Sermons tagged with Philippians

Well, good morning. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Man, that was good. I tell you what, I tell you what, I love you guys. I love this place. I love this church. It is so special. God's doing something here, y'all. He's doing something in me. He's doing something in y'all. And I fully, fully believe that the brightest days of grace are ahead, that he has a lot for us to do in us and through us. And I'm excited about those. This morning, we are starting a new series. And I got to say this too. I expected for this morning to be terrible. Can I just tell you that? I expected it to be dead in here, for there to be sporadic attendance, and for it to just be a lame Sunday. I'm coming back from South Africa. I don't know what day it is. I feel like eating lunch right now. I have no clue what's going on around me or where I am. We have a team coming back from Mexico that represents a lot of our core folks. Did you guys just clap for yourself? Is that what just happened? Good job, everyone. Yes, we are the best. We got students coming back from Metta. They're all ready to fall asleep. Yeah, this is great. And then it's the middle of October, and if you don't know anything about Grace in October, it's like July 2.0. Everybody goes to the mountains to see leaves, I guess. I don't know. They don't come here to see me, and so it's just kind of sparse here. And I thought this Sunday is going to be dead. And then I'm sitting here worshiping and I'm like, holy cow, God, this is amazing. That was some of the best, most energetic, enthusiastic, sincere worship I've heard come from us. And I'm just fired up, especially about what I get to share with you this morning as we start our new series called Great Prayers. So what we're going to do for six weeks is just open the Bible and look at some of the more impactful prayers that we see in Scripture. And hopefully by looking at these great prayers, we can become greater prayers, but we're not going to talk about how to pray. We're not going to talk about having devotions and that prayer time needs to be a part of our life. And here's why. We're simply going to look at some of the most impactful prayers and meaningful prayers in scripture and kind of ask the question, what can we learn about them for our prayers? And so the one that we're kicking off with is very near and dear to my heart. It's very special to me. This is my prayer over grace. It's what Rachel Gentile just read. As she got up here to read, I leaned over to Jen, and I said, she's just the best. And Jen has tears in her eyes because she loves Rachel. And she's like, I know. Maybe I'm just jet lagged. I don't know. And I don't love Rachel that much. Maybe I'm just fatigued. You're not a big deal, Rachel. It's whatever. We're glad you're here. But this prayer, it's the one that I pray over grace. My office at home, I've got it sitting in the corner now. I need to get it framed and then hang it up. But I've got this prayer written out on a big piece of paper in calligraphy that we had a friend of ours do for us. When I come and pray over children who are born at grace, this is what I pray over them. When I pray for grace, it's what I pray for grace. When I pray for my children, it's what I pray for them. When I pray for you, it's what I pray for you. And so for me, it's perfect that this prayer sermon is coming right on the heels of traits of grace, where we're saying this is what makes grace, grace, and this is who we are. And so now right on the heels of that, we say this is to me the prayer of grace. And I think it's safe to call it the prayer of grace because the greatest church planner of all time, one of the most influential Christians who ever lived, Paul, the apostle, is the author of this prayer. And what I think is cool about it is that it's really mirrored throughout the rest of the Pauline epistles, the other letters that Paul wrote to the churches. So for those of you who may not know exactly what Paul did, you just know he's kind of a name of one of the saints that we talk about in church sometimes. Paul wrote a third of the New, or two-thirds of the New Testament, as far as the books that are attributed to him. Paul planted seven to ten churches right after Jesus died. He's responsible really for the early church movement throughout Asia Minor. And once he was converted on the road to Tarsus, Paul spent the rest of his life traveling around these cities on the Mediterranean coast, planning churches and encouraging the church leaders and the people within those churches, and then writing letters back to those churches as he was going on his four different missionary journeys. If you count the journey on the slave ship that shipwrecks at Malta and then eventually makes it to Rome, then there's four journeys. And so all through those journeys, he's visiting the churches and then he's writing letters back to the churches that he's already visited or that he longs to visit. And in most of those letters, he has a prayer. There'll be a preface and it'll say something like, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father. And that's what we see in Philippians. And sometimes it says, whenever I think of you, I pray for you and here's what I pray. But if you'll read Paul's letters carefully, what you'll see in these prayers when he prays for those churches is that they're remarkably similar and that he essentially prays for the same thing for all the churches. And so it's interesting to me to look, what does Paul pray for the churches? What's the singular thing that he wants? What does he always pray for no matter what else is going on? But before we look at and examine what he prays for, I thought I would ask you what you think you would pray for. Put yourself in the shoes of Paul. You spent your life planting these churches, investing in these people. You want to see them grow. You want to see them flourish. You want to see the communities evangelized and reached. You're hopeful for these churches. Not only that, a lot of these churches exist in cities and in empires that are under persecution and oppression, where it might even be illegal to be a Christian and to be in these churches and definitely to be leading these churches. So if you were to write a letter to these churches and you were to include in that letter a prayer, here's what I hope for you. Think with me sincerely, what would you pray? What would you hope for them? What would you want for them? Would you pray for safety? I would. Would you pray for relief from persecution? Would you pray in a day and age when a life expectancy isn't long? Would you pray for health? Certainly you would know some people there who were ailing. Would you pray for the success of the church? May you reach the community. May your love abound so that others come to know Jesus. Would you pray for the health of the church, for the wisdom of the leaders? If you were Paul, what would you pray for? And then think about it in terms of the people that you do pray for. Hopefully, hopefully you pray for the people in your life. If you have kids, hopefully you pray for them regularly, if not daily. If you don't, that's okay. Maybe you have an eight-year-old and you're thinking, gosh, I have not really prayed for that kid very often the first eight years of their life. Okay. Well, they don't have to go any more years without you praying for them daily. So start doing that now. Hopefully you pray for your spouse. Hopefully you pray for them daily. If you don't, that's okay. They've gone however long they've gone without you praying for them daily. But start now and don't make them live that life anymore. Pray for them daily. Hopefully you pray for the people that you love. Hopefully you lift them up to God and you ask for what's best for them. And when you do, what kinds of things do you pray for them? If we pray daily, maybe there's daily prayers, but I think a lot of us probably relegate prayers for others to when there's something urgent going on in their life, right? When there's a tricky relationship, when they've reached a difficult season, when they're awaiting news for a diagnosis or they've received it and now they're undergoing treatment, when there's a difficult situation at work, when there's a difficult situation with their family, with their kids, or with their marriage, then we lift them up. And so when we do, it's often a petition, right? God, save their marriage. God, help them here. God, help me here. Help them do that. God, I just pray for protection for my children. We've got one girl in the youth group who recently turned 16. I'm very certain that her parents are praying prayers of safety on the road and for the other drivers who are around this particular young lady. Those are the kinds of things we pray for, like circumstantial help in this situation. And listen, those are good prayers. They're good prayers. And we see those throughout the Bible. We see David say that God is his fortress and his strength and he prays for protection. We see Paul at different places pray for healing. We see Paul pray urgently and petition God that communities would be reached and that the gospel would be expounded. So we see all of those prayers in scripture. But when we look at Paul's prayer, to me, as we read it, and I'll read it again here in a second, to me it speaks just as loudly what he doesn't pray for as what he does. And I think that we have a lot to learn from that. So let's look again at the prayer that Paul prays, and let's ask together, what is it that he's asking on behalf of the church. Verse 14 in Ephesians chapter 3. So here's what Paul prays. the triune God, that you would be strengthened by the Spirit, that you would be indwelled by the Christ, and that you would be filled with the fullness of the Father, resulting in knowing God along with the saints. So when we say knowing God this morning, we mean the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So Paul's prayer is that we would know God. That's the prayer, that you would know God. Not for safety, not that everything would be okay, not that the people would be healed, not even for success and growth of the church, not for anything circumstantial, but a singular prayer for them is that they would know God, that they would know him deeply and so commune with the other saints that know him. And it is my prayer for you that everything in life would push us to this place where we know God more deeply. It was the apex value for Paul. Again, do we see in other places him praying for those things? For safety and for protection and for growth and for the expounding of the gospel? Yes, absolutely, he prays for those things. But it's not the first thing he prays. It's not the apex value. It's not what's most important to him. To help us think about this idea of like this apex value, this thing that's so valuable to me, I'm going to pursue it above and beyond anything else. I'm going to tell you a snippet of the story of me getting home from South Africa, which is a heck of a story. But our flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg kept getting delayed. And we had to catch a flight in Johannesburg from Johannesburg to Atlanta. And that margin of time between when we were going to land and when we needed to be at our gate kept shrinking. And I'm looking at my buddy that I'm traveling with, and it kind of dawns on both of us, because he's a more experienced international traveler than I am, and he didn't do me the favor of advising that I not check a bag. So this is really his fault, and he owes me money. But I didn't know not to check a bag, so I had a small bag, and I checked it, figuring it's an international flight. We're going to be there for six days. It seems like the time you check something. Anyways, I checked it. So we're looking at each other going, and he's like, dude, you ain't going to get that bag. You do not have time to go to baggage claim, go to check-in, go through security, and get to the gate. You've got to choose. Do you want what's in that bag, or do you want to get on that flight? Do you want that stuff, which, in that bag, or my Crocs, guys? I know. I know. Oh, man. That's great. If you're watching online and you don't know what just happened, I'm not going to explain it to you. You just got to be here. You just got to be here. So sad. But I know I want to get home. I want to see my family. I want to see my church. I don't want to spend more money on another ticket that's going to cost more than the content of my bag. So even though I really want that stuff and I like some of that stuff, it's just my apex value in this situation, my biggest value, my biggest priority is to go home. So even though it hurts a little bit, I'm going to make a choice to pursue the thing that I need the most. It was the apex value. My value is to go home, see my family, to be in my house. Paul's value for us is that our souls would go home, is that our souls would find rest. And if on occasion we have to leave a bag behind to get closer to the Father, so be it. If on occasion the sickness is what's acting in our life to actually conspire to bring us closer to God and drive us to a deeper knowledge of Him that we would be filled with his fullness, then so be it. Paul prays that our souls would go home, that our souls would find rest in God, that they would go there first and foremost, and that that's what we would want to sacrifice anything else for the sake of knowing God. Maybe this is why Paul writes in Philippians 3.8 that he considers everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. So if we want our prayers to mirror the ethic of Paul, then when we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, we pray that our souls would go home. We pray that our souls would find their rest in God, no matter what else we have to go through. So if we have a child who's wondering and they don't know about their faith and we see them making decisions that we might not make, the prayer to pray for that child is, God, would everything in their life that they're experiencing somehow conspire to push them closer to you so that they might go home? When someone is sick, sure, we pray for them to heal, but we layer that prayer at the end with kind of a tip of the cap to Jesus' prayer, to the Lord's prayer where it says, not my will, but your will be done. Yes, Father, I pray that they'd be healed. Yes, Father, I pray that they would be okay. Yes, Father, I pray that you would bring relief in this situation. But more than anything, I trust you and I trust your sovereignty. And I'm praying that you would use everything in that situation, use all the circumstances in their life. I pray that they would conspire so that they might simply know you more so that their souls could go home and find rest in you. That's what we pray. And when you ask me to pray for you, when someone's sick or someone's's marriage is struggling, or someone's child is wandering, or things are hard, I always pray the thing that you ask me to pray. But I always follow it with, but God, whatever you choose to do here, would the circumstances conspire to push them closer to you, that they might be filled with your fullness, that they would be indwelled by your Spirit, that they would be strengthened by your Spirit, indwelled by your Son, that they may be filled with the fullness of the wisdom of the Father, that they might know you. So I want to encourage you too, parents, as you pray for your children, pray this prayer over them. We can't possibly see all of the winding roads that may eventually lead them