Sermons tagged with Relationships

Well, good morning. Like I said earlier, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I'm just stating this for the record. This morning, Jen went to Atlanta on Saturday with Lily, with our daughter Lily. And so I'm solo dadding with our two and a half year old son, John, which means this morning I got us both up, showered, product in our hair, presentable for church, and here on time. So I don't know if the sermon's going to be any good, but that was pretty good, and I'll take it. Yes. Thank you. And to boot, the sermon doesn't even have to be good because worship was so great, I could send you home now, and we've all been ministered to. So that was really good, too. You got one clap, two. There we go. Dang it. Aaron got a whole clap last week for his sermon, and now he's getting clapped for for worship. He's going to get a big head. Y'all don't know what it's like to deal with him during the week, I'm telling you. This morning, we arrive at this concept of abiding in Christ. And I think it's one of the most profound concepts in scripture. It's one that if we can grasp it, if we can instill it in our brain, if we can make it our mantra, it changes our entire life. This concept to me is so profound that when I was originally planning this series, the whole series was going to be called Abide. And we were going to look at what it meant for us every week to abide in Christ. But as I dove into the text, I realized that I wanted to talk about the broader conversation happening around those verses, which is why we ended up with a series called Final Thoughts. I'll remind you it's called Final Thoughts because this series is entirely in John chapters 13 through 17. In the back half of John chapter 13, Jesus has just been betrayed by Judas. They are at the Last Supper. It's the last time he is going to be in the room with his disciples before his death, burial, and resurrection. And before he goes, he has some final thoughts for them in what's referred to in theological circles as the upper room discourse. So in this discourse, Jesus is just telling the disciples all the things he wants them to know before he leaves. So it's worth it for every Christian to look into these chapters to see what Jesus has for them there. This morning, we arrive at the concept of abiding, but to help us understand why this is such a profound concept, I want to tell you about the life of my friend, Tripp. I thought about telling you about my own life, just the details and the stresses, but it feels a little bit self-serving and whiny for the pastor to get up and talk to you about how stressed he is and how much the church demands of him. So we're not going to do that. Plus you guys are really, really great and really don't demand a whole lot. Just show up on time and preach for 30 minutes. But my buddy Trip, he's probably my closest friend in the world, and we talk pretty regularly. And he's a couple years older than me. He's got a wonderful wife named Hannah, who I adore. She's wonderful. And they've got three kids, ages, I think, eight, six, and three. And then they made the decision about six months ago to add a Bernad Doodle to the lot. How do you show that you have money in America today? You have the name Doodle at the back half of your dog, and you have a lot of money if there's a Berna in front of it. It is a huge mammoth of a dog that's really annoying, and it was a terrible choice. And I'm not saying that because of my typical shtick of not caring for animals. I'm saying that because introducing that dog into that family in this season of life was dumb. And he knows it. He regrets it deeply. But Tripp and Hannah, they both have jobs. Tripp is an entrepreneur. He can work from anywhere. And he works very, very hard. But because he's running his own shop, he has to kill what he eats, right? So he's switching hats between being a salesperson, being a marketing person, closing deals, customer care. He's a creative guy. He's basically creativity for hire. He can do videos. He can host. He can help you brainstorm for your marketing thing or for an idea for you. So he's got a bunch of different irons in the fire. And to be a friend of Tripp's is to every, I would say, about 18 months, escort him through an existential crisis in which he questions what he should be doing with his career. It just always happens. And you kind of put his eye on the ball, and then he goes, but it's because he has so many different things going on. In the midst of that, Hannah, his wife, is a VP for a company that works with churches, and not just churches, but also schools and stuff like that, to create curriculum for students and children and for the parents. And her office is 30 minutes away, and her job is very demanding. And so when she goes into the office, she can't really be going back and forth, and sometimes she needs to stay late, which means that Tripp is going to be balancing the kids. And because they each have careers that they deeply care about, I think life is so much easier when there's one career in a marriage where you go, yeah, that's the more important one. For them, it's 50-50. Neither of them takes precedence over the other. So everything in their house, if you've got kids, you know, is highly negotiated, right? You are responsible for putting this one and this one to bed. I will get this one and this one up. If this one wakes up during the night, that's on you. If this one wakes up during the night, that's on me. If the dog wakes up during the night, I'll probably just let it out and hope it runs away. But they have to highly negotiate all these things. You take them to school. I'll pick this one up. And then one of them gets sick. And so when they get sick, they've got to sit down in the morning, and they've got to be like, okay, what are your meetings today? What are the things that I have to move if I'm going to stay home? They have to figure all of this out on the fly, and it is highly tense sometimes. So they're trying to juggle all of that, and I don't know what it is about them, but their kids are sick all the time. And then if one of them gets sick, you know how it goes, parents. They're upstairs down for the count. You should be at work, but instead you're taking care of the kids and the dog for three days on end. And one of their kids, they just got a diagnosis of some pretty strong ADHD. And they've been having some big behavioral things going on with this particular child. And it's been a real challenge, and it's put tension on them and on their marriage. And they're trying to balance that. They also, in their extended family, there's different tensions like there often is, and that's impacting them and how they balance all of those things. And then he's an extrovert. He loves his friends, so he wants to have time for them, but then everybody needs time to unwind and recharge, and so he needs his alone time as well. And for him, when I look at his life, it's just chaotic. And I think that our lives might not look exactly like that, but many of our lives are some version of that. If they're not now, they have been. And I know that I'm biased. I'm in the season of life where I have young kids and nothing ever gets done all the way. You can clean the house, but then this is going to go to pot. You can fix this thing, then the house is going to be a disaster. You can't do all the things when you have little kids. It's a profound season of hustle, I think. But I'm not naive enough to think that life gets a whole lot easier when they're teenagers. I'm sure that's a totally different set of stresses. I remember back to when I was like 26 and married and thought I was busy. If you're under 30 and kidless and we all just laughed, I want you to know we were not laughing with you, okay? Laughing at you. You don't know, man. But even then, even in that season of life, there's stresses and concerns. Am I going to get married? Are we going to have kids? Is this the right career for me? Is this what I want to be doing? How do I manage all of these things? And then when you're older and you have adult kids, am I doing the right, a good job with them? Am I being a good grandparent? Am I stewarding them along well? In life, we have, especially in 2024, so many concerns and things pulling us in so many different directions. I feel like we live now in a culture of confusion and chaos. There's so much stuff going on around us, and it's so hard to know the right thing to do and what to focus on and what to give our attention to in the moment. To that, to that confusion and chaos, we apply this principle that we find in John chapter 15. If you have a Bible, I would invite you to open there. If you didn't bring your Bible with you this morning, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open and read along there. I would encourage you, if you do have a physical Bible, I hope you do, to open it up when you get home and make sure that this passage is highlighted for you. This is an absolutely must-do highlight passage. But this is what it says. John chapter 15, verses 4 and 5. By the way, you may notice that I have a Bible that I've not used before. Last week, Gibby preached, Aaron Gibson preached, and when he did, he had a new Bible, and I touched it, and I was like, I have to have that Bible. So now I have a new preaching Bible, and I love it. So anyways, verse 4, Jesus says, Now this is what I get for switching from ESV to NIV in my Bible translation. Because the ESV and a lot of other translations, that word remain there And it actually goes along well with the picture that I use to explain salvation sometimes. But Jesus says in our vernacular, I am the tree trunk and you are the branches. And so the idea is we are, God created us and he attached us to him. We are a sprout off of him. He is the source of life. And that when we sin, when we act against the will of God, when we pretend to be God in our own life and follow our own rules, what happens is we are separated from God. And so the picture is the branch falls off the tree. It is cut off or sawn off. It falls off the tree and it is on the ground and it will surely die because it is no longer connected to its source of life. And when we are saved, what Jesus does is he picks us up and he grafts us back onto the tree so that now we are attached to our source of life. We will continue to live and continue to bear fruit. And in keeping with that imagery, Jesus here says, if you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. If you are attached to me, if you remain attached to Christ, you will bear much fruit. And here's what I think is interesting about that. When a branch, when a healthy branch on a healthy apple tree remains there, it yields its fruit in season. That branch does not get to decide what it wants to produce, when it wants to produce it, or how much it wants to produce. That branch doesn't get to go, you know what? I'm feeling pears this year, and I'm going do it in December just for funsies. It doesn't get to do that. That branch grows apples and that branch grows apples when the tree decides it's supposed to. And that branch grows as many apples as it and the tree are capable of producing no more, no less. So what Jesus is saying is, if you abide in me, if you walk with me, if you remain attached with me, if you walk through every day with an awareness of my presence, if you begin and end your days with me, if you carry me into meetings with you, if you carry me into the workplace, if you carry me into interactions with your spouse and with your children and with your friends, if you abide in me, if you bring me along, then I promise you that you will bear much fruit. Here's why I think that's remarkable. And it's how I want us to think about the invitation to abide. The invitation to abide is a gift of simplicity in a world of confusion and chaos. The invitation to abide is a gift that God gives us of simplicity in a world of confusion and chaos. When it feels like there's so much pulling at us, when it feels like there's so much that we're supposed to do, so much that we're supposed to be good at, so many different irons in the fire or plates to keep in the air, there's so much put on us. Jesus says in the midst of all that, he sweeps it away and he offers us this invitation to abide. And he says, if you abide in me and I in you, if you pursue me and bring me everywhere you go, then you will produce the exact fruit that you're supposed to produce. I'm kind of reminded of Jesus's admonishment of Martha in Luke. In Luke, it might be chapter 10, but I should have looked it up and I didn't. Jesus goes to Mary and Martha's house. And it's a famous story. You probably know it. When he goes there, Martha is scurrying about. We call it bustling in our house. Just bustling. Every day I'm bustling. We bustle in our house. So Martha's bustling around, getting everything ready, making sure that everything's good for Jesus. I mean, if Jesus is coming over to your house, you probably want to be on your P's and Q's. You know, you probably want to look pretty good. So I don't blame her for the stress that she feels at hosting the Savior of the universe in her home. And so she's bustling around doing everything. Mary, meanwhile, is sitting at the feet of Christ, just taking him in, taking in his words, taking in his presence, being his friend. She's being with him. And Martha gets on to Mary. She says, what are you doing, lazy? Come help me. Don't you know Jesus is here? And Mary's attitude is like, yeah, I do know Jesus is here. That's why I'm sitting at his feet. And Jesus says to Martha some version of, Martha, Martha, you're worried about so many things, but only one thing matters. Mary's right. Focus on me. It's this gift of simplicity in a world of confusion and chaos. And I think it helps us a lot as we face life's big questions, as we assess ourselves. You know, this weekend, I had the opportunity to go to two funerals. One of them I led, the other one I attended. And it never ceases to arrest my attention of what's said about people at their funeral. The kinds of things that are always shared. I believe at a good funeral that a close friend or a family member who knew them well will share memories of the person who has passed. That's always my favorite part of the funeral. And they always talk about how that person loved. They always talked about how that person gave. They always talk about the good things. They don't typically talk about accomplishments. And whenever I go to a funeral, maybe because I'm a narcissistic jerk, I always wonder, what would people say about me at my funeral? What kinds of things would they mention? Who would come and what would they have to say about me? And I think about one was a funeral for a mom, one was a funeral for a dad, and so I think about my parents. If I were to share at my mom's funeral, what would I say? If I were to share at my dad's funeral, what would I say about him? And I think it's natural to wonder that and reflect on that and wonder at your funeral, what are your children or friends or family members going to say about you? Will they say everything that you wanted them to say? And I think in our life there's more big questions than this, but as we think about trying to do the right thing, trying to be the person God wants me to be, trying to live the right kind of life, I think we are, at least I am, constantly asking myself these two questions. There's two big questions we're asking ourselves. Am I making the right choice? And am I being a good fill in the blank? Am I making the right choice? Are we sending our kids to the right school? Am I handling this situation with my child in the right way? Am I doing a good job nurturing my child into adulthood as they are now adult kids and I'm trying to shift my role with them? Am I making the right choice in my career? This time, this space that I spend all of my time, a majority of my waking hours, I spend pursuing this career. Am I making the right choice? Is this the right career for me? Am I making the right choice by remaining in my career and not retiring? Am I making the right choice by retiring and not remaining in my career? Am I making the right choice in who I'm going to marry? Am I making the right choice in choosing that now is the time when we want to start trying for children? Are we making the right choice that now is the time that we want to buy the new house? Am I making the right choice in it feels like maybe it's wise to get rid of the old car and buy a new car. But as I do that, how much do I be indulgent and spend? And how much do I hold back and save? Am I making the right choice in those things? Are we making the right choices in who our friends are and how we assign our time and our talent and our treasure? Are we making the right choices? Are we doing the right things? I think if we don't, if you don't wonder that about yourself, I want to meet you and I want to know where you get your peace and your confidence. I think this choice, this question hounds all of us. Am I making the right choices in all of the right places? And then we're also hounded, or at least I am, am I being a good blank? Am I being a good pastor? What more can I do and give? Am I being a good father? Am I being a good husband? Am I being a good friend? Am I being a good acquaintance? Am I just generally kind to people? Yes, of course I am. Are you being a good aunt, a good uncle, a good grandkid, a good grandparent? Are you being a good boss? Are you being a good employee? We're constantly assessing ourselves. Am I making the right choices? Am I doing the right things? And am I being good at the roles that God has assigned to me? All of that reminds me of one of the verses in Ephesians that I like to point out to you often. You can even jot this down in your notes if you're a note taker, but it's Ephesians 2.10. Ephesians 2.10 says, And it carries with it this idea that the Bible tells us that God knew you before you were knit in your mother's womb. So before you were even an idea in the eyes of your parents, God knew that you were going to exist. He knew that he wanted to claim you as his child, and he knew that he was going to imbue you with certain gifts and talents so that, because you're his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus. Why? For good works, for the purpose of doing good works, that you might walk in them. So before you were ever created, God knew you were going to exist. He was going to give you gifts and good works to walk in in your life. That was going to be the purpose of your life is to identify your good works. Hey, Father, what is my good work? And then how do I walk in it? Incidentally, parents, this is, I believe, how we are to parent our children. To raise them, to identify the good works that they're supposed to walk in, and to give them the courage and the competence to begin to walk in those good works. And another way of asking, am I making the right choice and am I being a good blank, is to say, do I know my good works and am I walking in them? Because God created us before time to build his kingdom, not our kingdom. We are all of us supposed to be kingdom builders. And