Sermons tagged with Prophet

I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids' stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along, and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks mailman Kyle. Today, Jonah and the Whale. Well, good morning, Grace Raleigh. My name is Erin, or as I have affectionately somehow been now dubbed, Girl Erin. So I am so glad to be here this morning. I am excited to see these beautiful faces. And so thanks for joining us, whether here or online, or maybe later this week. We appreciate your time. So thanks for being here. I feel like I kind of need to start out our morning with a small confession. And that confession is, I'm a bit of a history nerd. And I'm in love with the Old Testament. And I know there's lots of you in here that are looking at me going, but the New Testament, Aaron, is where it's at. And you know what? Yes, it's the gospel. You know, we get to see all of the creation of the church and then the beautiful letters that show the church how to act and how to behave and how to love each other. And it's great. And I love that part too. But to me, the Old Testament, it just has me. It's got a special, special place in my heart. The 39 books that make up the Old Testament do a spectacular job of showing us the history of God and his people. And it shows us all about Jesus. It continues to point us in his direction. And then it just does a really cool job also of showing us how much God really kind of cares about us and thinks that we're special and our everyday lives mean something. So hear me out on this one because it really is like it's the cool place to be. It's full of really cool heroes that you guys have been seeing, some of them. And I know our world today has all kinds of great heroes too. We got a little Captain America over here. Maybe there's Thor. I think there's a new Thor movie out. There's also some Iron Man. I seem to be stuck a little bit in Marvel for DC folks. I'm sorry. But it's all the heroes. We have sports heroes. We have all these places that we could put and look to to put our faith maybe. But the Old Testament gives us really, really cool heroes too. And what I think makes them the coolest is the fact that they're big old mess-ups just like you and me. And so we have this place to land. The Old Testament tells us the good, the bad, the ugly. There's no filter put on these guys. You know, Instagram has that beautiful filter where everybody looks perfect and pretty and all of the other things. You're going to find in the Old Testament those heroes aren't filtered. They come to us raw and in their natural glory. We have Adam who was God's first creation, the man, but we find out later that Adam is a bit of a blame shifter who lacks some self-control. And then we also have Noah who was considered the last righteous man on earth and yet the minute that the ark landed Noah was over served and ended up falling asleep in his birthday suit and thus embarrassing his sons greatly. And then there's Jacob. We've learned all about Jacob in the past. Jacob from the very beginning was a manipulator. But you know what? Jacob's other name is Israel. So we think he's this big spectacular hero, which he was. But he also has his flaws. He convinced his brother to give him his birth, just like we are. And yet God chooses to use them in pretty spectacular ways. And I want to introduce you to another one of the heroes, I personally think is a hero, of the Old Testament. And his name is Jonah. And you're going to see as we talk about Jonah that Jonah was a little bit headstrong. And Jonah liked to do things his way. And that because of all this, Jonah gets to sit in some pretty stinky circumstances for a little while. But I've gotten ahead of myself. So let me introduce you, first of all, to Jonah before we jump into Jonah's story. You will find the book of Jonah in the back part of the Old Testament sandwiched in between Obadiah and Micah. And if you happen to have a Bible that has sticky pages, which mine can sometimes, you'll miss it because it's four short little chapters long. That's it. And it's back there waiting for us to dig into it. Jonah was a prophet. All that means is Jonah was God's mouthpiece. It was easy and simple. God gave instruction to Jonah. Jonah, in turn, then gave instruction to his people. And that was his job. He lived in a small little village outside of Nazareth. It was called Gas Heifer. Just to give you a little information, that's what it was called. It was called Gas Heifer. It's also speculated that he lived during the time of the Assyrian Empire's reign. And at this point in time, the Assyrian Empire was to the north and west or east, whichever. I'm directionally challenged, y'all. I'm so sorry. But it was up here to where he was down here. How about that? Does that work? And so he's, and this empire liked to try to take over all of the territory surrounding it, which included the lands where the Israelites lived. So unfortunately, or whatever, the Assyrian army was a huge enemy of the Israelite people. That becomes important later, so hold on to that one. The other thing to know about the Assyrians as people is they weren't nice. They were classified as idolatrous. They were proud. They were ruthless. They were bent on world conquest. They were known very specifically for their brutality and torture when it came to how they fought, as well as once they conquered an area, they were then known for their intimidation and fear factors that they used in order to hold these people in their control. So just the kind of people you would want to have as your neighbor. Just saying. Okay, so hold on to all that because, again, that information we'll come back to. So now let me introduce you to the book of Jonah. I did not prepare slides. So you have nothing to look at. I'm so sorry. But you do have your Bibles in front of you. So if you want to pull out and look at Jonah, again, it's towards the back of the Old Testament, you can kind of follow along there. We pick up in chapter one, verse 1, and it starts out and states that the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for the evil has come up before us. Well, that sounds pretty simple, right? God's doing exactly what it is. He's giving instruction to his prophet, and he's telling his prophet to go talk to people, but the thing is that he's not saying go talk to the Israelites. He's telling Jonah, I want you to get up, and I want you to go, and I want you to go talk to the Ninevites. Any idea where Nineveh is? Ah, Nineveh sits right in the Assyrian Empire. Right in the middle, y'all. So here it is as God's telling him, I want you to get up and I want you to go over here to our mortal enemies and I want you to tell them that they're in trouble. So Jonah, being the good prophet he is, decides to get up, and he decides to go, right? Well, unfortunately, his compass is about as directionally challenged as I am, and Jonah did get up and go, and if you look in verse 3, it says, but, oh, that word in the Bible is never a good thing. But Jonah rose and fled to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa. He found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. So here it is. Jonah is just like all the other people that we've talked about. He's not the perfect little hero that we kind of would hope he is because he gets up and he goes in the direction that he wants to go, not in the direction that God has asked him to go. No, he has chosen, and y'all, this one makes me laugh a little. If he wanted to go from where he was in Joppa to Nineveh where God asked him to go, it's about 500 miles, which is about like going from Raleigh to Buffalo, New York. And instead, though, Jonah has said, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going my way. And his way, though, is to go 2,500 miles in the opposite direction. And 2,500 miles is like going from Raleigh to Los Angeles. So not only is he fleeing, he's fleeing really hard, really fast, and completely in the opposite direction. And why is he doing this? All because it says here he's fleeing the presence of the Lord. So how many times is it that we've done that? How many times is it that we've had some sort of call from God to go and do something, and we've chosen to go our way or to the opposite way? Be honest. What in here is your Nineveh? Everybody has a Nineveh. Everybody has some place that you're avoiding. For whatever reason it is. Maybe it's that it's just too hard to even think about. Maybe that it's a little too dangerous. Or maybe it's going to require a little too much sacrifice on your part. And it's just so much easier to do it your way, even if, like in Jonah's case, it's a whole lot farther in a different direction. Maybe it's a relationship that you're supposed to be mending. Maybe it's something to do with your job. I don't know what your Nineveh is, but you do. So what is it? And I know also you guys are thinking, well, I might have my Nineveh, but I definitely don't run from God. I would never do that. Well, I tell you what. How about if I give you a couple of things to think about to see if you possibly are running from God. What does it look like for you to run from his presence? Are you avoiding those places where he shows up? What does your church attendance look like? Are you avoiding being here on a Sunday morning because you don't want to listen to these worship songs because it may hit someplace? Or you definitely don't want to hear something that Nate may have to say because it's going to convict you and then you're going to have something to do because of it. What does your activity inside of Bible study or small group look like? Are you part of one? If you're not part of one, why? And if you are part of one, are you actively engaged? Are you participating? Or are you trying to stay away from where God may show up? And the last one is, what does your daily time with God look like? Are you spending time with him each day? Do you sit? Do you reflect? Do you pray? Do you allow him to speak to you? Or do you just continue to run? Because, you know, Scripture tells us he's not going to leave us. He's not going to forsake us. But it's us that turns and runs. Thankfully, though, when he sees us on the run, quite often he does something to stop us and move us back into his direction. He tries to fix our compass a little bit. And I don't know about y'all, but I can be stubborn. As my family agrees, I can be stubborn. I can be hard-headed and sometimes I just don't listen very well. So the way that God has to move me, unfortunately, can become a two-by-four situation, like right here between the eyes that says, hey, Aaron, wake up. But then there's others. Maybe y'all are lucky and his still small whisper is what will get you where you need to go. I don't know. But in Jonah's case, we find out that God does a pretty big work to get his attention. So Jonah has moved and he's now on this boat and this boat is heading 2,500 miles away to Tarshish. And all of a sudden, God says, it's time for you to come home. And he sends a mighty wind off to the sea, which creates what they call a tempest. So basically, y'all, this is a big storm unlike anything we would have ever seen before. And this poor little boat is out in the middle of it, rocking and shaking and probably being pushed really, really hard at the seams. The crew that's on this boat knows. They're sailors. They're seasoned sailors. They know that this is not any normal storm. They're trying to figure out how not to sink. So they start picking stuff up and throwing it overboard. Like, I got to get rid of this so that we don't go down in this storm. And all the while, the captain's like, oh, wait a second. We had somebody on board with us. Has anybody seen Jonah? The captain goes looking for Jonah. He goes, y'all, Jonah is down in the hull of the ship, sound asleep. Of all things, it's rocking and rolling and the wind is blowing and it's probably raining and the whole works. And I don't know about you, but I might have been a little seasick at that moment. But Jonah's taking himself a little nap. And the captain looks at him and says, hey, you need to wake up. And you need to start praying that we don't all perish in the middle of this storm. And I hate to say it, but Jonah doesn't pray at this moment. But he does get up, and he does go up onto the deck. And somewhere when the captain was looking for him, the rest of the crew is just trying to figure out exactly what has caused this supernatural storm that's around there. And so they do something called casting lots and it all comes to a point that it's Jonah is the problem. So when Jonah appears up back onto deck, these crew members look at him and they literally start throwing all kinds of questions at him about as fast as you can hear them come out of their mouths. Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation and where do you come from and what is your country and of what people are you? And then Jonah in turn responds, I am a Hebrew and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. And right there, Jonah just told them everything that they needed to know about what was happening to him and why it was happening. He's a Hebrew, and he worships the one true God, the one true God who made the sea that they're sitting on that's now in this huge storm. And so they know it's Jonah's fault. And so they look at Jonah and say, what do we need to do in order to fix this? Because you're our problem. And Jonah just looks at him and he very calmly says, just throw me overboard. Okay. The crew members have probably got this going in their head though. Like the, the guy, God's already angry. He's already got this sea all churned up. And so if we pitch this guy overboard, don't we think he's going to be even more mad at us because we've just now killed this guy? And so instead of doing what Jonah said, they proceed to row as hard as they possibly can row because they're going to get him up on shore and kick him off and their problem is going to be solved. Well, the faster they row, the angrier the sea gets. And so finally they stop. But before they pitch Jonah overboard, these men stop and they pray. They don't pray to their idols or to their gods. They pray to Jonah's God. And they say, hey, Lord, we're going to do what he told us to do. And we're going to throw him overboard. And please don't let his blood be on our hands. Mind you, Jonah has still not prayed. But these pagans are praying to his God. And so they then pick up Jonah and they throw Jonah overboard and the seas stop. Whew. That was a whole lot in 12 verses. So I'm going to stop for just a second. I'm going to back us up and I want to look at something really fast. We've got our little rebellious prophet who has defied God. He's boarded his ship and I can only imagine what's going on in his head when he boarded the ship was I had a conversation with God. He told me to go to Nineveh. Nobody knows about that but me and God. And so it really doesn't matter that I'm going to get on this ship and I'm going the other way because nobody's for the wiser. It's just between me and God. But what do we see? This is that Noah's disobedience brought calamity to that ship and to all that were part of it. So ultimately what he shows us in this moment is that our obedience and our disobedience affects so many more people than we could ever begin to imagine. There are very, very few instances where our choices only affect us. Our choices echo through generations. A great example of these choices is, let's say, I'm the kids pastor, so I can use this as an example. But let's say you choose to volunteer inside of kids ministry or inside of Kyle's student ministry. You've made a choice to do it. In a lot of instances, it's not like you're getting a bunch for this choice. In most instances, there's a whole lot more sacrifice that happens on your part because you're giving up a Sunday to be hanging out with kids or a Sunday night on your couch to hang out with students. You get to laugh at all the 12-year-old humor, which, y'all, that's the best part right there. You get to answer crazy questions and weird texts and all of the above. But somewhere in there, that time that you spend with these kids or with these students is impacting that generation, which in turn will impact the next generation and the next and the next. You may never see the fruits from all those seeds that you planted, but I promise you heaven does. And there is a party happening because of your yes. And the same thing, though, goes with our disobedience. Let's say you've got that relationship that you know darn well you need to do something about. It's broken, and it needs some reconciliation. But by choosing the easy way and saying no, what have you told that other person? Maybe you've kind of told them that they're not lovable or that when the going gets hard, you're going to pack up and go the other way. What about your kids, your big kids, little kids, any of the above that are watching this. You know, this may be communicating to them too that it's really okay to give up on a friendship. It's really okay to hold a grudge. That forgiveness is not always the way to go. And maybe you have somebody else that's watching this in the background. Maybe it's a neighbor. And all of a sudden, by you choosing the easy way, it all of a sudden validates to them that Christianity is kind of a farce and that somehow most Christians are hypocrites. Our disobedience or our obedience affects so many more people than just us. So let's jump back into where Jonah is. We know Jonah is now overboard, but we also know that God is not done with Jonah. So God sends Jonah his little saving grace, which happens to be a rather large fish that swallows him up. And a bit of a side note, we don't know if this is a fish, a shark, a whale, or some creature that lives six miles down at the bottom of the ocean that we've never seen before. We have no idea. Scripture just calls it a big fish. So I'm going to call it a big fish. It just works that way. And Jonah is given now three days and three nights to sit in his circumstances and the consequences of his actions. And I don't know about y'all, but when I was little and I used to get in trouble, quite often my mama would look at me and say, hey, Aaron, and she used to call me Aaron Beth when I was in trouble. She's like, Aaron Beth, you need to go sit over there and think about what you've done, and then we're going to talk about it. Well, this is exactly what God is doing for Jonah. Hey, Jonah, you've messed up, and I'm going to give you some time to think about it and then we're going to talk about it. So that's what Jonah gets, three days and three nights in the belly of a very stinky fish. And while he's in there, Jonah does sit, Jonah does think, and then Jonah does what we hoped he would have done in chapter 1, and he prays. And all of chapter 2 is Jonah's prayer from his repentant heart as he pours out to God. And so I'm just going to pull out verse 2. I'm not going to give you the whole prayer. You guys can read it. But verse 2 says, I called out to the what that just says to me is that even after we've messed up and even after we're totally disobedient, God still hears our prayers. He still hears us. He still wants that relationship with us. Jesus is currently seated at the right hand of God, waiting to intercede for us, waiting to be able to say, hey, I'm going to give you a second chance or a third or a twelfth or a twentieth, whatever it is that you may need. He wants to give that to us because he longs to be in relationship with us and he longs to take the messes that are our lives and turn them into something very, very beautiful for his purposes. And that's exactly what he does for Jonah. After Jonah pours out his heart to him, God says, okay, it's time. And the fish deposits him on dry land. And again, some of the other reasons I love the Old Testament is it doesn't mince words. And my version says that he vomited Jonah onto dry land. So just add to the stinkiness, okay? So then we come to chapter 3, verse 1, and this is just so amazing because it says straight up, the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time. Again, he loves us, wants a relationship, and he's going to give us second chances. He doesn't need us to accomplish his goals. God, at this point in time, y'all, he could have taken care of Nineveh all on his own. He didn't need Jonah, but he wanted Jonah to join in, and that's exactly what He wants from us. And the next part, if you look down into the second verse, it says, Arrive and go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against in the message that I tell you. I think this is so amazing too because guess what? Not only is he a God of second chances, but he's also not going to let Jonah off the hook though because he's now telling him to do exactly what he told him to do back in chapter 1. Arise and go to Nineveh. You don't get to, you spent all that time and you were repentant. But you're still going to do what I need you to do. I need you to get up and I need you to go. And so this time, thankfully, Jonah gets up and Jonah goes. And he goes to Nineveh. But the really cool part or the hard part or whatever you want to say here is that Jonah has 500 miles to go. Jonah has some hard work that he needs to do. And that is this hard work of obedience. Because I can guarantee you in this five mile walk, or 500 mile walk that Jonah is about to take, he's going to do a whole lot of thinking. Because here he goes, stepping, hey God, like, I'm doing what you're asking me to do. I'm making this journey. I'm going. But what about like Amos and Hosea who were two other prophets at the same time as Jonah? You know, they're over there talking to the Israelites. Why can't I be over there like them? No, Jonah, keep walking. Jonah keeps walking. Okay, well, could you just send me a friend then so I don't have to do this by myself? No, no, Jonah, keep putting that foot in front of the other. And that's exactly what Jonah does in this act of obedience. And is it easy? No, it's not easy because guess what? Obedience doesn't come with a convenience clause. God doesn't make it easy because God wants you to have to rely on him with each step that you take. So like that broken relationship that we talked about, it may mean that to do the hard work of obedience is that you have to be the first person that puts out a hand and says, can we talk? Is it easier the other way? Of course it is. It's so much easier the other way. Because guess what? The other way is our way. And all we're trying to do is run the other way. He doesn't need our excuses. He just wants our obedience. The other thing to remember about Jonah at this point in time is he's probably a bit of a sight to see. There are actually two recorded versions of men who have been swallowed by a whale and later lived to tell the tale. And these men emerged hairless and covered in yellow and green splotches. And I imagine they smelled really good also. So now I'll get a picture of Jonah also in his 500-mile walk. We