles, we just assume that there's going to start to be some tasks that are beneath them, and there's going to be rights and privileges that come with their influence and power. One of my favorite stories that came out of the Donald Trump presidency, don't worry, I'm not going to say anything. Just know that whenever, if you're a pastor and you say any president's name at all, the whole room goes. This is going to be fine. I've read biographies, different accounts. This is, this is, this is, this is actually, this is a verifiable fact that in the Oval Office, I believe underneath the Resolute Desk, the Resolute Desk is the name of the President's Desk. If you didn't know that, I will not belittle you for not knowing things about the Bible here, but come on, that's just basic U.S. stuff. You got to know what the Resolute Desk is. There's a button under the Resolute Desk, and President Trump would delight in having guests into the Oval Office, and he'd say, hey, watch this, and he would press the button, and a few minutes later, a waiter would come in with ice-cold Diet Cokes, and he would love that this button would usher in Diet Cokes, right? And I think that's delightful. And I've heard, I've read somewhere, I don't know if this is true, I just want to believe it to be true, that Joe Biden kept that, President Biden kept that button in place, and for him, they bring in ice cream sundaes. Isn't that fun? I love it. Grandpa Joe bringing in ice cream sundaes for the kids. This is great. Now, what we would expect and what the Romans would expect is for Jesus to be the one hitting the button. And what Mark says is, no, he's the one bringing the Cokes. He's the one in the kitchen waiting for the call, cracking it open and pouring it over ice and bringing as many as is needed, and he's doing it with a smile on his face. That's who Jesus was, and that's how he's depicted. And to a Roman mind that would expect someone in authority to just continue to be in authority the way that everyone around them is in authority. It's pretty groundbreaking to think that Jesus is the one bringing the cokes, not hitting the button. And to the American mind, I think it does the same thing. Because if we're being honest, we don't think of people in authority as typically as the people bringing the Coke. We think of them as the ones that are hitting the button. And so I think if I had to summarize the book of Mark, if there was a summary verse, what is Mark about? What does Mark want us to know? What is he trying to communicate, not just to the Roman audience, but to us and to all people for all time? In Mark's words, what's he trying to communicate? Well, we actually have that in Mark chapter 10, and it's Jesus's words. On the screen, we're going to start in verse 43, but I'm going to start reading from verse 42. Verse 42 says, That is the summary verse, the summary passage of Mark. That whoever wants to be greatest among you must be least. Whoever wants to be first must be last. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve. That's the message of Mark. And I love how Jesus begins this discourse. Do not be like the Gentiles who lord their authority over one another. Have you ever had an experience with someone who got a scintilla of authority and it just went straight to their head and they were the most annoying humans on the planet? I have. His name was Philip, and I'm going to tell you his story. Normally, I do not use names to disparage people. I just say a guy that I know, but this time, Philip has it coming. This is years ago, 24, 25, I'm working for my dad, and my dad's an accountant. In the 70s, he got into this weird niche of accounting where he audits housing authorities. He travels around the country, and that's what he does. And so I'm working for my my dad and I'm on a trip, I think Dallas-Fort Worth, I'm working with Phillip. Phillip is my age. This is his first time on a business trip being the auditor in charge. It's on the work papers. It says auditor in charge, Phillip. I won't say his last name. That's not fair. Then you'll Google him or something. But he's listed as the auditor in charge. It's a big deal. And it's just me and him traveling. He's the boss. And I was very clear. I knew that I had that job because of who my dad was. He had a CPA. As Philip did. He passed the test. I had theology classes. I had nothing. Dude, you're the boss. Whatever you need me to do, I'll do. And so there's this one test that I would run in the test and control series, and I had to schedule out an account. This particular account was about $12 million. And I had to just basically retrace it through the year and make it zero out. And I don't even know what that means now. I don't know how to explain to you. I could get Greg as an accountant, he could come up here and he could kind of translate for you guys. I don't know what that means. I just know that I needed to zero it out. I needed to make sure that everything they were inputting into it had a reliable source and that it all matched up and that they weren't cooking the books, which I'm the guy to make sure no one's getting away with anything financially. I sure do know. Gosh. So anyways, I've got to schedule this thing out. And I'm scheduling it out, and I get the difference down to less than $100. And I'm going back through. It's one of those, I've got to stack. I've got this book, that thing that was printed out on the dot matrix with the green and white paper, and I'm flipping through, and I'm highlighting, and I'm looking, and I got it down to $100, about $100. And once you got the difference down to a small enough amount, you could just put on the cover page to make it all zero out, you could just put that amount there and you could write next to it, immaterial difference, which is accounting speak for, we didn't figure this out, but we're pretty sure it's fine. That's what that means. Like it's,, this doesn't matter. It's a, it's a hundred dollars and a 12 million dollar account. No fraud here, all right? So, I've been working on this thing for six or seven hours. I get it down to a hundred bucks. I can't get it down any lower than that, and I go to Phillip. I say, hey, Phillip, I've got this thing down to about a hundred bucks. Can I just, you cool if I write this off as an immaterial difference? And Philip goes, I just really want to do this one right, Nate. So I need you to go find me that $100. And I'm like, okay. All right. So I go back to the office. I'm like, I got to find this. I got to find the new sheriff in town. It's $100. Okay, here we go. So I'm flipping back to the thing again. I'm looking for it again. I find some stuff. I'm looking and I've got it down. I've got it down to four cents. Got it down to four cents. I know. And I'm just, I've got to find this four cents. I don't even care about Philip anymore. I've got to find this four cents, right? We go to dinner. We're done. I come back the next morning. I spend all morning looking, thumbing through this thing for the four cents. I had it memorized, right? I can't find it. I have to admit defeat. And I'm like, gosh, I don't want to go into Philip's office, but I got to go into Philip's office. I'm like, hey dude, I got it down to four cents. I'm going to write that off as immaterial difference if that's all right. And Philip looks me in the eye and he says, I'm going to need you to find me that four cents. I have never been closer to jumping across a desk and strangling someone out than I was in that moment. I was livid. So I go back to the office and I'm like, I can't find the four cents. Let me see what I can do here. So I grabbed the previous year's work papers. So because every job you go on, you bring the work papers from the previous year in case you need to reference something, see what we did last year, or in this case, discover that your boss is a jerk. So I found the folder. I opened it up. I go to the test that I'm working on. And guess who did that test last year? Philip did. And do you know what he wrote off as an immaterial difference? $208. I'll never forget that number. It was $208 to my four cents, and I was so mad. And I went back to him, and I told him, you know, last year you wrote off $208 as an immaterial difference. I think four cents in a $12 million account seems pretty reasonable. And he said, I need you to find me the four cents. So I went back to the office, and I wrote it off as immaterial difference, and I never looked back. I tried to play nice to you, Phillip, but guess what? My dad's the boss, and I know that he's going to take my side on this, so I'm not even that worried about it. I didn't want to do this to you, but I had to. Don't be like Philip. Gentiles, when they get an ounce of authority lorded over you, and they want to make sure that they're afforded the respect and the rights and privileges that come with leadership, you're going to address me as this, as doctor or pastor or whatever, Mr. or Mrs., if they're C-suite. You're going to address me as this. You're going to talk to me like this. You're going to defer to me. And sometimes when people get in power, they're nice until you start acting like you're equals. Then they got to make sure that you know how things balance out. That's what Gentiles do. They lord their authority over people. And worse than being annoying, when Christians do this, we push people away from God. If you're a leader in any capacity, small to large, and you allow that authority and that position of power and that influence to go to your head, and part of what you try to do with that influence is maintain your influence, and you lord it