so we've got to be asking ourselves, God, am I building it in the right way? Am I doing the right things? And as we wonder that, and likely beat ourselves up for not doing that as much as we think we should, we come back to this principle of abide. Abiding promises. We will be what we are supposed to be, and we will do what we are supposed to do. I love that promise. The promise isn't abide in me and I in you, and you will have the best possible shot at bearing fruit. Abide in me and I in you and you probably won't be disappointed. No. Abide in me. Follow me. Pursue Jesus. Bring him with you everywhere you go. Wake up. Spend time with him in word and in prayer. Carry him through your day. Talk to him. Pray to him throughout your day. Be a person who walks with Jesus, who abides in him. And the promise is you will bear much fruit. And here's the fun part. What fruit? Does the apple tree get to decide what fruit it produces? No, nor does it decide when, nor does it decide how much. You don't worry about what fruit you're going to produce. You don't worry about what it is you're supposed to do. You focus on Christ. You be merry. This one thing I will seek. This one thing I will give my attention to. And by focusing on Jesus, by following him every day, we are assured that we will do exactly what we are supposed to do. That we will be making the right choices. And we will be exactly who we are supposed to be, that we will be walking in, that we will walk as God's workmanship in the good works for which he created us. And we don't have to worry about what those are. All we have to do is worry about abiding in Christ, following our Savior. That's why I say it's a gift of simplicity and a world of confusion and chaos. Where do we send our kids to school? Well, the more you're abiding in Christ, the more clear that answer is going to be. Am I in the right career? The more you're pursuing Christ, the more clear that is going to be. Are we raising our kids the right way? Am I being a good spouse? Am I being a good friend? Am I being a good church partner? The more you abide in Christ and focus on him and invite him into your days and into your meetings and into your going and into your coming, the more you do that, the more certain you will be that you are walking the path that he has laid out for you. He gives us this remarkable gift of simplicity. You don't have to figure out if you're doing it the right way. You don't have to second guess if you've made the right decisions. You don't have to wonder if you're a good fill in the blank. All you have to do is abide in Christ and he will take care of the rest and you will produce much fruit. What fruit? Whatever fruit God has decided you're going to produce. We know the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So I think the fruit that we produce as we abide in Christ looks something like those increasing in our character. I think it looks like us expounding those into others in our life. I think it looks like us being used by God to do His work and build His kingdom. But the wonderful invitation is, hey, hey, hey, hey, you worry about focusing on Jesus, and he'll worry about everything else you're supposed to do. This is why I say, whenever we are evaluating or deciding, we should ask if we are abiding. As a general principle in life, whenever we are evaluating or deciding, we should stop and ask ourselves if we are abiding. I can't tell you how many times as a pastor that I've had a difficult conversation on the horizon. Somebody that I worked with that I was going to have to approach and say some hard things. Somebody with whom there was conflict and it needed to be resolved. Somebody who's disappointed in me and I need to reconcile. And how when those, I don't know about you, but when those hard conversations are on the horizon, I think about them all the time. I chew on them. I stress over them. I worry about them. I think, what angle are they going to take? And how can I be prepared for that? And how can I, I've got to get on to this person. How can I best do it and not demoralize them? Like, I think about them all the time. And I'll come up with an approach. This is what I'm going to do. This is what I'm going to say. This is how I'm going to attack it. And then something will happen and it will occur to me. Hey dude, have you been abiding? Not in this. Maybe I've had a couple of weeks where I've not been super consistent with my quiet times. Maybe I've been thinking about this conversation so much but I haven't prayed about it. And when I realize that's happening in my life, I put that conversation on the shelf. And I say, I'm not going to have that conversation until I'm prayed up on it. I'm not even going to think about how I want to approach that until I know that I have been spending some time with Jesus. And I put it on the shelf and I focus on my relationship with Christ. And then in that, I begin to pray about that conversation. Without fail, the conversation goes exponentially better than I ever thought it would when I have been abiding before I evaluate or decide. And also without fail. Funny how this works out. I'm always gentler after I pray. I'm always kinder and more gracious after I pray. If you're in your life faced with a big decision right now, what's the right thing to do here? Let me just ask you. Have you been abiding in Christ? Have you been walking with him? Have you been inviting him into your days? If you haven't, let me encourage you to put that decision on the shelf. Set it aside. Pursue Christ. Once you feel connected with Christ, pull it back off and see what he wants you to do. Have you been evaluating yourself? Which usually leads to beating yourself up. Are you someone whose voice in your head is a jerk? Is way meaner to you than anybody in your life? You're not good enough at this and you're not good enough at this and you're not good enough at this and you're failing at this and you're letting them down. If you have those voices, can I ask you, have you been abiding? Have you been pursuing Jesus and abiding him into all of your days? Are you listening to what he has to say about you? Or are you drowning out his voice with your own? Conversely, if you think you're doing great at everything right now, you're not. You abide in Christ. You're not. You need him to tell you. The question now becomes, as we look at this gift of simplicity that Jesus offers in a world of confusion and chaos, the question becomes, okay, Nate, I get it. I need to abide in Christ. I need to remain attached to him. I need to pursue him. I need to make him my singular focus. And everything else will kind of take care of itself. Decisions will become more clear. And his opinion of me is the one that I will adopt. That will all become more clear. I get it. I need to pursue Christ. How do I do that amidst the confusion and chaos? It's not like we get to call a time out on life and just do a spiritual retreat for the next two weeks so we're real connected. You all have stuff to do right after this. So how do we abide in Christ day in and day out in a practical way? That's what we're going to come back next week and talk about. So I hope you can be here for that, and I hope that it will be a tremendously useful and encouraging week next week. This week, I just want us focused on this gift of simplicity that Jesus offers, to simply abide in him. And in doing that, we can rest assured we will be who we are supposed to be, and we will do what we are supposed to do.. Let's pray and then Aaron's going to have some final thoughts for us. Lord, God, I thank you for a room full of people that do want to do the right thing, that do want to become who you created them to be. I thank you for a room full of people who do want to walk in their good works, who do want to build your kingdom. God, I pray that you would instill in us an increasing desire to do that. Lord, I pray that we would abide in you, that we would invite you into our days, that we would bring you along wherever we go, that you would give us your peace that passes understanding, and that you would create in our hearts a stronger and stronger desire for you. Lord, help us to abide, and in doing so, help us to enjoy the fruit that we produce by following you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning, a part of your January. I've enjoyed diving into this Ephesians prayer with you this month. This is the third part in our series called Rooted, where we're looking at a prayer by Paul over the church in Ephesus that we find in Ephesians chapter 3 verses 14 through 19. In the first week we looked at the act of salvation and how that's Paul's first priority in prayer for everyone that he encounters. And we talked about shaping our year around a similar priority for everyone that we would encounter. Last week we talked about the importance of going deep and developing deep roots in Christ. And this week, I want to give you what I believe is one of the most important ways that we can do that. One of the most important steps we can take in our life to intentionally develop deep roots. And I'll just say up front that this sermon is, I'm not sure that it's a sermon. Next week is a sermon. Next week, I'm going to light your faces on fire. Next week, I'm preaching. This week, I'm talking. This week, it's as if I can't sit down with every one of you over lunch or a drink and just casually discuss our faith and our journey and spirituality. But I have been able to do that with some of us and some friends outside of church. And we've had some frank discussions about small group, about conversations, about what really helps and what really drives growth. About what moves us and stirs our souls and about how we can connect ourselves to things that do that more so that we can pursue God with more fervor and more earnesty and with more depth. And so what I want to do this morning is kind of share with you a thought that I've been having for probably the last three or four months about something that I think everyone who's a Christian needs to do. And I honestly think, I know that this is, well, I was going to say this is kind of optimistic, but only if you think my other sermons are impactful. So maybe it's not optimistic at all, but I think that this could be the single most impactful one for you this year if you hear what I say and you agree with me and we take steps to do what we're going to talk about. So with that preamble, let's look at the prayer. Now this week is a little bit of a departure from the prayer because I believe in the middle of the prayer there's this almost parenthetical phrase, this parenthetical claim or reminder that Paul makes who writes the prayer. And so we're going to look inside that parenthesis today and wonder why does he say that and what does it mean? What are the implications for us? See if you can find it with me as we read Ephesians chapter 3 verses 14 through 19. established in love may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know the love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. That's the prayer. Next week we get to the climax of the prayer. What does it mean when Paul prays that we would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we would be filled with the fullness of God? I've spent two solid weeks trying to wrestle those phrases to the ground, and I'm excited to share with you next week. But before we get there, in the middle of this prayer, there's almost this just parenthetical reminder. And I know on the screen it says something different, but it says all the Lord's holy people. But in this NIV, apparently NIVs are different too. Who knows? I can't win for losing. But this, it says along together that you would have the strength to comprehend. And then here's a comma together with all the saints. What is the love of Christ that He doesn't have to include that little along with all the saints in the prayer. You can read the prayer without that. And it still means the same thing. He's still hoping for the same thing. He still wants the same thing for the church in Ephesus. He still wants the same thing for you and for me. Nevertheless, he pauses in the middle of it to almost remind them that there is a big C church. There are other believers going on. It's not just in Ephesus. It's not just about you. He pauses to remind them parenthetically, I believe, in the prayer, along with all the saints. He pauses to remind them that Christianity is inherently communal. This faith, if you're here and you call Christ your Savior, then the faith that you and I share together is inherently communal. It was always, always, always intended to be lived out in community. And I know that this is true because the communal nature of the Bible jumps off the page when you read the New Testament. I want to take you to Acts chapter 2. If you have a Bible with you, turn to Acts chapter 2. We're going to be looking at verses 42 through 47 for just a little bit of context of what's happening when we read these verses. This is the very beginning of the church. This is the genesis of what you and I understand as the church. This is when worship in the Jewish culture and this culture moved away. They departed from the synagogue. They departed from the sacrifices. They departed from the old ways and they started figuring out a new way to meet and to gather and to be the church. The context in Acts chapter 2 is that Jesus has come to earth. He's lived a perfect life and he's died a perfect death. He resurrects himself from the dead. He spends 40 days with the disciples and then he ascends heaven, and he says, I want you to go hang out in this room until you feel like you know what to do. And so they're hanging out in this room going, gosh, I don't know what to do. Do you know what to do? They're like going, I don't know what to do at all. So then they just hang out in the room, and then the Holy Spirit descends on them in tongues of fire. This is the event of Pentecost. Now they feel like they know what to do. They go out on the front porch. They preach the Word of God. They tell the story of who this Jesus was that we just saw killed and then resurrected. They tell his story. And everyone present hears it in their native tongue. This is the gift of tongues that we see in the New Testament. And thousands of people are saved. They say, what do we need to do to be saved? We agree with you. And Peter says, repent and be baptized. The fundamental repentance of Christianity. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Acknowledge who he is. He's the Lord and Savior of the universe. And be baptized. And then they did that. They were added to the church. So now the church is a couple thousand people strong. And they're going, what do we do? In verses 42 through 47 of Acts chapter 2, we see what characterizes the early church. We need to know that what we have, what we see in here is called descriptive, not prescriptive. It describes the early church. It does not prescribe for us everything that we are to do. One of the things you'll see in here is that they sold everything they had and they shared it in common. They lived literally communally like that. The reason they did that is because the church in Jerusalem was in a time of significant poverty. There was a huge disparity between some of the people in the church. And so they helped those who were in need. The church in Jerusalem was in such a tight spot that if you carefully read Acts and you study the life of Paul, what you'll find is that as he was going from place to place, he was also asking these churches in Ephesus and Galatia and Thessalonica for money so that he could take that money back to Jerusalem to support the saints there. So just keep in mind that what we see is not prescriptive. We should do everything here. It is descriptive. We should take the principles from here and apply them to our church. So if you want to know, is grace doing the right thing? Is grace the kind of church that Jesus would recognize if he were to show up here? What you do is you go back to the litmus test in Acts chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, and you read it. So we're going to read it together, all the verses, and then we're going to look at, to me, what jumps off the page of my head. Those who were being saved. Here's what jumps off the page to me when I read that. There's lots there. I could do a whole series on those verses. I just might one day. I've preached out of this passage a bunch of different times at this church and my previous church. This is home base for community in the church. But whenever I read this passage, what jumps off the page to me is that Christianity was never intended to be a solo exercise. Christianity was never, ever intended to be a solo exercise that we do on our own. It was never, listen to me, it was never intended to be a private faith. This idea that we don't talk about our faith or that we don't talk about our spirituality because my spirituality is between me and God. No, it is not. It was never intended to be just between you and God. And if you say that, how do I say this nicely? You're wrong. You're wrong. Our faith was always intended to be communal. It was never supposed to be a stoic solo exercise. That's private between me and Jesus. You won't find that kind of faith anywhere in the Bible. I'm not saying that the occasional solitude isn't important. We see all the time where Jesus goes off by himself to pray. But he prays so that he might come back and be ministered to and minister to. The times of solitude are to improve us for our times of community. Christianity was never intended to be a solo exercise. If you read the New Testament, you can't help but conclude that that's true. I would defy you to read the New Testament and not come away with the distinct impression that my faith is to be lived out in community with others. At Grace, we ardently believe this. That's why our mission statement is connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Because we simply don't believe that you can become everything that you are in Christ. That you can grow to the fullness of what he wants for you. Developing your gifts, walking in maturity, being rooted and grounded in love. Oh. Who was going to tell me? I saw you two laughing and I was like, oh, were you doing it? Oh, geez, old Pete. How long? How long was that there? Since the lights came on? Okay. Well, listen, you guys have been paying attention great. So good job. And that also makes me feel better because I saw Taylor and Wes laughing, and I thought, oh, no. I know I checked my fly before I came up here. What was I talking? Solo. That's where I'm at? Thank you. Let's pray. Let's go home. We're having BLTs today. I'm excited. You can't read the New Testament. That's so great. No one's going to remember anything I say. That was the bug sermon. Yeah, it was the bug sermon. All right. All right. Let's get ourselves together. Christianity was never intended to be a solo exercise. We cannot read the New Testament and not see the communal nature of our faith jumping off the page. One of the places that we see it show up over and over and over and over again in different