don't know if he bathed or not. We have no idea on that one. But he's also walking 500 miles, so we know he probably doesn't smell very good. We also know that he looks really, really strange. This is what he does. This is how he looks as he walks into the city of Nineveh. I'm here. And all that's going through his head at that point in time is like, really? Lord, are you sure about this? These people are going to run the opposite direction. I look pretty scary, and oh, I don't smell very good. And God's like, no, no, no, keep going, keep going. So Jonah keeps going, and he starts crying out, yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And he goes another step and yells again. And all I can think about is at this moment, the Lord is loving the position that he has Jonah in because he loves to put us in these challenging positions where he gets to be who he is. Jonah thinks it's impossible. Jonah thinks these people are not going to respond. There's no way this is going to come out for any kind of good. And God says, oh, but watch this. And in chapter 3, verse 5, it says, and the people of Nineveh believed God. And then verse 10 says, God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, and he did not overthrow them. So here's this one little guy who walks in smelling, and he's full of sores, etc. And yet because he did the work of obedience, these people believed God, and they turned from God. It was an unprecedented response because remember Ninevites are horrible people by nature and yet they turned to the one living God. It was a revival beyond all revivals. And I think it would just be fabulous if we could end right here. We're done. Let's have the baptism. We can call it a day. But the thing is, is if you remember correctly, I told you there's four chapters to the book of Jonah. And we just got to the end of chapter three. Because the fourth chapter does so much to show us Jonah's humanity in full color and full display. And, yeah, hear what happens. Because the beginning of chapter 4, verse 1 says, but, there's that word again, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. Come on, y'all. Seriously? Greatest revival ever, and Jonah is now mad because it happened. Why? Why would you be mad at something like that? I think what it really comes down to is Jonah is mad because God didn't do it his way. You see, back then the Israelites all believed that God's blessing and God's favor was for them and them alone. And it wasn't to be shared with others. But yet God said, oh, no, no. These Ninevites are part of my plan. And I need them to be taken care of. And so Jonah's mad. That's why Jonah's mad. But can I ask how many times we've done something like that. Where we've had our plan for ourselves. I am going to, and you know, you've just got it all written down. You know where your life's going. You know what your plan looks like. It's all great and good. And then you walk up to God and go, would you please just, will you sign off on this for me? Give it a good stamp of approval. Because it's my way, right? That's the way I want it to go. But we cannot. We cannot do that to God. We can't do that to ourselves because ultimately what happens is we're putting God in this box. And we're saying that your way, my way, has to be your way. That's not how he works. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. He knows what he wants to do. And we should be just getting out of his way instead. And so I don't know. You know, he's very good at what it is that he does. And I am so not sure why we choose not to trust him and what his plan is for us. And I kind of sat and thought about this. And the thing that I kind of came up with is I think that we're more concerned about ourselves than we are with actually showing others who God is. We don't believe that anything that we do, that the choices that we make, actually affect anybody around us. It's kind of an all about me. And I also think that, again, in that all about me, we don't want to be inconvenienced by having to do some hard work of obedience. But I'm so very thankful that God, in all of our ugly humanness, still chooses to use us. And in this case, we know he used Jonah in a mighty way. Chapter 4, unfortunately, does not tie up Jonah's story in a big red bow. We don't know if Jonah ever even got over himself. And I'm sorry. I like a good ending. This one's not a good ending, and I'm sorry about that. But that's just the way that it is. But I think that the lessons that Jonah brings to us before this ending are ones that we can hold on to for a really, really long time. God wants desperately to be in a relationship with us, but he doesn't need us. He wants us. He wants to use us to accomplish his goals. But the thing is, being the gentleman that he is, he's going to ask. And we, in turn, have to respond. We have to be willing to surrender to him. We have to be willing to do the hard work that he's going to ask of us. And when we choose to do that, we, in turn, bring glory to him. And again, maybe a little growth to ourselves. In the beginning of the book The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, there's an exchange between two characters, two of the main characters, Gandalf, who's kind of a kindly old wizarding folk, and then Bilbo Baggins, who is the hobbit. And the exchange starts like this. Gandalf says, I'm looking for someone to share an adventure that I'm actually in the process of arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone. And Bilbo's response to him is, well, I should think so in these parts. We are plain, quiet folk, and we have no use for adventure. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things make you late for dinner. So my question for y'all is, the next time God says to you, I'm looking for someone to share an adventure, or I'm looking for someone to step out to do something for me, are you going to be like Bilbo, and are you going to avoid it at all costs? Because it's uncomfortable. Because it doesn't quite fit in with your plans. Because you just might have to sacrifice something. And maybe something a little bit more than dinner. Or will you be willing to say yes, knowing that your yes is for God's glory and for your growth? And will you all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you, thank you for these examples in the Old Testament, these human characters that give us such a beautiful picture of the fact that no matter how messed up we really are, you can use us. And we ask that as we go through this week that you give us what it is that we need to turn towards you to begin that beautiful walk of obedience, no matter how hard it might be, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. Give us what we need to do that. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

The Yo, good to see everybody. Thank you again for being here. This is the sixth part in our series going through the book of Revelation. I have really very much enjoyed going through Revelation with you all. And honestly, you guys have been more enthusiastic about it than I expected because Revelation can be a slog. It can be tough. We just took three weeks working through the tribulation, talking about the wrath of God and all the mechanics of the tribulation best we can. And to me, that feels tedious, but you guys have been incredibly supportive and incredibly kind. And it seemed like y'all have enjoyed going through this with me. As folks have asked me, how is Revelation being received? I say, it seems universally good. However, no one's going to tell me it's bad. No one's going to email me and be like, just so you know, really are looking forward to when this series is over and we can talk about something else. So that might be out there. And if that's you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for hanging with us. But for those of you who have enjoyed this, thanks so much for the encouragement because it's been really, really neat to get to go through it with you guys as a church. This morning, we arrive at Christ's return, the return of Christ. And I said last week that this needs to be the best sermon that I've ever preached in my life, to do adequate justice to the grandiosity of what's happening in Revelation 19. This will not be the best sermon of my life. I just wish that it could be, okay? So let's temper our expectations now. This is a B minus, all right? But in this sermon, we arrive at Jesus' return, at kind of the culmination of God's wrath, the final nail in the coffin. I said we've been walking through the tribulation. We've kind of looked at it through three different lenses. We looked at it in the first week to understand the wrath of God that's poured out in the tribulation, and we defined it. We defined it that week when we looked at Revelation 4 and 5, and Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, qualified to open up the seals and begin to open up God's wrath on his creation. We said he's beginning the seven-year process of tribulation. Now, what is tribulation? Well, we define that as the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on his creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. And this week, he reclaims it. This week, he does the last part of the tribulation. Then we looked at kind of the flow of it, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, and then we looked at the figures of it, and we'll talk a little bit more about the beast, the Antichrist, today. But where we're at in the narrative of Revelation is we're at the end of the Tribulation. God has poured out his wrath. We've had this great battle. There's been a great earthquake. God has sent darkness onto the kingdom of the Antichrist. And then he sends his son to finish up the work. He sends his son to answer the voice of the martyrs that cries out in Revelation chapter 6, the fifth seal. The voice of the martyrs below the throne of God that say, how much longer, God, before you avenge our death? You know who killed us. You see us suffering as your children. How much longer will you let this keep going? And we talked about in that week how we cry out with the martyrs, that every time something in our life happens that seems difficult or hard to understand or seems unfair, every time there's a school shooting, God, how much longer are you going to let this go on? Every time we lose someone too soon, God, how much longer will you let this world be broken? Every time we see something that we can't understand, we cry out with the martyrs and we say, God, how much longer, oh Lord, will you put up with this? And when he begins to open up the seals and begin the process of tribulation, he says, no more. And when he sends his son Christ, when we see Jesus in Revelation 19, that is God putting the final nail in the coffin of evil and saying, now I will make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Now I will rectify things. Now I will restore creation. Now I will answer the groanings that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 8 when we are told that all of creation groans for the return of the king. When we're told that we yearn inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters to experience eternity in the marriage supper of the lamb, we wait for this. We long for this. This is the hope that persists in our faith and keeps us anchored to our savior because we believe that revelation 19 is going to happen one day, that he's going to come get us, and that when he comes back, you guys have heard me say this before, he's not coming back as the Lamb of God. He comes back as the Lion of Judah. And we see this description in Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. So if you have a Bible, you can read along with me. I love this description of my Jesus. Every time I read it, whether it's out loud or just in private, I get chills. I love this picture of him. And I don't know, I don't know if everybody can relate to this. This may just be silly. This may just be me being a dummy, and that's fine. I'm familiar with this territory. It's not unfamiliar. But when I read this passage about my Jesus, that part of me as a little kid that loved to see the hero win in movies, that teenage boy that loved to watch Braveheart win, that loved Gladiator and seeing Russell Crowe's character stick it to him, that little boy that loves Star Wars, that loves to see the hero win against evil, against all odds, that part of us, and I'm sharing that with you because I think that God lays that in us intentionally. I think we love the hero because the hero is a shadow of this reality that Jesus becomes. We grow up learning to love when the day is saved and when the hero makes an appearance because God wove that, I think, into our hearts to appreciate the appearance of his son when that hero returns and appears once and for all. So it's with that preamble that we'll read the description as Jesus comes back to reclaim his creation. This is the description of him that John records. Chapter 19, verse 11. And behold, a white horse. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Gosh. That's Jesus, man. That's Jesus. That's our Savior. When we think of Jesus, when we pray to him, when we sing to him, when we think about him, when we think about being reunited with him in heaven, I believe that it's our tendency to think about the gospel of Jesus, to think about the crucified Christ. And I don't think that's anybody's fault. We have four gospels. We spend time there all the time. I revisit a gospel every spring with you guys. We focus on Jesus at Easter. We focus on Jesus at Christmas. And we see the teachings from Jesus come out of the gospel. And so it's right and good to think about our Jesus as the crucified Christ. It's right and good to think about our Jesus as gentle and lowly. We're actually reading a book, as the staff right now, called Gentle and Lowly, and what it tells us, and I did not know this, but that the only time that Jesus is ever asked to describe himself in scripture, or rather the only time that he actually does it, he describes himself as gentle and lowly. And I think that when we think about Jesus, we think about a humble Nazarene from the country. And that's fine and that's well and good. But that's Jesus in human form. Revelation 19, that's Jesus. You understand? That's who's waiting on us. That's who's coming to get us. That warrior king written on his robe and on his thigh, king of kings and Lord of lords as a callback to Isaiah so that we know exactly who it is. And when you read through this passage, it's unbelievable to me how rich it is with allusions to other parts of scripture so that there is no doubt about it that this is Jesus coming from the very beginning. It says that he was called faithful and true, capitalized. This is a deity. This is Jesus coming. And then it says that only he knows his name, which is, that's Exodus chapter three and four, when God refuses to share his name. That's a throwback to that. And then he says that he was called the word of God, which John is referencing his own writings at beginning of John, the gospel, when he says that the word was with God in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God through him, all things were made without him, nothing was made. And then at the end, king of kings and Lord of lords. John, in this description of Jesus is weaving together all of the scripture to point us to our savior. This is the Jesus, the one who has fire coming out of his eyes and a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. The one who rules with the rod of iron, who has the armies of heaven arrayed in linen, following down as he thunders down to conquer the beast and the dragon and the antichrist. That's the one that sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. That's the one that rules for all of eternity. That's the one that we pray to. And that's the one who's coming to get you. So I want to at least take some time this morning to encourage you. When you sing to Jesus, when you pray to him, when you think of him, when you anticipate meeting him, anticipate the conquering Christ. Anticipate this Jesus. Anticipate the warrior king coming down to settle the score. Anticipate the lion of Judah coming down to wreck shop. To once and for all sweep evil off the face of the planet. And when you do that, when you focus on the conquering Christ, to me, it really caused me to think about this a lot this week, that the conquering Christ renders the crucified Christ all the more miraculous. The conquering Christ, Christ conquering renders Christ crucified all the more miraculous. Because this description in Revelation 19 with a robe dipped in blood and a sword coming out of his mouth and a rod of iron that he rules a nation with, he's gonna tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God with all of heaven's armies arrayed behind him, thundering down to wreck shop. That Jesus hung on the cross for you. That Jesus walked away from all of that, condescended to take on our form, walked with us for 33 years, nurtured disciples to birth a church that would become his true kingdom that he's coming back to rescue so that you and I can sit in here 2,000 years later. He did all that, meek and mild. And when he describes himself as gentle and lowly, yeah, you're not kidding, man. Because look who he is in earth and look who he could be this whole time. This description, this guy, this God, this warrior king, he hung on the cross for you. Not just some sage from the hills of Israel. God condescended for you. He chose to hang on the cross. So I love that moment with Pilate. He's like, are you really a king? And he's like, don't worry about it, Pilate. If I wanted to, this whole place would be smashed. At any moment in Jesus' life, he could have called down these armies and just crushed anybody who opposed him. Caiaphas, the high priest, is sitting there thinking he's got Jesus right where he wants him, and Jesus is just thinking, you have no idea who I am. He dies, he's separated from God. Satan thinks he's got Jesus right where he wants him. Jesus says, you have no idea who I am. Christ conquering, to me, renders Christ crucified as all the more miraculous. And when I think about my Jesus, this is who I think about. He comes to get us and to take us back up to heaven and to start off eternity. And when he comes to get us, he takes us back, we're told, to what's called the marriage supper of the Lamb. He's defeated the beast. He's defeated the Antichrist. He locks them up. It begins the thousand-year reign. We're going to talk about that next week. There's an encore of evil, and then Jesus once and for all throws them in the lake of fire, and that's it. But he comes down. He captures the beast. The armies conquer. He takes his children, he wipes evil off the face of the earth, he purifies his bride, and then we have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And I feel bad for how I'm covering the marriage supper of the Lamb in this series. Because I'm not gonna do it justice. I'm not gonna adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this series. Because I'm not going to do it justice. I'm not going to adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this way of false humility, like, oh yeah, I'm really not doing that good of a job with it. Like, no, I'm not. We just don't have enough time to sink in to everything that's here and even all the symbolism in the marriage supper of the Lamb. But a simple way of thinking about it is the marriage supper of the lamb is the greatest celebration feast of all time. It is the greatest celebration feast that ever was and ever will be. And this should hit home with us. Because what do we do? What do we do when we want to celebrate? I got a little bit of good news last week. Such good news that I went straight to the butcher's market. I bought myself a big old ribeye and I had that for dinner when the kids went to bed. I had myself my own personal private celebration feast. When your team wins, what do you do? You have a feast. When something good in life happens, when you graduate, you have a feast. When people come into town, what do you do? You have a feast. What are we going to do this week? We're going to get together with friends and family. We're going to reflect on the blessings that God has given us, and we're going to have a feast. This is what we do to celebrate. When your kid gets married, and you celebrate kind of transitioning into that season of life. This one has passed. We've formed a new family. What do you do? You get all your friends together and you have a feast. This is what God is doing. It's the greatest celebration feast of all time. In the days of old when kings would conquer and they would come back from conquering another king, what did they do? They feasted. And Jesus is bringing us back to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Why is it called the marriage supper of the Lamb? Because Jesus is getting married. Who's he marrying? Us. The church. His bride. We see throughout Scripture that the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. We see in Ephesians that God purifies his bride. He prepares us. We are made pure for Jesus so that we might marry him in eternity. I don't know how all that works out. It's a word play, but we are made pure by our savior. How are we made pure? By the crucified Christ hanging on the cross. He died for us. He covered over you in righteousness, made you good, purified you, prepared you for this very moment, for the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the church and Christ are united for all of eternity and perfect bliss. And so it's right and good to have a feast to celebrate the marriage. And this feast, man, it's going to be a good feast. The ones that you've lost, they're going to be there. I don't know for certain. I can't find it in Scripture. But I'm pretty sure they're going to serve catfish at this feast. Because my papa is going to be there. He loves catfish. And I know he's got some waiting on me. Your loved ones are going to be there too. Your dads are going to be there. And your moms. And the children that you never got to meet because you lost them too early, they're going to be there. All the saints who have come before us, all the saints that you've loved, they're going to be there. And listen to this. They're going to be the best versions of themselves. They're not going to be sick. They're not going to be unhealthy. They're not going to be unwell. They're going to be the perfect versions of themselves. They're not going to have all the brokenness that hurts us sometimes. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your dad, who you loved, but man, that guy had a temper. In heaven, he doesn't have a temper anymore. He's just love. He's just all the best parts of him. The people who we love, who made it sometimes hard to love them. Jesus has prepared those brides too. Their brokenness is wiped away. And they love you with purity. And you're made perfect too. All the crap in your life, all the stuff that you wish wasn't true of you, all the things that you hope nobody finds out, all the brokenness that spills out of you and hurts the people around you when you don't want to hurt them and you hate that side of yourself, that side's gone at the marriage supper of the Lamb. You're made perfect there. You're made your ideal self there. You're made your eternal self there. And you can love other people finally with the purity that God loves you with. We see the best versions of the folks we love. I am convinced of this. We finally walk in the best versions of ourself and don't have to wonder what it would be like to not have to walk through life as a selfish, egotistical jerk. That one's just for me. I don't know what your thing is. That feast is going to be remarkable. And everybody's going to be there. And Jesus is coming to take you to that. And I think that's pretty great. And as I thought about these things this week, the triumphant return of Christ and the marriage supper of the Lamb and all that it represents and what Jesus really won with that victory. What does it mean for us? Yes, evil is smited. Evil is gone and all the wrong things are made right and all the sad things are made untrue. All that is very true and God wins once and for all and that part of us that loves a hero gets to see the actual hero come storming out of the clouds. He wins those things for us. We see our God claim victory and that's great. But there's something else that occurred to me too. I was prepared. I knew this was going to happen. We're not even to the hard part yet. Jeez, old Pete. Something else occurred to me as I kind of asked the question, what has Jesus won? And what are we celebrating at the marriage supper? And I was reminded of this idea that I have long carried with me, but I've not heard too many other people talking about it. I've actually never heard a pastor talk about this. It doesn't make it a unique idea. It's just one that I've not heard other people mention. And maybe it's because pastors aren't supposed to say things like this and the other ones know better and yours doesn't. But I've long carried with me this idea that faith and hope are burdens. Faith and hope are hard. We celebrate faith and hope in our belief system. We're told that the greatest of all these things is faith, hope, and love. We celebrate faith and hope. We want those. We name our children faith and hope. They are good things. But I, in my life, in my most honest moments, experience them often as a burden, as something to be carried, as something to be chosen. Because faith is a belief in things that you can't see. Faith is what we choose when facts fall short of certainty. Do you understand? There's things that we can know about the universe and about our God and about scripture and about the claims and about life. There's things that can be scientifically proven and broken down and rendered as factual. And then there's what we choose to put our faith in. Then there's certainty. And when facts fall short of certainty, we fill that gap with faith. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're an atheist, there's no way to be totally certain of what you think's going on in the universe. So when we reach the end of facts and we have to arrive at certainty, we fill that gap with faith. So faith is a choice. We choose it. We exercise it. We learn it. We let God speak into it. We let him strengthen it over the course of our life. The longer you walk with God, hopefully the stronger your faith gets, but it gets stronger because it's been tried and it's been tested and it's been a burden that you've chosen to continue to carry. Hope is a burden. Hope is a belief that one day something can be true that I want to be true. Hope, to even have hope, is an admission that right now things are not the way that I want them to be. Right now things are less than ideal. Right now things are not what I want, but I hope, I believe that one day the things that I want can be brought about. Hope is an admission of a shortfall. People who are not yet parents and desperately want to be hope that one day this can be true of us. We, as believers, we read scripture, we hear the stories of Jesus coming down out of heaven, and we hope in that day. We place our faith in that day. We believe that there's going to be a marriage supper. We place our hope in that. We place our hope and our faith in the idea that our prayers are working, that they get to God, that they are powerful and effective and they're not just bouncing off the ceiling. But sometimes, life makes hope heavy. Sometimes life makes hope heavy. When you lose someone too early and your Bible teaches you that your God could have done something about it and you have to be confronted with the fact that he just simply didn't. In that season, you choose hope. And in that season, it's heavy. And sometimes, when life gets hard, and when faith and hope become burdens, and they become heavy, we see people put them down and walk away from them and say, I can't carry this faith anymore. I don't know how to believe in a God that would let that happen, so I'm gonna set down this faith. I don't know how I can still cling to hope when I've been disappointed in these ways, so I'm going to set down this hope. Sometimes faith and hope get heavy, and they get hard to carry. When you grow up in church, being taught a simple faith, and then you become an adult adult and there are things that happen in your world that just don't align with what you were taught when you were a kid and you have to learn how to find this new faith. You have to cling to it and you have to hope and you have to choose hope and you have to find ways to make what you were taught and what you're experiencing mesh and you have to find a whole new way to understand scripture and understand God and to understand how he speaks to you. In those moments, faith can get hard and hope can get heavy and we have to choose them. And I am convinced that the Christian life is simply a series of the decision to choose faith and to choose hope in Christ over and over and over again until we make it to the finish line. My prayer as I prayed before I preached this morning was that if there is anybody in here that's carrying heavy hope that it would get lightened just a little bit today. That we would have the strength and the faith to continue to carry it for a little bit longer. Just get down the road just a little bit further. Because sometimes faith and hope get heavy. And I hate that we don't talk about that as much because we should. And if that's true, if I'm right that they can be burdens, then one of the best things that Jesus wins when he comes sweeping out of the sky is on this day, he lays to rest faith and hope forever. And he says, here, you don't need these anymore. You don't need faith and hope anymore. Maybe that's why Paul writes in Romans 8, he says, for in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. When Jesus shows up, we don't need hope anymore. When he shows up, we don't need faith anymore. There's no more gap between facts and certainty. There's just Jesus. There's no more hoping for one day. There's just Jesus. One day has arrived. Do you understand that when Jesus sweeps down out of the sky, that he lays to rest for us for all eternity, faith and hope. And he says, you can set them down, weary traveler. You're here now. Let's feast. And I think that's a remarkable blessing. Because to be a Christian is to believe that one day these things will be true. To be a Christian is to believe that one day God will set all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. One of my favorite songs in the world is this song called Farther Along. Farther Along, I like the version from a guy named Josh Gerrels, and it opens up. And he says, I wonder why the good man dies and the bad man thrives and Jesus cries because he loves them both. And the chorus is, farther along, we'll know all about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. And it's just this acknowledgement, I think, that faith and hope are hard. Faith and hope are hard, but one day, I won't need those anymore. I can lay that and everything else down at the feet of my Savior. And on that day, when Jesus comes back, there are no more one days. On this day, Revelation 19, marriage supper of the Lamb, on that day, there are no more one days. It is one day for all eternity. There's no more wondering, there's no more hoping, there's no more struggling, there's no more pain. Because on that day, he puts an end to waiting on one day. And I kind of wonder now if that's why Paul didn't say what he said in Corinthians. When he gets to the end of talking about all the spiritual gifts and he says, but now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these, Paul says, is love. And I've always read and accepted that teaching, and it's made sense to me. Love binds. Love is the very nature of God. Love is what unites us together. It makes sense to me that love would be greater than faith and hope. But now I wonder, in light of what I've thought through this week, if maybe love isn't the greatest because when Jesus comes back and lays faith and hope to rest, that love is the only thing that exists for all of eternity. Maybe love is the greatest because it's the only thing left after Revelation 19. And we live in an eternity of perfect love that God designed us for, finally. As I was thinking through this sermon this week, I was pacing in the lobby. And as I was out there, just kind of walking back and forth, thinking through these things, asking myself the question, what has Christ won for us? I noticed on the information table, a bracelet, like a little ringlet. And I picked it up and I saw an inscription there. And I thought, oh, what is this? God, are you talking to me? Let? Speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm working on the sermon. There's a bracelet here. You've got to be working in this. So I reach over, and on the bracelet, it just says, it is well with my soul. Also, if that's your bracelet, it's right out there. It just said, it is well with my soul. And I thought, oh, I love that song. But that's not really helpful. Okay, God's not speaking. And I just kept pacing. And I got done and I kind of had a fully formed idea. And sometimes on Tuesdays when I get a fully formed idea, I get a little bit excited about the sermon and I'll go and I'll tell Kyle because Kyle's always up for a conversation. I said, Kyle, I got it. Listen, I told him about this idea of faith and hope being burdens and that Jesus is going to put those to rest for us. And Kyle started to get a little teary eyed. And he said, he said, that just reminds me of my favorite song, my favorite line from my favorite song. And he quoted me these lines from it as well. And I was like, oh my gosh, God is speaking. I'm just dumb. I always say God speaks in stereo. And Kyle quoted these lines. And he started crying. And I got misty, and I knew that this is what we were supposed to share, and I knew that we were supposed to end the service today with it as well. Because in these lines, we see the author of this song admitting what we've just talked about today. The faith and hope are burdens, and so it is well with my soul. We often sing this song in a response to grief as an admission that I am going to choose faith and hope even though it's heavy today. Now let's sing it looking forward to the day we can lay those things to rest and Jesus has won the final victory and forever we will say it is well with my soul. Stand and let's sing together.

The Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. Can you guys hear me? Is it coming through? Okay, good. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I'm the senior pastor here, so thanks for being here. If you're watching online, thank you for doing that or catching up during the week. We're grateful for that as well. If you are watching online, you probably cannot tell that this room is full, so that feels pretty good, which means I can only draw one of two conclusions. Either as a people, we are starting to feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit closer to post-pandemic life. Fall activities are coming to a close, and we feel more comfortable gathering together. And so maybe culture is coming back to life in general, which is great. Or you guys just really love tribulation and wrath sermons. I think it's the latter. And so we've got a lot more of that coming, baby. I'm rethinking January. We're really going to drill in on God's wrath and terrible things that we see in the Old Testament too. I'm very excited for it. Clearly you guys are as well. To that, I'm just kidding. to that end, this is a series in Revelation. It is a little bit of a different series than what we normally do. I mean, normally we go through stories and books in the Bible and things like that, but focusing on the content in Revelation is a challenge for us, but we felt as a church, having never gone through it, that it was appropriate to stop and to study the book of Revelation. And one of the reasons we do this is because the book opens up with this idea of blessed are you for studying this book. So it's worth it to move through it as a church. And I feel compelled this morning to make this delineation for your edification and expectations of what's going to happen this morning in this sermon. I don't know if you've ever thought of the difference between preaching and teaching. Many of you would have no reason whatsoever to ever try to define that in your own personal life. I am compelled to do that often. And so to me, the difference between teaching and preaching is that teaching informs and preaching inspires. So when I preach, my goal is life change, that we would open up the scriptures, that we would encounter God's goodness there, that we would be turned towards a desire for him and for our Savior and for the Spirit, and that we would leave changed. Convicted, challenged, encouraged, inspired, whatever it is, we would leave changed. Well, teaching is different. Teaching, the goal is to inform. I want you to know more about this thing than you did before you came this morning. So this week, just to be clear, is teaching, okay? Last week, I had the whiteboard up here. That was teaching. We walked through the events of the tribulation. Some folks told me it felt like a college classroom, which is generous. I would have said upper middle school classroom, but I'll take it. I'll take college classroom. Maybe it's a reflection of you guys. But anyways, take it easy. I was just, I was talking specifically about Alan Morgan, not anybody else. Last week was teaching. It was to inform you. I got a lot of good feedback on that. This week is teaching. It's on the figures that we see in the tribulation. My goal is that you would simply understand it better. So I would say if this is your first sermon experience at Grace, they're not all like this. It's not that I'm not proud of this. I just want you to know that this is a different experience than what we normally do. In Revelation, we've been spending three weeks in the tribulation. The tribulation is in chapter 6 through 17 or 18, depending. And there's really no way to go through and just do chapters like 6 through 10, and then 11 through 14, and then whatever. There's no way to group them together. So what we did is the first week we talked about God's wrath. What is the tribulation and why is it necessary? Because in the book of Revelation, we see God, the tribulation we defined is pouring God's seven-year process of pouring out his earned wrath and reclaiming what is rightfully his creation. So we talked about the necessity of God's wrath. Last week, we talked about the events of the tribulation, the seven-year period that comprises it, and everything that happens, and the seals, and the trumpets, and the bowls, and all the events that happen. And I kind of mapped them out on the whiteboard, and you guys responded favorably to that, and I really appreciate that. It was very encouraging this week. But also in the tribulation, in those chapters, 6 through 17, we see a lot of mysterious figures. We see beasts and dragons and groups of people and two witnesses and a woman in Babylon. We see all of these different figures, and it's not readily apparent all the time. There's only one that's specifically spelled out as to what it is, and that's the dragon, and we'll get there today. But the rest of them are really pretty mysterious figures, and this is where we start to encounter things like the Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast and all of that stuff. So this morning is devoted to just tackling these figures. There's six of them that we're going to look at this morning. We're going to go through them one by one. I'm going to say, here it is. This is where we find it in Scripture, and this is what we think that it could be or represent. So this is teaching this morning. And then we are going to wrap up with a spiritual point, but to get us ready for next week, when we start preaching again. Next week, I'll just say it this way. I feel incredibly intimidated by next week. Because next week basically needs to be the best sermon of my life to do adequate justice to what happens in the text next week. It is unbelievable and moving and I might yell through it, I might blubber through it, I'm not sure, but next week's got to be the best sermon of my life to even come remotely close to doing justice to the crescendo of time that happens next week. But to get there, we've got to understand everything happening in the tribulation. And part of that is the figures in the tribulation because we're going to see some of those come to life next week. With that preamble, let's begin to work our way through chapter 6 through 17 and look at the different figures that show up there and simply ask, what are they? What do they represent? What do we know about them? I would say a couple of things. First, I'm going to present to you one or two thoughts about each of them. I am not going to present to you all the views that exist of them. And as I said in week one, when it comes to revelation, be cynical of certainty. So everything I'm saying, I'm holding with an open hand. If I get to heaven and find out I'm wrong, I'm pretty comfortable with that. And I don't want anybody saying it's gospel truth, whatever I say this morning, because these are all guesses and hearsay. You're all smart adults, so we can deal in that realm. Most of you are smart adults, so we can deal in that realm. So the first figure that we see early on that we have not yet discussed, but we've mentioned and alluded to, is the 144,000. So if you have notes, you can write that down. The notes are simply a list of these things. Underneath each figure is some text that's listed. Those are the main places or the main place where we see this figure, or in this case, this group of people. Please know that that's not an exhaustive list of all the places where we encounter that figure. It's just the main place, specifically the dragon. I think I've listed, yeah, chapter 12, verses 1 through 17 for the dragon. That's three down. The dragon shows up throughout the book, okay? That's just the main place where the dragon is described. So just a little disclaimer. The 144,000, I am going to read a description for the rest of the figures. There's no good synopsis verses for the 144,000, but here's what we know about them, okay? The 144,000 are comprised of 12,000 Jewish virgin males from each tribe in Israel. And those are listed out in chapter seven in the first reference that I gave you. And there's really nothing else there that we're told. There's 144,000 Jewish males that for some reason God has sectioned off for himself to worship him in a particular way. They show up again in chapter 14, which is why I'm mentioning them, because they show up twice. If it was only the one time, I just would have kind of skirted past it because I don't have much conclusive to say about them. But because they show up twice, it feels important enough for us to at least say, why is that there? The second time they show up, we learn a lot more about them in chapter 14. In chapter 14, we learn that they are around God. They follow the lamb wherever he goes. They are being taught a song by the angels that only they can understand. No one else, we're told, can learn this song. And it's interesting that they are virgins and it says that they are blameless. They're sinless. They have been kept spotless by God for the purpose of following the Lamb wherever he goes. Now, what are they? Who are they? What do they represent? How do Jewish males know if they get into the 144,000? We really don't know that stuff at all. There's been a lot of guesses over the years. Some conservative Christian theologians have attempted to explain the 144,000 as a figurative number that's representative of all people who will ever be saved. There's a big Christian camp that kind of holds that opinion of the 144,000, that it's a figurative number, that the 12 times 12 times 12, 12 times, that is some sort of figure of perfection. The 144,000 really just means multitude. And so really it's a figurative way of saying all the people who will ever be saved in all of history are grouped together like this. The problem with that viewpoint is there is zero, absolutely zero indication in the text that that's the case. What's going on there is conservative Christians got upset that they weren't included in the 144,000 because they're not Jewish male virgins. And they're like, well, then it must mean this because then I'm in. We're just finding a way to shoehorn ourselves into God's blessing, which we've been doing for all of history. This is another instance of it. That probably doesn't hold a lot of water. There are other offshoot religions like Jehovah's Witnesses that have staked their claim in being the 144,000. That likewise holds very little merit, it would seem. The most reasonable view to me, to me, is that there's literally in heaven 12,000 Jewish virgin males from the different 12 tribes of Israel that total in number 144,000 that for some reason God has sectioned off for himself in eternity. And the real reason I bring this up is to make this point. It would seem, based on this, and based on much of Revelation, as kind of a counterbalance to the rest of the New Testament, it would seem that in the book of Revelation, we see coming out of it, particularly in God's treatment of this 144,000, that the physical nation of Israel and the actual genetic descendants of Abraham, God's chosen people, it would seem in Revelation, still matter to him greatly. That God still has a soft spot for Israel. That God still has a soft spot for his chosen people. As we read through the New Testament, it's easy to move away from that, particularly when we get to Romans and we read some of the Pauline writings where it indicates that if you have faith, then you are a spiritual descendant of Abraham and you are God's child, which is good for us because we want to be in that chosen number. We want to receive God's blessing in that way. But what Revelation shows us as kind of a counterbalance to the Pauline teachings is the nation of Israel, at the end of the day, remains important to God. I'm not going to pretend to tell you why or how or what that means, but it's my opinion that God does actually care about the physical nation of Israel. There's a lot of stuff going on in Jerusalem in Revelation. I think he cares about Israel. And I think he cares about the Hebrew people. And I think that's one of the things we can pull out of the inclusion of the 144,000 twice in the book of Revelation, second time being taught a song that only they can know. And if I'm right about that, it has implications for some of the other figures as well. So just kind of set that thought to the side, and we're going to circle back to it when we start talking about the beasts. The next figure that we see, there's actually two of them, are the two witnesses. We see them in Revelation chapter 11. They show up in the back half of the tribulation. You'll remember last week, if you were here, that the tribulation lasts seven years. And the first three and a half years, maybe, probably, is the seals being opened in heaven. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, the voice of the martyrs, the great earthquake, and then the silence in heaven as God's wrath is ushered in. And so those are pre-wrath in the first three and a half years. And then I argued last week that there seems a reasonable chance, based on Revelation 7, that the rapture could happen in the middle of the tribulation prior to God's wrath. And so we think that for the back half of the tribulation, the last three and a half years, that God has already raptured Christians up to heaven. This is why the two witnesses are important. So I'm going to read you a brief description about them and then we're going to talk about who the two witnesses are and what they do. I'm looking in verse three if you have a Bible and you want to follow along. It says this, and I will grant authority to my two witnesses and they will proph for 1260 days, clothed in sackcloth. 1260 days is three and a half years. So it's the back half of the tribulation. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. So the text goes on. They show up, these two witnesses show up in Jerusalem, in the back half of the tribulation, to prophesy and to share the gospel. So what this tells us is God, even though he's pouring out his wrath on what we believe based on some of the passages that we looked at last week, are an obstinate people who are refusing to ask for mercy from God. God sends two witnesses in his goodness to proclaim his good news, to tell people to turn to God, to remind them that they can be saved from this wrath if they would only turn themselves to God in humble submission. And so God, even in the back half of the tribulation, remains interested in bringing people into heaven, into the place that Christ has prepared for them, into his eternal glory, into their eternal glory. God still wants to do that. And I think that's worth pointing out. Now these witnesses, they share and they prophesy, and it says that they're given the power to shut up the sky, that they can stop it from raining, and that no one can kill them. They're impossible to kill, and if you kill them, you will be killed in the same way that they are killed. And because they go around sharing the gospel, and because they keep pressing on it, and we're going to get to this point in a second where we understand this character and why it matters, the beast gets ticked at them sharing the gospel, and the beast war against them and they end up killing the two witnesses. They kill them in front of the whole world, it says, in the middle of the streets of Jerusalem. So I'm imagining this being on CNN and BBC and things like that. Or just the internet. Maybe it'll be on YouTube. Who knows? I just thought of trying to explain YouTube to the Apostle John. That would be a fun exercise. So they die, but they lay dead in the street for three and a half days because their followers won't allow anyone to approach the bodies. After they've laid there for three and a half days, God miraculously resurrects them. They walk again in front of the whole earth, and then God sweeps them back up into heaven. So their role is to come down, share the gospel, be one final sign from God of his love and his goodness, and then they're swept up back into heaven. Now, a lot of people like to ask, who are the two witnesses? And it's good that you're asking because I know for sure who they are with no doubt whatsoever. Some people, most people argue that the witnesses are Moses and Elijah. This is based primarily on the scene of the transfiguration in the Gospels, where Jesus goes up on top of a mountain, he's transfigured into his heavenly appearance, he's glowing bright as the sun, and Moses and Elijah are there, and they're talking. And just as an aside, Peter says the most Peter thing in the history of Peter, when he leans, you can find the story in the gospel where he leans forward and he goes, it's a good thing I'm here. I can make you guys some tents. You can hang out for a little while. What kind of audacity do you have to have to see Jesus the Messiah turn into his heavenly form? Bright as the sun, you can't look directly at him. By the way, Moses and Elijah are there, brought back down from heaven to have the special conference with Jesus for them to chat. How could every urge in your body not be to simply shut up and try to not be noticed? And Peter decides to go, you know, fellas, you're lucky I'm here. Shut up, Peter. What's the matter with you? Just soak it in, man. Anyways. So a lot of people think it's Moses and Elijah based on the transfiguration and because of their prominence in the Old Testament. Some people think it's Enoch and Elijah because Enoch, along with Elijah, are the only two people to never experience death, to be so righteous that God sweeps them up into heaven. And so maybe he was preserving them for this moment. Not very many people think that. I think that because who cares if I'm wrong about it? What's the difference? So I'm an Enoch guy. My dad is a Moses guy, and we will argue about it until we get to heaven. But the other thing is, it could be none of those people. It could be two women. We don't know. We don't know. It could be people that we've never met. So those are the guesses, and those are the roles of the two witnesses to prophesy, to point people to God, even in the midst of his wrath. Those are the good guys, the figures that we see in the tribulation, the 144,000 and the two witnesses. So now we get to the bad guys. The bad guys make up this term, and you may want to write this down. The next three, you might want to draw brackets and bracket them together and title them in your notes as the unholy trinity. That's kind of what they're known in eschatological and theological circles, the unholy trinity. And I'll tell you why in a little bit. The first one we see is the dragon. The dragon shows up in Revelation chapter 12. I read this passage in week one as an example for another point that I was making, but just to refresh our memory, this is the description of the dragon. Verse three, and another sign appeared in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and on his head sevenabor it here. The simple answer is it's a picture of Christmas. And doesn't that get you into the spirit? The dragon is the only figure where we are told very specifically what he is. Further on in the chapter, I believe in verse 9, John just goes and states right out that the dragon is Satan or the devil. So we know that whenever the dragon is mentioned in the book of Revelation, it means Satan. And his tail sweeping the stars out of the sky is again a picture of him bringing a third of the angels out of heaven with him when he was expelled and they became demons. In the, sorry, I've got a cold. I've been tested. It's not COVID, promise you. It's just a cold. Anyway. In the unholy trinity, the dragon takes the place of God the Father. So the unholy trinity is meant to mimic the holy trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. So in the unholy trinity, the dragon is God the Father. He is the one that imbues the beast with power. He is the one that gives the message to the false prophet that we're gonna talk about here in a little bit. He is the one kind of directing the show, so to speak, in this point in history, and the one kind of pulling all the strings. So the rest are doing the will of the dragon in the same way that God the Son and God the Spirit do the will of God the Father. So that's kind of how they work together. And we don't need much explanation of Satan. I think we're pretty clear on what his role is. His role is to take as many people away from God as he possibly can. He's fighting to hurt God in every way possible. The next figure that we see is the beast from the sea. The beast from the sea. This beast comes out of the sea in chapter 13. I'll read you a brief description of him like a leopard and head like a lion and all that stuff. I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine. Anybody who says different isn't being truthful. So whatever. With that description, it's an impressive beast is the thing to take away from that. What's important is that it's imbued with the authority of the dragon and given the right to rule. So the beast is often referred to as the antichrist. So that's something that we've all heard before. If you watched horror movies and didn't read the Bible growing up, you still heard the term Antichrist at some point or another. And we have been looking for the Antichrist, wondering who the Antichrist is going to be. This is a thing that we concern ourselves with. I think every president that's ever in my lifetime has been accused of being that. And then there's historical figures like Hitler and sometimes the Pope gets lumped in with this of being the Antichrist. The reality is the Antichrist has not made an appearance yet. And it's going to be a lot more powerful when it does than anything we've tried to name it over the years. The other thing I would tell you is this. The word, term, title, Antichrist is not in the book of Revelation. At no point does John say this is the Antichrist. We get the idea of the Antichrist from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John when the same guy who wrote Revelation is writing letters to the church and he's warning them about the Antichrist and Antichrists, plural. So not only is there a the Antichrist, but there are other Antichrists. Any Antichrist is someone who tries to take on a messianic persona and trick other people into believing that he is somehow or she is somehow the Messiah and they should follow him or her. For those with a long enough memory, before Waco, Texas was a home goods store, it was the place where you thought of David Koresh. He was an antichrist, but not the antichrist. So because of what John wrote, we look for the antichrist, and many see him in Revelation and go, the beast, this has got to be the antichrist, and it very likely is. It's just important to me to point out to you that at no place does Revelation claim that, okay? But we're gonna treat him as if he is. The role of the Antichrist is to trick the world into thinking he's the Christ, is to trick the world into thinking he is the Messiah. So we think of the Antichrist as being evil, but it's important to know that when he shows up, he's going to seem inherently good. Particularly in the midst of a tribulation, he's probably going to be promising health and wealth to people and protection to people. And we know that the Antichrist sets up his own kingdom and sets up his own religion. He is the king of the kingdom. He is the focal point of the religion. And the whole world is to gather around and worship him. And he institutes this policy where you can be particularly effective with the Jewish audience, which we learned based on the 144,000, God still cares about deeply. If you've ever heard me preach through the Gospels, if you've been in a Bible study with me working through the Gospels, one of the things that I like to point out, because it helps us understand our Gospels so much better, is that no one around Jesus really understood