over people, you're actually pushing people away from Jesus. You're actually harming, you're not just harming yourself and harming your relationship with that person, you are harming the very kingdom of Jesus if you hold your leadership and authority in ways that the Gentiles do. If you hold it for yourself rather than for others. And what's actually interesting among many things that Andy Stanley said to Barack Obama that day is he came back at the end and he said, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? Will you leverage that for the benefit of the people around you? And then he says, and actually, to do anything less than this is to think that you're greater than Christ himself. To do anything less than serve is to act as though you're greater than Christ. Because the greatest one of all time came to serve and to be last. So when we don't do that, we are declaring to ourselves in our tiny little universes that we are better than Jesus. And in church, and this is the converse of this, when we do serve, when we do carry leadership, when we do carry authority like Jesus did, when we do that, we can actually pull people into Jesus by being Christ-like. We talk a lot in church about being Christ-like, about being more like Jesus. When the word sanctification comes up, sanctification is this time period and process from the point in which we become saved. Our salvation process starts to when it is sealed and done when we go to heaven. That intermittent time when we are in God's hand but we are not yet perfected in heaven is sanctification. And I always describe sanctification as becoming the process through which we become more like Christ in character. That's what sanctification is. So in the Christian journey, in the Christian life, we are all of us who would call ourselves Christians, seeking to be more like Christ. And so what Mark says is, if you want to be more like Jesus, serve others more. If you want to be more like Jesus, then anytime you have any influence anywhere at all, use it for the benefit of the people around you rather than yourself. And when you do that, it will draw people into Christ. That's the message of Mark. That when we don't carry our authority and our influence like Jesus does, we push people away. And when we do carry it like Jesus did, we draw people into him with Christ-like character. Now, I know that there are some of you who may be thinking to yourself, like, dude, I'm not in charge of anything, okay? I don't lead anybody. I don't have circles of influence. I don't do that. I'm not in charge of anyone anywhere. I get that. We move into seasons where we have greater and less influence. But I would submit to you that we all do at some point in our life and at some point in our week. Maybe you're a stay-at-home mom. You're in charge of those kids. Might not feel that way all the time. Might feel like they're in charge of you, but you're in charge of those kids. How are you going to exert your authority over them? Are we going to be the kind of parent that makes sure that our kids know who the boss is at every moment of every day? Are we going to be the kind of parent that sits lazily on the couch and the purpose of our kids is to go get us something from the fridge and bring it to us rather than engaging with them? How are we going to use the influence and the authority that we have in our homes? If we go to school and we volunteer, we're in charge of those kids for at least for a small amount of time. If you're over there, you're in charge for a small amount of time. If you're working at Summer Extreme this week, you're in charge for a small amount of time. We all move into places where we are the one who is in authority, where we are the one who has the most influence, where our voice is the heaviest one in the room. And when we are, how are we going to treat it? How are we going to usher a little bit of Jesus into their day, into that moment? Even when we go sit down at a restaurant, we are in authority over our server. What can we do in that meal to serve them, to show them a little bit of Jesus, to make their day a little bit better, to leave a good imprint on them for that day? How can we carry the authority that we have, even in that small situation, to bring them closer to Jesus and not push them further away? We can do this in the drive-through, in a position of authority. We are in authority. The people helping us are the people who are working for us. We can show them a little bit of Jesus just in that moment to draw them closer into our Savior. And if you don't think I'm right, go through a drive-through with my wife, Jen. Because when we go through a drive-through together, this is, I'm not making this up. When we go through a drive-ru together, if we get the food and the drinks and it's done, like we've reached the end of this exchange, and I've not been adequately kind to the people that we've been talking to, she will lean across me and say very loudly, thank you so much, you're doing great, have a nice day. And then look at me. Now, I didn't know there was such a thing as vindictive kindness, but she has figured it out. And she'll sprinkle a little Jesus on both of us on the way. A little bit on them, make their day better. A little bit on me, make my day worse, but I need to get better. I think we need to realize when we have opportunities to act in unexpected ways, to show people the kindness that exudes from our Savior, be those conduits of grace that we talk about being around here. But to more of you, not maybe more of you, but to a big portion of you, you do have some authority. You do have people who work for you. Maybe you're a team lead. Maybe you just got a new job and there's new people that are listening to you now and you've got to figure this out. Maybe you've got two employees. Maybe you've got 200 or 2,000. I know that we do have a lot of leaders in this church. And to those of you who do have people working for you, those of you that do have the opportunity to influence. Now here's what I would say about you, the ones that I know who do carry influence here. I know that you know this already. And I know that it means a lot to you to try to be the type of leader that Jesus was. And I know that serving your staff and serving the people around you matters a lot. But let this morning be an encouragement and a reminder for you to dive back into that. If you're here this morning and you do lead somewhere, you're on a board, you run a classroom, you have employees. You run a business. You oversee whatever. And you have been using that authority to serve yourself and to help yourself climb? I get it. That's how the world handles authority. But in your efforts to do that, I just want you to know as a Christian, you're actually pushing people away from you and from your Savior. But Jesus shows us that there is a way to lead and to have influence and authority that will be so radical that it would draw people into him. And for those of you who do lead, I wonder what could be better one day at your retirement party or after you're gone and there's a group of your employees and coworkers sitting around and they're talking about what it was like to work for you, what it was like to be led for you. What if the ones who believe in Jesus said about you, because that person was in my life, I'm closer to Jesus than I would have ever been? What if what they said about you after you retired, and no one's around, and they're not saying this to blow smoke up your dress, they're saying this because they mean it, because God put that person in my life, I'm closer to him than I think I ever would be because I got to watch them serve God faithfully for years. What a privilege it was to work under them because of what it showed me about who their Jesus was. What if the people who don't know Jesus but work for you would say about you, after seeing you at your best and your worst, after watching how you leverage your influence and authority, what if they were to say about you, you know what, I don't share the faith that they do, but they're one of the ones that I believe when they say it. I don't know that I believe like they do, but I know that they believed. I know that they love their Jesus. They were the real deal. We all, in different times and different ways, move into and out of positions of influence. The message of Mark is that when you find yourself there, remember, you can leverage your authority to get people to serve you and do what you want. But that's not what Jesus did. And that's not what he told you to do. And I am convinced that the best thing possible that anybody could say about you after working with you or for you or being under your leadership for any amount of time is, I am closer to Jesus because God put that person in my life. And we get them there by serving them. That's why Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. So whether we lead in small ways at the drive-through or in big ways, leading in life. We should carry that leadership and that influence and that authority like Jesus did and try to use it to serve others. Now a couple practical things on how we do that and I'll wrap up. Two things. How can we begin to be people who serve like Jesus served? Well I think one of the things we can do is that we can begin to equate serving with being Christ-like, not being belittled. We can begin to equate serving with being like Christ, not being belittled. This week, I reached out to an old friend of mine who is a pastor about an hour and a half away from here. And he and I worked at summer camp together years ago and have loosely