ways is in the one and others. I know that if you've spent any time in the New Testament, you've seen the one another commands. We should love one another. We should forgive one another. We should encourage one another. We should outdo one another in honor. We should show humility to one another. We should show hospitality to one another. We should be welcoming to one another. We should confess our sins to one another. Over and over and on and on, we see these all through, especially the New Testament. Jesus has some commands for us. Paul has some commands for us. And the other general epistles have some commands for us. The other authors, it's all over. It's universal. There are these one another commands. And I've spent a lot of time in the last several months thinking about these one another's and the implications in the church. One of the studies that I've written for us for our discipleship pathway that we're going to start to use and deploy in August of this year. That's the goal as we try to build some other stuff up. There's a whole eight-week study that I've written on the one and others and how we can be obedient to them. If you Google it, depending on which list you click on, there's 56 or there's 72 or there's however many, but there's more than 50 one another commands in the New Testament, showing us that Christianity is inherently communal. And as I look at the one another commands, I see them in concentric circles of possibility. I see some that you can do for everybody, some that you can do for a few, and some that you can do for a core. And so I want to look at those today and talk about the implications of this as we ask, how can we leverage Christ's community for our personal growth and for the growth of others as we seek to be obedient to the one another's admitting that our faith is inherently communal? And I promise that all of this will make sense as we move through it. So if we look at the one another's as concentric circles in which we can be obedient to them. The first set that I want to look at I'm calling church one another's. Church one another's. These are one another's that we can do for everyone at the church. Anyone that walks through the doors, we can be obedient to these one another commands for everyone in the whole church. If you have your notes, if you have a bulletin, today was a really great day to have a bulletin because I have all of these detailed in your bulletin for you so that you can have the examples and so that you can know I'm not making these up. I even gave you some references. In the church one another's, I put love one another, honor one another, welcome one another, and then just a few more, show hospitality, have fellowship, live in harmony. To love somebody, now certainly that's an intimate thing, but to love someone the way that Christ loves us, we love them sacrificially, we love them wanting what's best for them. I can love everybody who walks through these doors. I can love anybody in the way that I want what's best for you. I can try to love you sacrificially if I need to. I park far away. I don't know if that counts. We can love everybody here on a Sunday. We can welcome everybody here on a Sunday. We can all do that. We can show hospitality to anyone who walks in these doors. There's some one another's that we can do with everybody. But there's some that if we're being honest, we really can't do them for, we can't be obedient to those one another commands for everybody in the whole church, especially not in an effective way. And for those, I'm thinking of those as small group one another's. Small group one another's. That's the next concentric circle. I think of things like forgiving one another and bearing with one another, comforting one another, caring for, encouraging, instructing. If we look at those and we think about what they require, this admonition to forgive one another. Certainly, we can forgive people at the church community level if they've done something wrong or committed a sin or made a misstep or whatever. We can forgive. But I would just mention that that sort of forgiveness isn't really challenging. If you did something over there to offend your kids or your spouse or your friends, and I don't really know about it, I just heard about it, it's really easy for me, being separated from that situation, to go, I forgive you. God restore you. At the small group level, these families that we do life with, when they do something boneheaded and we have to forgive them, that's a little bit more challenging. So that one another and the challenge to that one another shows up, I think, at a more intimate small group level than it does at the whole church level. I love this one, bearing with one another. That literally means putting up with one another. You don't have to bear with somebody until you spend one night a week with them and their picadillos and their quirks and their questions and the way they go about their things, right? You guys who are in small groups, which is most of you, you know there's people in your group you have to put up with. If you can't think of anyone, someone's thinking of you. They just have quirks. They just have ways about them. But we love each other and we offer each other grace. And those things are okay here. We have to bear with one another in those small groups in ways differently than the general mill you. I put comfort one another there because it's one thing when someone offers an impersonal, I'm praying for you. When someone just gives you a hug and says, looks like you needed that. When someone says, I hope this works out well for you. That's fine. But when it comes from a friend, it means more. When it comes from someone who actually knows what you're walking through, it means more. And all of these reasons are reasons why we need small groups. They're reasons why we say, if you're not in a small group, you're not experiencing everything God has for you. We need to be in those groups. If you're here and you're not a part of a small group, I know that Kyle gave a pitch beforehand. It was very good. I would really love for you to prayerfully consider joining a small group. I just, I've been doing ministry now for 20 years. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone flourish spiritually who never walked alongside other people in their church. I know I've never seen anyone get connected and stay connected to a church without a group of friends at that church. And we need the connectivity of small groups. We need these groups. We need them to connect us. And so if you're not a part of one, I really hope you'll prayerfully consider being a part of one. The other thing I would mention is if you look through the catalog at the information table, and you can call that table whatever you want. There's two tables out there. One has coffee, one has paper. Go to them. But if you look through that and you don't see one that works for you, would you email Erin Winston? She's essentially our associate pastor. Pastor in charge of small groups as well. Will you email her? Because she might know about some that aren't on there that would be a good fit for you. We'd love for you to join a small group because we can't be obedient to all the one another's on the church level. But even as I say we'd love for you to join a small group, I would also admit that there are some one another commands for which small groups are simply inadequate. And those one another's, the deepest core of one another's, I'm calling intimate one another's. Intimate one another's. These are one another's that cannot be done at the small group level. And I think, I think one of the great sins, and this is where I'm just kind of talking with friends now, I think one of the great sins and errors of the church over the last two decades is insisting over and over again that the small group provide for these kinds of one another's when it is simply not equipped to do it. I think one of the great sins of the evangelical church in the last 20 years, and there's a lot, so I'm going to say one of the great mistakes, not one of the great sins, because I'm not going to put this on par with other ways that we've screwed up. One of the great errors we've made is putting all this pressure on small groups to help with these one another's for which not only are they not equipped to help, but it would be wrong if they did. One another's like confess your sins to one another. Not bear with one another, but bear one another's burdens. When's the last time in your small group that someone just kind of lowered their head and shared in a moment of weakness, hey, I'm angry. I'm angry all the time. And I don't know why. But I do know that it's causing me to treat my family in ways that I regret. I do know that my kids don't get to see who I want them to see. I know that I'm not the husband for my wife that I need to be. And I don't know what's making me so angry. But I'm pretty sure I should go see a therapist about it. Will you pray for me and walk with me in this journey? Will you help me and come alongside me? When's the last time in your couples group, in your men's group or your women's group, somebody said something that vulnerable? What space do you have in your life for a conversation like that? When's the last time in a small group somebody confessed their sin by saying, you know, I have a co-worker that I'm attracted to. And I know that I shouldn't be. And I know that I shouldn't indulge it. And I haven't. But I'm skirting the line. And I just want to say it out loud here so that you guys can help me. Anyone saying that in your couples group? No. And here's the thing. If you say that kind of stuff in your couples group, stop it. You're making people uncomfortable. Don't do that. That's not the place. That's not the place. But do you see what I'm saying? You can't truly confess your sins in a small group. You need a different space for that. Here's what else you can't really do in a small group. We're told that we should bear one another's burdens. Well, do you know what I know? I can't bear your burdens until you tell me what they are. And nobody's telling each other what they really are in small group. And I'm not sure that we should. That's not a condemnation of small groups. But no one in small group is saying, you know what my burden is? I feel alone. I feel like I don't have anybody who knows me. I don't know what to do. I need friends. I need people that I connect with, who see me for me. You're not going to share that in a couples group. But we can't be obedient to the one another of bearing one another's burdens unless you trust me enough to tell me what they really are. Unless you trust me enough to say, man, I'm struggling. I am depressed. My life is a dark cloud. I have thoughts that I shouldn't. I'm not sure what to do or where to go. Sometimes I don't want to be here. Listen, there's a reason that the room is so quiet right now. It's because everyone in here knows that our souls need spaces like that where we can talk about those things. And we also know, those of us in small group, that it is not adequate for that. So my suggestion to you, what I want you to do in light of that truth, is to understand this. Everyone needs a second place. A sacred space. Everyone needs a sacred space. And I call it a second place because to me, I think everybody needs to be in two groups. Everybody should be in two small groups, especially, and listen to me, leaders and elders, especially leaders and elders. Because if anyone's going to start confessing junk in your small groups, it's not going to be you. Because Tom Hanks taught us in Band of Brothers that crap goes downhill, not up, right? You leaders, you elders, you can't share in your groups what you need to share sometimes. You more than anybody need two groups. But we all need two groups. And I know that that feels audacious for me to tell you that you need to be in two small groups. Like, Nate, I'm barely holding it together. I can barely get to my one small group on time. And a lot of times we just pretend that the kids are sick so we don't have to go. Like, it's a lot. If you're laughing, you've done it. I heard Liz Roberg very loudly. I know it sounds like a lot, so here's what I want to offer you. That second small group, that sacred space, it can and should look unconventional. If you get together once a week trying to have that level of depth of conversation, it's going to exhaust you so much that you're going to quit very quickly. It needs to look unconventional. It needs to be a small group of people. As I was preparing the sermon, I realized that I have one, which is really nice. So I don't have to feel convicted like you. I'm doing it. Yay. The last Thursday of every month, I meet with a current elder and a former elder. We get together at somebody's house. And when we walk into that space, we take off all of our hats. I'm not a pastor there. They're not elders. We are men who want to grow spiritually. We are men who want to encourage one another onto good works. We are men who want to create safe spaces for confession. We are men who want to bear with one another and open that up to one another. And in that group, once a month, we ask two questions. What's God showing you? What's he teaching you? This is a good spiritual check-in question because in that is the implication of, I'm assuming you're reading your Bible. I'm assuming you're praying. I'm assuming you're listening. What's God teaching you? And sometimes the answer to that question needs to be nothing. I haven't been pursuing him, but I'm here. Great. There's space for that. But we ask, what's God been showing you? What's he been teaching you? And then we ask, where are you struggling? What's been harder for you? That's a space to say I'm angry. That's a space to say my marriage is really on its last leg. That's a space to say I feel really underappreciated in work or in my relationships or in my marriage. It's a safe space to do that. And here's what I've learned about those spaces. That all that they require is trust and respect. All they require is trust and respect. I think we're wired to think that spaces like that, that allow conversations like that to confess sin and to bear our burdens and to show what we're actually carrying and to actually be vulnerable and go deep, that those require deep friendships. And I don't think that's true. I was in an environment a month or two ago where there was just different people in the church, different guys in the church that I had had some really interesting conversations with. And I wanted them to be able to talk to each other. And so we found a night that worked for us. We got together at somebody's house and everybody had, the job was for everyone had to come with one question, one question that you want to hear an answer from, from everybody. And two of the guys had never even met each other. All three of them, I knew all three of them better than they knew each other. And two of them had never even met before. But because there was respect there and because there was trust there that you want what's best for me, once we started answering questions, they started ripping each other apart. The very first answer. The very first answer, I asked a question, somebody answered it, and somebody else looked at them and went, what does that even mean, man? That's just a platitude. Let's get to the bottom of that. They were not best friends, but there was trust and respect, and so we were able to go to levels that were deeper than normal conversations can go. You need a second space. That second space requires people you trust and respect. And now, here's a little bit of pushback that I think you could be offering in your head. If we were talking, I think these are the things you would say to me. First of all, you'd say, Nate, this feels a little like a one-sided conversation. I'd say, yeah, I'm sorry. But you would, there are some who think, I have that. I have that. I have my friends that I can call and I can have those conversations with when I need them. That's great. I'm so glad that you do. One of the big mistakes we make with those kinds of friendships is that we are not intentional enough with them. We wait until the warning light is on to pick up the phone instead of having those conversations regularly for maintenance. You follow me? I heard one pastor say that the reason to work on our marriage and talk about our marriage consistently is because we have a tendency to not want to talk about it until it's shattered on the floor in front of us. If you have those friendships in your life, men or women, that you can pick up the phone and you can have an intimate conversation with and say, hey, here's why I need prayer. Here's why I'm struggling. Here's what's going on. That's great. Just become more intentional with them. Talk with those two or three or four people. Pick a space monthly or quarterly where you can ask those two questions. What are you struggling with? What's God teaching you? Don't just let them idle and not take advantage of them. We need them in our lives. And I see good Christian friendships. Grace is really, really good at developing connections. I see friendships here abounding. You know what I'll tell you? After seven years of being your pastor, I do not see grace excelling at strategically using those friendships to leverage us towards spiritual growth. I see those friends existing as mechanics in our life that we call when the light comes on. But I don't see us very good at regular maintenance. So the assignment for some of you is to reach out to the friends that you have, the acquaintances that you have that you trust and respect, and get something on the calendar. Pick a rhythm, monthly or quarterly. Find a time to do it. Spouses prioritize it for one another, and it shouldn't be your spouse for obvious reasons that I will not go into. You need a sacred space this year where you can be obedient to all the one another's. You need small group. We should stay in small group. Some of you who've been coming here the last three to five years, you started coming to Grace. You got connected in a small group. Your kids now look forward to coming to church because their friends go to church. You look forward to coming to church because your friends go to church. It's what's kept you connected and rooted at Grace, and that's wonderful. So we need small groups. We can't just all go into our own inclusive, intimate groups of three or four that we never invite anyone into ever. So we need both things. So for some of you, you have rich, deep friendships where there's trust and love and respect. Please begin to intentionally leverage those for your spiritual growth rather than letting them idle by. For others, you're thinking to yourself, perhaps, yeah, man, I want exactly that. That sounds great. My closest friends are not believers. I don't know where I'm going to find that. First, start praying for it. I bet there's more opportunities than you think. Second, and I mean this sincerely, email me. Email me and say, hey, I want what you were talking about. I don't know where to look. And here's what I'll do. If I get two or three of y'all that email me in, I'll email y'all as a group and go, why don't y'all get coffee? And we'll figure this thing out. If you want that, you don't have it, you don't know where to go, pray about it. Let me know or somebody and let's start pursuing this together. If you do this, if you begin to leverage your friendships with the people that you trust and respect for your spiritual growth and for their spiritual growth, I believe that 2024 will be a hugely spiritually impactful year for you. And that's why I think this may be the most important thing I say to you this year. As a pastor, as someone who cares about your spiritual health, find those places where you can go deep. Don't leave your small groups. We need small groups. But find a sacred space. And when you find it, be consistent in it. And if you find those and you start doing this, would you let me know? I want to hear the good stuff that happens in there. I hope you'll do it. Next week we're going to come back and wrap up this prayer and I'm very excited to share with you what's there. Let's pray and then Kyle's going to come up. Father, I thank you for friendships. I thank you for community. I thank you for the power of what it is, what it can do, what it means. Lord, we are adept here at making friends and connections. But God, would you convict us to take those deeper? Would you convict us to go further? Would you give us spaces where we can bear one another's burdens and we're willing to share what we are bearing? Would you create spaces where we can confess the sin that we struggle with, where we can shine light on the dark shadows and the corners of our life? Father, would you give us these spaces where we can flourish, we can know you, grow closer to you, be deeply rooted in you. So that we might know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and that we might be filled with all of your fullness, Father. Give us a sacred space. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning and Happy New Year. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your New Year. For those for whom this represents a New Year's resolution to come to church with more consistency, I will try my best to not make you regret that while I'm preaching this morning. I've also, I feel like I should just address this, I've been told this morning that I look like I'm going on a ski trip, that I look snuggly, that I look like an author. And then Keith back there in the hat, he's wearing a hat in church. He's sacrilegious. He told me that the white balance was off and asked me if I could change my sweater. So this is, I'm going back to the quarter zips next week, but start off the year with a sweater. Here we are. Speaking of starting off the year, I wanted, I thought a lot in the fall about how to start 2024. What was the best way for us as a church to launch into a new year? And the passage that came to mind is maybe my favorite passage in the Bible. And I know that if you've been coming to Grace for any amount of time, you know that my favorites mean nothing. Because I play it pretty fast and loose with favorite. But this one is so favorite that when we moved into our house, we moved into a new house in July of 22. And I first time in my life, I had a committed space for my own office at home. The first thing I did is reach out to Jen, my wife, her cousin, who is a wedding calligrapher, or I guess just calligrapher in general. I got her to write this out for me. We framed it, and it's in my office. It's that favorite. It's a prayer that we find in the book of Ephesians. So if you have a Bible with you, I would love for you to open that up, turn to Ephesians chapter 3. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, asked me if I could start to preach. Well, he said, can we buy new ESV Bibles for the church? Because you always preach from the ESV and it's confusing because you read from your Bible and it doesn't match anything anywhere. And I said, how about instead I'll just use my old NIV Bible and I'll preach from that. So you should be able to read along with me this year, which is a welcome change, I'm sure. So turn your Bible to Ephesians chapter three. What you'll find in verses 14 through 19 is a prayer. This is, this prayer has shaped almost everything about the way, and I'm tempted to say the way that I do ministry, but that's not really it. It's really the way I live life, the way I think about others, the way I pray for others. This prayer is what I pray over every new baby that's born to friends or to people at church. This is what I pray over people who are getting married, high school graduates, college graduates. This is what I pray over my children. It's what I pray over the church. It's what I pray over you when you're sick. It's what I pray over you when you are in times of plenty. It's what I pray over you when you are in times of need. This color is how I pray for everyone in my life. And so I wanted to start the year off by going through this prayer with you. So for the next four weeks, all the Sundays in January, we're just going to stay right here in Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. It gives us a lot of time to pull it apart and look at it and understand it. Now one of the things that I think is really interesting about this prayer is you can find a prayer pretty similar to this in a lot of Paul's letters. This prayer is not dissimilar from what he prays for the rest of the churches. Now for those of you who don't know the Bible well enough to know Paul's letters, that's what I'm referring to, a significant part of the New Testament, two-thirds of it, is letters from Paul to churches. Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians. Those are letters to churches that Paul started on his missionary journeys, and then he writes a letter back to them for whatever reason, to admonish them, to encourage them, to convict them, to whatever, different purposes for different letters. And so in the middle of his letter to the church in Ephesus, he says, he prays this prayer. And what captures me, well there's a lot that captures me about the prayer, but one of the things I notice first when I read this prayer is the opening line. We're not going to read it just yet. But the opening line, we do read it, you'll notice. He says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father from whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. So what he's saying in that first sentence is this. For this reason, I bow my knees. This is why I pray for you when I pray for you, which I do. This is what I pray. And if this is what Paul prays for all of the churches that he started, and if this prayer shows up in other letters, then isn't it worth examining the prayer and praying it over people in our lives? We're actually making this the prayer for grace in 2024. I believe there are some magnets involved. Are there magnets involved? Are we doing those? Yeah, yeah, we're going to do some magnets. In the next week or two, we'll have magnets with the verse printed on it so you can put it on your refrigerator, wherever you want to, so you can see it. And we would invite you to, along with us, make this your prayer for you and your family and the people you love and for grace in 2024. But when you think about what the prayer is, one of the things that stands out to me is what Paul does not pray for. I think almost as powerful as what he does pray for are the things that he leaves out. And this is what shapes the way I pray for people a lot. I want you to think with me, and I mean this. Do this exercise with me. Put yourself in Paul's shoes. The church in Ephesus is a church you started. You know the people there. You care about them. You spent time with them. You write them in other letters that you want to go there. But there's a wide door open for a great work where you are now. You can't go there now, but you long to be with them. And then you're writing them a letter. And you say, hey, when I pray for you, this is what I pray. What would you pray for them? We would probably pray for safety, right? Because persecution was rampant in the ancient world. So we'd pray for safety. We would probably pray for circumstances. I hope you heal up. I hope this works out. I hope God shores up your family. We'd pray for different situations going on in there. I think we would probably, if we're the leader of the church, pray for success. May God add to your numbers day by day, those who are being saved, that kind of prayer that we see in Acts. I think that we would pray for those things. And when we pray for people we know, what do we pray for them? Don't we pray those things for safety and for circumstances and for success for them? So it's interesting to me that Paul does not pray for safety, circumstances, or success in this prayer. You will not see those things in this prayer. And it stands out to me because I don't know if I have the right to call myself a history nerd, but I read a lot of it, and I listen to history podcasts, so do what you want with that. Thanks, I'm a nerd, Jeff says. But the ancient world knew what suffering was in a way that is totally anathema to us. Birth rates, infant mortality rates, most children, I mean a good number of children just dying in infancy or as really, really young kids. The average age is significantly down, suffering rampant across the board. And yet Paul does not pray for safety or for circumstances or for health. He's a church planter. He's ambitious, uniquely ambitious in the scope of human history. He wants this church in Ephesus to succeed. I know he does. I know he wants it to grow, but he does not pray for that. Look, look at what Paul prays for. And I think you'll understand why we're going to spend four weeks in it. I'm going to's the whole prayer. This morning, we're going to narrow down our focus to the first thing that he prays for. So there's a bit of an introduction. He says, this is when I pray for you, this is why I pray. For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from every family on heaven and on earth is named. And then the first thing that he prays is that according to the riches of his glory, that you would be strengthened with power through the spirit in your inner being, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. The first thing that Paul prays for is salvation. The first thing that he prays for, for his church, is that they would be what we would call saved. That they would know Jesus. And it's interesting to me theologically, it's not much of a point, but I thought it was worth pointing out, the threefold involvement in the salvation process of salvation, what happens in salvation and how the Trinity, the God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, the Godhead are all three involved in the salvation process. If you're a note taker, this is down in your notes, but I've moved it up to this point in the sermon because I felt like it fit better here. But just notice in the salvation process that salvation is the result of the Father's riches, the Spirit's power, and the indwelling of Christ. We see all three parts of the Godhead involved in the salvation process according to the riches of His glory, God the Father. That you'd be given power through the Spirit. That you'd be indwelled with Christ the Son. So it's interesting to me that the Trinity shows up in the salvation process. And it's interesting to me that the first thing that Paul prays for is that they, church in Ephesus, you, global church, would be saved. Now, we're going to talk about why I believe it's so important that this is the first thing he prays for. But before we do that, I want to stop and I want us to understand what it is to be saved. Because I've been in church world literally my whole life. And I've been in ministry world for over 20 years, which is crazy to think about. And I've had enough conversations with enough people who I know are good church Bible-believing people who in that conversation betrayed to me a lack of understanding around salvation and what it is. So while I know that it could seem rather elementary to start the year with these two fundamental questions, how do I get saved and what happens when I am saved? I also know that if I were to talk to all of you and ask you those questions, that the answers would probably not be clear and concise and unilateral. So I think it's worth defining those things here. So what does someone have to do to be saved? And when I say saved, what I mean is to exist in right relationship with God. And actually, we're going to define this in a little bit, what happens when we are saved. So I'll leave it for that. But what does someone have to do to be saved? Well, Paul answers this in the book of Romans. Romans is the most thick theological, densely theological book in the Bible where he goes to great lengths to explain what salvation is. For the first eight chapters of Romans, he is building a systematic argument, an understanding of what it means to be saved. So if it takes Paul eight whole chapters to help a church arrive at a fluency with salvation, then certainly we can say what I'm going to give you this morning is the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more questions around salvation than I'm going to answer today. And if you have those questions, I would highly encourage you, talk to your small group leader. Talk to a friend who knows scripture. Come talk to me. Talk to someone you trust. Ask those questions. These are good questions to ask. But if we look at Romans chapter 10, verses 9 through 10, we can let Paul tell us what we have to do to be saved. Look at this with me. If you declare with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. So, what do we need to do to be saved? We are saved when we confess and believe. That's what it is. We are saved. We become a Christian when we confess with our mouth and we believe in our heart that Jesus is Lord. This is a more concise way of saying what I say often. Often, you can probably complete these sentences, I hope that you can by now, but I say often that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. A shorter way to say that is Jesus is Lord. Just within that is all that context. So we are saved. We are a child of God when we confess with our mouth and believe in our heart that Jesus is Lord. It's that simple. It's also worth pointing out, because of conversations I've had, what doesn't save us. Because I've been around church people long enough to know that we're not always trusting in the right thing to save us. Some of us put our faith in things that are ancillary, auxiliary to the salvation process. I know if you grew up in my tradition, it was really, really important that you nailed the prayer. You had to get the prayer just right. Anybody grow up praying the prayers? Yeah. And then you look at that as my salvation moment. This is when I asked Jesus into my heart. And then I'm saved. And then if you have a background like me, you're in church all the time. And so multiple times, I prayed that prayer for the first time at four and a half. I was at Sunday school. They told me about hell. That place seemed pretty bad. I was like, what do I have to do? You got to pray this prayer. I'm like, I'll pray it. I'm in. Seems easy. And then I told my parents about it. And my dad, who graduated from a Bible college, quizzed me. I passed the test. We went out for Butterfinger Blizzard. I was way more excited about the blizzard than I was that I was an adopted son of the king of the universe. So it's actually useful to point out that our understanding of salvation changes over our lifetime. What salvation was really clicked with me when I was 17. And I have a fresh and new depth of understanding of what it means to be a child of God every year that I walk with him. I think that's why Paul tells us in Philippians that we should work out our salvation with fear and trembling. When you're walking with God, your understanding of what it means to be his child and a citizen of heaven evolves and grows along with your faith. But I can remember, subsequent to praying that prayer when I was four, I'd be in other gatherings and there'd be a speaker, a youth event or a kids event or whatever. And at the end, he would do this thing. It was always a he in those days. He would do this thing and he would say, everybody bow your heads. Every head bowed, every eye closed. And then he'd say, if you don't know Jesus, would you just slip up your hand? I heard somebody over here say slip up your hand. We know slip up your hand. We know that. I have PTSD from slip up your hand. And then you're down and then the speaker would be like, I see that hand. Bless you back there. I see you. Do all that stuff. And who knows if hands are really going up or not. Some guys, I know for a fact, some guys fake it. Nobody's raising their hand. They just do it anyways. But you can't look, because if you look to know nobody's raising their hand, then it's like double whammy. You just sinned too, so you've got just trust the guy. Slip up your hand, and then he says, repeat after. If you just raise your hand, repeat after me. And so you repeat this prayer. And I can remember sitting there, and I would hear elements of that prayer that I didn't pray in my prayer. And I'm like, oh no. I'm damned. Like literally. This is a problem. So then I would pray that prayer just to make sure I was good. I've prayed the salvation prayer a bunch of times. I've gotten all the elements. Now here's the funny thing. The power of what saves me is in my desire to get the prayer right. It's confessing with my mouth that Jesus is Lord and believing in my heart ardently, oh no, if he's not really my Lord, I need to say the prayer right. The belief and the confession is what God is working in to save my soul. I believe, I really do, my daughter Lily is almost eight. She's confessed with her mouth that Jesus is Lord. She believes in her heart, I know that she does, that Jesus is Lord. We've never sat down with her and prayed a prayer. I'm sure we will at some point. And that to her can be the marker of her salvation. That's fine. But Lily's as saved now as she can be because she's confessed and believed based on that passage in Romans. I'll tell you what else doesn't save you. And I don't say this lightly because I know that we have a lot of different traditions in here. And it's one of the things I love about our church, but baptism does not save you. It is not something that saves you is described as salvific. Baptism is not salvific. If,, and I say this very gently, if you are one who is sprinkled as a child, or you had your child sprinkled or baptized, and you're trusting that as what has saved them, I don't think you'll find that in Scripture. I don't think that's what we can cling to. We believe that baptism is actually, we teach that baptism is actually for people who have articulated a faith, who have articulated a confession and a belief, and that we baptize by immersion. I would stop here and say, if baptism is something that the Holy Spirit's been gnawing at you about, and you're hearing this at the beginning of the year right now, and you're going, oh shoot, he's talking