to a greater depth of faith. I can tell you in my own life, there's been two times in my life when I thought, I'm going to have to walk away from this. I can't believe this anymore. This is untenable to me. And one is way more recently than you think it was. But that when I walked through it, and when I got honest about the God that I was pursuing, and when I started pursuing answers to the questions that I had, God opened my eyes to a greater faith and a greater depth of desire for Him. And I feel like as I walk through those points of inflection in my life that God used them to bring me closer to Him so that I might desire Him more. We never know how God is weaving lives to bring us closer to Himself. So sometimes we don't pray away the circumstances that He has brought about to work in. Sometimes we simply trust Him. All the time we simply trust Him. And we say, God, not my will, but Your will be done. We say, Father, I just want to echo Ephesians 3 and pray that everything that happens in the life of this person would conspire to push them closer to you, that they might know you more, that they might know what it is to walk in your peace. That's our prayer for others. That's our prayer for Grace, that God, whatever you do here, if we languish in the small room with the pole in it for the next six years, who cares? God, with all the events that Grace conspire, that we might know you more and do greater things in your name so that other people might come to know you more through us. Who cares where we meet? If we move into a big fancy new building and we do it in a year and a half because God just decided that's what we need to do and hundreds more people come, who cares? God, with the events of these people coming, conspire so that they might know you more and be pushed closer to you. It's our only prayer. And if you were to ask me, Nate, why is this Paul's apex value? Why is this the thing that he feels is most important? Well, the first answer and the most important answer is this is exactly what we were created for. This is why God made us, so that he could share Himself with us so that we would know Him. That's what heaven is. I think we mess up. I think we make a mistake when we make heaven about our personal salvation. Am I in or am I out? Am I going to burn or am I going to be in there for forever? That's kind of silly. The purpose of heaven is that we would be reunited with our creator God and experience eternity in harmony with him forever. The purpose of heaven is that we fulfill our ultimate purpose of just knowing him. And so every inch we move closer to knowing God, every bit of depth that we gain in our knowledge of him, every bit of closeness that we experience in our relationship with him is a way to bring heaven down here on earth. And so not only we experience heaven, but those around us get a little glimpse of what heaven's going to be like with every inch that we move closer to the Father, with every embrace that he uses to pull us in as this small reflection of what heaven will be one day. That's why Paul prays that we would know him. But as I was thinking about it this week, writing this sermon on various flights at who knows what time of day it was, depending on the time zone, this thought occurred to me that, you know, we are at our most gracious and most peaceful when we are experiencing the most closeness to God. Another way to say it is, the closer we get to God, the more grace and peace that we walk in. The closer I get to God, the more I pursue Him, the more I know Him, the more I love Him, the more I experience Him, and I feel his goodness in my life, the more gracious I am with myself and others, the less annoyed I get in traffic, the less annoyed I get with my kids, the less obnoxious I think someone is, and the more I realize they're just a hurt person who's hurting other people, and they need God's goodness just like I do. Isn't it true? In the times in your life, when you look back and you would say, or maybe it's right now, and you would say, I'm as close to God as I've ever been, or in that season I was as close to God as I've ever been, weren't you also your most gracious with yourselves and with others? And isn't it a good indicator that we're not walking with God when we begin to lack grace for ourselves and we begin to get really hard on others and we become harsher versions of ourselves? And isn't it true that the closer we get to God, the more peace we experience? And the more we know him, the more certain we are that he'll take care of us. I did not know. I did not know if I was going to be home today. Catching that flight was, I don't think you can cut it closer. I really didn't know if I was going to be here. But I also really didn't pray about it that much. My only prayer while I was sitting there wondering if I was going to make it was, God, if you want me home, I'll be home. If you want me to preach, I'll preach. If you don't, I won't. And I'll get to keep my crocs. So Lord, your will be done. There was an upside to both, you know? But my only prayer was, Father, do what you want. I trust you. Whatever, if you want me to get home, we'll get home. It's kind of like, it's one of the things that raising the money for the building taught me. We did the campaign really, really dumb and it was just kind of like, well, you know, God, if you want us to have the money to buy the land, then we'll have it. If you don't, then we won't. Now we need to raise more money to get into the building. And you know what? If God wants us to have the money, you're gonna give it. And if he doesn't, you won't. Okay. The closer you get to God, the more peace you experience in life. And so I think it's, and honestly, the times in our life when we're drifting from God are sometimes the times when we get most honest and we try to seize the most things and we worry about the most things that we can't control. And then the closer we drift to God, the more of his peace that we feel. And so I think it's very true that the more we know God, the more gracious and peaceful we are. And as I was thinking about that, I was also reminded of the fact that Paul signs off almost all of his letters, grace and peace. He almost always says grace and peace to you, to the saints and wherever. And I've always paid attention to that. And I've always wondered why that is, especially if you juxtapose it or you compare it with the passage in Corinthians, where it says these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. Like why doesn't he ask for faith, hope, and love to you and all the saints? He doesn't do that. He asks for grace. He wishes them grace and peace. I've always wondered why. And maybe, just maybe, it's because Paul knows that grace and peace are byproducts of knowing God. Paul knows that if God answers his prayer in Ephesians 3, 14 through 19, and then Colossians 1 and in other places, that the people in the churches will know him. And if they know him, they will be people who are filled and who will walk in grace and peace. And so by blessing them and wishing upon them grace and peace, what Paul is really doing in his Pauline way is saying, I hope you know God. I hope you grow closer to him. And so I'm praying grace and peace unto you this morning as well. If you are a praying person, I hope that this great prayer can influence the way that you pray for others. Sure. Pray for the circumstances. Pray for protection and pray for health and pray for success and pray for reconciliation and pray for forgiveness and pray for all the things. But layer over them this apex value from Paul, that the person you're praying for, that the body that you're praying for, the family or the church or the people that you are praying for, would simply know God. That even in the circumstances that you're praying for, that all of them would conspire in some miraculous and unknown way to draw people closer to the Father, that He would use those circumstances to pull people near to Him, that they might experience the grace and peace of their soul going home with God. If you're not someone who prays for the people in your life regularly. Okay. You don't have to be that. If your children have not had the benefit of a praying parent, they can now just start. If your spouse hasn't had the benefit of a praying spouse, if your friend hasn't had the benefit of praying friends, if your co-workers haven't had the benefit of a praying co-worker, okay, they can. Anytime you want. So I hope you'll be people who pray for people. And when you do, I hope that you'll pray according to the ethics of Paul as he prays. That whatever happens, whatever they experience, whatever highs and lows they walk through, that if there's success in their life, celebrate that success, but pray fervently and ardently that it would bring them to a deeper knowledge of God. If there's struggle in their life, pray for a relief of that struggle, but pray first and foremost that that struggle would bring them to a deeper knowledge of their God that they might walk in grace and peace. As I encourage you to pray that for others, let me pray that over you as we wrap up. Father, we love you. We thank you for what you're doing in this place. I thank you for what you're doing in me. There's so many things to pray for. In this room, God, there are struggles that no one knows about. There are hurts and hangups that have not been articulated or that have. Our mind goes to places of stress and of urgency. And so, God, I pray that your hand would be in all those. In this room, God, there's also seasons of celebration, of goodness, of sweetness, of joy and blessing. Whether it's in the highs or in the lows, God, may we not forget that you are the author of those things. And may everything happening within them conspire to push us closer to you. God, I pray for grace. I pray that you would work in the lives of the people who are here and who are at home. And that all the circumstances that are working in their life right now would conspire to bring them closer to you. That they would be strengthened by your spirit. That they would be indwelled by your son. That they would be filled with the fullness of the father. Help our souls to find their rest in you, to go home to you, and so walk in the grace and peace that you offer us. In Jesus' name, amen.

We serve a God who's working through time to bring about His will and ultimately our good. We see the evidence of His sovereignty in the book of Genesis with the life of Joseph. To know and understand the story of Joseph is to get a glimpse into the very heart of God and to be assured that we can trust His plan. Last week, even though Joseph was sold into slavery, we saw that he chose to trust God and honor Him in his service to his new master, Potiphar's wife, attention that eventually forced Joseph to make a decision to run from temptation, even though running ultimately landed him in an Egyptian jail. A prisoner once again, we wonder together, will Joseph still choose to believe in his God and that in the end, he has a plan? Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that after the service if you're not afraid of me. Thank you also for joining us online and to the people in the back right of the room, there's other rows. So you guys don't, you don't all have to sit there every week. Just, I'm just throwing that out there. There's other places if you're also not afraid of those. This is the fourth part in our series where we're moving through the life of Joseph in the Old Testament. We find the life of Joseph in basically the back third of the book of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible. And I've said from the beginning a couple of things. First of all, that the story of Joseph to me is one of the most sweeping and stunning portrayals of the sovereignty of God that I think we find in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. I love the story of Joseph. And because it's a big, long story that points to the sovereignty of God, we are approaching this series not as seven individual sermons, but as one big long seven week sermon. So we stop and we make points along the way that are applicable to us and that help the text come alive to us. But really we're driving to the end of this narrative and the end of the series as we get to week seven and hopefully see the story in a light that maybe we haven't thought of it before. Because it's one big long sermon, and I've said that from the beginning, this week in particular highlights that. So I would tell you if you're watching online or listening online and it's not Sunday morning right now and you haven't heard week one, this would be a good place to pause and go listen to week one and then come back and listen to this. Now I know that it's ambitious of me to assume that you're willing to listen to 60 minutes of Nate in one week, but if you are, then it would be worth it to listen to week one before you consume this. If you haven't heard week one and you're just, this is fresh for you, don't worry, I'm going to bring you along, but it's going to resonate more if you really drill down into the life of Jacob like we did in the first week. So that's just an upfront for you. I'm going to assume a couple things of your knowledge of Jacob when we get to his portion of the sermon today. But like we said last week, Joseph is accused of sexual harassment in Potiphar's house and is subsequently thrown in jail. Potiphar's wife kept trying to seduce Joseph. Joseph wouldn't have it. Eventually in this scene, she grabs a hold of him. There's no one else around and he chooses to run away. And we spent a lot of time last week on what it means to run away from our temptations. He runs away and he leaves behind his outer garment because she had a hold on it and it was the only way for him to get away. And then she lets out a cry and she falsely accuses him of accosting her. When Potiphar hears this story, the master of the house, he's enraged and he has Joseph thrown in jail, which is a good place to acknowledge this idea that just because we're obeying God doesn't mean our life is going to immediately go better. Joseph chose obedience, and his life immediately got worse, circumstantially. So simply choosing to walk in obedience sometimes makes our life more difficult. Obedience is a long-term decision. It's not a short-term decision. But Joseph chose obedience. He chose to honor his God, and it lands him in jail. He gets thrown into like the royal jail where the prisoners of Pharaoh are thrown in as well. This becomes important a little bit later in the story and in this week's sermon. But he gets thrown in that jail. And when he's in the jail, he's again, Joseph has these patterns in his life where he has these dreams, right, early on that his brothers are going to bow down to him and his father and mother are going to bow down to him. And then he's sold into slavery and he's brought low. And then he ends up in Potiphar's house and slowly he ascends to second in command in Potiphar's house. And he's in this unprecedentedly high place for a Hebrew person to be. And then he gets thrown in jail and he's brought low. And spoiler alert, okay, if you don't know the story, we're gonna get into the details in the future. But then eventually he gets out of prison. He's put in Pharaoh's house where he rises to prominence again. And so Joseph's life is this constant ebbing and flowing of being brought high and then being brought low. And in these low moments being faced with the decision, am I going to choose to honor God or am I going to resent him because he's disappointed me in some