kept in touch. And I emailed him and I just said, hey, man, I'm so sorry that it's taken me six years of living this close to you to try to get together, but I'd love to get together and just talk as pastors and buy you lunch sometime. Let me know if that's going to be possible. And he emailed me back, and he said, is Ruth's Chris or nothing for me, which is pretty typical of this guy. It's funny. And then he says, I'll have to get back with you on when. If you don't hear from me, feel free to email me again. And I thought, nope. If you don't email me, we will never speak in our whole lives. Because what did he do? He belittled me. Made me a secretary. I'm not your secretary. But as I was preparing the sermon, and I wrote that point, well, looks like I'll be emailing John. Because it's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not to be belittled. When we get asked to do something that we feel is beneath us, jump at it. Do it. It's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not be belittled. The second thing we can do is we can pray this prayer of confession and repentance. And as we consider the message of the gospel of Mark, and we consider this idea that to be first we must be last, to be great we must be least. I would encourage us all to pray this prayer together as I pray here in a second, but the prayer is simply this. Father, show me where I'm leveraging my power to be served rather than to serve. Whatever power and influence you've given me, however loud my voice is in a particular room, would you please show me where I'm using that influence and that authority for myself and not for the people that are around me? And in praying that prayer, hopefully he will open our eyes to greater opportunities of service and servanthood so that we can be like Christ and serve people towards the kingdom of God. Let's pray. Father, we just thank you for who you are and for how you love us. We know that your son could have showed up and just lorded it over us, and he would have had every right to do it, to just ascend to the throne, to be the most important and most powerful person in the room. He could have done that, but he came meek and mild, and he came as a servant. God, as you move us into positions of authority and influence, would you remind us of the way that your son came and that your son led and that your son served so that we might do the same? Would you, Father, in your goodness, keep us humble, make us eager to serve, give us a heart that sees the needs of others and meets them where they are, and deflate our egos where they're too big and where they're making it hard for us to serve like we need to. Thank you for your son. Thank you for the cross. Thank you for how you've loved us. In Jesus' name, amen.

We'll be right back. I don't know about you, but when you hear the word revival, we often think of reviving the city, which is what we prayed for, reviving the community, the people around us. God, let's see your spirit move and people come to know you in amazing ways. And that is what revival is, and that is the revival that God brings. But as Aaron alluded to in his prayer, he also revives individuals. He also breathes life into dry bones. And so if you are here this morning and your spiritual health, you personally, your soul, is in need of revival, God does that too. And as you sung and you prayed and sung for revival, just know that I have prayed for you this morning that God would revive our spirits, that God would breathe fresh life into us. And that I pray that prayer for myself often. So just know that though God does revive communities and cities, that he breathed life into us as well, and he revives us too. And if that's you, be encouraged this morning. I also wanted to mention before I jump in that the reason the church looks the way it does in the lobby is not just because it's summertime and we're encouraging you to go on vacation. You walk in, it's like, why are you here? You should be at the beach. But since you're not, here's some beach for you, which is also great. But tomorrow starts Summer Extreme. It's the first day of it. It goes for three nights, Monday through Wednesday. And we really hope that you'll come and hang out with us, even if you are not signed up to help or your child's not signed up to be a part of it. Just come see the madness one time and have a chance to kind of hang out with everybody. And I'll tell you this, there's a meal before it starts, which is my favorite time of night. And on Wednesday, I don't want to brag or try to make a big deal out of this, but I'm going to be cooking burgers on the Blackstone for everybody who comes. So come get a free burger. I'll put in a word for you right now. If Aaron and Julie can hear this, they're so mad at me, but I don't care. Come have dinner with us and hang out. All right. Now, as we look to finish the series in Peter, this week is part two of a two-part sermon that, you guessed it, I started last week. So I would tell you if you're watching online or catching up online or via the podcast or however it is you consume the sermons, I would encourage you to pause it here and go listen to last week's so that this week's makes more sense. Now, for those of you in the room who either you were here last week and you just forgot what I said, which I don't blame you. I forget what I preach about half the time. Or you were here this week, but you weren't here last week. Just by way of context, this is what we talked about so that we can arrive at verse 8 this week. It's a two-part sermon in 2 Peter 1, verses 5-8 that I said kind of gives us all that we need for life and godliness and points us in the right direction and tells us why we're running it. And it's a really, really important passage to me. And I hope that God makes it an important passage to you as well. So last week, we agreed that biblically speaking, the apex value is love. That's what we are to go for. We looked at Paul summing this up in Corinthians 13, where he says, now these three remain, faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love. And then we looked at Jesus's capstone of a new commandment. All the other commandments are fine, but I'm going to give you a new one that encapsulates all of them. Go and love others as I have loved you. Go and offer Christ-like love. And so we agree that we are supposed to pursue love as believers. But the problem is that telling a new believer to go and offer love as Christ offered to us, sacrificial Christ-like love, is like telling a crawling baby to go and run a marathon. There's some steps that have to happen along the way. There's some things that we need to build to so that we even have the capacity to offer Christ-like love. And Peter lays out those building blocks for us in verses five through seven. He says, for this reason, make every effort to add to your faith, knowledge, to knowledge, virtue, to virtue, self-control, to self-control, perseverance, to perseverance, godliness, to godliness, brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness, love. So there's these things that we have to build to before we have the capacity to love. And the encouragement at the end was to go and, like Peter says, make every effort. Go from here and make every effort to build towards the capacity to love others as Christ has loved you. That was the admonishment as we went last week. And one of the things that I love about the Bible and about the Christian faith is whenever we're told to do something, we should start doing these things, we should stop doing these things, we should embrace these virtues, and we should shun these vices, we're always in Scripture given a reason why. And the reason is never because God said so. And the amazing thing is, it very well could be. God can make the reason for everything he asks us to do because I said so. And we would go, well, you're creator God, you're all powerful, you're in charge of the universe. We are not because you said so is sufficient for us. let's go. Because God said so should be sufficient and yet still in his goodness, he never leaves it there. Whenever you look at what scripture asks you to do, at what God requires of us, you never have to look very hard for the why. Why does God want me to do that? Why is that what's actually best for me? It's always very clear in scripture when God asks us, when Jesus instructs us to do something, when we say why, why is that what's best for me? You can find that answer very quickly. And that's what verse eight does for us. So if we go, okay, I'm supposed to go from here and I'm supposed to go pursue, make every effort to have the capacity to love others as Christ loved me. That's what I need to do. I need to go pursue the capacity for Christ-like love. Why do I need to do that? Well, verse eight tells us why we need to do that. And I would sum it up in this way. I would tell you that this is the why. This is why it's best for us to pursue the capacity to love as Jesus did. If we pursue love, our deepest desires will come true. If we simply pursue the capacity to offer Christ-like love, our deepest desires will come to fruition. Now, I know that that sounds an awful lot like the health and wealth gospel that I tell you all the time that I hate and is not true. It is a trick of Satan. It ruins faiths and it shipwrecks Christians. It forces people to walk away from it when we have this idea that if I just go to God, everything's going to work out. I won't experience any tragedy. I'm probably going to make a little bit more money than I used to. I'm definitely going to get this promotion. If I'll just dedicate