to me. I am. I am talking to you. You should do it. Let's talk. But baptism doesn't save us. Baptism is a public profession of a private prayer. It simply declares that we're a child of God. Another thing that doesn't save us, and I bring this up specifically because I've been in conversations where parents have referred to this. And forgive me if I'm wrong on the wording. I did not grow up in a Presbyterian tradition or a tradition with this, but I believe somewhere around the age of 13, you take a confirmation class. Is that right, Lane? You nodded your head. Okay, good. You go through confirmation. And I've talked with parents before who are saying, how can my kids act like this? They went through confirmation. I know they're saved. And I had to say, to be saved, you confess with your mouth and you believe with your heart and isn't it possible as a 13 year old kid to be in a group of your peers going through class with the teacher that you respect and saying the things back to them that you're supposed to say and signing the papers that you're supposed to sign and being paraded up on stage like you're supposed to be paraded without ever actually believing what you're being taught. Doing it because this is what your peers are doing, this is what the teachers expect, this is what your parents expect. So that's not something I would cling to as evidence of salvation. We are saved by confessing and believing. That's what saves us. Now, what does it mean to be saved? When I say this word saved in right relationship with God, becoming a Christian, a believer, all the words, what do we mean? Well, Jesus tells us what he means in John chapter 5, verse 24. Look with me. These are the words of Christ. He tells us what it means to be saved. Very truly, I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged, but has crossed over from death to life. When we are saved, Jesus himself tells us we will not be judged and we will cross from death to life. What it means to be saved, the simple way to think about it is being saved means I am a citizen of heaven. That's what it means. Simple way to say it. And it's such an important concept. That's why I chose it, that we're a citizen of heaven. Once we are saved, we don't belong here anymore. Earth is not our home. We are aliens and sojourners in a foreign land. And one day, God will take us home. But right now, we are aliens here. And our job as aliens and sojourners is to take as many people as we can on our way home as humanly possible. That's what we're here for. But it means that this place isn't our place and it's a really important concept, but I'm going to get a chance to preach about this concept in the middle of March, so I'm not going to belabor it here. But that's what it means to be saved, that we are no longer judged. We are no longer judged for our sins. Scripture teaches us that when God looks at us, once we have confessed and believed, once we have become a Christian, that when God looks at us, we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ. That when he looks at us, he does not see our unrighteous deeds. He sees us covered in the sacrificial righteousness of Christ. The way it's phrased in Isaiah, and we're going to be in Isaiah after Easter. We're going to do a series called The Treasury of Isaiah, and I get to preach out of Isaiah 1, verses 10 through 18, and surprise, surprise, one of my favorite passages. The way it's phrased there is God says, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. So when we are saved, we are no longer judged. We are no longer declared guilty for the things that we've done. And listen, this is, I know, I would say heady, but it's not, I don't know. I don't know how to describe it. This is esoteric. God does not exist in time. He exists outside of time. We think. Who knows? Because I don't even think anyone understands that sentence. But because that's true when we become Christians, when he brings us into the fold, he forgives us of our sins past, present, and future. He forgives you of all the dumb stuff he knows you're going to do 10 years from now. We act like it's just from this point back, and it's all points. He covers over you with his righteousness and does not judge you. And then it says we pass from death to life. Death, whenever we see it in scripture, is always descriptive of an eternity absent of God. Just being dead, being cut off from God. So we pass from death to life. This is the punishment and the curse in the Garden of Eden. In the first couple chapters of the Bible, in Genesis chapter 3, we see the fall of man. And because Adam and Eve chose to sin, God says, you will now experience death. You will now be cut off. I think of it this way. I think of a tree and our sin, we're a branch on the tree, and our sin cuts us off of the tree and we fall to the floor helpless and essentially lifeless. Because we might not be dead yet, but we're going to die pretty quick. And then when we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ, we confess and we believe God and His goodness picks that branch up off the ground, grafts it back onto the tree, connects us to our source of life. We pass from death to life. That's what it means to be saved. We are now citizens of heaven, children of the King of the universe. So, if you didn't know that, now you do. If you did know that, then you just got to check the boxes. I'm good. Okay, I understood. Either way, that's a good outcome. Now, where I want to press us as a church in 2024 is thinking through the reality of where Paul chooses to put this prayer. This portion, this particular petition within the prayer. It's the very first thing that he prays. He prays for other things. He prays that we would be along with all of the saints. He prays for community. We're going to spend a week on that. He prays that we would know the surpass, that we would feel the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. We're going to talk about that. He prays that we would be filled with the fullness of God. We're going to talk about that. But before he can pray for those things, he has to pray for this thing. He prays for their salvation. I pray that you would know Jesus. It's the first thing that he prayed. It's the most important thing that he prayed. And it's interesting to me that he prayed it to a church, to a church full of people who very presumptively know Christ already. You don't just casually go to a Christian church in ancient Ephesus. It's not what the cool kids were doing. You don't just wander in there to try to make a sale. Like you go because you mean it and yet he prays for their salvation. I am deeply convicted that salvation was Paul's first priority and prayer for all he encountered. Salvation, that they would simply know God, that they would know Jesus, that he would dwell in their hearts through faith, was his first priority and prayer for every person that he encountered in his life. And it makes sense, doesn't it? Why would I pray anything else for you if I'm not praying that you know Jesus? Nothing in your whole life matters if you don't know Jesus, and everything after that matters in a completely different way once you do know Jesus. So why would I ever pray anything for you except that you would know Christ? And I said, this prayer shapes the way I pray for people. It shapes it in this way. Now when I pray for people, and some of you probably have heard me pray this, whether it's success or difficulty, I pray that all the events and circumstances in that situation would conspire to bring you closer to God, would conspire to bring you to a depth of Christ that's more full than you have now, that everything in your life would be, would conspire to bring you closer to Jesus. That's how this prayer color is my prayers. And I think it's incredibly important that Paul's first priority in prayer for every person that he meets is that they would simply know Jesus. Convicted of this, after I wrote the sermon this week, I emailed the elders. Every week, I come up with a prayer schedule for the elders. A little while ago, last year, I think sometime, we agreed. It's the dumbest agreement ever, because it's right there in Scripture, that one of the purposes of elders is to serve the church through prayer. So we said, how can we better do this? And we decided that every week I would make a schedule Monday through Sunday of here's what we should all be praying for today. Here's the one thing to include in our prayers as we pray for grace this week. And I write those on Mondays. And so when I finished writing the sermon this week, I wrote to the elders and, and it was the, you elders don't know, sometimes I sit there and stare at my screen for like 30 minutes. There's a huge hassle, but they're important to do. I did this in five minutes. And I don't remember the exact order, but it was Monday. Pray for your children that they would know Jesus. Just pray for your children that they know Christ. If you're sure that they already know Christ, pray that they would know him more deeply. Tuesday, pray for your small group, by name if you can. Pray that everyone in your small group would know Christ. If they already know him, pray that they would know him more deeply. Wednesday, pray for your service teams, the people that you serve with, including other elders, by name if you can, that they would know Jesus, that those who know Jesus would know him more deeply. And then it was community and neighbors. And then it was extended family. And then it was the people of grace, as many people as you can by name. And then the staff on Tuesday came in here and we went through the church. And one of the things I like to do sometimes, I don't do it as much as I need to, is I just sit in seats and I pray for the people who come to mind. Because you guys are creatures of habit, although the Morgans, you all are messing me up today. You guys are creatures of habit. You sit in the right seats. And I sit in your seats and I pray for you. And I go over there and I pray for you. And we pray that you would know Jesus. That's the prayer. Now here's the conviction. If that's Paul's first prayer and priority for everyone that he meets, shouldn't that be ours too? Shouldn't our first prayer and priority for every person we encounter be that they would know Jesus? What else are we praying for them if we don't do that? And then I started to think about this. What would happen if I shifted my perspective to Paul's perspective, and every person I encountered, the first and primary focus I had for them was I hope you know Jesus. How would that change my countenance? How would that change my life? How would that change my day to day? How would that change how I parent my children as they interact with others? How would that change my level of frustration in traffic? Think about that. If your first prayer and priority for everyone that you met, I think it's we did that, that what we would find is that we would begin to see people as objects of God's affection and not obstacles to our progress. We would begin to see people as objects worthy of God's affection, worthy of that reckless love that chases people down that we just sang about. And we would quit seeing them as obstacles to our progress. Now, I wrote this point specifically for me. So if it's helpful to you too, great. But I don't do so good with that sometimes. I was going to tell you guys a story about an interaction I had over the Christmas break, but the sermon's gone long enough, and I don't really have time to, and I don't really need to give you all the details. Just if I give you the premise, you'll fill in the blanks from there, I promise. I went to an AT&T store over the break. That's fun. I didn't say anything. Like if you just looked at the script, if it was a court transaction, and you just saw the words that I used, you wouldn't think I was being a jerk and that I had totally lost my patience. But if you hear them in a certain tone with a certain look on my face, you would understand that I was less than kind. And as I thought about this, I just deeply regret that interaction. And interactions like that that happened in my life. Where this person that I'm seeing is not an object of the Father's affection. This person that I'm seeing is an obstacle in the way of what I need to do. They're an annoyance. They're an obligation. Whatever word you want to fit in there. And so here's my encouragement to you. Make that your goal in 2024. That everyone you encounter, you would first think of as an object of the Father's affection. That your first priority for them would be that they would come to know Jesus. Pray that for your children. If they know him, pray they would know him more. Pray that for your coworkers. Pray that for your neighbors. And consider what would happen in your life, how your year would look different than 2023. If every person you encountered, your prayer was, God, I hope they know you. And if there's a way to move them towards that right now, I pray that you would use me to do that. How would that change your year? How would that begin to change your heart for others? So that's the challenge to you in 2024. As we make this our prayer for our families and our church and ourselves, we'll talk about the rest of what it means. But as we think about others and as we encounter others, let's let Paul's priorities be our priorities and make our first prayer and only priority for them be that they would know Jesus. As I finish, I'm going to pray. But before I do that, I'm going to leave some space for you to pray as well. I would encourage you right now to pray for the people that God's been bringing to your mind. Pray for the people in your life who might not know Jesus, that they would come to know Jesus. Pray with boldness and with faith. I love that we opened up the service with the song, There's Nothing That Our God Can't Do. Because some of us need to be reminded of that if we're going to continue to pray for that person to know Jesus. I have people in my life that I go through, I go through droughts of praying for them. Because sometimes I just don't think it's possible. But that's a faithless thought. Take a minute. Pray for the people in your life who don't know Jesus that they would know Jesus. If you're a parent, pray at first for your children. And just go out from there. And after a minute or two, I'll pray to close us up and Kyle's going to come up and we're going to have communion together. Heavenly Father, we just want to know you. Lord, would you give us your heart for those who don't know you? Would you give us just a portion of the desire that you have for us that we might feel that desire for you? God, for all the names that just got lifted up to you, we pray with faith and hope that they would come to know you. Lord, if there's a way to use us to bring others into a saving faith in you, I pray that we would open ourselves up to that. That we would be courageous, sensitive, bold, and caring. And we would share you with others. God, if you have an opportunity to use grace to bring people closer to you, we pray that you would do it. We offer you this space in our lives and ask that you use us in your plan to bring people into a saving faith with you. God, we thank you that you make it possible for us to know you. And we pray that you would give us the heart that you have to reach the people who don't. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service, which would be easy to do because we've got the holiday hoot going on and it's probably going to be pouring down rain. So you may want to stay and wait that out. If you were like me and you looked out the window at like nine o'clock, you're like, oh, look at that, it's raining. And you didn't know it was going to torrentially downpour on us, then you don't get any bonus points. But if you knew the forecast and you came anyways, that's impressive. That's almost like holiday weekend attendance there. So good for you. Also here at the beginning of the service, I just want to give everyone in the room a chance to get your cough drop out and put it in your mouth right now so that we don't hack through the entire service because it's that time of year, right? Mike mentioned earlier in the announcements that we are in the third part of our series called Twas the Night. Well, we're looking at Christmas, the greatest story ever told, and we're looking at it through the lens or perspective of the different people in the story. This week, we arrive at Joseph. We're going to look at his example of humble and consistent obedience in the Christmas story and in the early years of the life of Jesus. And we're going to ask what we can learn from that example. Now you'll remember, some of you, that this series started on December the 3rd and I was supposed to preach about Joseph on December the 3rd, but on December the 2nd, after the kids went down, Jen looked at me, my wife, and she said, Hey, what's the sermon tomorrow? And I ran her through the sermon and she made a face and I went, you don't like this one very much. And she goes, it's not, it's not your best one. And I said, well, what do I do? Like, it's Saturday night, you know? Like, it's been shipped, you know? And she goes, well, that's not really good enough. So you should probably go to your office and write it again. You can nap tomorrow. And I was like, and I knew in my gut she was right. Like, darn it, she's right. Because the sermon was going to be Christmas season. It was the first one. Christmas season is a stressful season. We all have things going on. We all have family obligations. It's just event, event, event, event. It feels so busy. Everything's packed that it's super stressful. Well, Joseph had maybe the most stressful Christmas of all time. And what was at stake if he let the stress of Christmas win is that he would miss the Messiah. Gross. That's a gross. That's dumb. That's like, I just gave you the important parts of that sermon. To make that 28 minutes and make you sit through it would be a disservice to you. So Jen was right. And then I remembered, I've written all the sermons already. I'm just going to bump them up a week. And then that will give me two weeks to come up with something on Joseph. And what I'm going to tell you about Joseph today, I think, is way better than that. Now, you may leave and be like, should have done the last couple of weeks has developed within me a much deeper appreciation for Joseph. I think he's an underappreciated figure in the Bible and portion of the Christmas story. Now, Joseph is the earthly father of Jesus, and we've all probably heard of him before, I would guess. But what I find interesting about Joseph is that even though he was the earthly father of Jesus, he had a very important part to play in the story of Jesus. In scriptures, we have no recorded words of Joseph. We don't see a single thing that he said. We don't know a single thing that he thought. Well, those are lost to history. I'm sure Joseph did have words, but his words are lost to history. And he fades out of the gospel narrative relatively quickly. We see him in Matthew and we see him in Luke. We see him in Matthew and that's where we're going to be today, Matthew chapters 1 and 2. Having and being obedient each time. We see him in Luke as part of the Christmas narrative, but he's got no words that he uses except he just takes his family faithfully to Jerusalem. And then we see him interact with Jesus when they left him at the temple when Jesus was 12 years old and they have to go back and get him. But beyond that and these three interactions that we're going to read today, we don't have anything else about Joseph in the Bible. We just know that by the end of the story, he's faded out of the narrative and we don't know why or what happened, but everyone's best guess is that Joseph simply passed away. Culturally, he was probably older than Mary, and he probably died before his time, which would imply that Jesus grew up grieving the loss of an earthly father, which I think is interesting, but not the point here. But we have fleeting glimpses of Joseph in the gospel narratives. And because we don't have any of his words, we can only know Joseph by his actions. We can only know Joseph by what he did. He doesn't get an eternal press conference to explain himself. We can only know Joseph by his actions and by how he responded. And there's three different times that God comes to him and tells him to do something. And all three times, Joseph responds with obedience. And I want us to look at those times. So if you have a Bible with you, please turn to Matthew chapter one. We're going to be in chapters one and two. If you don't have a Bible with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But in Matthew chapter one, beginning in verse 19, I'm going to read through 24. Actually, I'm going to read through 25, but that won't be on the screen. Joseph has just found out that Mary is pregnant. And this is problematic because they have not yet biblically known each other. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph woke up from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded. He took his wife, in verse 25,. God has spoken to Mary through an angel. He said, you're going to conceive. You're going to have a son. His name is going to be Jesus. He's going to be the Savior of the world. And she's engaged to be married to Joseph. And that wasn't Joseph that did that. So this is problematic. So Joseph, because he was a just man and a righteous man, had resolved to leave her quietly. And that speaks a lot to the character of Joseph because he did not have to do that, especially in that day and age. It's gross how women were treated in that culture, but he could have just publicly walked away from her and shamed her, and he chose not to do that. He was going to do it quietly. And after he had made that decision, the Lord comes to him in a dream and says, hey, the baby that's inside Mary is from me. Stay with Mary. Now, a lot of pastors and a lot of pulpits and a lot of small group leaders have used this opportunity to make some jokey jokes about Joseph and staying with Mary. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. Not because I find it to be disrespectful. But because those jokes have been trodden. And there's no good material there. So we're just going to move right on. With marveling. At the faith of Joseph. That says. Okay. And stays with Mary. He did not have to do that. But he was a just man. And somehow, this is pure speculation, but it's hard for me to believe that this was the first time God had directed Joseph to do something. Because that's a pretty big something. The first time in your life God shows up and says, hey, I want you to do something for me. I've got this act of obedience. I've got this step of obedience I want you to take. That's a pretty big step to raise a son that's not your own, that is supposed to be the savior of the world. That's a pretty big step of obedience. And yet Joseph takes it. Joseph takes this step of obedience, sees it through. We know the story. They go to Jerusalem for the census and they end up in Bethlehem and Jesus is born in a manger and the angels and the shepherds show up to celebrate. And at that point, the narrative is kind of about Mary and what happens after that. But in Matthew chapter 2, we see Joseph pop up again. Verse 13 through 15. Now when they had departed, these are the wise men, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, rise, take a man with a one and a half to two year old son. And he says, Hey, I want you to take your family and I want you to flee to Egypt. Now this, and here's, here's what he does. He gets up the next day, that very morning. And he goes, this to me is a more remarkable step of obedience than choosing to remain with Mary. Do you understand this made him a refugee fleeing into a foreign nation? We have no reason to believe that Joseph was a man of means. We have no reason to believe that at all. He was from a small city called Nazareth. Tradition has it that he was a carpenter, although I've been taught that the word there can be interchanged with mason in the original language. And there's a lot more stone quarries around Nazareth than there are trees. So more than likely, Joseph was a mason. So if you've ever had that bumper sticker, my boss is a Jewish carpenter. If you were literally a carpenter who worked for a literal Jew, then that was true. Otherwise, I got bad news for you. Jesus was probably a Mason. Anyways. He had to uproot this family, leave his career and professional ties. He had to take a two-year-old across the border as a refugee. Y'all, I have a two-year-old. I won't take that kid to Wilmington. Like, I don't want to drive him to Greensboro and back. It's a hassle, those kids. He uproots him the very next day and takes him to Egypt, where we have no reason to believe he had ties in Egypt. He reestablishes himself, finds a way to provide, finds a way to protect, finds a way to make money, does what he has to do to care for his family. It's a remarkable step of obedience. And then the last one we see is a few verses down, chapter 2, verse 19. But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, Rise, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead. And he rose, and he took, loads everything back up, cuts ties in Egypt, migrates back to Nazareth, reestablishes himself again. All three times, Joseph gets what are pretty tall orders. God didn't appear to him in a dream and be like, hey, read the Bible for 30 minutes a day. And then the next day, okay, I'll do it, Lord. He said, move your family to another country. That's hard. And he did it the next day. He didn't talk to the city elders about it. He didn't go counsel with his rabbi. He didn't throw a fleece out and say, God, I'm going to pray about this again, and if you want me to do it, make the fleece wet and the ground dry. He didn't do that. He got up and he went. The example of Joseph's simple, humble, consistent obedience is remarkable. And I do not believe that he gets enough credit in the Christmas story and in the way that we think about the figures in the Bible and in his value to the kingdom of God. To me, Joseph is the personification of this verse in James. You can turn with me James chapter 1 verses 22 through 24. I thought about doing this morning to get to James a sword drill with you guys. Raise your hand if you know what a sword drill is. A.k.a. raise your hand if you grew up Southern Baptist. So in Southern Baptist Sunday School, a sword drill is you would hold the Bible up by the spine. I've got my finger in the mark. But you would hold the Bible up by the spine, and the teacher would call out a verse, and you'd slam your Bible on your lap, and you'd scramble to find it as fast as you could. First person to find the verse stands up and starts to read it, and they're the winner. And they're the most spiritual person in the room and they're destined for greatness, right? That's how that went. So I thought about having a good old fashioned sword drill right here in the middle of church, but I didn't want to embarrass myself. So I didn't do it. But in James 1, 22 through 24 is this famous passage that many of us have probably heard before. And I believe that Joseph embodies and personifies this passage. Verse 22. Joseph was a doer of the word, not just a hearer. He was a man who received instructions from God, and he followed through with them. And so we know that Joseph was righteous because he obeyed. We don't have any words of Joseph, but we know that he was a righteous man because he was a man that obeyed God. And the disciple John wrote a whole book, the letter of 1 John, where the entire point of the book is, if you say you love God and you do not obey him, you're a liar. Joseph loved God. Joseph obeyed him. He was a doer of the word. And now it may sound simple to be a doer of the word and not a hearer. Simply act. Don't just listen to sermons. Don't just listen to small groups. Don't just listen to books, to messages, to different things that we picked up along the years, to the counsel of godly friends. Don't just listen to it, but employ it and do it. When you feel God nudging you to take a step of obedience, take it. That is a doer of the word. And if you're like me, if I could sit down with you individually over some coffee and ask you, what do you feel like God's been nudging you to do? What are the steps, what's the step or steps of obedience that you believe God would like you to take in your life? What have you heard him tell you to do but maybe you haven't done yet? I very seriously doubt that any of you would lack for answers there. And that's okay. We should all have that answer all the time. At Grace, we say that we're step-takers. We're always taking the next step of obedience. In this way, we're making disciples. It's okay to have that list of things that we ought to do. But let me ask you this. And I don't mean to step on toes, but just hear me out. If I could ask you that question six months ago, would your answers be pretty much the same as they would be today? If I could ask you that question a year ago, three years ago, five years ago, how long have your answers been the same to the question of God wants you to take a step of obedience, what is it? How many times has he reminded you of that? And yet we haven't been doers. So I don't say that to unduly convict or to guilt. But I do want us to see that being a doer of God's word is far more easily said than done. And here's why being a doer of God's word is so important. Here's why being an obedient servant is so important. Here's why humble, quiet, consistent, silent obedience is so important. Here's why being an obedient servant is so important. Here's why humble, quiet, consistent, silent obedience is so important because I am convinced that humble, quiet obedience is the brick and mortar with which God builds his church. I am absolutely convinced that that type of humble, quiet, day after day, relationship after relationship, step after step, task after task, season after season, that kind of life lived in obedience to God and fealty to him is the brick and mortar with which God builds his kingdom, the church. I'm absolutely convinced. And that's so important because we've talked about this before. Jesus came to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death, but that's not all he came for. If it was, then why did he waste three years letting the disciples follow him around being annoying, asking stupid questions? Because he was preparing them to lead the church that he was establishing. Because he didn't just come to live a perfect life and die a perfect death. He came to establish the church and equip us to build it. That's what he came to do. And when he left, he meant this so ardently that he spent three years of his life training everyone around him to do it. And then when he left, he looked at them and he gave them what we refer to them as the Great Commission that we find in Matthew 28 and in Acts chapter 1. Go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And then another way he says it is, take the gospel to the corner, to Jerusalem, Judea, to Samaria, even to the ends of the earth. Go tell my story. What he's telling them in not so many words is, I have equipped you and purposed you to go and build the church. And every generation of saints and believers after them, that is our sole biggest duty is to build God's church, to build his kingdom. At Grace, we have five traits, and I'm going to start talking about those traits more. But one of them, the one that we want to push everyone to, if you are a partner of grace, we want you to be a kingdom builder. Someone who realizes and understands that every gift you have, all of your time, all of your talent, and all of your resources have been given to you by God so that you might be used to build his kingdom. It's our purpose on earth to figure out how we marshal what we have to build God's kingdom, which is to add numbers to it and to strengthen those in it. And I am convinced that the Josephs, the unquoted, maybe misunderstood, maybe non-heroic. Figures in our church's history are the literal brick and mortar with which God builds his church. That obedience is how God builds his kingdom. And when I think about someone who personifies that, first of all, I would just say honestly, I can think of several people in this room that are that to me. But I didn't want to humiliate anyone, so I'm not going to use you as an example. When I think of someone who lived this life and was used in ways far beyond her expectations to build God's church. I think of my mama. And I've mentioned her before, and I think I've even expressed this before. But as I thought about the best example of this, I just couldn't get away from it because I think it's so powerful. My mama was born Linda Sandifer in Red Stick, Louisiana, Baton Rouge. Poor family. She has a brother named Doty. All right? That's his name. That's not his nickname. It's his name, Doty. And when she was 17 years old, she met my papa, Don Green, who grew up in South Georgia. And he said, he grew up on a literal dirt floor, and he told me when I was growing up that they were so poor that his family could only afford to buy one bean, and they would tie a string to it and take turns swallowing it for dinner. While we're here, he used to say, when I was growing up, we were so poor that when the family went to Kentucky Fried Chicken, we had to pay to lick other people's fingers. If you're too young to get that, just ask somebody who's chuckling. They'll explain it to you later. They were married at 18 and 19 years old. And at the end of Mama's life, she had four kids. She stayed with Don. I loved my Mama and Papa. She was widowed in her early 60s. And for the last about year and a half, two years of her life, I would have coffee with her every other Monday for Mama Mondays. And I got to know her better than I ever had. And what I learned about her is that she never, ever felt important. She felt important to her family. It wasn't anything bad. She's to the broader community. She didn't think she mattered. She never envisioned herself as having much impact. She grew up thinking her older sister, Ann, was prettier and smarter and more talented than she was. My pop, Aldon, had this big bombastic personality, and she was in the shadow of that, helping in the back. And so she never really thought she mattered. When she would hear sermons where the pastor would say things like, God has a purpose for your life, God has a plan, he's gifted you, and he's purposed you for great things in his kingdom. She would think, yeah, not me. I'm just a mom. I'm just doing my thing. Those sermons never really resonated with her. She never saw herself as important to God's kingdom or the church. When she was 72, she got diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And praise the Lord, she refused treatment. She said, no way. I'm going to spend the last months of my life seeing my family flying around not doing chemo. And I said, great. She had two bad days. She died. I got to do her funeral. When I got up on the stage to do my part in the funeral, I looked out, there's 400 people in the room. Now listen, I had done several funerals before that. I've done plenty since. The cold reality of life is the older you get, the fewer people who attend. That's just how it goes. For different reasons, and I will not enumerate because it's unnecessary, 400 people don't tend to show up for a 72-year-old's funeral, especially one who's been quietly widowed for over a decade, especially one who never led anything, who never felt important, and was never on the stage. But as I got up there, I looked out, and I saw the contingent of bank tellers that she worked with at First Union who loved her, who all had wonderful things to say about her, who told me how much they appreciated her and the deep impact that she made on their life with her faith and with her consistency. I saw the contingent of the deaf community. She had a daughter who was deaf, and so in learning sign language, she would always sign at the churches where she was to interpret for them. We had a whole contingent of the deaf community that came to honor Linda. I saw her family, 60 deep, that she spent the last six months of her life loving on and visiting, who showed up to honor Linda. All of her kids there loving her. I saw this contingent of girls from the youth group. They were in their 20s or 30s now, but a few years into being a widow, she's in her 60s, and she's like, God, what do you want me to do? And he felt like he wanted her to volunteer in the youth. So she starts showing up to mentor these teenage girls. And they love her. They love Grandma Linda. And they talk her into going unbelievably. She never did anything like this in her life. They talked her into going on a mission trip to Peru. So she's hiking around the Andes with high school girls. It makes no sense to us. But she's just loving on them, just being consistent in their life. And a decade later, they're there to celebrate her. She lived her life thinking she wasn't that important. And 400 people showed up to tell her that she was. Now, how did that happen? Because like Joseph, she lived a life of simple, humble, quiet, consistent obedience. And I'm convinced that is the brick and mortar that God uses to build his church. And I will say this too. If you can relate to Momo, that's how you feel sometimes. If you feel like if you were in the Bible narrative, you'd be a Joseph. No speaking parts for you. God's kingdom needs a lot more Josephs than it needs Pauls. It needs a lot more quiet, consistent obedience than it needs heroes. Do you understand? God's kingdom needs so many more Josephs than it needs Pauls. More people running their mouth, more mouthpieces, more people in leadership, all that stuff. And I know that this is funny for me to say because I'm the pastor of the church, but I don't think you realize how small potatoes I am in the community of pastors, so I'm not really bragging about anything here. To make this point, that God's kingdom needs a lot more Josephs than it needs Pauls to be built successfully. You can check me later on this. Years ago, I noticed it and found it so interesting. If you turn to Romans chapter 16, the last chapter of that letter, that letter was written to the church in Rome that Paul helped to start. And it's an amazing book. It's an amazing book. Jen asked me the other day, if you could preach anything, what would you preach? I said, I would take a year and go through Romans. I will not do that to you, but I would like to. And at the end of Romans, this incredibly technical, loving, wonderful book, all of chapter 16 is devoted to salutations. Greet so-and-so and so-and-so. Tell so-and-so I said hello. Tell so-and-so I love him. You know how many so-and-sos there are in Romans chapter 16? 