way, because he's allowed these things to happen to me? And so as he's thrown in jail again, he chooses to honor God, he chooses to obey him, and his life gets harder. And again, he's faced with, do I honor God or do I do my own thing? And this is what we're told in the text at the end of Genesis 39, beginning in verse 21, which in the ancient world was kind of employee-employer relationship. And it's understandable to see that someone could rise to prominence there, but you don't really expect someone to climb up the ranks in jail, right? So much so that they're now entrusted with everything, that whatever prisoners, whatever task the jailer gave Joseph, he didn't worry about it. Joseph had total integrity. I'm sure there were systems that he could have taken advantage of. I'm sure there were things that he could have gotten away with, but his integrity wouldn't allow him to do it. And so he garnered more and more trust, even within the prison system in Egypt, which to me is remarkable. And often when we think of the story of Joseph, I know that I do this and you might as well, and maybe this is one of the things you're picking up on as we move throughout the story together, that it seems like at every turn Joseph chooses to honor God. So then in turn, God continues to honor Joseph. But one of the things that stands out to me in the text is every time I read it, every time I get to the next portion of the story where he's brought low again, what you'll notice is that God's favor always precedes Joseph's behavior. This passage starts out, but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. So it's not that Joseph went to jail and then in his uncertainty and disillusionment, he says, you know what? I'm just going to choose to trust and obey God. And then God is there with the favor. It's important that we understand that Joseph's obedience was a response to God's favor. God's favor is not a response to Joseph's obedience. Do you see? We don't win God's favor. We don't win God's blessings by how we behave. One of the things I said in week one at the end of it is that God's commitment to his promises are not contingent upon our behavior. That works both ways. We don't lose God's promises with bad behavior, nor do we gain them, we see in Joseph's life, with good behavior. They're simply there. God's favor simply rests on us. God's love and concern for us simply rests on us. God has a plan for us and a way that he wants to use us and things that he's gifted us to do and people that he's placed in our life. And the spirit works in our hearts in mysterious ways. And he does all that despite our behavior. So we can't look at the life of Joseph and teach, look, if you honor God, God honors you. That's not the lesson. Because at every turn, God's favor precedes Joseph's behavior. So God's favor simply rested on Joseph's life. Which is why, as I was trying to plan to preach this, when we wrote the series out, when I wrote the series out months ago, this week was gonna be a lesson on obeying God where we are. Wherever you are, serve God. And I think that's a fine lesson, but I wasn't happy with it. And so Tuesday, I went on a walk. I've never done this before, but I left the little office complex and I walked all the way down to the end of the street where it stops in the woods and then I got scared and I came back. I went on a walk and I was just thinking and praying about this passage and what's going on in the life of Joseph, and it occurred to me something that's worth reflecting on. Joseph is brought high over and over again in his life because God has favor on him, because God has a plan for Joseph, because God has a plan for Joseph that echoes throughout the centuries, that is seen far beyond even what we're going to arrive at a place in chapter 7, it's going to be like, or in the seventh week, and we're going to go, oh my gosh, that's amazing. Look at how God was taking care of his brothers. But no, no, no. Look at how God was taking care of his people. And look at how it's a picture for what happens all time. So yes, God is showing favor to Joseph because he has a plan for him, but it's at this point worth stopping and reflecting on the life of his father, Jacob. Because listen to me, Jacob had that same favor. Remember? Jacob enjoyed the same favor that Joseph did. Jacob came from the same line. God had the same plan, was going to bring about the same things, was going to display his sovereignty in the same ways and in the same favor that Joseph had. And they didn't have it because of how they acted. They had it because God promised them something. And God keeps his promises. That's what his righteousness is. And so it occurred to me as I was thinking about the difference between Jacob and Joseph and kind of reflecting on their lives, that Jacob, his dad, was a person of strife. The father of Joseph, Jacob, was a person of strife. If you'll remember his story, at every turn he is scheming and he is planning and he is controlling and he is stressed and he is anxious about bringing about the life that he wants. He wanted his father's blessing. He wanted to be a claimant of the promises of Abraham. He wanted to be the one through whom the blessings would flow to future generations. He wanted to be the top guy. He saw the life that he wanted and he did everything that he could to bring it about. Even though, even though before he was born, God spoke to his mother and said, in you are two nations and the older will serve the younger. The younger will rule over the older. These promises were made before Jacob was ever born. God knew what his plan was and how he was going to bring it about. And yet Jacob chose to either not open his eyes to those promises or not trust those promises or not trust God's favor. And he spent his entire life scheming and planning to try to bring things about in his own life, and all it caused him was strife and stress. He wants his father's blessing, so he schemes up a way to get the birthright from his brother, and then he schemes up a way to get the blessing from his father that required him to lie to his dying father on his deathbed, which is a despicable thing to do. Then he has to flee to a family member where he's then deceived by Laban. And then he has to work for 21 years to be able to go out on his own. And on the way out, he has to lie and cheat and steal again. He's still a deplorable person. And then at the end of the narrative, we see him, he's going to be reunited with his brother Esau, who is coming for him. And he schemes again on how to mitigate the anger and the wrath of his brother Esau so that maybe he won't get murdered by him. And we see throughout his whole life this striving and this anxiety and this stress and this sense of control and scheming and how can I bring about the things that I want? And then at the end of his life, or at the end of the story, about halfway through his life, he wrestles all night with someone that I said humbly is possibly Jesus. But we can disagree on that and it's fine. And Jesus renames him Israel. And he says, you have striven with man and with God. And Jacob realizes that he's seen the face of God. And in that moment, he realizes all the striving that I've been doing to bring things about in my life were things that God was going to make happen anyways. If I'll just get out of the way and let him do it. And so what we see in Jacob and Joseph is two men upon whom the favor of the Lord rested. Two men with whom God had made plans, to whom God had made promises, who he had gifted, who he had blessed, and who he loved dearly, and he cared about what happened in their lives. But the contrast is that while Jacob was a person of strife, that Joseph was a person of peace. Jacob was a person of strife. Joseph was a person of peace. When you read the narrative about Jacob, you see stress and anxiety and control and worry and all these things leaping off the page and scheming and lying and manipulating and kind of being a jerk. And when I read the story of Joseph, I don't see any of that springing off the page to me. When I read the story of Joseph, I see remarkable peace and humility. I see a man that's never shaken in his faith. I see a man that seems to not worry too much about his circumstances. I see a man who humbly chooses to serve God at every turn in his life. If you continue to read down through chapter 40, and we'll talk about this in just a minute, there's two prisoners in the prison with Joseph, a baker and a cup bearer. And they go to him and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you can interpret dreams. Will you tell us what they mean? And Joseph, instead of puffing himself up, says, aren't interpretations of dreams, don't those belong to the Lord? Sure, I'll listen to what you have to say, but listen, it's not me doing this. At every point, he gives the credit to God. Last week, we talked about the temptation with Potiphar's wife. And she comes to him and she tries to entice him and get him to commit sin with her. And what's his response? I've been blessed in so many ways. How could I possibly sin against my God in this way? He's humble. He's obedient. He gives God the credit. A few chapters over, we're going to see that he's brought to Pharaoh. Pharaoh's had a couple dreams and he says, I've heard you're good at interpreting dreams. Let me tell you about my dreams. And in front of Pharaoh, where he could take credit again, he could say, I'm the guy. He says, don't dreams belong to the Lord? You can tell me your dreams. Let's see what he says. With Joseph, we see this profound peace. We see this profound joy that exists through his whole life, that runs like a stream through his whole life. No matter the ebbs and the flows, as he's brought high and he's brought low, we see this stream of joy and peace that runs through the life of Joseph. And it absolutely relates to the song that we sang a few minutes ago, that we're going to have joy and we're going to sing whether we're brought high to the mountain or low to the valley. And we see this displayed in the life of Joseph. That he's this person of incredible joy who in every moment simply chooses to trust God and honor God in the moment. And know that even though I don't know how this is going to work out, it will. God loves me and cares about me. So I'm going to control the things that I can control and I'm going to love him the best I can now. And this point, I was actually, I got done with the walk and I came back and I talked to Kyle. He was sitting in his office and I was all excited. Listen to what I just thought about. I think this is really fun. And I was telling him about it. And he made this point, and I think it's a great one. That Jacob's striving prohibited his joy. If the same favor rested on both of them, if God's sovereignty rested on both of them, if God had plans for both of them that he was going to bring about regardless of their behavior, then Kyle's point was the same joy was available to them the whole time. That if you can put yourself in the place of Jacob and imagine the relief that he felt when he realized, oh my gosh, I've been striving with God my whole life and I don't have to try so hard. If you can imagine the joy and relief that he felt when he met his brother who didn't want to murder him, who actually wanted to forgive him. If you can imagine how relieving and joy-filled those days were for Jacob, the disappointing thing is that joy was available to him for his entire life. And he lived half of his life without the joy of the Lord because his striving and his control and his anxiety and his worry and his scheming blinded him to the peace of the Father and prohibited him from experiencing the joy of the Father. And you contrast that with Joseph, who saw it the whole time, whose peaceful nature, whose trust in God, whose belief that God would come through, allowed him to be joyful and calm and peaceful in the moment, no matter what happened. And what you see, really, as you juxtapose their two lives and acknowledge that the same favor rested on both, is you see what it really means to trust God. I'm not talking about believing in God. Believing is an intellectual exercise. Are there enough facts in my head that I can willing to put my faith behind God? That's an intellectual exercise. And actually, every time we see the word belief in the Bible, in the original text, it means trust. And to trust is to rely on something fully, knowing that it will hold me up. There's belief mixed in there, but trust is really an action. And the difference between Joseph and Jacob is that Joseph trusted God and Jacob didn't. He may have believed in God, but Joseph trusted him. Because Joseph trusted God, he was a person of peace. Because Joseph trusted God, there was a river of joy that flowed through his life, irrespective of the circumstances that surrounded it. Because Jacob did not trust God, he merely at times when it was for him, chose to believe God. He was a person of strife, arrested with anxiety and worry and scheming and stress. And so where the rubber meets the road here for us this morning is for us to reflect on this question. Are you Jacob or are you Joseph? In your life, in the things that matter to you most, are you Jacob? Are you a person of strife? Or are you Joseph, a person of trusting peace? When I think about this for me, I think about grace. When the pandemic started and we can't meet in person anymore, and I lead an organization that it kind of matters whether or not we meet in person. That's a pretty big part of what we do. I got really worried. And I became Jacob. And I schemed and I stressed and I controlled. Who's coming? How do we reach out to them? How do we make our online product better? How do we keep people engaged? We just had this great campaign. We had a ton of people coming. How do I keep 330 people coming online every week? This is so challenging. I haven't talked to so-and-so in a couple of weeks. Are they gone? And then the other people would, I would talk to so-and-so and they said, yeah, I saw so-and-so this week. And I would go, do they still go to Grace? Do I need to call them? And every day I would just think about Grace. How do we hold it together? How do I keep this church where it is? And I made myself feel like, without realizing it, that it was all on me. And I Jacobed the heck out of that situation. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, it made me miserable. I didn't realize it. It made me miserable. And poor Jen, it made me grumpy at the house. She put up with some stuff. It was not good. And somewhere around four months ago, I wouldn't have used this language at the time, but somewhere around four months ago, I became Joseph about grace. And I finally realized, you know what? God loves this church. I don't know why. I don't know why he does. He just does. He loves us. And if you've been here for any number of years, you've seen him see us through time and again. God loves this place. And if he loves this place, he has a plan for this place. And if he has a plan for this place, he's going to execute it regardless of what I do. So I can keep trying to Jacob the situation and fix it and figure out what we need to do and stress out about it all the time. Or I can be Joseph. I can trust that God cares about this place and has a plan for this place that he's going to bring about regardless of my behavior. So the best possible thing I can do is to rest easy in the sovereignty of God, to choose to trust him with the church and simply humbly obey Jesus whenever the opportunity for obedience is presented to me and quit worrying about the things that I can't control. And it brought peace. Parents, with your children, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Do you stress out about who they are and how they behave and how we can augment this behavior so they don't embarrass us in public? Do we stress out about where they're going to go to college, if they're college, what kind of decisions that they're making? Do we stress out about every little thing and be a helicopter parent and stress and scheme and worry and control and be anxious? Or are we Joseph? Do we trust and acknowledge that, you know what? God loves my kid way more than I ever could. And because God loves them, he has a plan for them. And he has a design for them. And he has promises for them. And the best thing I can possibly do for my child is to step out of the way and be Joseph and try to simply obey Jesus in the moment when the moments present themselves. But to be people of peace about our children. About your career, are you Jacob or are you Joseph? Are you constantly trying to scheme and align yourselves with the right people and form the right relationships and do the right thing and impress the right person by putting that right time stamp on the email early in the morning or late at night? Are we constantly trying to figure out how to advance ourself in our career? Or are we Joseph? I know that God loves me. And I know that he cares deeply about who I work around and what I do and my witness for him as I work with my coworkers. And so I know that if I work hard and honor him, that he's going to do with my career whatever it is he needs to do. Many in our church are facing retirement. We've recently retired. We're thinking about it. Are you Jacob about that or are you Joseph? Are you trying to control every aspect of it and think through it and plan it all out and map it out and know exactly what's going to happen or can you acknowledge, you know what, I think God loves me and he cares deeply about what I do in the rest of the years of my life. And he's going to direct me to the right place if I trust him with him. In our relationships, in our marriages that we might be trying to save, in broken relationships with friends or with family, are we Jacob or are we Joseph? Are we people of strife or are we people of peace? Are we people who are trying to arrest control from God or are we people who trust God enough to give him control? And if you are a person who's answering over and over again, gosh, I'm Jacob. I'm Jacob and I want the peace that you're talking about, but I don't know how to get it. What do I do? I would simply tell you that our peace is found in Jesus. This is why I think Paul writes in Philippians 4, 6, and 7, be anxious for nothing, but in everything with prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in who? In Christ Jesus. If you're anxious, if you're controlling, if you're worried, if you're not trusting God with things, what does Paul tell you to do in the letter to the Philippians? He tells you, And you know how he's going to do that? By giving you more Jesus. By pointing you towards Christ. Hebrews writes the same thing. Run the race that's set before you. How? By focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Jesus says the same thing in John 15. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the other things. Don't worry about all the scheming. Don't worry about everything else that I'm going to do in your life. You focus on me. You abide in me. And I'll abide in you. And because of that, everything's going to work out. You're going to bear much fruit. If we want to be like Joseph, and we want to walk away from being like Jacob, then we need to acknowledge that our peace is found in Jesus. And our anxiety and our desire for control should be a reminder to us that we simply need more Jesus. That we simply need to follow him harder. That we simply need to press into him more. That we simply need to let go of something more. If you want to test this, trust him with something that's stressing you out in your life right now. Just this last week, I had a conversation with a couple in the church that I knew was going to be a hard conversation. And I had been stressed out about it for a while. The conversation happened the day after I stumbled on this lesson and this comparison of person of peace, person of strife. And I thought, all right, I'm gonna preach to myself here. Normally, when I go into a difficult conversation or a meeting, I have thought through, Jen will tell you, I have thought through every scenario. I've had every conversation in my head already. I hate being unprepared. I like to have thought through what's gonna happen so that I don't respond emotionally. I respond reasonably. I like to know that there's nothing that's going to happen that I'm not expecting. But for this one, I just chose to be Joseph. And I said, God, I know you love me. I know you love them. I know the results of this conversation matter to you. And that was good. And I went into the conversation trying to honor God with what we talked about, and so did they. And we would all tell you, the results of this conversation were far better than any of us thought they would be going into it. And the Holy Spirit was present with us that night, and he met with us that night. If this is a difficult concept for you, pick one thing that's stressing you out in your life and hand it to Jesus and watch him come through. Because here's what happens when we're people of peace and people of strife. Strife and peace permeate. Strife and peace, they bleed out onto other people. They act like my four-month-old son, John, right now. John permeates, man. He is a drool monster. Like, he wakes up. First of all, he's just drooling like crazy. I don't know what's going on in there. Jen picked him up in the living room the other day and was holding him up and smiling at him. And I saw what she couldn't, which was a bead of spit glimmering in the sunlight through the window that landed square on her forehead, and I died laughing. That is John. I did not even get her a towel. I was laughing too hard. Not only that, not only does he drool constantly, the kid wakes up, and the only thing he cares about in life is how much of his hand fits into his mouth. That's the only thing that matters to him. Nothing else. He doesn't care about a single thing else. It's just how much of this can I jam in here? And it's all he does. And it gets his hand all slobbery. So he'll wipe it on your face or he'll grab you. You'll pick him up. I picked him up yesterday. I picked him up when I was holding him and put him down and my forearm was wet from his leg, from drool that had run down and somehow his legs are really chubby. They had gotten in places and just to touch John is to have drool on you. It just is. I don't know how it happens. It just permeates. Strife and joy work the same way. When you're a person of strife and stress, it permeates, man. It bleeds. It gets on everybody around you. It gets on your spouse and it changes their days. It gets on your kids, it changes their days. It gets on your coworkers, it gets on your friends. Strife bleeds and permeates and has ripples on everyone around you. And so does peace, particularly in a world of so much strife. Normally, when people of strife are around each other, their stress starts amping everyone up, right? We kind of get into a frenzy. You're complaining about this, and I'm complaining about this, and life stinks together, and then we get all worked up about everything. But to be a person of peace that actually calms those waves of strife, well that has a calming effect on everyone around us too. To be a person of trust and for people to see this trust that Joseph had, regardless of circumstances, well that begins to bleed on other people too. So I thought it worth it to pause at this point in the story and acknowledge this idea that the same favor rests on these two men. The difference in their life is how they receive that favor. Jacob's striving made him blind to it. Joseph's trust helped him to see it. And it gave him peace and joy for his whole life that it took Jacob 40 years to experience. And so in our lives and in our situations, which ones do we want to be? Now, as Joseph is in jail, eventually Pharaoh gets angry with his cupbearer and his baker, and he throws them in jail too. And they're under the care of Joseph. While they're there, they have some dreams. And they go to Joseph and they say, we've had some dreams. We've heard that you're a good, good at interpreting dreams. Can you tell us what they mean? And Joseph again says that I'm not good at it. God is, but let's see what you got. And they tell Joseph his dreams. I'm not, their dreams. I'm not going to detail those for you. Those are in the text and you can read them if you like. I hope you will. But they say, these are our dreams. What do they mean? And he looks at the cupbearer and he's like, great news. You, here's what's going to happen. In three days, Pharaoh is going to call you back to service and you're going to serve him. And he's going to restore you to your former position. You're going to go out of prison, back to your former life. Everything's going to be good. And the cupbearer is like, that's great. What's mine mean? And Joseph's like, not as good of news. You're going to get called out of here in three days as well, but when Pharaoh calls you out of here, he's going to hang you, and you're going to die in three days. And as they're leaving, Joseph looks at the cupbearer, and he says, don't forget me. When you go, and Pharaoh restores you, remember me, that I might get out of this pit. I know I'm doing great here in jail. I don't love it. So remember me to Pharaoh that I might get out of here as well. And chapter 39 ends with the somber news that everything that Joseph said would happen did happen, except the cupbearer forgot about him. And we're going to pick up the story next week and spend the whole week on the very first sentence in the next chapter. And it may just be the best part of this whole seven-week series. So I hope that you can come for it, and I hope that we'll get to see you for the hootenanny. Let me pray, and we'll carry on next week. Father, thank you for the way that you speak to us out of Scripture. Thank you for the way that you speak to us through circumstances. Lord, I just pray that... I pray that we would be sensitive to those things. God, give us ears to hear. We know, we know and we've seen over and over again that the same spirit that speaks to Joseph, that spoke to Jacob, that speaks to me, speaks to us. So God, speak to grace and move in grace and press on the hearts of grace for what you would have us do and where you would have us go. Give us the faith to trust you even when we can't fully see the results of that trust yet. Give us the peace that comes from trusting you. Let us this week, those of us who are Jacobs, experience just a taste of the joy that comes when we trust you with a stressful situation and watch you come through in the way that only you can. Father, help us to trust you in all things, to acknowledge that you care about the details of our life even more than we do, and that you have a plan for us that is better than any we could ever come up with. Help us to walk in trust of you, and in turn, walk in peace and influence the people around us. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. What up, faces? Good to see everybody. This is great. Thank you for being here this Sunday morning. It really is good to get to see everybody's faces. I didn't really know what to expect this morning, but this is really, really great. It's good to see y'all. Thank you for joining us online if that's what you're doing. Somebody told me this morning it was a little bit hard to get out of the omelet routine, but they made it here anyway. But if you came to the omelet routine and you're enjoying one right now, good for you and your sweatpants. But we are happy to be here. This is, I think, part six of our series called Faithful, where we're looking at the stories of faithful women throughout Scripture that really have profound impacts on the kingdom of God through simply being faithful and kind of walking in obedience with what God placed in front of them. This morning we arrive at a woman in the New Testament named Lydia. And I think that she is an incredibly relevant figure for us in the New Testament church and particularly for us in the North Raleigh community. And I'll tell you why, but we really don't get much of a picture of Lydia except for this snippet of verses in Acts chapter 16. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Acts chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 13 through 15. A little bit later, we're going to be in Philippians chapter 1. So you can go ahead and mark your Bible if you want to turn there and read with me. But we don't get a lot about Lydia. We just get this snippet about her involvement in the church in Philippi. And that city might sound familiar to you. That is the church that Paul planted that received the letter that we know as Philippians. So a lot in the New Testament is made up of these letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Corinthians. Those are letters from Paul to churches that he planted. And so Lydia plays an integral role in the church that he planted in Philippi. And so this is where we pick up the story. He's gone to Philippi, and he has begun to preach the gospel. This is his very first day. He has just arrived. He goes to the town square. He begins to preach the gospel, and he meets this woman named Lydia. Here's what happens. We're going to pick it up in verse 13. the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. And after she was baptized in her household as well, she urged us saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us. So Paul and his traveling seminary, as it's known in theological circles, Timothy, Titus, Barnabas, some of these guys are traveling with him. There could have been as little as four or as many as eight to ten folks with him as he traveled. They go into Philippi. They go to a place of prayer. So they go to wherever the spiritual place was, and they share the gospel. They talk about Jesus. Lydia hears this message of the gospel, is compelled, says she's in. She, I want to sign up. What do I have to do? They had her fill out a new member card, and she put it in the, she, they talked, and she accepted Christ right there, and then they took the next step of getting baptized, which is, we always see baptism as a step of obedience after faith, and so she took this step of obedience. She got baptized. And it says her household was baptized. So her family members were baptized. And then she looked at Paul, who just rolled into town, and she said, you guys need a place to stay. Come stay at my house. And I love the way that she leverages the spiritual guilt here. If you are willing to validate the faith that I am claiming, if you believe me, then stay at my house. If you don't think that this stuck, you know, you don't think I'm really a Christian, then go stay somewhere else. But if you think that what you just did worked, then come stay at my house. Like, what choice does he have? So he says, okay, I'll stay. Now, in this, just this little short snippet here, I feel like we see so much about Lydia that is really profoundly accurate to us. Before I do that, though, there's one thing in here, in this snippet about Lydia that I wanted to point out. This is not part of the sermon, okay? So let's pretend