myself to God, then he'll give me the things that I want. And so I know that when I say, if we simply pursue Christ-like love, then he will give us our deepest desires. I know that sounds like I'm doing health and wealth, but I promise you I'm not, and here's why. First of all, what I'm saying is biblical. Second of all, I can say that if we pursue love, we will see our deepest desires come to fruition because I'm pretty sure I can guess what yours are. I don't know how you would word it or what you would say are your deepest desires in life, but I bet 1A and 1B, I bet for one, it's I just want to know when many years from now, when I'm facing death, when it is imminent, when I'm on my deathbed and I'm thinking back on my life, I want to know that I loved well. I want to know that I have family in my life who love me and are grateful for me. I want to know that in those waning years, I am surrounded by people who love me because I have invested my life in loving others. I want to know that I will love well. And so clearly, if we spend our life loving as Christ did, that will come to fruition. The other thing, 1B, that we all want to know, that we all deeply desire at the end of life, thinking back on life, what is it that we most want? I would be willing to bet that we all want to live a life that matters. That in our waning years, as we reflect back on the life that we led, that we will want to know and feel good about the life that we led. Did I invest it in the right things? Did I accomplish what I was supposed to accomplish? Did my life make a difference? Did it matter at all or will I fade into oblivion and no one will ever think of me or remember me again? Did I live a life that matters? I mean, this is what a midlife crisis is, right? And if you haven't dealt with one, it's coming. It's when you get in the middle of your life and your head's been down since you were in your 20s and you've just been making your path and making your way and figuring out life and getting independent. And then at some point or another, you pull your head up from all the work and you go, wait a second, I've built this whole life around myself. Is this even what I want? Is this the life that I wanted to build? And I've talked with enough people who were in their later years of their life to know that when you get to that stage, you think about, have I loved well and have I lived a life that matters? That's what we all want. We all want to live a life that matters. I remember when this really clicked for me. I was 18 or 19 years old, and I was at a Sunday night church service at my church. Remember when churches used to have Sunday night services? That's when pastors were good, man. We're lazy now. I go to this service, and there was a summer camp that we went to at my church called Look Up Lodge. And the director of that camp, the speaker of that camp, was a guy named Greg Boone. And we had invited Greg to come and to speak that night at our church. There was probably about 500 people there. And what Greg didn't know is that it was really a service to honor him because we were just grateful for the profound impact he had made on the youth of the church and the families of the church and the church as a whole. And so at one point or another, there was some boys up in the front that Greg had discipled, and I could explain the whole thing, but there's high school guys in the front of the room with candles, and everybody's got a candle in their seat. And Pastor Buddy gets up, and he says, if Greg Boone has touched your life directly through his ministry because you've been to look up Lodge and God has used him to impact you, I'd like you to stand up. And so me and all my friends and all the youth group leaders and parents and volunteers stand up. And before you know it, all 500 people are standing up. And then the boys walk down the aisle and they light all the candles and the lights are off in the room, but the room's totally illuminated. And Greg is able to visibly see the impact that his life has had in one space. And I remember in that moment, I was very moved by it. And I prayed, God, I don't ever need to see the room. I don't ever need to see the candles, but just let me live a life that could fill up one of these places. That's all I want. And I know that for my friends, it resonated with them too, because what you see in that moment is purpose. What you see in that moment is a life that mattered, that God was using, and that's a common desire that we all have. Now, some of you would never be as audacious to say, God, I want to know that I could fill up a room with the people that I've impacted. Some of you, our vision is as small as our family is, and that's fine, but the thing that we have in common, no matter how big or how small our vision is for what we want for our future, is that we want it to matter. We want it to count. And that's why I love verse 8 so much. Because it promises us that it will. It promises us that there's a way that we can ensure that our life will matter. That at the end of the day, when we're sitting there in the waning years of our life and we're reflecting back on a life lived, we can know that we know that we know that our life will matter, that at the end of the day, when we're sitting there in the waning years of our life and we're reflecting back on a life lived, we can know that we know that we know that our life was impactful and used by God. It can safeguard us against that fear. There's that, I love, it's a D.L. Moody quote where he says, one of the greatest tragedies in life is for a person to spend their life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. How do we insure ourselves against that? Verse 8. Other versions say ineffective or unproductive in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's really very simple. You want to live a life that matters? To know that we're investing it in the right things? Then pursue these things. Go and do what we talked about last week. Pursue the capacity to love as Christ loved. Pursue these things. Make every effort to pursue them. And when you do, you will build a life that matters. God will use that person in incredible ways. When we commit ourselves to pursuing the virtues laid out for us in 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. The promise is, if you commit yourself to those things, Jesus says, God says, Peter says, I promise you that your life will matter. And so the bottom line is, if we pursue Christ-like love, we can be certain that our lives will matter. And here's what I love about this truth is it's really just a focus on the fundamentals. We don't have to map it out. We don't have to think about the ministries that we're going to start or the people that we're going to disciple or the folks that we're going to share our faith with. We don't have to think about the things that we're going to build and this grand strategy for down the road. All we have to do is focus on the fundamentals. All we have to do is focus on these virtues, and God will use us as we pursue those. It reminds me of my experience, it feels like a lifetime ago, as a high school football coach. You guys may not know, but for three years of my life, from 2007 to 2010, I was a high school Bible teacher and school chaplain for Covenant Christian Academy in Loganville, Georgia. And it is every bit as fancy as you think it is. We had a cafe gym notarium that everything happened in. It was one of those schools. And the first week that I was hired, I'm starting out fresh. I was 26 or 27 years old, and I mean, I looked great. And we had a new science teacher named Coach McCready. Coach McCready is one of my favorite people I've ever met in my life. I love him very dearly. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam, and he was a tailback for Auburn in the 60s. He was the toughest man I've ever met. He's the only person I've met that I've been instantly scared of as soon as we started talking, and he was wonderful. So he comes to my classroom and he says, hey, Coach Rector. And I'm like, I don't even coach anything here. He goes, hey, Coach Rector, you got any experience in football? I said, no, sir. And he goes, I want you to come practice anyways, baby. I was like, okay. So I text Jen. I'm like, I got to go to practice. Coach says I have to go to practice. I'll be home late. So I go to practice and I'm out there watching the boys. They're practicing. They're doing whatever, and there's this guy off in the corner, and he's kicking a football, and he's not doing a very good job at it. And I've played a little bit of soccer in my life, so I said, hey, coach, I don't really have a lot of experience blocking and tackling, but I know how to kick things. You want me to work with that guy over there who clearly needs it? I can teach him how to kick things. And he's like, and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, Coach Rector, congratulations. You've just become my new special teams coordinator, baby. It came with a free shirt and the whole deal. It was great. And we get out there and I become part of the staff and we're talking about strategy and all the other things. And this team was terrible. They were awful. The previous year, they were two and eight. The team they beat was the same. They beat one team twice who was just, they had like three children running around out there. And this is rinky-dink small-time football. This is eight-man football. It is not a big deal at all, but it's the best we could muster in our private school league when we were two and eight the year before. And we also, from the previous coaching