26 different people are listed by name by Paul, plus two different families that he says to greet. Paul helped to start that church, but those people he listed are the ones that showed up every week and held babies and faithfully ministered and served as elders and small group leaders and made coffee and did the announcements and played the bass. Those 26 people are the ones on whom that church was built. Paul got to play a part in that church and it was an essential part, but make no mistake about it, all those people who are simply listed by name and then forgotten to history, they had so much more to do with the building of the church in Rome through quiet and consistent obedience than Paul ever did. The here's the thing. We never know the results, what the results of what quiet, humble obedience will be. We can never fathom what the results of our obedience will be. We do not know what chess pieces God is moving around the board. We do not know what he intends to do with the next step that he is asking us to take. But here's what we know from Joseph. If he doesn't obey God in the first place and stay with Mary, then she has to live in shame with her parents, likely for the rest of her life, and Jesus grows up a fatherless child. That's likely what happens if he doesn't obey God there. If he doesn't obey God the second time, what could happen is Herod could kill Jesus and the evil one wins early. If he doesn't obey God the third time and go back, then the prophecy that says God will call his son out of Egypt never takes place and isn't fulfilled and Jesus isn't who he says he is and the scriptures are proof false. There's no way Joseph could possibly know those things hinged on his obedience. He just knew that he was the man who did what God asked him to do, and so he did it. You don't know how God is building the kingdom through your faithful, quiet obedience, and you won't know this side of eternity. But I can promise you this. With every step you take of obedience in him, he's laying one more brick to build his kingdom. And it is pushed forward by the kind of faithful obedience that Joseph lived out and that my mom all lived out and that I see so many of you living out. So let's resolve in light of this to be like Joseph, to continue our humble, quiet, consistent, often unseen and unappreciated obedience, believing that God is using those things to build his very kingdom in ways that we cannot fathom. Let's pray. Father, thank you for Joseph. Thank you for what you tell us about him, for what we see in him and can learn from him. Thank you for his example. Lord, I pray that you would help us be doers of the word, not just hearers. But that when you ask us to take a step of obedience, we would have the courage and the faith and the discipline to wake up the next morning, the very next hour, and do it. And God, would you let us experience what it is to be used by you to build your kingdom as we simply do the next thing that you've placed in front of us. Father, we love you and we pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

Grace, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. It's a big morning for us. Just to keep the tension going for you guys, I'm not showing you the building until after the sermon. So just relax. Because there's some stuff I want to say to you before we do that. And we get excited about that. If it's your first Sunday here, we as a church have been looking forward to this Sunday for a while. We started a campaign in February of 2020 to raise some money to build a building or to purchase a building to have our own permanent home after 20 years of wandering and wandering from rental to rental. And we were able to get some land, and now we have been developing some plans to put a building on that piece of land, and this is the morning that we're going to show the church what we intend to build. So if it's your first Sunday with us, this is not typical, and I'm going to say some stuff. You're kind of sitting in on a family meeting. So this feels a little bit different than a normal Sunday. And I've actually been talking about this sermon since I got back from sabbatical in July, which is probably a mistake because I think I've overhyped it. I can't possibly deliver on whatever you guys expect me to do this morning. But as I was thinking about what I wanted to share with y'all, it's really not helpful for me to think about it in terms of good or bad, but to think about this morning in terms of helpful and true and authentic. And so where I'd like to start is in that sabbatical. In the month of July, you guys were gracious enough to give me the month to not work and just kind of reflect and recharge and all the things that you'd like to do when you don't have to work. And I've felt, I've carried guilt for that all year and still do. And I'm not sure I'll ever do a sabbatical again because I still just feel bad because most professions don't get those. Most of you had to like keep working while I was in Chicago playing video games. But, but I've also known since being given that time that it would be appropriate at some point to share with you guys, the church, what God impressed upon me during that sabbatical break. And as I processed what it was and realized what it was, because it's not like I was going through sabbatical going, God, what do you have for me? What do you want me to see? What's like the one thing that you want me to take away? I was just, honestly, I was just going through sabbatical, enjoying pursuing God as a not professional Christian, having quiet times that I didn't have to then go and preach about just, just pursuing God for me. And I had a lot of great experiences. I went to churches that I wouldn't normally go to. And, and, and, and God kind of imparted on me a bigger vision for church and church world and Christendom and just how supportive we need to be of one another and how gross it is when we seek to criticize other churches for not doing it the way that we doing it with the way that we do it and that's a whole other thing but when I realized what the main thing was that I carried away from sabbatical I knew that this was the morning that I wanted to share it with you guys. It feels appropriate on NFL kickoff Sunday, the single greatest Sunday of the year every year, to start the sermon with an illustration from Hard Knocks. Hard Knocks is a show, it's an HBO show, and I know that pastors don't normally tell you to go watch shows on HBO on Sunday mornings, but that's not even the worst show I'm going to recommend this morning in this sermon, so get ready. But Hard Knocks is a documentary series. They follow a different NFL team every year through the preseason as they prepare for the regular season. And inevitably, I think this year is a little bit different. They framed this year's up a little bit different, but almost always in the show, they chronicle some rookies. They highlight some rookies that have come to training camp for the first time. They're trying to make their name for themselves in the NFL. And there's always in the show, two kinds of rookies. There's one rookie that sees this as the opportunity of a lifetime, who's hounding the veterans, asking tons of questions, taking diligent notes, coming to meetings early, getting to practice early, doing all the extra things, trying to get in all the extra reps, doing all the little things behind the scenes to be excellent and to make the team. And that rookie always makes the team. And then there's this other kind of rookie who's just kind of coasted on talent his whole life, didn't really have to work that hard in college, and he shows up to the NFL and he's playing. He wants to spend his money. He wants to goof off. He wants to make jokes in meetings. He's not asking the veterans questions. He's not doing the extra little things. He's not coming early and staying late. And I always watch that show and see that rookie with so much frustration because I think to myself, dude, what are you doing? This is the opportunity of a lifetime. If you can't pour yourself out for this, if you can't get pumped up about this, what are you doing? Like, do you know that what people would give to have the chance that you have, and you're just going to fritter it away having fun? Like, this is the time when you push. This is the time when you run. This is the time when you go. What's the matter with you? And I realized over sabbatical that that's me. That I'm the one coasting. I'm not saying I'm coasting on talent because I don't have much. My family likes to joke, me and Jen like to joke, that there's no one on earth with more confidence for less reason than me. Oh, by the way, the notes that you have in your bulletin, you can just fold those up and tuck those away. I'm not using those this morning. As I looked at them at the end of this week, they just felt too rigid. And I just want to speak to you guys from the heart. But I realized that that was me. Have you guys ever had a job where once you figured it out, you could do that job to the expectations of the people around you and your boss to the degree that it needed to be done without giving your whole effort. You ever had that job that you could just kind of shift it into autopilot? Do a couple of things and you don't have to give 100% every week because it doesn't require that of you. And you find yourself just kind of coasting in that job. That's me. That's what I realized I've been doing. And I wanted to say that publicly because I wanted to apologize to you publicly for not putting all of myself into this. And I know that you guys are kind and you're nice. And some of you are going to have a heart to tell me afterwards, Nate, you're doing great. We feel like you're giving 100%. Don't be so hard on yourself. You can't give 100% all the time. So to that, thanks. Keep it to yourself. I know me. And I know what I can do. And I haven't been doing it. Over sabbatical, I watch this show. This is the bad one. Called The Bear on Hulu. Bill's seen it. He's seen it. He knows. It's about a chef. I'm not officially recommending it because there's a lot of cuss words and it's rough. It's intense. I came across it a couple of years ago and started to watch it and liked it, but it was a little bit too intense and I let it go. And somewhere in the month of July, a buddy of mine that I really trust said, hey, this might be the best show I've ever watched. And I thought, okay, I'll give it another go. And I watched it in like three days. I was on sabbatical. I didn't have anything else to do. And I know that as a good Christian pastor, that inspiration is supposed to come through the book on prayer that I read or the commentaries that I was studying. But it didn't. It came from a Hulu show called The Bear. And in the second season, I cried every episode. Every episode I watched, I cried. Because what was happening is these people on this show were galvanizing around a purpose, a restaurant, and they were given everything they had. It's what they thought about when they woke up in the morning. It's what they sold themselves out to during the day. It's what they were thinking about when they went to bed at night, and they gave it everything they had, and it showed how just gradually their lives started to change as they pursued this, and they started to become better humans as they rallied around this thing, and I just found it, for whatever reason, I'm shaky now as I'm talking about it, for whatever reason, I found it so very deeply inspirational. And I came out of sabbatical more determined than ever to do my best work. Because if this isn't worth pouring yourself out for, what is? If God's kingdom isn't worth your whole life, then what's worth it? If this isn't the time for me to go, when is? What could be more important than building God's church, than declaring his word, than loving people towards Jesus? What could be higher stakes than that? There's this verse, it's a couple of verses in 2 Timothy. Paul is writing a letter to Timothy, this guy that he trained, and now he's left him as pastor of a church. And he's writing him two letters of advice, 1 and 2 Timothy. And at the end of 2 Timothy in chapter 4, Paul confesses and acknowledges that he's reaching the end of his life. I don't think he was reaching retirement because I don't think retirement was a thing for Paul. I think he knew that he was reaching the end of his usable years. And he writes this to Timothy and it's always to me been one of the most intimidating verses. He's encouraging him in verse 5. He says, the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. And I have in my Bible, I don't know when I wrote this, years ago, just this little note, oh, to say this, to get to the end of my race and say that, that I have been poured out like a drink offering, that I've fought the good fight, that I've kept the faith, and I finished the race. But that's an incredibly intimidating verse, isn't it? When in our lives have we felt like we were poured out like a drink offering? Besides parenthood, which by default forces you to pour yourself out like a drink offering, whether you want to or not, that kid is tipping you over, man. Besides that, what have we done? What experiences do we have? When we look back at something and we say, I poured myself out like a drink offering. I've fought the good fight. I've finished the race. When do we get to say that? And I'm coming out of sabbatical reminded of this verse,izing that there has certainly been more seasons, more weeks than not, where I've not been pouring myself out for grace. Where I've not been the pastor that I believe I'm supposed to be. Because I figured out how to do my job without giving it all that I've got. And I'm telling you guys, I'm sorry, and I'm done with that nonsense. I'm going to pour myself out like a drink offering. I'm going to give this place all I got. Because if I don't, the crap am I waiting on? So here we go. Now, what does that mean? This is an important question. And you'll see in a minute why I've opened up a sermon on the building about myself. Okay, just relax. What does it mean that I intend to try my best? I'm going to preach better sermons? No, because I'll be honest with you, I don't know how to preach better sermons. Okay, if y'all got tips, give them to me. But I don't know how to preach better sermons than I already preach. So I'm not going to tell you I'm going to preach better sermons. I can't do that. I'm actually trying as hard as I can on most sermons. It's all the other stuff that you don't see that I need to step up to the plate on. And so what I've committed to, and I pulled staff together and I told them this coming out of sabbatical, what I've committed to is that every spare minute that I have, that I could fritter away on something else, or I could go home and just not do as many hours of work that day. All the spare minutes that I have in my work week are going to go towards two things. Reading on behalf of the church, learning, and just being a learner and a reader, because when I read, it makes me better. I'm not going to get into all that. But the other thing is writing. I need to write. And there's a lot that I need to write. My first goal was to get three weeks ahead on sermons. I am. So if I preach a sermon and I look lost in the middle of it. It's because I wrote it three weeks ago. And I've not thought about it since. So sermons actually might get worse. I don't know. But what I really need to write is stuff that I'm thinking about. I kind of think about it as the discipleship pathway materials. Right now at Grace, if someone comes to the door and they're a new believer or non-believer, but they come into faith and like, how do I grow spiritually? Our answer is get in a small group. What are we doing in the small group? Whatever the small group leader wants to do. We're doing 1 Samuel this semester in my small group. Great. How do I grow spiritually? We just, you know, we just hope it happens. Just go to small group, get into some good relationships, come on Sunday, we'll preach the Bible, we'll sing together, and God's going to grow you. And God in his goodness has grown us. He's grown a lot of people at Grace. He's worked in that sanctification process. Sanctification has become more like Jesus in character. But that's no longer an acceptable answer to me. This conviction started last fall, and I won't get into all the things that led to it, but it was an unexpected trip where I made two unexpected friends, and one of the unexpected friends spoke for Ministry Partner Sunday, Ru Sin. And through my relationship with him, I've really seen and been inspired that the next thing that grace needs to do, the next stage of the growth at grace is to develop all the things that need to happen behind the scenes. So that church on Sunday is just something that we do where we gather together, but the real church is taking place all throughout the week. And so what we need at grace is a discipleship pathway. What we need is materials, Bible studies, sometimes curated books, sometimes curated studies that other people have done. Sometimes it will be things that I've written. Sometimes it will be things that people in the church have written. But what we need is a pathway, is materials to put in people's hands, directions to encourage people who come to grace, direction to encourage you so that everybody who walks through those doors within about three or five years of coming here, even if they didn't know anything about the faith walking into grace, three to five years down the road, we've given them everything that they need so that they can be someone who is spiritually mature enough to be an elder of the church. Now, I'm not saying that every one of you in this room should be an elder. But what I'm saying is I want a church full of people who are capable of it if God calls on them to do it, who are spiritually ready and spiritually mature and ready to get there. And my part in that is to quit hoping that spiritual growth happens organically and to start writing out a pathway for us to begin to pursue Jesus together with all that we've got. And here's why I think that this is really important work for me to do. Here's why I think it's the most important work for me to do. And I would even say, if my sermons do get worse, but I'm writing this stuff faithfully, and I'm going to send the staff what I'm writing every week, they're going to see and they're going to know. I'm being held accountable for this. I would say that actually serves the church better. Now, I'm going to try to not preach worse, but, you