together that we've entered into a parenthetical expression, okay? I'm opening up the parentheses. Normally when I preach a sermon, I don't like to make a bunch of different points. I try to just make one point to send you home with to think about, but I don't know when I'm going to get back to Lydia and this was too good of a thing to pass up and not mention to you, okay? So while I'm in the parentheses, as I was researching Lydia, it says in the text that she was a worshiper of God. But it also says in the text that God opened her heart to receive what Paul had to say. A lot of scholars believe that she was sympathetic to the Jews that were already there, that had preceded her. So she knew about the same God that we worship, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The same God that Paul was preaching about, the same God that sent his son Jesus. She knew about this God, and she was sensitive to this God, but she wasn't all the way in on this God. She wasn't a practicing Jew. Lydia was from Thyatira. She grew up in a pagan environment. She grew up with Greek and Roman pantheons. That was probably her heritage. And so what we know about Lydia is that she was spiritually sensitive and spiritually seeking. She was open spiritually, but she was not yet decided spiritually. And when Paul came into town and shared the good news of the gospel, talked about Jesus, and she heard him, everything clicked with her. She was sensitive to the Jewish God, and now she'd heard the message from Paul, and now it makes sense to her. Now it clicks with her, and now she's all in. And what I think is fascinating and incredibly relevant for us now is that she was spiritually sensitive, spiritually seeking. And what we see is that God had laid the groundwork, that the Holy Spirit had begun to knead the soul of Lydia and the heart of Lydia as for fertile ground so that when her soul finally encountered the gospel, it would spring forth and respond to it. And so Lydia's conversion has very little to do with the profundity of Paul's words and the effectiveness of his sharing of the gospel and has everything to do with the Holy Spirit working on the heart of Lydia to prepare her for this moment. And I wanted to stop there and point that out so that I could simply ask you, how many Lydia's are there in your life? How many Lydia's will you encounter on your tennis team or on the golf course or in the office or in the neighborhood, the new couple that comes over and you don't want to help them move their things in, but if you do, you might get to have a conversation with them. How many people are just floating around in our lives whom the Holy Spirit has been working on, who are spiritually sensitive and seeking, who are attuned to spiritual things, and who are ready to hear the gospel, are fertile ground for the message of Christ, and they're simply waiting on you, like Paul, to blow into their life and actually share that story. So don't shy away from doing that. We have the opportunity to talk about our faith. We have the opportunity to answer spiritual questions of the people around us. We have no idea how long the Holy Spirit has been working that soil to prepare it for the good news of Jesus. So share the gospel. We have no idea when we're talking to Lydia. Okay, close parentheses. That may be what you needed. The rest of this may stink for you, and maybe it all stinks. I don't know. But hopefully something is effective. But that's that idea. You take that for what it worth. Now, the other thing we see about Lydia, and this is, I think, probably more relevant to our North Raleigh crowd, is that Lydia was a dealer of purple, okay? Now, many of you probably know, you probably picked up in your history lessons somewhere along the lines that purple was an incredibly expensive dye. It was the most difficult dye to create in the ancient world. I think it came from snails and getting it was really, really tough. And so anything that was dyed purple was an incredibly expensive garment. That's why purple is the color of royalty. So she dealt in really high-end goods. Think of her as like she owned Lululemon. Really overly expensive, not worth it stuff. That's what she sold. Then other rich people just flocked to it. This must be what we need. Surely purple is the color. That's what they did. Okay, so this is her. She's walking in affluent circles. She's a successful woman. By all accounts, very few scholars and theologians, she was single. So she was widowed or her husband had left her or something, but she was the head of her household, which is an interesting dynamic in the ancient world that didn't happen a lot. She becomes very influential in the church, which I think is a phenomenal example for the women that are influential in the church now and the elders that we have. But she was an affluent woman. She had things. She had money by all accounts. By all accounts, she probably had a big, nice house. She invited six to eight guys to come stay there and feed them for what ended up being a longer stay than Paul had had at any of the other cities. She was a woman of means. And I think that this is particularly interesting because up until this point, we really haven't seen anyone with wealth and affluence and resources encounter the gospel and sign up to become a part of the church. When we read the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that have the story of Jesus and the disciples within them, we see Jesus say things like, foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but even the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. I've told you before that Jesus and the disciples literally couch surfed and camped for three years while they went around Israel doing ministry. They didn't have a home base. Maybe Mary and Martha and Lazarus' house in Bethany was the closest thing they had to home base. I'm sure they could sleep there whenever they decided they needed to, but they didn't have anything. And when Jesus called the disciples, he didn't exactly call them away from lucrative careers. They're fishermen and tax collectors and carpenters and farmers probably. So he didn't call them away from means into poverty. And then Jesus actually encounters a rich man and he says, what do I have to do? And he says, sell everything you have and follow me. And there's an important principle there, which means I need to be more important to you than your stuff. So if you can prove that that's true, then come on. Otherwise, your priorities aren't there yet. But we don't see in the Gospels a person of influence and means encounter faith and become a believer and get engaged in the church. This is really, to my knowledge, the first time we see this. And I think that that would make this particularly interesting to the American church and even more particularly interesting to the North Raleigh crowd. Because listen, it's not a secret. We know this. We may as well be able to be comfortable with it and talk about it at church. A lot of us, we've got means. We have a couple extra nickels to rub together. A lot of folks in this church, you probably have more now than you thought you would when you were growing up, when you started your career. I'd be willing to bet there's a pretty good chance that for a lot of us, especially those of us who are at the tail end of our career or have already hung it up, you probably have been blessed with more than you expected. There's a lot of affluence in North Raleigh. Just to be honest, we got a lot of people at the church who have means, who have been successful. And that's okay. We have some people who might feel like, I'm not one of those. You might be talking to everybody else. You're not talking to me. I am not a person of affluence. I can relate to you. But listen, if you compared yourself to some of the families that we support at Fox Road, I bet you probably are affluent compared to them. And I know for a fact that everybody in this room, if you wanted to compare yourself to the families that we go to Mexico and build houses for, for $6,000 worth of cinder block, you're pretty affluent compared to them. So to me, when a woman of means encounters the gospel and then begins to interact with the church, we as North Raleigh should lean in and say, how do we do that? What's the example that she sets for us? How does she encounter the church with her wealth and with her affluence and with her resources? Because we are a church that has wealth and affluence and resources to varying degrees. And I feel like it's important to ask this question and to learn from her example because there exists in Christian circles, and I think it's almost uniquely Christian or maybe just uniquely religious, but my experience is Christianity, it's uniquely Christian to kind of feel bad about wealth, right? To kind of feel bad about having. To not want to have too much. To not want to drive too nice of a car. To not want my house to be too big. To not have to, I'm going to get a beach house, but it's going to be modest, you know? Like, I'm going to have a golf membership. It could be there. It's going to be here. It's going to be cheaper. Like, there's some uncomfortable stuff that exists around the things that we have and the resources that are available to us. We're just not comfortable with it. Case in point, I saw this displayed for me a little while ago. Some time ago, I was with somebody that I consider a friend. They're very dear to the family. He's not from here, so don't try to figure out who it is. I was with him, and our families were together. He's older than me. He's like my dad's age, so he's in generation older than me, and it was time. We decided to hop in the car and go get some meat to throw on the grill. So we go and we hop in his car and he's got a new car, it's a new Mercedes. And I hop in the Mercedes and we're riding down the road and I'm looking around and listen, I'm not a car guy. Okay. I don't, I drove a Nissan Leaf for the first three years that I was here. I think that's, that's all you need to know, to know that I'm not a car guy. All right. I don't care, but I am a car interior guy. I like soft seats, and I like big screens, and I like things that you touch, and then they change. Like, I like the technology inside of cars. That's pretty important to me. So I sit in this big, nice Mercedes, and I'm looking, and there's a screen like the whole width of the dashboard, and the seats are-stitched by elves and it is nice in there. It is really nice. I'm certain that a baby animal died for that steering wheel. I'm positive of it. We're riding down the road and I'm like, this is nice, man. Do you like this better? Prior to this, he had a BMW. I said, do you like it better than this? Yeah, for these reasons. Well, what does this do? And I'm kind of just talking to him about his car. It's a new car. He just got it. He says he likes it a lot. And so, great, let's talk about your car. And at some point or another, a few minutes in, he goes, he plays this card on me. Oh, you know, it's just a car. Oh. It's just a car. Just give me point A to point B. Okay, all right, loud and clear. We'll talk about something else. So we talk about something else. Now, I get home. I shouldn't admit this to you. Please don't judge me for this. But when he said, ah, it's just a car, that got under me a little bit. Because I'm like, bull, not just a car. So I Google it. I know, sorry. I Google it. The car's $115,000. Now listen, I don't care if your car is $115,000. It doesn't matter one little bit to me. But don't try to convince me that it's just a car. You don't get to play. Here's the deal. If you spend $115,000 on your car, that's fine. That's between you and your creator. I don't care what you do, but don't come at me with, well, it just gets me from point A to point B. If that's true, buy a Prius, okay? That's a $115,000 Mercedes that does more than that. I've seen it. It's nice. But you know why I did that? Because he's a really godly dude. I wish he would move here and become one of our elders. He teaches a weekly Sunday school class, and he sends me the notes every week. And you guys would benefit way more from his Sunday school class than from my sermons. I'll tell you that right now. They're really good. And he supports his church. He's integral there. His children love the Lord. And I thought about why did he feel the need to kind of, it's just a car. Because there's this thing about wealth and about having things that makes us uncomfortable. And there's those questions that we ask. I need a new car. How nice is too nice? I'm going to buy a new house. How big is too big? I'm going to get new countertops. How nice if they have gold in them? Is that too much? Should I not get that? And within these Christian circles, I think that we're made to feel badly about having means, about having nice things. And so when the gospel encounters a woman who has nice things and has means, I want to see how she responds to it and how she serves the church. Because I think we get caught up in that. How much car is too much car? Do I really need this extra wash? Do I really need this extra thing? Do I really need the Lululemon? Do I really need these need these things? Or should I be giving it to the kingdom? Like, how should this all work? What's the interaction there? And listen, I don't care how nice your things are. And for those of us who might want to judge my friend for having a car that's that nice, I'll tell you this, I can guarantee you that that car cost him less from a perspective of net worth and annual income than my 2015 Highlander cost me. It's got leather seats. It's really nice. And so I have lived enough years to get off being concerned how nice is too nice. I know they'd say they're a believer, but they live like this and they have all of these things. And do you know what they could do with that? I don't deal with that. That's between you and your creator. I don't care. I'm happy when my friends have nice things. It doesn't matter to me. And I think when we start to worry about what kind of things it's okay to have that we get it wrong. We're not thinking about it correctly anyways. What I want us to see this morning is it's okay to have things. What matters is what we do with what we have. It's okay to have affluence. It's okay to be successful. It's okay to have more than you would have expected. What matters is what you do with the resources that you have. This is why the example of Lydia, I think, is so important. Lydia encounters the gospel and immediately, right away, she accepts Christ, she gets baptized, she has her household baptized, they believe too, and then immediately her wheels start turning. How can I use what I have to serve this new church that I'm a part of? What can I do to move this forward? She knows she doesn't need to preach. She's not going to go preach it more effectively than Paul did. They don't have a 401c3. They don't have anything to give to. So what can I do to help this movement that I am now a part of? I know. I have a big house. I have people who can cook. We're going to handle your meals. We're going to take care of you. Come stay at my house. If you do nothing else at all, if you believe me that I am sincere in my faith, please allow me to use my resources to bless this ministry. Allow me to use what I have to move forward God's kingdom by giving you a comfortable place to stay. I almost did a whole sermon on the incredible hospitality of Lydia and how that's rippled down through the years, but I actually think it's more than that. It's not just being hospitable. It's in her head. The