staff, inherited this big, huge playbook, right? Like a wristband with the flap and like 75 different plays that you have to call in from the side. And these kids are trying to figure it out and they don't know what direction to run. Their shoulder pads don't fit and the pants are too small. But we got 75 plays. And these really complicated, intricate defenses and the whole deal. And nobody knew what was going on, but it was very clear that the previous regime had focused heavily on strategy, right, and not so much on fundamentals because these guys were terrible at everything. And so Coach threw it all out. He said, we don't need any of these plays. And the quarterback's like, that's all I know, Coach. He's like, don't worry. You're not going to have to learn that much. And I'm not kidding you. We reduced the whole playbook. We had two defensive formations that each had one play, blitz or don't. That was it. That was it. And if you don't know what that means, somebody laughing will explain it to you later. That was it. Those are the two options. Everybody go for the quarterback or everybody kind of hang out. That was it. That was all you had in two formations. And then we reduced 75 offensive plays to 12. And coach said, and everybody was like, coach, don't you think we need more? We're going to get a little predictable. Don't you think we're going to need more plays in this? He says, nope. All we need to do is block and tackle, baby. We just need to teach the boys to block and tackle and we'll be fine. Everything else take care of itself. And that's all we did in practice. We blocked and tackled. We ran those 12 plays. And that first year we made it to the playoffs. And then the three years after that, Coach McCready won back-to-back-to-back state championships. You know why? Because he had a great special teams coordinator. But also because we just focused on the fundamentals. Let's just learn to block and tackle. That happens on every play in football, and the results will come. Let's focus on the fundamentals. And so to me, there's a correlation there between the way that he coached and the way that Peter is coaching us. Don't worry about strategy. Don't worry about the 75 plays. Don't worry about the future and your grand plans and your big vision. Don't worry about that. You just focus on faith and knowledge and godliness and brotherly kindness and perseverance and self-control and virtue and love. You focus on those things and God will take care of how he uses you. You focus on those things and God will take those people and put them to work. You focus on those things. Don't worry about strategy. Don't worry about how big the ministry is. Don't worry about what you're supposed to start or what you're supposed to stop. You focus on these characteristics and we are promised in Scripture that we will live a life that is productive and fruitful of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are promised a life that will echo in eternity because of how we invest it now. And what could be a better investment of a life than one that matters for all eternity? The other thing that I love about this passage is it's not the only place that promise is made. That, hey, if you just simply focus on these things, then I promise you you will be effective and productive. I promise you that when you get to heaven, you'll hear the words that every Christian longs to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. This isn't the only place that promise shows up. The other place it shows up that I can think of is in John chapter 15, when Jesus is talking to the disciples and he calls himself the vine and then the branches. And he says this, I am the vine, you are the branches, whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. It's the same thing. Don't worry about plans. Don't worry about ministries. Don't worry about all the things you're supposed to do. Don't worry about all the things you're supposed to learn. You abide in me. You focus on me. You stick with me. You walk with me. You abide in me. And I promise as you do that, the results will take care of themselves. You will bear much fruit. God will use you in incredible ways if we simply abide in Christ. And the question becomes, well, what do I do to abide in Christ? And that's such an important question. And I was actually reading this passage this morning. And what he says prior to this is, abide in me. And the way that you abide in me is to obey my commands. And what was Jesus' command? To go love as I have loved you. It was a singular command. How do we abide in Christ? How do we promise that we will be fruitful? We love as Christ loved us. How do we love as Christ loved us? Well, we go through Peter and we build these virtues. We make every effort. These two passages are intricately connected to one another and they promise us that we can live lives that matter. But here's the other thing I would tell you as we pursue these lives that matter in God's kingdom and for all of eternity, that if you commit yourself to these character traits, if you commit yourself to being able to offer Christ-like love to people around you, sacrificial, selfless love to people around you. God will change those desires about how you're going to matter. He will change your plans. He's got a different path for you than you do. I saw this meted out in my dad, who when he started in his career, his goal was to be a millionaire by the time he was 40. And somewhere in there, as he pursued these character traits and fits and starts, God changed his heart and his goal became, before I retire, I want to have given away a million dollars. It changes you. And where it changed me is really the rest of the story about the candles. Because the rest of the story is, I went and I worked at Look Up. I worked for Greg because I wanted those candles. And when I got to Look Up, I met a man named Harry Stevenson. Harry was the maintenance director at the camp. Harry unclogged toilets and cut grass and felled trees and cleaned up hair clogs from the girl campers. Harry had a very humble job. Harry, from my 18, 19-year-old brain, was doing very little to impact the kingdom. There would be no candles for Harry. Greg was the guy. Except that, Harry discipled Greg. When Greg didn't know what to do in his marriage or in his family or in his ministry, he went and he talked to Harry first. Harry was the one who welcomed us. Harry was the one who led a Bible study that changed my life forever. Harry was the one that recommended to me a book called Abide in Christ by Andrew Murray that's one of the best, most formative books I've ever read all about these promises. And Harry was the one that when I looked at him the very first time I met him short guy, balding, deep piercing blue eyes and a mustache. And the way that he looked at me and the way that he smiled at me, I could see it in his eyes and I don't know how to describe it, but I knew in that moment this man loves God and this man loves me. I just knew it. And I've not met very many people with those eyes. That when you see them, when they look at you, there's something else happening there. There's some other kind of grace there. And you know this person loves God and they love me. And I didn't catch it at the time, but I was reflecting back years later. And I realized life is not about the candles at all. It's about the eyes. It's not about the rooms that we could fill with the people that we've impacted. It's about what it's like to be in our presence as we are conduits of God's love. And somewhere in my life, I shifted from wanting to be like Greg to just wishing I was a little bit more like Harry. And I'm so far off from it. Frankly, it would be a lot easier for me to try to be like Greg. But God, in his goodness, has shifted my desires to want to be like that person that simply loves. And I promise you, I promise you, that when Harry is in heaven one day, the people who are going to come to him and want to hug his neck are legion. I promise you that his life has mattered in ways that will echo in eternity. And it's because Harry simply pursued these values and these virtues. And God has used him in incredible ways to love others all along the way. And one of my favorite things about our Christian faith, if you're here and you're a believer, about our shared faith, is that God in his goodness offers us the joy and peace of purpose. If you're a Christian, you don't have to wonder, why am I here? What's my life for? How should I invest myself? What should I do? What's the best investment of my time? Where should I put my efforts? We don't have to worry about that. We don't have to be frantic about that. We don't have to get to 60 years old and wonder if we're doing it right. We don't have to get to 80 years old and wonder if we're doing it right. We don't have to keep getting older and wonder if we've already done everything right. God tells us what to do. Pursue Him. Pursue love. Make every effort to have the capacity to offer the love of Christ to other people. And I promise you, I promise you, I promise you based on Scripture, based on 2 Peter, based on John 15, based on the promises of Christ that you will have a life well lived. So my prayer for you is that this passage in 2 Peter 1 would take hold in your heart and possess a place of prominence in your life. It's a passage that I come back to regularly. It's a passage that every time I read it, I smile. Every time I read it, I want to talk about it and I want to tell people about it and I want people to understand the truth from it. And so I know that not everything I've said over the last two weeks, we're just going to follow in lockstep. I know that we've got life and we've got to move on from here and you're going to forget the things I said, even if you thought that they were good. But my hope is that this passage has made enough of an impression on you that you'll revisit it again, that you'll come back to it over and over again, that you'll be affirmed. If I simply choose to pursue love, if I simply be who God has designed me to be. It's not about how I behave, it's about who I am. If I'll simply let God create, work me into who he wants me to be and love other people well, I will have no regrets as I fade into eternity. I hope that this passage can mean for you what it means for me and that God will bring you back to it with a more fullness of understanding as we go from here. And I hope and I pray that you all would be people who go live lives that matter and that they matter because you love well, because you've pursued him earnestly, because you've made every effort. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for the joy and peace of purpose. We thank you for taking the stress of the unknown away from us and not having to wonder what we should do or where we should go, but that you make it very simple for us. Help us to be people who pursue the capacity to offer love as you've offered to us. Make us, God, people like Harry, who when other people interact with us, they know that we love you and that we love them. Let other people feel your love as it channels through us. And God, for those in this room whose spirits need revival, would you please revive them? Even in this song, even as we close, I pray that we would leave here with more of a desire to be close to you than what we entered with. God, I pray that our hearts would be softened towards you. They would be softer than they were when they entered into this place. God, I pray that as we leave here, we would have a stronger desire to know you, to love you, and to love others than we did when we came through those doors. And I pray that your spirit would remind us of it and hold us fast to it, and that those desires would not fade as we do your work for others and on ourselves this week. It's in your son's name that we ask all these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he 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. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. You guys say what you want about me, but I'm good at hiring worship pastors, apparently. I had no help. There was no teams or anyone else involved. It was solely my decision, and it was a good one. I'm sticking with it. No, just messing around. If you're here for the first time and I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that. Please come shake my hand in the lobby. That would be fantastic. And I think there's one more free mug out there left. So if you leave in the middle of the sermon, I'll know what you're doing. I hope that you guys enjoyed the Lent series. As we wrap that up, we're moved into a new series called the Letters of Peter. With the Lent series, there was a devotional and I heard a lot of feedback that you guys really, really enjoyed that. And I loved getting to hear from all the different voices in the church. And we will definitely find a reason to do those in the future. That's not the last time you're going to see a church devotional like that, because I really thought it was very good for us as a church. If you are looking for what to read in your quiet times, we do have a reading plan. It's available online. It's also on the information table in the lobby. If you don't know where the information table is, we have a coffee table and an information table, and I trust you to figure it out. It's a small lobby. But if you are curious about what to read, grab that reading plan and read through the letters of Peter with us. I'm excited to be in 1 and 2 Peter. I love the books of 1 and 2 Peter. Every time as a staff, we sit down to brainstorm what it is we're going to talk about and to kind of map out the series for us. This ends up on the whiteboard. Somebody will say, usually me, we could do 1 and 2 Peter, and then we write it up there, and then we have other ideas that we like, and we move on. And this time, it just hit right, man. It just felt right. It was up there on the board, and Kyle said, maybe this is the time that we're actually going to do it. And I said, you know what? Darn it, it is. I love Peter, and we're going to follow up the Lent series with these letters from Peter. So I'll say a couple things up front. We're not going to go through verse by verse or even theme by theme. There's just not enough space to do that. So I hope that you will read along with us so that you can get the full message of the letters of 1 and 2 Peter. These letters were written to the early church in the first century AD in Asia Minor. They were written to Gentile people, so they were not written to Jews. Most of the New Testament was written with kind of a mind towards Jewish thought, Jewish culture, Jewish inheritance. Peter wrote his letters to Gentiles that lived basically in modern day Turkey. And the idea with these letters is that they're meant to be circulated around the churches that are in that area. The other reason I like these letters is because they're written by Peter. And I can relate to Peter, just in overall holiness and usefulness to the church. Thank you, Harris. Peter was the dummy. Peter was one of these ready fire aim guys. He was, Peter would start running his mouth before he really even knew the end of the sentence. He just had words to say and out they came. My dad likes to say about me that Nathan, because my family calls me Nathan, Nathan having nothing to say, thus said. That's Peter. That's what Peter does. He just, he hops out of the boat and he walks on water until he sees a wave and then he sinks. He's the one that says, no, Jesus, I won't deny you. And then he does it three times. He's the one that steps up and answers all of Jesus's hard problems, hard questions. He'll take one for the team. I got this one, guys. That's Peter. He's just hard charging and he's out there. But Peter writes these letters at the end of his life. The years have softened him. They've made him wiser and more measured. And this is his message to the church. And I find great comfort in that because it gives me some optimism that maybe one day I can be a little bit more wise like Peter. Maybe one day I can quit doing dumb stuff and maybe I'll season into it like Peter did. But I love where Peter starts his letter. You would expect maybe if you thought about it, I don't know, but this is a murky time in church history. Their faith is 30 to 40 years old. We're talking about, we're talking about 60, 70, 80 AD right now as these letters are circulating. So they have this murky faith that's not based on 2000 years of good sound doctrinal biblical teaching. They don't have a canonized New Testament. They have some confusion abounds and false teachers are there kind of influencing them. And so Peter writes to this culture and these churches, and I would expect him in that context to write a book, maybe like Romans, what Paul wrote to the church in Rome, that really is the most detailed theology in the whole Bible in chapters one through eight. It's basically, here's what we believe and here's why we believe it. And then the rest of Romans is, here's what we're supposed to do in light of those truths. Or maybe Hebrews, which is just this high Christology, this high view of Jesus, of who he is and who he was and what he still does for us. Maybe I would start there, but that's not where Peter starts. Peter actually starts with suffering. It's like the first thing he addresses right out of the gates. And it's interesting to me that he would do this. And I think he does it because this is a culture, first century AD, very familiar with suffering. They knew what it was to grieve. They knew what it was to hurt. They knew what it was to lose. This is a culture and these are churches that are being actively persecuted, arrested, beaten, killed for their faith. This is a culture in which infant mortality is high and life expectancy is low. They knew what loss was. They knew what grief was. They had to walk through suffering on a regular basis as a regular part of life. And what Peter, I believe, knew and knows is that suffering can very often derail our faith. And it's why I wanted to open up the series talking about it as well. Because though I think we would admit that life in the 22nd century is markedly easier than life in the first century, we are the spoiled billionaire kids of history and the way that we get to live our life. But on the other hand, it's similar. Everybody in this room knows loss. Everybody in this room knows grief. Everybody in this room has been hurt by something that's happened in their life in a deep and profound way. Most of us know what it is to get the phone call that you or someone you love has a disease that's going to be really tough to battle. Most of us know what it is to have life not go the way we wanted or the way that we planned to sit in the midst of shattered dreams. We know what hurt is. We know what pain is. And we know that suffering has the power to dismantle our faith. We know that it has the power to tear it down. Which is why whenever I have the opportunity as your pastor to talk about suffering, as not fun as it is and as somber as it is and as serious as it is, I'm going to stop and I'm going to slow down and I'm going to talk about it with you. Because we have to do