know, we'll see what happens. I think it's so important that I do that now because of what lays ahead for us. In a few more minutes, I'm going to show you the building that we think God wants us to build. And when we get there, we're going to get bigger. I've heard people say, not to me, because people don't say things like this to the pastor, but they say it to you, and then you tell me what they said. That you've had friends come here, and they'll be like, place is cool, like the vibe, like the church, music's good, preaching is acceptable, and we'd like to go there, but your facilities stink. I'd rather not get stuck behind a pole. Our location is not good. They'd rather not walk outside and sometimes in the rain to get their children past the aquarium store. And I've seen young families come in for the first time. And they'll go in that hallway when all the young families are here at once. And they're holding their two-year-old and they're looking at the zoo of two-year-olds in the room. And the tears and the three of them that want to break out. Sometimes it looks like they're prisoners of wars back there. They're like holding the bars and there's tears streaming down their face. Please anyone just get me out of here. These people are terrible. They're hitting me. Like it looks rough. And I've watched young families like reluctantly hand their child into that room. And I've thought like good luck next week when you try that other church because you ain't coming back here. Our facilities are sometimes a barrier between four people who would consider grace. And I understand that. And on one hand, we could say like, well, you know, they're not committed enough. And yeah, they're not. That's the whole point. Frankly, I think if you won't go to a church because of the facilities, that's silly and you need to grow up. But that's what church does. We grow people up in Christ. And so maybe that's part of the maturation process that needs to happen with folks. When we get into a new building, that barrier is down. When we get there, there's going to be people in the community that see us building it and they're going to want to come kick the tires. There's going to be old grace folks, some OG grace people who came over from St. Andrews and helped plant in 2000. They're going to hear about it. They're going to want to come see it. You're going to invite your friends because you're going to want them to see it. And we're going to have more people coming here than we ever had, at least for a little bit. And when that happens, I want to be ready. I want to have systems in place. I've said since the day, I said in my interview that I believe in the role of pastor as shepherd. And every person who walks through those doors is a soul that we need to be shepherds and stewards of. And I want to be good stewards of those souls. And if we don't have a plan in place to grow people through small groups and through relationships and through Bible studies and through educational materials and through access to information and through encouraging in their next step and by loving them closer to Jesus, if we don't have an intentional way to do that, then we're not being as good of stewards of those souls as we can be. And so I want to be ready. I'm reminded of the scene in Matthew chapter 4. I believe it's in verses 20 through 22, where Jesus is calling the disciples. And he goes and he finds James and John, the sons of Zebedee, and he finds them mending the nets. And I've always loved the imagery of that. Of the idea that before these men are going to be sent out to do a great work, they're mending the nets, getting ready for their catch. Now they think they're going to catch fish, and Jesus says they're going to go catch men. They're going to be fishers of men, but they're mending the nets. They're getting ready for the work that God has had them to do. There's another place in Scripture where Paul writes a church, and he says, I've been wanting to come to you. I think it's Ephesus. I've been wanting to come to you, but I have to stay here right now, for the Lord has opened a wide door for a great work. That building is opening for us a wide door for a great work, and I want us to be ready. I want us to be discipled up. I want us to be trained. I want us to be ready to lead the Bible studies. I want our families ready to accept the new families. I want the kids over there in that room to know what it is to be kind and generous and gracious when new children show up and to integrate them. I want our small groups to be ready and open for other people to come in as we take on their spiritual growth and their spiritual development. I want us to be ready. We need to mend the nets so that we are ready for the great work that God has for us. Now, here's my biggest fear with starting this campaign and looking to build a building. My biggest fear is that as a church, we start to think that the greatest thing we can do is build something. And in one way, we're right. But we're wrong if we think it's building a building. The most important thing we can do is build disciples. The most important thing we can do is build people who love Jesus, who know him, who follow him, who passionately pursue him and love others. And if we never get a building, we're still going to do that as hard as we can every week. I'm committed to it. And if we think that building a building is the most important thing that we can do as a church in this season of church, then what we're going to do is we're going to spend the next however long it takes, however long it takes to raise the money we need to raise. We need to raise $2 million to build that building. So however long it takes to raise $2 million, if we think that's the most important thing that we can do, we're going to sit in here week in and week out just kind of waiting for the one day and skipping over what's happening right now. It's not about one day. Church doesn't start when we build what I'm about to show you. Church has been going on for 2,000 years. It'll keep going on and it needs to happen every week here. We need to build ourselves up. We need to be ready. We need to grow in our faith. The most important thing that can happen in the church is that we build disciples, and we can do that right now as we mend our nets and get ready for this great work. But the great work doesn't just start when we get there. The great work starts right now as we galvanize around growing ourselves into disciples and really more pointedly, allowing God to grow us as we get out of his way and allow him to pour us out like a drink offering and we learn what that feels like. So I'm going to do my work behind the, to prepare the lattice to direct the growth that the Spirit is going to bring. And this is where this applies to you too. Here's my challenge to you over this time and kind of what could feel like the land between now and when we build. Is to not think of it that way. Think of this as time to prepare ourselves and to get our butts in gear too. Here's the challenge to you guys. I don't know if any of you have a background in karate. I have thought about this illustration for years. It's been something that rattles around in my mind, and I wish that I had a better one. I don't. This one makes my point better than anything else I can think of, so we're going with karate this morning. I don't know if any of you have a background in karate. I do not because I have friends, but if you do have a background in karate, then you know that there's a belt system, right? Like the first belt you get when you go do karate is you get a white belt, I think. You get the white belt, and that means like you're in the door, you're part of the dojo. I think that's a thing. You get the little thing that you wear, and you're in. You're a karate guy or a girl. Good for you. And then you start to learn skills, and you get like another belt. I don't know, a yellow belt, and then maybe a purple one, and then a blue one, and then I think there's a brown one, and I think there's a brown one. I actually researched this. There's a brown one with a black stripe. It's pretty fancy. That's real close to black belt. And then you get to be black belt, right? And I think some people, I don't know what the matriculation rate is for karate and the belts. I don't know where everybody stops. But not everybody becomes a black belt, right? Because black belts are bad jokers. I remember in elementary school that there was a rumor going around our school. Like I heard this old wives tale. Maybe it's true. I don't know. But I heard somebody said that whenever you achieved black belt, you had to register your hands with the federal government as deadly weapons, which is hilarious. And I went ahead and took care of it when I was younger so that I wouldn't have to mess with it later on in life. But black belts are like, man, they're the top. They're the best. But that's not for everybody. Some people get the blue belt, and they're like, that was fun. I'm going to try soccer now. I'm just going to go on to the next thing. And they don't keep progressing. They're not a yellow belt. They learned some skills. They did some stuff. Now they're a blue belt. And I'm good. I want to go do something else. I'm comfortable with my current level of karate skill. I see how I chopped like that. This is a layered sermon. The church, this one, all of them, church has a lot of blue belt Christians. Church has a lot of folks who got their white belt. They're new. They're in. Got the suit. Ready to go. And then they started learning a couple of things. Started attending church regularly, making that a priority. Prioritizing church and their schedules with their kids. Started making small group important. Maybe even started to give and tithe. Small groups, Bible studies. Maybe they even actually read spiritual books like on their own without anyone asking them to. And they're moving up the ranks. They get to about blue belt and they're like, you know what, I'm pretty good. Pretty good. I don't look like I did before I became a Christian. I've made some progress, doing some good things. Got some good habits. Got some good skills. And I see some black belts. Those men and women, those are some serious Christians. Those are like missionaries. Those people have degrees. They went to seminary. They got doctorates. They are serious about their faith. Like at my church, Nate, we got Nate. He's not even a black belt. Like he's definitely brown, maybe with a black star. Probably not. Black belts are serious Christians. And I'm comfortable. I got other things I want to do. I want to go try soccer now. A lot of us are cruising through our spiritual life, comfortable with who we are and where we're at. And every now and again, God will poke us and kind of tell us something that we need to work on. And maybe we even begrudgingly go, okay, all right. And we give in to that conviction. But we're not sold out for our faith. We're not giving it everything we have. We're not pouring ourselves out like a drink offering. We're going to get to the end of the race and we're going to be like, well, I finished it. I wasn't really trying to win. And here's the problem with blue belt, middle of the road, comfortable Christianity. The Bible makes absolutely no space for that. There is not one single inch of space in the Bible's description of a life of faith that makes room for one day in the middle road. There's actually a verse that haunts me, and it should haunt you too. Revelation 3.16, he convicts a whole church. Jesus says he convicts a whole church, and he says, the one thing with you is you are lukewarm. You're neither hot nor cold. You're sitting on the fence. You're right in the middle. You're comfortable Christianity. You're on cruise. And because you were lukewarm, I will vomit you out of my mouth. God makes no space for comfortable Christianity. He makes no space for people who are not all the way sold out. Listen, look, just a couple of the verses that I thought about that make this point. Jesus says himself, he's preaching, and his mother and brother show up, and they need him. They're worried about him because he's kind of making a name for himself, and they feel like he's embarrassing himself. And they tell him, hey, your mother and your brother are waiting for you. And he says something to the effect of, if you do not hate your mother and your brother compared to me, then you are not prepared to enter into the kingdom of heaven. You are not ready for this life. You are not ready to sign up for this. Somebody comes to him and they say, hey, Jesus, I believe in you. I want to follow you. What do I need to do? And he says, follow me. Let's go. And he says, okay, but my dad just died. I need to go do his funeral. And Jesus says, let the dead bury their own dead and let's get going. No one puts their hand to the plow of the faith and then turns their head and looks behind them. We have to go. We are moving. We are all in on this. Paul writes about the faith and he tells us that we are to run in such a way to get the prize. He says, all runners run, but we need to run to win the race, which is look that we don't get participation trophies in Christianity. And then he says to Timothy at the end of his life, I've poured myself out like a drink offering. I'm done. I'm spent. There is no more juice in this lemon. I fought the good fight. I kept the faith. I finished the course. I won. I don't know what it means to you or how it sits on you when I say that there is zero space in our faith for comfortable middle-of-the-road Christianity. All I know is that I'm the poster child for that kind of faith. And I need to let God get to work in here. And I don't know how you feel about it. But here's what I want to find out. What would happen in your life if you gave all of yourself to your faith? Last week I preached out of Jude and I said the message of Jude is that we should contend for the faith with our whole life, with everything we have. What would happen if you did that? What would you look like if you actually gave yourself all the way over to the faith and you said, Jesus, I'm all in. I'm two feet in on this, Jesus. Whatever you want me to do, wherever you want me to go, however you want me to do it, I'm in. I'll do it. What if you joined me there and we did this together? What if you joined the people on the row with you and you said, you know what, from here on out, all in. No middle of the road. no blue belt nonsense. I'm all in on this. What could happen if we allow God to build a church full of disciples who are sold out to him? Because we finally got ourselves out of the way, we finally let him make us uncomfortable, and we finally started doing the things that he asked us to do. What could happen in this new space if there was a church full of people sold out to him, ready to accept the community that's going to come there? What kind of generational ministry can we do in that place as we prepare ourselves for the great work that's going to be open to us? I am committing to you that I will pour myself out like a drink offering for our Jesus and for this place. I'm going to ask you to come with me Because Lord knows none of us can grow this place alone. None of us can proclaim Jesus alone. None of us can move this church forward alone. Least of all me. So who's with me? Who's all in? Who's ready to get to work? Husbands, go love your wives like you've never loved her before. Go model for your children what they should do and what they deserve. Let her see a man who loves God and who pursues him, who prays fervently and consistently. Wives, let your husband see a woman who loves the Lord, who loves his word, who's diligent in prayer. Let him know that there is no one who loves him and respects him more than you do. And show him the love of Jesus in the way that you treat him every day. Parents, love your children as hard as you can. Be present for them. Model for them what godly Christianity is. Show them what a godly man looks like. Show them what a godly mother looks like. Show them what a godly friend looks like. Show them what it looks like to steward and to marshal your finances the way that God wants you to do that. Show them what it looks like to love other people who don't look like you or think like you. Show them what it looks like to gracefully disagree. Show them what it looks like to be gracious lovers of others. Show them what it looks like to build a life passionately pursuing Jesus. It's not too late to start showing them. And it's not too late to admit to them, hey, I've been coasting and I'm sorry, but I'm all in on this and I'm all in on you and I want you to follow me. It's not too late to do that. You can do that anytime you want. But leave from here. If you're all in, leave from here and go love the people in your life well. Leave from here and dadgummit, if you don't have a devotional habit by now and you've been here for years and you've heard me say over and over again, the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And you're still not doing it? Shame on you. Go do it. Come on. Go read your Bible. Darn it. Thank you. Get in God's word. Devote yourself to prayer. Let's be all in. Not on the building. I think that God wants us to build a building. I think the amount of money that we have to raise to build a building is absurd. And I think if we're going to build it, you guys are going to have to believe that too, and you're going to have to give. But I'm not going to talk about that a whole lot, because I think God's going to do the work that he needs to to do and that if he wants us to build a building, we're going to be in the building. If he doesn't want us to be in the building, we won't be in the building. I just kind of think he wants us to be in the building. In the meantime, you know what I really care a lot about? Us growing closer to Jesus together. Let's be all in on that. Come with me. Let's see what happens. And let's see what God does. Alright. Let me pray for us. Then we'll show you the stuff. God, on behalf of those who have cruised, who have set our faith on autopilot, I am sorry. We are sorry. God, we, I ask that if we feel a fresh conviction to pursue you relentlessly, that that conviction would not wear off as we leave this room, as we walk out of this space and the concerns of life begin to drown out the noise of this fresh conviction. God, would you put it at the forefront of our awareness and of our thoughts? Would you force us to wrestle this to the ground? Would you let it haunt them as it haunts me that there is no space in your gospel for half-hearted Christianity? I pray that for each person in this room, that you would lay before us the next thing you want us to do to pursue you, and that we would do it. Big or small, we would do it, eagerly and obediently. And once we do it, that we would say, God, what's the next thing? And what's the next thing? And what's the next thing? Let us not be a church full of cultural, casual, complacent Christians. But let grace be a place that is filled with people who love you and who desperately want others to love you too. Be with us as we go, God. In Jesus' name, amen.