switch was flipped immediately. Okay, I'm a part of the kingdom of God now. How do I use the things that I have access to to further this kingdom? And so it's not about what we have. Who cares? It's about what we do with what we have. It's about flipping the switch in our brain that makes us stewards of what we have. A few weeks ago, we did baby dedications, and we talked about this idea of stewardship just very briefly. These children are not our children. They are God's children that have been entrusted to us, and we are going to hand them back over to him. The things that you have are not your things. They are God's things that he has entrusted to you, and you are responsible for how you use them. She immediately got this idea of stewardship and wanted to use her resources to further the church that she was now a part of. And so what we see is that Lydia's faithful stewardship had a profound impact on the church. What we find out later is that Paul and his companions stayed in Philippi for longer than they stayed anywhere else in that journey because they had these good, now budding relationships there. They felt so welcomed there. What we see in the letter that he writes back to the church in Philippi is this incredible warmth from Paul. It's called by scholars the Joyful Letter. It's a very short book. I think it's four chapters, but it's incredibly impactful. It's a great book. If you're just picking up the Bible, you don't know what to read, read Philippians gospel and do his work so that the church could take off there, so that we could have this letter thousands of years later. And if you don't believe me, I'm going to read, I think it's the first eight verses in Philippians, because this is Paul greeting them. So what Paul does is he goes around and he plants churches. And then he goes on to the next place. He leaves them in the hand of capable leaders. And he goes on to the next place. And then he writes letters back to them to encourage them. I've heard these things are going on. I want to encourage you in these ways. He writes letters back to them. This is what makes up a bulk of our New Testament. These letters that Paul wrote to the churches. And at the beginning of the letters, he always says, greetings to you, grace and peace from Paul, an apostle in Jesus Christ, and says a couple of things, and then he gets into it. But I'm telling you, the greeting for the church in Philippi has more warmth and heart to it than any other letter by far. Look at what he says. He says, Paul to this. This is a direct reference to Lydia. That is a warm letter. I love grace. If God takes me somewhere years from now and I write you a letter back, it will not start like this. It will not be this warm. That is an incredible amount of love and warmth. I pray for you all the time. My heart yearns for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. My soul yearns to be with you as it does with Jesus Christ for your partnership with me from the first day until now. You can't tell me that Lydia's instant switch to stewardship, that Lydia's hospitality, that Lydia leveraging her resources to further God's kingdom didn't have a profound impact on Paul and on the people traveling with him and on the efficacy of the church that they left behind through this simple act that we see of hospitality where Lydia says, I have resources, they're yours now, you can use whatever you need. And so the lesson of Lydia is this. Maybe God has given you stuff so he can use your stuff. Maybe God has given you resources so that he can use your resources to further his kingdom and to bless others. Maybe we don't just have more than what we expected because life has just been good and now we're supposed to enjoy it. Maybe we're stewards of the things that we have to further God's kingdom. Maybe he gave you stuff because he wants to use your stuff. And if we will adopt this mindset of stewardship and use our resources for the things of God as directed by God, quit getting worked up about whether or not it's okay to have and just admit that we do and say, okay, God, now how can I use this for your kingdom? He is still in the business of bringing about profound change and impacting eternity out of generous hearts. I remember when Jen and I were, I think we were engaged or just newly married. We will have been married 15 years this July. Can you imagine? Poor Jen, 15 years every day. Jen's parents bought a lake house. A little bit south of Atlanta, there's a lake called Lake Oconee, and they bought a lake house down there. And Jen's sister was in college. And they said they bought this lake house, And then they said the Christian thing about buying the lake house, right? Like, they're doing okay in life. They're buying a lake house. And we're like, oh, that's great, John Terry. You're buying a lake house. And they're like, it's for ministry. Sure. You can minister to yourself on Saturday morning while you're looking at the water. I want to be a part of that ministry, right? And I've seen people say, we're finishing our basement for ministry. We're getting a third house to minister to people because once a year, the pastor stays there for a weekend. So it's God's, right? This is how we do it. And so they said, we're getting this lake house. I'm like, oh, that's great. And they're like, it's for ministry. And I was like, sure. Yeah, you can minister to me and Jen. We'll eat your food. But they meant it. They meant it. And Lauren, who we called the Pied Piper, was always bringing tons of friends, right? Every weekend, John worked at AT&T. He'd wrap up at 4.30 on Friday and he he'd head down the road to the lake house, and Lauren and her friends would meet him there. And every weekend, they'd go down there, and Terry would drive down and meet them, and me and Jen were invited, and it was really thrilling for me to get to ride on the boat and have an opportunity to wakeboard after these chiseled Adonis college athletes were back there doing flips, and then I'd get up there and just kind of fall over and get concussed and want to come back in the boat. I loved going to the lake. But these kids came every week, and they would feed them. They would buy steaks. They would buy tons of stuff, more food than they could know what to do with. They'd throw it all away at the end of the weekend, and they'd do the very same thing the next week. This became such a regular thing that they started to come without Lauren. They started to come without calling. There was one night, I'm not making this up, 10.30 at night, John and Terry are in bed. It's 10.30, they're falling asleep, and they hear, Big John! Big John! And he looks out the window, and there's literally 15 college guys parked in front of his house. And the only one that he knows is a guy named John Collins, who's the one yelling at him. And John says, I told my friends you wouldn't care if we came. To which I would say, you've lied to your friends. I do care a lot, and go away. John goes down the stairs, flings open the door, makes sure everybody has something to eat, makes sure everybody's got a place to sleep. They're sleeping all over the floor. It wasn't a big place. They're sleeping all over the floor like on each other. Next day, he's up at 7. He's taking them out on the wakeboard all day. He tells Terry we've got to get some stuff for them. She goes grocery shopping. They host these boys, right? This happened all the time. They loved him. He was in some of their weddings. He profoundly impacted these boys by literally using that lake house as a ministry, by not getting worked up about, is it good or is it bad or should I or shouldn't I, but saying, God, I'm going to buy this and it's going to be yours. Some of those boys prayed to accept Christ with him. He got to meet their kids. And 15 years after they experienced the generosity, and they called him Professor Vinson, there was 15 of those boys at his funeral. They flew in from Miami and Phoenix and Boston, and they were there, and they were blubbering, and they were talking about the profound impact that John had on their life. They were talking about how he showed them through his generosity and being measured with them what it was to be a man who walked with Jesus. One of them was his pallbearer. One of the pallbearers, he was crying so hard outside of the church that I had to do his part because he literally couldn't. John was a man who had a good job and he was successful. He made smart decisions. But when he had the ability to help, he did. When he had the ability to give, he did. And like Lydia, because the gospel took root in his life, he didn't see his things as his things. He saw them as God's things for him to hold on to and use for God's kingdom. So I would tell you this this morning. The lesson of Lydia is still true today. God still uses a generous spirit in deeply profound ways that will echo through the decades that you have no idea about. He gave you your stuff so that he could use your stuff to further his kingdom. And so what I'm telling you this morning is, in this affluent North Raleigh community, I don't care how much you have. I don't care how much resources you have. I don't care what you buy or any of that stuff. What matters to God is what you use it for, however much or little you have. What matters to God is our attitude towards the resources that he's given us. And so I would tell you this this morning. If you have your things, and you have your wealth, whatever that means to you, you have your resources, whatever that means to you, you have these things in your life, you feel blessed by them. If you're the only one that's blessed by them, if your families are the only ones that are blessed by them, there's a chance we're misusing God's things. There's a chance we're not learning the lesson of Lydia and understanding that God gave us stuff so that he could use our stuff. God gave us resources so that he could use our resources. Can you imagine the type of impact a church like this with the resources that we have can have on our community if we will more and more learn this lesson from Lydia and see these things. When we encounter the gospel, look at the resources that we have, not feel bad about having them, but say to ourselves, how can we leverage these things as a church to impact our community together? The good news is, I think a lot of us get this. We're pretty good at this, but I want to see us do more. I want to see us adopt this mindset. I want to see us learn more and more from the lesson and from the example of Lydia and believe that by being faithful stewards of the gift that God has given us that we can make profound impacts on the decades to come and even eternity. So let's be like Lydia. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. God, for those of us that feel blessed, we just thank you for that. We thank you that we do have more than we could ask or imagine. I pray that we would see ourselves as stewards of the resources that you've given us. I pray that it would matter deeply to us to leverage the things we have to further your kingdom, to reach people for you, to point people towards Jesus. Father, for those of us who feel like we might be struggling, I just, I pray that we would see that as a season. I pray that those folks would be blessed in that they're struggling. God, plant seeds in us, little ideas of generosity and a generous spirit. Give us the opportunity to participate on the front lines with what you're doing and experience the blessing of what it is to bless others with things that you've used to bless us to. Make us as a church more like your servant Lydia. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to be up here again. I usually start with my name is Nate, but I think we covered that earlier in the announcement, so I'm just going to jump right into things. This week, I had the opportunity to do two things that I think are kind of a special part of the experience of being a pastor. On Tuesday, I got to go visit a couple in the hospital who goes to the church who just had their new baby, Hudson Harper, the grandson of John Susan Turnburg and then the son of Lauren Harper and Brandon Harper. And it was a sweet, sweet thing to go there and to visit with them and to see this tiny little baby that could barely open his eyes and have the opportunity to talk to them and pray with them. And you kind of get invited into these special spaces that you might not always get to experience. I got invited into this hospital room with them, and it was a really great thing. And then Friday, I got to do a wedding for a couple. They were a sweet couple. He was 34. She was 31. This is their first marriage. They waited for each other. They found each other. They dated for two years. And I got to stand there and do their wedding and be a part of that. And that was a neat experience. And then as we're doing the vows, dude can barely choke through them. Like he is so choked up. He's so moved with love for this woman that he is going to marry. It was a really, really sweet moment. It really was. And what strikes me about those moments is they're both so very full of hope, right? They're both so very full of hopes and dreams. If you know, if you've had a kid, then you know what it is to hold that kid and realize, oh my goodness, all the things you hope for them, all the things that you want for them, all the things that you hope are true of them in their adolescence and into adulthood. And if you know Jesus and you believe in prayer, then you pray for them, you hope for them, you dream about them. And when you get married and you stand at the altar and you look at the person that you're giving your life to, you have hopes and dreams about that marriage as well. You have things that you want to be true, stories that you hope God writes in your life. And those are two really hopeful moments. And they remind me that we all have hopes and dreams. You carried hopes and dreams into this room. We all have things that we want. We all have things that we hope are true one day. That's how we are wired. And sometimes life changes those hopes and dreams. If you go back to when you had a kid and then you look at him now, you're like, that's not what I was hoping for. God adjusts those. Sometimes marriage doesn't go the way that we hoped that it would go. But we change them. We augment them. We still have these hopes and we still have these dreams. We have things that we want for ourselves. And it makes me wonder, if we have hopes and dreams for our children, and we believe that God is our Father in heaven, then he has hopes and dreams for us. And I wonder what those are. I wonder what God hopes for us. I wonder what God's will is for us. I wonder what he wants for each of his children. I wonder what he wants for his church. I wonder what he wants for you. I wonder what he wants for the people that you love the most. And I think that we actually arrive in Ephesians chapter three, as we go through the book of Ephesians in our series, I think we actually arrive at a place where we see God's hopes and dreams for us. I think they're articulated through the person of Paul in this prayer. We're going to be looking at Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. In that span of verses, I tweeted out or sent out on social media this week that this is my favorite passage in the Bible. Aaron, our children's pastor, was laughing at me because apparently I have a lot of favorites, but this is like my favorite favorite, okay? I love this prayer. It's a prayer that he prays to the churches surrounding the ancient city of Ephesus. He prays