who he was and what he came to do. Everyone's expectation of Jesus when the Messiah came was that he would be a physical king and sit on a literal throne, that he would be the most powerful physical ruler in the world. He would establish a worldwide empire and the whole world would worship him as a God while he did it. King, emperor, deity. That's their expectation of Christ. Now we get to the end of time and the Antichrist comes to impersonate and to deceive and what does he do? He meets the expectations that everyone has ever had of Jesus. By uniting the whole world under one empire, sitting on that throne, being the emperor and the deity that is the focal point of all the worship of the world. Okay? Which, sadly, is going to be particularly effective with the Jewish community. In 2012 or 13, I went to Israel. And one of the things I got to do is on the night of the Sabbath, on Friday night, I went to the Wailing Wall. It's the wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It's a holy place. And there was all these men dressed in traditional Jewish garb with the phylacteries and things on their forehead and the whole deal. And they're praying and they're wailing and they're rocking and they're singing and they're praying to God. And it broke my heart because God sent Jesus for them. And they don't yet believe in Jesus. They're still waiting for a Messiah to come and sit on the throne and be the emperor of the world on a focal point. They are primed and ready for the deception of Satan at the end of time. For the deception of the beast. Satan is very intentionally digging at God the best he can as he deploys his strategy to tear people away from God. So that is the Antichrist. In the unholy trinity, he's clearly taking the role of the son, right? But there's one more in the unholy trinity. That's the beast from the earth that's talked about later in the chapter. His brief description is this. Chapter 11. Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast whose mortal wound was healed. We're not going to get into the mortal wound thing, but we see that the role of the beast from the earth is to point people towards the beast of the sea. That's why he's often called the false prophet. So there's the Antichrist and the false prophet that have been prophesied about, and most people believe that these beasts fulfill those roles and round out the unholy trinity. And we see him as being the spirit. The spirit points us to Jesus. The spirit speaks to us in personal ways and directs us to Jesus and shows us what we ought to do. And so the false prophet, the beast from the earth, directs people towards the beast and towards the authority of the beast and acts as an evangelist for the beast, okay? And again, we don't see false prophet. We don't see unholy trinity show up in the Revelation text. We just use those terms to help us understand who they probably are, okay? So that's the unholy trinity. And those are the ones, those are the beasts that when they get tired of watching the two witnesses win souls to heaven, that go and attack them and kill them. These are the beasts that in, I think it's the sixth seal or the fifth bowl of wrath, God darkens their kingdom. He darkens the kingdom of which the first beast, the Antichrist, sits on the throne. These are the beasts, along with the dragon, that assemble the armies of Gog and Magog at Armageddon for the final battle, for the final scene in history. They're the ones that God curses when he sends a huge earthquake and breaks Jerusalem into three parts. This dragon and these beasts are the ones that are thrown into the pit and locked up for a thousand years for the millennial reign of Christ, which we'll talk about in two weeks. And then come back out and are loosed and are allowed to tempt the world for a short time before Jesus finally and victoriously throws them in the lake of fire for all of eternity. These are those beasts, okay? So those are those figures from Revelation. There's one more figure left to talk about. Her name is the least comfortable to say out loud, but she's the whore of Babylon or the great prostitute. We see her in chapter 17. We're told about who she is, and we're told in chapter 18 the author delights in her demise, like in a song. I'm going to dive into some research on that so I can adequately sum it up for you next week because it transitions into Jesus showing up in chapter 19, which is the best part. But this figure in chapter 17, known as the whore of Babylon, I will argue to you, renders Revelation chapter 17 as the most mysterious, unknowable chapter in the whole Bible. I don't think there's any way to know who she is and what's going on there. What we know for sure is that she represents a city. We don't know what city. People over the years have tried over and over again to guess. In the text, there's some indications that it could be Rome. That seems to be the strongest indication in the text because it's noted in chapter 17 that she is, oh, here's her description. I'm sorry, I almost forgot. And then I'll was written a name of mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and earth's abominations. Another quick point to make here, it says at the beginning that she is arrayed in purple and scarlet. If you dig into the Greek there, those color words can also be translated electric blue and silver. So Panthers fans, just be careful. You never know if you're wearing evil, evil colors. I'm just looking out for you guys, you know? For those that don't know, I'm from Atlanta and I hate the Panthers and I just made that up. That's not remotely true, okay? It's very clear in the text that she's representative of a city. It's hard to know which city. There's indications that it could be Rome because it says that she is drunk off the blood of the martyrs of Christ. And at the time of the writing, Rome had essentially declared a holy war on the followers of Jesus and was martyring them left and right. So that matches up. And then there's a mention that she sits on seven hills. And if you've ever been to Rome or studied Rome, you know that Rome is defined in its geography by seven hills. And so there's some lining up there. And it's very easy to say, well, that's got to be Rome. The problem with that is that would mean that whatever happens in Revelation has to take place when Rome is the most powerful city in the world, which was true at the time of the writing, but is no longer true. So if you want to say it's definitely Rome, you have to either commit yourself to compressing the timeline of Revelation to a degree that all of it's already happened, and then we have to figure out what the implications are with that interpretive style. Or you have to think that maybe Rome is going to be thrust into the forefront at some point later on in the future. Maybe that's where the beast decides to sit and brings it back to prominence as he leads his world empire. But when you get there, you're just guessing, man. It may as well be Tupelo, Mississippi for the guesses that you're making because you have no idea what's going to happen in the future. Which renders this chapter and understanding exactly who she is or what city she represents impossible and is the most mysterious chapter in the Bible will very likely only be known within the generation that it happens or in eternity for most of us. What we can know is she, the city that she is, embodies all the sin and all the willful rejection and all the flippant dismissals of Christ and his blood and God and his goodness throughout history. We could think of it like we would culturally think of Vegas. Just a city that thumbs its nose at Christian sensibilities, thumbs its nose at the idea that a God could exist who would actually care about what we do and honoring him with our bodies and our morals and just pursues hedonism and throws everything and greed and throws everything else to the wind. The whore of Babylon is the personification of reckless, unfettered, selfishness, evil, greed, and what we would call sinning for all of history. It is the embodiment of rebellion from God is how we understand her. So those are the figures of the tribulation. I would end with this thought as we try to wrap all that up and prepare ourselves for next week. Deception has always been and will always be Satan's strategy. Deception has always been and will always be Satan's strategy. The whole purpose of the unholy trinity is to trick a generation of people into believing that they are the Godhead, that the beast, that the Antichrist is the Messiah, that you are good and right and wonderful to put your faith in him and follow him. And in doing so, deceive people away from God and hurt God the Father's heart as he watches his creation march away from him being deceived, believing that they are doing good. That's the insidious part of it. It's not that these people are choosing to worship Satan because you stink God, we love Satan. They think they're worshiping God. They think they're following the Messiah. It's a deception of Satan and it's evil. And it's important for us to realize that now because deception will be then, was in the past, and is right now, the language that Satan speaks. It is the way that he pulls you away from your creator. And it's worth simply asking as we wrap up, what lies are we believing that are pulling us away from our God? There's any number that we could place there. Some of us believe the lie that politics are the way to fix our culture. Some of us believe the lie that if we just get the next thing, we'll be happy. Some of us believe the lie that if that thing wouldn't have happened in the past, that we could be happy right now. Some of us believe the lie that we're the main character of the story of the world. Not me, other people. It has never not been a profitable exercise for me in my spiritual life to not sit and contemplate. If Satan is the author of lies, he's the father of deception, and his efforts to pull people away from God are going to culminate in the greatest deception, what lies am I believing now that I need God to free me from? If you want a spiritual exercise from this teaching this morning, that would be the place that I would lean into. And if it makes you angry that Satan has been lying to people for all of history and has been hurting and harming you with his lies, if you see your children believing the lies of Satan and it hurts you to watch them walk in those lies. Guess who else is upset? God. And next week, we'll see him send his son to a wrecked shop and make someone pay for those lies. And it's pretty great. Let me pray for us. We'll go throughout our weeks. Father, we thank you for the book of Revelation. We thank you for being so clear with us in ways of what to expect, what's going to happen, how things are going to go. God, I pray that we would have a better understanding of this book and the things that occur in it now than we did weeks prior. Lord, my words that have been unclear or clumsy or poorly or irresponsibly chosen, I just pray that they would be forgotten or forgiven. The things that are right and good and true, let us lean into those and hold tight to those. Let our study of this book enliven our hearts towards you and help us want to know you and understand you more. God, I pray for all of these folks as they go throughout the week. I pray for the folks listening as they go throughout their week. May you show up, God. Would they see you? Would you be present to them? For those who need encouragement this week, I pray that you would breathe that into their life in a way that only you can so that there's little doubt that you love them and care about them. Thank you for loving and caring about us. Thank you for loving and caring for this church. Thank you for all that you're doing here and all that you're allowing us to do through your spirit. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

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