everything we can as a church and as individuals to fight against this pernicious idea that sneaks into the church over and over and over again, that somehow when I choose God, that somehow when I accept Christ, that Jesus is going to protect me from pain. Yeah, I'm going to have to go through some things. I mean, it's not all just going to be rosy. Life doesn't get to just be completely awesome all the time. There's going to be seasons of unhappiness, but the really bad stuff, God's going to protect me from that. If I follow God, he will not let anybody that I love get a disease that they don't deserve. If I follow God, everyone who dies, I'll be able to explain why they did. If I follow God, he's going to protect my children. If I follow God, he's going to bless me with children. If I follow God, he's going to protect me from failure. That idea sneaks in over and over and over again. And I think part of the reason it sneaks in is because it's so easy to preach. I would love to bring you in here and tell you, listen, the more you believe in God, the better your life's going to be. Now go live the good life. But that's crap. That's not true. And so we have to push against it every opportunity that we have. This idea that somehow my belief in God protects me from pain. So when suffering comes up in the Bible, we're going to talk about it. Because if we believe that about suffering, that my faith in God protects me from pain, then when we experience pain, we will no longer have faith in our God. Some of you have walked that road. The erroneous expectation, the misguided expectation that Jesus protects me from pain, only to find out that he doesn't. And then to reject the Jesus that was supposed to protect you, and he didn't. That failure of faith comes from understanding suffering wrongly. But I think this morning that what we'll see is if we understand suffering correctly, if we understand it biblically, if we understand it accurately, then it can be something that actually strengthens us. It can serve us. So let's look at what Peter says about suffering. Let's look at Jesus's role in that suffering. And then let's look at our responsibility in that suffering. This is just an old-fashioned work-through-the-text sermon, which they are my favorite to do, because I just stick to God's Word. Peter says this in of a loved one to persecution, Peter? Those kinds of various trials that have grieved me for a little while? Trials that grieve me for a little while are when I remember that Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays. That grieves me for a little while, and then I go to PDQ, all right? But what he's talking about here is not that. It's deep loss. It's deep persecution. It's deep grief and deep suffering. And he says, though you endure these trials for a little while, if necessary, and not if necessary for you as if God is putting them on you, if necessary because broken things happen in a broken world, and sometimes that necessitates suffering. Paul is similarly flippant in Corinthians, where he says that we suffer from light and momentary affliction. Again, I love the flippancy with which the New Testament refers to really, really deep, hard, depression-level suffering. Light, momentary affliction. Grieved with trials for a little while. And so what we see from this attitude of Peter as he presents the topic of suffering, sandwiched with the gospel, as we'll see, is simply this truth. Suffering will happen, and we don't have to understand it. Suffering will happen. It will. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. No one lives a full life and doesn't experience some suffering, doesn't experience or see abuse, doesn't experience or see death. I mean, right now, if you just turn on the news, you see what's going on in Ukraine and your mind is just boggled at the suffering that's happening there and the horror of the stories coming out of the towns that the Russian forces have now evacuated. And you know that once you live enough life, there's suffering that happens that you don't understand and that you can't explain. And there's this thing with suffering, with hardship, with grief and with struggle, where the very first thing we seek to do, our knee-jerk reaction is to understand it. Why would God let this happen? Why would God allow that person to die? Why would God allow that person to get this disease? Why would God allow things to not go that way? Why wouldn't God protect my family when he could? The very first thing we want in suffering is answers. Why is this allowed to happen? And sometimes, sometimes there's answers and it does make sense. Sometimes it is struggling for a little while so that you can harden your faith and so that it can be ready and seasoned. Sometimes the thing you're praying for, you're simply not ready for it yet. And if God gives it to you, you're going to mess it up. So you're waiting and you're being prepared. So sometimes when we suffer, we look back on that suffering and we go, oh yeah, okay. I understand why God allowed me to walk through that season. But sometimes suffering happens for which there is no explanation. That we cannot explain away. And this is when we need to be careful with phrases like, oh, everything happens for a reason. Does it? I've told you guys this before, but my college roommate dropped dead of a widow-maker heart attack at 30 with two kids under five years old. What was the reason for that? To make his wife's faith stronger? Get out of here. What was the reason for that? So his boys could grow up with a different dad who loves the Lord. No, my buddy was a pastor. He was one of the best people I knew. If everything happens for a reason, what's the reason for that? I was on the phone this week talking to a pastor. He's been a pastor for 40 years. He's been at one point the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was really great friends with my father-in-law, John. And we were just kind of chatting about it, and he calls me buddy. He said, you know, buddy, I've seen a lot of people pass away. I've seen a lot of people go too soon. But this one, losing John, that will never make sense to me. That's one that I just don't get. And it just makes me think, if there is suffering that happens, that a pastor who's been a pastor for 40 years, who's pastored thousands of people, who's done hundreds of funerals, thousands of hospital visits, he's seen all the suffering. When you're a pastor, sometimes you get a front row seat to that stuff, whether you like it or not. And he's been through it and he's looking at a death and he's going, this one, I don't get, man, there can't be any reason for this. If he can't make heads or tails of it, then what, what hope do we have to make it all make sense? And so something I want to alleve you of this morning, alleviate from you, unburden you of, is the necessity to make it all make sense. Because sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the only explanation for events, like what's happening in Ukraine, is that broken things happen in a broken world. And God in his infinite goodness and his infinite wisdom is choosing to allow those things to happen. He's choosing to allow the world to remain broken until one day he returns and he repairs it. But there's going to be suffering that happens in this life that there is no reason for. And if someone tells you everything happens for a reason, it's only because they've never experienced something that doesn't happen for a reason. And in that suffering, Peter tells us that we should rejoice. In this you rejoice, even though you're suffering. Even when we don't understand it, we should rejoice. And sometimes when we seek to understand it, we just want to make the pain go away. And we feel like if we understand it, it will make it feel better. But when I say that sometimes we just don't get to know why suffering happens, sometimes we're just not going to understand it. That's not me just being practical about things that I've seen in my life. That's actually me being biblical about God being confronted with why. We see it, to my mind, two very prominent times. Once in John chapter 11, when Jesus waits and allows Lazarus to die and then comes to raise him from the dead. And Mary, Lazarus's younger sister, runs out to meet him and he says, to meet Jesus and says, why did you wait? You could have come and you could have done something about this. And Jesus, in that moment, when we lean in and we want to understand why, why do you allow suffering? He doesn't offer an explanation. He weeps with her. He cries with her. We see it another time in Job, towards the end of the book, when Job confronts God and he's like, I need to know. I demand an answer. Why have you allowed all these things to happen to me? The worst suffering that could ever happen in the world happened to Job. And he said, why God, why did you allow this to happen? You owe me an answer. And God said to Job, and we are going to, might be uncomfortable with this. This is graduate level theology. But God said to Job, you lost your place. If I tried to understand this to you, you wouldn't get it. Tell me how I laid the foundations of the world and then I'll explain this to you. Tell me how the oceans know how far to go and no further. Tell me how souls get created. When you can grasp that, I'll tell you. So I have a belief that even though sometimes in the midst of our heart of suffering, we go, God, this doesn't make any sense. That one day when we're in eternity, if our heavenly brains have the capacity to understand and we can understand things like God does. We'll all collectively