this prayer, a very similar prayer, over the church in Colossae, in the book of Colossians. We find it there. We find it in the book of Philippians that he prays over the church in Philippi. This prayer has made such an impact on me and the way that I think about things and the way that I hope for the people that God entrusts to me that the very first sermon that I was able to choose when I came to grace, I came to grace in April of 2017. And the first two Sundays were Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. And so those had already kind of been determined what was going to be preached that day. But the first passage that I got to choose to preach to my new church was Ephesians 3, verses 14 through 19. When I go and I visit a kid in the hospital that's born, I pray the ethic or the ethos of this verse over them. The takeaway from this prayer, I pray over them. When I pray for Lily, my own daughter, every night, the first prayer I prayed for her was this. The first thing I pray, the thing I pray for her every night, I try to, is this, that she would know God. And when I pray for the marriages that I do, I pray that they would know God. And that's what we see in this prayer. But I don't just expect you to care about this prayer because I do. I don't just expect you to think it's a big deal because I think it's a big deal. And I don't just expect you to accept that these are God's hopes and dreams for you without a little bit of work or a little bit of background because I say they're a big deal. And I think that fundamental to this prayer is really understanding Paul. I think to appreciate the prayer, we have to appreciate the person who prayed it. Now, if I had made these notes later in the week when I was really on my game, I would have said to appreciate the prayer, you have to appreciate the prayer. Yeah, that's better. But this is fine. You have to appreciate the person who prayed the prayer. So who is the person of Paul? I feel like in church we talk about Paul. You've heard me say Paul before, and you know that you're supposed to acknowledge that he's a big deal. But I wonder if sometimes we don't know bits and pieces of who he is, and we don't really know the whole person of Paul. Maybe Paul to you is kind of like Bruce Springsteen to me. I have to confess to you, I don't really know anything that he sang. I don't, I'm sorry. I grew up in a cruel regime that didn't allow me to listen to secular music. And so the 70s and the 80s are totally lost on me until I could start sneaking like Offspring and Dave Matthews in the 90s. Like that's when I started listening to music. Before that, it was just just the Bill Gaither vocal band, which is awesome. I mean, don't hate on them. Some of you are not laughing. You're like, I don't get this. Don't. Google it. You're going to have a great afternoon. But like, I don't know who Bruce, I don't know what he's saying. I'm pretty sure he's called the boss. I think he's from New Jersey. I don't know. You don't have to tell me. I don't really care. And like, this, I was trying to tell the staff, like what songs did he sing? And my first two guesses were Born to Be Wild. No. And Summer of 69. No, that's not true. I think Born in the USA. Is that one? That's literally all I know. They taught me that this week. That's all I know. But my whole life, people will mention Bruce Springsteen. I'm like, yeah, the boss. He's the man. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know anything about him. I just fake it because by this time it's too late to ask any questions, right? I think sometimes we do that with Paul. We mention him in church. Last week you heard me say that he has these things called epistles. That sounds very fancy. Letters that he wrote to the churches. We know that he went around planting churches. We know things about Paul, but I wonder if we really know this person and who he is. Maybe some of you do. Maybe some of you know the deep cuts, like you know the bootlegs, like you know that there's a third Corinthians floating around somewhere out there that we haven't read before. That's actually a true thing. That's a thing that exists. Maybe you know that. Maybe you don't, but I thought we could kind of piece together our knowledge of Paul so we can really appreciate the person that prays this prayer over the church in Ephesus and ultimately over us. Paul was born, Saul, in a city called Tarsus. And he grew up as a Jew's Jew, man. He came up, he was in training, he had just become a Pharisee. And one thing to know about Jerusalem and Israel at the time is that every civilization has a celebrity culture. Every civilization has people that they look at and go, those are the ones that we want to be like. And in Israel, it was the religious leaders. It was the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And so to grow up becoming a Pharisee was to be a part of the celebrity culture of Israel. It was to be young and up and coming. It was to be known. And he was the cream of the crop. He was at the top of the heap. He was the guy. He was the guy with all the potential in Israel. He was a Jew's Jew. And then when Jesus was crucified and his followers, known as simply the way, began to multiply, he said, this is a threat to Judaism, to what I believe in. It's my job to stamp it out. So he took it on his own shoulders to stamp out this young religion of Christianity. And he began to persecute the Christians in Jerusalem. And then he got a special order to go to the next nation over to a city called Damascus and stamp out the Christian movement going on there. And on the way to Damascus, Jesus appears to him and he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? He blinds him and he sends him to a place. He says, you stay here, someone's going to come to you. And then God goes to Ananias, this great prophet that lives. And he says, I want you to go to Saul, and I want you to heal him of the blindness that I'm struck him with. And Ananias says, I don't want to do that. If I go to see Saul, I'm going to get killed. No way. You can find some other sucker. And God says what I think is maybe one of the most ominous lines in the New Testament. Saul is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. For those of you who think that the Christian life, that once I become a Christian, there's no more suffering and God fixes everything that hurts me, I will show you how much he must suffer for my name. That's not in the Bible, this idea that we don't experience hardship once we know Jesus. The one who followed him maybe the best had some of the hardest trials. So Ananias goes to Saul, now named Paul, and he takes the scales off of his eyes. Paul is infused with his purpose. He is the chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles, okay? Gentile is anybody who's not a Jew. So that's almost everybody in this room. And Paul was the guy that God took his infant church that was birthed in Jerusalem, that had a couple thousand followers in this one city, and he handed, I think, this infant church to Paul, and he said, here, I need you to bring this to adolescence. He entrusted it to him. Carry my word, carry the mystery of the gospel, the thing that happened here with Jesus when he died on the cross. Take that to the other church, to the other cities surrounding us in Asia Minor and spread the word of this church. And Paul did his job well because here we are, another continent 2,000 years later. He went off into the wilderness for a number of years. When he felt like he was ready, he presented himself to the council, to the church council in Jerusalem, populated by the disciples and Jesus' brother, James. And he said, hey, I think I'm ready to do my job. I think I'm ready to go tell the Gentiles about this Jesus. Can I go? And they said, yeah, you have our blessing. So he went for the rest of his life on four missionary journeys. Some scholars say it was three journeys. some say four. The reason there's a debate is that his last journey, he was arrested and then put on a ship and taken to Rome. On his way to Rome, they shipwrecked on this island of Malta, and then eventually they got to Rome. And the whole time, Paul, because he's Paul, was sharing his faith and inspiring churches and writing letters. So some consider that his fourth missionary journey. The important thing to know is for his entire life, he traveled around and he planted churches and he inspired people and he brought people to the gospel. He had what was called a traveling seminary. It wasn't called that then, but we call it that now. He always had people who were younger than him, men and women that he was training up so that they could lead churches too. Timothy is his most famous disciple. He actually, the books of 1 and 2 Timothy were written letters from Paul to Timothy when he made Timothy the pastor in Ephesians. He sent Timothy to Ephesus and he said, that's going to be your church now. Here's some letters to guide you as you lead them. Paul was a great man. He is the most influential Christian to ever live. Paul literally said, and he meant it, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted to be with God so badly that he considered it a good thing if he were gonna die. But he understood that to be here was to serve God, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted death, not in a morose way, not in a suicidal way, not in a depressed way, but in a way that he said his picture of what eternity was was so great that he wanted that more than whatever this life had to offer. I spent a lot of time over the years, I haven't done it lately as much to my detriment, but for a while I was reading a lot of biographies. I love reading biographies about people that have done incredible things, men and women that have impacted history through the years. And whenever I read these biographies about good and bad people, people that did great things, people that did terrible things, I try to look for the commonalities. What is it about these people that make them great? What do they have in common through the years, whether it's Genghis Khan or whether it's George Washington or Steve Jobs? What do they have in common that helped them do these great things? And the one thing that I found in the biographies that I've read is that the thing that these great people have in common is this remarkable singularity of focus. They have this ability in their life to be laser focused on this thing that they think is so important. Above and beyond everything else, often to the detriment of other things that most normal people prioritize. A lot of times what they did, the great thing that they do, costs them all kinds of things in their personal lives. But they have the singularity of focus. And as I study Paul, without a doubt, he has the singularity of focus on God's church. He will not be distracted. All he ever cares about is building God's church and the people in God's church. And Paul had hopes and dreams for you too. He had a desire for you. And he had a desire for grace, just like he had a desire for the church in Ephesus. And if we wanna know what Paul prioritized, I think you can look at his prayers. This prayer is important because it reveals what Paul most values. The reason this passage is important is because it's revelatory to us. It tells us what Paul most values. If you were to go to Paul and you were to say, what's the, to you, if you could only ask for one thing for a church, what would it be? If we went to him and we said, if you could, Paul, if you could only pray one thing over grace, what would it be? I think it would be this. If you said, Paul, what, if you could only pray one thing over my marriage, over my kid, over me, over the people that I love, what would it be? I think it would be this passage. I really, truly do. And I think what's said in this prayer reveals his priorities for us. So let's look at what Paul prays over the churches around Ephesus, and I think over the New Testament church of which we are a part. He says this, That's Paul's prayer for you. If you were to say, Paul, what do you want from me and my family? This is it. This is what he wants. And I think it's worth going through sentence by sentence and making sure we really understand what it is that Paul's asking for us here. So if you look at verses 14, and I've actually asked Lynn running our slides today to just leave it up on the screen so that we can look at it together. If you look at verses 14 and 15, for this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. Paul is saying, listen, Ephesus, I want you to know, church, I want you to know, I pray for you. I pray for you. And when I do, here's what I pray. Now, it's interesting to note he gets on his knees. It's a posture of submission. God, your will be done, not mine. It's acknowledging that God is Lord over the whole earth, that all the churches are his. But really, the heart of this is Ephesus, church, I pray for you regularly. And when I do, let me tell you what I pray for. We see in 16, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being. And there's a purpose to that prayer that he wants to be strengthened you. He wants you to be strengthened in your inner being by his spirit so that there's a purpose to that prayer. Okay. That's not just one thing that he wants. He wants that for you because it leads to something else. And the thing that it leads to is so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, okay? Those first two things there, that you would be strengthened with power in your inner being by his spirit so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. That's salvation. That's what he's talking about. To understand what it means to become a Christian is for the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to spiritual truths that you had not yet seen. If you're a believer, then what's happened in your life is at some point or another, your eyes were opened and you realized, oh my goodness, because of choices I've made, I'm at odds with my creator. I have no way to repair my relationship with my creator, and I need something, some supernatural action so that I can be reunited with my creator. And then you realize through the Holy Spirit, because he's working in your heart and in your mind, that that's Jesus. The Holy Spirit's first work in your life is to turn you on to your need for a Savior, and then to open up the doors of your heart so that Christ can take residence in your heart, that Christ would dwell in your hearts through faith. This is a salvation experience. The very first thing that Paul prays for all of us is that we would be Christians, that we would be saved. If you're here this morning and you're not a part of a church and you're not a part of the church because you're not yet a believer, you just came with somebody or you wandered in, we are so glad that you are here. And I want you to know that Paul prays for you. He prays for you that you would become a believer. And not just mental ascent, not just, yeah, I think so. But that you would be strengthened in your inner being. And that phrasing, that denotes your heart, your guts, your core, and your bones down to the fiber of who you are. Be strengthened with the Spirit, I think, so that you won't doubt. So that you'll know that you know that you know that Christ has you. That he will take up residence in your heart, and that you know that you are a believer, that you will be strengthened to your core and have this confidence in knowing that God has you. He prays that for you. But he doesn't stop there. He doesn't just want you to be a believer. He doesn't just want you to know Christ and for Christ to take residence in your heart. But the result of that, and I think this is a beautiful thing, it says that Christ would dwell in your hearts in faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love. I love that phrase. When we're confident in the work that the Holy Spirit has done, we've been strengthened in our core. When Christ has taken up residence in our heart, the result of this, of knowing that we are saved, is that we are rooted and grounded in love. And as I thought about this phrase, I thought, man, this is a really appropriate phrase for 2019. Because we are a people and we are a culture that is becoming more and more aware of the idea of health. All of us, we express it in different ways. Some of us are old school tough guys and we would never really admit this. We just have other ways of saying it, but it's the same thing. We want to be mentally healthy. We want to be physically healthy. We want to be spiritually healthy. We want to be emotionally healthy. We want to be healthy people. Now, some of you, the best way that you have to be emotionally healthy is just to convince yourself that you don't have any of those and then go through life, okay? So that's how some of you have achieved emotional health. If it's working for you, I don't want to mess you up, but we all seek it. We even have little phrases that kind of tip us off and remind us that not everyone's healthy and that's why life happens this way sometimes. Sometimes somebody will say something to hurt your feelings and you'll go to someone who loves you and you'll say, man, so-and-so said this and gosh, it really bothered me. And they'll remind you that, you know what? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. You ever heard that? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. And that's true. Sometimes people who are unhealthy get their unhealth on you by saying regrettable things. Sometimes we see behaviors in others that are gross to us. Just last night, I wasn't gonna use this, but I am now. This will be fun. Jen and I got to go out on a date. It was nice. We went to Second Empire. It was a good restaurant. There's a six-top next to us, and there was a guy there who his voice was loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear all night. He was an insufferable cuss words. And he went on and on about how, I'm not kidding you. He was like in his fifties. We learned how much he could bench. We learned what kind of car he drive. We learned what he did for a living. We learned the people that he knew. We learned the resumes of everybody at the table. It was, he almost ruined our dinner. If my date had to been so pretty, it would have been a waste of a night. Let's pray. But here's the truth. That guy, he's pretty insufferable. He was a me monster. He needed people to like him. He's just not healthy. He hasn't found his true value and his true worth. So he wants you to know those things about him so that you go, you're something. And if you're smart, if you're empathetic, when you're around people like that, and I didn't do it last night because I was neither smart nor empathetic, but right here I can figure it out. You offer those people grace and you go, they're not healthy. They haven't yet found their worth, their sense of being and belonging. And what this verse is telling you is, once the Spirit has moved in your life and strengthened you, once Christ has taken up residence in your heart, man, you are loved by your creator who sent his son to die for you. And you have all the sense of worth and value that you'll ever need if you'll trust it. He gives you your identity. He imbues you with purpose. He tells you every day that he loves you and that you're enough. And if we believe that, if we hear it, and if we walk in it, then we can be rooted and grounded in love. We can be spiritually and emotionally healthy people, and then out of that help, love others. That's the picture of what it is to be a believer, is to be somebody who's healthy enough to know, I'm loved. I don't need affection from other people. I'm affirmed, I don't need other people to tell me I'm special because God does. And then in that freedom and in that confidence, move and love other people. That's a picture of what health is. And I think so often our lives are not rooted and grounded in love. They're rooted and grounded in a myopia or in a narcissism. They're rooted and grounded in anxiety or in things that we can't control. They're rooted and grounded and characterized by a depression or by places where we're not trusting. They're rooted and grounded in ambition and greed and self-consumption. And Paul's prayer is that we would be people who are healthy, who know Christ, who are rooted and grounded in love. Once we are rooted and grounded the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Then he prays, I want you to go deeper into this love of Jesus. I don't want him to just take up residence in your heart. I don't want you to just express his love to other people. I want you to go deeper and deeper into this love that Jesus has for you. I kind of think about it like the ocean. If you go to the ocean and you walk up to it to your knees just before your shorts get wet, you can technically say that you've experienced the ocean. But have you experienced the depths of the ocean? You can walk out there until the waves are breaking over your head and you can feel it kind of swirling you around a little bit. You can feel the power of the ocean. Have you experienced the depths of the world's oceans? When I go to the ocean, what I like to do, and I know this is a terrible choice, and one day I'm just not going to come back, and that's how it goes. I swim out until I get scared. Every time I go to the ocean, I do it. I like to do it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I swim until I get scared. And then I turn around and swim back. Now, I never get scared because, oh my gosh, I'm so far out. I'm not going to have the energy to get back. I become acutely aware that I'm at shark depth and that they've seen me. And I cannot, as much as I try to get that thought out of my head and they're not interested in me, there's other things to eat. they don't want me. As much as I try to reason with myself, I just, there's sharks here, man, and I swim back. But even swimming out as far as I can until I get scared, have I experienced the depths of the ocean? If you've been on a cruise ship and you've had the opportunity to look in every direction and see nothing but the ocean. If you are a marine biologist, a maritime explorer, and you get in a submarine and you go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean, have you experienced all that there is to experience in the ocean? No. You can devote your life to exploring it and you will only ever scratch the surface of what it has to offer. This is the love of Christ. Just because we've been up to our waist, just because it swept over us and we felt the power of it a couple times, just because we were able to venture out far enough so that we got scared does not mean that we have experienced all that the love of Christ has to offer. And Paul's prayer is that your life would be this experience of an ever-deepening understanding of the love that God has for you, understanding that until we get to eternity, we will only ever scratch the surface. You could devote your life to understanding the love that Jesus has for you, and we still won't comprehend it. And then finally, he says, for all of this, that you would be filled with all the fullness of God. Thanksgiving's coming up around the corner. And when it does, we go to Dothan, Alabama, and we have the best meal of the year. It's phenomenal. And about 10 to 15 minutes before that meal, every year, what do I start doing? I start going through the kitchen. There's the turkey, and I pick up a little piece of that turkey and have some turkey. There's a deviled egg. I'm going to sneak like six of those, and I'll have a couple of dev you know? I start to kind of pick at the food. But I'm not full yet. Because what's going to happen is we're going to pray, and everybody's going to get a plate, and they're going to go. And I'm always going to go and wait and let everybody else go first because I don't want to have to worry about portion control when I get there. And when I get up to that food, I'm even thinking this year, I'm going to go to Walmart and buy some of those khakis with like the elastic waistband here. So I got some Thanksgiving pants, you know. I'm going to make some irresponsible choices at Thanksgiving. I'm going to have a big old food baby. And I'm not going to stop until I get the meat sweats, right? That's what America does, man. Yeah. That is full. That's full. When we taste on Sunday morning and we get another taste at small group, we get another taste when we get up in the morning, we get another little taste when we listen to something in the car. Let us not be satisfied with that. Let us be filled with all the fullness of God. That we would know him. And that's the heart of the prayer. All of this, if you had to sum it up, what does Paul pray for us? If you had to sum it up in one sentence, what does Paul want for us more than anything? That you would know God. That you would know Jesus. That you would be filled with the fullness of him. That you would have an inkling of the height and the breadth and the depth of his love for you. That you would be strengthened with power in your inner being. That you would be healthy from that health that you would love. That you would be overwhelmed by God and be full of him every day. That's the number one thing that he prays for you. I think that's remarkable. I think it's remarkable, particularly when you think about the things that he didn't pray. If you look at these churches, these churches in the ancient world, life expectancy was like, what, 40, 45? I can't back that up with paperwork, but I feel pretty confident with that guess. Sickness was very much a part of these churches. Loss was a part of the lives of all the people in these churches. Yet Paul does not pray for health. He does not pray in this prayer. He does in other places, but in this prayer, if he can only pray one thing, he doesn't pray for healing or spiritual health or physical health rather. He doesn't pray, even though he planted this church, he wants it to grow. He wants to see them add numbers day by day. He wants to see this church flourish and be bigger in five years than it is this year. He wants that for this church. He doesn't pray it. He doesn't pray, may your ministry be successful. May God give you favor in your community. He doesn't pray for prosperity or wealth or success or health. He prays that they would know God. Now, does Paul want all of those things? Sure, absolutely he does. And at other places in the Bible, he prays for some of those things. But what's the first thing that he wants? That they would know God. It makes sense to me that he doesn't pray for church growth. Because if your church is filled with people who have mined the depths of the love of Christ, who are filled with all the fullness of God. You don't think that church brings in other people? You don't think that church is a powerful force in the community in which it sits? You don't think that person who is filled in that way isn't an influencer at their place of work? He doesn't have to pray those other things. He prays for the fundamental thing. He doesn't pray for health. I think he doesn't pray for health because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very situation that is going to bring about the answer to this prayer, which is to make you closer to God. He doesn't pray for prosperity because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very struggle that's going to bring you closer to God. And earlier I said that Paul's prayer reveals what he most values. Our prayers reveal our priorities. And if our prayers reveal what we most value, what do your prayers reveal about you? And the times that you pray, for some of us, it's every day. For some of us, it's for our meals. For others, it's when we're at Bible study and someone asks us to pray. We go, well, here we go. For others, it's rarely. It's in dire situations. But when you pray, what do you pray? When you go to God and you ask for something, what's the first thing you ask for? What have you prioritized above everything else? Is it situational? Or does it transcend that? I think the first thing that we should pray in every situation based on this prayer is, Father, let what's happening now conspire in some way to bring people closer to you. When we get the diagnosis, I think first we pray, God, we don't understand this. We hate this. This breaks our heart. Let it conspire to bring people closer to you. And then we go, and if it's still your will, God, could you please get rid of this because this stinks. When we find ourselves between jobs or between purposes, our first prayer should be, God, in this time, when I try to figure out what's next, I pray that the events of this time would conspire to bring me and those around me closer to you. And then the next thing. When something happens in the life of our child, God, I pray that whatever's going on right now, even though I don't understand it, will it please conspire to bring them to a place where they know you better? Will that please be the result of this? And then, Father, do these things. The question I want to ask you is, how should Paul's prayer shape our prayers? How should what he prays for shape what we pray for? How should what he hopes for shape what we hope for? What are your wildest dreams for your kids? Do they start with that they would simply know God? I pray for Lily. I pray that she'd marry a nice man that loves the Lord, that takes care of her, that loves her better than I ever could. I pray that she knows God better than I ever do. But the first thing I pray for her above anything else, any of her character traits, where she goes and what she does, the first thing I pray for her every night is she would know God. When we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, what do we pray for them? When we respond to tragedy, what do we pray in the face of that tragedy? When we respond to triumph, this is where we need to be the most careful. Everything's going great. What do we pray in the face of that triumph? Because we all have hopes and dreams and things that we want in life. But God has those for us too. And I don't know about you, but I want my hopes and dreams to align with his. I want our hopes and dreams as a church to align with what God wants for us. I want us to be people who more than anything else want us and those we love to know God. Let's pray. Father, we love you. You pursue us with a reckless love. You fill us with that love. You offer it to us freely. And God, you call us to it. I pray that we would hear that call, that we would feel it, that we would give into it. Lord, I pray over grace that we would be people who are strengthened in our inner being through your spirit, that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith, that we would be healthy people who are rooted and grounded, God. And because of that, because of that health, because we know your love so much, that we would mind the depths of the love of Christ that he has for us, that we would know with all the saints exactly what that is, and that we would be filled with all of your fullness, Father. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.