go, oh, huh. Yeah, that checks out. That makes sense. And I suspect that what we'll find in eternity is that the ones that we grieve so much for losing too early or the lucky ones? Because they got there before us. We don't have the capacity to understand all the reasons and all the suffering that happens around us. And I can't sit up here as a pastor and tell you exactly why God lets a broken world do broken things. But I know that when we get to eternity, if we have the capacity to understand it, we'll go, hmm, yeah, okay, I get it. And so in the midst of that uncertainty and in the midst of our suffering, we're grieved by various things for a little while, Peter tells us to rejoice. How is this possible and what should we rejoice? Well, it follows verses 3 day these wounds will be healed. In what do we rejoice in the midst of suffering? How do we find a way to find joy? How do we find a way to find hope? Because Easter, that's how. Because last week I told you the most important sentence in the Bible is, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen. On that, all of history hinges. Because Jesus came to earth, because he lived a perfect life, because he died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, because he rose again on the third day and left us with the Holy Spirit and ascended into heaven where he's prepared a place for us, where he sits at the right hand of God interceding for you, where he sends the Holy Spirit to chase after your soul and bring you near to him and bring you back to him as he prepares for the marriage supper of the lamb to call you into eternity. He bought your salvation and he's waiting for you and he invites you into that. And in that truth, you rejoice. In that reality, you rejoice. That because he rose from the dead on Easter, we know that he's gonna come back to get us in Revelation. We know that he's gonna come back and that he's gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. We have faith that he is going to do that. And so we know that one day the wounds that we carry and the wounds that we walk in and the scars on our body emotionally and physically, that one day we will not have those anymore because Jesus has won us the next day. That one day we will not sit in that pain anymore because one day as believers, we're going to be in heaven for all of eternity where we will not need faith and we will not need hope and we will just simply sit in the joy of being in the presence of our Father and of our Savior and of the saints. We wait anxiously for that day. That's why I think if you pay attention, the most seasoned believers in the face of suffering and in the face of things that they can't explain will simply say, come Lord Jesus, just come. We don't get this stuff anymore. And so in the midst of suffering, we look to the gospel. We look to our hope. I'm fond of saying on days when I'm not feeling great, which is not awesome, or not often, because my life is awesome and my days are good. On days when I'm not feeling great, when I'm blue, or when I'm down, when I'm discouraged, when something hard is happening, I like to remind myself that not every day will feel like this day. This day is sad. That's okay. Let it be sad. But not every day is this day. Tomorrow's a new one. Maybe it'll be better. If it's not, there's a day after that. Not every day will feel like this day. And that's true in eternity too. If you're sitting in hurt and pain, if you've experienced loss, not every day feels like that day. And if there is scarring in your life that is so bad that it simmers under the surface at all times that can sometimes just jerk us right back into grief, there's coming a day when you can finally set that down and just bask in the presence of your Savior. And so we rejoice in that day and we hope for that day. And it's important to remind us that Jesus doesn't protect us from suffering. He sustains us through it. He doesn't protect us from the suffering. It's going to happen. All right, I can't reiterate that enough. There are no promises in the Christian faith that you get protected from suffering. There is a promise that you will experience it. And in the midst of experiencing it, Jesus will sustain us through it. It says in verse 5, That is us. That God himself is sustaining our faith. He's giving us the power for faith. And so he sustains us in the midst of our suffering. As we look at the gospel, we rejoice in the glorious future that awaits us. We know the people that we love that might already be there are experiencing joy and they are waiting for us too. So in the midst of suffering, we don't look to try to make sense of it here. We look to the fact that later it will not be true. That's what we rejoice in. And that's what Jesus does for us in our suffering. He wins us a future without that hurt and without those wounds. But what do we do in the midst of suffering? What do we do right now? How do we respond to it when life is really, really hard? Well, this is what Peter says we should do. Verse 7. So what do we do in the midst of suffering? What do we do when life is hard right now? How do we counsel people when they walk through suffering? We do it with this knowledge, that your faith, which guards your inheritance, becomes strengthened and results in the salvation of your soul. Your faith, which in this passage says guards your inheritance, the inheritance in verses three through five, that is imperishable, that is unfading, that is everlasting, that Jesus has prepared for you, your inheritance in glory one day. This teaches that somehow it is guarded by your very faith. That the fact that you have faith in that future protects that future. And I know that this calls into question, wait, wait, wait, so like I can lose my salvation if I don't have enough faith or I'm not secured by something besides my faith. No, no, no. God secures you. When you are saved, when you cry out to Jesus as your Savior and God as your Father, God saves you and secures you. But it is your faith that led you to that moment. Your faith is the one thing you're asked to maintain. Your belief in God is the one thing that he presses on you for your salvation. What do we have to do to be saved? We have to believe. What do we have to do to be invited into the kingdom of heaven? We have to believe that Jesus is who he says he is and that he did what he said he did. We have to have faith. But here's why God secures us. Because according to this passage, who powers our faith? God. So what do we do in the midst of suffering? We cling. We choose faith. In the midst of inevitable suffering, cling tightly to your faith and Jesus will sustain you. In a few minutes, Aaron and the band are gonna come up and they're gonna close this out with Don't Stop Believing. I'm just kidding. That would be awesome. I really wish we should have talked about that on Tuesday. But in the midst of our suffering, that's what you do. That's what you do. You don't stop believing in Jesus. You don't allow it to erode your faith. You don't allow it to steal it from you. You don't try to make sense and then argue Jesus away. You just sit in it and you know he's won me a future where one day this won't hurt like it does right now. And I'm going to cling to that future and I'm going to rejoice in that future. And in the meantime, when it's murkiest, when it's hardest, when life is darkest, I'm going to cling to faith. I'm going to cling to the faith that God empowers in me and choose to believe that Jesus is good and choose to believe in the promises of God and choose to believe that he makes graves, he makes gardens out of graves. We choose to cling to the faith when we don't know what else to do. Suffering will happen. It will. It's a promise. Because God knew that would happen, he bought our souls through his death. And he gives us an inheritance that's waiting for us. And so in the midst of that suffering, we don't say to ourselves, this must have happened for a reason. We don't say to ourselves, well, God has a plan. This has to be part of it. No. No, no. We say to ourselves, I'm going to choose to believe in the goodness of God. I'm going to choose to believe in the promises of God. I'm going to choose to believe that one day, if this could all make sense to me, it would, and I would understand it, and it would be fine, and it would be good, and it would be well with my soul, but until that day comes, I am clinging to Jesus. That's what we do in the midst of suffering. And that's how we should encourage others as we walk alongside them and their suffering. Let's pray and the band's going to come up. Father, God, first and foremost, if there is anyone in this room or anyone listening to my voice this morning or later this week who is hurting, who has suffering going on in their life that they cannot explain, that they cannot make sense of, that every explanation of it just somehow falls short. If there are people here or listening who are hurting, Father, would they cling to you? Would they wake up every day and choose faith and choose a belief in your goodness and choose a belief in your goodness. And choose a belief in your son. And in that choice, God, as your word promises, so galvanize our faith that it would be tested and true that as we walk through life many years from now, our faith is strong and our faith sustains and our faith guards. But in the midst of it, Lord, whether it's today or in the future, as we inevitably experience trials again, God, I pray that we would cling to you. It's in your son's name I pray these things. Amen.

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